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Nasty politics of Bergdahl's release
Supporters and opponents of swap have both been inconsistent on issue
By Halimah Abdullah, June 5, 2014
Well, that turned ugly fast.
A move that the White House hoped might herald a happy welcome home for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier held captive for five years by the Taliban in Afghanistan, quickly turned into a nasty and largely partisan fight when he was exchanged for five militants being held in Guantanamo Bay.
A political tsunami ensued with allegations from both sides of the aisle of politicizing national security, questions about whether Bergdahl is a deserter and criticism of his family.
"I'm never surprised by controversies that are whipped up in Washington. That's par for the course," President Barack Obama said Thursday during a news conference at a meeting of G7 leaders in Brussels.
Surprising? Perhaps not.
But the force of the vitriol, backlash and backpedaling is an example of how sensitive issues can quickly turn volatile in a hyper-partisan Washington climate, political analysts said.
"When, all of a sudden, you've got Republican congressman who previously were calling for this, criticizing the administration for leaving this man in captivity for five years, or praising his release, and then deleting those Tweets? That really belies the politics. That exposes the naked, ugly politics behind this controversy," said John Avalon, a CNN political analyst.
Politics, raw and unpleasant, is what defines Washington now, political analysts said.
"It's to be expected because it's a potent mix of partisan environment where the rhetoric is very heated," said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian and CNN contributor. "Combine that with a very controversial decision. Put those things together and you expect this kind of thing to happen."
However, it's important to wade through the rhetoric and get to the issues at the core, said David Rothkopf, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.
Behind the "the arm-waving and typical Capitol Hill vs. White House gamesmanship," there are pertinent questions about why the administration didn't tell Congress about the prisoner swap plan, if such a trade was a good one and whether the White House should have struck a more solemn tone about Bergdahl's release when there were questions about desertion, Rothkopf said.
"The Bergdahl situation has produced exactly the same kind of whirlwind of invective and overheated, highly politicized commentary that just about everything else does in Washington," Rothkopf said. "The trick in this case, as in all others, is to somehow discount all that and get to the underlying truth. Real issues regularly get obscured by all the invective and defensive spin."
And everyone involved is in heavy "defensive" spin mode.
I WAS FOR IT BEFORE I WAS AGAINST IT
Former Vietnam prisoner of war and 2008 GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, criticized the trade of Bergdahl for the Taliban commanders quickly.
"This decision to bring Sergeant Bergdahl home, and we applaud that he's home -- it's ill-founded, it's a mistake and it's putting lives of American servicemen and women at risk," the Arizona Republican told reporters.
However, in February, McCain seemed in an interview with CNN to back a swap.
"Obviously, I'd have to know the details, but I would support ways of bringing him home and if (an) exchange was one of them, I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider," he said at the time.
McCain has said his message has been consistent.
Then there are lawmakers who deleted their initial "welcome home" Tweets to Bergdahl as the controversy over his release spiraled into ugliness.
Democrats, including the President, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, said Bergdahl is being used as a political football.
"If Barack Obama cured cancer, Republicans would attack him for putting oncologists out of work," Democratic strategist Paul Begala told CNN.
But even some Democrats, such as Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, criticized the administration's end run around Congress in securing Bergdahl's release but defended the decision.
CONFUSING MESSAGES FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
The White House story on when and how top leaders on Capitol Hill were informed about the release has added to the confusion, political analysts said.
The initial Rose Garden announcement was quickly followed by apologies to such top Democrats as Feinstein for being kept out of the loop.
Then came more explanation about the critical timing of Bergdahl's release, which the administration has said was tied to his declining health and the pending withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the criticism outside of Washington has grown louder and less polite.
A group of soldiers from Bergdahl's unit in Afghanistan accused him of desertion. Their claims -- not confirmed by the Pentagon, which is investigating -- responded to how Bergdahl was lauded by the White House as a hero when there were questions about his disappearance. Those soldiers said several troops were killed in efforts to find him, another claim the military has not confirmed.
Republican strategist, Richard Grenell, who BuzzFeed reported helped get the soldiers' side of the story out to such media outlets as the New York Times, worked on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
Grenell declined to comment on his efforts to CNN.
In the meantime, the rancor has even begun to impact Bergdahl's family and community.
Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly said Bergdahl's father, who wears a long beard, "looks like a Muslim," and their hometown of Hailey, Idaho, called off a welcome home rally after fears of backlash over the controversial nature of the soldier's release.
"Emotions are running very high on this case," said CNN senior political analyst David Gergen. "Among the military personnel and veterans, my sense is it has less to do with the trade for the five militants than the celebratory qualities that the administration initially displayed toward Bergdahl. The message they got was this was a hero coming home. And that totally misreads the military mentality on this issue."
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Thursday, June 5, 2014
"It's a war, not a hostage crisis, dummies."
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Four Myths About the Bowe Bergdahl Swap That Must Be Destroyed
Don't believe everything you hear when it comes to the return of the highest profile American POW in a generation
By John Knefel, June 5, 2014
The return of U.S. prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five Guantanamo-held Taliban of varying importance has become the most important foreign policy story in the country this week. As a result, there has been a lot of great reporting on what the swap does and doesn't mean, how it happened, and how it could affect the war in the future.
Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of reporting that is either sensationalistic, simplistic or straight-up inaccurate. In trying to grapple with how the U.S. conducts matters of war, peace, and international law enforcement, it's important to separate fact from fiction. Below are four examples of things everybody seems to know, which just happened to be either incorrect or far from certain.
MYTH: This sets a dangerous precedent that the U.S. will negotiate with terrorists
In the first minutes after Bergdahl was released on May 31st, various media and political elites took up the all-too-predictable rallying cry that the U.S. doesn't negotiate with terrorists. The claim – in this context – is absurd for at least three distinct reasons. Though the White House recently said the Taliban is on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists by executive order, the Taliban is not actually on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The distinction may be somewhat academic, but confusing or conflating the Taliban with Al Qaeda (as John McCain recently did on CNN) is bad analysis and bad policy. The Taliban is primarily a local political and military organization, and has demonstrated little or no interest in attacking U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
Second, the U.S. – and many other countries – in fact do negotiate with terrorists and other unseemly figures and organizations. This prisoner swap is far from unprecedented, and as President Obama said, this is what happens at the end of a war.
Third, as the Kabul-based journalist (and Rolling Stone contributor) Matt Aikins pointed out, "It's a war, not a hostage crisis, dummies." In a war, it's generally better not to give an enemy an incentive to kill your side's captured soldiers – which would be the perverse outcome of taking a strict "don't negotiate" stance.
MYTH: These five Taliban are the hardest of the hardcore
Just as predictable as the first myth, this one will be even more difficult to destroy. Despite the 13-year occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. media and political establishment continues to see the country primarily through the black-and-white lens that George W. Bush so clearly laid out: "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." One needn't defend the Taliban to acknowledge that political and military allegiances in Afghanistan are often tenuous and shifting, and clear distinctions between friend and enemy are even more fraught in that country (especially under U.S. occupation) than in more conventional conflicts.
A post from the Afghan Analysts Network actually describes all five talibs and their relative significance in the Taliban, and casts serious doubts on the U.S. intelligence that was used to justify their detention.
Anand Gopal, who lived in Afghanistan for years and traveled to areas of the country few journalists go, details in remarkable clarity how that happened and then how the Taliban reconstituted itself in his new book, No Good Men Among the Living.
MYTH: Six to eight U.S. soldiers died looking for Bergdahl
Again, this talking point has incredible resonance, because it feels like the kind of thing that really could be true. But as The New York Times has noted, the facts are actually far less clear. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has commented that "I do not know of specific circumstances or details of U.S. solders dying as a result of efforts to find and rescue Sergeant Bergdahl." And blaming Bergdahl's disappearance for every death in Patika province during one of the most deadly periods in the war simply doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. (As an aside, part of the reason we know what we know about Bergdahl's disappearance comes from the Wikileaks trove provided by Army leaker Chelsea Manning – further evidence of how valuable that leak was and continues to be.)
MYTH: The swap shows Obama's willful disregard for the law and his embracing of an imperial presidency
This is a tough one, because by virtually all accounts Obama did violate the law by negotiating Bergdahl's release without Congress' express permission. That's a big deal, and a legitimate criticism of the swap – as opposed to the "don't negotiate with terrorists" line, which is opportunistic, disingenuous and terrible policy. Recent reports from the Associated Press that the Taliban threatened to kill Bergdahl if news of the swap leaked certainly bolster the administration's claims for the need for secrecy (even if they likely wouldn't change the legality of ignoring the law).
But the real problem with seeing the swap as an example of Imperial Obama is that there are so many better examples that highlight his expansive interpretation of executive authority. Take, for instance, the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki in 2011. Though that killing raised considerable levels of concern from human rights groups – and eventually some politicians – the controversy never rose to the level that the prison swap reached almost immediately this week.
Or take an even more troubling and recent example of Obama's vast theories of presidential power – a Congressional hearing wherein two top lawyers couldn't give clear examples of what powers the president would lose if Congress repealed the AUMF (the law passed immediately after 9/11 upon which virtually all military action since has rested). The administration seems to be claiming that under Article II of the Constitution, and under an incredibly broad and expansive definition of self-defense, they could continue to carry out drone strikes in Yemen and perhaps even continue to hold people in Guantanamo Bay even if the AUMF were repealed.
That's all a way of saying: Obama using his claimed powers to free Guantanamo detainees troubles Congress greatly. Using those same powers to detain or kill people, apparently, isn't nearly as concerning.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Four Myths About the Bowe Bergdahl Swap That Must Be Destroyed
Don't believe everything you hear when it comes to the return of the highest profile American POW in a generation
By John Knefel, June 5, 2014
The return of U.S. prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five Guantanamo-held Taliban of varying importance has become the most important foreign policy story in the country this week. As a result, there has been a lot of great reporting on what the swap does and doesn't mean, how it happened, and how it could affect the war in the future.
Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of reporting that is either sensationalistic, simplistic or straight-up inaccurate. In trying to grapple with how the U.S. conducts matters of war, peace, and international law enforcement, it's important to separate fact from fiction. Below are four examples of things everybody seems to know, which just happened to be either incorrect or far from certain.
MYTH: This sets a dangerous precedent that the U.S. will negotiate with terrorists
In the first minutes after Bergdahl was released on May 31st, various media and political elites took up the all-too-predictable rallying cry that the U.S. doesn't negotiate with terrorists. The claim – in this context – is absurd for at least three distinct reasons. Though the White House recently said the Taliban is on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists by executive order, the Taliban is not actually on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The distinction may be somewhat academic, but confusing or conflating the Taliban with Al Qaeda (as John McCain recently did on CNN) is bad analysis and bad policy. The Taliban is primarily a local political and military organization, and has demonstrated little or no interest in attacking U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
Second, the U.S. – and many other countries – in fact do negotiate with terrorists and other unseemly figures and organizations. This prisoner swap is far from unprecedented, and as President Obama said, this is what happens at the end of a war.
Third, as the Kabul-based journalist (and Rolling Stone contributor) Matt Aikins pointed out, "It's a war, not a hostage crisis, dummies." In a war, it's generally better not to give an enemy an incentive to kill your side's captured soldiers – which would be the perverse outcome of taking a strict "don't negotiate" stance.
MYTH: These five Taliban are the hardest of the hardcore
Just as predictable as the first myth, this one will be even more difficult to destroy. Despite the 13-year occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. media and political establishment continues to see the country primarily through the black-and-white lens that George W. Bush so clearly laid out: "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." One needn't defend the Taliban to acknowledge that political and military allegiances in Afghanistan are often tenuous and shifting, and clear distinctions between friend and enemy are even more fraught in that country (especially under U.S. occupation) than in more conventional conflicts.
A post from the Afghan Analysts Network actually describes all five talibs and their relative significance in the Taliban, and casts serious doubts on the U.S. intelligence that was used to justify their detention.
"Fazl is the only one of the five to face accusations of explicit war crimes and they are, indeed, extremely serious. One would also want to say that Wasiq was deputy head of an agency which carried out torture – except that torture has always been carried out by Afghan intelligence whoever has been in charge and, indeed, this has been no bar to close cooperation with it by the U.S. and other countries since 2001. There is no or little evidence of criminal wrong-doing against the other three men."The same piece from AAN details how four of the five surrendered at the beginning of the U.S. invasion, "in return for promised safe passage home or had reached out to the new administration in Kabul." In fact, virtually the entire Taliban surrendered within months of the invasion, leaving the U.S. military with a war but not an enemy.
Anand Gopal, who lived in Afghanistan for years and traveled to areas of the country few journalists go, details in remarkable clarity how that happened and then how the Taliban reconstituted itself in his new book, No Good Men Among the Living.
MYTH: Six to eight U.S. soldiers died looking for Bergdahl
Again, this talking point has incredible resonance, because it feels like the kind of thing that really could be true. But as The New York Times has noted, the facts are actually far less clear. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has commented that "I do not know of specific circumstances or details of U.S. solders dying as a result of efforts to find and rescue Sergeant Bergdahl." And blaming Bergdahl's disappearance for every death in Patika province during one of the most deadly periods in the war simply doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. (As an aside, part of the reason we know what we know about Bergdahl's disappearance comes from the Wikileaks trove provided by Army leaker Chelsea Manning – further evidence of how valuable that leak was and continues to be.)
MYTH: The swap shows Obama's willful disregard for the law and his embracing of an imperial presidency
This is a tough one, because by virtually all accounts Obama did violate the law by negotiating Bergdahl's release without Congress' express permission. That's a big deal, and a legitimate criticism of the swap – as opposed to the "don't negotiate with terrorists" line, which is opportunistic, disingenuous and terrible policy. Recent reports from the Associated Press that the Taliban threatened to kill Bergdahl if news of the swap leaked certainly bolster the administration's claims for the need for secrecy (even if they likely wouldn't change the legality of ignoring the law).
But the real problem with seeing the swap as an example of Imperial Obama is that there are so many better examples that highlight his expansive interpretation of executive authority. Take, for instance, the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki in 2011. Though that killing raised considerable levels of concern from human rights groups – and eventually some politicians – the controversy never rose to the level that the prison swap reached almost immediately this week.
Or take an even more troubling and recent example of Obama's vast theories of presidential power – a Congressional hearing wherein two top lawyers couldn't give clear examples of what powers the president would lose if Congress repealed the AUMF (the law passed immediately after 9/11 upon which virtually all military action since has rested). The administration seems to be claiming that under Article II of the Constitution, and under an incredibly broad and expansive definition of self-defense, they could continue to carry out drone strikes in Yemen and perhaps even continue to hold people in Guantanamo Bay even if the AUMF were repealed.
That's all a way of saying: Obama using his claimed powers to free Guantanamo detainees troubles Congress greatly. Using those same powers to detain or kill people, apparently, isn't nearly as concerning.
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Wednesday, June 4, 2014
"The shadowy, billionaire Koch brothers are pulling out all the stops to get Senator Reid to stop shining a light on their efforts to buy our democracy ..."
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Ethics Complaint Over Attacks on Koch Brothers Won’t Silence Harry Reid
By Niels Lesniewski, June 2, 2014
Not long after the head of the Tea Party Patriots filed an ethics complaint against Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader’s office accused that group of doing the bidding of the Koch brothers.
The complaint filed with the Senate Ethics Committee accuses Reid of engaging in improper political activity related to his persistent attacks on Charles and David Koch and their associated spending on conservative interests.
“It’s been generations since a member of the Senate has abused the power of his office to attack private citizens the way Harry Reid has sought to vilify Charles and David Koch,” Martin said in a statement.
“Reid’s repeated and mean-spirited attacks violate federal laws and Senate rules against using taxpayer-funded resources for partisan politics and he knows it, yet he repeatedly takes to the floor of the Senate and the media to attack those with whom he disagrees – and then turns around and devotes the Senate floor to a ‘talk-a-thon’ on a major donor’s key issue of climate change. Harry Reid is abusing his office in pursuit of naked political purposes and it is a gross misuse of his taxpayer-funded office,” Martin said.
Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for the Nevada Democrat, fired back in an email.
“We are shocked — shocked! — that a publicity-seeking, extremist Tea Party group which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Koch brothers’ secret bank would attempt a frivolous publicity stunt to distract from the Kochs’ efforts to rig the system for billionaires like themselves,” Jentleson said. “The shadowy, billionaire Koch brothers are pulling out all the stops to get Senator Reid to stop shining a light on their efforts to buy our democracy, but he will not be silenced.”
Senate Democrats led by Reid are seeking to amend the Constitution to allow increased regulation of campaign spending by groups and individuals, a move derided by Republicans as an undue infringement on freedom of speech.
The debate will take center stage again Tuesday morning at the Senate Judiciary Committee when Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., make a rare joint appearance to testify on opposite sides of that issue.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Ethics Complaint Over Attacks on Koch Brothers Won’t Silence Harry Reid
By Niels Lesniewski, June 2, 2014
Not long after the head of the Tea Party Patriots filed an ethics complaint against Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader’s office accused that group of doing the bidding of the Koch brothers.
The complaint filed with the Senate Ethics Committee accuses Reid of engaging in improper political activity related to his persistent attacks on Charles and David Koch and their associated spending on conservative interests.
“It’s been generations since a member of the Senate has abused the power of his office to attack private citizens the way Harry Reid has sought to vilify Charles and David Koch,” Martin said in a statement.
“Reid’s repeated and mean-spirited attacks violate federal laws and Senate rules against using taxpayer-funded resources for partisan politics and he knows it, yet he repeatedly takes to the floor of the Senate and the media to attack those with whom he disagrees – and then turns around and devotes the Senate floor to a ‘talk-a-thon’ on a major donor’s key issue of climate change. Harry Reid is abusing his office in pursuit of naked political purposes and it is a gross misuse of his taxpayer-funded office,” Martin said.
Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for the Nevada Democrat, fired back in an email.
“We are shocked — shocked! — that a publicity-seeking, extremist Tea Party group which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Koch brothers’ secret bank would attempt a frivolous publicity stunt to distract from the Kochs’ efforts to rig the system for billionaires like themselves,” Jentleson said. “The shadowy, billionaire Koch brothers are pulling out all the stops to get Senator Reid to stop shining a light on their efforts to buy our democracy, but he will not be silenced.”
Senate Democrats led by Reid are seeking to amend the Constitution to allow increased regulation of campaign spending by groups and individuals, a move derided by Republicans as an undue infringement on freedom of speech.
The debate will take center stage again Tuesday morning at the Senate Judiciary Committee when Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., make a rare joint appearance to testify on opposite sides of that issue.
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"Righting the “wrongs” of science allocations is also strangely at odds with the conservative claim to be champions of enterprise"
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Why Conservative Politicians Don’t Like Political Science
By Boer Deng, June 4, 2014
The news wasn’t all bad. H.R. 4660, an appropriations bill that passed the House last Friday, provides $7.4 billion for the National Science Foundation for 2015, increasing its budget by 3.2 percent. The total sum actually exceeds what President Obama requested. Science is a good place for government to direct funds: More basic research comes from public projects than private ones. Government-supported science yields longer-term gains compared with industry, where development (rather than original discovery) is emphasized.
But conservatives don’t value all fields equally. Last week’s House appropriations bill freezes new spending on social science grants through an amendment Texas Rep. Lamar Smith introduced with Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Money for political science is put toward physical sciences instead. Political science—along with other fields such as economics and climate change research—has been under sustained attack by conservatives in recent years. Sen. Tom Coburn (along with Smith in the House) has been an active crusader against disciplines he considers “wasteful” or “misallocation[s] of resources.” Last year, Coburn pushed through an appropriations amendment barring the NSF from giving out “non-essential” political science grants. Recently, the House Science Committee, which Smith chairs, approved FIRST, a bill that cuts research funding for social sciences and climate studies.
But social science research is patently useful—it improves policymaking (something that ought to be of interest to a group of legislators). Every American winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics since 1998 has benefited directly from government grants. The countless times we look to studies to guide legislative decisions is proof positive of its impact.
Even if you think waste ought to be curbed, there are other, far more meaningful excesses for Congress to tackle—sugar subsidies, prison reforms, take your pick of things, really—before you start eliminating meager research grants. If political science research is not a priority, working so hard to limit support for it surely shouldn’t be, either.
To be fair, congressional scrutiny over government grants isn’t new. In the 1970s and ’80s, Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, lampooned what he thought were frivolous projects with “Golden Fleece Awards,” issued in his regular press releases. Proxmire’s criticism took aim at everyone from the Department of Defense to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural committee. His initial skepticism about the SETI Institute is a case in point of misdirected government judgment about science: Proxmire withdrew the Golden Fleece Award he gave it in 1978, recognizing the value of the institute’s work.
But why exactly is political science funding a misallocation? Is there something being stifled that the supporters of these measures can point to? There can’t be, because that’s not how science, of any kind, works. The point of studying things we don’t understand is that new knowledge brings its own rewards in unpredictable ways. The “Golden Goose Awards,” given to honor “seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs” with “significant societal impact,” are now given out by a scientific consortium precisely to make this point. (It is a play on and rebuttal to those long-ago Proxmire gongs.) Last year it was given to a study titled “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage.” Findings from that 1962 paper led to key insights on matching kidney transplants.
Righting the “wrongs” of science allocations is also strangely at odds with the conservative claim to be champions of enterprise. Their approach is the opposite of one that encourages innovation, which requires a maximal free range of ideas. Rather, the current Republican rally against social and climate sciences has a more political bent. It is that these studies tend to find outcomes conservatives don’t like—about the consequences of inequality, or limiting democracy, or that anthropogenic climate change is a problem. Dressing up these budget cuts as fiscal responsibility isn’t fooling anyone.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up a version of the bill on Thursday. Hopefully it will leave out such senseless cuts.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Why Conservative Politicians Don’t Like Political Science
By Boer Deng, June 4, 2014
The news wasn’t all bad. H.R. 4660, an appropriations bill that passed the House last Friday, provides $7.4 billion for the National Science Foundation for 2015, increasing its budget by 3.2 percent. The total sum actually exceeds what President Obama requested. Science is a good place for government to direct funds: More basic research comes from public projects than private ones. Government-supported science yields longer-term gains compared with industry, where development (rather than original discovery) is emphasized.
But conservatives don’t value all fields equally. Last week’s House appropriations bill freezes new spending on social science grants through an amendment Texas Rep. Lamar Smith introduced with Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Money for political science is put toward physical sciences instead. Political science—along with other fields such as economics and climate change research—has been under sustained attack by conservatives in recent years. Sen. Tom Coburn (along with Smith in the House) has been an active crusader against disciplines he considers “wasteful” or “misallocation[s] of resources.” Last year, Coburn pushed through an appropriations amendment barring the NSF from giving out “non-essential” political science grants. Recently, the House Science Committee, which Smith chairs, approved FIRST, a bill that cuts research funding for social sciences and climate studies.
But social science research is patently useful—it improves policymaking (something that ought to be of interest to a group of legislators). Every American winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics since 1998 has benefited directly from government grants. The countless times we look to studies to guide legislative decisions is proof positive of its impact.
Even if you think waste ought to be curbed, there are other, far more meaningful excesses for Congress to tackle—sugar subsidies, prison reforms, take your pick of things, really—before you start eliminating meager research grants. If political science research is not a priority, working so hard to limit support for it surely shouldn’t be, either.
To be fair, congressional scrutiny over government grants isn’t new. In the 1970s and ’80s, Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, lampooned what he thought were frivolous projects with “Golden Fleece Awards,” issued in his regular press releases. Proxmire’s criticism took aim at everyone from the Department of Defense to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural committee. His initial skepticism about the SETI Institute is a case in point of misdirected government judgment about science: Proxmire withdrew the Golden Fleece Award he gave it in 1978, recognizing the value of the institute’s work.
But why exactly is political science funding a misallocation? Is there something being stifled that the supporters of these measures can point to? There can’t be, because that’s not how science, of any kind, works. The point of studying things we don’t understand is that new knowledge brings its own rewards in unpredictable ways. The “Golden Goose Awards,” given to honor “seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs” with “significant societal impact,” are now given out by a scientific consortium precisely to make this point. (It is a play on and rebuttal to those long-ago Proxmire gongs.) Last year it was given to a study titled “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage.” Findings from that 1962 paper led to key insights on matching kidney transplants.
Righting the “wrongs” of science allocations is also strangely at odds with the conservative claim to be champions of enterprise. Their approach is the opposite of one that encourages innovation, which requires a maximal free range of ideas. Rather, the current Republican rally against social and climate sciences has a more political bent. It is that these studies tend to find outcomes conservatives don’t like—about the consequences of inequality, or limiting democracy, or that anthropogenic climate change is a problem. Dressing up these budget cuts as fiscal responsibility isn’t fooling anyone.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up a version of the bill on Thursday. Hopefully it will leave out such senseless cuts.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Much of the South’s current conservative passion stems from a personal and often racial dislike of President Obama ..."
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Southern Politicians Try to Hold Back the Tides
By David Firestone, June 3, 2014
It’s always taken longer to get to the future in the South, and the region’s social tardiness has been on display in this season’s political races. For the moment, at least, harsh and fossilized language is still required of both Republican and Democratic candidates.
In Mississippi, a Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel, has a strong chance of knocking out the Republican incumbent, Senator Thad Cochran, in today’s party primary. Mr. McDaniel has built his case on the dubious premise that Mr. Cochran has dared to work with Democrats in the past, and remains a captive of compromises and the discredited politics of the pork barrel.
“Mississippi is the most conservative state in the republic,” Mr. McDaniel said at rally on Saturday. “It deserves the most conservative senator in the republic.” (Even if he found enough voters who care about maintaining that standard, he would have considerable competition from other Tea Party colleagues for that particular race to the bottom.)
In Kentucky, Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat who is challenging Senator Mitch McConnell, blasted President Obama’s groundbreaking decision to reduce carbon emissions from power plants, nakedly pandering to the state’s economic interest in coal and the many voters whose livelihoods come from it. She said on Monday that she would “fiercely oppose the president’s attack on Kentucky’s coal industry because protecting our jobs will be my No. 1 priority.”
Still, it’s clear that these kinds of adamant pronouncements are planted in sand, and within a few years will be washed away by changing tides. Ms. Grimes and Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, another Democrat in a tight race, undoubtedly feel that the politics of the moment call for a firm embrace of fossil fuels. But as the country begins to see the evidence of climate change, and accept the overwhelming consensus of science, voters are starting to accept the wisdom — the necessity — of carbon controls.
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 70 percent of Americans want stronger federal limits on greenhouse gases, even if that raises household bills. Those numbers hold true even in red states, like Kentucky, where electricity is produced largely by coal. And in fact the state’s elected and appointed officials last year acknowledged a need to move away from coal, capture carbon from smokestack emissions, and begin using more natural gas. They asked the White House for flexibility in finding ways to reduce coal emissions, and got much of what they requested in the decision released on Monday.
That kind of realism is unavailable to Ms. Grimes, who’s fighting a dedicated pro-coal opponent and feels the need to put daylight between herself and the White House. Within a few years, though, as coal jobs decline and the state moves toward the mainstream, it will be possible for a Democrat running statewide to break from the kind of language Ms. Grimes is using.
Similarly, the time will come when even Mississippi voters throw off the need to prove themselves the most conservative in the nation. As Jonathan Martin of The Times wrote this morning, immigration and migration from other parts of the country are already liberalizing the political mix in Virginia and North Carolina, and similar changes can also be seen in some suburban areas of Georgia and South Carolina. Much of the South’s current conservative passion stems from a personal and often racial dislike of President Obama, but after he passes from the scene, the region will no longer be immune to the larger forces that the Tea Party was formed to resist.
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Southern Politicians Try to Hold Back the Tides
By David Firestone, June 3, 2014
It’s always taken longer to get to the future in the South, and the region’s social tardiness has been on display in this season’s political races. For the moment, at least, harsh and fossilized language is still required of both Republican and Democratic candidates.
In Mississippi, a Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel, has a strong chance of knocking out the Republican incumbent, Senator Thad Cochran, in today’s party primary. Mr. McDaniel has built his case on the dubious premise that Mr. Cochran has dared to work with Democrats in the past, and remains a captive of compromises and the discredited politics of the pork barrel.
“Mississippi is the most conservative state in the republic,” Mr. McDaniel said at rally on Saturday. “It deserves the most conservative senator in the republic.” (Even if he found enough voters who care about maintaining that standard, he would have considerable competition from other Tea Party colleagues for that particular race to the bottom.)
In Kentucky, Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat who is challenging Senator Mitch McConnell, blasted President Obama’s groundbreaking decision to reduce carbon emissions from power plants, nakedly pandering to the state’s economic interest in coal and the many voters whose livelihoods come from it. She said on Monday that she would “fiercely oppose the president’s attack on Kentucky’s coal industry because protecting our jobs will be my No. 1 priority.”
