Friday Reads: How Can People be so Heartless (and wrong)

Good Morning!

Well, I’ve been looking at a lot of things recently but nothing sticks out to me more than the insane ideas that right wingers cling to even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Let’s look at a few today.

This one is really delusional.  Mike Huckabee thinks that MLK would think that marriage equality is “like the holocaust”.  You’ve got to be kidding me!!! Does he really say these things because he believes them or because he needs to boost the ratings on his show?

“We are under an obligation to obey God and the law, and if necessary, to defy an institution that is out of control,” the former Arkansas governor continued.

To make his point, Huckabee quoted from a letter that Martin Luther King’s Jr. wrote while spending eight days in the Birmingham Jail for fighting to end segregation.

“One may well ask, ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?'” King had written. “The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.'”

Huckabee continued reading from King’s letter: “We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.”

“I wish I had penned those words,” Huckabee exclaimed. “But they were penned by someone who understood freedom, and understood that there was a time to stand up against law when it has become unjust. Those are the words that were penned in 1954 by Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

Some one, please explain how this Texas judge decided that the fathers of two babies weren’t the appropriate parents? Two married gay Dads were denied the right to adopt each other’s biological son born as twins. Here’s the story of their conception and surrogate mother.

 No matter, everyone gets a thank-you note with a special image — the same ultrasounds of the “twins” that Hanna posted on Facebook. (“They’re actually half-siblings,” says Riggs. “Two dads, one mom. But we say twins.” “Actually,” Hanna says, “We call them ‘the boys.’”) To him, the images say quite clearly, “This is where your money went.”

Here’s the story of the Texas judge that will tear the brothers apart if one of their fathers accidentally dies before they come of age.

Jason Hanna and Joe Riggs are the proud fathers of Lucas and Ethan, who were born in April, after they’d connected with a surrogate mom, CharLynn.

Each of the men is a biological father to one of the babies. But, because Texas has a ban on gay marriage (it was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge last February, but the decision was stayed pending appeal), and because a judge can use his or her own discretion in these cases, neither of the men is currently on the birth certificates of either of the boys, nor have they been able to co-adopt each other’s biological child.

So, here’s some more craziness. It’s this week’s latest in second amendment overkill.  First up,  the case of instant karma.

A man in Macon, Georgia accidentally shot himself in the penis while attempting to holster his gun last week.

According to WMAZ Channel 13, the man was parked at a gas station and was attempting to put away the .45 caliber pistol when it discharged, striking him in the groin.

The man immediately drove to a friend’s house. According to police, the victim dropped his pants to find that he had shot himself in the penis and that the bullet had exited his body through the buttocks. As he disrobed, the spent round fell to the floor.

Unfortunately, the next links I have are more tragic.

The father of a newborn is now dead because of stray bullets from his neighbor who was drunk and an ex-felon to boot.  This is from Florida, of course.

A musician, teacher and new father is dead after a stray bullet pierced the wall of his Florida home on Tuesday and struck him in the back of the head. The Panama City News Herald reported that 33-year-old Justin Ayers and his wife were welcoming their 3-day-old baby home from the hospital with relatives when Justin was killed.

The bullet came from the house next door, where 62-year-old Charles Edward Shisler picked up a .9 mm pistol by the trigger, causing it to discharge. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, they found Shisler standing on his porch, although he initially was “belligerent” and uncooperative.

“The damn gun doesn’t usually shoot,” said Shisler, according to his arrest report. “You have to squeeze the hell out of the trigger to shoot  it.”

I’m not sure if you read about this right winger who shot a BLM officer, but it’s a doozy.  This dude fits the perfect picture of a right wing conspiracy wing nut.

The man accused of shooting two law enforcement members in California, including a Bureau of Land Management ranger, has had at least one previous run-in with law enforcement and has described himself as the target of a massive government conspiracy.

Brent Douglas Cole, 60, was named by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office on Monday as the suspect in Saturday’s shooting that also left him wounded.

