NEANDERTHALIER THAN THOU?

You've probably seen this story:

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) told colleagues on the House floor on Tuesday that young boys and girls should take classes on traditional gender roles in a marriage because there are some things fathers do "maybe a little bit better" than mothers.

"You know, maybe part of the problem is we need to go back into the schools at a very early age, maybe at the grade school level, and have a class for the young girls and have a class for the young boys and say, you know, this is what's important," Gingrey said in a speech supporting the Defense of Marriage Act. "This is what a father does that is maybe a little different, maybe a little bit better than the talents that a mom has in a certain area. And the same thing for the young girls, that, you know, this is what a mom does, and this is what is important from the standpoint of that union which we call marriage." ...

This comes just after a fellow Georgia Republican, Paul Broun, decided to oppose a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks because it wasn't restrictive enough -- a decision that may be helping Broun in the world of Georgia Republican politics:

Paul Broun just might have secured the Georgia Right to Life endorsement in the U.S. Senate race. He did it with typical Broun flair -- crossing the GOP leadership and national pro-life organizations in favor of an absolutist stance.

Broun voted against a "fetal pain" abortion bill backed by House Republicans that would ban abortions after a fetus is 20 weeks old.... He and Georgia Right to Life blanched when House Republican leaders inserted exceptions for rape and incest into the bill....

Phil Gingrey, who also wants the GOP Senate nomination in Georgia, voted for the abortion bill -- he didn't agree with Broun that the bill is too permissive.

I guess that leaves Gingrey vulnerable in the Georgia GOP. Ed Kilgore thinks Gingrey's paean to traditional gender roles may have been a sop to Georgia GOP extremists who might think he's too wobbly now:

Perhaps it's a coincidence, but on the same day that he risked the opprobrium of GRTL by voting for an unconstitutional abortion ban that didn’t go far enough, Phil Gingrey made a speech on the House floor suggesting that schools hold classes instructing kids on "traditional gender roles."

That's how Republicans roll down in Georgia.

I think Gingrey should have tried to out-crazy Broun (and their other potential challengers). And I know just the issue: he should have called for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

I mean, really, if he's going to say that boys and girls should be taught traditional gender roles from a young age, why not go all the way and say it was a mistake to allow women to vote? That great constitutional scholar Ann Coulter favors repeal ("If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president"), as do such conservatives as National Review's Michael Walsh ("let's just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team"), Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, and Vox Day.

The Georgia GOP Senate primary is likely to have a crowded field. Maybe ex-Susan Komen executive Karen Handel can up the ante by calling for a ban on contraception. Maybe Tom Price, who's expressed concern that legislators who endorse "some homosexual agenda item" often fail to "take into account the tremendous medical health impact and economic impact that promoting such a lifestyle will result in," could call for the death penalty for all gay people.

Come on, folks! This is what your primary electorate wants! Go for it!

THERE IS NO HOT TUB PEDOPHILIA TIME MACHINE

Remember this, from 2011?

Report indicts '60s counterculture in Catholic abuse cases

Blame the flower children. That seems to be the chief conclusion of a new report about the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal. The study, undertaken by John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the request of America's Catholic bishops, links the spike in child abuse by priests in the 1960s and '70s to "the importance given to young people and popular culture" -- along with the emergence of the feminist movement, a "singles culture" and a growing acceptance of homosexuality. It also cites crime, drugs, an increase in premarital sexual behavior and divorce....

Well, if you believe that, then you must also believe that those '60s and '70s libertines had a time machine:

Audit Finds Sexual Abuse Was Topic Decades Ago

A regional province of the Capuchin religious order that had fought allegations of sexual abuse for decades decided last year to open its files dating to the 19th century to three independent auditors....

The auditors' report, released on Tuesday, found that sexual abuse by friars in the St. Joseph Province of the Capuchin Order was discussed at meetings as far back as 1932, the first year for which minutes of meetings were available....

More:

The report also concludes that since the 1930s, when it says records were first available, the province rarely reported abuse to authorities, spent more money on hiring lawyers than on aid to victims, and routinely moved offenders between positions without divulging complaints against them....

Auditors also specifically reviewed the situation at the Milwaukee-area seminary, known as the St. Lawrence Seminary High School, one of the country's last remaining all-male boarding school seminaries....

According to the audit, 28 boys ... were abused or subjected to inappropriate sexual behavior at the seminary by eight friars dating back to 1964.

And prior to that, according to the report itself (PDF):

Summary and Examples of Reports Between 1932 and 1991
1932 to 1951: Provincial Council minutes reveal that at least 15 friars were reported between 1932 and 1951. At least four reports involved sexual abuse of minors....

1952 to 1956: There are no recorded reports between 1952 and 1955. In 1956, one friar was reported for sexual abuse of minor girls. This friar had been admonished for similar behavior while in formation yet was ordained anyway. He was reported for sexual abuse of minor girls several more times throughout the decade. The reports were made by the minor girls and their parents. Others, including a female police officer parishioner, reported their observations of the friar's inappropriate behavior with girls. He eventually left the order to marry.

1956 to 1960: There are 13 documented reports involving 13 different friars between 1956 and 1960. The documentation contains only summary information of these reports. Some reports were made by minors or others on their behalf, but it is unclear if all of these reports involved minors....

This happened before Plato's Retreat, before Woodstock, before Stonewall, before Haight-Ashbury, before the Beatles, before the Pill, before Elvis, before whatever the hell it is you typically blame if you're the kind of person who still rails against the sexual revolution. Nobody forced a joint into the mouths of those long-ago Capuchins and forcibly made them so crazy they couldn't control their animal lusts. They were pedophiles, plain and simple, long before pedophilia in the Church made the news, and their behavior was covered up. It wasn't the '60s' fault.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE -- JUST A FEW BAD APPLES

For years the Beltway has been in denial about the extremism of the Republican Party, and here's yet more evidence, from Politico, that that state of denial will never, ever change:

They've waxed philosophic about "legitimate rape," reflected on the economic role of "wetbacks" and denounced the actions of "brazen, self-described illegal aliens." They've lamented that "mom got in the workplace" and called out the United States attorney general for casting "aspersions on my asparagus."

