by russell
Eric Cantor lost his primary to economics professor David Brat. Cantor spent about $5M, Brat about $200K.
What does this mean (if anything)?
Is it a demonstration of the ongoing vitality of the Tea Party movement?
Proof that money doesn't always prevail, even in Washington DC?
Evidence that people around Richmond VA really, really don't want any more Mexicans in the US?
Is Cantor the victim of a "throw the bums out" mentality, regardless of who the "bums" are?
Your thoughts, please.
i like the theory that a bunch of Democratic voters voted in the open primary and swung it to the wingnut out of pure mischief.
Cleek, doesn’t your theory assume that Democrats are “organized”?
If so, major flaw.
i like the theory that a bunch of Democratic voters voted in the open primary and swung it to the wingnut out of pure mischief.
Heh, good on them if they did it.
Really, not that many in congress have much respect from me, Cantor was about as ineffective as they come. His constant spats with Boehner weakened the “establishment” republicans politically, and made it politically dangerous for a republican to swing towards compromise. He likely ultimately enabled the very challenge that sunk him.
He got hit on crony capitalism (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/10/why-cantors-loss-is-especially-bad-news-for-big-business/ ), although other things as well, like immigration (as noted).
I’m just glad somebody took a hit at the ballot box with crony capitalism as a campaign theme. Really, I doubt it means much, but I like to think people might be starting to have some concerns about cronyism and soft corruption in DC.
Proof that money doesn’t always prevail, even in Washington DC?
Money prevails whenever the voters don’t care. Say what you will about our system, when the voters care about something a lot, money can’t help you all that much. Especially in smallish states.
When the cameras goes away and the voters move onto something else, money will play a role.
I like to think people might be starting to have some concerns about cronyism and soft corruption in DC.
“What’s soft about it?”, he asked, only half in jest.
Money prevails whenever the voters don’t care.
IMO this is a very good observation.
Say what you will about our system, when the voters care about something a lot
it’s a shame that the voters don’t get more say in things. more ballot initiatives, more special elections, etc. would be awesome, IMO.
for example, just this week: 1. the GOP-run NC state lege voted to allow fracking, to allow companies to withhold the composition of their fracking materials, and to allow your neighbors to dictate if your land gets fracked or not – all in opposition to what the voters say they want. 2. the town council of my little town (pop 4K) approved a development that would not just double, triple, quadruple or even quintuple the population of the town, it would (what’s the verb for “to increase by a factor of 20”?) increase it by a factor of 20.
IMO this is a very good observation.
I’d take credit for it, but I can’t. An underpaid CC poly sci teacher spent a lot of time making that point very thoroughly with stats and polls and history etc.
Which of course I didn’t care about after the test. To be young and stupid again.
But the moral stuck with me. When voters care, they are the authority. When they don’t feel that strongly about something…they yield that to the stakeholders (business, etc).
it’s a shame that the voters don’t get more say in things.
I’d phrase it as ‘it’s a shame voters don’t care about more things’, but no argument here.
increase it by a factor of 20.
Also, really? Somebody’s got to be making out like a bandit, because that sounds like a *terrible* idea.
Brat (yes, names signify) is another of the Randian/Crypto Christian chimeras (savage, genocidal blood thirsty jaws grafted onto murderous religious sentimentality) the Teapublican Party is breeding to ruin the country.
The smug Cantor was eaten by the monster he thought he had leashed while he fed it red meat. It got into the house and ripped his neck open.
Charles Pierce:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/
A Sullivan reader speculates on the advisability of carving out a largely gerrymandered Christian district with a streak of anti-Semitism running under the surface and then trying to re-elect a Jew:
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/06/11/was-there-a-jewish-factor/
Josh Marshall demurs on that point of view.
The rancid, corrupt, murderous Democrat (exactly the kind of Democratic politician Brett admires and a guy who should hire some armed bodyguards to protect himself and his corrupt daughter) who was bribed to quit the Virginia statehouse to pave the way for Republicans to murder their own citizens by keeping them off of Medicaid shouldn’t go without mention here.
Cleek’s favorite theory may hold water, but I’m no more a fan of that strategy than I was of Cantor carrying Tea Party poison onto the floor of the Senate.
Look what it gets ya.
As an aside, after the most recent weekly school murders and the Bundy splinter group slaughter sponsered by that piece of sh*t thous shalt murder covenant called the Second Amendment, I’ve decided I’m in favor of arming (give them paramilitary training as well) all students and teachers across the country with high caliber weapons but only if they attend NRA, Republican, and Libertarian meetings (they should schedule a trip to Congress, too) and conservative broadcasts and talk radio shows and open fire in self-defense on the gathered filth and vermin.
Maybe the survivors will then see the light.
Ridding this country of its mortal enemies who are trying, one way or the other, through the actions of their conservative paramilitary forces and/or though policy, to kill as many of us as possible, may require turning the place into Mosul for a goodly while to settle some hash once and for all.
(what’s the verb for “to increase by a factor of 20”?)
Icosuple? Honestly, at that point “increase twentyfold” sounds better.
I’d say that money doesn’t prevail when the voters DO care. If they don’t care, then they’re liable to accept whatever the people with money say, because the people with money have the megaphones.
But if the voters do care, and know what they think, no amount of money will convince them otherwise. We’ve had a few cases in California of empty-suit candidates with money trying to buy elections, and it spectacularly fails.
I think Cantor lost because he was an ideologue who tried to trim with personal ambition, and that’s a bad combination when there’s an alternative on offer of an ideologue more ideological than thou.
“The rancid, corrupt, murderous Democrat (exactly the kind of Democratic politician Brett admires”
I’d be interested in any evidence you have that I admired Ted Kennedy.
Anyway, note well: The Count once again lets the clown mask slip, and expresses his true feelings. Soon the clown mask will be donned again, and he will expect you do dismiss murderous ravings as a joke. The genocide doesn’t lie his way into power, folks. He lays it all out, in the expectation that those who’d object will laugh it off.
Cantor lost because he tried to take one side in Washington, and tell people back home he was taking the other side. And then went into an election faced with a candidate who was clearly in agreement with the people where Cantor wasn’t.
Money speaks where the people don’t care, or the issues are confused. It barely whispers when the people care, and the lines are drawn clearly.
The voters don’t like crony capitalism?
Nonsense.
Name one single item in government that Brat won’t hand over to his Randian cronies.
Name one single issue on which Brat won’t side with Corporate cronies over the individual.
Fracking?
Colonoscopies?
Campaign Finance?
Gun Manufacturers?
(Armed school children should schedule field trips to the latter’s facilities and ask to see the production lines on which the weapons that will be used to kill them and their teachers on a weekly basis are made.
And then blow them up)
Crony capitalists like the Kochs are having meetings with Brat as we speak. First a prayer and then a list of bullet points on strategies designed to kill the poor.
Brat ….. Kantor ….. no difference, except that the former will kill faster.
Soon the clown mask will be donned again, and he will expect you do dismiss murderous ravings as a joke.
I must have missed something. Has the Count killed anyone? Menaced anyone in anything resembling real life? Does the Count even own a weapon?
I mean, other than the pitchfork that he once confessed can be found in his garage.
The genocide doesn’t lie his way into power, folks.
Once again, I’m asleep at the wheel. The Count is running for office? Or, heading up a coup?
“The Count once again lets the clown mask slip, and expresses his true feelings. Soon the clown mask will be donned again, and he will expect you do dismiss murderous ravings as a joke. The genocide doesn’t lie his way into power, folks. He lays it all out, in the expectation that those who’d object will laugh it off.”
The punch line, of course, is that the people you arm kill en masse several times a week, and mine haven’t lifted a finger yet.
I don’t see why you have a problem with school children and indigent medical patients, to name a view, widening your definition of armed self-defense.
At least they aren’t asking the Secret Service to do their dirty work for them, but if they did, at least they would be willing to increase taxes to pay for the service.
The problem is not my multiple masks, one under the other endlessly, but your utter lack of one.
I am more disturbed that Cantor got elected in the first place. Independent of what ideology he pushed and claimed to hold (I have strong doubts that he was anything but self-serving), the guy was first class slimebag. His smug, arrogant facial expressions* and his way of talking alone would have prevented him from ever getting my vote even if I had agreed with anything he said. I got to see some clips of him being booed by his own constituents today and can only say I would have joined in. It was so obvious that he considered his audience as a bunch of hicks far below him that should lick his shoes, peasants before their liege lord. The guy he lost to is a demagogue and/or delusional but does not give the impression of leaving a slime trail behind wherever he goes. That Cantor is a Jew does not matter in the least (except maybe by feeding into antisemitic stereotypes).
Politically Cantor was a guy one would not wish to have as a second, if one was the nominal leader, because one would have always to fear that he would stab you in the back with a poisoned dagger the moment he could get away with it and become your successor.
Good riddance (although it is by no means sure that he will not make a comeback).
*to use that old joke: so repellant that photos of his colud be used to make lightweight body armor
All this talk of the Count as Pol Pot with a sense of humor brings up an interesting point–were there any genocidal monsters in history with a sense of humor? I need some sort of precedent here before I start to worry.
A business article that agrees with Thompson and disagrees with me on Brat’s appeal to those against crony capitalism:
http://money.msn.com/investing/post–wall-street-loses-a-friend-in-cantors-stunning-defeat
I don’t buy it.
His public statements are a mess. He wants higher wages but he wants no minimum wage, no safety net, no foodstamps, etc.
Presumably, without the safety net, Walmart will be forced to raise wages, because … why again?
Brat loves the free market, nno mixed economy for him, by which he means he must love the open, free trade policies, fire-and-layoff-at-will, Walmartian policies that have systemically lowered wages over the past thirty years on all but the shareholder plutocracy.
So, he loves the free market, just not the one that permitted shareholders and Wall Street MBAs driving company managements to pare employment and benefits to the bone for workers across the spectrum to boost shareholder and management bottom line returns and bonuses?
Right?
Or what?
Is he going to jawbone the Kochs to raise wages for their employees?
Is he going to Occupy Wall Street?
I guess there will be tear gas for him.
Brett: Soon the clown mask will be donned again, and he will expect you do dismiss murderous ravings as a joke.
Whereas Brett never expects his ravings to be dismissed as joke. The joke’s on Brett, of course, because he’s most risible when he is most earnest. Brett makes me laugh more often than he knows.
–TP
“were there any genocidal monsters in history with a sense of humor?”
Yes …. and no .. depends on who’s asking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWINtUCshxY
Not safe for home or work, though you can show the clip in schools and near the Bundy Ranch where gunfire will drown out the profanity.
It is said that Stalin would do a wicked soft shoe and five minutes of standup for private audiences, who would then be liquidated for expressing less than uproarious laughter.
Torquemada, not least among his other faults, had a mime act that went on endlessly and folks disliked more than some of his
other hobbies.
Henny Youngman never divulged WHAT he wanted us do with his wife once we took her, please, but one can only guess.
Henry Kissinger used to talk like a Nazi in the Oval Office as counterpoint to Nixon’s railing against Jewish influence everywhere but he could never get Haldeman to crack a smile.
As for Pol Pot, that sight gag he would do with city folk where he took them into the country, asked them to remove their eyeglasses, and then poked them in the eyes with a Moe Howard two-fingered thrust didn’t even play well in Peking.
Donald Johnson, it depends on what one considers humorous. Do court fools or ‘funny’ ways of torturing and killing people count? The top Nazis were great fans of Mickey Mouse (and that was when Mickey was still some kind of anarchist). Maybe the question should be: Were there any genocial monsters that could honestly laugh about jokes aimed at themselves?
There were some that could take honest criticism and hated it when people tried to sugarcoat inconvenient truths in front of them but that’s not the same thing. And then there is the legend about Timur Lenk having several painters killed that did not find a way to paint him as he was but without drawing attention to his missing eye. Allegedly the winner showed him as an archer with the missing eye conveniently closed.
were there any genocidal monsters in history with a sense of humor
The Joker, duh.
Hitler was pretty funny in The Producers
A business article that agrees with Thompson and disagrees with me on Brat’s appeal to those against crony capitalism:
My point wasn’t that Brat is anti-crony. I really have no f’n idea. I’ve seen some interviews/rallies, etc and he hit Cantor with the crony stick pretty hard.
People responded to the overall message, and I have no idea how much the anti-crony thing mattered overall. I like to hope it mattered a lot. But I don’t know, and I don’t know if he’s going to be anti-crony in DC, even if he is now.
Maybe Cantor lost because he is just divinely unlikable, like Hartmut says. I’d buy it.
I’m just glad anti-crony got a few minutes in the media. It might get some people thinking.
I am as opposed to crony-ism as anybody, but I don’t think Brat knows what crony means.
–TP
What does this mean (if anything)?
That House terms should be 4 years and coincide with Presidential election years? And congressional districts should be drawn using the method employed by Iowa.
And congressional districts should be drawn using the method employed by Iowa.
on county borders? sounds good.
but it would be tough in states like NY, where the 7 big NYC-area counties (with 1M or 2+M each) account for 60% of the entire state population.
I was thinking more of the nonpartisan process, doesn’t necessarily have to be county-based as Iowa appears to be (and really no reason for Iowa to have 99 counties, not sure how that came about).
This, from a commenter at Balloon juice regarding the possible provenance of the AR-15 used in the most recent school murder in Oregon:
“Re: the local GOP in Troutdale, OR (site of yesterday’s school shooting).
This year, the party planned to give away an AR-15 at a dinner honoring Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King — two men who were shot to death. Portland’s KATU reported that this was “the third time in less than a year that the group [had] raffled off an AR-15.” Bad publicity led Portland’s Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral to rescind its offer to host the dinner, which was subsequently held at a Portland hotel; the featured speaker was Ted Cruz’s father, the Reverend Rafael Cruz, who’s said he wants to send President Obama “back to Kenya” and compared him to Fidel Castro.
They celebrated Lincoln and King by raffling off a rifle. Irony is dead.”
The Republican Party and its sister organizations are a murder syndicate, a mammoth domestic terrorist organization that is systematically murdering our children and continues to reveal its intention in rhetoric and action to kill government and its employees and public servants, and to withdraw access to medical care for the indigent and others who haven’t the means to buy health insurance without public assistance.
Like Pol Pot, The Republican Party distributes the weaponry to teenaged sociopaths and crazy psychopaths to do the job.
In the realm of clownishness, the problem is that they are NOT clowns.
They aren’t squirting folks in the face from their lapel flowers. They are shooting them with military weaponry.
The American people, including me, ARE, in fact, clowns, as Brett points out, for NOT doing something equally violent to end this regime of terror instead of just clowning around on the internet.
If my words could kill, how come Ted Cruz, Wayne LaPierre, and Grover Norquist aren’t bleeding?
Yet the weapons they proffer to their psychopathic brethren cause major hemorrhaging among the innocent.
Regarding Brat, Daily Kos reports that he and his cronies, 15 hours after being elected, had to postpone their celebratory press conference to meet and decide what their message is going to be.
I guess they are not sure whether to approach the election in the Fall with the ass-end of their chimera leading or wear one of the masks Brett is always going on about over their Death’s Head.
Meanwhile, Kevin Drum looks at opinion surveys in Cantor’s district among Republicans and learns that sizable majorities are in favor of immigration reform, including paths to citizenship for millions, which gives the lie (so much giving, so little time) to the issue the Brat skewered Cantor on, besides crony crapitalism.
So, I’ll take “throw the bums out” for $500 on Russell’s gameboard, despite my suspicion that the voters .. the people … are the bums, each and every one of us, which is why we keep electing our own kind and having to repeatedly throw them out.
Maybe we’ll run out someday and our problems will be solved.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how it works. The clown tries to throw the cream pie and it somehow hits him in the face. Keep up the good work Brett!
“I am as opposed to crony-ism as anybody, but I don’t think Brat knows what crony means.”
I don’t know, looks to me like you’re the one who doesn’t understand it. What’s your position here, that people aren’t allowed to help with the election of folks they agree with?
“cro·ny·ism
ˈkrōnēˌizəm
noun, derogatory
the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications.”
“cro·ny·ism
noun \-nē-ˌi-zəm\
: the unfair practice by a powerful person (such as a politician) of giving jobs and other favors to friends”
So far, what “cronyism” has Brat engaged in?
Now, you want cronyism, how about the incestuous relationship between the MSM and the White house? Isn’t it kind of impressive how many people in the media have close relatives working for this administration? Isn’t it astounding how many ‘green’ firms that sucked down stimulus funds wound up sending some of it back as donations?
No, I don’t think you know from cronyism.
The clown goes to the dictionary!
Crony capitalism describes an economic and political
environment in which pursuing and obtaining government
favors is both part of everyday life and a necessary protocol
for succeeding in business. Where crony capitalism exists,
notions of meritocracy have been displaced by notions of
cronyism or kleptocracy or something similar. Crony
capitalism has ebbed and flowed in our history, and it seems
as though today it is on the rise.link
From the Pierce link quoted given by Tony P.
In 2008, Allison was forced by the evil federal government to take some TARP bailout money. As a devotee of the book that Is Not About Orcs, this pained him greatly. But he got busy and set up the BB&T Moral Foundations Of Capitalism Program, which is how Brat’s gig at Randolph-Macon came to be. In brief, Brat’s job, and the support he got from the Raving-Loon Industrial Complex, all was financed in some way or another by the same vast lagoon of plutocratic payola with which we’ve all become sadly familiar. This is not going to be prominent in the mainstream analysis of what happened.
Do try to keep up…
Do you mean to say that BB&T, the bank, won’t receive favorable treatment, and that Brat will not hire his cronies from the Cato Institute to staff his Congressional Office and he will not permit his cronies in the private sector to write legislation for the rest of us.
I hope you hold Brat to your strictly literal definitions of cronyism, because I think he’s well on his way to being the next bum you’ll want to toss.
Regarding the green industries you note, I was reading the other day, as part of the research I do to invest and crapitalize on cutting-age technologies so I can make a living, that these so-called cronies who create innovative on-site energy storage technology, especially for solar, are now so feared by the big regulated conservative dinosaur utility companies and THEIR cronies that the latter are now trying to ram measures through public utility commissions and their cronies that will prevent libertarian off-grid types like yourself and maybe me too from storing their own energy and power at home and office.
Sounds like Obama’s cronies might be … YOU! … given what he is doing to further your independence from the energy and electricity tyrannies by funding green innovation and the technology spinoffs.
I don’t think you know which side of your crony is buttered.
Wanna buy a Tesla electric vehicle from crony Elon Musk without going through a registered dealer in your state full of cronies of a different color? I suggest you get yourself some different cronies.
The MSM? Ya mean, the one that is increasingly pounding this White House for not being their crony?
You’ve been reading NEWSMAX again, run by Christopher Ruddy, former right wing crony of right wing Clinton-hating cronies, and now crony of Hillary Clinton.
Look it up.
But really, folks, who doesn’t depend on a network of cronies in this country, even in the smallest daily endeavors, to make our way?
I’ve got a friend of a friend who might be able to help you out so you can cut in line ahead of all others who have fewer or less influential cronies.
Actually, I don’t, which is the trouble with cronyism, as I see it.
I don’t have a network.
I have friends only in low places.
Posted by: Countme-In |
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If cronyism was outlawed, the business card printing industry would be in rough straits.
it’s a shame that the voters don’t get more say in things. more ballot initiatives, more special elections, etc.
Actually, it is a seriously mixed blessing. At least as implemented in California a century ago. In theory, ballot initiatives are due to voters caring about something. In fact, they get on the ballot by organizations with lots of money hiring lots of paid signature gatherers. The state is just too big.
And, because they cannot be modified by the legislature, if there is glitch in something that was passed into law via an initiative, there has to be another initiative to fix it. Which means, among other things, that it can’t happen quickly. And it takes a lot of money to get it taken up at all.
Well, perhaps not fully qualified as a genocidal monster, but–
Remember Colbert’s performance for the White House Press dinner? Best political comedy schtick ever?
Remember the dull audience, either uncomprehending or afraid to admit knowing what was going on? Remember who appeared to be the only person in the room actually laughing and looking as if he was having a good time?
Sure you do: Scalia.
While I’m up, about that multiple of 20. I looked in the OED with fear and trembling, and —
Nope, no such word as vigintuple. That’s a relief. Ugly word.
However, Google seems to have over 1,200 matches for it.
Actually, it is a seriously mixed blessing.
I’d extend that to most of representative democracy. Overall for the better, though.
But yeah, the ballot initiative system in CA has some problems.
Actually, I think the problem WJ describes is just that California is too damn big. Democracy doesn’t scale all that well. At some point, you get big enough that local concerns just get lost, and people don’t have enough time to keep track of what’s going on, and can be effectively snowed. And California’s counties don’t have enough independence for federalism to save California democracy, like US federalism did while intact.
California is just way over the ideal size for a democracy. The US, enormously so.
As far as California is concerned, I have to agree with Brett. But size is not the only thing there, it’s the split between the conservative North and the ‘liberal’ South (similar between upstate New York and New York City). A lot of problems could be solved by splitting them into separate states, although they would still stay large. It would also at least mitigate the rather lopsided representation in the US senate. But the latter would of course be the main political obstacle since that very shift would be rather inconvenient for DC power brokers that exploit that lopsidedness.
In California this would create a big problem though. South California would be totally depdendent on the water sources under control of North California which, imo, would be quickly used for the most blatant serial blackmail. Let’s leave aside for the moment that California water management and projects are an environmental abomination in any case.
Have to admit, I appreciated the dry wit of this:
“I’d be interested in any evidence you have that I admired Ted Kennedy.”
Democracy doesn’t scale all that well.
True enough.
And that is why the US is not a democracy, but a constitutional republic.
This link is for Brett.
Enjoy.
The Ezra Klein piece that is linked in bobbyp’s piece is interesting–
link
I’m not sure I agree with point 1–that the core problem with the Republican Party is the weakness of its leaders and not with the extremism of its voters. I think I see where he gets it (from the fact that Cantor won overwhelmingly in 2012 and lost in a primary with many fewer voters involved), but there’s only a difference in degree and not in kind between Cantor and Bratt.
Bobbyp, from your link:
“If the Tea Party didn’t keep knocking off viable Republicans Mitch McConnell would have been Senate Majority Leader since 2010.”
I’d say, it’s more like, if the Republican establishment didn’t automatically abandon any seat where a Tea Party candidate knocked off an establishment incumbent. They talk to the base about the need to suck it up, and support the candidate in the general election even if you didn’t support them in the primary, but that’s not what they do themselves. THEY lose the primary, they generally get in a snit and abandon the seat.
Gives the impression they’d rather a Democrat got elected, than a Tea Party Republican. And I think that’s true; Democrats don’t threaten the establishment’s control of the party, while the Tea Party explicitly aims at wresting control of the GOP from the establishment. From the view of both sides, a smaller GOP they themselves control is superior to a larger GOP controlled by the other side.
Hard to say if Tea Party candidates are particularly weak in the general elections, given that lack of support.
After a day or so of perusing Brat’s CV etc. my general thought is:
Any guy who can build a career around finding the moral intersection of Ayn Rand and Jesus either owns a uniquely subtle mind, or is completely full of crap.
It’ll be interesting to find out which.
Hartmut, while California water politics split much as you describe, the split by political philosophy is rather different. One one side are the big coastal metro areas (the Bay Area, greater Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara); on the other are the inland, mostly argicultural areas (the Central Valley, the north of the state, and the areas inland from LA).
Because of the way the population breaks out, the state overall has a somewhat center-left lean. And because of how far right the California Republican Party has gone, that means that the Democrats hold all the state-wide offices and over 2/3 of the seats in the legislature. This has led to two things:
First (as I may have mentioned previously) the Democratic Party here is showing signs of fracturing into a liberal, heavily union supported, wing and a moderate wing with significant business support. Overall, the moderates seem to have a small edge. (That is why the state’s finances have gotten sorted out. Over the screams of the liberals.) We saw that in the Assembly primary here, with an ex-leader of the statewide teachers union in a really nasty battle with a guy running primarily in opposition to public sector (specifically public transit) union strikes. Really, really nasty.
And second, there are some hints that maybe, just maybe, sanity is creeping in to the Republican Party here. In my Assembly district, the Republicans just nominated a pro-gay-marriage, pro-choice lawyer. Fiscally conservative, certainly, but definitely not a conservative on the social and cultural issues that have been defining the GOP. She may not win, but it is noteworthy that she managed to get the nomination.
Brett, it seems like Cantor’s district may provide a test of your thesis, that abandonment by the establishment is the problem, rather than Tea Party extremism. That district is seriously conservative and Republican. It was carefully gerrymandered that way.
So if the Democrat manages to win it, it won’t be anything but Tea Party extremism driving away more moderate (aka less extreme) Republicans. His chances are not particularly good, considering the demographics. But they are not zero either. Which they would have been, had Cantor been on the ballot — even if Cantor devoted minimal money and effort to his general election campaign.
Brett–I don’t know if you’re correct about the Republican party leadership, but if so, it’s another illustration of The Iron Law of Institutions, coined by blogger Jonathan Schwarz, which says that leaders in an institutional setting care more about their power within the institution than the institution itself.
More on Brat’s “syncretism”.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_06/the_catholic_calvinist_liberta050748.php
Next up, we’ll review the carefully thought-out syncretism of female pornstars who engage in onscreen gangbangs while wearing a gold Christian cross around their necks and hiring their mothers to answer their fan mail.
