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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

by SamaraLetters Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Colorado gun-rights crusader Dudley Brown has a simple political philosophy: “No compromise.” He says the NRA is spineless. (An NRA official once tagged him the “Al Sharpton of the gun movement.”) He loathes middle-of-the-road politicians. For show, he occasionally drives a Pinzgauer, a bulky Austrian-made troop transport vehicle, which he describes as his “political pain delivery vehicle.” His opponents—Democrats and Republicans alike—call him “poison” and a “political terrorist.” After Democratic lawmakers in the state passed new gun-control laws in response to the Aurora and Newtown mass shootings, Brown told NPR, “There’s a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.” But, as it turns out, Brown’s bid for political revenge has upped the odds that Democrats will hold on to power in the state legislature.


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Brown—who is widely referred to just as “Dudley”—is the face and voice of the absolutist gun-rights movement, which opposes any and all gun-related restrictions. A frequent guest on Fox News, Brown founded an outfit called Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO); it’s Colorado’s more extreme version of the NRA. He also runs a group called the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), which butts heads with the NRA and is allied with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Brown’s groups have spent millions lobbying state and federal politicians and trying to sway Republican primaries in favor of hard-line pro-gun candidates. As Brown’s organizations bolster their membership lists and war chests, they could play a key role in the 2016 Republican presidential primary contest—but perhaps at a price for the party. In Colorado, Brown’s take-no-prisoners tactics have splintered the state GOP. And this year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican state Senate primaries, which has boosted the chances for the Democrats in those races and given the Ds a good shot of retaining control of state Senate.

Born in Wyoming, Brown studied at Colorado State University and chaired the College Republicans of Colorado with the confrontational style that would become his trademark. “The College Republicans were having doughnuts with the College Democrats, even during Reagan’s re-election year,” Brown told Denver’s 5280 magazine. “I didn’t want to have doughnuts with them. I wanted to beat them over their heads.” After college, he kicked around state politics working for US Sen. Bill Armstrong, the state House’s GOP caucus, the Firearms Coalition of Colorado, and the Colorado Conservative Union. In 1996, he struck out on his own and formed Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

Those were the halcyon days for Colorado Republicans. They had enjoyed almost uninterrupted majorities in the state House and Senate since the 1970s. After the 1998 elections, the GOP controlled the governorship, the legislature, both US Senate seats, and four of six congressional districts. And it was conservative Republicans who were ascendant in the state. Using RMGO, Brown took aim at GOPers who did not pass his pro-gun ideological test. In one early instance, RMGO attacked a Republican congressional candidate named Don Ament, who for Brown was insufficiently pro-gun, with a mailer showing Ament purportedly leaving a Denver strip club. The mailer declared, “Send Denver Don home to his wife.” But the state Republican Party’s office was located down the street from the strip club, and the photo of Ament was a set-up. Ament lost in the Republican primary to a far-right challenger.

After the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, Colorado voters approved a ballot measure mandating that buyers at gun shows undergo a background check first. (Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had obtained their guns illegally from a straw buyer.) Bill Owens, Colorado’s newly elected Republican governor, backed the measure, putting him in Brown and RMGO’s sights. RMGO badgered Owens at public events, blitzed his office with angry mail, and bird-dogged him at public events. Sean Tonner, Owens’ deputy chief of staff, told 5280, “All Dudley wanted to do was create controversy. He makes his money when there’s turmoil, real or perceived, because that’s what gets his members to write him checks.”

But Colorado’s political landscape has shifted in the past decade. The state has attracted large numbers of young people and Hispanics, turning the state “greener and browner,” as local political consultants put it. Colorado progressives organized in the early 2000s and soon took back the legislature and the governorship. Still, gun rights (or gun safety) has remained a contentious issue, essentially a proxy battle in a changing Colorado, pitting new Coloradans against old. And Brown has capitalized on this intense fight to expand RMGO’s profile and political clout.

Brown’s controversial tactics have drawn national attention. In a 2012 GOP primary, conservatives sought to oust state Sen. Jean White, a Republican who had voted twice in favor of civil unions. So Brown and a right-wing group out of Virginia crafted a mailer showing two men kissing with the tagline, “State Senator Jean White’s idea of family values?” Here was the rub: The two men in the photo lived in New Jersey, and, through some clever editing, Brown’s team had replaced the Manhattan skyline with snowy pine trees reminiscent of Colorado. (The two men sued the conservative group that distributed the mailer; a judge ruled in April that RMGO had a right to use the photo under the First Amendment.) White ended up losing her primary to an RMGO-backed state representative and rancher named Randy Baumgardner.

As Brown stoked his supporters’ fears of gun-grabbing Democrats and as RMGO’s bank account grew, the group became a potent force in Republican primaries—and a headache to the state GOP. “He’s exactly what’s wrong with the Republican Party all rolled up into one guy,” Sean Duffy, a former spokesman for Bill Owens, told 5280. “He’ll say or do anything to destroy viable candidates and legislators who agree with him 90 percent of the time, because you’re either 100 percent with him, or you’re 100 percent against him.”

The mass shootings in 2012 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, did nothing to slow Brown. In an email blasted out to RMGO supporters, he sent condolences to the families of those affected and then attacked “the Washington, DC, gun control lobby”—calling it “circling vultures”—for “shamelessly using the blood of innocents to advance their anti-gun agenda.” When told that Aurora gunman James Holmes had 6,000 rounds with him the night he shot 70 people, killing 12, Brown replied: “I call 6,000 rounds running low.” His National Association of Gun Rights spent $6.7 million in 2013 lobbying against new gun-control measures in Congress—nearly twice what the NRA spent on lobbying. NAGR has gone far beyond the NRA in its gun-rights advocacy, fighting reauthorization of the Patriot Act (because it allows “unconstitutional” gun searches) and suing to overturn the ban on firearms in post offices. Sen. Rand Paul, who was endorsed by the NAGR in 2010, has signed fundraising appeals for the group.

