Barack Obama, Surveillor-in-Chief

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Barack Obama has done a lot of really good things as president, and I have remained for the most part enthusiastically supportive, particularly when it came to getting him re-elected last year, but I find his conduct of "national security," notably the drone war and surveillance, generally abhorrent.

And his speech on surveillance last Friday was just that. Far from being the pragmatic leader pulling the country together on a complex problem, as for example he did on race and racism following the Zimmerman verdict, he hid behind a veneer of (faux) transparency and doubled down on the assault on liberty and privacy over which he is presiding.

As Conor Friedersdorf wrote:

On Friday, President Obama spoke to us about surveillance as though we were precocious children. He proceeded as if widespread objections to his policies can be dispatched like a parent answers an eight-year-old who has formally protested her bedtime. He is so proud that we've matured enough to take an interest in our civil liberties! Why, he used to think just like us when he was younger, and promises to consider our arguments. But some decisions just have to be made by the grownups. Do we know how much he loves us? Can we even imagine how awful he would feel if anything bad ever happened while it was still his job to ensure our safety?

Friedersdorf then helpfully proceeds to break down the "disinformation," the "weasel words," the "impossible-to-believe protestations," and the "factually inaccurate assertions." For example:

The passage: 

I'm also mindful of how these issues are viewed overseas because American leadership around the world depends upon the example of American democracy and American openness, because what makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation.

It's the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process.

But his surveillance politics and policy, whatever one thinks of it, has never been characterized by open debate. There are secret sessions conducted by Congressional committees -- and secret hearings conducted by FISA court judges -- where hugely consequential policy decisions are made. If the real world depends on the example of American openness, we are failing the world. The example we're setting is that it's okay for governments to secretly intercept the private communications data of all citizens. How would that work out in most countries? The official secrecy surrounding the NSA has already corroded U.S. democracy in real ways.

If this were Bush, or any Republican, Democrats would be outraged. But because it's Obama, many on the left have turned into surveillance state apologists. And they join those on the right, as well as throughout the establishment "center," who have little regard for liberty and privacy in any event.

But let's be blunt about this: President Obama is lying to the American people, and to the world, and in so doing is undermining the significant progress he has made in other areas, like health care and women's rights.

And that should be abhorrent even to his most ardent supporters.

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Obama the hypocrite, Snowden the patriot

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Snowden made me do it."

There was yet another Guardian report today (this one not authored by Glenn Greenwald) of yet another troubling revelation, via Edward Snowden, about the extent of the U.S. surveillance state:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".

The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs.

Yes, that's right: warrantless surveillance of American citizens. (And you still see no problem with this, surveillance state apologists?)

Apparently all this has gotten to be too much even for noted surveillance state enthusiast Barack Obama:

President Obama said Friday he would pursue reforms to open the legal proceedings surrounding government surveillance programs to greater scrutiny, the administration's most concerted response yet to a series of disclosures about secret monitoring efforts.

At his first full news conference in more than three months, Obama said he intends to work with Congress on proposals that would add an adversarial voice -- such as a lawyer assigned to advocate privacy rights -- to the secret proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

In addition, Obama said he intends to work on ways to tighten one provision of the Patriot Act -- known as Section 215 -- that has permitted the government to obtain the phone records of millions of Americans. He announced the creation of a panel of outsiders -- former intelligence officials, civil liberties and privacy advocates, and others -- to assess the programs and suggest changes by the end of the year.

"It's not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs," Obama said in the White House East Room. "The American people need to have confidence in them as well."

All of this is quite promising, if not nearly enough (really, a privacy lawyer, that's it?), but it's clear that the president has been forced into doing this -- by media reports, public outcry, and falling approval ratings -- and for that reason it's reasonable to be skeptical of his sincerity, and of his commitment to ensuring there is anything like serious oversight and accountability. 

And it's still rather concerning that while announcing this he still went after Snowden:

No, I don't think Mr. Snowden was a patriot... My preference, and I think the American people's preference, would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws.

Well, first, how can there be a "lawful, orderly examination of these laws" when the president's own administration is persecuting whistleblowers, as well as their media contacts, like they were vicious enemies of the state?

There can't be, which is why Snowden had to do it the way he did it.

And, second, would we even be having this discussion, and would the president be proposing even these insufficient safeguards, were it not for Snowden?

No, and for that reason alone Snowden is a true patriot.

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American hypocrisy on extradition

By Frank Moraes 

Glenn Greenwald wrote a very insightful article the other day on the hypocrisy of the United States government and and media. It circled around this business of Obama calling off the summit with Vladimir Putin. The White House gave a number of reasons for this including the fact that Russia is persecuting homosexuals. But everyone excepts the fact that it is just that Russia was given Edward Snowden temporary asylum.

Since when did the United States government give a flying fuck about the treatment of the powerless anywhere, even in the United States. After all, it was only last year that Obama "evolved" on the issue of gay marriage. As it is, Obama is perfectly fine with locking up cannabis and cocaine users for decades at a time -- even though he has quite publicly admitting to doing the same thing himself. So it's all about Snowden, because if there is one thing that the administration does care about, it is punishing whistleblowers, or as Obama calls them, "people involved in espionage."

Greenwald noted that the United States and Russian do not have an extradition treaty. So Putin isn't doing anything unusual, much less illegal. But guess who the United States does have an extradition treaty with? Italy. And yet, our great nation of laws broke its treaty when the Italian government asked for the extradition of Robert Lady and other CIA operatives who were convicted in absentia of kidnapping for the purpose of torture. And last year, the United States refused to extradite Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada to face genocide charges in Bolivia. And a couple of years before that, we wouldn't extradite terrorist Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela.