Every disparate element is an Absolute, natch.
he is large; he contains multitudes.
And second, there are some hints that maybe, just maybe, sanity is creeping in to the Republican Party here.
Same in my district.
To Hartmut: The political layout of CA is pretty complex, actually.
Jeffersonians to the north (and I know some that take it pretty seriously), Ultra-liberal SF, Ultra conservative Kensington and bleeding out to sorta conservative Livermore and Silicon Valley, etc. LA is pretty conservative, the CV very much so, central coast pretty liberal.
I’ve always been troubled by the description of CA as a ‘liberal stronghold’ or some such. It’s not, really. It’s just the mostly-liberal have an edge in the polls, and its a large enough state that its unlikely the lines are going to change that much.
But Pelosi wouldn’t get elected dogcatcher in a statewide election, she’s too liberal. (Nothing against Pelosi, I’ve met many of her constituents and from my estimation she represents them quite well.)
To Brett:
Splitting it is an idea to make it more democratic, I suppose, but its an economic powerhouse as it is. I don’t know that it would benefit CA to trim itself into pieces.
People give CA a lot of crap, and some of it is deserved. But its actually a pretty decent place to live.
“I don’t know that it would benefit CA to trim itself into pieces.”
I’m more concerned about whether it would benefit the people living in CA, than whether it would benefit CA. When you yoke together diaparate groups, somebody’s got to be unhappy.
“But its actually a pretty decent place to live.”
How do you square that with the net domestic migration out? People seem to be voting with their feet for the contrary proposition.
whether it would benefit the people living in CA, than whether it would benefit CA
I refer to Article 2, Section 1 of the CA Constitution: “All political power is inherent in the people.”
The people are the state, as far as I’m concerned, same in CA as the rest of the union.
I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make (the political establishment vs. the citizens). It’s a distinction I make often myself. But I’m not so cynical that I think democracy is lost in CA. Strained, sometimes, but its fundamentally democratic. The people are the state. IMO, giving up on that concept is giving up on the democracy.
How do you square that with the net domestic migration out?
How do I square it? I live in CA, and its pretty decent. Seriously though, your link shows net loss (domestic net migration) of around 100K. The population of CA is around 37-38M? So around -0.3%? With substantial international immigration (legal and otherwise… http://www.sacbee.com/2013/01/17/5120459/asian-immigrants-to-california.html )
Forgive me if I don’t take sub percentage point loss domestic as withering critique of the state overall.
Not to mention that
a) there are a lot of us here who thing the state is too bloody crowded. And losing some people, for us, counts as a plus.
b) the state undoubtedly has more people that it has the resources, specifically water, to sustain. And that was before the climate changes which, in California, seem to primarily mean less percipitation.
No, on balance a little out-migration is a definite plus for those of us who remain.
No, on balance a little out-migration is a definite plus for those of us who remain.
Sadly I can’t count myself among those for too much longer. I’m off to live on in northeast, where types of alcohol can’t be sold together out of fear of some beer/liquor hybrid forming on the shelves, or something. I can’t follow the logic.
And to think I baffled when I moved to a county in CA where alcohol sales at a grocery store were blocked from 2-6AM. Outrageous, I thought!
Slightly off-topic, but Tea Party and far right-related. Andrew Sullivan had a link to this really interesting Pew Research study on polarization in American politics since the 90’s. Here’s the study
link
Depressing and kind of scary when you consider some of the issues (like global climate change) we need to be doing something about.
my favorite liquor law was SC’s pre-2006, where you only buy hard liquor by the drink and all of it came from airplane bottles. because it would be wrong to have one big bottle when you can have 30 small ones.
because it would be wrong to have one big bottle when you can have 30 small ones.
Wasn’t there some state where you had to bring the tiny bottles to the bar for a bartender to make you a drink, because they weren’t allowed to sell and mix alcohol in the same establishment?
thompson,
Here in the Northeast (aka the Original USA) you may actually enjoy our curious folkways. Many towns around here still govern themselves by Town Meeting, for instance. Can’t get closer to The People than that. And if sometimes The People impose silly rules about booze on themselves, well, that’s what comes of letting The People meddle in their own affairs while sober. I can’t say I’ve ever encountered the beer/liquor segregation thing you speak of, but I can tell you that if you want to drink on Sunday morning you will need to visit your local “package store” on Saturday night.
Seriously, if by “northeast” you mean the Boston area, we should try to revive the occasional ObwiBoston get-together that some of us used to do, way back.
–TP
Geez, Donald, that is a grim link. Thanks for that more on topic piece than liquor laws.
The sections on antipathy and compromise are especially sad. For me, anyway. Apparently many of my countrymen want their reps to stand firm against the other half of the country.
Bringing it back to Cantor, maybe he didn’t have shot. He’s been trying to play to a base that is uncompromising. It’s not the type of base you can play to, and it turns off the more centrist voters. From your link:
Yet many of those in the center remain on the edges of the political playing field, relatively distant and disengaged, while the most ideologically oriented and politically rancorous Americans make their voices heard through greater participation in every stage of the political process.
A popular bumpersticker in Oregon used to be (and may still be) ‘Beautify Oregon: Shoot a Californian’. One of the things with being an economic powerhouse is that you create lots of kids (just ask China) That kind of demographic raises home prices, and makes the mobile want to cash out.
I’m off to live on in northeast, where types of alcohol can’t be sold together
I’ve lived in the northeast my entire life – NY, PA, now MA – and I’ve always been able to buy alcohol in pretty much whatever combination I chose.
There are some quirks, and you can’t buy whiskey at the gas station at 2 AM like I’ve done in AZ, but I think you’ll get by.
Here’s the study
What Donald’s study doesn’t seem to call out is the degree to which the range of political discourse *as a whole* has moved, significantly, to the right.
There are, at most, a handful of social issues where the country is more “progressive” than it was a generation ago. To be honest, the only one I can think of is gay rights.
Other than that, I’m not seeing any leftward drift, by anyone, anywhere.
On the right, positions that would have been seen as being straight-up insane are now commonplace.
” But I’m not so cynical that I think democracy is lost in CA.”
Screw democracy, that’s just tyranny of the majority. I care about liberty, and when you force disparate groups together, the majority may be happy, but the minority is hosed.
Tony:
Yeah, I imagine I’ll find plenty of things to like about the East. I’m moving to Penn, and I’ve been told it has among the most bizarre liquor laws in the states. No direct experience, so it might be overblown.
well, that’s what comes of letting The People meddle in their own affairs while sober.
Heh. If you’re proposing a one drink minimum for sessions of congress, I approve.
we should try to revive the occasional ObwiBoston
It’s prolly a little far from me (although I admit the geography still has me baffled…how can you live and work in different states?), but I’ve never been to Boston and I plan to rectify that at some point.
Screw democracy […] I care about liberty
Brett, this may be where you and I part ways. Liberty must be ensured, it does not exist in a vacuum. The constitutions of the US and CA, help ensure liberty, in part through the democratic process.
Not always in the manner of, or extent to which I wish, but I doubt a lack of democracy would be better.
One of the things with being an economic powerhouse is that you create lots of kids
LJ, if that were true, how is it that most developed countries have birth rates at or below replacement rates?
In fact, the US is exceptional in that our population is growing. But even here, that is due to immigration (and higher birth rates among first generation immigrants), rather than lots of kids in general.
how can you live and work in different states?
They’re small.
I’ve lived in the northeast my entire life – NY, PA, now MA – and I’ve always been able to buy alcohol in pretty much whatever combination I chose.
PA comes close to what thompson speaks of; perhaps it wasn’t always that way, but when I lived there it was the state-run Wine and Spirit Shops for hard liquor and wine, and private beer stores (or bars selling 6-packs, but only up to 192oz per purchase) for beer. I come from OH, where you can buy hard liquor, wine, and beer in drive-throughs, gas stations, and grocery stores, so this was a strange new world to me.
No direct experience, so it might be overblown.
See above. It’s definitely not. PA is special.
I’ve lived in the northeast my entire life – NY, PA, now MA
Heh, I guess my fears about PA are overblown…I heard state run stores with limited hours, beer separate from wine/spirits, etc etc. It all sounded like a pain.
PA comes close to what thompson speaks of and PA is special.
Oh, yay.
yeah, when i lived in philly liquor was from the package store and beer was from the bar.
but you could get a six-pack to take away from a bar anytime they were open, so that was cool.
Who does Brett think is “forcing” disparate groups together?
As far as I know, Brett is an American by birth, so he can rightly claim that he did not choose to be born among us sheeple. But also as far as I know, Brett is an atheist, so he can’t blame god for his plight. So who can the poor guy blame for “forcing” him to live in the USA instead of Libertopia or Freedomstan?
–TP
Philly (I guess all of PA) has byob restaurants, which is the first time I’d encountered that.
political discourse *as a whole* has moved, significantly, to the right.
I wonder if that’s because the “center” is moving, or because the right extreme is just dragging the dialog to the right?
Not that Munroe is an expert on such things, but this graph shows it, I think:
http://xkcd.com/1127/large/
The makeup of the right has been shifting more and more towards a “far right” ideology at the expense of the “center right”.
LJ, if that were true, how is it that most developed countries have birth rates at or below replacement rates?
I was thinking that there is a comparison between China and California. and because those places then bring in or have lots of lower-class folks, you’ve got lots who find jobs and have lots of kids. But the pyramid does move up to an apex, so if you are in the middle class, of get into the middle class, you want to take your gains and live somewhere where you can enjoy them. I’m not sure if that’s right and googling, all I find are a lot of pieces by right wing economics think tanks that seem to have an ax to grind.
“The constitutions of the US and CA, help ensure liberty, in part through the democratic process.”
Dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy; These are different systems of deciding WHO issues the rules. In theory, anyway, a democracy is going to be a bit more free than a dictatorship or oligarchy, because it’s presumed that the majority won’t issue rules contrary to their own desires, so at least a majority have some liberty. But the minority in a democracy can be very, very badly treated, if there are no limits on what sorts of rules the majority can promulgate.
Who decides, and what subjects are to be decided about, these are separate issues, and both have a bearing on the amount of liberty in a society. The constitutions of the US, and of states, have bearing on what, too, but less and less, as the tendency to value democracy over liberty causes those limits to be overridden whenever a democratic majority feels like it.
Take 45 people who want to do one thing, 55 who want to do another. If they are separate jurisdictions, 100 people are happy. If you put them together into one jurisdiction, and have them vote on what to do, suddenly you’re going to have 45 unhappy people on your hands. Because of democracy.
So, yes, I think there would be more freedom in California if you broke it up into smaller states.
LJ, areas within countries which are doing well do get lots of immigrants, both internal and external. As a result, their populations grow. But that isn’t the same as getting lots of kids. (Except if the immigrants happen to bring kids with them.)
Brett, more happy people would depend on two things:
First, if you actually had the state split into relatively homogeneous sections. Which is somewhat possible, but hardly easy.
Second, if being able to get what they wanted out of their government made up for the economic impacts. For example, if one new state has lots of people and little water, while another has few people and lots of water, there is no guarantee that sufficient water will get moved. Within a state, you can get water projects done, even though some areas don’t want to have their supply constrained just to give water to other areas. Between states? Not so much.
I use water as an example because it is a major issue in California. And it is an issue which cuts across political philosophies. Lots of liberal ecology-minded people joining with lots of conservative farmers in Northern California to oppose a lot of liberals and conservatives in Southern California.
People in states east of the Rockies may not be aware of just how contentious this is. And has been for a century or more. And may also not be aware that most of California is a desert, not unlike Arizona or West Texas . . . except with lots more people. People who can be supplied only because there are mountains which (used to) get lots of snow, from which water can be transported 500 miles south (or 200 miles west) to where the people are.
Split the state apart and two things happen:
– A lot of people discover that they have no access to water. At least, not without massive increases in prices.
– a lot of other people discover that most of the money which has subsidized their local economy came from somewhere else.
Result: increased poverty in one place, and massive population relocations from another. Both of which are bad for the overall economy, and worse during the times when the changes are taking place. In short, a whole lot of very unhappy people.
But that isn’t the same as getting lots of kids. (Except if the immigrants happen to bring kids with them.)
Though immigrants have, in both senses of the term, a lot more kids than the folks who have been there for a while, which encourages folks who may have reached a certain level to leave, I would think. At least that is what I see as the driver, though I may be looking at it through my own lens, Japan, which has a terrible time accepting immigrants.
Philly (I guess all of PA) has byob restaurants, which is the first time I’d encountered that.
Oh, god, how did I talk about PA alcoholic oddities and forget to mention corkage fees?
Who decides, and what subjects are to be decided about, these are separate issues
At the margins, where it is important, to point out the utter wrongness of this claim is itself a banality.
though I may be looking at it through my own lens, Japan, which has a terrible time accepting immigrants.
I think that is probably true. Japan has no history of accepting immigrants, even those families who have been resident there for generations. In contrast, the US has been accepting immigrants, and turning them into Americans just like everybody else, for a couple of centuries.
It isn’t a smooth or flawless process. And it doesn’t happen instantly. But it keeps happening. The the point where you see children of immigrants winning statewide offices as representatives of a party which is rabidly opposed to immigration. (c.f. Louisiana)
Brett:
In addition to wj’s point about water, which is quite correct, CA has an additional problem that there aren’t really clean lines that you could use to divide the state into anything remotely politically homogenous.
I don’t really see an argument that economic failure and smaller, politically fractured sub-CAs would work out to protect anybody’s liberties. Or as wj aptly said:
In short, a whole lot of very unhappy people.
The issue Brett will be unable to address is that, to achieve consensus, you have to have polities that consist of single digit numbers of people.
I live in a town of about 20K people. The town is run by town meeting, period, and has been for almost 400 years. No aspect of public life happens – no money is spent, no by-law is passed – without getting past an up-or-down vote at town meeting. That’s democracy, and it’s democracy at, by current standards, quite a small scale.
There has never been, and never will be, a town meeting where everybody was happy with the result.
If you want to live around other people, you’re not going to get to do whatever you want. If that doesn’t suit you, go live in the woods.
The libertarian paradise you dream of does not exist, never has existed, and never will exist. So it’s basically irrelevant to any discussion of political or social issues that emerge from real life.
Breaking CA into even county-size chunks will not yield any net gain in the perceived liberty of any of its inhabitants, because you will never get any ten, let alone ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million, people to agree about what they want.
C’est la vie.
That’s all or nothing thinking, Russell. If a change doesn’t make everybody happy, it can’t make MORE people happy?
Breaking California up into chunks would make more people happy, because the different chunks would have different average compositions. The outcome of votes within them would more closely follow the local opinion.
That assumes that there is uniformity among the local opinion.
If smaller states would make more people happy, then we wouldn’t have cities where people are massively unhappy with their city government. To the point where many of them (if they can afford to) inflict long commutes on themselves, just to get away from it. And a lot of those who cannot afford to move away are still unhappy, just stuck.
And yet, that pretty well describes a lot of our big cities. For all that they are smaller than most of the states.
I didn’t realize that they didn’t have county and municipal governments in California. It’s such a weird place.
P.S. BYOBs are very popular in NJ, too. You can buy beer, wine and liquor in the same privately-owned stores, but they are referred to as “liquor stores” because you can’t buy alcohol from any other place, except bars that sell “package goods.” (Not all do – particularly not higher-end bars. It’s more of a corner-bar thing. What’s a little strange about that is that they can only sell wine and beer, not liquor, after the liquor stores have closed at 10 PM.)
I loved being able to buy beer when I went grocery shopping at Wegman’s when I worked in NY state.
size doesn’t matter, if there are elected representatives.
it’s hard to get too much smaller than the 4K who make up my town. but 5 town council members just decided that the best course of action is to let developers build the 5th largest real estate development in the history of the US, something which nobody but the developers want.
and even when democracy is direct, there’s always the chance that 49.99999% of the people will be on the losing side of any vote, regardless of the size of the population.
By “buy” I meant take with you, in case that wasn’t clear. Of course, you can also buy alcohol in restaurants, with liquor licenses, to be consumed on premises. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about the details of legally purchasing alcoholic beverages in New Jersey. It’s an important topic.
I loved being able to buy beer when I went grocery shopping at Wegman’s when I worked in NY state.
i was thrilled, when we moved to NC, to be able to buy wine in grocery stores.
and i was giddy, when we were in WY, to be able to buy liquor at grocery stores.
and when i was in AL, visiting my MiL, we had to drive to the next country to buy alcohol of any kind.
hooray for local laws.
” But the minority in a democracy can be very, very badly treated, if there are no limits on what sorts of rules the majority can promulgate.”
That’s true, and where you see this is in places with ethnic, racial, or religious differences. As was discussed in the reparations thread. As is happening in Iraq. Also in The Only Democracy In the Middle East.
But oppression of middle class white male libertarians in the US shouldn’t be real high on anyone’s list of human rights violations.
Who is David Brat?
Let him tell you.
Memo to Mr. Brat: Never, ever use the phrase ‘I love all people’, esp. not in the context of justification of your own acts or beliefs!
Btw, in Germany that sentence is on par with ‘no one has the intention to erect a wall’ and ‘since 5:45am the fire is being returned’, i.e. on the top ten list of famous blatant lies.
says the professor?
wanna see red turn blue?
get Brat to run on that!
heh
don’t let them know my positions!
I’m watching the Brat videos linked to at the MotherJones page referenced in my last comment.
What I notice is that a lot of them are from Life Church.
Basically, Brat is running for office from the pulpit of Life Church.
Was Jack Trammell (his opponent) invited to come and address the folks at Life Church?
Is Life Church a 501(c)(3)? If so, how is Life Church holding on to its tax-exempt status as a religious organization?
“My hero Socrates trained in Plato on a rock.”
He may also have buggered Plato on a rock, but leaving that aside accept as a plea to Brat to allow great thinkers of the same sex to marry, what does that sentence mean?
Besides, I’d like to see older, male university professors and high school teachers in this country lose their tenure, as conservatives demand, and see what the Right’s response will be when they become itinerant village square philosophers roving over the countryside followed everywhere by droves of vaguely effeminate men in thrall to a free education which instructs revolution against the government Brat wants to be part of.
If education should be cheap, why did the ex-Chairman of BB&T have to dole out so much money to endow the Chair in “The Capitalist Reacharound While Mouthing God’s Sweet Nuggets of Nothing” Brat now occupies, I’d like to know.
And what about Brat’s other hero, Ayn Rand and her other hero, Aristotle?
Look, you’re either a Yankees fan or you are a Red Sox fan. Pick one and shat up.
Jesus reportedly multiplied the loaves and the fishes endlessly and for free, but I notice the capitalists at Whole Foods haven’t internalized the lesson.
I look forward to the Brat regime wherein the people are “changed” and Whole Foods follows the teachings of Jesus and hands over the $22/lb sea bass for free or at least hands me a fishing pole and teaches me to cast for the sea bass in the case laid out on crushed ice.
Brat hates the word “common”, as in common sense.
Whoops, turns out Bergdahl may have been a Rand fan too and was merely going Galt.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/12/1306313/-Was-Bowe-Bergdahl-going-Galt-Cue-Teapublican-heads-exploding
Cue a moment of silence as Brat and the Rand disciples riffle through their copy of Atlas Shrugged to see if Rand’s chapter and verse permit Galt’s Gulch to accept deserters and unruly beards.
Perhaps Brett should try moving to the City of Industry, California.
219 residents, according to Wikipedia.
IIRC, there was some sort of scandal when a couple of people informally renting there decided that they could actually VOTE and RUN FOR OFFICE.
Either that, or a small island, current population zero, bump it up to “one”.
i know i’ve personally had to make decisions that 49.999% of me found repugnant. so, i doubt even a population of 1 could manage to keep everybody happy all the time.
I’d call this Obama’s missing 18 minutes. The IRS claims that a computer accident has deleted beyond all retrieval the Lerner emails the House as subpoena’d in relation to the targeting of conservative groups.
Man, the mind boggles at how incriminating they must have been, to resort to this kind of “dog ate my homework” level of excuse for destroying the evidence.
here’s a phrase you might not know, Brett : “confirmation bias”
look it up. good stuff!
Cleek, you got any idea just how absurdly improbable, with modern backup practices, it is for the IRS to have “lost” those emails? Lose them? They’d have to spend a frightening amount of manpower to deliberately delete them!
We’re talking here about an agency where people used private email addresses with fake names to evade FIOA requests and Congressional subpoeanas. I’d believe they went to some trouble to make sure such emails were never backed up in the first place, but, lose them?
Yeah, I’ve heard of confirmation bias, and you’re exhibiting it.
Did they delete the emails discussing the targeting of liberal groups?
Cleek, you got any idea just how absurdly improbable, with modern backup practices, it is for the IRS to have “lost” those emails?
please, tell us all about the IRS’s internal IT practices.
Ok, we’ve established that, during Democratic administrations, you not only expect the dog to eat the homework, but would complain if it didn’t. No surprise.
I don’t know anything about the IRS’s internal IT practices, beyond this, but if they follow the same standards the federal government mandates for a wide range of businesses, this story is utterly implausible.
Again, we’re talking about the same agency whose officers, including Lerner, illegally used private email addresses, often with fake names, to evade FOIA and Congressional subpoeanas.
They long ago lost any right to the benefit of the doubt. But I’m sure you’ll give them that benefit for perpetuity, or anyway, until a Republican is in office.
Here is the IRS’s description of its email backup process and the loss of Lerner’s email. I’ve only skimmed it and don’t know anything about backup processes anyway. It says the backup tapes from that period have been recycled.
http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/irs-description.pdf
So, essentially, the claim is that the IRS was using data retention policies they would criminally prosecute anybody else for using?
“Confirmed that back-up tapes from 2011 no longer exist because they have been
recycled (which not uncommon for large organizations in both the private and
public sectors);”
Never been the policy in any organization *I* was a part of. If you scrub a backup, there’s no backup anymore, and six months is an absurdly short time to declare emails to be dated enough to be disposed of. Insanely short for an organization which requires others to maintain records for years.
That’s not a backup policy, that’s a “don’t backup” policy. Blatantly so. If it really was their policy, they were deliberately destroying evidence. And THAT I would believe, given the use of private emails and fake name email addresses.
Insanely short for an organization which requires others to maintain records for years.
Where is the law requiring “others” to maintain email for years?
“Records”.
Look, I’ve been using computers in industry since the early 80’s. I learned to program on a mainframe, with punch cards, I used email from the time it became available.
The claim that destroying *all* your backups after 6 months has been an accepted industry standard any time within the last couple of DECADES isn’t just a lie, it’s an insulting lie. Destroying your backups in that manner would get you a presumption that they contained damaging information in any legal proceeding in the US, and that’s been the case for years.
Imagine it: The government takes some company to court for something, subpoeanas their emails going back a few years, and the company says, “Sorry, we delete all our emails after six months!”.
The best you’d get is an assumption that what you’d deleted was incriminating. You might be looking at jail time.
A quick search reveals that the legal minimum for “financial services” is 3 years. That’s the minimum.
Now, transferring tapes to something more long term after six months, maybe. “Thinning” your backups, maybe. Just deleting them all?
No way, that hasn’t been a standard industry practice in decades. In fact, the standard is that it’s prohibited, can get you in legal trouble.
I don’t know anything about the IRS’s internal IT practices, beyond this,
and did you read that?
The claim that destroying *all* your backups after 6 months has been an accepted industry standard any time within the last couple of DECADES isn’t just a lie, it’s an insulting lie.
nonsense.
you don’t know the IRS’s internal systems; you don’t know their policies; what you do know about them, you’ve declared to be an “insulting lie”. and yet you say with certainty that crimes and violations have occurred.
con.fir.ma.tion. bias.
@cleek–
i don’t know if you ever spent any time at the formerly marvelous comments at samefacts but if you had you would know that you won’t ever wound mr. bellmore with cries of “confirmation bias.” keep in mind that mr. bellmore, in a few lengthy threads about the birth certificate, took the position that while he had no proof that obama’s birth certificate was a fraud neither could he state positively that obama was born in the united states because he wasn’t present in the delivery room. if dr. kleiman, et al. hadn’t lost all of the previously accumulated comments in their transition to a much more clumsy system i would give links to those discussions. maybe those lost comments represent the REAL scandal.
veddy, veddy fishy … that.
Zie plot turns and zie vurm, eet does theecken.
I often wonder if Brett Bellmore is a government plant, watered from deep within the homeland security bureaucracy.
A contractor, of course. A cleaner.
So, essentially, the claim is that the IRS was using data retention policies they would criminally prosecute anybody else for using?
Actually, I would believe that in a heartbeat.
The federal government is not famous for it’s cutting-edge IT practices.
Not saying there isn’t foul play here, because I don’t know. Then again, neither do you.
But as a point of fact, the feds are in general not that sophisticated, in terms of basic workaday use of technology.
But as a point of fact, the feds are in general not that sophisticated, in terms of basic workaday use of technology.
part of my daytime life is doing postal address correction software, so that means i have a lot of contact with the USPS. all of their sample applications are written in COBOL and their data format of choice for postal data is flat text files.
I’ll have to go with Brett on this one. (And not just because I, too, have been in the IT industry since the days of punch cards.) I’ve worked in big shops, and I’ve worked in very small ones. And I’m currently part of an effort by a professional organization to establish policies on document retention.
