The Commentariat -- Aug. 9, 2013
Friday Afternoon News Dump. AP: "President Barack Obama says he'll hold a news conference Friday afternoon at the White House."
Mike Lillis of the Hill: "House Democrats hoping to restore the Voting Rights Act (VRA) have an unlikely ally in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).... Cantor is already talking to prominent Democrats about doing just that. 'We've had a one-on-one; it went very well,' Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) told The Hill last Friday.... Asked if Cantor is eying a legislative fix that would satisfy Democrats, Lewis didn't hesitate. 'Yes, yes, by all means,' he said.... A March trip with Lewis to Selma, Ala. -- site of a watershed civil rights march in 1965 -- left an impression on the Virginia Republican, who described it as "a profound experience" illustrating 'the fortitude it took to advance civil rights and ensure equal protection for all.'" CW: the extension of the Voting Rights Act passed with near-unanimous approval in 2006. If today there are more than a handful of Congressional Republicans who aren't completely cynical about ensuring the right to vote, it will partially restore my faith in human nature.
Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post: "Across a dozen years of records collection, critics say, the government has offered few instances in which the massive storehouse of Americans' records contained the first crucial lead that cracked a case -- and even those, they say, could have been obtained through a less intrusive method."
New York Times Editors: "Time and again, the N.S.A. has pushed past the limits that lawmakers thought they had imposed to prevent it from invading basic privacy, as guaranteed by the Constitution.... It [is] more urgent than ever that Congress clamp down on what is unquestionably the bulk collection of American communications and restrict it to clear targets of an investigation. Despite President Obama's claim this week that 'there is no spying on Americans,' the evidence shows that such spying is greater than the public ever knew."
David Nather of Politico: "Al Qaeda’s back, and its timing couldn't be worse for the Republicans who are taking on the national security wing of their party. Edward Snowden reignited a debate over privacy and civil liberties that had fizzled in recent years. Just last week, civil libertarians were even picking up momentum on proposals to restrict the NSA's mass collection of Americans' phone records thanks to renewed attention in the media. But that was before the serious new Al Qaeda threats that have forced the shuttering of 19 American embassies and consulates overseas." CW: so if you're looking for reasons some Republicans got on the teevee & praised Obama's closing the embassies, I think you've found one.
Jonathan Allen of Reuters: "The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security."
Salman Masood & Declan Walsh of the New York Times: "The United States ordered staff pulled from its consulate in Lahore, [Pakistan,] on Friday, citing terrorist threats that also led the State Department to advise Americans against traveling to Pakistan as violence continued to rattle the country for another day."
Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian: "The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people." Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance.... Silent Circle, another provider of secure online services, announced on Thursday night that it would scrap its own encrypted email offering, Silent Mail. In a blogpost the company said that although it had not received any government orders to hand over information, 'the writing is on the wall'." ...
... Wherein Glenn Greenwald describes the U.S. as a "rogue and lawless nation" -- as compared to Russia, Bolivia, Equador, Venezuela, Cuba, etc., & the U.S. media as U.S. government lapdogs. ...
... CW: Yesterday, I ran a link to a Guardian interview of Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), which suggested that he likened Ed Snowden to Gandhi & other civil rights heroes. On his blog, Lewis responded to the published piece:
News reports about my interview with The Guardian are misleading, and they do not reflect my complete opinion. Let me be clear. I do not agree with what Mr. Snowden did. He has damaged American international relations and compromised our national security. He leaked classified information and may have jeopardized human lives. That must be condemned. I never praised Mr. Snowden or said his actions rise to those of Mohandas Gandhi or other civil rights leaders. In fact, The Guardian itself agreed to retract the word 'praise' from its headline." ...
... Via Driftglass, who has something to say about all that.
Deb Reichmann of the AP: "The scuttled summit means that talks scheduled Friday at the State Department between Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu will be awkward at best. U.S.-Russia discord had been simmering since Putin regained the Russian presidency more than a year ago."
