Reformation on Demand [Dragging Texas into the 1500s Edition]

When the Catholic Church was rocking the Middle Ages selling indulgences left and right, it found itself introduced to the Reformation when Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses of the Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences  onto the door of the All Saints' Church in Wittenburg.

Likewise, when Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott kicked off his gubernatorial campaign for the Republican nomination with the usual archaic utterances on his July 17 Twitter Townhall, he was confronted with a twitter stream nailed with protests anachronistically originating from the twenty-first century:

#AskAbbott

Why was it ok for YOU to collect $10M in your injury lawsuit but then enact tort reform w/limits of $250,000?

Why did your office release the social security numbers of millions of Texas voters?

Why haven't you shut down tax-payer funded $487M slush-fund that current Gov. uses to reward businesses & donors?

Why do you accept large sums of $ from Big Coal and then fight the EPA when it wants to clean up Texas?

How do you reconcile regulating women's personal health choices while not regulating deadly  industries that kill hundreds?

How about laws that make it easier to vote & harder to get shot?

Why do you think banning abortions will eliminate abortions but banning guns won't stop gun violence?

Why is Sharia law evil while Biblical based law is OK (despite its prohibition in the Constitution)?

Do you own a favorite orange shirt that you're angry about never being able to wear again for fear of being called a RINO?

If god blessed Texas, how did Bush, Perry, and you end up as leaders?

If you were stranded on an island with Perry, Dewhurst and Cruz with only 1 can of hairspray, what time would you drown yourself?

[None of these made it through the Belo corporate media filter.]

Is the Texas Taliban really going down?

Via Burnt Orange Report

Robert Draper writing in the current Texas Monthly cover story:

Still, the Texas Republican party’s problem hasn’t been a paucity of resources. Rather, its problem—which additional money and staff are unlikely to cure—has been its special gift for offending whole categories of the state’s electorate. As conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan acknowledged to me, “Republicans are so good at taking out their guns, shooting themselves in the foot, reloading, and then shooting themselves in the other foot.” While the sobering results of the 2012 presidential election have prompted introspection among Beltway Republicans about why they have lost favor among Hispanics, single women, and young voters, it’s fair to say that the soul-baring has not fully caught on within the Texas GOP. In April, Attorney General Greg Abbott ruled that same-sex couples could not receive domestic-partner benefits. And in June, word got out that Texas tea party organizer Ken Emanuelson had been caught on tape saying, “I’m going to be real honest with you: the Republican party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote nine-to-one for Democrats.” Such bombast is exquisitely tailor-made to alienate hordes of millennial-generation voters

But it is the Texas GOP’s tone deafness on issues relating to the state’s fastest-growing demographic that is likeliest to prove the party’s undoing. Several Republicans attempted to convince me that many Texas Latinos do in fact vote for their candidates, citing, as GOP pollster Baselice did, numbers from the 2010 election cycle. One would think, then, that Republicans would’ve responded with delight to the new census figures. Instead, as the federal courts have repeatedly determined, the GOP redistricting chiefs have gone to great lengths to dilute Hispanic voting power.

 “All Hispanics have to do is look at the value documents of the Republican party of Texas,” said 43-year-old San Antonio state representative Trey Martinez Fischer, one of the Democrats’ most prominent opponents of the redistricting plan. “Their party platform says that this is an English-only state, that it’s a crime to be in this country illegally, that we should eliminate prekindergarten education for sixty-five percent of Hispanics, that we should repeal the DREAM Act for children of immigrants who came here through no fault of their own. Go to any of the two hundred and fifty-four counties—go find a Latino and ask them, ‘Would you join a political party if this is what they stood for?’ You’d get Ted Cruz, and that’s where it would end.”

Squawking at Reality

Via TPM, Elizabeth Warren wading through the CNBC anchorage on re-enactment of Glass-Steagall..

Sarah Slamen: The Prequel

Sarah Slamen testifying June 20th before the Texas House State Affairs Committee on the House Bill 60 variant of the abortion restriction bill which went down to defeat under Wendy Davis's Senate filibuster but passed during a second special session last week.

[ Austin American-Statesman coverage ]

Sarah Slamen on Majority Report

A bit more in depth on the Texas abortion controversy.

Jeffrey Toobin, the Firewall Sniper of Hypocrisy [2013 Reloaded Edition]

Jeffrey Toobin has written an article attacking Ed Snowden for the unauthorized release of  government documents:

And what of his decision to leak the documents? Doing so was, as he more or less acknowledges, a crime. Any government employee or contractor is warned repeatedly that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a crime. But Snowden, apparently, was answering to a higher calling. “When you see everything you realize that some of these things are abusive,” he said. “The awareness of wrongdoing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up. It was a natural process.”