This year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican primaries in crucial Colorado state Senate races in Jefferson County, west of Denver. These were major victories for the RINO-bashing RMGO. But the result could be good news for the Democrats. Had the more moderate Republicans won those primaries, political handicappers observed, the GOP would have had a good chance of winning those seats in the general election and regaining control of the Senate. (Democrats currently have a one-seat majority in the state’s upper chamber.) But with Brown-preferred (and die-hard) candidates on the ballot, Democrats may be able to eke out victories in these critical races. “Dudley Brown could be the Democrats’ savior this year,” says Laura Chapin, a Democratic consultant based in Denver.

While Brown’s brand of take-no-prisoners politics has earned him enemies in both political parties, among his fellow conservatives he’s a rock star. Last Wednesday, in a packed hotel ballroom, Brown introduced his old friend David Bossie, who runs the conservative group Citizens United, at the premiere of Bossie’s latest propaganda film, Rocky Mountain Heist. The film purports to tell the story of how a secret cabal of liberal donors hijacked Colorado beginning in the 2000s, and warns that this model could turn other states deep blue. Brown stars in the movie.

Afterward, I introduced myself to Brown and asked for an interview. The smile disappeared from his face. “I don’t talk to leftists like you,” he snarled. “My guys don’t read your crap.” He brushed past me, yelled “Pravda” over his shoulder, and moved into the crowd.

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

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How Harry Shearer Discovered the Soul of Richard Nixon

by OliveGreenfield Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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The renowned satirist, actor, author, and musician Harry Shearer—you might know him as the bassist of Spinal Tap, the voice behind a panopoly of Simpsons characters (Mr. Burns and Flanders among them), host of Le Show, and a former Saturday Night Live player—has done his share of presidential impersonations, but no subject has captured his imagination like Richard Nixon.

In Nixon’s the One, a series that first aired on British television and premieres October 21 as a YouTube series, the 70-year-old Shearer reenacts the follies of our 37th president word for word from Nixon’s secret Oval Office recordings. (In the exclusive clip above, Nixon and an aide discuss how to destroy the networks, and come up with something that sounds a lot like Fox News.) The “comedy-drama,” co-written by the distinguished Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, is pure unadulterated Nixon. And Shearer, a talented impersonator, has nailed the cringe-inducing, can’t-help-but-watch pathos of perhaps our oddest and most paranoid Oval Office inhabitant. I caught up with the actor last week to discuss his comic attraction to Tricky Dick, his favorite Simpsons character, and the one thing he can’t stand about The Daily Show.

You also can listen to the unabridged audio version* (~46 minutes):

Mother Jones: You spent a great deal of time researching and developing this project. What draws you to Nixon?

Harry Shearer: I’m drawn to him like a bunch of flies to a pile of fascinating comic characteristics. I grew up in Southern California, and Nixon was omnipresent. I have dim memories of actually seeing the “Checkers” speech, where he saved his vice-presidential bid by making a very mawkish, lachrymose speech. He was accused of taking—here’s a quaint concept—illegal campaign contributions, and defended himself by saying, oddly enough, somebody gave us this dog, black and white checkered, and we’re gonna keep her. And that saved his bacon! And then, you know, he had this silly kitchen debate with Khrushchev; in 1958 he runs for president at the first televised debates and loses to John F. Kennedy; runs for governor of California two years later and has this remarkable press conference after he loses where he says, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” and then, of course, spends the next six years running for president.

MJ: Being kicked around!

HS: And kicking around. And so he sort of stood above and beyond the normal creepy politician. The first thing I was aware of as a kid was his hardball, if not mudball, politics. You may remember this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post which had Richard Nixon crawling up from down below in the sewer, followed shortly after by a picture of Nixon with just the words, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Nixon with his endemic five o’clock shadow!

MJ: So it was essentially his creepiness that attracted you?

HS: That was the first thing. But then it became obvious that there were really funny characteristics about this guy, chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times—just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.

MJ: Are you saying that he had more pathos than the average president?

HS: No, not more pathos. More—if the cortex is just a series of twists and bends and folds, he had more folds. Laughter.

Listen to an unedited audio clip of the previous exchange:

MJ: How long did it take you to feel you really had him nailed?

HS: I’ve been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called The Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him—if that’s a word—for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best. It was Nixon as a guest on an infomercial, where he was demonstrating a teeth-whitening miracle product. It was an opportunity to do full Nixon make-up and do the whole body, and a really great moment for me to see how far along I was.

MJ: Did you see any traits this time around that you hadn’t captured in your earlier impersonations?

HS: Yeah. I did emphasize more something that I’d never seen anybody capture, which is, for a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, he had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures. If you go look at that iconic moment where he’s standing on the bridge of the helicopter about to get in after he’s resigned, and he gives a salute, it isn’t a crisp, military salute at all. His hand is sort of like this butterfly flying away from his forehead. And he would purse his lips, he would flutter his eyelashes—there were a lot of these kinds of gestures.

MJ: Nixon has been satirized by Philip Roth in Our Gang. Anthony Hopkins played him in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Frank Langella in Ron Howard’s Frost Nixon. Dan Aykroyd did him early on in SNL.

HS: With a mustache!

MJ: Indeed.

HS: For added verisimilitude.

MJ: Who do you think has done him best or worst, mustaches aside?

HS: I’m not going to get into that. I saw a little bit of Anthony Hopkins after we did our show out of curiosity—I’m not a big Oliver Stone fan. But even sighted men have different versions of the elephant. And this is my version.

MJ: One of your most harrowing scenes covers the minutes before Nixon’s televised resignation speech. It really makes you cringe as Nixon nervously attempts to make jokey small talk with the television crew. Did you do anything special to prepare for that very emotional scene?

