The Commentariat -- April 9, 2013
Obama 2.0. Peter Schroeder of the Hill: "The Senate unanimously approved Mary Jo White to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.... The only lawmaker to oppose her nomination at any step in the process was Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who voted against her when she appeared before the Senate Banking Committee but did not block the consent request on the Senate floor."
Peter Applebome & Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "In an impassioned speech that at times took on the tone of a campaign rally, Mr. Obama told an audience of 3,100 at the University of Hartford that he came to Connecticut to ensure that the deaths in the school in Newtown would not recede and to remind Americans how important their voice is as the gun debates unfold":
... MEANWHILE, Rachel Weiner & Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) plans to join a Republican filibuster of legislation aimed at curbing gun violence should Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) bring it to the floor." CW: Yo, Harry: blow up the filibuster. ...
... Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, one of the nation's most committed and deep-pocketed gun-control proponents, is ratcheting up pressure on lawmakers by launching a new system to grade them based on their votes and statements on gun issues. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the nonprofit group financed by Bloomberg (I), will unveil a scoring system Tuesday to award lawmakers grades of A through F, much like the National Rifle Association, which has derived much of its power by deploying letter rankings against politicians at election time." ...
... Greg Sargent on why Republicans get away with opposing background checks when 90 percent of Americans favor them: "If more voters understood that Republican officials are opposed to expanding background checks to plug a hole in existing law -- even though most of those officials would probably not go so far as to say that the current background check system is a violation of Second Amendment rights -- it would be much harder to ground that opposition in the Second Amendment. But since many don't know precisely what it is Republicans are opposing, it's easy for Republican officials to keep invoking general pieties about the Constitution." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...
... AND Sargent highlights a nugget from this op-ed by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) in the Virginian-Pilot: "There are those who believe the National Rifle Association and its allies are so powerful that no legislation will pass. But the power of the organization's leadership is vastly overrated. I've run three statewide races in the NRA's home state. Its leadership campaigned vigorously against me each time, spending nearly $800,000 against me in my 2012 Senate race. I won all my races anyway."
Speaking of Mitch McConnell, as we were above, David Corn of Mother Jones obtained a tape of a meeting of McConnell campaign staffers laughing at the fun they expected to have attacking Ashley Judd -- who considered a run against McConnell -- as "emotionally unbalanced" & anti-Christian. Corn prints the highlights & embeds the full audio. ...
... McConnell, who attended the meeting but didn't say much, isn't laughing. Kevin Robillard of Politico: "'Senator McConnell's campaign is working with the FBI and has notified the local U.S. Attorney in Louisville, per FBI request, about these recordings,' McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton said in a statement. 'Obviously a recording device of some kind was placed in Senator McConnell's campaign office without consent. By whom and how that was accomplished will presumably will be the subject of a criminal investigation.'"
What to tell your friends when they tell you deficits are B-A-A-A-D. Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post rebuts the usual arguments.
"And Then There Were Three." Jillian Rayfield of Salon: "Sen. Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota, is the latest senator to say that he supports same-sex marriage, leaving just three Democrats left standing who have not.... Joe Donnelly, Ind., and Heidi Heitkamp, N.D., announced their support last week, leaving just Joe Manchin W. Va., Mark Pryor, Ark., and Mary Landrieu, La., as the only Senate Dems who have not."
Kindlier, Gentler Protests. Dana Milbank: "Taking a page from the gay-rights playbook, other causes on the left are holding fewer of the disruptive protests of recent decades and opting for persuasion over confrontation. In part, this strategy reflects the failure of recent movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and the anti-globalization demonstrations, to turn protesters' enthusiasm into enduring public support."
ALEC's Ag-Gag. Steven Hsieh, in Salon: "Farm lobbyists and supporting lawmakers want to close the shutters on video cameras exposing animal cruelty across the country.... So-called 'ag-gag' bills ... aim to make it more difficult, or in some cases, criminal, to shoot undercover factory farm footage. Last year, the statehouses of Missouri, Utah and Iowa passed ag-gag bills, bringing the total number of states with such laws to five. As Think Progress' Katie Valentine notes, many of these laws received backing from the American Legislative Exchange Council." ...
... ** Law Prof. Jedidiah Purdy, in a New York Times op-ed, suggests a great alternative: "... we should require confined-feeding operations and slaughterhouses to install webcams at key stages of their operations. List the URL's to the video on the packaging."
Paul Waldman of the American Prospect argues that the federal government can't govern because Republicans like being an obstructionist minority -- AND it's good business for Fox "News" & Rush.
Basketball Before Business. Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) delayed a vote on a judicial appointment so he could attend a college basketball game. " Even excusing McConnell's decision to place his personal needs ahead of the country, there is no good reason why the Senate cannot simply confirm [the nominee] in McConnell's absence." CW: guess that's Harry Reid being tough again. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link.
