The Commentariat -- Nov. 26, 2013
Mark Landler of the New York Times: "The weekend ended with the first tangible sign of a nuclear deal with Iran, after more than three decades of hostility. Then on Monday came the announcement that a conference will convene in January to try to broker an end to the civil war in Syria. The success of either negotiation, both long sought by President Obama, is hardly assured -- in fact the odds may be against them. But the two nearly simultaneous developments were vivid statements that diplomacy, the venerable but often-unsatisfying art of compromise, has once again become the centerpiece of American foreign policy." CW: ... which explains why neo-cons & Bushies are reflexively against any brokered peace agreement. ...
... Matt Spetalnick of Reuters: "When push came to shove in the closing hours of marathon negotiations in Geneva on Iran's nuclear program, it was President Barack Obama, back at the White House, who approved the final language on the U.S. side before the historic deal was clinched. It was perhaps only fitting that Obama had the last say. His push for a thaw with Tehran, a longtime U.S. foe, dates back to before his presidency, and no other foreign policy issue bears his personal stamp more since he took office in early 2009." ...
... Sarah Wheaton & Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "President Obama said on Monday that 'cleareyed, principled diplomacy' had produced the agreement with Iran to stall its nuclear development, pushing back against rising criticism in Congress and from allies like Israel that the pact reached in Geneva was a capitulation. Speaking at a rally in San Francisco, Mr. Obama emphasized what he described as a major achievement in the long-estranged relations with Iran. He spoke as American officials confirmed that Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped finalize the deal on Sunday, had engaged in secret communications with Iran months ago in an effort to improve relations and encourage talks." ...
... They Were Against It Before They Knew What It Was. Dana Milbank: "In the eyes of Republicans, the agreement with Iran has a fatal flaw: It was negotiated by the Obama administration. This president could negotiate a treaty promoting baseball, motherhood and apple pie, and Republicans would brand it the next Munich.... At 9:08 p.m. [Saturday] -- before any details of the pact were known -- Ari Fleischer delivered his opinion on the agreement, via Twitter. 'The Iran deal and our allies: You can't spell abandonment without OBAMA.' ... Would it be better to go to war now without exhausting diplomatic options? We've been there and done that -- when Ari Fleischer stood on the White House podium." ...
... Steve M. of NMMNB explains the rhetorical rules that govern Right Wing World: "To the right, every Democrat operating in the foreign policy sphere is Neville Chamberlain. Every Democratic policy that affects the economy came straight from The Communist Manifesto. Every liberal or moderate immigration is sovereignty-destroying amnesty.... Right-wingers aren't grown-ups. They're overgrown children who are heroes of their own political fantasy stories. It's not enough for them to oppose a policy -- they have to persuade themselves that they're the only ones preventing the destruction of civilization as we know it." ...
... Gershom Gorenberg in the American Prospect: "Instead of toasting Obama's success, Netanyahu has responded with public fury perhaps unprecedented in the Washington-Jerusalem relationship. The link between Netanyahu's reactions in September [to successful U.S. negotiations in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis] and now is what could be called Agreement Anxiety Disorder (AAD): a reflexive certainty that any time an antagonist is willing to make an agreement to end or manage a conflict, the deal is a deception." ...
... Ed Kilgore: "It doesn't really matter what the U.S. does with respect to Israel's enemies so long as Bibi is in charge: it won't be the right thing, or enough of the right thing. Everybody just needs to accept that and move along."
Alfonso Serrano of al Jazeera: "President Barack Obama invoked the spirit of Thanksgiving on Monday as he urged House Republicans to back an immigration deal, saying he accepts chopping comprehensive reform approved by the Senate into pieces if that helps pass legislation":
The system will not work perfectly on Dec. 1, but it will work much better than it did in October. -- Julie Bataille, spokesperson for the Healthcare.gov project ...
... Elise Viebeck of the Hill: "Administration officials said Monday that some visitors to ObamaCare's federal enrollment site would experience outages, slow response times or messages to try again later during the month of December. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) delivered the message in the latest attempt to downplay expectations surrounding Nov. 30, the administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing HealthCare.gov." ...
