Sanity Prevails in Wisconsin

From MSNBC:

An Indiana state official who tweeted that riot police in neighboring Wisconsin should "use live ammunition" to clear out pro-union demonstrators has lost his job.

The Indiana Attorney General’s Office said Wednesday that Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox "is no longer employed by this agency."

The office made the announcement after reviewing statements Cox purportedly made in tweets and blog posts, including one in which he said he advocated "deadly force" against "thugs" who threatened state elected officials in Wisconsin.

...

On Saturday night, Mother Jones staffers tweeted that a source had told them Wisconsin riot police were preparing to clear out demonstrators from the Wisconsin capitol building — something that didn't end up happening.

...

Weinstein said only later did he find out that JCCentCom was the Twitter user name for Cox, one of more than 140 attorneys in the Indiana Attorney General's Office. Weinstein wrote that Cox has expressed similar contempt for political opponents on his personal blog, Pro Cynic, which has since been disabled.

The last thing needed in the US is for officials in Wisconsin to "go Gaddafi" and use violence. It is dispicable that an official in Indiana was spreading this rumour and hoping to provoke violence.

This is just more evidence that Americans have managed to push their politics to the edge. They have put into office people on the right who so fanatical that they are willing to do anything to "win".

This statement from Wisconsin is scary and very unhelpful:

The Wisconsin state police union president said troopers would "absolutely" use force to clear out protesters if ordered by the governor, the investigative news website Raw Story reported on Monday.

Tracy Fuller, executive board president of the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association, said state law officers would don riot gear and "do their job" if Walker ordered them to break up the protests, according to Raw Story.

"I have worked with the University of Wisconsin police officers that are there, along with the capitol police officers, and certainly I've worked with the state patrol officers because I'm a state patrol inspector. I'm not able to even fathom that any of those police officers would not carry out whatever orders were given to do their job," Fuller was quoted as saying.

However, Fuller added that he "can't even imagine that the governor or anybody else would think that's a viable option."

The military are told they are not to follow illegal orders. I would hope that state police in Wisconsin are instructed to ignore and refuse to follow any illegal orders. People have a right to demonstrate. Just because a governor says "clear them out!" is not sufficient legal basis for removing demonstrators. Here is the fine line that police must follow between the right to protest and the legal need to maintain public order. This bit is from the UK, but the law in all English speaking countries is basically the same:

The Human Rights Act protects freedom of expression and freedom of assembly – these form the basis for your right to gather with others and protest.

The act forbids governments and other public bodies (including police) from violating these rights. However, it does allow for some limitations on these rights in order to prevent unrest, violence and crime, and for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

The police work to balance the right to protest with the right of other people to go about their lives safely and freely.

So to have the state police chief in Wisconsin blandly say that he will "carry out orders" is very unhelpful. Wisconsin is not a police state. Demonstrators have a right. The governor needs to stay within the law and the police must be especially careful in how they enforce the law.

Death and Mayham in Libya

From Al Jazeera:

10.38pm: More than 2, 000 people have been killed in Benghazi alone over the past few days, a French doctor told Le Point Magazine. The doctor also said that those attacking anti-government protesters included foreign mercenaries from Chad and Niger.

The "official" death toll is laughably small...

6.34pm: At least 640 people have been killed since the protests began, the International Federation for Human Rights (IFHR) says. This figure is more than double the official Libyan government toll of 300 dead.

The elephant has given birth to yet another mouse. Here is the key statement from Obama in today's news conference about Libya:

The American people extend our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of all who've been killed and injured. The suffering and bloodshed is outrageous and it is unacceptable. So are threats and orders to shoot peaceful protesters and further punish the people of Libya. These actions violate international norms and every standard of common decency. This violence must stop.

Having the leader of the world's biggest army, the country look to for leadership, and having this guy say "this violence must stop" as if it will fall from heaven by itself if ridiculous. This isn't "leadership". This is idiocy. I have not a shred of respect left for Obama. He isn't the positive evil that Bush was, but he is a big nothing when it comes to helping usher in a better future. His actions on Libya are consistent with his "do nothing but wring you hands" approach he has taken with his own people in trying to deal with the legislative onslaught of the rabid Republicans in the US. Tragic.

International Community Snoozes while Libyan People Looses

There are all kinds of calls on international bodies to "act now" on the crisis in Libya, but since Obama has decided to do what he has done with every other democratic outbreak, i.e. put on the snooze button and wait to see "what develops", nobody is taking any action.

