The Commentariat -- May 10, 2013

Julie Pace of the AP: " President Barack Obama is launching a new effort to rally the public around his hotly disputed health care law, a strategy aimed at shoring up key components of the sweeping federal overhaul and staving off yet another challenge from Republicans. The president will specifically target women and young people, groups that backed him overwhelmingly during his presidential campaigns. During a Mother's Day-themed event at the White House on Friday, Obama will promote the benefits of the law for women, including free cancer screenings and contraceptives, and ask moms to urge their uninsured adult children to sign up for the health insurance 'exchanges' that open this fall."

Zeke Miller of Time: "President Barack Obama's campaign-style, jobs-focused swing through the Texas technology core on Thursday was notable mainly for what it left out -- any plan for putting his proposals into law." CW: okay, pundits say President Obama should publicly promote his agenda even though he can't get Congress to do squat. So when he does that, Miller complains that he doesn't have "a plan for putting his proposals into law." What, exactly, would that plan be? Taking House Republicans hostage & incarcerating a half-dozen GOP Senators? Sounds feasible. ...

... AND what about this, Mr. Miller? Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Mr. Obama announced Thursday an executive order creating three ... manufacturing hubs using $200 million from the budgets of five agencies: the Departments of Defense, Energy and Commerce, and the National Science Foundation and NASA. White House officials said the president would continue to push for Congress to finance the remaining hubs."

Douglas Brinkley interviews Joe Biden for Rolling Stone.

Paul Krugman discusses recent talk about a bond bubble and/or a stock bubble in the manner of Harry Truman's economists: "On the one hand...; on the other hand."

Stupid Republican Tricks, Ctd. -- The "Pay China First Act." Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "The House voted Thursday to allow the Treasury to continue to make payments to foreign and domestic federal creditors and Social Security recipients in the event of a stalemate over the government's statutory borrowing limit, digging in for another debt ceiling standoff, which is looming in the fall.... Even if the Treasury could pull off the difficult task of managing incoming taxes and outgoing payments on a daily basis, about 25 percent of the government would have to shut down for lack of money.... Tony Fratto, a Treasury and White House spokesman in the Bush administration..., called the bill 'technically impossible and politically disastrous.'" ...

... Stupid Republican Tricks, Ctd. Sahil Kapur of TPM: "The top two Republicans in Congress informed President Obama on Thursday that they will refuse to fulfill their duty under the Affordable Care Act to recommend members of a new board with the power to contain Medicare spending.... In a letter to President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) noted their original opposition to Obamacare, reiterated their intent to repeal it entirely, and declared that they would not make any appointments to the Independent Payment Advisory Board." ...

... Joan McCarter of Daily Kos: "That Medicare 'raid' [McConnell & Boehner complain of] is the same raid Paul Ryan included in his budget, the budget that actually does destroy Medicare by privatizing it into a crippled voucher system. To save money. Which is the point of the IPAB, reducing Medicare costs. But McConnell and Boehner don't want to reduce Medicare spending by making it more efficient. They want to reduce Medicare spending by privatizing it and making seniors pay for their own damned health care."

Erica Martinson & Darren Goode of Politico: "President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency is in jeopardy after Republicans formed a united front Thursday to deny her a vote in committee. Democrats erupted in frustration at the GOP 'obstructionism' [yes, do put that in quotation marks because a Republican boycott is in no way "real obstructionism."] and vowed to find a way to push Gina McCarthy's nomination through the Environment and Public Works Committee, despite the last-minute Republican boycott of the vote. But even then, McCarthy could still face a filibuster on the Senate floor -- and won't have the 60 votes she needs, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told his Democratic allies Thursday morning. He pleaded with the Senate to finally heed liberals' pleas to change the filibuster rules so that nominees can be confirmed through majority vote." ...

... Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones: "The blockade on McCarthy is even more noteworthy because ... she worked for Mitt Romney back when he was governor of Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut's Republican former Gov. Jodi Rell." CW: Wow! McCarthy was in one of those binders full of women!

Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg News: the Internet -- which often raises to national prominence local stories of horrible gun deaths -- may trump the NRA. CW: I like Wilkinson's definition of "responsible gun owners":

... many gun owners are not paragons of probity. Some are drunks, drug addicts, wife-beaters, criminals or simply reckless, stupid, irresponsible humans with atrocious judgment. It's anybody's guess, for instance, how many of the one million concealed carry permit holders in Florida are a danger to themselves and others. (Trayvon Martin isn't around to make his guess.)