HS: It’s interesting. That is the one scene that is not from the White House taping system he installed. It was videotaped by an anonymous CBS engineer, and that tape circulated around in many bootleg versions of really dire video quality. When I went to the repository of the Nixon tapes at the National Archives, I befriended one of the guys there, and I said, “You know that tape?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, we have a great broadcast-quality version of it.” And so I managed to get a copy. And for years I would watch that tape with friends, and I’d memorized that scene long since. We’d recite it along with watching it—it was just such a wonderful moment.

MJ: Laughs. Is that what you do for fun in the Shearer household?

HS: Instead of betting on football! But—this sounds like goofy actor talk— having lived with that scene for all these years, the closest I could come to understanding it was the following: Here’s a guy who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk. And he manages through sheer determination—let’s be Horatio Algeristic about it—to rise to the top of the greasiest pole in America. And now he has to climb off that pole in humiliation and mortification. And what does he do in this room for these eight minutes? He engages in small talk.

I just thought it was ironically goofy. Then, while we were making this series, I happened upon a memoir by a mid-level White House staffer, and he had been in the room that night. This guy’s memoir told me what Nixon’s last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: “Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!” That was just so bizarre.

Now we’re rehearsing the scene, and suddenly it came to me what was going on. This was the beginning of his next campaign! This night was to become the beginning of his campaign for rehabilitation. In his mind, all those crew members were going to walk out of there saying, “He wasn’t bothered. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t upset. He was the nicest guy. He was making jokes, he even wished us a Merry Christmas!”

MJ: Christmas in August?

HS: He wanted them to remember him at Christmastime. He was planning little seeds of his rehabilitation. That’s my theory.

MJ: Listening to so many of these Nixon tapes that never made a lot of news, what other new gems did you discover?

HS: I wasn’t looking for newsworthy material. My partner, Stanley Kutler—the historian whose life has been steeped in these tapes and who filed the lawsuits that made them public—we were looking for the character stuff, the stuff that made us laugh. I’m not sure there are any bombshells left.

MJ: Well, did you learn anything new about Nixon?

HS: I couldn’t help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama’s. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. He wasn’t necessarily leading the parade, but they did happen during his administration. And he actually gave a speech late in his truncated second term advocating a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.

MJ: Sounds like a Commie!

HS: Imagine the number of drugs you’d have to administer to Obama to get him to make that speech!

MJ: Or any Democrat. Nancy Pelosi. Harry Reid. Even Paul Krugman wouldn’t advocate that, or at least I don’t think so.

HS: Even Bernie Sanders probably wouldn’t! If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.

MJ: Did you feel any sympathy for the man as you spent hours putting on make-up to look like him and produce these hours of reenactments?

HS: I wouldn’t say sympathy. Because sympathy implies you’re taking his side in things.

MJ: Empathy?

HS: Empathy gets a little closer to it. You know, I came up working for Jack Benny—I was a child actor. I think through osmosis I kind of got what his comic genius was about. If one recalls Jack Benny’s comic persona, he was not a nice man. He was vain, he was miserly, he was a bad boss, all characteristics we would regard as unlikable, and yet he was a lovable performer, because he was portraying the very flawed humanity of that character. And I wasn’t playing Nixon’s satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy. Here’s the eerie part: We were word accurate. We did our own transcripts. We actually hired John Dean’s transcriber.

MJ: And some of these tapes are hard to make out.

HS: Oh, they’re incredibly difficult. We hired someone who is skilled at that and even she had “inaudibles” and guesses at words. I have these digital sound-processing tools so, as we were rehearsing, the cast and I would discuss these phrases that just didn’t sound quite right. And I’d run the tape again through more of these tools, and almost magically words would pop out. And all of a sudden, Oh my God, that’s what he’s saying!

We had more script revisions than a troubled sitcom. The script supervisor would come around after what we thought was a great take and say, well, you moved this word or you paraphrased this. And I would curse her, but we’d do it again. And strangely enough, the takes where I got the words absolutely right, true to the transcript, were the performances that I felt and looked most Nixonian. Getting to his weird word choices and the weird word order and the repetitions and the backtracking that make it impossible almost to memorize got me closer to that guy.

MJ: Did you find that he had his own unique internal logic?

HS: Absolutely. When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there’s a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he’s still taping. I was writing these sketches and trying to approximate the way he and Haldeman would jump over each other and race to confirm each other and then race to negate each other, and Nixon’s way of expressing himself. So by the time we’re doing the real stuff, I felt so familiar with that inner world of his. The relationship with Kissinger is so funny and goofy we made a whole episode out of it. Kissinger was everything Nixon hated: a Harvard professor and a Jew and an intellectual. And Kissinger knew it. But the offer to be in a position of power was so intoxicating that he put up with all that shit.

Especially in the Kissinger scenes, Nixon would repeat the word “never” as if on a loop: “There’s never gonna be people from Harvard invited into this White House ever again. Never. Never. Never.” And he’s saying this right to Henry’s face, knowing that every time it’s a little pinprick into Kissinger’s gut. He did that on several occasions. You hear the “never, never, never” partly, I think, because Nixon knew that so many of the crazy things he told his staff to do they would ignore. There’s a scene in the pilot episode where he tells Haldemann flat out, “Destroy the tapes!” and he says “Can you do that?” and Haldemann nods and says, “Yes.” Of course, the tapes aren’t destroyed.

There’s another scene where he’s bitching about how he never got invited to a social occasion at the White House when Kennedy was president. Now, Kennedy is long dead by this point, and this is still burning deep within Nixon. That’s one of the things that I think is one of the darkly comic parts of his character. He just couldn’t let go of these resentments.

MJ: What was the response to the series in England?