... Robert Pear of the New York Times: "Many users of the website have had their applications cast into limbo after they uploaded copies of documents like driver's licenses, Social Security cards and voter registration cards, or sent them to the office of the federal insurance marketplace in London, Ky. Administration officials said the government had established strict procedures to verify that people applying for insurance were who they said they were.... But a breakdown in the process instead is causing concern among some consumers about the handling of their personal information." ...
... Brian Beutler of Salon: "... Jeffrey Zients -- the Obama administration point person in charge of fixing Healthcare.gov -- ... told reporters on Friday that the site will be able to handle 50,000 users at a time and 800,000 users a day by the the end of next week." So what's a right-wing extremist/elected official to do? "When Healthcare.gov actually starts working, GOP will have to choose between politics or their constituents' health." ...
Art by Donkey Hotey.... Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times: "Perhaps in an effort to defuse reports that House Speaker John Boehner is making out pretty well as a first-time insurance customer under the Affordable Care Act, Boehner's office put out the word this weekend that his family healthcare premiums will be much higher next year than now. That outstanding stenographic service, Politico.com, swallowed this story whole.... Boehner is plainly an outlier as an Obamacare client. He's way older than the average individual policy applicant, and his family income is way beyond the U.S. average.... But the real lie at the heart of Boehner's claim is that the typical Obamacare customer is someone transitioning from a good employer plan to the individual market, as he is. The truth is that two-thirds of all the users of the individual insurance exchanges nationwide are expected to be people who didn't have any insurance previously." Read the whole column. ...
... CW: This bit was reported in at least one of the posts I linked yesterday, but I don't think I highlighted it here. Josh Marshall of TPM: "According to Scott MacFarlane, a reporter for the local NBC affiliate in Washington, reports that a DC Health Care exchange representative actually tried to contact Boehner by phone during the enrollment process but was put on hold for 35 minutes [listening to "lots of patriotic hold music"], after which time the representative finally hung up." So basically Boehner's complaint about ObamaCare is, "I'm rich, old & don't like to answer the phone. Waaaaahh!" ...
... Hiltzik on the ObamaCare success stories you're not hearing: "... Americans learning that they'll be eligible for coverage perhaps for the first time, or at sharply lower cost, are far more typical of the individual insurance market [than are "victims" experiencing "sticker shock"]. Two-thirds of the 30 million Americans who will be eligible for individual coverage next year are uninsured today, whether because they can't afford it now or because they're barred by pre-existing condition limitations, which will no longer be legal. And more than three-quarters will be eligible for subsidies that will cut their premium costs and even co-pays and deductibles substantially." Hiltzik cites a few cases of people the ACA has rescued from the Bad Old Days, which are about to end. ...
... Erik Wemple of the Washington Post: According to Fox "News" hosts, ObamaCare is worse than Iraq & Katrina because "unlike other issues, Katrina or the Iraq war that we've seen in ... the past second term, this is something that touches so many people's lives across the country." CW: See? They've rejected those melodramatic false equivalencies comparing the ACA to Katrina & Iraq. ...
I believe I'm going to be a Democrat. -- Ronald Hudson, a white Kentucky Republican, upon learning he would qualify for a "medical card" under ObamaCare ...
... Markos Moulitsas: "The fight for Obamacare has become an existentialist crisis for the GOP. And Ronald Hudson in Breathitt County, Kentucky, is turning that nightmare into reality." ...
... Jason Millman of Politico: "Tea party-aligned [Gov. Rick] Scott, who was once one of Obamacare's most fervent critics, shocked the political world by endorsing [Medicaid] expansion in February. The GOP-controlled state Senate subsequently agreed, but those plans died in the House amid forceful opposition from GOP Speaker Will Weatherford.... With so many uninsured, Florida will help shape whether the Affordable Care Act can eventually be viewed as a success." ...
