The Commentariat -- April 21, 2015
Internal links removed.
Afternoon News:
Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post: "The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to resign soon, according to U.S. officials, following revelations about 'sex parties' involving prostitutes overseas and other misconduct among its agents. Michele Leonhart, who has served at the helm of the DEA since 2007, has come under heavy criticism on Capitol Hill since an inspector general report last month documented a series of episodes in which agents hired prostitutes. Agents were also found to have had sex parties with some women hired by drug cartels in Colombia."
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Carl Hulse of the New York Times: "Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader, announced this morning that a deal had been reached to resolve a dispute with Democrats over a bill to halt sex trafficking.... Referring to the stalled nomination of Loretta E. Lynch, he noted that as soon as the measure was completed, 'we'll move to the president's nominee for attorney general -- hopefully in the next day or so.'" CW: Do bear in mind that the trafficking bill has zip to do with confirmation of the attorney general. Tying a vote for Lynch to the bill was just another GOP stall tactic. ...
... Update. The full story, by Jennifer Steinhauer & Emmarie Huetteman, is here.
Clare Foran of the National Journal: "As President Obama rushes to cement his climate legacy, other nations are questioning whether his administration can make good on its promise to slash greenhouse-gas emissions ahead of a major climate summit in Paris at the end of this year.... Legal challenges and political attacks faced by the regulations, which stand as a major pillar of the U.S. climate pledge, highlight the uncertain fate of Obama's most ambitious action to tackle global warming." ...
... CW: This is the second story I've linked to in less than a week (see the top of the April 18 Commentariat) in which other nations mistrust the U.S. on major issues because the GOP is working to undermine international cooperation. (And this doesn't include their egregious behavior on the Iran nuclear deal.) It is not President Obama who is "making the U.S. weaker" as Republicans claim; it is, as it has been, Republican obstinacy. When will voters wake up to the damage they are causing their country & themselves?
Grandpa Is a Selfish Bastard. Brian Beutler of the New Republic looks at poll numbers & finds that the demographic that most hates ObamaCare is old folks who, you know, are on Medicare.
Today in Right-Wing Loony. Dana Milbank: "As the Supreme Court prepares to take up same-sex marriage next week, conservative scholars have produced a last-ditch argument to keep the scourge of homosexual unions from spreading across the land:... They're saying that legalizing same-sex marriage will cause 900,000 abortions. The logic is about as obvious as if they had alleged that raising the minimum wage would increase the frequency of hurricanes."
Charles Pierce has noticed that Dave Brat (R-Va.), the Tea Party victor over former House Majority Leader & current $3.4MM/year investment banker Eric Cantor, "is several tentacles short of an octopus." CW: worth remembering -- Brat is a certified Ph.D. from a respectable university, thus providing more evidence that American education ain't what it used to be.
Dana Somberg & Maariv Hashavua of the Jerusalem Post: Israeli "President Reuven Rivlin has refused to meet with former US president Jimmy Carter during his upcoming visit to the region, due to his stances over recent years seen as 'anti-Israel.'"
Annals of Journalism. Here's the Pulitzer Prize Committee's list of 2015 winners of Pultizer Prizes. The Washington Post story, by Paul Farhi, is here. The New York Times story, by Ravi Somaiya, is here.
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Dylan Byers of Politico: "The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have made exclusive agreements with a conservative author for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton, a move that has confounded members of the Clinton campaign and some reporters, the On Media blog has confirmed.... On Monday, a source with knowledge of the arrangements told the On Media blog that CBS' '60 Minutes' and ABC News turned down offers for similar exclusive access to portions of the book's contents." ...
... As Byers notes, Media Matters is already on the case: "Media should be cautious with Republican activist and strategist Peter Schweizer's new book Clinton Cash. Schweizer has a disreputable history of reporting marked by errors and retractions, with numerous reporters excoriating him for facts that 'do not check out,' sources that 'do not exist,' and a basic failure to practice 'Journalism 101.'" The report, by Eric Hananoki, cites case after case of Schweizer's misreporting.
Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes of the Washington Post responds to Garry Trudeau's lecture on "appropriate" cartooning.
