Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux have just written a very scary article, Blacklisted: the Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist. Basically, it documents that it doesn’t take much of anything for the government to label you a terrorist. Being associated with someone who the government suspects of being a terrorist can be enough. But the problem really isn’t how broad a net the government is casting. It is how vague a net it is casting.

The problem here is that this is how the Soviet Union worked. Basically everyone there was guilty of multiple crimes against the state. You couldn’t really get through life without doing things that were technically wrong but which everyone did. And it was just fine—as long as you didn’t bother anyone in power. Once you did that, then you were screwed. The law came down on you hard. I’m not suggesting that this is the case in the United States, but it is certain that we are moving in that direction, and have been for at least a century.

One line from the article really got to me, “They also define as terrorism any act that is ‘dangerous’ to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.” It is the second part of that sentence that really bothers me. The reason is that I kind of agree that intimidation is a form of terrorism. Remember when Sharron Angle said, “I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.” That was intimidation: elect me or there will be armed revolt. Remember when Ted Nugent said, “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” That was intimidation: if Obama wins re-election, I will try to kill him. Remember when Sarah Palin tweeted, “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”? That was intimidation. Do you want more? Media Matters provided a small list in, Conservative Media Figures Have History of Violent Rhetoric.

But you know you will never see Sharron Angle or Ted Nugent or Sarah Palin labeled a terrorist. The biggest reason is that they are part of the power elite and so are effectively untouchable. But it is also that they are on the right wing. The government has a history of being more worried about non-violent peace protesters than the Second Amendment brigade. (And maybe they should be; I think most of the Second Amendment shouters are actually cowards.) So you can depend upon whatever rules the government comes up with to be used against anyone working for change that the power elite doesn’t want.

Consider this wonderful sentence from the rule book, “Although irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary, to be reasonable, suspicion should be as clear and as fully developed as circumstances permit.” In a strictly legal sense, I think this means that someone can be reasonably suspected of being a terrorist just because someone wants them to be. Given that I am not only not a terrorist, but a person committed to nonviolence, the circumstances would not permit any evidence being obtained to suspect me of terrorism. Therefore, the government ought to be able to label me as a suspected terrorist with no evidence at all. They won’t, of course; I’m no threat to the power elite. But this kind of wide open legalistic rule book for labeling terrorists is already being misused and will only be misused more in the future.

You question me? Read:

Evo Morales is not terrorist, but he is a leftist, which appears to be close enough. And while Nabih Berri is a conservative, he’s also Lebanese. Need I say more?

If this all sounds like I’ve lost my mind, go read the whole article. It’s even worse than I’m making it out. The “Watchlisting Guidance” document should be called the “Wishlisting Guidance” document, because it pretty much allows the government to target anyone they want for any reason they want. But I don’t suppose that comes as a shock to any of my readers. To give you an idea, let me quote from the end of the article at length. While you’re reading it, ask yourself if it doesn’t sound like something out of a Kafka novel:

Remember: when they hand you the knife, you are expected to kill yourself; but you don’t have to; if forced, they will do it for you.

One of my many minor addictions is checking The Upshot‘s Senate Forecast every day. And it is not the simple thrill of seeing what “today’s number” is. For the record, today’s number is 53%—the Republicans have a 53% chance of retaking the Senate, which The Upshot classifies as a “toss up.”

There is much more, though! They also provide up to date forecasts from five other organizations that do this kind of work. These include the Cook Political Report, which does old fashioned analysis and is never, it would seem, willing to go out on a limb. For example, it says that Montana leans toward Republican Steve Daines and against Democrat John Walsh, even though Walsh’s own mother wouldn’t think he has a shot—barring Daines having a fatal heart attack.

Also on the list is Five Thirty Eight, which is what The Upshot replaced at The New York Times. They tend to agree rather well with The Upshot, but it seems that Nate Silver just isn’t that interested in politics anymore. They don’t run their model all that often.

But the real outlier is The Monkey Cage model, now sadly supported by the Washington Post. It is a political science driven model and it does not paint a rosy picture of the Senate come next year. They currently give the Republicans an 87% chance of taking the Senate.

For a long time, I’ve said that the Democrats have a 50-50 change of keeping the Senate. But I am also a “fundamentals” guy. And political scientists have gotten really good at predicting elections—especially from a long way out. And I have to say that I go along with the fundamentals. It is looking more and more like the Republicans will take the Senate in November. But it is important to remember a two things.

First, if they take it, it isn’t going to be a “wave” election. They will have 51 or 52 seats. So it isn’t going to be that big a deal, and they are going to lose the Senate come 2016. Barring a Supreme Court opening, there isn’t likely to be much in the way of change, regardless.

