Daily Kos

Rep. Phil Gingrey: Gay marriage shows need to teach school kids proper gender roles?

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 23:10:10 UTC

Yeah, I think we can do without this idea, Rep. Gingrey:

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) told colleagues on the House floor on Tuesday that young boys and girls should take classes on traditional gender roles in a marriage because there are some things fathers do "maybe a little bit better" than mothers.
"You know, maybe part of the problem is we need to go back into the schools at a very early age, maybe at the grade school level, and have a class for the young girls and have a class for the young boys and say, you know, this is what’s important," Gingrey said in a speech supporting the Defense of Marriage Act. "This is what a father does that is maybe a little different, maybe a little bit better than the talents that a mom has in a certain area. And the same thing for the young girls, that, you know, this is what a mom does, and this is what is important from the standpoint of that union which we call marriage."

So we can't teach them about sex, but we can divide grade school kids into a girls' class and a boys' class and teach them that back in the 1950s mom stayed home and cleaned dishes while dad went off to his high-paying job at the booze factory. This will help them by … well, I have no idea. Help me out here, Gingrey:

"Of my three daughters and one daughter-in-law, they all work," he said. "They all work, some of them full-time, some of them part-time. But they’re still there as moms. And when they come home and take over that responsibility, they need a shared partner, and that partner is that partner for life. And I’m talking about, of course, the father."

Nope, still not getting it. This was offered in the context of defending marriage from The Gay Folks, mind you, so the implication here is that America's gone all wrong and is insufficiently intolerant of The Gay Folks because the young kids today don't understand how the nurturing mom-dad fusion is supposed to work and are screwing it up. Or something.

Can anyone out there translate what this guy is going on about?

In Berlin, President Obama calls for one-third reduction in U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear arsenals

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:10:20 UTC

Trident missile launch

On the heels of a two-day summit meeting of the Group of Eight industrial nations, President Obama stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin Wednesday and called for reductions in the strategic nuclear weapons of Russia and the United States beyond what is called for in the New START treaty ratified by the Senate in 2010. He set forth no timeline for completion of the reductions of the two arsenals to about 1,000 warheads each.

While various aspects of the administration's foreign policy leave much to be desired, President Obama's continuing push to cut nukes is a bright spot.

The reduction would leave the United States with the highest of three reduced levels of nuclear armament the Pentagon has been reviewing as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Act. The lowest level considered would have reduced the U.S. arsenal to 300-400 strategic nukes, much closer to the "Global Zero" that Obama has previously endorsed. At the peak, 57 years ago, the United States had 32,000 nuclear warheads. In Berlin, Obama said:

Peace with justice means pursuing the security of a world without nuclear weapons—no matter how distant that dream may be. And so, as President, I've strengthened our efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and reduced the number and role of America’s nuclear weapons. Because of the New START Treaty, we’re on track to cut American and Russian deployed nuclear warheads to their lowest levels since the 1950s.
But we have more work to do. So today, I’m announcing additional steps forward. After a comprehensive review, I’ve determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies, and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent, while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third. And I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures.

At the same time, we’ll work with our NATO allies to seek bold reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical weapons in Europe. And we can forge a new international framework for peaceful nuclear power, and reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking.

America will host a summit in 2016 to continue our efforts to secure nuclear materials around the world, and we will work to build support in the United States to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and call on all nations to begin negotiations on a treaty that ends the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. These are steps we can take to create a world of peace with justice.

Bringing tactical nukes into the negotiation picture is an important move. Previously, these have been "off the table." By covering non-strategic nuclear weapons, Europeans and Asians who feel threatened by Russian tactical nukes can be brought into the arsenal-reducing process. Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and, presumably, Israel all have many tactical nukes in their comparatively small arsenals.

Expect the usual hyperventilation from the right wing. Another round of depicting the Democrats as weak on defense. Not just weak, but selling us out to the Soviets ... er ... Rooskies and now, of course, the "yellow peril."

Please continue reading below the fold for more analysis of deep cuts in strategic nuclear weapons dating back to Ronald Reagan's presidency.

One nation, under surveillance

rss@dailykos.com (BrianMcFadden) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:50:09 UTC

Click to enlarge.

It's not what we believe, it's that more people need to support us

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:30:10 UTC

"It's not my fault I'm alone. It's all the idiots who won't sit next to me!"

Well, I guess this is one way for Republicans to look at their demographic problem:

But [Rep. John Fleming (R-LA)], a former Navy and family physician, said there’s no political or policy harm in trying to restrict abortion.
And the best way to win over Hispanics, blacks and Asians, he said, is to encourage the conservatives among them to enter local politics and run for office as Republicans.

“I see a bright, bright future for the Republican Party and conservatism in general,” Fleming said. But it will happen only if “we have people of all sectors who join us in our beliefs and principles,” he said.

So, according to Fleming, the problem has nothing to do with the substance of the Republican agenda—it's just that not enough Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians support it. Basically, it's their fault they don't support Republicans. If they want to see a more inclusive Republican Party, then they should support the Republican Party. If they don't, that's their problem.

There's actually a bit of twisted logic there. And it does help make one thing clear: It's no accident that Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections.

Ohio extremist wants buyers for his assault weapons to keep 'pro-life' personhood project alive

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:48:37 UTC

Patrick Johnston in his Intolerant shirt.
The back of the shirt reads: Homosexuality is
a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder.

Dr. Patrick Johnston, a forced-birther who is founder of Personhood Ohio, wants to keep his cough-cough "pro-life" operation alive by getting supporters to buy "an assault rifle” and “some high capacity magazines and a ton of ammo.” The progressive Ohio blog Plunderbund notes that Johnston is offering for sale two Chinese SKS rifles and a MAK 90, all of them semi-automatic rifles that fire the same caliber ammunition. Johnston is auctioning 2,550 rounds of ammo along with the rifles, he wrote in an email over the weekend.

As in other states, the personhood amendment his group backs would confer citizenship rights on fertilized eggs, thereby outlawing abortion.

Johnston is a general practice physician, writes anti-gay and lesbian rants, home-schools his eight children, has his own hate-radio show, and ran unsuccessfully for Ohio's 94th state legislative district in 2007 on a platform that included "making Ohio the first state in the Union to defy Roe v. Wade with a statewide abortion ban.” He has been linked with some of the most extremist forced-birther groups.

Although he has disavowed connections to the Army of God, which supports assassinations of abortion providers, the lie is put to that by the fact that some of Johnston's writing remains cached on the organization's website, including this bit in which he argues semantics with another person who also thinks killing abortion providers is proper:

If someone is about to kill you with a gun, and I shoot him first to save your life, I have not committed "murder" or an act of "justice", but rather, justifiable homicide. My motive was not malicious, but compassionate. The fetus, though smaller and weaker, is just as worthy of the right to life as you and therefore, with the same defensive motive and without blame in the sight of God, the same force may be used against his/her assailant in order to defend them.

Another example of his loonery dug out by reporter Wendy Norris in 2008 found Johnston arguing in CAPS LOCK mode with Ron McRae, a conservative opposed to abortion who nevertheless opposed the 1994 assassination of Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard by Paul Hill:

McRae: Paul Hill did God no service when he murdered Dr. Britton and his 74 year friend. The life of Christ is never manifest to the world by a Christian killing a lost sinner, regardless of how depraved.
Johnston: YOU WOULD NEVER SAY THIS TO CONDEMN ONE WHO USED LETHAL DEFENSIVE FORCE TO STOP AN ASSAILLANT [sic] FROM KILLING ALREADY-BORN PEOPLE. WHY THIS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST THE PREBORN?

This is the kind of talk that gives abortion providers like Dr. Warren Hern good reason to wear bullet-resistant armor and not sit by windows with the drapes open.

From that perspective, maybe it's a good thing that Johnston is selling his rifles.

President Obama: 'Lives have been saved' by NSA surveillance

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:40:25 UTC

Speaking in Germany with Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Obama attempted to put German and American citizens at ease after revelations that the NSA has been collecting phone and internet data in a dragnet operation. He repeated the now familiar talking point from government officials that the programs had prevented more than 50 terrorist plots, and added the assertion that lives had been saved because of the surveillance.

Ultimately, he said, “lives have been saved” because of the cautious execution of the surveillance systems. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted” not just in the United States, but in countries around the world, including Germany. That number, which the administration has been using in recent days to defend its actions, includes plots thwarted by PRISM and by the National Security Agency’s scrutiny of phone metadata.

Among the specific foiled plots officials have talked about, none have included plots developed to the point where lives were actually saved, where a concrete plot to kill had been stopped. The New York Times Charlie Savage writes about those interventions in his report on Tuesday's House Intelligence Committee hearing.

One case involved a group of men in San Diego convicted of sending money to an extremist group in Somalia. The other was presented as a nascent plan to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, although its participants were not charged with any such plot. Both were described by Sean Joyce, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at a rare public oversight hearing by the House Intelligence Committee. [...]
As an example of how the domestic calling log database has been used, Mr. Joyce cited the case of several men convicted by a jury in February of raising and sending about $8,500 to Al Shabab, a terrorist group in Somalia. The N.S.A. had flagged the calling activities of one of the men as suspicious, he said. [...]

Monitoring a terrorist in Yemen, the N.S.A. discovered that he was talking to a man named Khalid Ouazzani in Kansas City, Mo. After applying for a separate warrant for Mr. Ouazzani’s communications, they identified two additional conspirators and discovered they were “in the very initial stages” of the stock exchange bomb plot, he said. [...]

However, Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer for Mr. Hasanoff, called Mr. Joyce’s portrayal “astonishing” because none of the defendants was charged with the stock exchange allegation and there was no jury trial in any of the cases. Mr. Joyce also invoked two cases officials have previously linked to surveillance conducted under the FISA Amendments Act — a plot to bomb the New York City subway and the discovery that David Headley, a Chicago man, was working on a plot to bomb a Danish newspaper that published cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

The New York City subway plot, however, was thwarted by "old-fashioned police work" rather than dragnet electronic surveillance. That's according to public documents that show the tip-off came from British authorities who had arrested several suspected terrorists. They found the connection to American Najibullah Zazi, the would-be bomber, through those arrests, and through email correspondence between Zazi and his al Qaeda handler. The emails were targeted, though, by intelligence work, not by finding this needle in the haystack of swept-up data.

As far as David Headley is concerned, the DEA informant was caught before the Danish newspaper bomb plot could be carried out, but not before 168 people died in attacks he helped plot in Mumbai, in 2008. So that could be called a limited success, at best.

So far, the foiled plots that officials are talking about are a bit dubious, and the assertion that lives have been saved isn't proven by them. This would be just one issue in which Congress could start asking those questions the American public wants answered.

Daily Kos Elections Senate race ratings: Initial ratings for 2013-14

rss@dailykos.com (David Nir) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:29:10 UTC

Daily Kos Elections is pleased to announce our first set of Senate race ratings for the 2013-14 election cycle. Democrats are defending 20 seats (including one in a special election next week), while 15 Republican seats are up for re-election. The overall playing field favors the GOP, though they need to net five seats in order to take control of the chamber.

Our full chart rating the competitiveness of each contest is below (with Democratic seats shaded in blue and Republican seats in red), along with a description of our ratings categories and an explanation for why we've rated each race the way we have.

Courtesy Stephen Wolf, we've also put our ratings into map form, with lighter colors representing more competitive races (gray states don't have Senate races this cycle):

Here's how we define our ratings categories:

Safe: Barring unforeseeable developments, one party is certain to win.
Race to Watch: A foreseeable but as-yet unrealized development has the chance to make an otherwise "Safe" race potentially competitive (such as an incumbent retirement), or an incumbent faces a potentially competitive primary.

Likely: One party has a strong advantage and is likely to win, though the race has the potential to become more competitive.

Lean: One party has an identifiable advantage, but an upset victory is possible for the other party.

Tossup: Both (or all) parties have a strong (though not necessarily perfectly equal) chance of winning.

Below the fold are brief explanations of our initial ratings, grouped by category of competitiveness and following our chart from left to right and then downward.

Midday open thread

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:00:10 UTC

Today's comic by Jen Sorensen is Surveillance bait:

Typical excuse for gun carriers at airports—I forgot:

Nationwide, 1,525 firearms were seized at airports last year. Of those, 85 percent were loaded—and 26 percent were loaded and had a cartridge in the chamber ready to fire. The most frequently seized guns were .380-caliber, 9 mm and .38-caliber pistols. Those three types made up a little more than half of all guns confiscated, according to the Medill initiative.
And those arrested with guns paid $1.8 million in fines to the federal government last year, according to TSA.

The poll from Quinnipiac University shows Clinton with a solid lead over former Gov. Jeb Bush and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida. Clinton whips Bush 50 percent to 43 percent. She does even better against Rubio, besting him 53 percent to 41 percent.
Clinton and Bush both do well in rounding up members of their party, but the Democrat beats out the former governor with independents, leading that group 48 percent to 42 percent. Men divide evenly between the two candidates, with each claiming 45 percent, but Clinton has a clear edge with women voters. A majority—53 percent—of women back Clinton, while 41 percent prefer Bush.

Hastings [hired by Buzzfeed to cover the presidential race in 2012] was also a contributing editor at Rolling Stone [and] perhaps best known for his candid Rolling Stone interview with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, that eventually led to McChrystal being relieved of his command.
He was also the author of two books about America's wars: The Operators, detailing the flaws of the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, and I Lost My Love In Baghdad, about his experiences as a war correspondent in Iraq during his mid-twenties.

FBI investigators say FBI agents were justified in 150 killings and woundings from 1993-2011:

In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.’s internal investigation was the only official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been conflicting accounts about basic facts like whether the Chechen man, Ibragim Todashev, attacked an agent with a knife, was unarmed or was brandishing a metal pole. But Orlando homicide detectives are not independently investigating what happened.

Former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa expects to run for governor.

[In an interview with public radio station KPCC, he said]: "You mentioned governor. Look, I believe in public service. I want to run for governor. In fact, I fully expect that I will. I'm going to tell you something, I will never have a job like this. This city has given me more than I could have ever hoped for."

NASA issues Grand Challenge to find all asteroids imperiling humankind:

"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. "This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."

Virginian pleads guilty in fraud to get Newt on state primary ballot in 2012:

In December of 2011 Newt Gingrich needed 10,000 signatures to get his name on the Virginia presidential primary ballot. Adam Ward, 28, collected more than 11,000 signatures according to prosecutors. More than 4,000 signatures could not be verified by investigators.

Gingrich failed to qualify for the primary.

On today's Kagro in the Morning show, NN13 looms large! Greg Dworkin remembers NNs past in his roundup, plus stories on Rick Perry's job poaching junket to CT, new NSA polls, and more gut vs quant sparring. Greg also notes the passing of Michael Hastings, with a few stories looking back on his fearless style. Armando called in from the road, noting he'll be reporting from San Jose, as will the larger Netroots Radio team. #GunFAIL news yields typically amazing results. McConnell's lame "threat" on the nuclear option. Lastly, the free market says "derp" to the NRA's terrible "arm the teachers" idea.

Steve King launches droning strike on nation's capital

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:30:10 UTC

Ol' Dead Eyes

Add "press conference" to the list of phrases Congressman and longtime lightbulb-hater Steve King does not understand. For days he's been hyping an anti-immigration-reform "six hour press conference" that he'd be putting on today, and by "press conference" he seems to have meant "combination outdoor filibuster and mini-rally for tea party hangers-on."

The actual event seems to be quite the shindig:

King promised to host a respectful exchange of ideas and invited colleagues of both parties and on either side of the immigration debate to join him for what he hoped might become a Lincoln-Douglas-style debate. […]
As the event began, King stood on a makeshift stage with Reps. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and Randy Weber (R-Tex.), all of whom were wearing red ties and dark suits.

First, that ain't both sides of the debate by a stretch, and second, Newt Gingrich has copyrighted the phrase "Lincoln-Douglas debate" so you had better be prepared to fight for it, pal.

So who makes up the crowd for this sort of thing? Pretty much what you'd expect for a Steve King function:

One woman from California held up a sign that read, “Rubio Lies, America Dies,” a reference to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a lead negotiator on the Senate immigration bill.
Another older gentleman held up a sign that cited three immigration demands: First, “strong boarders,” [sic] second “No Amnesty” and third, “No Voting Rights.”

Strong boarders are the foundation of a rent-based economy, so I'll give him that one. But as you might guess, the theme of the rally has been a bit scattered.

The attendees are not necessarily on message, as evidenced by this sign equating the IRS to the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS, military unit: [pic]

Or maybe they are on message:

Steve King on IRS: "It's not even the government's business how much money you make. That's part of freedom!"
— @daveweigel

Will Steve King hold out for the promised six hours? Will immigration reform and/or the basic premise of tax collection be thwarted by this stalwart crowd of a few hundred people who finally got to break out their anti-everything signs from a few summers back? Will anyone still be talking about this tomorrow? And will Louie Gohmert be able to find his way home afterwards, or will he still be wandering the lawn three days from now?

Democratic bill would undo the dishonorable discharge stigma many gay veterans still carry

rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:00:14 UTC

President Obama signs the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Now, Congress needs to undo some of the damage of past injustice.

Before Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed, as many as 114,000 service members were discharged because they were gay, and many of those were dishonorable or other than honorable discharges. The damage those dishonorable discharges have done can't be undone, but the status of the discharges themselves could be, and two House Democrats—Wisconsin's Mark Pocan and New York's Charlie Rangel—have proposed a bill to do just that.

Explaining that many states treat dishonorable discharges as felonies, and that service members discharged for being gay may have had trouble getting work or even been prohibited from voting or getting unemployment benefits or veteran benefits, Pocan details the remedies of the proposed bill:

The “Restore Honor to Service Members Act,” turns the current broad review policy outlined in a memo from the Under Secretary of Defense into clear and settled law. It ensures all services members who were previously discharged because of their sexual orientation receive a timely, consistent and transparent review of their records so that gay veterans who served honorably have their records rightfully upgraded to honorable. It also removes any indication of a service member’s sexual orientation from the record, so they are not automatically “outed” to those accessing their record and protects against future discrimination by decriminalizing consensual relations between same sex couples, bringing military law in line with Supreme Court rulings.

Reasonable responses to this bill include: Yes. Now. Right this minute. Last week. How has this not already happened?

Will congressional Republicans have such reasonable responses? Somehow, I'm not confident in that. But this is one to watch—upgrading these discharges will undo past injustice, injustice that the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell ended for today's military but that is still haunting too many veterans.

GOP aide goes on popsicle-fueled right-wing publicity stunt in favor of cutting food stamps

rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:34:37 UTC

Apparently stung by the Democratic pushback against House Republican dreams of slashing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by $21 billion over 10 years, Rep. Steve Stockman is lashing out. Where two dozen Democratic members of the House did a SNAP challenge themselves, eating on the average food stamp budget for a week, Stockman had an aide do the challenge and then announce that it's a breeze, no problem, we can totally cut the program.

Question: If it's so easy to eat on less than a SNAP budget, proving that cuts are totally warranted, why aren't Republican members of the House doing the challenge en masse? Why is it left to one staffer to make this point? I mean, really, dozens of members of Congress do the challenge and say it's hard, to say nothing of all the clergy and others who've participated and say the same. To say nothing of all the people who actually live on this budget and it's miserable and difficult.

