The Commentariat -- November 22

On the 47th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, career Secret Service officer Clint Hill remembers First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. CW: BTW, Hill doesn't offer much support for the one-bullet theory.

** In a stunning blogpost, Paul Krugman writes, "Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what [Barack Obama] said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts. And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth." ...

     ... CW: after newsman Walter Cronkite delivered an editorial on-air saying the Vietnam War could not be won, President Lyndon Johnson famously said, ""If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." President Obama should now be saying, "If I've lost Krugman, I've lost the United States of America."

Eric Alterman of the The Nation, with a little help from Van Jones, holds us as responsible as President Obama for the midterm election debacle. I don't buy his argument (which he just lays out there but doesn't bother to support), but I do appreciate his reference to ** this terrific essay by Marshall Ganz, first published in the Los Angeles Times, and now available on AlterNet. Ganz explains how Obama switched from being a "transformational" candidate to a "transactional" President. He must get back to advocating rather than merely trying to horse-trade.

Chris Hedges is, as usual, over-the-top. But his critique of the current political structure is accurate. His solution -- pitchforks & torches -- not so much.

"A Little Help from His Friends." Jackie Calmes & Peter Baker of the New York Times: "... while [his] Asia trip had mixed results, forcing Mr. Obama to leave without the South Korean trade deal he had expected, the consensus with Europeans and Russians at the NATO summit in Lisbon about how to handle Afghanistan and missile defense gave him a more successful sheen — even if ultimate success, particularly in Afghanistan, remains problematic. Mr. Obama was able to lead on a world stage in a way that he has not been able to do lately at home. He did so with public and private assistance from his European and Russian counterparts, many of whom called the summit meeting historic."

More from Krugman: Alan Simpson "can't wait for the blood bath ... when debt limit time comes in April," and the rest of his Republican buddies are planning a slaughter.

James Rubin, former Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, in a New York Times op-ed: "... most of our international objectives on arms control and other matters can be met much more easily with domestic actions" than with treaties, which are much harder to ratify in the U.S. than they are in most countires. CW: maybe. It's true that domestic legislation requires a mere 60-40 vote in the filibustering Senate, whereas a treaty requires 67 Senate votes. But a domestic bill also requires passage by the House, which a treaty does not. In the next Congress, for instance, the chances of President Obama's getting anything tougher than a pro-American flag resolution passed are nil.

"Wall Street is Worthless." John Cassidy of The New Yorker: "... no advanced society has survived without banks and bankers.... Yet Wall Street’s role in financing new businesses is a small portion of what it does.... Many of the big banks have turned themselves from businesses whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to exploit day-to-day movements in the markets.... These activities shift capital into projects that have little or no long-term value, such as speculative real-estate developments in the swamps of Florida.... Despite all the criticism that President Obama has received lately from Wall Street, the Administration has largely left the great money-making machine intact." CW: while it lasts, listen to Cassidy's discussion of his findings in the right column. 

Warren Buffett has said it before & he says it again, "Read My Lips, Raise My Taxes":

Lon Montgomery of the Washington Post: Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) has released a deficit reduction plan she says "would cut nearly $430 billion from the deficit in 2015." Schakowsky is "one of the most liberal members of President Obama's bipartisan deficit commission." Her plan would "keep Social Security benefits intact, make deep reductions at the Pentagon and raise corporate taxes to target profits and excessive pay for chief executives." Here's Schakowsky's statement about her plan. AND here's a pdf of the details.

Art by Oleg Volk.Ashley Halsey of the Washington Post: "A cheap and simple fix in the computer software of new airport scanners could silence the uproar from travelers who object to the so-called virtual strip search, according to a scientist who helped develop the program at ... the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California....  The fix would distort the images captured on full-body scanners so they look like reflections in a fun-house mirror, but any potentially dangerous objects would be clearly revealed, said Willard "Bill" Wattenburg, a former nuclear weapons designer at the Livermore lab.... [He] said he was rebuffed when he offered the concept to Department of Homeland Security officials four years ago." ...

... Somebody up There Got to Him. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News: "... TSA's administrator John Pistole appeared dug-in Sunday, telling CNN they weren't going to change anything. But within hours, TSA issued a statement clarifying that the door is open to changes. It said security procedures 'will be adapted as conditions warrant' to be 'as minimally invasive as possible.'" ...