But we need to have our priorities. These three examples are only kidnapping for the purpose of torture, genocide, and terrorism. Snowden is accused to leaking potentially embarrassing documents. And let us not forget, these three men only harmed poor and weak people. Snowden annoyed some very powerful people. That's the kind of crime that must be punished!

Meanwhile, the press is right there to stoke anger at Russia without providing any context. Even last night's The Daily Show was on it. But more generally, the media have gone out of their way to attack Snowden and put what he's done in the worst possible light. Check out this great argument between Greenwald and James Risen against the entirely typical mainstream apologetics of Jeffrey Toobin. Note how Toobin's arguments devolve into, "You gotta be kidding me!" Because all right-thinking journalists know that the government is always right. And notice also that Piers Morgan is only one tiny step more reasonable than Toobin:


So we continue on with the United States government acting like the corrupt super power that it is. Meanwhile the media spew out their usual happy talk about how we are all good and the evil Russian government just won't follow the law. I grew up during the Cold War. One of the things that we celebrated was that we had a free press whereas the Soviet Union had the government run Pravda. But even then, our press provided one-sided news that rarely came close to the truth. It is the same now -- at least if you get your "news" from the television. 

Afterword 

Jeffrey Toobin's claim is that it is great that we are talking about all of this stuff. Additionally, he admits that we are only discussing this stuff because of Edward Snowden. But he thinks that Snowden is a criminal who shouldn't have leaked the documents. James Risen counted him (and most in the mainstream press), "That's the thing I don't understand about the climate in Washington these days. People want to have debates on television and elsewhere. But then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail." Morgan bails out Toobin by immediately pushing a straw man, "Is there no limit?!"

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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The adult in the room

By Carl 

The interesting dynamic that is the relationship between Obama and Putin has a new twist, and it's one we should welcome: 

On Wednesday evening, when U.S. President Obama cancelled his upcoming visit to Moscow, the Russian reaction was perhaps most clear in the way that Vesti, the state's main propaganda TV channel, conveyed it on the channel’s website. Buried about half way down on the page, underneath a story about Russian tourists in Turkey, Vesti announced: "The invitation for Obama stands." Beside that was the somewhat diversionary headline: "Barack Obama will travel to St. Petersburg for the G20 summit." The actual news — that Obama had decided not to meet with his Russian counterpart before, after or during the G20 summit in St. Petersburg next month — was clearly not something the official spin doctors wanted to advertise.

After a year spent honing their anti-American rhetoric — on issues ranging from the adoption of Russian children to missile defense in Europe and the civil war in Syria — the Kremlin message makers were suddenly eager to claim that President Vladimir Putin didn't really mean for things to go this far. "Sure, Putin uses this rhetoric, but it's not so much anti-American as anti-Euro-Atlantic," says Evgeny Minchenko, a Kremlin-connected political strategist. "And keep in mind that he has tried to stop short of a head-on collision."

So, shorter Kremlin: Holy fuck, he's not that idiot Bushy BooshBoosh! 

Indeed, he is not. And he's not going to kowtow to the likes of a tin-plated moron who trades offices like a Southern governor.

Putin has played the U.S. since at least 9/11, using our War on Terror as cover for all kinds of sins in Georgia and Chechnya, and let's not forget the 130 Russians who died in a terrorist standoff in a Moscow theater.

Yes, this is the guy Edward Snowden wants protecting him, but won't give up secrets to. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Keep in mind that, as Bush pursued a unilateral American foreign policy with healthy servings of imperial aggression, without engagement or advisement from what could have been its strongest ally in fighting terrorists, Putin took both offense and advantage of Bush's narrowed focus to become an active player in the Arab and Muslim world, particularly as the development of the Russian natural gas industry saw Russia become a major player in the energy field that previously had been dominated by the OPEC nations.


Putin began to develop ties to Venezuela, Syria, and North Korea, partly to further their own energy markets but also to assist them, it seems, in keeping America occupied. Our response?

To place a ballistic missile system in 2007 along the Polish border, nominally to protect against, errrr, Iranian and North Korean missiles.

This provocative move came a few short years after Bush removed us, again, unilaterally, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties in 2002.

While I cannot and will not defend Putin's responses to any of these actions, in hindsight his motivation becomes clear: he saw a new Cold War starting up. I'm not sure that was an unjustified position to take. 

So here comes Obama, tasked with both maintaining the façade of those missiles being vital to American security, while having to defuse Russian imperial ambition and coax (or bully) them on board with regards to Syria and Iran, and possibly North Korea.

Is ignoring a summit opportunity the way to go? Keep in mind that both Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will still be meeting with their Russian counterparts as part of the G-20 Summit and that both Obama and Putin will have opportunities to communicate, possibly even privately, while in St. Petersburg. So it ain't over yet. The message is sent. Let's see how Russia responds. As indicated by the Time magazine article, the signs are hopeful.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

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People will notice if the Republicans get any crazier

By Frank Moraes 

The other day, Jonathan Chait wrote a provocative post, "Are House Republicans Voter-Proof?" In it, he argued that the Republicans likely have nothing to worry about in going full-tilt Michele Bachmann. After all, most people don't even know which party is in control of the House of Representatives. Why would they blame the Republicans?