Well, let's take a look at what Stockman communications director and master of the universe Donny Ferguson bought as his entire food supply for a week:

For $21.55 Ferguson purchased at Dollar Tree:
Two boxes of Honeycomb cereal
Three cans of red beans and rice
Jar of peanut butter
Bottle of grape jelly
Loaf of whole wheat bread
Two cans of refried beans
Box of spaghetti
Large can of pasta sauce
Two liters of root beer
Large box of popsicles
24 servings of Wyler’s fruit drink mix
Eight cups of applesauce
Bag of pinto beans
Bag of rice
Bag of cookies
For $6.03 at the Shoppers Food Warehouse next door Ferguson bought a gallon of milk and a box of maple and brown sugar oatmeal.

So he's got a lot of cereal for breakfast, and he can have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, along with maybe some applesauce and fruit drink. For dinner, it looks like he's eating spaghetti for a couple nights and otherwise eating beans and rice. Also popsicles and cookies. Healthy diet, there! And such a varied menu at dinner. Perhaps Ferguson isn't aware that the definition of low food security is "reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake." Exactly the diet he's reporting, in other words: fruits and vegetables only in the form of grape jelly, pasta sauce, and applesauce, heavily dependent on root beer and cookies and sugary cereal for calories, and beans and rice night after night for dinner. Not to mention the increased health care costs we can expect to see as a result of people living on diets like this and developing diabetes, hypertension, and a series of other health problems.

If having food stamp recipients actually starving wasn't a goal for Republicans, they'd see this shopping list for what it is: an argument in favor of increasing SNAP benefits. But to Stockman and Ferguson, the SNAP challenge was nothing but "a left-wing publicity stunt," to be countered with a right-wing publicity stunt. And you know, it kind of is a left-wing publicity stunt—one that says "you can ignore all the people who live on this budget day in, day out. Can you ignore members of Congress and clergy and community leaders?" It's telling that the counterpart right-wing publicity stunt says "let them live on cookies and grape jelly, let's cut more."

Republican rebranding fail, continued: Congressman calls immigrants 'takers' at anti-reform rally

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:04:12 UTC

Rep. Randy Weber (R-AZ) gives a pretty good example of the flavor of things today at the Steve King press conference/rally against immigration reform:

Mr. President. Build up this wall. [...] We need some sanity. The things that made America great are Americans like you that work and understand that it's sacrifice. You don't get to come over here and be takers.

You need only listen to his words to know that Mr. Weber is a bigot. But he's also an idiot: Immigration reform isn't just the right thing to do from a moral perspective, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it would reduce the deficit—by a lot. This isn't a tough choice: Immigration reform isn't just good for people who want to become Americans, it's also good for people who already are Americans.

Poll: Give us congressional hearings on NSA surveillance

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:49:39 UTC

As Greg Dworkin and Chris Bowers have already noted, polling on the NSA revelations is a tricky business and the latest from Washington Post-ABC News isn't an exception. One thing though is very clear: The public wants Congress to do its job in regards to the NSA and conduct real oversight.

Americans are divided when it comes to charging Edward Snowden with a crime for leaking portions of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of phone records and Internet activity, but they clearly want to know more, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Nearly two-thirds said they want open, public congressional hearings on the previously secret programs.

Slightly more (48 percent) oppose criminally charging Snowden than support (43 percent), suggesting that more see him as a whistleblower than a traitor, even while they support the program by a 58 percent margin. (The question asked: "It's been reported that the federal government's National Security Agency collects extensive records of phone calls, as well as Internet data related to specific investigations, to try to identify possible terrorist threats. Do you support or oppose this intelligence-gathering program?" Note that the "ordinary Americans" formulation Chris Bowers highlighted as key in how people respond to the question was left entirely out in this question: It's not clear from the question whose phone calls are being swept up.) But they want to know more about the program.

The entirely unambiguous response to this poll, however, is that the American people want to know more. They want transparency and they want congress to provide it. But if Tuesday's performance by the House Intelligence Committee is any guide, we're going to have a long wait before that happens.

Republican congresswoman pleased that her party is 'changing hearts and minds' on abortion

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:15:10 UTC

Please, GOP, keep on changing minds

Well, I guess you could say that this is half right:

“We are changing hearts and minds,” said Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo. “We hear more and more evidence that life begins at conception.” She said she covets the day when abortion is “absolutely unthinkable.”

Now I have no idea what evidence she is referring to, unless she means that whole masturbating fetuses thing. But while she dreams about a world in women are legally banned from making medical decisions about their bodies, she does have a point about how Republicans are "changing hearts and minds" when it comes to talking about abortion. Unfortunately for her, the GOPers who have been most effective at doing just that are named Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They changed some minds all right — and Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly couldn't be happier.

The Republican Party's clueless caucus is pretty much their entire caucus

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:30:22 UTC

Alexander Burns and Jake Sherman of Politico take a look at what they call the GOP's "clueless caucus" — the Todd Akins and Allen Wests and Steve Kings and Michele Bachmanns of the Republican Party who just can't stop saying stupid things. I'll never object to talking about clueless Republicans, but here's the thing thing: the clueless caucus isn't some rump group of House Republicans who get more attention they deserve. It's pretty much infused the entire party.

For example, here is one of the Republicans who Burns and Sherman offer up as a counterpoint to the clueless caucus:

Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn, perhaps the deftest communicator among the House GOP women, stepped up to be an advocate for the legislation instead. Speaking to POLITICO, Blackburn said the only thing the party can do in these moments is try to put its best messengers forward.
“I think people are going to misspeak. What we seek to do as women is to be a positive force for the right kind of change,” Blackburn said. She suggested voters might swap out some of her loquacious colleagues in coming elections.

“Many times when you want to change what’s happening, you change the players,” she told POLITICO. “Having more conservative women in Washington would be a good thing.”

But if Marsha Blackburn is supposed to be one of the "clueful" Republicans, it only serves to reinforce the depth of their problems. Sure, Blackburn replaced Rep. Trent Franks as leader of their abortion ban legislation after Franks dismissed pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. But yesterday, Blackburn defended the legislation's requirement that women report rape to police before being able to have an abortion by arguing that the purpose of the bill was to to put more rapists behind bars.

Now, I don't know about you, but I think the idea that banning abortion after 20 weeks will help stop rape is pretty damn clueless. In fact, it doesn't seem any less clueless than the guy she replaced. But even if it is, the fact that there are Republicans even more clueless than her shows just how clueless congressional Republicans really are.

Surveillance bait

rss@dailykos.com (Jen Sorensen) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:50:09 UTC

(Click to enlarge)

I find the NSA Prism program -- what I know about it, anyway -- to be problematic. But it does seem there's a disconnect between public reaction to this particular scandal and our tolerance for the selling of highly-personalized data by tech companies in the private sector. I've read over the years about evolving technologies to offer individuals different prices and interest rates based on data collected through the internet; I have no idea how much this is actually happening, but the potential for abuse seems vast.

Somewhat amusingly, while I was working on this very cartoon, I watched a music video on YouTube -- The New Pornographers' "Slow Descent into Alcoholism" -- and immediately afterward was served Google ads for various detox programs. So there's one particular data point on my record that might not be so accurate. At least, not currently.

Update: To reiterate what I've said in comments below, I'm not trying to suggest an either/or situation here in which government spying is OK and private sector data mining is not. The potential for abuse by the state is enormous and well-precedented. Just trying to point out the elephant in the room. Silicon Valley is no saint here, and a bit hypocritical. Many tech libertarians seem to overlook this. Private data could be used to deny people health insurance and harm their credit -- it goes beyond mere advertising. What we have with the Prism program is foxes working with foxes guarding the henhouse.

Get a signed print of this cartoon from the artist.

Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Brian Schweitzer might decide in six million years or so

rss@dailykos.com (David Nir) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:00:11 UTC

Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here.

Leading Off:

• MT-Sen: So when will Democratic ex-Gov. Brian Schweitzer decide on whether to run for Senate? It sounds like he's waiting until the Late Holocene epoch:

"I'm a soil scientist. We're trained in how the Earth was formed," he said.
"The most important thing a soil scientist has an understanding of is time—glacial time ... I look at a mountain and I'm able to visualize how that mountain was created over 6 million years. You're a journalist. You read time as next week, tomorrow. I think of time geologically. When you see me say 'soon' you may be thinking days—but I think of time in millions of years sometimes."

Meanwhile, retiring Sen. Max Baucus has reportedly cut a $100,000 check to the DSCC (senators can make unlimited donations to the group). However, he is still sitting on a $4.9 million war chest, and given the fact that he's never going to run for office again, what's the point of holding on to all that cash? He should just give it over to the Senate Democrats in one lump sum and go out looking like a mensch. In this lifetime.

Daily Kos Radio is LIVE at 9am ET!

rss@dailykos.com (David Waldman) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:30:10 UTC

Daily Kos Radio's Kagro in the Morning show podcasts are now available through iTunes.

We just might squeak by without lingering on the NSA story today. We've got economic and labor stories. Crazy Congress stories.

But we'd trade it all for something fun, like a Republican claiming fetuses can play racquetball, or something.

We're LIVE at 9 a.m. ET with Kagro in the Morning, thanks to NetrootsRadio.com.

Listen LIVE here:The Daily Kos Radio Player

Can't see the Flash player? Click here to download the stream directly.

Or if you prefer, why not download the Stitcher app on your favorite mobile device, and search for the Netroots Radio live stream? And hey, when you do, be sure to sign up with the promo code DAILYKOS, and earn Daily Kos Radio $1 in the Stitcher affiliate program!

Please do remember to "favorite" us while you're at Stitcher. We're bouncing up and down in the rankings these days, and the more of you who help us, the more listeners out there who'll find us on the Stitcher network.

Miss the last show? You can catch it here:

Need more info on how to listen? Find it below the fold.