Catherine Thompson of TPM: "Staff writer Dylan Goforth and enterprise editor Ziva Branstetter of The Tulsa World newspaper published a report Thursday that cited multiple anonymous sources alleging supervisors had signed off on firearms certifications and field training that Reserve Deputy Robert Bates did not complete.... Branstetter was named Monday afternoon as a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting.... The reporters left the publication on Monday.... Goforth told TPM in a direct message over Twitter that he, Branstetter and two other The Tulsa World reporters had another job offer in the works for a few months."
Presidential Race
Steve M. on money in politics, & specifically, Clinton money in politics: "Here's the thing: We will elect a corrupt president in 2016. That's simply a fact. The question is whether we'll elect a corrupt president who'll take a wrecking ball to what's left of the social safety apparatus, to voting rights, to reproductive rights, to progressive taxation, and so on. I say: Vote for the left-centrist crook, as opposed to one of the other crooks." CW: Reality sucks. ...
... Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg: "Hillary Clinton dismissed scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation's donors as just part of running for president and said [in Keene, N.H.,] Monday that she's ready for the incoming attention. 'It's worth noting that Republicans seem to only be talking about me,' she told reporters after a roundtable discussion on small businesses.... 'I don't know what they'd talk about if I weren't in the race.'" ...
... Mary Bruce & Jonathan Karl of ABC News: "The White House today declined to address reports that Clinton Foundation donors were purportedly given preferential treatment by the administration while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. 'I know there's been a lot of accusations made about this, but not a lot of evidence,' Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at the daily briefing. 'The president continues to be extraordinarily proud of the work that Secretary Clinton did as the secretary of State. But for the details of some of those accusations, I'd refer you to Secretary Clinton's campaign.'" CW: Earnest sure does a lot of talking for someone "declining to comment."
Margaret Hartmann of New York is a tiny bit skeptical of claims that Mayor DeBlasio has a secret plot to become President DeBlasio.
The Princes & the Populist. Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: "Charles G. and David H. Koch, the influential and big-spending conservative donors, have a favorite in the race for the Republican nomination: Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. On Monday, at a fund-raising event in Manhattan for the New York State Republican Party, David Koch told donors that he and his brother, who oversee one of the biggest private political organizations in the country, believed that Mr. Walker was the Republican Party's best hope for recapturing the White House. 'We will support whoever the candidate is,' said Mr. Koch, according to two people who attended the event. 'But it should be Scott Walker.'" CW: In case you were wondering who-all might back an anti-labor "populist." (See yesterday's comments thread for context.) ...
... Philip Bump of the Washington Post: "In a statement, David Koch said that his comments did not constitute an endorsement." ...
... CW P.S.: Many a Democratic rival could use the Kochs' backing to their great advantage. Hillary? Not so much. ...
... Charles Pierce: "... back in America's Dairyland, they may never get out of the death spiral into which Walker has shown the actual state he allegedly actually governs. His new budget is so draconian that even some of the Republicans in his pet legislature are starting to get nervous. And the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a newspaper of wild ambivalence regarding Walker and his prospective candidacy, dropped a dungbomb on him that demonstrated that, while Scott Walker may have bought a shirt at Kohl's, he isn't qualified to run a cash register there." ...
... Regression of the Meanies. Only last week we learned that "Gov. Scott Walker's approval rating of 41 percent is its lowest point in three years, according to the latest Marquette Law School Poll." ...
... New Jersey, We Have a Winner. Quinnipiac University: "New Jersey voters disapprove 56 - 38 percent of the job [Chris] Christie is doing as governor, his lowest approval rating ever and the lowest approval rating for any governor this year in the nine states surveyed by Quinnipiac University."
A Plan for All Seasons. Jonathan Chait explains why Marco "Rubio's plan is so crazy and unrealistic it might as well be no plan at all." Even mathematically-challenged Republicans have noticed the "plan"'s flaws. They "are afraid that Rubio's plan to cut taxes for the middle class would cost too much, forcing him to 'fix' his plan by curtailing his promises to rich people." CW: Of course we know that is not what would happen: Republicans -- and some Democrats -- will always keep their promises to the rich. The unwashed masses get to vote only once. Wealthy puppetmasters hold the strings 365 days/year.
Paul Steinhauser of the Washington Post & NH1News: "Ohio Gov. John Kasich Monday took a big step toward a possible 2016 Republican presidential run with the launch of a new a 527 group, the Washington Post and NH1 News in New Hampshire have learned. The new group is called New Day for America, and one of the biggest political names in New Hampshire -- former Sen. John E. Sununu -- is serving as a director." CW: Does this mean God has spoken? (See yesterday's Commentariat.)
