Saturday
Jan182014
The Commentariat -- Jan. 19, 2014
Internal links removed.
Ellen Nakashima & Greg Miller of the Washington Post: "President Obama's intention to end the government's controversial practice of amassing the phone records of millions of Americans faces a tangle of technical, logistical and political problems that defy ready solutions and are largely beyond the president's control. Among the challenges is stiff resistance from phone companies that do not want to be told how long to hold their customers' data if the government does not collect it, especially if that means longer than they do now." ...
... ** Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center, in a New York Times op-ed: "Now that Google and AT&T can track us more closely than any N.S.A. agent, it appears that the Madisonian Constitution may be inadequate to defend our privacy and dignity in the 21st century." ...
... ** David Cole, a law professor writing in the New York Review of Books, takes a balanced look at Chelsea Mannings' & Edward Snowden's leaks.
Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, focuses on growing income inequality in this documentary film, "The One Percent":
... Wherein Paul Krugman explains elementary statistics to David Brooks. Thanks to Nisky Guy for the link. See, if you say, "The top 5% ate all the cookies," but it turns out the top 1% ate 100 times as many cookies as did the next 4%, you might not be exactly lying, but you'd be mighty misleading. ...
... Wherein Krugman explains (to an unnamed person who is David Brooks) why sociological explanations don't account for income inequality. See also yesterday's Commentariat.
Elisabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times: "Specialists earn an average of two and often four times as much as primary care physicians in the United States, a differential that far surpasses that in all other developed countries.... That earnings gap has deleterious effects: Only an estimated 25 percent of new physicians end up in primary care, at the very time that health policy experts say front-line doctors are badly needed.... More specialists mean more tests and more expensive care.
Trip Gabriel, et al., of the New York Times take the West Virginia chemical leak national, fingering Senator (& former coal magnate) Joe Manchin (FakeD-W.Va.), among others, for promoting coal & other energy interests over health & safety.
In a New York Times op-ed, Greg Grandin equates today's Tea Party racists with Amasa Delano, the protagonist in Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno, and President Obama to Babo, the leader of a slave revolt aboard the foundering slave ship Delano visits.
Eric Lyman of the Washington Post: "Pope Francis on Wednesday (Jan. 15) took his biggest step yet at cleaning house at the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank, replacing most of the institution's advisers with fresh faces."
Congressional Race
CW: A few weeks ago, the Tampa Bay Times published a longish story on former Rep. Bill Young's first marriage & family. According to the family, Rep. Young, who died last year, left his wife Marian & married his second wife Beverly in the messiest of ways. Reporter Andrew Meacham picked up on the story as the result of Bill's first family coming forward after his death. ...
... All of this mightily pissed off Beverly Young, who wrote a scathing, ungrammatical entry on FaceBook, where she posts a scathing, ungrammatical letter she says she sent to the St. Pete Times. Although Beverly Young reserves most of her invective for the Times & Meacham, she claims Democrat Alex Sink, who is running for the open seat, is complicit: "The fact that Alex Sink is a widow disgusts me that she can't show an ounce of compassion for what I and my family are going through at this time, but instead, she has chosen to participate in these hateful attacks on Bill to attempt to hurt the Republican Party."
Local News
... By Ruben Bolling in Daily Kos. Please click on the site. I like to give artists their due. Thanks.
"Follow the Money." Steve Kornacki of NBC News: "Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie's administration warned a New Jersey mayor[, Dawn Zimmer of Hoboken,] earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc. With video. Thanks to contributor Victoria D. for the link. ...
... CW: I figured Bridgegate was much ado about little & that it could hurt Christie only if he tried to cover it up. Now it looks as if Bridgegate could hurt him, & Christie's attempts to distance himself from it will prolong the story, giving reporters time to dig up other examples of Christie & his team's strongarming officials & maybe doing more serious stuff. The Hoboken story, like the Fort Lee story, looks especially bad because the people who really got hurt were ordinary citizens -- in this case storm victims. Governors play favorites all the time, but most have the sense to be more subtle about it & not use federal money for bribes &/or retribution. After all, Nixon's undoing began with news of a "two-bit burglary." ...