Cheers and Jeers: Wednesday

rss@dailykos.com (Bill in Portland Maine) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:17:53 UTC

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Netroots Nation 2013: Final Checklist

Unreal how fast these hippie love-ins roll around, ain't it? Tonight #8 kicks off in San Jose with the Liquid Courage shindig featuring Howard Dean. After that, it's a four-day blur of progressive awesomeism. Here's your barest-of-bare checklist of essentials:

Tonight!!!!!!!!

√ Spreadsheet of panels and events via Kossack Vicki. (If you can't be there, you can watch from home via this link.)
√ Town Square events (Arcade games! Fire truck! Hot damn!)

√ Parties…

…and Afterparties!

√ San Jose attractions

√ Last-minute registration

√ Media coverage

√ And more media coverage

√ Toothbrush, socks, tuxedo t-shirt, pants (optional), mustache wax, shiny new dimes to pass out to children on the street.

√ NN13 Twitter feed (and hashtag #nn13)

√ Pie

√ And last but not least...earworm:

You are now ready. Have fun. Learn a bunch of stuff that will serve you well for the rest of your life. And safe travels.

Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: NSA leaks and other arguments

rss@dailykos.com (Greg Dworkin) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:30:09 UTC

WaPo on new ABC/WaPo poll (above graphic):

Americans are divided when it comes to charging Edward Snowden with a crime for leaking portions of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of phone records and Internet activity, but they clearly want to know more, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Nearly two-thirds said they want open, public congressional hearings on the previously secret programs.

Pew:

The new national survey, conducted June 12-16 by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY among 1,512 adults, finds that 44% think that the release of classified information about the NSA program harms the public interest, while 49% say it serves the public interest.
However, 54% of the public – including identical majorities of Republicans and Democrats (59% each) – say the government should pursue a criminal case against the person responsible for leaking the classified information about the program.

Definitely some age related splitting: younger voters think it was more valuable and want less prosecution.

RIP Michael Hastings at age 33. He wrote this. And this:

On Reddit, Michael Hastings once shared some good advice for young journalists #RIP http://t.co/...
— @charliespiering

Rick Perlstein:

So far [Glenn] Greenwald has been lucky, and because he has been lucky, everyone who cares about fixing our puke-worthy system of "oversight" of the American state's out-of-control spy regime has been lucky too. Yes, clowns like Peter King and irrelevant throwbacks like Dick Cheney cry treason and call for death squads or tumbrels or whatever. But the bottom line is that for whatever reason (reasons I think will only become clear in the light of later history) the American establishment seems ready to think about this story—ready to give a hard look at what our surveillance state has become. The evidence is there in thoughtful and detailed reporting and analysis on how PRISM might actually work, for instance in this Associated Press piece (which is far more usefully critical than the typical piece on the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq's claimed weapons of mass destruction in 2003, which the American establishment was not ready to think about), and this analysis by technologist Ashkan Soltani—both of which sort through the available evidence far better than Glenn Greenwald does, but also would not exist without what Greenwald and Edward Snowden courageously did, however flawed Greenwald and Snowden might be as messengers. Life can be complicated that way.

Complicated, and nuanced. That it is. And Glenn fights with other people. So it goes. It's not about him, it's about the story, but the fights are generally about the story.

More politics and policy below the fold.

Open thread for night owls: Excerpts from the July edition of Harper's Index

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 03:30:10 UTC

Here are a few excerpts from the latest edition of Harper's Index:

• Number of U.S. retail jobs Doritos Locos tacos created in the past year, according to Taco Bell: 15,000

• Number of retail jobs created worldwide by Apple in that same period: 400

• Percentage of college professors teaching online courses who do not believe students should receive credit for them: 72

• Number of bills strengthening gun control that have been signed into law since the Sandy Hook shooting: 14

• Number weakening gun control: 37

• Percentage of criminal suspects asked to waive their Miranda rights and speak to police who do so: 84

• Number of early deaths in China in 2010 that have been attributed to air pollution: 1,200,000

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—The Republicans are not on your side:

The message is simple and easy, because it happens to be true. On issue after issue, the Republicans prove that they don't care about people, they only care about their corporate owners. Last week, they blocked an extension of unemployment benefits. This week, theykilled it. They also ensured a pay cut to doctors who accept Medicare patients, ensuring that fewer doctors will, and that those on Medicare will have more trouble finding medical care. But while they've been busy hurting people, they've also been busy helping corporations

With the BP oil gusher destroying the Gulf of Mexico, Republicans are having to pretend not to be defending BP. Meanwhile, they're criticizing President Obama for trying to protectpeople from BP. It's always the same. They protected the banks from financial regulation. They protected the health insurance industry from real health care reform. They killedcramdown, which would have protected homeowners from losing their homes. The list goes on and on. Issue after issue. Year after year.

When have the Republicans supported legislation that helps people at the expense of corporate special interests? When have they proposed such legislation, on their own? Don't hurt yourself trying to find examples. They're rhetorical questions.

Tweet of the Day:

NSA Chief: Contractor trainee waltzed into #NSA HQ & stole doc only 20 people on the planet supposedly had access to: http://t.co/...
— @billmon1

On today's Kagro in the Morning show, a Republican back-bencher (not a euphemism) makes headlines with an eyebrow-raising claim about how fetuses pass their time! Greg Dworkin discusses his latest for Politix, both-sides-ism, Republican rebranding, and traditional media missing the point(s). Armando called in on trust in gov't, in the context of the fading IRS story, the NSA revelations, Syria, and the polling on all three. David Weigel at Slate notes Republican tactics in conflating IRS accusations. Jindal's latest derp. David Dayen's Salon entry, "Bank of America whistle-blower's bombshell: 'We were told to lie.'" And the KS Sec. of State outraged by a protest at his home goes to 2nd Amendment rhetoric.

High Impact Posts. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.

Economics Daily Digest: The hunt for good jobs continues

rss@dailykos.com (Roosevelt Institute) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:12:12 UTC

By Rachel Goldfarb, originally posted on Next New Deal

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email.

“This was really eye-opening for me”: Fed’s Raskin Shocked at Low Quality of Work at Local Job Fair (Reuters)

Pedro da Costa notes that Sarah Bloom Raskin's comments at A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency on June 4th were surprisingly personal. Raskin's trip to the job fair helped her to understand just how difficult things are in today's job market.

Roosevelt Take: Jeff Madrick continues the conversation started at the conference, and notes that we must keep working until everyone who wants a decent job has one.

Minimum Wage: Catching up to Productivity (Democracy)

John Schmitt suggests plans to increase the minimum wage so that low-wage workers get a piece of the pie from our massive productivity gains. Linking the minimum wage to CPI isn’t the solution, because that would just maintain the status quo.

Roosevelt Take: Watch John with Brink Lindsey, Ai-jen Poo, and Roosevelt Institute CEO and President Felicia Wong on the panel "Is Education the Answer?" at A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency.

Dems Rebrand Minimum Wage, Sick Leave As Women's Issues To Pressure GOP (HuffPo)

Laura Bassett and Dave Jamieson see these efforts as an intentional push against the GOP, since the Democrats have such large margins with women voters. By making economic issues into gender issues, they are already in the lead for voter approval.

Florida’s Governor Signs Business-Backed Bill Banning Paid Sick Leave (ThinkProgress)

Bryce Covert reports that Rick Scott has signed a bill that bans local governments from implementing paid sick leave legislation. Apparently Floridians are best served by bringing their infectious diseases to work.

Walmart Bill Vote Bumped to Next Week; Cue the Lobbyists (Washington City Paper)

Aaron Wiener writes on a D.C. City Council bill that would require large retailers whose workers are not unionized to pay a living wage of $12.50 per hour. Unsurprisingly, a Walmart spokesman doesn't like the exemption for organized labor.

Volunteering Lifts Job Prospects of the Jobless (WaPo)

Michael Fletcher reports on a federal study that provides data for something many have assumed: volunteering increases an unemployed person's chance of finding a job by 27%. For those without high school diplomas, who really struggle to find work, the effect is even greater.

The Current U.S. Economy: Text and Subtext (NYT)

Jared Bernstein thinks that the relatively positive IMF assessment of the U.S. economy requires annotation, which reveals the underlying struggles of the middle and lower classes and the problems with our current economic policy.

Will the Robots Steal Your Paycheck? BREAKING: They Already Have (The Atlantic)

Jordan Weissmann examines a study that shows that in countries where the cost of doing business has dropped, worker share of GDP fell as well. He argues that we need to consider how this change affects workers who are being replaced by technology.

Mad Men: The Quality of Mercy (6.12)

rss@dailykos.com (Adam B) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:57:06 UTC

Ted Chaough, on the hot seat (courtesy AMCtv)

This week's episode is mostly about the characters who know who they are, and those who aren't as self-aware.

McDonald's and 7-Eleven franchise owners push the exploitation envelope

rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:58:34 UTC

Big corporations like McDonald's and 7-Eleven exert a lot of control over their franchise owners when it comes to things like branding and the products they sell. When it comes to labor standards, though, it's almost like corporate management doesn't care at all, as two recent cases remind us. Fourteen 7-Eleven stores were seized and nine franchise owners and managers were arrested and charged with conspiring to commit wire fraud, identity theft, and harboring illegal immigrants. According to U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch:

... the 7-Eleven defendants allegedly forced the immigrants to work 100 hours a week and pocketed the majority of their pay, while also forcing them to live in and pay rent in boarding houses that the defendants owned. This "plantation system" allegedly went on for more than 13 years, she said.

The workers were assigned stolen identities by the defendants, but it sure sounds like the abuses directed at these workers merit some charges—you know, theft, forced labor, that kind of stuff? These 14 stores are looking like the tip of the iceberg, with 40 more being inspected, yet apparently in 13 years, 7-Eleven corporate management didn't figure out something was wrong.

