The Commentariat -- October 19

I have a comments page on the Repubican debate on Off Times Square, but you can write about something else.

Jake Tapper of ABC News interviews President Obama on the road:

... Michael Scherer of Time compares Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party. CW: He gets it mostly right, IMHO, but he gives too little credit to the Tea Party's super-rich & establishment backers.

Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas confronts NYPD officers using excessive force against Occupy Wall Street protesters. ABC News story here; Keith Olbermann interviews Sgt. Thomas here:

Barney Frank to OWS: Where were you in 2010?

... Oh, You Knew This Was Coming. Ashley Lopez of the Florida Independent: "In a video clip and blog post published today, a right-wing activist with ties to GOP Senate candidate Adam Hasner alleges that Occupy Orlando, a Central Florida group that has sprung up in solidarity with the New York-based Occupy Wall Street movement, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Occupy Orlando held its first event this past weekend....” Thanks to a reader, who summarizes & comments on the story:

YES! Fresh off their big win in Cairo earlier this year, the Muslim Brotherhood has decamped for sunny Florida and (after a quick trip to Disneyworld to frag Mickey) is behind the OWS protests in Orlando. The double super secret don't-tell-no-one plan is to use this platform to spread Shariah Law across the land. Pretty soon you'll all be wearing burqas and I'll have make sure I never shave my beard (oh-oh Memo to self. Stay out of Amish country!) Can this get any stupider? Sadly, yes.

Nelson Schwartz of the New York Times: "For Bank of America, it is the end of an era. With the bank shrinking its balance sheet and selling off assets, the company ... surrendered its title as the country’s biggest bank Tuesday, another sign of how a money-losing giant assembled over decades is being reshaped into a smaller and, investors hope, more profitable institution. Bank of America, with $2.22 trillion in assets reported Tuesday in its third-quarter earnings, is now second to JPMorgan Chase, which has $2.29 trillion assets. It also ranks second to JPMorgan Chase in terms of branches and total deposits."

Oops! CW: I should not have skipped over this New York Times story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, published Sunday, on Mitt Romney's career as a Mormon lay leader; in fact, "the highest-ranking lay leader in Boston.... He operated as clergyman, organization man and defender of the faith, guiding the church through a tumultuous period of rapid growth." Stolberg goes into some of the "pastoral guidance" Romney offered "on all manner of human affairs from marriage to divorce, abortion, adoption, addiction, unemployment and even business disputes.... A group of Mormon feminists demanding a greater role for women, found him condescending, doctrinaire or just plain bossy. He clashed with a married mother of four who sought to terminate a pregnancy; the incident made news years later, when Mr. Romney ran for United States Senate as a supporter of abortion rights — a position he has since abandoned." ...

... Maureen Dowd opines on some of Stolberg's findings in today's column.

The Republican Debate

Adam Nagourney & Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "A tax overhaul proposed by Herman Cain, the business leader running for president, came under fire from across the Republican presidential field at a debate Tuesday, as Mr. Cain encountered the toughest round of attacks yet on a proposal that has been the signature of his candidacy.... The discussion on stage quickly turned back to [Mitt] Romney, who faced the most stinging assault yet on the health care plan he signed into law in Massachusetts. Former Senator Rick Santorum started the criticism, saying, 'Mitt, you just don’t have the credibility.' The attacks elevated and quickly turned into a firing squad, with Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and others piling onto Mr. Romney. ...

... Jonathan Bernstein of the Washington Post: "Well, it was the feistiest debate — Rick Perry even stayed awake for the whole thing, which was a nice change — and we had the welcome (at least for entertainment purposes) return of the Crazy GOP Audience thing, this time cheering for the idea that the unemployed were the ones to blame for unemployment. The debate to me had a clear loser ... Anderson Cooper.... Cooper, the CNN moderator, has no excuse: his claim that 47% of American pay no taxes was inexcusable. Just terrible." CW: How the hell would Cooper know? He's a multimillionaire from a long line of multimillionaires. ...

