Daily Kos

Politico posits that while plenty of people are plenty pissed off about the NSA surveillance revelations of Edward Snowden, activists will have an uphill battle in trying to bring about change.

The question is whether these anti-surveillance voters will be successful in creating a broader populist movement. Many lawmakers have defended the NSA surveillance program — a program Congress itself reviewed and approved in secret.

And unlike the anti-war effort that rallied Democrats during the Bush administration, and the tea party movement that galvanized conservatives in President Barack Obama's first term, government surveillance opponents tend to straddle party lines. The cause appeals to libertarian Republicans who don't like big government and progressive liberals [...] who do but favor civil liberties. Together, these voters would have little in common otherwise.

Another complication is the potential of another terrorist attack. One spectacular act and public opinion could flip, much as it did after 9/11, back to favoring government surveillance. Politicians know this, with many of them opting to blast the Obama administration for not being more transparent but most opposing an end to broad surveillance powers.

"If in fact something happens, you're basically putting yourself in a position to look like you didn't do something when you should have. And that's got to be in the back of their head," said Ed Goeas, president of the Tarrance Group in Alexandria, Va., a Republican survey research and strategy company.

Here's the problem with that analysis. As is typical for Politico, which can't report on anything unless it has something to do with Republican versus Democrat, it's framed entirely by election prospects. What is discounted here is the fact that there are at least dozens more NSA revelations to come from the material whistleblower Edward Snowden has provided, and that this story won't be going away any time soon. Yes, pressure from voters would help garner support for reform, and the new revelations could build both public and congressional support for reform.

There's another aspect of this that Politico is missing that could be significant. They say that "industry isn't exactly fighting back." That's more than subject to change as tech companies are losing business and stand to lose a lot more over their cooperation in the surveillance: $21.5 to $35 billion over the next three years. These losses, and the powerful lobby efforts of the tech industry to try to stem them, could definitely swing the debate in favor of reform in Congress.

Finally, Congress could be insulted by and fed up with moves like the the one President Obama made this week. The "outside" and "independent" technical advisory group Obama promised in his NSA "reforms" will be neither. He's put Director of National Intelligence James Clapper—the administration official who has admitted to lying to Congress about the extent of the NSA's domestic spying—in charge of this not-outside and not-independent group, which Clapper will be selecting. That's not a way to win over Congress.

Sign our petition urging Congress to declassify the FISA Court’s rulings so we can find out what else the court has decided about the Fourth Amendment.

In what she later announced would the first in a series of policy-oriented speeches she will deliver over the coming months on the "strains on our social contract,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a passionate and wide-ranging address to the attendees of the American Bar Association's annual convention in San Francisco Monday, telling them of the need to restore the protections of the Voting Rights Act. She excoriated efforts in some states to deal with the "phantom epidemic of election fraud” as a means of keeping minority and younger voters away from the polls.

She pointed out that in 2013 so far, more than 80 bills restricting voting rights have been introduced in 31 states. She singled out four states in particular: North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Texas.

“Now, not every obstacle is related to race, but anyone who says that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention.

And despite the best efforts of many well-intentioned election officials, discrepancies in resources across precincts and polling stations still disproportionately impact African Americans, Latinos and young voters." [...]

"Unless the hole opened up by the Supreme Court's ruling is fixed […] citizens will be disenfranchised, victimized by the law instead of served by it, and that progress, that historical progress toward a more perfect union, will go backwards instead of forward," Clinton said.

The ABA's House of Delegates approved a resolution Monday urging Congress to take quick action to restore provisions of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court gutted in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling.

Clinton will receive the prestigious 2013 Liberty Medal in September in Philadelphia at the National Constitution Center. Her speech there will focus on “balance and transparency necessary in our national security policies as we move beyond a decade of wars to face new threats.” Then, in the fall, in Florida, she “will address implications on these issues for [U.S.] global leadership and moral standing around the world.”

