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On Thursday evening, as the news broke that conservative author Dinesh D’Souza had been indicted by the feds for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to an unnamed 2012 Senate candidate (widely presumed to be Wendy Long, a long-shot Republican who was crushed by incumbent Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York), liberal commentators had trouble hiding their glee—or, what I called on Twitter, Dineshenfreude. After all, for years D’Souza has been a right-wing bad boy spouting the most noxious criticism of the left and being rewarded for his exploits. More recently, he was the fellow who derived the odious theory that President Barack Obama could only be understood if viewed as the secret keeper of the flame of Kenyan anti-colonialism—a notion that Newt Gingrich giddily embraced and promoted. D’Souza’s movie, 2016: Obama’s America, contends that Obama, driven by the remnants of this anti-colonial rage inherited from his father, had a covert second-term plan to weaken and impoverish the United States of America. It depicts Obama as anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-white.
D’Souza’s extremism traces back to his college days, when he was an editor of the Dartmouth Review, the leading conservative college publication of the early 1980s. (Wendy Long was a Dartmouth student and served as a trustee of the Review in the 1990s.) In that post, D’Souza became a hero to young conservatives across the nation (and the right-wing foundations looking to fund them). While he helmed the Review, it published a “lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader”—accompanied by a staged photo of a black person hanging from a tree—and an assault on affirmative action titled, “Dis Sho Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” which was written in Ebonics. (“Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be up over our ‘fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa.”) The “Jive” article caused Jack Kemp, a conservative icon mindful of the right’s problems with minority outreach, to resign from the Review‘s advisory board. Decades later, it’s clear that D’Souza chose the path of the foul at an early point. But he also had trouble with trustworthiness—as I discovered in an early encounter.
In 1982, I attended—that is, snuck into—a conference for conservative students journalists held at the New York Athletic Club and sponsored by foundations eager to spread the conservative gospel on college campuses. D’Souza was received at this affair as royalty. And at lunch, I had the good fortune to share a table with him. There he bragged about the Review having made use of a list of Dartmouth alumni it had somehow procured—without the university’s approval—for a mailing. (The university maintained the Review had misappropriated the list and committed a copyright violation.) He and his surrounding acolytes also gloated over an infamous Review article that had outed members of Dartmouth’s Gay Student Association and published excerpts of letters written by the group’s members. (As a result of this article, some members of the group had their sexual orientation disclosed to friends and family members.)
Nine years later, when D’Souza was being hailed upon the publication of his book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus—the Washington Post called him “palpably smart,” “sober-minded,” and a “gentleman”—I wrote a short piece in The Nation and recalled that I had once witnessed him boasting about improperly purloining documents for the gay-naming article.
D’Souza cried foul, claiming that the Review had not used any underhanded means to gain access to information about the members of the Gay Student Association. I searched my old notes, and it seemed I had conflated two overlapping moments from that lunch, misattributing D’Souza’s boast about the alumni mailing list caper to the outing article.
I duly noted this in a subsequent correction. But here’s where it gets interesting. In his response to my original article, D’Souza had maintained that the Review had only printed the names of the officers of the Gay Student Association, and it had located this information, along with the personal letters written by gay students, in publicly available records the group had filed with the school administration. In other words, the Review had done nothing untoward to unearth the names of the gay students it outed; the paper had merely relied on public information submitted by the group itself. (Put aside, for the sake of this tale, the probity—or mean-spiritedness—of outing a fellow student whose sexual orientation might not be known beyond the campus gay community. As the New York Times reported at the time, “One gay student named by the Review, according to his friends, became severely depressed and talked repeatedly of suicide. The grandfather of another who had not found the courage to tell his family of his homosexuality learned about his grandson when he got his copy of the Review in the mail.”)
At first, I took D’Souza at this word, accepting his account that the Review had used public information for its article naming the officers of the Gay Student Association, and conveyed that in the correction. That was a mistake on my part. After D’Souza complained about the correction, I decided to investigate further. I called Dolores Johnson, director of student activities at Dartmouth. She said it was “absolutely untrue” that the documents the GSA had filed with the school were open to the public. Certainly, she explained, the GSA, like all student groups, had provided her office the names of its officers and a constitution (and perhaps letters written by students about the group). But, she said, “I would never give that information out to the public.” And there was this: She pointed out that shortly before the Review published its article naming the gay students, some documents had disappeared from the GSA’s desk in a student center. Johnson noted that these missing documents were the ones cited in the Review story.
