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Scott Walker, God's Gift to the Democratic Party |
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Saturday, 28 February 2015 09:50 |
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Taibbi writes: "Beltway Democrats may not deserve good luck, but it looks like they could have plenty in the next presidential race. Heading into the weekend, Scott Walker, a man born to be slaughtered in a general election, is suddenly leading the Republican pack in the Iowa polls."
Matt Taibbi appearing on Democracy Now! (photo: Democracy Now!)
Scott Walker, God's Gift to the Democratic Party
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
28 February 15
 eltway Democrats may not deserve good luck, but it looks like they could have plenty in the next presidential race. Heading into the weekend, Scott Walker, a man born to be slaughtered in a general election, is suddenly leading the Republican pack in the Iowa polls.
Walker is surging thanks to his performance at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference, where the union-busting governor inspired raucous applause with his "I was a dick in Wisconsin, and I can be one in Washington, too!" stump speech.
Walker's address was a broadside against a litany of conservative bugbears, from Planned Parenthood to the media to tax day to the subversive act of voting without a photo ID, etc.
But the money line came during a Q&A session. Asked how he would take on radical Islamist terrorists, Walker referred to his experience taking on pro-union protesters in his home state:
If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.
Walker's seeming comparison of peaceful union activists to head-chopping Islamic terrorists drew a predictable response, with progressive groups like American Bridge sending out alerts denouncing his comments, along with outrage from the Democratic National Committee.
But the National Review also called it an "unforced error," with writer Jim Geraghty taking special offense at the fact that Walker had forced him into a place where he had to defend, of all people, union activists. Even Rick Perry, not exactly a kumbaya-chanting paragon of tolerance, chided Walker for crossing a line:
These are Americans... You are talking about, in the case of ISIS, people who are beheading individuals and committing heinous crimes, who are the face of evil. To try to make the relationship between them and the unions is inappropriate.
In response to all of this, Walker's campaign quickly backtracked from his statement, sort of. Campaign spokesperson Kristin Kukowski said that Walker was "in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS," which sounded like a retraction.
But Walker himself denied making any offensive comparison, and blamed the whole thing on the media. "You all will misconstrue things as you see fit," he said.
This echoed earlier comments, made in the wake of Rudy Giuliani's "Barack Obama doesn't love America the way you do" flap, about "self-manufactured 'gotcha' moments from the media."
Meanwhile, the polls spoke for themselves. Politicians who make major accidental gaffes usually don't see a bounce in the numbers, but what little data there is suggests Walker surged on the strength of this past week's performance. The Quinnipiac poll, admittedly a small sample size and one taken extremely early in the game, shows him at 25 percent and lapping presumptive favorite Jeb Bush, who's now limping along at 10 percent.
This came on the heels of another interesting poll. Remember how much abuse Rudy Giuliani took (even I got into the act) for accusing Barack Obama of not loving America?
Well, the Huffington Post took a poll asking America what it thought, and it turns out that while 47 percent think Obama does love America, the rest think he doesn't, or they're not sure. This remarkable poll also showed that only 11 percent of Republicans believe the President of the United States loves his country.
All of this data speaks to Walker's remark being a smart short-term move, not a dumb gaffe.
Conventional Wisdom would hold that no candidate who's on record comparing hardworking, law-abiding Americans to mass torture-killers would stand a chance in a general election. But in so holding, Conventional Wisdom would be missing the current point of the exercise from Walker's perspective, which is to win the nomination.
And the sad fact is, you can probably win the Republican Party nomination doing things like comparing unionized state workers to ISIS, or hinting that the president hates America.
The entire narrative of modern conservative politics casts the United States as a fast-disappearing Eden of freedom and democracy that's under siege both here and abroad, surrounded by a constellation of enemies united (for some never-fully-explained reason) in their passionate hatred for the simple, God-fearing, freedom-loving American.
It's not just terrorists who hate us for our freedom, but lefty college professors, dilettante Hollywood actors, undocumented immigrants sucking up tax dollars in the form of entitlements, Al Sharpton, Jonathan Gruber, feminists, environmentalists who want to forcibly abort babies to keep more room free for trees, scientists who think global warming is real, the Manchurian President Barack Hussein Obama, etc.
The blurring of lines distinguishing these domestic political irritants and armed foreign murder cults is rhetorically popular and has been for a while. You can hear this pretty much every time you turn on afternoon talk radio. Here's Rush Limbaugh's answer, when asked which is the greater threat, the liberal or the terrorist:
Both of them — both liberals and terrorists — have a lot in common. The one thing that they hate the most is freedom… A leftist and a terrorist — a leftist and a totalitarian — are one and the same.