Call them the clueless caucus of the Republican Party.

I'd call them "the Republican Party," but hey, that's just me.

As much of the GOP strains to implement a post-2012 course correction, the party has found itself stymied over and over by what leaders describe as a tiny rump of ham-fisted pols with a knack for stumbling onto cable news. No matter what the party leadership is up to in a given month, there's almost invariably a back-bencher in the House of Representatives or a C-list player out in the states who's only too eager to take the wind out of a conservative comeback with some incendiary comment that seizes national attention.

First of all, what evidence is there that the GOP currently "strains to implement a post-2012 course correction"? As soon as the election was over, congressional Republicans went right back to having hearings about Benghazi (and all sorts of new scandals and pseudo-scandals), while trying to repeal Obamacare as if repeal were an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It's quite possible that immigration reform won't make it through the House. Even Bobby Jindal, a guy who told the GOP that it needs to change, now says he's had it will all this change nonsense.

But Politico tells us that the party restructuring is a real thing, regrettably hindered by "a tiny rump of ham-fisted pols with a knack for stumbling onto cable news." What is this "knack"? To me, the word "knack" suggests a special skill -- but if these folks are otherwise "back-bencher[s]" and "C-list player[s]," then obviously they don't have particular communications skills, they just make the news when they say something so transcendently stupid we can't help but notice. Politico, though, makes them sound like the guy you read about in Parade magazine who's been struck by lightning light times -- we can't explain it! it's just one of those things!

It all got started last fall when two Senate candidates — Missouri's Todd Akin and Indiana's Richard Mourdock -- blew up their campaigns with offensive remarks about rape. But the trend of self-destructive, largely marginal Republicans seizing the spotlight has only continued in 2013.

I'd say "it all got started" a lot further back than that -- Dan Quayle? Reagan interior secretary James Watt? Reagan himself?

In January, it was Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey trying to explain how Akin was "partly right" about rape and pregnancy, after all. In March, it was Alaska Rep. Don Young referring to immigrant farm laborers as "wetbacks" on a radio show. The first week in June saw Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant blaming the decline in American education on the advent of "both parents ... working."

Then there was E.W. Jackson, the recently minted Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia whose record of slashing comments about homosexuality and abortion has yielded a steady stream of headlines the past month.

The parade of face-plants only goes on. Last week, Iowa Rep. Steve King announced on Twitter that "illegal aliens have invaded my D.C. office," while Arizona Rep. Trent Franks suggested -- in a mangled comment he rapidly walked back — that relatively few pregnancies result from rape.

Ahhh, but because we all know that Both Sides Do It, we need a balancing set of embarrassing quotes from Democrats. So, Politico, whaddaya got?

It's not that Democrats don’t have people in their ranks who say stupid stuff.... Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean calling the Benghazi uproar a "laughable joke," or coulda-been Senate candidate Ashley Judd comparing mountaintop removal mining to rape, just doesn't send the same ripples when Barack Obama's the unquestioned spokesman for the party.

Seriously? That's the best you have? Two Democrats who don't hold office, one of whom never has and never will, while the other probably never will again? One who's an actress?

And if you watch the clip, you'll see that what Dean was calling a "laughable joke" was the politically cynical GOP campaign to blame President Obama for Benghazi, not the Benghazi incident itself.

But you see what Politico did at the end there: yes, we had trouble scraping together a couple of recent examples of Democratic gaffes, but they're there, you betcha -- they just don't "send the same ripples" because if your party holds the White House, no one ever pays attention to anything any other member of your party says.

Except that wasn't true when Quayle was VP, or Watt was secretary of the interior. Hell, it's not true of Joe Biden -- people notice his gaffes, but they're not ideological gaffes, so they have very little impact.

Republican gaffes matter because they reflect Republican policy. Much of the Republican Party really does want to ban all abortions and deport all undocumented immigrants and wish women back into the kitchen and gay people back into the closet.

The Politico story goes on to tell us that the GOP just has to put more articulate figureheads forward -- like Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, who became the face of the House GOP's successful push to pass a bill banning late-term abortions. Um, isn't that the same Marsha Blackburn who said that women "don't want" the government to pass equal pay laws? Yeah, that'll work.

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE STOOD IN THE RAIN AND PLEADED FOR FAIR TREATMENT, DON'T YOU?

Okay, immigrant-bashing Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach hasn't compared the protesters who gathered outside his front door on Saturday to Hitler -- but he's come close. Yesterday he imagined shooting them, as he told Fox News:

The secretary of state is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment -- and he said the incident at his home is an example of why Americans should bear arms.

"If we had been in the home and not been armed, I would have felt very afraid -- because it took the police 15 minutes to show up," he said. "It's important we recognize there's a reason we have the Second Amendment. There are situations like this where you have a mob and you do need to be able to protect yourself."

He said had they been home and the mob had gotten out of hand, his family would have been in "grave jeopardy."

"The Second Amendment is the private property owner's last resort," he said.

Subsequently, he was interviewed by Glenn Beck, and he and Beck agreed that the protesters were comparable to the Klan:

Beck show[ed] a video of the protest and ask[ed], "What’s the difference between that and the Klan coming to Martin Luther King’s house?"

"This is not just domestic terrorism, this is civil rights stuff," he added. "This isn't America. This is old-style South kind of tactics."

... Beck finally got on the phone with Kobach, who agreed with him about the demonstrators: "They're just not wearing white cloaks, but this is exactly KKK type of intimidation."

Want to see what was so intimidating? This is what was so intimidating:




Video streaming by Ustream


People standing in the rain under umbrellas and chanting. Speakers making speeches. Children milling about. All asking to be treated like human beings in this country. Doing so by leaving shoes outside Kobach's door:

The immigration reform advocates crowded the street and driveway outside Kobach's home and lined up pair after pair of black shoes at his doorstep.

