Republicans Need to Dig Up Some Better 'Scandals'

Want a scandal? Here's a scandal:


Salon: Try, if you can, to ignore all the lurid coke-and-sex bombshells contained in the three Department of Interior Inspector General reports about the shenanigans at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS). The program director who snorted speed off a subordinate’s toaster oven, and made her give him a blow job while driving around the neighborhood. The two “MMS Chicks” who were notorious for getting plastered at conventions and having one-night stands with oil industry employees.

Try — and yes, I know it’s hard — try even to ignore the allegation that one program director told a subordinate that if she could score him some coke during the MMS performance appraisal period, he would increase her performance award. What’s the big deal? Who wouldn’t be motivated by such an incentive? And what’s a little drunken sex and coke binging on government time among friends? It happens to the best of us.

The significance of the three reports delivered by the inspector general to Congress on Wednesday lies not in the prurience of some of the indiscretions, but in the symbolism. The Royalty-in-Kind Program of the U.S. Minerals Management Service is where offshore drilling meets the U.S. government. And gosh, is it ever one heck of a mess. You want a toxic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Just read the reports.


You'll happy to know that this isn't happening now, but in the misty, far-flung past of bustling 2008. This was the Bush administration's scandal and it was bad. The MMS was responsible for leasing federal land for oil and natural gas drilling. And it was corrupt nearly beyond belief. An Inspector General found not only ethical breaches, but criminal misconduct in an agency who's mission had changed under the Bush administration from serving the interests of the American people to making as much money as possible for the oil and gas industry. The agency was basically run by lobbyists, practically guaranteeing malfeasance. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the agency was finally eliminated under Interior Department restructuring.

I don't bring this up to try to distract from the current controversies plaguing the White House, but to make a simple point; as salacious and shocking as it was at the time, no one talks about the MMS scandal anymore. Of course, the Bush administration had four colossal scandals that leap immediately to mind: the failure to take terrorism seriously, resulting in 9/11; the lies and hype about WMD that led to the invasion of Iraq; the awful response to Hurricane Katrina; and the use of torture. There were also warrantless wiretaps, blowing the cover of Valerie Plame, Dick Cheney getting hammered and shooting some poor guy in the face, and some I'm either forgetting or skipping over for the sake of brevity. In the scandal-production department, the Bushies were overachievers.

Still, you'd think that sex and drugs would sustain people's attention. But in the end, people were fired, people were found guilty of crimes, and America moved on. What really sank the story was that beyond the orgy atmosphere, the story became stultifyingly dull. The actual scandal was about the way the payments were made for leases and how those payments were abused. MMS was using a program called "royalties-in-kind" (RIK), where instead of paying rent with actual money, companies would pay in oil and gas, which MMS would then sell to raise revenue. This resulted in a circle-jerk of corruption, with the MMS renting storage for all this oil and gas from pipeline companies and tank farms. All very bad for American consumers and taxpayers -- and all very boring.

What the controversies involving the White House today lack is that easily understandable hook. If the MMS scandal had only been about meth and blow jobs, it might have had more of a lasting impact on the American memory. But the core controversy was something not so accessible. If all you talked about was drug parties and sexual misconduct, you'd be practicing journalistic malpractice because -- as bad as those things were -- they were not the source of the big crimes. And eventually the public just lost interest.

This is the problem Republicans face with Benghazi -- except they don't even have sex parties and drugs to work with. The GOP timeline for their scandal is hopelessly convoluted and overly-complicated -- Occam's Razor hacks it to bits. You barely even get started explaining it and people's eyes glaze over. Beyond making no sense, the Republican Benghazi story is boring as all get-out and too complicated to follow. As a result, no one but Republicans care and no one but Republicans believe the Republicans.

The Tea Party/IRS controversy has a different problem -- once you take a close look at it, it's hard to see what the supposed "scandal" actually is. It's turning out that the IRS scrutinized organizations on both the left and the right and, of those, turned down tax-exempt status for none of the Tea Party groups. Only a lefty group was denied. Further, people are more likely to start wondering how in Hell a Tea Party group can be classified as a charity and not political. If anything, it highlights a flaw in the system, where political groups are getting a free ride on the taxpayers' dime (and isn't the Tea Party supposed to be against things like that, anyway?). They'll make hay with this and throw around a bunch of victim cards, but -- like Benghazi -- this "scandal" has been on life support since the day it was born.