... Scott Shane of the New York Times: "... the [Obama] administration has appeared to be caught off guard by the outrage of some passengers. [TSA Administrator John] Pistole agreed on Saturday to demands from pilots that they be exempted from the searches, after critics noted that a pilot who wants to destroy a plane hardly needs explosives to do so."

... The new TSA procedures will kill more Americans on the highway. -- Prof. Steven Horwitz ...

... Jordy Yager of The Hill: "The recent public ire toward the TSA’s new pat-down and body imaging screening methods is likely to cause more people to drive automobiles and forego airline travel, say two transportation economists who have studied the issue. As the nation readies for one of the busiest traveling holidays, Steven Horwitz, a professor of economics at St. Lawrence University, told The Hill that the probable spike in road travel, caused by adverse feelings towards the ... TSA's new screening procedures, could also lead to more car-related deaths."

Prof. Tammy Schultz in a Washington Post op-ed, on why the Marines are the biggest backs of DADT -- and what to do about it.

Rick Hertzberg attacks Glenn Beck, Roger Ailes & Rupert Murdoch for Beck's hideous, three-hour defamation of financier & democracy-backer George Soros. He doesn't miss the irony of Ailes' calling NPR executives Nazis even as Beck was accusing Soros, a Jew who hid from the Nazis in plain sight, of "helping send the Jews to the death camps."

Mythbuster. Eric Ostermeier of Smart Politics uses damned statistics to shoot down conventional wisdom. An "hypothesis - emphasized repeatedly across the broadcast networks": in states with Republican governors, it will be much harder for a Democratic President to win the state. But an analysis of presidential races since 1968 shows that "Overall, Democratic and Republican presidential nominees have carried more states in which they did not control the governor's mansion ... than states in which they did...." ...

... BUT Matt Yglesias really has Our Political Science Lesson for the Day: "... the 'normal' outcome for a country with our political institutions and ideologically sorted parties is constitutional crisis and a collapse into dictatorship. So far it hasn’t happened here.... But we live in interesting times...."

The Beauty Queen Meets Popeye

The New York Times moderators nixed my comments on both Frank Rich's column and Maureen Dowd's. So you get a two-fer today.

"I can see the White House from my house." Art by Barry Blitt in the New York Times.Frank Rich: "Sarah Palin’s amateurism and liabilities are her badges of honor, and Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so." CW: this doesn't bode well at all. It appears we are going to be subjected to at least two more years of Ponifications on Palin. ...

... Oops. Nate Silver assures me my fears are justified. Based on Palin's Google traffic, Silver concludes, "If and when Ms. Palin declares her candidacy for the White House, it could consume much of the media oxygen literally for months. For that matter, if Ms. Palin declines to run for office, it could also be a huge story. And, of course, until her mind is made up, there will be plenty of articles that attempt to anticipate Ms. Palin’s decision."

The Constant Weader comments:

What no one mentions, because it is so not politically correct to say so, is what a very liberal septuagenarian wrote to me today about Sarah Palin: "I have to tell you that she is a smasher. Her sexiness MUST be a BIG factor in what's going on."

If Sarah Palin didn't look like her generation's Sophia Loren, she would be -- perhaps -- Alaska's sitting governor, a ditzy woman unknown outside her own state. Bristol Palin would not be dancing with the stars and a younger Palin child would not be known for dissing one of her mother's young detractors with homophobic slurs. They would all be part of one big, troubled family in what for us in the Lower 48 is a far-off place. Had a story about the family and its matriarch ever made it in a mainstream media outlet, we would read with amusement, and with gratitude that we weren't quite THAT bad.

A few years ago, I thought the American people were to be congratulated for getting beyond the "Miss America" 1950s mentality. We have pretty much ditched the pageant, which in my childhood was An Event watched by millions on black-and-white TVs & a guaranteed front-page Sunday morning photo of the teary-eyed tiara winner on every American newspaper willing to hold the presses for the finale. But the allure of the pageant is still with us, re-purposed -- thanks to John McCain -- to fit our political landscape. Now a Miss Alaska runner-up is poised to be President of the United States. Instead of a rose-bedecked beauty-queen in tulle whose most political remark is a wish for world peace or an expression of admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt, we will get a thoughtless, gun-toting Neo-con from whom no one in the world, least of all Americans, will be safe.

