Right Wing Media, Strategists Seize Upon Gates Arrest and Controversy

Right Wing Media, Strategists Seize Upon Gates Arrest and Controversy
The controversy over the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Obama’s remark that the police “acted stupidly” has taken up a lot of newspaper and broadcast space in the past week, and brought some attention to the problem of racial profiling and indeed the problems of even having a public discussion of race issues in the United States.

But the fact that President Obama had to backtrack from his remarks says more about certain institutional aspects of racism in the United States than it does about individual attitudes among the electorate or among police officers. That is what is generally missing from the discussion that takes place in the major media.

It is well known that no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote since 1964. Indeed, that is the main reason why President Obama’s race was not so much of a handicap in the last election: most people who would not vote for an African-American would not vote for a Democrat in any case. This partisan divide over race issues goes back to Richard Nixon and the Republican party’s “Southern Strategy,” which – using coded racial appeals and other methods -- helped keep the White House in Republican hands for 32 of the ensuing 44 years.

All this is significant because, although individual attitudes obviously matter and are influenced by deep historical factors such as slavery and segregation, the persistence of such prejudices over time can be substantially strengthened by certain political institutions and strategies. As the Gates case illustrates, in today’s context this means the Republican party and the right-wing media – which overlap considerably.

Gates, a well-known author, scholar, and professor at Harvard University, was arrested by Cambridge police officer James Crowley for “disorderly conduct” on July 16. Crowley had responded to a 911 call from a neighbor who reported that two men were possibly breaking in to a house. It turned out that Gates was pushing open a jammed door to his own house, assisted by a driver who had dropped him off. After Obama criticized the police actions, the right went into attack mode.

Glenn Beck, a popular Fox News commentator, said that Obama “had exposed himself . . . as a guy who has a deep seated hatred for white people . . .”

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who reaches a reported 20 million people, said, “let's face it, President Obama's black, and I think he's got a chip on his shoulder.”

Talk radio has an enormous audience in the United States, with a reported audience of 50 million people each week; at least three-quarters of the programming is conservative.

U.S. Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, (R-Mich.) is preparing to introduce a bill calling on President Obama to formally apologize to the Cambridge Police.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee distributed an online petition asking whether “it's appropriate for our nation's Commander in Chief to stand before a national audience and criticize the men and women in law enforcement who put their lives on the line every day . . .”

The Republican party is obviously in disarray as it faces the threat of becoming a permanent minority party. Its hold on power prior to 2008 was based on a fake “populist” appeal to white working class voters – the biggest block of swing voters in most presidential elections during the last four decades. But issues such as gay marriage, guns, abortion, and whether “liberal elites” shared “our values,” have lost resonance since the economy collapsed.

Hence the right’s rapid and persistent response to Obama’s remarks, and its efforts to consolidate their base around a race issue. They don’t have much else to run with right now.

Obama came under fire for saying that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” by arresting Gates. For his part, President Obama has undoubtedly had experiences similar to those of Gates and has talked about his past difficulties, for example, in hailing a cab. As Stanley Fish pointed out, he has now also had the experience of being “President While Black.”

But Obama was being generous to Crowley; a better description would have been “acted maliciously.” Even if we accept Crowley’s own police report as a completely accurate version of events, there was no excuse for putting Professor Gates in handcuffs and dragging him down to the police station. (Gates gave a more credible account of what happened that contradicts Crowley on several key points; Crowley’s account is accepted here only for the sake of argument).

According to the police report, at the time of the arrest Gates had been positively identified as the owner of the home. There is no allegation that he had threatened or was threatening Crowley or anyone else. The “disorderly conduct” charge was, according to the police report, based on Gates allegedly yelling at the police officer from in front of his house.

Police sometimes abuse their authority, and this is a prime example. There is probably not one chance in a thousand that a Cambridge jury would have convicted Gates on these or any other criminal charges. But Crowley knew that the case would never go to trial. He may have arrested Gates out of spite and to demonstrate his authority; or he may have done it to protect himself from any complaint that might have been lodged against his own behavior prior to the arrest. As anyone who is familiar with police practices in the United States knows, it is common for police to arrest the victim when they commit an abuse. For example, when police beat people they sometimes charge them with assault so that they can drop the charges in exchange for the victim agreeing not to file a complaint. This is the most generous interpretation that one can give to Crowley’s decision to arrest Gates. But either way, the arrest itself was unethical, unprofessional, and an outrage.

