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Welcome to our 6th Annual Speakers Dinner for the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Each year, Stewart and I host the speakers to our great joy, and to paraphrase Greg Mortenson, our "Three Cups of Tea" runneth over.
I rejoiced when Greg related how he convinced the mullahs in a remote Pakistani village to allow him to build a school for girls by reminding the elder that the dowry of a bride with no education is worth just one goat, but a bride who had completed high school could be worth as much as 40 goats. And Stewart lovingly whispered to me that I was worth at least 50 goats. I'm sure I will be worth many more after this year's Ideas Festival.
Each year, I marvel at the changes in our world, and the many ideas discussed to solve each new challenge. I so longed for the way we were that I invited our friend Barbra Streisand to attend this year's Festival.
As the oil in the Gulf threatens to spreads its dreadful tentacles to the far reaches of the eastern seaboard, the national debt threatens to absorb 20% of the taxes we pay, Arianna Huffington tells us that the middle class is an endangered species, our largely ineffective stimulus limps along, galloping unemployment and a nearly broken education system prevail - now, I ask you all, why so glum?
It was in 2005 that my friend Reverend Rick Warren warned that those of us who do not accept Jesus as our savior are going to hell. It seems that most of the speakers at our festival this year are finally united in a common thought: We're all going to hell. So there will be plenty of fine company.
And speaking of hell, it is so nice to witness the harmony among political parties at this conclave -- even if it is the demise of civilization as we know it that has caused it. Now that 40% of our citizens call themselves independent, do you think political parties may go the way of Glenn Beck's sanity?
That Narcissus of negativity, Niall Ferguson, likened our collapse to the fall of the Roman Empire, warning that it will be much quicker. Everyone better learn how to eat with chopsticks -- and fast.
Tom Friedman said that in 2008 and 2009, when Mother Nature and markets hit the wall, it was our warning heart attack. Take a baby aspirin and call him in the morning.
But it wasn't all that grim... The "marriage" of Ted Olsen and David Boies is downright heartwarming as they work hand-in-hand to defeat those opposed to gay marriage.
[...]
But it was my hero, David Brooks -- who, by the way, makes me cry every time I hear him speak -- who gave me the most inspiration for our future. David related a story about a young Mexican-Chinese girl who grew up in a very troubled household, yet managed to create a great life for herself because of her innate mental disposition. It is all about resiliency, isn't it? And above all, America is a resilient country. After all, most of us survived a whole season of Jersey Shore.
"The true challenge of our times is to stoke the creative genius within each and every one of us," said Richard Florida, and Sir Ken Robinson explained that finding our true passion in life is the key to success. And Stewart and I are passionate about having you all here this evening.
David Brooks also told us that we eat less when we're alone and more when we're in a crowd -- that is why we made so much food for you tonight. So eat up, and have a good time. Thank you all for being here.
We agree on one thing --- David Brooks makes me cry every time I hear him speak too.
I realize that it is condescending and rude to criticize Palin, so I won't. But I do think that if she is considered a spokesperson for the Tea Party, it's not too awfully impolite to inquire about her views on certain issues. But just to make sure that she's not being unfairly portrayed, it's probably a good idea to only allow her colleagues at Fox News to do the questioning so that we can be certain she gets the respect she deserves.
So here's Sarah Palin on immigration offered without any derisive left wing commentary at all:
So according to Forbes, Sarah Palin's income is not only far more paltry than assumed. Frankly, I'm embarrassed for the poor girl. I'm guessing that First Dude's going to have to go back to work on the North Slope just to make ends meet:
[A]n investigation by Forbes of Palin's income since she left office last July (done as part of our research for the annual Celebrity 100 list, out last week), plus a review of her finances from a source with access to her business records, suggests Palin made a far smaller advance and that her earnings over the past 12 months were at best $10 million.
Worse than that, they figure this is probably going to be her best year ever, which means she might as well be destitute.
It's getting harder and harder to stretch ten million these days, but maybe they can clip some coupons and lay in a bigger supply of moose meat next year. And little Willow must be getting old enough to start pitching in with a paper route. They're just your average American family struggling to get by in these tough times but I'm sure they'll all pull together and make it through.