The shoes, protestors said, represented families who had been torn apart through deportations since 2008.

Yeah, just like the Klan.

(Via Talking Points Memo and Salon.)

BLACK LEGISLATOR SAID BY FOX TO BE A NEW GOP CONVERT WAS ACTUALLY A REPUBLICAN YEARS AGO

Story at Fox Nation, via The Right Scoop:

MUST SEE: Black Louisiana Senator Explains Why He Left the Democratic Party and Became a Republican





This has to be one of the most powerful 'ads' I've ever seen on what it means to be a Republican. But even more than that, Louisiana Senator Elbert Guillory explains why, as a black man, leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican was absolutely the right choice.

TUNE IN TO 'HANNITY' TONIGHT AT 9 ET TO SEAN'S INTERVIEW WITH SEN. ELBERT GUILLORY!

If you don't want rto watch the video, you can read the transcript at Real Clear Politics. Guillory makes the same arguments every other African-American Republican seems to make: Lincoln was a Republican; Southern racists in the Jim Crow era were Democrats; the "Democrat Party" keeps blacks on "the government plantation."

Still -- he was a black Democrat! And now he's a black Republican! Wow! No wonder there's so much excitement at Human Events, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller ("Is Elbert Guillory the next conservative superstar?"). This is a big deal!

Or maybe not. Guillory is described in this 2002 legal document as a member of the St. Landry Parish Republican Executive Committee; we're told here that he "was registered Republican previously, switching to the Democratic Party in December 2006"; his affiliation with the GOP until 2006 is also mentioned in this article, as is the fact that he "served on the Republican State Central Committee" in Louisiana. What's more, that last article describes how Guillory worked with a right-wing group called Louisiana Family Forum Action on a redistricting plan for the state that eliminated three black-majority state Senate districts in New Orleans, replacing them with black-majority districts elsewhere in the state.

... the plan is generating no shortage of controversy from some of Guillory’s Senate colleagues, who see the plan as an affront to New Orleans' long-established districts and as a Trojan Horse for a hidden Republican agenda that will turn a majority of redrawn Senate districts more conservative....

"What it comes down to," [state Senator J.P.] Morrel says, "is this is a purely political move by the Family Forum. The Family Forum is a super right wing conservative group, and if you look at what they do with African-American [state Senate] districts in Orleans Parish and what they do with Bill Jefferson/Joseph Cao's congressional seat, their goal is to dilute anyone who has a non-neoconservative agenda. That's their goal."

By the way, Oliver Willis notes that Guillory argued for teaching creationism in the public schools by recalling an experience he'd had with a witch doctor:

Evolution is not the only scientific theory that is controversial to Louisiana politicians. Apparently, modern medicine is also subject to debate. Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory had a novel argument in defense of LSEA: It should not be repealed because he doesn’t want to "prematurely" declare that faith healing is "pseudo-science."

During this year's state Senate hearing to repeal LSEA, Guillory explained that he wouldn't want to keep the "science" behind an experience he had with a witch doctor -- who "wore no shoes, was semi-clothed, used a lot of bones that he threw around" -- out of a public school science classroom.

In Guillory's own words:

Yet if I closed my mind when I saw this man -- in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed. If I closed him off and just said, 'That’s not science; I'm not going to see this doctor,' I would have shut off a very good experience for myself.

(Video here.)

Oh, and here's Guillory toeing the NRA line on guns (also via Oliver Willis):





I think we'll be fine without you, Senator.

I'm not sure why the GOP is hell-bent on finding an African-American standard-bearer who will scold every black person still registered as a Democrat, but the quest, clearly, is never-ending.

NEW YORK TIMES AWAKENS FROM COMA, IS SHOCKED TO DISCOVER GOP ATTACKING ABORTION

This morning I was pleased to see The New York Times finally paying attention to the GOP's vigorous anti-abortion efforts -- a story on the subject is the lead item in today's print paper. But the Times story gets cause and effect all wrong:

After Republicans lost the presidential election and seats in both the House and the Senate last year, many in the party offered a stern admonishment: If we want to broaden our appeal, steer clear of divisive social and cultural issues.

Yet after the high-profile murder trial of an abortion doctor in Philadelphia this spring, many Republicans in Washington and in state capitals across the country seem eager to reopen the emotional fight over a woman's right to end a pregnancy....

Seriously? The Times thinks this is because of Gosnell? Yup -- pay no attention to what's been going on in GOP-run states since the teabagger wave election of 2010. That's just an afterthought for the Times:

Much of the movement in recent weeks can be linked to the outcry over the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia physician who was convicted last month of first-degree murder for cutting the spines of babies after botched abortions.

His case, coming on top of successful efforts to curtail reproductive rights in several states over the last three years, has reinvigorated the anti-abortion movement to a degree not seen in years, advocates on both sides of the issue said.

You may have seen the chart:





Twenty-five paragraphs in, the Times story quotes some numbers from recent history, including the numbers from that chart:

... laws that banned abortions at or near 22 weeks have been enacted in 11 states since 2010....

Gosh -- and what happened electorally in 2010?

In 2011, 92 laws limiting the procedure went into effect. The previous record had been fewer than 40. Last year there were 43, according to Guttmacher.

It should be obvious what's going on: the success of the teabaggers in 2010 immediately led to a reinvigorated anti-abortion push, although Republicans dialed it down temporarily during a presidential election year. But that was a strategic pause. What's happening in 2013 is a continuation of what happened in 2011.

But no -- much easier to shift the blame to Gosnell. It's all the fault of an abortion practitioner, and thus it's all the fault of people who support abortion rights. We asked for it.

WAIT -- BUT DIDN'T MITT ROMNEY SAY...?

