“Peace Rather Than War”: If Chuck Schumer Kills The Iran Nuclear Deal, He Should Not Be Senate Minority Leader
The framework for the Iranian nuclear deal is about as good as anyone could reasonably expect. If it were solely up to the negotiators, it would likely be finalized in June. But they are not the only players, and it’s become clear that the biggest danger to the deal are hawks in Iran and the U.S.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) is threatening action that may destroy the bargain, while Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is doing the same. Iran is out of the U.S.’s control — but Democrats can hold Schumer to account. If he destroys the Iran deal, he must not be allowed to become Senate minority leader, a position that was basically bequeathed to him by outgoing Minority Leader Harry Reid.
On the Iranian side, Khamenei said out of the blue this week that any deal must include the immediate lifting of all sanctions and prevent foreign inspectors from visiting military sites, two demands that could blow up the tentative framework negotiated in Lausanne, Switzerland. However, there’s good reason to believe Khamenei is positioning for domestic hardliners. The Lausanne framework provides for the lifting of a big chunk of current sanctions, while keeping others related to Iran’s support for Hezbollah. Khamenei, in other words, could squirrel out of his seemingly tough demands if he wanted.
At any rate, if Khamenei really does want to blow up the deal, there’s no stopping him. Iran will either accept the deal or it won’t. If not, it’s really Khamenei’s loss.
That brings us to Schumer. He has announced his support for a Senate bill sponsored by Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee that would require congressional approval for any final deal with Iran. Since a veto by President Obama is certain, Republicans will need Democratic support to override it. Schumer, as the Senate minority leader heir-apparent, is sending a clear signal to Democrats that betraying the president is fine, while undermining arguments that the Corker bill is a mere exercise in partisanship.
The fact that Schumer is even daring to try this is surely evidence of the continuing weakness of the Democratic Party’s anti-war faction. Even Elizabeth Warren isn’t particularly anti-war.
However, pro-war Democrats have consistently underestimated the long-term political danger behind such casual aggressiveness. Just like Cory Booker, Schumer appears to have forgotten that voting for the Iraq War is the reason Hillary Clinton is not president today.
Many good old liberals were absolutely furious with the whole Democratic establishment for voting for Bush’s war of aggression and getting something like half a million people killed for no reason. They’re not so agitated at the moment, but if Schumer shanks what may be the last best hope at a deal before President Bush III takes the nation on another jolly Middle East crusade, then he will face an enormous backlash. And it should cost him the job he covets so badly.
According to Matt Yglesias, a former Schumer intern, the senator is a “really sincere and committed Israel hawk,” and sees himself as dedicated to protecting Israel’s security. If that is his motivation, it might be possible to convince Schumer that this Iran bargain is actually in Israel’s long-term interests. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thought the Iraq War would be a swell development for Israel, and it turned out to be an epic strategic disaster instead. Chances are that he’s wrong about this one, too, like he is about everything else.
But if Schumer can’t see reason, then someone else should be Senate minority leader — preferably someone who is more interested in peace than war.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 10, 2015
“The Lonesome Death Of Walter Scott”: Why Michael Thomas Slager Should Share The Blame
Soon after video recorded by Feidin Santana showing officer Michael Thomas Slager killing Walter Scott went public, Ed Driggers, the chief of the North Charleston, South Carolina, police force where Slager was once employed, spoke to the press. Like an increasing number of law enforcement officials as of late, Driggers found himself suddenly thrust into the media spotlight, tasked with explaining to an outraged nation why one of his officers used deadly force against an unarmed African-American, a 50-year-old father of four, who posed no threat.
But although Driggers’ public appearance was, on a superficial level, all too reminiscent of what we recently saw in places as disparate as Ferguson, Missouri; Cleveland, Ohio; Staten Island, New York; and Los Angeles, California, the substance was different. Because rather than mount a defense of officer Slager — who repeatedly claimed that he shot Scott only after a routine stop over a busted taillight led to physical altercation, one during which he feared for his life — Driggers buried him instead. “I have watched the video and I was sickened by what I saw,” he said. “And I have not watched it since.”
What a difference a smartphone can make. As Judd Legum of Think Progress has noted, if not for the remarkably brave Santana, who used his smartphone to record the final moments of Scott’s life, the only version of the story the world would know is the version Slager told. Which, in plain language, was a monstrous lie. There’s no evidence that Scott tried to use Slager’s taser against him, as the officer claimed; the only reason it was found near the dead man’s body, it appears, is because that’s where Slager put it. And contrary to what Slager said in the official incident report, he never feared for his personal safety; as he pumps Scott’s back full of bullets he is calm, cool and collected.