Toobin has been accused of hypocrisy on this and other points before, more than once.  And not without kaus:

There's more! Let's not forget that Toobin, the man who now decries the baleful influence of book deals, first made his mark betraying Iran-Contra special counsel Lawrence Walsh, for whom he worked as a lawyer, by quitting to publish a book about the case before it was even over!

And how did Toobin betray Walsh?  Michael Isikoff:

Toobin was caught having absconded with large loads of classified and grand-jury related documents from the office of Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. Toobin, it turned out, had been using his tenure in Walsh's office to secretly prepare a tell-all book about the Iran-contra case; the privileged documents, along with a meticulously kept private diary (in which the young Toobin, a sort of proto-Linda Tripp, had been documenting private conversations with his unsuspecting colleagues) were to become his prime bait to snare a book deal.   Toobin's conduct enraged his fellow lawyers in Walsh's office, many of whom viewed his actions as an indefensible betrayal of the public trust.  Walsh at one point even considered pressing for Toobin's indictment. ("I was petrified," Toobin confided at the time, "that criminal charges were going to be brought against me.") The matter also triggered an internal disciplinary inquiry by the Justice Department. Whether he feared dismissal and disgrace, or simply wanted to move on, target Toobin soon resigned from the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn (where he had gone to work after Walsh) and abandoned the practice of law.

Here's what Lawrence Walsh wrote in his memoir of the Iran-contra investigation, Firewall (p.273):

During our negotiations over the timing of the book's publication, Toobin and his publisher surprised us with a preemptive suit to enjoin me from interfering with the publication or punishing Toobin for having stolen hundreds of documents, some of them classified, and for exposing privileged information and material related to the grand jury proceedings. I could understand a young lawyer wanting to keep copies of his own work, but not copying material from the general files or the personal files of others.

Sarah Slamen resumes her testimony

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Calling out the Texas Taliban

Petition of grievances: the abridged edition..

A Note from the Hall Monitors of High School USA

Marcy Wheeler flags a courtesy note from the Pentagon's National Security Agency surveillance unit updating us on its current policymaking on our right to protest:

The Fourth of July reminds us as Americans of the freedoms and rights all citizens of our country are guaranteed by our Constitution. Among those is freedom of speech, often exercised in protests of various kinds. NSA does not object to any lawful, peaceful protest. NSA and its employees work diligently and lawfully every day, around the clock, to protect the nation and its people

No need to update them on your itinerary or agenda. They've already got that handled.

Dug up from the Frankford, Texas Sharia Cemetery

Via TPM

Order from the Catfood Commission's Chinese Menu!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Shakira addresses Oxford Union

...from December:

Libertarian Vacation Zone!

Via Crooks and Liars:

Reggaeton remix still pending...

Via Atrios

Another Giant Leap...

Keith Olbermann calls Obama's election the social and political equivalent of a moon shot...

Kentucky Fried Movie 2

Auditions beginning!
(Via TPM)

The Divider

Via Paul Krugman, veteran political journalist Tom Edsall has the scoop on Rudy Giuliani's readying the race card as the G.O.P. continues its ongoing Philadelphia Mississippi Experiment to cling to power.

As the late New York City journalist Jack Newfield told us a few years ago, this is nothing new for Rudy:

Giuliani's lowest moment as Mayor came in March 2000, when the unarmed Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by undercover narcotics police in midtown Manhattan. Dorismond, 26 and black, an off-duty security guard, was standing outside a bar when a plainclothes cop, part of a narcotics detail patrolling the area, tried to buy crack from him. "What are you doing asking me for that shit?" Dorismond asked.

A fight developed, and one of the cops killed him. The shooting came just three weeks after a jury had acquitted four white police officers in the death of another unarmed black man--Amadou Diallo--who was shot forty-one times on his Bronx doorstep. The cops claimed they had mistaken his wallet for a gun. So Dorismond's shooting occurred in an atmosphere of tinderbox racial tension.

At first Giuliani called for calm, asking the city to withhold judgment until all the facts were established. But the next morning he ignored his own counsel and started demonizing the dead man. Instead of trying to be fair-minded and reassuring, Giuliani made a series of prejudicial and venomous remarks about Dorismond--even before his funeral. The Mayor seemed unable to express any human sympathy for the dead man's mother, or to grasp the fact that this was a citizen of his city who was killed--by police--for saying no to drugs.