How long back-ups are kept varies with the kind of information involved. Can be months, years, or permanently. For example, back-ups of contracts are kept permanently. Back-ups of the operating system are taken regularly, but only 2-3 generations are typically kept — that is, if we take back-ups weekly, we probably only have them from a month.
For e-mails, especially those that relate to how we are conducting business, retention is typically 7 years, with longer retention for those relating to contract negotiations, policy decisions, etc. For general correspondence without a legal, regulatory, or audit requirement for longer retention, 3-5 years (not months) is typical, although so. The idea of regularly deleting back-up copies of anything over 6 months old is simply absurd.
Sorry, that next to last sentence should read “… 3-5 years (not months) is typical, although some places keep it longer.”
The idea of regularly deleting back-up copies of anything over 6 months old is simply absurd.
absurd or not, here’s what Ugh’s link says:
recycling backup tapes is common. we do it.
and
Note, however, that the document that Ugh links to is extremely recent. That is, it appears to date from a time when the IRS was justifying why it didn’t provide the required documents. Far more interesting would be a document from 2009 or 2010, showing what the official policy was then.
wj, I’d say that what you describe is good, solid best practice.
I also note that we recently discussed the fact that federal retirement applications are processed, by hand, on paper, in a big cave somewhere in PA.
Long story short, the fact that industry best practice is to hold documents for 3-5 years neither proves nor disproves that the IRS is deliberately 86’ing emails to cover up a scandal.
Folks want lean, mean, cut-to-the-bone federal federal operations. This is what they look like.
You can’t drown it in a bathtub and then b*tch when it’s broken.
russell, it may well be that the IRS was using some ridiculously short retention periods. But the document Ugh linked to only shows us what they say their policy is now.
What I’d really like to see (assuming that they haven’t deleted it, of course) is a document from 3-4 years ago showing what their policy was then. Maybe it was the same, and they just have crazy policies. Then again, maybe it was to keep things longer then, and the policy got conveniently changed recently. It would be nice to know. And necessary to know, if we are trying to decide whether documents were deliberately deleted.
But the document Ugh linked to only shows us what they say their policy is now.
i will re-quote:
A few more docs at the link below. If I have some time with a real computer today I will weigh in in more detail. Maybe put up a separate post.
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/06/the-irs-scandal-10.html
cleek,
yes, I know what they say, today, was their policy then. What I’m talking about is a document from then, saying what their then-current policy was.
It’s the sort of thing that would necessarily have been documented. If only in the specs given to the IT folks charged with maintaining the tape library software. And I would expect those system specifications would be retained, if only because they typically cover a lot of different aspects of the system. And the IT guys want to be able to go back and say, “This is what you told me to do [not just about retentions], in a document you sent, and that is what I did.”
What I’d really like to see (assuming that they haven’t deleted it, of course) is a document from 3-4 years ago showing what their policy was then.
Fair enough.
No doubt documents of all types are sure to be forthcoming.
Look, is it possible that the White House leaned on Lerner to louse up some Tea Party groups? Yes.
Is it also possible that the IRS used obvious cues like the words “Tea Party” to focus their auditing of groups abusing the tax code to engage in unlawful political electioneering? Yes.
The latter has more weight in my mind because the IRS *also* targeted groups with obvious left-leaning language in their names and self-descriptions.
The latter also has move weight in my mind because, from day 1 of Obama’s time in office, he’s been pursued by a freaking cloud of ankle-biting harpies intent on finding anything they can find to either get him out of office or delegitimize him while in office.
There are about 173 possible reasons why the emails are missing. One of them is that they were deliberately destroyed to cover up deliberate targeting of conservative groups at the White House’s request.
If you want to make that case, you need to bring something stronger than “the IRS’s policies don’t adhere to best IT practice”.
Anybody who files a tax form already knows that the IRS doesn’t adhere to best IT practice. There is no news there.
Maybe there’s a smoking gun out there somewhere. This ain’t it. At least not based on what we know about it at this point.
I appreciate that Dave Camp is pissed. Well done Dave, that’s your job. I’m also skeptical that today’s scandal du jour is going to have anything more to it than the last 2,000 days worth.
We’ll see what we will see.
“The latter has more weight in my mind because the IRS *also* targeted groups with obvious left-leaning language in their names and self-descriptions.”
For rather different values of “also”, and “targeted”, it must be said. Days vs years of delay. It must also be said that the IRS is, despite the dearth of news accounts about it, STILL targeting such groups.
That the same IRS which was using private emails and fake name email accounts to evade discovery was also deleting emails after an absurdly short period, for the same purpose? That I’d believe. That they thought it was industry standard practice?
Don’t insult me. Seriously, don’t. It wasn’t standard practice, and nobody in IT who wanted to remain employable would claim the contrary.
No, this isn’t a smoking gun, but in any legal proceeding, in the private sector, it would presumed that a smoking gun was among the things deleted.
Most transparent administration ever, strikes again.
No, this isn’t a smoking gun
My point, precisely.
Camp et al should follow up, and no doubt will. If there’s something there, I’m sure we’ll hear about it sooner or later.
And if there’s nothing there, we’ll no doubt hear about the imaginary stuff, too.
Most transparent administration ever,
so, it’s your assertion that the administration is down at the IRS, managing their IT practices ? Barack Fncking Obama is down at the IRS server farm, telling people to recycle backup tapes ? or does he send Biden to do the dirty work ?
GOP = clown show
does it ever occur to mr. bellmore that this is how you work the refs and move the goalposts? in the history of our last 50 or 60 years it is the groups with ties to the left that get picked out for extra scrutiny, extra abuse, and extra penalties. even after the militia movements of the 80s and 90s, racist gangs like the aryan brotherhood and worse, at any point when right wing groups become the focus of law enforcement scrutiny the whole right wing press and their opinion leaders become up in arms about it to the point that legitimate security interests are ignored in favor of placating the fox news crowd. when left wing groups get singled out for such treatment or worse, and here i’m looking at the record of the treatment of the occupy movement, there is barely a whisper. why? i’ll give you my thoughts on it, it’s because the left wing establishment, such as it is, is vaguely embarrassed by the leftist fringe while the right wing establishment regards its fringe as equal to its base.
so even though the irs used keywords to help it find and investigate left liberal groups all you really care about, all you really hear about, is how the irs is picking on those poor tea party groups and you don’t even begin to care whether those groups are violating the tax code or not because that’s never been what this is about. this is about making so much pain for anyone to enforce the law on conservative groups that they’ss stop trying and focus on the left liberal groups that no one will defend with that type of sound and fury. admit it, mr. bellmore, you don’t even care if those tea party groups were actually in violation of the law, you just want them to be left alone regardless of any reason of law.
Cleek, you ever heard of the phrase, “The buck stops here.”? Do you have any clue what it means?
It’s been revised to, “The buck never ever gets here.”, apparently.
Do I think Obama issued explicit orders to the federal bureaucracy, to harass his political opponents? Nah, I think it was more a “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” sort of thing. I think the federal bureaucracy is so overwhelmingly Democratic that they barely need a hint to weaponize and go after the opposition.
But the destruction of emails has me open to the possibility that it actually did go further than that, that there was some explicit direction involved.
Nah
and yet you wrote “the administration”.
Nah, I think it was more a “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” sort of thing.
and you have no proof. but you assert it.
But the destruction of emails has me open to the possibility that it actually did go further than that,
oh, of course it did. of course it did.
like i said, way back when: confirmation bias. you’re just looking for things to plug into the conclusion you’ve already come to.
Navarro,
Well said.
Just for example, what’s going on with Cliven Bundy, the thief who was a big right-wing hero until he proved too dumb not to keep his mouth shut about race?
when left wing groups get singled out for such treatment or worse, and here i’m looking at the record of the treatment of the occupy movement, there is barely a whisper.
Right on navarro. And it ain’t just Occupy.
The buck stops at the top. Quite true.
But does anyone really believe that the people who actually do the work in the IRS IT department, and who know what really happened to the e-mails, will all remain silent if something was actually going on? Far, far more likely that someone comes forward with fantasies than that nobody comes forward at all. These are, after all, not political appointees.
“when left wing groups get singled out for such treatment or worse, and here i’m looking at the record of the treatment of the occupy movement, there is barely a whisper.”
First order bs, talk about bias. The flip side of thus isn’t true either. For someone, in the vast majority of us over 40 types, that gets their news from the big three and the local affiliate there is little bias and less coverage of either.
In the end, the bad treatment is exaggerated, by both sides. The news media covers it if it will drive ratings but not after. And this is a classic example, the Occupy movement was treated with kid gloves allowed to illegally live in public parks, protected from counter protests by mayors and their cronies, oh wowed by the media when it made them look good, then it crumbled and the cleanup of the vestiges was news again.
“and you have no proof. but you assert it.”
And THAT is the purpose of a cover-up, to make sure that your partisans will be able to say that. Not to keep people from being aware that something nasty went down, but to deny them the moral certainty necessary to do something about it.
Congress issues a subpoena for Lois Lerner’s emails, and months later the IRS comes back and claims that a hard drive crash, combined with the sort of data retention policy that gets you jail time in the private sector, has destroyed just exactly the emails Congress wanted.
You know, somewhere, sometime, I’m sure homework actually got eaten by a dog, too. Doesn’t mean you expect that excuse to be believed.
@marty
i’d like you to point to any example from the past 20 years where you can show treatment of right wing groups that is on the order of the treatment of the occupy movement. here’s a few reminders if you’ve conveniently forgotten how it played out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/nyregion/occupy-movement-was-investigated-by-fbi-counterterrorism-agents-records-show.html?_r=2&
http://www.theawl.com/2012/03/its-the-lowest-moment-yet-for-michael-bloomberg
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/updates-on-occupy-protests-nationwide/?src=twt&twt=thelede#video-analysis-of-projectile-hurled-at-oakland-protest
Waco, move on from there.
I’ve never thought of David Koresh and his flock as a right-wing group.
Funny that you claim them as one of your own.
I wish Occupy had been armed.
No, I can’t think of any occasion in the last 20 years when a right wing group illegally occupied a public space for days, and was permitted to just keep on doing it. Can’t think of any right-wing groups that were shitting on police cars, either.
I *have* been part of perfectly legal and peaceful protests that had police snipers watching through the scopes on their rifles as the right wing women pushed their right wing strollers about, and the right wing protesters left the place cleaner than when they arrived.
I put it down to the right and left having different styles of protest.
I don’t find anything in your articles to be upset about. Oh, except the cops using too much force when protestors challenged them. Same issue I had with the cops and the rancher in Nevada. I think he was considered a right wing guy. The FBI were thankfully doing their job on Occupy. Why wouldn’t a mass protest designed to shut down financial markets be of interest to the FBI. Them they protested at individual executives houses, protection was in order.
So my response is. What am I trying to find a comparison too?
Count
I suspect Koresh is as far right as you can go…… I don’t claim him.
I don’t think people like Koresh are a good fit for right or left; It’s just that, as the Davidians were being attacked over gun ownership, this marked them out as enemies of the left, which by default made them “right” if you only see two possibilities.
In reality, they weren’t involved in politics, they were trying to stay out of that sort of thing.
One guy shat on a police car.
At least he didn’t have his women shielding him while he did it, not that a woman would have wanted to shield him.
Koresh was a lunatic. The political spectrum couldn’t find a home for him.
So the authorities used too much force on heavily armed combatants parking themselves illegally on public land in Nevada but they used precisely the right amount of force on unarmed protestors parking themselves on public land in cities?
I’m going out tonight and claim some public land for my own in Colorado while waving around an AR-15 and a couple of pistols with sizable clips.
What kind of force do you think is appropriate when your cops show up to fuck with me?
It had better be formidable because shitting on parked cars will be the least of your gummint’s worries.
No, I can’t think of any occasion in the last 20 years when a right wing group illegally occupied a public space for days, and was permitted to just keep on doing it.
Think harder.
For how long has Bundy essentially occupied, and used, federal land without paying the fees he owes? How much land has he occupied? More that ther eis in Central Park, or less?
“So the authorities used too much force on heavily armed combatants parking themselves illegally on public land in Nevada but they used precisely the right amount of force on unarmed protestors parking themselves on public land in cities?”
exactly, if its your guy the cops were completely out of line, if its the other guy they were completely justified.
Also I am not sure Bundy counts as a protest group….
Essentially the only complaint the feds had with Bundy, was that he was getting in the way of their killing endangered desert tortoises. They’d declared the area he ran his cattle a preserve for them, and then starting euthanizing them because they were too much trouble to take care of. This, because they had to move the tortoises to make room for a Chinese solar plant Reid was going to make more money off of.
Pretty lame, but the sort of thing you need to do, if you’re going to drive cattle ranching out of Nevada.
You’d have to go out of your way to run into Bundy, Occupy was deliberately getting in the way of other people.
In terms of the public interest, yeah, Occupy was much more obnoxious. Went out of their way to be obnoxious, actually. All Bundy was doing was providing people with beef.
Brett,
Bundy was grazing his cattle on federal land and not paying the fees.
Forget all that stuff about tortoises. He didn’t want to pay for the stuff he was using. He didn’t want to pay his bills. He didn’t want to obey the law. And he had plenty of supporters on the right.
You’re a big “rule of law” guy, always complaining when things don’t go the way your reading says they should.
So suddenly it doesn’t matter? Give me a f**king break.
If Bundy’s heavily armed militia had dropped their weapons and begun flinging their poo at the BLM’s vehicles, would you have moved in with force?
Bundy could raise beef cattle in Central Park, New York City, too.
“Went out of their way to be obnoxious, actually.”
To some extent, yeah, obnoxiousness being a protestor’s baseline.
Cabbage has been thrown through the centuries.
And arrests get made for throwing cabbage, which may be the point.
But, let me ask you, is “obnoxious” the term you would use too for heavily armed self-proclaimed militia clowns driving across the country to threaten authorities and citizens on public roads with military-style weapons, whose only purpose is to kill, and all in defense of a guy who is illegally grazing on land he did not pay for?
Shit on my car and I will hurt you with my bare hands, even if you are a fellow Occupier.
Point an AR-15 at me, and I will kill you on the spot and if you want to shove your wives and girlfriends in front of you for cover, I’ll try to merely wound them and then maybe marry them later once they’ve recovered and make honest women out of them, since apparently they adore men who like to kill and then we’ll collect those gummint checks together the dead right wing filth have been receiving from their gummint pensions and SS disability and Medicaid medical payments and so on, in all of their armed righteousness.
Bring your kids, too. I’m sure they have excellent manners and shit where you tell them, before they start killing and spilling blood with their Second Amendment rights.
This is an incredibly stupid argument we’re having, but I can keep it up all night if you want.
Why wouldn’t a mass protest designed to shut down financial markets be of interest to the FBI.
I’m not sure you have a clear understanding of the goals of the Occupy movement.
FWIW, when I consider the relative treatment of left vs. right wing fringe groups, what I notice is that there are right wing fringe groups who openly advocate the overthrow of the federal government, who advocate use of force against people who work for the federal government, who stockpile weapons and do so openly and in fact boast of their arsenals, and who openly carry firearms to public political meetings and state plainly that if their point of view does not prevail, they are going to kill people.
And nothing whatsoever happens to them.
So I don’t really want to hear about a guy who took a shit on a car.
A number of things on the IRS emails:
1. Nowhere in the document describing the IRS’s email backup practices does it say anything the IRS does is “industry standard.” It says it is “not uncommon” for large public and private institutions to (a) limit the total amount of email employees can keep in their inboxes and (b) recycle backup tapes.
2. The emails in 1.(a) are the ones backed up on a daily basis, and then kept for six months (under the old policy) or indefinitely (under the new policy).
3. The backup for *other* emails not permanently deleted is the employee’s hard drive.
4. The “real” backup for “official records” of the IRS, including email, is that IRS documents must be “printed and placed in
the appropriate file”. So it’s not surprising that email backup is not that critical as anything that has to be saved is supposed to be kept in hard copy. Has Congress asked for these paper documents of Lerner’s (probably)?
Given 4, it’s not at all surprising that the IRS’s email retention policy is not up to the supposed industry standard/best practice, assuming there is such a thing (I know of one very large bank that, as a general matter, deletes all employee emails older than six months).
Yes, but you see, the right to shit on a car is not expressly enumerated in the Constitution (yet another oversight by our foreskinfathers), while planning and stating one’s intentions thereof regarding what you’re gonna do with your weapons if you don’t get your way, and in fact, all manner of threats and mayhem, and especially wholesale killing with any weapon of any size at Starbucks should someone make a false move in the direction of your illegally grazed cattle is permitted.
I’m going to start going to Tea Party meetings with a megaphone, and express myself loudly with the bell of the megaphone right next to folks’ ears.
I have, after all, the right of free speech under the 1st Amendment. So there should be no problem.
Then maybe I’ll go to Target, or Walmart, or my local Chilis, and do the same thing.
I’m gonna bring this one. 112 db, y’all, 120 db for the siren, 2000 yard range.
Intended for military and crowd control applications, which is what I want, because I want to have milspec speaking power.
I’m gonna walk up and down your street with that thing on 10, and share my thoughts with you all.
It’s my right. Don’t like it, talk to the founders.
Come to think of it, if the guy shitting on the police cruiser, or was it a civilian car, anyway, if he had been apprehended (was he?), would he have summoned a couple of hundred heavily armed militia douchebags and their cannon fodder chicks to his rescue and made the case that since they had been forced, I say, forced to pay taxes to purchase that police car, surely at least one fender should be available to the public for the occasional bowel movement, and if the police had said, yes, but we’re trying raise desert tortoises in the back seat of the cruiser and this pooping is just beyond the pale, if it wasn’t already illegal in and of itself, and then should the police, armed as they are, back down, like the BLM did, when the shitter threatened to kill all of the police if they stopped him from Nature’s call and freedom declared won and secured for generations of idiots with spastic colons.
And did Bundy know decades ago when he stopped, or never started, paying his grazing fees that Harry Reid’s son might want to use the land for a solar installation, which I’ve seen no proof of besides a guy at NewsMax and maybe Drudge (car fenders flinch every time that guy opens his mouth on the street) taking a giant dump on some newsprint and hawking it as hot off the presses.
This boils down to whether the shitters or the shooters are more of a threat to law and order and civil society, my pappy would have concluded.
What happens if you put a Shiite shitter and a Sunni shooter in a room together?
IIRC, there was a huge loss of email in the latter years of the Dubya administration.
Emails from Rove to Alberto Gonzales, for example. POOF!
It would have been highly suspicious, were it not for the extremely high ethical standards that Rove and all of the rest of the Dubya administration hewed to, every microsecond of their existence.
Russell, groups that actively promote the overthrow of the government aren’t “right wing” groups. They are criminals and terrorists. It is convenient to throw them in with real right wing people do no one has to compare apples to apples.
Russell, groups that actively promote the overthrow of the government aren’t “right wing” groups.
Sovereign citizens.
Self-appointed “militias”.
@sshats who open-carry semi-automatic rifles to public meetings about the ACA, while carrying signs talking about “watering the tree of liberty”.
These aren’t my people, Marty. They may not be yours, personally, either, but they by god are right-wingers.
“what I notice is that there are right wing fringe groups who openly advocate the overthrow of the federal government, who advocate use of force against people who work for the federal government, who stockpile weapons and do so openly and in fact boast of their arsenals, and who openly carry firearms to public political meetings and state plainly that if their point of view does not prevail, they are going to kill people.”
I have to admit, I haven’t encountered any of these groups. I was involved in the Michigan Militia back in the ’90’s, but they weren’t advocating overthrow of the government. Ran a lot of get out the vote drives, though.
I think there’s a bit of confusion going on here. There are a fair number of right wing groups out there that are armed, (This is a civil liberty, you understand.) and state that, in the event the government turns tyrannical, and starts attacking the people, they’re prepared to engage in armed self defense. I suppose you could characterize this as “their point of view not prevailing”, if you wanted. Isn’t it your point of view, too, that the government shouldn’t cancel elections, and set the US military to attacking the populace?
That qualification is rather important. I should hope that, if the federal government set up death camps, and started rounding up dissidents and shipping them off to be made into lampshades, we’d all, every one of us here, be willing to engage in such armed self defense. (Though I’ve got my suspicions about which side the Count would be on…)
But saying that you’d defend yourself if attacked is not the same thing as issuing a threat, not as a practical matter, and not as a legal matter. A lot of the talk on the left about right wing groups advocating violence against the government elides the contingent aspect of that violence.
Back in the 90’s, you have to remember, the federal government was actually burning people alive. Did it more than once, as a matter of fact; Not just Waco, but Move, too, and a lot of tax protesters you probably never heard of. Shooting mothers through the head while they stood in a door brandishing a baby. The militia movement was a reaction to this. For a while, it was quite believable that it was going to escalate to some kind of final solution.
Even today, though the government at least figured out that publicly slaughtering it’s own citizens was bad PR, the degree to which the government has militarized police and regulatory agencies is pretty scary. Barney Fife has a tank these days. AND has the NSA supplying him deniable information about who he needs to use it on.
Meanwhile, on the overthrowing the government in violent revolution front, do try to remember that the current President was pals with an actual terrorist. Just to keep things in context.
It is convenient to throw them in with real right wing people do no one has to compare apples to apples.
Earlier in this discussion
And this is a classic example, the Occupy movement was treated with kid gloves allowed to illegally live in public parks, protected from counter protests by mayors and their cronies
So drawing a direct line to Occupy to ‘the left’ is cool, but connecting Bundy, or the folks bringing in AR-15 into restaurants, etc is not cause it ain’t apples to apples. Curious, that.
My suggestion is that the Right is so full of fruits and nuts that just trying to pick out the apple bits to compare to each other is pretty futile.
I drew no line from Occupy to anywhere, Navarro drew that line.
I think it would be fair to say that both ends of the political spectrum have tails extending into utter insanity and malevolence. It would be silly to claim that the Aryan Nation aren’t, in some sense, “right” wing. It would be equally silly to deny that there are “left” wing college professors who used to get their jollies building bombs to use against the government. And now find building bomb throwers more efficient, since they’re being watched too closely to throw any bombs themselves.
Meanwhile, we have militarizing police, a surveillance system that any police state would envy, and I reflect on the fact that Germany went from peaceful democracy to the Final Solution in, what? Six years?
And I worry about that. Shouldn’t you?
Russell, see you don’t like that. More than anything. If they didn’t carry a gun they would just be exercising their free speech rights. That pretty much shows a lack of understanding of how guns are viewed in vast swaths of the country.
I drew no line from Occupy to anywhere, Navarro drew that line.
Here is what Navarro said
i’ll give you my thoughts on it, it’s because the left wing establishment, such as it is, is vaguely embarrassed by the leftist fringe while the right wing establishment regards its fringe as equal to its base.
You suggest that Occupy was supported by ‘mayors and their cronies’. The equivalency is made by you and your claim that their are these hidden supporters in the government. Don’t try to fob it off on navarro, you heard Occupy and drew the line. Of course, whatever you do, Brett does you one better.
I reflect on the fact that Germany went from peaceful democracy to the Final Solution in, what? Six years?
Jeez, from Glenn Beck’s blackboard to your comments. clown.
mr. bellmore, while i find many if not most of your opinions repugnant and offensive in the extreme you are generall more on point when you point to historical events. it is with the utmost disappointment that i note your description of the weimar republic as a “peaceful democracy.” even a cursory inspection of this timeline would show what a misstatement that designation is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Weimar_Republic
certsinly an in-depth reading of history from that time and place would banish any thought of that being a peaceful democracy.
I think I may have watched, in my entire lifetime, perhaps five minutes of Glenn Beck. Inadvertently. That came from my high school history text.
“That pretty much shows a lack of understanding of how guns are viewed in vast swaths of the country.”
Got that right. He sees a gun, he sees a threat. In most of the country, it’s understood that a gun isn’t a threat until it’s drawn and pointed. Holstered, it’s just a gun.
Russell, members of the right don’t open carry as a threat, they do it as desensitization therapy. You’ve been conditioned by mass media to have a phobic reaction to guns. They’re just trying to cure you of it.
Lj, If you read, take the time, the quote from my first comment it is a quote from navarro. Ok I’ll copy it
“when left wing groups get singled out for such treatment or worse, and here i’m looking at the record of the treatment of the occupy movement, there is barely a whisper.”
his words.
If anything that timeline underscores how short the period from free elections to concentration camps really was. So I’m not sure what your complaint is. Unless maybe you’re suggesting democracy in Germany had to be perfect, to be “peaceful”.
US democracy hasn’t been perfect in quite a while, either, and who knows what history will tell us about the relationship between NSA surveillance of the population and US politics, in retrospect. We may not have as free of elections today as we like to think.
Yes and he pointed out that Occupy was ‘a leftist fringe’. Your claim was that ‘mayors and their cronies’ somehow protect Occupy. bs, pure and simple.
Brett, if you are relying on your high school textbook from what, 40 years ago, no wonder you’ve got the views you have. Educate yourself.
I think there’s a bit of confusion going on here.
No doubt.
There are a fair number of right wing groups out there that are armed
Yes, that is quite right. And, it’s one of the significant differences between left and right wing groups.
in the event the government turns tyrannical, and starts attacking the people, they’re prepared to engage in armed self defense.
That seems reasonable.