Jamelle Bouie of the American Prospect: Prof. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz conducted two studies in which he estimated that Barack Obama lost between 3 & 5 percent of the vote nationwide because of racial animus; in 2012, that figure was between 3.2 & 6 percent. This, Bouie points out gave McCain & Whatzizface "the equivalent of a home-state advantage throughout the country.... There's a chance that the Democratic brand is stronger than we think."
Did Margaret Thatcher Save the British Economy? Paul Krugman: "Thatcher came to power in 1979, and imposed a radical change in policy almost immediately. But the big improvement in British performance doesn't really show in the data until the mid-1990s. Does she get credit for a reward so long delayed?" ...
... A. C. Grayling, in a New York Times op-ed, on Margaret Thatcher: "The curious feature of Mrs. Thatcher's legacy is that although she struck an ax-blow deep into the heart of Britain, it is society, not the political sphere, that remains deeply divided by a widening gap between rich and poor." ...
... ** Paul Routledge of the (UK) Mirror: "I do not look back on [Thatcher's time] through the rose-tinted spectacles of her admirers. I remember instead the young lads throwing themselves off the Tyne bridges in Newcastle because they had no work. I remember instead the despair in the inner cities that triggered riots, the hopelessness of the industrial communities devastated by her policies, and the social alienation caused by her 'me first' selfish individualism. And I reflect today on the social and cultural impact of her long rule, a decade that subverted the British way of life vastly more effectively than any of her imagined 'enemies within'." ...
... Charles Pierce: "f you want to see where the Bush people got all those bright ideas about preventive detention, and drumhead tribunals, and extrajudicial assassinations, look to Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister." ...
... Glenn Greenwald: The "demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous.... Thatcher... played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as 'terrorists', something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, 'across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted -- and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.'" ...
... Max Read of Gawker writes, "On the other hand, she helped invent soft-serve ice cream." ...
... AND, as Annie-Rose Strasser of Think Progress points out, Thatcher was still too much of a lefty for today's U.S. Republican party. ...
... CW: as for me, I was so preoccupied with mourning Maggie that I forgot to link this. Prachi Gupta of Salon: "Although it started as cruel satire celebrating the death of former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher, some of the Internet is reading the 'nowthatchersdead' hashtag on Twitter as 'Now That Cher's Dead.' (To be clear, Cher is not dead. Cher is very much alive.)" The whole post is amusing.
Krugman noted in a blogpost that he was "still convalescing" from his appearance on "This Week with George," so I thought I'd check it out. Looks as if it was Krugman v. Everybody, including former Reagan budget director David Stockman. I can't embed the video because ABC News videos cause problems for some RealityChex readers, but you can watch it here. (I found it to be a very slow-loader.)
Right Wing World
Jamilah King of Color Lines: how wingers have rebranded a program initiated by Ronald Reagan as "ObamaPhones" -- one of the "gifts" Obama gives to "urban people." Via Jonathan Bernstein.
Local News
Jeff Adelson of the Times-Picayune: "After months of pushing a dramatic proposal to swap the state's income and corporate taxes in favor of higher, broader sales tax, [Louisiana] Gov. Bobby Jindal is shelving his proposal. In a speech opening the 2013 legislative session, Jindal is telling lawmakers that he is taking his plan off the table..., instead asking lawmakers to develop and pass their own version of a plan to phase out the state's income tax, according to a copy of the governor's prepared remarks.... The speech is a major concession that Jindal's proposal, a complicated plan contained in a total of 11 bills, is unpopular both within and outside the Legislature. The proposal has come under increasingly heavy fire in recent weeks as business groups and advocates for the poor have assailed its effects and think tanks have questioned whether the math in the proposal adds up." Via Salon. ...
... Benjy Sarlin of TPM: "... the provisions [of Jindal's tax proposal] that inflamed the public against it overlap plenty with national GOP proposals. Namely, both plans generated complaints from economists that they would require regressive tax increases on the poor and middle class to pay for lower taxes for the wealthy." Sarlin sees national implications to Louisiana's rejection of Jindal's drastic plan. ...
... Juanita Jean: "By the way, is this the same Bobby Jindal who said that the Republicans should stop being the stupid Party? Oh dude, heal thyself."
News Ledes
AP: "A man identified by employees as a former maintenance worker opened fire Tuesday inside a Detroit medical facility, sending workers and visitors screaming and rushing for the doors just moments before the building erupted in flames. Crews digging through the gutted Park Medical Centers building hours after the fire recovered the remains of a man and a woman.... Authorities did not release the identities of the dead, pending autopsies, but police had been searching for 35-year-old medical assistant Sharita Williams and the fired maintenance worker, who relatives said was her ex-boyfriend."
Reuters: "Iran said on Tuesday operations had begun at two uranium mines and a milling plant and that Western opposition would not slow its nuclear work, days after talks with world powers made no breakthrough."
Reuters: "Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta took his oath of office on Tuesday, presenting Western states with a challenge of how to deal with a leader indicted by the International Criminal Court."
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