Blue America Chat With Congressional Candidate Dr. Fred Johnson
by digby
Howie introduced Dr. Fred Johnson at DWT this morning:
One of the sharpest candidates running for the House this year is Dr. Fred Johnson in western Michigan, for a seat being abandoned by the ever-ambitious twitterer Pete Hoekstra. In April Fred did a great guest post at DWT on education and societal priorities-- well worth reading. Today, Blue America's latest endorsed candidate, he's joining us for a live blogging session at Crooks and Liars, 2pm in Michigan, 11am, PT. Before we get into the reasons we've endorsed Fred for the seat, I want to mention that he gave us an autographed copy of a book he wrote with Tayannah Lee McQuillar, Tupac Shakur: The Life And Times Of An American Icon which we will be giving away to a randomly selected donor today. To qualify for the drawing, please give any amount-- there is no minimum-- at the Blue America PAC page. You might be interested in knowing that all the money donated through this page this weekend will be put towards campaign advertising on Michigan *-blogs.
A former marine and a genuine progressive, Fred is well positioned to take advantage of the rapidly changing demographics and political identifications in the district. 2008 saw a huge jump in the Democratic vote throughout the district. This was delivered primarily through the top-notch voter registration and GOTV efforts of the Campaign for Change. The district now has a whopping 45,000 first time voters, who can deliver this seat to Fred in November. Despite the fact that conventional wisdom calls this a safe Republican district, it is very much worth noting that Senator Levin won here with 53% of the vote, and President Obama fell just short, at 48.5%. This district is turning purple rapidly, and 2010 can complete the process.
To give you a sense of Fred's priorities, here's a statement he gave me soon after I first met him this spring:
There are two interrelated issues that command the attention of any freshman progressive Representative: financial reform and campaign finance reform. The hard fact is that the two are so intertwined as to be inseperable.
The mavens of Wall Street have proven both their incompetence, and their venality. Only the strongest possible financial reform package will stop another catastrophe from hitting our economy. As a historian, I strongly reject the revisionism currently in vogue on the right, and feel that the reimposition of Glass-Steagall, and a whole host of strong reform measures is now demanded of Congress by the American people. This is one area where I diverge from the President. I believe we need stronger financial reform. Too big to fail is just plain too big.
But, how do we get there when the lobbyists and PACs of Wall Street have so much influence? My number one priority upon taking office will be the Fair Elections Now Act. This bill is a great first step in leveling the playing field at election time. But we need to do more. I strongly support the package of legislation being drafted by Rep. Frank and his colleagues in the Banking Committee. We need to take every avenue available to us to undo the destruction of the last vestiges of fairness in our campaign system wrought by the Citizens United decision. Whether it be through statutory restrictions on the political activities of corporations or, at minimum, much greater influence on the part of shareholders, we must strongly address campaign finance in order to have any chance at real reforms in other areas.
There are virtually no problems our country faces that can be solved without first solving the way the ruling elites can buy and sell our politicians and manipulate our system for their own benefit. One that Fred would very much like to address-- as would the people living along Lake Michigan's eastern shore has to do with protecting the environment, something very much treasured for its natural beauty and recreational opportunities by most of the people living there. I say "most" because, believe it or not, there are Big Oil corporate types and the Republicans who they finance and who serve their interests who actually want to drill for oil in the Great Lakes! I'm not kidding. Just last week Pat Toomey, an ex-congressman running for the Pennsylvania Senate seat was yelling about drilling in the Great Lakes again, despite the fact that they contain some 20% of all the world's surface fresh water and that even a smaller spill than the BP Gulf disaster could contaminate every drop of drinking water for 40 million people and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. What is wrong with these people?
"The level of debate regarding energy policy," Fred told me a few days ago, "just amazes me. Here you have a disaster of unprecedented scope, and yet there is very little of what I would call 'jumping up and down' in Washington. I mean, good grief, if this doesn't wake people up on energy policy, what will it take? What we've actually seen is a calcification of the partisan positions that are out there-- which I don't mind on our side because I know we're on the right track. But there hasn't been one single Republican who has moved in the direction of strong changes to our energy policy -- not one!