Still, it’s clear that these kinds of adamant pronouncements are planted in sand, and within a few years will be washed away by changing tides. Ms. Grimes and Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, another Democrat in a tight race, undoubtedly feel that the politics of the moment call for a firm embrace of fossil fuels. But as the country begins to see the evidence of climate change, and accept the overwhelming consensus of science, voters are starting to accept the wisdom — the necessity — of carbon controls.
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 70 percent of Americans want stronger federal limits on greenhouse gases, even if that raises household bills. Those numbers hold true even in red states, like Kentucky, where electricity is produced largely by coal. And in fact the state’s elected and appointed officials last year acknowledged a need to move away from coal, capture carbon from smokestack emissions, and begin using more natural gas. They asked the White House for flexibility in finding ways to reduce coal emissions, and got much of what they requested in the decision released on Monday.
That kind of realism is unavailable to Ms. Grimes, who’s fighting a dedicated pro-coal opponent and feels the need to put daylight between herself and the White House. Within a few years, though, as coal jobs decline and the state moves toward the mainstream, it will be possible for a Democrat running statewide to break from the kind of language Ms. Grimes is using.
Similarly, the time will come when even Mississippi voters throw off the need to prove themselves the most conservative in the nation. As Jonathan Martin of The Times wrote this morning, immigration and migration from other parts of the country are already liberalizing the political mix in Virginia and North Carolina, and similar changes can also be seen in some suburban areas of Georgia and South Carolina. Much of the South’s current conservative passion stems from a personal and often racial dislike of President Obama, but after he passes from the scene, the region will no longer be immune to the larger forces that the Tea Party was formed to resist.
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Hemp: "... an American cash crop that could jump-start the country's next economic revival."
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Other Cannabis War : The Battle Over Hemp
How a 20-year campaign to distinguish industrial hemp from marijuana scored an epic victory
By Coco McPherson, June 3, 2014
In the annals of strange bedfellow politics, the story of how, in 2014, industrial hemp emerged from Drug War purgatory is an epic one. But even for long-time hemp advocates, the sight of Rep. Thomas Massie, a conservative Republican from northern Kentucky, biting jubilantly into a hemp bar on live TV last month was startling.
Buried in February’s $956 billion farm bill is an amendment, co-sponsored by Rep. Massie, that legally distinguishes industrial hemp from marijuana after decades of conflation. It defines hemp as an agricultural crop rather than a drug — and effectively frees American farmers to grow it for the first time in almost 60 years.
Widespread cultivation won't happen overnight - for one thing, the U.S. has no hemp seeds or hemp-processing facilities. But the sudden change in hemp's fortunes shocks its supporters. "If you'd asked me five years ago if I thought we could get Mitch McConnell to introduce a hemp bill, I'd have told you it was impossible," says Eric Steenstra, president of Vote Hemp, the advocacy group formed in 2000 to educate and lobby for hemp legalization in state legislatures and on the Hill. "This is huge."
It’s also been a long time coming. For 20 years, legislators, farmers, hippies, activists, agency heads and agronomists have worked to recast hemp as a game-changer, an American cash crop that could jump-start the country's next economic revival. Kentucky took the legislative lead with outright advocacy by its agriculture department. Unlike a high-profile 2007 lawsuit in which two North Dakota hemp farmers took on the DEA without support from their elected officials in Washington, Kentucky brought its entire federal (and much of its state) delegation to the party.
Among hemp’s biggest advocates are Kentucky’s Republican senator, Rand Paul, the avowed champion of limited government who tweets about the tragedy of the drug war, and James Comer, the state’s young Republican agriculture commissioner who successfully sued the DEA last month for seizing Kentucky’s imported hemp seeds and for interfering with the implementation of pilot programs made legal by the farm bill. And Massie, a fiscal hawk active in last year’s government shutdown who once studied robotics at MIT.
Colorado, Vermont and Kentucky wasted no time launching their industrial hemp research and the pilot programs provided for in the farm bill. In an obscure notice dated April 16th, the USDA alerted state and county officials that farmers in states that ok’d hemp production (15 so far) could now include hemp acreage in their crop reports. The floodgates have opened.
From California and representing the activist left: David Bronner, president of his family's Magic Soap empire. Bronner has thrown the weight of probably the most iconic hippie brand in the world behind hemp legalization and GMO-labeling initiatives. In 2012, Bronner locked himself in a cage with a thatch of hemp plants in clear view of the White House; he was preparing a hemp oil sandwich when he was sawed out of his prison by the D.C. fire department and hauled away by police.
Explaining industrial hemp has taken decades. A lot of people don’t know what it is and many think it’s pot. "It’s just been incredibly frustrating for the hemp industry that hemp has been lumped legally and in public perception with marijuana," Bronner tells Rolling Stone.
Hemp isn't weed and hemp can’t get you high—it's a bust as a recreational drug. Hemp is marijuana's non-psychoactive sibling, derived, like weed, from the cannabis sativa plant. The current American hemp market is estimated at nearly half a billion dollars, with hemp’s oil, seed and fiber used in food, carbon-negative building materials, and automobile composites that are already inside millions of cars. Hemp cultivation is also as old as the country itself. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it, hemp was once legal tender, and several drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper. During WWII, American farmers were paid to grow it, cultivating more than 150 million pounds of industrial hemp to support the American war effort. The U.S. government's 1942 propaganda film, Hemp for Victory, depicts workers toiling happily to harvest lush fields of hemp; the fibrous plants to be later converted to materiel like rope and parachute webbing for the military.
Despite its patriotic bona fides, cannabis sativa was a victim of reefer madness in almost every decade of the 20th Century. Praised, taxed, vilified, confused with pot and blamed for killing sprees and the theft of American jobs by immigrants. The final nail in hemp's coffin was its classification as a Schedule 1 narcotic in 1970's Controlled Substances Act.
The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a commercial hemp industry. All the hemp sold in the U.S., including the food and body products lining the shelves of Costco, the Body Shop and Whole Foods is imported. As Americans buy hemp, Britain, China, France and Germany are among the countries benefiting from America’s incoherent drug policy. Last year, Canadian farmers grew 67,000 acres of hemp and say they may not be able to grow enough to fill this year's orders. David Bronner began adding hemp oil — imported from Canada — to his liquid soaps in 1999. "I thought this was the most ridiculous piece of the drug war," he says "that a non-drug agricultural crop was caught up here."
Even as hemp fought to differentiate itself from pot, it undeniably benefited from its association with it, successfully riding the wave of marijuana legalization in states throughout the country. And as hemp lobbyists worked to change cannabis laws, high-profile court cases highlighted the confusing and capricious application of federal drug laws to the non-drug plant.
In 2001, in a fit of drug war paranoia, the DEA declared a ban on foods that contain hemp including certain cereals, salad dressings, breads and veggie burgers — claiming that the foods contained THC. Effected businesses were given 120 days to dump their inventories. With the hemp food market just taking off, 200 hemp companies, including Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, took the DEA to court. The lawsuit allowed the hemp industry to make its case in the media. Hemp won the bruising battle nearly three years later when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the government couldn't regulate the trace amounts of THC that occur naturally in hemp seeds.
When the first hemp bill was introduced in Congress in 2005, it was lonely business. "At that point we had Ron Paul, a pariah in the Republican Party, recalls Steenstra. “Nobody wanted to do anything with us and we could barely get co-sponsors. We'd say hemp and they’d say 'no, no, no, that's pot.' We banged on a lot of doors and worked in state legislatures to get laws changed there. A lot of states considered marijuana to be all cannabis and they didn’t distinguish. We knew we had to change minds in both places." It wasn't until 2012 that the first hemp bill was introduced in the Senate, when Oregon’s liberal senator, Ron Wyden, took to the floor to call federal hemp prohibition "the poster child for dumb regulation."
What worked was the lure of jobs and economic development. When Comer, a family farmer who served six terms in the Kentucky state legislature, ran for agriculture commissioner in 2011, campaigning on industrial hemp was a no-brainer. Kentucky was once the heartland of hemp production in the U.S. and people came out of the woodwork to talk to Comer about it. "And it was all over the spectrum," Comer tells Rolling Stone. "Liberals liked it because they were environmentalists and conservatives in the Tea Party liked it because it was an example of government overreach. Older voters were overwhelmingly for hemp because they remembered when their families grew it. They didn't know you could make automobile parts from it because at the time, all you made with hemp in Kentucky was rope."
Comer is credited with extraordinary consensus building in a state known for legislative gridlock and political enmity. Early last year, the Kentucky legislature passed Senate Bill 50 over the objections of the state police commissioner who insisted that state police conducting pot eradication programs couldn't tell the difference between hemp and marijuana.
On Capitol Hill last Thursday, Rep. Massie and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) each introduced amendments that would prevent the DEA and Justice Dept. from spending any money to interfere with states who are implementing their hemp laws. In the last 50 years there has only been one hemp vote in the House and that was last year. Suddenly there’ve been two more.
Without seeds, how long will it take to make hemp just another American crop like soybeans? "There’s definitely a process we have to get through," says Bronner. "We’ve given the Canadians and the Europeans and the Chinese a huge head start on the modern global awareness of hemp. They’ve had years of breeding programs to optimize their cultivars for their climate conditions and we’ve been doing nothing."
Canadian agronomist Anndrea Hermann says finding the right hemp varieties for the U.S. is crucial. "I would never tell a farmer anywhere, 'let's start mass cultivation next year,’" Hermann tells Rolling Stone. Hermann lives in a country with a fully-regulated hemp industry. "And we have to have the farmers’ voice. If we don't have farmers, we don’t have agriculture."
In Kentucky, farming programs for veterans that teach families how to grow their own food have just sewn hemp in collaboration with the agriculture department and Vote Hemp. Mike Lewis, a military veteran and food security expert who founded the group in 2012 when his brother returned from the war in Afghanistan with a brain injury, now has grant money for a hemp textile project and part-time work for twelve people. This in a state with a 19% poverty rate. "Appalachia has a strong history of textiles," Lewis observes. "In my vision that's what's missing from rural communities, ag income. People used to survive off tobacco. If it has to be hemp for textiles, let's do it. People call hemp a panacea, a pipe dream, but look how many people came together from all walks of life in Kentucky to make this happen."
Rand Paul’s father — who got on the hemp bandwagon on a dare from Ralph Nader — saw it coming. "I use [hemp's illegality] quite frequently as an example of government stupidity," Ron Paul told Mother Jones in 2011. "And I am sure I get credibility for this, especially with the young people, because that's where I get my strongest support. If you are concerned about the economy, then why are we doing these dumb things?”
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Other Cannabis War : The Battle Over Hemp
How a 20-year campaign to distinguish industrial hemp from marijuana scored an epic victory
By Coco McPherson, June 3, 2014
In the annals of strange bedfellow politics, the story of how, in 2014, industrial hemp emerged from Drug War purgatory is an epic one. But even for long-time hemp advocates, the sight of Rep. Thomas Massie, a conservative Republican from northern Kentucky, biting jubilantly into a hemp bar on live TV last month was startling.
Buried in February’s $956 billion farm bill is an amendment, co-sponsored by Rep. Massie, that legally distinguishes industrial hemp from marijuana after decades of conflation. It defines hemp as an agricultural crop rather than a drug — and effectively frees American farmers to grow it for the first time in almost 60 years.
Widespread cultivation won't happen overnight - for one thing, the U.S. has no hemp seeds or hemp-processing facilities. But the sudden change in hemp's fortunes shocks its supporters. "If you'd asked me five years ago if I thought we could get Mitch McConnell to introduce a hemp bill, I'd have told you it was impossible," says Eric Steenstra, president of Vote Hemp, the advocacy group formed in 2000 to educate and lobby for hemp legalization in state legislatures and on the Hill. "This is huge."
It’s also been a long time coming. For 20 years, legislators, farmers, hippies, activists, agency heads and agronomists have worked to recast hemp as a game-changer, an American cash crop that could jump-start the country's next economic revival. Kentucky took the legislative lead with outright advocacy by its agriculture department. Unlike a high-profile 2007 lawsuit in which two North Dakota hemp farmers took on the DEA without support from their elected officials in Washington, Kentucky brought its entire federal (and much of its state) delegation to the party.
Among hemp’s biggest advocates are Kentucky’s Republican senator, Rand Paul, the avowed champion of limited government who tweets about the tragedy of the drug war, and James Comer, the state’s young Republican agriculture commissioner who successfully sued the DEA last month for seizing Kentucky’s imported hemp seeds and for interfering with the implementation of pilot programs made legal by the farm bill. And Massie, a fiscal hawk active in last year’s government shutdown who once studied robotics at MIT.
Colorado, Vermont and Kentucky wasted no time launching their industrial hemp research and the pilot programs provided for in the farm bill. In an obscure notice dated April 16th, the USDA alerted state and county officials that farmers in states that ok’d hemp production (15 so far) could now include hemp acreage in their crop reports. The floodgates have opened.
From California and representing the activist left: David Bronner, president of his family's Magic Soap empire. Bronner has thrown the weight of probably the most iconic hippie brand in the world behind hemp legalization and GMO-labeling initiatives. In 2012, Bronner locked himself in a cage with a thatch of hemp plants in clear view of the White House; he was preparing a hemp oil sandwich when he was sawed out of his prison by the D.C. fire department and hauled away by police.
Explaining industrial hemp has taken decades. A lot of people don’t know what it is and many think it’s pot. "It’s just been incredibly frustrating for the hemp industry that hemp has been lumped legally and in public perception with marijuana," Bronner tells Rolling Stone.
Hemp isn't weed and hemp can’t get you high—it's a bust as a recreational drug. Hemp is marijuana's non-psychoactive sibling, derived, like weed, from the cannabis sativa plant. The current American hemp market is estimated at nearly half a billion dollars, with hemp’s oil, seed and fiber used in food, carbon-negative building materials, and automobile composites that are already inside millions of cars. Hemp cultivation is also as old as the country itself. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it, hemp was once legal tender, and several drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper. During WWII, American farmers were paid to grow it, cultivating more than 150 million pounds of industrial hemp to support the American war effort. The U.S. government's 1942 propaganda film, Hemp for Victory, depicts workers toiling happily to harvest lush fields of hemp; the fibrous plants to be later converted to materiel like rope and parachute webbing for the military.
Despite its patriotic bona fides, cannabis sativa was a victim of reefer madness in almost every decade of the 20th Century. Praised, taxed, vilified, confused with pot and blamed for killing sprees and the theft of American jobs by immigrants. The final nail in hemp's coffin was its classification as a Schedule 1 narcotic in 1970's Controlled Substances Act.