When I read about this quote, I actually thought some right-wingers might embrace it:

The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza has a (subscriber-only) long reported piece on the Senate immigration-reform negotiations, in which an aide to Marco Rubio strips bare the dynamic with a brutal frankness that I have never seen before in American politics:

"There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can't cut it," a Rubio aide told me. "There shouldn't be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can't get it, can't do it, don't want to do it. And so you can't obviously discuss that publicly."

Glenn Reynolds says that insulting American workers "is political poison." But how different is what this Rubio aide said from what Mitt Romney said at that fundraiser last year?

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax.

What did Glenn Reynolds say about that?

WELL, YES: Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel: Romney must own '47 percent' argument 100 percent of the time....

Related: Howie Carr: "A huge percentage of Obama's voters are basically wards of the state. There are millions of them, and they have no intention of voting for anyone who might want them to ever go out and work for a living."...

Me, I don't see much difference between saying that 47 percent of people in this country are shiftless parasites and saying that certain American workers won't do backbreaking labor -- to me, what Romney said is more insulting than what the Rubio aide said. And yet the right embraced Romney's remarks, at least until their political impact became obvious.

But I guess the difference is that when Romney talked about that shiftless 47 percent, he never called them Americans. He referred to them as likely Obama voters. The right certainly doesn't regard those people as Americans.

HOW'S THAT REBRANDY THING WORKIN' OUT FOR YA, GOP? DO YOU EVEN CARE?

Salon's Joan Walsh on the return of Sarah Palin to Fox News:

Palin's return to Fox shows that Roger Ailes knows the GOP can't win back the White House in 2016, so he may as well focus on consolidating his audience, and keeping them comfortable as they watch the further decline of what Bill O'Reilly called "the white establishment" that was vanquished by Barack Obama.

I disagree.

Roger Ailes knows that the Fox propaganda effort didn't work out well for the Republicans, and he knows Palin was a noteworthy part of that failure -- but I think he assumes that she's an excellent person to have out there going into a midterm election, when turnout will be low and the question is which side can rally its base. Maybe Palin will be gone from Fox again after November 2014, but she's useful to the Ministry of Conservative Truth now.

Also, for all the talk about Republican rebranding, the party clearly thinks that can't happen in any serious way without alienating the base. Maybe immigration reform can squeak by, but don't even count on that -- the base is resisting. The game plan for victory in 2014 and 2016 is scandal piled on scandal -- real scandals, phony scandals, Obama scandals, State Department scandals meant to harm Hillary, whatever's available. That plus suppression of Democratic voters (no, the Supreme Court did not make that impossible today, as you'll know if you read this SCOTUSblog post), plus persuading a credulous mainstream media that the GOP is full of promising and relatively fresh faces (Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Scott freaking Walker), and, yes, the GOP has a chance.

Or at least I'm sure Ailes thinks so. I think he believes the Obama presidency is melting down like Nixon's. I think he expects Obamacare to be a disaster -- or at least to have a sufficiently bumpy rollout that, even if it works fairly smoothly, it can be portrayed as one.

I just can't believe he's writing 2016 off. He probably shouldn't -- Democrats blew a 17-point lead in 1988, and lost (or "lost") what should have been a gimme election in 2000 despite peace and prosperity -- although Democrats do have a natural demographic advantage.

But Ailes will err on the side of pleasing the base because he wants it all, as he always has -- he wants the love of the base and victory from the masses. He thought he could have it all in 2012, and I'm sure he still thinks so. That's his nature.

FORGET IMMIGRATION -- THIS WOULD PROBABLY SAVE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Look, I don't want to tell the Republican Party how to save itself, and I think the conventional wisdom about its inevitable demise via demographics has been oversold, but if Republicans are really worried about winning future presidential elections, then the results of this poll ought to suggest a way forward:

President Barack Obama's approval rating dropped eight percentage points over the past month, to 45%, the president's lowest rating in more than a year and a half, according to a new national poll.

The CNN/ORC International survey released Monday morning comes as the White House has been reacting to controversies....

The poll indicates that for the first time in Obama’s presidency, half of the public says they don't believe he is honest and trustworthy.....

"The drop in Obama's support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30, who, along with black Americans, had been the most loyal part of the Obama coalition," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland....

(Emphasis added.)

Down 17% among young people? I've got to believe that's the result of the NSA scandal. Maybe it's the other scandals as well, but I think that's the big one. (The IRS, Benghazi, and AP stories were all in the news at the time of the previous CNN poll and didn't do this kind of damage.) It's not that young people's responses to the survey questions are more negative than the responses of older people -- it's that they're just as negative, and that hasn't been true throughout the Obama presidency (young people have been much more positive about Obama). And I'll note that young people are the least likely to think Edward Snowden should be prosecuted. (Demographic crosstabs in this PDF.)

Republicans, this is a sign that you should drop the Bush/Cheney/McCain/Graham approach to surveillance and go Paulite -- or even just try to feign concern in this area convincingly. We assume that Rand Paul will criticize the surveillance state if he runs in 2016, but the field is going to be full of Bush/Cheneyites otherwise. If I were Rubio or Christie or Walker or Cruz or Jeb Bush, I'd mimic the Pauls on this subject. I think it would appeal to a lot of upscale, white, educated young voters -- and since the GOP doesn't seem to have the stomach for outreach to non-whites (I don't think an immigration bill is going to get through the House), why shouldn't Republicans go for upscale whites, since whites are their base anyway? Add young Paulbots to young bankers and brokers and you're starting to build yourself a coalition.

I don't think it will happen -- old habits die hard, so I assume the 2016 GOP field apart from Paul will be full of folks pushing foreign policy muscularity, advised by a lot of old Bush/Cheney hands. But I think they'll be missing an opportunity to redefine an issue.

WE WANT TO BELIEVE THE WORST BECAUSE IT MAKES US THE HEROES OF THE STORY

The big story yesterday morning was a CNET story by Declan McCullagh titled "NSA Admits Listening to U.S. Phone Calls Without Warrants."

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned....

