The Commentariat -- Dec. 24, 2012
NEW. Andy Borowitz forwards "A Holiday Letter from John Boehner."
The Deficit Cult. Paul Krugman equates deficit hawks with doomsday cult members: "... the prophets of fiscal disaster, no matter how respectable they may seem, are at this point effectively members of a doomsday cult. They are emotionally and professionally committed to the belief that fiscal crisis lurks just around the corner, and they will hold to their belief no matter how many corners we turn without encountering that crisis.... They've been hugely, absurdly wrong for years on end, and it's time to stop taking them seriously." ...
... Right on cue, Annie Lowrey of the New York Times profiles Maya MacGuineas, the "face of the Campaign to Fix the Debt." Lowrey reports, without so much as a "he said" for all the "she said"s, on MacGuineas & her "all-star cast" of debt & deficit hawks. Lowrey, who was a liberal writer just months ago, is married to Ezra Klein.
Economic Policy Institute: 250 Ph.D. economists & 50 Ph.D. social insurance experts write in a November 20, 2012 statement, "... we oppose proposals to reduce the Social Security COLA by tying it to a chained consumer price index that does not directly measure the actual expenditures of beneficiaries. Such a move would lower the COLA by an estimated 0.3 percentage points per year, translating into a 3 percent benefit cut after 10 years and a 6 percent cut after 20 years. The oldest beneficiaries, who are often the poorest beneficiaries, and persons receiving disability benefits for more than 20 years would see even larger cuts over time." (pdf) ...
... BUT, hey, everybody has to "compromise." Nancy Altman & Eric Kingston in the Huffington Post provide a "how-to" manual for politicians, etc., on the best ways to betray seniors & people with disabilities. The writes note that "Most [politicians], including President Obama and Speaker Boehner, have acknowledged that Social Security has not and cannot contribute a penny to the federal debt. Nearly all are on record as promising that they will never, ever cut the benefits of today's seniors and people with disabilities." CW: Altman & Kingston aren't so smart: I'm pretty sure they copied their "ideas" from actual politicians. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. A lump of coal, you faithless jerks.
E. J. Dionne: "... we know something important: The current Republican majority in the House cannot govern. Only a coalition across party lines can get the public's business done."
Amy Davidson of the New Yorker on why Republicans are attacking former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), whom Obama may nominate for Secretary of Defense: "... what's becoming clearest in this fight isn't anything about Hagel, but the derangement of the Republican Party, to use what may soon be an obsolete term for a movement in a state of sour disorder."
NEW. Robert Parry in Consortium News on the Second Amendment, an attempt to preserve "domestic tranquility" while saving the cost of maintaining a standing army against insurrectionists.
... "Where Have You Been, Mr. President?" Philip Rucker & Sari Horwitz of the Washington Post: "It took the massacre of 20 children and six adults in a Newtown, Conn., elementary school this month to spur Obama to action. He vowed last week to push for immediate and concrete gun-safety proposals to prevent such carnage." ...
... David Gregory thinks of a few apt questions of ask the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, then actually follows up when LaPierre, unsurprisingly, says stupid stuff. CW: Bad news, Wayne. If you've lost Gregory, you've lost the country. ...
... Cory Booker on the "false debate" on gun control. The ads rotate on YouTube videos, but when I saw this particular video on the YouTube site, it was preceded by a 3-minute-plus ad of a guy showing you how to legally make your very own assault rifle (one that is illegal to purchase or sell) from parts you can buy -- legally again -- on the Intertoobz or elsewhere. He says of one component: "it's just a paperweight." (The same ad came up both times I clicked on the video -- if you run the video here, then click on the YouTube icon in the lower right-hand corner, you too may learn how to become a Ninja):
** Bill Keller: South Africa is way ahead of the U.S. when it comes to institutionalizing gay rights. In the U.S., the Supreme Court "apportions basic rights by putting its finger in the wind." So does the President: "As best I can tell, President Obama's position on same-sex marriage is that it should not be imposed on unwilling states." Eusabeius McKaiser, a gay South African writer asks, "What are the chances of Obama saying, 'Black people should be allowed to vote, ideally, but I'd let the states decide when they are ready.'"
Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: Democrats and Republicans gathered in Honolulu "to pay tribute on Sunday to Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, a Democrat, who died last Monday at 88 after serving in the Senate for five decades." President & Mrs. Obama attended the ceremony; the President did not speak. ...