The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a commercial hemp industry. All the hemp sold in the U.S., including the food and body products lining the shelves of Costco, the Body Shop and Whole Foods is imported. As Americans buy hemp, Britain, China, France and Germany are among the countries benefiting from America’s incoherent drug policy. Last year, Canadian farmers grew 67,000 acres of hemp and say they may not be able to grow enough to fill this year's orders. David Bronner began adding hemp oil — imported from Canada — to his liquid soaps in 1999. "I thought this was the most ridiculous piece of the drug war," he says "that a non-drug agricultural crop was caught up here."
Even as hemp fought to differentiate itself from pot, it undeniably benefited from its association with it, successfully riding the wave of marijuana legalization in states throughout the country. And as hemp lobbyists worked to change cannabis laws, high-profile court cases highlighted the confusing and capricious application of federal drug laws to the non-drug plant.
In 2001, in a fit of drug war paranoia, the DEA declared a ban on foods that contain hemp including certain cereals, salad dressings, breads and veggie burgers — claiming that the foods contained THC. Effected businesses were given 120 days to dump their inventories. With the hemp food market just taking off, 200 hemp companies, including Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, took the DEA to court. The lawsuit allowed the hemp industry to make its case in the media. Hemp won the bruising battle nearly three years later when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the government couldn't regulate the trace amounts of THC that occur naturally in hemp seeds.
When the first hemp bill was introduced in Congress in 2005, it was lonely business. "At that point we had Ron Paul, a pariah in the Republican Party, recalls Steenstra. “Nobody wanted to do anything with us and we could barely get co-sponsors. We'd say hemp and they’d say 'no, no, no, that's pot.' We banged on a lot of doors and worked in state legislatures to get laws changed there. A lot of states considered marijuana to be all cannabis and they didn’t distinguish. We knew we had to change minds in both places." It wasn't until 2012 that the first hemp bill was introduced in the Senate, when Oregon’s liberal senator, Ron Wyden, took to the floor to call federal hemp prohibition "the poster child for dumb regulation."
What worked was the lure of jobs and economic development. When Comer, a family farmer who served six terms in the Kentucky state legislature, ran for agriculture commissioner in 2011, campaigning on industrial hemp was a no-brainer. Kentucky was once the heartland of hemp production in the U.S. and people came out of the woodwork to talk to Comer about it. "And it was all over the spectrum," Comer tells Rolling Stone. "Liberals liked it because they were environmentalists and conservatives in the Tea Party liked it because it was an example of government overreach. Older voters were overwhelmingly for hemp because they remembered when their families grew it. They didn't know you could make automobile parts from it because at the time, all you made with hemp in Kentucky was rope."
Comer is credited with extraordinary consensus building in a state known for legislative gridlock and political enmity. Early last year, the Kentucky legislature passed Senate Bill 50 over the objections of the state police commissioner who insisted that state police conducting pot eradication programs couldn't tell the difference between hemp and marijuana.
On Capitol Hill last Thursday, Rep. Massie and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) each introduced amendments that would prevent the DEA and Justice Dept. from spending any money to interfere with states who are implementing their hemp laws. In the last 50 years there has only been one hemp vote in the House and that was last year. Suddenly there’ve been two more.
Without seeds, how long will it take to make hemp just another American crop like soybeans? "There’s definitely a process we have to get through," says Bronner. "We’ve given the Canadians and the Europeans and the Chinese a huge head start on the modern global awareness of hemp. They’ve had years of breeding programs to optimize their cultivars for their climate conditions and we’ve been doing nothing."
Canadian agronomist Anndrea Hermann says finding the right hemp varieties for the U.S. is crucial. "I would never tell a farmer anywhere, 'let's start mass cultivation next year,’" Hermann tells Rolling Stone. Hermann lives in a country with a fully-regulated hemp industry. "And we have to have the farmers’ voice. If we don't have farmers, we don’t have agriculture."
In Kentucky, farming programs for veterans that teach families how to grow their own food have just sewn hemp in collaboration with the agriculture department and Vote Hemp. Mike Lewis, a military veteran and food security expert who founded the group in 2012 when his brother returned from the war in Afghanistan with a brain injury, now has grant money for a hemp textile project and part-time work for twelve people. This in a state with a 19% poverty rate. "Appalachia has a strong history of textiles," Lewis observes. "In my vision that's what's missing from rural communities, ag income. People used to survive off tobacco. If it has to be hemp for textiles, let's do it. People call hemp a panacea, a pipe dream, but look how many people came together from all walks of life in Kentucky to make this happen."
Rand Paul’s father — who got on the hemp bandwagon on a dare from Ralph Nader — saw it coming. "I use [hemp's illegality] quite frequently as an example of government stupidity," Ron Paul told Mother Jones in 2011. "And I am sure I get credibility for this, especially with the young people, because that's where I get my strongest support. If you are concerned about the economy, then why are we doing these dumb things?”
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Tuesday, June 3, 2014
"Why aren't corrupt politicians charged with treason?" It's time to get them out of office!
...................................................................................................................................................................
Letter: Politicians won't change, so let's change politicians
By Richard Johnson, June 3, 2014
I changed my LiveStrong T-shirt to read LiveWrong. I am convinced our society is starting to embrace winning at any cost.
I am not referring to athletes but to the world of business and government.
The Madoff gang almost financially destroyed our country. Why weren’t they charged with treason? According to Wikipedia, 68 elected officials, from 2010 to 2014, used their positions for personal gain. The figures are based on current investigations, arrests and convictions.
Why aren’t corrupt politicians charged with treason? Why are some of the accused permitted to resign to avoid prosecution and still retain pensions with benefits?
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said: “Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials be subject to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizens. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.”
The U.S. is the largest conventional weapons dealer in the world, yet we haggle over gun rights in our own country.
Members of Congress have gotten 15 percent richer, while the net worth of Americans has dropped 8 percent.
More than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. If you count governors, there are 595 politicians who are responsible for our country’s problems. Votes are not made for the betterment of the country; special interest groups buy them.
There is a sobering quote in the movie “Killing them Softly: “I’m living in America, and in America you’re on your own. America is not a country it is a business.” When it comes to politics, capitalism is at its worse.
Politicians aren't changing, so we need to change all the politicians.
It’s our only option.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Letter: Politicians won't change, so let's change politicians
By Richard Johnson, June 3, 2014
I changed my LiveStrong T-shirt to read LiveWrong. I am convinced our society is starting to embrace winning at any cost.
I am not referring to athletes but to the world of business and government.
The Madoff gang almost financially destroyed our country. Why weren’t they charged with treason? According to Wikipedia, 68 elected officials, from 2010 to 2014, used their positions for personal gain. The figures are based on current investigations, arrests and convictions.
Why aren’t corrupt politicians charged with treason? Why are some of the accused permitted to resign to avoid prosecution and still retain pensions with benefits?
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said: “Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials be subject to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizens. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.”
The U.S. is the largest conventional weapons dealer in the world, yet we haggle over gun rights in our own country.
Members of Congress have gotten 15 percent richer, while the net worth of Americans has dropped 8 percent.
More than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. If you count governors, there are 595 politicians who are responsible for our country’s problems. Votes are not made for the betterment of the country; special interest groups buy them.
There is a sobering quote in the movie “Killing them Softly: “I’m living in America, and in America you’re on your own. America is not a country it is a business.” When it comes to politics, capitalism is at its worse.
Politicians aren't changing, so we need to change all the politicians.
It’s our only option.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... Congress needs to get past political posturing and act" about Bernie Sanders' bill for VA reform
...................................................................................................................................................................
VA reform should be above politics, but it's not likely
The Ledger-Enquirer, June 2, 2014
It's appropriate that the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is a political independent. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Friday shared the highlights of his bill to reform the VA medical system. If anything should be above partisanship, it's reform of the appalling treatment of veterans in VA medical facilities.
The issue isn't and won't be apolitical, of course; the law of gravity might be easier to suspend than the laws of Capitol Hill, especially in an election year.
But we can always hope.
Certainly the history of the issue (politically selective timelines from both sides of the aisle notwithstanding) makes it clear the rot in the VA medical bureaucracy has been developing long enough for blame to be spread quite widely and thickly.
A report from a 2003 task force established by then-President George W. Bush indicated that more than 236,000 veterans were subjected to waiting times of six months or more -- and this for a first appointment or first visit follow-up. Four years later, the Veterans Affairs inspector general reported to the Senate that "schedulers at some facilities were interpreting the guidance from their managers to reduce waiting times as instruction to never put patients on the electronic waiting list. This seems to have resulted in some 'gaming' of the scheduling process." In 2010 more documentation reached the same conclusion. And two years ago a former VA hospital administrator said records were being manipulated not just for bureaucratic purposes, but to qualify some officials for bonuses.
(Surely prison space can be made available for people responsible for so callous and cynical an abuse of veterans.)
In all, the Associated Press reported, there have been 19 separate VA inspector general reports since 2005 on how long vets have had to wait for treatment at VA medical centers.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki yielded to calls for his resignation last week, conceding that he was "too trusting of some, and I accepted, as accurate, reports that I now know to have been misleading with regard to patient wait times."
But Shinseki's departure doesn't solve problems that were simmering before he arrived and are still there now that he's gone. This is where Congress needs to get past political posturing and act.
At first glance, there's little in Sanders' proposed reforms to debate. The bill would provide for veterans subjected to long delays in treatment to get it at private facilities, or at military or community health centers. It provides funding for more doctors, nurses and other health care professionals, and funds scholarships and/or college loan relief for doctors and nurses who go to work with the VA.
There will be, and should be, healthy debate over the details. It would be encouraging, even inspiring, if that debate could be about the best interests of veterans instead of the best political interests of Congress.
Again, we can always hope.
...................................................................................................................................................................
VA reform should be above politics, but it's not likely
The Ledger-Enquirer, June 2, 2014
It's appropriate that the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is a political independent. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Friday shared the highlights of his bill to reform the VA medical system. If anything should be above partisanship, it's reform of the appalling treatment of veterans in VA medical facilities.
The issue isn't and won't be apolitical, of course; the law of gravity might be easier to suspend than the laws of Capitol Hill, especially in an election year.
But we can always hope.
Certainly the history of the issue (politically selective timelines from both sides of the aisle notwithstanding) makes it clear the rot in the VA medical bureaucracy has been developing long enough for blame to be spread quite widely and thickly.
A report from a 2003 task force established by then-President George W. Bush indicated that more than 236,000 veterans were subjected to waiting times of six months or more -- and this for a first appointment or first visit follow-up. Four years later, the Veterans Affairs inspector general reported to the Senate that "schedulers at some facilities were interpreting the guidance from their managers to reduce waiting times as instruction to never put patients on the electronic waiting list. This seems to have resulted in some 'gaming' of the scheduling process." In 2010 more documentation reached the same conclusion. And two years ago a former VA hospital administrator said records were being manipulated not just for bureaucratic purposes, but to qualify some officials for bonuses.
(Surely prison space can be made available for people responsible for so callous and cynical an abuse of veterans.)
In all, the Associated Press reported, there have been 19 separate VA inspector general reports since 2005 on how long vets have had to wait for treatment at VA medical centers.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki yielded to calls for his resignation last week, conceding that he was "too trusting of some, and I accepted, as accurate, reports that I now know to have been misleading with regard to patient wait times."
But Shinseki's departure doesn't solve problems that were simmering before he arrived and are still there now that he's gone. This is where Congress needs to get past political posturing and act.
At first glance, there's little in Sanders' proposed reforms to debate. The bill would provide for veterans subjected to long delays in treatment to get it at private facilities, or at military or community health centers. It provides funding for more doctors, nurses and other health care professionals, and funds scholarships and/or college loan relief for doctors and nurses who go to work with the VA.
There will be, and should be, healthy debate over the details. It would be encouraging, even inspiring, if that debate could be about the best interests of veterans instead of the best political interests of Congress.
Again, we can always hope.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"The most Darth-like of the new Robber Barons are the Koch Brothers ... Welcome to the American Kochocracy."
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Kochocracy
By Will Durst, June 2, 2014
In the bad old days, medieval German Lords figured out how to pocket some quick coin by charging a toll on the primitive paths meandering across their lands. The money wasn't used to improve the roads or better the lives of the peasants or clean the rivers their pigs pooped in but rather heighten the piles in their treasury. Even back then, you just couldn't have enough pewter candlesticks.
These were the first robber barons. Literally. Rich people whose sole pursuit was to survive to become richer people. A criminal aristocracy. A term history has proved redundant.
During the Gilded Age, the flushest 1 percent of the country held 1/3 of the national income. In the 1920s, this figure ramped up to 2/5ths. Molehills compared to today’s mountainous wealth, where the richest 400 American families control more money than the poorest 165 million of their fellow citizens put together. And if all 165 million were knelt end to end, those 400 families would have footrests from any compass point.
6 members of the Walton Family have accrued as much money as the bottom 41 percent of all Americans. Now, how hard would it be for them to cover the health care of Walmart employees? They’d still be worth as much as the bottom 34 percent. How many pewter candlesticks does one family need? You’d think they could get them wholesale.
In decision after decision the Supreme Court has equated money with free speech. Which would be great if it meant the more we spoke, the more we’re worth. But, alas, no. That’s not the deal. Pretty much the opposite, come to think of it.
Rich people have exploited these high court rulings like foxes given skeleton keys to the Tyson chicken empire. Any politician who espouses lowering taxes on the rich and blunting the powers of the poor gets backed. With unlimited sums. Of course the poor have free speech too, but we might as well be whispering downstage at a Metallica concert.
A plutocracy is a society where the rich make the rules- quickly becoming our norm. The 9th richest man in the world, Sheldon Adelson, focuses on politicians whose Israeli policies most closely mirror his. That’s it. One issue. In 2012, he gave 90 million to various GOP presidential candidates. And in the next election cycle, he is reportedly ready to triple that number, recently holding auditions in Las Vegas for his own personal presidential candidate American Idol. Once again: not Clay Aiken.
The most Darth-like of the new Robber Barons are the Koch Brothers, David and Charles, each richer than Adelson. These self-made inheritors of a vast oil empire are responsible for jumpstarting the Tea Party and ALEC, and are now hand picking candidates all over the country; pouring in vast amounts of money to get them and their skewed legacies elected. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is one of the first generation Kochbots.
If so desired, the Koch Family could spend a billion dollars a year for the next 85 years buying politicians. Bankrupting the rest of us through Kochbot legislated tolls on the primitive paths meandering across Koch owned lands. Especially egregious when ALL the lands are Koch owned. Welcome to the American Kochocracy.
