The Commentariat -- September 27

Glenn Thrush of Politico: Vice President Biden tells the Democratic base to "stop whining"; base yells back, "'Stop whining" is a hell of a rallying cry."

Bob Woodward talks to Diane Sawyer of ABC News about his book Obama's Wars. Updated report, with audio of the President:

The first of three articles adapted from Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward. AND Steve Luxenberg of the Washington Post outlines the major points in the book.

** "The revolution Will Not Be Tweeted." Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker: Gladwell contrasts the organization of the civil rights movement with the networking facilitated by Twitter, Facebook, etc., & concludes that major social movements require strong, usually hierarchical organization, whereas "Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires."

Mama Grizzlies. Lisa Miller of Newsweek: Sarah Palin dubbed "mama grizzlies" women who "rise up" & protect their young. BUT. "With few exceptions, [Palin's designated] grizzlies have been disinterested in the issues and policies that their political opponents say are good for children — despite new numbers from the census showing that rising numbers of America’s children are poor. Most of these candidates have vowed to fight to repeal President Obama’s health-care plan, for instance, and [Michele] Bachmann and Nikki Haley have taken special aim at CHIP, a federal program aimed at helping low-income kids get health insurance."

Republican "Pledge" = Survival of the Fittest. Robert Reich links the current Republican agenda to that of President Herbert Hoover & industrialist Andrew Mellon, proponents of Social Darwinism. "The basic idea is force people to live with the consequences of whatever happens to them." ...

... Neil King & Janet Hook of the Wall Street Journal: both political parties think they can campaign on -- or against -- the Republican "Pledge." ...

... Shane D'Aprile of The Hill: "Vulnerable House Democrats are working hard to create distance between themselves and their party’s leadership in Washington on the airwaves." CW: they're making a big mistake.

Michael Crowley of Time feels Obama's pain as the President imposes far-reaching restrictions on civil liberties.

Lincoln Caplan of the New York Times: "The message of Justice [Stephen] Breyer’s book [Making Our Democracy Work] is that the court jeopardizes its legitimacy when it makes such radical rulings and that, in doing so, it threatens our democracy. That message is powerful, ominous, and very useful."

Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times: "Nearly 600 mayors nationwide, led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York..., are mounting a new campaign to single out states with lax gun laws and push for tighter restrictions to prevent the trafficking of guns used in crimes. A study due to be released this week ... concludes that the 10 worst offenders per capita, led by Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky, supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states last year." Here's a draft of the study (pdf).

NEW. Damien Paletta of the Wall Street Journal: "Former Federal Research Chairman Paul Volcker scrapped a prepared speech he had planned to deliver at the Federal Researve Bank of Chicago on Thursday, and instead delivered a blistering, off-the-cuff critique leveled at nearly every corner of the financial system. Standing at a lectern with his hands in his pockets, Volcker moved unsparingly from banks to regulators to business schools to the Fed to money-market funds during his luncheon speech."

Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post: presented with evidence that mortgages didn't meet basic underwriting standards, Wall Street firms sold them to unsuspecting investors anyway. AND here's Gretchen Morgenson's New York Times story.

Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times: "Hoping to overshadow last month’s rally led by Glenn Beck that drew thousands of Tea Party advocates and other conservatives, a coalition of liberal groups plan to descend on Washington on Saturday to make the case that they, and not the ascendant right, speak for America’s embattled middle class.

David Streitfeld of the New York Times: Library Systems & Services, "a private company in Maryland, has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system. Now the company ... has been hired for the first time to run a system in [Santa Clarita, California,] a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy." CW: a friend of mine asks, "How far a leap will it be from for-profit libraries to ones that decide not to stock certain books?"

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Marc Lacey of the New York Times: U.S. Fish & Wildlife officers are ticketing Americans who leave water bottles for illegal immigrants on desert routes. The U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned one conviction, but the issue remains unsettled, & some hardliners are destroying the bottles.

The Commentariat -- September 26

CW Warning! Cute Kid Story Alert. One of my readers writes of her grandson, "B--n, age four, has always called himself an Obama baby and now is an Obama boy. At his fourth birthday party, he turned over a $20 bill someone had given him and said in a loud voice, "Look, Grandma, it's a picture of Obama's house on the back!"

Here's an excerpt from President Jimmy Carter's White House Diary. AND Steven Weisman reviews the White House Diary for the New York Times.

"Economic Madness." David Cay Johnston of Tax.com reviews the results of the Bush tax cuts: "Examining performance against the promises, what do we find? Overwhelming evidence that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 made us much worse off." Besides the multi-trillion-dollar increase in the federal deficit, average income fell well below the 2000 level; there were more taxpayers but less revenue; there were fewer jobs, less money & lower pay (mostly). Johnson compares the Republican leaders to the doctors who bled George Washington; when it didn't work, the doctors bled him more, killing him. ...

... The Editors of the New York Times tear the Republican "Pledge" to pieces. Sample:

The best way to understand the pledge is as a bid to co-opt the Tea Party by a Republican leadership that wants to sound insurrectionist but is the same old Washington elite. These are the folks who slashed taxes on the rich, turned a surplus into a crushing deficit, and helped unleash the financial crisis that has thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes. ...