Second, it does not mean that “the people” have turned against Obama or the Democrats or liberalism or anything else. It means that there were roughly twice as many Democrats running for re-election as Republicans. And it also means that angry old rich white people show up to the polls for midterm elections a lot more than calm young poor multi-ethnic people do. Forgive me while I rant for a paragraph.

I am so tired of this idea that Americans are constantly changing their minds about politics. This year they like the Democrats! Next year they like the Republicans! No, no, no! Pretty much year after year, people are the same. They don’t change. All that really changes is who is willing to make the effort to vote. And in this country, we have decided that we don’t believe in a fair democracy. So we make it far easier for rich people to vote than for poor people. So it isn’t even that liberal voters are less inclined to vote, it is just that in general, it is harder for them: they have less time and their polling places are poorly staffed. Regardless, whatever the election result, it doesn’t mean that anything has changed in the mind of the typical American from 2012.

Having ranted that, there is one thing that gives me hope. The Democrats are spending a lot more money this election on efforts to get out the vote. If this works and the electorate looks more like it does during a presidential election, then all the models will be wrong and the Democrats will do much better—almost certainly holding onto the Senate. We will have to see. I’ve been arguing for this for a long time. All this business about attracting the “swing” voter is just madness. You want to know my definition of a swing voter: a Democrat (Republican) who just isn’t yet willing to say he is going to vote for the Democrat (Republican). So the new Democratic approach is a good one. We will have to see how effective they are at it.

Sometimes, I think I’m too hard on myself. There really is a big difference between being cynical and simply seeing reality clearly. This came to mind this morning reading Dean Baker, Why Would Anyone Think Republican Opposition to Obamacare Is Based on Ideology as Opposed to Just Money. It is in reference to an article by Jonathan Cohn. Now, as regular readers know, I think Jonathan Cohn is absolutely essential reading on healthcare issues. But he made the mistake of claiming, “[Republicans] simply don’t believe in universal health care.”

The truth is that no one knows for certain why Republicans absolutely, positively think Obamacare is the end of freedom in America, when it was their idea in the first place and they were all for it before the Democrats agreed to it. There are actually two parts to this, that I have discussed at various times in various ways. The main thing is that the whole Heritage Foundation plan that Obamacare is based on was never meant to be actual policy. It was only used to shoot down any more liberal policy like single-payer healthcare. This is what Jonathan Chait labeled, The Heritage Uncertainty Principle. The idea is that conservative healthcare reform only exists as long as it has no hope of implementation. The moment it becomes plausible, it is denounced by the very same conservatives as, “Socialism! Socialism, I tell you!”

Baker takes on the other half of the issue. But I’ve been talking about the same thing for years: the reason that Republicans hate Obamacare has nothing to do with the individual mandate or “freedom” or any of the dozens of other reasons they claim the law is Satan’s spawn. The reason they hate it is the one reason they never talk about explicitly: it raised taxes on the rich. Now it is true, that occasionally, a Republican will talk about how it raised taxes, but they will imply that it raised taxes on everyone and it didn’t. It didn’t raise taxes on a single person I know, and one of them is a millionaire.

Baker provides the scenario:

Is this cynical? Actually, no. Political parties have constituencies. The Republican Party’s main constituency is the rich. They also pander to social conservatives and racists, but this is just out of necessity. There aren’t many rich people. And the social conservative and racist appeals don’t bother the interests of the rich, and (as with welfare “reform”) can often be used to further the interests of the rich.

I’ll admit: looking at the the world this way is Machiavellian. But the point of The Prince is to show a young ruler how to stay in power. It’s not like I think that all people would kill you as soon as look at you, if they thought they could get away with it. I actually believe in altruism and that it is a big part of how our species has managed to make it this far. But political parties survive by serving constituencies. This is how they are supposed to work. The only reason the Democratic Party is better than the Republican Party is that it serves a much bigger and more diverse constituency.

So yeah, Republican opposition to Obamacare is all about money. Most of the people who vote for Republicans don’t realize this of course. But all you have to do is look at the Tea Party to understand. A lot of the Republican base was very unhappy about the TARP bank bailout. (So were a lot of the Democratic base!) They grumbled but nothing happened. Then, when a Democrat was in the White House and actual homeowners were going to be helped, the group sprouted. It didn’t sprout because Rick Santelli ranted—he does that five days per week. It sprouted because the conservative elite took that same grumbling and pushed it via Fox News, hate radio, and well funded events!

But it’s all about what the rich want. And maybe someday, the people in the poorer classes who vote Republican will realize that the party doesn’t actually represent them. But that’s a different issue. In terms of looking at actual Republican Party policy, all you have to do is look at what the super rich want.

