The Cowardly Tribble

Has anybody tried just walking up to these cowards and shouting "Boo!"?  Because they're that afraid of their own shadows.


Digby, on Rand Paul begging Harry Reid to protect him from the scary white boyz with funny names.

The principled libertarian Rand Paul wets his pants

For anyone who ever expects the allegedly principled libertarian Rand Paul to be anything more than an ephemeral civil liberties ally to be used for your own purposes and nothing else, here he is in all his glory, letting his little white slip show once again:

SNIP

This is what "liberty" looks like to the poster boy for libertarian freedom. Funny, it looks very much like a standard issue, right wing, pants-wetting, panic artist to me. They all seem to believe that we will be so much freer if only we allow the authorities more "freedom" to decide who does and doesn't hate us for our "freedom" and make sure they don't get into our "free" country. Because that's totally doable.

Meanwhile, freedom loving Americans must be "free" to buy as many guns as they want, no matter the carnage gun violence causes. That's the American way. Because they're fighting tyranny. You know, like when the government uses "biometrics" to track people.

We have lost our bearings again (if we ever had them.) And sadly, I'm going to guess we've lost our chance at an immigration reform for the time being. Clearly, the Republican party has lost its nerve. And the Democrats never had much to begin with. I'm sure everyone's relieved.

The NRA's Personal Responsibility for the Murdered MIT Police Officer

Let's make it simple: if a corporation or organization is enough of a constitutional "person" to exercise free speech and the right to buy the Congress of its choice, then it's enough of a constitutional "person" to get its executives thrown in prison for murder.

Down with Tyranny:

The inability to quickly track the gunpowders in the Boston bombs is due to government policy designed and promoted by the NRA, which has found a way to transform every massacre associated with weapons into an opportunity for the munitions companies that sustain it to sell more guns, gunpowder and bullets.

The price for such delays was put on terrible display Friday morning when the two brothers, who had been caught on video placing the bombs, killed one police officer, wounded another and carjacked a motorist, creating conditions so unsafe that the 7th largest population center in America spent Friday on lockdown.

But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects.

Are We Invading Russia?

Digby:

And unless we need "intelligence" because we are getting ready to invade Russia to stamp out the Chechnyan threat to America (and no, I wouldn't completely rule it out) I'm going to guess that we can keep the babies safe and still follow the constitution in this case.

Also:

This person is charged with committing a heinous crime on American soil which means this really is not complicated at all.  The bill of rights clearly applies along with all other protections accorded to criminal suspects under the constitution. It shouldn't even be a question. And the fact that it is means we still have a long way to go shake off our panic and infantile retreat to authoritarian illusions of "safety" after 9/11. I'm afraid if we don't do it soon we won't ever be able to.

Gitmo Stupidity

The torture-lovers are hiding under the bed, demanding that the Boston bombing suspect be gitmo-ized asap. Digby has some pertinent thoughts.

The one thing this suspect has going for him is that he's a legitimately naturalized citizen which, while it should have no bearing on anything (the constitution applies to everyone on American soil), which means that while they can throw him in prison indefinitely under section 1021, they cannot try him by military tribunal. They still need to be mindful of the normal rule of law, even if he's called an "enemy combatant" (a term that has no legal meaning --- the Obama administration doesn't use it) if they hope to have a trial and a resolution. So, we live in hope.

On the other hand, he does have a ferrin sounding name and he wan't born here --- and the national security psycho caucus obviously doesn't find the fact of his citizenship to be a hindrance, so who knows?

This is going to be a big test of the Obama administration. I'm fervently hoping they do the right thing here. Their early endorsement of an indefinite detention policy is worrisome, but I'm hopeful they wil understand that they simply must come down on the right side of this one for the sake of out constitutional foundation.

Someday, when historians study the long-gone American empire, they are going to identify the point at which the American Experiment when totally, irrevocably wrong: Guantanamo detention.

Kevin Drum:

Marcy Wheeler tweets:

I'd really love some pollster to figure how what % of Americans know how many Gitmo detainees have been cleared for release.

I believe the answer is about 40 percent—but, like Marcy, I doubt that many people know this. Her tweet was prompted by an op-ed (laste week) in the New York Times by Samil Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni hunger striker at Guantanamo who is being force fed:

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial…The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense…I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.

Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

Yemen's previous administration prevented the release of many detainees by demanding enormous payments from the US before it would accept them. The current administration has changed course, and has requested that all Yemeni nationals be repatriated to Sana'a. But now it's the U.S. that refuses to deal.

SNIP

Some detainees are tougher to deal with than others. But those who have already been cleared for release, and which Yemen is willing to accept, should be the easiest. Moqbel might or might not fall into this category (his status is unclear), but there are at least a couple dozen Yemenis who do. Obama should let them go.

 Especially since it turns out that the bad guys in the warren terra is us.

But holding torturers accountable is a violation of the Constitution.

Just Cops Was All It Needed, and Just Cops Was All It Took

Not Terrorists.  Criminals.  Not Supervillains.  Criminals.  Not Existential Threats.  Criminals.

Charlie Pierce, who was there:

The one thing we should all remember about this is that it was always a police action. There was no need for Patriot Acts, or for warrantless wiretapping, or for "enhanced interrogation techniques," or for anything else out that bag of horrors the previous administration filled so fatly after the attacks of 9/11. The waterboard was left in the closet. This was cops being cops, albeit with some fairly impressive modern-day technology. (I didn't know police helicopters had thermal-imaging capabilities. I will now respect more those signs in New Hampshire that say, "Speed Monitored by Aircraft.") There has been grinding forensic work ever since the bombs went off. There was all that basic shoe-leather detective work yesterday, house after house, block after block. And that's not even to get into the horrific events of Thursday night, which nonetheless did not require a military response. Just cops being cops.

And now there should be a trial. And not just a trial, but the greatest, fairest trial in the history of trials. The defendant should get the best possible legal assistance money can buy. The "public safety exception" to Miranda should be allowed to expire. He should get the best jury we can empanel and, if we have to move the trial to Guam on account of pre-trial publicity, then godspeed. And then he should be tried and, if convicted, in the greatest, fairest trial in history, he should get shipped off forever to federal prison, never to be heard from again. We should ignore all the predictable howling from John McCain, and from his maiden aunt, Lindsey Graham. This guy is accused of being a multiple murderer. He committed his crimes against the people of Suffolk and Middlesex Counties in Massachusetts. These were not acts of war. They were crimes, more garish than most. This was a day for cops, not for grandstanding celebrity politicians who were not here this week.

"Selflessly. Compassionately. And Unafraid."

We have also responded - and succeeded - with pure, world-beating, no-torture law enforcement.



Full transcript here.

The Power of Commonwealth

This.

Charles Pierce:

I will make you the Toby Ziegler bet — all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets — that, back in 2012, when he made his original comments, Kingston fastened on the Boston Marathon because, in the political culture within which he was raised, that same political culture that is the source of almost all the wildness in our politics, and that same political culture within which the basic principle of the wildness (Government is an alien thing.) is carefully tended and nurtured in a hundred ways, he got to say "Boston," which is a conjuring word summoning up "liberal," and "Dukakis" and "welfare" and all the other spells that so bewitch the people who live in that same culture. (Remember, Kingston said it in March of 2012, and I don't think the Boston Marathon just happened to pop into his head because it was a month away.) I can speak for a great number of people up here when I tell you that we're just a little tired of being used as a heavy-bag workout for every third-rate radio gasbag, every shoeless Bible-banging preacher, and every pecker-wood politician from hell to breakfast just because we have good public schools, decent public parks, and places we all can walk for free in the woods or by the sea, and a semblance of a decent health-care system. (Thanks again, Mitt!) We are tired of apologizing for having public servants and first-responders who make a decent wage and who work for us, and not for Fire Departments, Inc. in Tennessee. Not only that, but Michael Dukakis is a good and decent man and the country would be better off if it listened to him about high-speed rail.

We will not be embarrassed that we share these things in common just because, elsewhere, governors let children starve, and the sick get sicker, and preach of self-reliance while cashing checks from faceless millionnaires. We will not be shamed by the yahoo creationism of the Louisiana public schools, or the cruel neglect of health-care in Texas, or the corporate chop-shop that is being created out of the state of Wisconsin these days. We will not feel slighted that there are more sweatshops elsewhere than there may be here. We will not join your race to the bottom. It has to stop somewhere. It might as well be here.