Paul Krugman on why the "captains of industry" lobby against federal deficit spending to create jobs -- basically, because they think it undermines their influence. But they can't admit that, so they have to make up other excuses -- such as government spending "undermines confidence" -- to pretend to justify their opposition to job creation via federal stimulus. ...
... THEN there are the politicians whose careers depend upon fearmongering the federal deficit. A few days ago it was Eric Cantor; now it's Rand Son-of-Ron Paul, who is genetically engineered to abhor paper money. To defend his radical, government-slashing budget proposal, Paul sez:
You know, the thing is, people want to say it's extreme. But what I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year. I mean, that's an extremely bad situation. ...
... Jonathan Chait: "Some good news for Senator Paul -- we're not running a trillion-dollar deficit anymore. The deficit this year is forecast at $642 billion, per the Congressional Budget Office, which also forecasts the deficit to fall to $560 billion next year and $378 billion the following year." CW: actually, a falling deficit is bad news for Li'l Randy's career plans, such bad news he has to pretend it isn't happening.
Catching the London Whale. Ben Protess & Jessica Silver-Greenberg of the New York Times: "Federal regulators are seeking to level civil charges against JPMorgan Chase and extract a rare admission of wrongdoing from the nation's biggest bank as an investigation into a multibillion-dollar trading loss enters its final stage. If JPMorgan concedes to some wrongdoing in a settlement, such an admission would set an important precedent for the Securities and Exchange Commission, coming after decades of allowing defendants to 'neither admit nor deny wrongdoing.'"
New York Times Editors: "Last month the Justice Department won an antitrust suit against Apple, convincing Judge Denise Cote of United States District Court that the company had colluded with five major publishers to fix e-book prices. At a hearing on Friday, the department will argue that its plan to remedy Apple's misconduct will 'restore lost competition.' ... But the problem with this case all along was that the department ignored the potentially bigger anticompetitive force in the e-book market -- Amazon -- while focusing on Apple." CW: I guess we won't see an editorial like this in the Washington Post.
Right Wing World
Between you an me, I'm sorta holdin' my nose for two years. What we're doing here is going to be a big benefit to Rand [Paul] in '16. -- Mitch McConnell's campaign manager Jesse Benton, talking to conservative activist Dennis Fusaro about working for McConnell ...
... Jed Lewison of Daily Kos: "The backstory here is that Benton, who in addition to being Rand Paul's political guru is also Ron Paul's grandson-in-law and managed Paul's 2012 presidential campaign, now faces questions about whether he played a role in a payola scheme to boost support for Ron Paul's 2012 presidential campaign. On the call, he denied knowledge of the scheme.... When Benton signed up to manage McConnell's reelection campaign, it was widely seen as an effort to insulate McConnell from a tea party challenge as well as a move by Rand Paul to suck up to the GOP establishment ahead of his 2016 presidential campaign." ...
... Rosie Gray of BuzzFeed: Dennis Fusaro, "the former Ron Paul aide who secretly recorded a conversation with Mitch McConnell campaign manager and former colleague Jesse Benton, told BuzzFeed on Thursday that he recorded the phone call to protect himself and that he released it because Benton didn't meet a six-month deadline to take care of an alleged bribery incident. The McConnell campaign released a statement attributed to Benton which disparages the "truly sick" person who released the recording & says it's a great honor to work for McConnell. ...
... Alec MacGillis of the New Republic: McConnell can't fire Benton because Benton -- with his ties to the Pauls & Tea Partiers -- is McConnell's get-out-of-a-primary-challenge card. ...