To make it reasonable in context, you have to consider passing a law that establishes health care exchanges as “attacking the people”.
Or, passing a law limiting the size of firearm magazines, or requiring private arms sales to be subject to background checks, to be “attacking the people”.
Otherwise, not so much.
Back in the 90’s, you have to remember, the federal government was actually burning people alive.
Yes, and so were dudes like McVeigh.
McVeigh – not a lefty.
the degree to which the government has militarized police and regulatory agencies is pretty scary.
We find a point of agreement.
If they didn’t carry a gun they would just be exercising their free speech rights.
Yes, quite right. And a noteable point of difference between left and right wing activists is that left-wing activists find that exercising their free speech rights is sufficient, without the additional threat of violence.
That pretty much shows a lack of understanding of how guns are viewed in vast swaths of the country.
I’m fairly well acquainted with how guns are viewed in “vast swaths of the country”.
In vast swaths of the country, open-carrying a semi-automatic rifle to a political meeting, while carrying a sign stating that the “tree of liberty needs to be watered”, and talking about how you’re going to start shooting if things don’t go as you wish, is seen as either (a) a threat of violence, or (b) a gesture of flaming assholery.
Ditto, having groups of people open-carry semi-automatic rifles into a hamburger joint, or a retail store, to make some freaking point about your “2nd A rights”.
I’d like to see those jamokes try that at a bank. They won’t, and we all know why.
The only difference I see between some folks, and other folks, in this great nation of ours is whether threats of violence and gestures of flaming obnoxious assholery are met with condemnation, or cheers.
Pick your side.
more hogwash from mr. bellmore. i’m probably a little older than he is and i grew up in texas. i own a rifle, a shotgun, and a revolver. i have a concealed carry permit but i’ve never carried because i’ve never gone into any situation in which i felt so threatened as to need it. when i was in high school it was not unusual to see rifles and shotguns in racks in the trucks of students in the school parking lot. of course the school also had a smoking area for students as well. many times i would go with my father and grandfather and friends to hunt on our property. never in my childhood or teenage years would any of us ever considered taking our long guns into a diner or gas station. not because of a fear of shocking the locals but simply as a matter of courtesy and good sense we always left them locked up in the car or truck we were in. when i see pictures of people taking rifles and shotguns into coffee shops and restaurants my first thought is “what a bunch of disrespectful dumbasses.” the amazing thing to me is that a report of a couple of “new black panther” guys standing in front of a polling place represents an intolerable threat but people with long arms in public places is just “desensitization therapy.” i can’t wait to read what you write next because you’ve seriously begun to dive into self-parody.
And THAT is the purpose of a cover-up
LOL
lack of evidence is evidence!
Russell, you once again go to pick a side. There are millions of people who might carry a gun and would never carry a stupid sign. The left, you, MSNBC, pick who you want, use the fringe to create terror. To paint all people who carry as “those” people.
lj, you are being purposefully dense. He in no way suggested the occupy movement was a fringe group. You accused me of drawing the line between left wing and occupy. I did not.
The purpose of a coverup is to replace evidence of a crime, with evidence of a coverup, in order that people who want to defend the people engaging in the coverup can point to the absence of evidence of a crime, and thus blow off the coverup.
Congress, investigating a very real problem of IRS abuses, subpoena’d certain emails. The IRS waited many months, and then claimed that those exact emails, and no others, had been accidentally lost.
You will credit this claim, because you’re determined to defend the administration, and all you need to be able to defend it is an absence of absolutely iron clad proof of guilt.
Nobody who doesn’t start out meaning to defend the administration will believe in such conveniently specific computer accidents. Lerner’s hard drive ‘crashed’ in 2011. AFTER this became an issue. The backups of Lerner’s computer were destroyed AFTER the Congressional investigation into IRS targeting began.
In any normal legal proceeding, this would lead to a legal presumption the contents of her email were incriminating.
Navarro, I may be close to your age, grew up in rural Texas and have seen long guns in the local diner at breakfast at 4 in the morning often. While I agree that most folks in my day would have left then in the gun rack, the numbers of people that don’t do that today is exaggerated. I am sure you see very few even in Texas today. Concealed carry is different, in large part there has been a huge jump in concealed carry driven mostly by the various threats to outlaw guns.
The number of people we are discussing is really pretty small.
Marty,
Russell, groups that actively promote the overthrow of the government aren’t “right wing” groups. They are criminals and terrorists. It is convenient to throw them in with real right wing people do no one has to compare apples to apples.
Bundy and his allies enjoyed considerable support from presumably “legitimate” right-wingers. And on exactly which side of the right-left spectrum do you think their views resided? Criminals have political opinions too.
Now, maybe they were not, strictly speaking, advocating violent overthrow, but they sure were using threats of violence to keep the government from enforcing its laws.
Brett,
Any more about tortoises, or have you dropped that line of BS?
BS?
@marty– here’s the relevant portion of what i wrote, copy and pasted from my original comment near the top of the second page of comments–
” when left wing groups get singled out for such treatment or worse, and here i’m looking at the record of the treatment of the occupy movement, there is barely a whisper. why? i’ll give you my thoughts on it, it’s because the left wing establishment, such as it is, is vaguely embarrassed by the leftist fringe while the right wing establishment regards its fringe as equal to its base.”
i’m sorry if my prose was too subtle for you to parse correctly. i thought the implication that occupy represented a leftist fringe was relatively clear but, apparently, proved not to be clear enough. i regret the confusion and state clearly and unambiguously that the quoted sentence was intended to open up a comparison and contrast in the behavior of left- and right-wing elties to fringe groups on each end of the political spectrum. the abusive treatment and corrosive surveillance of the occupy movement passed with a barely a whisper of protest by “liberal” elites while the suggestion in a 2009 dhs report that right wing groups might be on the rise and require closer scrutiny resulted in prolonged statements of outrage from political leaders and opinion leaders on the right. i implied that occupy represented a left fringe and then went on to point out that the so-called liberal establishment was embarrassed by it and failed to defend it with any vigor while the conservative establishment lavishes attention and protection on the right-wing fringe.
i presume the above makes my intentions clear and if you bother to read through the relevant text again i hope you can now see it.
i’m probably a little older than he is and i grew up in texas. i own a rifle, a shotgun, and a revolver.
But you see, navarro, you grew up (as did I) in a time when the NRA was an organization of, primarily, people who hunted. And they actively supported gun control legislation.
Today, it is a whole different world out there. Due in significant part, IMHO, to decades of an NRA vigorously promoting paranoia in order to boost gun sales.
Granted, the police forces have gone overboard with SWAT teams and other quasi-military stuff. But that was, if memory serves, initially a reaction to people with heavier weapons than just pistols and hunting rifles. It is a situation that certainly ought to get reversed. But hardly one which requires everyone to possess a semi-automatic rifle in the delusional belief that they would be effective against a real military force in the US.
byomtov,
Bundy is a crook. That wasn’t clear at first. It took a little bit to get all the facts. The generalization of him to other ranchers isn’t fair, and he certainly doesn’t constitute a protest movement. As far as I can tell, once the facts were known he got little support from anyone. And, as I said before, the only concern I had was the “standoff” potential violence with numbers. Overall, it worked out with less violence than could have happened. I think the various Occupy standoffs did also, with little exception.
Navarro, I believe the comparison is incorrect. With lj I was accused of drawing the line between the left and occupy, I didn’t. Bundy and Occupy are not nearly the same thing. If you want to compare Iccupy and the Tea Party you get closer.
oh, of course. of course i will – unlike fair-minded and evidence-based truth-finders such as yourself. needing actual evidence is a symptom of my bias-blinded librulism; i just don’t have the finely honed truth sensors that a real ‘conservative’ has. i can’t just sense the presence of real truth hiding behind facts i don’t like.
“(Though I’ve got my suspicions about which side the Count would be on…)”
Well, I would demand separate but equal death camp accommodations away from the right-wing and Republican detainees and I’ll be damned if I’ll allow my testicles to be hooked up to a car battery so that I’ll spill the beans.
No, I’ll submit to solar or wind-powered testicle electrification and further, when the inevitable water boarding begins, I’m happy to choke down all of the Evian Water you can bring to the job, but don’t try the toilet bowl variety the Cheney right wing was fond of using on their victims.
Save it for the right-wing militia wing of the Death Camps, which if designed along the lines of Sarah Death Palin’s odd view of the world, will also include tax-deductible government healthcare for those who can’t afford their own, in order to heighten the terror and torture of the their End-days.
What could be worse? Not even Stalin or Hitler thought of those sorts of depredations.
Now, regarding the production of lampshades from either of our hides, I’m not picky (except for the flaying and the screaming) about the light source my skin will be shading, I mean, I won’t be whining, like Brett would, about why is my skin forced by the tyrannical government to shade the light of expensive phosphor-based light bulbs instead of the cheaper incandescent ones the flayed people prefer, and he knew, KNEW, that once the government took our incandescent bulbs, next up would be the government mandating by force the shading of those bulbs by the skin of the people.
Here’s the root of the dilemma: Right-wing paramilitary groups and individuals show up now as a matter of routine heavily armed to settle in their favor the normal arrangements of civil government.
Left wing groups and individuals, not without some isolated exceptions, yes, THESE days (yes, the Symbionese Liberation Army and a few other fringe groups resorted to armed domestic war 45 years ago and the gummint protected your hides from them at great cost; I took part in peaceful, unarmed protests around the same time, surrounded by the grim-faced 19-year old National Guard troops), such as Occupy do not show up with weaponry any more obnoxious than their hair-trigger sphincters.
Do you and Marty (sorry, is this a tag team event, I’m not sure, now Marty is claiming armed right wing groups offered rhetorical blowjobs by mostly western and southern politicians and candidates of the Republican Party over the past 35 years for their right to carry and brandish weaponry in the civil and now commercial spaces are NOT part of his movement, so it’s hard to tell with all of the backpedaling, but with Brett pedaling so hard forward into nonsense, what’s the use anyway) really believe that when you show up with weapons to protest that the rest of the citizenry and the authorities aren’t going to get a little jumpy at the sight of deadly weapons, just as your lot does when someone breaks into your home and tries to steal your stereo or walks nonchalantly down a public street brandishing Skittles?
We’re discussing upping library fines here, so why the need for the AR-15?
If you believe that, then here’s my proposal, along the lines of whichever of you two cried over the fact that counter-protestors were kept away from the Occupy sites (maybe it was a move to preserve domestic tranquility in heavily populated areas, considering that it wouldn’t be fair to pit AR-15s against projectile shitting):
First, we disarm the government of their domestic weaponry. They may show up at protests to doth protest that peace must be maintained but good luck with that.
This will prevent further Wacos, although had the government not assembled, even in their ham-handed manner, I’m not sure that today years later, we wouldn’t be going in there and removing lampshades made of the skin of Koreshian apostates, with perhaps purses crafted of teenaged female spleens for sale in the local flea markets.
Second, at every right wing protest, such as the Bundy theft of government services, equal numbers of heavily armed left-wing (hell, heavily armed moderates can come along too) will assemble as well to counter the original right wing protest and we’ll see how the negotiations over whatever lame issue is on the table transpire, with gummint agents standing a ways off with cans of string cheese and body bags as their sole equipage.
Same with vice versa — heavily armed right wing dumbasses may surround, say, abortion clinics, or nuclear plants, or Wall Street protests or other unarmed so-called leftist fetes without interference from disarmed government and we’ll see what happens as my heavily armed left wing militia shows up in turn to surround the surrounders.
Bring it the fuck on.
My guess, the world will be looking at something like the pictures dispatched the other day from Mosul and believe me the government won’t be able to exercise their intent to make lampshades of our skin, because if there is anything I hate in a designer lampshade, it is bullet holes.
Now, today I’ve decided not to pay my rent, because I find rent to be tyrannical and I’m going to encamp in my well-provisioned (I have one beef cow munching on the houseplants I stole from the lobby) apartment for the duration with the help of items procured at right-wing gun shows, and when the landlord gives up on various bureaucratic summons and threats and calls in the Sheriff and his armed tyrants, I’m going to put out the word here and elsewhere that freedom is about to go down and I’ll expect Brett to show up on my side.
DOBE, I’d stay out of this and I wouldn’t trouble you with such a request because I can tell your heart is just not in it. Besides, this stuff goes on your permanent record and could ruin your college prospects.
In closing, I was reading about a drone delivery service the other day that can be summoned via cellphone at outdoor events (like children’s concerts, picnics, armed standoffs, what have you) and the drone will find you, hover about 20 feet over your head and parachute a plastic cup of beer into your waiting hands.
I’ve ordered, as a peace offering, beers for all here on the house, so that buzzing sound is not sapient and the NSA (sorry, I couldn’t resist) checking up on you, it’s just beer from on high.
Apparently a dry cleaner in China is trying to deliver pressed pants via drone and over here again burritos are arriving via drone service, though I fear, competition being what it is, that if I ordered burritos from three different vendors simultaneously that their respective drones would engage in dogfights over my head and the government would have to step in and regulate and probably make lampshades of all of us, as an unintended consequence.
Due in significant part, IMHO, to decades of an NRA vigorously promoting paranoia in order to boost gun sales.
that’s the same paranoia that “conservative” talk media promotes, too. keeping the rabble roused is good business across the board.
@marty
please note that i was not the one who pointed to bundy but have insisted on the term “right-wing fringe.”
also note that as recently as your 10:11 am comment you said “He in no way suggested the occupy movement was a fringe group.” regardless of whether you feel any of my comparisons are valid can we at least agree now that i did imply that occupy represented a fringe group on the left?
As a further measure to limit government and place force where it belongs — with the turtles — I propose that desert tortoises have Gatling Guns affixed to their shells for self-defense.
Here’s the root of the dilemma: Right-wing paramilitary groups and individuals show up now as a matter of routine heavily armed to settle in their favor the normal arrangements of civil government.
As the Count makes one of his occasional forays into seriousness, he brings up one on the “features” of America today. You can argue, perhaps correctly, that this sort of thing is unusual. But you should face the fact that, for lots of the country, that is the face of the 2nd Amendment enthusiasts. Including for a lot of people who are otherwise quite conservative.
Nobody who knows much about the US military thinks that these folks could stand against them in battle. Or even mount an efective guerrilla campaign. (And any of themm who think that they could do so are delusional.) But they can terrorize (and I use the term deliberately) local governments and citizens. And appear to delight in doing so.
One might wonder, when will we see a Clinton-type Sister Souljah gesture towards them from national, let alone local, Republican politicians? They denounce those who stage massacres in schools — but only after the fact. And object to any and all suggestions that there is a larger problem, due to a gun culture that goes far beyond hunting rifles or even handguns for personal self defense.
navarro, in lj fashion he got me off point talking about fringe or not fringe. You are correct that I missed that part of the paragraph and only later disagreed with it.
@marty
thank you, sir. i’m willing to put up with a considerable amount of invective as part of the price of open and honest discussion. misquotation, not so much.
marty, I hope it’s not being ‘purposefully dense’ to suggest that it’s nice if you read the whole comment before making your leap and not blame it on someone else getting you off point.
“Bundy is a crook. That wasn’t clear at first.”
OF COURSE he’s a “crook”. He’s up against the people writing the laws! How could he be other than a “crook”? It’s practically tautological!
You’ve got to be able to evaluate the merits of an argument apart from what the law happens to be, or you’re just automatically going to find the government in the right every single time.
In this case, you might ask if there’s a good reason why the federal government should own roughly 85% of the land in Nevada in the first place, which is why neither Bundy nor anybody else can raise cattle without using federal land. You might ask if the federal government made any assurances to the citizens of Nevada concerning the terms on which it would handle that land, which it might today be violating.
You might ask a lot of things. But if the only thing you’re going to ask is, “Is he a ‘crook’?”, the government is going to win every case.
Because the government decides who is a crook.
Yes lj I agree you should read the words I wrote. Its much easier to have a discussion if you disagree with what i said.
Brett, he hadn’t paid a nominal usage fee for decades, no other rancher is more than two months behind, every excuse he uses us a lie, he bought his ranch in 1948. The law was well established by then and he paid fees for decades. He is a crook. Any other diversion is a pure red herring.
” no other rancher is more than two months behind”
No other rancher in that county is still in business. He’s the last remaining cattle rancher in that county, because the feds drove them all out of business. He would have gone out of business, too, if he’d paid the escalating fees.
His argument is that the fee was supposed to be for managing the land, and that the only management it’s paying for today are the efforts to put him out of business. And why should he pay the feds for that?
As I say, the whole thing would never have happened if the feds didn’t own about 85% of Nevada, and what good excuse was there ever for that?
For Marty
Brett, you are arguing no point. The makeup of federal lands in the western states and the associated land management fees are a great topic, having no bearing on whether Bundy is a crook
Russell, you once again go to pick a side. There are millions of people who might carry a gun and would never carry a stupid sign. The left, you, MSNBC, pick who you want, use the fringe to create terror. To paint all people who carry as “those” people.
I don’t have any problem, whatsoever, with the millions of people who own and carry firearms, but who do not open-carry them into public political discussions while carrying signs calling for the tree of liberty to be watered and threatening to start shooting if they don’t get their way.
I have a problem with the dozens or hundreds of people who do.
My point overall, as can be seen by my comments here, is that the dozens or hundreds of people who do are free to do so with impunity.
It’s impossible to say if the same would be true of folks on the left behaving in the same way, because folks on the left don’t behave the same way.
He is a crook.
Thank you.
Bugs and Daffy at the Bundy Ranch most recently:
http://freakoutnation.com/2014/05/02/bundy-militia-member-to-oath-keepers-draw-mother-fcker-im-gonna-kill-ya/
No problem with pronouns but one guy apologized for cussing at the guy he was going to plug.
That must have been Elmer Fudd.
“The government decides who is a crook.”
I’m going to put that in the next note I give to a bank teller.
But Brett, they do own it. They always have, ever since that treaty with Mexico.
As I understand conservative and/or libertarian principles property ownership is sacrosanct (or very nearly so). And the idea of taking property that belongs to one entity and giving (selling, if you wish) to another is an anathema. I also think it obvious the only civilized way to alter Federal ownership of lands in the State of Nevada would be via Congressional act.
Am I to infer your comment(s) that it is OK to question the distribution of wealth in this country and propose legislative remedies to bring percentages of ownership more in line with one’s liking? Just because?
Also, too: the differences between Weimar-era Germany and the United States, circa 2014, I would think should be fairly apparent. Certainly the fact that our nation isn’t dealing with the continuing societal & financial repercussions of having our asses kicked in a World War is a rather significant difference to elide in such a comparison.
Marty,
As far as I can tell, once the facts were known he got little support from anyone.
I don’t think that ‘s correct. The withdrawal of support, IIRC, came after he made a number of rather nasty racist comments, and had little to do with the whole fee business. Of course, it may be that those comments simply provided an easy out for those who realized that their support for him was foolish and wanted to back away.
But that’s not the same thing.
In this case, you might ask if there’s a good reason why the federal government should own roughly 85% of the land in Nevada in the first place,
If you think the government should sell the land (at market value), then make that case, Brett. But don’t argue that there is osmething wrong with it owning it in the first place.
Governments at all levels own land. That’s all.
Brett,
Even your link does not support your version of the tortoise BS.
“The makeup of federal lands in the western states and the associated land management fees are a great topic, having no bearing on whether Bundy is a crook.”
TO the extent that’s true, that Bundy is a crook has no bearing on whether people should support him.
The idea that the law has a moral basis, and that it’s always wrong to violate it died long ago, the government itself killed it off. You tell me somebody is a crook, all you’re telling me is that they and the government have a disagreement, not which of them is in the right.
The idea that the law has a moral basis, and that it’s always wrong to violate it died long ago, the government itself killed it off.
so silly.
humans never follow 100% of the law 100% of the time, regardless if it’s statute or scripture. rules are always provisional, and when it’s time to choose whether to obey a rule or not, morality finds itself taking the backseat to all kinds of things. and “the government” has zero to do with it.
The idea that the law has a moral basis, and that it’s always wrong to violate it died long ago, the government itself killed it off. You tell me somebody is a crook, all you’re telling me is that they and the government have a disagreement, not which of them is in the right.
Bundy as Gandhi and King rolled into one. Is that it?
Do we all just disregard everything we think is unfair, or do we apply the Bellmore morality test, or what? What if we call and you’re not available?
And why is a simple law requiring ranchers to pay for grazing rights on federal land immoral, anyway? And if you don’t like it, might there be better ways – more moral ways – to make the argument than brandishing weapons?
You are getting very close to the level of your arguments about Obama’s birth.
You tell me somebody is a crook, all you’re telling me is that they and the government have a disagreement, not which of them is in the right.
So what you are saying is that you are so disillusioned that you simply assume that the law is as likely to be totally illegitimate as not. Because otherwise, the assumption is that the law is valid, until and unless someone demonstrates that it is unconstitutional or otherwise invalid. In short, an individual is justified in breaking any law, if it happens be inconvenient for him to follow it. Because, hey, it’s just a difference of (equally valid) opinion.
That being the case, Brett, I have to wonder why you remain in a country which, apparently, has no legitimacy in your eyes. Or is it simply a matter of there being no governments, anywhere in the world, which you consider legitimate?
That being the case, Brett, I have to wonder why you remain in a country which, apparently, has no legitimacy in your eyes.
He’ll be here until the shit hits the fan.
If and when that happens, he’ll be on a plane.
“In short, an individual is justified in breaking any law, if it happens be inconvenient for him to follow it.”
That would appear to be the administration’s point of view, the difference between us being that *I* haven’t taken any oath to see to it that the law is upheld.
What I’m saying is that the federal government gave Nevada a raw deal, made it a Swiss cheese state where you couldn’t do anything substantial without using federal land, because most of the land IS federal.
Every cattle rancher in Clark county except Bundy has been driven out of business by the federal government relentlessly raising those fees.
In a normal state that wouldn’t have happened, because that land wouldn’t have been federal land. Bundy would have been just another cattle rancher.
Most of the land in a lot of states started out as Federal land. There were various Homestead Acts to allow people to acquire title, but it started out as Federal land.
The difference in Nevada was, among other things, that most of the land was unfit for human habitation. (People who live east of the Mississippi frequently have trouble visualizing just how barren the western deserts reall are.) Or for agriculture of any kind. So there was no way to homestead the land and for it to thereby pass into private hands. It’s not like it was once privately owned and the Federal government took it. It never was private.
Every cattle rancher in Clark county except Bundy has been driven out of business by the federal government relentlessly raising those fees.
How do those fees compare with private fees? How does the implied value of the land comapre with market values?
Look, Bundy is as big a mooch as any welfare cheat, but you’re on his side because he’s white, lives in the west, probably carries a gun, and generally seems like a guy you think you would like. But he still wants to live on the dole – much more so than any urbanite. A taker, IOW.
So I have a proposition. Very generous. Let’s drop the fees and other government charges on all those noble westerners. The only condidtion is that they stop striking poses as independent self-reliant “real Americans,” and, more important, quit supporting politicians who play to those fantasies.
I’m tired of this crap. Westerners lives on the federal teat, and run around acting like they are the only tough, independent, people in the country.
To hell with them.
What I’m saying is that the federal government gave Nevada a raw deal
Apparently the folks in Nevada were cool with it at the time.
In a normal state that wouldn’t have happened
Nevada’s not a normal state.
” So there was no way to homestead the land and for it to thereby pass into private hands. ”
Now, that’s not the least bit true, or else there wouldn’t have been any cattle ranches in Nevada. There’s no way to homestead most of the land in Nevada, if you’re limited to the parcel sizes the federal government was willing to hand out.
“Look, Bundy is as big a mooch as any welfare cheat,”
Welfare cheats raise cattle for a living, or farm, and the only support they get is not being charged for the use of the land? Go figure, I thought they were getting checks.
Here’s what I think happened. When the federal government first got the Louisiana purchase, the prevailing ideology was that the federal government should only own land for specific purposes, like military bases. By the time Nevada’s turn to apply for statehood rolled around, an ideology had shown up at the federal level, that supported the federal government just holding onto land.
At first the excuse was that they were holding it to hand out to future generations, (Hence the homesteading act.) but eventually they didn’t need any excuse.
Here’s what I think happened.
Why speculate? Go look it up.
But looking it up would reveal that, for example, Nevada became a state a couple of years before Nebraska (hardly a place with vast tracks of Federal land). Indeed, the state with the next largest amount of Federal land is Alaska. Which, be it noted, has the some of the same kinds of habitability issues as Nevada.
Kind of messes with the narrative.
Welfare cheats raise cattle for a living, or farm, and the only support they get is not being charged for the use of the land? Go figure, I thought they were getting checks.
Bundy owes, I think, over a million dollars. That’s money in his pocket from the government that he’s not entitled to. It’s more than the typical welfare cheat gets. Yes. He’s a mooch.
He runs a business that presumably can’t succeed without heavy subsidy from the government. Rugged, self-reliant, anti-government type, is he? As far as I can tell he, and you, think he should just be given access to the land for free. I bet he opposes government handouts, just like you.
First, the vast majority of western ranchers pay their fees and make a living by working hard. This concept that, in general, their usage fees or use of the land constitutes a handout is crap. And many of them were, some are, rugged individualists. My uncle has broken just about every bone in his body riding herd and breaking horses. Hardscrabble is a could term for how they make a living.
There is NO subsidy from the government. Free range became paid range. Good enough.