... Reid Epstein & Maggie Haberman of Politico: "Rick Perry went into Tuesday night’s debate looking to rattle Mitt Romney — and it worked. Perry’s been under fire for his own immigration record, and resurrecting the 2007 report that Romney had hired illegal workers helped him blunt the advantage Romney had been able to get on the issue.... Plus, according to a Perry source, there was an added bonus: by going after Romney personally — the accusation has to do with Romney’s own house — they saw the potential to make Romney react the hardest." ...

... And the Winner Is -- Barack Obama. E. J. Dionne: "The fact that Perry may have worked his way back into the mix and the likelihood that Romney and Perry will make life miserable for each other can only help the president. The candidates weren’t competing with each other to have the best attack lines against Obama to nearly the degree they had in the earlier encounters."

Susan Saulny of the New York Times: Herman Cain "could have a hard time being taken seriously, at least to the degree that he uses sarcasm and laughs to divert attention from what for another candidate could be disqualifying gaps in knowledge and experience. And while his casual style of racially inflected humor works to ingratiate him with mostly white audiences at campaign rallies, it has angered some black critics, who believe he uses age-old stereotypes."

Oops! At the top of this clip of an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Mitt Romney criticized President Obama for slowing down home foreclosures. Yup, just can't get the deadbeats out of their homes fast enough so the devious bankers who made sometimes fraudulent loans can board up the houses & take down the neighborhood, too. And Nevada -- which has perhaps the highest percentage of underwater homes in the nation -- was a super place to make this point. He's all heart, isn't he? Steve Benen has more.

Dana Milbank: "The GOP "nominating process, controlled by the religious warriors and anti-government agitators who dominate straw polls, has reached its logical conclusion: The hottest candidate in the field is Herman Cain, a fast-food tycoon who never heard of neoconservatism, has never held office, has no foreign policy and a three-digit number for a domestic policy, and likes to joke about electrocuting illegal immigrants. By contrast, Jon Huntsman, governor, ambassador, the man who in a normal political environment would be the most qualified and formidable candidate in the race, wasn’t even on the stage. A system that rejects a Jon Huntsman in favor of a Herman Cain isn’t a primary process. It is a primal scream."

Right Wing World *

As President, Herman Cain Would Overturn the U.S. Policy against Negotiating with Terrorists:

** Charles Pierce of Esquire: "It's Tuesday, and David Brooks is happy — nay, ecstatic — that all of you out there are using your encroaching poverty to rediscover your moral compass. He calls it — and I am not kidding here — The Great Restoration, and he's awfully proud of each and every one of you peasants. (UPDATE: LINK FIXED)" (Brooks' "Great Restoration" is here.) ...

... CW: commenters far & wide are still scratching their heads over what Brooks meant by the "Great Restoration" of the 1820s. So I turned to Wikipedia:

The idea of restoring a 'primitive' form of Christianity grew in popularity in the U.S. after the American Revolution.[11]:89–94 This desire to restore a purer form of Christianity played a role in the development of many groups during the Second Great Awakening, including the Mormons, Baptists and Shakers.

      ... Yes, indeedy, what we really need now is a more primitive form of Christianity because the current fundamentalist version is just so science-y & sophisticated. Or maybe this is Brooks' lead-in to a Romney endorsement. ...

... CW: here's something I did not notice about Brooks' column but Reality Chex reader Diane F. did: as originally published, Brooks made reference to people in the 1820s making "changes away from the cameras."
Diane writes, "The last paragraph is now different.... The comments about being away from the cameras is gone." No link. Perhaps historian Brooks didn't realize that in the 1820s there were no cameras. Of any kind. Okay, maybe he was thinking of the camera obscura. ...

... Karen Garcia points to a few proofs -- all gleaned from one NYT column -- that David Brooks is insane: " According to him, people are having fewer children because they are pessimistic spoil-sports about the future, not because of financial hardship. They are cutting up their credit cards, not because their credit scores are in the toilet, but because they have experienced the sudden epiphany that thrift is a virtue in and of itself. And they're sticking with their jobs, not because they have no other choice, but because they have discovered the value of loyalty. It's a 'Values Restoration' to combat the OWS radicalism!" ...

