The Commentariat -- Sept. 16, 2015

Internal links & defunct video removed.

CW: I am happy to report that here in the U.S. of A., Tuesday was a day without any serious political news. Ergo, most of today's Commentariat borders on -- or crosses over into -- the silly. Most of the "news" is speculation about how the candidates will fare in tonight's debates.

David Herszenhorn & Julie Davis of the New York Times: "Congress hurtled toward a government shutdown on Tuesday, with Republicans threatening to block a budget deal if it includes financing for Planned Parenthood, as President Obama prepared to join the fight by pushing Republicans to scrap a multibillion-dollar tax advantage for private equity managers.... The so-called carried interest provision ... [is] a tax break ... that the president has repeatedly proposed eliminating, and it is a favorite bête noire of Democrats condemning income inequality. Its repeal has little chance of passing a divided Congress, but it has gained new political potency in recent days, with two Republican presidential candidates, Donald J. Trump and Jeb Bush, endorsing it."

Jesse Byrnes of the Hill: "President Obama is weighing in on the discussion over political dialogue on college campuses, saying students shouldn't be "coddled" from opposing views:

It's not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues who sometimes aren't listening to the other side. And that's a problem, too. I've heard of some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative. Or they don't want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I've got to tell you, I don't agree with that either. I don't agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of views.

     ... President Obama's full speech is here. ...

Josh Gerstein of Politico: "After decades of stiff resistance, the CIA is preparing to pull back the curtain -- to an extent -- on one of the most vaunted rituals in the intelligence world: the daily briefing delivered to American presidents on world events and global threats. At a conference in Austin, Texas Wednesday, the spy agency is set to release about 2,500 President's Daily Briefs and similar reports delivered to President John F. Kennedy and then to President Lyndon Johnson during a nearly-eight-year span in the 1960s. The briefings detail the evolution of the war in Vietnam and responses to events like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Six-Day War in the Middle East."

... Jonathan Chait: "One of the problems with p.c. culture is that it allows the likes of Donald Trump to pass off their bigotry as opposition to political correctness (just as communists used McCarthyism to discredit all anti-communism).... Political correctness is most closely associated with campus life, because the academy is one of the few institutions in the United States where the left has the ability to impose its hegemony.... The right's inability to conduct rational internal debate is on daily display and has had disastrous consequences for the country and the world. The impingement of this illiberal political culture on mainstream left-of-center debate is a problem of nontrivial scale." ...

... Libby Nelson of Vox: What engendered President Obama's remarks on political correctness was a student's asking him "to respond to Republican presidential contender Ben Carson's proposal to cut off funding to colleges that demonstrate political bias.... 'I have no idea what that means, and I suspect he doesn't either.... The idea that you'd have somebody in government making a decision about what you should think ahead of time or what you should be taught, and if it's not the right thought, or idea, or perspective or philosophy, that person would be -- they wouldn't get funding, runs contrary to everything we believe about education,' he said. 'That might work in the Soviet Union, but that doesn't work here. That's not who we are.'"

Rachel Bade of Politico: "Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn [R], a former Texas attorney general and Texas supreme court justice, asked [Attorney General Loretta] Lynch in a Tuesday morning letter to appoint a special counsel" to investigate Hillary Clinton's e-mail usage. CW: Thanks for your concern, Senator. Now go away.

** James Carroll of the New Yorker: "Rather than seeing [Pope Francis] as a cult-worthy personality who represents something wholly new in Catholicism, it is better to understand Francis, even in his stylistic deviations, as the culmination of a slow, if jerky, recovery on the part of the Church from its self-defeating rejection of modernity." CW: Sorry to interrupt the nonsense with something worth reading.

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Special Halperin Edition. Ed Kilgore: "I guess this is Trump Panic Day..., and the best sign of that is not so much the reports of angst on Wall Street as the reaction of everybody's favorite Insider Journalist, Bloomberg Politics' Mark Halperin, who has written a piece mainly remarkable for its analysis of the GOP race as a death match where Donald Trump gets 'killed' or everybody dies! Right from the get-go, Halperin gets his thug on.... You get a mental image of Halperin sitting in a half-lit Italian restaurant with the members of Murder, Inc., planning their next hit. It's pretty hilarious, but that's how tense it's getting in the Republican side of the Village.... If it weren't for the real-life consequences, it would be tempting to cheer Trump on, if only for the comedic value of what he does to people like Halperin and his sources." ...