We realize there is corruption in our systems. (The last several previous Speakers of the Massacusetts House in a row have all been convicted of one felony or another. Top that, Louisiana!) We realize there is waste. We howl and rail against it as loudly as anyone does. We mock its beneficiaries, and mock ourselves for being foolish enough not to see it happening. Our uncles get us jobs on the country road crews. We still have a Governor's Council, a vestigial Rivendell for political elves that last was truly relevant to anything shortly before they threw the tea into the harbor. But the essential point is that even the corruption and waste in our government belongs to us because the government belongs to us. We won't give it away, or sell it off wholesale, or exchange it for a bag of magic beans proffered by the political hucksters fronting for oligarchical money power. There is corruption and waste in Scott Walker's Wisconsin, and in "Bobby" Jindal's Louisiana. But you can't see it. It's the product of backroom deals and corporate brigandage beyond the reach of democratic accountability. That has been the great triumph of the conservative political revolution — it has managed to privatize political corruption.

We mourn now, because what happened Monday is still too close in time. We grieve, because it was only yesterday that we learned the names of the dead. We grieve and we mourn and we do all these things because that is what citizens of a political commonwealth do at times like this. But there are limits to grief and there are limits to mourning. We will go back to being what we were before. We will return to our good public schools and our decent public parks. We will walk again for free in the woods and along the sea. We will place ourselves in the care of our decent health-care system. (Thanks again, Mitt!) We will pay again for our public servants and our first-responders, and some of them will game our systems, and we'll raise a great howl, and mock the suckers who got caught, but we will not be conned by the grifters who are trying to make a Mississippi of us all.

We are not what they think we are. We are not the myths they've made of us. We are what we are, the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, God save it, goddammit.

"Refuse to Be Terrorized"

Let's not make the mistakes we made after 9/11.  This time, let's fight the right way.

Bruce Schreiner at the Atlantic:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe. 

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized. 

SNIP

If it's hard for us to keep this in perspective, it will be even harder for our leaders. They'll be afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism -- or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity -- they will be branded as "soft on terror." And they'll be afraid that Americans might vote them out of office. Perhaps they're right, but where are the leaders who aren't afraid? What has happened to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"? 

Terrorism, even the terrorism of radical Islamists and right-wing extremists and lone actors all put together, is not an "existential threat" against our nation. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn't do existential damage to our nation. Our society is more robust than it might seem from watching the news. We need to start acting that way. 

SNIP

Don't glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a "war on terror." Wars involve two legitimate sides. There's only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we're scared. 

Empathize, but refuse to be terrorized. Instead, be indomitable -- and support leaders who are as well. That's how to defeat terrorists.

Read the whole wonderful thing, and pass it on to everyone you know.

Also this, from Digby:

Patton Oswalt wrote this:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will." 

Domestic Terrorism Is Right-Wing Terrorism

We don't yet know who perpetrated the Boston Marathon Massacre, but we do know that whoever is charged with the crime, the rightwing noise machine will label them "left-wing," regardless of the facts.

So let's remember that for more than thirty years, virtually all the domestic terrorism in this country has been perpetrated by right-wingers.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Despite the violence fetish of some leftists, the reality is that left-wing terrorism has declined to almost nothing in the United States since 1980. We do face severe domestic terrorist threats, but those threats exist almost exclusively on the right, including recent white supremacist violence against law enforcement. Yet in popular media, the face of scary left-wing terrorists, usually environmentalists, dominate our images of domestic terrorism. While the 1990s saw a rise in radical environmentalists who sometimes engaged in property violence, such as certain cells of the Earth Liberation Front, the idea that “ecoterrorism” means some idiots burning SUVs is absurd.* Yet a visit to the museum at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing is all about ecoterrorism and not about right-wing terrorism at all. It’s a crazy and highly politicized disconnect. 

Rachel Maddow has the list:

Rachel spent some time last night detailing the series of bombings we've seen on U.S. soil over the last 20 years, including the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the Unabomber in 1994, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the pipe bombs at the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, the bomb at an Alabama abortion clinic in 1998, the arson attack at a Syracuse temple in 2000, the 18 pipe bombs planted in mailboxes in five states in 2002, the 2008 bomb planted in front of a military recruiting center in Times Square, the bomb at a San Diego courthouse also in 2008, the fire bombs targeting researchers in 2008 at UC Santa Cruz, and in 2011, there was an attempted bombing of an MLK parade in Spokane.

Racists, freakazoids, misogynists, white supremacists  - anti-progress conservatards every single one.