Over the weekend, Thomas Frank wrote, Right-Wing Obstruction Could Have Been Fought: an Ineffective and Gutless Presidency’s Legacy Is Failure. Nothing that Frank ever writes should be dismissed, but sadly, the article doesn’t live up to its title. It is actually about what Obama’s legacy will be, and he takes what I think is a rather naive view. Reading it, one would get the impression that Frank actually believed all Obama’s wonderful rhetoric during the 2008 campaign. And I don’t think that’s true; Frank is far too clearheaded a political observer.

In 2008, I was far too involved in creating devices to hung on airplanes to stream realtime video to a computer on the ground 15 km away to be paying too much attention to politics. Maybe it was because I wasn’t terribly involved that I could see that Obama was just another New Democrat—a centrist who was as revolutionary are George III. It was only in 2010 that we found out that Obama actually thought of himself as a “blue dog” Democrat—a conservative democrat, and given how conservative the Democratic Party has become over the last 25 years, that’s pretty conservative.

What’s sad—tragic really—about Obama, is that in his mind, he probably really did think he could bring the parties together. After all, he truly was a centrist! Unlike with Frank who can’t be as naive as he implies, I do think Obama was that naive. But I could have told him before he got into office. During the Clinton years, I was a libertarian. And I was shocked, but amused, that conservatives ranted about how he was a socialist. It didn’t matter that Clinton was the most conservative Democratic President since Woodrow Wilson, the Republicans were going to pretend that he was Joseph Stalin, even as they would have embraced him had he been a Republican.

So I know just how Obama’s presidential library is going to talk about him. It will focus on Obamacare. It will focus on the huge deficit when he came in and how much lower it was when he got out. It will talk about how the economy improved. And there will be the other minor accomplishments like Dodd-Frank. What there won’t be is a lot of talk about fundamentally transforming Washington. And there won’t be that for two reasons. First, Obama never meant by that what the people who voted for him thought it meant. To him, the two parties were going to meet in between Obama who was already in the middle and the far right; no one voted for that, but that was what was in Obama’s mind. Second, Obama didn’t even manage to accomplish that because however lowly I may think of Obama, the Republicans really are just a crazy, power for power’s sake party.

Unfortunately, Kevin Drum responded to Frank’s article with his own, If the Left Wants Scapegoats, Just Look in the Mirror. Drum is a very good and insightful writer; I like him a lot. But as wrong as Frank is, Drum is even wronger. He argues that Obama did only what he could because America just isn’t that liberal, and the fault goes to people like Drum and Frank who couldn’t convince them of the rightness of our cause. Well, that’s an argument I hear a lot. And it just isn’t true. I care about economics, but let’s look at a social issue: same sex marriage. That’s an area where Obama just followed along behind public opinion. Thomas Frank is right to characterize the last six years as “an ineffective and gutless presidency.”

Then, after the 2010 election, Obama acted as though it were an indication of what “America” wanted. What it was, was what the conservative base wanted. Obama’s young and diverse base didn’t show up at the polls in high enough numbers. This is Political Science 101 stuff. But he at least pretended that he didn’t know this. He pretended that the nation had sent him a message. And he allowed the catastrophic Budget Control Act of 2011, which is a big reason our economic recovery is so anemic to this day.

Ultimately, by 2011, I don’t think that Obama was naive. He really did want a Grand Bargain. He really was a Blue Dog Democrat all along. He really was more concerned about the budget deficit in 2011 than he was 9% unemployment. But I think he did about as well as could be expected. And on bad days, I think he is about the best we can expect from a president in a time of billion dollar campaigns.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Obama will get his library and it will say he was great, just like all the other ones say that their presidents were great. And none of it matters. Because after he leaves office, Obama will have a great life. Why shouldn’t he? They all do. Bush the Younger had a catastrophic presidency, but he is still admired by huge numbers of people, he’s still invited to all the best parties, he’s still rich and powerful. All the same will be true of Obama. It won’t matter to him.

As for how “the people” will remember Obama? I wrote about this last year, Obama and Buono and Christie:

And it’s because of that that Thomas Frank is mostly right about Obama and Kevin Drum is totally wrong.

I have started a habit of most nights quickly checking out what was on the MSNBC primetime lineup. Normally, it doesn’t take more than ten minutes, because all the shows are pretty much the same, and they are just reporting stuff that I’ve already read about. But in doing that last night, I came upon the image at the left. It was from yet another anti-immigrant protest. It is notable that most of the people in it were African American. It reminds me of a parallel universe Dean Martin, “Everybody Hates Somebody.”