HS: It got a great critical response.

MJ: You know how they love to feel superior to us.

HS: Yes, and sometimes they’re right. But I was thinking about why the show could get made there with this sort of creepy accuracy and couldn’t get made here. I just imagined if I’d been in the office of an American highfalutin’ cable channel, there would’ve been meetings that started with, “We know he didn’t like black people, but did he have to hate Jews too?” And I wanted to avoid those meetings. I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.

MJ: Who are easy to caricature.

HS: Drawing as well as acting. So in some ways, Brits just saw him as another one of those, except without a crown. Whereas in this country, at least when I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, “Oh, Jefferson had slaves?” It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn’t somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

MJ: Does the fact that Nixon attained the highest office in the land say something about America?

HS: Every president that makes it up there says something about the country. I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the ’90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s—a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I’m sure, though there’s no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

MJ: He should’ve trademarked it.

Harry Shearer Mark Sullivan/WireImage

HS: But now, in the grip of a very similar wave involving terrorism, we’ve succeeded in a far greater receding of our civil liberties in the name of avoiding an enemy much less powerful than the enemy when we were afraid of with Communism. Yet that fear propelled Nixon to the White House. Nixon’s genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam war. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election—but he didn’t tell us that then.

MJ: Is there any other president you’d like to play?

HS: Well, I’ve, on my radio show I’ve played every one since—

MJ: How’s your Garfield?

HS: Poor. But who’s to know?

MJ: Good point.

HS: My Franklin Pierce is spot on. But I’m not sure that there’s anybody else that’s as psychologically complex and who’s given us this window into his soul that Nixon gave us. That’s what I find absolutely addictive and seductive.

MJ: You’re the voice of many characters on The Simpsons: Mr. Burns, Smithers, Flanders, and probably 27,000 others. Stupid question: Do you have a favorite?

HS: Stupid answer: C. Montgomery Burns. Watch the following clip of Shearer reading a scene:

MJ: Is there a Nixonian quality to Mr. Burns?

HS: Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it’s the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

MJ: Will The Simpsons ever end, and if so, what should happen in the finale?

HS: As they say in Washington, above my pay grade. But I’ve long had an answer to the first question, which is that The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it—so I give us another 50 years.

MJ: Long may you wave.

HS: Thank you.

MJ: Is it true that Spinal Tap is reuniting to do a collection of Crosby, Stills & Nash covers?

HS: It’d be great! But sadly, no. I think you can look for a Crosby, Stills & Nash reunion doing Spinal Tap covers before you look for the other.

MJ: I’d like to see that! So, looking around at the state of political satire—SNL, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, etc.—how would you say the form is faring today?

HS: Well, I will say one thing that all those shows have in common, which I find sad, if not reprehensible. Satire is an art best practiced behind the back of the intended target. I think inviting politicians on a satirical show becomes a very big trap. Because one of two things happen: Either you have to kind of unsharpen your fangs because you can’t be quite as cruel to people to their face as you are behind their backs…

MJ: When you have the Pakistan dictator on, you kind of yuk it up with him.

HS: Yeah. Or you don’t defang, and those guests get the word and they stop coming. I think the former has happened in all three cases. I remember when Christopher Guest and Marty Short and I joined SNL in 1984. And we said to Dick Ebersoll, then the producer, “This show is established. We can get our own ratings. We don’t need these guests that can’t do comedy and are often politicians—everything kind of gets distorted by that.” In fact, the first show of that season had no guest host. And we thought “Okay, great!” And by show three, our guest host was Jesse Jackson, and he had moved half of Operation Push into our office so they could make free long-distance calls.

MJ: He did Green Eggs and Ham on SNL and it was very funny.

HS: Yeah, I just think everyone knows you go on those shows if you’re a politician to, “humanize yourself”—to show, “Hey, I can take a joke.” Well, why should satire be in the service of humanizing these people who are supposed to be the target of our venom and vitriol? I think that’s unseemly.

MJ: So many political satirists seem to be on the liberal side of the equation. Are there any great humorists out there with a conservative bent?

HS: Yeah, sure. PJ O’Rourke has been funny and conservative for years. I find myself being lumped in with the left, though I’m as critical of Obama as I have been of any president. I think it’s the satirist’s job to be critical of—the cliché—the guys with the monopoly on the guns. In the United States you have to amend it to say the guys with the majority of the guns. Or the bigger guns. But I think that’s the gig. Otherwise you become a court jester. You become the satirist who ended up writing jokes on the side for one of the recent presidential candidates. Well, now you’re really a hired gun. You’re just comedy oppo research.

*In the audio version, Shearer got a few facts wrong: Nixon is emerging from the sewer in the Herblock cartoon, but he isn’t actually peeking out from under a manhole cover. Also, the “Would you buy a used car…?” poster was created by Nixon’s Democratic opponents, not Herblock.

Original link:  

How Harry Shearer Discovered the Soul of Richard Nixon

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Here’s How Russia and China Are Teaming Up to Shape Our Future

by ColemanPermewan Posted on October 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

A specter haunts the fast-aging “New American Century”: the possibility of a future Beijing-Moscow-Berlin strategic trade and commercial alliance. Let’s call it the BMB.

Its likelihood is being seriously discussed at the highest levels in Beijing and Moscow, and viewed with interest in Berlin, New Delhi, and Tehran. But don’t mention it inside Washington’s Beltway or at NATO headquarters in Brussels. There, the star of the show today and tomorrow is the new Osama bin Laden: Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the elusive, self-appointed beheading prophet of a new mini-state and movement that has provided an acronym feast—ISIS/ISIL/IS—for hysterics in Washington and elsewhere.