Voting rights weren't Clinton's only topic at the lawyers' confab, where she received the organization's highest award, the ABA Medal:

“One of the observations I’ve made traveling the world over is how rare trust is, yet trust is the thread that weaves together the social fabric that enables democracy to exist,” Clinton said. “When citizens are alienated from their government, democracy suffers. And around the world in recent years, we’ve seen what can happen when trust unravels and societies pull apart.”

As a survey by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press indicated earlier this year, you don't have to go around the world to find such alienation.

Please join Daily Kos by urging Congress to save the Voting Rights Act by creating a new preclearance formula.

This is going to be a real mess.

DENVER - A shockwave reverberated through both side in the recall elections of two southern Colorado Democratic senators after a judge's ruling likely eliminates mail-in ballots for the looming Sept. 10 elections.

Judge Robert McGahey considered a lawsuit brought by the Libertarian Party saying they were wrongfully denied the ability to get a candidate into recall elections for Sen. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, and Sen. Angela Giron, D-Pueblo.

McGahey—in a decision that stunned many on Monday evening—ruled that potential candidates should have had until 15 days prior to the election to turn in enough signatures to get their names on the ballot. It's a part of the constitution that applies only to recall elections and is seldom used.

Among those the ruling stunned were election officials in El Paso and Pueblo counties, who have already prepared and even sent out some mail-in ballots. Pueblo County Clerk Gilbert “Bo” Ortiz had already printed ballots and mailed them to overseas voters. Anyone using those ballots will have the votes invalidated if another candidate ends up being placed on the ballot in the next few weeks, and since officials now have to wait until Aug. 26—the deadline Judge McGahey set—they definitely won't have time to get the new ballots printed, mailed, and returned from overseas voters. They'll have a very tough time getting mail ballots to regular voters in time, with just 15 days for turnaround. It also means Ortiz has to scrap the 100,000 ballots he's already printed. A new law in Colorado requires that every voter receives a mail-in ballot, so this ruling really complicates how the Sept. 10 recall will proceed.

It also complicates GOTV efforts for Sens. Morse and Giron, who've likely geared their campaigns for the mail-in balloting. They'll have extra work to educate voters about the very fact that the recall election is happening and where to vote. You can help make sure they have the funds to deal with this new wrinkle.

Please give $3 to each of the two Democrats targeted by this recall.

A relatively light week in GunFAIL, which is great news. Unfortunately, it wasn't completely quiet out there, and it never will be. Which is sort of the point. But we can hold out hope, anyway.

Among the events of special note, two Marines accidentally shot and killed themselves this week, which is more than a little unexpected, not to mention sad and avoidable. Trained in the use of firearms though they may be, in one case the training did not prevent one young Marine from twirling a loaded pistol on his finger, which discharged straight through his left eye, killing him five days later. Also among the unexpected accident victims: one armed security guard and one gun collector. Surely all folks who would have been presumed able to handle their guns safely. But it doesn't always work out as expected, does it? I'd really hate to find that out in, say, an elementary school classroom. Though some school districts seem bound and determined to take their chances, even as their insurance carriers insist that they not, at least not on their dime.

Perhaps somewhat less reliable, but still striving, would be the two gun owners who caused accidents while practicing with their weapons. More practice will be necessary, it seems. More common among the accidents, of course, are the people who had their guns out for no particular reason, either playing with them or showing them off. Five incidents this week involved people explicitly reported as having been doing just that. That's not counting the people reported as merely "handling" their weapons, as opposed to loading, unloading, or cleaning them. Which reminds me: I found zero gun cleaning accidents this week! A major milestone! Congratulations, everyone! (Though I guess it's possible that you just left your guns dirty.)

Two father/son fights resulted in GunFAIL this week. There were two stray bullet shootings, and one "home invasion," in which a fellow accidentally shot through a neighbor's apartment wall in the middle of the night. Three gun owners dropped and discharged their weapons this week, though this is often something that gun enthusiasts insist does not happen with modern semiautomatic weapons. But that's what they're telling the police when they arrive, so take that for what it's worth. And then there was the concealed carry ninja who, angered by being called out by neighborhood residents for speeding through their streets, jumped out of his car, went to draw the gun out of his waistband, and shot himself in the groin.