Charles Johnson noted at the time that what Nadler actually said didn't match this claim:

If you read this carefully, you'll notice that the source for this "admission" is not the NSA at all -- it's second-hand information from Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY). And Nadler himself never even says he heard it from the NSA....

The key quote here is, "We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone." Notice: Nadler did not say they could listen to the phone call, he said "get the specific information."

...There's no mention of it in McCullagh's article, but this entire discussion was about metadata. They explicitly say this several times, using the word "metadata." And metadata is not "listening to phone calls"...

And what Nadler was saying was in response to a denial from FBI director Robert Mueller that NSA can listen to a call at will -- or, if you agree with Josh Marshall, Nadler and Mueller were misunderstanding each other (or CNET's McCullagh was misunderstanding their conversation).

The CNET article was later altered, and retitled "NSA Spying Flap Extends to Contents of U.S. Phone Calls." And then after that, CNET's sister site ZDNET walked back the story:

Update at 2:50 p.m. ET on June 16: We're pulling the plug on this story ... following Rep. Nadler's latest comments casting doubt on CNET's story. In a statement to our sister site, Nadler said: "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans' phone calls without a specific warrant." ...

Update at 10:20 p.m. ET on June 16: The U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement, debunking the claims. "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress," the statement read....

It's not surprising to me that CNET ran with this and that much of the blogosphere believed it. The government has a disturbing amount of access to what we're doing on the phone and the Internet -- but it's apparently not unlimited access. However, I think an awful lot of us would like to believe it's unlimited. That would make us -- all of us -- unambiguously at imminent risk of utterly unrestricted eavesdropping.

We want this to be a story about villainy that's unchecked, with us as its victims. Similarly, we wanted to believe that the NSA agents directly taps into to the main servers of major Internet companies, rather than having access to FTP sites where specific information is dropped based on specific government requests. The latter is unsettling enough, but the former means they're reading what we're writing on the Internet as we type! All of us! You! Me! And that's not quite true.

Right-wingers love this feeling of persecution -- they want to believe that Obama is coming for their guns, itching to shut down their churches, planning to send them to death panels. It's an ego boost to believe the government wants to do this to you.

Lefties relish the story of the government targeting American citizens with drones. They could target us! The fact is, the vast majority of us aren't going to be targeted. The reality of the targeting seems sufficiently problematic without our trying to turn ourselves into potential victims -- but we like doing that. It makes us feel important.

There's a lot to dislike about this approach to national security. There's plenty to be appalled at. But the government really isn't as interested in most of us personally as some of us seem to want to believe.

ONCE AGAIN, RIGHT BLAMES BUSH-ERA ORWELLIANISM ON OBAMA

Drudge:

AT&T to Load iPhones With Emergency Alerts From Obama – That You Can't Switch Off... http://t.co/QYNj0NDm8v

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) June 16, 2013

The link (tweeted by Drudge and also at the Drudge Report) goes to this Gateway Pundit post:

Just in case you want more Obama in your life...
AT&T is loading iPhones with emergency alerts from Barack Obama...
That you can't switch off.....

Engadget reported:

AT&T has begun rolling out Wireless Emergency Alerts updates for iPhone 4S and 5, so you won't be the last folks to know if the entire northern hemisphere is about to be covered in ice à la Day After Tomorrow.

You'll receive a notification from the carrier when your update is ready, but only if you're using iOS 6.1 or higher.

Once installed, AMBER and Emergency alerts are automatically sent to your phone unless you switch them off via Settings. However, should you be tired of Obama, just know that there’s no way to switch off Presidential alerts.

So now Barack can track your calls and send you messages, too....

A quick search of the Net reveals that right-wingers (Pam Geller, Alex Jones) have been flipping out about this for quite a while, although even Fox Business acknowledges that "presidential alerts," which would be sent to all enabled recipients in the U.S., are intended to be for the direst of natural disasters and other emergencies.

But isn't this just Obama megalomania? No, as the FCC explains:

Why can't consumers block WEAs [Wireless Emergency Alerts] issued by the President?

In passing the WARN Act, Congress allowed participating carriers to offer subscribers the capability to block all WEAs except those issued by the President.

The WARN Act is the Warning, Alert and Response Network Act, which was passed as part of a larger port security bill ... in 2006. That's 2006 as in "when Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress."

So, yeah, this is more Obama fascism that was actually a Bush-era idea.

RIGHT WING: IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE NEW SUPERMAN MOVIE, IT'S BECAUSE YOU HATE JESUS

Townhall's Kevin McCullough says that the filthy critics who've given Man of Steel negative or mixed reviews don't like it because they hate God and fatherhood:

We could point to any number of reasons why this film works, but perhaps one of the most offensive things to critics, but by far is of singular importance to the film in ways that few will dispute, is Clark's two dads.

Clark Kent/Kal-El a.k.a. Superman, has not one but two men of distinct honor, fidelity, integrity, and moral uprightness that speak into his life in the narrative.... the father figures in the film portray far more than what the American entertainment complex usually allows men--especially fathers--to exhibit.

These men are pillars in their families. They both make decisions that consistently demonstrate provision and protection for those in their care, and unapologetically they lead their families--with humility--to make decisions that are not emotionally easy, but that at their core are truly just, good, and right.

These men are pillars in their communities. They both demonstrate the character-birthed foresight to speak truth to those who need it, regardless of how unpopular it may be....

These men are pillars to a watching society. Both men sacrifice their own welfare for the good of the greater world, their families, and even for Clark/Cal....

One gives up Clark, knowing he is the only hope of salvation for the universe, thus he sends him to earth. And it is there where the other adopts Clark as his own flesh, teaches him all that he is capable of and lives faithfully before him, to give Clark the foundation he will need to be the saving force of all mankind.

But wait, this sounds vaguely familiar.

Of course it does.

The narrative of the Biblical text claims that God the Father -- who in many places throughout scripture takes the name of "El" (the name of Superman's Krypton family) -- sent His Son, who would also have questions about His role in the world as a child, grow up as an alien to those around Him, see the evils and injustice of the world--and work miracles to correct them, and eventually be the literal salvation of humanity through His ultimate miracle of defeating death.