 It does make a reasonable person long for the fabulous 50s when the President was a sensible older gentleman & the President-in-Waiting, though every bit as good-looking and charismatic as Sarah Palin, came with a brain and a coterie of those dreaded intellectual elites.

Maureen Dowd: President Obama "aims to position himself as a statesman. He wants to come across as the grown-up in the room, disciplining puerile Republicans who would 'mess with nuclear weapons and screw up alliances.' The Republicans may help Obama if they act so vindictive, entitled and puffed up that they turn off the voters who just anointed them." But, Dowd concludes, after failing to take stands against Republicans earlier, Obama represents a case of "Popeye pulling out the spinach too late."

The Constant Weader remarks:

Bad news, Ms. Dowd. Popeye will not eat his spinach. Today in Lisbon, the President ticked off a litany of venerable American statesmen, American military leaders and foreign ministers who were begging Senate Republicans to Pass. the. Damned. Treaty. Then, as the canned spinach began to mold, the President covered for the Defector-in-Chief, Sen. Jon Kyl. As the AP reports,

 Obama suggested he was encouraged that Kyl, the Republican point man on the issue, had not publicly said he wants to see the treaty rejected -- just that there wasn't enough time during the current lame-duck session to get it done. 'I take him at his word,' Obama said.

Therein lies the reason Americans do not trust anyone in Washington. We all know Jon Kyl is lying, that his "concerns" about a time crunch are all about politics. He wants to delay the ratification vote until the next Congress is in session and Republicans have an even larger stranglehold on the Senate. But, the President says, "I take him at his word." If we know Jon Kyl is lying, then we know President Obama is lying, too, and he is lying from his bully pulpit on the world stage.

Ratifying the New START treaty is an imperative, but being straight with the American people is even more important. Dwight Eisenhower could speak the truth. So could Jimmy Carter. But for the last several decades, the White House has been occupied by men who told the American people what they thought the American people wanted to hear, not what they knew. Ronald eagan denied the truth of the Iran-Contra arms deal. Bush Pere promised "Read my lips. No new taxes" (in fairness, it's to his credit he reneged on that promise). Bill Clinton pointed an accusing finger at us & said, "I did not have sex with that woman." And Bush-Cheney. Well. I can't count the lies.

A country in crisis needs a candid, can-do President. We need someone who will fight to the finish and eat all his spinach. So far, it appears Popeye has abandoned ship.

The Commentariat -- November 21

Economist Dean Baker in Firedoglake on why the Congress should not cave to catfood commission plans to cut Medicare & Society Security benefits. Baker lays out the economic & political reasons the plans are stupid.

** Sabotage. Steve Benen: "We're talking about a major political party, which will control much of Congress next year, possibly undermining the strength of the country -- on purpose, in public, without apology or shame -- for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.... [The Republicans'] general approach has shifted from hoping conditions don't improve to taking steps to ensure conditions don't improve. We've gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure." ...

     ... CW: commenters to the New York Times, myself included, have been saying this for more than a year. Why have main-streamish pundits taken so long to smell the stench? Indeed, the title of Benen's post is "None Dare Call It Sabotage." Oh, yes, we do.

     ... Update: here's a case in point: my comment on Paul Krugman's column last week; it's at the top of the page, probably the most popular Times comment in a few weeks. It isn't just people who take the trouble to write comments who recognize the Republican Plot against America; people who read agree that Republicans are American saboteurs. ...

... Kevin Drum of Mother Jones disagrees with me: "... my own view isn't that Republicans are consciously trying to sabotage the economy. Rather, I think it's really easy to convince yourself of things that are in your own self-interest, and that's mostly what they've done. A bad economy is in their self-interest, so they've convinced themselves that every possible policy to improve things is a bad idea. Of course, excuses like that from mushballs like me are the reason the liberal noise machine is sort of anemic in the first place." ...

... Digby: in the new media world, "strategy is considered a moral value in itself," so sabotage -- if it proves a winning strategy -- becomes a virtue.

Vice President Joe Biden in a New York Times op-ed: "The United States must also continue to do its part to reinforce Iraq’s progress. That is why we are not disengaging from Iraq — rather, the nature of our engagement is changing from a military to a civilian lead."