"I also wonder what the endpoint is of this process. When you have elected officials responding to this disaster by proposing greater deregulation of the oil and gas industry, where does that lead us? Do we end up with oil drilling in the Great Lakes? That's the kind of thing that gets voters in my district just going crazy. But we have to see this as all interconnected. If you don't want drilling in the Great Lakes, then you have to send folks to Washington who get the picture on energy policy. And I'm doing my best to lead on this locally-- I talk about it with voters all the time. That's why I've been very supportive of wind power here-- against some of the usual NIMBYism. We just gotta do this stuff."
Dr Johnson sounds like someone who can work with stalwart progressives like Alan Grayson and Donna Edwards.
Earlier I wondered if Clarence Thomas might have his consciousness raised by the cruel tasering of his mentally ill nephew. I'm reminded by a commenter just what an epic epiphany that would have to be:
One of these years, before he dies, Thomas might explain to us why prisoners disgust him to the point of approving the very human rights violations we lecture China, Iraq, and other nations about. We have no explanation because Thomas has never conducted a major interview since being appointed to the court by the first President Bush.
Back in 1992, just after joining the court, Thomas dissented in the 7-2 decision that upheld a $800 award for damages for a Louisiana inmate who, from behind his locked cell, argued with a prison guard. Three guards took the inmate out of his cell, put him in handcuffs and shackles, and dragged him to a hallway where they beat him so badly that he suffered a cracked dental plate.
The lower court ruled that the beating had nothing to do with acceptable prison discipline. But Thomas all but laughed off the beating, saying the injuries were ''minor.'' Thomas said the ''use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be tortious, it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it is not `cruel and unusual punishment.'''
Last year Thomas was one of three dissenters, with Rehnquist and Scalia, in the 6-3 decision that found that executing the mentally retarded was ''cruel and unusual punishment.'' Also last year, Thomas dissented from a 6-3 decision to ban the practice in Alabama of chaining prisoners to outdoor ''hitching posts'' and abandoning them for hours without food, water, or a chance to use the bathroom. While the majority also called that ''cruel and unusual,'' Thomas said the hitching post served ''a legitimate penological purpose,'' encouraging a prisoner's ''compliance with prison rules while out on work duty.''
Maybe he can find some way to reconcile all this with his nephew's plight, but it will take some serious mental gymnastics. He's pretty much the last person on the planet one could count on to have any sympathy for anyone. But you never know ...
And in more taser news, here's a truly lovely story:
Phyllis Owens apparently didn't know day from night when she died at 87, an hour after sheriff's deputies closed in on her as she reached for a handgun, an officer said Friday.
"We had to respond," said Detective Jim Strovink of the Clackamas County sheriff's office.
An officer hiding in the shrubbery around her rural home jolted the frail woman with a stun gun Thursday afternoon, and she collapsed unconscious. She died soon after in the hospital. The autopsy report said her heart disease was the cause of death.
Two Clackamas sheriff's deputies had gone to her wooded housing development near Boring after a man using a backhoe to replace her water line reported that she had threatened him with a handgun, Strovink said. It was about 2:30 p.m.
"She came out waving the gun and had him up against the backhoe," Strovink said. "She yelled at him, 'What are you doing here at this time of night?'"
The worker called for help, and deputies arrived to find the woman on her porch, Strovink said. Approaching her, they talked her into putting down the weapon, he said, but she quickly picked it up again.
The probes of the officer's Taser hit her left arm and hip, said Dr. Larry Lewman of the state medical examiner's office.
Owens had a history of heart disease and that was the cause of death, Lewman said Friday. He said he would do more research to determine what effect the electrical shock had on her pacemaker.
"A healthy person would not have died this way," Lewman said.
And who could have predicted that an 87 year old woman might not be healthy?
Obviously, they had no choice. For instance they couldn't possibly have backed off and called a mental health professional. And anyway, back before tasers they would have just shot her dead with with a bullet between the eyes, so at least they tried to spare her with non-lethal force.
This stuff is happening over and over and over again all over the county.
