Anger and division in America

So, after I put a comment onto Facebook, I will then, weeks or months later, take select comments and put them onto prawnworks, where they'll be permanently archived. Having been a history major back in college, I use that second draft to correct spellings, flesh out or clarify comments a bit more and sometimes do a bit of research to answer questions the comment may raise. I did that last thing with the following.

Vice President "Pence laments 'a time of too much division and too much anger in America'"

I thought "Hmm. Okay." It took me about half a minute on the search engine to locate conservatives being angry and divisive.

Here's a link to NRA Spokesperson Dana Loesch claiming that "There were people rushing the stage and screaming 'burn her.'"

That didn't sound like any protest group that I've ever been part of and I've been to quite a few liberal protests. I put another half-minute into another search and sure enough, Loesch was lying:

That's another easily provable lie, at least according to multiple videos and eyewitness testimony from Wednesday's event. The clearest video, above, shows Loesch calmly leaving the stage while the crowd chants, "Shame on you!"

After a New Times photographer put out a call on Facebook, five attendees sent footage they shot of the aftermath of the town hall. One video begins immediately after the town hall ends and shows Loesch walking off the stage surrounded by other participants and security. She then walks away and out of the arena. At no time does anyone in the audience approach her, and there's certainly no evidence that anyone ever "rushed the stage."

"She walked right in front of me and people yelled at her and chanted, 'Shame on you!' Nobody rushed the stage," says Ryan Yousefi, the New Times reporter who covered the event.

So yeah, the Vice President is correct. There's a lot of anger and division in America right now. It was obvious that he intended to have his listeners think, of course, that it was all the fault of liberals and not of his own side.

Bill O'Reilly and the closed world of Fox News

Bill O'Reilly claimed, first in a conversation with Laura Ingraham and then in his own show, that the Internet was making people stupid and prone to fantasy explanations. That's presumably as opposed to reading the local newspaper, plus maybe an out-of-town one like the New York Times, or watching one to three of three TV channels, as was true back during the 1950s and 60s. Problem with that theory is, unlike Fox News, where Roger Ailes puts out talking points of the day in memos to all of the staff, most of what people find on the Internet tells a consistent story. Why is that? Well, because it's true. When you have multiple, independent sources all reporting more or less the same thing, it's highly likely to be the truth.
Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan obviously needs to spend less time in the Fox News hothouse and more time out on the Internet. Ryan appears to subscribe to the belief that there are such things under the Affordable Care Act as "death panels." Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin put out this idea, inspired by what appeared to be a sort of a cross between black & white horror films and dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World (She even makes a reference to "Orwellian" in her initial Facebook post on the claim), that a group of authoritarian figures would make arbitrary, soulless decisions that certain patients would either live or die. There was no mention in her post of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), that was an assertion made by a spokesperson after media figures and politicians started questioning her claim.
Wikipedia is frequently criticized as an unreliable source, but even Wikipedia reports flat out that the "death panels" claim was debunked. The claim was such a blatantly shameless lie that it won the award for "Lie of the Year" from Politifact.
Listening to the video of Ryan's description of "death panels," he appears to be suggesting that Medicare would do better by simply handing doctors everything they ask for in terms of payments, that the government should excercise no controls whatsoever and should not try and impose any sort of discipline when it comes to payments. And this is the fellow who advertises himself as a fiscal conservative?!?!?!

Pennsylvania's Voter ID law

What is going on with PAs voter ID law? What is the real purpose of the law? Is voter fraud really a legitimate concern?

Going through the comments on the Inky's website (The Philadelphia Inquirer puts comment sections after most articles, the section after the Letters to the Editor is, in particular, a very popular place for on-line political comments even though all the comments are usually deleted the next day) I saw a somewhat persuasive defense of Pennsylvania's Voter ID law. The commenter, clearly acting in a similar position to the one that your humble writer holds (I act as the Minority Inspector of Elections for my polling place) declared that, as an election official, his job was to ask voters for their name, look up that name in the book printed up by election officials, the would-be voter signed underneath the name and then voted. The commenters complaint was that it was impossible to verify that the person then voting was really and truly the person that he or she claimed to be, especially as the book often used signatures that were entered in a long time ago and, to a non-handwriting expert, it appears as though a different person is signing in.