Yes I suspect one of the reasons some entertainment critics have been so unfair to the legitimate greatness of this epic masterpiece is that they are too overcome by an allegory of another story that they have not settled in their own belief system yet....

So the critics may think they don't like it because "Every opportunity for humor, compassion or plausible responses to otherworldly phenomena is buried beneath product placements and CGI special effects," or because "There's very little humor or joy in this Superman story," or because "this reboot skimps on fun and romance" -- but they really hate it because they're instruments of Satan.

It's not just McCullough who's trying to get cultural traditionalists into the theaters to see Man of Steel. Here's a FoxNews.com story aimed at the Christian crowd:

[Director Zack] Snyder and his "Steel" co-creators Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer have layered this latest incarnation with quite a few allusions to Jesus Christ. Here are a few:

While there isn't a miraculous birth per se, Kal-El's (Henry Cavill) father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) claims that his son is the first "natural" birth in centuries. All children on Krypton are genetically engineered to a pre-determined purpose and thus artificially inseminated. Not Kal-El.....

There is some Christ-like imagery planted throughout "Man of Steel." One blaring symbol occurs during a climactic battle: Superman jumps from General Zod's (Michael Shannon) ship and hovers in the sky with his arms out-stretched like the crucifix. Freeze-frame it and you can have your own Superman prayer card.

Kal-El says he is 33, a not-too-subtle reference to the same age as Jesus Christ when he was crucified.

The Passion of Superman. Kal-El is more than willing to sacrifice himself to save the people of Earth. Originally reluctant to reveal his identity and powers to the world, Supes decides to turn himself over to Zod to save humanity from annihilation.

When things get tough, Clark Kent seeks advice from a priest. Visible in the background is a large painting of Jesus so you can see Supes and Christ side-by-side.

Superman is a non-violent being. Even though people everywhere seem to want to beat up on Clark Kent, he never returns the favor, always opting to keep the peace....

Did an eagle-eyed Fox scribe just happen to spot all that? Or did Warner Bros. spoon-feed this list to the Fox writer? My money's on the latter -- Hollywood knows that a movie secular audiences read as secular can make a lot of extra cash if Jesusy audiences can be persuaded to see it as Jesusy. (See, e.g., The Blind Side, which was carefully marketed to Christians and became a surprise smash.)

I wonder if McCullough also got a call from the Christian-marketing folks at Warners, and if that inspired his Townhall column. He sure wrote Man of Steel up as if he was trying to please the studio ("The film is without question the greatest Super Hero film of the modern era, maybe of all time.... 'Man Of Steel' without question will be the number one money maker at the box office for the year").

They say you can't serve both God and Mammon. Hollywood, I guess, would beg to differ.

(And um, didn't we all know this about Superman already?)

*****

UPDATE: More articles on Man of Steel's Superman as Christ at Christian Post, Breitbart, the CNN Belief Blog, and The New American. Yeah, Warners is working this hard.

BROOKS SEES THE SPECTER OF MONEY-GRUBBING ATHEISM (or something like that)

David Brooks has published a new column about how we were all better people back in the good old days when we were more religious. I have to admit I'm having trouble getting past Brooks's first anecdote, the key point of which I've highlighted below:

About a century ago, Walter Judd was a 17-year-old boy hoping to go to college at the University of Nebraska. His father pulled him aside and told him that, though the family had happily paid for Judd's two sisters to go to college, Judd himself would get no money for tuition or room and board.

His father explained that he thought his son might one day go on to become a fine doctor, but he had also seen loose tendencies. Some hard manual labor during college would straighten him out.

Judd took the train to the university, arrived at the station at 10:30 and by 12:15 had found a job washing dishes at the cafeteria of the Y.M.C.A. He did that job every day of his first year, rising at 6 each morning, not having his first college date until the last week of the school year.

Judd went on to become a doctor, a daring medical missionary and a prominent member of Congress between 1943 and 1963. The anecdote is small, but it illustrates a few things. First, that, in those days, it was possible to work your way through college doing dishes. More important, that people then were more likely to assume that jobs at the bottom of the status ladder were ennobling and that jobs at the top were morally perilous. That is to say, the moral status system was likely to be the inverse of the worldly status system. The working classes were self-controlled, while the rich and the professionals could get away with things.

But how does this anecdote illustrate that? If that's what Judd's father really believed, wouldn't he, instead of encouraging his son to wash dishes to pay for college, have encouraged him not to go to college at all, and to save his soul by being a humble dishwasher for the rest of his life?

In any case, Judd didn't avoid the "morally perilous" -- he became a doctor, a twenty-year member of Congress, and the keynote speaker at the 1960 Republican convention. He was a prominent anti-communist, and he lived long enough to get a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. A life like that might give a guy a swelled head, don't you think? And thus subject him to moral peril?

*****

Brooks goes on to express nostalgia for a bygone era when we were skeptical about the worth of success. He even gives a shout-out to Depression-era lefty proletarian fiction. But mostly it's religion that's kept us on the righteous path, in his view:

It wasn't as if Americans renounced worldly success (this is America!), but there were rival status hierarchies: the biblical hierarchy, the working man's hierarchy, the artist's hierarchy, the intellectual's hierarchy, all of which questioned success and denounced those who climbed and sold out.

Over the years, religion has played a less dominant role in public culture. Meanwhile, the rival status hierarchies have fallen away. The meritocratic hierarchy of professional success is pretty much the only one left standing.

As a result, people are less ambivalent about commerce....

Um, you know where they really don't feel any ambivalence about commerce? In the red states, where they denounce liberals as capitalism-bashers and howl at Barack Obama ("You didn't build that!") for challenging the notion of entrepreneur-as-Randian-demigod.

Now, which are the most religious states in America? And which are the least religious? And how do those rankings line up with the success of that unabashed champion of commerce Mitt Romney?