... Steve M.: "We've now entered the stage of this presidential race in which gullible reporters not only retransmit Donald Trump's nonsense but actually believe it themselves." Enter right, Mark Halperin. "Halperin has a narrative and he's sticking to it.... I guess the only people dumb enough to believe Trump's BS are Republican voters and mainstream political journalists." ...

... Charles Pierce: "America's cable-news executives ... lap up [Donald Trump's] every word these days like hogs going for the last corn husk on doomsday. You know the sucking up has reached critical mass among the elite political press when the inexcusably employed Mark Halperin begins slurping so loudly you can hear him from space.... This is a completely and self-evidently ridiculous man and the idea that cable news executives feel compelled to televise every waking minute of his campaign requires that they be flogged out of the business." ...

... Wait, Wait! We need to hear from Bill Kristol on this! Caitlin MacNeal of TPM: "The Weekly Standard Editor told CNN on Monday that he would be unable to back the real estate mogul. 'I doubt I'd support Donald. I doubt I'd support the Democrat,' Kristol said. 'I think I'd support getting someone good on the ballot as a third-party candidate.' Kristol told CNN that he would like to see former Vice President Dick Cheney or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) run as independents in 2016." CW: You see, it is possible to be even more ridiculous than Halperin.

Presidential Race

Paul Waldman: "The big policy headline [Tuesday] comes from the Wall Street Journal, which delivers this alarming message: Price Tag of Bernie Sanders' Proposals: $18 Trillion.... Holy cow! He must be advocating for some crazy stuff that will bankrupt America!... While Sanders does want to spend significant amounts of money, almost all of it is on things we're already paying for; he just wants to change how we pay for them. In some ways it's by spreading out a cost currently borne by a limited number of people to all taxpayers.... And ... fully $15 trillion of it comes not from an analysis of anything Sanders has proposed, but from the fact that Sanders has said he'd like to see a single-payer health insurance system.... Since Sanders hasn't released a health care plan yet, we can't make any assessment of the true cost of his plan.... Given the experience of the rest of the world, there's a strong likelihood that over the long run, a single-payer plan would save America money." ...

... CW: Waldman closes with a truism too often lost on a lazy-minded electorate: "The question when it comes to government should always be not what we're spending, but what we're getting for what we spend."

Greg Sargent makes a strong case that Hillary Clinton should push for more Democratic presidential debates.

Dana Milbank turns to StopBullying.gov for advice on how to deal with Donald Trump. By substituting StopBullying.gov's advice for how to deal with a bullying "child" to "candidate," Milbank discovers that the advice on the site could be quite effective against the Donald.

Maggie Haberman & Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times announce that over recent weeks Donald Trump has become a "better candidate"; i.e., he is beginning to follow some of the established campaign rituals like relying on prepared notes for his speeches & doing rope lines. CW: Could explain why his latest poll numbers are stagnant.

Kevin Liptak of CNN: "Donald Trump's campaign remarks about Mexican immigrants represent a play to the worst parts of society, Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday. Speaking at a reception marking Hispanic Heritage Month, Biden laid into the businessman turned GOP front-runner -- naming him twice -- as reverting to 'xenophobia' in a play for votes.":

Daniel Strauss: "The conservative group the Club for Growth unveiled its upcoming barrage against Donald Trump set to air later this week: a pair of 30-second ads that will air in Iowa and peg the real estate mogul as just another politician who supports liberal policies.... 'We have an amazing tax plan,' Trump said Sunday. 'We're going to be reducing taxes for the middle class, but for the hedge fund guys, they're going to be paying up.'" ...

... Joan McCarter of Daily Kos: "When we last checked in on one of many of Donald Trump's feuds, the Club for Growth was having a hard time finding takers for an ad campaign it was proposing against The Donald. It seems that 'some top GOP financiers' were worried that such an effort could 'backfire' since every person or thing that got sucked into a Trump fight loses. That's still a concern for many Republicans, but not all, apparently. CfG has managed to scrape together $1 million to run two ads in Iowa attacking Trump for being a closet liberal: "Which presidential candidate supports higher taxes, national health care and the Wall Street Bailout? It's Donald Trump," one of the ads intones.