Fox's Eric Bolling not long ago blasted campus activists for tweeting "Je Suis Charlie" when (according to him) many of those same people were anti-speech zealots who had disinvited speakers to their schools. "The same people want to wear these pins and tweet 'Je suis Charlie,' I am Charlie," he said. "No you're not! You're more Al-Qaeda than you are Charlie!"
And then of course there's Ann Coulter, who famously said this in a tirade against college activists: "Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don't hate America like liberals do."
None of this is saying anything new – people who aren't Fox fans long ago grew used to being called traitors, America-haters, sympathizers with Osama bin Laden and so on.
The problem is that no candidate carrying this narrative around past the convention can win a general election. Even Mitt Romney, a politician so sunny and loquacious that he can make it sound like he's selling you a vacuum cleaner when he's actually calling black voters freeloaders, ended up capsizing his campaign on rhetoric like this.
The announcement that he never intended to "worry" about the 47 percent of Americans he believed incapable of taking personal responsibility exposed Romney as a politician who had no vision for the whole country.
Even if you're lying about it, you have to at least pretend to have a vision for everyone. Yet the Republican Party's own rhetoric sells half the country as a kind of domestic enemy. It's a nearly impossible balancing act for a general-election candidate.
Scott Walker as a political performer is pretty uninspiring. He doesn't have George Bush's pretzel-mouthed Texas charm or Sarah Palin's hockey Mom magnetism. He can't fall back on an ethnic American dream parable like the one Marco Rubio can run on. He's just a doughy, finger-pointing white guy of the type the Republican Party has been churning out to fill state assembly seats or run in back-bench congressional districts seemingly since the beginning of time. He's exactly the kind of politician the modern Democratic Party is set up to beat.
This was supposed to be the election cycle that featured an inclusive new conservative vision, one that reflected the country's changing demographics and would make the Democrats work harder for everyone's vote. Instead, they're churning out the same old us-against-everybody narrative, filled with the same insulting bromides about how they have a monopoly on patriotism and are apparently the only people in America paying taxes.
If that's where this is going – if the Republican Party runs with someone like Walker instead of having the courage to tell their voters to stop calling the rest of us terrorists and traitors – then they deserve to lose again and lose badly. Forget about how offensive it is, that schtick doesn't work anymore, not even for them.
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Americans Favor Legalizing Pot and Criminalizing Congress |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Friday, 27 February 2015 15:16 |
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Borowitz writes: "By a huge majority, Americans support laws legalizing marijuana and criminalizing Congress, according to a poll released on Thursday."
U.S. Congress. (photo: Pablo Martinez/AP)
Americans Favor Legalizing Pot and Criminalizing Congress
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
27 February 15
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
y a huge majority, Americans support laws legalizing marijuana and criminalizing Congress, according to a poll released on Thursday.
While the poll reflects a relaxation of attitudes about recreational pot use, it also suggests that many Americans now view membership in Congress as a problem ravaging the nation.
Harland Dorrinson, an activist who has spent years mobilizing support for the criminalization of Congress, said that “this poll reinforces what many of us have been saying for a long time: Congress destroys lives.”
“I’ve seen productive members of society get involved with Congress and completely lose the will to work,” he said. “They just sit there, totally numb and out of touch with reality.”
He noted that the once prevalent view that membership in Congress was “harmless” is now being discredited. “If you look at what happens to someone’s brain after ten, twenty, or even thirty years in Congress, it’s devastating,” he said. “There is severe impairment.”
Additionally, he warned that Congress is a “gateway elective office” that leads many to try running for President.
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Ensuring Internet Equality for All |
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Friday, 27 February 2015 15:15 |
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de Blasio writes: "Like electricity in the 1800s, the Internet is now an essential building block of economic opportunity."
Activists Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese hold a pro-net neutrality banner outside the FCC's front door. (photo: PopularResistance.org)
Ensuring Internet Equality for All
By Bill de Blasio, Reader Supported News
27 February 15
 t's no secret I consider income inequality the greatest challenge of our time. And whether you're my age or my teenage son Dante's, it's clear: the Internet has become fundamental to solving it. Like electricity in the 1800s, the Internet is now an essential building block of economic opportunity.
It doesn't just connect us to our friends and family through Skype or Facebook. It links us to job opportunities, critical services, and troves of information. It allows us to check whether our children have homework, take advantage of new education tools, or build a business. More and more each day, the Internet -- like electricity -- is turning into a basic utility. And this critical resource should be treated as such.
All this points to one conclusion: we must have affordable broadband.