Under normal circumstances, I agree with Chait. If the Republicans keep doing what they have been doing killing the economy inch by inch, the electorate will not notice. As I wrote last week, I fully expect the Republicans to pick up some seats in the House and also likely take control of the Senate. But I do wish people would stop talking about the Sixth-Year Curse. This is the belief of political observers that the president's party loses big the sixth year of his presidency. Sean Trende has debunked this idea. What actually happens is that the president's party loses big in one of the midterm elections. That already happened to Obama in 2010. Although it is likely that 2014 won't be a good year for the Democrats, they are already doing about as badly as they can. There aren't many seats (in the House at least) that they can gain.

Chait mentions five factors that work in the Republicans' favor. The first is the silly Sixth-Year Curse. The second is that Democrats tend to do badly in midterm elections. That's true, but that's already figured into the calculation. The third is that there aren't many swing voters anymore. I'm not sure how this gives the Republicans an advantage when most of those swing voters are just Democrats now. The fourth is the observation that Democratic voters are concentrated and thus their votes don't count as much. That's true in the Senate races, but not in the House. So I don't get his point given that the big issue is the House. And the fifth is that the 2010 redistricting favors the Republicans. That's true, but again, already figured into the calculation.

All he is saying is that the Republicans can continue to misbehave and get nothing done without a voter backlash. And that's true! But no one is suggesting that the Republicans are idiots. They respond to incentives and they see that in 2014 they are not going to harmed if they vote yet again to defund Obamacare. What people like me have been talking about is the longer term. Over the next six to eight years, if the Republicans don't start to change, they will be overwhelmed by the demographic change. And no amount of redistricting and voter suppression is going to save them.

But this isn't even about the long term. If the Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling or if they simply shutdown the government, people will notice. The TV news will be all about this. Even Fox News will have a hard time blaming it on the Democrats. And people won't have to know who their legislators are or who controls the House of Representatives. They will just freak out about the crazy party that hates the government.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Obama's economic clique and the Summers pick

By Frank Moraes 

When Obama and Clinton were running for the Democratic nomination for president, I tended to side with Obama. The reason was not one I've heard anyone else mention. My fear was that Clinton would be another George W. Bush, just on the left. By that I mean that she would have been to insular. I thought that Obama would be more broad in where he looked for input. But that hasn't been the case. Obama has been very insular. And when it comes to economic policy, it seems that the people he listens to are a group of New Democrat, pro-banking nitwits.

I've been thinking about this because of all the speculation about Larry Summers being nominated as Federal Reserve Chair. It isn't that Summers would make a terrible choice for the job. I have big problems with him, especially his strong dollar policies (under and then following Robert Rubin) while he was in the Clinton administration. But there are far worse candidates for the job. The big problem is: why would Obama be so keen on Summers?

The answer, I think, is just that Obama's insular economic decision making team is dominated by the kind of people who think that Larry Summers rocks. Obama could have just picked Janet Yellen, the current Vice Chairman of the Fed. She is extremely well qualified for the job and she is, as the pronoun indicates, a woman. Obama could have nominated arguably the best person for the job and also done something historic. Apparently, that didn't matter. Or more likely, that didn't even occur to Obama's economic clique.

It's pretty clear that a Summers nomination is not going to fly with most of the Democratic Party.


As Dean Baker wrote, "There is a multi-count indictment that includes his support for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, his opposition to regulating derivatives, his notorious comment about women possibly lacking the ability for sophisticated mathematical reasoning, and his protection of the big banks in his years as President Obama's National Economic Adviser." And now a Senate Democratic leader told Talking Points Memo, "Given the level of opposition to Larry Summers within our caucus, confirming him would be a huge challenge and probably a pretty ugly process."

But that doesn't mean Obama won't do it. In fact, he has often taken pride in thumbing his nose at the Democratic base. That's how he got his New Democratic economic team in the first the place. Think what a Summers pick would mean, however. It would mean that Obama didn't care about shoring up his base for the coming fights with the House Republicans. It would mean that he thought that Summers was so important that it trumped everything else going on in his second term. It would mean that he really didn't care about his party.

I wonder if that's not the case. After all, this talk about a Summers nomination has been festering. The White House could have leaked information to indicate that Summers isn't in contention. Hell, they could have forced Summers to withdraw his name from consideration because he wanted to spend more time with his kids. But we haven't heard a peep. And remember: that wasn't the case with Susan Rice. So I think it is possible that Obama is still thinking he can ram Summers through as the Fed chair. It isn't hard to believe. Generally, Janet Yellen is seen as a fiscal dove who isn't obsessed with inflation. And in Obama's insular economic club, that may disqualify her. 

Update 

Matt Yglesias sent me to a Bloomberg View article by Al Hunt, "Could Geithner End Up the Next Fed Chairman?" The important bit of the article is what people in the Summers camp are saying about Yellen, "No one doubts Yellen's credentials as an economist, but questions have been raised, mainly by those in the Summers camp, about whether she has the gravitas to manage a financial crisis." As Yglesias notes, it is hard to see this as anything except pure sexism.

I will go Yglesias one further: if Obama decides to pick Geithner as Fed chair, it will be an even more sexist pick. Then it won't be a matter of thinking that Summers just has some great ability that no one else has. It will be that Obama just doesn't want to pick Yellen. And what reason could there be for that? After all, no one doubts Yellen's credentials as an economist. What else could it be? (Also: Geithner is a little weasel; who could think that he has "gravitas"?)

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Bradley Manning found guilty, while the real criminals remain free

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Following up on my post from earlier, (courageous whistleblower) Bradley Manning was indeed found guilty today, just not on the most significant, and most ridiculous, charge:

A military judge on Tuesday found Pfc. Bradley Manning not guilty of "aiding the enemy" for his release of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks for publication on the Internet, rejecting the government’s unprecedented effort to bring such a charge in a leak case.