No matter how often Washington remixes its Global War on Terror, however, the tectonic plates of Eurasian geopolitics continue to shift, and they’re not going to stop just because American elitesrefuse to accept that their historically brief “unipolar moment” is on the wane. For them, the closing of the era of “full spectrum dominance,” as the Pentagon likes to call it, is inconceivable. After all, the necessity for the indispensable nation to control all space—military, economic, cultural, cyber, and outer—is little short of a religious doctrine. Exceptionalist missionaries don’t do equality. At best, they do “coalitions of the willing” like the one crammed with “over 40 countries” assembled to fight ISIS/ISIL/IS and either applauding (and plotting) from the sidelines or sending the odd plane or two toward Iraq or Syria.

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Here’s How Russia and China Are Teaming Up to Shape Our Future

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Did Crazy Luck Help Cigarette Makers Sidestep These Gruesome Warning Labels?

by CandiceKuefer Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Talk about luck.

Back in 2009, Congress passed landmark legislation directing the US Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, which according to the Centers for Disease Control kill at least 480,000 Americans each year—more than were killed in battle in all of our foreign wars combined. Among the agency’s early moves was a ban on candy- and fruit-flavored cigarettes, which were assumed to attract children.

Judge Richard J. Leon

Over the past five years, however, cigarette and e-cigarette companies have filed three major lawsuits against the Food and Drug Administration to halt the imposition of rules intended to make their products less appealing to consumers—and less accessible to kids.

The three cases, which involved, among other things, graphic warning labels, FDA oversight of e-cigarettes, and the use of menthol, were all decided in the industry’s favor by Richard J. Leon, a US District Court judge in Washington, DC, whose rulings have demonstrated concern about government overreach and a tone of deep skepticism toward the FDA’s legal positions. “Please! This conclusion defies common sense,” he wrote, dismissing one of the agency’s arguments.

Given how cases are normally assigned, the fact that Leon was assigned to all three is extraordinary—and extraordinarily good luck for the industry, which currently, for example, remains free of federal restrictions on selling candy-flavored e-cigarettes to children.

How extraordinary? Well, the District Court assigns cases randomly among its regular judges, plus several senior judges with reduced caseloads. According to the court, there were 13 regular judges on hand when two of the cases were filed, and 9 regular judges available when the third was filed. The odds of the cases being randomly assigned to any one judge—1 in 13, 1 in 13, and 1 in 9—put the chance of a single judge drawing all three FDA cases at 1 in 1,859. With senior judges in the draw, the odds would be even more remote.

Just an unlikely coincidence, court officials say. Nothing more. It would be “indefensible,” said Greg Hughes, the court’s chief deputy clerk for operations, for anyone to bend the assignment rules. The situation “does stretch the bounds of credulity,” he acknowledged, but the complaints were indeed randomly assigned. “That’s what the system’s telling me, and I have to put faith in the system.”

The court does have a “related case” process: The filing lawyer is supposed to inform the court when the case in question is closely related to another case under the court’s jurisdiction. Also, a judge who is randomly assigned a case may request its transfer to a colleague who has handled a very similar case in the past. But court officials told me that neither of those things happened with the FDA cases, and my review of the docket supports that.

Judge Leon joined the court in 2002 after being nominated by President George W. Bush. He is considered something of a maverick conservative, and has come down hard on federal agencies in other cases. In December 2013, for instance, he ruled that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records of United States citizens is probably unconstitutional. It’s unclear whether another judge would have ruled differently in the FDA cases—two of which have been held up on appeal. (An appeal of the third case is pending.)

Leon declined to be interviewed for this story, as did officials with the FDA and Justice Department—which represents the agency in court. Tobacco industry lawyers either did not return my calls or declined to be interviewed.

But the tobacco control advocates I reached were somewhat incredulous. It seems “very, very strange that somebody who has demonstrated a sustained hostility to the federal regulation of tobacco products keeps getting assigned to these cases,” said Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University law professor and chairman of the Boston-based Tobacco Products Liability Project. “It certainly leaves one wondering what is going on.”

Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, told me that the impact of these rulings has been “enormous.” Leon “has fundamentally altered the FDA’s authority and ability to carry out its congressional mandate,” he said. “It has had a direct effect on what has happened with e-cigarettes, and the fact that the United States still has among the weakest warning labels in the entire world.”

“But,” Myers added, “there is no evidence of wrongdoing. You can’t point to anything. I wish I could.”

Legal authorities had to agree. “The odds are long,” said Andrew Bradt, an assistant professor and expert on litigation procedure at the UC-Berkeley School of Law, “but I would have no basis for saying there’s any shenanigans going on.”

Alan B. Morrison, a George Washington University law professor with extensive litigation experience in the DC District Court, concurred that the odds were “quite astounding.” But given the outcome of the appeals to date, he doubts anything happened that “is evil or malicious or affecting outcome.”

Leon’s decisions have stymied federal oversight in the following areas:

E-cigarettes: In 2009, the FDA tried to halt a shipment of e-cigarettes into the US on the grounds that the products—which produce nicotine vapor without burning tobacco—were unapproved drug-delivery devices. E-cigarette marketers sued the agency. In January, 2010, Judge Leon issued an injunction saying the FDA lacked authority to regulate e-cigarettes as drug-delivery devices because the marketers weren’t making therapeutic claims. The ruling was affirmed on appeal.

Almost five years later, e-cigarettes (along with similar devices called “vape” pens or hookah pens that can be used to ingest nicotine) are still exempt from FDA oversight. Although the vapors e-cigarettes produce appear to be less harmful than tobacco smoke, nicotine is extremely addictive. Health officials fear kids who get hooked using the devices may well graduate to smoking.

Indeed, according to a recent CDC study, more than a quarter of a million middle and high school students who had never smoked said they had used e-cigarettes in 2013. And because the devices are unregulated, they aren’t bound by federal age limits, bans on kid-friendly flavorings, or advertising restrictions. In April, the FDA finally issued a proposed rule that would give it the authority to regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products (as opposed to drug-delivery devices), but that rule won’t become final until next year at the earliest.