So the evidence—at least, Johnson’s account—suggested that foul play had been involved in the outing article. And D’Souza’s self-serving cover story—we obtained the information from public records—was undercut. He had duped me. Not surprisingly, after I returned to this matter in the pages of The Nation to relate Johnson’s description of the events and partially retract the correction, D’Souza did not respond. His silence spoke loudly.
Much of what D’Souza did in college as a rising conservative star foreshadowed the career of ideological nastiness to come. But relishing the outing of gay students (and at that luncheon there was much relishing) and engaging in dirty tricks to obtain those names—well, that speaks not to ideology, but character. And it is but one reason, even if now dusty, why D’Souza warrants little sympathy for being accused of once again breaking the rules to serve his ideological aims.
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Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?
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Mother Jones DC Bureau Chief David Corn joined Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball to discuss the Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell scandals, how the Tea Party benefits when the public loses faith in government, and what happens to the Republic Party when it loses its rising stars.
David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He’s also on Twitter.
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How the Christie and McDonnell Scandals Hurt the GOP, but Help the Tea Party
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I see via TPM that conservative crackpot Dinesh D’Souza has been indicted for violating federal election laws. But is this real fraud, or the sort of picayune thing that anybody might get entangled in simply for not being an expert in the finicky details of campaign finance regs? Here’s the Reuters report:
According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D’Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate’s campaign. The candidate was not named in the indictment.
Hmmm. This would be the real deal. Telling other people to make contributions and then reimbursing them is an obvious no-no, something that D’Souza could hardly plead ignorance about. If this turns out to be true, he’s in trouble.1
1Alternatively, it could be a godsend, something he can milk forever as proof that he’s being hounded by Obama administration thugs determined to shut down their conservative critics.
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This morning, I appeared on CNN’s New Day to discuss my investigation into Animal Planet’s hit reality TV show, Call of the Wildman. (Watch the interview above). My story detailed a cavalier culture of animal treatment on the set of the show, produced by New York’s Sharp Entertainment, including the improper drugging of a zebra and the placement of bats—a protected species in Texas—inside a Houston hair salon to be “rescued” by the show’s star, Ernie Brown Jr., a.k.a. Turtleman. Dan Adler, a senior vice president with the production company, represented the program for the first time in public since the story broke on Tuesday.
Most notable was Adler’s insistence that nothing whatsoever occurred on COTWM sets that could be described as improper: “The idea that there is a culture of neglect or abuse on the show is completely false,” he said. “So many shows out there kill animals for sport or for money. This show is about saving them.” Adler also said that Sharp’s own internal investigation, prompted by a former staffer last May, failed to find anything questionable with production practices.
But at the same time, new evidence is emerging of another case involving legally dubious production activities. In a letter sent in August 2013, Kentucky wildlife officials warned Brown that he was breaking the law.
The letter, made available to Mother Jones, was sent by legal counsel for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, after officials saw footage of Turtleman catching a deer in a consignment store on YouTube—despite the fact that that’s against Kentucky law, according to department spokesman Mark Marraccini.
Addressed to Ernie Brown Jr., the letter states that, “Our regulation…prohibits a NWCO Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator from taking white-tailed deer unless specifically authorized by the Commissioner.” The letter also says Turtleman’s actions breached another state law governing animal welfare, which entails the risk of “criminal citation.”
Also, state law…makes it illegal for any person to take, pursue, or attempt to take or pursue, or otherwise molest an elk, deer, wild turkey, or bear in a manner contrary to the Department’s regulations. Such action may result in the revocation of your NWCO permit…for a minimum of three years and/or a criminal citation.
Mother Jones has filed an open records request with the department to see responses from Turtleman, Sharp Entertainment, or Animal Planet to the department’s letter. We have also approached producers for comment on the incident, with no response. Sharp has previously told Mother Jones that all animals were handled legally by licensed wildlife personnel while on set.
