Never one to hold back, Bette Midler recently tweeted a quote she found which compared GOP racist, sexist, bigoted warmongering presidential candidate Donald Trump, to a characterization out of the American classic novel Catch-22. The book was written by Joseph Heller over fifty years ago.
“…Catch-22 remains “a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time.”
After reading the quote and comparison, some folks can also see Republican lawmaker Ted Cruz and other GOP extremists in Heller’s words below. In any case, the critically acclaimed author who passed away in 1999 seemed to describe the worst of some in the Republican Party—on their best days. See what you think.
Here is the quote from Midler’s tweet
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Catch-22had been called one of the most significant American novels of the 20th century. Cheers to both Midler and Kreizman for bringing to light the words of a great author, which bring to light what’s wrong with the Republican Party and American politics today.
Reblogging this from the Daily KOS, original writer Hunter, a contributor to the Daily KOS. Do we want to elect someone who spent money on an issue like this? What next a law requiring a license to buy and use condoms?
Getting attention today: The court case in which Republican now-presidential candidate Ted Cruz, then the Texas solicitor general, ferociously defended the state’s law barring the sale of dildos.
The brief insisted that Texas in order to protect “public morals” had “police-power interests” in “discouraging prurient interests in sexual gratification, combating the commercial sale of sex, and protecting minors.” There was a “government” interest, it maintained, in “discouraging…autonomous sex.” The brief compared the use of sex toys with “hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy,” and it equated advertising these products with the commercial promotion of prostitution. In perhaps the most noticeable line of the brief, Cruz’s office declared, “There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”
Cruz lost, with a federal appeals court opining that the state had no legal business telling people what they could and couldn’t do in their own bedrooms. (And no, Cruz’s stance that using a dildo was like hiring a prostitute did not fly, though it is a damn fascinating opinion that hopefully Ted Cruz will elaborate on at some future point in the presidential race.)
This is an interesting enough little glimpse into how a Ted Cruz administration might play out, but in the movie version of the case I’m writing in my own head Ted has a tragic backstory that makes his attack on dildos far more personal and compelling. Ted Cruz was raised by dildos, in my version. As a toddler Ted Cruz survived a Texas plane crash, but was left orphaned and alone in Texas Hill Country until he was taken in, starving and bedraggled, by a pack of wild dildos. He soon came to believe he was one of them, and romped happily over the Texas hills with the other dildos until his teenage years, when he was discovered by hunters and, against his own will, torn from his dildo family and slowly reintroduced to human society. All of this leading up to the tragic courtroom scene with a grown-up, suit-wearing Ted railing against dildos and calling on the state to ban them. Behind him as he gives his arguments, his dildo mother and father weep: Why, son, why?
Even now, when he is alone at night, Ted Cruz can still hear their quiet sobs. Exhausted from long days campaigning for the presidency, he looks out the window of his latest hotel room, past the anonymous city lights and into the darkness beyond. He can still hear the call of the Texas hills, and thinks back to those carefree young days leaping through the tall grass with all the other dildos. Why, indeed.
It is unfortunate that we have to filter what we hear and read. It is also unfortunate that the media doesn’t. The most unsettling issue is our lack of will to look beyond the headlines. We all believe in something, that belief is what drives our motivation to do or not do. In our beliefs there are subsets that apply to religious, work and home activities. It is stated in the U.S. Constitution there is a separation of Church and State. The attached article spells that out. This is all about the recent state laws supporting the religious right to discriminate against LBGT Americans.
Yes There Is a Constitutional Separation of Church and State
Perhaps nothing is more important to American politics than a well-reasoned debate. Unfortunately, far too many people are ill-informed to make such discussions possible.
An excellent example of this comes from the responses to an article I wrote examining the concerns of conservative Christians over Tennessee schools’ teaching the five pillars of Islam. While there were a number of topics that readers could have discussed, by far the most outrage centered on my statements regarding the separation of church and state. Comments included “Clearly, someone hasn’t read the Constitution, because there is no such thing as “separation of church and state” in the US Constitution.” “Where exactly in the U.S. Constitution does it address “separation of church and state?” and “Simply put, nowhere in the First Amendment does the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ exist.”
It seems that to some people, if the words don’t explicitly appear in the constitution then the idea they refer to isn’t constitutionally guaranteed. Viewing it in these simplistic terms is meant to dismiss the entire argument; as if every decision based on the separation of church and state is somehow invalid because the term separation of church and state doesn’t appear in the constitution.
