Everybody Behaving Badly

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the DNC voter database flap, and finally I found somebody who appears to understand what happened.

Basically, the DNC uses a creaky old voter database setup with firewalls between campaign staffs. Because of a glitch on the part of the database company, at least one Sanders staffer suddenly had access to Clinton data. He was supposed to immediately report this but did not. This was stupid on his part, because user activity on the database is monitored. Instead, it appears at least one staffer tried to access lists of donors. He or they  would not have been able to download these lists, according to the source linked above, but they would have been able to view valuable “topline” information. So, the Sanders staffer(s) behaved badly. The person deemed responsible for the bad behavior has been fired. There is no indication Bernie Sanders himself was involved.

There’s a broad consensus that actual damage to the Clinton campaign from this mishap was minimal. Would have been minimal, anyway, except other people behaved badly.

In a normal world, the DNC would have quietly gone to both campaigns, investigated the incident, and perhaps request that responsible parties be fired. However, this is not a normal world. In a massive display of bad judgment, and in a bare-assed attempt to put her thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz went public with this incident and made it a big bleeping deal.

Temporarily cutting off the Sanders campaign from the database was not an unreasonable thing to do while the glitch was being investigated and the firewall patched up. But DWS made it seem the DNC was punishing the Sanders campaign. And then the Sanders campaign felt compelled to threaten a lawsuit to get their access back (which has been restored). Maybe that was grandstanding; maybe the Sandernistas feared DWS was going to keep them locked out long enough to seriously shut down their funding drives.

The Clinton campaign has accused the Sanders campaign of theft, when IMO HRC and her people would have been better off stepping aside and letting Sanders and the DNC duke it out, especially since the beef all along is that the DNC is entirely in the tank for HRC.  This is at Vox:

The back-and-forth here is emblematic of a larger struggle between Sanders and the DNC, which has persisted since the beginning of the primary. The DNC has pretty openly lined up behind Hillary Clinton, pushing for her to cruise to victory without splitting the field, as happened in 2008. The Sanders campaign sees the severity of this punishment as driven by the DNC’s broader bias against their candidate.

Charles Pierce:

Let us stipulate a few things. First, the DNC, under the barely perceptible leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has greased the skids for Hillary Rodham Clinton. (A debate on the Saturday night before Christmas, when half the country’s on an airplane going to visit the other half? Please.) Second, yes, it’s true, if the situation were reversed, and it was the Clinton campaign that had breached the Sanders campaign’s data, The New York Times would be screaming bloody murder and talking about a “culture” of slicker, and where’s there’s smoke etc. etc. Third, it’s true that, if I wanted to throw the Democratic primary campaign into a little chaos to distract attention from the fact that Tuesday night’s Republican debate more closely resembled a casting call by Roger DeBris, this is exactly the kind of story I would want to have out there. And, last, it’s true that, if I wanted to distract from the fact that Sanders on Thursday was endorsed by the Communication Workers of America, and by Democracy For America, this also would be exactly the kind of story I would want out there. So, all your paranoid speculations are as well-founded as paranoid speculations can be.

 Josh Marshall believes this is going to hurt HRC and the Democratic Party more than it’s going to hurt Sanders.

Let’s be clear on one point: It may not look like it. But the DNC/Clinton campaign actually needs the Sanders Camp much more than the Sanders Camp needs them.

Here’s why.

The overwhelming likelihood is that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. That means that 3 or 4 or 6 months from now her campaign and the DNC will need to unify the party. Whatever the data folks at the Sanders campaign did, by suspending their access the DNC will quite likely give a lot of Sanders supporters the idea that if they’d only had access to their data, Sanders might have won. At a minimum, many will be convinced that the game was rigged all along: that the DNC was operating as an arm of the Clinton campaign.

Now, Clinton is the candidate with overwhelming party establishment buy-in. We all know that the DNC and its apparatus is more friendly and inclined toward her campaign. But there is a world of difference before passive support or hopes for her victory and actively tipping the scales in her favor. If Sanders supporters get the idea the DNC and its chair are doing the latter, it introduces a toxic chemical into the bloodstream of the party. That could cause big, big problems down the line for Clinton and for the entire Democratic ticket.