... Economics Prof. Richard Thaler in the New York Times: "... the Republican position is, in effect, that if the rich can’t share in the bounty, rates should rise for everyone.... The question comes down to whether we want a society in which the rich take an ever-increasing share of the pie, or prefer to return to conditions that allow all classes to anticipate an increasing standard of living. Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist. Tea Partiers, take note."

Glenn Greenwald is apoplectic about the DOJ's abuse of the "state secrets" doctrine in a case brought by the father of suspected terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, asking the court to prevent the President from assassinating his son, who is a U.S. citizen. ...

... Marcy Wheeler finds more errors in the DOJ's argument in the case in a post she titles, "Obama doesn't know why the fuck he's entitled to kill Al-Awlaki; he just is, damnit." ...

     ... The Washington Post backstory: "The Obama administration urged a federal judge early Saturday to dismiss a lawsuit over its targeting of a U.S. citizen for killing overseas, saying that the case would reveal state secrets. The U.S.-born citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, is a cleric now believed to be in Yemen."

... Let's Not Leave out the FBI. Andrew Cohen of Politics Daily: Pittsburgh agent gets on-the-job-training trampling First Amendment rights of peaceful demonstrators. The agency covers it up, right up to & including the FBI Director's lying to Congress. The media say, "So?" ...

     Update: the New York Times Editorial Board warns the FBI against "backsliding into the[J. Edgar] Hoover days."

Ezra Klein has "a plan that will raise wages, lower prices, increase the nation's stock of scientists and engineers, and maybe even create the next Google. Better yet, this plan won't cost the government a dime. In fact, it'll save money. A lot of money. But few politicians are going to want to touch it. Here's the plan: More immigration." Klein explains.

Michael Cooper of the New York Times: "Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs within weeks unless Congress extends one of the more effective job-creating programs in the $787 billion stimulus act: a $1 billion New Deal-style program that directly paid the salaries of unemployed people so they could get jobs in government, at nonprofit organizations and at many small businesses."

On SNL, New York's Gov. David Paterson sets the record straight:

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "Democratic candidates across the country are opening a fierce offensive of negative advertisements against Republicans, using lawsuits, tax filings, reports from the Better Business Bureau and even divorce proceedings...." ...

... CW: but Greg from Austin, Texas (#15), has a better idea (read his whole comment):

The highly fractious, overly cautious, intensely nuanced, clutch-the-pearls-and-head-for-the-fainting-couch Democrats need to get a grip and find a message fast. Like the one that they keep swatting away from their eyes like a gnat. The one where they highlight and embrace what they've done so far and contrast it with what the Republicans did in their eight years in power: enrich the rich and bankrupt this country while telling us peons to wave the flag and pray.

Victor Koen artwork for the New York Times.John Harwood, writing in the New York Times, likens the 2010 elections to the 1982 mid-term elections when an unpopular Ronald Reagan managed to lose "only" 26 House seats to Democrats.

James Oliphant in the Los Angeles Times: "Galvanized by the lightning-in-a-bottle success of conservative 'tea party' candidates, moderate Republicans and others in the political center are looking for ways to push back against what they see as an advancing tide of ideological extremism. The efforts are loosely organized and embryonic, but politicians, advocacy groups and others are piecing together a framework to promote moderate candidates...."

Maureen Dowd writes of Republican nominees for high office, "We seem beset with spellbinding hybrids with the looks of Fox News anchors, the brains of mice and the power of changing the direction of the country." ...

... CW: one thing we can count on: the abstinence-only crowd will do nothing to fund contraception research & distribution, which Nicholas Kristof points out "is necessary to overcome global poverty."

Kevin Dolak of ABC News: "Nearly 100 pastors across the country planned to take part in Pulpit Freedom Sunday, an in-your-face challenge Sunday to what the government says can and cannot be said in church." CW: of course religious leaders, like all citizens, have a First Amendment right to publicly support or denounce political candidates. What they don't have a right to is tax-free status. So let 'em speak out & pay taxes. It's fine by me.

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times: "Whether it is about killing or simply about being out in the woods, in the cold and wet of fall dragging a big animal over steep terrain, hunting is just not cool to many young people. Fewer hunting licenses were sold in Colorado in 2008 than in any other year since 1979, according to the most recent figures from the State Division of Wildlife."

Anita Kumar of the Washington Post: "Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is on track to restore voting rights to more felons than either of his Democratic predecessors - a surprising development for a conservative Republican who served as a law-and-order attorney general. He has won praise from African Americans and civil rights groups for scrapping plans to require essays as part of felons' applications and vowing instead to act on each case within 60 days."

Gillian Wong of the AP: "China .... recently became the world's second largest economy. Yet it gets more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid — and taxpayers and lawmakers in donor countries are increasingly asking why."

As long as modern technology continues to progress, there will be human-caused disasters of one kind or another. The greater the powers unleashed by technology, the bigger the disasters get. -- Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, on the Gulf oil disaster

The Kennedy-Nixon "Great Debate" September 26, 1960

On the 50th anniversary of "The Great Debate" between presidential candidates Vice President Richard Nixon & Sen. John Kennedy, historian & former Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen, who was a witness to history, explores & explodes some of the myths surrounding the debate. Here's the transcript of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. Here are good-quality videos taken from a kinescope of that first debate, provided by The Film Archive: