The Commentariat -- April 8, 2014
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Ramsey Cox, et al., of the Hill: "The Senate approved a five-month extension of federal unemployment benefits on Monday in a 59-38 vote that saw six Republicans break ranks and vote in favor of the legislation. The bill now goes to the House, where Senior House Republicans have felt little pressure to act on jobless benefits. Although they won't say so directly, they are likely to ignore the Senate bill." ...
... ** Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post: "Since the early 1990s, politicians have deliberately shifted funds away from those perceived to be the most needy and toward those perceived to be the most deserving.... Since the mid-1990s, the biggest increases in spending have gone to those who were middle class or hovering around the poverty line. Meanwhile, Americans in deep poverty ... saw no change in their benefits in the decade leading up to the housing bubble. In fact, if you strip out Medicare and Medicaid, federal social spending on those in extreme poverty fell between 1993 and 2004."
Michael Shear & Annie Lowrey of the New York Times: "President Obama on Tuesday will call attention to what he has said is an 'embarrassment' in America: the fact that women make, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns. But ... a study released in January showed that female White House staff members make on average 88 cents for every dollar a male staff member earns.... [Press Secretary Jay Carney] said that the 88-cent statistic was misleading because it aggregates the salaries of White House staff members at all levels, including the lowest levels, where women outnumber men. Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner, said the 77-cent statistic that Mr. Obama has often cited was misleading for the same reason, because it aggregates salaries for the American workforce." ...
... CW: Guess what? Boehner's guy is right. Wouldn't it be fabulous if the Times writers would tell us this rather than present an easily-verifiable statistic in their traditional he-said/he-said format?
Dan Roberts of the Guardian: "The White House has defended a four-fold increase in the deportation of undocumented immigrants for minor crimes such as driving offences, insisting it is simply complying with 'administration priorities' by removing foreign law-breakers from the country." CW: Think about the logic there: We're just following our own policy, so it's okay.
Aamer Madhani of USA Today: "President Obama on Monday announced the winners of his Youth CareerConnect program, part of his long-touted goal of reshaping high schools to make sure students are properly prepared for the rigors of college and a rapidly evolving job market.
Adam Serwer of NBC News: "The Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from a New Mexico photographer who refused to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony because of her religious beliefs, which the state supreme court found violated New Mexico's anti-discrimination law. If the Supreme Court had taken the case, 'all of public accommodations anti-discrimination laws would have been up for grabs,' said Joshua Block of the American Civil Liberties Union. 'Drawing the line here is a huge victory.'"
Julian Hattem of the Hill: "The Supreme Court on Monday declined an initial challenge to the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk collection of information about the public's telephone calls. The high court passed on a chance to review a lower court ruling that found the controversial program 'almost Orwellian,' which means the case will go through the normal appeals process as lawmakers battle over reform proposals."
I am not a crook. -- Richard Nixon
Jerry Ford pardoned Nixon, and now John Roberts has absolved him. History is written by the winners, but for a while anyway, the losers know better. -- Constant Weader ...
... Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: "... according to an opinion Chief Justice John Roberts handed down last week, most of the Nixon Administration's shadiest efforts to raise campaign funds do not qualify as 'corruption.'" ...
... Charles Pierce: "Richard Nixon didn't hand Gordon Liddy a bag of hundreds and tell him to bug Larry O'Brien's phone so, according to the Chief Justice, there was no corruption there at all." ...
... As the Worm Turns. Constant Weader: Under his "new rules," Chief Justice Roberts also has effectively granted pardons to all of the Keating Five (Charles Keating just died), since a quid pro quo was never specified between Keating & any of the five U.S. senators. Ironically, John McCain, one of the five, was so humiliated by his complicity in the Keating scandal that he began actively supporting campaign finance reform; ergo, McCain-Feingold -- the very law that the Roberts court further eviscerated in the McCutcheon v. FEC ruling.
New York Times Editors: "... the pro-Russian secessionists who seized the local administration building in Donetsk, the center of the industrial Donets Basin, are following the script laid down in Crimea to the letter. They have declared the region's independence from Ukraine and called for a referendum by May 11 on joining Russia.... The United States and Europe have said time and again that further Russian aggression would prompt a stern and painful response. Now is the time to prepare it." ...
... Ignorance Breeds Belligerence. Kyle Dropp, et al., in the Washington Post: "We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine's actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force." CW: Maybe if somebody had given Dick Cheney a map, all would be right with the world.
The accusations are not true. Some people called it torture. It wasn't torture. If I would have to do it all over again, I would. The results speak for themselves. -- Dick Cheney, last week, defending the CIA's use of waterboarding against a Senate report's "accusations" that waterboarding is torture
I was stunned to hear that quote from Vice President Cheney. If he doesn't think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through, one of them a hundred and plus-odd times.... This was torture by anybody's definition. -- Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the Intelligence Committee, which wrote the report
David Corn of Mother Jones: "Last week..., former Vice President Dick Cheney took a shot at Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). But Paul is not likely to be fazed by criticism from Cheney, for several years ago the Kentucky senator was pushing the conspiratorial notion that the former VP exploited the horrific 9/11 attacks to lead the nation into war in Iraq in order to benefit Halliburton, the enormous military contractor where Cheney had once been CEO."
Burgess Everett of Politico: "Senate Democrats ripped former CIA Director Michael Hayden on Monday for describing Sen. Dianne Feinstein as 'emotional,' calling Hayden's remarks both a 'baseless smear' and condescending.... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Hayden's comments are emblematic of 'Republicans' disregard for women as displayed here in Washington.'"
Juan Cole: "Right wing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday blamed the Palestinians for the collapse of peace negotiations that began last August under the auspices of Secretary of State John Kerry." Cole lists "the top ten things Israel did to cause the negotiations to falter."
Bush conservative Michael Gerson slams ObamaCare, not necessarily for the wrong reasons, but of course he goes awry by claiming "conservatives have serious alternatives to Obamacare." He never acknowledges the elephant in the room: single-payer would solve almost all of ObamaCare's problems. One point he does make though is crucial: Americans have a right to health care, & conservatives must come to recognize that.
Steve Ohlemacher of the AP: "Rep. Dave Camp set a [Way & Means] committee vote for Wednesday on whether to refer Lois Lerner, who used to head the agency's tax-exempt division, to the Justice Department 'for possible criminal prosecution.'"
Joan Walsh of Salon takes issue with Jonathan Chait's piece on racism, linked in yesterday's Commentariat.
At the Minnesota DFL Humphrey-Mondale fundraiser, Elizabeth Warren takes on Paul Ryan & Ted Cruz:
Gosh, Another Conservative Christian/Family Values Politician Is Caught on Tape. John Bresnahan & Jake Sherman of Politico: "Freshman GOP Rep. Vance McAllister (La.) - who ran as conservative Christian - has been caught on video in a romantic encounter with a woman believed to be on his congressional staff just before Christmas. The Ouachita Citizen, a newspaper based in West Monroe, La., posted a Dec. 23 surveillance video purportedly from inside McAllister's district office in Monroe.... McAllister won the special election on Nov. 16 to replace Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.). McAllister won in the heavily Republican district by playing up his conservative credentials, including his Christian faith and his 16-year marriage. McAllister's Washington office door was locked on Monday. He issued a statement in the afternoon apologizing for the incident and asking for forgiveness." The video is here.
Beyond the Beltway
Trip Gabriel of the New York Times: "Maryland embraced President Obama's call to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour on Monday, the second state to do since Connecticut acted last month. The Maryland General Assembly voted for the pay raise on the last day of its 2014 regular session, giving Gov. Martin O'Malley a victory on his top priority this year. The governor, in his last year in office, has staked out a consistently liberal record as he weighs running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.... The governor also said he would sign a bill passed Monday that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana."
