The Commentariat -- December 6

New York Times: "The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said in an interview broadcast on Sunday evening that rising inequality was eroding social cohesion and that Congress could help economic growth by making the tax code more efficient." Bloomberg story here.  Here's the video:

Julie Pace & Ken Thomas of ABC News, December 4: "The White House says the Korean agreement could put as many as 70,000 Americans to work...." CW: I'm pretty sure I repeated this assertion somewhere ...

... BUT Paul Krugman says trade deals do not produce jobs. He even provides a fancy formula -- which I don't understand -- to explain why. If you also don't quite get it, here's a good rule to apply: a sentence that begins "The White House says" is less likely to be true than one that begins "Paul Krugman says."

There is a war ... in this country..., a war being waged by some of the wealthiest & more powerful people in this country against the working families of the United States of America, against the disappearing & shrinking middle class of our country.
-- Sen. Bernie Sanders ...

Chicken Crap? Jay Newton-Small of Time thinks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is crowing before he counts his chickens. ...

... Howard Fineman: "While the public focus of the Great Tax Battle remains riveted on the U.S. Senate, top Democratic insiders are privately worried about the real lame-duck end game: a last-minute, potentially deal-breaking revolt by Democrats in the House." CW: I hope the House Dems do revolt; the capitulation to the rich is revolting. ...

... Jonathan Chait of The New Republic: "So now that President Obama has given up on his campaign pledge of ending the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000, what is Plan B?" (a) Get re-elected. (b) assuming he does win, he'll be in much stronger position on taxes two years from now.... Eliminating the Bush tax cuts would reduce the deficit by $4.6 trillion over ten years, considerably more than the $3.8 trillion that the Bowles-Simpson plan would save." ...

... Paul Krugman: "Democrats should not give in to Republican blackmail on extending tax cuts." ...

... Oh, the Worries of the Rich. Louise Story & Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: "Worried that lawmakers will allow taxes to rise for the wealthiest Americans beginning next year, financial firms are discussing whether to move up their bonus payouts from next year to this month.... If Congress does not extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest income levels, a typical worker who earns a $1 million bonus would pay $40,000 to $50,000 more in taxes next year than this year, depending on base salary." ...

... Matt Yglesias: "Even though Social Security is only a very mildly redistributive program, inequality of wealth is such that it’s a vital element of the bottom 60 percent’s living standards but kind of small beer to the top twenty percent":

New York Times Editors: "Schwarzenegger v. Plata ... is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The [Supreme Court] justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors." ...

... AND Times Editors: the Senate Ethics Committee must make "a decisive report" or take "disciplinary action" against Sen. John Ensign, "since the facts suggest the use of both influence and money to hush up the affair" he had with an aide.

Sunday Times, via Fox News: "Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has circulated across the internet an encrypted 'poison pill' cache of uncensored documents suspected to include files on BP and Guantanamo Bay. One of the files identified this weekend by The Sunday Times — called the 'insurance' file — has been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters, from America to Australia. Assange warns that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets." ...

... CBS News: "WikiLeaks has been condemned by British and U.S. officials for publishing a secret State Department inventory of sites across the world deemed vital to American security. The document, dubbed the Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative according to a report in The Telegraph, lists everything from British pharmaceutical factories churning out vaccines and insulin, to a Bauxite mine in the African nation of Guinea." ...

... Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Obama administration officials reminded rank-and-file federal workers and contractors late Friday to steer clear of WikiLeaks, the controversial document-sharing Web site." ...

Judy Woodruff's interview of former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski & Stephen Hadley is a week old, but it's still worth hearing:

     ... The transcript is here. ...

... Andy Borowitz Scoop: "WikiLeaks Attempts to Expose Palin's Thoughts, Finds Nothing":

For her part, Gov. Palin seemed to be relishing her role as the one politician in the world who has nothing to fear from WikiLeaks. On Twitter, she addressed the following message to Mr. Assange: 'How’s that Wiki-Leaky thing workin out for ya?' ...