Here's a call from Amnesty International on Al Jazeera:

9.27pm: Rights group, Amnesty International, has launched a petition to the US president and the US representative to the UN, calling for immediate action against the attrocities taking place in Libya.

The petition states:

Libyan leader Mu'ammar al-Gaddafi and his government appear to be prepared to kill an unlimited number of people to stay in power.

The international community should act now to put a stop to the bloodshed.

To read more, and to sign the petition, click here.

I remain deeply unhappy with muddle along do-nothing Obama. This is a historic opportunity to help the Middle East join the 21st century and build democracies across the region, but Obama would rather have "security and stability" under madmen like Gadaffi than have people with democratic control over their own lives. Sad.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin Answering to His "Boss"

Naive people would think that the governor of Wisconsin was "hired" by the electors of Wisconsin, but in reality Walker knows who his real boss is, big money right wing crazies like the Koch brothers. Here's a taped phone call of a guy pretending to be David Kock and getting a "status report" from "employee" Scott Walker. This phone call makes it clear that Walker works for big rich people, not for the people of Wisconsin:

Part 1:


Part 2:


Here's an article in Salon magazine which describes the prank and how it got Gov. Scott Walker to spill his guts:

Ian Murphy, editor of the Buffalo Beast, just did something wonderful. Murphy, pretending to be billionaire industrialist and secretive conservative political activist David Koch, called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, currently in the midst of attempting to crush the public employees' unions. "Koch" got through to Walker (who hasn't been taking calls from the Democratic state Senate minority leader). He taped the call and put it online.

So Walker will happily take a call from a Koch brother. He says that he considered "planting some troublemakers" among the protesters. He is convinced that everyone is on his side. Like most people who only watch Fox, he has a skewed impression of the popularity of his union-crushing proposals. (His plan is, nationally, roundly unpopular. Except on Fox.)

When "Koch" calls Mika Brzezinski "a real piece of ass," Walker does not respond by saying something awful, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Walker does reveal that he is planning to trick the Democrats into coming back into town for a "talk," despite his lack of interest in compromising anything. He will ask them to open a session in the Assembly, and then take a recess for this talk. At that point, the Senate Republicans would hold the vote on the bill while Walker distracts them Democrats with this entirely pointless discussion:

They can recess it... the reason for that, we're verifying it this afternoon, legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum because it's turned out that way. So we’re double checking that.If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capitol with all 14 of them. My sense is, hell. I'll talk. If they want to yell at me for an hour, I'm used to that. I can deal with that. But I'm not negotiating.

Walker also thinks that Reagan crushing the air-traffic controllers' union was "the first crack in the Berlin wall," because he's been stewing in the propaganda of conservative mythology for years.

And finally:

Koch: [Laughs] Well, I tell you what, Scott: once you crush these bastards I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time.

Walker: All right, that would be outstanding.

So! A Koch brother can call up a nationally prominent Republican elected official and get an audience whenever he likes, basically. That is not particularly surprising, I guess.

There is more about this prank at Mother Jones magazine.

What makes me want to throw up is that Walker loves to play the "these union guys got a better deal than you, so let's bring them down a notch" jealousy while at the same time not pointing out that his big tax cuts for the ultra-rich and corporations are where the real money is at. Working class and middle class people shouldn't be jealous of the other guy who has a dollar more an hour than they have, they should be hopping mad at the billionaires and millionaires that can pocket a tax cut of several hundred thousand dollars that Walker is giving the fat cats. The whole thing is so sleazy. I can't believe that people don't rise up in rebellion and burn the state house down, tar and feather Scott Walker, and then run him out of the state. He is a complete sleaze.

Americans need to rise up and take back their government. Their governors, senators, and representatives should not be working -- and reporting to!!! -- rich right wing nuts. They need to be working for and reporting to the American people.

Birds of a Feather, Flock Together

From an Al Jazeera blog post:

7:41am Latin American leaders who have long been friendly with Gaddafi - such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro - are being noticeably silent on the revolt in Libya and its violent suppression, Al Jazeera's Lucia Newman notes. Though Castro has suggested NATO might be planning an invasion of Libya, neither he nor Chavez has gone as far as Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and offered actual support for Gaddafi.