Beyond the Beltway
Dark & Dirty. Mary Bottari in the Huffington Post: "Two court cases next week -- one being heard in open court, another being considered in silence behind closed doors -- will decide the future of Wisconsin campaign finance law, the independence of the Wisconsin judiciary, and will impact the future of presidential candidate Scott Walker. The stakes could not be higher, but the converging cases have garnered little national attention."
Lindsey Bever & Abby Ohlheiser of the Washington Post: "A 25-year-old man who died several days after being arrested by Baltimore police suffered a fatal spinal injury, authorities said Monday, as city officials announced that six police officers have been suspended." A court document "reports that [Freddie] Gray 'was arrested without force or incident' on April 12."
Jessica Roy of New York: "88,000 people applied for the 55 affordable rental units available at [New York City's] Upper West Side 'poor door' building. The condo features 219 luxury river-facing condos, and 55 street-facing units for those who earn 60 percent or less than the median income." CW: Apparently hobnobbing with the rich & famous was not uppermost in the minds of the applicants.
Steve Schmadeke & Jeremy Gorner of the Chicago Tribune: "In a stunning, abrupt end to the first trial in years of a Chicago police officer for a fatal off-duty shooting, a Cook County judge acquitted the veteran cop Monday on a legal fine point, drawing outrage from the black victim's family and leaders in the African-American community. Judge Dennis Porter ruled that prosecutors failed to prove that Dante Servin acted recklessly, saying that Illinois courts have consistently held that anytime an individual points a gun at an intended victim and shoots, it is an intentional act, not a reckless one. He all but said prosecutors should have charged Servin with murder, not involuntary manslaughter." CW: A legal fine point? How about a blunt corruption of justice.
News Ledes
AP: "An Egyptian criminal court on Tuesday sentenced ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi to 20 years in prison over the killing of protesters in 2012, the first verdict to be issued against the country's first freely elected leader.
AP: "Texas-based Blue Bell Creameries issued a voluntary recall Monday night for all of its products on the market after two samples of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream tested positive for listeria, a potentially deadly bacteria."
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Reader Comments (9)
Tom Toles in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2015/04/20/why-are-you-a-republican/
Straightforward prose. Takes Stunk and White Chapter 13 to heart.
@Marie: You failed to mention, but probably know, that Dave Brat didn't just get any old PhD, he got it in economics. In fact he was appointed by former Gov. Tim Kaine (D) to a panel of economic advisors on which he still sits. And yet he implies that the reason South Korea is successful, yet North Korea a failure, is due to the former's embrace of "free markets;" and that the U.S. is seeing increased poverty because we are moving away from free markets. I don't think he learned this at American University, where he received his PhD. I think it comes straight from the Kochs, or at least some other wealthy puppet masters.
Had a moment to follow my mouse to this Wikipedia entry:
"American University was named the most politically active school in the nation in The Princeton Review's annual survey of college students in 2008, 2010, and 2012.[8] American University is especially known for promoting international understanding reflected in the diverse student body from more than 150 countries, the university’s course offerings, the faculty's research, and from the regular presence of world leaders on its campus."
Apparently Brat missed some of that as he earned his Phd. in Kochonomics.
As a sidelight, my mouse also whispered to me a report on Koch largesse to universities, which BTW included a little over $17,000 to American University. The Kochs must have been taken aback by American University's tat for their tit when in 2013 a team from that institution published an extensive report naming the university recipients and the amounts of Koch grants. Eek!
I'd also guess Brat was not on that study team.
Victoria,
And Brat's appointment to teach at Randolph-Macon College wasn't just any old appointment either. Brat was hired as part of what basically amounts to bribery. Hire our guy to teach our brand of "economics" and we'll give you a boatload of money.
So John Allison, a Koch connected, Ayn Rand obsessed former CEO of BB&T bank, forked over half a million to the school as long as they hired Brat to teach something laughably called "The BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program". I wonder if Brat teaches about the $3.1 billion dollar bailout Mr Banking Morals Allison grabbed from the US government? I seem to recall Ayn Rand decrying anyone who took handouts from the guv'mint as moochers. But never mind.