Meanwhile, Natalie Gunshannon, a former McDonald's worker in Pennsylvania, is suing because the franchise she worked for refused to pay her by check or direct deposit, as she requested and the law requires, instead paying her with a debit card loaded up with fees:

She was to be paid about $7.44 per hour—her paystub didn’t list her hourly rate. Minimum wage is $7.25.
According to the complaint filed, the JP Morgan Chase payroll card lists several fees, including a $1.50 charge for ATM withdrawals, $5 for over-the-counter cash withdrawals, $1 per balance inquiry, 75 cents per online bill payment and $15 for lost/stolen card.

If she was working 40 hours a week (unlikely) at $7.44 an hour, $7.61 in fees would bring her below minimum wage—and it's not hard to see how you rack up more than $7.61 in fees given that list. If she was working 30 hours a week, one over-the-counter cash withdrawal and an online bill payment would bring her below minimum wage.

The franchise owners are the ones who directly decide to keep immigrants as forced labor or pay in fee-laden debit cards. But 7-Eleven and McDonald's are not exactly hands off in other areas of franchise ownership—for instance, 7-Eleven franchisees are required to buy 85 percent of their products from the company's recommended vendors, and carry certain key items no matter what. Funny, isn't it, how labor standards are the big thing these low-wage corporations let slide with their franchisees?

Anyone can be a PAC. Even you, unhinged crackpot guy.

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:45:10 UTC

Sorry, bigots.

Via Right Wing Watch:

Government Is Not God PAC has issued a warning to

All right, I'm gonna stop you right there. Government Is Not God PAC is an actual thing? Oh for the love of ...

Government Is Not God PAC has issued a warning to President Obama over his ceremony marking LGBT Pride Month, warning that “his goal of normalizing homosexuality in America” will not go unpunished.

The "warning" apparently is that God will be smiting all those who let gay Americans raise children and hold government jobs without properly hating them, or something. It appears to be mostly about gay Americans raising children. From their pronouncement:

In a special video on LGBT Gay Pride Month, Obama praised “gay” leaders who had “bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice.” That’s a clever way of saying they have turned morality upside down and violated God’s moral laws in pushing for the normalization of homosexual sex acts.s
Obama, who claims to be a Christian, might want to read Romans 1:18-31.

And, he might want to read that the Lord Jesus Christ said about those who defile children: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” – Matthew 18:6.

Government Is Not God PAC consists of longtime far-right crackpot William Murray and, apparently, whatever farm animals he has around the ol' barn that day. Past pronouncements have included the claim that Obama would "force doctors to assist homosexuals in buying surrogate babies," so … yeah.

The main lesson I think we can all learn from this is that you, personally, are an idiot for not starting your own crackpot political PAC. No, really, anyone can do it. You barely even have to do anything, and so long as you drip out a teensy trickle of cash to a few crackpot candidates and maybe put up a completely unhinged newspaper advertisement it's all legal. I could start a "God Is Not Government PAC" right now, just to mess with people, and the only reason I'm not doing it is because paperwork gives me a bad rash.

Hannity's lame justification for partisan hypocrisy

rss@dailykos.com (DarkSyde) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:00:25 UTC

When last we heard from Sean Hannity, he was for data mining before he was against it. Having been exposed yet again as a partisan hypocrite, Hannity offers this ... defense? I guess, if Hannity whining he's completely consistent and a Republican congressman agreeing is a defense. Not that this anything new for Sean Hannity, he was also against hacking emails before he was for it.

Immigration reform cuts deficits—a lot

rss@dailykos.com (kos) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:55:53 UTC

New American citizens swearing in.

Not a good day for opponents of comprehensive immigration reform, who have been arguing that legalization would explode the deficit. The reality? It's one of the best deficit-cutting measures on the table.

The immigration bill under consideration in the Senate would reduce federal deficits by nearly $200 billion over the next decade, and continue generating savings in the years beyond, even after millions of new citizens became eligible for health-care and welfare benefits, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday.

Everyone assumed immigration reform would cut the deficit over the first decade, as newly legalized workers paid more into the Treasury. But there was also an assumption that legalization would explode the deficit over the second decade as those immigrants became citizens and eligible for entitlement benefits.

Instead, the CBO projects further savings in that second decade, completely eliminating a chief talking point of the xenophobic brigade. Like chief Senate foe Jeff Sessions, who had originally demanded the second-decade scoring back in late May:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has urged the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to consider the costs of immigration reform beyond the next decade.
Sessions is concerned the CBO will dramatically underestimate the costs of comprehensive immigration reform by only projecting its costs over the next decade.

He argues that the biggest costs will kick in after the 10-year window typically used in CBO cost analyses.

“It is crucial that your fiscal and economic projections extend well beyond the current 10-year budget window,” Sessions wrote in a letter to CBO Director Doug Elmendorf.

Oops. Oh well. Without a budgetary argument against immigration reform, the haters will have to stick to good old-fashioned xenophobia. And they've got plenty of that to go around.

House votes for jobs for masturbating fetuses, or something

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:46:40 UTC

All up in your uterus, again.

Or maybe it wasn't jobs. No, it definitely wasn't a vote about jobs, because John Boehner's House just doesn't do that. It was yet another vote—destined to be ignored by the Senate, and with a promised presidential veto—for yet one more abortion restriction: banning the procedure after 20 weeks. It passed. 228-196.

But it's totally not about a war on women, guys. It's all about the fetuses. Because fetuses pleasure themselves and something about rape (although it took them a while to care about the rape part).

D.C. Football

rss@dailykos.com (keefknight) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:50:10 UTC

McConnell promises to end filibuster if made majority leader

rss@dailykos.com (brooklynbadboy) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:30:35 UTC

Mitch lets the cat out of the bag:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday starkly warned Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) not to eliminate the filibuster on presidential nominations, threatening to end the 60-vote threshold for everything, including bills, if he becomes the majority leader.
“There not a doubt in my mind that if the majority breaks the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate with regard to nominations, the next majority will do it for everything,” McConnell said on the floor.

Now does anyone really believe that McConnell won't do that anyway? Especially if he gets a Republican president?

Senate Democrats need to get this through their thick skulls: Republicans don't give a shit about "Senate comity." They've proven that time and time again. Nor do they give a shit about Senate traditions or the proverbial "one day it might be us" crap that Democrats box themselves in with. They will abuse the filibuster now and get rid of it completely when they get the majority. It doesn't matter at all what Democrats do. Republicans are going to be Republicans.

So let's just end this ridiculous farce now and just get rid of the whole goddamn thing and restore majority rule as the Founders wrote into the Constitution. McConnell and the GOP certainly have the guts to do it. The question is, do the Dems?

Take action: Tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to re-open filibuster reform.

Gov. Bobby Jindal explains what 'the left wants'

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:50:09 UTC

I have a serious question: Is Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal high? Because in this otherwise uninteresting op-ed bleating about how the Republican Party needs to stop introspecting so much and just start being awesome, he closes with perhaps the truest statements on what the Republican Party is about, which is fighting against an American "left" pulled entirely from his own imagination:

At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state and the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon.
Why?

Because the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

Wow. Now that's impressive. I could probably write an entire book consisting of nothing but going down that list and pondering what Bobby Jindal thinks constitutes being "left": the exploding government, the flat-earth bit, the urgent leftist need for the IRS to "violate our constitutional rights" and all the rest. The flat earth one is a particular puzzle, coming from someone whose knowledge of post-industrial-age science did not include an awareness that volcanoes still exist and that scientists monitor them in an attempt to provide some warning when they're about to go Michael Bay on us all. No sir, any Republican insistence that they are the truer patrons of science, now that is an eyebrow raiser. I'm not aware of any particular evidence that the party of Jindal, Palin, Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Sam Brownback, James Inhofe, John Cornyn, Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli, Pat Robertson, E.W. Jackson, Allen West, Rick Scott, Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann and countless state representatives howling about conspiracies as diverse as when the United Nations is coming to get us and whether or not the Treasury Department is hoarding ammunition so that good patriots can't fight back or whether the scientific community of the entire planet is on a quest to trick us all—I'm not aware of any evidence that that party is even tethered to the same reality as the rest of us, much less that they are the party of fact-having and science-promoting. That paragraph of Jindal's pretty much proves the point, does it not?

There's a theory going around that the intellectual underpinnings of conservatism have so collapsed as to render the movement nothing more than a blind reflex against "whatever liberals want," or rather whatever any non-conservative American is perceived to want, as cobbled together from a long list of conservative fears and conspiracies. From health care to deficits, there's precious few actual conservative policy stances that can survive longer than a single opportunistic moment; the only true measure of conservative policy can be found in who proposed it. Romneycare good, Obamacare bad. Deficits unimportant, until deficits will eat us all. Medicare is an evil government overreach—and we Republicans are the true protectors of it. Jindal would be a reasonable example of the theory, though far from the only one; he may not know what the GOP stands for (and has penned an entire op-ed professing no particular opinion on it, so long as Republicans "get on offense" about it) but he can rattle off all the leftist fictions it supposedly stands against in one long breath.

The new Republican plan to go after rapists ... one fetus at a time

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:46:26 UTC

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, tapped by Republican leadership to be the face of their new abortion ban legislation, comes up with a new—and completely bizarre—argument in favor of the legislation:

REP. MARSHA BLACKBURN (R-TN): The bill has been amended. It does allow exceptions for rape and incest and the life of the mother, and that was the appropriate step to take.
CRAIG MELVIN (MSNBC ANCHOR): But the bill only allows the exception for rape when it's reported. Only allows the exception for incest when it's reported. Is that correct?

BLACKBURN: There is a reporting requirement in the text of the bill. And the hope is that that will help in getting some of these perpetrators out of the population that are committing these crimes against women and against minor females.