... CW: President Obama mentions Maryland's minimum wage effort in his speech, embedded above.
Scott Raab of Esquire: "Esquire has learned from sources close to the investigation that David Wildstein, the former Port Authority operative who helped plan and execute the Great Fort Lee Clusterfk, is now cooperating with Paul Fishman, the federal prosecutor investigating the soon-to-be-ex-governor and his minions for criminal conduct. Fishman has also increased the number of investigators at work on the case, and has begun presenting evidence and witnesses to a grand jury in Newark."
AP: "Charlotte, N.C.'s council has chosen a state senator to be the city's new mayor to replace Patrick Cannon [D], who resigned last month in a public corruption scandal. Members on Monday picked Dan Clodfelter [D] to finish the two-year term Cannon only started in December."
Jim Efstathiou Jr. of Bloomberg News: "There have been more earthquakes strong enough to be felt in Oklahoma this year than in all of 2013, overwhelming state officials who are trying to determine if the temblors are linked to oil and natural gas production.... As fracking expanded to more fields, reports have become more frequent from Texas to Ohio of earthquakes linked to wells that drillers use to pump wastewater underground." But, hey, "The number of earthquakes with suspected connections to injection wells is a small fraction of the number of wells, according to America's Natural Gas Alliance, an industry group in Washington."
... CW: Okay then. Or as Hamilton Nolan of Gawker writes, "Could blasting water into cracks in the earth with incredibly high pressure be related to an explosion of earthquakes? Who's to say? In the meantime, strap yourself in -- for energy savings!" A commenter to Nolan's post has an explanation: "Those aren't earthquakes at all. It is simply Mother Earth quivering with pleasure from getting fucked so hard by humans." ...
... Griff Witte & Anthony Faiola of the Washington Post: "Ever since Russian forces took hold of Crimea last month, the British prime minister [David Cameron] has been leading a chorus of conservative politicians and energy executives in a refrain they believe will spark a shale gas revolution in Europe: Frack, baby, frack."
Smoking Gun: Al Sharpton was once an informant for the FBI & NYPD. "Beginning in the mid-1980s and spanning several years, Sharpton's cooperation was fraught with danger since the FBI's principal targets were leaders of the Genovese crime family, the country's largest and most feared Mafia outfit. In addition to aiding the FBI/NYPD task force, which was known as the 'Genovese squad,' Sharpton's cooperation extended to several other investigative agencies. TSG's account of Sharpton's secret life as 'CI-7' is based on hundreds of pages of confidential FBI affidavits"
CW: As a UW-Madison alum, I am super-proud of my old college for offering a women's studies course that included this informative handout, ca. 1988: "When You Meet a Lesbian: Hints for the Heterosexual Woman." Much of it concerns girl-on-girl etiquette (though not exactly like the advice we got from our housemother at Elizabeth Waters Hall, who was coincidentally a lesbian). For instance, Rule 1: "Do not run from the room. This is rude." I'm going to try to remember that for next time.
Congressional Races
Earmarker-in-Chief. Paul Kane of the Washington Post: "In the post-earmark era, using the party's control of the federal bureaucracy to deliver local projects or delay new regulations that might stifle jobs has become a critical part of Democratic efforts to maintain control of the Senate. In close races, particularly in less populated states such as Alaska and Montana, incumbents are hoping that a few favorable agency decisions might secure the backing of key constituencies."
Presidential Election
Presidential aspirant Ted Cruz responds to presidential heir Jeb Bush on immigration reform:
Digby, in Salon: In the "Tea Party's great dunce-off...,Ted Cruz is quietly kicking Rand Paul's butt."
John Cassidy of the New Yorker: "Whatever else you do this week, carve out half an hour to read my colleague Ryan Lizza's piece about Chris Christie and New Jersey politics. It's Robert Penn Warren meets Carl Hiaasen on the west bank of the Hudson. By the time you get to the end of it, I bet you'll find yourself asking the same question I did: How could we ever have taken this bully seriously as a Presidential candidate?"