To this, all I can say is that on my second ship in the Navy, my job as Personnelman was ordinarily to work with enlisted sailors, but one day a Yeoman asked me to take a document up to the ship's Executive Officer (Known as the XO, second in command after the CO, the Captain) have him sign it and then bring the document back to the ship's Admin Office. The XO was clearly having a bad day as he complained that he had to sign off on documents all the time and he simply had to trust the people who were asking him to sign as he couldn't actually go to inspect the machinery he was certifying was in good working order, couldn't question the Petty Officer who was assuring him that she was following protocol and couldn't personally assure himself that the officers who served below him had really run through all of the proper checklists and had really exhausted all avenues before resorting to what they were now asking him to certify was the correct procedure. I stood straight, listened sympathetically, said "Yes, sir," and took the now-signed document back to the Admin Office. Even on a medium-size ship of just 400 sailors, it was often necessary for the people in charge to simply take their people's word for it that they were following the correct procedures and that the weapons or the machinery they were assuring their senior people was in good working order was indeed in good working order.

Are there exceptions? Are there sailors who lie and who say they've inspected something when they actually haven't? Yes, there are a few such isolated, very infrequent cases here and there. Generally, by and large, the system works and American ships make it safely to and from their destinations and they perform their missions correctly all the time. In terms of voter fraud, are there cases of voters pretending to be someone they're not? Yes, but those such cases constitute fewer than 100 for the entire country, for the entire past decade. Voter fraud, someone who pretends to be someone they are not for the purposes of submitting an improper ballot, is a more-or-less nonexistent problem. How do we know this? Well, the G.W. Bush Administration opened up an investigation back in 2002 and concluded after five years that the problem of voter fraud was more-or-less nonexistent. Please keep in mind that during those years, Republicans controlled the Presidency, the House and the Senate, so there was little or no Democratic interference to complain of.

The Montgomery County Community College hosted an information session on the voter ID law on Thursday the 26th of July. The line of questioners went out the door. The piece reporting on that session goes over all of the ID cards currently known to be valid for voting with. The Intelligencer tells of a number of cases where voters were able to obtain valid voter IDs, but as their first case tells it, she had to jump through a number of legal hoops to do so as

Block’s birth certificate and Social Security card bear her maiden name: Joyce Lucille Altman. Her Medicare card identifies her as Joyce Block, her utility bills are in her married name, and her marriage certificate is in Hebrew.

Wow! Who would ever have thought that a single individual would have identifications in so many different formats and using so many different names? Gee, it's almost as though this person were someone who had lived a long life under many different jurisdictions (The cited voter is 89 years old). Also, to believe that asking voters to show IDs will solve the problem of voter fraud is to ignore that, for many decades, young people have been drinking and buying cigarettes using fake IDs.

What could be the reason that Republican governors (No Democratic governors are pressing for voter ID laws) are trying to get voter ID laws into place? As the Senior Washington Correspondent of the Huffington Post puts it,

...there is ample evidence that voter ID laws inhibit voting, particularly among minorities and the poor — two major demographic segments that tend to vote Democratic.

And that’s hardly a coincidence. Consider the recent bragging by the Pennsylvania House Republican leader that his state’s voter ID bill “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

This is not simply another gratuitously partisan act by the GOP. This is an attack on the very notion of democracy.

Voting rights are under attack and the US Attorney General Eric Holder very aptly described voter ID laws as a "poll tax," designed specifically to disenfranchise voters.

The voting blocs that support each candidate have "floors," vote totals of which they're not likely to go below, no matter how bad the Democratic or Republican candidate is. The Republican floor is estimated to be about 45%, meaning the Republican candidate only has to work on winning over 6% of the population in order to win. Or, what the candidate can do is to deny the Democratic side votes that should rightfully be theirs and thereby have to win over fewer undecided voters. All voters should be uncomfortable with this as the very idea of democracy is  at stake. Is the winning candidate going to win because he truly represents the voters or because he's going to carry out dirty tricks?

The Housing Crisis - updated

When Congress was debating G.W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of American citizens (Allegedly, he and his people were just monitoring al Qaeda, but there's never been any formal, credible confirmation of that), US telecommunications companies made it quite clear that they didn't wish to be held accountable for anything they did. Congress was very accommodating and failed to apply what we quaintly term the “Rule of Law.” Apparently, the same general rule applies to banks and their mortgages and their wrongdoing vis-a-vis homeowners.

Bank executives argue that New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman is using the lawsuit to go after claims already covered under the settlement

The NY AG Eric Schneiderman is the fellow who has distinguished himself as the hero of the foreclosure crisis that has already resulted in several million homeowners losing their dwellings. The chart at the Calculated Risk blog, the “Total Delinquent and Foreclosure Percent by Month” shows that foreclosures held steady at under 5% per month until around mid-2006 and then stopped rising at the end of 2010 at a little under 11% per month. The drop in foreclosures at that point was not due to a greater rate of compliance and solvency among homeowners, “Foreclosures were in full delay mode in 2011,” which means that “only” 804,000 homes were repossessed and “foreclosure filings jumped 21 percent in the third quarter of 2011,” meaning that banks are cleaning up their procedures and clearing their decks for many, many more foreclosures.