Would Don Draper Ever Make a Mistake Like This? Can't We Get Better Ad Agencies? Eliza Collins & Daniel Strauss of Politico: "Jeb Bush's super PAC Right to Rise used stock video images from England and Asia for its new video, which seeks to contrast the former Florida governor's optimism about America's future with Donald Trump's pessimism about its present.... 'If we get a few big things right, we can make lives better for millions of people in this nation where every life matters and everyone has the right to rise,' he says. The only problem: The sun is rising over a field in Cornwall, England -- a clip available for between $19 and $79 on Shutterstock." CW: O, to be in England now that September's there. ...

... It's Morning in America Someplace All Over Again:

... AND Jeb! himself, according to Jonathan Chait, "has made a huge mistake": "When Marco Rubio proposed his massive tax-cut plan a few months ago, he left the details so vague it could not be analyzed.... The incoherence has been a boon to Rubio, who has been able to portray his plan as a departure from Republican orthodoxy, without any hard numbers that could (and surely would) disprove his spin.... But Bush has filled in enough details that his plan's impact could actually be measured. Citizens for Tax Justice has run the numbers, and it turns out a whopping 53 percent of the benefit of Bush's plan would accrue to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers.... 'Most of your tax cut goes to the richest 1 percent' is a really damaging attack line, especially when you're personally a very rich person named Bush." ...

Beyond the Beltway

AP: "The death-row inmate Richard Glossip maintained his innocence on the eve of his execution in Oklahoma on Tuesday, while his attorneys went to court with what they said was new evidence supporting claims that he was framed. Glossip, 52, is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday afternoon at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He was convicted of ordering the 1997 beating death of Barry Van Treese, who owned the motel where Glossip worked."

AP: "A university instructor told police he killed his girlfriend at the home they shared in Mississippi, where investigators found a note that said 'I am so sorry' and gave no hints that he was already headed a few hundred miles north to kill a colleague, police said Tuesday."

CW: Excellent news for writers. Under the protection of the U.S. Constitution, you can write "FUCK YOUR SHITTY TOWN BITCHES" on your speeding tickets.

Way Beyond

William Booth & Robert Samuels of the Washington Post: "Blocked by Hungary's new border fence, the river of migrants and refugees began to change course Wednesday and move west toward Croatia in a desperate gambit to forge a new route to Western Europe. 'Barbed wire in Europe in the 21st century is not an answer, it's a threat,' complained Croatia's prime minister, Zoran Milanovic, in a direct jab at the blockades by neighboring Hungary. He told lawmakers in Zagreb that Croatia would 'accept and direct' the migrants to transit the country -- comments that are likely to ripple through the social media networks used by the refugees and increase the march toward Croatia."

News Ledes

New York Times: "A Cuomo administration lawyer who was shot in the head during a predawn celebration before the West Indian American Day Parade last week died on Wednesday evening, according to a family friend. The lawyer, Carey W. Gabay, 43, was a bystander caught in a shootout in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that the police believe to have been between gangs."

Washington Post: "Flash flooding in Utah has claimed the lives of 18 people, including 12 who died after two vehicles packed with families that had gone to watch torrential waters ran into a 'wall of water' filled with debris on Monday. Six Zion National Park visitors also died in the flooding, and one person who was at the park is still missing, ...."

Comments

[Akhilleus]

Looked at the new Jeb(!) campaign ad.

Zzzzzzzzzzz...

Seems like he wants to do a sort of "Morning again in America" with the flags slowly waving and wheat fields and buildings going up, except for the fact that those wheat fields are in England and the buildings in Asia. Oops. I thought his Super PAC, Right to Rise (what a name!) had oodles of cash. Why cheap out on such a big ad?

But then this ad was created by the same people who sent out a glossy flyer to voters in Iowa earlier in the year that featured a photoshopped figure of Jeb(!) with one hand white and one hand looking decidedly black. Oops again. Pretty sure this wasn't a subtle signal that Jebbers was secretly a supporter of the NAACP or, heaven forbid, Black Lives Matter. To Bushes, black lives only matter as cannon fodder for whatever ego war they're about to indulge in.

