The Commentariat -- Sept. 14, 2012

CW: This would be a good day to journey to the bottom of the post.

NEW. Dean Baker has a good piece on David Brooks' column. Headline: "Did Public Schools Fail David Brooks?"

Ben Bernanke holds a press conference to explain the Fed's action:

Felix Salmon of Reuters: "The main news isn't the fact that the Fed is back in the market, buying bonds. Indeed, as Binyamin Appelbaum [of the New York Times] points out, QE3 in volume terms, at $40 billion per month, is significantly smaller than QE1 and QE2.... [The big deal is that] QE3, unlike QE1 and QE2, has no set expiry date. The Fed's ... promising a steady extra flow of monetary fuel for the foreseeable future -- or at least until the labor market improves 'substantially.' ... But the Fed went even further ... where they all but promised zero interest rates until mid-2015." ...

QE3 -- Good for Everybody! Josh Barro of Bloomberg: "While overly tight monetary policy has hit the unemployed the hardest, it has been bad for almost everybody, including rich people. It's true that disinflation has been good for certain securities, particularly low-risk bonds. But wealthy bondholders also tend to be wealthy stockholders, and Fed policies that hold economic growth down are bad for equities...." ...

... Paul Krugman makes some remarks on the Fed's move. ...

... Michael Tomasky of Newsweek: "Republicans are piling on in the expected ways. Romney calls it another 'bailout.' I'd watch that word if I were he; that word is no friend of his (oh, by the way -- Obama is up 10 in Michigan).... If Republicans want to be in the position of opposing an effort by the Federal Reserve Bank to lower the jobless rate, that's their problem.

Krugman: You might be a Keynesian if ... you believe reports that sales of the new iPhone 5 is likely to stimulate the economy.

Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy: "President Barack Obama didn't intend to signal any change in the U.S.-Egypt relationship last night when he said Egypt is not an 'ally,'" the White House [said Thursday]. Here's the full transcript of the Telemundo interview. In response to the question, "Would you consider the current Egyptian regime an ally of the United States?" Obama responded, in part,

I don't think that we would consider them an ally, but we don;t consider them an enemy. They're a new government that is trying to find its way. They were democratically elected. I think that we are going to have to see how they respond to this incident. How they respond to, for example, maintaining the peace treaty ... with Israel.... Certainly in this situation what we're going to expect is that they are responsive to our insistence that our embassy is protected, our personnel is protected, and if they take actions that indicate they're not taking responsibilities, as all other countries do where we have embassies, I think that's going to be a real big problem.

Finally, Juan Cole raises the question that likely occurred to all of us: "Why in the world [Ambassador Chris Stevens] was in an insecure minor consulate in a provincial city on September 11 is a mystery to me." Read Cole's whole post; he is an expert on Middle East politics, & he gives a more nuanced sense of what happened in Libya & Egypt.

Presidential Race

And You Thought Voter ID Laws Were Abominable. Evan McMorris Santoro & Ryan Reilly of TPM: "Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an informal advisor to ... Mitt Romney, said on Thursday he and his fellow members of a state board were considering removing President Barack Obama from the Kansas ballot this November." CW: the Kansas board won't get away with this of course, but it is important to realize to what lengths Banana Republicans will go to blow up the democratic process & exactly what their commitment is to "American values." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link.

Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times: "President Obama spent the second day of what was to be an upbeat swing through the politically vital Mountain West on Thursday balancing the somber tone that a foreign policy crisis demands and the hyper-partisan rhetoric that eight thousand Coloradoans came to hear."

The Obama campaign released this Web video yesterday, hitting Romney on his secret tax returns again. Donovan Slack of Politico has a related story:

This Didn't Take Long. McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed: the Romney camp is blaming the "liberal" press for its problems. One "Republican said, 'Experienced political operatives say they've never seen the press be so unhinged and determined to write 'Republican in disarray' stories.'"

... Tim Egan on the burdens of free speech by hatemongers -- and Romney, whose popping off was the "most revealing moment of the campaign." ...

... Roger Cohen of the New York Times: "This September surprise has given the world cause to appreciate the cool head in the White House and worry about the hothead who aspires to replace him. Romney, in Jacques Chirac's immortal phrase, 'lost a good opportunity to keep quiet.'" ...

... Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post in a column titled "Romney Owes an Apology": "... no one should be surprised by Mitt Romney's decision to ... exploit the attack on U.S. diplomatic outposts in Egypt and Libya as ammunition in the presidential campaign. After all, [he] ... wrote a book in 2010 premised on, and titled with, the false notion that Barack Obama has been going around the world apologizing for America.... To Romney, apologizing means never actually having to say you're sorry." ...

... Glenn Kessler: "Earlier in the week, we hesitated about handing out Pinocchios because not all of the facts had been established. But now it is pretty evident that the Romney campaign misstated the facts on Tuesday, on Wednesday -- and then again on Thursday, even after the peculiar circumstances of this embassy statement had been made abundantly clear." ...

... Gene Robinson: "The most charitable explanation is that he's in a panic over polls that show Obama opening a lead. If this is not the case, then Romney's ignorance of foreign policy is more profound -- and potentially dangerous -- than anyone could have suspected.... You have to wonder whether he knows there are moments when the guiding principle has to be 'America first.' Not 'me first.'" ...

... Jonathan Alter in Bloomberg News: "It's hard to avoid the conclusion that [Romney] is trying to pander to the Republican base, almost one-third of which still believes -- against all evidence -- that Obama is a Muslim.... Americans recognize that judgment, prudence, instinct and a sense of what the moment demands are all job requirements for the presidency. Romney met none of them this week." ...

... Frank Rich talks with New York magazine's Eric Benson about the new soap "All My Cheap Shots," starring Mitt Romney (or something like that).

I think the challenge that I'll have in the debate is that the president tends to, how shall I say it, to say things that aren't true. -- Mitt Romney, to George Stephanopoulos:

... CW: I've taken down the video of part of George Stepheanopoulos' interview of Mitt Romney because it may be the cause of some readers' computers freezing up. You can see video of the whole interview & read the transcript here.

Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "Speaking to a modest-sized crowd in Northern Virginia on Thursday, Mitt Romney sought to move beyond his criticism of President Obama's response to the turmoil in Libya and Egypt and instead broadly paint the president as weak on foreign policy.... At the mere mention of Libya, however, a man in the crowd began shouting: 'Why are you politicizing Libya?' As the crowd shouted down the protester, Mr. Romney tried to continue, before concluding, 'I would offer a moment of silence, but one gentleman doesn't want to be silent so we're going to keep on going..., strong military..., American leadership,' blah-blah.'" CW: So he's going to stand up to the world, but he caves to a lone protester? ...

Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "Advisers to Mitt Romney on Thursday defended his sharp criticism of President Obama and said that the deadly protests sweeping the Middle East would not have happened if the Republican nominee were president.... Mitchell Reiss, a top Romney policy adviser, said in an interview, 'There are things that we can do in terms of what we say, the constancy of what our vision is -- pluralism, respect for law, human dignity -- these are things that you don't hear from the administration, and the people in the region want to hear that.'" CW: I guess Mitt Romney was expressing his "vision" of "human dignity" when he said Israelis were more successful than Palestinians because of "cultural differences." And I suppose he was expressing respect for "pluralism" when he said Muslims should not be able to build a mosque within the vicinity of Ground Zero. Yessiree, those are great ways to win Muslim friends. ...

... Benjy Sarlin of TPM points out that Richard Williamson, the Romney advisor who claimed the attacks on U.S. embassies in the Middle East would never have happened if Romney were president, was an official in the George W. Bush administration, & "Numerous deadly attacks on diplomatic compounds in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Syria took place during the Bush administration."

If we [conservatives] want to win the battle of ideas in the long term, we should be willing to face the fact that Mitt Romney is likely to lose -- and should, given that he's neither a true conservative nor a courageous moderate. He's just an ambitious man. Nothing wrong with that, except when you want to be president. Great leaders combine ambition and ideas and conviction. -- Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" & a former Florida Republican Congressman who was one of the managers of the Clinton impeachment trial

Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon: where were Romney & RNC Chair Reince Priebus when President George W. Bush was actually apologizing for anti-Muslim actions & remarks by Americans?

A Diplomat Goes Rogue. Max Fisher of the Atlantic: "A senior public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, [Larry] Schwartz on Tuesday wrote a much-discussed memo stating that the embassy 'condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,' as well as several defensive tweets, some of which he later deleted.... State Department officials back in Washington, it turns out, had reviewed the memo and explicitly told Schwartz not to publish it, which he did anyway."

