Justin's Political Corner

Former congressman Allen West has found a new home on Fox News, where he has been signed on as a contributor.

“Representative West’s congressional and military experience along with his fearless approach to voicing key issues will provide a valuable point of view to the FOX News lineup,” Fox News Vice President Bill Shine said in a statement. West served in the army before running for Congress in 2010.

h/t: WaPo

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has reached an “agreement in principle” on a sweeping immigration bill that would parallel work underway in the Senate, sources said Thursday.

h/t: Los Angeles Times

Longtime KMOV (Channel 4) anchorman Larry Conners is “off the air” until further notice.

The station is examining Conners’ recent allegations that he was targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after interviewing President Barack Obama.

“He’s not suspended. We just all thought it made sense (for him) to take a few days off,” news director Sean McLaughlin said.

“We take this very seriously, and we don’t expect this to drag on. We’re still looking into the situation and weighing our options,” he said.

The situation arose Monday night with a post from Conners on his Facebook page. In that post, Conners said he had been getting “pressure” from the IRS after the Obama interview in April 2012.

On Tuesday — in a televised statement near the end of KMOV’s 5 p.m. newscast — Conners backed off that initial claim.

“To be fair, I should disclose that my issues with the IRS preceded that interview (with Obama) by several years,” Conners said Tuesday in the 35-second statement.

St. Louis County records show that a federal tax lien has been placed on Conners’ property in Clayton. The lien claims that Conners and his wife,Janet L. Conners, owe more than $85,000 in “small business/self employed” taxes.

The lien, filed Sept. 20 in Chicago and then recorded in St. Louis County on Oct. 4, specifically alleges that the Conners owe the government $7,793 from 2008, $38,482 from 2009 and $39,508 from 2010.

“His Facebook post and his Twitter posts, as a result, were inappropriate,” he said. “And we don’t condone personal posts that jeopardize the journalistic nature of our business. It’s really that simple.”

KMOV NEEDS to permanently pink-slip this “reporter.”

h/t: STLtoday.com

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. 

1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.

If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.

2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well:

According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators.

White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points.

But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate.

So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be. 

3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it’s hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies.

Insofar as there’s a “scandal” here, it’s more about what is legal than what isn’t. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens — members of the media included. The White House is trying to change existing law by encouraging Sen. Chuck Schumer to reintroduce the Media Shield Act. The Post’s Rachel Weiner has a good rundown of what the bill would do. It’s likely that the measure’s national security exemption would make it relatively toothless in this particular case, but if Congress is worried, they always can — and probably should — take that language out. Still, that legislation has been killed by Republicans before, and it’s likely to be killed by them again.

The scandal metanarrative itself is also changing. Because there was no actual evidence of presidential involvement in these events, the line for much of this week was that the president was not involved enough in their aftermath. He was “passive.” He seemed to be a “bystander.” His was being controlled by events, rather than controlling them himself. 

And yet, even if the scandals fade, the underlying problems might remain. The IRS. could give its agents better and clearer guidance on designating 501(c)(4), but Congress needs to decide whether that status and all of its benefits should be open to political groups or not. The Media Shield Act is not likely to go anywhere, and even if it does, it doesn’t get us anywhere close to grappling with the post-9/11 expansion of the surveillance state. And then, of course, there are all the other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.

H/T: Ezra Klein at Washington Post

Springfield, IL — The Illinois House has just over two weeks to vote on SB10, or the Religious Freedom and Marriage Act, or the legislation is in danger of dying. If a vote does not take place by May 31, the end of the current session, supporters of the bill will essentially have to start from scratch.

Members of the activist coalition lobbying on behalf of SB10 said they are confident their work has proceeded as far as it can go, but the bill’s supporters in the House say they’re still trying to shore up more support from legislators.

“We’re in a place where we feel we’ve done as much as we can do, said James Bennett, Midwest Regional Director for Lambda Legal, who has been lobbying for the legislation. ”We’ve made phone calls, people have visited—we’re comfortable that we’ve done our part.”

Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of Equality Illinois, said he “did not want to imagine” what would happen should the bill be allowed to languish. The Coalition has “done what it’s supposed to do with this, so we would not want to be back to ground zero.”

But Cherkasov said he was confident that Illinois would share in some of the momentum from marriage equality victories the LGBT community has enjoyed in Rhode Island, Delaware and Minnesota. ”The truth is, those victories came about from momentum contributed from what we are building in Illinois, and our victory will come from momentum from those states—there is national momentum on this issue.”