Graphic Warning Labels: The 2009 antismoking legislation directed the FDA to create bold pictorial warnings for cigarette packs that would replace the small text warnings that have been unchanged since the 1980s. Seventy-four countries and territories around the world require such graphic warnings, according to survey data from the Canadian Cancer Society, but the United States, with the world’s biggest tobacco control program, still doesn’t have them.

In June, 2011, the FDA ordered the use of nine rotating warnings designed to cover 50 percent of cigarette packages. The images included things like diseased lungs and a cadaver on an autopsy table.

Five tobacco companies, including RJ Reynolds and Lorillard—the second and third leading cigarette makers—filed a lawsuit claiming the mandate violated their First Amendment rights. Judge Leon sided with the companies, ruling that the labels were “more about shocking and repelling than warning,” and amounted to an “impermissible expropriation of a company’s advertising space for Government advocacy.” A federal appeals court upheld the decision in August 2012.

The FDA has gone back to the drawing board to develop new warnings that will pass legal muster. But officials aren’t saying when they will be proposed.

Menthol Cigarettes: The 2009 tobacco control act also directed the FDA to create an expert panel—the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee to study whether menthol cigarettes pose more of a risk to public health than non-menthol brands. In a July 2011 report, the panel concluded that menthol, which anesthetizes the throat against the harshness of the smoke, likely makes it easier for teens and young adults to take up smoking.

Lorillard and RJ Reynolds sued to invalidate the report, complaining that several panel members had conflicts of interest because they had served as consultants to pharmaceutical companies developing smoking cessation products and had served as witnesses in anti-tobacco lawsuits.

This July, Judge Leon ruled that panel members Neal Benowitz and Jack Henningfield, both renowned addiction experts, and Dr. Jonathan Samet, an editor on several Surgeon General reports, had conflicts that “fatally tainted” the panel and the menthol report. He ordered the FDA to reorganize the committee, and forbade it from considering the panel’s findings. The agency has filed a notice of appeal.

A version of this story was published concurrently by FairWarning.org, a nonprofit investigative news organization focused on public health, safety, and environmental issues.

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Did Crazy Luck Help Cigarette Makers Sidestep These Gruesome Warning Labels?

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The US Is Also Fighting Pirates Off the Coast of West Africa

by CaridadBollinge Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website and was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Additional funding was provided through the generosity of Adelaide Gomer.

“The Gulf of Guinea is the most insecure waterway, globally,” says Loic Moudouma. And he should know. Trained at the US Naval War College, the lead maritime security expert of the Economic Community of Central African States, and a Gabonese Navy commander, his focus has been piracy and maritime crime in the region for the better part of a decade.

Moudouma is hardly alone in his assessment.

From 2012 to 2013, the US Office of Naval Intelligence found a 25% jump in incidents, including vessels being fired upon, boarded, and hijacked, in the Gulf of Guinea, a vast maritime zone that curves along the west coast of Africa from Gabon to Liberia. Kidnappings are up, too. Earlier this year, Stephen Starr, writing for the CTC Sentinel, the official publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, asserted that, in 2014, the number of attacks would rise again.

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The US Is Also Fighting Pirates Off the Coast of West Africa

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At Climate March in New York, a Clarion Call for Action

by Myrna Posted on September 21, 2014

The People’s Climate March paraded through Manhattan on Sunday, taking frustration over stalled efforts to curb carbon emissions to the streets ahead of a climate summit meeting at the United Nations. Link – At Climate March in New York, a Clarion Call for Action

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At Climate March in New York, a Clarion Call for Action

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Why millennials aren’t going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

by CandacePapst Posted on September 12, 2014

Cheeri-NOs

Why millennials aren’t going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

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12 Sep 2014 5:40 PM

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The New York Times crunched the nation’s cereal-eating numbers this week, and it looks like the typical American breakfast is starting to include fewer sugary flakes and moon-shaped marshmallows.

The Times’ Stephanie Stroml reports that in the past decade, Americans have been eating less boxed cereal, preferring healthier options like juiced fruits and veggies and probiotic-rich Greek yogurt. Between 2003 and 2013, sales of the once-beloved flaky cereals (Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, etc.) decreased by 5.5 percent. Children’s cereals (Lucky Charms and good ol’ Cap’n Crunch) have plummeted 10.7 percent. Meanwhile, Muesli, a favorite of health nuts everywhere, is steadily gaining popularity, increasing in sales by 1.8 percent.

The article reads:

For the last decade, the cereal business has been declining, as consumers reach for granola bars, yogurt and drive-through fare in the morning. And the drop-off has accelerated lately, especially among those finicky millennials who tend to graze on healthy options — even if Cheerios and some other brands come in whole-grain varieties fortified with protein now.

As a millennial myself, I’d like to take this opportunity to say a little something to big breakfast cereal companies to give them a heads-up on why young people like me are opting out of their morning Cap’n Crunch:

Dearest Big Breakfast Cereal Companies (BBCCs),

Hello, I am your loyal fan Liz. I am particularly fond of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran Crunch, the perfect blend of whole-wheaty oats and sun-dried raisin chewiness. It’s my favorite thing to snack on while I scroll through my Instagram feed. So, to you I extend the deepest of gratitude.

But, BBCCs, I’m writing to tell you to CUT THE CRAP. We millennials are having a tough time believing the whole “Lucky Charms are a great source of whole-grains” thing when they actually contain 40 percent more sugar by weight than typical adult cereals. C’mon, people, we both know this is bogus. Sugary breakfast cereals are not health food, even if you pump them up with protein. It’s like trying to make “fetch” happen. And it’s not going to happen.

