The Commentariat -- April 2

President Obama's Weekly Address:

Today's Weader Award for Irony Goes to ...

... The SEC. David Hilzenrath of the Washington Post: "The Securities and Exchange Commission, which demands good accounting in the corporate world, has considerable trouble keeping its own books, according to a report this week by federal auditors.... The problems are not new: Auditors have been issuing warnings about the SEC’s internal accounting for years, and the SEC has acknowledged weaknesses. But the situation worsened in 2010 as temporary patches failed, according to GAO officials."

Robert Pear of the New York Times: especially since states have made massive budget cutbacks, Medicaid now "pays doctors so little that many refuse to take its patients."

"Cruel but Not Unusual. Clarence Thomas Writes One of the Meanest Supreme Court Decisions Ever." Dahlia Lithwick of Slate shows that Justice Scalia's concurring opinion in the case of Thompson v. Connick is just as bad. In the course of this article involving the case of multiple ADAs suppressing multiple exculpatory documents that would have exonerated or helped to exonerate an innocent man who was on death row for 18 years & many times faced a scheduled execution, Lithwick calls the Justices "apathetic," demonstrating "a moral flat line," "hyper-technical," "deliberaely callous," "pitiless" and "scornful." When you read the particulars, you'll think Lithwick is being overly polite. These are two evil "Justices" who don't give a flying fuck about justice. That goes for Kennedy, Roberts & Alito, too.

New York Times Editors: "... continuing hate crimes [against Muslims] were laid bare at a valuable but barely noticed Senate hearing last week that provided welcome contrast to Representative Peter King’s airing of his xenophobic allegation that the Muslim-American community has been radicalized. In running the hearing, Senator Richard Durbin tried to set the record straight about the patriotism of a vast majority of American-Muslim citizens and the continuing assaults on their civil rights. He warned against the 'guilt by association' whipped up by Mr. King’s broadsides...." C-SPAN has video of the hearings.

Joe Nocera has his first op-ed column in today's Times, which he devotes to Warren Buffett's completely unconvincing gloss of "what looks like insider trading" by Buffett's No. 2 man, David Sokol. CW: Martha Stewart went to jail for doing a lot less than Sokol did. According to Nocera, Sokol negotiated a takeover of a company called Lubrizol & actively encouraged Buffett to go for it at the same time Sokol was trading in Lubrizol stocks. Sokol made about $3 million on the stocks when Buffett acquired Lubrizol, at Sokol's urging. Does anybody think the SEC will go after the deputy of President Obama's friend Warren Buffett the way they went after Stewart? Time will tell. Comments are here. ...

... Nocera's account is consistent with this one by Serene Ng & Eric Holm of the Wall Street Journal. ...

... Buffett's support for Sokol is all the more perplexing when you figure he must have known of Sokol's past. Peter Cohan of AOL details some of Sokol's earlier misdeeds, which include (1) a huge stockholder ripoff effected by cooking the books (a Nebraska court ordered Sokol to pay $32 milllion to the plaintiffs for that stunt), (2) tricking the directors of his own company into selling it to Buffett (Sokol settled with shareholders out of court for $7.5 million).

Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times: Islamic radicals "are now leaping aboard the democracy bandwagon, alarming those who believe that religious radicals are seeking to put in place strict Islamic law through ballots."

Right Wing World

Gail Collins: "In a potential Republican field that includes Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, it’s hard to come up with a line of attack loopy enough to stand out from the pack. But darned if [Donald] Trump didn’t manage to find one." Comments are here.

Local News

Wisconsin ...

The video below is a "closing argument" against conservative State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, who is up for re-election Tuesday. (The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel provides the backstory on the incident outlined in the video.) Before the Wisconsin union protests, Prosser was probably a shoo-in. Former Democratic Gov. Patrick Lucey, for instance, was Prosser's campaign co-chair. This past week, Lucey withdrew his support & endorsed Prosser's challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, saying Prosser demonstrated "a disturbing distermper and lack of civility." Yeah, I guess:

     ... BUT, beware. That brilliant Constitutional scholar (the First Amendment guarantees that nobody can criticize me) and expert on Wisconsin jurisprudence Sarah Palin has endorsed Prosser, and outside interests backing Prosser have outspent those supporting Kloppenburg. ...

     ... AND a a group called Citizens for a Strong America is running a TV ad which claims, among other things, that "Kloppenburg is so extreme, she even put an 80-year-old farmer in jail for refusing to plant native vegetation on his farm." The ad earned a "Pants-on-Fire" rating from Wisconsin PolitiFact.

David Dayan of Firedoglake: "The chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is confident that at least six of the eight recall elections of state Senators that the party is seeking will be successful, leading to an unprecedented set of recall elections in the summer or fall."

Maine ...

