The Washington Post offers tips on how to keep your EV battery running in frigid temperatures. The link at the end of this graf is supposed to be a "gift link" (from me, Marie Burns, the giftor!), meaning that non-subscribers can read the article. Hope it works: https://wapo.st/3u8Z705
Wednesday
Jul232014
The Commentariat -- July 24, 2014
Internal links removed.
Amie Parnes of the Hill: "State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Wednesday said blame for the crashed Malaysian Airlines flight 'lies directly at President [Vladimir] Putin's feet,' as the Obama administration looked to raise pressure Russia. Harf said Putin was responsible not just for the downed commercial airliner, 'but every incident we've seen' throughout the conflict. 'Period.'"
Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: "A decorated veteran of the Iraq war and former adjutant general of his state's National Guard, [Sen. John] Walsh [D-Montana] offered the Democratic Party something it frequently lacks: a seasoned military man.... But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh's 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh's master's degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors' works, with no attribution.... The breadth of Mr. Walsh's apparent plagiarism ... is startling...." His explanations/excuses are, well, conflicting. ...
... CW: I thought it was hilarious when Rand Paul got caught plagiarizing a few speeches. This is not hilarious. Walsh should resign.
Mike Lillis of the Hill: "President Obama is flat wrong to seek changes in current immigration law to manage the wave of migrant children at the southern border, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) charged Wednesday.... Obama has urged 'more flexibility' to expedite deportations of the migrant children, and the head of the Homeland Security Department clarified Tuesday that he's seeking changes to a 2008 human trafficking law to speed up the process."
Coral Davenport of the New York Times: "Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma are among the most vocal Republican skeptics of the science that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, but a new study to be released Thursday found that their states would be among the biggest economic winners under a regulation proposed by President Obama to fight climate change. The study, conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Rhodium Group, both research organizations, concluded that the regulation would cut demand for electricity from coal -- the nation's largest source of carbon pollution -- but create robust new demand for natural gas.... The demand for natural gas would, in turn, drive job creation, corporate revenue and government royalties in states that produce it, which, in addition to Oklahoma and Texas, include Arkansas and Louisiana." ...
... This is just one of many ways, of course, that the rank ignorance of "leaders" like Perry & Inhofe hurt their states, & in Inhofe's case, hurt all of us.
Wendy Koch of USA Today: "Spurred by a boom in oil-carrying trains and several recent tragic accidents, the Obama administration proposed stricter rules Wednesday for tank cars that transport flammable fuels."
Neither the canons of construction nor any empirical analysis suggests that congressional drafting is a perfectly harmonious, symmetrical and elegant endeavor. ... Sausage-makers are indeed offended when their craft is linked to legislating. -- Judge Andre Davis, 4th Circuit
... E. J. Dionne: "We are confronted with a conservative judiciary that will use any argument it can muster to win ideological victories that elude their side in the elected branches of our government.... The extreme judicial activism here is obvious when you consider, as the 4th Circuit did, that even if you accept that there is ambiguity in the law, the Supreme Court's 30-year-old precedent ... held that in instances of uncertainty, the court defers to federal agencies rather than concocting textual clarity when it doesn't exist." ...
... Everything Is Obama's Fault, Ctd. CW: Re: a link I posted yesterday to an apologia for the D.C. court's decision, I wrote that the author Michael Cannon provided a good preview of "how Republicans will sell the chaos they've engendered." Well, lo & behold, Dave Weigel reports that Cannon is already at it, & in so doing, "drain[ing] the national strategic chutzpah reserve": In a conference call, Cannon told reporters, ""If 5 million people lose subsidies, it is because the administration I think recklessly was offering them subsidies that it had no authority to offer. If that causes dislocation, if that causes disruption, I think that responsibility lies with the administration." Piggybacking Cannon's Blame Obama message, Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) said, "This means that the President has been misrepresenting the true costs of health coverage to millions of American families." CW: So that's the party line: you people are screwed because Obama promised you something he couldn't deliver legally. ...
... Oh, please, let's not forget Scott Brown, arguably the person most responsible for the legislative screw-up. By Weigel's reckoning, "Scott Brown Has the Single Most Chutzpah-Rich Response to Halbig.... Yesterday, he reacted as if Halbig was now the law of the land and Democrats had just raised taxes on people.