Anna Ferguson, assistant district attorney for Nevada County, confirmed to TPM that Cole was also facing misdemeanor charges in Nevada County Superior Court for allegedly carrying a loaded firearm. He was charged on Jan. 26.

The Union newspaper in Grass Valley, Calif., published an article that quoted from court documents in the case. The documents showed Cole believed he was the target of a massive conspiracy…

It seems like every day, these folks just get crazier and crazier.  It’s not even the little nut jobs in the rural south or the rural west.  We often wonder if it’s truly mental illness or some really mad folks being whipped into a frenzy by the likes of Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh.  What do mental health professionals say about the connection between massing shootings and mental illness?  This is a MOJO interview with  “Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, and one of the leading researchers on mental health and violence.”

In the face of it, a mass shooting is the product of a disordered mental process. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist: what normal person would go out and shoot a bunch of strangers?

But the risk factors for a mass shooting are shared by a lot of people who aren’t going to do it. If you paint the picture of a young, isolated, delusional young man—that probably describes thousands of other young men.

A 2001 study looked specifically at 34 adolescent mass murderers, all male. 70 percent were described as a loner. 61.5 percent had problems with substance abuse. 48 percent had preoccupations with weapons. 43.5 percent had been victims of bullying. Only 23 percent had a documented psychiatric history of any kind—which means 3 out of 4 did not.

People with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, do have a slightly higher risk of committing violence than members of the general population. Yet most violence is not attributable to mental illness. Can you walk us through the numbers?

People with serious mental illness are 3 to 4 times more likely to be violent than those who aren’t. But the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent and never will be.

Most violence in society is caused by other things.

Even if we had a perfect mental health care system, that is not going to solve our gun violence problem. If we were able to magically cure schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, that would be wonderful, but overall violence would go down by only about 4 percent.

Amanda Marcotte believes there are five issues where the wing nuts are getting wing nuttier by the minute. They are immigration, sexual violence, Gay rights, Domestic violence, and bare minimum standards of politeness.  Let me quote from her example of sexual violence.

In the past four decades, relentless feminist campaigning on the issue of sexual abuse and rape has created some amount of consensus about what rape is and what it isn’t. Until recently, even the most belligerent rape apologist had to admit that “date rape” is a thing that actually happens in the real world and that no really does mean no. Sure, anti-feminists still try to deny the extent of date rape and argue that consent is more confusing than it actually is, but even they had to admit that clear-cut cases of non-consent amount to rape.

But ever since Obama started a White House task force to combat campus rape, suddenly we’re back in the ’80s again, with conservatives trying to argue that women can literally be forced to have sex against their will and this somehow doesn’t count as rape. In a recent Washington Post column, George Will accused women of making up rape to gain the “coveted status” of “victimhood”. His evidence? A story of a woman who said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you,” to her alleged assailant. But no apparently doesn’t mean no to Will, not if the victim knows her attacker and/or she doesn’t fight him off with violence. Similarly, both A.J. Delgado of the National Review and Stu Burguiere of The Blaze argued recently that because consensual sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol happens, all non-consensual sex under the influence should not be considered rape.

Let me just end this foray with a shout out to the St Louis Dispatch that dropped George Will over his comments on the “coveted status” of rape victims on campus.

The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch announced today that it has dropped conservative columnist George Will’s column from the paper, citing a recent piece in which Will asserted that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoyed “coveted status.”

In the controversial column which drew a letter of reproach from four U.S. Senators, Will wrote that college administrators are being “educated by Washington.” Will wrote, “they are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous” they are promoting the idea that victimhood is “a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.”

In a letter to readers, the Post-Dispatch apologized for running the offending column, calling it “offensive and inaccurate.”

Here’s a great “Bizzaro world” example of a Republican on Sexual Assault and Abortion and a little nutso ideas on GLBT too.

Republican Maine state Representative Lawrence Lockman is under fire for comments he’s made in the media regarding rape, abortion, and homosexuality.

An investigation by Mike Tipping, an activist with Maine People’s Alliance, found numerous offensive comments made by the Republican in various newspaper interviews.