In reality, when you think you're seeing everything, you're really seeing nothing. But if you peel away some layers, all of a sudden you're looking at the gun; peel back another layer and all of a sudden you can see the expression of horror on Mehserle's face; or Oscar Grant's desperate pleading. In the following video, I sought to add depth to the original interpretation of this tragic event, in order to reveal more of the story. If you remember the first grainy footage following the shooting, dispel the ingrained "YouTube truth" you may be harboring, so that you can look for what's new, what wasn't there before. This video is best (indeed, should only) be watched on Full Screen mode with good speakers or headphones.
Crooks and Liars featured an important post earlier today by Congressman Raul Grijalva. I don't think John Amato will mind if I repost the whole thing here:
I’m sincerely grateful for President Obama’s national address last week on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. Like the president, I want to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to finalize legislation that fixes our broken immigration system.
If the Republican Party doesn’t want to cooperate on a reform bill, Democrats should move forward regardless. The American people want action, and they want results. If all the opposition intends to do is chant “amnesty” over and over in an attempt to scare us out of passing a bill, they may as well just get out of the way. We’re ready to move on immigration reform, and I call on everyone who cares about border safety, the rule of law, and the economy to join us.
We need a bill that ensures safe borders, holds undocumented immigrants accountable, and creates a rigorous process for acquiring earned legal status, as HR 4321 currently does. I’m happy to hear the president talk so clearly about why we can’t kick this can any further down the road. We can’t leave millions of people in permanent limbo. A rigorous process for bringing them into the legal system, the employment system and the tax system will benefit not only these people individually but the nation as a whole.
We need a serious approach to this issue. Deporting 11 million people is unrealistic and would destroy the fabric of this country. Anyone who says otherwise is not living in the real world. Demagogues in the Republican Party, and their Democratic allies, will say this is about amnesty and open borders. No matter how many times they repeat it, it won’t be true. No one who understands the issue believes we can just dig trenches, point guns at the border and live in fear the rest of our lives. We need legal, social, economic and political reforms to truly make immigration work in this country, and we need them now.
The president made clear in his speech last week that immigration reform is a matter of political courage. He’s absolutely right about that. As Congress and the White House craft a legislative proposal that sets up meaningful steps individuals need to take to get right with the law, in addition to addressing important border safety questions, it will become clear to the American people who’s trying to fix this problem and who’s obstructing progress for short-term political gain. We can’t let them win this one.
I have no idea if the Democrats will follow the just and smart course and push for this. If they do it will be against public opinion which is moving the wrong direction under the influence of right wing demagoguery and cynical GOP strategy. Supporters should mobilize and provide cover for them to do it. This is one small way to start.
Here's something you don't see every day: a news anchor actually challenging a lying winger on the air and then going back the next day with a thorough fact check:
Derek Thomas was admitted to West Jefferson Hospital in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Thursday, after a possible suicide attempt, reports ABC affiliate WGNO.
When [the patient] refused to put on a hospital gown and said he wanted to leave the hospital, doctors ordered security to restrain him.
Security guards "punched him in his lip, pulled out more than a fistful of his dreadlocks and tasered him to restrain him," a statement from Thomas' family said.
Shortly afterwards, family members say, Thomas suffered a "massive epileptic seizure."
This particular case of malicious torture of a mental patient is a little bit different, however. Derek Thomas is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's nephew. And Thomas and his family are reported to be outraged and heading down to Louisiana to personally intervene.
One of the hallmarks of the right is that they have no empathy (indeed, they scoff at the very notion) so they can't understand something like injustice until they personally experience it. But maybe this will raise Clarence Thomas's conscience a little bit and draw attention to this scourge among his elite peer group. Perhaps Thomas will even share some of his outrage with his ideological soulmates on the Supreme Court when one of these cases finally make their way to them.
By the way, there are other cases of these torture devices being used against epileptics. This one is the most horrific.
Update: No, I am not holding out a lot of hope for Clarence Thomas who has shown a remarkable ability to avoid feeling empathy, even for people in his own family. But hope lives eternal.
Following up on my post from this morning, here's a Youtube of the man from Orlando asking the head of HUD why it is that people shouldn't default on their mortgages:
Update: Howie has a good post up on this subject focusing on the right wing meme that Barney Frank caused the housing crisis. (Not kidding.)