According to the work of one local reporter, Slager’s neighbors didn’t suspect him of being especially malevolent or inclined toward violence. To them, he seemed normal — even nice. Driggers responded with a similar mix of sadness and bewilderment. “I want to believe in my heart of hearts that it was a tragic set of events after a traffic stop,” Driggers said on CNN. “I always look for the good in folks,” he continued, “and so I would hope that nobody would ever do something like that.” Keith Summey, the town’s mayor, was also fatalistic: “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” he told the press. “And if you make a bad decision … you have to live by that decision.”
Neither man was interested in damning Slager; and considering he is now facing charges for murder, that’s probably for the best. But both men went further than simply biting their tongues; they made a point of distancing Slager’s behavior from that of the overall North Charleston police force, too. “The one does not totally throw a blanket across the many,” Driggers said, according to the Los Angeles Times. The mayor and he noted that the NCPD is composed of more than 340 officers. The video traveling all over the world was hideous, no doubt. But it told us nothing of the overall law enforcement system; it was merely a single man making a horrible, horrible mistake.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, because Slager is not the only officer seen in the video. After Scott had fallen to the ground, prostrate and bleeding, and after Slager had barked at him to put his hands behind his back (so he could handcuff him before he lost the ability to move his arms), officer Clarence Habersham, who is African-American, arrives at the scene. His body language, like Scott’s, indicates this was not the first time he’d come upon such a scene. He seems unperturbed as he kneels down to check Scott’s pulse. He makes no real attempt to save the back-shot man’s life. And that’s understandable, really; Scott was likely already dead.
We don’t know yet what exactly transpired between Slager, Habersham, or the third, Caucasian one who joins them later. We don’t know how much they knew, and we don’t know when they knew it. What we do know, though, is plenty. We know that the police department of North Charleston was content to treat Slager’s story as fact; and we know that this was not the first time a member of the force had engaged in acts that we’d otherwise describe as thuggery. We know that in the past five years, police officers in South Carolina have used their guns against 209 human beings; and we know that they were exonerated of wrongdoing every single time.
Lastly, we know that Walter Scott — a father, brother, cousin and veteran; a man who loved to joke and loved to dance, and who was known as the extrovert of his family — died after being shot multiple times when his back was turned. And we know that if he lived long enough to be conscious as Slager tightened the cuffs around each of his wrists, he spent his final moments on this Earth alone, and enchained.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, April 9, 2015
“Follow The Money Is A Game Everybody Can Play”: Funny Business; The Financial ‘Shenanigans’ Of Ron Paul And Company
Obsessed as he is with Hillary Clinton, Rand Paul comments almost constantly on her family finances, often snarking about the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation — as he did to Politico‘s Mike Allen within minutes of announcing his own presidential candidacy on Tuesday. Suggesting dishonesty or worse, he barks about “thinly disguised bribery,” “shenanigans,” and a “trail of money” that will “shake the confidence” of American voters.
While there is nothing wrong with vetting Clinton — or consulting the publicly available foundation records that exceed IRS requirements for transparency — the Kentucky senator should remember that “follow the money” is a game everybody can play. And since he believes that any funds raised or spent by Bill Clinton are fair game, shouldn’t the same rule apply to all the financial “shenanigans” that surround his millionaire father, Ron Paul?
When he ran for president in the Republican primary three years ago, the Texas Republican drew the attention of Washington reporters and ethical watchdogs bemused by his habit of using campaign funds and congressional expense reimbursements to enrich himself and his family. In 2012, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington examined every congressional campaign filing – and Paul had paid more of his relatives with campaign funds than any other member. His re-election committee paid salaries to his daughter, his grandson, his daughter’s mother-in-law, his granddaughter, and his grandson-in-law — namely Jesse Benton, who just took charge of Rand Paul’s SuperPAC.
Total payments to Paul and his family in that cycle were nearly $400,000 — and this dubious practice, illegal in some states, has continued.
During the first few months of 2012, Roll Call published a series of stories citing credit card records that showed Ron Paul billed travel expenses to both his congressional office account — that is, to the taxpayers — and several political organizations that were controlled by him and his family. When one of those committees came under independent management, the new leadership noted the discrepancies and complained that he had “double-billed” at least $20,000 and possibly much more. (According to the ubiquitous and scandal-tinged Benton, married to Rand Paul’s niece and Ron Paul’s sometime employee, those were all mere bookkeeping errors.)
But the nagging, never-answered question about the Paul family business is how much of Ron’s millions were the fruit of Ron Paul & Associates — corporate purveyors of the racist, anti-Semitic, gay-baiting, conspiracy-addled newsletters that raked in millions over two decades from their dim ultra-right subscribers.
The Washington Post reported in January 2012 that under his supervision, Paul’s company “pursued a marketing strategy that included publishing provocative, racially charged newsletters to make money and spread his ideas…” In other words, he sought to profit from the bigotry of his supporters.