Perhaps the most inflammatory was a press statement from 1995 in which Lockman says “If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”

That wasn’t all.

According to the report, Lockman once implied that the HIV virus can be spread through mosquitoes and bed sheets. Lockman also asserted that liberals helped exacerbate the AIDS epidemic by assuring “the public that the practice of sodomy is a legitimate alternative lifestyle, rather than a perverted and depraved crime against humanity.”

In a letter to Bangor News, Lockman once wrote “Clearly the practice of sodomy is learned behavior, and those addicted to this form of biologically-insane sex are at high risk for all manner of serious medical problems.”

Lockman also spoke out against HIV infected students attending school, saying “It’s peculiar that the government is telling health care workers that surfaces contaminated with bodily fluids should be thoroughly disinfected, but at the same time they are telling us that toilet seats have some magical property that they are able to resist viruses.”

He also tried to alert people to a “secret gay affirmative action plan,” saying “You can bet the rent money they will demand that employers set up goals and timetables to achieve 10 percent homosexual representation in the workforce and in government contracts.”

How do people with such poorly wired brains wind up in positions of authority?

I’m still at a loss as to why there seems to be a perfect storm these days in which the wingiest and nuttiest of the right wing seem to have risen to the top of the septic tank.  I have decided it has something to do with our president’s racial heritage, the right wing media being so outrageous and so available, and the funding provided by complete idiots like the Koch Brothers.  There is, of course, the total take over of the Republican party by religious extremists, libertarians, and corporate lobbyists. I really can’t decide if we should rejoice in the fact that demographics will soon put an end to this or hunker down because it’s going to continue to get bad in the short run.

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Tuesday Reads: Drumbeat to Iraq ad infinitum

Good Morning!

It’s hard to believe that the press has turned to the architects of the disaster in Iraq and their enablers.  Over the last two weeks, we’ve seen and heard from folks that should be up for war crimes not TV spots.  Why aren’t these folks being held accountable and why is the press returning to the same folks that were responsible for the worst foreign policy mistake in US History. Well, not only are they all over TV but they’re being hired to teach.

If you’re anything like me, when you hear the words “wise insights about the Iraq war,” two names that immediately come to mind are Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby.

Fortunately the Hertog Institute has engaged them both to teach a course, “The War in Iraq: A Study in Decision-Making.”

I will confess that when someone told me about this today, I assumed it was anOnion-style joke. As in, “The Work-Family Balance: Getting It Right,” co-taught by John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer. But it turns out to be real. Or “real.”

In the cause of public knowledge, I am happy to offer royalty-free use of several items for the reading list. Like:

• “The Fifty-First State?” from the year before the war. The Wolfowitz-Libby “study in decision-making” might consider why on Earth so many obvious implications of the war were blithely dismissed ahead of time, including by these two men. Or …

• “Blind into Baghdad,” about the grotesque combination of arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence that characterized decision-making about the war. Or …

• “Bush’s Lost Year,” about the sequence of advantages squandered, opportunities missed, and crucial wrong bets made in the months just after the 9/11 attacks. Students might find this one particularly interesting, since it begins with a long interview with their own Professor Wolfowitz. For the Cliff’s Notes version, see after the jump.

Or, you can read some really good things like this:

Want some great op ed? Look no further than the WSJ and this op-ed:  Only America Can Prevent a Disaster in Iraq

Without U.S. help, the civil war may spiral into a regional conflict as other countries, including Iran, intervene.

Who better would know this than L. PAUL BREMER? Remember him?

Maybe William Kristal and Frederick Kagan? Certainly, they picked up a little wisdom on the way to disaster.

That alternative is to act boldly and decisively to help stop the advance of the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—without empowering Iran. This would mean pursuing a strategy in Iraq (and in Syria) that works to empower moderate Sunni and Shi’a without taking sectarian sides. This would mean aiming at the expulsion of foreign fighters, both al Qaeda terrorists and Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah regular and special forces, from Iraq.