Laughably, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Darrell Issa, Sean Hannity and other Republican clowns have tried to lay the blame for the housing problem on both working families and on progressives and no one more than on Barney Frank. It's become as much a truism among right-wing dim bulbs that Barney caused the housing bubble as it is that Obama is a fascist socialist Muslim born in Kenya or Indonesia. We caught up with Barney a few minutes ago at an airport on the way back to Boston. He had read the Times piece. "We've had," he began, "the worst economic situation since the Great Depression and it was caused by the right wing's commitment to deregulation non-regulation. And as to their blaming us, the Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress from 1995 'til 2006. I deny responsibility personally for the decisions of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey. And I can prove that Tom DeLay does not take advise from me... because if he did, I would have told him not to go on that dance show."
If you didn't get a chance to see Maddow last night you missed this interesting segment on the fate of the current energy bill with Chris Hayes and David Roberts from Grist.
The whole segment's worth watching, but I thought this was particularly interesting and it seems like something the Democrats could be making more of:
HAYES: This is—this is infuriating for a million reasons but let‘s just—to increase the frustration, the CBO has now released its report on the Kerry/Lieberman bill, right, which shows it reduces the deficit by $19 billion, which seems to me like the kind of thing that maybe amidst this deficit hysteria we could get some, you know, conservative Democrats and Republicans behind. ROBERTS: You might think. This is one of the great untold stories of the whole—of the whole climate fight, is that the bill—you can think of the bill as having two parts, there‘s all the energy stuff, which is bipartisan. Everybody loves it. It gives incentives to nuclear, to wind and solar, to electric cars. All that stuff spending. That‘s the spending side, which, of course, everyone in Washington loves to do.And then the other half is the price on carbon, which raises the revenue to pay for all that spending.
HAYES: Right.
ROBERTS: And so, what you‘re seeing in D.C. is, everybody loves the spending half and everybody‘s scared to death of the other half, where you raise revenue. So, you know, I—Chris, I don‘t want to be cynical about the sincerity of the deficit hawks in the Senate but—
HAYES: Oh, never, never.
ROBERTS: -- but it‘s peculiar that the ones that are the loudest about their deficit concern are the very ones lining up behind the most expensive, unpaid-for energy bill that you can imagine.
These deficit posers can get away with anything. This is happening on issue after issue but the Democrats can't make anything of it because cynical Americans no longer care about hypocrisy. The assault on reason has left the body politic reeling.
I think if you watch our show, you're hearing the American family arguments. It's as if you're sitting at a dinner table with your conservative uncle and your liberal relatives and they're arguing with each other and you're hearing both sides. You're hearing the interesting American attitude about things. You're hearing the flavor of our country. You catch it. I don't think it's a calm event. I think it's a noisy event. And I think at the end of the argument you'll know where the American people are.
Really? Are you related to wealthy TV celebrities, political operatives armed with talking points and professional politicians all of whom live in the same place, went to the same ivy league schools and whose professional and social advancement depend upon each other? Does listening to their canned repartee really give us insight into "where the American people are?"
There's a been a rumbling from above for some time now that people who walk away from their homes when the economics no longer makes sense are behaving very badly. This is known as "strategic default" which simply says that homeowner looks at the numbers and determines that she is economically better off if she gives the house back to the bank .
Apparently this is immoral. Why this should be I don't know. The contract is clear. You pay or the bank gets to keep your equity and takes back the house. It's a collateralized loan, after all. That's the whole point. The person who does it suffers from the loss of all the money she has paid into the house and also gets a black mark on her credit record. The bank gets all the money and the property, which it can resell. Why this homeowner is considered to have made a moral transgression is beyond me. It's just a contract and the bank loses nothing in the the transaction.
However, our betters are getting very exercised over the little people deigning to make rational economic decisions on their own behalf. Indeed, just last month they decided to take action:
Taxpayer-owned mortgage giant Fannie Mae is targeting families by going after struggling homeowners who strategically default on their mortgage, the firm announced Wednesday.
A default is considered strategic when homeowners have the capacity to pay, yet choose to walk away from their mortgage. The trigger, researchers say, is negative equity: When the value of a home is less than what the lender is owed on it, borrowers are more likely to strategically default.
[...]
And Fannie Mae, an arm of the federal government and a big part of the Obama administration's housing policy, wants to make sure that if struggling families walk away, they suffer for it.