... Finally, a Bachmann Conspiracy Theory Proves True. As for that bribe that Benton denies knowing about, "TheIowaRepublican.com has obtained [from Dennis Fusaro] a recording of a phone conversation between State Senator Kent Sorenson and Dennis Fusaro. The call was recorded just days after Sorenson abruptly abandoned Michele Bachmann's campaign and publicly endorsed Ron Paul. Along with confirming the payment a representative of the Paul campaign [Dimitri Kesari] made to Sorenson, the recorded conversation also appears to indicate that Sorenson was considering withdrawing from the Paul campaign almost immediately after announcing his support for Paul.... Sorenson also confirms that Paul's National Campaign Chairman, Jesse Benton, was aware of Kesari's actions." After Bachmann accused the Paul campaign of paying Sorenson to switch to Paul, Sorenson publcly denied the allegation. ...
... Matea Gold of the Washington Post: Fusaro also gave e-mails to the Iowa Republican which further incriminate Sorenson in the bribe scheme & suggest Benton was involved. ...
... CW: the FBI is investigation Michelle Bachmann's campaign, specifically in regard to irregular payments to Sorenson, who -- as an Iowa state legislator -- is barred by law from working for campaigns. Here's hoping in the course of the investigation, they asked Sorenson about that bribe thingee. And here's betting that if they did, he lied about it, just as he has done on the teevee. Sure would hate to see him go to jail for lying to federal officials.
Local News
Rosalind McDonald of the Washington Post, who is Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's worst nightmare: "A Virginia Beach radiologist lent $50,000 to a real estate corporation owned by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and his sister in 2010 — the same year the doctor was offered an appointment to a state medical board.... The loan offers a new example of how McDonnell's personal finances became entangled with his public role as the governor struggled to keep up with payments on property investments he and his family made during the height of the real estate boom."
News Ledes
Reuters: "Firefighters gained ground against a wind-whipped California wildfire that has destroyed 15 buildings, injured at least five people and forced the evacuation of 500 homes in several small communities east of Los Angeles. The fire erupted on Wednesday near a back-country road south of the town of Banning, and by nightfall on Thursday had blackened an estimated 14,000 acres, the Riverside County Fire Department said...."
New York Times: "A prosecution witness in the sentencing phase of the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning told a military judge on Thursday that Al Qaeda could have used WikiLeaks disclosures, including classified United States government materials provided by Private Manning, to encourage attacks in the West, in testimony meant to show the harm done by his actions."
New York Times: "The judge overseeing the military trial of the Army psychiatrist charged in a deadly shooting rampage at the Fort Hood base denied on Thursday his former lawyers' request to limit their role in the case. The ruling came a day after the lawyers said they could no longer assist him because he was seeking the same goal as prosecutors -- to be sentenced to death." ...
... The AP recounts some of yesterday's testimony & proceedings.
Los Angeles Times: "Gunmen early Friday waylaid a minibus carrying a Turkish Airlines crew on a road leading from Lebanon's major international airport, kidnapping the pilot and co-pilot and taking them to an unknown destination, authorities said. The brazen abduction was widely viewed here as the latest fallout from the war in neighboring Syria."
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Reader Comments (12)
I wonder what the regular readers (and weaders) think of Our Mr. Brooks latest: "Considering how mentally lazy most of us are, a little soft paternalism that forces us to choose what’s good for us is probably just what we all need."
Excuse me? Who is lazy, Mr. Brooks?
"@Kate Madison: for a country that pretends to be an egalitarian democracy, we are now & always have been one that is run by and for wealthy, straight (or pretend-straight) white men (mostly of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion). That ethnic minorities, women, gays & the poor made the strides that we did in the 20th century was quite an achievement." CW.
The strides made in the 20th century were amazing when compared with the timeline of history. And there were tremendous losses, too. I've heard it said by someone brighter than I am that now is a great time to be alive because of all the important subjects that are in play in the public forum. Anything worth having is worth the struggle to attain. When I think that women have had the vote for less than 100 years and human rights for blacks, Asians, and gays have been in existence an even shorter period of time, I realize the truly thin branch of history upon which progressivism is sprouted.