Now, if that’s not depressing enough, read Andrew O’Hehir:

We have been told once again, for the 443rd time, that sooner or later all the leathery, old, white Republicans will wither away and Democrats will inherit the earth. Sounds good in theory, but I have two questions: What Democrats? And what earth? …

…Hillary Clinton is a symptom of a party that has lost its ideological moorings and more recently been eaten away from below by political termites. She is not the disease itself, and the Hillary vs. Bernie cage match, with its frequently unappetizing gender politics, is not the main event. This week’s report from the Center for American Progress, with its claim that the nation’s shifting demographics overwhelmingly favor the Democrats in 2016 and beyond, was hardly breaking news (least of all to Republican donors and strategists). One of the authors of that study, Ruy Teixeira, co-wrote the book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” — published in 2002. At least he doesn’t give up easily. But this time around, the report contains or conceals a grievous epistemological error: It assumes a bipolar universe of Democrats and Republicans, the traditional realm of traditional politics. And in this year of Trump and Sanders and generalized political madness, that universe is imploding around us….

…The demographic changes envisioned in that CAP report will take many decades to play out, and if you want to insist that the Democratic glass is half-full, you can see the Sanders 2016 campaign as the beginning of a badly needed internal process of reform or revolution. But all confident predictions of an endless future of Democratic hegemony involve a failure to observe the most obvious facts in American politics: Party identification is dropping to all-time lows, and outside the unique demographic leverage of a presidential election, voting is doing likewise. …

… The Democratic Armageddon of 2014 revealed a party with no fight, no strategy, no ideas and no soul. Its elected officials and Washington apparatchiks whined and wailed, blamed their own voters for accurately perceiving that they were clueless and defeated, and then capitulated and crawled away. That party still hopes to be rescued by the demographic advantage it has been promised for 25 years and counting. But it has done nothing to earn or deserve that advantage, has no idea what to do with it and, absent major change, will be sure to squander it if it ever gets here.

I can’t say he’s wrong.

Don’t Short the Big Short

Paul Krugman himself praises The Big Short, the new feature film on the financial crisis. Let’s all go see it.   Here’s a list of auxiliary reading to accompany the film.

There are lots of good reviews. This is by Peter Travers in The Rolling Stone:

It sounds like a horror show: a doomsday epic about the 2008 financial crisis and the Wall Street wolves who got rich off it. Gone were the homes, jobs and savings of average Joes. But wait. As directed and written by Adam McKay – the dude behind Anchorman and other giddy hits with Will Ferrell, his partner on the website Funny or Die – The Big Short is hunting bigger game. I’d call it a Restoration comedy for right the fuck now, a farce fueled by rage against the machine that relentlessly kills ethics, and a hell of a hilarious time at the movies if you’re up for laughs that stick in your throat.

So who doesn’t like it? Um, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The New York Post, and Fortune. Um, do tell.

I haven’t seen it, but now I’m going to have to make a point of it.

 

Squawk Squawk Chickenhawk

Hearing those meatballs running for the Republican nomination brag about how tough they’d be on terrorism is surreal. It’s like hearing some pot-bellied drunk brag about how he could beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. if the World Boxing Association would let him in the ring.

Ted “Tailgunner” Cruz brags about “carpet bombing” ISIS, apparently without comprehending what “carpet bombing” means. Even Frank Bruni is snarky

Someone needs to explain carpets to Ted Cruz.

They’re continuous stretches of material, usually rectangular, sometimes round. They’re not staggered, interrupted, with stops, starts, holes and sharp jags so that they smother and blot out only the evil bits of floor but leave adjacent, innocent ones untouched.

When you call for carpet bombing, as Cruz did again on Tuesday night, you are not outlining a strategy of pinpoint targeting or of any discernment.

You are sounding big and bold and advocating something indiscriminate. That’s the nature of a carpet. You can’t pretend otherwise.

Unless you’re Cruz, who can pretend just about anything.

I’m pretty sure none of the A-list contenders has had any experience wearing a military uniform, except perhaps for Halloween.  (Toast! and Dr. Ben did register for the draft during the late Vietnam era but were not called.)  Gilmore (is he still running?) was in the Military Intelligence Corp. for a while. Miz Lindsey has a considerable military record serving as a lawyer but was never deployed into combat. Of course, combat experience is no predictor of whether a President will be an effective commander in chief. But you’d think a person who has never seen war would at least affect some humility and reticence about sending other people into one.

On the other hand, there’s Mike Huckabee, who never served, telling young people to get off their butts and secure their freedoms.