I’m open to the feds ceding the land they hold in Nevada back to the state.
In return, we the people of these fine United States will keep all the water in Lake Mead.
Maybe somebody in AZ can find a use for it.
I’m sure the 2.8 million people other than Cliven Bundy who live in Nevada will be happy to sign up for that deal.
“He runs a business that presumably can’t succeed without heavy subsidy from the government.”
Conveniently, the higher the federal government jacks up the fee, the “heavier” the “subsidy”, and the better your argument that he’s on welfare. If they set the fee at $1 trillion an acre, he’d be subsidized to the tune of our entire federal budget.
An alternative way of looking at it is that the ‘subsidy’ is only on the scale the fee was before they started jacking it up to drive out the cattle ranchers, and he only owes a pitance.
No, Brett. Bundy’s “subsidy” is the money he owes in fees, but doesn’t pay. Unlike other, competing, ranchers in the west who do pay their fees.
I’m curious about the militia goons hanging at the Bundy Ranch.
What is their source of income?
Are they on unpaid leave from their day jobs?
Are they and their families receiving income support from private political entities?
When their wives and girlfriends aren’t serving as camouflage for these fat f*cks, do they stay at home and work and raise the kids while the these fat f*cks sit at Bundy’s Ranch and threaten each other with deadly force. Do the womenfolk send them an allowance each month for ammo and TV dinners?
How does desert tortoise flesh taste?
Are they retired, and if so, from whence (that kind of phraseology will get a guy shot in Nevada) do they receive their retirement income?
Are they on either military or Social Security disability? If so, should they be doing all of the strenuous work of your everyday combat revolutionary? Aren’t they afraid their backs will go out and when SS asks how did that happen, they’ll have to lie to the taxpayer to continue on disability?
Have they used any government-supplied income to purchase weapons and ammo to use against the government that supplies the income?
What are their medical insurance arrangements? Especially in the event of gunshot wounds?
If Obama touched their Medicare or, God forbid, their Medicaid, what would they do to him?
If one (or more) of them are on some sort of Government Medicare or other program, when their fellows take them to a medical facility with massive gunshot wounds, will they blanch when their buddies are asked to look in their wallets for their Medicare cards, or does irony take a backseat amidst massive blood loss?
If they are former military and use VA services, will they get timely care in the event of massive gunshot wounds, or will they have to wait for appointments?
If they are former military, when they receive these massive gunshot wounds will they cut in line at the VA emergency facilities ahead of military veterans who have received their wounds serving abroad in real combat zones?
Have any of them lost their homes in the mortgage debacle and is it because they lost their jobs and/or received favorable but dicey loan terms like the rest of the 49% of the parasites as defined by their fellow patriots on the Right?
Do they have discussions about what behavior is permitted and liable to get a guy arrested? For example, do the ringleaders caution their fellow fat f*cks that threatening to murder each other and the law-abiding citizenry going about their business in Nevada is within the bounds of the law and normal human behavior, but whatever you do, don’t take a sh*t on the fender of my 4 by 4, because we might have to call the police or kill you on the spot?
When they suck each others’ dicks, not that there is anything wrong with that among lonesome cowpoke revolutionaries fiddling away their time in mancamps, do they wash their surly mouths out with water provided by the Colorado River Compact and stored, transported, and conveyed by Federal dams, irrigation pumping stations, and irrigation canals?
An alternative way of looking at it is that the ‘subsidy’ is only on the scale the fee was before they started jacking it up to drive out the cattle ranchers, and he only owes a pitance.
Another way to look at it is you have no argument, so you’re just making stuff up as you go along.
Free range became paid range. Good enough.
Works for me.
Why are all individualists considered rugged?
Rupaul is every bit the individualist Bundy is, isn’t she, despite the relative lack of callouses?
I’ve met plenty of rugged collectivists in my day.
Come to think of it, Bundy may be one of those too.
Grazing fees:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS21232.pdf
As I understand the chart therein, ranchers pay $1.35 per cow per per month to graze on Federal BLM land.
The price has fluctuated over time, but is now roughly the same as it was 20-25 years ago, which contra Brett, hasn’t even begun to keep up with inflation.
More:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/04/22/cliven-bundy-owes-american-taxpayers-for-his-cattle-grazing
A buck thirty-five an acre on federal land in Nevada.
Private grazing fees per animal per month are are in the $15 to $18 range.
Read that sentence again.
Read it a third time.
Bundy didn’t even apply for a permit to graze his 900 cattle on 600,000 acres over the past 20 years.
Roughly 18,000 permits are issued for Federal lands in the West.
Bundy owes more in grazing fees than all other rugged individualist ranchers combined in the entire country who pay their paltry bills.
Therefore, “Conveniently, the higher the federal government jacks up the fee, the “heavier” the “subsidy’ “” holds exactly the amount of water it would take to let Bundy’s cattle die of thirst in about a week — NONE!
It may serve, however, as a source of cow manure.
I bet Rupaul has callouses from the shoes….
before they started jacking it up to drive out the cattle ranchers
everything’s a conspiracy in conspiratarian-land.
More on grazing fees — public versus private:
http://ag.arizona.edu/arec/pubs/rmg/7%20policyissues/65%20publicgrazingreform94.pdf
The EPA is reportedly working on the desert tortoise genotype to come up with a breed that feeds on beef cattle.
They call it the dessert tortoise.
More on grazing fees:
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/57952777-90/grazing-lands-blm-livestock.html.csp
What are Bundy and his armed acolytes going to do when the Nevada Bureau of Tourism starts charging them “Gazing Fees” for even looking at the land surrounding the ranch.
More on “Cantor’s Out”, from TBogg via Balloon Juice:
“… Let us add to the cornucopia of reasons why Eric Cantor will soon be out of a civil service job and forced to make millions as a lobbyist in an effort to keep himself knee-deep in ribeyes.
Eric Cantor is a dick.
One need only spend a few minutes watching Cantor on TV to realize that the only way he could be more dickish is if he was driving a black BMW while wearing Google Glasses. He’s smarmy in a passive aggressive way and one can imagine that same genteel southern accent may have once been used used by a landowner as he explained to a sharecropper that he’s going to need a bigger cut to cover the cost of a broken shovel…
Virginians in Cantor’s district no doubt chose one from column A and one from column B from the I Hate Eric Cantor menu above before ordering him out of the House. But years from now, when discussing his political demise, the details will seem a little fuzzy, the specific reasons lost in the mists of time. Eventually someone will say, “Why exactly did we vote him out?” the answer will be, “Well, he was kind of a dick.”
And everyone will agree…”
Maybe if Bundy hadn’t raised his beef cattle for free on Federal Land, Cantor would have been priced out of rib-eye and spent the money somewhere with a bigger return in his campaign.
The Republican worm eats his own tail.
Some information about Nevada and why the feds own so much of it.
The Nevada Summary Policy Plan for Public Lands has a very good capsule history.
These guys, likewise.
The indispensable Federation of American Scientists provide this CSR synopsis of historical federal land ownership policy.
The bottom line is that Nevada ceded ownership of all unclaimed land to the feds at statehood. By far most of the state’s land area was unclaimed at the time, because nobody wanted to live there. There wasn’t any water.
Why did they give it all to the feds? Why didn’t they keep the unclaimed land for themselves? I couldn’t tell you. The total population of the territory at the time of statehood was middling five figures, maybe they just weren’t all that interested in the outback acreage.
Apparently, at the time it seemed like a fair deal.
The feds did offer Nevada the standard two sections per township via the land grant program, later on. Nevada didn’t want the land offered, because most of it was not habitable. They traded the 3.9 million land grant acres for about 2 million acres of land that was actually near water.
They (the state) then sold that off to private ownership.
So, basically, the feds granted all of the land that anyone wanted to live on back to the state, and it’s now mostly privately held.
There is a federal program called the desert land entry program, whereby you can have a half-section – 320 acres – of desert land in any state if you will irrigate it and farm it.
No doubt the reason folks haven’t done this in the millions of acres of federal land in NV is due to the fact that there *just isn’t any water there*.
It’s a desert. It’s the most arid state in the US.
From the Nevada state land policy doc cited above, I’ll end with this:
It’s federal land because the state ceded all unclaimed land to the feds when they became a state. Most of the land in NV was unclaimed because nobody wanted to live there. Nobody wanted to live there because there isn’t any water.
I can’t tell you why NV agreed to cede all unclaimed land to the feds upon statehood. Perhaps they could have driven a harder bargain. Then again, maybe they didn’t really want it, and were perfectly happy to give it to feds in exchange for clear claim to all of the places where there was actually water.
I’ve finished eating my turkey sandwich now, and it’s time to get back to work.
Enjoy the reading.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
No. Bullshit is. Works well on gardens, too.
–TP
the ‘subsidy’ is only on the scale the fee was before they started jacking it up to drive out the cattle ranchers, and he only owes a pitance.
If you look at some of the links others have provided you will note that the fees haven’t been “jacked up” at all. You will also note a huge discrepancy between private fees and government fees, half of which, by the way, go to improve rangeland.
The subsidy, if you want to be all precise and economic, is the difference between what a private owner would charge and what the government charges.
Also, the current conflict with Bundy is because BLM leased the grazing rights to Clark County, and Clark County is not sub-leasing to Bundy.
Bundy is stealing from his own County, not just the Feds.
Oh, and that “the only rancher left in County” argument? So what? Is there some something in the Constitution that guarantees at least one rancher per county in the US? If so, NYC is in serious violation.
If your livelihood depends on using resources owned by the government, you can call yourself “Libertarian”, but everyone else gets to call you “a LIAR”.
Russell –
You know darn well you-know-who isn’t go to read all that stuff. You’ve already admitted it contravenes the narrative. Expect instead another tangential feint.
I’m still waiting for an answer why if we can (should) consider legislative redress to the 85% Federal ownership question, then asking similar questions about other wealth ownership patterns shouldn’t also be up for consideration, i.e., to rephrase a quote with placeholders, ‘you might ask if there’s a good reason why [Entity W] should own [X percent] of [Y wealth] in [Z sphere] in the first place…’
In related news, birds continue to chirp.
Another chirping bird lays an egg:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/joseph-houseman-police-standoff
In order to make the tyrannical gummint constabulary’s (they should be disarmed as well) jobs easier, I’m advocating absolutely open carry laws for both weapons and alcohol be passed in all 50 states so that sad, armed drunks with grievances can exercise their full freedoms simultaneously instead of serially.
We’ll call it the No Sh*thead Left Behind law.
If anyone still cares about the IRS’s lost emails, here is a WaPo story that, at the end, has the email exchange between Lerner and the IRS IT department about her hard drive.
Here’s how I think it all went down:
When the whole “IRS picking on the tea party” thing emerged in 2013, Lerner went back in time to 2011 and poured a Pepsi on her hard drive.
Someone should go ahead and confront her with this. She’ll claim that the time travel theory is nonsense, and anyway technology like that is way beyond the IRS budget.
And that, right there, will be all the proof you need.
Q.E.D.
By the time Nevada’s turn to apply for statehood rolled around, an ideology had shown up at the federal level, that supported the federal government just holding onto land.
Well, not. It was a well established past practice that new territory purchased or stolen by the federal government were public lands, and their disposal was subject to public (i.e., federal) policy, not state policy or private whim.
It’s in the Constitution.
Setting aside tracts of land for schools was one such policy. Giving away millions of acres to crooks like the Vanderbilts, Leelands, Goulds, and Huntingtons so they could pretend to build railroads and sell watered stock, was another. Homesteading was another such public policy.
The Nevada state convention was merely acceding to an already well established policy that federal land belonged to and was to be disposed of by the Congress.
That nobody wanted it right away was not the fault of Congress. It was an accident of geography. To dispose of it in “economically feasible” parcels would have required a system of enourmous latifundia style land grants to privileged insiders that would have essentially created a landed aristocracy.
There is something in the American blood that is highly ill-disposed to such models of wealth distribution, especially during the early years of the republic (alas, not so much now, it would seem).
Perhaps, in your ideological fever dreams, you have forgotten this.
Marty,
First, the vast majority of western ranchers pay their fees and make a living by working hard. This concept that, in general, their usage fees or use of the land constitutes a handout is crap. And many of them were, some are, rugged individualists. My uncle has broken just about every bone in his body riding herd and breaking horses. Hardscrabble is a could term for how they make a living.
There is NO subsidy from the government. Free range became paid range. Good enough.
To the extent that government fees are less than private fees for comparable land there most definitely is a subsidy.
Further, while I don’t doubt that ranchers work hard, so do a lot of other people, many of whom also do demanding physical labor and have it just as tough as ranchers.
“When the whole “IRS picking on the tea party” thing emerged in 2013,”
Except that it emerged in 2010. All that happened last year was that Lerner finally fessed up.
You really think conservatives didn’t notice they were under attack until Lois admitted it?
Except that it emerged in 2010.
Then bob’s your uncle.
Obviously, she poured a Pepsi on her hard drive.
Ranchers! Dont’ get me started…..
WE subsidized their electricity (REA)
WE subsidized the hard wired phone lines (ATT, regulated utility)
WE subsidize their wireless internets.
WE subsidized their water (BLM/BPA, etc.)
WE subsidized the highways enabling them to get the goods to market. Maybe we should reinstitute cattle drives! (Interstate Highway System)
WE subsidize their public schools (Dept. of Ed)
WE subsidize the price of their products (AAA, etc.)
We gave, or give them the tools to build wealth. Fine by me. I try to avoid calling them moochers. They are productive. They work hard.
What I detest is their calling “others” (we all know who THEY are) “moochers” because we refuse to give THOSE people a leg up or the tools to build wealth, preferring instead to give them enough scraps to barely get by so we can admonish them with high dungeon morality lectures about “the work ethic”.
To the extent that government fees are less than private fees for comparable land there most definitely is a subsidy.
Further, while I don’t doubt that ranchers work hard, so do a lot of other people, many of whom also do demanding physical labor and have it just as tough as ranchers.
In order, the extent to which public fees are less than private fees is no such thing as a subsidy. It is the federal government getting something instead of nothing for the land. This is a real stretch for a complaint.
Second, I have no doubt that lots of people work hard, live hard lives, have great physical hardships and never did I even imply otherwise. I was defending ranchers, not demeaning anyone.
oh…and of course we rent them OUR public lands at below cost and/or market because we like to delude ourselves that such subsidies to often sizable corporations encourage the treasured, but long gone, “family farm”.
Except that it emerged in 2010.
Re-emerged, like slime mold. Remember 1998?
The GOP game plan is simple enough: if the IRS tries to enforce the tax code on rich people or teabaggers, accuse the IRS of tyranny and partisanship. Same old, same old.
–TP
It is the federal government getting something instead of nothing for the land.
No. From “rancher” Bundy, the federal government is in fact getting nothing. That’s the whole freaking point.
I was defending ranchers, not demeaning anyone.
As long as your “ranchers” don’t include Uncle Cliven, that’s fine.
–TP
That Pepsi Lerner spilled on the hard drive, it was delivered by crony capitalists:
http://nlpc.org/stories/2011/12/07/frito-laypepsico-cashes-electric-truck-subsidies
If you want less Pepsi spilled on IRA hard drives, tax Pepsi, spilling, and Coke for good measure, as Reagan pointed out.
IRS employees respond to all of the bullsh*t right wing incentives and disincentives, too.
Darrell Issa agrees with Brett’s meddlesome priest theory of the IRS.
Yes, but in Brett’s defense, we don’t reason as he does, and would never conclude that Brett, despite Issa’s agreement with HIM in this instance, engaged in car theft and other crimes before being elected by vermin dumbass Republicans to our government by the sh*teheads on behalf of the sh*teheads.
the extent to which public fees are less than private fees is no such thing as a subsidy.
?
That is practically the very definition of a subsidy. That’s like saying Section (8)a housing is not a subsidy because they get “something” rather than “nothing” for the buildings used to warehouse the poor.
Also, costs to the feds to manage the land are not insubstantial.
the extent to which public fees are less than private fees is no such thing as a subsidy.
It is exactly a subsidy.
If the government owns an apartment, say, that would command a $1500/month market rent, and rents it to you for $500 instead you are getting a $1000/month subsidy.
Alternatively, if the government rents my business office space for less than the going rate, my profits are higher, by the amount of that difference, courtesy of the government, than they would be if I had to pay ordinary market rates.
That’s a subsidy.
To argue otherwise is ridiculous.
Marty wrote:
“First, the vast majority of western ranchers pay their fees and make a living by working hard. This concept that, in general, their usage fees or use of the land constitutes a handout is crap. And many of them were, some are, rugged individualists. My uncle has broken just about every bone in his body riding herd and breaking horses. Hardscrabble is a could term for how they make a living.
There is NO subsidy from the government. Free range became paid range. Good enough.”
For the past 35 years of living in the arid West and working for some of that time with a federal water agency and having face time with rural constituents and water users, I have agreed with every word of that sentiment.
The word subsidy to refer to these arrangements has really never occurred to me.
So do all of the rugged individualist ranchers and water users, who have had all of the usual grievances and complaints about governing arrangements when it comes to allocating a scarce resource, water or arable land, and have used all of the usual and available civil avenues to settle those grievances, that one would expect in a civil STATE, AND who hate Cliven Bundy for his antics.
Not any more.
I don’t agree any longer.
Since the time of the Republican Right from the Gingrich revolution until the sniveling know-nothings now infesting our civil arrangements at all levels of government, and their armed para- military wings, and their support media have changed the terms of the debate, despite flat grazing fees for years (in contradiction of free market scripture from formerly reasonable conservative stink tanks) and the need to balance American consumer demand for safe havens for endangered species, recreation and the lot, by introducing the rhetoric of revolution and armed murderous conflict with weapons of war into the formerly civil arrangement.
This goes for issues across the board, domestic and in the realm of foreign policy.
Comparing it to the dyspeptic Left of the late Sixties and early Seventies, I’d say we’re just about at the juncture where free love, uninhibited hitchhiking, and flowers stuck into the barrel of National Guard M-16s gave way to the Sharon Tate murders, Altamont, hippies being scalped on the highways, upscale brownstone residences in Manhatten being blown to bits by coed bomb-makers, and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army and the subsequent mayhem.
Just as then, the right wing movement in turn has reached the end game in which the public and the public authorities are going to demand the gloves come off and the perpetrators be confronted and killed in the streets and in their beds.
We’re close. The usual suspects should take the short time remaining to hide, like various bombthrowers from times past.
Society is not going to put up with this f*cking horsesh*t much longer, no matter the quality of the ideals about justice.
What did you expect, you fools?
“Then bob’s your uncle.
Obviously, she poured a Pepsi on her hard drive.”
Not incidentally, that actually would be the legal presumption in a court case. “Hard drive crash” happens after she knows the emails will be sought, backups destroyed after the the investigation begins. A clear case of “spoilation of evidence.”:
“Under existing precedent, where a party who created electronic documents either delays or fails to produce relevant materials to the opposing party, a district judge has substantial discretion in crafting a sanction which takes into consideration the nature of the violation. Amongst the range of sanctions that are possible are those known as spoliation sanctions. In such a case the party that failed to preserve evidence relevant to the case will face a trial in which the jury will be instructed that it may infer that the unproduced evidence was damaging to that party’s case and supported the claims of the adverse party.”
“Re-emerged, like slime mold. Remember 1998?”
Heck, I remember the Clinton administration, and a laundry list of conservative groups that got audited by the IRS for the duration of the administration. Not just once, continually. And an IRS admission that it was deliberate, back then, too.
So, I’m not terribly surprised that the Obama administration would revive the use of the IRS to attack administration foes. I’m disappointed that you guys can’t take this kind of abuse seriously, sure, but I’m not surprised by that, either.
There was outrage over Nixon threatening IRS audits of his enemies. Democratic Presidents actually DOING IT is no big deal.
I put it down to consequentialist theories of ethics: You can always excuse Democratic crimes on the basis that Democrats are better than Republicans, so crimes are justified to keep them in power. Naturally, the worse you think Republicans are, the bigger the crimes you can justify, so you’ve settled on regarding Republicans as just this side of demonic, and can justify anything.
There was outrage over Nixon threatening IRS audits of his enemies. Democratic Presidents actually DOING IT is no big deal.
so, do you now have proof of that Obama was personally down at the IRS, coordinating audits, (including those of leftie groups, which i know you hate to acknowledge) ?
I have to say, the lost Lerner emails must be like manna from heaven for Issa. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect gift to him to keep this going through the midterms.
lost Lerner emails must be like manna from heaven for Issa.
So *Issa* poured pepsi on Lerner’s hard drive?
Brett,
Your standards for believing things seem to be awfully contingent on whether they match up with your opinions. True for most people of course, but you take it to new heights.
byomtov,
Brett’s standards make perfect sense. All you have to do is accept that the left hates America and is out to destroy it. “The left” being anybody even a little left of center. When the extreme left does something bad, it tars everybody left of center. (When the extreme right does something bad, it is the work of a few nut cases who are unrepresentative of most conservatives.)
Once you have a grip on that, everything falls neatly into place.
So *Issa* poured pepsi on Lerner’s hard drive?
Impossible. The guy is chronically dyspepsic. It must have been coke.
It must have been coke.
A true american beverage, certainly.
So *Issa* poured pepsi on Lerner’s hard drive?
Clarence Thomas. But he was only trying to get rid of a pubic hair.
A clear case of “spoilation of evidence.”
Reading through the full text of your link, it’s not clear to me if spoilation of evidence applies unless the evidence in question was destroyed *after* it’s production was requested.
Does that apply in this case?
In any event, IMO it’s quite possible that Lerner broke the law. If nothing else, her actions are consistent with someone who believes themselves to be in danger of criminal prosecution.
It’s possible that in 2011 she knew that she might be headed for legal trouble, and it’s possible that she responded by deliberately trashing her hard drive.
It’s possible that the materials that were lost include evidence of a so-far-unproven conspiracy to target conservative action groups.
It’s possible that that conspiracy, should it exist, extends to the White House.
It’s possible that Obama and Lerner were carrying on a secret torrid affair, and Obama communicated his desire for her to lean on Tea Party groups as part of their pillow talk.
All of these things are possible.
What they are not – none of them – is in evidence.
Is it suspicious that materials of interest have conveniently gone missing?
Yes.
Does that amount to evidence of a broader conspiracy?
No.
Also, not for nothing, but your reflexive suspicion of the motives of other people, and your confidence in your ability to divine what they are thinking on any given topic, are borderline paranoid delusional.
If your thought process in real life resembles what you share here, you might think about getting yourself a reality check of some kind.
I suppose this qualifies as an open thread.
Rick Perry “is more Jewish” than people think.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rick-perry-im-more-jewish
Despite that cockamamie claim by the lowest common denominator of the far left side of the Bell Curve, the real lead was buried.
Perry is thinking about moving to California after his term as Texas Governor ends.
Could this be the beginning of a major reversal in migration trends in the U.S., led by the guy who traipses, I say, veritably jaywalks his way across the country trying to convince folks to move to Texas, especially FROM California?
Just my way of expressing that I miss McTX’s and Charles W’s usual contributions on this hilarious thread.
By the way, if Issa is spilling anything anywhere, it’s his usual Draino/Koolaid cocktail spit-take done for comedic affect all over the body politic.
What they are not – none of them – is in evidence.
what we have is clearly enough to convict. we can’t wait for a smoking gun – it could turn out to be a mushroom cloud. then you’ll all be sorry.
Not incidentally, that actually would be the legal presumption in a court case.
Also, continuing to look at the page you link to, the section you quote is a description of how lost evidence would be handled *prior to the rules changes* that are the subject of the article.
Since the rules changes that are discussed there were implemented, benefit of the doubt may be, and apparently usually is, extended when the materials in question are electronic documents, and their destruction happened either as part of normal IT operations, or through events that were not the fault of whoever is the subject of the investigation.
The presumption of malfeasance on Lerner’s part, under the new rules, would appear to depend on:
1. Did she have anything to do with the damage to the hard drive
2. Did she know that the materials on the drive were relevant to any investigation going on at the time the drive was lost
I don’t know the answers to these questions. Do you?
Whether the loss of emails through destruction of backup tapes is “suspicious” is completely a function of what the IT policy was at the time. Which, as above, we do not appear to know.
Long story short, the thrust of the piece you link to is not arguing in the direction you would like it to. Unless, of course, you can show us the Pepsi.
But press on buddy, surely there’s an acorn in there somewhere.
Oh, cool. The IRS’s dog just ate six more days worth of homework.
This isn’t an excuse, it’s an upraised finger.
And, when I say that, I don’t mean that the emails aren’t really gone. I mean that the only way this many emails could have gone, is if the IRS’s data retention policies were actually data destruction policies, designed to make sure that incriminating documents would evaporate quickly.
You could nuke my workplace, and aside from the personel and equipment, we’d only lose a few hours of data. You could ask for my emails from 6 years ago, and they’d be produced within hours.
That’s the way people who don’t figure they might need to hide something run backup systems. Backup tapes are so cheap that it costs more to scrub them for reuse, in terms of labor, than to buy new ones, and keep the old in the archives. They, net, spent money in order to NOT have these backups.
I’ll be interested to see if they were destroying their backups every six months all long, or began doing so after having previously having had a sane backup policy.