But the judge in the court-martial, Col. Denise R. Lind, convicted Private Manning of six counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and most of the other crimes he was charged with. He faces a theoretical maximum sentence of 136 years in prison, although legal experts said the actual term was likely to be much shorter.

While advocates of open government celebrated his acquittal on the most serious charge, the case still appears destined to stand as a fierce warning to any government employee who is tempted to make public vast numbers of secret documents. Private Manning's actions lifted a veil on American military and diplomatic activities around the world, and engendered a broad debate over what information should become public, how the government treats leakers, and what happens to those who see themselves as whistle-blowers. 

Okay, well, let's look at the elements of that debate:

First, according to the U.S. federal government -- which, let us not forget, is currently led by Democrat Barack Obama -- no information should become public that is in any way sensitive regarding national security (or pretty much any other area), and certainly no information that might in any way expose what the government is really up to, not least its criminal or even questionably ethical activities.

Second, the U.S. federal government treats leakers like traitors.

Third, the U.S. federal government, including the military, tortures whistleblowers and persecutes them relentlessly.

A fierce warning? Yes, I'd say so. Cross the government, expose its criminal activities, and you're done for.

Now, it's great that Manning was aquitted on the charge of "aiding the enemy," but let us not forget that the government pursued that charge right up to the end. And no doubt it will do so again, if at all possible, with the next whistleblower.

On the other hand, it's quite likely that the Obama White House is privately content with this outcome. The president has rightly been taking a lot of heat over NSA surveillance, from a combination of both left and right, and his approval numbers have been declining. Yes, the government wants Edward Snowden back to prosecute him for that leak, but a guilty verdict for Manning on a stupid, trumped-up charge like "aiding the enemy" would only have given Obama's critics -- and I'm one of them on this -- even more cause for criticism. (For this reason, it's possible that Obama is privately content to let Snowden find asylum, avoiding a high-profile trial back home.)

Now, there's no doubt that Manning will go back to jail. A presidential pardon would be most just, but that isn't happening, and the judge isn't about to let him off with a slap on the wrist (though, of course, he has already been in custody for three years, facing gross mistreatment, so that's hardly just a slap). I would hope for a fairly minimal sentence, one that would allow him to be paroled in a few years, but perhaps that's unlikely as well. In any event, let's hope for a fair sentence that recognizes that Manning did not aid the enemy and is a whistleblower who acted in the service of the American people, not a hardened criminal.

Bradley Manning, after all, was just the messenger, not the criminal. He didn't kill innocent civilians, he just helped expose the crimes.

And for that he is being punished.

But shame on the government, and shame on President Obama, just as on Bush and his crew before him, and everyone else involved in this travesty. They will not be held to account for these crimes, and therein lies the true injustice here.

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Not so long road to GOP authoritarianism

By Frank Moraes 

Last week, Robert Reich wrote an article trying to explain, Why Republicans are Disciplined and Democrats Aren't. Basically he argued that this is because of the kind of people who are attracted to the two parties. Republicans tend to lean toward authoritarianism, and thus it isn't surprising that their politicians would be good at delivering the same brainless talking points over and over and over again. I don't think there is much question of this. When I was a libertarian, I hated the Republican Party and still had a certain fondness for the Democrats for exactly this reason. (Sadly for the movement, most people are exactly the opposite, which ought to tell you all you need to know about libertarianism as a practical matter.)

What confuses me is that according to Reich, it ever was so. He quotes Will Rogers saying, "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." He likely said that before the first World War. But I'm not sure it means what Reich claims. After all, people normally make that kind of joke about whatever organization they are associated with. But I do think the joke works because Democrats have long recognized themselves in it and Republicans have felt superior for that reason. But is that image correct?

In many ways, the Republican Party has always been conservative. When the party started in the 1850s, it had a very compelling slogan, "free labor, free land, free men." The "free land" part of that referred to the fact that plantation owners tended to own all the good farm land in an area. As a result of this, free (white) farmers were kept down because the system was proto-feudal. But it's clear that the slogan is laser focused on slavery. The first and third phrases are about slavery and the second is about slave holders. The truth is that from the beginning, the Republican Party was very much pro-business, although it is certainly true that business then was quite different from now.

Moving forward into the progressive era, Theodore Roosevelt would seem to push against the idea that the Republican Party was always conservative. But his liberal policy of trust busting was very unpopular within his party and he eventually went on to run as a Progressive. That can certainly be seen as a practical matter -- he just wouldn't admit defeat. But that was also true of Joe Lieberman, who has also stood outside his party on important issues.

Since I was a kid, I've wondered how it is that a liberal party becomes a conservative party. I think what I've talked about here is part of the issue -- but not all of it. To some extent, the GOP has reached its current position by starting out as rather conservative -- at least on economic issues. Equally important, in many ways the party simply hasn't evolved.

In the 1950s, there were lots of Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower who had made their peace with progressivism and the New Deal. But there was always a strong minority in the party that accepted nothing -- people who wanted to return to 1880. During the beginning of Obama's presidency, there was a wave of conservative concern about the 17th Amendment to the Constitution: direct election of senators. That was a movement that started in the 1890s that became law in 1913. This part of the party has been ascendant in recent years.

In many ways, the party has regressed. There is a tendency among all of us to learn narrow lessons rather than broad ones. For example, most Americans now think the Nazis were bad simply because they killed so many Jews and other "undesirables." But even without the Final Solution and the racism, the Nazis were a terrible authoritarian political movement.