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The Kochocracy
By Will Durst, June 2, 2014
In the bad old days, medieval German Lords figured out how to pocket some quick coin by charging a toll on the primitive paths meandering across their lands. The money wasn't used to improve the roads or better the lives of the peasants or clean the rivers their pigs pooped in but rather heighten the piles in their treasury. Even back then, you just couldn't have enough pewter candlesticks.
These were the first robber barons. Literally. Rich people whose sole pursuit was to survive to become richer people. A criminal aristocracy. A term history has proved redundant.
During the Gilded Age, the flushest 1 percent of the country held 1/3 of the national income. In the 1920s, this figure ramped up to 2/5ths. Molehills compared to today’s mountainous wealth, where the richest 400 American families control more money than the poorest 165 million of their fellow citizens put together. And if all 165 million were knelt end to end, those 400 families would have footrests from any compass point.
6 members of the Walton Family have accrued as much money as the bottom 41 percent of all Americans. Now, how hard would it be for them to cover the health care of Walmart employees? They’d still be worth as much as the bottom 34 percent. How many pewter candlesticks does one family need? You’d think they could get them wholesale.
In decision after decision the Supreme Court has equated money with free speech. Which would be great if it meant the more we spoke, the more we’re worth. But, alas, no. That’s not the deal. Pretty much the opposite, come to think of it.
Rich people have exploited these high court rulings like foxes given skeleton keys to the Tyson chicken empire. Any politician who espouses lowering taxes on the rich and blunting the powers of the poor gets backed. With unlimited sums. Of course the poor have free speech too, but we might as well be whispering downstage at a Metallica concert.
A plutocracy is a society where the rich make the rules- quickly becoming our norm. The 9th richest man in the world, Sheldon Adelson, focuses on politicians whose Israeli policies most closely mirror his. That’s it. One issue. In 2012, he gave 90 million to various GOP presidential candidates. And in the next election cycle, he is reportedly ready to triple that number, recently holding auditions in Las Vegas for his own personal presidential candidate American Idol. Once again: not Clay Aiken.
The most Darth-like of the new Robber Barons are the Koch Brothers, David and Charles, each richer than Adelson. These self-made inheritors of a vast oil empire are responsible for jumpstarting the Tea Party and ALEC, and are now hand picking candidates all over the country; pouring in vast amounts of money to get them and their skewed legacies elected. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is one of the first generation Kochbots.
If so desired, the Koch Family could spend a billion dollars a year for the next 85 years buying politicians. Bankrupting the rest of us through Kochbot legislated tolls on the primitive paths meandering across Koch owned lands. Especially egregious when ALL the lands are Koch owned. Welcome to the American Kochocracy.
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Monday, June 2, 2014
"The five-ninths [of the US Supreme Court] also do not get that established religion and politics, like conformity and individualism, do not mix"
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Letter: Religion and politics don’t mix
By William F. Bertolette, June 2, 2014
The U.S. Supreme Court’s latest drama, allowing prayer in public meetings, might as well be the scream accompanying our Constitution’s post-Citizens United free fall. Please remember that earlier shameful piece of work for the unfair political leverage it gives corporate bigwigs using shareholder money.
The five-ninths who ruled have now tagged themselves for the ages as people who do not get the practical logic of the First Amendment’s “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” They don’t get that separating religion from government protects everyone’s religious or nonreligious freedom. Instead, they have read religious freedom as license to foist majoritarian ideals on everyone else — the “majority” likely to be determined by city council seats.
The five-ninths also do not get that established religion and politics, like conformity and individualism, do not mix. The supposed moral high ground that vague religious affiliations seem to afford political contenders only clouds real issues that should be the focus of government.
Besides blatant discrimination against non-Christians that will result from this ruling, the argument that it favors Christianity also offends me. Who speaks for all Christians? Nobody, not even the Pope.
Furthermore, the decision’s exclusionary and authoritarian overtones sound distinctly un-Christian; didn’t Jesus himself suggest rendering to Caesar (i.e., the state) the things that are Caesar’s?
In other words, pay your taxes and keep religion purely personal.
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Letter: Religion and politics don’t mix
By William F. Bertolette, June 2, 2014
The U.S. Supreme Court’s latest drama, allowing prayer in public meetings, might as well be the scream accompanying our Constitution’s post-Citizens United free fall. Please remember that earlier shameful piece of work for the unfair political leverage it gives corporate bigwigs using shareholder money.
The five-ninths who ruled have now tagged themselves for the ages as people who do not get the practical logic of the First Amendment’s “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” They don’t get that separating religion from government protects everyone’s religious or nonreligious freedom. Instead, they have read religious freedom as license to foist majoritarian ideals on everyone else — the “majority” likely to be determined by city council seats.
The five-ninths also do not get that established religion and politics, like conformity and individualism, do not mix. The supposed moral high ground that vague religious affiliations seem to afford political contenders only clouds real issues that should be the focus of government.
Besides blatant discrimination against non-Christians that will result from this ruling, the argument that it favors Christianity also offends me. Who speaks for all Christians? Nobody, not even the Pope.
Furthermore, the decision’s exclusionary and authoritarian overtones sound distinctly un-Christian; didn’t Jesus himself suggest rendering to Caesar (i.e., the state) the things that are Caesar’s?
In other words, pay your taxes and keep religion purely personal.
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Written by a Republican..... wonder if he follows his own advice?
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The nature of politics
By John Pickerill, June 3, 2014
Whether a voter is Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, other political party or independent, he should insist that a candidate articulate and follow a set of principles that voters can later hold the candidate accountable to. For political parties that set of principles is generally their Party’s platform. For Republican voters, that means they expect candidates bearing the Republican label will make decisions that are fiscally responsible, obey the Constitution, respect personal liberty, support free markets and let people take responsibility for their own lives.
Demagogues enjoy taking a principled stand by the proponents of liberty and reason, and then grossly distorting the truth to make it sound like it supports something ugly and mean. If one suggests that candidates should support their own Party’s platform, they will twist it into some sort of personal agenda by a “party boss” who is completely uncompromising and non-cooperative, give the impression he is commanding all candidates follow his every instruction. They tend to use fear tactics, and say if you don’t follow their plan you will be responsible for unemployment, dwindling property values and shrinking public services. They will give dire warnings that the community will slide backwards and slowly die. They will try to convince you that all these things will happen if you don’t have “smart” people to take care of you, and that only they can provide the “wisdom” to rule over us.
Perhaps one way to identify the demagogues before you vote is to ask candidates a few simple questions:
Question #1: “As a candidate, what is your standard of principles that will guide your decision-making once you are in office?”
Question #2: “Do you think government can do anything it wants, pass any law or ordinance it wants, tax and spend on whatever purpose it wants, so long as a majority of its members agree to it?”
Question #3: “If not, then what standard tells members of government what they are allowed and not allowed to do?”
The principled candidate will embrace the Rule of Law, be transparent about what he stands for and allow himself to be held accountable to it. The demagogue will hide from all these things.
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The nature of politics
By John Pickerill, June 3, 2014
“Politics breeds demagogues — politicians and media pundits alike. Demagogues seek influence and political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears and expectations of the public. They do not enlighten; they browbeat and play rhetorical games.” — retired Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas)The inability of elected leaders to actually articulate and follow principles, any principles, is maybe the biggest reason people hate politicians. This frustration is why few people show up to public meetings or become active in civics. It increases voter apathy and is a significant cause of low voter turnout. Unfortunately, this attitude by voters gives rise to more demagogues.
Whether a voter is Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, other political party or independent, he should insist that a candidate articulate and follow a set of principles that voters can later hold the candidate accountable to. For political parties that set of principles is generally their Party’s platform. For Republican voters, that means they expect candidates bearing the Republican label will make decisions that are fiscally responsible, obey the Constitution, respect personal liberty, support free markets and let people take responsibility for their own lives.
Demagogues enjoy taking a principled stand by the proponents of liberty and reason, and then grossly distorting the truth to make it sound like it supports something ugly and mean. If one suggests that candidates should support their own Party’s platform, they will twist it into some sort of personal agenda by a “party boss” who is completely uncompromising and non-cooperative, give the impression he is commanding all candidates follow his every instruction. They tend to use fear tactics, and say if you don’t follow their plan you will be responsible for unemployment, dwindling property values and shrinking public services. They will give dire warnings that the community will slide backwards and slowly die. They will try to convince you that all these things will happen if you don’t have “smart” people to take care of you, and that only they can provide the “wisdom” to rule over us.
Perhaps one way to identify the demagogues before you vote is to ask candidates a few simple questions:
Question #1: “As a candidate, what is your standard of principles that will guide your decision-making once you are in office?”
Question #2: “Do you think government can do anything it wants, pass any law or ordinance it wants, tax and spend on whatever purpose it wants, so long as a majority of its members agree to it?”
Question #3: “If not, then what standard tells members of government what they are allowed and not allowed to do?”
The principled candidate will embrace the Rule of Law, be transparent about what he stands for and allow himself to be held accountable to it. The demagogue will hide from all these things.
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"... the Republicans feigning the most concern for veterans are the ones most at fault for the crisis in veterans' health care"
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Fake Political Outrage Is the Real V.A. Scandal
By Carl Gibson, June 2, 2014
Since the Afghanistan war began in 2001, over 2,700 veterans have taken their own lives. Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that in 2010 alone, 22 veterans committed suicide each day -- that's another wounded warrior gone every 65 minutes. Luckily for Army Reserve veteran Kye Hardy of Ashland, Kentucky, who served for a year in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, none of the soldiers he fought alongside have taken that drastic step yet.
"I was lucky to join a unit of men who knew how to keep younger veteran soldiers safe even after coming home," Hardy said. "I don't go a week without calling or receiving a call from someone I deployed with just to chat for a bit."
Hardy, an E-4 specialist, is diagnosed with muscle damage and potential spinal damage, and qualifies for VA services. However, the years-long backlog has kept him from applying, as he wants those with more serious injuries to get the treatment they've been waiting for rather than adding to the backlog. Hardy doesn't believe politicians' outrage over the VA backlog is genuine. Rather than the resignation of top VA officials like the recent exit of General Shinseki and a continued top-down bureaucratic structure, Hardy instead wants to see a more community-based, veteran-led approach to VA services.
"Wounded warriors who are on disability for the remainder of their lives oftentimes have serious trouble readjusting to civilian life," Hardy said. "[They] seem to improve when they're communicating with other veterans."
However, the Republicans feigning the most concern for veterans are the ones most at fault for the crisis in veterans' health care. Paul Ryan, author of three separate GOP-approved budget plans that severely cut VA services, has made no bones about his plans to privatize Medicare and turn it into a voucher system. He's also called for changes in VA services that would cut off care for 1.3 million vets. Outrage over the VA scandal could also be manipulated by Ryan and his ilk to force a similar privatization over veterans' health care.
The extreme rightists who control the House of Representatives don't want to privatize the VA to help veterans - if the Republican majority truly cared about veterans, they wouldn't have repeatedly voted against bills providing jobs, homes, and health care to veterans and their families. The budget deal that Ryan and Senator Patty Murray approved last year cut veterans' pensions by $6 billion. The GOP actually wants to see the VA fail to score more political points.
By continuously cutting VA services, the far-right wants to reinforce their anti-government narrative by cementing the idea into people's heads that government is bloated and inefficient, and that private companies unaccountable to voters should seize control of public assets. This is why GOP leaders in Congress don't seem to mind that the approval rating of Congress has slipped consistently in the polls - they're counting on voters to blame the president and his party in the months before the next Congressional elections. They're also counting on voters to grow increasingly mistrustful of government and public services in general.
When Republicans held the White House between 2000 and 2008, they demanded that everyone stand with the troops that they sent overseas to fight a costly war waged on false premises. As President Bush stated, Americans could either stand with the president and his war or be considered sympathizers with the enemy. But now that troops have left Iraq and are soon to be leaving Afghanistan, veterans coming home with multiple physical and mental health issues have been left by the Republican-led House and a relentlessly-filibustering Senate minority to fend for themselves. It's similar to the GOP's belief in fighting for children while they're still growing fetuses in a womb, but cutting off their Medicaid, WIC, and food stamps once they're born. They're pro-war, but anti-vets. They're pro-life, but anti-children.
The American public must not allow themselves to be fooled by the GOP's blustering over the VA backlog. It's certainly a tragedy that 40 vets died while waiting for health care in Phoenix, but instead of blaming overworked and underpaid medical staff and an administration dealing with an uncooperative Congress that's trying its best to make the government fail the people, voters should blame hypocrites and deficit hawks in Washington who have allowed a longtime crisis to turn into a scandal. When someone runs for office on a platform of cutting government services to pieces, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that government services under their leadership have been cut to pieces.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Fake Political Outrage Is the Real V.A. Scandal
By Carl Gibson, June 2, 2014
Since the Afghanistan war began in 2001, over 2,700 veterans have taken their own lives. Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that in 2010 alone, 22 veterans committed suicide each day -- that's another wounded warrior gone every 65 minutes. Luckily for Army Reserve veteran Kye Hardy of Ashland, Kentucky, who served for a year in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, none of the soldiers he fought alongside have taken that drastic step yet.
"I was lucky to join a unit of men who knew how to keep younger veteran soldiers safe even after coming home," Hardy said. "I don't go a week without calling or receiving a call from someone I deployed with just to chat for a bit."
Hardy, an E-4 specialist, is diagnosed with muscle damage and potential spinal damage, and qualifies for VA services. However, the years-long backlog has kept him from applying, as he wants those with more serious injuries to get the treatment they've been waiting for rather than adding to the backlog. Hardy doesn't believe politicians' outrage over the VA backlog is genuine. Rather than the resignation of top VA officials like the recent exit of General Shinseki and a continued top-down bureaucratic structure, Hardy instead wants to see a more community-based, veteran-led approach to VA services.
"Wounded warriors who are on disability for the remainder of their lives oftentimes have serious trouble readjusting to civilian life," Hardy said. "[They] seem to improve when they're communicating with other veterans."
However, the Republicans feigning the most concern for veterans are the ones most at fault for the crisis in veterans' health care. Paul Ryan, author of three separate GOP-approved budget plans that severely cut VA services, has made no bones about his plans to privatize Medicare and turn it into a voucher system. He's also called for changes in VA services that would cut off care for 1.3 million vets. Outrage over the VA scandal could also be manipulated by Ryan and his ilk to force a similar privatization over veterans' health care.