In yesterday's Ledes, there's a New York Times report on how President Obama told Israeli PM Netanyahu the U.S. would not accommodate his latest appeal. By contrast, Mitt Romney has said he would cede U.S. policy on Iran to Netanyahu. 

Dana Milbank: "Paul Ryan ... is scheduled to address the [Family Research] Council's 'Values Voter Summit' in Washington Friday morning.... He is making a mistake."

Daily Kos: "For the first time in 98 years, the 330,000-member Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) will not endorse a candidate for president this year. The FOP supported the Republican candidate for President in 2008, 2004, and 2000, and its non-endorsement is seen as a refutation of Mitt Romney. Why the change? One big reason was Mitt Romney's support of Senate Bill 5 in Ohio, which stripped collective bargaining rights from police officers."

AND Bruce Dickenson wants more cowbell:

     ... "Christopher Walken Endorses Obama." ...

     ... Thanks to contributor Lisa for her extensive research & virtual authorship of the "More Cowbell" feature.

FINALLY, Greg Sargent chooses this Fox Nation headline the Headline of the Day:

News Ledes

NBC News: "The bodies of four Americans killed in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, earlier in the week were returned to the United States and honored in a somber ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, Md., on Friday." Secretary Clinton & President Obama speak:

... New York Times: "The violently anti-American rallies that have roiled the Islamic world over a video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad expanded on Friday to nearly 20 countries, with demonstrators storming the American Embassy in Tunisia in a deadly clash and protesters in Sudan's capital broadening the targets to include Germany and Britain." ...

... Washington Post: "The team of FBI agents assigned to investigate the deaths of four Americans in Libya has not been able to get into the country because of the volatile situation there, according to law enforcement officials." ...

... Al Jazeera: "Protesters in Egypt, angry at a video they say insults Prophet Mohammad, have hurled stones on a police force that prevented them from marching towards the US embassy in Cairo. On Friday, police in riot gear fired tear gas and threw stones back at the demonstrators. A burnt-out car was overturned in the middle of the street that leads to the fortified embassy from Tahrir Square." Al Jazeera has a liveblog of news about this & other protest incidents related to the anti-Islam film. ...

... AP: The "Egyptian ... president went on state TV and appealed to Muslims to protect embassies, trying to patch up strained relations with the United States.... Islamist President Mohammed Morsi spoke for more than seven minutes on state TV, his most direct public move to contain protests...."

... Washington Post: "As the anti-U.S. demonstrations spread, the [Obama] administration acted on a variety of fronts to convey two messages: that it had nothing to do with the offending video and that violence was not an acceptable response to the material." CW: a comprehensive story with info on a number of developments. ...

... ABC News: Glen Doherty, "one of the Americans killed alongside Ambassador Christopher Stevens in an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya Tuesday, told ABC News before his death that he was working with the State Department on an intelligence mission to round up dangerous weapons in the war-torn nation."

... The Washington Post also reports on the "mystery" surrounding the video's producer(s).

Friday Afternoon News Dump. New York Times: The White House delivered a report to Congress Friday "detailing line by line what will happen next year if Washington fails to act to head off about $100 billion automatic defense and domestic spending cuts scheduled to begin Jan. 2. The Obama administration had been reluctant to show its hand on the true impact of so-called sequestration, but once forced to do so by Congress, the White House budget office did not scrimp on the details. 'As the administration has made clear, no amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts. Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument. It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction,' the report concludes." You can read the report here.

Chicago Tribune: "Chicago Public Schools and the teachers union have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract and classes could resume for 350,000 students on Monday, according to school and union officials."

Washington Post: "The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a six-month stopgap government funding bill on a 329 to 91 vote, putting aside the partisan warfare of the past 18 months in bipartisan resolve to avoid a budget showdown ahead of the November election. The Senate is expected to pass the same measure late next week, providing funding for agencies for the first six months of the fiscal year and avoiding any threat of a government shutdown when the year ends Sept. 30."

New York Times: "Two Republican state senators who provided pivotal votes to legalize same-sex marriage last year fought opponents to a standstill on Thursday in primary races so close that they will be decided only after absentee ballots are counted."

The Commentariat -- Sept. 13, 2012

Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian: "All the rage and denunciations of these murders in Benghazi are fully justified, but one wishes that even a fraction of that rage would be expressed when the US kills innocent men, women and children in the Muslim world, as it frequently does. Typically, though, those deaths are ignored, or at best justified with amoral bureaucratic phrases ('collateral damage') or self-justifying cliches ('war is hell'), which Americans have been trained to recite.... It's as though there are two types of crimes: killing, and then the killing of Americans."