I think the same thing is going on with Republicans regarding slavery. There is little doubt in my mind that if slavery were an issue today, most Republicans would be apologists for it. The Christians would rightly note that slavery is in the Bible; it wouldn't be their fault; it is God's law. The economic conservatives would make arguments like, "Slavery is not optimal, but eliminating it would be terrible for the economy." Conservative economists would come up with complex models to show how slavery actually makes poor whites better off than they would otherwise be. Am I going too far here? Maybe, but I seriously doubt it based upon some of the outrageous claims that otherwise good economists have made over the last five years especially.

I'm come to the conclusion that what ties conservatives together is authoritarianism. Their rhetoric is all about freedom, but you hardly need to scratch the surface to see what they really think. Tax cuts are not for the poor, they are for the power elite. And when taxes are cut to a point where the poor pay no federal income taxes, Republicans grouse about how outrageous that is. And that's the best case they have for not being an authoritarian party. Certainly their positions on guns, war, welfare, abortion, and just about anything else you can think of are explicitly authoritarians. Does anyone really doubt that if abortion was a medical procedure done to men that it wouldn't be controversial?

The Republican Party is doubtless more authoritarian than it has ever been. But for a long time it has been authoritarian and the roots of this have always been present. What's more, there has been a steady trend toward authoritarianism in the Republican Party. And the opposite has been the case with the Democratic Party. And this is why, despite my great disappointment with it, I self-identify as a Democrat. It is also why any thoughtful person should distance themselves from the party of Abraham Lincoln. Because other than the issue of slavery, they weren't so great. And today, it hardly stands out as a party that would end slavery.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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The 12% Congress

By Mustang Bobby 

Say what you will about President Obama's approval rating falling to below 50%, he'd have to be somewhere on the same level as anthrax and galloping diarrhea to get to the level of the United States Congress:

The new NBC/WSJ results show Congress' approval rating at 12%, with 83% disapproving. When was the last time support for Congress was this awful? NBC/WSJ have been doing national polls for about two decades, and it's never been this bad.

Given that Obama's support is still lukewarm, and he'll never be on the ballot again, I'd argue that Congress' woeful approval rating is significantly more important.

Indeed, this number could get considerably worse if congressional Republicans kill immigration reform, force a debt ceiling crisis, and threaten a government shutdown.

Indeed, the closer one looks at the poll, the worse things appear for the legislative branch. Obama's personal favorability is 48%, while for House Speaker John Boehner, it's 18%. Only 22% believe congressional Republicans emphasize unifying the country, while 67% believe they prioritize partisanship. A 56% majority believe GOP lawmakers are "too inflexible" when dealing with the White House.

And a 51% majority wants Republicans to stop holding votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

As a practical matter, if GOP lawmakers wanted to be more popular, it'd be pretty easy — they could, in theory, pass a popular immigration-reform bill, turn off the deliberately harmful sequester, pass a measure to reduce gun violence, maybe consider a bill or two that creates jobs, or compromise on a budget plan.

The most maddening thing of all is that next year, fully 90% of these people will win re-election, and the Republicans stand a 50-50 chance of getting a majority in the Senate as well.

So explain to me why elected officials who have a lower approval rating than the dictator of North Korea can rest assured that they will never lose their job or face the consequences of basically bringing the country to a halt through a perpetual act of adolescent petulance.

Congress may suck, but we're the enablers.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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A life in black and white: Personal reflections on race in America

Guest post by Robert Stein

Ed. note: I'm extremely pleased to be able to present to you this wonderful piece by my friend Bob Stein, who looks back over the nearly nine decades of his life to tell a very personal story about race in America. On another note, I'm just pleased to be able to have Bob as a guest blogger here. I've long been a fan of his blog, Connecting the Dots, which I highly recommend. He's an extremely thoughtful writer, and in his writing you will find a deeply humane and compassionate man. -- MJWS

Robert Stein has had a long career as an editor, publisher, media critic, and journalism teacher. A former chair of the American Society of Magazine Editors, he currently blogs at Connecting the Dots.

**********

Now that Barack Obama has turned personal about race and started a national debate, an older witness is impelled to step forward and testify.

Nearly 90 years ago, I was born to white shopkeepers in the black ghetto of Harlem, living in back of a small store, selling things to people even poorer than they were. Their customers were descended from African slaves, while they themselves had left behind a Europe where their kind would soon be killed by the millions.

We were all safe here from servitude and slaughter, but not fully American, free but far from equal.

When I was three and seriously ill, my parents gave up the store and moved away, but my father kept working in Harlem for the next forty years. When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent in a pawnshop there.

The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras to offer as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.

Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people always dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker's cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy.

Pawnbrokers made loans to the desperate, with higher interest than banks were allowed to charge. In earlier days, they were little more than fences, acquiring stolen goods cheap to resell. Now strict laws required them to be wary -- but it was a sad business, bordering on usury, profiting from human misery. For my father, it was simply where he worked sixty hours a week to earn sixteen dollars.

Once he brought home an autograph, from Colonel Hubert Julian, an American pilot who single-handedly had opposed Mussolini's air force in Abyssinia to become known as Haile Selassie's "Black Eagle." What led him to a Harlem pawnshop I never learned, but for years I saved that scrap with the flamboyant signature of a genuine hero.

In the windows of Harlem shops, black-on-yellow placards showed the week's offerings of local movie houses: Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen (huge letters) in Gone With the Wind with (much smaller) Clark Gable, or The Big Broadcast of 1937 starring Rochester and (footnote size) Jack Benny. There was so little to nourish pride on those streets that when Joe Louis (called by newspapers, without irony, "a credit to his race") knocked out Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch for the heavyweight title, Harlem erupted in riotous joy.