As for this ad in which Jebbie promises to make life better in Cornwall and Southeast Asia, I have to say that to me, the whole thing looks a little.....low energy.

Not nearly exciting enough to disrupt a good nap.

Zzzzzzzzzzz...(!)

[Akhilleus]

Since we're talking ridiculous today, there are few better places to start than with anything written by Mark Halperin, a shameful imposter whose inability to think usefully about anything related to politics should have gotten him arrested years back on charges of intellectual destitution and political vagrancy for sleeping on the air vents of democracy.

I won't take up much time deconstructing Halperin's embarrassing hagiography of Trumpy the Trumpet except to point out how equally embarrassing is his deficient thought process. Halperin describes the standard structure of a Republican campaign, which is to forget about policy positions and presentations of what you could do to better your country, and instead spend your time and money defaming your opponents (this part is accurate, another reason Confederates have not put forward a serious candidate for president for many years. Bush doesn't count. The first election was stopped and he was crowned king by Nino Scalia. The next election he stole).

Then he comes out with this gelatinous glob of folderol:

"That is how you kill the enemy and prevail. Insiders and the campaigns themselves have long known this secret, even as much of the media coverage obscures the truth." (from the Bloomberg piece linked above)

A secret? Really Mark? You think this shit is a secret? Republicans spend millions to hammer their opponents with dirty tricks and attack ads until they run away? This is the great undisclosed mystery of Confederate campaigning?

Please. That's about as big a secret as Sarah Palin's inability to construct a sentence diagrammable by the greatest experts in English grammar without resorting to mainlining heroin.

Of course the part about media coverage obscuring truths? Find a mirror. Take a bow. And thanks for nothin', douchebag.

Oh, and I have to thank Marie for another great laugh. The story of how Bill Kristol's choices to run the country are a deranged war criminal and a dangerous, ignorant tyro who writes letters to foreign powers telling them not to trust the United States. Kristol has never had any credibility and common antonyms for "credible" don't seem properly descriptive. Yes, unreliable, dishonest, unsound (that's not a bad one, though), implausible, and unreasonable all work to a degree, but I'm inclined to go with "frighteningly impaired".

[Akhilleus]

Pssst...psst...hey, c'mere. Yeah, you. C'mere.

Hey, do you know....is Texas still there? Is it still Texas, even? You're sure? It's not ObamaLand? People aren't locked up and chained together as Obama walks down the line and selects his personal harem girls to service him and his Black Panther and ISIS buddies while laughing at pictures of crucifixes dipped in a vat of urine? The guns haven't been confiscated and sent to terrorist camps in Syria? Children aren't being indoctrinated to believe that everyone is created equal and abortion is legal?

Well whadaya know? Jade Helm 15 is over, as of yesterday, and Texas has not been invaded. No one is in chains, no guns taken away, and no sightings of black helicopters. No POW camps set up in empty Wal-Marts, and no Texas women sent away to sex slave camps in Iran.

But how can that be? Ya mean Louie Gohmert and Greg Abbott, the governor, and Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and....on and on and on....all those other guys....LIED? Think anyone will ask them about their irresponsible fear mongering tonight?

Then again, this must be another Obama trick. You know how shifty those blah people can be. Just when everyone thinks they're out of danger, Michelle will drop an EMP device from Air Force One (she carries five or six in her purse, because white people) and flatten the state. Then you'll all see! Heaven's to Reagan, you'll all see then.

Now, is there a chance that the idiots who have been screaming bloody murder about this for the last couple of months know what they're talking about in any other venue? Has their continual lying given anyone a single reason to trust anything they say?

Well, don't worry. They're still betting that there will be no 2016 election. It will be canceled by Obama. They're SURE, this time. Swear to god. Pinky swear to god!

P.S. Hey, didn't Louie Gohmert promise to leave the country if something, something, something, wingnut, crazy, something, Confederate, liberal, gay, something? When does that happen? Please, can that be soon?

[Akhilleus]

Whoa. Stop the presses, or whatever you have to do to stop the internets.