News Ledes
New York Times: "Arthur Smith, a country musician known for the hit 'Guitar Boogie' and for 'Feuding Banjos,' a bluegrass tune that became 'Dueling Banjos' in the film 'Deliverance,' died on Thursday at his home in Charlotte, N.C. He was 93."
AFP: "US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday blamed approval of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem for derailing peace talks with Palestinians, a charge that pricked Israeli officials and sent aides into damage control." CW: Which is what Juan Cole said yesterday. See today's Commentariat.
AP: "The defense chiefs of China and the U.S. faced off Tuesday over Beijing's escalating territorial disputes in the region, with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and telling his Chinese counterparts they do not have the right to unilaterally establish an air defense zone over disputed islands, with no consultation."
Reuters: "Deputies in the Ukrainian parliament brawled in the chamber on Tuesday after a communist leader accused nationalists of playing into the hands of Russia by adopting extreme tactics early in the Ukrainian crisis." With video.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/opinion/putins-czarist-folly.html
Sarah Palin, et.al. don't appear to grasp the larger implications of Putin's power grab. Writing in the Nytimes, Robert Service, a historian specializing in Russia, has the details. Nb
Justice John in his retroactive pardon of Nixon, Keating and whole legions of slimeballs is simply applying the logic of climate change deniers: If you don't get the quid pro quo, the undeniable cause leading to the certain effect, on camera, in an act witnessed and attested to by forty parsons and sixteen saints, it never happened.
The same goes for fracking and earthquakes, of course. I think the legal term might be implausible deniability, but then, what do I know? I didn't go to law school.
Nonetheless I'm thinking that if we apply the same logic to our prison population and eliminate all consideration of circumstantial evidence, we can overnight reduce our prison census by half.
Maybe that's what Justice John really had in mind. That man is always thinking.
The Atlantic has a provocative 300 year evolution of the tenet that "Greed is Good" which has now been firmly integrated into our neoliberal economic engine.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/greed-is-good-a-300-year-history-of-a-dangerous-idea/360265/
This brings me back to the "stunning" revelation that Hobby Lobby is both a righteous follower of All Things Holy and therefore cannot bear the thought of indirectly condoning non pro-creation sexual activity,while simultaneously investing in the company making those Devilish pills that poison our society.
In retrospect, there's no hypocrisy here. On a personal level, this corporation is simply standing firm on its religious beliefs that those not holding to Christian Values should end in a fiery pit for eternity. Fair enough. Yet on a corporate level, they're simply following the amoral quest for bigger and bigger profits, at any price.
Whereas actual people typically see a moral connection between economics and society in general, corporations are seemingly blind to this connection. For those people that actually care, "buying local" is a common strategy to keep the money in the community and help out fellow neighbors and friends, a personal choice with moral underlyings. Yet corporations, especially multi-nationals, led by their "Greed is Good" mantra of profits at all costs, inversely hold an amoral attitude toward their local community. "Local's for Losers" should be their rallying cry, particularly all of the corporations who've moved abroad. And even those that stick around are fighting tooth and nail against raising the minimum wage which might divert some of the unknown $ Trillions corporate liquid assets sitting abroad...
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/corporations-cashreservestaxavoidanceoffshore.html
Certainly some corporations that have a historical connection to their local area have chosen a different path and generalizing on such a complex subject leads to numerous counter examples. But the "Greed is Good" led by "Creative Destruction" and the "I've Got Mine" mentality is tearing at the seams of our social fabric and cannot be overlooked in this age of nouveaux oligarchs, extreme inequalities and entrenched personal interests blocking any hopes of fighting the effects of climate change which is already here to stay.
Marie, I didn't realize you were a UW alum. Did you know that a couple of years ago, Liz Waters finally became a coed dorm?