Steve Benen: The Census Bureau annual report, published yesterday, shows that "for the first time in three years, the percentage of the public with [health insurance] coverage went up, not down, going from 83.7% to 84.3%.... The Affordable Care Act is making a positive difference, before it's even fully implemented.... 'Obamacare' is working."

Bill Maher on how Tom Brokaw & his band of "balanced, both-sides-do-it" newscasters contribute to birthism and racism. Thanks to Kate M. for pointing me to Maher's blogpost. CW: Brokaw is also a pompous know-nothing -- sort of the Rand Paul of broadcast journalism. I don't expect old farts like Brokaw to be policy wonks; he made a spectacular living reading the news, not analyzing it. But he should stay off the pundit circuit if he wants to pontificate about the deficit & hasn't read Krugman or about health insurance & hasn't read Ezra Klein. He's an embarrassing reminder of what happened to broadcast "journalism" in the U.S. when the first generation of actual journalists -- who came up from radio or print media -- died or retired.

Nicholas Kristof cites impressive statistics on how the quality of teachers affects students' futures. CW: I find the results surprising because I came up thru a school district (Dade County, Florida) where the vast majority of the teachers were pretty awful but many of the students -- who were almost all from lower middle-class families -- ended up being tremendously successful. Anyway, Kristof's piece is quite convincing. Maybe what it means is that if students don't get encouragement at home, then effective teachers make up the deficit.

Presidential Race

Michael Lewis has a well-writ feature in Vanity Fair on how President Obama made the decision to aid the Libyan rebels. Contributor Dave S., who recommended the piece wondered at its coincidental timing.

Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times: "President Obama began what was supposed to be a boisterous campaign rally [in Las Vegas, Nevada] Wednesday before his most ardent group of supporters with a somber remembrance of the four Americans who were killed at the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Tuesday." ...

Peter Baker & Ashley Parker's New York Times article on L'Affaire Libya is an attempt at "fair-and-balanced" reporting that manages to make Romney look pretty bad. It will appear in today's print edition. However, the story mentions Romney's running fake complaint that "Obama goes around the world apologizing for the U.S." but omits the "fake" part, thus leaving the reader to guess if this is true or not. ...

... Philip Rucker's story in the Washington Post is much tougher on Romney, & so is the front-page headline: "Romney faces flak for assailing Obama on Libya." (The internal headline & URL are not so flashy.)

Brian Montopoli of CBS News: "In response to Mitt Romney's criticism of the Obama administration for its handling of recent violence in Egypt and Libya, President Obama ... told '60 Minutes' correspondent Steve Kroft at the White House. 'And I -- you know, Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later. And as president, one of the things I've learned is you can't do that. That, you know, it's important for you to make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts. And that you've thought through the ramifications before you make 'em.' Asked if Romney's attacks were irresponsible, the president replied, 'I'll let the American people judge that.'"

Matt Vasilogambros of the National Journal has a timeline of events leading up to & during the Libyan attacks. As Greg Sargent says, the timeline "demolishes Romney's version of events." ...

... Kasie Hunt of the AP: "The gunfire at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had barely ceased when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney seriously mischaracterized what had happened in a statement accusing President Barack Obama of 'disgraceful' handling of violence there and at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo." Headline: "Romney Misstates Facts on Attacks." ...

... Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's fact-checker: "We have looked in vain for an 'apology' in the Cairo [embassy] statement, as well as significant differences between that statement and earlier ones [going back to the Bush administration]. One could criticize the Cairo statement for lacking a meticulous defense of freedom of speech. But that is not the same thing as an apology -- especially since the embassy clearly issued the statement long before the protests began. This all started because some people got the timeline wrong. In the fog of war and protest, it often helps to get the facts straight before you act -- or speak."

"Romney Camp Tries to Manage Fallout from Libya Response." Peter Hamby of CNN: "Facing criticism for its aggressive and politically-charged response to Tuesday's violent attacks on the American embassies in Egypt and Libya, Mitt Romney's presidential campaign is quietly advising Republicans how to respond to questions about the campaign's handling of the episode." Hamby publishes the list of talking points. ...

