The Commentariat -- September 26

CW Warning! Cute Kid Story Alert. One of my readers writes of her grandson, "B--n, age four, has always called himself an Obama baby and now is an Obama boy. At his fourth birthday party, he turned over a $20 bill someone had given him and said in a loud voice, "Look, Grandma, it's a picture of Obama's house on the back!"

Here's an excerpt from President Jimmy Carter's White House Diary. AND Steven Weisman reviews the White House Diary for the New York Times.

"Economic Madness." David Cay Johnston of Tax.com reviews the results of the Bush tax cuts: "Examining performance against the promises, what do we find? Overwhelming evidence that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 made us much worse off." Besides the multi-trillion-dollar increase in the federal deficit, average income fell well below the 2000 level; there were more taxpayers but less revenue; there were fewer jobs, less money & lower pay (mostly). Johnson compares the Republican leaders to the doctors who bled George Washington; when it didn't work, the doctors bled him more, killing him. ...

... The Editors of the New York Times tear the Republican "Pledge" to pieces. Sample:

The best way to understand the pledge is as a bid to co-opt the Tea Party by a Republican leadership that wants to sound insurrectionist but is the same old Washington elite. These are the folks who slashed taxes on the rich, turned a surplus into a crushing deficit, and helped unleash the financial crisis that has thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes. ...

... Economics Prof. Richard Thaler in the New York Times: "... the Republican position is, in effect, that if the rich can’t share in the bounty, rates should rise for everyone.... The question comes down to whether we want a society in which the rich take an ever-increasing share of the pie, or prefer to return to conditions that allow all classes to anticipate an increasing standard of living. Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist. Tea Partiers, take note."

Glenn Greenwald is apoplectic about the DOJ's abuse of the "state secrets" doctrine in a case brought by the father of suspected terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, asking the court to prevent the President from assassinating his son, who is a U.S. citizen. ...

... Marcy Wheeler finds more errors in the DOJ's argument in the case in a post she titles, "Obama doesn't know why the fuck he's entitled to kill Al-Awlaki; he just is, damnit." ...

     ... The Washington Post backstory: "The Obama administration urged a federal judge early Saturday to dismiss a lawsuit over its targeting of a U.S. citizen for killing overseas, saying that the case would reveal state secrets. The U.S.-born citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, is a cleric now believed to be in Yemen."

... Let's Not Leave out the FBI. Andrew Cohen of Politics Daily: Pittsburgh agent gets on-the-job-training trampling First Amendment rights of peaceful demonstrators. The agency covers it up, right up to & including the FBI Director's lying to Congress. The media say, "So?" ...

     Update: the New York Times Editorial Board warns the FBI against "backsliding into the[J. Edgar] Hoover days."

Ezra Klein has "a plan that will raise wages, lower prices, increase the nation's stock of scientists and engineers, and maybe even create the next Google. Better yet, this plan won't cost the government a dime. In fact, it'll save money. A lot of money. But few politicians are going to want to touch it. Here's the plan: More immigration." Klein explains.

Michael Cooper of the New York Times: "Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs within weeks unless Congress extends one of the more effective job-creating programs in the $787 billion stimulus act: a $1 billion New Deal-style program that directly paid the salaries of unemployed people so they could get jobs in government, at nonprofit organizations and at many small businesses."

On SNL, New York's Gov. David Paterson sets the record straight:

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "Democratic candidates across the country are opening a fierce offensive of negative advertisements against Republicans, using lawsuits, tax filings, reports from the Better Business Bureau and even divorce proceedings...." ...

... CW: but Greg from Austin, Texas (#15), has a better idea (read his whole comment):

The highly fractious, overly cautious, intensely nuanced, clutch-the-pearls-and-head-for-the-fainting-couch Democrats need to get a grip and find a message fast. Like the one that they keep swatting away from their eyes like a gnat. The one where they highlight and embrace what they've done so far and contrast it with what the Republicans did in their eight years in power: enrich the rich and bankrupt this country while telling us peons to wave the flag and pray.

Victor Koen artwork for the New York Times.John Harwood, writing in the New York Times, likens the 2010 elections to the 1982 mid-term elections when an unpopular Ronald Reagan managed to lose "only" 26 House seats to Democrats.

James Oliphant in the Los Angeles Times: "Galvanized by the lightning-in-a-bottle success of conservative 'tea party' candidates, moderate Republicans and others in the political center are looking for ways to push back against what they see as an advancing tide of ideological extremism. The efforts are loosely organized and embryonic, but politicians, advocacy groups and others are piecing together a framework to promote moderate candidates...."

Maureen Dowd writes of Republican nominees for high office, "We seem beset with spellbinding hybrids with the looks of Fox News anchors, the brains of mice and the power of changing the direction of the country." ...

... CW: one thing we can count on: the abstinence-only crowd will do nothing to fund contraception research & distribution, which Nicholas Kristof points out "is necessary to overcome global poverty."

