“Texas Guv Surrenders To Conspiracy Nuts”: Pandering To Paranoid, Secessionist Fools
Texas’s governor moved this week to protect his state from an Obama-led military takeover.
Governor Greg Abbott, who decisively beat Wendy Davis in the 2014 to take Rick Perry’s job, announced on Tuesday that he’s going to sic the Texas Rangers on the U.S. military.
Not really. But it sure sounds that way.
What’s actually going on is U.S. troops are doing training exercises—called Jade Helm 15—in several states throughout the Southwest, including Texas.
The mission will involve Special Operations forces moving through the Southwest and training for covert missions. A declassified map posted online in March (whose legitimacy The Washington Post confirmed) identified several of those states as “hostile” and “leaning hostile.” That isn’t particularly unusual, as Dan Lamothe explained at The Washington Post, but it has a small number of Texans—including, apparently, the governor—totally freaking out and (arguably) overreacting.
Conspiracy theories about the training exercise have spread through cyberspace with all due speed, as such theories are wont to do.
And, naturally, Alex Jones, of conspiracy theory-touting Infowars fame, is involved.
The Drudge Report aggregated a number of stories about the exercises, directing readers to Infowars—including a March 24 story that said the trainings in Utah and Texas led observers “to fears that traditionally conservative areas may be a simulated target for future domestic operations.”
Yipes!
That story also said “military scholars” have started hypothesizing that such troops “would be used to target political groups such as the Tea Party.”
On March 26, Drudge linked to another InfoWars story suggesting the operations could be preparing for the implementation of martial law, which would certainly be big news indeed.
Those stories and others drew traffic and stoked fears.
On April 27, Raw Story reported that an Army spokesman appeared before a packed crowd at a Bastrop County Commission meeting in Texas to try to quell the citizens’ anxieties.
“The Army spokesman assured participants that the United Nations was not involved in the operations, but the crowd jeered when he told them he was not familiar with Agenda 21,” wrote Travis Gettys on the site.
That little meet ’n’ greet didn’t have its desired effect.
The next day, Abbott announced that he had directed Major General Gerald “Jake” Betty, commander of the Texas State Guard, to monitor Jade Helm 15.
In a letter to Betty, he said he made the move “[t]o address concerns of Texas citizens and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe.”
The Texas military has three branches, as its website details, including the Texas Army National Guard and the Texas Air National Guard, as well as the Texas State Guard. The governor, in this case, is its commander-in-chief.
And per The Houston Chronicle, it hasn’t completely ironed out all the specific details of how exactly it will monitor the U.S. Army.
Abbott’s decision to err on the side of Alex Jones has drawn a bit of joshing from the left.
“Abbott’s c would be comical if it wasn’t so costly and frightening,” said Glenn Smith, the director of the Progress Texas PAC. “Abbott has the state military confronting the U.S. military because some nutcases fear, what, armed U.S. takeover of Texas? Seriously? What next? Will Abbott call out the troops to protect us from alien abduction, abominable snowmen and Bigfoot, or should I say an invasion of Bigfeet?”
Jason Stanford, a longtime Democratic Texas consultant and member of the Truman National Security Project, said Abbott’s move is great news for conspiracy-mongers everywhere.
“A lot of people think he’s more sensible than this, but he has yet to stop campaigning for a Republican primary that he won virtually unopposed,” he said. “Most Texans aren’t like this.”
That said, Abbott isn’t without defenders. Republican State Representative Jonathan Stickland defended the move enthusiastically and said Texans’ distrust of the Obama administration probably informed his decision. He said that the exercises have caused “justified concern.”
“I don’t want to instill panic,” he added. “I’ll tell you what’s scary is if we get to a place where it’s not normal to question our government or their motives. We should always be questioning government.”
And Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, said he would be surprised if Jade Helm 15 was a subversive plot to occupy Texas. But he added that he understands Texans’ concerns.
“It’s hard to know what’s true and what’s false,” he said. “Is every single conspiracy theory wrong? No. Most of them probably are.”
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, April 30, 2015
“When Baltimore Burned”: There Are Crucial Underlying Inequities That Demand Attention
Conservatives have sometimes been too quick to excuse police violence. And liberals have sometimes been too quick to excuse rioter violence.
It’s outrageous when officers use excessive force against young, unarmed African-American men, who are 21 times as likely to be shot dead by the police as young white men. It’s also outrageous when rioters loot shops or attack officers.
So bravo to Toya Graham, the Baltimore mom captured on video grabbing her teenage son from the streets and frog-marching him home. The boy wilted: It must be humiliating to be a “badass” rioter one moment and then to be savagely scolded in front of your peers and sent to your room.