... Because even the neocons who constitute the Washington Post Editorial board have this to say: the "tragedy" in Libya "should prompt bipartisan support for renewed U.S. aid to Libyans who are struggling to stabilize the country. That it instead provoked a series of crude political attacks on President Obama by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is a discredit to his campaign.... Mr. Obama struck the right tone on Wednesday...." ...

... Paul Krugman thinks that the real damage Romney did to himself was to his relationship with the media: "Romney has really ensured that everyone in the news media, the GOP propaganda organs aside, is going to view him with distaste and alarm -- as well they should. Romney could still win, but he has just made it even harder for anyone to consider him suitable for the job."

Andrew Sprung of Xpostfactoid: "In response to everything Obama does or says -- or, for that matter, anything his primary opponents did or said -- Romney's reaction is so knee-jerk condemnatory, so extravagantly worded, so predictably self-serving that the instinctive response for most listeners or readers not themselves besotted with hatred for the target has got to be, 'this guy is faking it.' ... A majority even of Republicans think that Romney typically 'says what he thinks people want to hear' rather than that he 'says what he believes.'" Via Kevin Drum of Mother Jones.

... It Was a Set-Up! Noam Scheiber of The New Republic talked to a former Romney advisor who said "Romney may have been feeling defensive over the hazing he took in Charlotte last week -- 'my opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy,' the president tweaked him -- and was primed to hit back. 'They set him up Thursday night at the convention with the smack down on foreign policy,' says the former adviser. 'They called him naïve, Palin-esque. Then he got his back up about it and was waiting for opportunity to show, "I'm strong, too." CW: nothing more reassuring than having a president who can be easily punked. ...

... Gail Collins: "Two months to go and we're rethinking our presumption that the Republican primary voters picked the most stable option." ...

... Michael Cohen of the New York Daily News: Romney's "reaction to the violence in Egypt and Libya over a film mocking the religious beliefs of Muslims is truly one of the most brain-dead political acts that I've ever witnessed -- and it speaks volumes about his personal character and fitness for the nation's highest office.... "Put [it] all together and you have a political assault that is craven, dishonest and shameless all at once."

... Jon Chait of New York: "Romney had grown accustomed to spinning fantasies cobbled together from months-old Obama speeches and nurtured into legend by extensive repetition and exaggeration in the conservative subculture. What he failed to realize from the outset was that the embassy attack was an immediate, high-profile event that he could not hope to rewrite so brazenly. Forced to confront the yawning chasm between reality and the fantasy he had wallowed in so long, Romney was exposed and, justifiably, discredited." CW: this may be the price a person pays when he feels he is "entitled" to lie. Romney has been lying for years & no one but a few lonely voices on the left called him out. Since substantively there's no difference between lying about something that supposedly happened years ago & lying about something that happened yesterday, Romney couldn't see the difference. The difference, as Chait writes, was that everybody but the Tom Brokaw contingent can remember way back to yesterday. ...

... BUT the REAL leader of the Republican party -- that would be Rush Limbaugh -- said that "Romney is the only guy that looked presidential in all of this." CW: evidently Rushbo was aware that while Willard was looking presidential, he was also moving his lips, which made him sound like a lying lunatic.

Greg Sargent rounds up for recent polls that show Obama tied or slightly ahead of Romney on who would do a better job on managing the economy &/or creating jobs: "For much of the presidential race, polls have shown that Mitt Romney has led Barack Obama on the question of who would do a better job handling the economy.... Well, we now have four national polls that show Obama and Romney tied on the question -- perhaps suggesting a potentially significant shift in the race's dynamics." Sargent also notes that the Fox "News" poll finds that Obama is favored 51-40 on "who is more trusted to protect Medicare and ensure that it's there for future generations." ...

... Nate Cohn of The New Republic looks at the Fox "News" poll: "Collectively, these figures are terrible news for the Romney campaign. They have always claimed that their path to victory depended on voters resolving to dismiss the president on the grounds that his economic performance is a resounding failure, but voters appear to be drawing a different conclusion." Via Greg Sargent. ...

... CW: these poll results are not news to the Romney campaign. They do their own polling. These post-conventions results explain why Romney is attacking Obama on every front, even when the attacks make no sense and are counterfactual. The Romney camp's central belief -- that they could win on "Me-Businessman/He-Socialist" and nothing else -- has been eroding for a couple of months. Those Bain Capital attack ads -- that so annoyed Cory Booker -- worked.