Lerner’s hard drive “crashed” over a week after the Ways and Means committee chairman wrote a letter to the IRS inquiring about the targeting. The investigation was well underway when the backups were scrubbed. Yes, this is spoilation, in all it’s glory. They knew the data would be requested when they deleted it.
“You could nuke my workplace …
We’d need some targeting coordinates, your work hours, etc. ;))
“conservative” is now a synonym for “armchair IT expert”.
Just an aside: One of the Benghazi suspects was captured and will be tried in a criminal court:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/06/17/230590/us-captures-benghazi-suspect.html
A good development, in my mind.
“conservative” is now a synonym for “armchair IT expert”.
I suspect Brett has never worked for – or perhaps even closely with – a federal agency.
Especially a federal agency outside of the DoD.
I also suspect that, in the event of a catastrophic loss, the folks Brett works for would be unlikely to produce his emails from 6 years ago in a matter of hours. If that’s true, he works in an atypical shop.
That’s not a comment on the capabilities of the technology involved, it’s a comment on the priority most places put on establishing and maintaining bullet-proof backup and recovery procedures.
Things that don’t generate revenue generally get to play red-headed stepchild. In most organizations.
Maybe Brett’s shop is unusually enlightened.
In any case, I’m sure Issa’s on the job, and if there’s a nut in there, he’ll root it out.
Stay tuned Brett and let us know what turns up.
One of the Benghazi suspects was captured and will be tried in a criminal court
Right on.
“it’s just a distraction“, says the party of grownups.
“I suspect Brett has never worked for – or perhaps even closely with – a federal agency.”
No, though I *did* handle backups for some years at my prior employer, before we had an IT department. The idea of destroying backups after six months to save on tapes is insane. “Thining” them, sure: You’d back up daily to minimize the lose if an accident happened, and then archive weekly if nothing out of the ordinary took place.
But deleting archived back ups? We’d never have done that.
“I also suspect that, in the event of a catastrophic loss, the folks Brett works for would be unlikely to produce his emails from 6 years ago in a matter of hours.”
I think they’d have higher priorities, but they’d be technically capable of it. All my work is saved to a server, which is mirrored on a regular basis to a matching facility on a different continent. Ditto for my email. I locally archive emails for quick reference, but all emails coming through the system get permanently archived. (Including spam; They know backups, but HQ doesn’t seem to believe in Baysian filters.)
Now, the guy at the desk next to me IS our “IT department” at this plant, and has worked for the government before. When he heard the IRS story, he thought it was hilarious. Thought they weren’t even trying to be plausible.
Brett, I think your experience with saving archived backups may have been a result of you working for a small company, where saving all those tapes is feasible.
I however work in IT for a very very large corporation, where we handle many very very large files for our customers. As in–we get many files, many of which are in the multiple gigabyte range, every single day.
First saving every single archived back up is prohibitive from just the consideration of space. Where the heck would we put 365 tapes/disks for hundreds of servers annually?
Second, many of our customers have regulatory requirements where a) they must keep everything for a specific period of time, in case they are audited but b) if they are audited, they are required to produce everything they have stored. So, if the retention period is 3 years, but we have 10 years worth of their files archived, they are required to produce all 10 years worth. As you can imagine, they feel strongly about us dumping their content at 3 years, which includes all archived backups.
Third, a number of the files that we receive contain PCI restricted data. Backups of those servers don’t necessarily get a full-sweep backup; no folders which contain PCI data get backed up at all on some servers, while other servers have their backups wiped after a short period (a week or two).
Also, our corporate email policy was until recently that no email could be kept for more than 6 months. You weren’t allowed to archive it to answer disk–nothing.
Don’t know what the Federal Government’s policies are regarding backups. I just wanted to point out a real-life example that doesn’t match your experience. Backups can be very complicated.
The idea of destroying backups after six months to save on tapes is insane.
actually, it’s common. tapes cost money, they have a shelf life, and they have a non-zero volume. and if you’re backing-up to prevent catastrophic loss and not for long-term data retention purposes, six months is a pretty long window.
most backup applications have an options to delete the oldest backups if the backup media fills up, or to delete old backups automatically if they’re older than a fixed time. it’s simply common. i do it.
But deleting archived back ups? We’d never have done that.
Good for you.
The idea of destroying backups after six months to save on tapes is insane.
The list of things that are both “insane” and “true” is a very, very, very, very long one.
No doubt you’ve noticed this before.
Long story short, I’m not really questioning the plain facts of the situation, nor am I ruling out malfeasance on the part of Lerner and/or others.
What I’m not doing is ruling it *in*, based on the facts you’ve presented so far.
People do stupid things. There’s a reason that, per the article you cited above, greater leniency is granted when failure to produce evidence involves electronic documents.
Net/net, incompetence and/or FUBAR logistics are a completely sufficient explanation for the missing emails, and for Lerner’s crashed drive.
There’s no particular need to conclude that foul play was involved, from the information that we actually have in hand.
You can choose to do so if it presses your scandal buttons in a pleasurable way, but it’s pretty far from a given.
I think they’d have higher priorities, but they’d be technically capable of it
Ergo, your emails would not be in hand after six hours.
You are correct, the impediment in most places is not technical feasibility, but the priority placed on non-revenue-generating operations.
In the federal context, for “non-revenue-generating” substitute “non-mission-critical”.
I however work in IT for a very very large corporation, where we handle many very very large files for our customers. As in–we get many files, many of which are in the multiple gigabyte range, every single day.
FWIW, I have some hands-on experience in this domain as well.
The volume of backed-up data for not-particularly-large companies, for spans of time measured in months rather than years, can run to terabytes.
The volume of electronic documents that pass through IRS servers is, I imagine, toward the “very very large” end of the scale.
Folks think the feds operate on lavish, wasteful budgets that would never pass muster in the private sector.
My impression, and experience, is that this is in general not so. Waste, in the form of organizational inefficiencies, is IMO not uncommon. Oodles of cash for the latest and greatest technology, not so much.
I don’t know what the IRS’s IT budget and staffing are, but I would be absolutely unsurprised to discover that yes, in fact, they backup to tape, and they recycle the tapes every six months.
If for no other reason than that was common practice, say, 15 years ago.
The House’s budget will fund the IRS for FY2015 at levels below FY2008. This despite that IRS has since been charged with implementing the ACA and FATCA.
But, gosh, how can they possibly not have state of the art/industry standard uber IT backups?!!?
Here’s a politico article:
But transparency advocates and experts in retrieving email from antiquated government computer systems say they’re not at all surprised. The reason: The IRS’s record-keeping procedures — like erasing backup tapes every six months — have been known for years as critical weaknesses in government record collection. These observers say all of the warning signs were there for years before large troves of messages from as many as six IRS employees caught up in the tea party scandal were destroyed through a combination of equipment failures and inadequate archiving procedures.
Years.
“Brett, I think your experience with saving archived backups may have been a result of you working for a small company, where saving all those tapes is feasible.”
Another sign that I worked for a small company, was that we had bathrooms. That’s feasible for a small company, but for a large one? The volume of sewage would be terrifying, you might be talking about hundreds of urinals, maybe thousands of them for a really big company.
That’s why all the big companies recommend their employees wear adult diapers, instead of installing bathrooms.
Seriously? That’s about the reasoning behind your “Big companies can’t archive their backups!” statement. Big companies are “big”. Everything about them is big. Doesn’t matter, because it’s in “proportion”, the backup demand doesn’t scale faster than company size.
It’s like the IRS’s excuse that it would have cost $10 million a year to save those backups instead of wiping them. Intended to sound infeasible to anybody who doesn’t realize what a tiny fraction of their total IT budget $10 million was.
Now, I’m willing, tentatively, to believe they did things that way, until we have actual records from before the IRS targeting scandal showing what their practices were before they needed an excuse. Sometimes inertial drives large organizations to do stupid things.
But here’s the thing: The IRS, a number of federal agencies, also had management using private email and even email under fake names to evade FOIA requests and Congressional inquiries. That’s an entirely separate scandal, without a great deal of partisan salience.
So, we know that the same agencies which use antiquated backups for critical records, which allows embarrassing or incriminating records to be successfully memory holed, had management who were thinking in terms of evading review.
So, why should I believe it’s incompetence?
Further, we’ve got at least SIX computers now, with email specific to this highly charged inquiry, which suffered “crashes” in a narrow time window right after a Congressional inquiry into the matter in 2011. What percentage of IRS computers crash in any given week?
I’m betting it’s not high enough to make that coincidence plausible.
We know Lois Lerner broke the law in an attack on Tea Party organizations. She sent a sh*t load of, by law restricted taxpayer info, to the FBI, to try to get them to initiate prosecutions.
Somebody who’s breaking the law has their hard drive “crash” right after they find out Congress is investigating, and you’re bound and determined to find it’s a coincidence?
No, sorry, coincidence doesn’t cut it. The emails were deliberately destroyed. And the IRS knew those emails would be wanted, by the time they scrubbed the backups.
Spoilation of evidence, a cover-up.
conclusion first, facts second.
oh, hey, btw. nobody is shocked that the latest killer of government agents is a right-wing conspiracy theorist and Bundy sympathizer, right?
We know Lois Lerner broke the law in an attack on Tea Party organizations. She sent a sh*t load of, by law restricted taxpayer info, to the FBI, to try to get them to initiate prosecutions.
We don’t knowny such thing.
A quick inquiry: what exactly is it you are alleging Ms. Lerner to have attempted to get the FBI to prosecute Tea Party groups for ?
We do know such a thing.
Brett already has his conclusions. pointing out that the facts don’t support those conclusions will have no effect.
Actually, it is pretty clear that
a) both sides in this debate about the IRS have their conclusions, and are pointing out evidence that supports those conclusions. And sneering at evidence which goes against them.
b) the evidence is mixed. It looks like the IRS has some seriously poor IT practices. And it also looks like those were not the only reasons that some information that Congress requested is “unavailable.”
So which evidence you choose to high-light, and which to skip over, looks to be a matter of what, overall, you think was going on. I’d like to think that, eventually, we will get a reasonably full determination of the facts. At which point, it may be possible to decide objectively what happened and why. (I’m not particularly optimistic, given the way things are going in Washington these days. But I can hope.) But we certainly aren’t there yet.
It appears that the goalposts have moved from “Obama’s 18 minutes” to “Lerner illegally disclosed taxpayer information”.
IMO the latter is credible, given the information that we actually have.
The former is, to say the least, at this point not in evidence.
Actually, it is pretty clear that
a) both sides in this debate about the IRS have their conclusions,
my conclusion is that we don’t know anything. ok, we know some things. but we don’t know the things that “conservatives” are asserting. and since “conservatives” are driving this, and lying about it, in public, loudly, those are the only conclusions that really matter.
it’s every bit as conclusion-driven and hyper-partisan as what they’re asserting the IRS was doing. except, of course, what the IRS did had no effect at all on anything – the only groups denied tax-exemption were three left-leaning state-level branches of a much larger group. but this inane conservative scalp-quest has cost the government millions and millions of dollars, just so Darryl Issa and his league of amateur wanna-bes can have something to moan about.
It appears that the goalposts have moved from “Obama’s 18 minutes” to “Lerner illegally disclosed taxpayer information”.
ah, but read Brett’s full claim:
little tiny fact failing to support huge conclusions.
and essentially everything on the web about this seems to be a hyperbolic paraphrase of Darryl Issa’s hyperbolic comments. there is very little actual information about what happened and why.
why did Lerner send this info to the FBI? (wingnut mind-reading aside) did the FBI request it? was it a routine thing?
why did Lerner send this info to the FBI? (wingnut mind-reading aside) did the FBI request it? was it a routine thing?
Very good questions. I’m sure that, at some point, somebody will answer them.
In the meantime, we will be treated to Issa’s hysterical shrieking, because Brett will make sure to pipe it all direct to us here at ObWi.
As something of an aside, it strikes me that working for the federal government must be a freaking horror show. In addition to the usual aggravations of working in a large bureaucratic organization, you have the added attraction of creeps like Issa breathing down your neck.
“what the IRS did had no effect at all on anything – the only groups denied tax-exemption were three left-leaning state-level branches of a much larger group.”
I’m beginning to think the real coverup is the Obama Administration’s prosecution of left-wing groups while NOT pursuing the much larger questionable practices of right-wing groups stepping over the ever-moving line of tax-deductible status in campaign bribery … um, finance.
I believe, though I have little proof except the nose knows, that Brett is actually a double agent working with high Obama Administration officials to spread disinformation throughout the intertubes regarding the coverup of the IRS targeting of left-leaning groups, while letting right wing tax avoiders go free of investigation and then covering-up that policy.
I’m concerned too about the Obama Administration looking the other way when right-wing terrorists threaten murder and government overthrow in places like Nevada.
What are they covering up? Their secret complicity with dark, violent forces on the Right to procure deadly weaponry and kill liberals and their children far and wide in schoolrooms across the country while lulling us with diversions like nutritious school lunches and preventing Brett and the rest of the conservative movement from sucking coal-powered pollution into their lungs, which will only prolong the conservative influence in this once great country.
As a result, today I am a Republican (we’ll see how it goes, and if I don’t feel the need to commit an act of terrorism against my self-disgusted subhuman self, I’ll sign up for tomorrow too) and have adjusted my various stances on issues across the board.
For example, I now think the BENGHAZI!!, conservative Republican Party embassy attacker just captured in Libya should be released immediately and permitted to continue his positive influence on the Republican Party by opening fully tax-deductible campaign finance organizations without harassment from a way-overfunded rogue IRS agency.
Further, I want Comrade Mullah Lerner arrested on the spot and placed under military arrest and sent to GITMO for processing for the crime of injuring the feelings of Tea Party activists and their Obama Administration enablers who after all, want nothing more than the abolishing of the IRS and all taxation in the United States.
The world must be set right as Republicans see it.
I believe the attack on the BENGHAZI!! Embassy and the Sunni uprising in Iraq were planned and set in motion by the Republican Party to distract from the good news of the steady climb in Obamacare enrollment numbers and the progress the Obama Administration was making in preventing the need to bomb Iran.
It’s like the Republican Party spilled Pepsi on the entire Mideast to coverup its criminal actions there from the Iraq Invasion on and to deflect attention away from the their murderous efforts to keep ten million Americans from having access to healthcare.
More probably a Mountain Dew.
wj: I’d like to think that, eventually, we will get a reasonably full determination of the facts. At which point, it may be possible to decide objectively what happened and why.
Actually what will happen is what often happens with sensational accusations of all kinds: the scandalmongers will have moved on to the next Thing That Will Destroy Civilization long before the facts are revealed to be so unsensational that there’s no point in publicizing them.
The real scandal is the IRS ruling, during the Eisenhower administration, that “exclusively” means “primarily”. Nobody — no “originalist” stickler for the plain meaning of statute, at any rate — is asking pointed questions about that, or demanding to know why carbon copies of IRS memos from the 1950s might have been lost.
The current brouhaha is about Teahadis not wanting to pay taxes. No amount of record-keeping at the IRS can change that.
–TP
It is revealed that Mr Abu Khattala, prisoner of war, and hit man for terrorist forces in the Mideast and on behalf the Republican Party’s effort to instigate continued terrorist mayhem against the U.S. Government and its murdered Embassy employees (a sister effort of their domestic terror against U.S. interests on American soil), may in fact of been motivated and set in action by ace-of-spades death card, Manchurian candidate-type encoding in videos provided by a U.S. based terrorist organization called, coincidentally, the Republican Party.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/06/so-benghazi-attacks-were-motivated-video-after-all
The resulting coverup and distraction from these terrorist actions by Republican operatives by the highest levels of the U.S. Government (House and Senate Committees), codenamed BENGHAZI!! RATFUCK and or IRS RATFUCK!! was set in place to mask and distract from a much larger and dangerous domestic plan to foment armed, bloody revolution and the murder of government employees and innocent bystanders, now ongoing but largely ignored by the national media and the public.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/hillary-clinton-makes-peace-with-her-rnc-squirrel-stalker/
Ah ha!
Armed Republican and NRA domestic terrorist and noted guitar shredder Ted Nugent latest plans to assassinate Hillary Clinton (and Barack Obama), a move which he has outlined graphically in threatening rants while brandishing the murder weapons in public venues before sexually engorged teenaged females who are then led backstage post-rant to be initiated into the murder plots, are taking shape.
Here’s what I think is happening in the video evidence presented above and what is about to go down.
Nugent, inveterate squirrel hunter and consumer extraordinaire of squirrel flesh (he’s known as the Galloping Gourmet of Michigan, not only among the squirrel community of Michigan, but also by the teenaged female fans who visit his home in the woods to feast on his squirrel sausage and squirrel sweetbreads and giblets) is being signaled by the RNC and its Gigantic Campaign Squirrel to lure Hillary Clinton, and probably Barack Obama too, into gunshot range with a large hunk of squirrel meat and when his automatic gunfire rings out, killing both Hillary and the ersatz squirrel (dirty, dirty animals, ratf*ckers with tails is what they are), and then Nugent can plead that he was merely filming a squirrel-hunting segment for his numerous TV enterprises (The Rocky and Bullshittal Show) and how was he supposed to know Hillary Clinton would be so unwise and silly to actually try to engage in close-in conversation with the very object of squirrel-hunting season, at the very moment Nugent had a bead on him.
The RNC and the IRA will rush to his defense and then claim hysterically that here go the liberals again trying to take our hunting weapons away from us – yet another attempt by Obama to completely disarm us so that squirrels are fee to overrun the country, just because a liberal and ex-government official happened to take a little friendly fire.
The Logical End of Things.
Why are the Republican and Libertarian movements, and their Ace-of-Spade Manchurian Candidate actuators in the Republican Media and in their para-military sister organizations like the NRA not being rounded up, tried, prosecuted, and shipped to Death Camps for ordering and supplying the deadly weapons for the murder of government employees and children in public schools?
Why are government agencies not being taken to task on the coverup of their inaction against domestic terror ordered from the highest levels of the Republican Political establishment who throw sand in our faces by faking sideshow internecine warfare between the old fascist wing of the Party and the new Tea Party fascist wing.
Why is Brett Bellmore distracting us from these more important and deadly issues?
The Logical End of Things … link:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Inevitable_Turns_Out_To_Be_Inevitable
It’d’ve been ~0.5% of the Information Services budget, based on 2013 numbers. Which is really a lot if you consider it’s for one program, and that we’re talking about a gov’t agency that’s supposed to be finding ways to cut costs (because the bathtub people are always pushing for all gov’t agencies to be more “fiscally responsible” all the time).
Because the fallacy of composition? Because your “reason” on offer here to deem the IRS to have been malicious instead of incompetent is that in a large organization there were some people acting shady in a manner contrary to institutional standards, therefore all people in the same professional tier are suspect?
The fallacy fallacy.
Argument A supports Proposition X.
A is fallacious, but that doesn’t disprove X.
Argument B supports Proposition X.
B is fallacious, but that doesn’t disprove X.
Argument C supports Proposition X.
C is fallacious, but that doesn’t disprove X.
Rinse, repeat, until you get to:
Argument X supports Proposition X.
X is fallacious, but that doesn’t disprove X.
QED
–TP
Doesn’t really apply here, Brett. You’re claiming you’ll tentatively believe it was incompetence instead of malice, except for this one thing, where the one thing is fallacious reasoning. The single omitted paragraph that went between the chunks I quoted above:
So to use the language of your link, you’re claiming you’d tentatively accept Proposition ~P (where P is the IRS acted maliciously), except for Argument A (your little compositional argument regarding how some managers at the IRS used unofficial email accounts for official business). Per you, the only reason you’re rejecting ~P is because of Argument A. This is not at all what your “fallacy fallacy” applies to. That would apply if you said P because A, B, C, D, E, and I pointed out that A was fallacious, and therefore declared ~P. That’s not happening here. You’re saying (though kinda unsurprisingly, it looks to have been a bit of a rhetorical flourish rather than a sincere utterance) that P because A, period. In this context it is so not fallacious of me to reject your little diversion. If it was actually true that the only reason you were assuming malice instead of incompetence was your compositional fallacy (which, ya know, is what you actually said above), you have no way to cling to your assertion of malice. If it was merely a rhetorical ploy, then obviously you have other reasons to cling to malice.
if it’s a federal agency, it’s oppressive and dedicated to the curtailment of our liberties.
especially if the “we” whose liberties are being curtailed are conservatives, because liberals are the natural clients and enablers of the federal leviathan, so the feds don’t like to step on their toes too hard or too often.
but conservatives are fair game.
all of the above can be assumed and requires no evidence, it’s simply and blatantly self-evident.
because hobnails.
No, I’m tentatively willing to believe they actually did use the described data destruction procedure, baring evidence to the contrary, rather than fabricating it after the fact. I suspect that they kept it, despite the fact that it was grossly inadequate because it allowed for evidence to be destroyed. Since that they were trying to evade oversight is already established. But that’s speculation.
However, malice is already established. They have already admitted to subjecting Tea Party organizations to especially harsh treatment based on partisan criteria, Lerner has already taken the 5th. So I’m not willing to credit six independent hard drives crashed in a short period after they were on notice that the jig was up, by accident.
The dog does not eat your homework six days running by accident. I have no reason to be that credulous, this isn’t MY party’s scandal.
I believe we need to have the Attorney General of the United States of Brett Nation look into these matters and submit a rifle report in triplicate before House Republican Committees.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/blm-shooting-suspect-statutory-attorney-general
They have already admitted to subjecting Tea Party organizations to especially harsh treatment based on partisan criteria
“especially harsh treatment” = easier treatment than the liberal groups got.
right-leaning groups denied tax-exempt status : zero
left-leaning groups denied tax-exempt status : three
and as a percentage, three is infinitely more than zero.
At the risk of pointing back to the original subject of this thread, has anyone else noticed the interesting battle shaping up in the House? It appears that the current Majority Whip will move up to Majority Leader (replacing Cantor). But who will fill the opening that creates for Majority Whip?
It looks like a serious establishment vs insurgents face-off is in the offing. But will things get settled behind the scenes, or in an actual vote (or series of votes, since there appear to be at least 3 candidates) for the position?
The especially harsh treatment referred to is that the members and financiers of the armed Tea Party Nation are taxed at all, period.
No taxation, with or without representation, at any level of government, is the goal.
Being refused tax exempt status for their political fundraising tentacle by the IRS, the very agency the Tea Party collects money from their financiers to abolish, along with all other taxation, is a piddling thing, hardly the main event in the reign of harshness brought down on the heads of the Tea Party as a result of being born in America and participating in the bounty our form of representative government has bestowed on their burdened, put-upon shoulders.
And whatever you do, don’t touch their Medicare.
However, malice is already established.
Really? How?
Lerner has already taken the 5th.
A novel concept. Is that in the Constitution?
Lerner has already taken the 5th.
She has. That can be undone by granting her immunity in exchange for her testimony. Issa et. al. won’t do it because, I would say, they know her testimony will be consistent with the 41 other IRS employees interviewed by Congress: that the White House had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.
Plus she’s taken the 5th, IIRC, not because of any of her actions with respect to the scrutiny of the underlying TEA party applications (which, according to the TIGTA report, she only found out about in in 2011 – AFTER her hard drive had crashed), but for her statements to Congress that appear, at least on their face, to be inconsistent.
Indeed, I don’t think there has been any evidence that anything criminal has been done with respect to the underlying issue. Unwise and politically charged, perhaps.
“The dog does not eat your homework six days running by accident.”
Depends. What breed are we talking about?
Has anyone spilled a Pepsi and/0r cheeseburger leavings on the homework, which might entice even your most self-respecting breed of dog to consume homework?
Sometimes if the blood of patriots and tyrants are spilled on your homework by the overzealous, even stray dogs in packs might show up night after night for dinner.
I attended a public school, and, for a time, had as much contempt for all things in the public sphere as the Tea Party does today, and, as a result, my dog ate my homework roughly every day for two years running.
The problem was I didn’t have a dog, so in my mother’s notes in response to the teachers’ (unionized, they were, and felt they had the right to demand we hand homework in, and on time) inquiries, that dog became the dog that did not eat the homework in the night and I resorted to submitting book reports on “Atlas Shrugged”, which no self respecting dog with any taste in his mouth would lay a tooth on.
Then I got sent to a military academy, where the dogs were in “canine units” and were trained to NOT eat anyone’s homework no matter the reason.
In fact, they would keep an eye on US to make sure WE didn’t eat our homework.
But if you sneaked some cayenne pepper into their dog chow, they would sneeze and whine for a good long time but also conveniently forget to bark when we were returning from AWOL in town to visit the townie girls.
We’d help them with their homework and they’d tell their mothers they were out walking the dog.
also, because she’s trying to avoid even more death threats from “conservatives” .
In case anyone who read cleek’s link regarding the daily routine of death threats directed from the usual suspects toward anyone who works for government or expresses any views whatsoever that contradict conservative dogma, prejudice, and nonsense, I believe I may have spotted evidence in the article’s quoting of one of the threats written by the anonymous (a common surname among Americans who oddly enough also tout their higher order individuality despite being too yella to name the bag of rotting bones in which it resides) letter-writer that
contradicts the presumption that conservatives are the only folks who have it in for the IRS ….