Giuliani authorized the release of Dorismond's sealed juvenile arrest record, which contained nothing more serious than a violation punishable by a summons, to discredit him. Juvenile arrest records are supposed to be kept confidential, and Giuliani violated legal ethics by breaking the seal without getting a court order. Dorismond was 13 at the time his arrest was entered into a police computer. At a press conference Giuliani argued that the dead man's conduct at age 13 was "highly relevant." Dorismond, he sneered, was "no altar boy." But Dorismond had actually been an altar boy. He had even attended the same elite Catholic high school as the Mayor--Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn.

A few nights later television journalist Dominick Carter asked Giuliani about his "no altar boy" comment. "This is not a fair question," the Mayor complained. He declared that Dorismond had "spent a good deal of his adult life punching people," and that he had a "propensity" for violence.

The Mayor's defense for opening the records was that Dorismond had no privacy rights because he was dead.

In 1993 Giuliani had run on the positive slogan "One Standard, One City." But in practice he treated the black community by a different standard. He actually argued that by ignoring New York's elected black leadership, he had been able "to accomplish more for the black community." He defended his boycott of black leaders by claiming that most of them have "a philosophy of dependence" that keeps their constituents "enslaved." On another occasion he argued that it wasn't productive to "engage in dialogue" with "political leaders that pander." But he had no trouble at all engaging in dialogue with white Republican leaders who could pander with the best of them.

Moderate black leaders like State Comptroller H. Carl McCall say they had only one or two meetings with Giuliani during his eight years in office, and those were only "for show" after the Diallo shooting, with no follow-up. McCall told me that Giuliani ignored his requests for a meeting for five years. Respected Queens Congressman Gregory Meeks says he didn't have a single meeting or even phone conversation with Giuliani in eight years.

The volatile combination of the questionable police shootings of Dorismond and Diallo, plus the police precinct torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, plus the brutal blitz of insults of Dorismond by the Mayor, plus the absence of any channel of communication between City Hall and the black community, all help explain why under Giuliani blacks felt that New York was a city with a double standard.

The Philadelphia Mississippi Experiment

In the ongoing TPMCafe discussion of Paul Krugman's new book The Conscience of a Liberal, Bruce Bartlett claims Krugman is calling Reagan a crypto-racist for his 1980 call for states rights in the infamous locality of Philadelphia, Mississippi which despite Bartlett's protestations is pretty much generally known only for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964 and Reagan's infamous invocation a scant 16 years later:

The only way he could have avoided such a charge would have been by not campaigning in the South and ceding that region once again to Carter.

"The only way" if we don't count invoking states rights.
"The only way" if we don't count invoking states rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

For example, Michael Dukakis spoke there on August 4, 1988. According to press reports, he made only a passing reference to civil rights and, like Reagan eight years earlier, basically gave a standard stump speech. Yet no one has ever suggested that Dukakis was winking and nodding to local racists by speaking in Neshoba and not giving a strong pro-civil rights speech.

Yet no one has ever suggested "not giving a strong pro-civil rights speech" is somehow equivalent to "I believe in state's rights."

This question of the Conscience of a Conservative does not rest on any premise of crypto-racism but rather in the willingness to campaign on race, to exploit anti-minority animus in the electorate.

And the question of the resulting social and political-economic impact as exemplified by the 1990 chart [AFDC Monthly Maximum vs. Percent Black By State] on page 55 of the Alberto Alesina paper Krugman mentions,Why Doesn’t the US Have A European-Style Welfare System?[PDF], literally graphically demonstrating the inverse correlation between AFDC benefits voted by state electorates and the percentage of black population and the whole question Krugman gets into on the role of anti-black animus in the paucity of American social democracy.

Where we're going we don't need roads to have Doc set the odometer from Philadelphia to Philadelphia when it comes to witnessing Ronald Reagan's exercise of that ol’ Philadelphia Mississippi Freedom to articulate and embody the diminishment and debasement of the American spirit.

And not just of that ol' Philadelphia Pennsylvania Freedom…

Now, as history has grievously demonstrated, this is a reality that conservatives have been shown to want to walk out from.

But it's not something that they can walk away from.

The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People -- People -- human beings -- this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds -- all sorts of people -- and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.

Hubert H. Humphrey
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 14,1948

I believe in states rights. I believe in the people doing as much for themselves at the community level and the private level. And I believe that we have distorted the balance of our government by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to the federal establishment.

Ronald Reagan
Philadelphia, Mississippi, August 3, 1980

Iraq Backstory: Josh Marshall on the CIA vs. Chalabi

From an August 2003 Talking Points Memo post :

Bob Drogin article in Thursday's Los Angeles Times put me in the mind of something I came across a year and a half ago when I was researching my first long article on Iraq -- a murky moment from Ahmed Chalabi's past, which played a key role in making him an object of deep distrust and animosity for many at the CIA.