Two theories of presidential election dynamics, which are not mutually exclusive: David Atkins of Hullabaloo: the electorate's relationship with President Obama is "complicated" & personal; Paul Krugman: Americans know the economy is still bad, especially for middle-class job-seekers, but they perceive it as moving in the right direction. ...

... CW theory: the Republican base prefers crazy candidates, & the GOP honchos think their candidates should be the ones who have "paid their dues"; i.e., run for POTUS previously -- Saint Ronnie, Pappy Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Rmoney; Dubya was a legacy pick. "Normal" voters are turned off by the flame-throwers (as Rmoney has become) & don't give a rat's ass (including Willard's) if a president is a former also-ran. ("I used to be a loser," is not that great a campaign pitch; "I used to be a loser, & now I'm crazy" is worse.) Notice that the successful Democratic candidates have been relative unknowns who never previously ran for president -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton & Barack Obama.

Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: the Obama "campaign's big-dollar fund-raising has become more dependent than it was four years ago on a smaller number of large-dollar donors and fund-raisers. All told, Mr. Obama's top 'bundlers' -- people who gather checks from friends and business associates -- raised or gave at least $200 million for Mr. Obama's re-election bid and the Democratic National Committee through the end of May...."

Congressional Races

Frank Phillips of the Boston Globe: "Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren -- amid growing unrest from party activists and leaders -- is facing pressure to make a major shift in her television advertising with a new series of commercials that seek to soften her image, while focusing more directly on her GOP rival, Senator Scott Brown."

Edith Zimmerman profiles Joseph Kennedy III for the New York Times Magazine. Kennedy is running as a Democrat for U.S. Congress in the redrawn district of Barney Frank (D), who is retiring.

News Ledes

New York Times: "President Obama on Tuesday rejected an appeal by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to spell out a specific 'red line' that Iran could not cross in its nuclear program, a senior administration official said, deepening the divide between the allies.... In an hourlong telephone conversation..., Mr. Obama deflected Mr. Netanyahu's proposal to make the size of Iran's stockpile of close-to-bomb-grade uranium the threshold for a military strike by the United States against its nuclear facilities."

Reuters: "The United States on Thursday identified two additional victims of this week's deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, as former Navy SEALS who died trying to protect their colleagues. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty died in Tuesday's assault on the Benghazi consulate, which also killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department information management officer."

New York Times: "Following a blunt phone call from President Obama, Egyptian leaders scrambled Thursday to try to repair the country's alliance with Washington, tacitly acknowledging that they erred in their response to the attack on the United States Embassy by seeking to first appease anti-American domestic opinion without offering a robust condemnation of the violence."

New York Times: "The Federal Reserve opened a new chapter on Thursday in its efforts to stimulate the economy, announcing simply that it plans to buy mortgage bonds, and potentially other assets, until unemployment declines substantially."

AP: "Chanting 'death to America,' hundreds of protesters angered by an anti-Islam film stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen's capital and burned the American flag on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East. The protesters breached the usually tight security around the embassy and reached the compound grounds but did not enter the main building housing the offices." ...

     ... New York Times Update: "Deadly outrage in the Arab world over an American-made video insulting Islam's founder spread to at least half a dozen places across the Middle East on Thursday and threatened to draw in Afghanistan, two days after assailants in Libya killed four American diplomatic personnel, including the ambassador, and caused a foreign policy political clash in the United States. The worst of the violence was in Yemen, where at least five Yemenis were killed as hundreds of protesters stormed the American Embassy and were repulsed by Yemeni security forces."

... Al Jazeera: "Protesters angered by an anti-Islam film have stormed the US embassy compound in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, as similar demonstrations have spread to several countries across the Middle East." ...

... New York Times: "Hours before the attacks in Benghazi on Tuesday, the American Embassy in Cairo came under siege from protesters. While the violence there did not result in any American deaths, the tepid response from the Egyptian government to the assault gave officials in Washington -- already troubled by the direction of President Mohamed Morsi's new Islamist government -- further cause for concern." ...

... Al Jazeera: "US officials confirmed to Al Jazeera that a special unit of roughly 50 members of the Marine Corps had been dispatched to Libya to reinforce the troops guarding diplomats there, as two warships headed to the Libyan coast." ...

... Reuters: "Security forces fired teargas to disperse stone-throwing demonstrators near the U.S. embassy in Cairo late on Wednesday, some 24 hours after protesters scaled the walls and tore down the flag over a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad." ...