... Update. Ezra Klein agrees with me: " These stories are beginning to build. Each new revelation makes the past scandals more believable -- and more damaging. And each new story intensifies the media's efforts to find more. The problem for Christie isn't what his aides did. It's what they thought he wanted them to do." ...
... MEANWHILE, Michael Barbaro, et al., of the New York Times, demonstrate that Republican "leaders" remain clueless (or completely cynical): "Party leaders are urging the governor to let go of a trademark Christie trait: his fierce loyalty to old friends and high school classmates who have risen with him in state government. It is time, they counsel, for him to recruit a more nationally savvy political team that can take him beyond Trenton to Washington." CW: Yeah, the real problem is Christie's "fierce loyalty." That's what I thought all along; Christie's superhuman virtues are the cause of his troubles. Life is so unfair.
... Martin Longman in the Washington Monthly: "... even though it's nothing new for a New Jersey governor to throw his weight around to smooth a redevelopment project, holding up disaster relief funding is unconscionable, showing again that the Christie administration has taken traditional Jersey corruption to a whole new level." Read the whole post. Longman notes, among other helpful observations, "It's significant that Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno is implicated in this scheme because she would succeed Chris Christie in the governor's office if he felt it necessary to resign." ...
... digby: "This strikes me as a bigger deal than the traffic snarl. Hurricane Sandy is Christie's bipartisan boy scout badge, the big story that made him a national figure. If it turns out he was actually using it for nefarious purposes I think it permanently damages his image." ...
... Carol Leonnig, et al., of the Washington Post: "... many [New Jersey] Democratic mayors ... made clear that they thought endorsing Christie's reelection bid likely directly benefited their towns in the pursuit of Sandy recovery aid and other state support." ...
... Jeanne B. points to this helpful Wall Street Journal chart, which shows the key players in the Christie scandal. As Jeanne suggests, the chart, published Friday, is already outdated; it doesn't include Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer who has alleged -- with evidence -- that the Christie machine deprived her city of Hurricane Sandy funds because she wouldn't totally acquiesce to a development scheme Christie favored.
Frank Bruni: a cruel Texas law forces a hospital to keep a brain-dead pregnant woman on "life" support because she was 14 weeks pregnant at the time she suffered a pulmonary embolism that effectively ended her life. The chances of her bearing a healthy child are slim.
Right Wing World
This Was Inevitable. Kyle Mantyla of Right Wing Watch: "On his radio show [Tuesday, popular fundamentalist preacher] Bryan Fischer called for ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, as well as the elimination of the minimum wage ... all in order to help the poor and those struggling to make ends meet, of course. So logically this discussion resulted in Fischer eventually calling for a return to an electoral system in which only people who own property can vote." With video.
... Steve Benen: "Let's also not forget that Fischer is a fairly high-profile figure in conservative media -- in recent years, a wide variety of Republicans from the U.S. Senate and U.S. House have appeared on Fischer's program. In advance of the 2012 presidential race, roughly half the Republican candidates in the field cozied up to Fischer, despite his extremist views."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said on Sunday that he had invited Iran to an international peace conference to end the war in Syria. The announcement drew immediate objections from American officials, who suggested that Iran had not met all the conditions for attending and that the invitation might need to be withdrawn."
Los Angeles Times: "Air Force officers responsible for safeguarding and operating nuclear-armed missiles at a base in Montana cheated for years on monthly readiness tests, but rarely faced punishment even though some commanders were aware of the misconduct, according to three former officers who served at the base. Their assertions shed new light on a cheating scandal involving 34 officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, who are under investigation for improperly sharing information about exam questions and failing to report the alleged misconduct.... The cheating scandal came to light when Air Force investigators looking into drug possession involving two Malmstrom officers came across text messages in which dozens of officers allegedly shared details about a test last September...."
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Reader Comments (7)
That's an interesting Jamie Johnson film. Not particularly good or revealing or startling, but maybe an indication of something better to come.
Two Krugmans in a row may be worth a little tune:
http://billmoyers.com/2013/01/10/weve-got-the-paul-krugman-blues-today/
forwarded to me by one of our sons.
A parallel with RC may strike only me. Both Krugman and RC can be a bit bluish at times. but I can't get enough.