The court's ruling means that people receiving subsidies for their insurance coverage will lose those subsidies. Either they will have to dig deeper into their own pockets to pay the full cost of their insurance, or taxes will have to be raised on all of us to make up the difference.
... According to the Brown campaign, 'in New Hampshire, premiums for those who have subsidies could jump 70-74 percent.' Of course, the state could prevent the subsidy hikes by doing something rather simple. It could create a state exchange. That way, even if Halbig were upheld, New Hampshire residents would continue to get the subsidies. But Brown isn't saying anything about New Hampshire creating its own exchange." ...
... Steve M. has a good post on the GOP strategy, which is gearing up now in anticipation of the Supremes siding with the D.C. court.
Frank Rich on the crises in Gaza, Ukraine & the U.S.-Mexico border.
New York Times Editors: "The attorney-client privilege is the oldest, broadest and most important of all privileges in the American legal system.... In recent years, the Bureau of Prisons has made limited email access available to federal inmates, but the price of that access ... is allowing the government to monitor and read all messages sent and received. As the Times reported on Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and around the country are taking advantage of this fact, freely accessing emails between inmates and their attorneys.... If the Justice Department refuses to change its policy, which undermines the constitutional right to counsel..., judges should ... disallow this unprincipled practice."
Nicholas Kristof explains the downsides of inequality to "idiots."
Kendall Breitman of Politico: Bloomberg rips Blitzer for being "insulting to America" & "trying to create dissension" when Blitzer asked him if he thought the State Department (or FAA) had disallowed flights to Tel Aviv "for political reasons." ...
... Keith Laing of the Hill: "The Federal Aviation Administration is extending a ban on U.S. airlines flying to Israel for another 24 hours, despite high-profile objections from politicians in both nations. The ban was originally issued on Tuesday afternoon, after rocket fire diverted aircraft near Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport. Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argued that the Tel Aviv was safe for passengers, and they complained that the ban would embolden Hamas leaders." ...
... Update: The ban has been lifted. See today's Ledes.
... If you listen to Michael Bloomberg's remarks to Blitzer posted here, you'll find he's criticizing the FAA & U.S. air carriers for not doing as good a job as Israel & El Al in providing a safe air travel experience. He never mentions this, which explains a lot ...
... Lee Ferran of ABC News: "El Al, the national airline of Israel, has reportedly equipped its planes with some form of anti-missile tech since the mid-2000s, a move that came in response to an attack on an Israeli chartered aircraft in late 2002 in Mombasa, Kenya. Two shoulder-fired rockets narrowly missed their target then, and El Al and other Israeli airlines have been preparing for a repeat ever since. In the years following the failed attack, El Al turned to Flight Guard, a combination of several technologies reportedly including early warning systems and flares designed to confuse any heat seeking missiles." ...
... BTW, if Bloomberg found Blitzer's question "insulting to America," he probably would not think much of fellow Republican Ted Cruz's accusation ...
The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands. -- Sen. Ted Cruz
... AP: "State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf rejected Cruz's comments as 'ridiculous and offensive.' ... Cruz said later Wednesday he would block Senate confirmation on all State Department nominees until his questions were answered. Harf said, 'There's no place for these kinds of political stunts in confirming nominees for critical national security positions.'" ...
... Cruz's staff adds a little nah-ne-nah-ne-you-are-too: "Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Cruz, said the Obama administration's foreign policy was itself 'ridiculous and offensive.'" ...
... CW: I'm not sure if the Bloomberg-Blitzer exchanged occurred before or after Tailgunner Ted made his accusation. If after, Blitzer's question was appropriate, though he should have cited Cruz's charge when he asked Bloomberg if he thought the FAA's decision was "political."
Ted Johnson of Variety: "White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that President Obama and his staff chose not to do an appearance on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' on Wednesday because of 'more serious matters the president is dealing with on the international scene.'"
Beyond the Beltway
Michael Kiefer & Mariana Dale of the Arizona Republic: "The Wednesday afternoon execution of convicted murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood III took nearly two hours, confirming concerns that had been raised by his attorneys about a controversial drug used by the state of Arizona. Wood remained alive at Arizona's state prison in Florence long enough for his public defenders to file an emergency motion for a stay of execution with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, after the process began at 1:53 p.m. The motion noted that Wood 'has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour' after being injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs." ...