Finally, there's the AP phone records scandal. That's the one that's probably the most genuine and that's the one Republicans are the least interested in. The problem here: Republicans wanted leaks chased down and they're big fans of monitoring private communications in the name of national security. The media will talk about this one a lot, because it involves themselves and their interests, but Republicans are mainly on a fishing expedition here -- they're hoping someone screwed up and seized phone records illegally. If they don't find evidence of a crime, they're walking away from this one.

Unless Republicans can manage to scare up a good old-fashioned hookers-and-blow scandal -- and only hookers and blow -- their second terms scandal line-up is looking a little weak. They're hoping for Watergate and all they have are Whitewaters.

-Wisco

[photo via Des Moine Register]

Using the Threat of Violence to Shut Down Debate

You didn't have to be Nostradamus to see it coming, but I'll take credit for it anyway. When Mayors Against Illegal Guns announced they'd be holding rallies in eight states Mother's Day weekend, I wrote, "Expect armed goons to show up to at least one of these, because if there’s anything the gun nuts really lack, it’s class and a nose for good PR." Lo and behold, at a rally in Pennsylvania, said goons showed up.


PhillyBurbs.com: As victims of gun violence spoke about how universal background checks might have saved a loved one’s life, pro-gun supporters jeered and yelled remarks Saturday in Morrisville’s Williamson Park.

Steve Kesselman of Holland raised his voice above the crowd to briefly talk about the loss of his 20-year-old son from a deadly shotgun blast after an argument last year. 

“My son is dead! His mother cannot enjoy him anymore because of gun violence! Universal background checks is all we’re looking for. I have nothing against guns!” Kesselman yelled into the microphone.

“Do you believe in unicorns?!” a pro-gun supporter yelled from the crowd.


"Gun owners from groups such as Concerned Gun Owners of Bucks County, the National Rifle Association and a New Jersey group called the NJ2As gathered at Williamson Park before the marchers arrived," according to the report. "Many wore guns and rifles."

“I think it’s ridiculous the way they’ve been acting. I’m so numb to the idiots out there," Kesselman said of the armed counter-protesters.

I don't want to refer to my own writing on the subject too often, but I've been on a bit of a tear lately, so the info I've for previous posts is the info I have closest at hand. So I'm going to go ahead and refer back to a post from last week, where I argued that things like armed protests should be taken as open threats of violence on par with terrorism:


So you’ve got people who hate government and want to kill tyrants. And these are the same people who see tyranny under every rock. Polling shows that nearly half of all Republican voters think armed revolution "might be necessary" in the near future. A reasonable person wouldn’t be out of line to wonder when all this tyrant-fighting was going to start and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think it could be any second now. And when they hear about a terrorist attack with an unknown motive, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if maybe all this tyrant-killing has finally gotten under way.


When people argue that violence, murder, and assassination are legitimate political tools, brandishing firearms is meant to frighten people into silence. It's bullying and, like all bullies, these bullies are cowards. Anyone who shouts in the face of a peaceful grandmother isn't a model of courage. And anyone who heckles a father speaking about death of his son is not a paragon decorum. These people don't want to have a debate. In fact, they're so terrified of the discussion that they'll show up with guns to try to shut it down. These people call themselves "patriots," but they're really just cowardly thugs. Courageous people don't need to hide behind their weapons.

And they're ineffective thugs, at that. They couldn't shut down the rally in Morrisville and they won't stop the growing movement to reduce gun violence, because the issue is way too important. It's not going to get derailed by a bunch of tantrum-throwing toddlers afraid someone's going to take away their binky. That importance was underscored the very next day, with a Mother's Day mass shooting in New Orleans. Nineteen people were injured while attending a parade, when three men opened fire on the crowd. Two of the victims are children.

So wave your guns around and menace old ladies and jeer at grieving fathers all you want, gun nuts. We're not going anywhere. Every time there's a mass shooting or a dead kid, it strengthens our resolve. And if you feel the need to wave your guns around in a crowd of families and children, you're just proving our point. We're pretty convinced you shouldn't be able to do that.