Finally, our last recurring category: the kids of GunFAIL. Victims this week were ages 22 months, 8, 9 and 13. All were shot by other children, mostly by siblings or other family members.

Below the fold, you'll find this week's compilation.

Reposted from Comics by Tom Tomorrow

While the 2016 presidential election is more than three years away, the official Hillary Derangement Syndrome season has clearly arrived.

The first inkling of Clinton-panic was in May, when polling showed Clinton trouncing all comers, which naturally led to Republicans deciding that the deaths of four Americans in a war-torn Middle Eastern country was all her fault. Then came the news that a Republican brain trust was coalescing around a plan to stop Clinton by calling her old.

And today we have a daily-double of derangement. There's the Washington Post's Richard Cohen revealing the shocking news that Clinton is, in fact, a woman whose only claim to fame seems to be frequent-flier miles and an association with a woman whose husband cheated on her. Then there's David Cantanese, who famously defended Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment, who says Hillary needs to step it up and get her ass to Iowa to pose with butter sculptures instead of "claiming" that Republicans are trying to disenfranchise voters. And they're only warming up.

So, what can we expect from the next three years? First, think "tip" and "iceberg." And second, three years of a bizarre combination of old-school Clinton hate, thinly—and not so thinly—veiled misogyny, the pundits wanting a horse race, the GOP being scared to death of her, and of course, the "liberal" press bending over backwards to be fair. And balanced.

Bet on it.

Join Daily Kos and EMILY's List to demand that every GOP candidate in 2016 pledge to refuse money from The Hillary Project and any other group advocating violence against women.

It would appear that Republicans are not quite as eager to hold "town halls" as they once were, back during Insanity Summer '09. Not too surprising, as very few politicians enjoy being yelled at by crazy people and the net result of Insanity Summer was to turn the town hall format from something always-challenging to a national running joke, but the reaction of the professional crazy people is pretty interesting:

“The reason 2009 was so successful for the grass roots was because the politicians never saw it coming,” said Jennifer Stefano, the state director for the Pennsylvania chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party group. “Now they know. And they are terrified.”

Translation: We had big plans to send crazy people to say crazy things yet-a-freaking-gain, but now that all but the most hardcore congressional crackpots are dodging the events because they do not want to be seen with us, that blows our entire marketing strategy out of the water.

But wait! The big-name crazy people have decided to hold their own town halls! Ones with blackjack, and—

After seeing a paltry schedule of Congressional town hall meetings this month, another major conservative group, Heritage Action for America, decided it would stage public forums of its own from Arkansas to Pennsylvania. The aim is to recruit people for a group it calls the Sentinels, a citizens’ brigade of sorts, to reach lawmakers through other means, like writing letters to the editor, dialing in to talk-radio programs and mastering the language of Twitter and Facebook.

All right, that genuinely made me sad. Being able to rally all of America's craziest people to show up and spout theories about how the gubbermint is taking over Medicare so that they can make death panels and then the U.N. something-something, now that's some grade-A event planning. Gathering together all of America's craziest people to write letters to the editor, call into right-wing talk shows and yell at people on Twitter, however, is considerably less ambitious. I promise you, all of America's crazy people are already on Twitter, thank you. Your work has already been done. (Also, the name "Sentinels" evokes a sort of septuagenarian biker gang, which is fine if that's what you're going for, but it seems a little, dunno, on the nose? Whatever, it's your movement.)

More on the temporary demise of the town hall format below the fold.

Now this is unfortunate. Last February, the administration released a new rule under Obamacare that delays a key part of the "Affordable" in the Affordable Care Act: caps on patients' out-of-pocket costs. The rule was "obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed" until The New York Times health reporter Robert Pear dug it up.

Under the policy, many group health plans will be able to maintain separate out-of-pocket limits for benefits in 2014. As a result, a consumer may be required to pay $6,350 for doctors’ services and hospital care, and an additional $6,350 for prescription drugs under a plan administered by a pharmacy benefit manager.