... If you're interested in knowing how Julian Assange thinks & why he's doing what he's doing, here are links to pdfs of a couple of his, well, position papers. The first is titled, "State & Terrorist Conspiracies"; the second is "Conspiracy as Governance." Assange distributed both in late 2006. If you want a short course, Michael Collins, writing on AlterNet, has an overview, tho I think he misunderstands Assange's comment about 9/11. Warning: maybe if you're planning a diplomatic career, you should stay away from this stuff.

Welcome to America. Holbrook Mohr, et al. of the AP: "Lured by unsupervised, third-party brokers with promises of steady jobs and a chance to sightsee, some foreign college students on summer work programs in the U.S. get a far different taste of life in America. An Associated Press investigation found students forced to work in strip clubs instead of restaurants. Others take home $1 an hour or even less. Some live in apartments so crowded that they sleep in shifts because there aren't enough beds. Others have to eat on floors. They are among more than 100,000 college students who come to the U.S. each year on popular J-1 visas, which supply resorts with cheap seasonal labor as part of a program aimed at fostering cultural understanding." ...

... Tougher by the Numbers. Andrew Becker of the Washington Post: "For much of this year, the Obama administration touted its tougher-than-ever approach to immigration enforcement, culminating in a record number of deportations. But in reaching 392,862 deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement included more than 19,000 immigrants who had exited the previous fiscal year. When ICE officials realized in the final weeks of the fiscal year..., that the agency still was in jeopardy of falling short of last year's mark..., officials quietly directed immigration officers to bypass backlogged immigration courts and time-consuming deportation hearings whenever possible...."

Illustration by Tomer Hanuka for New York Magazine.New York Magazine: "Ten years ago this month, a Supreme Court ruling ushered in George W. Bush as our 43rd president. We asked five (sometime) novelists to imagine the past decade as if the election had gone the other way. America: This is your parallel life." The five writers are Kurt Andersen, Kevin Baker, Glenn Beck!, Jane Smiley & Walter  Kirn.

The Commentariat -- December 5

New York Times artwork.Cleopatra biographer Stacy Schiff, in a New York Times op-ed, recounts "Cleopatra's Guide to Good Governance." CW: it appears the Republicans have been reading Schiff's biography; they're already good at her Lesson No. 1: "obliterate your rivals."

Frank Rich makes the case that President Obama is suffering from Stockholm syndrome. ...

... Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, in a Washington Post op-ed: "To many liberals and progressives, the president's unwillingness to veto any measure that includes continued tax relief for billionaires is the last straw, building on a record of spinelessness that includes his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, abandonment of a public option for health-care reform, refusal to prosecute those who tortured in Iraq or lied us into that war, and unwillingness to tax carbon emissions." Rabbi Michael's solution: "a real way to save the Obama presidency: by challenging him in the 2012 presidential primaries with a candidate who would unambiguously commit to a well-defined progressive agenda and contrast it with the Obama administration's policies."

Manu Raju of Politico: "New York Sen. Chuck Schumer is wasting little time assuming his new power in the Senate leadership over the Democrats' message, seizing the reins of the tax debate by sharpening attacks against Republicans and effectively intensifying the partisan rancor in the upper chamber." ...

... Steve Benen lays out the case for "Why Compromise with These Guys Is Impossible, Part MCCXVII." ...

... Aw, but here's that nice Mitch McConnell talking about compromise:

... Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: Newt Gingrich says, in effect, "let rich people decide how long their tax cuts last." Then, "In practically the same breath that he proposes giving a massive tax cut to Paris Hilton, he [Gingrich] also suggests that 'we change the entire [unemployment benefits] program into a worker training program and not give anybody money for doing nothing.'” With video which I can't watch.

... Nate Silver looks at the probabilities in the tax standoff game.

Paul Krugman, in a post about the Obama Administration's "attempt to downplay the terrible jobs number," draws this conclusion: "top management has gone missing."