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The deer episode questioned by Kentucky officials involves a buck laying waste to a store, where it has somehow become stranded. Turtleman and his team attempt to corner and chase the deer, and then tackle it to the ground by its antlers, but not before havoc breaks out and crockery crashes to the floor:
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Once Obamacare has been in place for a while, will it become popular enough that Republicans will finally give up their opposition? Maybe, maybe not. But how about the Medicaid expansion? The evidence there might be a little clearer. Here’s Greg Sargent:
The Medicaid expansion, as an issue, is kind of taking on a life of its own, independent of Big Bad Obamacare. In Louisiana, Senator Mary Landrieu has aggressively criticized the rollout of the law, but has also attacked Republicans for refusing to implement the Medicaid expansion. In Georgia, Dem Senate candidate Michelle Nunn has called for fixes to the law while also saying the state should expand Medicaid.
….Meanwhile, the expansion could hold pitfalls for Republicans, because as enrollment mounts, they may be pressed to say whether they really support taking that coverage away from people. Mitch McConnell was recently asked to comment on Kentuckians benefitting from the law, and he filibustered. The GOP Senate candidate in West Virginia is gung ho for repeal but has hedged on the expansion.
Hmmm. Jonathan Bernstein took a quick look at the websites of Republican gubernatorial challengers in blue states that have expanded Medicaid but look like possible Republican pickups. After all the appropriate caveats, he tells us what he found:
And the answer? Nada. Zip. Nothing. None of these Republicans is pledging to repeal the Medicaid expansion put in place by a Democratic governor….I don’t want to make more of this than the evidence can support. But for what it’s worth, early evidence supports the liberal optimist (and conservative pessimist) view: that where it’s in place, Medicaid expansion is here to stay.
If that’s truly the case, then sooner or later Obamacare’s Medicaid component will expand to all 50 states. Eventually, every state will have a governor who is willing to embrace it. Provided that trend is not counteracted by reversals in states that were in the first wave of Medicaid expansion, we’re talking about a one-way street. The only question is how long it takes.
Pushing for Medicaid expansion in the holdout states could turn out to be a solid populist issue for Democrats this year. The argument is simple: It’s free medical care and it doesn’t cost the state anything. Who’s against that? We’ll find out later this how well that argument works.
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Medicaid Expansion May Be a Sleeper Issue for Democrats This Year
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Last week, a rogue black bear made a cameo appearance for skiers at the Heavenly Mountain Resort near Lake Tahoe. The month before, a 260-pound male bear had to be put down by wildlife officials after breaking into several cars and a home in the same area. The spate of run-ins comes as California’s brutal drought lingers on, with snowpack in the Sierra Nevada at a fifth of its normal level, leading several news outlets to suggest that balmy conditions have led bears here to awaken prematurely from their annual winter slumber.
That’s a nice hypothesis, but according to the California Department Fish and Wildlife, there’s nothing to it. Five to 15 percent of the Tahoe area’s 300 black bears stay awake every winter, said CDFW biologist Jason Holley, and “we don’t have any evidence to support that there’s any more this winter.” In fact, Holley said, the last few months of 2013 saw fewer bear complaints than average.
The front page of a recent San Francisco Chronicle. There’s no evidence that more bears are awake this year than in an average year, officials said. Clara Jeffery/Mother Jones
So why all the hullabaloo? Holley’s guess is that the drought cut down supplies of the bears’ natural food sources—mainly grass, berries, and insects, although they’ll eat just about anything—forcing those that are normally awake anyway to wander further afield, i.e., onto your ski slope or into your backyard. Not that the bears mind much.
“They are very adaptive and very mobile, so they will usually be able to take care of their daily needs in a drought situation,” Holley said. “But then they’re coming down to the lake to drink a lot, coming down for food. If the drought persists, it greatly increases the odds of a negative interaction with people.”