The delay doesn't apply to all insurers or employers and will not harm many consumers. But it can harm some of the most vulnerable, as Kaiser Health News reports. People with devastating and chronic illnesses—cancer, AIDS, lupus, epilepsy—who have the highest drug and doctor bills will be disproportionately hurt. It's a relatively small patient population, but it's the patient population that arguably needs the cap the most.

The administration and its defenders argue that it was necessary because some employers and plans don't have the capacity to determine those costs easily and need another year to put those systems in place. You could argue that the the businesses have had plenty of damned time to put those systems in place since the law passed.

The most frustrating part of the law is that it will have the most expensive impact on the people who are the sickest. The second most frustrating thing about it is that it's giving more fodder to Republicans, like House Speaker John Boehner, who said: “Once again the president is giving a break to big businesses struggling with his health care law while individuals and families unfairly remain stuck under its mandates." No, Boehner doesn't give a shit about the individuals and families, and yes, he's on the side of big business. Boehner's hypocrisy aside, giving the GOP more ammunition in their argument that Obamacare is a train wreck is just politically stupid.

You can find more discussion in james321's diary.

• Today's comic by Matt Bors is Obama's dirty dishes:
  
• The deadline to register and get earlybird rates for Netroots Nation '14 is just hours away. Save yourself some money for the big event in Detroit by registering today.
• Fourteen Detroit billboards display wrong election date: International Outdoor, the owner of the billboards, mistakenly advertised the general election as Sept. 2 instead of the actual date, Nov. 5. The city clerk said people made a big deal of the error but shouldn't have because the mistake would be corrected by Tuesday.
• CIA lies and lies and lies about spying on Noam Chomsky, then admits it did. A Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI finally turned up a memo between the CIA and the bureau mentioning a Chomsky file in the 1970s when he was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War:

  The disclosure also reveals that Chomsky's entire CIA file was scrubbed from Langley's archives, raising questions as to when the file was destroyed and under what authority.

• Exxon knew its Arkansas pipeline was old and brittle, but used it anyway. The pipeline broke and sent diluted bitumen being transported from the Canadian tar sands into the residential neighborhood of Mayflower on March 29:

  Since at least 2006, ExxonMobil has known that its 1940s-era Pegasus pipeline had many manufacturing defects like the faulty welds that recently sent crude oil spewing into an Arkansas neighborhood. The company also knew that the seams of the pipe have been identified by the industry as having another dangerous flaw: They are especially brittle, and therefore more prone to cracking.

  "Having a crack or flaw in a pipeline is a whammy," said Patrick Pizzo, a professor emeritus in materials engineering at San Jose State University. "But having a crack embedded in brittle material, such as the heat-affected zones of the pipeline seams—that's a double whammy."

• Meet five people serving draconian drug sentences because of idiotic law. Sometimes it's the system that's criminal:

  John Horner had no record of drug-dealing when he was sentenced to a 25-year mandatory minimum prison term for selling some of his own pain pills to an undercover informant who befriended him and told him he could not afford both his rent and his prescription medication. Horner, a fast-food restaurant worker and a father, had been prescribed the pain medication because of an injury in which he lost an eye, according to a BBC report. If, as expected, he serves all 25 years, Horner will be 72 when he is released, and he will have spent more time in prison than the former Enron CEO who was convicted in one of the largest corporate fraud schemes in modern history. In the vicious cycle of snitches and informants that plagues the criminal justice sentence, it was another individual trying to mitigate his own sentence who lured Horner into a drug deal by first befriending him and then appealing to his generosity.

• "Near-death" experiences of cardiac arrest victims could be true.
  
• San Diego mayor says: "Now is not the time to go backwards.". That was Mayor Bob Filner's response to the recall efforts against him. The first Democratic mayor of the city in two decades is under fire for sexual harassment. Fourteen women have come forward:

  "Now is not the time to go backwards — back to the time middle-class jobs and neighborhood infrastructure were sacrificed to downtown special interests," the statement said. "We need to continue to move forward."