Only a monster could not feel sympathy for the poor people of Libya under the heel of the monster Gadaffi. This shows that Chavez, Castro, and Ortega are like Gadaffi in mouthing claims of "for the people" or "democratic" but they are sleazy and vicious people who use others for their own personal glorification. They have no empathy for their own people. They are not democrats. They are social parasites.

Brad DeLong Takes Down the Hypocrisy of (Some) Libertarians

I was very much amused as I read this post by Brad DeLong. It matches my picture of the hypocrisy of many who would "preach" at us, especially the nutcase libertarians:

In general there are two types of critics of the social insurance state. One type--Milton Friedman, say--claims that the social insurance state is bad policy because its benefits misalign incentives and the reduction in the size of the pie outweighs whatever distributional benefits are attained. A second type--the Robert Nozicks, the Ayn Rands, the Robert Borks--say that the social insurance state is immoral because its benefits are theft by parasites and loafers.

That is why it is noteworthy when Robert Bork files a tort lawsuit of a type he has denounced against the Yale Club of New York, why it is noteworthy when Robert Nozick uses the Cambridge Rent Control Board to extort money from Eric Segal, and when Ayn Rand accepts Medicare because otherwise her lung cancer surgeries would bankrupt her.

Joshua Holland

Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them: Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well. Her books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).... Her ideas about government intervention in some idealized pristine marketplace serve as the basis for so much of the conservative rhetoric we see today. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” said Paul Ryan, the GOP's young budget star at a D.C. event honoring the author. On another occasion, he proclaimed, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.” “Morally and economically,” wrote Rand in a 1972 newsletter, “the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull.”...

Rand... believed that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco was a hoax. By 1974, the two-pack-a-day smoker, then 69, required surgery for lung cancer. And it was at that moment of vulnerability that she succumbed to the lure of collectivism. Evva Joan Pryor... interviewed in 1998 by Scott McConnell, who was then the director of communications for the Ayn Rand Institute.... “She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like, which was Medicare and Social Security,” Pryor told McConnell. “I remember telling her that this was going to be difficult. For me to do my job she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory. So that started our political discussions. From there on – with gusto – we argued all the time. The initial argument was on greed,” Pryor continued. “She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”...

[A]t least she put up a fight before succumbing to the imperatives of the real world – one in which people get sick, and old, and many who are perfectly decent and hardworking don't end up being independently wealthy....

A central rule of the U.S. political economy is that people are attracted to the idea of “limited government” in the abstract—and certainly don’t want the government intruding in their homes—but they really, really like living in a society with adequately funded public services.

That's just as true for an icon of modern conservatism as it is for a poor mother getting public health care for her kids.

Too often the religious moralizers are shown to be a Jimmy Swaggarts or Jim Bakker or Ted Haggart. I got a chuckle that Karl Marx was a mooch his whole life, a sex maniac, a Jewish anti-semite, and loved to keep the airs of the bourgeoisie while claiming to be a friend of the working man. Hypocrites! All of them were hypocrites. And Brad DeLong points out that big shot libertarians were hypocrites as well.

American Rights & Liberties are in the Toilet

It is absolutely disgusting that the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) is less interested in finding terrorists than in terrorizing honest citizens. Here is the latest outrage from BoingBoing:

Alaska state rep refuses TSA grope of her mastectomy scars, drives home from Seattle

Cory Doctorow at 11:34 AM Tuesday, Feb 22, 2011

Alaska State Rep Sharon Cissna, a breast cancer survivor who has had a mastectomy, was barred from flying home to Juneau from Seattle by the TSA when she refused to allow a screener to touch the scars from her operation. She drove home instead. Apparently she is always selected for an invasive "hand screening" because the "irregularities" presented by her prosthesis when viewed through the pornoscanner raise the TSA's suspicions. As others have observed, the War on Terror is really a War on the Unusual -- it's the systematic erosion of rights for people with nonstandard appearance, health, itineraries, and beliefs, without regard to whether those "irregularities" are correlated with terrorist activity. It's as though the TSAhas said, "All terrorists are engaged in something unusual, therefore all unusual occurrences should be viewed as potential terrorism."

"So last night, as more and more TSA, airline, airport and police gathered, I became stronger in remembering to fight the submission to a physical hand exam. I repeatedly said that I would not allow the feeling-up and I would not use the transportation mode that required it."

"For nearly fifty years I've fought for the rights of assault victims, population in which my wonderful Alaska sadly ranks number one, both for men and women who have been abused. The very last thing an assault victim or molested person can deal with is yet more trauma and the groping of strangers, the hands of government 'safety' policy."