If you want to have a rational discussion about how to deal with gun violence, that's fine. We may not agree on everything and may walk away as divided as we were before, but that's the way it's supposed to work. Democracy's not supposed to be easy or comfortable all the time. But if your idea of "debate" is to stick a gun in someone's face and tell them to shut up, then we don't have a lot to talk about.

You're nothing but a goon and you're part of the problem.

-Wisco

[photo via PhillyBurbs.com]

A Child-Killer Twice as Deadly as Cancer

Mediaite's Tommy Christopher believes he's seeing an epidemic of child-related shootings in recent days. He identifies twelve accidental shootings by children -- nine involving toddlers -- in the month of April. And the string of tragedies continues, with news of a three year-old boy shooting and killing himself in Florida with his uncle's 9mm. Although the gun was left carelessly in a backpack, the state had deemed Jeffrey Walker a "responsible gun owner" and granted him a concealed carry permit. The uncle's gun, no doubt carried out of concern for safety, did absolutely nothing to protect his loved ones against a child's curiosity. This Officially Responsible Gun Owner was arrested and charged with culpable negligence for exposing a minor to a firearm -- a felony.

Christopher's list of incidents is horrifying, including a ten-month-old infant shot in the face by a three year-old and a "four year-old who shot and killed his aunt in a room full of adults, including a sheriff’s deputy who was also a school resource officer."

Christopher includes in his report a "disturbing statistic" from a story about a six year-old shot in the chest by her brother:


According to the Children’s Defense Fund, one-third of all households with children younger than 18 have a gun, and more than 40 percent of gun-owning households with children store their guns unlocked.

The fund also reported that 22 percent of children with gun-owning parents handled guns in their homes without their parents’ knowledge.


Which begs the question: is this a sudden epidemic child-related gun violence or is this just the bloody background noise to American life -- a constant string of tragedies that have become so normal here that we don't give it any more thought than car accidents?

It didn't take much digging to get my answer.


USA Today: In 2010, 15,576 children and teenagers were injured by firearms — three times more than the number of U.S. soldiers injured in the war in Afghanistan, according to [the Children's Defense Fund].

Nationally, guns still kill twice as many children and young people than cancer, five times as many than heart disease and 15 times more than infection, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

"We see guns as much of a threat in their life as we used to see bacteria and viruses," said Dr. Judith S. Palfrey, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the co-author of the New England journal report. "If you look at what's actually killing children and disabling children, guns is one of the major things."


This is nothing new. In 2012, Reuters reported that the American Academy of Pediatrics was calling for "strictest possible regulation of gun sales, as well as more education for parents on the dangers of having a gun at home, to prevent deaths of kids and teens." And even if you're an extremely cautious gun owner, locking your guns away in a gun safe or using trigger locks, you're not statistically doing any good. A 2006 study reports, "Parents who locked their guns away and discussed gun safety with their children were as likely to be contradicted as parents who did not take such safety measures."

In other words, it makes no difference how difficult you make it for kids to get a hold of your guns -- there are so many reckless gun owners out there that your neighbor's carelessness probably cancels you out. And the people who think they've taught their children not to handle guns stand a good chance of being wrong. The same report tells us, "Many parents who were living in homes with firearms and who reported that their children had never handled firearms in their homes were contradicted by their children's self-reports."

No, it's not a sudden epidemic. "People tend to only pay attention to gun safety issues after these mass killings but this is happening all the time to our children and it’s totally preventable," says Angela Sauaia, M.D., Ph.D., of the Colorado School of Public Health and the University of Colorado School of Medicine and author of a study on children and guns.

This is the wallpaper in American life -- so constant that we don't see it any longer. A blood soaked status quo where children are sacrificed to some twisted version of "liberty" and -- in a demented and cruel irony -- a completely erroneous conception of personal safety. How many of these firearms that resulted in the deaths of children were supposedly there to protect the family?

We do things about childhood cancer. We fight it. But firearms result in more dead kids in America than cancer -- by a 2:1 ratio -- and people tell us we're completely helpless to do anything about it. For these gun worshipping morons, the answer to gun violence is always more guns. But how do you use a gun to protect a toddler from an unsecured gun? Do you shoot the kid to stop her from shooting herself? Unsecured guns are the problem and it's time we dealt with it.