I had my own hopeless optimist turn 20 yesterday and realize that some of my political pessimism brought on by the unassailed corporatism and regressiveness of the Reagan and beyond years is not shared by young people. What a relief it is that many young people hopefully turn their eyes to the future; all the while they are well aware of the vacuous policies of the Greedy Old Party and the DC scrum.
How many normal people want to abolish social security or Medicare/aid or the right of women to vote or equal rights for minorities or the integrated military or sports leagues? Give it 10 - 20 years and few will contest the merits of the Affordable Care Act. I totally agree with the Krugman article sited today that the corporate chieftains can't give up the reins of power to government. These few leaders reveal their vulnerability; their power rests on the well positioned few and the bamboozled many. The financial meltdown of 2008 has left the bamboozled many more discerning of their patsy status. Change just isn't fast enough when one sees so clearly what needs to happen. I take heart when I see that the GOP think Bachmann, Limbergher, Ailes and Cruz are leaders. The flame out is happening everyday and their demographic is less every day.
Pointing out the obvious here, but it's quite the interesting limbo the leaders of our military machine are dancing these days. Obama just the other day talked tough to some soldiers about how we've been "hammering" Al-Qaida leadership and that they're on the verge of collapse. That fleeting death blow is just around the corner, just you wait. Any day know. Those drones will bomb the Legion of Doom into oblivion.
Hey, Legion of Doom, that's pretty catchy. Axis of Evil kinda lost its appeal after 8 years of Bush fear mongering. But Legion of Doom, we could be on to something...
Especially considering the Legion has apparently decentralized and grown across the globe. That whole "we're winning" theory doesn't hold up so well when we shut down embassies across the Middle East and Africa after picking up a convenient conference call. I must admit I was a little confused when Rwanda and Burundi were closed. But I also adhere to the idea that this was a practice in extreme caution regardless of actual threat level. The military knows the fundamentalists are good recruits and their ranks are expanding. It's currently a practice of containment and minimizing blowback. Anything to prevent another Benghazi shit show.
The next few months will be a great lesson in first class spin, as our military demonstrate how to claim imminent victory while losing, and refusing to admit failure of strategy which in turn perpetuates the machine.
At least Cheney and Rumsfeld are happy.
Baldwin on MSNBC? Hell I nominate Julia Ioffe. Caught her on L O'Donnell standing her ground against LO at his worst. Felt like an idiot when I calmed down enough to hear myself yelling "you go girl" at a tv screen. Really impressed, and then I followed your link to her article in the New Republic. Really, REALLY impressed.
Davidson in the New Yorker also writes about Lavabit. Another of those Patriot Act letters which cannot be mentioned. The Patriot Act is one of those republican named things which mean the opposite, an act which no patriot could vote for.
Just Suze,
You are 100% correct in your detection of the innate and chronic intellectual laziness of one D. Brooks (no extra charge however for his snide, patronizing sancitmony).
I have established a personal moratorium on reading Brooks (with the occasional exception of his treatment of certain subjects which I scan for a laugh) because he has, with the most barely perceptible modifications, written the same column for the last 15 years.
Here goes:
Liberals are lazy, privileged, elitist bums who, at heart, don't understand real Americans. Conservatives, regular guys all, are the keepers of the flame of democracy, freedom, apple pie, free markets, and in at least one case, the key to the locked closet where Ross Douthat keeps his blow up doll and 1950s bondage magazines.
The country used to be great but unauthorized sex and dirty hippies ruined everything. The sixties killed the dream.
Morality has been flushed into the swamp of relativism by dissolute progressives who cannot, at the drop of a silk top hat, incorporate pithy Edmund Burke quotes into droll monologues on amateur sociology.
That's it. Repeat as needed stealing ideas and quotes from whichever conservative writers are currently flying off the right-wing bookshelves. Cash checks from NY Times, admire own reflection in nearest mirror, and take a nap.