A vote is unlikely this week—Friday is a “getaway” day for legislators, and major legislation is rarely decided on those days. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Greg Harris (D-Chicago) would not disclose the current tally of votes. Unofficial counts have fluctuated since March, but a recent tally had the measure just within the 60 needed number of votes. 

“When it goes up on the board, it will go up with the necessary number of votes,” Harris told ChicagoPride.com Thursday. 

H/T: GoPride.com

Minnesota-based Religious Right activist/rock star Bradlee Dean went ballistic on his radio show yesterday in response to his state’s new marriage equality law. Dean warned that Gov. Mark Dayton, who signed the same-sex marriage bill into law, is at “war with God” and is “about to find out what it’s like as to what the fallout is when you throw rocks towards God, he’s going to learn how gravity works.” He added that Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who backed his state’s marriage equality law, and other pro-gay rights “criminals” will face divine justice as well.

Dean even seems to believe that every gay person in the country showed up for yesterday’s celebration of the marriage equality law in order to “push their propaganda and their agendas on the American people,” just as Saul Alinsky commanded.

“They come from all over the country to do this so what you’ve seen was probably the whole lump of the population of the homosexual community in the United States of America,” Dean said.

After lamenting about the “pansies” in the Minnesota legislature, Dean and his co-hosts began discussing the “Safe and Supportive Minnesota Schools Act,” an LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying bill, which he said is proof that “radical homosexuals” are part of a “UN global agenda” to “destroy the family.”

Dean then channeled his inner-Antoine Dodson and claimed that gays are coming after your wife and kids: “Go home, look at your wife and look at your kids, because now that’s what they’re coming for.”

He even lashed out at “my good friend Alex Jones,” who is apparently not anti-gay enough for Dean, despite his belief that chemicals in juices are turning kids gay.

h/t: Right Wing Watch

Brianna Pena, a 5-year-old, was told she could not return to her kindergarten classroom at her Bronx, NY, charter school until she was “psychiatrically cleared” to return by a medical professional.  It was her first day at a new school.  She didn’t know anyone and repeatedly cried, “Nobody cares about me!” School officials insist that Brianna kept “yelling and throwing chairs” during the incident.  Administrators placed her on a list of so-called “psychiatric suspensions.”

In Bartow, FL, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student was expelled from Bartow High School and arrested for conducting an unapproved chemistry experiment.  She combined some household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle and the top popped off, giving off a small explosion.  According to the school principal, Ron Pritchard, “she made a bad choice. … She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did.”  She was charged with possession of and discharging a weapon on school property.

Brianna’s and Kiera are but two examples of the growing “discipline” crisis besetting schools throughout the country.  School administrators are resorting to an increasing number of questionable tactics to address problems associated with the breakdown of the classroom as a learning environment.  These include the use of local EMS workers to remove pre-teen children as well as such high-tech methods as RFID tracking and CCTV video surveillance.  An increasing number of officials are resorting to aggressive in-school policing, with on-campus uniformed and armed officers ticketing and arresting more and more kids.  All to contain “disruptive” students often engaged in what was once considered bad behavior but is now criminalized conduct. 

Reports that American education is in crisis appear in the media almost every day. From Pres. Obama to mayors across the country, everyone complains about the country’s supposedly failing education system.  Each promises to fix the problem – and it only seems to be getting worse.  Yet, efforts to police schools reflect the further shifting of education spending from the classroom to the administrative apparatus of control.  

A major contributing factor to this crisis is the failed “zero tolerance” discipline program promoted by the Bush administration and still in force in school systems throughout the country.  Like its abstinence-only sex ed program, Bush policies made a serious issue worse.  The effort to enforce classroom discipline through the expulsion and punishment of students is an example of the moral absolutism propagated during much of the last few decades. It further extends the “school-to-prison pipeline” by aggressively incarcerating ever-younger children, particularly African-American and Hispanic youth.

Some cities, like New York, are increasingly turning to costly emergency medical services to restrain students. Cashmiere Turner, a 7th grader at New York’s Intermediate School 151 in the Bronx, struggled both academically and socially in the classroom.  Her mother, Sonya, repeatedly sought school administrators’ help with her daughter’s learning problems and the bullying she faced, but was ignored.  In October 2011, school officials claimed that the troubled teen acted out, attempting to harm herself.  They contacted Cashmiere’s mother, who rushed to the school only to find that the officials had also contacted the local EMS.  Refusing to let Ms. Turner take her daughter home, EMS workers and police officers brought her to a local hospital that found her neither a threat to herself nor others.  She was released, but not before the hospital billed her mother an estimated $1,300 for services rendered.