Prof. Gates' Unconstitutional Arrest

Prof. Gates' Unconstitutional Arrest
The now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response, so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the First Amendment than with race and social class.

The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said--assuming, for argument's sake, the officer's version of events as fact--could by any stretch of both law and imagination constitute a ground for arrest for "disorderly conduct" (the charge leveled) or any other crime. Whether those same words could be censored on a college campus is a somewhat different--though related--question.

First, a quick recap. Gates returned to his Cambridge residence from an overseas trip to find his door stuck shut. With his taxi driver's assistance, he forced the door open. Shortly thereafter, a police officer arrived at the home, adjacent to the Harvard University campus--in my own neighborhood, actually--responding to a reported possible burglary.

Upon arrival, the officer found Gates in his home. He asked Gates to step outside. The professor initially refused, but later opened his door to speak with the officer. Words--the precise nature of which remains in dispute--were exchanged. Gates was arrested for exhibiting "loud and tumultuous behavior." The police report, however, in Sgt. Crowley's own words, indicates that Gates' alleged tirade consisted of nothing more than harshly worded accusations hurled at the officer for being a racist. The charges were later dropped when the district attorney took charge of the case.

It is not yet entirely clear whether there was a racial element to the initial decision by a woman on the street--working for Harvard Magazine, no less!--to call the police, although that is looking unlikely. It remains disputed whether Sgt. Crowley treated Professor Gates any differently than he would treat a white citizen in the same position. (In fact, if one accepts Crowley's claim that he dished out to Gates equal treatment under the law, this case stands as a dire warning to all citizens as to the dangers inherent in exercising one's constitutional right to free speech when in an exchange with a police officer--but more on that below.)

Indeed, Crowley did not arrest Gates for breaking and entering, for by then he was clearly convinced that the professor did live in the building. (For one thing, Harvard University Police officers had by that time arrived at the scene, and they easily could have checked not only that Gates was on the faculty, but that he lived in the Harvard-owned residential building. Gates is one of the most widely known faces in the Harvard community.) Instead, Crowley arrested the diminutive and disabled professor (he uses a cane to walk and bears a passing resemblance to the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) for disorderly conduct--the charge of choice when a citizen gives lip to a cop.

By longstanding but unfortunate (and, in my view, clearly unconstitutional) practice in Cambridge and across the country, the charge of disorderly conduct is frequently lodged when the citizen restricts his response to the officer to mere verbal unpleasantness. (When the citizen gets physically unruly, the charge is upgraded to resisting arrest or assault and battery on an officer.) It would appear, from the available evidence--regardless of whether Gates' version or that of Officer Crowley is accepted--that Gates was arrested for saying, or perhaps yelling, things to Crowley that the sergeant did not want to hear.

As one of Crowley's friends told The New York Times: "When he has the uniform on, Jim [Crowley] has an expectation of deference." Deference and respect, of course, are much to be desired both in and out of government service--police want it, as do citizens in their own homes or on their porches or on the street. However, respect is earned and voluntarily extended; it is not required, regardless of rank.

Some have posited that Crowley's tolerance for citizen vituperation was lower because the speaker was a black man, or a member of the city's economic and social elite. As a four-decade (and counting) criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer, I can say with reasonable assurance that while there might have been some degree of racial or, more likely, class animus that underlay the contretemps between citizen and officer here, fundamentally the situation can, and should, be analyzed as a free speech case.

Why? Because any citizen--white, black, yellow, male, female, gay, straight, upper or middle or lower class--who deigns to give lip to a police officer during a neighborhood confrontation or traffic stop stands a good chance of being busted. And this is something in police culture nationally--and probably all around the world (I've observed Frenchmen giving lip to Paris flics and gendarmes, also with bad results for the civilians)--that begs for change.

Heath-Care Reform and Medicare Myths

Heath-Care Reform and Medicare Myths

I am just going to provide some brief remarks, and then I want to hear from you. It is wonderful to be here today. I want to thank Mike for moderating this discussion. I want to thank Jennie and Barry for their extraordinary leadership here at AARP.

Some of you may know that, 44 years ago today, when I was almost 4 years old, after years of effort, Congress finally passed Medicare, our promise as a nation that none of our senior citizens would ever again go without basic health care.

It was a singular achievement, one that has helped seniors live longer, healthier, and more productive lives. It's enhanced their financial security, and it's given us all the peace of mind to know that there will be health care available for us when we're in our golden years.

Today, we've got so many dedicated doctors and nurses and other providers across America providing excellent care, and we want to make sure our seniors and all our people can access that care. But we all know that right now we've got a problem that threatens Medicare and our entire health care system, and that is the spiraling cost of health care in America today.