In the Times a piece on wealth addiction by recovering derivatives trader Sam Polk. In brief: Just as booze or food can become addictive, so can money, and like drunk drivers those who are in the grasp of money addiction are insensible to anything but their own immediate needs. I'm not sure that anything can change the public's attitude toward the rapaciously rich from fawning admiration (when viewed in short enough doses, even cocaine addicts with unlimited supply can provoke envy) to sympathetic scorn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html?action=click&contentCollection=Sunday%20Review®ion=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article
Late yesterday, I began to watch a fairly recent documentary called "The Flaw" about the credit bubble that caused the financial crash. Thinking I was going to give my eyeballs a rest midway through the film, I moseyed over to Reality Chex where I THEN found myself viewing the entire Johnson film.
Had heard about it when this (mid-2000's) project was underway, but was unaware of its release. It had a certain naiveté and perhaps wasn't the most smoothly told tale—but, none-the-less offered intriguing insights.
The interview with Milton Friedman was especially provocative. The dismissive Mr. Friedman did not come across well. It reinforced why I never bought into his positions touted during the Reagan years. He struck me as an irritating little man who held a high opinion of himself (and whose trousers were too short).
(Note to self: Must look up what criteria the Nobel Peace Prize committee considers when designating a Laureate for his/her economic contributions. Seems quite the contrast between the efforts of Friedman vs. Krugman/Steiglitz).
One surprise was the segment re maybe-not-so Mr. Nice-Guy billionaire, Warren Buffet. Second surprise, gained new respect for Bill Gates, Sr. — seems a very down-to-earth guy.
Back to 'The Flaw" — so far I've watched Alan Greenspan mumbling his usual evasive excuses in front of Henry Waxman's Congressional hearings. Yes, he somewhat confessed, "...there probably was 'a flaw' in his thinking about self-regulating markets, but, but, but.....yada, yada..." Yeah, still who'd have imagined? The film also contains excellent interviews with Robert Schiller, Steiglitz, Robert Reich, among others.
Both films reinforce the increasing frustration and anger with income inequality and how we got here.
"they lack democratic legitimacy", so says the author in the piece in the the New York review of books about the overseers of spying at the NSA. If Daniel Ellsberg spent months photocopying at the age of 40, should the harddrive toting Snowden be punished worse because he is 30 in the age of data acquisition and data mis-management?
Thanks for the piece about Rep. Young: no matter how bad we think we have it, somebody always has it worse. And behaves that way, too.
@MAG: I, too, viewed the entire Johnson documentary (thanks so much, Marie) and found it quite an amazing film. Hope this circulates far and wide. As for Uncle Milty: Always thought him an arrogant prick and this film seals that impression–-when Johnson starts to probe, Milton retreats shamefully. Thought the scene with the mother at the end quite poignant.
Happy Sunday, boys and girls. Today I'm instituting a new measure for determining the public significance of stories about a person, place, or event (or all three).
It's the RC Index. It ain't terribly scientific, and Nate Silver probably ain't inviting me up to join his next statistical endeavor, but it works for me. It's a kind of political seismograph (without the cool pen thingies whipping across graph paper) for current stories.
So, Marie is in possession of post-worthy stuff. She puts it up. Sometimes a story merits only one post a day. That's an RC Index of 1. Got it? Okay.
So today, Chris Christie has an RC Index of 9.
Whoa...Sucks for him.
At least 9 RC posts with links relating to his perfidy, calumny, quandary, ignominy and prob'ly a whole bunch of other ees.
Like I said, sucks for him. It represents a critical mass in the media. The more monkeys in the tree, the worse for the fruit.
And Christie is a big ol' juicy melon.
The underlying value, however, of the RC Index, is the discernment of our editor (editrix?) in chief. One could, without aggravating any carpal tunnel issues, find hundreds of stories every day about the president stealing stuff, lying, imposing Sharia Law, confiscating guns, sending messages to the Taliban, hiding his Kenyan origins, and occluding his not-so-secret plans to turn the country into a Stalinist gulag circa 1938.
But consider the sources (cui bono)?
Stories don't usually pass muster (unless they're posted for shits and grins) if they come from "wingnutpatriots4freedom.com"
Just another way of saying "Thanks, Marie. You kick ass, girl."