Deborah Solomon of the New York Times interviews Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the magazine.

I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful. And she's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there. -- Barbara Bush, on Sarah Palin

Jeff Sommer of the New York Times: Based on the facts at hand right now, Mr. Obama is likely to win the 2012 election in a landslide. That, at least, is the prediction of Ray C. Fair, a Yale economist and an expert on econometrics and on the relationship of economics and politics. What’s the basis of this forecast? In a nutshell: 'It’s the economy, stupid.'”

Julie Pace of the AP: President Barack Obama has asked security officials whether there's a less intrusive way to screen U.S. airline passengers than the pat-downs and body scans causing a holiday-season uproar. For now, they've told him there isn't one, the president said Saturday in response to a question at the NATO summit in Lisbon. 'I understand people's frustrations,' Obama said, while acknowledging that he's never had to undergo the stepped-up screening methods." ...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the new TSA security procedures. Clinton herself, as Jeff Zeleny of the Times reports, does not have to go through the TSA gauntlet when she travels: "cabinet members if they are escorted by agents or law enforcement officers ... are allowed to go around security":

... The TSA Won't Touch His Junk. Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "Representative John A. Boehner, the soon-to-be Republican speaker, pledged recently that he would fly commercial airlines back home to Ohio, passing up the military plane used by the current speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat. But that does not mean he will endure the hassles of ordinary passengers.... [At] Ronald Reagan National Airport..., there was no waiting for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the identification-checking agents, the metal detectors and the body scanners, and whisked directly to the gate."

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone comments on the reported federal probe of insider-trading: "... there is a mounting pile of evidence suggesting a sort of widespread culture of insider trading in which a few players (specifically the major banks and a few of the biggest and best-connected hedge funds) have milked a seemingly endless stream of exclusive information, not occasionally or opportunistically but as an ongoing commercial strategy."

Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post on oversight of the Home Affordable Modification Program, known as HAMP. HAMP is subsidizing financial institutions even when the institutions can't provide paperwork proving they own properties & when they back out on homeowners because they say the individuals haven't provided proper paperwork. 

"7,000 Ways to Fix the Deficit." David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "... the online you-fix-the-deficit puzzle that accompanied a Week in Review article last Sunday ... [received] more than one million page views, and more than 11,000 posted Twitter messages about the puzzle, most including their own solution. The Times analyzed those solutions, each of which cut at least $1.345 trillion from the 2030 deficit, to get a sense of readers’ choices." You can still play with the budget here.

Republican Judges to Party of No: "Say Yes." Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: in an "exceptionally rare" plea, "... seven Republican-appointed federal judges [joined Democratic appointees &] co-signed a letter [to the Senate leadership] warning of the consequences of the GOP’s systematic obstruction of President Obama’s judges: "We respectfully request that the Senate act on judicial nominees without delay." The full letter is here (pdf).

Local News:

Ana Valdes of the Palm Beach Post: Florida's "Republican Gov.-elect Rick Scott is giving no indication he intends to bow to Christian protesters' demands that he give up his investment in a Spanish-language social networking site they consider immoral because it partners with Playboy Mexico and allows users to share provocative photos and messages." CW: isn't it stunning that these "Christian protesters" didn't mind voting for Scott even tho they knew he ran a multi-million-dollar fraud against the U.S. taxpayer (the firm of which he was CEO settled for a $1.7 billion fine), but now they're outraged because he has an indirect investment in an enterprise that publishes "provocative photos and messages"? The real porn is the Medicare fraud, you idiots.

Down & Out in Fort Myers, Florida. Washington Post: a photo essay. Chris Walker used to make $100,000 a year as a nursing home executive. She has been out of work for a year-and-a-half. Story by Wil Haygood.

Thoughts on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from the Folks Back Home. From the Editors of the Lexington Herald-Tribune: "Despicable sounds like a better fit [than 'cynical'] for someone willing to sacrifice American lives in the pursuit of winning and keeping political power." AND McConnell's acquiescence to a moratorium on earmarks was merely a symbolic exercise & a way to avoid a showdown with tea party Republican Senators-elect; it will have little or no effect on the deficit -- or on creating jobs & improving the economy, which is what Americans really want. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the links.