As costs balloon, so does Medicare's budget. And unless we act within a decade -- within a decade -- the Medicare trust fund will be in the red.

Now, I want to be clear: I don't want to do anything that will stop you from getting the care you need, and I won't. But you know and I know that right now we spend a lot of money in our health care system that doesn't do a thing to improve people's health, and that has to stop. We've got to get a better bang for our health care dollar.

And that's why I want to start by taking a new approach that emphasizes prevention and wellness so that instead of just spending billions of dollars on costly treatments when people get sick, we're spending some of those dollars on the care they need to stay well, things like mammograms and cancer screenings and immunizations, common-sense measures that will save us billions of dollars in future medical costs.

We're also working to computerize medical records, because right now too many folks wind up taking the same test over and over and over again because their providers can't access previous results or they have to relay their entire medical history, every medication they've taken, every surgery they've gotten, every time they see a new provider. Electronic medical records will help to put an end to all that.

We also want to start rewarding doctors for quality, not just the quantity, of care that they provide. Instead of rewarding them for how many procedures they perform or how many tests they order, we'll bundle payments so providers aren't paid for every treatment they offer with a chronic -- to a patient with a chronic condition like diabetes, but instead are paid for, how are they managing that disease overall?

And we'll create incentives for physicians to team up and treat a patient better together, because we know that produces better outcomes. And we certainly won't cut corners to try to cut costs, because we know that doesn't work. And that's something that we hear from doctors all across the country.

For example, we know that, when we discharge people from the hospital a day early without any kind of coordinated follow-up care, too often they wind up right back in the hospital a few weeks later. If we had just provided the right care in the first place, we'd save a whole lot of money and a lot of human suffering, as well.

And, finally, we'll eliminate billions in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies in the Medicare Advantage program, giveaways that boost insurance company profits but don't make you any healthier. And we'll work to close that donut hole in Medicare Part D that's costing so many folks so much money.

Drug companies as a consequence of our reform efforts have already agreed to provide deeply discounted drugs, which will mean thousands of dollars in savings for the millions of seniors paying full price when they can least afford it.

OBAMA: All of this is what health insurance reform is all about: protecting your choice of doctor, keeping your premiums fair, holding down your health care and your prescription drug costs, improving the care that you receive. And that's what health care reform will mean to folks on Medicare.

And we've made a lot of progress over the last few months. We're now closer to health care reform than we ever have been before, and that's due in no small part to the outstanding team that you have here at AARP, because you've been doing what you do best, which is organize and mobilize and inform and educate people all across the country about the choices that are out there, pushing members of Congress to put aside politics and partisanship, and finding solutions to our health care challenges.

I know it's not easy. I know there are folks who will oppose any kind of reform because they profit from the way the system is right now. They'll run all sorts of ads that will make people scared.

This is nothing that we haven't heard before. Back when President Kennedy and then President Johnson were trying to pass Medicare, opponents claimed it was socialized medicine. They said it was too much government involvement in health care, that it would cost too much, that it would undermine health care as we know it.

But the American people and members of Congress understood better. They ultimately did the right thing. And more than four decades later, Medicare is still giving our senior citizens the care and security they need and deserve.

With the AARP standing on the side of the American people, I'm confident that we can do the right thing once again and pass health insurance reform and ensure that Medicare stays strong for generations to come.

So I'm hoping that I can answer any questions that you have here today. I'm absolutely positive that we can make the health care system work better for you, work better for your children, work better for your parents, work better for your families, work better for your businesses, work better for America. That's our job.

So thank you very much.

Corporate Socialist Heath-Care dropped sick policyholders

Corporate Socialist Heath-Care dropped sick policyholders

Blue Cross of California encouraged employees through performance evaluations to cancel the health insurance policies of individuals with expensive illnesses, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) charged at the start of a congressional hearing today on the controversial practice known as rescission.

The state's largest for-profit health insurer told The Times 18 months ago that it did not tie employee performance evaluations to rescission activity. And executives with Blue Cross parent company WellPoint Inc. reiterated that position today.

But documents obtained by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and released today show that the company's employee performance evaluation program did include a review of rescission activity.

The documents show, for instance, that one Blue Cross employee earned a perfect score of "5" for "exceptional performance" on an evaluation that noted the employee's role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.

WellPoint's Blue Cross of California subsidiary and two other insurers saved more than $300 million in medical claims by canceling more than 20,000 sick policyholders over a five-year period, the House committee said.