“That’s my only son, and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” Graham later told CBS News. It was of course Gray’s death, after an injury at the hands of the police, that set off the rioting.
On social media, there were plenty of people making excuses for rioters — a common refrain was “nothing else works to get attention.” But to their great credit, African-American leaders provided firm moral guidance and emphasized that street violence was unconscionable.
President Obama set just the right tone.
“When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot. They’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing,” Obama said. “When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.”
Or as Carmelo Anthony, the Knicks basketball star who grew up in Baltimore and has invested in a youth center there, put it: “We need to protect our city, not destroy it.”
Yet as Obama, Anthony and other leaders also noted, there are crucial underlying inequities that demand attention. The rioting distracts from those inequities, which are the far larger burden on America’s cities.
That also represents a failure on our part in the American news media. We focus television cameras on the drama of a burning CVS store but ignore the systemic catastrophe of broken schools, joblessness, fatherless kids, heroin, oppressive policing — and, maybe the worst kind of poverty of all, hopelessness.
The injustices suffered by Freddie Gray began early. As a little boy he suffered lead poisoning (as do 535,000 American children ages 1 to 5), which has been linked to lifelong mental impairments and higher crime rates.
In Gray’s neighborhood, one-third of adults lack a high school degree. A majority of those aged 16 to 64 are unemployed.
And Baltimore’s African-American residents have often encountered not only crime and insecurity but also law enforcement that is unjust and racist. Michael A. Fletcher, an African-American reporter who lived for many years in the city, wrote in The Washington Post that when his wife’s car was stolen, a Baltimore policeman bluntly explained the department’s strategy for recovering vehicles: “If we see a group of young black guys in a car, we pull them over.”
Likewise, the Baltimore jail was notorious for corruption and gang rule. A federal investigation found that one gang leader in the jail fathered five children by four female guards.
Wretched conditions are found to some degree in parts of many cities, and Shirley Franklin, the former mayor of Atlanta, told me that when we tolerate them, we tolerate a combustible mix.
“It’s not just about the police use of force,” she said. “It’s about a system that is not addressing young people’s needs. They’re frankly lashing out, and the police force issue is just a catalyst for their expression of frustration at being left out.”
Whites sometimes comment snidely on a “culture of grievance” among blacks. Really? When tycoons like Stephen Schwarzman squawked that the elimination of tax loopholes was like Hitler’s invasion of Poland, now that’s a culture of grievance.
If wealthy white parents found their children damaged by lead poisoning, consigned to dismal schools, denied any opportunity to get ahead, more likely to end up in prison than college, harassed and occasionally killed by the police — why, then we’d hear roars of grievance. And they’d be right to roar: Parents of any color should protest, peacefully but loudly, about such injustices.
We’ve had months of police incidents touching on a delicate subtext of race, but it’s not clear that we’re learning lessons. Once again, I suggest that it’s time for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to step back and explore racial inequity in America.
The real crisis isn’t one night of young men in the street rioting. It’s something perhaps even more inexcusable — our own complacency at the systematic long-term denial of equal opportunity to people based on their skin color and ZIP code.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, April 29, 2015
“An Ad-Hoc Fallback Position”: Immigration; The Only Time The GOP Cares About The Working Class
Last Monday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor and a presumed GOP presidential hopeful, kicked the hornets’ nest that is the immigration debate.
He told Glenn Beck’s radio show that America needs to “make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages,” and that this concern should be “at the forefront of our discussion going forward.”
Walker’s comments are significant because they’re something of a reversal for him, but also because they break with the “legal-immigration-good, illegal-immigration-bad” orthodoxy of the GOP establishment.
Lumping both forms of immigration together as equally questionable makes sense from an economic perspective; market forces don’t care about legal formalities like borders. But it takes near-cosmic chutzpah for Walker to say our first concern should be American wages and workers, given that pretty much every policy move by the Republican Party and the conservative movement seems designed to keep lower class incomes as depressed as possible.
By now, the battle lines on this issue should be familiar. First you get the argument from the center left and right that whenever immigrants, documented or undocumented, come to America, they bring added demand to the economy: They gotta eat, drink, put a roof over their head, get health care, and entertain themselves, just like everyone else. Even as they take on work, they increase the economy’s overall ability to create jobs. So claiming immigrants “take jobs from Americans” is wrong.
This is the view of the economics of immigration from 30,000 feet, and it’s right as far as it goes.
But closer to the ground, the terrain becomes more complicated. The U.S. economy isn’t one big market. It’s actually lots of overlapping markets, with different types of businesses and workers participating in each. And sometimes movement between these markets is easy for those workers, and sometimes it isn’t. So it’s possible for big influxes of low-skill, low-education immigrants to decrease wages and jobs for low-skill, low-education natives. You get more workers in particular markets, so wages go down. Meanwhile, the wealth created by those new entrants flows to other parts of the economy, so jobs in that market don’t increase all that much. And the native workers in those markets can’t easily hop to other markets, so they’re stuck with depressed wages and fewer jobs.