Of course the problems with this assertion are many. First and most basic is the fact that the Supreme Court is the ultimate interpreter of federal constitutional law. This means that while the term “separation of Church and State” may never appear in the constitution itself, the Court ruling in the case of Everson v. Board of Education stated “the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between Church and State.’”
A quarter century later, the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman further defined this separation when it established the Lemon Test to determine if a law violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Every ruling since has confirmed that, in the view of the highest court in the land the Constitution created a separation of church and state.
Having said that, the separation of church and state is hardly the first unwritten concept that is protected by the constitution. In the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court established a women’s constitutional right to have an abortion despite the word abortion never appearing in the constitution. In the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges the Supreme Court established that laws against same-sex marriage were unconstitutional despite the word marriage never appearing in the constitution. In the 1963 case of Gideon v. Wainwright the Supreme Court established that the constitution guarantees the right to an attorney despite the words public defender never appearing in the constitution. In the 2010 case of McDonald v. Chicago the Supreme Court established that the second amendment right to bear arms included the right to bear arms for self-defense despite the words self-defense never appearing in the constitution.
It should also be noted that of the 112 Supreme Court Justices, none of them has been an atheist. In fact 92 percent of them were Christian. What rationale would these justices have for making laws that would create a legal prejudice towards their system of beliefs, especially if the separation of Church and State is a misinterpretation?
The reality is that the constitution was never meant to be a stagnant document that was rigidly adherent to the words on the page. As Thomas Jefferson said “The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please.” Over the past 200 years the Supreme Court has shaped the constitution to contain a clear separation of church and state that protects every religion equally. If only those who argue against this separation could see how they benefit from it instead of inappropriately interpreting it as an attack on Christianity.
Costs are determined by the number of people who sign up, the more people signed means lower costs for all.
One Big Insurer Explains Why Obamacare Premiums Are Rising So Much
By Millie Dent 21 hours ago
The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association just released a new study that helps explain why some big health insurers are struggling to make money under Obamacare — and have jacked up premiums in many cases.
The insurance giant’s newly covered customers were sicker, required more care and had higher medical costs than individuals who were already covered.
Blue Cross looked at the medical services used by people who enrolled in its plans before and after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2014. The study was based on claims for 4.7 million people.
Compared to the company’s previously insured population, new enrollees in individual Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans in 2014 and 2015 were found to have higher rates of certain conditions and diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, depression, coronary artery disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and Hepatitis C.
HIV was more than three times as common among newly enrolled customers compared to those who already had coverage, the report found. Hepatitis C was more than twice as common.
The relatively poor health of people enrolled under Obamacare is not surprising given that many of the newly covered had gone without health insurance before and thus were not able to get medical treatment for their illnesses. That history also helps explain why newly enrolled consumers in 2014 and 2015 also used more medical services than those who had purchased coverage prior to 2014. In the first nine months of 2015, new enrollees filled 35 percent more prescriptions than those who had purchased coverage prior to 2014. Hospital admission rates jumped 84 percent higher, the report found, and the frequency of visits to doctors and other medical professionals shot up by 26 percent.
Insurers expected the newly enrolled would be more expensive to cover, but Blue Cross and others underestimated just how much more expensive they would be and how much more medical care the new customers would need.
The result, in many cases, has been a spike in premiums: Blue Cross plans have seen substantial rate hikes. “As we see increases in uses of services, the premium has to go up to cover the services,” says Alissa Fox, vice president of policy at the insurer.
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One hope is that, as these newly insured get treated for their most urgent and long-standing medical issues, they will require somewhat less, or less expensive, care going forward.
But the Blue Cross data also serves as a reminder of why it was important for Obamacare’s success that a large pool of people — healthy and unhealthy, young and old — signed up for coverage, as a way to keep a lid on cost increases. And the Congressional Budget Office projected in a report issued last week that about 12 million people will get their insurance through Obamacare exchanges this year, down from a projected 13 million as of January and a forecast of 21 million a year ago.
Those numbers, combined with the figures from Blue Cross and Blue Shield, suggest that the painful Obamacare transition period for insurers will last a while longer.
If you’re tired of hearing Donald Trump go on about his ratings and polls, if you’re mystified by the Twitter War of the Candidates’ Wives, if you can’t understand why Wolf Blitzer interviews a former contestant on “The Apprentice” as if she were a political authority, then I’ve got a video you really need to watch.