Brooks' mention of paternalism must have come with no small amount of chagrin or at least wistfulness for the old days (that never were) when people just shut up and admitted that Father Knows Best, the primary wet dream of all faux conservative intellectuals ("conservative intellectual" becoming more and more of an oxymoron as I type this).
"Paging Mr. Brooks, your indolence wagon has arrived."
Just Suze,
You are 100% correct in your detection of the innate and chronic intellectual laziness of one D. Brooks (no extra charge however for his snide, patronizing sancitmony).
I have established a personal moratorium on reading Brooks (with the occasional exception of his treatment of certain subjects which I scan for a laugh) because he has, with the most barely perceptible modifications, written the same column for the last 15 years.
Here goes:
Liberals are lazy, privileged, elitist bums who, at heart, don't understand real Americans. Conservatives, regular guys all, are the keepers of the flame of democracy, freedom, apple pie, free markets, and in at least one case, the key to the locked closet where Ross Douthat keeps his blow up doll and 1950s bondage magazines.
The country used to be great but unauthorized sex and dirty hippies ruined everything. The sixties killed the dream.
Morality has been flushed into the swamp of relativism by dissolute progressives who cannot, at the drop of a silk top hat, incorporate pithy Edmund Burke quotes into droll monologues on amateur sociology.
That's it. Repeat as needed stealing ideas and quotes from whichever conservative writers are currently flying off the right-wing bookshelves. Cash checks from NY Times, admire own reflection in nearest mirror, and take a nap.
Brooks' mention of paternalism must have come with no small amount of chagrin or at least wistfulness for the old days (that never were) when people just shut up and admitted that Father Knows Best, the primary wet dream of all faux conservative intellectuals ("conservative intellectual" becoming more and more of an oxymoron as I type this).
"Paging Mr. Brooks, your indolence wagon has arrived."
@625 Damn me for a pessimist but I can never forget that in the 2012 election the people, presented with what I thought were stark choices, needed to have switched fewer than 1,340,000 votes for there to never have been an Affordable Care Act. That's 1.1% of the vote cast or the votes of 0.4% of the population. Just imagine a republican presidential candidate who was a canny politician (or a better liar if you will)
Brooks is an easy target but I wonder if he and that other NYTimes recycling master might not be harbingers of the future. Bezos made his billions on squeezing inefficiencies out of the system but how to apply that to newspapers? $/word or words/reporter or news items/reporter or ? Nothing I can think of gives comfort. Can you really blend art and science?
Art and science have been blended beautifully for tens of thousands of years.
The entire history of the plastic arts is a history of the combined forces of art and science. The transition from cave painting (pigments applied without a prepared ground and without permanent emulsifiers) to tempera (water based paints mixed with egg whites), and on to oil paints which allowed for the luminous quality of Caravaggios and Rembrandts all relied on that specific combination.
Architecture, from ziggurats and pyramids to the Eiffel Tower are literal monuments to art and science.
Publishing of both fiction, non-fiction, and news materials have all benefited from the same combination and still do.
Film, television, and media all rely on the admixture of art and science, even though the results, at least on the artistic side, may rely overly on subjective judgements.
I think the more pertinent question might be how one can blend art and science with the incessant demand for significant quarterly earnings.
Most of the things we value in life have nothing to do with the 10-Q. Most of the things we abhor about our society do. A rational society might want to modify how we worship the 10-Q. Our society has no interest in modifying it.
After the third or fourth time seeing it, would folks care to pay attention of the difference between "to cite" and "to site?"
you copy editor
Dear Copy Editor:
I think you confuse "needing a cite" with "needing a site," which in many cases in the 21st century are the same.
Dear Copy Editor: I'd cut people who right comments on Webcites alot of slack. There thinking faster than they type & sometimes their not thinking about grammer and spelling.
People used to correct my typos all the time; in the last little wile they've given up. I appreciate it when the grammer police site me, & I always try to make the correction.
Marie