You can click through the links for a fuller examination of this phenomenon. But the short version is that it’s possible the second story is true, even if concrete evidence has been hard to tease out.
What this all boils down to is a problem of bargaining power. If you increase the number of workers in a market, but don’t increase the number of jobs proportionally, employers can play workers off one another, driving wages down. That’s why some Republicans like Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — whom Walker is apparently taking his cues from — are opposed to increasing legal avenues for high-skill immigrants. Tech workers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals don’t like seeing their incomes reduced either.
But immigration policy doesn’t occur in a vacuum. There are lots of ways we could increase worker bargaining power, especially for low-skill Americans, while still taking in many more immigrants than we do now.
We could break up the work the economy already provides into smaller chunks that can be distributed to more workers, through things like national paid leave mandates, paid vacation, strengthened overtime laws, and a shortened work week. We could get the Federal Reserve to run much more aggressive monetary stimulus, or even fundamentally reform the way that policy operates, so that the boost the Fed pumps into the economy goes straight to the Americans hardest hit by bad economic times. We could ramp up government stimulus spending, the generosity of the social safety net, or both, which would also create jobs. And we could change laws to make unions more powerful, so they’d be ready and waiting to take on new immigrants as members and fight on their behalf.
Full employment should really be the top line goal, and it’s what the first four of those five policy options aim at. (With an expanded social safety net and stronger unions also acting as a backstop for wages when full employment isn’t reached.) When there are more workers than jobs available, bargaining power is going to go down across the economy. But at full employment, the first story about immigration — about how it just grows the size of the pie, and everyone benefits — is most likely to be true, because employers aren’t able to play the new workers off the old ones.
Fundamentally, the U.S. economy faces a two-stage problem: First, the share of national income going to labor is getting smaller, as more and more is gobbled up by people who own capital. Second, of that share going to labor, a bigger portion is going to elite workers, leaving the working class with less and less. That’s the context in which the question of immigration has to be understood. Full employment and increased bargaining power for all workers would solve both these problems — equalizing shares between workers, and getting them a bigger slice of the pie vis-a-vis capital.
In a sane and decent world, we would open our borders as wide as humanly possible. Because letting other people immigrate to America makes their lives better; much better in many cases. And we would rely on all those other policy levers to keep the wages and jobs of immigrant and native-born Americans alike healthy and robust.
The perversity of the whole immigration discussion amongst conservatives and Republicans is that they’ve already rejected all these other options for increasing worker bargaining power. That the elite GOP establishment still wants more immigration even after that rejection should make their goal plain as day: keep capital’s share as high as possible!
But for anyone on the right that still wants to claim they give a damn about working class Americans, trying to limit immigration is a kind of ad-hoc fallback position to keep wages up.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, April 28, 2015
“Maybe Unity Is The Last Thing Republicans Need”: We Love The Lord And Hate His Enemies
It’s the season for pandering to the base, which is as good a time as any to ask whether the glorious, fascinating mess that is today’s Republican Party can ever unify enough to win back the White House—or whether unity is something they should even be after. Because it may well be that a fractured, contentious GOP is the only kind that can prevail next November.
You probably missed it, but over the weekend nearly all the Republican presidential candidates (with the notable exception of Jeb Bush) hotfooted it back to Iowa to participate in the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition Forum, where they testified to the depths of their love for the Lord and their hatred for His enemies, particularly Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The entreaties to this band of the base—important in primaries everywhere, but critically so in Iowa, where 57 percent of the attendees at the Republican caucuses in 2012 identified as born-again or evangelical Christian—are a good reminder of the internal and external challenges the candidates face.
According to multiple reports, the biggest ovations were given to two candidates who are almost certainly not going to win the primaries: Bobby Jindal, who has already made clear that he wants to be the most sectarian candidate in the race, and Carly Fiorina, whose pitch many of the assembled probably hadn’t heard before. But Scott Walker, the son of a Baptist minister, was enthusiastically received as well. Walker’s message, the New York Times reported, “is that in an unusually fractured Republican field, with 10 or more candidates potentially on the ballot in the Iowa caucuses next year, he is best positioned to unite the party.”
And he may well be, since he is liked by everyone from evangelicals to Tea Partiers to the plutocrats waiting to anoint the candidates with a shower of cash. The problem is that if you haven’t ticked off some faction of the Republican Party, you’ve probably put yourself in a dangerous place for the general election.