... CW: I think Brooks and his former boss Bill Keller (Keller's column is here; see also Off Times Square for October 17) are crazy like a Fox. Greg Sargent: "Critics of Occupy Wall Street have a transparent objective: They want to persuade blue collar whites and ordinary middle class Americans to turn on the movement for cultural reasons — because its optics offend these voters’ cultural instincts — even if they broadly agree with its general principles and critique of what’s gone wrong." The object of Sargent's scorn is former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen -- now a right-wing hack -- but the object ls the same for Brooks & Keller: create an unnatural cultural divide among people in the same sinking economic boat. ...

... Judd Legum of Think Progress also lays into Schoen, a pollster who falsified his own findings in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, when he claimed -- contra his poll results -- that "Occupy Wall Street ... is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth…." And that was just for starters.

* Thoroughly committed to making up stuff about ordinary people who don't follow Right Wing World rules.

News Ledes

Reuters: "Citigroup Inc will pay $285 million to settle charges that it defrauded investors who bought toxic housing-related debt that the bank bet would fail, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Wednesday. The SEC said the bank's Citigroup Global Markets unit misled investors about a $1 billion collateralized debt obligation by failing to reveal it had "significant influence" over the selection of $500 million of underlying assets, and that it took a short position against those assets." New York Times story here.

President Obama spoke at a fire station in Chesterfield, Virginia, this afternoon. Video of his full speech is here.

President & Mrs. Obama will speak at Langley-Eustis naval base in Hampton, Virginia at 10:30 am ET. AP: "President Barack Obama is employing the services of the first lady on the final leg of his three-day bus tour as they tout proposals in the president's jobs bill that the White House says would put more of the nation's unemployed veterans back to work." ...

     ... New York Times Update: "Trying to help veterans find work when they return home from war, and bolster his appeal to that constituency, President Obama announced a partnership with companies on Wednesday that aims to employ 25,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and military spouses within two years."

AP: "Turkish soldiers, air force bombers and helicopter gunships launched an incursion into Iraq on Wednesday, hours after Kurdish rebels killed 24 soldiers and wounded 18 others in multiple attacks along the border. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey had launched large-scale operations, including 'a hot pursuit within the limits of international law.'"

AP: Gen. John Allen, "the top NATO commander in Afghanistan says the international coalition has unleashed a new offensive against one of the country's most lethal militant networks and will ramp up operations next year along the Pakistan border to better secure the Afghan capital before the U.S. drawdown gathers steam."

Guardian: "Naomi Wolf, the celebrated feminist author and campaigner, has been arrested at an Occupy Wall Street protest outside an awards ceremony held to honour New York's governor. Wolf and a companion were led away in handcuffs from the street in front of Skylight Studios in Manhattan. Inside, the New York state governor, Andrew Cuomo, was being presented with the 'game changer of the year' award from the Huffington Post website, for which Wolf is a contributor." ...

... New York Times: Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, "a New York police commander who pepper-sprayed protesters during the opening days of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last month, faces an internal disciplinary charge that could cost him 10 vacation days, the police said Tuesday.... The inspector can accept the charge and plead guilty, or he can opt for a departmental trial. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is the ultimate arbiter of punishment in such matters and has wide leeway in his decisions." CW Lesson: assaulting an innocent bystander could cost you a day at the beach.

AP: "A two-day general strike that unions vow will be the largest in years grounded flights, disrupted public transport and shut down everything from shops to schools in Greece on Wednesday, as at least 70,000 protesters converged in central Athens. All sectors, from dentists ... to ... dock workers walked off the job ahead of a Parliamentary vote Thursday on new austerity measures which include new taxes and the suspension of tens of thousands of civil servants."

Haaretz: "Forty-two released Palestinian prisoners arrived in Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Qatar on Tuesday after being set free as part of a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. The prisoners are considered the most notorious of 1,027 Palestinians and Israeli Arabs being released by Israel in exchange for abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held in Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip for five years and four months.... The rest will be released in two months time."

AP: "Libyan revolutionary forces fought building by building Wednesday against the final pocket of resistance in Moammar Gadhafi's hometown — the last major city in Libya to have been under the control of forces loyal to the fugitive leader. But while Libya's transitional leadership worked to consolidate control over the entire country, the country's acting prime minister warned in a newspaper interview that Gadhafi can still cause trouble from his hiding place."