That wasn’t what caught my eye, however. I was shocked to see that sign, “You Can’t Fix Stupid!!” I know the line. It is from stand-up comedian Ron White. Now, I really don’t much like him. I admire his skill. Much of his material is funny. But I don’t like the whole, “whisky-soaked, cigar smoking, redneck who got rich and smokes pot” routine. For one thing, it strikes me the way most country music does: inauthentic. And not only does his audience seem to eat up the act, they think he’s wise. (And just to offend educated liberals too: I have a similar problem with Louis CK.)

Despite my general problems with him, White’s “You Can’t Fix Stupid” routine is actually kind of sweet—or as close as he comes to it. He’s saying that you shouldn’t marry for looks (actually “looks alone”). He says that you can fix pretty much any physical defect (all referred to females, of course; he looks like he might be getting to lap band surgery territory himself); but you can’t fix stupid. I have my own problems with this because I think the whole idea of intelligence is kind of a myth. But the overall idea is that you should marry someone because of what’s inside, not what’s outside. So hooray!

But what on earth is a sign that reads “You Can’t Fix Stupid!!” doing at an anti-immigration demonstration? I really don’t know. I fear that it is saying that people from Mexico and Central America are stupid. I hate to think that. In addition to everything else, it is demonstrably false. An unaccompanied 7-year-old who makes it all the way from El Salvador through Mexico to the United States boarder, is not stupid. And in general, the people who come here illegally are the most intelligent and motivate of people. I have far more respect for them than some random American whose only brilliance was that he was born here.

The problem is, I can’t find another compelling explanation for the sign. It could refer to the government’s response to the crisis. But I really think that’s reaching. If we can’t fix the stupidity of the government, then why are these people demonstrating. And barring any truly bizarre explanations, like the protesters also selling tickets to an upcoming Ron White appearance, I can’t think of anything else. If anyone else has any ideas, I’d appreciate hearing them. Because I really don’t like to think of my fellow Americans like this.

There has been an issue that has been making its way through the courts. Because of some sloppy language in the ACA (Obamacare), it would appear that people who live in a state that has not set up its own healthcare exchange are not qualified for the federal subsidies that are one of the cornerstones of the new law. The fact that people are attacking the law from this position just shows how low conservatives will sink. All it means is that poor and middle class people in red states will be harmed. And it is done simply to make a statement that they don’t like Obama—it really has nothing even to do with the law.

Clearly, this was not the intent of the law, but a pedantic reading of the law would indicate this. So I wasn’t at all surprised to learn this morning of a “2-to-1 ruling by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.” Now that’s not the whole court, so it will undoubtedly be appealed to the full court. And then it will be appealed to the Supreme Court. It didn’t bother me, because I’m actually pretty optimistic (maybe just naive) that the “originalists” on the court will look at the law and say, “Clearly the intent was to provide subsidies for everyone.” What’s more, there seems to me to be issues of equality. A federal law applies differently to you depending upon what state you live in?!

Well, The New York Times reported that within hours, another appeals court ruled the other way, Courts Issue Conflicting Rulings on Health Care Law. According to it, “The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, upheld the subsidies, saying that a rule issued by the Internal Revenue Service was ‘a permissible exercise of the agency’s discretion.'”

The one dissent on the DC panel was Judge Harry Edwards, who said that the only reason for the suit was an “attempt to gut” Obamacare. He also said that the White House’s broader reading of the law was “permissible and reasonable, and, therefore, entitled to deference.” This is pretty much what the Richmond Court found as well.

In a sidebar to the article, there is a quote from David Klemencic, the owner of a carpet store in West Virginia. He is one of the plaintiffs in the case. He said, “If I have to start paying out for health insurance, it will put me out of business.” It’s an interesting thing to say when the case has absolutely nothing to do with his business. But as I said: this is how far conservatives will sink. And this is how ignorant conservatives are, because Obamacare doesn’t apply to Klemencic’s small sole proprietorship. So basically what he’s saying is that even though he doesn’t have to provide healthcare for his employees, he’s really angry that they might be able to get it without his help. (Assuming he even has employees and if he doesn’t, I don’t know what he’s talking about.) There so should be a special level of hell for people like that.

Klemencic also wrote an OpEd in Inc, Why I Am Fighting the Health-Care Law. It’s just a bunch of Republican talking points, ending with, “For me, though, the loss of liberty is Obamacare’s real threat.” Jeez! Based upon some of the statistics he quotes, I assume he either didn’t write it, or got lots of help.

So overall, I’d say this is a good day for Obamacare. It’s even a good day for David Klemencic, although he may never realize it.