Homeowners who strategically default or did not work "in good faith" to avert foreclosure through other means will be ineligible for new Fannie Mae-backed mortgages for seven years. The firm said it will also pursue homeowners in court, seeking so-called "deficiency judgments" to recoup outstanding debt by seizing borrowers' other assets. Thirty-nine states do not limit the ability of lenders to recover what they're owed.
If this catches on, the whole field of contract law is likely to get very interesting. Collateral isn't good enough. Bad credit isn't enough either. Americans are apparently now pretty much signing themselves into indentured servitude for the term of a homeowners loan based on "good faith."
Well, probably not all Americans. This is the policy of Fannie Mae, working under the auspices of the Obama administration, which means they will only be going after lower and middle income people. And this is very good news because otherwise things could start to get a bit uncomfortable:
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.
When did housing become some kind of religious commitment? It is just another sour investment about which both contracting parties, the banks and the buyer, understood going in to be collateralized by the damned property. The difference is that middle class people who do this are called deadbeats and have their ability to function in our credit society severely limited, while the rich do not.
“I just decided to let it go, give it back to the bank,” he told the celebrity gossip TV show “TMZ.” “I just didn’t feel like it was a good investment.”
The rich and successful often come naturally to this sort of attitude, said Brent T. White, a law professor at the University of Arizona who has studied strategic defaults.
“They may be less susceptible to the shame and fear-mongering used by the government and the mortgage banking industry to keep underwater homeowners from acting in their financial best interest,” Mr. White said.
The rich and successful come naturally to this attitude because they understand how contracts work and don't get hung up on the Calvinistic notion that they should destroy themselves rather than return a piece of property to a bank.
Banks don't "feel" and they have no morals. They hold all the power to foreclose on you when you can't pay and exercise it without emotion. If it is in their interest to renegotiate they will try to do it. If it isn't, they won't. Corporations are required by law to act this way on behalf of their shareholders. As long as that is true, then the all the parties to these contracts have no choice but to do the same thing. It's just a financial transaction not a religious rite. This is a rigged game for average Americans and they should wise up.
Update: Pastordan writes in to explain that the Pharaohs had this all under control many moons ago:
But the king of Egypt said to them, ‘Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labours!’ Pharaoh continued, ‘Now they are more numerous than the people of the landand yet you want them to stop working!’ That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, as well as their supervisors, ‘You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, “Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.” Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will labour at it and pay no attention to deceptive words.’
Pharaoh gives the benefits, Pharaoh expects results, not slaves getting rational economic ideas in their heads.
He thought he was only tasering a man on the ground with his hands behind his back but he grabbed his gun and shot him dead instead. So, it was an "involuntary" manslaughter:
After a tense wait in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, a Los Angeles jury has found the former BART police officer guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the January, 2009, death of Oscar Grant. Mehserle was accused of having shot the 22-year-old Grant in the back as he lay face-down on the platform of Oakland's Fruitvale BART station after an altercation broke out on a train. Mehserle pleaded not guilty, claiming that he mistook his gun for his Taser stun gun.
According to reports from the courthouse in Los Angeles, the involuntary manslaughter verdict, along with Meshlere's additional conviction for the use of a gun in Grant's death, could carry a sentence of 5 to 14 years. The other options before the jury included acquittal, voluntary manslaughter, which would have carried a penalty of 3 to 11 years,and second-degree murder, which would have carried a penalty of 40 years to life.
Last week, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry ruled that Mehserle could not be convicted of first-degree murder, saying that evidence in the trial proved that Mehserle did not plan to kill Grant by shooting him once in the back.
No, he didn't "plan" it. That would be murder. But you would have thought the story of what happened that day would have made a difference:
Anthony Pirone took the witness stand this morning at the murder trial of a former colleague on the BART police force, explaining to jurors how and why he detained train rider Oscar Grant minutes before the colleague shot and killed him.
Pirone, a critical witness for both the prosecution and defense in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, said Grant and four of his friends fit a vague description of suspects in a fight aboard a train that had pulled into Fruitvale Station in Oakland early Jan. 1, 2009.
A police dispatcher, relaying information the train operator had gotten from a passenger, had said the suspects were black men in black clothing on the lead car. Grant was African American.