... Toluse Olorunnipa of Bloomberg News: "At least five public hospitals closed this year and many more are scaling back services, mostly in states where Medicaid wasn't expanded.... Hospitals have dismissed at least 5,000 employees across the country since June, mostly in states that haven't expanded the joint state-federal Medicaid health program for the poor as anticipated under ... Obamacare.... Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, said governors who chose not to expand Medicaid are to blame for the hospital closures." CW: OR ... Let's see how many people the Supreme Court can sicken or kill in a single side ruling. AND, thanks, Stephen Breyer & Elena Kagan, for concurring in this ruling.
... Ben Goad of the Hill: "The Obama administration is conceding that its decision to allow people to keep insurance policies that would otherwise be canceled under the Affordable Care Act could weaken federal health exchanges. Hundreds of pages of regulations made public Monday contain an acknowledgment that the decision, announced amid fierce criticism over canceled policies, would mean fewer healthy people would buy healthcare through the exchanges." ...
... Jonathan Chait: "With healthcare.gov lurching toward functionality, the next wave in Obamacare disaster coverage revolves around President Obama's oft-repeated promise, 'If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.' Let me spoil the suspense: Not everybody is going to keep their doctor.... Keep Your Doctor was mainly offered as a rebuttal to the ever-present accusation that Obamacare amounted to a form of socialized medicine that would dictate by fiat which doctors a patient could see." Chait explains why the coming Keep Your Doctor Outrage is nonsense. ...
... Paul Waldman of the American Prospect: "... a belief that the ACA's failure would make single-payer more likely fundamentally misreads our political history." ...
... Steve M.: "Democrats need a confluence of extraordinary circumstances in order to make big societal changes. They may not get them again for quite some time." ...
... Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg News: "It's quite possible that Obamacare will be a sufficient liability to cost Obama his popularity and Democrats their Senate majority. The party and individual politicians may sink for a time. (They may also recover far faster than many suspect. We live in volatile times.) But unless Obamacare is far more troubled than it now appears, the law will not sink. It floats."
Mark Hosenball of Reuters: "British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a 'doomsday' cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud. The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said.... One source described the cache of still unpublished material as Snowden's 'insurance policy' against arrest or physical harm. U.S. officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public. Some Obama Administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories." ...
... How to Steal a Bajillion Bytes of Metadata. Nicole Perlroth & John Markoff of the New York Times: "People knowledgeable about Google and Yahoo's infrastructure say they believe that government spies bypassed the big Internet companies and hit them at a weak spot -- the fiber-optic cables that connect data centers around the world that are owned by companies like Verizon Communications, the BT Group, the Vodafone Group and Level 3 Communications. In particular, fingers have been pointed at Level 3, the world's largest so-called Internet backbone provider, whose cables are used by Google and Yahoo." ...
... Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Mark Udall (D-Colo.) & Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), in a New York Times op-ed: "The bulk collection of Americans' telephone records -- so-called metadata -- by the National Security Agency is, in our view, a clear case of a general warrant that violates the spirit of the framers' intentions.... The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated.... Despite this, the surveillance reform bill recently ratified by the Senate Intelligence Committee would explicitly permit the government to engage in dragnet collection as long as there were rules about when officials could look at these phone records. It would also give intelligence agencies wide latitude to conduct warrantless searches for Americans' phone calls and emails. This is not the true reform that poll after poll has shown the American people want."
Adam Goldman & Matt Apuzzo of the AP: "In the early years after 9/11, the CIA turned some Guantanamo Bay prisoners into double agents then sent them home to help the U.S. kill terrorists, current and former U.S. officials said. The CIA promised the prisoners freedom, safety for their families and millions of dollars from the agency's secret accounts.... At the same time the government used the risk of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA."
$11.2 Million More Reasons for Campaign Finance Reform. Kim Barker of ProPublica: "New tax return shows Karl Rove's [tax-exempt] group spent even more on politics than it [reported to the IRS] ... under penalty of perjury." CW: Yeah, that will happen when you send your "social welfare" money to Grover Norquist. ...
