The Commentariat -- May 19, 2013
Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "President Obama will deliver a speech Thursday at the National Defense University in which he will address how he intends to bring his counterterrorism policies, including the drone program and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in line with the legal framework he promised after taking office." CW: but can substance beat scandalmania?
Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times has a very good report on how the Cincinnati IRS office got into trouble, and the answer is -- quite innocently. ...
... Justin Elliott & Kim Barker of ProPublica have another excellent take on the makings of a mess. They also answer the question that may have been floating int the back of your mind -- why Cincinnati? ...
... CW: the real culprits here are not IRS bureaucrats but Congressional Republicans, President Obama & the Supreme Court, who have (1) cut funding for the IRS, (2) cut staffing, (3) increased the IRS workload, & (3) failed to write laws that provide clearcut guidelines. Needless to say, this was not an entirely innocent series of errors on conservatives' part; they have long tried to prove that government doesn't work by setting it up for failure. What better agency to hold up as a nest of vipers than the IRS? Naturally, Obama & Congressional Democrats fell into the GOP trap. Again. ...
... Update. Oh, pretty much what I said. Robert Reich on "the real IRS scandal," a short post that gets to the heart of it. ...
... But Seth Meyers & Amy Poehler are still really pissed off:
CW: Reading a Maureen Dowd column on Obama almost always makes me want to defend Obama.
At some point obstruction becomes ... treason. -- Bill Maher
James Dao of the New York Times: Members of Congress -- and more importantly, Jon Stewart -- are holding Secretary of Veterans of Affairs Eric Shinseki responsible for the huge and growing backlog of unprocessed veterans' claims for disability compensation. CW: to me, failing to process 600,000 veterans' claims is a much bigger scandal than making a few phonies sweat over their claimed "social welfare" tax exemption.
Lincoln Caplan of the New York Times: "There is little doubt, statistically, that the Supreme Court presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.has been more sympathetic to corporate interests than any court since World War II. A comprehensive study of more than 1,750 decisions from 1946 to 2011, published recently in the Minnesota Law Review, found that the Roberts court has repeatedly shielded business from lawsuits involving class actions, workplace disputes and consumer complaints.... There are few better (and more outrageous) examples of this pro-business bias than Genesis HealthCare Corp. v. Symczyk." CW: read the post. Kagan (in her dissent) lets Thomas have it, saying flat-out that the majority opinion is the product of fantasyland & bears no relation to reality. "By taking a fallacy as its premise, the majority ensures it will reach the wrong decision." The Court's conservatives are dumber than first-year law students, she implies. The decision & dissent are here (pdf). Kagan's dissent starts on the 14th page. She knows how to write!
Local News
Laura Vozzella of the Washington Post: "Thousands of Virginia Republicans on Saturday picked a slate of statewide candidates who vowed to stay true to conservative principles, resisting calls to remake the GOP message after losses in 2012. At the top of the ticket is gubernatorial hopeful Ken Cuccinelli II, the attorney general. Known for high-profile battles against 'Obamacare,' abortion and a university climate scientist, Cuccinelli stood by what detractors have called an out-of-the-mainstream agenda."
News Lede
Wall Street Journal: "Yahoo, Inc. has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for Tumblr, a six-year-old company with more than 100 million users but very little revenue...."
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Reader Comments (8)
"Circuit: Rethink your mootness-by-unaccepted-offer theory. And a note to all other courts of appeals: Don’t try this at home."
I reckon the courts of appeals are not the only ones Kagan is telling to rethink their mootness. Love her dissent and yes, she does, indeed have a way with words. After her confirmation hearings I wrote something that I posted here before, but am going to post it again. It captures, I think, a little of Kagan's moxy and Jeff Session's beady-eyed distain. Although I enhanced it somewhat, this exchange is pretty much the way it went down.
A SESSION WITH SESSIONS
Senator Sessions: So I understand that on Christmas Day you celebrate by
eating at a Chinese restaurant. Isn’t that somewhat radical?
Kagan: No, actually it isn’t Senator Sessions, I’m Jewish. That’s what we do
on Christmas day.
S: Well, Ms. Kagan, that’s not what this Christian nation does on Christmas
Day, so I would conclude your practice is somewhat radical, to say the
least. Now, I also understand you prefer pistachio ice cream, is that not
true?