… this being the use of the word “karma” in the quoted death threat to describe what Lerner has coming to her, Now, your typical conservative Republican Tea Party type in America would be unlikely to use words derived from the “soft”, hippie-like religions of the Indian sub-continent and the Oriental sensibility, but I suspect would use terms more in line with Occidental religious doctrine, such as that of the Republican Party’s al Qaeda and other radical, conservative affiliates operating throughout the Mideast.
The words “fatwa” or “Jihad”, as misused in similar ways by al Qaeda and conservative, war-loving Americans when they want to f*ck you up, would be a more likely usage, not “Karma”, with its suggestion (here I resort to conservative stereotyping to drive home a point) of incense-laden candles burned by politically correct lesbian feminists sitting with their legs tucked under them as they relax on divans and discuss what may come back around and get them because they once forgot to recycle.
No, I conclude, using all of the professional forensic evidence-gathering methods perfected by Inspector Bellmore, that this letter-writer is definitely from one of the liberal groups targeted by the IRS to see if the former were in compliance with the law, evidence which also contradicts previous findings here at “Seat Of The Pants Private Detective Service” that only conservative groups, if any, were targeted unfairly by the IRS.
So, Count:
That’s the “karma” guy. (Or gal. Gals can be yahoos too.) I notice Mr (or Ms) Angel does not explicitly profess his (or her) own Christianity, but merely hopes that Mr. Lerner believes in Hell. A pious, upright, dare I say “Christian” hope, you will agree. This, coupled with Mr (or Ms) of-Death’s generous offer to do God’s work for Him, must surely raise a doubt that we are dealing here with some New-Age hippie slacker.
–TP
Well, I knew I’d get into trouble using Brett’s evidentiary methodology in trying to present a balanced, nuanced case that it isn’t only the hard-line conservatives and their insane, murderous base who threatens death to all who disagree with them.
I suppose, Tony, you are correct. It is pretty much unanimously those on the Right Wing, stoked by the Republican Party and their conservative media via white trash gang hand signals and codewords who are trying to kill the rest of us if we even try to uphold whatever laws they don’t like.
New Age hippie slackers: the bane of what could be a militant political Left, too lazy to lock and too stoned to load.
That’s what really sets apart the Right, never too loaded to load. Darn hippies can’t hold their intoxicants.
On the other hand, Marty, the Right’s odd habit of placing their weapon so that it points at their gun has its downside, too.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/accidental-shooting-penis-georgia
The power of spam:
The White House did find three emails where Lerner and White House officials were copied on two third-party tax-assistance inquiries and one spam email.
Proof!
Good catch Ugh! At LAST a compelling motivation for Obama to order drone strikes on email spammers.
If he doesn’t, I might just side with Brett in calling for impeachment.
wj:
But will things get settled behind the scenes, or in an actual vote (or series of votes, since there appear to be at least 3 candidates) for the position?
I believe there is a vote on Thursday with a possible runoff:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/06/18/230762/race-for-house-republican-whip.html
To get a feel for how the average “tea party” member might feel about the candidates, I went to redstate (not my typical hangout).
They don’t really like the frontrunner, Scalise:
http://www.redstate.com/2014/06/12/rep-marlin-stutzman-running-house-majority-whip/
http://www.redstate.com/2012/12/05/steve-scalise-fails-the-first-test-for-conservatives/
Although my understanding is Scalise is pretty conservative:
Scalise has a lifetime Club for Growth rating of 90%, and a Heritage Action rating of 81% for this Congress
But just from what I’ve read (politico, CSM, etc) it seems like the TP candidate is really unlikely. But they said the same thing about Brat.
“She has. That can be undone by granting her immunity in exchange for her testimony. Issa et. al. won’t do it because, I would say, they know her testimony will be consistent with the 41 other IRS employees interviewed by Congress: that the White House had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.”
You’re right that she’s said inconsistent things, and in doing this she’s set up a trap for herself, the kind of trap a grant of immunity can’t get you out of, because a grant of immunity today doesn’t get you off from committing perjury tomorrow.
She says it was all her idea, Republicans go after her for perjury in saying that. She says it was on Obama’s orders, Democrats go after her on perjury in saying that.. (And the Democrats have the better chance of actually initiating a prosecution on this theory, because Holder isn’t being paid to laugh at their referrals.)
And it doesn’t matter if she got acquitted in the end, because the cost of defending IS the punishment in the US ‘justice’ system.
If only there were some independent physical evidence available, some documentary record, to confirm which version of events was correct. Oh, wait, the dog ate it. SIX TIMES.
Yeah, she’s in a trap, immunity can’t get her out of it, and I have no sympathy, because she built it herself.
And it doesn’t matter if she got acquitted in the end, because the cost of defending IS the punishment in the US ‘justice’ system.
This, I agree with.
Brett – I am keenly interested in how these six other employees lost emails. The initial reports all stated they were involved in the controversy, but later reports have now dropped that note.
Is it just that they deleted the emails as they managed their inbox capacity limits? Did their hard drives crash as well? Etc.
Lerner should technically feel fine testifying to the truth once given immunity. Query which side of the aisle is more likely to refer her to DOJ for “perjury” even if she tells the truth, however.
“Query which side of the aisle is more likely to refer her to DOJ for “perjury” even if she tells the truth, however.”
I think that depends rather critically on what the truth happens to be. If she testifies that the targeting was at the direction of the President, and has no documentary evidence preserved to prove this?
Democrats will charge her with perjury.
Did their hard drives crash as well?
Current story is their hard drives crashed:
Earlier this week, Ways and Means Republicans said as many as six IRS employees involved in the scandal also lost email in computer crashes
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/irs-lois-lerner-emails-108044.html?hp=t1
ahem.
Cantor’s internal polling showed that Brat was favored among such people as:
those who had voted in a Democratic primary 70%-30%
those who had never voted in a primary before 59%-41%
Independents 62%-38%
Democrats 86%-14%; those who say it was their first time voting in a primary 61%-39%
those who say they usually vote in Democratic primaries 84%-16%
those who are voting for [Democrat Jack] Trammell in November 75%-25%;
those who would vote for the generic Democrat 78%-22%
those who approve the job Obama is doing 80%-20%
those who favor Obamacare 88%-12%
those who do not watch Fox News 74%-26%
those who do not agree with the Tea Party 65%-35%
ticket-splitters 63%-37%
those who always or usually vote Democratic in November 83%-17%
moderates 61%-39% and liberals 77%-23%
pro-choice voters 60%-40%
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cantor-pollster-john-mclaughlin-republican-voters
They have already admitted to subjecting Tea Party organizations to especially harsh treatment based on partisan criteria,
I don’t think this is proven to begin with.
A big part of the whole problem is that we have a rule,or a law, or whatever it is, that couldn’t be better designed to generate accusations of unfair treatment.
Lerner has already taken the 5th.
Anyone with two neurons who is threatened with some sort of criminal liability, however remote, will take the 5th in any situation where they are otherwise required to testify. To draw an inference from that is incorrect not only as a matter of law but as a matter of common sense.
You actually know this, Brett.
Perhaps the critical word in “taking the 5th” is this: “…on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.” Not would but might. And when we consider how some people (even here) regard “taking the 5th,” it is pretty clear how broadly construed can be the variety of things which might tend to incriminate.
“I don’t think this is proven to begin with.”
Why would we have to prove what they came out and admitted they did?
Not would but might.
Heh. A distinction without a difference in winger high crimes and misdemeanors analysis.
However, the claim that taking the 5th was evidence of malice, well that took my breath away.
This looks to be a fairly thorough summation of the complicated context of the IRS’ actions, including Congressional pressure from both parties in the resulting light (more like, darkness) conferred by the Supreme Court on campaign finance and its always and now exacerbated and murky tax status:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_IRS_controversy
Now, I’m going to walk down the street and have a drink and when the clairvoyant drunk next to me makes some asinine assertion about the simple nature of reality, I’m going to chalk it up to the context of the fact that he’s six drinks ahead of me.
bobbyp: “However, the claim that taking the 5th was evidence of malice, well that took my breath away.”
Ah, little bobbyp, if you were old enough to remember the 1950s (as I am) you would still have plenty of breath, because this kind of charge was routine among Red-baiters of that period. Brett is just keeping alive a grand old tradition of rightwing character assassination, a reminder of the Bad Old Days.
For anybody who is interested, a reasonable list of reasons why conspiracy is unlikely, from someone that has little esteem for the IRS:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-19/an-irs-conspiracy-not-likely-yet
And yeah, taking the 5th means nothing except that you are aware of your rights as an american.
“And yeah, taking the 5th means nothing except that you are aware of your rights as an american.”
I’ll remember that the next time I’m called to testify, and assert my 5th amendment right not to testify for some random reason having nothing to do with the line of testimony being likely to implicate me in crimes. I’ll let you know how it works out.
I’ll let you know how it works out.
It often doesn’t in criminal law, and that it doesn’t work out is shameful. The 5th is a crucial right for all citizens.
The attempt to make asserting individual rights equivalent to guilt is not something that should be tolerated in a free society.
The attempt to make asserting individual rights equivalent to guilt is not something that should be tolerated in a free society.
but it’s such an essential tool of mind-readers and blame-casters!
won’t somebody think of the demagogues ?
won’t somebody think of the demagogues ?
oh, plenty of people will, including the demagogues themselves. 🙂
Just not me.
I’ll remember that the next time I’m called to testify, and assert my 5th amendment right not to testify for some random reason having nothing to do with the line of testimony being likely to implicate me in crimes.
Wow, Brett, that was quite a leap. From taking the 5th because something might (not would, but might) implicate you. All the way to “some random reason having nothing to do with the line of testimony being likely to implicate me”.
Did you think nobody would notice the difference between avoiding incriminating yourself and not answering for any other reason?
“Did you think nobody would notice the difference between avoiding incriminating yourself and not answering for any other reason?”
I’m not the one refusing to notice the difference, you are. You have a legal right not to testify where the testimony would incriminate you. This is reasonable, we don’t want to live in a country where you can be required to tell the government of any crimes you may have committed.
But this is a right to not testify where doing so would incriminate you, and it logically follows from this that taking the 5th implies that you are guilty of something.
The government may not legally infer this from your refusal to testify. But nobody else is required to refrain from noticing the logical implication of this.
It’s rather like, if a police officer illegally breaks into your home, and finds the loot from a local string of burglaries, the government may not use finding this as evidence against you. But nobody else is required it ignore that you have been revealed to be a burglar.
Lerner did not, by taking the 5th, legally incriminate herself. She did incriminate herself for all non-legal purposes, though.
Peasants: We have found a witch! (A witch! a witch!)
Burn her burn her!
Peasant 1: We have found a witch, may we burn her?
(cheers)
Vladimir: How do you known she is a witch?
P2: She looks like one!
V: Bring her forward
Woman: I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!
V: ehh… but you are dressed like one.
W: They dressed me up like this!
All: naah no we didn’t… no.
W: And this isn’t my nose, it’s a false one.
(V lifts up carrot)
V: Well?
P1: Well we did do the nose
V: The nose?
P1: …And the hat, but she is a witch!
(all: yeah, burn her burn her!)
V: Did you dress her up like this?
P1: No! (no no… no) Yes. (yes yeah) a bit (a bit bit a bit) But she has got a wart!
(P3 points at wart)
V: What makes you think she is a witch?
P2: Well, she turned me into a newt!
V: A newt?!
(P2 pause & look around)
P2: I got better.
(pause)
P3: Burn her anyway! (burn her burn her burn!)
(king walks in)
V: There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.
P1: Are there? Well then tell us! (tell us)
V: Tell me… what do you do with witches?
P3: Burn’em! Burn them up! (burn burn burn)
V: What do you burn apart from witches?
P1: More witches! (P2 nudge P1)
(pause)
P3: Wood!
V: So, why do witches burn?
(long pause)
P2: Cuz they’re made of… wood?
V: Gooood.
(crowd congratulates P2)
V: So, how do we tell if she is made of wood?
P1: Build a bridge out of her!
V: Ahh, but can you not also make bridges out of stone?
P1: Oh yeah…
V: Does wood sink in water?
P1: No
P3: No. It floats!
P1: Let’s throw her into the bog! (yeah yeah ya!)
V: What also floats in water?
P1: Bread
P3: Apples
P2: Very small rocks
(V looks annoyed)
P1: Cider
P3: Grape gravy
P1: Cherries
P3: Mud
King: A Duck!
(all look and stare at king)
V: Exactly! So, logically…
P1(thinking): If she ways the same as a duck… she’s made of wood!
V: And therefore,
(pause & think)
P3: A witch! (P1: a witch)(P2: a witch)(all: a witch!)
Prosecution: Where were you Tuesday night?
Witness: I was patronizing a prostitute. [Which is a misdemeanor in this jusisdiction. Not to mention cause to get him fired, he being a clergyman.]
Prosecution: So you have no alibi for the murder which occurred across town?
Witness: I guess not.
Or we can substitute any other minor (but illegal) action.
Prosecution hasn’t proved the Witness had anything to do with the murder. But the witnesses testimony has tended to incriminate him for a crime, albeit not that one. So if he took the 5th instead of testifying, Brett gets to say he is obviously guilty of the murder. Because, after all, he refused to testify.
Impressive.
“Lerner did not, by taking the 5th, legally incriminate herself. She did incriminate herself for all non-legal purposes, though.”
Besides sounding vaguely naughty, I see you’ve read your Kafka Cliffs Notes.
Remember when everyone here was correctly observing that Cliven Bundy is a criminal, and Brett said you can’t assume a criminal is in the wrong because the government stacks the deck with its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad power to define crimes?
Here is the text of the Fifth Amendment, in it’s entirety:
Note my bold.
The 5th does not require that you be guilty of anything, nor does it require the testimony you decline to give to be incriminating.
In any criminal proceeding, you have a right to not testify against yourself.
Full stop.
Any inference anyone draws from that is the product of their own imagination.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
I didn’t say that Lerner is obviously guilty of a particular crime. (Aside from the little matter of sending legally restricted taxpayer information over to the FBI, of course.) What I said was that we know that she’s a criminal, because she took the fifth, and in order for testimony to “incriminate” you, you have to be guilty of something.
And this does tell us something about how far we should trust her explanation of why emails got destroyed after she was on notice somebody would want to see them.
Bottom line here? If you reasoned about Republicans the way you’re reasoning about Democrats, you’d assume Nixon’s 18 1/2 minutes were a rant about how the local pizza delivery guy kept putting anchovies on his pizzas.
What I said was that we know that she’s a criminal, because she took the fifth
note to defense attorneys: don’t let this guy serve on your jury.
we know that she’s a criminal, because she took the fifth, and in order for testimony to “incriminate” you, you have to be guilty of something.
No, we don’t know that. And no, in order for a statement to be potentially incriminating, you need not actually be guilty of anything.
Said the SCOTUS in Ohio v Reiner.
If you think something you say *may expose you to criminal prosecution*, you can invoke the 5th Amendment.
Actual guilt or innocence is another question.
I invite the actual attorneys on the board to weigh in.
Brett: And this does tell us something about how far we should trust her explanation of why emails got destroyed after she was on notice somebody would want to see them.
The TIGTA report states that she didn’t know about the targeting of TEA party groups until after her hard drive crashed. The TIGTA report could be wrong, of course.
The same TIGTA report which was completed without bothering to contact any of the groups being targeted? A whitewash.
Besides all the other reasons for not engaging with Brett, we now have another one: his complete contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. So much for “conservatism.”
Brett often has insightful and interesting things to say.
Brett also often fixates on whatever the Breitbart media meme of the day is, and will tenaciously and mind-numbingly argue points of no value whatsoever, until it’s demonstrated that he’s factually wrong, at which point he’ll change the subject.
SSDD
Do we mean to conclude that we’ve been lectured lo these many years about the literal meaning of the unchanging, sacrosanct Constitution and all its Amendments, and all of its Amendments’ commas, and its commas’ commas, by a person who has so egregiously allowed the meaning the Fifth Amendment to escape him.
And we have expended so many hours and days of our precious lives and bandwidth humoring this, this .. is shibboleth the right word?
I feel like Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations when she realizes, finally, that she has wasted the decades maintaining an illusion in aspic .. the rotting cake, the wedding table shrouded in cobwebs, the virginal bridal gown now brittle and flammable, the withered bouquet, now colorless and the scent gone.
The flames, the flames!
And what of the Second Amendment?
Has it and its commas been misconstrued as well?
Estella, bring me my gun.
Estella?
By my faith and freedom, is Brett missing a conference?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-urinal-faith-and-freedom-conference
Brett: The same TIGTA report which was completed without bothering to contact any of the groups being targeted? A whitewash.
A whitewash by the Bush appointed IG? For conduct that all (or nearly all) took place under the Bush appointed IRS commissioner? I suppose.
By my faith and freedom, is Brett missing a conference?
LOL.
My old man once put a Bush/Cheney election sticker in a urinal, took a picture of it, and sent it to his (R) sister, just to annoy her.
It worked.
I miss my old man, but I’m not sorry he shuffled off his mortal coil before the full post-9/11 pants-crapping clusterFUBAR kicked in.
I’m not sure there would have been enough urinals.
But this is a right to not testify where doing so would incriminate you, and it logically follows from this that taking the 5th implies that you are guilty of something.
Nonsense. Double-nonsense. Another one for the Bellmore Hall of Shameful Comments.
What it implies is that you have a reasonable fear of being caught in the crosshairs of some ambitious prosecutor or other powerful figure who is eager to twist anything you say into evidence against you. There is no shortage of such people.
Anyone caught up in a situation like Lerner’s will be advised by any competent lawyer to take the Fifth regardless of guilt or innocence, because nothing can be gained by testifying.
Do you honestly believe, “If you’re innocent you have nothing to fear?”
The same TIGTA report which was completed without bothering to contact any of the groups being targeted? A whitewash.
How exactly does a group know if it is “being targeted” because there are reasonable grounds for suspicion that they are breaking the law (which, you seem to overlook, they probably were) or for political reasons?
How exactly does the IG determine this, while never talking to the putatively “targeted” groups, only checking out the IRS’s side of the story?
Are you saying that an official investigation in to alleged abusive behavior by a government agency should involve only talking to that agency, and not to anybody who claimed to have been abused?
Hmm, lemme see… The TP groups didn’t want extra IRS attention focused on their financial practices. Obviously, the government cannot legally infer they’re guilty of tax fraud from their desire to avoid above-average scrutiny of their taxes. But nobody else is required to refrain from noticing the logical implication of this… right, Brett?
….is shibboleth the right word?
Darned good question. Might I suggest “totem”? Not quite sure about that one either.
an official investigation in to alleged abusive behavior
that’s not what the investigation was investigating.
FTFR:
there is nothing about “abusive behavior”.
once again, you’re starting from your conclusion and trying to wedge facts into it.
NV,
Well, if I recall correctly, those groups were asked initially to provide more documentation of their claimed tax-exempt status. That’s what started the whole furor.
Typically, they claimed they just innocently got together once and a while to pass out copies of the Constitution to an eager public.
If they had invoked the 5th, that would have just proved their guilt (of something, we don’t know what), so they just lied instead.
My God, you are. You are actually going to claim that the Inspector General, investigating whether an agency engaged in inappropriate actions with regards to somebody, doesn’t need to talk to that somebody.
the issue at hand was not “abusive behavior”, it was the criteria used to filter groups, and how those groups were subsequently moved through the system. the groups themselves had zero to do with the filter and zero to do with how they were processed within the IRS, so what is gained by asking them?
So, Brett: you want government investigators to “talk to” people who claim to have been unfairly investigated by the government. That’s cool. It might even be one of the “insightful and interesting” things that Russell credits you for “often” saying.
But it seems to me that “talk to” and “investigate” may overlap a bit. I recognize that by “talk to” you really mean “listen to”, of course. A government investigator passively listening to your complaint may seem like a welcome prospect. But if your complaint is already public information, passive listening would be pointless. So the “talk” might involve questions back at you, from the investigator. And then you’d caterwaul about being interrogated.
“Social welfare organizations” claiming tax-exempt status for their political activities are the Cliven Bundys of 501c, and I wonder how much interrogation they would have really wanted.
–TP
“FTFR:
The overall objective of this audit was to determine whether allegations were founded that the IRS: 1) targeted specific groups applying for tax-exempt status, 2) delayed processing of targeted groups’ applications, and 3) requested unnecessary information from targeted groups.
there is nothing about “abusive behavior”.”
Cleek, I’ve got to thank you, And Tony, too. I first came here because I was looking for a good argument, and for that you need somebody who disagrees with you. And that’s why I’ve stuck around, through the insults and outright homicidal threats.
But something’s been bothering me more and more about this site, and I was having trouble identifying it, until the last couple days exchanges. Now I understand what it is.
To get a good argument, you need to associate with people who disagree with you about something. But it takes more than that. They need to share some fundamentals, too. Otherwise, you’re speaking English, and they’re speaking Urdu. (Yes, that’s a metaphor.)
You can’t get a good argument from a madman, from somebody who can cite a definition of abusive conduct, and ask where the abuse is. You can’t get a good argument from somebody who thinks you investigate an alleged crime by interviewing the alleged criminal, and utterly ignoring anything the supposed victims have to say. You can’t have a good argument with somebody who thinks “The dog ate my homework, six days running. Doesn’t everybody do their homework on cold-cuts?” is a reasonable excuse.
And so I’m leaving. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Hopefully not on opposite sides of a civil war, or at a death camp run by the Count.
Ta!
And that’s why I’ve stuck around, through the insults and outright homicidal threats.
I’ve seen insults fly around occasionally. From both sides. But “homocidal threats”? Here? I must have been persistantly asleep to have missed those….
I know it’s hard to run in those clown shoes, but do not let the screen door hit you on the ass when you leave, Brett.
TonyP writes: “But if your complaint is already public information.”
Brett whines and counters: “….and utterly ignoring anything the supposed victims have to say.”
You see, Brett, the victims had already had their say. At great length. Their complaints were in out there. Daryl Issa was all over the case!
So, wouldn’t you think the next step is to, you know, investigate the allegations?
That’s what the IG did, right?
I think you need to take a fifth.
Hopefully not on opposite sides of a civil war…
As you alluded to in a previous exchange, that would only happen if you missed your flight.
Brett?
I say, I’ve made your favorite recipe tonight, tea-brined chicken breasts, which as you claimed in a completely substantive and accurate comment some time ago is simply scrumptious ….
…. Brett? Are you there?
What do you mean … he got mad and quit?
I don’t believe it.
What kind of a death camp am I running here, where the inmates can just announce that they’ve had enough and march, I say, fairly skip right out the front gate?
And before cocktails and dinner are served?
The deuce of it is, now I’ve got to find a substitute teacher for tomorrow’s atlatl-carving seminar by 9:00 am, which we instituted as kind of a replacement therapy for the those addicted to loading thousands of pounds of fertilizer into rental trucks and blowing up Federal employee children in day care centers while their parents beavered away upstairs tyrannizing the population.
This is most disrupting. And we were going to have games after dinner, wherein the inmates get to flog the liberal guards while “Red Dawn” is screened throughout the night.
Perhaps, I need to call in the Cheneys to tighten things up a bit in this sorry excuse for a Death Camp, not to be confused with Death Panels, which seems yet another layer of expensive, duplicative Death Bureaucracy.
I knew we should have gone for a for-profit model and cut bobbyp’s wages to transfer the booty into shareholder hands.
First thing we do is get rid of the banner over the gate proclaiming “Sarcasm Shall Set You Free”, which in this case, has been taken much too literally.
I mean, we paid your AMTRAK fare here, Brett. Why was that so threatening, despite the quality of the tucker, which I’m told has improved, especially since they have instituted the writers-in-residence program in which 25 individual poets/writers may ride the rails for a full year with writing accommodations and the promise that no German Shepherds shall greet them at the end of the journey to herd them into dental facilities.
The tyranny of it would be mind-boggling, given the subsidies, if there was any tyranny, though there is no shortage of minds to boggle over small beer in this great of country of ours.
I blame myself, of course, for this unfortunate escape and self-exiling.
It happened on my watch and I had directed the Camp’s watchtower spotlights to the tap-dancing by gunfire pageant under rehearsal and scheduled to debut this weekend, in which the inmates hurl off-label fruit and cabbages at Kenyan tax collectors in loin clothes serving aperitifs to Neo-Cons and violent gun lobbyists while the band plays Dixie.
Come back, Shane.
Do.
This brings to mind the unfortunate departure of Moe Lane, who left in a second and a huff, feelings severely bruised.
Have the Death Camp’s kept track of their escapes?
Perhaps we need an alumni program of some kind to track escapes and solicit donations for the Camp upkeep, especially the maintenance of the solar-powered electrical boundary fence and the politically correct slavery had its upsides shrine in the inmate walkabout.
The last Lane was spotted, he was ignoring Dodge Ram 4 by 4 loads of unemployed yahoos on public assistance, bristling with expensive military weaponry and home-made badges and epaulettes speeding past him to kill government employees and harass citizens on their weekly grocery shopping excursions, while typing outraged missives into Redstate servers about Democratic Congressman slapping Brietbartian scum for knocking the former’s specs off their nose with the lenses of their videocams.
The new OBWI
I like Obama but I think we should stay out of Iraq
I like Obama more, I think we should stay out of Iraq, but its Bushes fault
I don’t always like Obama, but I do mst of the time, I think we should stay out of Iraq, and forget about the IRS scandal.
I don’t think we should be in Iraq, what scandal, no drones.
What a great discussion.
what russell said.
