The Commentariat -- Nov. 12, 2012
Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "As he prepares to meet with Congressional leaders at the White House on Friday [to discuss the federal budget], aides say, Mr. Obama ... will travel beyond the Beltway at times to rally public support for a deficit-cutting accord that mixes tax increases on the wealthy with spending cuts. On Wednesday, Mr. Obama will meet with corporate executives at the White House.... Though many of them backed Mitt Romney, scores have formed a coalition to push for a budget compromise similar to the one the president seeks. He hopes to enlist them to persuade Republicans in Congress to accept higher taxes on the assurance that he can deliver Democrats' votes for future reductions in fast-growing entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid." ...
... CW: they are not "entitlement" programs! And cutting them -- except for inefficiencies -- is stupid, counterproductive policy. People are still going to get sick, & if they can't get medical care, they're going to get sicker. "Let's Have More Sick People" is not an economy-boosting plan.
What's going to happen on January 1? ... The deficit is going to dramatically reduce. There will be this intense austerity squeeze.... Washington is so obsessed with the debt and deficit, and right now they are freaking out, and markets are freaking out, about the spectre of an automatic, massive reduction in the deficit. No one actually cares about the deficit. -- Chris Hayes ...
... Paul Krugman: "The fiscal cliff poses an interesting problem for self-styled deficit hawks. They've been going on and on about how the deficit is a terrible thing; now they're confronted with the possibility of a large reduction in the deficit, and have to find a way to say that this is a bad thing." ...
... ** In his column today, Krugman builds on the blogpost linked above. Oh, and he implicitly backs up my disdain for the Let's Have More Sick People plan. Plus this: "Appointing [deficit scold Erskine Bowles to replace Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary], or anyone like him, would be both a bad idea and a slap in the face to the people who returned President Obama to office."
It won't kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires. It really won't, I don't think. I don't really understand why Republicans don't take Obama's offer. -- Bill Kristol, Editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard, speaking on Fox "News" Sunday ...
... were prepared to allow the expiration of all George W. Bush-era tax rates if Republican lawmakers objected to raising taxes on the wealthiest." ...
of The Hill: "Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) on Sunday said Democrats... Matt Yglesias of Slate: "The American political system is full of checks and balances, and the way the game works is that tie goes to the status quo. And in this case, the status quo is that the [Bush] tax cuts expire. Conservatives can perhaps console themselves with the realization that the expiration isn't an underhanded liberal trick. It's their own trick.... The House Speaker has no leverage on the Bush tax cuts. We should stop taking him seriously." CW: Yglesias suggests Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is stupid because he doesn't get this. Schumer is not stupid; he is the Senator from Wall Street. He is also the #3 man in the Senate, & he will try to lead Senate Democrats to "concede" to Republican demands, as if he's performing some heroic act of bipartisanship. Chuck Schumer is looking out for Chuck Schumer.
Ian Millhiser & Josh Israel of Think Progress: Ohio's GOP Secretary of State, the now infamous Jon Husted, has a plan to rig Ohio's vote in the Electoral College in 2016, one that he borrowed from an aborted plan proposed by Pennsylvania's Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. Under Husted's plan -- had it been in effect this year -- Romney would have received the bulk of Ohio's Electoral College votes. CW P.S. As Millhiser made clear in a post I linked yesterday, gerrymandering matters. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link.
"Huge Clusterfuck." Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica has an excellent write-up of all that went wrong with the Romney campaign's vaunted "ORCA" GOTV system, one that a Romney spokesperson boasted was far superior to the Obama campaign's "Narwhal" system. Thanks to Lisa for the link.
John Cassidy of the New Yorker has a pretty readable post on polling & forecasters of the presidential race.
Greg Sargent: "Republicans have long been mystified by Obama's ability to retain his bond with voters in defiance of conditions that self-evidently seemed to doom him. If they just prevented Obama from succeeding, he'd surely sink under the fundamentals.... The ultimate irony is that this miscalculation may have led Republicans themselves to unwittingly conspire in creating the narrative that enabled Obama to survive." ...
... Thanks for the memories, Orange Man:
... CW: I don't know who wrote this post in the National Memo, but it's one of the best I've seen of Monday-morning quarterbacking the presidential election: "Why did Mitt Romney lose? It couldn't be because the GOP is wrong on taxes, health care, women's rights, immigration, education, marriage, regulation, diplomacy, climate change, evolution, science, polling, jobs numbers, fashion, sex, Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, Meat Loaf. No, it had to be Hurricane Sandy, ORCA, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, mean ole Barack Obama actually daring to release negative ads, one New Black Panther, a mural in one polling place'."
Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian on the Petraeus Affair(s): "... the relationship between the now-former CIA Director and his fawning hagiographer should be studied in journalism schools to see the results reliably produced by access journalism and the embedding process." Read the whole column. Greenwald notes, "Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post, argued that Obama should not have accepted [Petraeus's] resignation.... Like most people in the media, Ricks has long been an ardent admirer of Petraeus, even turning his platform over to Paula Broadwell in the past for her to spread her hagiography far and wide." Thanks to contributor cowichan for the link. ...
... Maybe Ricks has had a sudden change of heart. In a New York Times op-ed, he writes: "Our generals actually bear much of the blame for the mistakes in the [Iraq & Afghanistan] wars. They especially failed to understand the conflicts they were fighting -- and then failed to adjust their strategies to the situations they faced so that they might fight more effectively. Even now, as our wars wind down, the errors of our generals continue to escape public investigation, or even much internal review." CW: but, hey, we scrutinize their sex lives! ...