The extreme rightists who control the House of Representatives don't want to privatize the VA to help veterans - if the Republican majority truly cared about veterans, they wouldn't have repeatedly voted against bills providing jobs, homes, and health care to veterans and their families. The budget deal that Ryan and Senator Patty Murray approved last year cut veterans' pensions by $6 billion. The GOP actually wants to see the VA fail to score more political points.
By continuously cutting VA services, the far-right wants to reinforce their anti-government narrative by cementing the idea into people's heads that government is bloated and inefficient, and that private companies unaccountable to voters should seize control of public assets. This is why GOP leaders in Congress don't seem to mind that the approval rating of Congress has slipped consistently in the polls - they're counting on voters to blame the president and his party in the months before the next Congressional elections. They're also counting on voters to grow increasingly mistrustful of government and public services in general.
When Republicans held the White House between 2000 and 2008, they demanded that everyone stand with the troops that they sent overseas to fight a costly war waged on false premises. As President Bush stated, Americans could either stand with the president and his war or be considered sympathizers with the enemy. But now that troops have left Iraq and are soon to be leaving Afghanistan, veterans coming home with multiple physical and mental health issues have been left by the Republican-led House and a relentlessly-filibustering Senate minority to fend for themselves. It's similar to the GOP's belief in fighting for children while they're still growing fetuses in a womb, but cutting off their Medicaid, WIC, and food stamps once they're born. They're pro-war, but anti-vets. They're pro-life, but anti-children.
The American public must not allow themselves to be fooled by the GOP's blustering over the VA backlog. It's certainly a tragedy that 40 vets died while waiting for health care in Phoenix, but instead of blaming overworked and underpaid medical staff and an administration dealing with an uncooperative Congress that's trying its best to make the government fail the people, voters should blame hypocrites and deficit hawks in Washington who have allowed a longtime crisis to turn into a scandal. When someone runs for office on a platform of cutting government services to pieces, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that government services under their leadership have been cut to pieces.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Solving problems isn't what our politicians do. They comment on problems. They complain about problems. They condemn others for not solving problems. Then, they move on to the next problem."
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The political 'tigers' we elect are actually ...
By EJ Montini, June 2, 2014
Our elected officials think of themselves as political tigers.
Always on the prowl. Always on our behalf.
(I'll pause here until you stop laughing.)
Actually, politicians are more like kittens.
Easily distracted. Totally self-consumed.
They will be totally enthralled by the latest string toy to pass in front of them. Obsessed with it, as if it is the most important thing IN THE WORLD. Until … another piece of string crosses their path.
Last week it was the Veterans Affairs "scandal." They couldn't get enough of it. It was the most pressing issue the country needed to deal with, the most important thing in our world.
Until … the prisoner exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
Now THAT is the most important thing.
As if the VA problems have been solved. As if we have even started to solve the VA problems.
Doesn't matter.
Not to most of them.
Look at the appearances on TV made over the weekend member of Congress.
Solving problems isn't what our politicians do. They comment on problems. They complain about problems. They condemn others for not solving problems.
Then, they move on to the next problem. The next political piece of string. The next "scandal," which is best defined as anything that helps your party to beat the other guy's party in the next election, whether it's actually a scandal or not.
There are plenty of unanswered questions about the VA health system and about the release of Sgt. Bergdahl. The kittens in Congress will pretend to want to know the answers. And they will, sort of. But only if it helps them politically.
The real answers will depend on us. Citizens. Journalists. All of us. We can be as easily distracted as the pussycats we elect to public office. So we need to develop the eye of the tiger, to carefully and honestly evaluate the questions of the day and demand the answ … wait … what's that ... a new piece of string?
...................................................................................................................................................................
The political 'tigers' we elect are actually ...
By EJ Montini, June 2, 2014
Our elected officials think of themselves as political tigers.
Always on the prowl. Always on our behalf.
(I'll pause here until you stop laughing.)
Actually, politicians are more like kittens.
Easily distracted. Totally self-consumed.
They will be totally enthralled by the latest string toy to pass in front of them. Obsessed with it, as if it is the most important thing IN THE WORLD. Until … another piece of string crosses their path.
Last week it was the Veterans Affairs "scandal." They couldn't get enough of it. It was the most pressing issue the country needed to deal with, the most important thing in our world.
Until … the prisoner exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
Now THAT is the most important thing.
As if the VA problems have been solved. As if we have even started to solve the VA problems.
Doesn't matter.
Not to most of them.
Look at the appearances on TV made over the weekend member of Congress.
Solving problems isn't what our politicians do. They comment on problems. They complain about problems. They condemn others for not solving problems.
Then, they move on to the next problem. The next political piece of string. The next "scandal," which is best defined as anything that helps your party to beat the other guy's party in the next election, whether it's actually a scandal or not.
There are plenty of unanswered questions about the VA health system and about the release of Sgt. Bergdahl. The kittens in Congress will pretend to want to know the answers. And they will, sort of. But only if it helps them politically.
The real answers will depend on us. Citizens. Journalists. All of us. We can be as easily distracted as the pussycats we elect to public office. So we need to develop the eye of the tiger, to carefully and honestly evaluate the questions of the day and demand the answ … wait … what's that ... a new piece of string?
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Just when you think you can relax, here she comes again.... "like the Arctic plague"
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Peddling Palin's Snake Oil: More Duplicity and Deception from the Last Frontier
By Geoffrey Dunn, June 2, 2014
In the arc of Sarah Palin's meteoric rise to fame following her acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention and her equally meteoric crash a short time later during her infamous interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson -- a crash that has repeated itself over and over again in the six long years since -- there's been a troubling and ultimately duplicitous narrative sprung up by some commentators out of Alaska, where Palin was briefly a popular governor, and it goes something like this: that Sarah Palin was a beloved figure and a committed political crusader before her Cinderella appearance on the national stage, plucked out of obscurity, such as it was, by John McCain's bumbling and beleaguered presidential campaign.
It's a fanciful fairytale. Alaskans are a bit like a dysfunctional family: it's fine for them to call Aunt Sally a so-and-so or Uncle Johnny a this-and-that, but when Outsiders -- and that's what they call the rest of us in the Lower 48, Outsiders -- do the same, well, then, watch out, it's circle-the-wagon time.
There have been many Alaskans who run counter to this tendency -- they know who they are, and I continue to salute them -- but this peculiar zeitgeist has been manifest in a couple of ultimately problematic books about Palin that have emanated from the Last Frontier, and it's a tendency that has often found its way into the reporting of the website Alaska Dispatch (which, it should be noted, has now purchased the state's newspaper of record, the Anchorage Daily News).
And so we find on both the websites of the News and the Dispatch this past weekend still more of this disturbing tendency, in which one Maia Nolan-Partnow is trying to peddle the Palin snake oil once again.
For the past few months, Nolan-Partnow has found it her calling to review Palin's latest reality television schlock, Amazing America. (How any serious reporter could stomach this assignment is beyond me.) That said, following Episode 2, Nolan-Partnow issued a screed complaining that the show had "too little Sarah Palin," and that she was hoping for "more" of the former-half-term-quitter governor, who by just about any objective account is the most polarizing figure in recent American history. So be it. It takes all kinds, and, apparently, there's no accounting for taste.
But in her summary of the season finale, in which she asserts that we have met "a kinder, gentler Sarah Palin," Nolan-Partnow drops this absolute idiocy:
It's unadulterated bullshit from beginning to end. What people conveniently forget is that Palin was under serious siege as governor before McCain plucked her from oblivion. She had just fired the beloved Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt Monegan, in what was clearly an act of political vengeance. She had already fired many from the inner circle that had first helped to get her elected governor -- John Bitney, Christopher Clark, Paul Fuhs, and Mike Tibbles.
It didn't begin in Juneau. As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin betrayed the likes of police chief Irl Stambaugh, her campaign manager Laura Chase, and her onetime political ally John Stein. She stuck the stiletto in the backs of several Alaska icons, including Wally Hickel, Ted Stevens, and Frank and Lisa Murkowski. Sooner or later, Palin burned everyone with whom she came in contact, including her onetime hatchet man Frank Bailey. Palin's political road-kill extended all the way from Juneau to the Matanuska Valley and back thru Anchorage again.
She's like the Arctic plague.
The one common denominator that links the old Sarah Palin with the new isn't her political ideology (she has none), it's her blatant opportunism. Sarah Palin has always been about Sarah Palin. If it enhanced her hand to work with Democrats on oil-reform and sound like a socialist, then she was willing to cross the aisle. It wasn't from a truly noble impulse to curtail the stain of oil money in Alaska; it was about building her ratings in a state absolutely riddled with political scandals. As I chronicle in my book, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, Palin had the national stage on her mind for a long, long time. The governorship was simply a stepping stone. She was angling for the national spotlight all along.
Would she really be beloved by all? Whom is Nolan-Partnow trying to fool? Palin has left mayhem and destruction everywhere she's tromped throughout her life.
But Palin's latest apologist doesn't stop there. "Politics Sarah Palin," writes Nolan-Partnow, using the noun as an adjective, "is a bit like Rachel Maddow in her red-meat appeal to her base, but Reality TV Sarah Palin has more in common with Rachael Ray."
Rachel Ray? Ask Palin's former brother-in-law Mike Wooten how much like Rachel Ray she was.
And is Nolan-Partnow actually comparing Palin to Maddow, a Rhodes Scholar and a brilliant political analyst, to the woman who muddled her way through five colleges and who still can't string two sentences together?
Really?
I'm sorry, but Nolan-Partnow and other like-minded Alaskans who buy into her line of argument still have their heads stuck in the snow. Sarah Palin is never going to be the Rachel Ray of the Last Frontier, no matter how many times she clicks her heels together. She's detested both Inside and Outside, a mean-spirited, self-absorbed grifter out to make a cheap buck wherever she can. And here's the saddest part of the story: She doesn't give a damn about Alaska and never did.
The proof is in the pudding. Palin had every opportunity to run for Senate this season against a Democrat in a bright-red state, and she chose not to. The deadline for filing for the Senate seat is today; I'll bet Nolan-Partnow a case of caribou sausage that Palin doesn't file. Not only does she not have the spine, but she also lacks the courage of her convictions.
If anyone ever wanted to understand what truly motivates Sarah Palin, what moved her and inspired her ambitions, all one has to do is go to the clip file of the old Anchorage Daily News and find a fascinating account from April of 1996:
Does that really sound like Rachel Ray?
Of course, Nolan-Partnow mentions none of that, nor the infamous Palin crosshairs on the Arizona congressional district of Gabrielle Giffords. Of course not. That's because our real collective lives are not to be found on reality TV or in the musings of social commentators who view Palin through that distorted lens.
In the last six years, the real Sarah Palin has been revealed multiple times to the American people. She's not fooling anyone. No amount of reality television footage or duplicitous commentary can obscure that.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Peddling Palin's Snake Oil: More Duplicity and Deception from the Last Frontier
By Geoffrey Dunn, June 2, 2014
In the arc of Sarah Palin's meteoric rise to fame following her acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention and her equally meteoric crash a short time later during her infamous interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson -- a crash that has repeated itself over and over again in the six long years since -- there's been a troubling and ultimately duplicitous narrative sprung up by some commentators out of Alaska, where Palin was briefly a popular governor, and it goes something like this: that Sarah Palin was a beloved figure and a committed political crusader before her Cinderella appearance on the national stage, plucked out of obscurity, such as it was, by John McCain's bumbling and beleaguered presidential campaign.
It's a fanciful fairytale. Alaskans are a bit like a dysfunctional family: it's fine for them to call Aunt Sally a so-and-so or Uncle Johnny a this-and-that, but when Outsiders -- and that's what they call the rest of us in the Lower 48, Outsiders -- do the same, well, then, watch out, it's circle-the-wagon time.
There have been many Alaskans who run counter to this tendency -- they know who they are, and I continue to salute them -- but this peculiar zeitgeist has been manifest in a couple of ultimately problematic books about Palin that have emanated from the Last Frontier, and it's a tendency that has often found its way into the reporting of the website Alaska Dispatch (which, it should be noted, has now purchased the state's newspaper of record, the Anchorage Daily News).
And so we find on both the websites of the News and the Dispatch this past weekend still more of this disturbing tendency, in which one Maia Nolan-Partnow is trying to peddle the Palin snake oil once again.
For the past few months, Nolan-Partnow has found it her calling to review Palin's latest reality television schlock, Amazing America. (How any serious reporter could stomach this assignment is beyond me.) That said, following Episode 2, Nolan-Partnow issued a screed complaining that the show had "too little Sarah Palin," and that she was hoping for "more" of the former-half-term-quitter governor, who by just about any objective account is the most polarizing figure in recent American history. So be it. It takes all kinds, and, apparently, there's no accounting for taste.
But in her summary of the season finale, in which she asserts that we have met "a kinder, gentler Sarah Palin," Nolan-Partnow drops this absolute idiocy:
If Sarah Palin had never run for vice president of the United States, if she had instead finished her term as governor (or served a second term for good measure) and then gone into TV and talked about huntin' and fishin' and Alaska and tips for cooking up the perfect moose chili and maintaining volume on bad hair days, she wouldn't be Sarah Palin, Divisive Politician Who Also Does TV. She would be Sarah Palin, Engaging TV Personality, beloved by all.It's a great myth -- a huge lie, really -- embraced by some in the Last Frontier and Outside as well -- that if Palin hadn't been corrupted by those damn outside forces, she'd still be one of us, good ol' Sarah from Wasilla.
It's unadulterated bullshit from beginning to end. What people conveniently forget is that Palin was under serious siege as governor before McCain plucked her from oblivion. She had just fired the beloved Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt Monegan, in what was clearly an act of political vengeance. She had already fired many from the inner circle that had first helped to get her elected governor -- John Bitney, Christopher Clark, Paul Fuhs, and Mike Tibbles.
It didn't begin in Juneau. As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin betrayed the likes of police chief Irl Stambaugh, her campaign manager Laura Chase, and her onetime political ally John Stein. She stuck the stiletto in the backs of several Alaska icons, including Wally Hickel, Ted Stevens, and Frank and Lisa Murkowski. Sooner or later, Palin burned everyone with whom she came in contact, including her onetime hatchet man Frank Bailey. Palin's political road-kill extended all the way from Juneau to the Matanuska Valley and back thru Anchorage again.
She's like the Arctic plague.
The one common denominator that links the old Sarah Palin with the new isn't her political ideology (she has none), it's her blatant opportunism. Sarah Palin has always been about Sarah Palin. If it enhanced her hand to work with Democrats on oil-reform and sound like a socialist, then she was willing to cross the aisle. It wasn't from a truly noble impulse to curtail the stain of oil money in Alaska; it was about building her ratings in a state absolutely riddled with political scandals. As I chronicle in my book, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, Palin had the national stage on her mind for a long, long time. The governorship was simply a stepping stone. She was angling for the national spotlight all along.