From the Bronx, I commuted to City College, walking ten blocks to and from the subway station every day through a sea of dark faces without fear or harm.

After returning from World War II and being shot at by white people, I graduated and went to work at that Harlem campus, where I fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant young woman. But a decade before Barack Obama was born, we -- certainly I -- did not have the courage to marry and bring interracial children into a world so little changed from the time of my own childhood.

Soon afterward, I went to work as an editor in midtown Manhattan and was eventually hired by George H. W. Bush's father-in-law as the first Jew among hundreds of employees. Needless to say, everyone there was white.

In 1955, at Redbook, I assigned the first article in a national magazine on 26-year-old Martin Luther King during the Montgomery, Alabama bus strike. Ten years later, when I was editor of McCall's, Dr. King wrote a memoir for me about leading young African-American gang members from Chicago on non-violent Freedom Marches in Mississippi where "they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies."

When I became head of the American Society of Magazine Editors, I began an effort to recruit African-American college students as summer interns, but that program was watered down by fellow editors and subverted by a young black woman hired to recruit applicants who was found to be urging them not "to buy into the system."

Martin Luther King was killed, and so was any white naivete about easily changing a culture so deeply ingrained in American life.

Looking back at that time and the years that followed brings a heavy sense of swimming against powerful tides that now seem even stronger than ever in the wake of an African-American president.

Yet there is hope in TV panels of black faces debating uncomfortable statistics on crime in their own communities and old white people trying to sort out what they can do for a better future.

Barack Obama has opened up biographical soul-searching. If it can slowly begin to change minds and hearts, the generations that follow us will be the better for it.

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Liberals finally wake up: GOP will destroy economy

By Frank Moraes 

"It's almost as if spoiled children seized control of part of the federal government and don't appreciate just how much damage their recklessness can do." That was written yesterday by Steve Benen. He is one of the prominent members of the Happy Horseshit Caucus (HHC), a group of liberal pundits who are far better than I at ignoring all the evidence and assuming the best about the Republicans.

I first came up with the name when writing about Greg Sargent's repeated claims that we didn't have to worry about the Republicans destroying the world with the Debt Ceiling. He would always say something like, "Boehner has already admitted Republicans won't allow default." As I said back in May:

It is true that Boehner said, "I'm not going to risk the full faith and credit of the federal government." But one can only read so much into that. To begin with, Boehner is talking about himself, not the party. But far more important, the statement sounds like a hope more than a commitment. If he is signaling, it is to his caucus, not to the rest of the nation. It's more like, "Please guys, don't do this!" And since saying it, he's been pretty quiet.

Well, all that has changed! Yesterday, Boehner said, "We're not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending. It's as simple as that." Quelle surprise! 


Now, it seems that the HHC is having trouble maintaining its optimism. Greg Sargent is at least wavering. This afternoon he wrote lots of column inches about the Obama administration's strong commitment to not negotiating. And he seems to be holding out some home that John McCain will save the day. Benen seems to have completely collapsed. But even he ends his article on a positive note, "The last time the White House stuck to its guns, the GOP backed down. Stay tuned."

The problem as I see it is that the Republicans will do damage regardless. Obama may say that he won't negotiate over the Debt Ceiling, but he will still negotiate about the budget and that is never a good thing.

In the end, I expect that we will see the Debt Ceiling raised and the Republicans will get something for doing it. Obama has shown himself to be too twitchy a negotiator and the Republicans have shown themselves to be every bit as crazy as their reputation would indicate. Where this all ends is anyone's guess.

And that's what's so terrifying about this situation. I don't think that Boehner has any idea how this all going to end. He's like a bad chess player who starts a major attack without any notion of where it leads: he will ultimately lose, but there will be huge loses on both sides.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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President Obama, leading with maturity and understanding

By Mustang Bobby 

Andrew Sullivan marvels at President Obama's ability to handle a very tense situation with coolness and reflection.

No other president could have said what Obama said on Friday afternoon with similar authority. What was striking to me was the tone of acute sadness – a tone others could have used after what was, under any interpretation, a tragedy. And then there was the fact that this first black president, even after such a polarizing incident, spoke to all Americans, white and black. I cannot fathom how some on the knee-jerk right could have seen this as a divisive set of comments – just as I cannot quite fathom how this president is capable of controlling and channeling his own emotions.

What he tried to do was explain to white America how it must feel like to be perpetually deemed guilty before being proven innocent just because of your age, gender and the color of your skin. He didn’t deny the facts of the Martin case; he didn't dispute the jury's decision; he didn't dismiss legitimate issues like the toll of gun violence within the young black male population – but he did insist that we all understand the context, the history, and the reason, behind the anguish and anger of many African-American men and parents and boys. What he was asking for was some mutual empathy.

To answer his point about the knee-jerk right seeing this as divisive, it was a given; Sean Hannity and the rest of the people at Fox News and other such places would have had the same reaction if the president had come out and given his mother's recipe for beef stew.  Their response to anything he says is programmed far in advance. He speaks like Martin Luther King, they hear Malcolm X.

And this reaction proves the president's point: it's going to be very hard to have this discussion when you have a mindset in the nation that refuses to acknowledge that not only is there a race problem in this country, this kind of reaction is adding to it, and accusing the accuser of racism by pointing it out keeps the discussion at arms’ length.

The right wing used the same tactic after Newtown and the topic of gun control came up: it's too soon to talk about it, and by talking about gun control, you're just making the situation worse. It's an infantile evasion, but it works: the discussion is deflected from what needs to be done about the situation at hand to talking about whether or not we should even be talking about it.