  Recall leader Michael Pallamary rejected Filner's statement as an inadequate defense.

  "Mayor Filner obviously believes his policy initiatives excuse his being a sexual predator," Pallamary said. "San Diegans want a mayor who doesn't grope and demean women."

• Drought kills the era of the lawn in the West.
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show, the live stream's data center is moving, so it's podcast-only once again. And too bad, because we got a glowing tribute from Bill in Portland Maine in Cheers & Jeers, marking the two-year anniversary of Daily Kos Radio! Without Greg on hand, we read through Georgia's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup. Excessive levels of Teh Crazee necessitated an extended GunFAIL report. Stop feeding Gop trolls on birtherism? NYT's Q&A with Snowden. Investing Daily questions the privatization of national security, leading to a surprise (to me) conclusion about private equity in the already too-convoluted picture.

If you're raped or sexually assaulted at the University of Southern California, you're likely to find that the university decides to label what happened to you by another name, a complaint from a group of students alleges. And, unsurprisingly, the new name USC gives your assault will just happen to look a lot less serious in its federally required annual security report—"personal injury" or "domestic dispute," maybe.

Colleges are required under the Clery Act to report campus crimes accurately and in a timely fashion. But USC students tell stories of a lot of ways that doesn't happen. Ariella Mostov had to follow up on her own report when campus public safety did not do so, then was told by campus police that she wasn't raped because her attacker didn't have an orgasm, and:

Mostov said the campus police report of her attack also was inaccurate, and she was "furious" about the discrepancies. She said she told an officer she had asked the assailant several times during the attack to stop. The police report said Mostov told the suspect once to stop and he did.

Campus police also discouraged Mostov from going to the Los Angeles police. She's not alone, according to the complaint, and USC officials reportedly work hard to undermine students as they come forward with sexual assault allegations:

When [USC senior Tucker] Reed reported her own sexual assault to USC in November 2012, it was logged as "sexual battery" by the campus Department of Public Safety officer, according to the complaint. Reed didn't know this until July 2013, she said, when she got a copy of the report.

Reed said she was told by Raquel Torres-Retana, student judicial affairs and community standards director, that the university had difficulty taking Reed's side because "we know that all the students at this university are good students. They're good people. That's why they're here."

Apparently the USC admissions staff is omniscient and can know who's a good person and who's not just based on their college applications.

USC is far from alone in wanting to bury sexual assault and rape complaints. Schools don't want prospective students, parents, and donors to see such complaints, and all too often, they don't want to deal with the crimes or really punish the perpetrators. Yale, for instance, routinely punishes "nonconsensual sex" with written reprimands. Colleges' self-interest in underreporting crimes and a poisonous tendency for administrators to want to protect male students from life-changing criminal charges, even at the cost of allowing rape to go unpunished and rapists continuing access to their victims, combine to create campuses on which rape is basically tolerated by administrators. It shouldn't be up to students to ensure that the laws against that are enforced, but USC students are showing they'll do it if that's what it takes.

Say you are a Republican and you actually want to get something passed. Don't try to do it on the merits. Your party is so nihilistic that nothing can pass. Nothing. And certainly don't try to negotiate, because that's worse than Hitler and Stalin combined (those well-known negotiators). So what's left?

Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the start of President Obama’s deferred deportation program for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, which he authorized through executive authority last summer. As The Washington Post reported Tuesday, the Obama administration has granted more than 400,000 of those immigrants temporary legal status to work or go to school without fear of deportation.

Now, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is warning that the administration is likely to dramatically expand the program to cover the majority of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants if Congress fails to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

Wow, Rubio finally speaks after months of silence. The Republican establishment must be getting really nervous about the fate of reform in the House, because the last thing Rubio wants to do is remind base conservatives that he played a role in reform. He'd rather talk about defunding the government if Democrats don't scrap Obamacare as he tries to keep pace with Sen. Ted Cruz.

Of course, Rubio knows that this "Obama will amnesty every by executive order" argument is bullshit, as the Obama Administration has shown zero inclination to pursue any such blanket administrative amnesty, and it legally couldn't anyway. In fact, it has done the opposite—it has significantly stepped up deportations of undocumented immigrants above the levels of the Bush Administration.