What motivates some bears to stay awake while others hibernate is still somewhat of a mystery to scientists, according to Roger Baldwin, a wildlife specialist at the University of California-Davis who has conducted extensive research on bear behavior. When small mammals (a squirrel, say) hibernate, their heart rate and body temperature drop radically, toeing death’s doorstep without actually stepping over, and stay that way for several months. Black bears, on the other hand, are much less extreme: They crank down their metabolism, heart rate, and body temperature just enough to get seriously lazy, but are still with it enough to be “perfectly capable of taking a swipe at you if you crawl into the den with them,” Baldwin said, so rousting them is neither uncommon nor difficult.
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Dozens of Democrats are pushing back against an Obama administration effort to curb racial discrimination by car dealerships.
In late March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the consumer watchdog agency dreamt up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—issued new, voluntary guidelines aimed at ensuring car dealerships are not illegally ripping off minorities. Since then, 13 Senate Democrats, including Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.); and 22 House Dems, including Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Florida) and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), have joined 19 House and Senate Republicans in signing letters to the agency objecting to the anti-discrimination measure. Consumer advocates and congressional aides say the lawmakers’ backlash against the anti-discrimination rules is unjustified, and that Dems have backtracked on civil rights in this instance because of the colossal power of the car dealership lobby, which has spent millions lobbying Congress in the months since the CFPB issued these new guidelines.
Auto dealers “wield enormous amounts of power,” one Democratic aide explains. “There’s one in every district. They give a lot of money to charity. They’re on a bunch of boards. They sponsor Little Leagues.”
When a dealership makes a car loan, it often sells the loan to a bank or credit union, which, in return, allows the dealership to mark up the interest rate. Here’s the problem: Some dealerships have been accused of charging higher rates to black and Hispanic customers, potentially costing consumers millions of dollars in overcharges. The CFPB’s anti-discrimination guidance reminds lenders that they are liable under federal law if car dealerships they work with charge higher interest rates to minority borrowers. The guidance suggests that lenders help prevent discrimination by educating dealers, increasing oversight, and either capping dealership interest rates or requiring dealers to charge a flat fee.
Auto dealers are up in arms. If lenders follow the CFPB’s advice, dealership profits could fall by hundreds of dollars per car sold, according to the Department of Justice. Car dealer trade groups claim that the CFPB has not adequately proved that discrimination is a problem in the industry. Dealerships have spent millions lobbying Congress over the past year, including on this very issue. Many Democrats have the auto dealers’ back. In their letters to the CFPB, Dems claim that they appreciate the CFPB’s goal of curbing discrimination by car dealerships. But they echo the dealers’ arguments, and demand that the CFPB provide the detailed methodology it uses to determine that some dealers may be discriminating.
The CFPB maintains that the way it detects discrimination in the auto industry should be no mystery to Congress. These methods, which are similar to those used by the DOJ and other federal banking regulators, have been used in voting rights cases, discrimination cases, and jury selection cases for decades, a CFPB spokeswoman notes. Here’s how it works: Because customer race and ethnicity data is not available for auto loans, the CFPB uses proxies, including geography and surname, to see if lenders are allowing dealerships to charge higher interest rates to minorities. The CFPB has responded to lawmakers’ requests for this methodology in letters, at a public forum on the issue, and on its website.
If lawmakers don’t trust the feds’ definition of discrimination, they can also look to the courts. In December, the DOJ and the CFPB reached a $98 million settlement with Ally Financial and Ally Bank over claims that Ally’s markup policies resulted in illegal discrimination against over 235,000 minority borrowers. At least seven class-action lawsuits have been filed over the past 14 years that allege auto-dealers unfairly overcharged minorities. And “nothing has really changed in the marketplace” to force auto lenders and dealerships to change their practices, says Chris Kukla, the senior counsel for government affairs at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit consumer rights group.
Car dealers have also complained that regulating the interest rates dealerships can charge will increase costs for consumers. Consumer advocates disagree: “I don’t believe…dealers’ ability to mark up prices…in any way benefits consumers,” says Stuart Rossman, director of litigation the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group. Jeff Sovern, a law professor and expert in consumer law at St. John’s University in New York, adds that the low prices some customers have been paying may have been subsidized by the higher prices paid by minorities. “It’s not usually considered a defense that the beneficiaries of racism should keep the lower prices that other groups pay for,” he says.
So why the outcry amongst Democrats? Congressional aides and consumer advocates say that the auto dealer industry’s lobbying efforts are intense. “Dealers are a powerful lobby,” Kukla says. “These people sell things for a living. They’re good at advocating.”