The video I’m showing you here, courtesy of C-Span’s archive, is of a presidential candidate speaking in 1987, at a moment of tectonic upheaval in our politics and media. Chances are pretty good you’ve never seen it, or even heard about it, and there’s a reason for that.
Before I tell the remarkable story of that eight-minute speech, though, let’s put it in the context of our moment.
Recently, a bunch of commentators — among them the president of the United States — seem to have latched on to the idea that the media is culpable in enabling Trump’s antic march to the Republican nomination. In the New York Times, my former colleagues Nicholas Kristof and Jim Rutenberg have both written columns in the past week asking whether we, as an industry, need to be more accountable.
Regular readers of this column know that I wrote early and often on this theme, including a column last December about the destructive “symbiosis” between Trump and the media — a term very much in fashion now.
In fact, not long ago I wrote an entire book on the collision of entertainment and political journalism, called “All the Truth Is Out,” which seems to have accidentally anticipated the Trump phenomenon. I borrowed from the brilliant work of the social critic Neil Postman, whose 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” feels more relevant today than it probably did then.
But the guy who really predicted all of this was Gary Hart, the protagonist of “All the Truth Is Out.” And man, did he try to sound the alarm.
At this time in 1987, Hart was rather like the Hillary Clinton of his day, only more talented and more visionary; he had been the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party since narrowly losing in 1984, and the Gallup Poll had him beating George H.W. Bush — then the sitting vice president — by double digits. A man of staggering intellect, he was talking even then about the rise of stateless terrorism and the arrival of a high-tech economy.
But his campaign unraveled in the space of five surreal days, during which reporters from the Miami Herald hid outside Hart’s home in order to catch him spending time with a younger woman. Hart found himself undone by the first modern political sex scandal — the inevitable result of myriad forces that were just then reshaping the media, from the echoes of Watergate to the birth of the mobile satellite.
What happened next is interesting and almost entirely forgotten.
Driven from the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hart repaired to his cabin in the Denver foothills, where he and his family were literally penned in by a fleet of satellite trucks and news choppers. His aides wrote him the kind of withdrawal statement we’ve come to expect from scandalized politicians — contrite, gracious, bland.
Hart couldn’t sleep after reading that speech. It made him want to vomit. He called his close friend Warren Beatty (who would later make the film “Bulworth,” not incidentally) and talked through what he wished he could say instead.
Then, the next morning, Hart drove the canyon road down to Denver, stepped before the national media and calmly delivered one of the most stinging and prescient indictments of an American institution you will ever see.
“In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important,” Hart said, decrying a process that he said reduced reporters to hunters and candidates to the hunted.
“And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for high office,” Hart went on. “Now I want those talented people who supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself.
“Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match.”
He closed by paraphrasing his idol, Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve.”
Whenever I talk about my book to audiences around the country, I close with those lines. Invariably, I look up to find shocked and silent voters nodding their heads, amazed at how eerily that captures our present reality.
So why haven’t you heard anything about this seminal speech? I’ll tell you why. Because within 24 hours of its delivery, despite the polls showing that the public mostly sided with Hart over the reporters, America’s elite media, led by its columnists and editorial boards, rose up in unison to mock and discredit it.
“Instead of saying goodbye with a measure of dignity, respect and introspection,” A.M. Rosenthal, the Times’ former editor, wrote on the paper’s op-ed page, “Gary Hart told us he had decided that Gary Hart was a wonderful man after all and that everybody was responsible for Gary Hart’s political demise except Gary Hart.” (Watch Hart’s speech and decide for yourself if that was the point.)
Hart’s monologue was instantly buried in an avalanche of defensiveness and moral posturing. “It wasn’t just that I was blaming the media,” Hart recalled when we talked this week. “It was that I was a bad guy, and it was good riddance to a bad politician.”
For 29 years after that moment, until I directed him to it this week, even Hart hadn’t watched that video clip. Nor did he bother to continue pressing his case, despite a stream of offers to give speeches or appear on talk shows.
“I was not put on earth to pick a fight with the media and carry it out,” he told me. “I couldn’t repeat the theme of that talk without the headline inevitably saying, ‘Hart attacks the press,’ and I just didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.
“There was no capacity for thoughtful reflection,” Hart said. “It was all me versus them.”