No doubt Rand Paul will soon demand to see even more records than Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have released already — every email, every canceled check, maybe every dry-cleaning bill. As of 2008, the last time either of them ran for elected office, Bill and Hillary Clinton had released 30 years of income tax returns (in addition to her Senate disclosures, the foundation’s IRS returns, and the additional information provided by the foundation since her appointment as Secretary of State).
If and when Hillary Clinton is asked to release her tax returns again sometime this year, you can bet she won’t give the cute answer offered by Ron Paul when asked to release his tax returns at a debate in 2012:
“I don’t have any intention of releasing it – but for a different reason. I’d probably be embarrassed to put my financial statements next to [the other candidates’] income and I don’t want to be embarrassed because I don’t have a greater income.”
Does anyone really believe that’s why the former proprietor of Ron Paul’s Survival Report refused to release his returns?
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, April 9, 2015
“The Weak Link: Winning State Elections”: Republicans Now Control 69 Of The 99 State Legislative Bodies In The US
This has not been a positive year in state legislatures, and there’s a good chance that, for progressives, this may be the worst session in decades.
Wisconsin imposed “right-to-work.” Nevada suspended prevailing wage rules for school construction projects. South Dakota lowered the minimum wage by a dollar an hour for workers under age 18. Many states are slashing funds for public education and social services. Several are legalizing the carrying of guns on college campuses or abolishing the 80-year-old requirement of a permit to carry a concealed firearm. Utah brought back firing squads as a means of execution. Even the Indiana “religious liberty” battle didn’t have a happy ending: the law they passed is not a good one, it’s just less bad.
The reason for the states’ lunge to the right is clear — the GOP gained more than 300 state legislative seats in the 2014 elections. Republicans now control 69 of the 99 state legislative bodies in the US (if we include Nebraska, where lawmakers are technically nonpartisan but effectively Republican), while Democrats control only 30. That’s the most legislative chambers Republicans have ever held.
Put another way, there are now 25 states where both the legislative and executive branches are entirely controlled by Republicans, if we include Nebraska and Alaska (where the governor ran as an independent but is effectively a Republican). In contrast, there are only seven states with a Democratic legislature and governor: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont. In four additional states (Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey), Democrats control the legislature but progress is stymied by a GOP governor.
It should be obvious that progressives desperately need to engineer a strong comeback in 2016. It’s not just that 150 million Americans living in GOP states are subject to regressive rule. The longer the right wing holds power, the more “gamechanger” policies they enact — like voter ID and union busting — designed to rig the electoral game for the long term. Even more important, it’s nearly impossible to take back the congressional redistricting process in 2021-22 unless we start winning state legislative seats in 2016. Progressives need to put in place strong incumbents who can withstand a difficult 2018 election cycle. It would be sheer folly to wait until 2020 to try to win back legislative chambers for reapportionment.
The old saying goes, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” In state politics, progressives have some very strong links indeed. Over the years, our movement has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in terrific policy research, excellent polling and a lot of hardworking grassroots organizations and activists. But because of one glaring weak link, conservative majorities block good policies and enact bad ones. Progressive investments at the state level are stymied by a distinct lack of focus on winning elections there.
The good news is that our movement could do very well in 2016. We could conceivably move legislatures from split to Democratic control in seven states: Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Washington. And we could possibly move legislatures from Republican to split control in eight others: Arizona, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin (although half of these are longshots).
Fortunately, 2016 presents Democratic legislative candidates with a wealth of advantages:
- A lot of the seats won by the GOP are naturally blue — it’s easier to take them back;
- Turnout in 2016 will create a much more Democratic-friendly electorate;
- Conservatives’ extremism in 2015-16 can be used against them; and
- The national narrative should provide a much better environment for our candidates than the 2014 narrative — especially if we do the work to promote a smart, state-level progressive agenda for our candidates to run on.
Can progressives re-cast our weak link in the coming 18 months? Absolutely, and the path to victory is straightforward. As for campaign mechanics, we need to contest every key legislative district; recruit the strongest progressive prospects to run; provide thorough training and political support to candidates and campaign managers; and funnel direct contributions to the races that count most. Given our losses in recent cycles, this is no small undertaking, but it can be done.
In addition, we need to use the rest of 2015 to design and organize around a compelling state policy agenda that energizes our base, pulls swing voters our way, and wedges the right wing. I’m talking about a real agenda — not a laundry list of policy ideas or a “narrative.” We’ve got to drive a set of robust policies in multiple states and localities that, together, illustrates an overall theme and shows explicitly that we’re on the voters’ side and conservatives are not. And we can’t wait until the summer or fall of 2016 to promote that agenda — we need to push our policies hard in the 2016 legislative sessions, forcing the right to publicly alienate the middle.