Charlies Pierce:

So sitting there, listening to a bunch of people who never served a day in combat talk about how they’re going to turn the Middle East into obsidian glass and how they will keep me safe, it was hard not to fall off my chair. Frankly, I wouldn’t hire any of these people to watch my car in a valet parking lot, let alone lead the country into what they never miss a chance to call, “the Third World War.” Chris Christie? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio?

Trump?

You see where I’m going here.

When he was a “federal prosecutor,” Chris Christie made more ferocious war on his expense account than he did against the “people who want to kill us.” (His big trophy case, the Fort Dix Six, is one of those strange half-entrapment cases.) He also doesn’t seem to like the Senate very much. Marco Rubio, continuing his ongoing effort to fill out a grown-up person’s suit, postured and promised us (again) a 500-ship Navy to keep us safe from the people who drive their pick-up trucks across the ocean to attack us. He also puffed himself up and declined to talk about classified information on national television. (This assumes, of course, that he even knows any, given the fact that he seems to have developed a severe allergy to something in the  room where the Senate Intelligence Committee meets.) Ben Carson said something very weird about being a neurosurgeon in connection with carpet-bombing Syria. (I’m not kidding.) It’s a very good thing that we really are not electing a commander-in-chief for the whole country because none of these guys is up to the job.

There’s an old saying, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Well, if hot air were missiles, these guys would be fearsome. But it ain’t, and they aren’t.

Bombs Away

I’m not watching the Republican debate, but I’m betting it’s a bomb fest.

I’m learning that the New York Public schools received a bomb threat very similar to the one that closed Los Angeles schools today.  But the NY schools did not close, mostly because nobody saw the email until it was too late to get the word out. By 9 o’clock or so, the NYPD had determined the threat was a hoax. I don’t know if that’s reassuring.

Ran into wi-fi issues today, which slowed me down. I will write something tomorrow, I promise!

Out Until Sunday

We’re about to start a meditate-your-butt-off retreat here in the temple, so I’ll be offline (officially) until Sunday. Do try to behave. Please feel free to discuss whatever atrocities are going on.

Bad Hair?

Few of the people waxing indignant because The Donald proposed banning Muslims from the U.S. seem not to have noticed that Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush want to allow only Christian refugees from Syria into the country. And many state governors have gone out of their way to be as ugly and nativist as possible, barring Syrian refugees of any sort.

In other words, it appears the Muslim ban thing is only bad because The Donald said it. Is it the bad hair?

Seriously, the only difference between the snake oil Trump is peddling and the snake oil being marketed by the rest of the Republican candidates is that some are using more upscale advertising.

I don’t entirely buy Charles Blow’s argument that Trump the Candidate is a monster created by craven mass media, but I agree with this:

Speaker Paul Ryan said at the House Republican leadership’s weekly news conference, “This is not conservatism.” Maybe it’s not traditional conservatism, but it is modern Republicanism, or at least a large enough portion of it to make the most inflammatory Republican candidate the most liked Republican candidate.

Ryan continued: “What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for and, more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for.”

I’m not sure which party Ryan has been paying attention to for the last decade, but to my eye and ear, extreme rhetoric is increasingly becoming intrinsic to the Republican Party. The front-runner is simply saying out loud what many conservatives are feeling — he’s not Svengali; he’s a crowd reader.

The truth is that even candidates with more graceful language and elegant delivery than the current front-runner express views that sound eerily similar to his.

People who self-identify as journalists in mass media just about never point out how absurd a politician’s positions are, even when they are, but now for The Donald all bets are off. It’s now okay for them to admit his ideas are nuts and he’s beginning to resemble a cross between a low-rent Mussolini and Pennywise the Clown. But they won’t say the same thing about the other GOP candidates, even though they are all pretty much on the same page in substance, if not in packaging. Although it’s okay to repeat every unsubstantiated rumor about Hillary Clinton.

The GOP is still hoping The Donald will flame out that that a “serious” candidate, i.e. someone with a conventional working relationship with the GOP establishment and its corporate donors, will step up. The longer Trump stays on top of the polls, the harder it’s going to be for that to happen. Heh.

See also Gail Collins, Republicans, Guns and Abortion.

The Thought Police

Not enough attention is being paid to this: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas, of course), who is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is using his committee chairmanship to intimidate the government’s own climate scientists.

In October, Mr. Smith issued a subpoena to Kathryn D. Sullivan, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, demanding all internal notes, emails and correspondence concerning a study its scientists published in the journal Science. The study found that the “rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than what was seen during the latter half of the 20th century.”