By the time I got into the business of political journalism in the late 1990s, 24-hour cable news — mindless, sensational, personality-obsessed — was driving the conversation. Then came the Internet, with its frenzied competition for clicks. By 2007, Politico (which does some excellent work, to be fair) was calling itself the ESPN of news, which is pretty much exactly what Hart had prophesied.
And so we systematically created a process perfectly suited to a manipulative, reality-TV performer like Trump (or Sarah Palin before him) — and just as hostile to a guy like John Kasich, who talks about governing as complicated work. We spend half of any given debate talking about poll numbers and strategies, mean tweets and sordid allegations, because the game of politics is so much more alluring than the practice of statecraft.
I asked Hart if, on a week like this one, when battery charges against Trump’s campaign manager were vying for airtime against his war with Ted Cruz over their spouses, he felt vindicated at last.
“No,” he said quickly. “No. No.” After all, he explained, no one (other than me) ever saw the need to revisit what he said all those years ago.
I raise the Hart video this week because if you read this latest flood of self-criticism, some of it from commentators who have worked in our business for decades, you might come away thinking that something transformative has just taken us by surprise. You might get the impression that a tsunami of triviality has suddenly overwhelmed our media, and we barely had time to suck in air and duck our heads.
But don’t let anyone tell you that this is all just about Trump’s suckering us, or about some convergence of recent trends we couldn’t have foreseen. It is, in fact, a generational reckoning — the failure of executives and anchors and reporters-turned-cable-personalities, many of them in our most serious news outlets, who for decades refused to confront the creeping realities of their industry, as surely as a generation of political leaders refused to confront the realities of fiscal and global instability.
Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, did a pretty nice job of encapsulating that failure when he talked about Trump’s campaign this way last month: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
We can say, as Moonves surely would, that we were just responding to market forces beyond our control. We can say that voters, and not us, get to decide what matters and what doesn’t. We can point out that we’ve gone to great lengths to expose the depth of Trump’s ignorance and inconsistency.
What we can’t say is that we weren’t told it would happen.
Article from American Prospect
Barack Obama Is Looking Better and Better Paul Waldman
March 28, 2016
His approval ratings are up. It might have something to do with the
clowns on the other side.
Imagine the pain your average Republican must feel when he opens his
morning paper. His party is not just riven by internal dissent, but
looks like it will nominate a spectacularly unpopular candidate to be
its standard-bearer in 2016, with a campaign that gets more farcical
every day, bringing ignominy upon a party that has suffered so much
already. And now, to add insult to injury, the president he loathes with
such fervor is looking … rather popular with the American public.
Barack Obama’s approval ratings are now above 50 percent in daily Gallup
tracking, and have been for weeks. He’s risen higher in public esteem
than he’s been in three years. Every poll taken in the last month and a
half shows him with a positive approval rating.
You might say that it’s no great achievement to be above 50 percent.
After all, didn’t Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan leave office with
ratings around 65 percent? Indeed they did. But even Clinton’s
presidency occurred in a different era, when party polarization was not
as firm as it is now. These days—and in all likelihood for some time to
come—if a president can stay at 50 percent, he should be counted a
remarkable success.
That polarization runs through everything Americans think, know, and
learn about the president. There’s always been a large gap between how
members of the president’s party view him and how members of the other
party view him, but if you look over the history for which we have
polling data (going back to Eisenhower in the 1950s), you see what has
changed over time. With just a couple of exceptions, those in the
president’s party usually give him around 80 percent approval, give or
take a bit. For instance, Ronald Reagan averaged 83 percent among
Republicans and George H.W. Bush averaged 82 percent, while Bill Clinton
averaged 80 percent among Democrats.
It’s in the opinions of the other party that there has been a
transformation. Presidents used to routinely get 30 or 40 percent
approval from the other party; it would only dip down into the 20s when
things were going really badly. But George W. Bush’s presidency and then
Barack Obama’s have been characterized by levels of disapproval from the
other side we haven’t seen since the depth of the Watergate scandal.
This is one of the signal characteristics of public opinion in our time:
negative partisanship, in which Americans define their political
identity not by their affection for their own party, but by their hatred
for the other guys.
In fact, Obama is the first president since polls existed to have never
gone above 25 percent approval from the other side, not even in the
honeymoon glow of the first days of his presidency. He could defeat
ISIS, make America secure and prosperous, save a baby from a burning
building, then cure cancer and invent a pill that would let you eat all
the ice cream you want without gaining any weight, and no more than a
handful of Republicans would ever say they think he’s doing a good job.