Would she really be beloved by all? Whom is Nolan-Partnow trying to fool? Palin has left mayhem and destruction everywhere she's tromped throughout her life.
But Palin's latest apologist doesn't stop there. "Politics Sarah Palin," writes Nolan-Partnow, using the noun as an adjective, "is a bit like Rachel Maddow in her red-meat appeal to her base, but Reality TV Sarah Palin has more in common with Rachael Ray."
Rachel Ray? Ask Palin's former brother-in-law Mike Wooten how much like Rachel Ray she was.
And is Nolan-Partnow actually comparing Palin to Maddow, a Rhodes Scholar and a brilliant political analyst, to the woman who muddled her way through five colleges and who still can't string two sentences together?
Really?
I'm sorry, but Nolan-Partnow and other like-minded Alaskans who buy into her line of argument still have their heads stuck in the snow. Sarah Palin is never going to be the Rachel Ray of the Last Frontier, no matter how many times she clicks her heels together. She's detested both Inside and Outside, a mean-spirited, self-absorbed grifter out to make a cheap buck wherever she can. And here's the saddest part of the story: She doesn't give a damn about Alaska and never did.
The proof is in the pudding. Palin had every opportunity to run for Senate this season against a Democrat in a bright-red state, and she chose not to. The deadline for filing for the Senate seat is today; I'll bet Nolan-Partnow a case of caribou sausage that Palin doesn't file. Not only does she not have the spine, but she also lacks the courage of her convictions.
If anyone ever wanted to understand what truly motivates Sarah Palin, what moved her and inspired her ambitions, all one has to do is go to the clip file of the old Anchorage Daily News and find a fascinating account from April of 1996:
Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla [the paper failed to note that she was a seated member of the city council], told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana. And there, at J.C. Penney's cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist. 'We want to see Ivana,' said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, 'because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.'Sarah Palin has become the cheap, vacuous celebrity she so admired when she was a council member in Wasilla. She's become a caricature of her caricature. Unfortunately, her poison still spills across the nation's political landscape. Notice that Nolan-Partnow doesn't mention Palin's continued verbal assaults on both of the Obamas, her polarizing forays into Senate and Congressional races, and her recent disgusting remarks before the NRA declaring that "if I were in charge, [her enemies] would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."
Does that really sound like Rachel Ray?
Of course, Nolan-Partnow mentions none of that, nor the infamous Palin crosshairs on the Arizona congressional district of Gabrielle Giffords. Of course not. That's because our real collective lives are not to be found on reality TV or in the musings of social commentators who view Palin through that distorted lens.
In the last six years, the real Sarah Palin has been revealed multiple times to the American people. She's not fooling anyone. No amount of reality television footage or duplicitous commentary can obscure that.
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Sunday, June 1, 2014
The Koch brothers use the KochFacts website to attack reporters, trying to make journalists look dishonest
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The "Pugilistic" Way The Koch Brothers Handle The Media
By Joe Strupp, May 29, 2014
The author of Sons of Wichita, the new biography of the Koch brothers, never got the interviews he wanted with the archconservative billionaires. But he says the family nonetheless kept a close eye on his research, deploying the "very aggressive P.R. operation" they have used for years to silence media criticism.
"I had a senior person at [Koch Industries] basically tell me, 'Yeah, that is our strategy, we hit back and over time because of doing this the mainstream press has sort of learned a lesson to be careful about what they say about us,'" said Daniel Schulman, the book's author and a senior editor at the progressive Mother Jones magazine. "I would describe it as pugilistic, [which] is often their style in general."
Despite the lack of support from its subjects, Schulman's book is a fascinating portrait of the often bitter relationships between the four brothers -- Charles, David, Bill, and Frederick -- whose sprawling political empire has become a dominant force in the right-wing movement.
Schulman said the company's efforts to find out about his research and stop some from cooperating is not unusual, noting the Koch brothers and Koch Industries, the company at the root of their vast wealth, have a history of both intimidating reporters and seeking to counter negative coverage.
"People in the media certainly have what they would call their war stories dealing with Koch Industries," Schulman said in a lengthy interview with Media Matters. "There is a range of experiences. They have a very aggressive P.R. operation." He added, "I should also say that I like a lot of people I was in communication over there, they were nice people. But they were aggressive."
Schulman, whose book was published last week, said he began his research by writing a formal inquiry letter to each of the four brothers. He said only Frederick, the least involved in the company, would meet with him -- and then said he would only discuss his family if he received veto power over any third-party source material. Schulman declined.
At Koch Industries, which is headed by David and Charles, initial reaction was curious and somewhat cooperative, Schulman said. But it never amounted to any access to the two top executives.
"At one point they flew out to even talk to the publisher," Schulman recalled about a Koch executive. "They wanted to make sure this was going to be a fair book, they saw Mother Jones and immediately thought the worst. I was speaking to people there throughout the process, but they would never give me access to David or Charles, which I think was unfortunate because I do think that they had not much to lose and a lot to gain. I think these guy are all very interesting and should have their stories told."
But Koch Industries' interest did not end there, Schulman said.
"I certainly got the sense that there were ... certain people [to whom] they were probably saying, 'don't talk to him.' I definitely got that impression," Schulman said. "I definitely talked to people who said, 'yeah, I spoke to Charles and he said he would prefer that I don't speak to you.'"
The Koch concerns about the book went even further, Schulman said.
"I definitely got the sense that the Koch Industries folks were tracking what I was doing fairly closely," he explained. "In one instance, I interviewed a friend of theirs out in Wichita and ... I asked if I could record this interview and he said, 'sure, but I would like a copy of it if you wouldn't mind.' To which I said, 'okay, sure, fair deal.'"
Schulman said when he returned home, he sent the person a copy of the interview: "I followed up a couple of days later to make sure he had received it and I got his secretary on the line and she said, 'oh, so-and-so from Koch just stopped by to pick it up.'"
The author said in another instance he had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the federal government for some Koch Industries documents and heard back from the Justice Department that Koch Industries had filed its own FOIA about his inquiry.
Schulman describes in his book the tools the Kochs use to respond to press coverage they do not like and does not see the treatment he received as a surprise. Among their most effective weapon, Schulman said, is the KochFacts website, which the company launched to hit back at critical coverage.
The site offers company responses to coverage it finds negative, but has also made personal attacks on the credibility of reporters such as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Ken Vogel of Politico.
"This was their way of sort of bypassing the media to get their story out there," Schulman says of the site. "But at the same time, they've used this as a place to basically dump the correspondence of reporters and that sort of thing in order to sort of make journalists look dishonest and things of that nature. It's a place where they rebut media articles."
And he says it has worked, to an extent.
"In terms of the general P.R. operation, I think that KochFacts itself has been pretty effective at giving reporters pause," Schulman said. "Now you know that every email you send is going to find, could find its way on to that website."
He also pointed to other intimidating approaches the company has taken against the press, including "taking out web ads lambasting reporters such as Jane Mayer and others which is sort of shocking to us in the press to be treated like that. Their argument is that they feel like they are really getting beaten up in the press and they have to take action."
Mayer has been the Kochs' top journalistic target since her lengthy 2010 New Yorker piece titled "Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama."
In it, she detailed Charles and David Koch's hundreds of millions of dollars in political backing for conservative organizations. Not only did the Kochs attack Mayer publicly and on KochFacts.com, but they went so far as to write a stinging letter to the American Society of Magazine Editors urging the group not to honor the piece with its annual reporting award after Mayer received a nomination.
In another case, the Kochs took on InsideClimateNews.com, a Pulitzer Prize-winning website, and its editor, David Sassoon, after he wrote about the Koch's interests in Canadian oil. An online ad reportedly stated: "Activist/owner of InsideClimate News misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods about Koch. Get the full facts on KochFacts.com."
Schulman cites Powerlineblog.com as an ally for the Kochs, hinting that they seem to get their hands on company information and documents others could not.
"John Hinderaker [Powerline's editor] is quite frequently coming to their defense and sort of rebutting stories about the Kochs," Schulman said, citing a recent Washington Post story about Koch Industries' link to the Keystone pipeline, a report Hinderaker blasted. "He certainly quoted Mark Holden, the general counsel of Koch Industries and has in the past received internal documents from Koch Industries to push back."
Schulman said information or criticism about his book has yet to make it to KochFacts: "I haven't seen anything. I think they view the book as more or less fair, the only thing they said was that they are withholding their judgment and reviewing the book."
...................................................................................................................................................................
The "Pugilistic" Way The Koch Brothers Handle The Media
By Joe Strupp, May 29, 2014
The author of Sons of Wichita, the new biography of the Koch brothers, never got the interviews he wanted with the archconservative billionaires. But he says the family nonetheless kept a close eye on his research, deploying the "very aggressive P.R. operation" they have used for years to silence media criticism.
"I had a senior person at [Koch Industries] basically tell me, 'Yeah, that is our strategy, we hit back and over time because of doing this the mainstream press has sort of learned a lesson to be careful about what they say about us,'" said Daniel Schulman, the book's author and a senior editor at the progressive Mother Jones magazine. "I would describe it as pugilistic, [which] is often their style in general."
Despite the lack of support from its subjects, Schulman's book is a fascinating portrait of the often bitter relationships between the four brothers -- Charles, David, Bill, and Frederick -- whose sprawling political empire has become a dominant force in the right-wing movement.
Schulman said the company's efforts to find out about his research and stop some from cooperating is not unusual, noting the Koch brothers and Koch Industries, the company at the root of their vast wealth, have a history of both intimidating reporters and seeking to counter negative coverage.
"People in the media certainly have what they would call their war stories dealing with Koch Industries," Schulman said in a lengthy interview with Media Matters. "There is a range of experiences. They have a very aggressive P.R. operation." He added, "I should also say that I like a lot of people I was in communication over there, they were nice people. But they were aggressive."
Schulman, whose book was published last week, said he began his research by writing a formal inquiry letter to each of the four brothers. He said only Frederick, the least involved in the company, would meet with him -- and then said he would only discuss his family if he received veto power over any third-party source material. Schulman declined.
At Koch Industries, which is headed by David and Charles, initial reaction was curious and somewhat cooperative, Schulman said. But it never amounted to any access to the two top executives.
"At one point they flew out to even talk to the publisher," Schulman recalled about a Koch executive. "They wanted to make sure this was going to be a fair book, they saw Mother Jones and immediately thought the worst. I was speaking to people there throughout the process, but they would never give me access to David or Charles, which I think was unfortunate because I do think that they had not much to lose and a lot to gain. I think these guy are all very interesting and should have their stories told."
But Koch Industries' interest did not end there, Schulman said.
"I certainly got the sense that there were ... certain people [to whom] they were probably saying, 'don't talk to him.' I definitely got that impression," Schulman said. "I definitely talked to people who said, 'yeah, I spoke to Charles and he said he would prefer that I don't speak to you.'"
The Koch concerns about the book went even further, Schulman said.
"I definitely got the sense that the Koch Industries folks were tracking what I was doing fairly closely," he explained. "In one instance, I interviewed a friend of theirs out in Wichita and ... I asked if I could record this interview and he said, 'sure, but I would like a copy of it if you wouldn't mind.' To which I said, 'okay, sure, fair deal.'"
Schulman said when he returned home, he sent the person a copy of the interview: "I followed up a couple of days later to make sure he had received it and I got his secretary on the line and she said, 'oh, so-and-so from Koch just stopped by to pick it up.'"
The author said in another instance he had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the federal government for some Koch Industries documents and heard back from the Justice Department that Koch Industries had filed its own FOIA about his inquiry.
Schulman describes in his book the tools the Kochs use to respond to press coverage they do not like and does not see the treatment he received as a surprise. Among their most effective weapon, Schulman said, is the KochFacts website, which the company launched to hit back at critical coverage.
The site offers company responses to coverage it finds negative, but has also made personal attacks on the credibility of reporters such as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Ken Vogel of Politico.
"This was their way of sort of bypassing the media to get their story out there," Schulman says of the site. "But at the same time, they've used this as a place to basically dump the correspondence of reporters and that sort of thing in order to sort of make journalists look dishonest and things of that nature. It's a place where they rebut media articles."
And he says it has worked, to an extent.
"In terms of the general P.R. operation, I think that KochFacts itself has been pretty effective at giving reporters pause," Schulman said. "Now you know that every email you send is going to find, could find its way on to that website."
He also pointed to other intimidating approaches the company has taken against the press, including "taking out web ads lambasting reporters such as Jane Mayer and others which is sort of shocking to us in the press to be treated like that. Their argument is that they feel like they are really getting beaten up in the press and they have to take action."
Mayer has been the Kochs' top journalistic target since her lengthy 2010 New Yorker piece titled "Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama."
In it, she detailed Charles and David Koch's hundreds of millions of dollars in political backing for conservative organizations. Not only did the Kochs attack Mayer publicly and on KochFacts.com, but they went so far as to write a stinging letter to the American Society of Magazine Editors urging the group not to honor the piece with its annual reporting award after Mayer received a nomination.
In another case, the Kochs took on InsideClimateNews.com, a Pulitzer Prize-winning website, and its editor, David Sassoon, after he wrote about the Koch's interests in Canadian oil. An online ad reportedly stated: "Activist/owner of InsideClimate News misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods about Koch. Get the full facts on KochFacts.com."
Schulman cites Powerlineblog.com as an ally for the Kochs, hinting that they seem to get their hands on company information and documents others could not.
"John Hinderaker [Powerline's editor] is quite frequently coming to their defense and sort of rebutting stories about the Kochs," Schulman said, citing a recent Washington Post story about Koch Industries' link to the Keystone pipeline, a report Hinderaker blasted. "He certainly quoted Mark Holden, the general counsel of Koch Industries and has in the past received internal documents from Koch Industries to push back."
Schulman said information or criticism about his book has yet to make it to KochFacts: "I haven't seen anything. I think they view the book as more or less fair, the only thing they said was that they are withholding their judgment and reviewing the book."
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These A-holes should be "returned to sender", whatever that may be
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Anti-Gay Christian Group Refuses To Accept Mail With New Harvey Milk Stamp
By Shadee Ashtari, May 29, 2014
Fundamentalist Christian group American Family Association is urging members not to accept any mail postmarked with the U.S. Postal Service’s newly released Harvey Milk stamp, the first U.S. stamp to feature an openly gay elected official.