... AND Wilkinson quotes David Frum on the same:

... guns are easily available to everybody, responsible or not. It's an empty compliment even to refer to "responsible gun owners" - many of them are people who through good luck simply have not had their irresponsibility catch up with them yet."

DIY Guns. Tim Murphy of Mother Jones: "Defense Distributed, the Texas-based company specializing in 3-D-printed plastic firearms, took down its downloadable files on Thursday at the request of the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Control Compliance. The company posted a blueprint for the first fully-operational printed plastic handgun, 'The Liberator,' on Monday at its site, DEFCAD; the file was downloaded more than a 100,000 times in its first three days." Also, luckily for you handy do-it-yourselfers, "the takedown notice from the DTCC has its limitations. For one thing, there are already a number of 'mirror' sites that essentially replicate DEFCAD but are not controlled by ... anyone in the United States.... You can also download the plans for the Liberator or various component parts from the Pirate Bay, the notorious Swedish file-sharing index site." CW: where's the NRA's Second Amendment outrage on this? Well, I'd say they're on the government's side, because homemade guns might cut into their sponsors' bottom line.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: FBI Director Robert "Mueller's 12-year tenure under two presidents [link fixed] is facing new scrutiny, months from his longtime plans to step down in September, as hearings begin on Capitol Hill into what happened in Boston and why.... He has always had supporters in both parties in Congress. Now, instead of coasting into retirement, Mr. Mueller will spend the final months answering tough questions about how the bombing suspects slipped away.... He became director on Sept. 4, 2001."

William Finnegan of the New Yorker: "The long-awaited immigration-reform bill written by the haplessly named Gang of Eight in the United States Senate got buried this week, not unexpectedly, by a great mudslide of amendments -- more than three hundred, at last count.... Many were malicious. Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, proposed that anyone who had ever lived illegally in the U.S. be barred for life from U.S. citizenship.... (CW: worth noting -- Cruz is the son of a Cuban immigrant.) Senator Mike Lee ... of Utah would permit undocumented immigrants to remain employed on the condition that they work in low-status, badly paid jobs, specifying 'services performed by cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governesses, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, care-takers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use.' (A pro-reform group called this the Chauffeur Carve-Out. I like the 'footmen' touch.)" ...

... The Washington Post has a list of the committee rulings -- so far -- on key amendments. ...

... Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker: the phony think-tank Heritage Foundation hits a speed bump built by Republicans. ...

... Adam Serwer of Mother Jones: "Jason Richwine, the coauthor of the conservative Heritage Foundation's controversial study on the supposed $6.3 trillion cost of comprehensive immigration reform, has received much attention and criticism for his 2009 Harvard dissertation that argued there was 'a genetic component' to racial disparities in IQ.... [At a 2008 forum,] he contended that today's nonwhite immigrants are dumber [than earlier European immigrants]. After he made his remarks in 2008, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that 'Richwine's remarks were warmly received on white nationalist blogs.' ... Richard Alba, a sociology professor at the City University of New York and an author of several books on race and assimilation, called Richwine's remarks 'appalling.'" ...

... Chris Moody of Yahoo! News: Oh, and when he's not scribbling for the Heritage Foundation, Richwine writes for the White Supremacist News. ...

... Jamelle Bouie in the Daily Beast: "... people are skeptical when anyone attributes persistent racial difference to genetics. It doesn't help that proponents of the view tend to overlap with the fringes of Western life....There's more than enough information to conclude that if the right wing is attracting racists and white supremacists, it might want to reevaluate its approach to politics." ...

... CW: What's the matter with Harvard? First we have Reinhart & Rogoff, then we have Ferguson, now we have this guy Richwine. (And let's not forget TED CRUZ.) In most major universities, Richwine's dissertation would not be accepted by his major professor, & if the professor was a crackpot who did accept it, the paper would not get past the dissertation committee.

Kayla Webley of Time: "... Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced her first piece of legislation this week, a proposal that would allow students to take out government educational loans at the same rate that big banks pay to borrow from the federal government. Under her Bank on Student Loans Fairness Act, for one year, new student borrowers would be able to take out a federally subsidized Stafford loan at 0.75%, compared with the current 3.4% student loan rate.... Her legislation is well-timed as Congress gears up to debate student loan rates, which are set to double on July 1. Unless legislators vote to extend the 3.4% rate for another year, some eight million students will be forced to pay back their loans plus 6.8% in annual interest."

Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog: "Richard Blumenthal is a hero. Mike Lee is a lying extremist," incapable of reading 219 words. Allow Steve to demonstrate.

An excellent piece by Norm Ornstein, in the National Journal, on the limits of presidential power. A sample: President "Clinton once taught Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama a lesson, cutting out jobs in Huntsville, Ala. That worked well enough that Shelby switched parties, joined the Republicans, and became a reliable vote against Clinton. George W. Bush and Karl Rove decided to teach Sen. Jim Jeffords a lesson, punishing dairy interests in Vermont. That worked even better -- he switched to independent status and cost the Republicans their Senate majority. Myths are so much easier than reality."

All Benghazi, All the Time. Julian Pecquet of the Hill: "Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) came under increased pressure Thursday to create a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack. A day after three State Department whistle-blowers criticized the administration's response to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) suggested the Speaker risked becoming 'complicit' in a cover-up if he doesn't create a special panel." ...

... "The Stop Hillary 2016 Campaign." Jed Lewison of Daily Kos: "In case you have any lingering doubt about the true agenda of House Republicans in [Wednesday's] Benghazi hearing, check out these numbers*:

• 15: Number of times President Barack Obama was mentioned during the hearing
• 71: Number of times fmr. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was mentioned

      If this were still before election day 2012..., those numbers would be reversed -- the president would have been the one getting five times as many mentions as Hillary." ...

... AND, look what Karl Rove has wrought (via Greg Sargent):

... Jonathan Karl of ABC News: "When it became clear last fall that the CIA's now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story. ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack."

... Karl also has an interesting post on an RNC-produced Benghazi attack ad against the President, which Romney nixed because he wanted to "focus on the economy." With video of the ad.

Eric Pfeiffer of Yahoo! News: "Americans really, really trust Hollywood. They are, however, far more skeptical of Washington, D.C. A new survey on the most trusted people in America finds actors taking the top three spots: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock and Denzel Washington. The first politician to appear on the list is former President Jimmy Carter, who comes in at number 24." ...

... Andy Borowitz: "Republican lawmakers asked increasingly tough questions today as they held another day of hearings to investigate, in the words of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), 'Hillary Clinton's suspiciously high poll numbers and what can be done to make them lower.'"

Local News

Ian Urbina, et al., of the New York Times: "Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers' compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes.... But Texas has also had the nation's highest number of workplace fatalities -- more than 400 annually -- for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas' more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. "And a lot of Texans -- including, of course, Rick Perry -- like it that way. ...

... CW: I see a connection between Texans' attitudes toward unnecessary disasters caused by human failings (including & especially, greed) & Tim Egan's paean to Westerners who happily live with impending natural disasters.

AP: "A pivotal vote Thursday in the Minnesota House positioned that state to become the 12th in the country to allow gay marriages and the first in the Midwest to pass such a law out of its Legislature. The 75-59 vote was a critical step for the measure, which would allow same-sex weddings beginning this summer. It's a startling shift in the state, where just six months earlier voters turned back an effort to ban them in the Minnesota Constitution. The state Senate plans to consider the bill Monday and leaders expect it to pass there too. Gov. Mark Dayton has pledged to sign it into law." ...

... AND this, via Kate M.:

News Ledes

Reuters: "A pair of bombs targeting the offices of candidates running in this weekend's election killed three people Friday in northwest Pakistan, the latest attacks in what has been a bloody campaign. At least 130 people have been killed in attacks on candidates and party workers since the beginning of April. The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for most of the attacks, saying the country's democracy runs counter to Islam."

Reuters: "A woman was rescued on Friday after spending 17 days trapped under the rubble of a Bangladesh factory building that collapsed on April 24, killing more than 1,000 people, police and military officials said. Bangladeshi television channels broadcast live footage of emergency service workers pulling the woman from the collapsed building, as onlookers burst into cheers."

Comments

[Diane]

The Republicans have successfully institutionalized such a level of outrageous, ignorant and despicable behavior that there are no longer adequate descriptors. The Southern Poverty Law center needs to add the Heritage Foundation to its watch group for hate groups, along with the Republicans in both houses of Congress as well as Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts.