... Sen. Harry Reid delivers a moving tribute to Sen. Inouye:
Ann Telnaes of the Washington Post with a holiday greeting from the Obamas:
Taylor Berman of Gawker: "Crapo, [a Mormon,] has said in past interviews that he doesn't drink." (See today's Ledes.)
Presidential Race
Why Mitt Lost: He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire to ... run.... If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn't love the attention. -- Tagg Romney, claiming it was he & Ann Romney who convinced Mitt to run
Congressional Race
Hunk v. Hunk? Anjali Sareen of Mediate: in a Sunday show interview, actor Ben Affleck tells Bob Schieffer he hasn't closed the door on a Senate run for the Massachusetts seat John Kerry will almost surely vacate. This could pit him against current Sen. Scott Brown, who -- you might have heard -- lost his bid for re-election. CW: and they said Washington was Hollywood for ugly people. Ha!
News Ledes
AP: "Pope Benedict XVI marked Christmas Eve with Mass in St. Peter's Basilica and a pressing question: Will people find room in their hectic, technology-driven lives for children, the poor and God? The pontiff also prayed that Israelis and Palestinians live in peace and freedom, and asked the faithful to pray for strife-torn Syria as well as Lebanon and Iraq."
AP: "Thousands of Christians from the world over packed Manger Square in Bethlehem Monday to celebrate the birth of Jesus in the ancient West Bank town.... For their Palestinian hosts, this holiday season was an especially joyous one, with the hardships of the Israeli occupation that so often clouded previous Christmas Eve celebrations eased by the United Nations' recent recognition of an independent state of Palestine."
Reuters: "The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Monday to restart negotiations on a draft international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global trade in conventional arms, a pact the powerful U.S. National Rifle Association has been lobbying hard against. U.N. delegates and gun control activists have complained that talks collapsed in July largely because U.S. President Barack Obama feared attacks from Republican rival Mitt Romney before the November 6 election..., a charge U.S. officials have denied."
New York Times: "Jack Klugman, the rubber-mugged character actor who leapt to television stardom in the 1970s as the slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison on 'The Odd Couple' and as the crusading forensic pathologist of 'Quincy, M.E.,' died on Monday at his home in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 90."
New York Times: In Webster, New York, a town on Lake Ontario north of Rochester, a gunman shot a volley of bullets that hit four firefighters whom he had apparently called to the scene after setting fire to a car. Two firemen died in the ambush, and "an off-duty police officer from nearby Greece, N.Y., who was on his way to work, was wounded when he and his car were hit by shrapnel." The gunman, William Spengler, 62, later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had "a lengthy criminal record.... In 1981, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for bludgeoning his 92-year-old grandmother to death with a hammer. He was imprisoned until 1998." CW: if only the policeman had been armed, this would never have happened.
Reuters: "More than 48,000 people have signed a petition that they posted on the White House website demanding that British CNN talk show host Piers Morgan be deported over comments he made on air about gun control. Morgan last week lambasted pro-gun guests on his show, after the December 14 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman shot dead 26 people, including 20 children." CW: never thought I'd say, "I stand with Piers Morgan."
New York Times: "More than 250 religious leaders in Illinois have signed an open letter in support of same-sex marriage, which the legislature is likely to take up in January."
Miami Herald: "PortMiami administrators are on edge as the nation's 14,650 longshoremen threaten to shut down the giant gantry cranes used to ship containers at 15 major East Coast ports at midnight Saturday. The job action portends a potential blow of tens of millions of dollars a day to Miami-Dade County's economy.... Late Friday, Gov. Rick Scott got involved, sending a three-page letter to President Barack Obama asking that he invoke the Taft-Hartley Act if a strike occurs, which would mandate an 80-day cooling off period, and force mediation."
CBS News: "Sen. Michael Crapo, R.-Idaho, was arrested in Virginia early Sunday morning and charged with driving under the influence, Alexandria police say."
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Reader Comments (12)
As much as I appreciate the elegance of cognitive dissonance theory and believe it explains much otherwise puzzling human behavior, what Krugman did not say in his Doomsday (hell of a thing to post on this Christmas Eve eve) piece is why anyone would work for the folks funding all the doomsaying to begin with.
In a response to another reader of Krugman's trail balloon blog yesterday, who wondered where he could get a job as a deficit scold, I said this:
"To answer your presumably rhetorical question:
One gets a job like that almost anywhere the money stream flows, as long as you have no character, no feeling for others, believe money is a true measure of your worth and have no compunction about offering yourself as a spineless lickspittle to anyone who will cross your palm with gold.