But this Moral Foundations scam is only supposed to teach Ayn Rand. I doubt students are learning anything about real economics or guys like Keynes, unless it's that he was an evil big guv'mint moocher.
This is becoming a pretty common Confederate flim-flam in academia. The Kochs have been paying colleges a pile of dough as long as they hire their guys to inculcate their theories of "economics" and teabagging politics. The Koch plan is called something like blah, blah, blah Capitalist Ethics. A nice name for a program funded by one of themost unethical companies in the country. A company run by self-described libertarian capitalists whose nest egg, the money the family used to make all their billions came, originally from their Uncle Joe Stalin for whom they built oil refineries which fueled decades of genocide and murder . Lots of neat ethical stuff there, guys, I'm sure.
And to get back to John Allison for a moment, his connection to Ayn Rand's dysfunctional, disjointed, unworkable "philosophy" of Objectivism, has created a plutocrat beloved by the Kochs (for whom he now works, thank you very much). Allison is so deluded about Rand's eminence as a philosopher that he claims that she filled in the blanks that Aristotle couldn't figure out. I am completely serious! (A little like saying your fourth grade nephew had to help Einstein with his math homework, except that at least that nephew was thinking in real world math terms, not delusional bullshit.)
In that same NY Times piece, he relates his economic theory with an anecdote about kids playing in a sandbox. If one boy has a toy and won't share with the other kids, he is considered bad. But to Allison's thinking, this kid not only shouldn't share, he should kick the other kid in the face and never share with anyone 'cause in the Koch/Rand worldview, greed is the only value worth pursuing. And boy, do they ever.
And David Brat is helping in that cause.
So what do we have? We have a confused, paranoid, self-absorbed con artist who herself never adhered to the standards she demanded of everyone else, standards based on horrible, boring, hackneyed fiction. Her theory of greed is absorbed by guys who call themselves stand up capitalists like John Galt, but who take bailout money from the government (and then complain that the government "forced" them to do it), and are then hired by other plutocrats who call themselves red-blooded American capitalists but who made their fortune providing essential assistance to the most infamous Soviet tyrant in history, helping to fuel his rise to murderous power, and now are hiring frauds like David Brat to teach young people their brand of Confederate ideology and greed.
If it all sounds pretty icky and weird, it is.
But you won't hear any of this on Fox.
Oh, and one more interesting twist in this Confederate briar patch.
Brat's campaign was helped immensely by round the clock hammering on Eric Cantor by right-wing radio shills like Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Beck, Limbaugh, and other screamers, all of whom had their advertising coffers boosted immensely by an enormous ingestion of cash from.....guess who?
Da Kochs.
Really, the whole thing is so nasty, it's like watching a mongoose eat a snake. It's horrible, but you just can't look away.
I was just getting ready to paste in the link to Dana Milbank's article when I noticed that Marie already linked it ("Today in Right Wing Looney"). Basically, an amicus briefer wants to advise the SCOTUS that same sex marriage degrades the value of traditional marriage, so that if a guy gets a gal pregnant he'll be less likely to marry her, and she will then decide to terminate her pregnancy. 900,000 expecting moms will do this. All of this based on no data.
Howsomever -- there has been quite a bit of research lately that crappy wages at the middle-low end of the earning spectrum do make it exceedingly difficult for young folks to make the leap to form families. I'm not saying that crappy wages lead to abortions, but if the "marriage degradation" argument had any validity, so would the "wage degradation" argument. But conservatives argue the opposite -- that welfare single moms want more kids, because that increases their support subsidies.
The world is full of wonderful potential for belief, when you abandon all logic. But then it is sort of like a loony bin, no?
Akhilleus - recall that such activities as having the plutocrats fund "right-thinking" programs at universities, such as Prof. Brat at R-M, are part of the recommendations of the "Powell Memorandum." For those few RC readers who have not read it, Google it and you will see the road-map for conservativism that has been fairly prescient for the past four decades.
And speaking of loony bins...
Last night I was thumbing through Garry Wills' excellent (is there a Wills effort that isn't at least interesting?) "Explaining America: The Federalist" in hopes of learning the secret to Alexander Hamilton's famous hot toddies, and since there wasn't much on that, I got to my secondary reason, Wills' take on Federalist 10. Federalist 10 is Madison's defense of a strong federal government for the purpose of staving off insurrection and the violence of unchecked factions (read: teabaggers). It begins:
"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction."