And can we please put the myth of the "responsible gun owner" being the majority to bed? When studies show that American guns are so loosely secured that locking up your own guns is statistically meaningless in protecting your children, we can safely assume that a huge percentage of gun owners do not deal with their firearms responsibly. If responsible gun owners will have to be inconvenienced by gun safety regulations, then it sucks to be you. But frankly, I don't care. Blame the massive percentage of gun owners who are clowns, not the people who want to protect their kids from those clowns. Put the blame where the blame belongs; not with the regulators, but with the irresponsible and incautious dopes who leave firearms where anyone can get at them. If I just described you (and if you're a gun owner, there's a good chance I did), then too bad -- you suck. Take that energy you're using to be so offended and use it to do something about all your stupidly easily accessible firearms.

We have to have priorities. Putting the safety of children above the ability for any moron to have as many guns laying around as they want is responsible prioritizing. If you own firearms and you don't see that, then you're not a responsible gun owner. As we've already established, you suck.

-Wisco

[photo by spaceabstract]

Poll Shows Guns, Immigration 'Top Priorities' for Voters -- Queue the Rightwing Spin

 

It's a poll that sure to get a lot off attention -- and spin -- from the right. A new Gallup poll shows that most voters rate "reducing gun violence" and "reforming immigration" as top priorities. The problem is that this percentage is on the lower end of the scale from economic issues.

Part of the problem is that Gallup gives their analysis of the poll the completely inaccurate title of "Americans Give Guns, Immigration Reform Low Priority." The poll shows that 55% of Americans rate gun violence and 50% rate immigration reform as "top priorities" and 20% and 32% think that the respective issues are of medium priority. It's hard to see how those numbers are bad news for people advocating for either issue. It's just that fewer are rating those issues as priorities over economic issues. People don't think immigration and gun violence are "low priority," as Gallup's headline would make it seem. Majorities think they're high priority. In fact, Gallup specifically asked in they were low priority and the response was overwhelming. Only 13% believe that immigration reform is a low priority, while 17% believe the same about gun violence.

Gallup even admits to comparing specific apples to very broad oranges:


"Creating jobs" and "helping the economy grow" are of course broad and diffuse goals that do not easily translate into specific legislation. And even though there is significant consensus across party lines that these two issues should be given high priority, there are fundamental party disagreements on the broad approach that can be taken to achieve these goals. These disagreements no doubt have kept the Congress and the president from moving forward on these issues -- but to the degree that these elected representatives feel it is their duty to follow the wishes of those they represent, they would renew their focus on efforts to come to consensus on reaching these goals."


The short take to that is that "creating jobs" and "helping the economy grow" are vague notions that always score high. In answering those questions, respondents could have very different approaches in mind. To one person, these could mean another round of economic stimulus; to another, big giant tax cuts for the "job creators." Meanwhile, gun violence and immigration reform are not only more specific agenda items, but suggest very specific legislation being debated in Washington at this very moment in history. In fact, the more vague the question, the more positive the answer across the board. "Creating more jobs" and "helping the economy grow" score higher than more specific policy-related questions like "reducing the deficit" and "improving access to healthcare." The maddeningly vague but oh-so enticing sounding "making government work more efficiently" scores big, despite the fact that it could mean anything from increasing budgets so departments and agencies don't have to cut corners to privatizing everything and turning the nation into a Libertarian Utopia. It means whatever you want it to mean, so of course it's very popular.

But the big takeaway from this poll isn't that people should forget about gun violence and immigration reform, the takeaway is that prioritizing these issues wouldn't be politically expensive. When majorities say that issues are of top priority, you're doing OK. And even people who say an issue is of "medium priority" won't be disappointed to see it addressed -- after all, they do agree that it's a priority. Despite Gallup's poor wording in their headline, their poll shows that majorities would like to see gun violence and immigration reform addressed as a top priority.

As I said, the right will try to spin this to scare politicians away from these two issues -- in fact, they already are. But anyone who looks at the numbers closely will see that the soft-on-crime and anti-immigrant arguments do very poorly here -- which is why they're glomming onto the headline, instead of the actual report.

-Wisco

[photo via KB35]

If the Right Doesn't Like Being Suspected of Terrorism, They Should Stop Talking Like Terrorists

I’m not sure how to start this one, but I know where I want to go with it. So let’s just jump right in.