"For these people, as well as myself, I refused to submit."

Worse than the pure stupid outrage upon an honest person is the fact that the Obama administration is brain dead and unable to learn from its mistakes and improve real security. Instead, Obama seems intent on following the down the same road of "security theatre" that was trail blazed by Bush. It is pure idiocy. It is a waste of taxpayer dollars and it buys no security, but it sure tramples upon rights and liberties.

In order to show that I'm not prejudiced, here is a case of bureaucratic stupidity from China from the UK's Sunday Times newspaper:

China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate

Tibet’s living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China’s atheist leaders. The ban is included in new rules intended to assert Beijing’s authority over Tibet’s restive and deeply Buddhist people.

“The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid,” according to the order, which comes into effect on September 1.

The 14-part regulation issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs is aimed at limiting the influence of Tibet’s exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, and at preventing the re-incarnation of the 72-year-old monk without approval from Beijing.

It is the latest in a series of measures by the Communist authorities to tighten their grip over Tibet. Reincarnate lamas, known as tulkus, often lead religious communities and oversee the training of monks, giving them enormous influence over religious life in the Himalayan region. Anyone outside China is banned from taking part in the process of seeking and recognising a living Buddha, effectively excluding the Dalai Lama, who traditionally can play an important role in giving recognition to candidate reincarnates.

I submit that the US's TSA shows a similar level of stupidity as China's State Administration for Religious Affairs. To be perfectly honest, I believe the Chinese bureaucrats are actually more "reasonable" than the American ones. There is more of a "real" security threat from a reincarnating Tibetan monk who plays a role in choosing his successor than in an Alaskan state representative who has a mastectomy scar. Hey, but what do I know? I'm not a "security" expert like these paragons of virtue who serve the state in America and China!

Oh... and I can't leave the UK out of this charade of public stupidity. Here is a bit from a post in BoingBoing by Richard Dawkins about the abysmal stupidity of "security" searches in the UK:

I'm writing this on a plane, having just passed through Security at Heathrow airport. An obviously nice young mother was distraught because she wasn't allowed to take on board a tub of ointment for her little girl's eczema. The security man was polite but firm. She wasn't even permitted to spoon a reduced quantity into a smaller jar. I couldn't quite grasp what was wrong with that helpful suggestion, but the rule book was implacable. All the official could do was offer to fetch his supervisor. The supervisor came and, equally polite but firm, she too was regretfully bound by the rulebook's hoops of steel.

There was nothing I could do, and it was no help that I recommended a website where a knowledgeable chemist explains, in delightfully comedic detail, what it would take to manufacture a workable bomb from binary liquid ingredients, working for several hours in the aircraft loo, using copious quantities of ice, in relays of champagne coolers helpfully supplied by the cabin staff.

The prohibition against taking more than very small quantities of liquids or unguents on planes is demonstrably ludicrous. It started as one of those "Look at us, we're taking decisive action" displays, the ones designed to cause maximum inconvenience to the public in order to make the dimwitted Dundridges who rule our lives feel important and look busy.

Same with having to take our shoes off (another gem of official wallyhood that must have Bin Laden chuckling triumphantly into his beard) and all those other classic exercises in belated stable door shutting. But let me get to the general principle. Rulebooks are themselves put together by human judgments. Often bad human judgments, but in any case judgments by humans who were probably no wiser or better qualified to make them than the individuals who subsequently have to put them into practice out in the real world.

No sane person, witnessing that scene at the airport, seriously feared that this woman was planning to blow herself up on a plane. The fact that she was accompanied by children gave us the first clue. Supporting evidence trickled in from the brazen visibility of her face and hair, from her lack of a Koran, prayer mat or big black beard, and finally from the manifest absurdity of the notion that her little tub of ointment could ever, in a million years, be alchemically magicked into a high explosive - certainly not in the cramped laboratory facilities afforded by an aircraft loo. The security official and his supervisor were human beings who obviously wished they could behave decently, but they were powerless: stymied by a rulebook. Nothing but a rulebook, which, because it is made of paper and unalterable ink rather than of flexible human brain tissue, is incapable of discretion, compassion or humanity.

Sadly we live in a world where government is intent on proving the Reagan maxim "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem". I genuinely despise Reagan as the originator of this Kafkaesque world we now all inhabit, but that maxim has got it damn right as far as airport "security" is concerned.