K: It is, Senator.
S: Well, I find that, too, very unusual. I mean, I could go with butter
crunch or chocolate almond, but pistachio is definitely not in the main
stream. Don’t you agree?
K: I do, senator. But may I say something about this?
S: Of course, say ahead.
K: When I was younger, I liked vanilla. You see young taste buds are
delicate, so vanilla was perfect. Then as I got older I found chocolate to
my liking, my taste buds having matured somewhat. From chocolate I did go to
other flavors, but I found pistachio really hit the spot. And that spot,
Senator Sessions is who I am, like it or leave it.
S: Well, Ms Kagan, I’m afraid I’d have to leave it seeing that you are
getting very uppity for someone who hasn’t even sat on a bench. And your
love for pistachio is an indication of your very progressive nature. By the
way, do you like your ice cream in a sugared cone or plain.
K: I have neither, senator, I have it in a lovely glass dish that once
belonged to my mother.
S: Just as I thought. Again, out of the mainstream, coupled with a lot of
sentimental mush. My time is up. but I do want to wish you the best, Ms
Kagan, even though you’ll never get my vote.
K: Thank you, Senator Sessions, it has not been a pleasure but if you ever
find yourself at loose ends on a Christmas Day you would be welcome to join
my Jewish friends and family at that Chinese restaurant. And by the way, you
never got to sit on the bench either, did you?
Re: Just like on TeeVee; " Went to New York last week to cover the TV presentations for the new season, shows like “Scandal,” “Shark Tank” and a faltering “American Idol.” Ms. Dowd doesn't add that she was pushed into the shark tank by accident and pushed back out on purpose by the sharks.
How can an adult reading her first paragraph take anything she writes as serious? I truly believe she is waiting for the special effects moment when the President turns into 'TAN MAN' superhero and cleans up the mess in Capitol City. When 'TAN MAN' is raging only a redhead in a tight-fitting bodice can sooth the beast that is 'TAN MAN'.
Call wardrobe and tell'em to order up extra bodices; the tear-away kind.
PDPepe: Remember 'Will & Grace'? Of course, you do. The show had some of the most interesting characters. Among them was Beverley Leslie. Doesn't Jeff Sessions strike you as having been the prototype for the little, whiny, bitchy pretentious Beverley Leslie character?
I enjoyed the TV character hilariously portrayed by Leslie Jordan. The real life version embodied via Mr. Sessions, gah!
Our problem, it seems, is that we tend to want to lionize our leaders and forget that these persons ALL have clay feet. This is in response to Maureen Dowd's yearning/need for Obama to be all things to all people coupled with the ability to tackle, with skill and fortitude and a mixture of magic dust, anything and everything that comes his way. She mentions the Clintons and we remember the on going faux scandals that plagued his presidency including the silly business of frolicking with an intern and his big mistake of not coming clean at the beginning and just telling all those creeps that were so creeped out that he never "fucked her" which might have shut them up given that they would not have wanted that word bandied about. However––the bigger scandals, if one can categorize them as such,
might be two that George Packer has cited in his new book, "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America:
*The passage in 1999 of the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act, dropping the bar against banks trading securities on their own account like any other speculators playing with borrowed money in the casinos the supposedly regulated markets had become.
* The Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, eliminating all regulation of the soon-to-be infamous financial instruments called "derivatives."
But they are only scandalized now because of their outcomes––then they were acts of deregulation passed off as reform just as in our time Republicans cut funds for security (Benghazi) cut funds for the IRS, and dropped the Shield Law at some period. They have fallen on their own petard, but pretend no blood is on their waistcoats while brandishing their swords at none other than the guy at the helm who keeps getting it on the chops. And some wonder why the comics of all those super heroes never go out of style.
@PD Pepe: At the risk of being too nitpicky, a petard is an explosive device originally used to blow open a door or gate. "Hoisted on his own petard" literally meant blown up with his own bomb. The expression goes waaay back.
@Barbarossa
More picking at nits: I wouldn't relish falling on an explosive device either.
Dear Nitpickers: Yeah, you're right––but maybe I had that that explosive device in the back of my mind in terms of blowing up all the doors and gates that prevent real action to take place in our sacred halls of legislation. My imagination does take flight at times.