Pirone said he began cursing at the men almost immediately after spotting them on the platform, and threatened to shock them with a Taser as a means of "intimidation" to gain compliance.
Pirone said he had ordered three men to sit against a wall. Grant and a second man initially tried to hide inside a train car, Pirone said, but he found them and pulled them out.
He said he had found Grant walking from one car to another using the interior doors, then had directed the laser light of his Taser at Grant through a window. He said he had ordered Grant off, then had told him to "get the f- off the train."
Grant soon came out, Pirone said, and cooperated as he was escorted to the wall, though he complained and swore as he went.
This afternoon, Pirone is expected to testify about why he ultimately decided to arrest Grant for allegedly resisting officers, and about what happened in the moments before Mehserle shot Grant while trying to handcuff him. Grant was unarmed and on his chest.
Witnesses at the trial have said Pirone's profanity and aggressiveness in detaining the men angered other BART riders. Grant's relatives believe Pirone escalated the situation, and that racial profiling was a factor in his initial detention of the five men.
He was just trying to teach the little bastard a lesson by swearing at him and then shooting him full of electricity while he was already on the ground. People have to learn to obey transit police officers unquestioningly and when they curse you out and threaten you out of the blue you have an obligation as a citizen to take whatever they mete out --- including death if they accidentally pick up their torture device instead of their killing device. Shit happens.
Apparently, San Francisco and Oakland are anticipating that there might be some kind of Rodney King verdict reaction. Waiting to see if it materializes. Let's hope not.
Mort Zuckerman was on MSNBC just now talking about the Aspen Aristocracy Festival. He's very upset with the president and says just everyone he runs into (at the Russian Tea Room) is too. He rightly pointed out the stimulus program was inadequate and then went on to explain that 85% of the country wanted a health care plan that would deal with costs and the administration foolishly decided to focus on covering more people (presumably rather than fewer.) He says it will add a trillion dollars to the deficit and it is cratering in the polls with only 34% of people supporting it.
I don't think I need to point out that all these points about the health care plan are wrong -- the CBO says the plan will cut the deficit, you had to find a mechanism to get most people into the system in order to cut costs (or allow people to just die in the streets when they get sick) and the health care plan is actually gaining in popularity. (I'm not defending it, I'm just pointing out that every single point Zuckerman makes against it are factually incorrect.)
Then he explains that all the right people were very receptive to his message:
Zuckerman: Niall Ferguson and I were the two speakers talking about this [at the Aspen Elite Circle Jerk Society Confab] and I would just say that a year ago 90% of them would have thrown tomatoes at us!
Hostess: Are you even surprised by some of the people who are in that group with you as critics of the president?
Zuckerman: I don't know if I'm surprised because I don't think of specific people, but you know everywhere I go there is a level of dismay at the failure of this president to address the problems that we're facing.
In fairness, Zuckerman's critique of the stimulus is actually fairly right on. He was writing over a year ago that it was too small and not properly targeted, although I'm not sure that we would agree on the targets. His health care critique is just misinformed. There are lots of good reasons to be disappointed, but his points aren't among them. What curious is that his speech at the Aspen Socialite Kaffe Klatch proclaimed that because of all this we now need to concentrate on austerity and cutting spending dramatically because people have lost faith in government to do anything right. Looks like old Mort is now an open confidence fairy.
Meanwhile, his tag team partner, invisible bond vigilante channeler Niall Ferguson, is flogging Paul Ryan's nihilistic Randian dystopia (which even the Republican party has abandoned like a rotting corpse) and telling all these rich dilettantes that the only thing that can cure this problem is destroying the safety net, cutting the taxes of the wealthy and "incentivizing" the unemployed to take jobs that don't exist (presumably by homelessness and starvation.)
And all of this to wild applause from the wealthy Obama supporters in the audience. I assume they all went out afterward and ate gobs and gobs of cake.
Neiwert has the whole story, which explains that the New Black Panther party has been designated a hate group for some time by the SPLC, but points out that contrary to Beck's comparison to the KKK, it has had zero success at recruiting or voter intimidation, while the KKK, well, we know that history. (If not, click the link.)