Which means that if his ratings have gone up, it’s because he’s doing
better among everyone who isn’t a Republican. Why is that? There are
multiple reasons, but one factor that always plays a key part in
presidential approval is the strength of the economy, though presidents
get both more credit and more blame for it than they deserve. And today,
even if income growth is lagging much more than we’d like, unemployment
is under 5 percent and there have been 72 consecutive months of job
growth, the longest streak on record. There are plenty of things wrong
with the American economy, but the most visible thing to many people
(apart from gas prices, which are near historic lows) is whether you can
find a job if you need one, and today you can.
And then there’s the biggest political story of the year, the Republican
presidential nomination campaign. Put simply, it’s been an utter
catastrophe for Republicans—and a marked contrast with the guy they’re
all vying to replace. Where Obama is calm and reasonable, the Republican
candidates are shrill and panicky. Where he’s thoughtful and informed,
they’re impulsive and ignorant. Republicans are constantly trying to
argue that Obama is frivolous—he played a round of golf while something
important was happening somewhere!—but you won’t catch him arguing with
his opponents about the size of their hands or attacking their
spouses. You can disagree with Obama on matters of substance, but he’s
nothing like the clowns Republicans are deciding between.
So juxtaposed with the freak show of the Republican primaries, Obama
looks better all the time. And ironically, of all the Republicans who
ran for president this year, only one almost never singled out Obama for
heaps of abuse: Donald Trump. Trump says that our leaders are idiots,
but he includes all kind of people in that criticism. He barely talks
about Obama, unlike the candidates he has vanquished, who regularly
asserted not just that Obama is a terrible president but that he has
intentionally tried to destroy America, a bit of talk-radio lunacy many
of them incorporated into their rhetoric back when it seemed like you
could win the nomination by being the one who says he hates the
president more than anyone else.
Yet none of the Republicans make for a clearer contrast with Obama than
Trump, the buffoonish vulgarian who wouldn’t know class if hit him in
the head with a gold-plated hammer. And while the Republicans talk
endlessly about what a cesspool of misery and despair America is, Obama
looks to be chugging toward the end of his presidency with most
Americans thinking he’s done a pretty good job.
Ten days before Justice Antonin Scalia died, launching the political battle over who would fill his vacancy, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered a speech slamming the Supreme Court nomination process. In remarks at Boston’s New England Law,The New York Times reports that Roberts denounced the politicization of the process that he says is really just meant to ensure that nominees are qualified for the job.
“We don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” the chief justice said, “and I think it’s a very unfortunate impression the public might get from the confirmation process.”
Roberts pointed out that while nominees back in his day were easily confirmed, the last three justices — Samuel Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — have all faced split votes from the Senate. “Look at my more recent colleagues, all extremely well qualified for the court and the votes were, I think, strictly on party lines for the last three of them, or close to it, and that doesn’t make any sense,” Roberts said. “That suggests to me that the process is being used for something other than ensuring the qualifications of the nominees.”
President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court last week, despite Republicans’ promises that they will deny any Obama nominee in favor of letting the next president fill the vacancy. It has become clear that the Congress is essentially Racist and disingenuous. Vice President Biden made it clear in a recent speech that the GOP Congress has taken excerpts from a prior speech to avoid doing the job of vetting a candidate for the Supreme court. For the past 7 years we (voters) have been operating under a dysfunctional Government due to the Political machinations of our Congress. Voters are better than the people we elected to represent us but we seemingly have not considered this. Our Federal lawmakers are no more than 535 people who are taking our money for a job poorly done or not done at all. If this were a contractor or service, we as consumers would be up in arms so the question is: Why are we not taking these people (Congress) to task for not doing their job?
The current elections and the recent 12 years of Government gamesmanship have been a time of hardship for our country, We have candidates whose purpose appears to be dividing our country rather than uniting it. The meanness and hate evidenced at these rallies is unsettling at the least and dangerous at most. After watching the excerpts of the physical and verbal assaults, I was reminded of the 60’s when dogs and water hoses were the order of the day. I have a book of Lincoln’s quotes and in reading it I found something that does not resonate now but should . This is a quote attributed to Lincoln: “If the people remain right, your public men can never betray you… Cultivate and protect that sentiment ( that the principles of liberty are eternal) and your ambitious leaders will be reduced to the position of servants instead of masters”
We have a neer do well Congress whose sole purpose is to run the country the way they want to run it no matter what we want or need and they (Congress) have persuaded us that they are doing what they do in our interest. I would like to believe that the dissatisfiedvoters understand what the candidates say is not what they will or can do if elected. We already have a majority of elected officials who are divisive, disingenuous and often liars all for the sake of their parties not for the people who voted them in and who they so often invoke when they have a media event. These are the same people who have enacted laws that provides them with a cost of living increase without a vote (how many of us knew about this?). The recent issue regarding the Supreme court is another political ploy to side track the working of the Government. We are the victims of this irreverent Congress who we elected to work on our behalf but spend more time working for their party and themselves. We need to stop the train of idiocy created by Congress and demand solutions that benefit us. A letter costs 1/2 of k just a dollar to mail, emails work just as well. When elections are over we need to continue to press Congress for solutions and demand satisfaction.
