Prairie Weather

Who's circulating all those lies about America?

Well, look no further than the mirror.  You'd have to come away thinking America has gone crazy and you wouldn't be all that wrong. The truth is, we are guilty of a kind of peculiar sin:  we idealize ourselves.  Now and then a little squirt of Windex on our mirrors wouldn't be a bad idea --certainly better than slamming the door in the faces of refugees.  Don't forget:  America played a  significant role in creating the situation in the Middle East that dislodged those refugees. 

Here we go again ...

The most notorious example of American hostility to vulnerable outsiders came on the eve of the Second World War, when the U.S. government refused to admit many Jewish refugees from Hitler. The voyage of the ship called the St. Louis, which left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with nine hundred and thirty-seven mostly Jewish refugees on board, provides the most heartbreaking example of the consequences of American policy. After a stop in Cuba (which didn’t want the refugees, either), the ship was turned away from Florida when it was so close that passengers could see the lights of Miami. Back in Europe, two hundred and fifty-four of those passengers ultimately died in the Holocaust.

In cutting off the refugees, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government was only doing what the American people wanted. A Fortune magazine poll at the time, recently highlighted on the Historical Opinion Twitter feed, indicated that eighty-five per cent of Americans opposed relaxing restrictions on Austrian, German, and other political refugees; sixty-seven per cent wanted to “try to keep them out” entirely. ...JeffreyToobin,NewYorker

So no, we're voracious when it comes to prospective immigrants who match our labor needs and pocketbooks, but as humanitarians "reaching out"?  Uh, well...

As Rick Perlstein pointed out in his 2014 book, “The Invisible Bridge,” the Vietnamese boat people, who were refugees from a war that the United States conducted, were widely despised and feared when they arrived in 1975. Perlstein quotes the famous Harvard sociologist David Riesman, who said at the time, “The national mood is poisonous and dangerous and this is one symptom—striking out at helpless refugees whose number is infinitesimal.” Sound familiar? ...JeffreyToobin,NewYorker

As Toobin says, we have moments of generosity as a people or as individuals.  But, if you're willing to face the facts, we're far from being able to claim that generosity is in our nature as a nation.  We just like to think it is. And we could do better...

Trapped in our own goddam nutshell

Chuck Dupree --  writing about presidential  candidate Ben Carson at Bad Attitudes -- gets the real America. 

I think he speaks for many when agreeing that we most certainly would not want to deny who we are just so we’d look like good people. We’re bad-ass, and we’re proud!  That, in a nutshell, is the nut who goes for Carson, the bad-ass Christian. ...Dupree,BadAttitudes

How did so many Americans fall into this trap?  When did we become a bad actor ... an entire nation screwed up and dangerous?

Another police story you're not going to like

If you're a big supporter of the "men in blue" you're not going to like this.

In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.

Cops can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime -- yes, really! -- through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion. ...WaPo

Pure trumpery

Donald Trump has found his audience, and he knows what they want. So he's giving it to them. ...KevinDrum,MoJo

Donald Trump is, well, trumpeting some false statistics.  Kevin Drum nails him with this:

I don't know what the "Crime Statistics Bureau" in San Francisco is, and I don't think I want to know, but one of the most well-established facts about murder in the United States is that it's pretty racially segregated. Whites kill whites, blacks kill blacks, etc. But today Trump decided to tweet the CSB graphic on the right, for no readily apparent reason. And wouldn't you know it: it contains a wee racial error. It claims that most whites are killed by blacks, but in 2014, which is the latest full-year homicide data available from the FBI, 82 percent of whites were killed by other whites and only 15 percent were killed by blacks. ...DrumMoJo

You don't have to work very hard to get the facts. You wind up learning that Trump has reversed the stats to get the result his fans want.  Of course, if you're white, underinformed, and feel threatened by "those people," you'll take Trump's trumpery very seriously.

___

By the way, there appears to be no such outfit as the Crime Statistic Bureau in San Francisco.

Another police report

This time from a woman.

To many, the militarization of the police is primarily abstract or painted as occasional. That thinking allows each high-profile incident of aggressive police interaction with people of color — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray — to be written off as an outlier. ...WaPo      

No, not some uppity kid in St. Louis or Queens or Cleveland.  This time it's about a middle class woman in Santa Monica going home to her apartment where she was assaulted (what other word would you use?) by 19 police officers.

Centcom has been lying about ISIS

Centcom -- the intelligence and security arm of an imperial America that overseas the largely Islamic section of the world (North Africa to Afghanistan) -- has been covering up ISIS' successes. 

An ongoing internal investigation shows "supervisors revised conclusions to mask some of the American military’s failures in training Iraqi troops and beating back the Islamic State. The analysts say supervisors were particularly eager to paint a more optimistic picture of America’s role in the conflict than was warranted."  They simply chucked reports showing ISIS' real strength.

This past summer, a group of Centcom analysts took concerns about their superiors to the inspector general, saying they had evidence that senior officials had changed intelligence assessments to overstate the progress of American airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

The analysts said problems in Iraq were rooted in deep political and religious divides that could not easily be solved with a military campaign, current and former officials have said. Yet Centcom’s official posture remained generally upbeat. ...NYT

So now an investigation is opening up  the possibility (probability?) that Centcom has done the same for Afghanistan, misleading Congress and the White House. Of course, the White House's possible role in Centcom's sunny reports has been under investigation for some weeks.

Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has been eager to expand his panel’s inquiry into the Centcom assessments. Mr. Nunes is planning to send a letter to the inspector general on Monday asking if emails and documents relevant to the investigation have indeed been deleted. He is also asking for copies of any deleted materials that investigators might be able to retrieve from Centcom servers. ...NYT

Another "gotcha" committee chair is at work here -- this time with an accusation that leads back directly to the guy who stirred up the wars leading to ISIS:  George W. Bush.

That investigation was prompted by complaints this past summer from Centcom’s longtime Iraq experts, led by Gregory Hooker, the senior Iraq analyst. In some ways, the team’s criticisms mirror those of a decade ago, when Mr. Hooker wrote a research paper saying the Bush administration, over many analysts’ objections, advocated a small force in Iraq and spent little time planning for what would follow the invasion. ...NYT

And this reminder:

It’s happening again. A White House fumbling with the violent mess of Iraq finds itself surrounded by mounting accusations that it’s played dirty games with intelligence. A Pentagon facing charges that its analysts have skewed assessments on Iraq to tell top policymakers what they want to hear, rather than what is really happening in that troubled country.

If this sounds terribly familiar, it should. Only a dozen years after the George W. Bush White House was buffeted by allegations that it had “cherry-picked” intelligence to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Barack Obama is facing similar accusations.  ...Observer