Associated Press: FBI officials said Monday they foiled a terrorist attack being planned in a small western Minnesota town, but they offered no details about the exact targets of the attack _ or the motive of the man accused of having a cache of explosives and weapons in a mobile home.

The FBI said "the lives of several local residents were potentially saved" with the arrest of Buford Rogers, 24, who made his first appearance Monday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul on one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Rogers, of Montevideo, was arrested Friday after authorities searched a mobile home he’s associated with and found Molotov cocktails, suspected pipe bombs and firearms, according to a court affidavit.


ABC News’ Matthew Jaffe reports via Twitter that the FBI told him Buford is a "militia type" -- meaning one of those rightwing extremist domestic terrorists we’ve all been assured are imaginary. And that’s enough to trigger a whine from the right. The wingnut blog Jammie Wearing Fool would like to inform you that the real victim here is the Tea Party:


We’re just applying the mainstream media standard for reportage here. C’mon, a guy name Buford with a so-called assault rifle living in a trailer park? Why he has to be a tea party guy, right? He meets every possible stereotype. Of course we have no evidence to support that assertion, but that hasn’t stopped the left from wild speculation any time there’s a terror incident or mass shooting.


Yeah, no evidence of terrorism -- other than the FBI saying they’ve stopped a terrorist attack. How completely irresponsible of the lamestream media to repeat the things they’re told by law enforcement. No one’s actually saying the guy’s Tea Party, they’re saying he’s a rightwing nutjob. Granted, those would seem to be the same thing at first glance -- and most often are -- but it’s possible to be one without being the other. Think vanilla and French vanilla.

But how whiny is it that JWF feels the need to jump right in immediately and proclaim media victimhood? This seems a bit like a hangover from the Boston bombing. When news of that broke, a lot of people -- responsibly, if you ask me -- warned not to jump to conclusions. It could’ve been an Islamic terrorist or could’ve been a rightwing extremist; we didn’t know.

And that was all it took.The rightwing blogosphere went nuts with victim cards. It turned out that acknowledging the very real possibility that the bombing was the work of a rightwinger was verboten by wingnut political correctness. And now they’re getting into niggling and pointless little distinctions; yes, the would-be mass-murderer was likely a rightwing fanatic -- but don’t you dare say he was part of the Tea Party!

Because... Well, I’m not sure about the because. Just because.

Consider how silly this all is. Imagine that this was the first rightwing domestic terrorist ever. Imagine that such an animal had never been seen in the wild before. But imagine the Republican Party and the Tea Party were exactly the same. They’ve been openly hostile to the very idea of government. They’ve been obsessed with guns and the need for the ability to kill members of the police, military, and government (what do you think "fighting tyranny" would actually look like, after all?). And, while talking about the need to kill tyrants, they also accuse everything they don’t agree with of being "tyranny." For chrissakes, curly fluorescent lightbulbs are supposedly tyranny.

So you’ve got people who hate government and want to kill tyrants. And these are the same people who see tyranny under every rock. Polling shows that nearly half of all Republican voters think armed revolution "might be necessary" in the near future. A reasonable person wouldn’t be out of line to wonder when all this tyrant-fighting was going to start and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think it could be any second now. And when they hear about a terrorist attack with an unknown motive, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if maybe all this tyrant-killing has finally gotten under way.

In other words; if you don’t want people to assume you’re a terrorist, don’t spend most of your time talking like a goddam terrorist. If you’re spending a lot of time talking about going to war with the American government and murdering and assassinating your fellow Americans, don’t whine when people assume you’re serious. And now that some rightwing nutjob is almost certainly an honest-to-goodness, for-real terrorist, we’ve got the right whining that Buford is not being classified as the correct kind of rightwing nutjob. Maybe it might be a good time to give it a rest, OK? Maybe turn off the victim machine for a bit, because it’s finally blown a logical gasket.

But if being called a terrorist bothers the right so much, maybe using a threat to use deadly violence any second now as a mantra isn’t the best way to approach politics. Maybe the best way to avoid being accused of terrorism is to stop talking like you’re a terrorist.

-Wisco

[photo via HowieInSeattle]