Comments Off on Guantanamo Camp Cost $900,000.00 Per Prisoner Per Year
This posting from The Huffington Post shows what the cost to keep Guantanamo Camp open and what should be spent on the actual facility to bring it up to standards. Where could this amount be better used? We have several “High Security” prisons in the U.S. but due to politrics and fear mongering these facilities and the apparent boon to the communities as far as material resources like jobs, products sold to the facility and traffic from products being brought in has not happened. Maximum security is just that maximum security and would cost a lot less in the United States than off shore. This move would free up military forces now engaged in guarding this facility for other duties. The move would be n money saved and well spent.
WASHINGTON, May 3 (Reuters) – It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 per prisoner annually.
The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner.
By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.
The high cost was just one reason Obama cited when he returned this week to an unfulfilled promise to close the prison and said he would try again. Obama also said that the prison, set up under his Republican predecessor George W. Bush and long the target of criticism by rights groups and foreign governments, is a stain on the reputation of the United States.
“It’s extremely inefficient,” said Ken Gude, chief of staff and vice president at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, who has followed developments at Guantanamo Bay since 2005.
“That … may be what finally gets us to actually close the prison. I mean the costs are astronomical, when you compare them to what it would cost to detain somebody in the United States,” Gude said.
The cost argument could be a potent weapon at a time of running budget battles between Obama and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and of across-the-board federal spending cuts that kicked in, in March. The “sequestration” as it is known, is due to cut some $109 billion in spending up to the end of September and has cut government services small and large.
Just one inmate from Guantanamo, for example, is equivalent to the cost of 12 weeks of White House tours for the public – a treasured tradition that the Secret Service says costs $74,000 a week and that has been axed under sequestration.
A single inmate is also the equivalent of keeping open the control tower at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport for 45 months. That control tower, another victim of cuts, costs $20,000 per month to run.
The $900,000 also matches the funding for nearly seven states to help serve home delivered meals to the elderly. Sequestration has cost Meals on Wheels a median shortfall of $129,497 per state, the organization says.
Or measured in terms of military spending and national security, the cost of four inmates represents the cost of training an Air Force fighter pilot – based on the Department of Defense’s figure of $3.6 million per pilot.
WHY THE HUGE COST?
The huge cost of running the prison and judicial complex stem from its offshore location at a 45-square-mile U.S. Naval Base on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Because ties between the two countries are almost nonexistent, almost everything for the facilities has to be ferried in from outside.
When the military tribunals are in session, everyone from judges and lawyers to observers and media have to fly into Guantanamo on military aircraft. Food, construction materials and other goods are shipped in from outside, experts say.
But despite the high cost of the camp, and despite the fact that Republicans traditionally demand belt-tightening by the federal government, a Republican aide with the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee said there was little point in asking if the price was worth it because “there isn’t an alternative at the moment.”
“No one has any particular affection for Guantanamo Bay, but no one has come up with a practical solution that’s better,” the aide said.
Obama needs to produce a plan for what to do with the detainees at Guantanamo “who are too dangerous to release,” Representative Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in an opinion piece in USA Today this week. “Until a better solution is offered, at Guantanamo they must stay,” he wrote.
Among current inmates, nine have been charged with crimes or convicted, 24 are considered eligible for possible prosecution, 86 have been cleared for transfer or release and 47 are considered too dangerous for release but are not facing prosecution.
But until now, worries about security have prevented the idea of transferring some or all of the inmates to the United States from getting much traction.
Obama pledged to close the prison within a year after first taking office in January 2009 but his efforts ran aground, partly because of congressional opposition, from both Republicans and some in his own Democratic Party, to transferring prisoners to the United States.