Mr. Gallup, may I have the envelope, please?




The ten most religious states in America all voted for Mr. Bain Capital. Only one of the ten least religious states (Alaska) voted for him.

And, of course, Rick Perry, probably the most God-bothering governor in America, spends much of his time rubbing other states' noses in the economic success that his state has achieved as a result of high oil prices and a shredded social contract.

*****

Brooks used to think it was perfectly OK that people craved the trappings of wealth -- or maybe he just said that because it was an easy way to bash Democrats who engage in "class warfare":

Americans live in a culture of abundance. They have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich.

Americans read magazines for people more affluent than they are (W, Cigar Aficionado, The New Yorker, Robb Report, Town and Country) because they think that someday they could be that guy with the tastefully appointed horse farm. Democratic politicians proposing to take from the rich are just bashing the dreams of our imminent selves.

He also seemed to think that rich people don't really lose their moral bearings -- or maybe he thought that was true only outside the decadent big cities:

Most successful people, like Lincoln, also have a core faith in the moral power of hard work.

... many of the hard-working people who make up the ranks of the gradually successful are flamboyance vacuums. Often they are far more interested in working and making money than in consuming and spending money. According to research that Thomas J. Stanley did for his book "The Millionaire Next Door," written with William D. Danko, 70 percent of millionaires have their shoes resoled and repaired rather than replaced, and the average millionaire spends about $140 on a pair of shoes, which doesn't get you Guccis. After Visa and MasterCard, the most common credit cards in the millionaire's wallets are charge cards for Sears and J.C. Penney . In that 1996 study, Stanley and Danko reported that the typical millionaire paid $399 for his most expensive suit and $24,800 for his or her most recent car or truck, which is only $3,800 more than what the average American spent.

In other words, they shop the way most Americans shop....
In this, as in so many respects, people who live in Manhattan or Los Angeles or San Francisco or even Dallas have to keep reminding themselves that their experience is not typical. In most places in America, there are no massive concentrations of rich people and hence no Madison Avenue boutiques, no fine art galleries, no personal shoppers. There is just the country club, and certain social pressures to be just this affluent, to prove you are a success, and no more so.

What happened?

Did we decadent city folk burn down the churches all these Millionaires Next Door used to attend? I don't remember doing that myself, but maybe I was drunk on atheism.

THE OFF-KILTER DOMESTIC POLITICS OF INTERVENTION IN SYRIA

We see President Obama's decision to arm Syrian rebels as a concession to the conservative War Party, led by John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and joined by the perpetually triangulation-minded Bill Clinton.

But the right-wing base hates this intervention. Sample titles of right-wing blog posts:

* MORE PROOF HE IS EVIL: OBAMA HAS DECIDED TO GIVE MILITARY SUPPORT TO AL QAEDA'S AFFILIATES
* Obama Decides to Supply Syria’s 'Rebels' — i.e. al Qaeda and Assorted Islamists
* State Department Listed Supporters of Terror Used Chemical Weapons on Different State Department Listed Terrorists

Drudge is calling them the "Syrian 'rebels,'" with "rebels" in quotes, and is greeting the decision with booga-booga scare headlines and visuals:





The reviews in this Free Republic thread are all negative:

John N Lindsey proving their loyalty to the progressive caucus.

****

So, what is it with Graham ~ the gay thing ~ he doesn't like Christians because of their stand on homosexuality?
Remember, none of these pukes have any answer to how we keep Obamugabe's rebel buddies from killing all the Christians ~ and they know it, and that's why it's fair to impute intent to their actions.

****

Bambi finally got the excuse he wanted to back Al Qaeda in Syria

****

Don’t pay any attention to that IRS scandal behind the curtain, look at the shiny new support for the Syrian rebel movement! Bang the drums. Make noise with those cymbals.

So this upsets the right as well as the left. But it makes the Sunday chat show panels happy, so it's the mainstream, sensible thing to do.

NEW HIRE BY THE VIRGINIA GOP: VOODOO, ABORTION ABSOLUTISM ... AND SEX ALLEGATIONS?

You may have seen this:

Rev. Joe Ellison Jr. was tapped as the Republican Party of Virginia's state director of African American engagement Tuesday, but, as seems to be the recent status quo in Commonwealth politics, the pick is not without its controversy.

Ellison, the director of Pastoral Relations and Church Ministries for the Virginia Pastors Coalition, is a social conservative that has called for the shuttering of Planned Parenthood and publicly supported an idea that the devastating 2009 earthquake in Haiti was linked to a pact Hatians made with the devil 200 years ago.

Regarding voodoo:

... in 2010, Ellison said he agreed with Rev. Pat Robertson's controversial claim that the 2009 earthquake in Haiti was caused by a "pact with the Devil" that was sealed in a voodoo ceremony on the eve of Haiti's successful slave rebellion.

"I know his comments angered a lot of the so-called, in my opinion, liberals," said Ellison, who said he was speaking as an emissary of the black community, according to the Washington Post. "From a spiritual standpoint, we think the Dr. Robertson was on target about Haiti, in the past, with voodoo. And we believe in the Bible that the practice of voodoo is a sin, and what caused the nation to suffer. Those who read the Bible and study the history know that what Dr. Robertson said was the truth."

But there are a couple of other creepy things in Ellison's past.

There's this 2007 news report, which really buries the lead (I'll highlight the disturbing part):

Checkbook in hand, Bishop Gerald Glenn, pastor of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield County, is coming to the aid of the Rev. Joe Ellison, a friend and former head of the chaplaincy at Richmond City Jail.

It seems that Ellison's wardrobe during his stint as chaplain in early 2006 required some special outfitting. Filled with the Holy Spirit, the towering Ellison requires a 20-inch collar, a 54-inch waist, a 58-long blazer and size 14 shoes.

So when Sheriff C.T. Woody told a local newspaper that Ellison refused to return the five jail chaplain uniforms ordered specially made for him, Ellison was surprised. "What they told me ... was they didn't want them back," says Ellison, adding that he later found out the jail wanted to be reimbursed.