... Fred Barbash of the Washington Post: "Executions are 'brutal, savage events' -- and if society wants to carry them out, it ought to stop pretending otherwise, forget about lethal injections and return to 'more primitive -- and foolproof -- methods.' Like the guillotine -- or on second thought, the firing squad. That's the view of Alex Kozinski, one of the nation's most prominent appeals court judges, a Ronald Reagan appointee generally regarded as a libertarian conservative and, by standards of the judiciary, a bit of a 'troublemaker,' who likes to stir the pot. Kozinski dissented Monday from a decision of the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to stay the execution of Joseph R. Wood until Arizona told Wood more about the drugs that would be used in the execution and the personnel who would carry it out." ...
... Update: Josh Sanburn of Time has more on Wood's attorneys efforts to stop the execution-in-process.
Charles Pierce: "The United Nations treaty regarding the rights of the disabled is back. It went through a Senate committee easily (again) and, therefore, the Congress has another chance to join the rest of the world in being humane to people in wheelchairs, like Bob Dole, who sat there on the Senate floor and watched the nutball paranoid fringe of his party sell him out wholesale.... We have another chance to see if there are 60 votes in the United States Senate against being paranoid. I'm not betting on it either way." ...
... CW: Actually, the Constitution requires a 2/3rds vote to ratify treaties, not 60 votes. The rights of the disabled treaty got 61 votes in December 2012. A mere 38 of his fellow Republican Senators sold out Ole Bob Dole.
Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times: "In what will most likely be one of the last Nazi cases on American soil, an 89-year-old Philadelphia man [Johann Breyer] who served as an armed guard at Auschwitz during World War II died Wednesday, just hours before a judge ordered him extradited to Germany in the murders of 216,000 prisoners at the notorious concentration camp."
Congressional Race
Josh Israel & Scott Keyes of Think Progress: Meet "Baptist pastor and right-wing radio show host Jody B. Hice," the likely next representative of Georgia's 10th Congressional district. He calls the U.S. a "distinctly Christian society"; he supports radical "nullification"; he has "argued that women should receive permission from their husband before running for office"; he thinks people can "leave the homosexual lifestyle" & believes "there is a gay plot to recruit and sodomize children"; he says that Muslims do "does not deserve First Amendment protection; & he blamed "secularism" for the Sandy Hook massacre. Israel & Keyes say Hice is certain to best his Democratic opponent, Ken Dious. Here's Dious's biography. It's a sad country.
Presidential Election
Nia-Malika Henderson & Jackie Kucinich argue that Michele Bachmann should run for president -- as she hinted she might -- because "there has been almost no speculation about any GOP women being at the top of the 2016 ticket." They also mention Sarah Palin favorably for "upend[ing] stereotypes" of women's political potential. CW: What about the fact that both Bachmann & Palin are ignorant & stupid? Shouldn't a presidential or vice-presidential candidate be at least minimally intellectually qualified to handle the top job? The writers don't seem to think so. You can't take a paper seriously when its reporters suggest a doofus should run for president & another doofus was a model candidate. Have I mentioned the Washington Post sucks? ...
... Henry Decker of the National Memo is not so much into cheerleading Bachmann: In the last GOP POTUS Sweepstakes, "... her candidacy rapidly bottomed out and collapsed. It was exactly as crazy as you might expect; along the way, the campaign allegedly committed multiple campaign finance violations, and Bachmann allegedly fell under the 'unnatural,' 'Rapsutin-like' influence of a campaign advisor.... Bachmann has claimed that in 2012, she was a 'perfect candidate' who 'didn't get anything wrong' and was literally chosen by God -- so she's setting a pretty high bar when she promises to improve.... Still, it's unclear why Bachmann would bother to seek a four-year term in the White House. After all, according to her, we’re already in the End Times."
News Ledes
New York Times: "A series of explosions at a school run by the United Nations sheltering hundreds of Palestinians who had fled their homes for safety from Israeli military assaults killed at least 16 people on Thursday afternoon and wounded many more. The cause was not immediately clear."