It’s not as if there were not enough true scandals but those for the most part will not be touched by either side of the ‘serious’ people. If we did we would have to hang all presidents not yet deceased plus a few hundred congresscritters and had to put most of the remaining ones behind bars for extended periods of time.
hey Marty, we have a new open thread. the floor is open.
oh noes. i’ve broken the poor lad.
hang all presidents not yet deceased plus a few hundred congresscritters and had to put most of the remaining ones behind bars for extended periods of time.
Beyond not being a proponent of capital punishment, I don’t really see the problem. 🙂
A good response as to the delay between Feb and now regarding Lerner’s HDD crash:
Koskinen replied that the reason for the time lapse between February (when e-mail patterns exposed a lapse in certain years that led the IRS to the discovery of Ms. Lerner’s computer crash) and now (when the IRS informed the committee of the hard-drive crash of not only Ms. Lerner but of several others in the case) was because of the danger of dribbling out information a little bit at a time.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2014/0620/IRS-e-mails-In-contentious-House-hearing-the-battle-is-for-credibility-video
It’s a valid response, and honestly one I hadn’t thought of.
I’m disappointed the WH is unwilling to appoint a special prosecutor. I don’t buy the theories about a conspiracy stretching to the WH, or even broadly within the IRS, but I think the IRS’s credibility has been damaged. Perhaps wrongfully, but damaged nonetheless.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/06/20/231027/wh-rejects-independent-prosecutor.html
I think a prosecutor could do a lot to repair that credibility.
And Brett, if you reconsider, I’d formulate your hypothetical a little differently. Rather than:
It’s rather like, if a police officer illegally breaks into your home, and finds the loot from a local string of burglaries, the government may not use finding this as evidence against you. But nobody else is required it ignore that you have been revealed to be a burglar.
I would say it’s more like:
Faced with a string of unsolved burglaries, the police ask every homeowner in a town to voluntarily allow them to search their homes for the loot. Someone refuses to let the police search their home, and everybody assumes they are the burglar.
Beyond not being a proponent of capital punishment, I don’t really see the problem. 🙂
I am against CP too in the real world but I have some cruel and unusual fantasies usually based on traditional ‘mirror punishments’ (punishments mirroring the crime, e.g. burning arsonists at the stake). Let’s start with the torture memo writers and the poison gas sellers..
In the case of public officials the first thing would of course be the cutting out of the tongue since public lying is the most common misdeed.
😉
I’m disappointed the WH is unwilling to appoint a special prosecutor.
Formally, it’s DOJ that appoints special prosecutors, I think. As a practical matter, of course, it is unlikely the AG would refuse to appoint one if POTUS asked nicely.
I must admit that my google-fu has proved inadequate to nail down the current statutory authority of the AG to appoint a special prosecutor or the limits on such an appointee’s scope.
FWIW, my own suggestion to Eric Holder would be to appoint a special prosecutor empowered to investigate EVERYBODY associated with the IRS “scandal”:
o Lois Lerner and the 82 other IRS employees
o The “social welfare groups” complaining about their tax exemptions
o The Treasury and the White House
o Darryl Issa and company
Let the special prosecutor follow the truth wherever it leads, and if it leads to a blue dress with Issa’s DNA on the inside, well, we sort of have precedent for that.
–TP
But if a Special Prosecutor gets appointed for this contremps, someone is sure to ask why one hasn’t been appointed to look into the far more serious crime (if it is shown to have happened) of the use of torture in the previous administration. Awkward!
Why no special prosecutor for Bush administration offenses (if any)? Simple.
Because: BENGHAZI!!
Of course.
(Readers of Slacktivist may supplement this mantra with the new all-purpose conclusion: Thus, Calvinism. Non-readers should start reading. Seriously.)
“It’s not as if there were not enough true scandals but those for the most part will not be touched by either side of the ‘serious’ people.”
Yep.
I prefer, “Thus, Calvinball.”
I would say it’s more like:
I would say that it’s not completely clear that a burglary happened.
The IRS was tasked – or perhaps tasked itself – with investigating groups who were using non-profit status as cover for incorrectly, and illegally, engaging in certain forms of political activity.
As part of that effort, they focused their investigation on groups whose names indicated some obvious political affiliation.
Not just right-wing, but left-wing as well. And not the same numbers of each, but that may simply reflect a disproportion in the numbers of groups with names reflecting some obvious political affiliation.
That may have been politically inastute, but other than that it was a *completely legitimate* thing for them to do. It’s their job.
Lerner, specifically, also released information to the FBI. Which may have been illegal, as cleek notes we don’t know whether the FBI asked for the information. We don’t know what, if any, Lerner’s specific political motivations were.
There are a lot of emails that have gone missing, and 6 hard drives containing information of interest crashed and the materials are not recoverable. That is, IMO, at a minimum highly suspicious, but it’s also something that might simply be down to crap IT practices at the IRS.
Malfeasance is always a possibility, but in large organizations it’s never wise to rule out simple step-on-a-rake stupidity and incompetence.
And, of course, we have Lerner taking the fifth.
On the other side, we have some number of investigations stating that there was no criminal behavior.
So, In My Very Humble Opinion and FWIW, which is not a lot, there are a number of damning pieces of evidence that deserve investigation and explanation. It’s possible that there are perfectly innocent explanations for why all of that email went astray, and all of those hard drives conveniently crashed, and Lerner plead the fifth, but as a whole it’s pretty smelly.
But what’s not on the table at the moment is proof that there was a conspiracy to specifically target conservative groups for harassment.
The other piece of this is that Issa has seized upon this particular issue and is determined to make as much hay of it as he can.
IMO that is actually *harmful* to the cause of folks who think conservative groups have been singled out, because Issa is a transparent opportunist and ass-clown, and any statement that comes out of his mouth, however true it might actually be, loses about half of its credibility simply by virtue of having been uttered by him.
If you’re a conservative group who thinks it has been ill-served by the IRS, Issa is not your friend.
Long story short, IMO everybody should take a freaking pill and let the investigation continue. Which it will.
cutting out of the tongue
CNN would get quieter.
I would say that it’s not completely clear that a burglary happened.
Yeah, maybe the better hypo would be the police want to look in houses to see if there is any ill-gotten loot, or something the might look like ill-gotten loot.
My point was more that Lerner taking the 5th told us very little beyond that she didn’t want congress rifling through her life.
Which is reasonable, IMHO.
however true it might actually be, loses about half of its credibility simply by virtue of having been uttered by him.
Yeah. But I think even though he is unreliable, there is enough FUD out there (and some of the facts are genuinely suspicious), there is actually lasting damage to the credibility of the IRS. IMO, not a good thing.
Putting on my cynical hat for a moment, I think that’s why there is no prosecutor (and thanks, Tony, for the clarification. I believe you are correct about that). If a prosecutor found something, it would look bad, and it may end up getting some traction as a political tool during midterms or in 2016.
If Issa finds something, beyond people who hate the administration already, nobody is going to care. Because it is a witchhunt, and even if Issa finds witch, well, the fact it is a plainly partisan witchhunt is going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of any independent that might be swayed otherwise.
It also feeds into a narrative of R’s in congress not legislating, just politicking. (A narrat0ive which seems pretty legitimate at the moment.
But that’s my cynical hat. Maybe the AG is just standing on principle.
Even if a special prosecutor got appointed, (s)he would become a political target very soon too, starting with ‘how can anyone appointed by the administration be trusted to investigate misdeeds by the same or on its behalf?’.
…let the investigation continue.
Until when? An investigation can end by:
o Finding a smoking gun
o Concluding there is no smoking gun
o Boring everybody to death
o Becoming moot
There may be other ways I can’t think of right now.
Of the above, the LEAST likely way is the second: can we really imagine that any number of recovered emails, or sworn testimony, or any other evidence, would ever result in Issa or Ryan, or even Boehner or McConnell, declaring that the investigation is over because the smoking gun turned out to be a water pistol? They’re much more likely to keep saying: “The depth of the conspiracy is demonstrated by the fact that we have not found the smoking gun YET.”
Let “the investigation” continue, all right, but let’s not pretend the “investigators” are willing to reach any conclusion short of “Obama did it”.
Just for curiosity, has anybody claimed that the IRS “targeted” previously-existing “social welfare groups” with already-established 501c status, or is the whole thing entirely about applications for that status?
–TP
Back for one moment, to deliver… (Drum roll, please.)
The smoking gun.
Have fun explaining this away, I’m sure you will.
yeah i thought you’d be back.
All of that, and the IRS couldn’t afford an email archiving service? Not only that, it had to recycle its backup tapes to save money? Ridiculous.
the IRS being able to afford it isn’t relevant. the IRS rules at the time apparently said they were to keep backups for 6 months. and that’s what they did. you can go read those rules on line.
so now you have to prove that the rules were written to facilitate Lois Lerner’s Big Email Deletion Caper. go for it.
as for “personal files” – mind-reading (based on a single adjective!) from John Hinderaker is evidence of nothing except his own inability to read minds. but, “personal” seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a non-savvy user to call files that reside locally on her PC, as opposed to stuff that resides on a network or is managed by Sharepoint, or whatever.
Yay, Hindrocket!!
I agree. Get the records, and if there’s a “there” there, we’ll all get to see it.
And in the meantime, the rest of us will all get on with our lives.
The movie “Shane” would have been ruined if he had actually come back.
Subpoena Hindrocket, because he OBVIOUSLY knows more about the IRS scandal than the public information.
And while he’s under oath, ask him about “A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”
..just to establish his judgment and credibility, y’know.
Count: The movie “Shane” would have been ruined if he had actually come back.
Very true, but did Shane flounce? I think that makes a difference.
Sorry, but when I think of Brett, it’s not Alan Ladd that comes to mind, it is Alan Hale jr. A 3 hour cruise, a 3 hour cruise…
the hindrocket piece puts me in mind of a logical fallacy that may, as of yet, not have a name.
something can make sense – can be internally logically consistent, can be a plausible inference from known facts – and yet not be true. saying that it must be true, because it “makes sense”, doesn’t make it true.
for any given situation, there are often hundreds of explanations that “make sense”. they aren’t all true.
none of them, in fact, may be true. sometimes reality turns out to be somewhat absurd.
crime(s) may have been committed, and short of crimes plain old malfeasance may have occurred.
there is enough weird stuff on the record to make an investigation worthwhile.
but proof is not yet, remotely, on the table.
there is enough weird stuff on the record to make an investigation worthwhile.
Maybe, if that’s a national priority. But, an investigation by whom. An investigation by the House of Representatives? Waste of time.
the hindrocket piece puts me in mind of a logical fallacy that may, as of yet, not have a name.
something can make sense – can be internally logically consistent, can be a plausible inference from known facts – and yet not be true. saying that it must be true, because it “makes sense”, doesn’t make it true.
Honestly, what you describe just sounds like garden-variety affirming the consequent. P->Q, Q, ∴ P. If that’s not actually what you’re referring to, I must say the Hindraker piece fit the mold well enough that I’d still stand by an assertion that this is (at least one of) the fallacy(/fallacies) in play. “This would cause that, that happened, therefore this.”
Maybe, if that’s a national priority. But, an investigation by whom.
All good points. And, I’d add, how many investigations?
“This would cause that, that happened, therefore this.”
That’s the flavor of it, but it’s not even that strong. The argument here seems more like “If there was a conspiracy, they *might* destroy the hard drives. The hard drives are destroyed, therefore there is a conspiracy”.
So, “If A, then possibly B. B, therefore A”.
In any case, I’m sure Issa, Hinderaker, Brett, et al will continue to look for that acorn.
if you assume the conclusion, and if you believe it with all your heart, then any little factoid can be made to support the conclusion. you simply need to believe, and click your heels together three times, saying “there’s no crook like Obama. there’s no crook like Obama. there’s no crook like Obama.”
Not to forget that the IRS is in the pay of Satan (and recognizes His church). EVEN Democrats have officially inquired about this 😉
Obama’s no crook. Obama’s no crook. Obama’s no crook.
maybe he is, marty. but if he is, it needs more than what brett has brought so far to prove it.
cast those stones, Marty. cast em good.
McCain’s no crook. Romney’s no crook. Rand Paul is no crook. Ted Cruz (stretching a point) is no crook. Chris Christie (pending indictment and trial) is no crook.
If we must have a president who is not a crook, I’ll take Obama any day.
–TP
Well, the Supreme Court decided he is a crook. He is just cleek’s crook, or crock. I believe it “with all my heart”. Now where ARE those slippers.
It takes some to know one. I think a number of SCOTUScritters would be appropriate to hang to the left and right of the POTUSes should the rule of law become a reality for just enough time to get through the trial.
Marty, is there no room in your worldview for someone who is not a crook, but has merely been mistaken on something? Or does anyone and everyone who disagrees with you merit the appelation of “crook”?
Assuredly, the Supreme Court has ruled that the President was in error on the point at issue in their latest decision. But if they have ruled that he was guilty of a theft of funds, I have missed the headlines.
I’d go further than wj. IMO Obama pushed the envelope, and the SCOTUS smacked him down.
I find both of those things – Obama’s testing of the limits in the face of Congress refusing to move on his appointments, and the SCOTUS drawing the line in the sand – reasonable, and justifiable.
I think we may be unclear on the meaning of “crook”.
So which not-a-crook do you like in 2016, Marty?
I ask in all seriousness. In a world full of not-a-crook politicians of which we must elect one to be President, you surely have a suggestion for somebody we should all consider.
–TP
I find both of those things – Obama’s testing of the limits in the face of Congress refusing to move on his appointments, and the SCOTUS drawing the line in the sand – reasonable, and justifiable.
This is exactly what happened. In fact, the Constitutional provision regarding recess appointments wasn’t clear. I would also submit that the Congress also “pushed the envelope” in holding “pro forma” sessions, in order to prevent the Executive from making recess appointments.
So one nice thing about the law, and the Constitution, is that there’s a way for Executive and Congressional actions to be tested when people are “harmed” by them. Testing limits in the law is honorable. It has nothing to do with being a crook.
I hope mitt runs again, I would consider one of the young turks, but I would think they are only slightly more qualified than Obama was so I wouldn’t be thrilled with Ryan or Rubio. I would definitely vote for Jeb Bush but I figure his name all but disqualifies him. After that its anybody but Hilary.
As far as the crook thing goes, it is just entertaining and cleek started it. those slippers. but its a stretch to try and pretend Obama doesn’t know, and didn’t know on the appointments, that he’s breaking the law. he is counting on what, hmm not sure whether it was cleek or sapient, said, there is no way to punish him short of impeachment so he believes he is above the law. in this case someone with standing got there day in court and they said he broke the law. Smalltime or big time that makes him a croiok.
Reflecting it’s really anybody except Elizabeth Warren.
so he believes
show your work
I’m no fan of Hilary’s. And Warren would, I think, be really bad. But unfortunately, there are way too many worse disasters among those who might be in the running for the Republican nomination for me to even consider “anybody but…” as a formulation.
Not only is there always the possibility of someone worse, no matter who you put forward. It seems these days like there is even a probability of someone worse. Or, at least, little sign that I can see of someone significantly less worse appearing. But maybe there is somewhere a Republican governor who has sense (there are actually several), who will be moved to take a shot (no idea), and who will somehow manage to get to the nomination (not something I would bet much on).
Well, the Supreme Court decided he is a crook
Well, no. It did not decide any such thing. It imposed an arbitrary 10 day mandate on what constitutes a Senate “recess”.
And Warren would, I think, be really bad.
You can advance this unfounded argument on several grounds. Perhaps you could actually take the time to write as sentence (just one, please) as to why this overarching claim has anything approaching a semblance of validity. So in the spirit of which your claim was asserted, I offer this reposte: She would be f*cking miles better than ANY f*cknig Repuklican you can name. Any. Name just one.
The ball is in your court, sir.
I hope mitt runs again.
Me too. The GOP needs its version of Adlai Stevenson.
perhaps Marty and wj could take a few minutes and respond to this conclusion by Scott Lemieux: Originalism-for-me-but-not-for-thee can’t work even if we could discern a meaningful “original meaning,” which we generally can’t.
I see a couple of problems with Warren.
First, because I tend to be fiscally conservative, I have concerns that her interest is in spending more than we can afford. Not to mention on things that are of dubious use.
Second, and perhaps worse, I see her nomination (should it happen) as making if far more likely that one of those Republicans you are concerned about might actually win. Because, like it or nor, the majority of the country is substantially more conservative than she is.
To your challenge:
Susana Martinez
Of course, Governor Martinez has said flat out that she will not be a candidate. But you didn’t ask for possible candidates. Just for a Republican who wouldn’t be out of comparison worse than Warren.
I confess, I think originalism is nonsense. And not just because, as Lemieux says, we are on shaky ground determining what it might have been. (Actually, I think it reasonable to say that the “original intent” of the Founders was to come up with compromises which would allow the Constitution to get ratified.)
But to the line you reference, what originalism seems to mean in pracctice is “this is how I can contort the Constitution’s wording to reach the conclusion which I have already decided on for reasons unrelated to the legal issue before the Court.” Which isn’t exactly “Originalism-for-me-but-not-for-thee;” it’s worse.
wj, your second reason to oppose Warren is imo a fully valid one, although I would not agree with your first. But rest assured that the chances of her getting nominated are close to zero unless there is fundamental change in the political landscape. And she is (again imo) fully aware of that and thus realist enough not to run for that post in the first place.
On the other hand I see a real danger that the GOP (or what has become of it) will run a well groomed monster and win (by fair or actually mostly foul means). Washington is corrupt to the core but to have it run by true fanatics (instead of make-believe ones as now) will not necessarily be an improvement.
To be very cynical again, the US still have to go through the fascist phase in order to finally grow up, a mere Brüning won’t do.
Scott is an interesting read, but less lawyer than ideologue these days. So he’s just another person interpreting the Constitution AND the founders intent(which is the interesting part of his odd argument) from the cheap seats.
To be more direct, this paragraph is a totured and meaningless set of rants, yet are the heart of his argument:
Worse for Scalia’s argument, as Breyer demonstrates, is that prior to the Civil War Senate sessions were comparatively short on the one hand and intrasession recesses for all intents and purposes didn’t exist on the other. What we can infer about what Madison, Monroe, Jackson et al. thought about intrasession recess appointments from the fact that they didn’t make any, in other words, is nothing. That they didn’t make intrasession recess appointments is about as relevant as the fact that they didn’t make statutes available in PDF form. The increasing ubiquity of intrasession recess appointments is based on factors, such as modern party politics and air travel, that the founding generation didn’t anticipate. To try to to figure out how they would have evaluated intrasession recess appointments in a contemporary context is a pointless exercise.
We simply can’t infer from the combination of what the founders said, and then what they did, what they meant? Well, he can’t maybe, but I think Scalia can, legitimately. And Breyer isn’t capable of winning an argument with Scslia, even if he were accidentally right.
imnsho
Well, the Constitution DOES give the President a means to use recess appointments: if the two chambers of Congress don’t agree on when to recess (the cause of the ‘every 3 day pro-forma sessions’), just go to Art II. Sec 3:
“[The President]…in Case of Disagreement between [the House and Senate], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper”
Obama to Congress: “Get the F outta town, you pack of miscreants. Don’t come back until Halloween”
We simply can’t infer from the combination of what the founders said, and then what they did, what they meant?
Discussions about “what the founders meant” always seem to assume they were of one mind.
They were not. Not before the Revolution, not during the Revolution, not during the period of the Articles of Confederation, not during the discussions around the Constitution, not during the drafting of the Constitution, not after the Constitution was ratified.
Not ever.
The founders did, and said, a very wide variety of things. Pick your point of view, and you’ll find a founder to back you up.
It’s like playing duelling Bible quotes.
To your challenge:
Susana Martinez
That was a good try, but no go. Here’s a hit piece on Martinez:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/governor-susana-martinez-new-mexico-2016
Miles better. Miles.
It’s like playing duelling Bible quotes.
it’s exactly like that: seeking unquestionable authority in an ambiguous text by assuming it contains capital-T Truth if you just read it correctly.
lawyer, priest, judges and bishops all have the same job.
has any psychologist ever tried to figure out why humans behave this way?
“has any psychologist ever tried to figure out why humans behave this way?”
Yes, which is one reason why that profession, and psychiatrists, have some of the highest rates of suicide.
Their sister professionals, bartenders, observe this behavior up close daily. I don’t know their rates of suicide — they don’t get paid enough to bother, plus who would keep track — but I would speculate it is lower given a bartenders’ singular right to jump over the bar and kick the dueling discussants’ asses into the street.
Yet another problem with allowing weapons into bars and elsewhere.
bobby, are you sure that Hilary isn’t way too conservative for your taste?
I listened to one of the pro forma sessions that the Senators called, specifically to try to prevent Obama from making recess appointments.
It lasted about 42 seconds.
Did any of the founders call 42-second-long Senate sessions?
The (R)’s in Congress will pull any stunt to kick Obama in the shins. He pushed back. The SCOTUS said no. End of story.
Next topic please.
One question for the lawyers among us. Given the Court’s opinion, could all decisions ever made which involved recess-appointed individuals be invalidated?
That is, if decisions were made, say in the Reagan administration, that involved recess-appointed individuals, are those decisions all now null and void? Or at least subject to being overturned at this point if challenged? Or does the Court limit how far back administrative decisions can be challenged?
it’s not all recess appointments, it’s only recess appointments made during these sham recesses that the GOP was holding.
Or, presumably, the non-recess recesses that the Democrats held during Bush II.
sham recesses that the GOP was holding.
These were started by Harry Reid in ~2007, and continue under him today, Democrats being in control of the Senate during that time.
Also, sham sessions, not sham recesses.
Ugh, the lack of recesses currently is, as I understand it, due to the House not going into recess. Which means that the Congress is not in recess.
Russell, you keep going Congress and Obama, Reid started this under Bush. Bah. your right move on.
Reid started this under Bush.
I’m sure it goes back before Reid and Bush.
Obama got fed up with, challenged it, and lost.
Is there more to the story than that?
Teddy Roosevelt, in 1904, made 197 recess appointments during a few seconds between one session of congress was gaveled closed and the next was called to order.
But then, Teddy always was an over-achiever.
Teddy knew the rules.
bobby, are you sure that Hilary isn’t way too conservative for your taste?
Yes, I’m pretty sure she is. But if it came down to a choice between her and a “moderate” republican, she would get my votes all the time.
The “left” could exert some small, insignificant amount of pressure on a Hilary, but absolutely none on any republican.
good summary of the decision in the Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/25/us/annotated-supreme-court-recess-decision.html?_r=0
bobbyp’s link reveals Scalia, Thomas et al to be anachronists as well as originalists.
Making sh*t up.
Look what Obama did this time:
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/06/27/mark-mayfield-dead/11456769/
Will he stop at nothing to divide Republicans?
Run with it, Marty.
With Brett in absentia, someone’s got to hold down the fort.
Ugh, Marty, to me it does not matter, whether it is a Dem sham or a GOP sham or who started it. It is a disgrace in any case. (and those rhymes are a coincidence, in this case at least).
If it was up to me the Senate would be obliged to vote on nominees within a fixed period of time. If the Senate is in session (for real or for sham) and does not vote within that period, this should be construed as ‘no objection’. And any recess appointment should fall under the same rule. The Senate should have to vote on them at the first opportunity and be able to reject them with a full majority (so not open to a filibuster). Plus, under me, lifetime appointments would require more that a simple majority but candidates that get at least 50% could get the position pro tempore and could get ‘upgraded’ within that term limit given a sufficient majority.
hey count, I can top that.
check this one out.
Money quote:
h/t TPM
But for a pesky election, I would happily declare Hartmut over me.
Ah yes, Russell, the old body snatching gambit.
It’s been reported, in some cases, that closing the mental hospitals years ago resulted in a massive increase in unmedicated, gibbering homeless schizophrenics, multiple personality cases, delusional looney tunes, merchants of street corner jibber-jabber, sociopathic blubberers, and whacked-out shouters crowding into our urban areas to harass passersby — all sad, tragic cases, to be sure.
But I’m gratified to see that so many of them have picked themselves up by their crazystraps and made something of themselves by running in Republican primaries across the country, some even getting elected to national office to bring new levels of cracked irrationality to the assorted serious folks they represent, and failing that, maybe getting a gig on right-wing talk radio where they can place their mouths close to the mic and run an index finger rapidly up and down over their lips to make the sound, the battle cry, this country’s Founders made as they emerged from the Continental Congress to announce what they had wrought, if we could keep it.
Just once, I would like to hear Louis Gohmert or Michelle Bachmann step before the mic, take a fulsome mouthful of water and gargle throughout whatever pronouncements are on their single-celled minds.
In answer to those who believe all politicians are crooks, let us praise the system bequeathed to us that let us elect our peers, neighbors, cousins, brothers-in-law, classmates, the guy you knew back when, our friends, dare I say, ourselves to run the show.
Our leaders are everyman, plucked from amongst us by us to run the show (into the dumper, at our behest) and to be the recipient each Fall of our huzzahs and inevitably, as we sit back and demand “bring on the next guy”, the target of our hurled cabbage crop the next growing season.
And then they rejoin us, the rabble, and once again, unbowed the newly convicted by their ideals, know all of the answers to life’s persistent questions, like “Whither Mosul?” having somehow gone irretrievably stupid while in office.