You know, if Republicans really wanted to crack down on the crime of rape, wouldn't it be smarter to do something crazy like ... cracking down on the crime of rape? Maybe even helping the victims of rape? Instead, they are proposing to punish rape victims.

Sure, their bill gives an exception in cases where the rape was reported, but the exception wouldn't include victims of unreported rape. That accounts for roughly half of all rapes, which means the GOP's legislation would target the other half of rape victims, denying them legal access to abortion.

That might seem heartless to you, but according to Blackburn, the real reason for the legislation is to put more rapists behind bars by giving women an incentive to report rape. Obviously, that argument is complete and total bull, but Blackburn wasn't done:

MELVIN: Congresswoman, do you know how many cases of rape and incest go unreported in this country every year?
BLACKBURN: You know, I know that any rape and any incest is a horrible and horrific crime and what we want to do, and the purpose of the legislation today, Craig, is to make certain that those who are carrying out crimes against women, and against these unborn babies, are dealt with

On the bright side, Blackburn says Republicans want to make sure that "those who are carrying out crimes against women" are dealt with, but the legislation doesn't actually do anything meaningful to crack down on perpetrators of sexual violence. But what it does do—by her own admission—is make sure that those who carry out crimes "against these unborn babies" are "dealt with." And the way it deals with that is by making criminals out of women who want to exercise their constitutional right to choose.

I guess the moral of the story is that you don't need to be a Republican man to spout nonsense about abortion—Republican women are perfectly capable of it as well. Which explains why Marsha is the new face of the Republican War on Women.

Cummings releases full transcript of IRS screening manager interview

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:31:02 UTC

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Government Oversight Committee, delivers on his promise to call committee Chairman Darrell Issa's bluff:

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have just released a full transcript of testimony from a key witness in the investigation of IRS targeting of conservatives — and it appears to confirm that the initial targeting did originate with a low-level employee in the Cincinnati office.
It also shows a key witness and IRS screening manager – a self described conservative Republican — denying any communication with the White House or senior IRS officials about the targeting.

So now we know why Government Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa didn't want to to release the full transcripts—they show everything he's been saying is bunk. You can read the transcripts here and here.

Midday open thread

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:01:02 UTC

Today's comic by Matt Bors is Data intrusion:

TransCanada Corp. (TRP), which says Keystone XL will be the safest pipeline ever built, isn’t planning to use infrared sensors or fiber-optic cables to detect spills along the system’s 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) path to Texas refineries from fields in Alberta.[...]
The [U.S. Transportation] department is studying leak detection as it considers new rules to improve safety. Equipment available to spot spills more quickly would have cut 75 percent off the estimated $1.7 billion toll in property damage caused by major incidents on oil lines from 2001 to 2011, consultants said in a December report prepared for the department.

Activists seek to reverse Arizona's ban on marriage equality:

The petition drive comes as the Supreme Court is expected to release its ruling this month on gay marriage. Many observers believe the court will rule that individual states must decide whether gay marriage should be legal, and Equal Marriage Arizona wants to position voters to change the state’s course on marriage equality.
“The attitudes of this state, of the people of this state, have changed a lot,” said Warren Meyer, a Phoenix business owner leading the initiative effort. “We believe that Arizonans are ready for equal marriage.”

FBI digging for Hoffa again:

The FBI—working on information from an aging reputed mobster—began digging in the waist-high grass of a Detroit-area field Monday in yet another search for the remains of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, according to a law enforcement source with direct knowledge of the investigation. [...]
FBI Special Agent Bob Foley, head of the agency's Detroit office, told CNN at the scene that the information leading to the search "reached the threshold of probable cause, which was sufficient to allow us to obtain a search warrant.

"If it didn't rise to that level then, certainly, we wouldn't be out here."

Alzheimer's drug said to restore synapses:

The first experimental drug to boost brain synapses lost in Alzheimer's disease has been developed by researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. The drug, called NitroMemantine, combines two FDA-approved medicines to stop the destructive cascade of changes in the brain that destroys the connections between neurons, leading to memory loss and cognitive decline.
The decade-long study, led by Stuart A. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., professor and director of the Del E. Webb Center for Neuroscience, Aging, and Stem Cell Research, who is also a practicing clinical neurologist, shows that NitroMemantine can restore synapses, representing the connections between nerve cells (neurons) that have been lost during the progression of Alzheimer's in the brain. The research findings are described in a paper published June 17 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

BofA crookedness confirmed by former BofA employees:

Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit systematically lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications, and paid their staff bonuses for deliberately pushing people into foreclosure: Yes, these allegations were suspected by any homeowner who ever had to deal with the bank to try to get a loan modification – but now they come from six former employees and one contractor, whose sworn statements were added last week to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.
“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.

Somewhere in India, the last telegram will be sent on July 14.

Biden vote could be necessary to break filibuster

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:10:27 UTC

The death of Sen. Frank Lautenberg makes the margin of error in Harry Reid's whipping for filibuster reform that much tighter, and it means that Reid might require the vote of Vice President Joe Biden to make it happen. Greg Sargent writes that the White House has assured Reid that it would support an effort to end the filibuster on executive nominations with a majority vote.

It’s simple math. Lautenberg’s passing means Dems now only have 54 votes in the Senate. (His temporary Republican replacement can’t be expected to back rules reform.) Aides who are tracking the vote count tell me that Senator Carl Levin (a leading opponent of the “nuke option” when it was ruled out at the beginning of the year, leading to the watered down bipartisan filibuster reform compromise) is all but certain to oppose any rules change by simple majority. Senators Patrick Leahy and Mark Pryor remain question marks. And Senator Jack Reed is a Maybe.
If Dems lose those four votes, that would bring them down to 50. And, aides note, that would mean Biden’s tie-breaking vote would be required to get back up to the 51 required for a simple Senate majority. That’s an awfully thin margin for error.

On the other hand, Leahy, Pryor and Reed could be persuadable, or even already persuaded and keeping mum. Just four undecideds, even with Levin's opposition, means Republicans have some serious thinking to do about how far they're going to push opposition to Obama's three executive nominations that are still pending floor action, and three judicial nominations that haven't gone to committee yet. The commitment of the White House to back Reid on rules change, which presumably includes Biden's tie-breaking vote, adds one more component to everyone's calculations—the Republicans' willingness to keep obstructing and the Democrats' desire to do something about it.

The most effective course of action for us in the next month is to keep pushing Democratic senators to just do it.

Keep the pressure on. Send an email to your Democratic senators telling them to re-open filibuster reform and make the Senate function again.

Republican rebranding fail, continued: The new nopology

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:10:41 UTC

American Taliban

Last week, Republican Rep. Trent Franks dismissed concerns about banning abortion for victims of rape and incest by saying that they really don't get pregnant all that often so it's no big deal. Republicans, eager to avoid a repeat of the Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock sagas, decided to replace him as manager of his abortion-ban bill, putting Rep. Marsha Blackburn in charge of leading debate on his proposal.

Today, asked about Franks' comments on MSNBC, Blackburn said:

Representative Franks has apologized for his comments.

Except he didn't apologize—he fundraised off of his comments. In an email to supporters, he wrote (emphasis added):

NARAL, Planned Parenthood and the taxpayer-funded abortion lobby is attacking me for one reason -- I'm 100 percent unapologetically pro-life and I won't back down. Will you contribute $25, $50, $100, or even $500 right now to help me fight back?

That's not even a nopology. That's not even simply not offering apology. That's Trent Franks aggressively raising his middle finger to everyone who was concerned by what he said. Or, as the congresswoman charged with leading the GOP's efforts to ban abortions describes it: "Representative Franks has apologized for his comments."

Think of the masturbating fetuses!

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:16:02 UTC

I hate you so much right now, crazy rightwing politician.

Texas Congressman: Masturbating Fetuses Prove Need for Abortion Ban

And thus, the latest internet meme is born. All right, let's hear from the cell-blob of questionable intelligence, by which I mean Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX):

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” said Burgess, a former OB/GYN. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

They're curled up into a lump the size of an orange, those little stubby hands have to go somewhere. Also, you're wrong. No, God's little miracle is not pleasuring himself like a college sophomore in his little meat apartment. Please. Stop.

If we want to have a discussion on when a fetus has enough consciousness to feel either pleasure or pain—not merely reflex action mind you, but actual awareness—that would be a very fine discussion to have. It cannot, however, be based on an old Texas pervert thinking he saw a fetus whacking it one time with its little proto-fingers. Do better.

Also, if that fetus was really masturbating then it's going to hell anyway, so there's no problem.

House Intelligence Committee hearing shows limits of oversight

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:24:35 UTC

The public portion of Tuesday's House Intelligence Committee hearing with NSA chief Keith Alexander, along with other intelligence officials, has proven one thing: House oversight of intelligence activities is, if anything, less rigorous than the senate's.

What we've learned:

NSA chief Alexander says that the top secret surveillance programs have foiled more than 50 terrorist plots since 9/11. But we don't know yet from the first round of questioning whether any of those plots could have been foiled by legal, constitutional, regular intelligence. The officials have also not been asked about the assertion of security experts that the programs played a minor role. For example, in one of the key cases they highlight—would-be New Yorksubway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009—old-fashioned intelligence led to his arrest.
No one among intelligence leadership thinks that the FISA court is just a rubber stamp. The fact that the court hasn't rejected a single application, out of some 4,000, in the past two years didn't come up.
There are around 1,000 system administrators, like Edward Snowden, who have access to the same information as him. The majority of them are contractors.
Not everything discussed so far has been useless. Some of it has been downright disturbing. For example, regarding PRISM, the Internet surveillance program:
Confirmed: NSA Analyst doesn't need a separate court order to query database. Analysts can decide what is "reasonably suspicious."
— @EFFLive

That means NSA analysts get to decide and act unilaterally to extract collected information. Also, this:
Confirmed, no court review of individual queries. Rest of the checks are inside the DOJ — this is not oversight!
— @EFFLive

The FISA court that totally isn't a rubberstamp isn't even rubberstamping individual queries.
NSA chief Alexander says that he's never seen an NSA analyst who has that authority do anything wrong. He has a short memory apparently having completely forgotten the time an analyst illegally rooted around in Bill Clinton's email.