But far too many Americans struggle to afford this common service -- or lack it altogether. In New York City, home of the second largest tech sector in the country, we pay more for less when it comes to broadband access. And the reason is fairly evident.
Internet access is now essentially controlled by four companies. Comcast and Time Warner nearly have a complete lock on broadband in the markets they control, covering some 50 million American homes. They're now looking to merge, which would put them in control of about half of the nation's broadband subscribers. A significant number of Americans also use their smartphones for broadband access -- and Verizon and AT&T together own 64 percent of cell phone service.
That's why we need the right rules safeguarding the fast and open Internet. Access to it shouldn't be a luxury only available to the privileged few.
Last summer, I joined Mayor Charlie Hales of Portland, Oregon, and Mayor Edwin Lee of the City of San Francisco in urging the Federal Communications Commission to protect the open Internet and prevent Internet Service Providers from discriminating against certain content and services online. We called on the Commission to re-classify broadband as a telecommunications service and to enact the strongest possible rules against blocking, paid prioritization, and other discriminatory practices limiting our Internet access.
To date, the Commission has classified broadband Internet service as an "information service." This made the Commission's authority unclear, giving Internet Service Providers inordinate control over what Americans are able to create and access -- not to mention how we connect with one another online.
But earlier this month, the Commission outlined a bold new set of rules designed to promote net neutrality. If enacted, they would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service -- giving the Commission tools to ensure fair play, just as they did when telephone service became the primary means of communication.
Major media companies shouldn't be gatekeeping our Internet access -- speeding up some content, blocking other -- simply because they're able to pay for it. The FCC must not allow mega firms to stifle innovation, competition, and public goods through exorbitant price points for the speeds that drive the 21st Century economy.
Rules prohibiting the blocking of lawful content, services and applications are particularly important for public schools and libraries serving our residents. For too many New Yorkers, these may be the only places they're able to get online -- making their ability to do so without delay especially key. Our libraries and our schools also develop content and may not be able to afford the speeds necessary to ensure that the low-income Americans who rely on them can access it.
The latest findings show: the fastest growing and best-paying jobs are coming from the tech sector. And tech start-ups need to know they can get their content out there without prohibitive fees.
But it isn't just the tech sector that needs a fair and open Internet. Small businesses added about two-thirds of all new jobs over the past decade and a half. We need to ensure that all businesses can come into existence, grow and thrive in New York City.
That's why the Commission's proposals mark such a momentous milestone. They demonstrate a steadfast commitment to ensuring this technology remains a tool for advancing goals related to equity, education, innovation, economic growth, and smart and responsive government.
Take a parent trying to connect to our Department of Education services online -- or a high school student trying to complete a history project. The Internet has become crucial for parental engagement, and sometimes it's the only way kids can do their homework. Without unambiguous rules protecting it, these connections could become much slower and more cumbersome -- for communities who already have limited access to fast and open Internet.
I applaud FCC Chairman Wheeler for the bold leadership he has demonstrated with the proposed rules. New York City also commends his efforts to ensure that cities across this nation can create municipal options, so that everyone has an on ramp onto the information superhighway.
It is critical that the FCC act now to implement these regulations to protect consumers and innovation. I urge the Commission to safeguard a free and open Internet for generations to come by voting in favor of these rules when it convenes tomorrow. The time for this is now.
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US-Led Attack on Mosul Could Displace up to 1 Million |
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Friday, 27 February 2015 15:07 |
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Cockburn: "It looks as though the Islamic State has much more money than it ought to have. It's raised certainly 100,000, and getting on over 200,000, soldiers."
Award winning journalist Patrick Cockburn warns of the humanitarian dangers of an offensive against Mosul. (photo: YouTube)
US-Led Attack on Mosul Could Displace up to 1 Million
By Patrick Cockburn, Democracy Now!
27 February 15
 ilitants from the self-proclaimed Islamic State have reportedly abducted at least 220 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria during a three-day offensive. Meanwhile, the Islamic State militant nicknamed "Jihadi John," who has been featured in several beheading videos, has been identified as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born former resident of London. In other news, two U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have reportedly killed over three dozen people in Iraq, including at least 20 civilians. Also this week, UNESCO is has condemned the Islamic State for destroying the Mosul public library, which housed more than 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. UNESCO described the incident as "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Earlier today, video was posted online that appears to show members of the Islamic State smashing ancient artifacts inside a Mosul museum. The video shows men toppling statues and using sledgehammers and drills to destroy the artifacts. The Guardian reports one of the statues destroyed was a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity that dates back to the 9th century B.C. Live from Iraq, we are joined by Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book is "The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the Middle East. Militants from the self-proclaimed Islamic State have reportedly abducted at least 220 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria during a three-day offensive. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Islamic State has seized 10 villages near the city of Hasaka.