Bloomberg News: "Jobless claims fell by 19,000 to 284,000 in the week ended July 19, the fewest since February 2006 and lower than any economist surveyed by Bloomberg forecast...."
Guardian: "A flight operated by Air Algérie carrying 116 people from Burkina Faso to Algeria's capital disappeared from radar early on Thursday, the plane's owner said." ...
... New York Times UPDATE: "An Air Algérie jetliner with 116 people on board crashed early Thursday in a remote area of Mali near the borders with Burkina Faso and Niger, officials said."
The Guardian is liveblogging developments in the Gaza crisis. More than 700 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, many of them children.
Reuters: "A powerful Ukrainian rebel leader has confirmed that pro-Russian separatists had an anti-aircraft missile of the type Washington says was used to shoot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and it could have originated in Russia. In an interview with Reuters, Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the Vostok Battalion, acknowledged for the first time since the airliner was brought down in eastern Ukraine on Thursday that the rebels did possess the BUK missile system and said it could have been sent back subsequently to remove proof of its presence."
Los Angeles Times: "The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday night lifted its ban on U.S. flights to and from Tel Aviv."
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Reader Comments (19)
People die from drug over-doses every day. For a long time I couldn’t understand why, if we’re gonna kill these miscreants by lethal injection, we don’t just OD them on heroin or morphine and be done with it. Then it dawned on me: We get as much satisfaction from seeing them suffer as we do from murdering them.
@James Singer: The remarks of the victims' family members certainly supports your thesis. One would think after 25 years, they could show at least a little decency. But no.
Marie
Miscellaneous reflections of a lurker (in no particular order):
1. I also vote for the guillotine. Although it's humane (if such a thing can be,) painless and infallible, I'm sure the R's will claim it's effete and French. Until they observe one demonstration. I fearlessly predict that the silence will be very loud. All the other methods of execution (except maybe the firing squad) gloze over the absolute and sudden finality of death, which is a matter the Christian cretins of our century simply cannot accept or confront. This is, to my mind, the fundamental reason that they are unable to think or to contribute to civil society in any productive way.
2. Out of all the wreckage of American politics, Senator Elizabeth Warren is a notable bright light. We are lucky that she has dared to take on the awful business of a major political role. I'm glad she is completely unambiguous about her refusal to be flattered into a Presidential run; now is not the time. Her intelligence is rare, but not really because of her brains, her deep expertise, or her fine education and skill at teaching. It is her moral intelligence which sets her apart from the criminals, panderers and Pharisees who generally inhabit our legislatures and executive offices. The issues we confront are basically moral issues -- from the future of the Earth, our only home, to the starvation of poor children somewhere invisible. Only a powerful moral intelligence can have a chance of marshaling the political force humanity needs now.
3. I am also grateful for RealityChex. The postings here in the last couple of days have been illuminating, as is often the case. This takes a lot of work. Please accept my belated Thank-you.
4. Clearly much is afoot with regard to the ACA. The R's, who seem to be approaching their objective, appear to begin to recognize that they may find themselves in a box of their own construction. Who knows? The religious zealots of the SCOTUS (whether it is churchly dogma or originalist) may not be able to stop themselves. And then? Wouldn't the logical response from Ms. Clinton and the D's be to say, "Medicare for All!"? Logical, for sure, but how likely? Maybe that should be the focus of progressive action now -- getting the public option into the Democratic Platform for 2016. Alas, can anybody believe that such a Democratic response is anything but a sentimental dream?
5.
I don't care what your name is, dear.
Just bring the menu, and a beer.
Best,
Keith Howard
A welcome addition, Keith Howard; a lurker, but obviously a listener.
Marie ends her bit on Hice and Dious with, "It's a sad country," which is exactly what I said to someone yesterday, but added, "and it's a cruel world." I said this with deep breaths and with a sense of futility. I think it was all those Malaysian airline deaths, and all the Gaza deaths and suffering that did it for me. You sometimes just reach a point where the little life you lead just doesn't cut it and as I write this I think of Bogart telling Bergman that iconic line about sacrifice and some things are bigger than us little people. I'll get back to my usual cheerful self in a day or two, it's what we have to do, isn't it?
And yes, the Washington Post, indeed, sucks.