The city’s Board of Education (BOE) reports that during 2010-2011 school year, EMS was called 947 times to handle disruptive or dangerous kids; this is up 12 percent from the previous year.  Nelson Mar, an attorney with Legal Services NYC-Bronx, represented both Brianna Pena and Cashmiere Turner, warns, “minor children are removed by EMS for childhood behavior or misbehavior which does not rise to the level of a medical emergency.”  He points out that at one Bronx hospital, there were 58 EMS calls from schools during a 10-day period in February 2011. Most troubling, doctors and psychologists found that only 3 percent of the kids brought to an Emergency Room were admitted to the hospital.

A high school student from Hoover, AL, was recently beaten by a school official and then arrested for falling asleep in school, according to a recent lawsuit.  Ashlynn Avery is not your typical teenager.  She suffers from diabetes, asthma and sleep apnea.  Sadly, while sitting in the in-school suspension room and reading “Huckleberry Finn,” she dozed off.  She asserts that the classroom supervisor seized the book and hit her with it; he claims it was an accident.  The police were called and the girl was “forcefully” arrested, causing her to have a seizure, vomit, pass out and endup in the hospital. 

To enforce discipline, school systems across the country are employing harsher techniques and turning to the local police. In Maine, educators report an increase in school disruptions with students pulling fire alarms and scratching and bruising teachers.  The state is considering allowing teachers to use restraints or seclusion on misbehaving students; the current bill limits such actions to those authorized in writing by a student’s parent, whether this will remain in the final bill is an open question.  In Connecticut over the last few years, nearly 1,700 students were arrested, almost two-thirds of them for breach of peace, minor fights and disorderly conduct.  In-school busts account for 20 percent of all youth arrests in the state.

In Georgia, school misbehavior incidents bring in the local police.  In Milledgeville, GA, a small town about 90 miles from Atlanta, Salecia Johnson, a 6-year-old student at Creekside Elementary School, was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car to the police station.  According to the Baldwin County schools Superintendent, Geneva Braziel, the police were called due to Johnson’s “violent and disruptive” behavior that threatened other classmates and school staff.  In Clayton County, police recently arrested seven students at the North Clayton High School for disorderly conduct; Precious Woods was busted for spiting on a fellow student who had thrown a trashcan at her and Trinell Kennedy was arrested for using profanity during the same incident.

In Albuquerque, NM, during the 2009-2010 school year, 900 of the district’s 90,000 students were referred to the criminal justice system.  More than 500 of were handcuffed, arrested and brought to juvenile detention.  More than 200 were arrested for minor offences, including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, refusing to obey and interference with staff.  (In response to a 2010 class-action lawsuit, student arrests fell by 53 percent.) 

Things are far worse in Texas.  In a 2010 report, Texas Appleseed, a public-interest group, found that each year more than 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to juveniles.  It reports that the vast majority of offences are due to classroom disruptions and disorderly conduct.  It noted that in 1989, only 9 school districts in Texas had separate police agencies while in 2010 more than 160 had police units.  Ticketed students received fines of between $250 and $500 or do community service in lieu of fines.

Steven Teske, MA, JD, and a Judge, Juvenile Court of Clayton County, Jonesboro, GA, writing in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, defines zero tolerance as “policies operate under the assumption that removing disruptive students deters other students from similar conduct while simultaneously enhancing the classroom environment.” His detailed analysis makes clear not only that the policy doesn’t work, but contributes to the deepening crisis of American education and harms children.

The concept of zero tolerance originated during the Reagan-era’s so-called “war on drugs.” It entered the educational sector in 1994 when Pres. Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act that required a student’s 1-year suspension if s/he was found possessing a firearm.  In the wake of the Columbine shootings of 1999, the law has been expanded to include any so-called weapon, including Kiera Wilmot’s chemistry experiment.  Under Pres. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, zero tolerance was linked to teaching-to-the-test policies as a solution to the education crisis. 