Meanwhile, the BBC and Washington Post have revealed the identity of the British man nicknamed "Jihadi John," who’s been featured in several Islamic State beheading videos. The outlets say the Kuwaiti-born man is Mohammed Emwazi, who lived in west London and was known to British security services. He first appeared in a video last August when he allegedly killed the American journalist James Foley.
In other news, two U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have reportedly killed over three dozen people in Iraq, including at least 20 civilians. Hospital sources told Reuters a strike near the Syrian border killed nine civilians and 17 Islamic State militants, while a separate bombing west of Baghdad killed 11 civilians and six militants. The Pentagon has also announced a shipment of 10,000 U.S. M16 rifles and other military supplies to Iraq this week, as U.S. troops train Iraqi forces for an operation this spring to try to retake Iraq’s second-biggest city, Mosul, from Islamic State militants.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, UNESCO is condemning the Islamic State for destroying the Mosul public library, which housed more than 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. UNESCO described the incident as, quote, "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Earlier today, video was posted online that appears to show members of the so-called Islamic State smashing ancient artifacts inside a Mosul museum. The video shows men toppling statues and using sledgehammers and drills to destroy the artifacts. The Guardian reports one of the statues destroyed was a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity that dates back to the 9th century B.C.
We go now to Iraq, where we’re joined by Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book is titled The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. One of his recent articles from Iraq is headlined "Private Donors from Gulf Oil States Helping to Bankroll Salaries of Up to 100,000 ISIS Fighters." Last year, he received the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award in England. He joins us now from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Why don’t we go right to the headline of that piece, Patrick? Talk about who is funding the self-proclaimed Islamic State?
PATRICK COCKBURN: It looks as though the Islamic State has much more money than it ought to have. It’s raised certainly 100,000, and getting on over 200,000, soldiers. They’re all being paid. It’s introduced conscription. It recently lowered the age of conscription below 18. If you join up, you don’t get much. You get $400 a month. If you’re a foreign fighter, you’ll get $800 a month and your keep. But this is a pretty large army they’re putting in the field, and they don’t have many sources of revenue. They have some oil. They have some taxes. So, there’s a great big gap there, which senior Kurdish officials and officials in Baghdad have told me they’re convinced come from private donors in the oil states of the Gulf. That’s the only real explanation for that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Patrick Cockburn, you’ve been talking to people who have been fleeing Mosul, the city that’s now entirely controlled by the Islamic State. Could you explain what people have been saying about what conditions are like there?
PATRICK COCKBURN: The conditions are pretty grim. There’s a shortage of electricity. There’s a shortage of clean water. That’s so bad that lots of people are in hospital with various complaints, illnesses, because of eating dirty water. There’s executions. Women forced to wear the niqab, so everything is covered, but one woman whose eyes weren’t quite covered was taken to a police station and was forced to bite on a sort of donkey or horse’s bit, that you put in the mouth of a horse, and to bite so hard until there was blood all over her mouth, and she had to go to hospital. So, it’s pretty vicious.
But one should also say two things. One, that the Sunni Arabs in Mosul are very frightened of ISIS, what they call DAESH, of ISIS, but they’re also very frightened of the idea of the Iraqi army or the Shia militias capturing Mosul. So, they don’t really know which way to go. I was talking this morning to some people in a refugee camp here in Erbil who had left Mosul because their parents had been in the Iraqi police force. And what happened was that they had fled Mosul, but then ISIS goes to their houses and blows them up and then puts the video of the explosion on the social media, so the—saying this is a message to even people who have fled, that they’re blowing up their houses.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Patrick Cockburn, given the brutality that you’re describing, why is it that people are, in some cases, as you say, equally scared of the Iraqi military taking over?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Because every place that the Shia militia and the—it’s mostly—the main fighting force of the Baghdad government at the moment is not the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army has actually failed to take back any city in Iraq or town in Iraq since the beginning of last year, since Fallujah fell to ISIS. But the Shia militia, that probably have about 120,000 men—the Iraqi army probably has about 40,000 to 50,000—where they take over cities or towns, they haven’t taken many, but were they have taken them over, or villages, they treat all the inhabitants, if they’re Sunni Arabs, as if they were members of ISIS. It doesn’t matter if these people are completely opposed to ISIS: They’re still treated as members of ISIS. So the young men disappear. In some cases, they’re killed. In some cases, they’re tortured or put in prison. So, houses are burned. People are driven out.