I don't know what Harry Reid is doing, but our country is sliding into a racist, misogynist and ignorant quagmire while he prepares and serves his own cojonnes to McConnell with a side of foie gras. When Obama has to run as fast he can in a vat of molasses, uphill, there is no way but backwards. Should the Republicans gain control of the Senate, their first act will be to eliminate the 60 vote requirement accompanied by a hearty F-U to the Democrats, which I might add, they deserve.

Again, may I suggest, fire up the drones.

[PD Pepe]

"AVON PARK, Fla. — Florida’s citrus industry is grappling with the most serious threat in its history: a bacterial disease with no cure that has infected all 32 of the state’s citrus-growing counties."

This story which is on the front page of the Times today is pretty devastating. The culprit is the psyllids, a tiny insect no bigger than a pin head that burrows into the fruit causing it to turn green and prematurely drop from the tree rendering it useless for eating or processing. The research on how to eradicate this sucker has been ongoing, costing millions of dollars, but so far nothing seems to be working. I know this might be a stretch, but I got to wondering whether this wee insect had a cousin that has infected certain members of our congress or as someone once called them, PINHEADS. They, too, have caused devastation, costing us moocho money, and so far no cure seems to be on the horizon. When we have someone like Mark Sanford, an utterly looney tunes kind of guy, but like the psyllids burrows into the romantic psyche of the majority of voters and wins over someone like Colbert Busch then...Something has infected a goodly portion of this country and maybe the citrus grooves aren't the only things that have been ravished.

[Akhilleus]

Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.

Somehow the Screaming Mimis in the GOP seem to think that harping on some imagined conspiracy theory/coverup is their road back to respectability on foreign policy (you know, after the galactic level cluster fuck of Iraq and all).

Sorry boys, you don't need a road for that. For that you need a 28 lane superhighway leading to a launch pad that will take you in a space shuttle to the USS Enterprise on which you will travel at 7,000 times the speed of light. For 27 years. That will get you halfway there.

As for Benghazi, let's look at a couple of things. The Screamers are complaining that the Obama administration, sorry, make that Hillary Clinton, was shamefully unprepared for an action that no one saw coming and are not coming clean about what really happened. But first, this is not an Embassy we're talking about, it's a consulate, meaning that it had a lower level of protection to start with. And because the violence erupted quickly, without any real intelligence available to predict its coming, there wasn't much anyone could do, especially in a city with a fairly unstable situation (remember how easy it was to protect the staff at the US embassy in Tehran?).

But anyway, let's compare the preparedness level of the Obama/Clinton people, who had no warning about this attack with the preparedness level of the Bush/Cheney people who had intelligence sitting on the Decider's desk that said "Bin Laden ready to hijack planes and fly them into really big buildings in the US."

What did they do with that very actionable piece of intelligence?

Zippo. Bush went fishing. Cheney counted the moles on his ass.

And what about the guys who are now two of the loudest Screaming Mimis, McCain and Graham? Well, they hopped aboard the Made Up Intelligence Express and screamed "Bomb Baghdad Right Fucking Now" based on zero intelligence and outright falsehoods. And they want accountability, dammit! Because three Americans died in Benghazi! But no accountability is required for the nearly 5,000 American servicemen and women and 162,000 Iraqis who died because Bush lied and McCain and Graham said "Fine by me"? Oh and that part about coming clean? You all recall how Bush and Cheney mea culpaed themselves almost to death about the lies they told to start a war, don't you? Such candor; honesty, like you read about.

And just this week, to make it even clearer how far the Bushies went to protect America and protect freeeedddoooom, Darth Cheney snarled that he and President Sock Puppet were always prepared for attacks. AFTER their incompetence allowed the most deadly terrorist attack on US soil in history. After that, though, they were ready, by jing. And don't you forget it!

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy.

Oh, and stupidity too. Don't forget that one.

Oh, and treason....

oh yeah, and....

[Barbarossa]

Re: Richwine and low IQ immigrants. When I was a kid, it was the Scandinavians (Squareheads) who were alleged to be dumb, and the Irish (Micks) and Czechs (Bohunks). My Grandpa used to tell a joke about the Swede who kept sawing off a board and couldn't figure out why it was still too short.

When I was in Vietnam, some thought the Vietnamese couldn't possibly be smart enough to be a worthy adversary. The VC soon disabused them of that notion.

Racism runs deep in our society. There's always someone to look down on.