Trumpy has finally let us in on his absolutely, no kidding, very most favoritest verse from the Bible. And it's a great one! I mean, I never would have guessed this would be his favorite verse:

"Never bend to envy." From Proverbs.

Or not.

Hmm....let's look at Proverbs. Not there. Not here. Not in this chapter. Not here either. Shit. It don't exist.

But it sounds good, don't you think? "Never bend to envy", something Trumpy has kept in mind his whole life because so many people envy him. Don't you? I know I do. I sit up nights grinding my teeth in green envy over Trumpy's many excellent qualities, chief among which is humility.

Well, false alarm, kids. It's not from that Bible, but I guess it's from some other Bible; the Bible according to Trumpy.

And, why not?

It's right before the verse that says "Thou shalt say no bad shit about the Trumpet. God'll get ya."

[Elizabeth]

It may be a slow news day, but we do have CW and Akhilleus to keep us entertained. With some reluctance, I watched the Jeb! ad. Boring is one word. Derivative and predictable fit as well. How about high school pep-rally project?

For all the shouting on the front pages of newspapers about Hillary's emails (so glad I chose not to read any of those stories when this news broke a couple of months ago) and Trump's arrogance, it's been quiet in my little neck of the NH woods. Oh, candidates come and go, there are flurries of excitement, but no one I know is talking about them. But I have been keeping an eye out for bumper stickers. So far, Trump and Carson. That's it. And that's it for yards signs too. But very few of either. It's still too warm, I think. I did see a bumper sticker while stopped at a red light earlier today that, honestly, it took me nearly the entire red light to figure out. At first I thought it was because I need stronger glasses and I just wasn't reading it clearly. It was red, white, and blue, very patriotic, with Hillary Clinton's name at the top, an attractive line of stars underneath, and then below that, "Prison 2016." Prison? Was I reading that right? But I couldn't come up with any other word that looked like "prison" but could be something else. Then I realized--the driver of that gold Honda really was saying that Hillary Clinton belongs in prison because ... of emails? Benghazi? Being married to Bill?

Perhaps we should be grateful that the Republican candidates are providing some comic relief these days. Certainly most of the rest of the news runs the gamut from distressing to tragic.

[Akhilleus]

Well, everyone enjoy the Punch 'n' Judy show(s) tonight. Plenty to talk about tomorrow.

Plenty of nuthin' that is.

But there will be stiff competition for the main prizes:

The Rick Perry Memorial "Duh, I forget" Award.

The Most Obsequious Follower of Trumpy Award.

The I Can be Meaner and Stupider Than Trumpy Award.

The Let's Kill All the Immigrants Award.

The Let's Stick it to Women (Again) Award.

The I Hate Obama Way More than All of You Award. Way More.

The George W. Bush Memorial Foot in Mouth Award.

The I Don't Have a Frickin' Clue What I'm Talking About Award.

The I Said Something Stupid Quicker than Anyone Else Award.

The Jesus is Pissed and Getting Pisseder by the Second Award.

and the ever popular

Most Shameless Panderer to the Idiots Award.

Enjoy.

[safari]

Overseas I've only got CNN's channel to catch a glimpse of American "news" teevee. Since it's one of the only debates I can actually watch without streaming I thought I'd give it a try...

Maybe I was mentally warped by constant bombardment of the American media bubble or maybe I was still just "raw" intellectually, but I had previously imagined CNN as a worthy news source compared to its rivals. Was I so naive at the time or has CNN just drastically lowered its quality?

The pre-debate commentary has been solely based on personality and circus show, and zero policy discussion. Zero indication of these candidates are being vetted to take on the perhaps most important job in the world. Wars, nuclear bomb codes, trade relations, tax policy, etc. etc.

On another mainstream French news channel (France 24) the presenter, interviewing a Republican 'strategist', mentioned that a lot of people think Trump is sexist and represents the worst of American politics and then asked if he thinks he could be president. The response: "Uh, yeah, maybe. We'll have to wait and see." Great.

Entertaining ourselves to death indeed.

[NiskyGuy]

@safari,

Entertaining ourselves, absolutely. And the "best" part is that the death is elsewhere. How to even begin to account for the havoc wrought in our name is daunting.