What I find singularly impressive is that the president was able to step forward and speak to the situation in both strikingly personal terms but also as an adult addressing a problem that requires adult responses. I'm sure he knew what kind of response he'd get from the right wing; in fact, I'll bet that he was counting on it. That way he can lead by example – as Andrew notes, by lowering the temperature – and letting the real race-baiters prove his point for him. That takes a remarkable amount of maturity and understanding – something we rarely see in our leaders any more.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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So you think Ray Kelly should head up the Department of Homeland Security?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, whether you do or don't, you should read Conor Friedersdorf's excellent piece at The Atlantic, "Prominent Democrats Are Now Comfortable With Racial and Ethnic Profiling," which includes:

Under Ray Kelly, the NYPD infiltrated Muslim communities and spied on hundreds or perhaps thousands of totally innocent Americans at mosques, colleges, and elsewhere. Officers "put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity," AP reported, citing NYPD documents. Informants were paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements. The NYPD even conducted surveillance on Muslim Americans outside its jurisdiction, drawing a rebuke from an FBI field office, where a top official charged that "the department's surveillance of Muslims in the state has hindered investigations and created 'additional risks' in counterterrorism."

Moreover, "In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques," the Associated Press reported, "the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation." The horrifying effects on innocent Americans are documented here. But despite the high costs and lack of counterterrorism benefits, Kelly stands behind the surveillance on Muslims.

*****

On its own, Kelly's treatment of Muslims ought to disqualify him from the position, and even from being praised by the president of the United States. On its own, his treatment of blacks and Hispanics ought to disqualify him from being promoted, too. But his tenure has also been characterized by a dearth of transparency that has exacerbated his abuses. As Murray Weiss explains, "The lack of transparency during the Kelly administration played a pivotal role in keeping the public -- and by extension the NYPD -- from recognizing years earlier that the number of stop-and-frisks in New York was escalating to troubling levels. Kelly failed to disclose the stop-and-frisk numbers for seven years despite being required by law to do so. When he was finally forced to release them, the numbers were stunning, and caused critics to ask why stop-and-frisks escalated from 100,000 during Bloomberg's first year in office to 500,000 seven years later."

Yet New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer is lobbying for him, and on Wednesday President Obama said Kelly's "obviously done an extraordinary job" and would be "very well qualified for the job" of Homeland Security secretary.

Sadly, this isn't at all surprising, though it is to the immense discredit of both men.

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Will Obama cave to Republican demands on fiscal deal?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The other day, National Journal ran an article entitled "Republicans, White House in Talks Toward Big Fiscal Deal":

At least a dozen Republican senators are regularly meeting with President Obama's top aides in an attempt to plot a way forward on the looming fiscal challenges facing leaders this fall, senators involved in the meetings tell National Journal.

The meetings, which began after Obama hosted GOP senators for dinner earlier this year, are the first sign that Democrats and Republicans are in talks to strike a deal that would reduce the deficit and reform entitlements and taxes.

Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's no deal in sight: "The talks are, as McCain put it, still in the 'embryonic stage' and so far have consisted of identifying the dividing lines between the two sides." Furthermore, "[t]he differences between the two sides... remain vast."

Suffice it to say, though, this is all rather concerning.

First, there are no Democrats to be seen, at least in this piece. It's the White House and Congressional Republicans doing the talking.

Second, if the point is to establish the dividing lines and to find agreement in between the White House on one side and Republicans on the other, the result will be a deal that is somewhere on the center-right: tax revenue the Republicans agree to along with entitlement and tax "reform" (with Obama having put entitlements on the table, and any such deal securing Republicans an historic victory in their quest to dismantle the social safety net) the Republicans demand.

Meanwhile, we see yet again what the president thinks of progressives, and of the vast majority of his own party -- he wants to cut a deal with Republicans, moving to the right in the process, everything to the left of his establishment centrism be damned.

Of course, the House likely won't agree to any of this. So there's that, for better and for worse.

(By the way, the answer to the title of this post is: Yes, probably.)

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Why was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki killed?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think the Obama Administration, and the president personally, has some explaining to do:

Though everyone already knew that U.S. forces killed American Al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki in a 2011 drone strike, the Obama administration only admitted in May that he was among four Americans targeted overseas. The government's justification for killing one of its own citizens without due process is still sketchy, though Attorney General Eric Holder assured us it was, "lawful, it was considered, and it was just." The White House has been even more evasive about why al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son was killed by a drone two weeks later, saying only that he and two other slain American citizens "were not specifically targeted by the United States." In a devastating New York Times op-ed published Thursday, his grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki demands to know why. "My grandson was killed by his own government," he writes. "The Obama administration must answer for its actions and be held accountable."

In the op-ed, Nasser al-Awlaki describes his grandson Abdulrahman as a typical teen who "watched The Simpsons, listened to Snoop Dogg, read Harry Potter and had a Facebook page with many friends." In September 2011 he left home without permission because he wanted to find his father. He turned up at a cousin's house in southern Yemen and called after learning of his father's death to say he was coming home. Two weeks later, Abdulrahman, his teenage cousin, and five other people were killed in an open-air restaurant.

Actually, I'm not sure an explanation is nearly enough. What we need is some accountability -- yes, from a president who claims he has the right -- and that it is both legal and just -- to kill American citizens, not to mention anyone else, simply by fiat.

Oh, and a 16-year old at that.