... Michael Crowley of Time: as Petraeus goes, so goes his military doctrine, not that he hadn't pretty much abandoned it anyway. ...
... Scott Shane & Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "High-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department were notified in the late summer that F.B.I. agents had uncovered what appeared to be an extramarital affair involving the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, government officials said Sunday. ...
... The Washington Post story, by Karen DeYoung & Sari Horwitz, is here. ...
... Eli Lake of Newsweek: Paula Broadwell "gave a speech last month asserting otherwise unreported information about the Benghazi attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.... The CIA Sunday denied her claim that prisoners were held at the annex, which has not been reported elsewhere. As her answer continued, Broadwell seemed to speak on behalf of Petraeus." With video.
... Jayne Mayer of the New Yorker examines the time line of who knew what when, & finds unanswered questions about motivations of key political players, including Petraeus. ...
... CW: I've believed from the get-go there is a plausible explanation for Petraeus's resignation, and that "Had an affair; no security breached" ain't it. BTW, since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) knew the contours of the story before the election, it would have been political malpractice for him not to have slipped word to Romney &/or Ryan, & nobody has every accused Eric Cantor or excessive propriety. And I'd be damned surprised if Eric Holder didn't give the President a heads-up, especially as he was likely aware -- via FBI Director Mueller -- that Cantor was in the loop. This was an October Surprise that didn't happen, either because Romney couldn't see the profit in it or because he couldn't figure out how to leak it in a way that wouldn't have his fingerprints all over it. ...
... Okay, Andy Borowitz has located a fellow who has that plausible explanation I was seeking: "The scandal involving former C.I.A. director David Petraeus took a startling twist today, as a leading right-wing conspiracy theorist claimed that Gen. Petraeus initiated his affair with author Paula Broadwell last year to avoid testifying about Benghazi this week."
A picture being worth a thousand words & all: Natalie Khawam (Jill Kelley's identical twin sister), David Petraeus, Scott Kelley, Jill Kelley & Holly Petraeus in Tampa, Florida. Photo by the Tampa Bay Times, via the New York Daily News.Adam Goldman, et al., of the AP, re: David Petraeus: "A senior U.S. military official identified the second woman Jill Kelley, 37, who lives in Tampa, Fla., and serves as the State Department's liaison to the military's Joint Special Operations Command, where among other duties, secret drone missions are worked on.... The military official ... said Kelley had received harassing emails from Broadwell....A friend of Kelley and Petraeus ... also said the two saw each other often, but the nature of their friendship was unclear." ...
... Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "The woman who reported to the F.B.I. that she had received threatening e-mails from a woman romantically linked to David H. Petraeus ... is a friend of Mr. Petraeus and his wife, Holly, who lives in Tampa, Fla.... The woman, Jill Kelley, 37, is 'a very well-known person of influence in the Tampa community,' active in community organizations that support military causes.... Tampa is the home of the military's Central Command, which Mr. Petraeus headed before serving in Afghanistan and then as C.I.A. director. It was during the Petraeuses' time in Tampa that they became friends with Ms. Kelley and her husband, Dr. Scott Kelley." ...
... Bill Hutchinson of the New York Daily News: Kelley is "the unpaid social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base." ...
... Matthew Solan, et al., of the Daily News have a lot more here. And it's a New York tab, so you know it's all tasteful. ...
... Five factoids about Jill Kelley & her family from Nina Strochlic of Newsweek. ...
... Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: neighbors in Charlotte, North Carolina, say Paula Broadwell is a good neighbor-soccer mom who dines by candlelight.
David Remnick of the New Yorker: "The effort [to halt climate change] should begin with a sustained Presidential address to the country, perhaps from the Capitol, on Inauguration Day. It was there that John Kennedy initiated a race to the moon -- meagre stakes compared with the health of the planet we inhabit."
Annie-Rose Strasser of Think Progress: "Zane Tankel, the CEO of Applebee's New York Franchise, Apple-Metro, is so dedicated to not spending money on his employees that he's refusing to hire anyone new. Why? Because he might have to provide them health care.... Studies have shown that a company that provides health care has a higher retention rate for its employees, reports more employee satisfaction, and draws the best employees to the job." ...
... CW: Tankel is as stupid as he is heartless. Most large employers will have to provide health insurance, so the playing field will be more-or-less level. People are not going to stop eating at restaurants (though you couldn't get me inside an Applebee's except by force), and if Applebee's has to raise the price of nachos by 50 cents to cover healthcare costs, so does everybody else. You can't make guys like Tankel give a shit about the health & well-being of their employees, but now they'll have to provide insurance or pay a penalty. Some people won't be decent human beings unless the law requires it. Now the law requires it.
The Half-Enlightenment Dawns upon Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.):
News Ledes
New York Times: "Israeli tanks made a direct hit on Syrian artillery units on Monday, the army said, responding to mortar fire that fell near an army post in the Israeli-held Golan Heights. It was the second consecutive day that Israel confronted fire along its border with Syria<."
New York Times: "Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo plans to ask the federal government for at least $30 billion in disaster aid to help New York City and other affected areas of the state recover from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy...."
AP: "The BBC's news chief and her deputy have 'stepped aside' while the broadcaster deals with the fallout from a child abuse scandal that forced its director-general to resign, the broadcaster said Monday. Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news and current affairs, and her deputy, Stephen Mitchell, have handed over their responsibilities to others for the time being 'to address the lack of clarity around the editorial chain of command,' the corporation said."