Some of the panels in the mural depicting the history of labor in Maine, by artist Judy Taylor of Tremont, Maine. FDR Labor Secretary Frances Perkins is represented (left) in the second panel pictured. Perkins, who is buried in Maine, was the first woman member of a U.S. presidential cabinet. Via the New York Times. Peter Catapano of the New York Times rounds up a few opinions by writers opposed to Maine Gov. Paul LePage's decision to remove a mural from the labor department that depicts, well, laborers. One of those opinionators is former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. In the meantime, as I pointed out in my comment on Catapano's post ...

Asked last week what he would do if protesters engaged in civil disobedience to protest removal of the mural, Gov. LePage said he would "laugh at the idiots." It turns out the "idiots" may get the last laugh.

... A lawsuit has been filed over removal of the mural, claiming that removal violates the First & Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs are a union leader, an OSHA employee, three artists & an attorney. ...

... Meanwhile, a Democratic member of the state legislature has introduced a bill providing for recall of the governor & other state officials. ...

... At the same time, some state senators from LePage's own party are blasting him in an op-ed to be published in some state newspapers on Monday.

Florida ...

More from America's Worst Governor Sociopath. Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones: "Continuing his assault on Florida's most vulnerable, Gov. Rick Scott issued an executive order on Thursday that immediately slashes money for the developmentally disabled. The cuts will reduce payments to group homes and social workers by 15 percent. Here's the Orlando Sentinel story; it will sicken you. ...

... The State Column: "According to the latest poll, Florida governor Rick Scott is the least popular governor in the nation. After just three months in office, Mr. Scott, a Republican, is facing a major backlash from voters. If he stood for re-election today, he would likely lose by a landslide, according to research released Wednesday by Public Policy Polling.

... He Said "Uterus!" Pierre Tristam in Common Dreams on "Florida legislators' creepy uterus obsession."

News Ledes

Al Jazeera: "US and Egyptian special forces have reportedly been offering covert armed training to rebel fighters in the battle for Libya, Al Jazeera has been told. An unnamed rebel source related how he had undergone training in military techniques at a 'secret facility' in eastern Libya."

New York Times: "A NATO airstrike near the battlefront in eastern Libya killed 13 rebel fighters outside the pivotal port city of Brega, a rebel spokesman and wounded fighters said Saturday."

New York Times: "As rebels swept across Ivory Coast in a rapid advance last week to oust the nation’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, hundreds of people were killed in a single town, the United Nations and aid groups said Saturday, in the worst episode of violence during the four-month political crisis that has plunged the country back into civil war."

New York Times: "The head of a United Nations panel that investigated Israel’s invasion of Gaza two years ago has retracted the central and most explosive assertion of the report — that Israel purposely killed Palestinian civilians there. Richard Goldstone, an esteemed South African jurist who led a panel of experts that spent months examining the Gaza war, wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Post, which was posted on its Web site on Friday night, that Israeli investigations into the conflict 'indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.'” Goldstone's Washington Post op-ed is here.

CNN: "Mike Huckabee won a 2012 presidential straw poll conducted in a key South Carolina county Saturday."

The Hill: "The House narrowly passed legislation on Friday that calls for a House-passed FY 2011 spending bill to become law should the Senate fail to approve a spending bill by April 6. It would also prevent members of Congress from being paid during a government shutdown. The bill, H.R. 1255, was approved over bitter Democratic opposition in a 221-202 vote in which no Democrats supported it, and 15 Republicans opposed it." CW: this is the bill that is clearly unconstitutional in that it declares a bill passed if the House says so; forget the Senate & the President. It's a joke your 5th-grade can probably explain.

The Hill: "President Obama pressed Senate and House leaders Saturday on crafting a spending deal, the White House said, making phone calls in which Obama said 'progress' was being made in the talks while still stating opposition to GOP policy riders. Obama’s used calls to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to emphasize his view that a shutdown would harm the economy...."

New York Times: "Violent protests over the burning of a Koran in Florida flared for a second straight day, with young men rampaging through the streets of this southern capital [of Kandahar], flying Taliban flags and wielding sticks. Nine people were killed and 81 injured in the disturbances, all from bullet wounds, according to Abdul Qayoum Pakhla, head of the provincial health department. One of the dead was a police officer.... The protests here came a day after a mob overran the headquarters of the United Nations in Mazar-i-Sharif Friday, killing 12 persons, seven of them international staff. The mob gathered after three mullahs at Friday Prayer urged action in response to the Koran burning by a pastor, Terry Jones, in Florida on March 20." ...

... Washington Post: "Taliban fighters attacked the gate of a large NATO military base on the outskirts of Kabul on Saturday morning but failed to do serious damage or breach the compound walls."

New York Times: "Highly radioactive water is leaking directly into the sea from a damaged pit near a crippled reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, safety officials said Saturday, the latest setback in the increasingly messy bid to regain control of the reactors." ...

     ... CNN Update: "A first attempt to plug a cracked concrete shaft that is leaking highly radioactive water into the ocean off Japan failed Saturday, so officials are now exploring alternatives, spokesmen for Tokyo Electric Power Co. said." With video.