"When times are good, the insurance company is happy to sign you up and take your money in the form of premiums," Stupak said. "But when times are bad, and you are afflicted with cancer or some other life-threatening disease, it is supposed to honor its commitments and stand by you in your time of need.

"Instead, some insurance companies use a technicality to justify breaking its promise, at a time when most patients are too weak to fight back," he said.

Fox News Poll Propels Myth About Obama "Czars"

Fox News Poll Propels Myth About Obama "Czars"

Last week, ThinkProgress noted that Fox News reporter Wendell Goler thoroughly debunked conservative fearmongering about President Obama’s supposed 30 czars, which they often claim “don’t need to be confirmed by the Senate.” “There is no constitutional issue” and many of these “czars” are “confirmed by the Senate,” reported Goler. Despite this, a new Fox News poll asserts that “Obama has appointed over 30 czars” and “Czars are advisors to the president who work outside of the cabinet and do not have to be confirmed by the Senate”:


As ThinkProgress noted, Fox regularly cites a list by Taxpayers for Common Sense to support their claim of 30 czars. But that list includes Senate-confirmed positions such as the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Additionally, it also includes Elizabeth Warren, who is employed by Congress as the head of chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP program.

Recent History: Torture, Assassination and surveillance

Don't Turn the Page on History
By Tom Engelhardt

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there's much that we don't know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration's deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice- Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more- widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA's-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and- prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted- for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap it's day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we're told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to "look forward, not backward."

Of course, he's not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but--just for a moment--let's not.

Admittedly, we're a people who don't really believe in history--so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing, of which each of these flaps has been but a tiny example. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each one of them is, soon enough, lessened by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?

The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we--not just the Obama administration--have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn't been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.

As a start, remind me: What didn't we do? Let's review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques--known to the previous administration and most of the media as "enhanced interrogation techniques"--were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at "black sites" offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both.

President Obama and His Signing Statements Promise

President Obama and His Signing Statements Promise

A recent diary by David Swanson asserts, in part, that President Obama as a candidate said of signing statements that "It is a clear abuse of power to use such statements as a license to evade laws that the president does not like or as an end-run around provisions designed to foster accountability. I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law."

Mr. Swanson then says "Obama now does this routinely."

But it is historically, legally, and politically wrong to equate President Obama's use of signing statements with President Bush's, or to suggest that President Obama is doing what he pledged not to do. Any historical or legal scholar can easily point out how wrong Mr. Swanson is.

..a history of Obama's generally correct use of signing statements at link.

[T]he use, nature and frequency of [President Bush's] signing statements demonstrates a "radically expansive view" of executive power which "amounts to a claim that he is impervious to the laws that Congress enacts" and represents a serious assault on the Constitutional system of checks and balances. ( Bush abuseed signing statements, using them in place of vetos - which is unconstitutional)

In Bill O'Reilly's Sights
Last week I was greeted with an uncomfortable curiosity: a brace of hate mail in my inbox, received within a 20-minute span. The first came at 7:26: "You are an uneducated writer! You need to get your fact straight! You are a liberal bastard! You need to get informed!" All arguable propositions, perhaps, but that still left the question: why was this person realizing that precisely now, and why, two minutes later, did "Dr. Anthony" feel moved to inform me, "I've noticed a trend that left-wing extremists tend to be exceedingly ugly & perverse. Living with that ugliness & deviance seems to lead to an aberration of thought as well. I am attempting to formulate the correlation..."

And then, while he did, as if on a schedule, another deluge hit some three hours later, the messages several notches more frightening:

"Your a piece of s---. we will hunt you left wing libs down one by one. you lieing piece of trash."

"So perlstein,whats your problem with Fox and conservatives. you jews should be dancing on the ceilings.you have control of the government,obama,congress, senate...."

"You sir are far more dangerous than Sarah Palin ever will be."


Another Conservative Hypocrite Hoist On His Own Petard-- Paul Stanley (R-TN)

I have a feeling all DWT readers will know the punch line of this tale before they read another 15 words. Tennessee state Senator Paul Stanley was the driving force behind his state's anti-gay adoption legislation. No, he wasn't caught in a toilet trying to seduce an undercover cop. The ultra-conservative freak was having an affair with a young woman who was working as a legislative intern. What the hell is wrong with these Republican hypocrites? They're such a cliche at this point that it's becoming painful to write about them! The woman, McKensie Morrison, is 23 years old.