Thus far, the most significant revelation from this hearing is that we don't need to worry because there is totally oversight, from a congress that intelligence officials obviously feel no compunction about lying to and from a court that will give the NSA whatever it wants.

9:43 AM PT: Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) did follow up with a question about how critical the programs were to those 50 cases. The upshot in answer to that:

So: 7 years of collecting every American's records has "contributed" to maybe 10 investigations, no claim that contribution essential.
— @normative

Issa continues playing games with leaks of cherry-picked IRS interview excerpts

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:00:50 UTC

Despite demands from across the political spectrum to release the full transcripts of interviews conducted with IRS agents about how tea party applications for non-profit status were handled, House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is continuing to play games by releasing them in drips and drabs. As HuffPost's Sam Stein reports, Issa's goal is blatantly political: Instead of shedding light on what actually happened, Issa is trying to manage the release of information to form a narrative that the activities were politically motivated, and driven from the highest levels of the Obama administration.

In recent days, the California Republican has allowed reporters from local and national news outlets to review portions of his panel's investigative work into the IRS targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. The move looks like a rebuke to the ranking Democrat on his committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), and even some Republican lawmakers, who have publicly worried that selective leaking imperils the integrity of the investigation.
According to one journalist who attended a briefing session at Issa's committee office, the ground rules have been fairly strict: Reporters have been given access to a limited number of pages of interview transcripts from which they can take notes (no photocopies). And they have been given access to only a few interview transcripts at a single time, although Issa's staff has spoken with at least half-a-dozen IRS employees about the targeting of tea party groups.

Despite Issa's goals, not even his cherry-picked releases actually support the narrative he's trying to develop. The best he's been able to do is release transcripts that reinforce what we already knew: That IRS officials in Washington, DC were aware of some of the actions. Not only is that not surprising, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Issa hasn't put forward any evidence suggesting that White House directed any of this activity. Moreover, he's failed to surface a single shred of evidence that the motive for the targeting was political as opposed to an inappropriate effort to deal with ambiguous laws. The fact that he refuses to release all the information he has is a pretty clear indication that he's got nothing except a yearning for scandal.

Continuing to play these sorts of games is completely dishonest. But what else would you expect from Mr. Grand Theft Auto?

Boehner's job is threatened and he folds like a cheap tent

rss@dailykos.com (Barbara Morrill) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:13:55 UTC

"It's all about me!"

This is truly pathetic: On Monday afternoon:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) says Speaker John Boehner should be ousted if he rams through an immigration bill without majority Republican support.

And first thing Tuesday morning:

Speaker John Boehner privately tried to assure conservatives in a closed-door meeting Tuesday that he wouldn’t advance an immigration bill through the House without the support of the majority of Republicans.

Because John Boehner is all about ~~the jobs~~ John Boehner.

Bottom line? It probably doesn't matter what happens with immigration reform in the Senate when the lunatics are running the asylum that is the House.

Republican rebranding fail, continued: House set to vote on abortion ban

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:31:16 UTC

The new brand is pretty much the old brand

Starting at noon today, congressional Republicans will continue their laser-like focus on ~~jobs and the economy~~ appeasing their fundamentalist base by bringing legislation to ban abortion to the floor of the U.S. House.

The bill was proposed by Rep. Trent Franks, who last week decided to reenact the Todd Akin experience by offering pearls of wisdom about rape and pregnancy. But just in case you're a Republican political consultant worried that your party is sinking deeper into the abyss, never fear—because thanks to deft political maneuvering on the part of House GOP leadership, Trent Franks is now out, and the legislation now has a new face.

Aware of the risks inherent in abortion politics, Republican leaders have moved to insulate themselves from Democrats’ criticism that they are opening a new front in the “war on women.” Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, will manage the debate on the bill when it reaches the House floor, a role that would customarily go to the sponsor, Representative Trent Franks of Arizona.

Brilliance! Because as long as the person managing the floor debate is female, American women couldn't care less about whether abortion is banned or not. So clearly, problem solved. But just to make sure they don't get in a tight spot again, Republicans made one more move:

And in a last-minute revision, House leaders slipped in a provision that would allow for a limited exception in cases of rape or incest, but only if the woman had reported the crime.

The provision requires women to go to law enforcement before having an abortion to report the rape or incest. Enforcing it would require medical care providers to verify that the rape or incest had been reported. Effectively, that means rape and incest victims would need to report the abortion to law enforcement.

So the moral of the story is that Republican rebranding comes down to this: They're still for banning abortion, but now they want a woman to be the face of their legislative efforts, and they want an "exception" for victims of rape and incest ... as long as the victim has previously reported the crime and doesn't mind having a third party notify law enforcement that she is going to have an abortion. Well, that sure is some rebranding.

Data intrusion

rss@dailykos.com (Matt Bors) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:51:02 UTC

click to datamine

Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Exercise caution with optimistic generic congressional polls

rss@dailykos.com (David Nir) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:01:05 UTC

Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here.

Leading Off:

• House: A big reason why I don't typically pay a lot of attention to generic congressional ballot polls this far out is because there's often a lot of inconsistency in the data. So far this year, most reputable pollsters have given Democrats a small lead, but every so often, one has shown a much bigger gap. The latest is PPP, which put Dems up 47-40 in their most recent poll. Last month, the Washington Post found Democrats in front by 8 points, and Quinnipiac also once came up with a D+8 result earlier this year.

More recently, though, Quinnipiac found the parties tied, and NBC/WSJ put Dems up just 3. It would be tempting to get excited about the polls that show Democrats way out in front, but excluding the unreliable Rasmussen, HuffPo Pollster pegs Dems to an average lead of about 4 points or so. I wouldn't want to conclude the gap is any bigger than that unless and until we see a whole bunch of polls demonstrating that, rather than just the occasional optimistic survey.

Daily Kos Radio is LIVE at 9am ET!

rss@dailykos.com (David Waldman) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:31:03 UTC

Daily Kos Radio's Kagro in the Morning show podcasts are now available through iTunes.

We could catch up on what's happening in Congress. You wanna do that?

No?

OK, fine.

We'll try to clear out some non-NSA tabs and see if the story settles down some, to the point where we can at least agree what we are and aren't talking about. And then, in six months, we can try again!

We're LIVE at 9 a.m. ET with Kagro in the Morning, thanks to NetrootsRadio.com.

Listen LIVE here:The Daily Kos Radio Player

Can't see the Flash player? Click here to download the stream directly.

Miss the last show? You can catch it here:

Need more info on how to listen? Find it below the fold.

Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday

rss@dailykos.com (Bill in Portland Maine) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:16:49 UTC

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Time to play History: Cruel…or Kind?

Round 1

Florida Governor Rick Scott signs a bill into a law that forbids local governments in the state from requiring companies to provide paid sick time for employees.
History will be kind because businesses won't have to worry about shelling out money to employees who are probably just faking it, anyhow. After all, everyone knows no one gets sick enough to put in less than 110 percent at work---it's un-American!

History will be cruel because "AhhhhCHOO!!! 'Scuse me. So, uh, do you want fries with your influenza burger?"

Verdict: History will be CRUEL. Riding roughshod over the little guy by riding roughshod over local governments for no reason other than protecting corporate profits? Between this issue and many others (like his fetish for drug testing anybody in his state with a pulse), the 2014 anti-Scott campaign ads are practically writing themselves.

Round 2

NSA contract employee Edward Snowden spills the beans to the media about the enormity of America's Borg-like domestic surveillance apparatus.
History will be kind because Hero!

History will be cruel because Traitor!

Verdict: History will be KIND. Because when the government tells us not to worry our pretty little peasant heads about what it's doing behind our back, it's time to worry our pretty little peasant heads about what it's doing behind our back.

Round 3

Maine state Senator Ken Fredette (R) stands up on the Senate floor and cites the ancient scroll Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus to prove his point that women shouldn't have a say in whether or not to expand Medicaid in Maine as part of Obamacare because his manly brain is better at figuring this stuff out than the mushy womanly brains of his female colleagues.
History will be kind because Og! Og! Ook ook og!!!

History will be cruel because, to quote Judge Judy: "Fredette, you're a moron! There's something wrong with you! You're not normal!"

Verdict: History will be CRUEL. The only thing Ken Fredette proved last week is that his brain is from a planet with the word anus in it.

Next time: history judges the Massachusetts special election, squid pants, and what Jeb Bush thinks about WASP fertility. Meanwhile, Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Abbreviated pundit roundup: SCOTUS ruling on voting rights

rss@dailykos.com (Georgia Logothetis) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:35:02 UTC

The Arizona Republic isn't too pleased about the Supreme Court's ruling on Arizona's draconian proof-of-citizenship law:

Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement was an unnecessary political gambit that suppressed the vote.
But the court did not strike down Arizona’s law. The ruling applies only to federal forms and elections. The state can continue to impose the proof-of-citizenship rule for state registrations.

What’s more, Scalia outlined how Arizona could seek federal approval to apply the proof-of-citizenship requirement to federal registration forms, as well.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett said he intends to follow Scalia’s guidelines.

Let’s be clear: The integrity of elections is of paramount importance. But there was little evidence of voter fraud before Prop. 200. It was part of a backlash against illegal immigration that tapped into raw emotion without stopping to engage analytical thought processes.

Undocumented immigrants were not hijacking elections. They were busing tables.

So, let’s be even more clear: Participation in elections is also of paramount importance, and Prop. 200 hurt that.