The increased policing of the classroom is part of the effort to transform schools from “educational” institutions that cultivate citizenship to “training” campuses inculcating workplace discipline.  It is a battle that has shaped American education since mass public schooling was introduced more then a century ago.

h/t: Alternet

AARP strives to serve the interests of all people over the age of 50, and that includes members of the LGBT community. The organization has a webpage dedicated to AARP Pride, with resources related to issues like marriage equality’s legal benefits, nondiscrimination protections in nursing homes, and unique health concerns like HIV. Because of AARP’s inclusiveness, the American Family Association is specifically targeting the retirement group for contributing money to the “homosexual agenda.” AFA Executive Vice President Buddy Smith offered this warning:

SMITH: When you reach the age of a person like myself and you begin to get information from the AARP saying that they will represent you and your values and standards, you’d better be careful. This group is a very, very powerful Washington lobby, and you just may be very surprised and disappointed to see those things that they are promoting and those things they are opposing.

Be very careful that you know what your fees are going for because the AARP is not on your side. If you are a Christian and believe in Biblical values, you can pretty much count on the fact that everything that you are in favor of, the AARP is opposing.

LGBT older adults face many unique challenges, especially in regards to their very economic well-being. Because of discrimination and alienation throughout their lifetime, as well as their inability to claim partner benefits like Social Security, LGBT older adults are much more likely to be living in isolation and poverty.

H/T: Zack Ford at Think Progress LGBT

As you may have heard in the news recently, veteran KMOV news anchor (and right-wing hero) Larry Conners (@lconnersnews4) is in really hot water because he claimed (falsely) that he was “harassed by the IRS”  after his infamous interview with President Obama last year in which he asked right-wing gotcha questions (most notably the “Obamas take too much vacations” lie promulgated through the wingnut universe).


From the 05.14.2013 edition of KMOV’s News 4 at 6:

(Cross-posted from JGibsonBlog.Blogspot.com)

WASHINGTON, DC – President Barack Obama said Wednesday that the “misconduct” detailed in a report about the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of requests from conservative groups is “inexcusable.”

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” he said.

In the wake of the uproar, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew requested — and has accepted — the resignation of the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, according to Obama.

The president also said his administration will work to enact “new safeguards to make sure that this kind of behavior cannot happen again.”

(CNN) — The Internal Revenue Service has identified two “rogue” employees in the agency’s Cincinnati office as being principally responsible for “overly aggressive” handling of requests by conservative groups for tax-exempt status, a congressional source told CNN.

In a meeting on Capitol Hill, acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller described the employees as being “off the reservation,” according to the source. It was not clear precisely what the alleged behavior involved.

Miller said the staffers have already been disciplined, according to another source familiar with Miller’s discussions with congressional investigators. The second source said Miller emphasized that the problem with IRS handling of tax-exempt status for tea party groups was not limited to these two employees.

Miller met with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana on Tuesday to discuss an appearance before Congress.

Asked in a Senate hallway about his meeting with Miller, Baucus told CNN, “I did not learn as much from the meeting as I would have liked.”

“I told him that it was in his best interest to be totally cooperative — that it’s often the coverup that causes more problems than the original malfeasance,” the senator said. “And just to be totally straight with me and everybody, and he said he would.”

President Barack Obama was scheduled to deliver a statement Wednesday from the East Room of the White House after a meeting with senior Treasury Department officials. During the meeting, Obama will be “making sure people are held accountable for their conduct, for their activities,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

A Democratic source told CNN’s Dana Bash that Obama will discuss “IRS changes” when he makes his statement.

H/T: Fox2now.com

During an interview with World Net Daily, former Republican presidential aspirant Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) raised the question: could Obamacare allow the IRS to “deny or delay” conservatives’ access to medical care?

Bachmann’s musings come on the heels of an ongoing IRS scandal centering on the agency’s improper scrutiny of conservative political groups. While right-wing commentators andpoliticians are already using the incident to smear the health law by raising questions about IRS access to Americans’ private medical data, Bachmann took things one step further:

Since the IRS also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements,[Bachmann] asked whether the IRS’s admission means it “will deny or delay access to health care” for conservatives.

At this point, she said, that “is a reasonable question to ask.” […]

[S]hould Americans fear their government may try to harm them if they are conservative?

“It now is an entirely reasonable question for the American people to ask,” she said. “Will Obamacare be so politicized and misused?”

The IRS has been processing information about Americans’ health care for decades, since approximately 160 million Americans write off their tax-deductible employer-provided health benefits each year. 

This isn’t the first time Bachmann has made outlandish comments about Obamacare or health care in general. The congresswoman has previously asserted that Obamacare will “literally” kill people and propagated debunked conspiracy theories claiming that the HPV vaccine causes young girls to become “sexually promiscuous.”

H/T: Sy Mukherjee at Think Progress Health