El Al Flight Guard, Ben Gurian Airport Tel Aviv, Bloomberg, FAA:
The FAA prohibition was a safety precaution instigated by Hamas ballistic rockets (really, rocket artillery) coming DOWN and exploding near Ben Gurion airport. The El Al counter-missile system is designed to distract and "re-aim" man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS - short range portable AA missiles) coming UP to hit an aircraft in flight, and practically effective against airliners only when they are on takeoff or landing. So, apples and oranges and Bloomberg's assertion that El Al is doing a better job of protecting passengers against Hamas ballistic missiles is misleading.
All that said, in all respects, El Al DOES do a much more extensive and effective job of providing aviation security, and have done so for forty years. El Al is target number one in the MidEast, and Israel acts accordingly -- except, that if they were really, really serious, they might close El Al down because it is such a prime political target. But having a national airline is important to Israel, so they pay a huge security price to operate it.
If, as all conservatives within the US borders seem to think, everything is Obama's fault, then they should do something about it.
If the president pulled an enormous bait and switch on the American public with a dastardly healthcare scam (what kind of scam, they never say), then such an underhanded scheme, playing with people's lives, demands a response.
If the president is inflicting economic harm on an ally, Israel, to suit his personal foreign policy objectives (what objectives exactly, they never say), then something should be done about it.
In fact, if this guy is half as bad as we hear, every day, all day long in the conservative media echo chamber, then he deserves not just impeachment, but prison time.
So, where are all those mighty, righteous, right-wing patriots concerned that Barack Obama is turning the country into one great big illegal, unconstitutional, gay, Socialist, Fascist, post-colonial African secularist criminal theme park designed to suit his own Muslim, racist, hate values? What are they doing about it? Bellyaching? Where are the serious investigations leading up to articles of impeachment?
Nowhere.
Why? Because, as I mentioned yesterday (and no surprise to anyone here), the people making these claims are ignorant, incompetent savages.
Keith, above, observes that Senator Warren, the antithesis of someone like Ted Cruz, has not only competence, knowledge, and well developed skills at communication, but a moral intelligence that grounds her and provides her with an ability to, as Plato suggested, move toward the Good, which allows her to avoid both deception and, more importantly, self-deception. This also allows her moral grounding to expand through, as Iris Murdoch might put it, "a progressively changing quality of consciousness."
Not so for the mountebanks and unprincipled clowns across the aisle.
As the Texas Mangler, Rick Perry mentioned, in a rare moment of inadvertent truth telling (a condition seen on the right less frequently than Halley's Comet), it's all about the visuals.
All the bloviating, all the rants, all the flinging of the bullshit is for show. Their barbaric kabuki displays and their legislative lethargy hurt millions of Americans and diminish America's standing in the world disturbs them not a bit, more proof of their unchecked savagery.
Along with savagery, incompetence, and ignorance, we must also remember their essential immorality. Deception and self-deception are keys to their blinkered existence.
So will they do something about a president so horrible that no amount of aspersions cast is too much?
Of course not. It's all about the visuals.
http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/national-democrats-remain-percent-behind-walsh-despite-plagiarism-charges/article_0b3b45ba-132f-11e4-b574-0019bb2963f4.html. Before shit-canning Walsh for his failure to attribute and penchant for copying the work of others, do you want to sacrifice the senate and possibly the Supreme court? Republicans don't care about rules and playing nice with others, they want to win.
CW: I couldn't disagree more, Walsh should not resign. There is no way a Democrat can start now and beat Steve Daines. And Walsh's error might have given victory to Daines anyway; we'll have to see how that plays in Montana with the voters.
To me the real question is: does the remainder of Walsh's character and integrity supersede his attributional failure and copying other peoples work? I'm not so quick to condemn Walsh in this case, I guess.
More plagiarism.
The really bad thing about this is the possibility that Democrats lose another seat in the Senate. You know the old saw, or a version of it, anyway, for want of attribution a degree was lost, for want of a degree, a Senate seat was lost, for want of a Senate seat, civilization was lost.