These guys are obviously racist asses. But as Neiwert observes there were a whole slew of racist vote intimidation cases that were dropped by the Bush administration. Of course those were of the more common "traditional" kind, which the Ashcroft and Gonzales DOJ civil rights division didn't think were worth pursuing. The only racism the right recognizes is that which is perpetrated by the minority toward the majority. Whites, after all, have been historically sorely victimized in this country so special attention must be paid, even on a symbolic level.
The thing I love most about tea partiers is their common sense approach to sticky problems. For instance, Sharron Angle has a plan for girls who are raped by their fathers and get pregnant. Force the little girl to have a child and then adopt both of them out to a new family!
Angle: I think that two wrongs don't make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade. Well one girl in particular moved in with the adoptive parents of her child, and they both were adopted. Both of them grew up, one graduated from high school, the other had parents that loved her and she also graduated from high school. And I'll tell you the little girl who was born from that very poor situation came to me when she was 13 and said 'I know what you did thank you for saving my life.' So it is meaningful to me to err on the side of life.
No word on what happened to the incest victim, but that's really not something anyone should waste much time worrying about.
And anyway it just shows that God provides many good alternatives to abortion for for young girls who are raped by their fathers --- perhaps we could just bend the rules a little bit and the little girl could marry her daddy so they could make a new family all their own. Talk about lemonade!
I wonder if Third Way has found a way to accommodate these views inside the Democratic Party. There must be some common ground, here, right?
Alex Pareene reports that the aristocrats have decided that they've just about had enough of all this whining from the lower order:
At the Atlantic Magazine's "Aspen Ideas Festival," the idle rich go to a ski resort town and pay the Atlantic Media Co. a great deal of money to listen to rich people with intellectual credentials of some kind talk at each other for a while. It may surprise you to learn that these wealthy elites think the biggest problem facing America today is that the wealthy elite have to pay taxes, while the poor and unemployed sit around collecting "Social Security" and "food stamps" and "unemployment benefits."
Appropriately, the gossip columnist Lloyd Grove is covering the conclave and reported what they were all so excited about:
[Niall] Ferguson called for what he called “radical” measures. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness.” He praised “really radical reform of the sort that, for example, Paul Ryan [the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee] has outlined in his wonderful ‘Roadmap’ for radical, root-and-branch reform not only of the tax system but of the entitlement system” and “unleash entrepreneurial innovation.” Otherwise, Ferguson warned: “Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union? I’d advise you against it.”
Seriously, he's quoting Paul Ryan, the infantile, crackpot Randian to a bunch of wealthy socialites, Hollywood liberals and self-interested tycoons. And these people actually seem to be gaining traction:
Rand developed the objectivist philosophy, which values the self, capitalism and laissez-faire economics. Ryan, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, reportedly requires staffers and interns to read her opus, Atlas Shrugged, and gives out copies as gifts.
In his keynote address to CPAC last year, Ryan said Obama's policies sound "like something right out of an Ayn Rand novel."
Fearing political suicide, Republican leaders have tried to distance themselves from Ryan's "roadmap" budget proposal, which calls for privatizing Social Security. But Ryan is upfront about it.
At a 2005 celebration of what would have been Rand's 100th birthday, Ryan called for reforming the "collectivist system" of Social Security by changing it to individual savings accounts.
"If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society," Ryan said at the 2005 event, according to a profile written last year in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
In interviews, he has said Republicans should frame the choice between "collectivism" and capitalism as a moral choice.
"We have an opportunity to make a choice clearly once and for all in the next two elections, and we owe it to the American people to give them a clear choice: Do you want a collectivist welfare state or do you want to get back to being a free market? We need to make a moral, not just practical or statistical, case," he told Reason, a libertarian magazine, in December.
In last year's CPAC address, he claimed the White House had blamed the free market for the financial crisis, then used the crisis as an "excuse to impose a more intrusive state."
And despite GOP attempts to frame these entitlement reforms as something other than privatization, Ryan has been clear on the point.
"Rather than depending on government for your retirement and health security, I propose to empower people to become much more self-dependent for such things in life," he said in a speech to the Hudson Institute last June.
It looks like Randism may be the latest incarnation of radical chic. It figures.