The Supreme Court would have done the state a favor by sweeping away the law.

More analysis from The New York Times:

The Supreme Court, in a 7-to-2 ruling on Monday, strongly affirmed the power of Congress to regulate Congressional elections. The court held that Arizona cannot impose a requirement on voters to prove their citizenship when the federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, does not require any such thing. [...]
While the decision was emphatic about federal authority over the manner of elections, the Scalia opinion also said that states have power to set the qualifications of voters, like residency requirements, and to enforce them. Justice Scalia wrote that Arizona could still ask the federal agency responsible for administering this federal law to permit the state to require proof of citizenship. And he said that if the agency did not grant the request, the state could ask a federal court to decide that signing the federal form is not enough to ensure that a would-be voter is actually a citizen.

In leaving open an avenue for an Arizona challenge, the court also made it clear that ensuring voting rights to every eligible American requires continued vigilance.

The Washington Post:

If Arizona doesn’t like how the feds are applying that clause, the state can take them to court. Arizona, however, has not pressed its case through the channels available to accommodate its interests in regulating voter qualifications.
And Arizona shouldn’t. The prospect of voter fraud should not be dismissed, but there is no evidence that it poses a practical problem. There is a far greater danger in limiting access to the ballot box, a sacrosanct right in America. Neither the states nor the federal government should be imposing new restrictions on the franchise. They should instead enact universal voter registration laws and other reforms to expand access to the vote.

For more on the day's top stories, head below the fold.

Open thread for night owls: 'Twas the War Before Christmas

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:30:06 UTC

Sigh.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) announced on Monday that she was writing a book filled with "legalese" about how to fight what some social conservatives call the "War on Christmas."
[...] "Kind of a legalese how-to push back and protect the heart of Christmas. At the same time, a very festive and happy and jolly book about tradition and recipes and fun things about Christmas."

Just ... sigh.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Clear Evidence of War Crimes: Stern Letters to Come?:

It is impossible to escape a mixture of sadness and fury while reading the 149 horrific pages of the just-released report published by Physicians for Human Rights and called Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the US. Sadness for the victims. Fury for the fact that American citizens have paid for the ghastly criminal acts of guards and interrogators at U.S.-run prisons in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and Afghanistan. Sadness that Americans are now seen as torturers worldwide. Fury that high officials who ordered these acts are not digging holes and filling them up every day on some penal atoll.

The torture those officials authorized has been revealed over the years in bits and pieces. We’ve seen the photographs. Newspaper stories, magazine articles and a dozen books have been written. There have been previous scathing reports, including two by PHR. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have delved into the matter. There was, of course, the Army’s 2004 investigation into what happened at Abu Ghraib. And, better late than never, Senator Carl Levin began presiding Tuesday over three days of hearings on the subject, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.

For the first time, however, Broken Laws, Broken Lives has added grim evidence gleaned from medical tests, both physical and psychological, of 11 former detainees. Unique stories, but with a theme that cannot - and must not - be ignored. The evidence was gathered and evaluated under strict internationally recognized standards and procedures for determining whether someone has been tortured or ill-treated and for documenting the consequences in a manner so that the results can be used in court. These standards are part of the Istanbul Protocol, Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the United Nations in 1999.

Tweet of the Day:

58% voters either "like" or "love" cats; 8% think they should all live in the woods: http://t.co/...
— @ppppolls

On today's Kagro in the Morning show, NSA remains at the top of the charts this week, with things only becoming more confused the more articles are written on the subject. A CNET story stirred the hornet's nest over the weekend, setting off parallel chain reactions of rebuttal, retraction, walk-backs, debunkings, and everything in between. Greg Dworkin rounds up still more polling on the issue, and most of the show is once again given over to scurrying down the rabbit holes. Just for a change-up, we threw in the Lower Hudson, NY area Daily Journal's follow-up on their publication of names and addresses of area pistol permit holders. Did it in fact result in criminal targeting of those gun owners?

High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

Economics Daily Digest: When interns are employees too

rss@dailykos.com (Roosevelt Institute) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:20:31 UTC

By Rachel Goldfarb, originally posted on Next New Deal

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email.

When Unpaid Internships are Illegal (MSNBC)

On All In With Chris Hayes, Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren discussed the normalization of unpaid internships in all sectors, even government, in response to last week's ruling that Fox Searchlight violated labor laws by not paying interns.

Faces of the Minimum Wage (NYT)

Annie Lowrey profiles six minimum wage workers and their struggle to get by. It’s hard to see what could help these people more than a minimum wage increase, but Republicans in Congress have blocked that option.

Are Long-Term Unemployed Taking Refuge in Disability? (WSJ)

Ben Casselman explains new research that shows few are taking advantage of disability: the law requires that a worker be unable to perform their last profession, and the job market is tight. Going on disability instead of finding a new career isn’t ideal, but it is legal.

BofA Gave Bonuses to Foreclose on Clients, Lawsuit Claims (Bloomberg News)

Hugh Son and David McLaughlin report that former Bank of America employees will provide evidence that the bank intentionally falsified documents related to mortgage modifications and slowed down that process in order to boost their foreclosures.

Chart of the Day: America's 30-Year Project to Make the Rich Even Richer (MoJo)

Kevin Drum looks at a chart from the Economic Policy Institute and the further calculations performed by Andrew Fieldhouse, which shows that thirty years ago, tax policy began to encourage income inequality on a massive scale. Under the 1979 tax code, the gap wouldn’t have grown as fast.

Want to Stop Flu Epidemics? Give Workers Paid Sick Days (Salon)

Katie McDonough says that researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have produced data to corroborate the common-sense assumption that lack of sick days contributes to the spread of infectious disease. One day off is enough to reduce flu infection transmission by 25%.

Great Gatsby Economics are no Party for the Middle Class (WaPo)

E.J. Dionne uses the music industry as an example of how the income inequality we're facing in the U.S. works, and argues that until those in the middle actually have a shot at huge success, our country will suffer..

Fight the Future (NYT)

Paul Krugman wants to stop focusing on the "long-run fiscal sustainability" of our economy, because we have no idea what the future will look like. Getting rid of sequestration and focusing on the short-term problem of mass unemployment is more important today.

Heartland Institute gets called on their shameless revisionism—by the Chinese

rss@dailykos.com (DarkSyde) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 02:30:05 UTC

The Boulder Glacier retreated 450 m (1,480 ft) from 1987 to 2003. Click for more info on receding glaciers

The Heartland Institute is a fossil-fuel front tasked with convincing as many people as possible to ignore their lying eyes. They were originally cooked up in 1984 to downplay the dangers of tobacco use. When last we heard from Heartland, they were for online theft before they were against it and comparing climate scientists to serial killers on public billboards. Recently Heartland bragged the Chinese were shying away from the idea of human-induced climate change because the science did not support it. This was so egregiously false the Chinese issued a stern correction reading in part:

The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false. ... The false claim by the Heartland Institute was made public without any knowledge of the translator group. ... we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed. ... If the Heartland Institute does not withdraw its false news or refuse to apologize, all the consequences and liabilities should be borne by the Heartland Institute.

It's not that Heartland is in the denial business, it's that they're terrible at it, creating more bad press for the issue and their sponsors than they could possibly be worth. How do these clowns continue to get funded?

IRS officials threatened with violence again

rss@dailykos.com (Jon Perr) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:42:34 UTC

If House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's faltering inquisition of the IRS seems familiar, it should. Back in the 1990s, Republicans demonized the agency, slashed its enforcement staff and, unsurprisingly, helped the growth of tax cheating which now costs Uncle Sam up to $500 billion in lost revenue annually. And as Reuters reported Saturday, history is repeating itself in one other disturbing respect: IRS officials are now receiving threats of violence.

Just days after Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) questioned why some IRS agents receive training in using AR-15 rifles ("Are Americans that much of a target that you need that kind of capability?"), Reuters revealed threats made against current and former IRS officials at the center of the supposed targeting of conservative non-profit "social welfare" groups:

Ousted IRS acting commissioner, Steven Miller, has received such threats, according to a source familiar with his situation. The source declined to elaborate on the nature or the source of the threats.
And the head of the tax-exempt unit at the agency, Lois Lerner, who has been put on administrative leave as investigations into the controversy continue, has had telephone and email messages from unknown sources that "threaten physical violence," according to her attorney William Taylor.

Those threats have been reported to Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). And while lower level Internal Revenue staff frequently face such dangers, the top brass are another matter:

Threats are nothing new for IRS workers. In their unpopular line of work, IRS agents face hundreds of threats annually, including death threats, TIGTA data shows.
But it is unusual for senior IRS executives to get personal threats, said Steve Walsh, a former agent with TIGTA who worked on security for some former commissioners. He is now a licensed private investigator in Los Angeles.

TIGTA provided armed escorts for IRS employees on 74 occasions in fiscal 2012 ended September 30. In the six months from October 2012 through March 2013, TIGTA provided 36 armed escorts to IRS agents.

As a quick review of the past two decades shows, those armed escorts are provided with good reason. After all, Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage is hardly the first member of his party to slander the IRS as "the new Gestapo."

As David Cay Johnston explained in his 2003 classic Perfectly Legal, the GOP during the Clinton administration waged an all-out war on the IRS. Then as now, GOP spinmeister Frank Luntz framed the issue for his Republican allies, "Which would you prefer: having your wallet or purse stolen or being audited by the IRS?" As Sen. William Roth's Finance Committee held hearings in 1997 and 1998, Mississippi's Trent Lott and Alaska's Frank Murkowski decried the IRS' "Gestapo-like tactics." Murkowski went on to complain, "You don't need to send in armed personnel in flak jackets." Don Nickles of Oklahoma raged, "The IRS is out of control!" Congress went on to pass and Bill Clinton signed the IRS Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998.

Continue reading below the fold.