Did young Abdulrahman just have the wrong last name? Was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? It all seems rather suspicious, and terribly wrong, and hopefully, however, unlikely, Nasser's lawsuit will force some answers.

There's been a lot of focus recently on the killing of another minor at the hands of someone with a gun and an exaggerated sense of authority. This killing, like drone killing generally, may not involve racism and gross injustice in the legal system, but there are undeniable similarities nonetheless.

To George Zimmerman, and to those like him, Trayvon Martin was the Other, and he was targeted as such. But so too, for the wagers of America's endless "war on terror," most of it waged well out of sight, are the innocent Muslim victims of drones.

No, I'm not saying that Obama is like Zimmerman. I'm just saying that the killings are similarly troubling. There is understandable outrage over the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict, though at least Zimmerman was eventually charged and put on trial. There should be similar outrage at how the government is killing innocent people -- including children, including Americans -- in the name of the American people themselves.

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Snowden for the Nobel?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He claims he's not a hero, but... why not?

In his letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, [Swedish professor] Stefan Svallfors praised Snowden for his "heroic effort at great personal cost." He stated that by revealing the existence and the scale of the US surveillance programs, Snowden showed "individuals can stand up for fundamental rights and freedoms."

I mean, he's more deserving of the Peace Prize than, oh, say, Barack Obama, no? And certainly more deserving than a war criminal like Henry Kissinger.

He's a whistleblower for peace. And deserves to be recognized as such.

(Even though, as I and others keep stressing, this isn't about Edward Snowden, or Glenn Greenwald, it's about what the NSA is doing and more broadly about the expansion of the American surveillance state at the expense of liberty, privacy, and democratic self-governance.)

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Denying reality: Surveillance state apologists and the obsequious submission to authority

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Ever since the Edward Snowden saga started, I've been writing "surveillance state apologists of the left" tweets, directed mainly at Obama-can-do-no-wrong types who seem to think there's nothing wrong with what the NSA is doing, with what's been authorized under the Patriot Act, and with what the country is doing generally in its effort to go after terrorists. In some cases, these surveillance state apologists are also drone war apologists. Generally, they're a-okay with the national security state, not least because it's one of their own running the show right now, and so they viciously attack Snowden, and Greenwald, and make fun of "emoprogs," and avoid actually having to address the nuts and bolts of what the government is doing in their name, and to them, and what that means for life, liberty, and privacy.

Great to see the surveillance state apologists of the left turn their head-up-the-ass venom on #Snowden and @ggreenwald again.
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 1, 2013

At The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf, whom I admire greatly for his uncompromising views on drones, domestic surveillance, and other aspects of the national security apparatus, wrote about the "privacy moderates" in similar terms -- that is, about those who think that "the national-security state ought to be subject to more oversight, debate, scrutiny, and restrictions" but who also "contrive frames that enable them to criticize both the surveillance state and its antagonists, as if the excesses of both sides are commensurately important and worrisome," and who sometimes "even attack critics of the NSA more energetically than the surveillance state itself." He writes:

I am mystified by the "privacy moderate" who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.

Indeed. I would just add that there are many not just in the "middle" but also on the left who aren't yearning for any such thing, so enamored are they of Obama, so much have they been taken in by the fearmongering propaganda that is the democracy-crushing currency of the national security state, the state of fear that it feeds to justify its acquisition of ever more power, justifying ever more intrusions into life, liberty, and privacy.

I highly recommend the whole piece, but the following passages stood out to me:

What I sense, but cannot prove, is the privacy moderate's desperation to avoid facing the full extent of the establishment's extreme behavior. Americans once condemned such excesses. The Obama Administration is nowhere near as morally odious as, e.g., the bygone East German state. But Americans didn't just criticize its surveillance apparatus, the Stasi, because the East German regime used it for evil. Quite apart from the character of the regime and its secret police, Americans found the very notion of secret, pervasive spying on innocent citizens repugnant. We found the notion of vast files kept on private citizens creepy, because that isn't the role the state ought to play in a free society. Today, the American state is engaged in intentionally spying on tens of millions of innocent citizens. It did its utmost to hide the truth about that spying. 

*****

In fact, the U.S. government is, right this second, pouring untold billions into what is ultimately an effort to monitor all digital communications; scan all mail; amass a fleet of surveillance drones that can hover in the sky for days on end; develop technology to scan all faces in crowds; assemble gigantic databases of biometric data; break all encryption efforts; indiscriminately spy on millions of citizens in friendly countries like Germany and Brazil; and share spy technologies with allies. None of that is in dispute. What's hyperbolic is calling people hysterical because they see the endgame of various plans to impose ever broader surveillance on whole societies. There isn't a government document somewhere titled, "The Plan to Destroy Global Privacy," but that is exactly what Western intelligence agencies will do if adequately funded and left, unopposed, to their own devices. Anyone who can't see that hasn't adequately grappled with the implications of Snowden's revelations, the history of spy agencies allowed to operate in secret, or the radical new capabilities that advances in data analysis and retention have given states (and are likely to give them in the near future if they aren't stopped).

As a matter of history, Constitutional theory, and policy, the people now running national security in the United States are surveillance-state extremists.

As I and many others keep saying, again and again and again, this isn't about Snowden or Greenwald, or anyone else for that matter. This is about the takeover of America by its national security elements, about the out-of-control growth of the "intelligence community" and its political and corporate allies, and about the challenge to meaningful democratic self-governance that this entails.

But we can't talk about that, can we? Because too many people who should know better are content to live in willful ignorance, attacking those who expose the truth and pretending that all's well even as everything they supposedly stand for is being crushed.

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