... AP: "The anti-Muslim film implicated in mob protests against U.S. diplomatic missions in the Mideast received logistical help from a man once convicted of financial crimes and featured actors who complained that their inflammatory dialogue was dubbed in after filming. The self-proclaimed director of 'Innocence of Muslims' initially claimed a Jewish and Israeli background. But others involved in the film said his statements were contrived as evidence mounted that the film's key player was a southern Californian Coptic Christian with a checkered past."

ABC News: "Al Qaeda has released a new video of American hostage Warren Weinstein delivering a personal message to Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. In the video, Weinstein, 71, believed to be held in the tribal regions along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, appears healthy and calm, speaking in a soft, controlled manner."

Reuters: "The union for Chicago teachers and the third largest U.S. school district said they will try on Thursday to make a final push to settle a strike that has drawn national attention to the sweeping education reforms sought by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. As the strike of 29,000 public school teachers and support staff prepared to enter a fourth day, negotiators for the first time expressed optimism that the nasty fight could end soon." Chicago Tribune item here.

AP: "One of New York City's most ambitious efforts to prod residents to live healthier appears poised to pass as a health panel takes up a plan to cut down sales of big sodas and other sugary soft drinks. The Board of Health was set to vote Thursday on the proposal, which would bar sales of sugar-heavy drinks in more than 16-ounce cups or bottles in restaurants, movie theaters and some other settings." ...

     ... New York Times Update: "... The New York City Board of Health approved on Thursday a ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, street carts and movie theaters, enacting the first restriction of its kind in the country."

Lady Romney at the School of Hard Knocks

They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income. It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting. We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. -- Lady Romney, 1994

We got married and moved into a basement apartment. We walked to class together, shared the housekeeping, and ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish. Our desk was a door propped up on sawhorses. Our dining room table was a fold-down ironing board in the kitchen. Those were very special days. -- Lady Romney, GOP convention, August 2012

Mitt and I do recognize that we have not had a financial struggle in our lives. -- Lady Romney, "Meet the Press," September 10, 2012

Oops. Guess that phony poor-mouthing wasn't polling too well. Nonetheless, I think maybe we should let Lady Romney know that she & Little Lord Willard weren't the only students who struggled to make ends meet on a paltry inheritance. Here's my contribution. Please feel free to add your own. It can be real or more like this:

It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Worst of Times. I'll just skip right over my undergraduate days, where I worked my way through school on summer jobs, research assistantships & tuition scholarships. Let's get on to the days when my first husband was finishing his last years of grad school. Although Lord & Lady Romney didn't have to work, we did because neither of us had a family inheritance. My husband had teaching jobs -- where he was paid by the course; he didn't have a full-time salary or standing -- & I worked at one of the universities where he taught. After a while I got pregnant -- to keep my husband out of Viet Nam -- & had to quit work. But I still worked researching my husband's dissertation, & after my son was born, I went back to school, too. We first lived in a third-floor walk-up on the Near North side of Chicago, then we moved to -- a basement apartment in Rogers Park -- just south of Evanston. It had linoleum floors -- no fancy mismatched carpet. To keep to our schedule of classes, my husband & I used to meet on the El platform & trade off our infant son. Our desk was a door propped up on oak filing cabinets I found in the alley. We didn't have a bed! (My husband & I slept on an avocado-green sofabed in the living/dining room.) We didn't have a car. The summer after my son was born, to save the cost of a round trip on the El, I used to ride my bike 18 miles through Lincoln Park on Saturdays to the Chicago Historical Society to read microfilm for my husband while he stayed home with our son & worked on compiling the research I'd done.

Not counting baby food, I never spent more than $20/week on groceries; it was usually closer to $10. We had a black-&-white TV. During the 1968 Chicago convention, burglars stole it & our typewriter.

When my husband finished his dissertation, which I edited & typed (on a new electric portable), he got a full-time job teaching at the University of Southern California. After we moved to SoCal, I got a job as a claims adjuster for an insurance company so we could save for a down payment on a house. Shortly after we bought the house, I got pregnant again -- my husband's bright idea -- and he promptly left me for one of his beautiful USC students. While I was packing up to go live with my parents (my mother was less than thrilled) for my "confinement," my husband's sheepskin came in the mail. When he came around to collect his mail, I gave him his half of the diploma.

"Very special days"? You bet. I learned a lot. Like -- diplomas are made of high-quality rag bond. If you tear them carefully, you get a beautiful deckled edge.