What Rubio is doing here is trying that reverse psychology schtick we saw Rep. Frank Wolf try last week—if you want to get crazy Republicans to act, tell them that it's inaction that Obama really wants. Because, of course, the crazies are reflexively opposed to everything Obama supports. If the president wants to cure cancer, those morons will decide cancer is "conservative" and fight for its right to kill people.

Pro-reform GOPers have been employing reverse psychology for a while now, arguing that Democrats actually want reform to fail so they can then blame Republicans and get an electoral boost in the coming election cycles. But no, that's not what we want. That would just be the silver lining if reform is killed by the House, which is where things seem to be headed. And while teabaggers have the emotional maturity of a five-year-old ("it's mine, mine, mine! And I'll punch you if you disagree."), they don't seem to be falling for this trick. You'll have to pry that xenophobia from their cold, dead fingers.

So if the Republican establishment really wants to get this thing passed, they're going to have to allow that open vote in the House, which takes us back to where we began: Everything hinges on what House Speaker John Boehner wants for his future. If it's about power, he'll stymie reform and hold on to his heavily gerrymandered House for a few more cycles as the rest of his party goes down in demographic flames. If it's about his party, he'll do the right thing, allow a free vote on the reform bill, and land cushily on K-Street with a million-dollar gig after the inevitable coup.

Sign our petition urging U.S. House members to bring comprehensive immigration reform to a floor vote, with or without Speaker Boehner.

North Carolina's Republican Gov. Pat McCrory took the unorthodox step Monday of announcing his signing of the state's new racist voter suppression law via YouTube. Within hours, a coalition of civil rights advocacy groups, including the ACLU of North Carolina, took the more traditional approach in filing lawsuits against the law, arguing that it violates the Constitution's equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The North Carolina NAACP and Advancement Project filed its own suit later in the day:

A third lawsuit is expected to be filed in state court Tuesday. Congressman G.K. Butterfield also asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to “take swift and decisive action by using any legal mechanisms” to protect North Carolina’s voting rights.

“With one stroke of the pen, McCrory has effectively reversed 30 years of progress and reinstated practices similar to the discriminatory ‘Southern Strategy’ adopted by the Republican Party in the ’60s and ’70s,” said Butterfield, a former N.C. Supreme Court justice. “Without question, today is a shameful day for Republicans in North Carolina.”

McCrory emphasized the voter-ID portion of the law, which is popular in North Carolina, but didn't mention the other provisions of the law, which are unpopular.

Besides requiring a narrow range of acceptable IDs, the law dumps same-day registration during early voting, cuts a week off the number of early voting days, ends early voting on Sunday (a day traditionally strong for African American voting), eliminates pre-registration of 16 and 17-year olds, eliminates straight party voting, reduces disclosure requirements of corporate campaign donations and gives poll watchers more clout to challenge the eligibility of people who come to the polls.

Despite all the GOP blather about this being a common-sense law, it was designed to reduce voter turnout among constituencies that are more likely to vote Democratic—minorities, the poor and students. From the perspective of doing anything to win, I guess that is common sense.

The latest Public Policy Polling survey shows that just 39 percent of the state's voters back the law, with 50 percent opposed:

White voters only narrowly support the new voting bill (46/44), while African Americans (16/72) are heavily opposed. Republicans (71%) support the bill but Democrats (72%) are just as unified in their opposition and independents are against it by a 49/43 margin as well. And perhaps most foreboding for Republicans, moderate voters stand against the legislation 70/20.

The Republicans in charge of the legislature and ensconced in the governor's mansion didn't, as Kos pointed out Monday, do this out of strength but rather from weakness because they fear the changing demographics that spells long-term disaster for a party unwilling to change: "And when a political party becomes afraid of the voters, it has lost any moral authority it might've ever claimed."

Please join Daily Kos by urging Congress to save the Voting Rights Act by creating a new preclearance formula.