We've been over this ground before. There is simply no way someone writing an academic paper, especially something like a master's thesis, can confuse someone else's words for your own. If it were an exact copy of another source, you might be able to get away with saying it was a cut and paste job that you had meant to attribute or alter sufficiently, but when that alteration amounts to a single word, the jig is up. Plus it wasn't just a single incidence of this sort of thing.
Will it hurt him in the polls? I don't know. Plagiarizing hasn't seemed to hurt Li'l Randy. But, as Marie points out, this is a much different sort of thing. Ripping off a line or two, or even as Aqua Buddha did, a couple of paragraphs, is bad enough. But a third of your entire paper?
Sorry, sport. And saying that he was going through a tough time is no excuse either. Plenty of others have had tough times while writing a paper but most didn't use that as an excuse not to do a few SHIFT-"s and mention where those words came from.
Might as well resign now and give some other Democrat a chance to say a few words (hopefully her or his own) before the election in November.
What can people be thinking?
Citizen,
I was writing my comment about Walsh when yours went up.
I have to admit, I was leaning in the same direction at first. I too think that losing that seat could be catastrophic. But, if we're going to hold the other side to certain standards (even if they don't give a shit about ethical behavior--and they don't) we have to do the same to our people.
If the degree didn't mean much of anything, then I might not be so worried (although I still wouldn't think much of his academic achievements), but, at least from the Times article, it seems his War College degree has been made much of, by him and others, and seems to confer upon him a higher level of respect and lend his career a certain brio (in company with Eisenhower, Stormin' Norman, et al) it might not otherwise have.
It's true that Li'l Randy is only a certified doctor because he says so, but he doesn't run on the fact that he's a self-certified ophthalmologist.
So what say you other RC denizens?
Should he stay or should he go now?
(A nod to the Clash for that last line....don't want to have to resign from RC.)
Keith,
Speaking of the guillotine, I think we should make executions public and everyone should get to watch. Put it on the nightly news.
If we're going to put people to death in the name of the state, then those consequences should be public and voters should get to see what they voted for. The public, no doubt, would opt for the guillotine as well. Waiting around for two hours while the condemned, strapped to a table, writhed in agony with poison seeping into his veins, might put people off from the idea of state sponsored execution. And where's the fun in that?
The Christian concepts of redemption and forgiveness are far behind conservatives' thirst for vengeance, punishment and enforced agony.
Can ritualized torture followed by burning at the stake be far off?
Akhileus,
Should he stay or should he go? As a practical matter, this decision will not likely affect the outcome of the race - unless there is a SUPER Dem waiting in the wings to jump in, and one who has great name recognition. Ethically, I think Walsh should stop offering excuses ....he was wrong, and he is compounding it. He might admit his error and throw himself on the mercy of public opinion.
What I have read indicates he was significantly behind, anyway, although a recent poll showed him moving up.
That's my two cents. And this: (Sigh!)
V.
P.S. Just loved your rendition of the old bromide about horses loosing shoes.
"So what say you other RC denizens?"
"Should he stay or should he go now?"
I say he needs to go even though politically that might hurt us. If we are for a higher ethical/moral ground, then we need to show it. It's the old, "put your money where your mouth is." Some might look at this as cutting off your nose to spite your face kind of thing, but...and it's the "buts" that cause the complicated choices one has to make––time and again.
And speaking of choices: Does Bachmann not realize what a joke she is? Does she not know she could never, ever, win the brass ring? Isn't there someone in her life that can tell her the truth? And who in the world would give this woman money for her campaign that obviously will go down the drain––how silly of me to wonder.
Re: Walsh. Play it as it lies. It is foolhardy to believe that another Democrat could step into the race a mere 100 days before the election and not lose his or her head, at least partly from lack of exposure. If Walsh loses, Walsh loses. No need to hang a loss around the neck of another Dem. And he likely will lose, and probably would have without the plagiarism. He’s had an uphill battle since the beginning against a hugely popular Republican, Steve Daines.
Speaking of bromides, Walsh could simply say, "If I win I will not serve."
From Jonathan Martin's NYT article:
"In an interview outside his Capitol Hill office on Tuesday, after he was presented with multiple examples of identical passages from his paper and the Carnegie and Harvard essays, Mr. Walsh said he did not believe he had done anything wrong.... Asked directly if he had plagiarized, he responded: 'I don’t believe I did, no.'”