In case you haven't read the earlier posts, Drogin's article says that US intelligence has concluded that a number of defectors with stories about Saddam's WMD programs were probably either double-agents or dupes who unwittingly passed on disinformation from Saddam. (One might also suppose they simply saw the rewards in store for any Iraqi defector who told the Americans what they wanted to hear ...) The piece went on to say that the Agency was applying renewed scrutiny to many of those defectors and implied that that scrutiny would also be applied to the man who was the conduit and handler of many of those defectors: Ahmed Chalabi.

Here's the incident I'm talking about ...

In the Iraq hawks' version of the events of the last dozen years, a key turning point was the failed CIA-backed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996. The coup was run out of Amman, Jordan; it centered on a group of Iraqi army defectors. And it came apart in a particularly humiliating manner: Saddam's agents used the radios the Agency operatives had given the plotters to radio them back and tell them they'd foiled the coup and that the plotters would be executed.

From any perspective it was a pretty low moment.

But, again, back to the Iraq hawks' version of events.

In early 1996 - a few months before the plot unraveled - Chalabi came to Washington to warn the US that the CIA's coup plot had been compromised and should be called off. Chalabi went to Richard Perle - already the eminence grise behind the INC's shadow war in Washington - who arranged a meeting with then-CIA Director John Deutsch, his then-deputy George Tenet, and the CIA's Director of Operations for the Near East, Steve Richter.

According to the INC, Chalabi warned the three of what he had discovered --- that the plot had been compromised. But his warnings went unheeded. That meant the CIA brass was doubly responsible for the plot's eventual failure: Not only was the operation poorly run, but they refused to call it off even when they'd been warned that the plot had been compromised.

In September, a couple months after the coup attempt went bust, Deutsch was called to testify on Capitol Hill about whether Saddam had bested the United States with the thrust into northern Iraq he had just made. (This move back into northern Iraq came after a series of US setback earlier in the year and came after Saddam was able to sow division between the two main Kurdish factions.) Before Deutsch went to testify, Perle went to him and put that earlier meeting to good use, bullying
Deutsch into, in essence, breaking with the administration on Iraq. "Richard Perle got a hold of him and really busted him up," one source familiar with both meetings told me. With the knowledge of the earlier tip-off meeting, this source told me, "Richard had even more ammunition come September."

When Deutsch appeared before the Senate he broke with the administration's position and agreed that Saddam was, in fact stronger, than he had been before the thrust North.

INC sources tell this story as an example of how they used the CIA's incompetence as a tool to advance their own agenda in Washington.

In any case, that's their version of events.

The CIA had a very different take on what had happened with the 1996 coup debacle. Many at the Agency thought that Chalabi, rather than warning that the plot had been compromised, had in fact been the source of the compromise.

The key thing about the 1996 coup attempt, after all, was that it didn't include Chalabi --- but rather the rival umbrella group, the Iraqi National Accord, an assortment of Sunni military defectors. And Chalabi had a history of scuttling anti-Saddam plans that didn't involve him.

Most believed that Chalabi had intentionally compromised the plan, though some thought he might have unwittingly done so or that his group had been infiltrated by Iraqi agents.

Let's make clear that the CIA also wasn't an unbiased observer to all this. The plot had gone south. It was their operation. And they weren't crazy about Chalabi to begin with. It's not unreasonable to question whether these operatives were just looking for a convenient person to blame the whole mess on.
Without all sorts of security clearances, it's almost impossible to judge the basis of their suspicions, though senior people at the Agency implied that their evidence was more than circumstantial.

However that may be, the fact that many folks at the Agency believed Chalabi had leaked word of their plot and gotten a number of US assets executed helps explain why their distrust and animosity toward him runs so deep.

If the CIA is now taking another look at Chalabi's organization, suspecting it may have been infiltrated by or used by Iraqi double-agents, will this earlier incident come in for more attention?

It certainly should be. And given the hostility between the CIA and Chalabi, you'd expect they would if for no other reason than bureaucratic payback.

But according to one former Agency employee, quite the opposite might happen. The CIA, this source told me recently, is in full circle-the-wagons mode. They've got their hands full a) trying to find some WMD and b) investigating why so many points in their pre-war intelligence analysis seemed to be wrong. Looking back to the mid-1990s might drudge up some facts
that would sully Chalabi's reputation. But it would probably bring up many of the Agency's errors too. At the moment, they're trying to keep the self-examination and investigation limited to only the most recent events.

They've already got more problems than they can deal with...