You see, it’s not that we don’t enjoy the taste of sugary deliciousness, it’s that we’re becoming smarter consumers. We’re smarter, BBCCs, because we’ve seen these tricks before. Other companies have been trying to sell us products that cater to millennial interests — by making cars more tech-friendly and fast-food look quaint and local. But those marketing ploys that tell us we should be slaves to the automobile, or that food products are healthy when the nutrition label reads, “sugars: 19 grams” — well, they’re starting to feel a little stale.

I probably won’t give up eating a bowl or two of cereal for dinner once in a while, but if you’re wondering why your sales continue to drop despite your new “heath conscious” advertising campaigns — it’s because when millennials want to get their daily fix of whole grains, we’ll reach for the organic barley, not the box of Fruit Loops.

Source:
Cereals Begin to Lose Their Snap, Crackle and Pop

, New York Times.

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Why millennials aren’t going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

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This Is What a Farmer Looks Like

by Abby3598bb Posted on August 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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During the 2013 Super Bowl, Marjorie Gayle Alaniz was captivated by a commercial for Dodge Ram trucks that featured portraits of American farmers. She couldn’t help but notice, however, that among the many farmers shown, there were only a handful of women. Alaniz, who comes from a family of Iowa farmers, was disappointed. “I wondered, how has this happened, that images of farms don’t include women, when practically every farm has a woman working on it?” Indeed, according to the latest USDA Census of Agriculture, 46 percent of American farm operators are women.

Shortly after her Super Bowl revelation, Alaniz quit her job at a crop insurance company and started documenting women farmers in Central Iowa. The result is FarmHer, an online collection of photographs of some 40 lady farmers and counting. “The feedback has been fabulous,” says Alaniz. “It’s usually coming from women who grew up around agriculture or are currently involved in ag. They say, ‘Thank you for showing the rest of the world that we are out here doing this, too.'”

Kim Waltman, along with her family and about 20 neighbors, drives a herd of her beef cattle from the pasture to a holding area for vaccination and branding.

Angelique Hakazimona, who farmed in her native Rwanda before coming to Iowa as a refugee, digs sweet potatoes on the certified organic farm where she works.

Kate Edwards, who farms veggies on a few acres to feed 150 families through her CSA program, harvests produce during the last light of a long summer day.

Inga Witscher pushes a wayward cow back into the barn on the organic dairy farm that she runs with her husband.

Kellie Gregorich drives her John Deere tractor, which has been handed down through generations on her family’s cattle and row crop farm.

Carolyn Scherf holds a heritage-breed turkey she raised on a farm in rural Iowa.

Danelle Myer, the sole owner and operator of her farm, carries a box full of freshly washed produce from the field to the nearby barn, where she will sort and package it in preparation for the farmers market.

Jill Beebout checks on her alpacas. With her partner, Beebout grows produce and raises bees for honey, chickens for eggs, and alpacas for fiber.

FarmHer photographer Marjorie Gayle Alaniz

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This Is What a Farmer Looks Like

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Here Are the Psychological Reasons Why an American Might Join ISIS

by KlaraXDJWuempk Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Its Islam over everything.”

So read the Twitter bio of Douglas McAuthur McCain—or, as he reportedly called himself, “Duale Khalid”—the San Diego man who is apparently the first American to be killed while fighting for ISIS. According to NBC News, McCain grew up in Minnesota, was a basketball player, and wanted to be a rapper. Friends describe him as a high school “goofball” and “a really nice guy.” So what could have made him want to join the ranks of other Americans drawn towards militant Islam like John Walker Lindh and Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Yahiye Gadahn? And how can we explain the dozens of other Americans who have also gone off to fight as jihadists in Syria, for ISIS and other militant groups?

According to University of Maryland psychologist and terrorism expert Arie Kruglanski, who has studied scores of militant extremists, part of the clue may lie in that Twitter tagline of McCain’s. Not just its content, but the mindset that it indicates—one that sees the world in sharp definition, no shades of gray. “These extreme ideologies have a twofold type of appeal,” explains Kruglanski on the latest Inquiring Minds podcast. “First of all, they are very coherent, black and white, right or wrong. Secondly, they afford the possibility of becoming very unique, and part of a larger whole.”

That kind of belief system, explains Kruglanski, is highly attractive to young people who lack a clear sense of self-identity, and are craving a sense of larger significance. In fact, Kruglanski and his colleagues have found that one important psychological trait in particular seems to define these militants who leave their own culture and go off to embrace some ideology about which they may not even know very much. (We recently learned that Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, two British jihadis who went to fight in Syria last year, ordered Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies from Amazon before they departed.)

Arie Kruglanski

These young people seem to have what psychologists call a very strong “need for cognitive closure,” a disposition that leads to an overwhelming desire for certainty, order, and structure in one’s life to relieve the sensation of gnawing—often existential—doubt and uncertainty. According to Kruglanski, this need is something everyone can experience from time to time. We all sometimes get stressed out by uncertainty, and want answers. We all feel that way in moments, in particular situations, but what Kruglanski shows is that some of us feel that way more strongly, or maybe even all the time. And if you go through the world needing closure, it predisposes you to seek out the ideologies and belief systems that most provide it.

Fundamentalist religions are among the leading candidates. Followers of militant Islam “know exactly what is right and what is wrong, how to behave in every situation,” explains Kruglanski. “It’s very normative and constraining, and a person who is a bit uncertain, has the need for closure, would be very attracted to an ideology of that kind.” And for an outsider coming into Islam and drawn to that sense of certainty that it imparts, Kruglanski adds, you then want to prove yourself. To show your total devotion and commitment to the cause.

That’s not to say every fundamentalist becomes a terrorist, any more than it is to say that every person with a need for cognitive closure does. Other life factors definitely matter as well, and the need for cognitive closure is a trait measured on a continuum; it’s not that you either have it our you don’t. All of that said, the trait clearly does show up again and again in these extremists.