This would require a willingness to send American forces back to Iraq. It would mean not merely conducting U.S. air strikes, but also accompanying those strikes with special operators, and perhaps regular U.S. military units, on the ground. This is the only chance we have to persuade Iraq’s Sunni Arabs that they have an alternative to joining up with al Qaeda or being at the mercy of government-backed and Iranian-backed death squads, and that we have not thrown in with the Iranians. It is also the only way to regain influence with the Iraqi government and to stabilize the Iraqi Security Forces on terms that would allow us to demand the demobilization of Shi’a militias and to move to limit Iranian influence and to create bargaining chips with Iran to insist on the withdrawal of their forces if and when the situation stabilizes.

What is this the “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach to geopolitical policy decisions?  I suppose it’s easy when your children, home, country, and business aren’t likely to be lost in another round of shock and awe. JASON HOROWITZ calls it an “interventionist revival”. Does history really have to repeat itself?

A decade after their fierce advocacy for the war in Iraq largely discredited neoconservatives like Paul D. Wolfowitz and Richard N. Perle, who argued most loudly for democracy exportation through military power, Mr. Kagan is hardly apologetic about the current mess. Instead, he believes that the widespread frustration over Mr. Obama’s disengagement despite the resurgence of organized terrorist groups in the region has created the climate to again make the case for interventionism.

And who better to lead a cast of assorted hawks back into intellectual — and they hope eventually political — influence than the congenial and well-respected scion of one of America’s first families of interventionism?

His father, Donald Kagan, a historian of ancient Greece, is a patriarch of neoconservatism. His brother, Fred, is a military scholar who helped conceive the American troop increase in Iraq in 2007. His wife and unofficial editor, Victoria Nuland, is an assistant secretary of state and one of the country’s toughest and most experienced diplomats, whose fervor for building democracy in Ukraine recently leaked out in an embarrassing audio clip. And Mr. Kagan, who often works in a book-lined studio of his cedar home here in the Washington suburbs, exudes a Cocoa-Puffs-pouring, stay-at-home-dad charm.

“A very nice family,” said William Kristol, a family friend and the founder of the conservative Weekly Standard, whose father, Irving, is another of neoconservatism’s father figures and one of Robert’s first bosses.

Mr. Kristol said he, too, sensed “more willingness to rethink” neoconservatism, which he called “vindicated to some degree” by the fruits of Mr. Obama’s detached approach to Syria and Eastern Europe. Mr. Kagan, he said, gives historical heft to arguments “that are very consistent with the arguments I made, and he made, 20 years ago, 10 years ago.”

Mr. Kagan, 55, prefers the term “liberal interventionist” to the neoconservative label, but believes the latter no longer has the stigma it did in the early days of the Obama presidency. “The sort of desire to say ‘Neocon! Neocon! Neocon!’ has moved out a little bit to the fringe,” he said.

Both Mr. Kagan and his brother are taking considerable pains to describe their advocacy as broadly bipartisan. “The urgent priority is to unite internationalists on both sides of the spectrum,” said Fred Kagan, while his brother, Robert, mentioned his briefing of a bipartisan congressional delegation at Davos and his good relations with top White House officials, including the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice. (Their father apparently did not get the memo, calling Mr. Obama’s speech “pathetic” and saying of the president, “We should not underestimate the possibility of extraordinary ignorance.”)

In an extremely odd twist, some of these folks say they are right in line with Hillary Clinton of all people.

But Exhibit A for what Robert Kagan describes as his “mainstream” view of American force is his relationship with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes. Mr. Kagan pointed out that he had recently attended a dinner of foreign-policy experts at which Mrs. Clinton was the guest of honor, and that he had served on her bipartisan group of foreign-policy heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.

“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Mr. Kagan said, adding that the next step after Mr. Obama’s more realist approach “could theoretically be whatever Hillary brings to the table” if elected president. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” he added, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

I can’t believe any one in any place but the right wing press would be printing this crap and taking these folks seriously again. However, you know how it is in the punditry cave.  Once an echo bounces of one wall, it just keeps on going.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?