“Honoring predator Harvey Milk on a U.S. postage stamp is disturbing to say the least. Harvey Milk was a very disreputable man and used his charm and power to prey on young boys with emotional problems and drug addiction,” an AFA press release said Wednesday. “He is the last person we should be featuring on a stamp.”
As one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, Milk’s efforts to advance LGBT rights earned him the Medal of Freedom posthumously from President Barack Obama in 2009. The 2008 Academy Award-winning biopic "Milk” was also inspired by the icon.
The AFA, however, viewed the historic commemorative stamp as a way for “the radical homosexual lobby” to “undoubtedly encourage businesses to use these stamps -- all in the name of inclusiveness, political correctness and diversity.”
“This is not diversity; this is perversity,” the release concluded.
The AFA, which has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2010, advised anyone who receives mail with a Harvey Milk stamp to take the following actions:
Anti-Gay Christian Group Refuses To Accept Mail With New Harvey Milk Stamp
By Shadee Ashtari, May 29, 2014
Fundamentalist Christian group American Family Association is urging members not to accept any mail postmarked with the U.S. Postal Service’s newly released Harvey Milk stamp, the first U.S. stamp to feature an openly gay elected official.
“Honoring predator Harvey Milk on a U.S. postage stamp is disturbing to say the least. Harvey Milk was a very disreputable man and used his charm and power to prey on young boys with emotional problems and drug addiction,” an AFA press release said Wednesday. “He is the last person we should be featuring on a stamp.”
As one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, Milk’s efforts to advance LGBT rights earned him the Medal of Freedom posthumously from President Barack Obama in 2009. The 2008 Academy Award-winning biopic "Milk” was also inspired by the icon.
The AFA, however, viewed the historic commemorative stamp as a way for “the radical homosexual lobby” to “undoubtedly encourage businesses to use these stamps -- all in the name of inclusiveness, political correctness and diversity.”
“This is not diversity; this is perversity,” the release concluded.
The AFA, which has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2010, advised anyone who receives mail with a Harvey Milk stamp to take the following actions:
1. Refuse to accept the Harvey Milk stamp if offered by your local post office. Instead, ask for a stamp of the United States flag....................................................................................................................................................................
2. Refuse to accept mail at your home or business if it is postmarked with the Harvey Milk stamp. Simply write "Return to Sender" on the envelope and tell your postman you won't accept it.
Judge Randa "has ties to the Koch brothers and other conservative advocates who privately fund judicial seminars"
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Judge who ended probe of Koch activities in WI regularly attends Koch-funded junkets
By Travis Gettys, May 28, 2014
A federal judge who stopped Wisconsin’s criminal investigation of spending during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections regularly attends all-expense paid junkets funded by a Koch brother and other conservative interests.
District Court Judge Rudolph Randa blocked the ongoing criminal probe into illegal coordination between nonprofit advocacy groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth and the recall campaigns of Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers.
The judge ruled May 6 that outside groups may freely coordinate with candidates and campaigns and remain free of contribution limits as long as they don’t “express advocacy” for the candidates themselves.
“The plaintiffs have found a way to circumvent campaign finance laws, and that circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted,” Randa ruled. “Instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech.”
Randa sided in his ruling, which is under appeal and could go before the U.S. Supreme Court, with the Wisconsin Club for Growth and its director, Eric O’Keefe — a longtime ally of the Koch brothers.
O’Keefe and his organization had asked the court to stop the criminal investigation, arguing that laws they were accused of breaking violated their right to free speech.
Randa ordered prosecutors to destroy all evidence gathered in the investigation, although the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that order for now.
An analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy shows the federal judge has ties to the Koch brothers and other conservative advocates who privately fund judicial seminars at George Mason University, reported The Progressive.
Randa attended these all-expense paid “judicial junkets” in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012, according to publicly available disclosure forms.
The disclosure form from last year has been requested but has not yet been posted online.
These seminars are funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and corporations such as BP, Exxon Mobil, and Dow Chemical.
Many of those interests have long opposed limits to campaign financing, although the analysis could not establish whether campaign finance reform was a topic at any seminars Randa attended.
The seminars, which are fully paid and typically held at swanky locations, promote corporate legal interests.
No other federal district judges in Wisconsin attended the events, according to the analysis.
The Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the conduct of federal judges, cautions against the appearance of improper influence and has required seminar organizers since 2007 to disclose the names of funders.
These disclosures do not require specifics of each judge’s expenses and who paid those, but foundation tax filings reveal some of those details.
The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation contributed $5.45 million to the George Mason University Foundation two years ago, and it gave $51,000 to the university’s Law and Economic Center.
The Koch foundation gave $4.7 million in 2010 to George Mason for “general operating support and education programs” and $2.78 million for “general operating support.”
The Koch network helped the Wisconsin Club for Growth, including $400,080 through their Center to Protect Patient Rights in the final weeks of the recall elections.
Other Koch groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, are believed to have been subpoenaed in the Wisconsin investigation ended by Randa.
The Bradley Foundation’s president and CEO, Michael Grebe, chaired Walker’s gubernatorial campaigns in 2010 and 2012, the most recent of which was part of the criminal probe halted by the judge.
The Bradley Foundation paid at least $105,000 to George Mason to help fund the junkets and other educational programs.
Randa’s own financial disclosure forms do not match those listed on the website of the Eastern District of Wisconsin, which does not list attendance at any seminars since 2011.
The judge reported no travel reimbursement in 2010, but the Center for Public Integrity reported he had attended a 2011 seminar at George Mason on “the rule of law.”
George Mason listed the only funding for the 2012 conference as “xyz corp,” with itself as the only donor, although Koch, Bradley, and Exxon have consistently participated.
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Judge who ended probe of Koch activities in WI regularly attends Koch-funded junkets
By Travis Gettys, May 28, 2014
A federal judge who stopped Wisconsin’s criminal investigation of spending during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections regularly attends all-expense paid junkets funded by a Koch brother and other conservative interests.
District Court Judge Rudolph Randa blocked the ongoing criminal probe into illegal coordination between nonprofit advocacy groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth and the recall campaigns of Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers.
The judge ruled May 6 that outside groups may freely coordinate with candidates and campaigns and remain free of contribution limits as long as they don’t “express advocacy” for the candidates themselves.
“The plaintiffs have found a way to circumvent campaign finance laws, and that circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted,” Randa ruled. “Instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech.”
Randa sided in his ruling, which is under appeal and could go before the U.S. Supreme Court, with the Wisconsin Club for Growth and its director, Eric O’Keefe — a longtime ally of the Koch brothers.
O’Keefe and his organization had asked the court to stop the criminal investigation, arguing that laws they were accused of breaking violated their right to free speech.
Randa ordered prosecutors to destroy all evidence gathered in the investigation, although the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that order for now.
An analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy shows the federal judge has ties to the Koch brothers and other conservative advocates who privately fund judicial seminars at George Mason University, reported The Progressive.
Randa attended these all-expense paid “judicial junkets” in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012, according to publicly available disclosure forms.
The disclosure form from last year has been requested but has not yet been posted online.
These seminars are funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and corporations such as BP, Exxon Mobil, and Dow Chemical.
Many of those interests have long opposed limits to campaign financing, although the analysis could not establish whether campaign finance reform was a topic at any seminars Randa attended.
The seminars, which are fully paid and typically held at swanky locations, promote corporate legal interests.
No other federal district judges in Wisconsin attended the events, according to the analysis.
The Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the conduct of federal judges, cautions against the appearance of improper influence and has required seminar organizers since 2007 to disclose the names of funders.
These disclosures do not require specifics of each judge’s expenses and who paid those, but foundation tax filings reveal some of those details.
The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation contributed $5.45 million to the George Mason University Foundation two years ago, and it gave $51,000 to the university’s Law and Economic Center.
The Koch foundation gave $4.7 million in 2010 to George Mason for “general operating support and education programs” and $2.78 million for “general operating support.”
The Koch network helped the Wisconsin Club for Growth, including $400,080 through their Center to Protect Patient Rights in the final weeks of the recall elections.
Other Koch groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, are believed to have been subpoenaed in the Wisconsin investigation ended by Randa.
The Bradley Foundation’s president and CEO, Michael Grebe, chaired Walker’s gubernatorial campaigns in 2010 and 2012, the most recent of which was part of the criminal probe halted by the judge.
The Bradley Foundation paid at least $105,000 to George Mason to help fund the junkets and other educational programs.
Randa’s own financial disclosure forms do not match those listed on the website of the Eastern District of Wisconsin, which does not list attendance at any seminars since 2011.
The judge reported no travel reimbursement in 2010, but the Center for Public Integrity reported he had attended a 2011 seminar at George Mason on “the rule of law.”
George Mason listed the only funding for the 2012 conference as “xyz corp,” with itself as the only donor, although Koch, Bradley, and Exxon have consistently participated.
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Companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are paying lots of money to get Congress to do their bidding
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The Dirty Secret Behind Rep. Latta's Anti-Net Neutrality Bill
By Timothy Karr, May 31, 2014
Support for net neutrality has spread -- in the streets, in Silicon Valley and at kitchen tables and coffee shops around the country.
But the more traction it gets nationwide, the more vicious the attacks on the open Internet have become. Most all of these attacks are generated by lobbyists and public relations flacks on the payroll of powerful phone and cable companies.
While they aren't winning many converts to a corporate controlled Internet among the general public, they have found a few allies on Capitol Hill.
Enter Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH), who on Thursday introduced a bill (H.R. 4752) that would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from taking any meaningful action to protect real net neutrality.
Latta cynically claims his bill will "keep the Internet open and accessible." But it will actually do the opposite--preventing the FCC from treating Internet service providers as "common carriers."
Without that authority--provided under Title II of the Communications Act--the FCC lacks any effective means to stop Internet discrimination.
Companies like AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable could forge ahead with their plans to create a two-tiered Internet, striking special fast-lane deals with websites and services that they like, while relegating the rest of us to slower and congested ones.
Without common carriage protections, these ISPs can slow and even censor web content at will. And they've already admitted to plans to do just that.
Follow the Money
So why is Rep. Latta claiming to be a champion of the open Internet while proposing legislation that helps ISPs shut it down? A big part of the answer can be found at the Center for Responsive Politics, which aggregates data on campaign contributions, including those made by phone and cable companies and their trade groups to members of Congress.
Rep. Latta is an industry favorite, having raked in a whopping $320,000 in campaign contributions from the communications sector since he took office in 2007.
In the 2014 election cycle, Latta has already received contributions from nearly every major ISP and supporting trade group in the country--including a veritable "who's who" of Net Neutrality haters:
Source: Center for Responsive Politics
By now it should be clear that Latta's bill is for the biggest companies that punch his campaign dance ticket, and not for the millions of people who have urged the FCC to protect the open Internet by making these same companies common carriers.
But while Latta may be pushing this bill, he's not alone on Capitol Hill. Nor is his congressional brand of quid pro quo limited to one side of the aisle. Earlier this month, 20 Democrats signed a letter to the FCC warning Chairman Tom Wheeler away from making ISPs common carriers.
According to research by Maplight, these Democrats have received on average much more in campaign contributions from the phone and cable lobbies than the non-signing members of Congress. One in particular, Rep. John Barrow (D-GA), has received nearly $60,000 in campaign contributions from these industries in this most recent election cycle--more than five times the average amount received by his House Democratic counterparts.
People across the country are taking action to make sure that Rep. Latta's toxic bill doesn't get traction with any other elected representatives.
Reclassifying ISPs as common carriers is the only way to stop phone and cable companies from taking control of the Internet away from users.
If the FCC fails to take this simple step--or if it's restricted from doing so--the Internet as we know it could be lost. That's exactly what companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon want. And they are paying good money to make sure Congress does their bidding.
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The Dirty Secret Behind Rep. Latta's Anti-Net Neutrality Bill
By Timothy Karr, May 31, 2014
Support for net neutrality has spread -- in the streets, in Silicon Valley and at kitchen tables and coffee shops around the country.
But the more traction it gets nationwide, the more vicious the attacks on the open Internet have become. Most all of these attacks are generated by lobbyists and public relations flacks on the payroll of powerful phone and cable companies.
While they aren't winning many converts to a corporate controlled Internet among the general public, they have found a few allies on Capitol Hill.
Enter Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH), who on Thursday introduced a bill (H.R. 4752) that would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from taking any meaningful action to protect real net neutrality.
Latta cynically claims his bill will "keep the Internet open and accessible." But it will actually do the opposite--preventing the FCC from treating Internet service providers as "common carriers."
Without that authority--provided under Title II of the Communications Act--the FCC lacks any effective means to stop Internet discrimination.
Companies like AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable could forge ahead with their plans to create a two-tiered Internet, striking special fast-lane deals with websites and services that they like, while relegating the rest of us to slower and congested ones.
Without common carriage protections, these ISPs can slow and even censor web content at will. And they've already admitted to plans to do just that.
Follow the Money
So why is Rep. Latta claiming to be a champion of the open Internet while proposing legislation that helps ISPs shut it down? A big part of the answer can be found at the Center for Responsive Politics, which aggregates data on campaign contributions, including those made by phone and cable companies and their trade groups to members of Congress.
Rep. Latta is an industry favorite, having raked in a whopping $320,000 in campaign contributions from the communications sector since he took office in 2007.
In the 2014 election cycle, Latta has already received contributions from nearly every major ISP and supporting trade group in the country--including a veritable "who's who" of Net Neutrality haters:
Source: Center for Responsive Politics
By now it should be clear that Latta's bill is for the biggest companies that punch his campaign dance ticket, and not for the millions of people who have urged the FCC to protect the open Internet by making these same companies common carriers.
But while Latta may be pushing this bill, he's not alone on Capitol Hill. Nor is his congressional brand of quid pro quo limited to one side of the aisle. Earlier this month, 20 Democrats signed a letter to the FCC warning Chairman Tom Wheeler away from making ISPs common carriers.
According to research by Maplight, these Democrats have received on average much more in campaign contributions from the phone and cable lobbies than the non-signing members of Congress. One in particular, Rep. John Barrow (D-GA), has received nearly $60,000 in campaign contributions from these industries in this most recent election cycle--more than five times the average amount received by his House Democratic counterparts.
People across the country are taking action to make sure that Rep. Latta's toxic bill doesn't get traction with any other elected representatives.
Reclassifying ISPs as common carriers is the only way to stop phone and cable companies from taking control of the Internet away from users.
If the FCC fails to take this simple step--or if it's restricted from doing so--the Internet as we know it could be lost. That's exactly what companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon want. And they are paying good money to make sure Congress does their bidding.
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