How do we know? Kruglanski and his colleagues have directly studied violent extremists and measured them on these traits. In Sri Lanka, for instance, Kruglanski was able to study thousands of members of the so-called Tamil Tigers (more formally called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). A militant and terrorist group fighting to secede from Sri Lanka—a conflict fueled by both linguistic and religious differences—the Tigers had lost their civil war and surrendered, and many were now in a deradicalization program (thousands have since been released). “We administered questionnaires and interviews to about 10,000 of them, and we see how their thinking has evolved, and how it has changed,” he says.

Other psychological research points to conclusions highly consistent with those of Kruglanski. Psychologist Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia, for instance, has investigated a trait called “integrative complexity,” which is clearly related to the need for cognitive closure and can be analyzed by examining an individual’s public speeches or writing. It is literally a measure of the complexity of thought, and one of its key aspects is whether one accepts that there are a variety of legitimate views about an issue, rather than thinking there is only one right way.

Suedfeld’s work has shown that in global conflicts, a decrease in integrative complexity on the part of the contending parties—exhibited, for instance, in an escalation of black-and-white rhetoric—is a good predictor that violent conflict will occur. He has also shown, through analyzing the speeches of Osama bin Laden, that the terrorist leader’s integrative complexity plummeted markedly in the run up to two major attacks: the twin embassy bombings in 1998 in Tanzania and Kenya, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Bin Laden “was very purist in his ideology,” adds Kruglanski—a trait suggesting his need for closure.

The USS Cole, with a visible hole in its side following a terrorist attack Department of Defense/Wikimedia Commons

And as it relates to terrorism, the need for cognitive closure has another, surprising implication. According to Kruglanski’s research, when terrorists attack a population, the fear and uncertainty that are created (for instance, following the 9/11 attacks) induce a strong need for closure in the attacked population as a whole. And this creates a kind of extremism of its own. People become more suspicious of outsiders and much more supportive of strong security measures that could curtail individual liberties. And they tend to rally around what is perceived to be a strong leader.

“The psychology of the terrorist victim—there is a high need for closure, high need for clarity, high need to commit to an ideology that would provide quick answers,” says Kruglanski. That’s certainly not saying that the victims of terrorism are themselves equivalent to terrorists. But it does mean that as psychological warfare, terrorism might very well work.

So how do you overcome the need for closure, and achieve deradicalization, when much of this core impulse emerges from the very human need to manage uncertainty and find meaning and significance in life? Kruglanski celebrates community-based programs in Muslim countries that try to “inoculate” young people against extreme ideologies. He also praises deradicalization efforts that seek to weaken the ideology of former terrorists with the promise of potential release and reintegration.

Both types of programs have shown at least some effectiveness, says Kruglanski. They help former extremists “find alternative ways of being significant, making a contribution, other than violence.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of a new Pew report showing that social media may actually discourage the expression of some opinions (rather than enabling them), and of how neuroscientists and filmmakers are working together to understand how people’s perceptions actually work in a movie theater.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Here Are the Psychological Reasons Why an American Might Join ISIS

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Obama’s Iraq Policy Has Been Pretty Masterly

by ChelseyPegues Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m not a diehard supporter of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Some of his actions I just plain disagree with: the surge in Afghanistan, the enormous increase in drone use, his almost inhuman patience in putting up with Bibi Netanyahu’s nearly open contempt for him. Then there are other actions of his that were arguably justifiable but have worked out less well than he hoped. However, they mostly represent very, very tough problems. And foreign policy is hard—especially now. Almost nobody gets even a small fraction of what they want out of it.

That said, the relentless criticism of Obama’s approach toward ISIS strikes me as unusually shortsighted. As near as I can tell, he’s handled it almost perfectly so far. If we had offered air support to destroy ISIS six months or a year ago, it probably would have made things worse. Iraq flatly wasn’t able to provide the ground troops to complement an air campaign, and America would have shared in the inevitable fiasco. We also would have been explicitly bound to Nouri al-Maliki and his policies, which were the very ones responsible for the rise of ISIS in the first place. The outcome of all this would have been the worst of all possible worlds for American interests.

Instead, Obama allowed Maliki to fail on his own, and then used the leverage of promised American air assistance to engineer his ouster. Needless to say, this hardly guarantees eventual success against ISIS, but is there really any question that it was a necessary precondition for success? I don’t think so. Maliki never would have left unless he was forced out, and it was plain that his brutally sectarian governing style was fueling the insurgency, not halting it. He had to leave.

The alternative to Obama’s strategy wasn’t more aggressive action. That would have been disastrous. Nor would it have made a difference if Obama had left a few troops in Iraq back in 2009. Nor would stronger intervention in Syria have made a difference. It might even have made things worse. The truth is simpler. There’s no single reason for the rise of ISIS, but there is a single primary reason: Nouri al-Maliki. Obama saw that clearly and kept his eye on what was important, working patiently and cold-bloodedly toward engineering Maliki’s departure. It was hardly a perfect plan, and messiness was always inevitable. Nonetheless, it was the best plan available. Because of it, there’s now at least a chance of defeating ISIS.

UPDATE: Does “masterly” go too far? Maybe so. But I was trying to attract attention to my main point: the ISIS threat couldn’t even be addressed until Iraq’s political dysfunction was addressed first. Unlike a lot of people, Obama recognized that and stuck to a toughminded approach that focused on getting rid of Maliki instead of getting distracted by endless calls for a stronger intervention before Maliki was gone. It wasn’t easy, but it was the smart thing to do.

Can the new government fight ISIS more effectively? There’s no way of knowing yet. But at least they’ve been given a chance.

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Obama’s Iraq Policy Has Been Pretty Masterly

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