And just this month, one of Scott Walker's besties, whose name was all over the recent email dump that revealed just how sleazy, corrupt and racist Walker's buddies are, has been named to a high paying communications post at the university? He offered a letter of recommendation from our college dropout gov, who has cut millions of dollars from the state university system's budget.
A mathematical solution to the White House perceived gender pay difference is obvious: just don't hire any more women for the two lower levels of pay bands. Bingo.
Another simple solution to a complex problem. You're welcome.
Just because the solution is wrong doesn't mean its not simple.
John Cassidy asks this question: " How could we ever have taken this bully seriously as a Presidential candidate?"
Answer: Some of us never did. Some of us got the scent of the Christi cockalorum loooong ago. And some of us when friends said, "I like that Chris Christi, if he runs in 2016 I just may vote for him," we said, "keep your eye on this guy, you may just change your mind."
Amusing video of Cruz describing himself as the kind of figure the grass roots folks would likely vote for. And of course the Amigos Three (Cruz, Paul, & Rubio) are going to chew each other up until there will be only faint facsimiles left standing to remind us of what could have been.
The Ryan Lizza New Yorker piece on the conception, gestation, birth, bullying adolescence, corrupt adulthood, and imminent death of Chris Christie as a national political figure (even a state and local one) almost reads like an autopsy.
Some years ago, I had a front row seat, for about a decade or so into the machinations of local, state, and, for a cup of coffee, national political operations.
To a wildly idealistic young man, it was eye-opening and not a little discouraging. But after a few years, you sort of get with the inside baseball logic of it all. You may not like it but you can at least appreciate the way the pros (not the corrupt ones either, but the legitimate ones) trade horses and hold it all together. You also come to see the influence of money. And it doesn't even have to be a stuffed envelope surreptitiously deposited on the seat next a city councillor eating a corn beef sandwich in a downtown diner. It mostly has to do with bringing home the bacon.
If you can do a little dance with some developer who will put up a shopping mall or improve some downtown area, or whatever, you can go back to the voters and say "This, I had a hand in". So maybe a couple of blocks get torn down and people are displaced. You can tout your effectiveness come election time.
But then, for other pols, it morphs into how you can stay in the game, gain influence and wield power. Personal enrichment is nice, but it's almost a sideline for these guys. And this is where the truly insidious corruption starts to seep in. For some, it's a slow process, like an intravenous drip, but for others it's a mainline shot they need every day or so to stay in the game. For too many, once they've stepped over that line, it's a new game with different rules.
When Lizza quotes New Jersey bosses talking about how they own six guys here and 12 guys there, it's direct, incontrovertible evidence of how money and power control the arcs of public affairs. Those guys will vote how you tell them to vote. Maybe not on everything, but on things that count. That's how it works. John Roberts is lying through his teeth if the thinks that this state of affairs doesn't, at the very least, contribute either to actual corruption, imminent corruption, or the appearance of corruption.
But, in his own way, Roberts is no different from corrupt state and local pols who roll around in the mud and sucker punch each other and the public, to see who gets to end up on top while pretending it's all for the benefit of the public.
He just has a nicer office. And....he's there for life.
Caught the concluding minutes of the 50's movie "A Face in the Crowd" last night. Had heard of it but not seen it. Would like to think that the Right's demagogues, the amigos as you call some of them, P.D., will end up shouting from on high as the crowd that once adulated them walks away in disgust.
But we do make the difference between a substantial politician and a media creation difficult for most to see. The voter' judgment, relying as it does on sound bites and projected image, is sorely handicapped by distance; still, over time many, though not enough, of the empty husks do get Palinized into irrelevancy.
I'm reminded of the career of a local TV personality, one Sheriff Tex, who had a children's program on a Seattle station when I was a kid. Once when he had a gig at the Darrington Timber Bowl, just up the Stilly from Oso, he invited little Kenny up on the stage for a purpose I've forgotten and gave me an autographed dollar bill that I treasured for years. Later, after his fall from grace he was again in the news when he claimed he coined the word "hootenanny," seeking some share of the profit from the TV show of the same name.