This conclusion disputed the claim, seized upon by climate-change deniers like Mr. Smith, that there has been a slowdown in the rate of global warming in recent years. In fact, 2014 was the warmest year on record, and this year is likely to end up even warmer.

Fortunately, NOAA did not acquiesce to Mr. Smith’s outrageous demands. The agency pointed out that it had provided Mr. Smith’s committee with the scientific briefings, data and studies behind the Science article, as well as two thorough briefings by NOAA scientists. But Mr. Smith was not satisfied. He repeated his demand for all subpoenaed documents and warned of “civil and/or criminal enforcement mechanisms” if the agency did not comply.

Do read the whole article.

Triggers

Righties are apoplectic about this Daily News article, which presents a hypothesis about the San Bernadino mass shooting.  Apparently one of Tashfeen Malik’s c0-workers was a five-alarm loudmouth wingnut bagger who wanted Ann Coulter to be named head of Homeland Security. The Daily News writer called him  a radical Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew.” Might explain why the shooters went after the workplace, which otherwise made no sense as a terrorism target.

The author also made the point that the shooters and this victim were mirror images of each other, and the Usual Wingnuts are over-the-top indignant. But the only difference I see is that few of  our whackjobs are desperate enough to go beyond the bloviating stage. They’re capable of it, though.

Yakety Yak

Yesterday Senate Republicans killed a couple of gun control proposals:

The first gun control measure proposed by Democrats was legislation from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would deny people on a federal terrorism watch list the ability to purchase guns. The measure failed, 45-54. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) voted with Republicans to reject the measure, and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) crossed over to vote in favor of the gun restrictions.

The second vote revived legislation from April 2013, written in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Conn., with bipartisan backing that would enact universal background checks. The four Republicans who backed the bill then — Kirk and Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, John McCain of Arizona and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the measure with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — also voted in favor of the Democrats’ plan on Thursday. Heitkamp also opposed the second gun-control measure, which was blocked on a 48-50 tally. …

… The vote carried little drama: No one changed their position from April 2013, and other than Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) attempting to vote “aye” twice, there was little drama as senators scrolled on their phones during the first major gun vote in two and a half years.

So, Republicans make sure we can’t do anything about our most common form of terrorism — mass shootings. The New York Times editorial board:

In the hours after the attack in San Bernardino on Wednesday, President Obama specifically mentioned that legislation as an important security measure. “Those same people who we don’t allow to fly can go into a store in the United States and buy a firearm, and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them. That’s a law that needs to be changed,” he said on CBS News. The George W. Bush administration backed the terrorist-list bill in 2007.

No matter. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, issued his party’s weak defense of arming potential terrorism suspects on Thursday morning: “I think it’s very important to remember people have due process rights in this country, and we can’t have some government official just arbitrarily put them on a list.” Mr. Ryan’s Senate colleagues demonstrated that they are more worried about the possibility that someone might be turned away from a gun shop than shielding the public against violent criminals.

Short on action, big on talk:

At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s conference on Thursday, the Republican presidential candidates offered little but political attacks. Senator Cruz immediately blamed Mr. Obama: “Coming on the wake of the terror attack in Paris, this horrific murder underscores that we are at a time of war, whether or not the current administration realizes it or is willing to acknowledge it, our enemies are at war with us and I believe this nation needs a wartime president to defend it.”

Gov. Chris Christie injected more fear: “The president continues to wring his hands and say ‘we’ll see,’ but those folks dressed in tactical gear with semiautomatic weapons came there to do something. We need to come to grips with the idea that we are in the midst of the next world war.”

From Jeb Bush, a bizarre slam: “The brutal savagery of Islamic terrorism exists, and this president and his former secretary of state cannot call it for what it is.”

And Donald Trump, true to his birther views, insinuated that Mr. Obama was hiding something: “Radical Islamic terrorism. We have a president that refuses to use the term. He refuses to say it. There’s something going on with him that we don’t know about.”

One, the Planned Parenthood shooter was not an “Islamic terrorist.” The Charleston shooter was not an “Islamic terrorist.” Of course, to Republicans, terrorism is defined by who does it. If a Muslim shoots somebody, it’s terrorism; if a white supremacist or anti-abortion whackjob does exactly the same thing, it isn’t.

Two, the President wants to be clear the United States is not at war with Islam. But, you know, those shrieking magical adjectives could keep us safe …