“I’m not surprised that any politician” would cave to the dealerships, Rossman adds. The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), an industry trade group, has spent $3.1 million on lobbying in 2013, according to lobbying disclosure forms. “The dealerships made a very concerted push to get members of Congress to sign those letters” criticizing the guidance, Kukla says.
None of the 35 Democrats responded to requests for comment for this story, nor did the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers, another industry trade group. NADA declined to comment.
The oddest aspect of Democrats’ push back on the CFPB anti-discrimination measures, advocates say, is that in issuing the guidance, the CFPB didn’t actually create any new regulation or law. “The funny thing is that… the CFPB is getting hit…because someone is actually enforcing rules already on the books,” says the Dem aide.
“It’s not that controversial,” Rossman adds.
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Why did so many Republicans vote for last week’s budget bill? One reason is that they wanted to avoid getting blamed for another government shutdown. As you’ll recall, the last one didn’t turn out so well. But Stan Collender says there’s another reason:
This is real inside-baseball: An omnibus appropriation provided an opportunity for the leadership to buy support from reluctant members by providing more dollars for their pet programs and projects. The demise of earmarks several years ago plus the use of continuing resolutions (which generally don’t provide dollars on a program-by-program basis) to fund the government took that ability away. This was the first appropriations bill in five years where that wasn’t the case.
More…. Virtually every Republican who voted for the bill got some dollars devoted to something, if not many things, that her or his constituents will be very happy to have. In other words, this was the first real return of earmarks since they were banned several years ago and even anti-spending members couldn’t resist.
Earmarks are back, baby! But really, I shouldn’t be so flippant about it. Nobody likes to see the sausage being made, but the truth is that earmarks are a useful part of the legislative process. Sure, they’re a little inefficient, and sure, they can get out of hand. But they don’t increase overall spending, and they do provide congressional leaders with a way to whip their troops into line. Human nature being what it is, leaders need at least a few carrots and sticks in order to get anything done, and this is something they’ve largely lost over the past few decades. It would be a good thing if they got some of them back.
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For its new cover story, GQ magazine has a wide-ranging interview with Democratic fundraiser/pop star Katy Perry, in which the 29-year-old singer chats about her relationship with the president of the United States—and what she’s eager to ask him about. It has to do with space aliens (naturally):
I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens. I look up into the stars and I imagine: How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form? I mean, if my relationship with Obama gets any better, I’m going to ask him that question. It just hasn’t been appropriate yet.
(Regarding her relationship with President Obama, she jokes that she “might have won Wisconsin for him.” Even though she was kidding, The Wire provided a chart-filled debunking of her “claim.”)
Who knows if or when Perry will be able to ask the president about aliens. But in the meantime, it might help her to know that the Obama administration already addressed this more than two years ago. Here’s their answer, written by Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy:
The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet…However, that doesn’t mean the subject of life outside our planet isn’t being discussed or explored. In fact, there are a number of projects working toward the goal of understanding if life can or does exist off Earth…Many scientists and mathematicians have looked with a statistical mindset at the question of whether life likely exists beyond Earth and have come to the conclusion that the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life.
Many have also noted, however, that the odds of us making contact with any of them—especially any intelligent ones—are extremely small, given the distances involved.
So there it is.
Perry, whose interest in politics and humanitarian aid goes far beyond her friendly relationship with the president (she traveled with UNICEF to visit slums and villages in Madagascar last year, for example), is a fiercely liberal person. She even barred her Republican parents from attending a 2013 Obama inauguration concert at which she performed. “My parents are Republicans, and I’m not,” she told Marie Claire. “They didn’t vote for Obama, but when I was asked to sing at the inauguration, they were like, ‘We can come.’ And I was like, ‘No, you can’t. I love you so much, but that—on principle.’ They understood, but I was like, ‘How dare you?’ in a way.”
Here’s video of Perry performing at an Obama 2012 rally in Las Vegas. Her dress makes her political preference clear:
Link:
Major Democratic Fundraiser Katy Perry Vows To Ask Obama About Potential Alien Invaders
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