First, Sen. McCain said he would seriously consider repealing [DADT] if the military leadership thought we should, and [when] the military leadership said it should be repealed, he pulled away the football. Then Sen. McCain said he would need to see a study from the Pentagon. When the Pentagon produced the study saying repeal would have no negative effect at all, he pulled away the football again. And his latest trick, he said yesterday that he opposed repealing 'don't ask, don't tell,' a proposal that would be a great stride forward for both equality and military readiness ... because of the economy. I repeat, the senior senator from Arizona said he couldn't support repealing 'don't ask, don't tell' because of the economy. I have no idea what he's talking about and no one else does either.
-- Harry Reid, on the Senate floor ...

... It would be wrong to think John McCain is just betraying gays in the military; he also has it in for 9/11 heroes.

The House had a dramatic election. We picked up seats in the Senate. Some of us thought, maybe we could pick up two or three more, but we made some pretty poor choices when it came to candidates. -- Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, in a Senate floor speech

Matt Bai of the New York Times: "What makes [the debt commission's] case for sacrifice so much harder to embrace, perhaps, is that it goes to our national psyche, threatening our self-image as a land with limitless potential. While past generations have readily sacrificed for national greatness, debt reduction — at least in the gloomy way its advocates argue for it — feels like a call to sacrifice in the name of our national decline. CW: Bai says it ain't necessarily so; I say it's a call to sacrifice in the name of oligarchy.

The Editors of the Washington Post do not like the film "Fair Game." They write, "'Fair Game,' based on books by [Joe] Wilson and his wife [Valerie Plame], is full of distortions -- not to mention outright inventions." ...

... Matt Duss of the Wonk Room refutes some of the WashPo editors' claims & suggests, "Maybe the Washington Post’s editors should try reading their own paper." ...

... AND Dennis G. of Balloon Juice really lambastes WashPo editorial page editor Fred Hiatt: "Today he goes after a movie because the film shines a light on the big lie Fred defends.... Perhaps the fact that a Hollywood movie is more honest about the War (and life) than Hiatt’s Editorial page is what really sets the rat bastard off."

James Glanz & John Markoff of the New York Times: Cables "from American diplomats ... made public by WikiLeaks ... portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States. Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations ... were aimed at a wide ... array of American government and military data...." ...

... Eric Lichtblau & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "Nine years after the United States vowed to shut down the money pipeline that finances terrorism, senior Obama administration officials say they believe that many millions of dollars are flowing largely unimpeded to extremist groups worldwide, and they have grown frustrated by frequent resistance from allies in the Middle East, according to secret diplomatic dispatches." ...

... Eric Lichtblau: "... dozens of State Department cables ... revealed the deep distrust of some traditional European allies toward what they considered American intrusion into their citizens’ affairs without stringent oversight.... When the European Parliament ordered a halt in February to an American government program to monitor international banking transactions for terrorist activity, the Obama administration was blindsided by the rebuke." ...

... David Samuels of The Atlantic deplores the attacks on Julian Assange: "It is dispiriting and upsetting for anyone who cares about the American tradition of a free press to see Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gibbs turn into H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and John Dean.... And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy." ...

... Career Counseling. Robert Mackey of the New York Times: "Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, which grooms future diplomats, has confirmed ... that it did send an e-mail to students this week warning them to avoid posting comments online about the leaked diplomatic cables, if they ever hope to work for the State Department." ...

... Lolita Baldor of the AP: "It will take several more years for the [U.S.] government to fully install high-tech systems to block computer intrusions, a drawn-out timeline that enables criminals to become more adept at stealing sensitive data.... As the Department of Homeland Security moves methodically to pare down and secure the approximately 2,400 network connections used every day by millions of federal workers around the world, experts suggest that technology already may be passing them by."

Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: a Senator's long good-bye is apt to be a lonely one.

In a well-argued essay appearing in the Washington Post, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend tears apart Sarah Palin's attack on President John Kennedy's Houston speech on the separation of church and state. What a shame Palin is too fucking dumb to understand Townsend's explanation of basic American principles. ...

Meanwhile, in Texas: We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.
-- John Cook, Texas Republican Executive Committee