Ellison was forced out of Woody's jail under a pall of sexual harassment allegations. Though accused by four female volunteers in the jail's ministry program, Ellison was never charged....

Now, for all we know, all four of Ellison's accusers may have been lying. Nothing seems to have come of the charges.

But here's the curious thing. That's not the first time Ellison has faced a sex accusation -- by his own admission. Here's Ellison acknowledging a pedophilia accusation, in the context of discussing a fellow preacher who's been formally charged with sexual abuse of minors:

Embattled [Richmond Outreach Center] pastor Geronimo Aguilar is expected to be extradited to Texas Friday morning to face 7 felony counts in two child sex abuse cases.

Pastor G stepped down as the ROC's senior pastor Thursday. The man who called for Pastor G to resign is now admitting he once faced charges of his own.

Rev. Joe Ellison with the Virginia Christian Alliance says the temporary resignation announcement is no admission of guilt.

"I've been accused," said Rev. Ellison. "But God cleared me."

... Ellison says his charges date back a decade.

"I have no animosity toward my goddaughter," said Rev. Ellison. "My wife and I still care for her a whole lot. It's just unfortunate. She said that I inappropriately touched her."

Ellison was cleared of the charges, but he went into a deep depression. He turned to his bishop, Gerald Glenn, for counsel.

"I didn't need anybody to tell me to step down," said Rev. Ellison. "I did it on my own, because I knew what was good for Joe Ellison." ...

Make of this what you will....

BLOOMBERG AND WHAT ARMY?

Following up on a recent New York Times story, Gail Collins discusses Mike Bloomberg's efforts to punish four Democratic senators who voted against the gun background check bill:

... this week, Bloomberg wrote to the thousand biggest Democratic donors in New York and told them not to give the same senators any money....

The Democratic leaders are privately double-furious.... They argue, with absolute accuracy, that if the Democrats lose control of the Senate in 2014, there will be no gun bill to vote for, because Mitch McConnell, as majority leader, would never allow one to get to the floor.

And what's the point? The two senators in question who are up for re-election -- [Mark] Pryor [of Arkansas] and Mark Begich of Alaska -- are going to be opposed by Republicans who are even more averse to weapons regulation. Right now it looks as if Begich's opponent will be Joe Miller, a Tea Party stalwart who would be an improvement only to people who believe that the one thing this country needs is to bring back Sarah Palin.

There's one really good argument on Bloomberg's side. Maybe the only way to get serious gun reforms passed in Congress is to convince our elected officials that people who believe in reasonable gun control are as insane as the forces of the National Rifle Association.

Let's take that last point first. Collins is right that gun reforms might pass if politicians feared gun control supporters the way they fear NRA supporters. But they don't, because they know that even if background checks have 90% support, the 10% in opposition will cast a lot of one-issue votes, and the 90% will barely cast any.

And what Bloomberg is doing isn't going to change that. It's top-down -- it's putting pressure on politicians, while doing nothing, or at least nothing likely to be effective, to close the intensity gap.

We know that universal background checks have overwhelming support in red states, and even among NRA members. So why won't supporters reward elected officials who favor the background check bill and punish the bill's opponents?

I don't know. I have a pretty strong hunch that it has to do with tribal affinities and the sense among heartlanders that the NRA is part of their tribe, while the gun control community is alien.

But Bloomberg doesn't seem interested in the answer to this question. And he really doesn't seem interested in the answer to a question that baffles me: So, how do you get heartlanders who favors some gun regulations to question their sense of affinity with the NRA and pro-NRA pols? How do you change their minds?

Bloomberg has run ads chiding the senators -- but, as the Times reported yesterday, Senators Pryor and Begich think they can turn those ads to their advantage:

In response to Mr. Bloomberg's ad, Mr. Pryor filmed his own, in which he adopts a defiant tone. "The mayor of New York City is running ads against me because I opposed President Obama's gun control legislation," Mr. Pryor says in the ad.

In an interview, Mr. Begich, who, like Mr. Pryor, faces re-election next year, said he was unbowed by the threat of a Bloomberg-led attack. Indeed, he seemed to almost relish the thought of one.

"In Alaska, having a New York mayor tell us what to do? The guy who wants to ban Big Gulps?" Mr. Begich asked incredulously. "If anything, it might help me," he added.

Well, of course. Because Bloomberg has a massive ego, everyone who's paying attention to this knows that the ads are his work -- and to many heartlanders, rightly or wrongly, no one embodies what's offputting about urbane liberal culture more than Bloomberg.

I don't know what could change the current state of affairs. I'd say it would have to be a long, slow, patient campaign to reduce Middle Americans' distrust of the gun control community (and liberals in general -- yes, on this Bloomberg is seen as a liberal), while also trying to disrupt Middle Americans' sense that the NRA and the gun community are its cultural allies.

That's a hell of an undertaking -- if Wayne LaPierre's rantings since Newtown didn't hurt the NRA's public standing, then the heartland's trust of the gun community is strong. But if it can be done, someone like Mark Kelly is a probably a hell of a lot more likely to get it done than Mike Bloomberg.

IN RED STATES, IS BLOOMBERG'S WRATH AN IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION FOR PRO-GUN DEMOCRATS?

(Didn't mean to post this -- it was something I never finished.)

I know my mayor is fighting the good fight -- I just question whether he's fighting it in an effective way:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a sharp escalation in the battle over gun control, is seeking to punish Democratic senators by taking away the one thing they most need from New Yorkers: money.

On Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg will send a personal letter to hundreds of the biggest Democratic donors in New York urging them to cut off contributions to the four Democratic senators who helped block a bill in April that would have strengthened background checks on gun purchasers.

... the four Democratic senators who sided with Republicans filibustering the background check bill -- Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota -- have raised more than $2.2 million from New York....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/06/12/the-morning-plum-holding-dems-who-vote-wrong-way-on-guns-accountable/