Think about where Republican candidates have gotten in trouble within their party. Jeb Bush has been attacked for talking about undocumented immigrants with compassion, and Marco Rubio alienated many by seeking comprehensive immigration reform. Rand Paul ruffled feathers by questioning whether a return to Cheneyite foreign adventurism is really in America’s interests. Ted Cruz got criticized for attending a fundraiser at the home of two gay supporters. Rick Santorum (yes, he’s back) raised eyebrows by advocating an increase in the minimum wage.
What do all these little dissents and blasphemies have in common? In every case, the thing that the candidate did to upset Republican primary voters would make him more attractive to voters who aren’t Republicans—and the Republican nominee will need a healthy chunk of them to win. So the candidate who can unify the Republican Party may by definition be the one who will start the general election at a disadvantage.
Not that any candidate wants significant portions of his party disgruntled and disillusioned after a bitter primary campaign. But by next summer, unifying the party with real enthusiasm from all sides will probably mean proposing tax cuts for the wealthy, last-ditch opposition to marriage equality, an interventionist foreign policy, a crackdown on immigration, and doing nothing on climate change (among other things)—and doing so with the zeal of the true believer. That’s not a program likely to win many converts who aren’t already committed to the conservative cause.
The response that most Republicans are gravitating toward (which has been expressed most forcefully by Cruz and Walker) is that this isn’t really a problem at all, because capturing independent votes isn’t about lining up with them on issues, it’s about having confidence in your conservatism. It’s the kind of advice you can find in a hundred self-help books: Keep your chin up and your chest out, walk in like you own the room, give everyone a firm handshake and a hearty clap on the back, and they’ll be drawn to your powerful electoral charisma, with success inevitably to follow.
This argument has obvious appeal. It says that winning is about attitude, and requires no compromise on the things you (or the primary voters) find important; even if an independent voter disagrees with you, they’ll be so impressed by your firm gaze that they’ll rally to your side. And there’s some truth to it, at least insofar as voters don’t just tally up a checklist of issues and determine which candidate they agree with more.
The irony is that winning the primary is in significant part about issues. Primary voters are paying attention, and with so many candidates to choose from, they’ve got plenty of opportunities to eliminate some based on even one area of disagreement. Stray from what they want to hear, and you can be punished—and it won’t do much good to say that a year from now, independent voters might find precisely that heresy appealing.
So anyone who could be a uniter will also be a divider: Unite the party and you’ll put up a wall between yourself and the general electorate. In the right circumstances and from the right candidate, that wall might be low enough to leap over. But it might be better to leave behind at least a few bruised feelings and ideological doubts.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 27, 2015
“Enshrining Discrimination In Constitutional Stone”: Cruz Leads The Race To The Bottom On Marriage Equality
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) attended an event in Manhattan this week, though the venue was a little surprising: the reception for the Texas Republican was held at the apartment of “two prominent gay hoteliers. At the gathering, Cruz reportedly said he would love his children regardless of their sexual orientation, and according to the event’s moderator, the far-right senator “told the group that marriage should be left up to the states.” As best as I can tell, there was no recording of the event, at least not one that’s available to the public, so it’s hard to know exactly what he said.
But before there’s speculation about whether Cruz’s conservative backers will revolt over the senator’s tone, consider the Texas lawmaker’s latest legislative push. Bloomberg Politics reported late yesterday:
Days before the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on same-sex marriage, Senator Ted Cruz has filed two bills to protect states that bar gay couples from marrying.
Cruz’s legislation would establish a constitutional amendment shielding states that define marriage as between one woman and one man from legal action, according to bill language obtained by Bloomberg News. A second bill would bar federal courts from further weighing in on the marriage issue until such an amendment is adopted.
To be sure, this doesn’t come as too big a surprise. Cruz has been threatening to pursue an anti-gay constitutional amendment for quite a while, and he started telegraphing his “court-stripping” effort soon after launching his presidential campaign.
For that matter, it’s also not too surprising that Cruz would use his Senate office to push doomed proposals intended to boost his national candidacy.
But beware of the race to the bottom.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) yesterday made a small public splash, trying to position himself as the GOP field’s far-right leader on the culture war. It seems very likely that Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and others will all make similar claims.
It’s against this backdrop that Cruz not only wants to enshrine discrimination in constitutional stone, he wants to prevent federal courts from even hearing cases related to marriage equality.
In other words, as the race for the Republicans’ presidential nomination continues to unfold, we’re confronted with a very real possibility of seeing one candidate say, “I’m the most anti-gay candidate and I’m going to prove it,” only to soon after hear another respond, “No, I’m the most anti-gay candidate and I’m going to prove it.”
The race to the bottom may impress far-right social conservatives, but it will push the GOP even further from the American mainstream.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 25, 2015
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