Strong progressives tend to have their own priorities: economic equality or environmental protection or criminal justice or social justice for women, African-Americans, immigrants or LGBT people. And we tend to work in silos, with some groups doing electoral work or civic engagement or voter registration and others developing policy or networking elected officials or organizing advocacy campaigns. Now, no matter our policy or political priorities, progressives need to link up in every way possible to drive toward one goal — winning the states back for the American people. The alternative is political disaster.
By: Gloria Totten, Moyers and Company, April 9, 2015; This post first appeared at Campaign for America’s Future
“Holding The Boston Bomber As An Enemy Combatant?”: Would Tsarnaev Be Convicted Under President McCain?
That was justice at work. It took a week less than two years, an impressively brisk time window, for federal prosecutors in Massachusetts to deliver justice to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the jury needed just 11 hours to deliberate. We didn’t waterboard him or send him to Gitmo, his jailers didn’t make him strip naked and get down on all fours while they led him around on a leash; and still, miraculously, despite these failures of our resolve, the people of the United States got a conviction.
I say “failures” above, obviously, in an ironical kind of way. But I wrote it like that because it strikes me that this is a day more than most other days to take stock of such matters and to remember that in this case, if John McCain and Lindsey Graham had had their way, some of those things could conceivably have happened to Tsarnaev. You might be tempted to say, so what, he’s a mass murderer. And that he is. But he’s a citizen of the United States, and citizens of the United States, no matter how despicable, have rights.
But in April 2013, right after the bombing, when the demagogue needle was way over in the red, McCain and Graham were leading the call for Tsarnaev to be detained as an enemy combatant. Not to be tried as one—even they understood that that would be crossing the line when it came to a U.S. citizen. But they wanted him held and questioned as an enemy combatant—thrown in a military brig and then questioned by military and CIA personnel rather than the FBI, a process that would have stripped him of his right to legal counsel and other basic rights to which any citizen is entitled.
McCain and Graham were joined by their usual compatriots in these crusades, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte and New York Congressman Peter King. Their argument was that holding Tsarnaev as a combatant for a certain period of time would allow the government to ascertain things like whether he had any al Qaeda connections. Graham said at the time that being able to question Tsarnaev without a defense lawyer present was his whole point. That might sound reasonable, if it weren’t for, you know, the Constitution.
I don’t doubt that there was some measure of sincerity in McCain’s and Graham’s belief at the time, but even if it was quasi-sincere, it was just the worst kind of demagoguery. This did not happen in a vacuum, of course, but was yet another instance in a long chain of McCain-Graham demagoguery that went back to the very beginning of the Obama administration, when the new president was trying to close Gitmo, and Republicans—Graham was particularly noxious, as I recall—were running around charging that Obama was trying to release Gitmo prisoners onto the American mainland so they could live among us.
The reality, of course, is that the Gitmo detainees would by and large have been transferred only to the most secure Supermax prisons in the continental 48. But the reality didn’t matter, see, because what was important was to establish the narrative that this new president, with his suspicious name and questionable provenance and terrorist-palling-around and so on, didn’t want to defend America the way you and I did.
Then came the uproar over the administration’s plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian New York court. Now to be sure, the administration botched that one in p.r. terms, by not reaching out in advance to then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg and to Senator Chuck Schumer to make sure they’d both be on board. It wasn’t the first time or the last that the administration has aimed the revolver at its own foot.
But where are we now on that front? KSM still sits down in Guantanamo Bay, awaiting trial. He’s been ping-ponged from the military court system to the civilian and back again. He purports in more recent years to have had a change of heart, bless him, regarding the whole wholesale slaughter of innocents business. Whatever the case on that front, the core fact remains that the families who lost loves ones on 9/11 have not seen any resolution with regard to the legal fate of the mastermind of those attacks.
The families of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, on the other hand, got justice in two short years. And this civilian-court efficiency is no aberration. Up through 2011, according to Human Rights First, federal civilian criminal courts had convicted around 500 terrorism suspects. Military courts had convicted eight, and three of those were overturned completely and one partially. It’s hard to find more recent precise numbers, but it’s not exactly as if military tribunals have caught up since then. The bottom line is clear. Civilian prosecutions work, and they live up to (well, more or less—Tsarnaev was questioned before being read his Miranda rights) constitutional standards.
And yet the snarling from McCain and Graham and their amen corner never ends. Obama/Democrats soft on terror is too tantalizing a story line, a toothsome steak that they can’t help but bite into. One of Obama’s more admirable attributes, in fact, is the way he has stood up to this bullying. He’s tried (without always succeeding) to bring our terrorism policies more in line with our stated values while at the same time still prosecuting actual terrorists. If you lament Obama’s shortcomings, just stop today and ask yourself where you think we’d be on these fronts if President McCain had been elected in 2008. His fomentations tell us all we need to know.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 10, 2015
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