You can maybe see why I was interested in going back over that ground with both Mr. Madison and Mr. Wills.
But as my Federalisting activities progressed, I came across this nicely worded description of what it is our representatives in government should be about (besides insurrection, secession, nullification, and out and out treason):
"The job of a republic is to represent the people, but through arbiters who are not entirely bound by narrow interest, who are sufficiently mindful of the common good to act with enlightened care for the people."
I wondered if old Garry had had time lately to compare his very elegant job description with the way an entire party now comports itself. The book was published in 1981, just as Reagan was starting to plant the landmines that would begin tearing apart the delicate fabric of the social and political constructs that the nation had created over its first 200 years. No more of that now.
Then it hit me. Marie mentions that she has posted a couple of links in just the last few days that refer to the way other nations view us, with suspicion, nervousness, mistrust, because they see that the Republican Party has lost its mind and is completely off the chain.
It's like we're living in an abusive relationship. Most people in the middle of that kind of chaos and disaster have a hard time viewing it from the point of view of friends and family who see just how much abuse one party is forced to accept as part of a "normal" situation. Or it's like being mired in a deep depression or addiction. It's hard to see just how bad things are until one can escape and find persective.
We are all in an abusive relationship, politically, economically, socially. We have madmen trying to grab the wheel who use violence or the threat of violence to get their way, to steer the ship of state with all aboard into the nearest whirlpool.
And I don't see much help on the horizon.
Are Republicans acting as those"...who are not entirely bound by narrow interest, who are sufficiently mindful of the common good to act with enlightened care for the people"?
Poor Mr. Madison.
Akhilleus,
Seems that "shill" might by the best synonym for "Koch-funded professor," hearkening to most dictionaries' definition of "profess" as affirming one's allegiance to a religion or set of beliefs, which is most often listed before "learned teacher at the university level."
Patrick: Your comment about crappy wages couldn't be more on the mark. And if in some social classes--those with a modicum of means and money--the established link between poverty and large families has been temporarily broken by the availability of abortion, the Koch-Republicans are out to re-knit it...so that perched high on the Citadel of Family Values they can continue to sneer at the consequences of what they themselves have wrought.
Again, no sense of the cloud of irony in which they live.
Patrick,
Quite so.
The memo has been followed assiduously and has had many a vicious addenda tacked on. It's funny. In one of the articles I was looking at describing the Kochs' connection to the Soviet Union, there is a mention of how Koch père, Fred, learned about the "Soviet plan to destroy America", supposedly from a man named Jerome Livshitz.
Koch, in order to demonstrate his own superior moral standing, compared to Livshitz, the commie, told the story of how he saved Livshitz' life after a car accident. Livshitz, according to Koch, was stunned. "I would never have saved your life. I'd have let you die. I'd strangle my own mother if it was good for Communism!" I'm gonna take a pass on whether or not he just made that shit up, but here is something interesting that this Lipshitz fellow supposedly confided to Uncle Joe's good buddy Fred:
"In the months I traveled with him (Lipshitz) he gave me a liberal education in Communist techniques and methods. He told me how the Communists were going to infiltrate the U.S.A. in the schools, universities, armed forces and to use his words, “Make you rotten to the core.” (from Koch's John Birch screed, "A Businessman Looks at Communism")
Sounds like the plan laid out in Powell's memo, doesn't it?
Perhaps the Kochs have found yet another way for Soviet communists to help them in their quest to destroy the United States and remake in their own image.
Reminds me of that old Charlie Daniels song, "Uneasy Rider" in which a character in the song is impeached in this way:
"Well, he's a friend of them long haired, hippy-type, pinko fags!
I betchya he's even got a commie flag
tacked up on the wall inside of his garage."
"He's a snake in the grass, I tell ya guys.
He may look dumb but that's just a disguise,
He's a mastermind in the ways of espionage"
And how does the guy get out of being labeled a "hippy-type pinko fag"?
They all started lookin real suspicious at him
And he jumped up and said "Now just wait a minute Jim!
You know he's lying I been living here all of my life!"
"I'm a faithful follower of Brother John Birch
And I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church.
And I ain't even got a garage, you can call home and ask my wife!"
Religion and John Birch!
You think the Kochs got a commie flag hangin' up in their garage? They sure as shit ought to.