Kevin Dolak of ABC News: "Nearly 100 pastors across the country planned to take part in Pulpit Freedom Sunday, an in-your-face challenge Sunday to what the government says can and cannot be said in church." CW: of course religious leaders, like all citizens, have a First Amendment right to publicly support or denounce political candidates. What they don't have a right to is tax-free status. So let 'em speak out & pay taxes. It's fine by me.

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times: "Whether it is about killing or simply about being out in the woods, in the cold and wet of fall dragging a big animal over steep terrain, hunting is just not cool to many young people. Fewer hunting licenses were sold in Colorado in 2008 than in any other year since 1979, according to the most recent figures from the State Division of Wildlife."

Anita Kumar of the Washington Post: "Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is on track to restore voting rights to more felons than either of his Democratic predecessors - a surprising development for a conservative Republican who served as a law-and-order attorney general. He has won praise from African Americans and civil rights groups for scrapping plans to require essays as part of felons' applications and vowing instead to act on each case within 60 days."

Gillian Wong of the AP: "China .... recently became the world's second largest economy. Yet it gets more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid — and taxpayers and lawmakers in donor countries are increasingly asking why."

As long as modern technology continues to progress, there will be human-caused disasters of one kind or another. The greater the powers unleashed by technology, the bigger the disasters get. -- Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, on the Gulf oil disaster

The Kennedy-Nixon "Great Debate" September 26, 1960

On the 50th anniversary of "The Great Debate" between presidential candidates Vice President Richard Nixon & Sen. John Kennedy, historian & former Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen, who was a witness to history, explores & explodes some of the myths surrounding the debate. Here's the transcript of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. Here are good-quality videos taken from a kinescope of that first debate, provided by The Film Archive:

The Commentariat -- September 25

** Larry's Not-so-Brilliant Career. Maxwell Strachen, in Salon, reports on Larry Summers' biggest blunders. CW: Summers is reportedly returning to Harvard to teach about job creation. How did this train wreck/blowhard get so arrogant?

Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times: corrupt Iraqi officials made off with $1.4 million worth of computers purchased by the U.S. & designated for Iraqi schoolchildren. The U.S. has forced the Iraqi government to investigate, sort of, & some computers have been recovered.

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar & Jennifer Agiesta of the AP: "President Barack Obama's health care overhaul has divided the nation, and Republicans believe their call for repeal will help them win elections in November. But ... a new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by 2-to-1."

My link to biographer Ron Chernow's excellent op-ed in yesterday's New York Times got lost in the ether, so better late than never. Chernow addresses the Tea Party's ahistorical view of the Constitution & its authors. "The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything." They definitely did not agree on how the Constitution should be interpreted, & George Washington himself came down on the side of a strong federal government.

The Republicans, I think, merged with the Tea Party, and in many instances they're finding out it's the Donner Party, because it's knocking off Republicans left and right. -- DNC Chair Tim Kaine

... Dana Milbank, a Donner descendant, thinks Kaine was unfair to the Donners (stranded in the Sierras & starving, the Donners resorted to dining on their own dead): "Republicans have been doing things to each other that would make a Donner's stomach turn." Milbank cites some examples of Republicans gleefully eating their own.

Gail Collins: Republican Sens. Jim DeMint & Tom Coburn, for no good reason, have put a hold on a bill that would allow the creation of a National Woman's History Museum which would be privately-funded. Coburn's "reason" is that there are already plenty of museums with women in them....

... CW: I liked Akhilleus' (#5) explanation: "National Women's History Museum. Now can you think of four things far right extremists like DeMint find more unappealing?" Karen Garcia (#4) thinks that if Meryl Streep, who gave $1MM to the women's museum & is playing former British PM & Reagan chum Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming film, should testify before Congress, in character, which will "bring back such fond memories of Uncle Ronnie the Republicans will ... give her whatever she wants."

Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post asks a question on the minds of many of us: why let Bob Woodward into the White House? She doesn't answer the question, but she does make some thoughtful observations about President Obama's decision-making process, as Woodward describes it.

A.G. Sulzberger of the New York Times: "Judicial elections that were designed to be as apolitical as possible are suddenly as contentious as any another race."

Andrew Lehren of the New York Times: "Experts say that weak oversight of the 2.7 million miles of gas pipeline in the United States has contributed to hundreds of episodes that have killed 60 people in the last five years."

Gardiner Harris of the New York Times: under the Obama Administration, the Food & Drug Administration has become more transparent & more flexible as demonstrated by their unusual decision on the controversial diabetes drug Avandia.

In 2003, Christine O'Donnell vowed to "stop the whole country from having sex. Yeah, yeah.... Kids are not dogs in heat":

"Evolution Is a Myth." As promised, Bill Mahar has more. From his ABC show, "Politically Incorrect":