... Charles Pierce: "Now you know at least part of why the Republicans tried to make a meal out of the IRS dumbassery in Cincinnati. It was to defang the enforcement mechanism that might force Karl Rove to spend some of this money on an actual social-welfare issue -- namely, prison reform."
Like Jesus, the Pope Is a Socialist. Naomi O'Leary of Reuters: "Pope Francis called for renewal of the Roman Catholic Church and attacked unfettered capitalism as 'a new tyranny', urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff. The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to an official platform for his papacy...." CW: Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I'm beginning to think this Pope could make a difference.
Jim Tankersley & Scott Clement of the Washington Post: "American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place. That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers.... More than six in 10 workers in a recent Washington Post-Miller Center poll worry that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s. Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry 'a lot' about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey...."
Ron Fournier of the National Journal: "More than almost any president, Obama has failed to exercise ... presidential clemency. But that may be changing. The White House is considering a broad range of clemency reforms."
No More Pretty Pictures. Andrew Beaujon of Poynter: "In a memo to staff Sunday, USA Today Deputy Director of Multimedia Andrew P. Scott said the news organization will not use 'handout photos originating from the White House Press Office, except in very extraordinary circumstances.' ... USA Today owner Gannett was among the organizations that protested the White House's clampdown on photographers' access to the president No week."
November 2013 Election
Laura Vozzella of the Washington Post: "The State Board of Elections on Monday declared Democrat Mark R. Herring Virginia's next attorney general, capping a dramatic three-week certification process in the closest statewide race in Virginia history. Herring defeated Republican Mark D. Obenshain by a mere 165 votes out of more than 2 million cast, according to the final tally certified in Richmond on Monday, at least temporarily giving Democrats a historic sweep of statewide offices.... Yet the exceedingly narrow results also offered reason to brace for a recount. The certified tally gave Herring 1,103,777 votes to Obenshain's 1,103,612 -- a winning margin of less than one hundredth of a percent. Obenshain did not immediately call for a recount, but he has set up a transition team...."
Local News
Jake Sherman of Politico: "Three top Florida Republican leaders -- including the state party chairman -- say Rep. Trey Radel should resign, less than one week after he plead guilty to possession of cocaine. State party chair Lenny Curry, Lee County GOP chair Terry Miller and Mike Lyster, the chairman of the Collier County Republicans issued statements late Monday, saying the Florida Republican should step down.... Several candidates who lost to Radel in a competitive 2012 primary -- including Chauncey Goss, whose father served eight terms in the House -- have been publicly critical of Radel. Many are already mulling a run for his seat. Former Rep. Connie Mack, who vacated the seat to run for the U.S. Senate, also is seen as eyeing another run." CW: I have every expectation that CoMa will again be my horrible Representative.
News Ledes
Guardian: "US warplanes have directly challenged China's claims of an expanding territorial air defense zone, flying dramatically and without incident on Monday over a disputed island chain. The incursion comes on the heels of a scathing statement over the weekend by defense secretary Chuck Hagel rejecting the expansion of the Chinese air defense zone into the East China sea as a provocative threat to regional stability. But the Pentagon insisted Tuesday that the overflight was not a reaction to the Chinese declaration."
New York Times: "For the second time in a decade, Ukraine is in turmoil, with tens of thousands of protesters in recent days loudly demanding that the country shake off its post-Soviet identity and move once and for all into the orbit of a more prosperous Europe."
Los Angeles Times: "In a major legal blow to the California bullet train, a Sacramento judge ruled that state officials cannot pursue their plan to tap billions of dollars in voter-approved bond funding for construction, a decision that could cause indefinite delays in the massive $68-billion project. Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny, ruling Monday in two closely watched cases, found the state officials made key errors and failed to comply with legal requirements as they moved the project toward a long-awaited groundbreaking."
'Tis the Season. AP: "A man who played Santa Claus at a Massachusetts mall has been barred from the shopping center after he was charged with groping an 18-year-old woman playing an elf."
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