His abrupt fall and disappearance from the airwaves seemed truly Lonesome Roadian: I heard later, his (perhaps apocryphal) remarks about what he really thought of those "little bastards" in his studio audience had been picked up by a live mike.
One of Christie's problems is that he's so full of himself that he apparently believes that bullying people in public makes him seem strong, unlike his weak opponents. That works for some, but never for those who identify with the people he chooses to bully, and while bullying may entertain for a while (it is a show, after all), it does sow second thought seeds. So much for his problematic public face.
Backstage, apparently, bullying has also defined him, and while that behavior has not all been broadcast or caught on tape, recent and ongoing investigations have made clear his administration is an extension of his public persona, domineering, heavy-handed and mean.
Wonder how many who voted for him last fall now regret it? And as a Presidential candidate, he's toast.
I'm a New Jersey resident and have never voted for him, nor ever will!
Ken,
"A Face in the Crowd" is definitely worth seeing all the way through. It's funny, but what brings down Lonesome Rhodes, the open mic into which he blurts his contempt for his audience, calling them morons and idiots, is not very different from the pulling back of the curtain on Mittens Rombot's 47% speech. I don't know if Romney would have won without that revelation, but it was as clear cut a picture of how he really sees the world as we could have hoped for and voters responded in kind by showing the Rat what they thought of him.
The sad thing is that, speaking of arrogant, bullying, self regarding demagogues, media creations like Beck and Limbaugh reveal their contempt for their audience every time they open their traps. They don't come right out and call them idiots or morons or insult them in other ways (unless, of course, they're uppity women, blacks, or other minorities who refuse to knuckle under) but they treat them that way, plying them with ridiculous lies, idiotic conspiracy theories, and insulting attacks on reason, logic, and truth.
But plenty of curtains have been pulled back on Limbaugh and he's still going strong. One suspects that were he to get caught doing a Lonesome Rhodes type rant, his ditto heads would forgive and forget, and shamble back to dutifully picking up his turds.
Why right-wing evangelical Christianity is bad for everyone.
Okay, you already knew that, right?
So, today, Pat Robertson is praying for god to kill the president. Or something. Deliver us from the evil Muslim. Nice, in'it? Very loving. Very kind. Very Christian.
And although evangelicals can only dream of having those they consider enemies killed in this country, over in Africa, a growing number of countries are acting on years of Evangelical hectoring and today, anyone considered a member--or in some cases a supporter--of LGBT communities and causes can be imprisoned or put to death.
Good work there, all you holier than thou Christian preachers! Fucking kill 'em all. That's what Jesus would do, isn't it?
But these people have an inordinate amount of influence over wingnut politicians in this country. They can't come right out and demand that unbelievers and non-evangelicals be put to death, but it's certainly a highly coveted goal buried in those withered black holes where their hearts should be.
No doubt there has always been anti-gay sentiments in traditional African cultures, but when you have American evangelicals going out of their way to lobby efforts to criminalize the very nature of being for certain people, and to further encourage governments like that in Uganda to enact punishments ranging from life imprisonment to death, you have further evidence of the abysmal, shameful, immorality of these assholes. They should have been turned back at the border and denied re-admittance to this country, but, oh...that would be an assault on their religious freedom, such as the freedom to militate for the murder of those they don't like.
And don't forget, they're not doing this on their own dime, mind you. They do it with help from the American government who lets these holy roller pig fuckers raise enormous amounts of money, tax free, to underwrite the export of hatred and violence against other human beings.
They're the first to scream "intolerance" when they imagine that their freedom to lobby for lethal discrimination against others might be frowned upon. Also the first to line up and point fingers at those they don't like and to lobby for their incarceration, torture, and murder.
That's conservative family values at work, yessiree Bob.
Right-wing evangelical Christianity is not just bad for you. It could kill you.