The problem, as far as the mega-banks (Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) are concerned, is that they thought they had a 50-state settlement negotiation in place that would wipe the books clean with a minimal slap-on-the-wrist fine for them ($25 billion) and continued or slightly altered foreclosure mills for homeowners. But in August 2011, Schneiderman made it clear that there was far too much illegality and far too many questions as to why homeowners were being foreclosed upon to just blindly continue, so he began pursuing criminal charges against the banks.

Initially, homeowners at risk of foreclosure and activist groups representing them were wary that President Obama was going to neutralize Schneiderman by appointing him to the state/federal task force on securitization and origination issues, but thankfully, Schneiderman and the California Attorney General Kamela Harris agreed that the offered settlement was inadequate.

In exchange [for the $25 billion settlement], attorneys general would agree to release the banks from further action related to the improper servicing of loans as well as claims against originating mortgages. Several attorneys general, including New York's Eric Schneiderman and California's Harris, have voiced concerns that those releases are overly broad and would preclude them from carrying out ongoing investigations.

Prospects for serious homeowner relief are looking good and it appears that that ol' quaint “Rule of Law” just might prevail in the end, not because of any action at the Federal level, but because the state attorneys general have been doing their jobs and looking out for citizens and homeowners.

Update:

Well, the settlement is complete and the Attorneys General failed American citizens by agreeing to a truly horrible deal.

As former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Kouril said on FDL this morning, “The court system will be permanently corrupted by forged and perjurious documents…This settlement is an incredible breach of the social contract between the government and the governed.”

More fun with the media

"In an advance copy of the new book Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co.) obtained by Media Matters for America, co-authors Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr." make a charge against the Clinton's right in the beginning of their book and repeat that charge using the words " 'plan,' 'pact,' or 'project' more than 20 times in Her Way."

"In the prologue of Her Way, Gerth and Van Natta write:

"More than three decades ago, in the earliest days of their romance, Bill and Hillary struck a plan, one that would become both the foundation and the engine of their relationship. They agreed to work together to revolutionize the Democratic Party and ultimately make the White House their home.¹⁴ Once their "twenty-year project" was realized, with Bill's victory in 1992, their plan became even more ambitious: eight years as president for him, then eight years for her.¹⁵ Their audacious pact has remained a secret until now."

Problem: The books authors provide no evidence that such a " 'plan,' 'pact,' or 'project' " ever existed. As a matter of fact, one of their sources, the historian Taylor Branch, calls the allegations of a secret 20-year plan "preposterous." At no time do they show that any of their sources refer to any such plan. The closest they come is to quote a source who neither confirmed nor denied that the quote used was accurate. The Media Matters piece is lengthy, 28 kilobytes, most of which consists of quotes from the book concerning this "plan." After trying to track down exactly where the authors got the main theme of their book, Media Matters concludes that the authors were using, as the British might say, "dodgy and iffy" sources, or more to the point, Media Matters concludes the authors pretty much just made it up.

Amusing endnote:

"Additionally, according to a May 30 weblog post by Smith on Politico.com, Van Natta wrote to Smith: "[T]he Clinton people should wait until the book comes out before they nitpick everything from our alleged 'main premise' to footnotes."

Well, of course they should wait! That way, their [entirely justified] complaints get lost in the media chatter about the book and get shunted aside as booksellers seek to make money off of selling lots and lots of copies of the book.

Eric Boehlert does some further digging into the journalistic career of one of the authors, Jeff Gerth, and recounts quite a few interesting facts about Gerth's career. Seems that Gerth was a major writer on the Whitewater case, a case that thoroughly disproved the old saw about "Where there's smoke, there's fire." In Whitewater, the allegations of wrongdoing by the Clintons proved to be entirely smoke with no actual wrongdoing, or "fire" ever having been discovered. Gerth further disgraced himself and the New York Times by making utterly baseless accusations against Dr Wen Ho Lee, who spent 278 days in jail while Gerth won himself a Pulitzer for the same reporting. Dr Lee was then released for lack of evidence and again, the American public saw a lot of smoke, but no fire.

America's major media outlets are in very sad shape today because of the kind of abysmally poor "reporting" done by Gerth. Let's hope he doesn't get away with it this time and that fellow major media outlets report, truthfully this time, that there was no secret Clinton plan.