Inmates started a hunger strike in February that has swelled to some 100 prisoners and has led to force-feeding of 23 of the prisoners. With the camp back under a critical spotlight, Obama told a news conference on Tuesday he would renew efforts to shut it down. He has an array of options, some of which would be more achievable than others.
Gude said it was difficult to figure out how much the United States has spent overall on Guantanamo detention facilities since it began housing prisoners there in 2002 because administrations only recently have been noting the expense in a budget line item.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an estimate but it is certainly more than $1 billion by a comfortable margin, I would say, probably more than $2 billion,” Gude said.
Above the annual operating cost, capital spending on the prison could rise again if the Pentagon receives the funding it says it needs to renovate the place.
General John Kelly, the head of Southern Command, which is responsible for Guantanamo, told a House of Representatives panel in March that he needed some $170 million to improve the facilities for troops stationed at the base as part of detention operations. Kelly said the living conditions were “pretty questionable” and told the panel, “We need to take care of our troops.” (Reporting By David Alexander; Editing by Frances Kerry and Tim Dobbyn)
Comments Off on Senator Franken Explains and Exposes
Senator Al Franken addressed the Senate’s failure to the country:
Senator Al Franken (D-MN) addressed the new justice vacancy in the Supreme Court on February 24. In opening, Franken told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “swift” action needed to be taken. He offered his “thoughts and prayers” to the family of the late Justice Scalia, adding he did not share Scalia’s views on the U.S. Constitution, nor on the country, and that Scalia had a great sense of conviction and humor. Franken then quickly gets down to the business at hand:
“Let us all remember that each and every senator serving in this body swore an oath to support and defend [the] Constitution,” said Sen. Franken in prepared remarks. “It is our duty to move forward. We must fulfill our constitutional obligation to ensure that the highest court in the land has a full complement of justices.”
Franken reminds the audience that the U.S. Constitution Justice Scalia loved is the same U.S. Constitution that allows the president to nominate a new justice, and with the “Advice and Consent of the Senate,” appoint a judge to the Supreme Court.
The senator notes with disgust that it took less than an hour after news of Scalia’s death hit the public for the GOP to announce they would not take up the business of considering a replacement until after the presidential election. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said the American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice.
The only problem with the Majority Leader’s reasoning, Franken adds, is that the American people have spoken. Twice.
He reiterates that President Barack Obama was elected and reelected by a solid majority of the American people who understood his role is to uphold his duties according to the Constitution and that includes appoint a Supreme Court justice should a vacancy occur.
Here’s where it gets good. One of the highlights of this speech was when Franken suggests the GOP apply their own reasoning to the Republican-led Congress.
If we were to truly subscribe to the Majority Leader’s logic and extend it to the legislative branch, it would yield an absurd result.
Senators would become ineffective in the last year of their term.
The 28 senators who are now in the midst of their reelection campaigns and the 6 senators who are stepping down should be precluded from casting votes in committee or on the Senate floor.
Ten committee chairs and 19 subcommittee chairs should pass the gavel to a colleague who is not currently running for reelection or preparing for retirement.
Bill introduction, and indeed the cosponsor ship of bills, should be limited to those senators who are not yet serving in the sixth year of their terms. When a Republican says it’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year, Franken says, “I know that’s not true. And I’m not the only one,” mentioning several sources including the indisputable SCOTUS blog, which says, “historical record does not reveal any instances [in over a century] of the Senate failing to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year because of the impending election.” In closing, Senator Franken states the Supreme Court is a central pillar of our democracy. The women and men who sit on that bench make decisions that touch the lives of every single American—regardless of party or political persuasion. Franken urges his colleagues to “reject the impulse to put politics before our sworn duty” to uphold the Constitution. There is a video of Franken’s entire speech.
In his speech, Senator Al Franken describes the hypocrisy, negligence, and obstructiveness of Republicans that has taken place the entire seven years President Obama has been in office.
Franken tells the committee (and the public) that the day before, every Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Majority Leader vowing to deny a hearing to the president’s eventual nominee, saying they will not hold hearings on any Supreme Court nominee—until after their next president is sworn in on January 20, 2017. Franken calls their actions an historic dereliction of the Senate’s duty. He brings up that “Chairman Grassley gathered only Republican Committee members in a private meeting where they unilaterally decided, behind closed doors, to refuse consideration of a nominee.” Franken calls the action to refuse a hearing “shameful, and I suspect that the American people share that view.“
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