And there’s one other point, a very important one, I’d like to make, which I don’t think people have taken on board. As you know, that the U.S. government, the Pentagon and the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, have said there’s going to be an offensive to capture Mosul. But the major relief organizations, the World Food Program, believe that if there’s an attack on Mosul, there’s going to be an exodus of up to a million refugees, of basically the Sunni Arabs who live in Mosul, that they’re going to flee the city when airstrikes intensify and they believe it’s going to come under attack. At the moment, they couldn’t get into the Kurdish region. They’re banned. So they’re all going to be on the road. So, they’re pre-positioning supplies for one of the biggest exodus of refugees that we’ve seen, I don’t know for how long. But it’s going to be massive. There’s going to be terrible suffering, and many will die.
AMY GOODMAN: Already the self-proclaimed Islamic State controls a swath of land that covers millions and millions of people. Is the Islamic State going to last? And also, if you could respond to this latest identification, supposedly, of the man that has been called "Jihadi John," who stands in the video as he was about to execute, for example, the American journalist James Foley—the Kuwaiti-born Mohammed Emwazi. British security said that they were following him. The significance of this? Three arrests in Brooklyn—these young people were supposedly going to join up with Islamic State in Syria. The three girls in Britain, the young women who supposedly have gone to join. Can you put all of this together?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah, I mean, there are about or said to be 20,000 foreign jihadis who have gone to the Islamic State. One of the amazing things is that they’re still quite easily able to cross the Turkish frontier into Syria to—into the Islamic State, despite the fact that Turkey is meant to be part of the coalition to eliminate the Islamic State. But there’s a 500-mile border between Syria and Turkey, and it still seems to be generally open.
Now, when these foreigners arrive in the Islamic State, they’re often not much good as fighters, because those from western Europe and America don’t speak Arabic. Even those that do are not professional soldiers. So they often become suicide bombers, or they’re given particularly sort of high-profile jobs for execution and so forth.
But the Islamic State is very obsessed, almost, with the idea of dominating the news agenda, and it doesn’t really matter how they do it. So they know that if you have a Japanese hostage and you demand $200 million ransom, that that’s going to be leading the news. For a long time, cutting off people’s heads led the news. Then that—people became used to that, so they burn to death this Jordanian pilot in a cage, knowing again that will dominate the news, will be assertion of their strength. And they do that particularly when they’ve had a military setback. When things aren’t going too well on the battlefront, they want the news to be dominated by some assertion of power on their part, which may be a hideous atrocity, usually is, but they feel they’ve achieved their aim if that’s what everybody’s talking about. They said at one moment on their social media that media is half jihad. So it’s something they do very consciously, and it’s something they use, particularly foreigners entering the Islamic State, as a method of publicity.
AMY GOODMAN: And will they last? Patrick Cockburn, will they last, do you think, Islamic State? And what do you think should be done?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Will they last? Well, at the moment—last year, they had a 100-day campaign in which they captured an area which is larger than Great Britain. They defeated the Iraqi army. They defeated the—inflicted defeats on the Syrian army, massive defeats on the Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, on almost everybody else. Since then, they haven’t been quite so successful against the Syrian Kurds and others, but they control pretty well the same area. And they’re recruiting vast numbers of people. I was at the battlefront here west of Erbil yesterday, and I was talking to a commander. And although he said that ISIS was losing a lot of men in attacks they had been making, they’ve still been able to recruit people and recruit people from the local area. I think, abroad, people get the impression somehow it’s all foreign jihadis. Actually, it isn’t. It’s mostly Syrians and Iraqis. And there are at least six or seven million people within the confines of the Islamic State. And if you’re calling up all the young men, you can put a very large army into the field.
Now, to defeat them, we have the Iraqi army here. But as I said earlier, the Iraqi army has not recaptured a single city or town since January last year. So talk of them defeating the Islamic State, of taking Mosul, taking these other cities, looks pretty optimistic. In Syria, the Syrian Kurds are fighting pretty hard. They’ve been advancing. That’s one of the reasons that these poor Assyrian Christians have been kidnapped by Islamic State. They’re supported by U.S. airstrikes. But that only really happens where there are a lot of Kurds in Syria, which is not that big. In the rest of Syria, it’s very noticeable the U.S. airstrikes are not against the Islamic State where it is combating the Syrian army. So, the pressure is there, but it’s not sufficient to defeat the Islamic State, to my mind. And the Islamic State’s many enemies are all there, but they’re disunited, and they distrust and hate each other almost as much, or if not more, than they hate the Islamic State.
AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, we want to thank you for being with us, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. We’ll link to your article, "Private Donors from Gulf Oil States Helping to Bankroll Salaries of Up to 100,000 ISIS Fighters."
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