According to the Martin article, & later reports on it, Walsh didn't just "inadvertently" lift a sentence or graf here & there, as journalist Chris Hedges did. Martin found Walsh had copied fully a quarter of his master's thesis, including its conclusions.
And this wasn't just some paper in one class; it was a crucial requirement for getting his degree. If others hadn't written huge chunks of Walsh's thesis, he wouldn't have the degree.
Not only that, he used the degree those other people earned to further advance his career. He might not have been appointed Senator if he hadn't gotten his subsequent jobs partly as a result of his supposed resume.
He lied about his undergraduate degree, BTW, too, saying he was graduated from SUNY Albany when in fact he got his degree through a mail-order college run by the University of the State of New York (USNY). Who knows how much else he's lied about?
And, oh, I-had-PTSD-at-the-time doesn't cut it for me. I understand that PTSD can be horrible & can cause people to do awful things they would not do under normal circumstances -- commit suicide, kill a loved one, just lose it. But plagiarism??? Really, is plagiarism a symptom of PTSD? I'm not doubting Walsh suffered from PTSD; he said he wasn't in a good place to do college work at the time he went to the War College. Well, fine; take a light load or don't go. Using PTSD as a semi-excuse also is unfair to other people who are suffering from it.
To me, plagiarizing a master's thesis isn't just stealing from the original authors; it's stealing from every honorable student who struggles thru school, who has all kinds of extraneous pressures, who might not be a very good writer, who has trouble grasping some of the required material, who builds up tremendous debt, etc., but somehow has the grit to make a go of it. Whether or not you have a degree or an advanced degree, John Walsh cheated you, because he has a pretend degree, & he used it it "cut in line" ahead of men & women who don't.
As for the Senate race, it doesn't appear Walsh was going to win anyway. But even if he were 20 points ahead instead of quite a few points behind, I'd still say he should resign. He got where he is under false pretenses. He's a fucking fraud & a cheat. And he doesn't think he's done anything wrong.
It is easy to suspect most Senators of lacking an integrity gene. We know this guy doesn't have one. He proved first in the plagiarizing & second in his response to getting caught that he isn't fit for office.
Marie
P.S. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is standing behind Walsh, gives you a clue as to the character of that gang.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/washington-inside-out/what-happens-when-extremism-becomes-mainstream-20140723
Norm Ornstein in National Journal preaches to the RC Choir. A very brief roundup of how the GOP went nuts, but not nearly enough credit given to RR for administering the wormwood absinthe that riddled their brains while it gave them delusions.
The fact that Walsh plagiarized his conclusion is a dead giveaway that this was the plan all along. Anyone who has labored over something like a master's degree or PhD dissertation remembers what it was like. You don't just all of a sudden figure out how you want the thing to end, halfway through, while you're reading someone else's stuff (unless you had no idea in the first place in which case the thing probably really sucks and wouldn't get you a degree from one of those online fly-by-night "universities").
All of which means he knew from the get go that he planned to use other people's research, thoughts, and words and fully intended to pass them off as his own.
Which is a further reason to disbelieve him when he says he did nothing wrong.
Writing one of these things is a major undertaking for most everyone. It's all-consuming. I remember debating the inclusion of specific adverbs. No one forgets that stuff. It creates it's own low-level PTSD.
Ah well, the guy we had before was Max Baucus, a fucking Republican with a D after his name. We'll just have to pick off someone else.
Plus, sending Walsh back to the Senate would give the "they all do it" assholes more ammunition.
Patrick,
I haven't yet read the Ornstein piece you suggest, but I will. He's always a pleasure to read.
But...
"...not nearly enough credit given to RR for administering the wormwood absinthe that riddled their brains while it gave them delusions."
Good line.
RR drank plenty of his own. I think Peggy Noonan still has a few of those bottles cached somewhere.
Re: Somebody else's work; Take credit for my work and you are a contractor speaking French; as in; "QUI had a rough time with this one." Take credit for my work and you are a designer, as in "The idea just presented itself." you are a gig-sucker. Take credit for what I wrote and you are a lazy fuckhead that steals ideas. But wait what politician is not a lazy fuckhead?
Update; family is still in the Palestine; Jews still killing innocents. No sugar coating here.