In short, we live in a nation of moral midgets with too much money. It's almost as if our system rewards the wrong kind of behavior, isn't it?"
Yes, failed prophecy is often ignored, but it is ignored even more often when someone is paying big bucks to have experts claim they were right all along; doomsday is still just around the corner; they just got the date a little bit wrong.
And that those paying us don't want their taxes raised a dime....well, that's not at all relevant to the discussion....
Have a good Christmas Eve, all.
Just spent 10 minutes reading the commentary on an NRA article from Politico. Result: my brains hurts and I've lost some faith in humanity.
While it's good to venture outside of the box to see what the "others" are saying, I must admit we're fortunate this holiday season with Sista Elephant's pertinacious diligence and an educative forum where thoughts come from brains and not arses.
Festive festivities my fellow freedom fighters
How did I miss this for so long. The Senator from Idaho is named CRAPO! (I know, its pronounced kraypo). He made the news because of his deeply committed Mormon faith. He was arrested for DWI.
Anyway, have a nice holiday. I am looking forward to my traditional Christmas dinner from the Chinese restaurant.
Crapo and Craig. Such a lovely couple.
@Marvin Schwalb. If I were a religious Jew -- which I am not on either count -- I think I'd be okay with Jesus, at least the Jesus portrayed by Mark and Luke (Matthew & John, not so much). The vast majority of the teachings in those Gospels are Pharisaic. Many are based on the Laws & the Prophets, and I found quite a number of "sayings of Jesus" in the Talmud. There's some question as to which came first -- the Talmud sayings (none of which was "published" till after the Gospels were written) or the Gospels. It's fair to say, tho, that these teachings became commonly-held beliefs among rabbis of the first century B.C.E. -- second century C.E.
The Jesus in Mark & Luke is a relatively open, non-judgmental guy who doesn't run around insisting everybody who doesn't sign up is condemned to an eternal hell. The Gospel of Mark, the earliest written, has no nativity story (and no resurrection), BTW. Matthew and Luke each have nativity stories, but they are highly inconsistent with one another, and no amount of massaging can make them jibe. Both are typical god-birth stories of the era, borrowing elements from similar stories from other ancient religions & from common Jewish concepts of a messianic birth. The Gospel of John, which treats Jesus as a pre-formed god & portrays him as a "stranger from heaven," has no nativity story, either, though the authors give him an earthling family that corresponds to the family in the other gospels.
Anyway, I hope you and your family enjoy your traditional dinner. I have to cook mine.
Marie
CW,
http://margaretandhelen.com/
adding their two cents re the NRA.
mae finch
@Marie: I have come to wonder how John claimed to know so much since the book of John was written three hundred years after Jesus' death. Fundamentalists are fond of John 3:16 in any case.
@Barbarossa: as far as I know, scholars place the writing of the Gospel of John as early as 85 C.E., but most put it in the early 2nd century. It could not have been "published" any later than ca. 170-180 C.E., when Tatian incorporated it into a "harmony" ("Diatessaron"). At about the same time, Irenaeus of Lyon included it in his canon of "accepted" Christian texts.
John appears to have had multiple authors & may have been a compilation of sermons or treatises written over a decade or two, some of which ended up out of any sort of order that made sense. Some scholar (Bultman??) tried to re-order some of the gospel.
Marie
Re: Our concept of Santa Claus. There are many scholarly works on the origins of Santa, many finding him to be a combination of Thor and the gift-bearing Christ Child.
But one book I want to recommend here is much more thorough on the origins of all things Christmas: Pagan Christmas by Christian Ratsch and Claudia Muller-Ebling (2006). The book is beautifully illustrated also. Well, another: The Origins of Christmas by Joseph F. Kelly, a professor of religious studies at John Carroll University, who covers issues of how the gospel stories developed and and why the stories changed over the many years.
@Marie, re the inconsistencies in the gospel--yet further proof that myth doesn't stand up to fact-checking. Why should it?
Anyway, Merry Christmas!
Thanks! The Andy Borowitz link is a super Christmas present!
I especially loved this remark from the alledged 'Boehner letter':
"How odious is Eric Cantor? Let me put it this way: when we have to speak to the press, I actually prefer to stand next to Mitch McConnell."
The finish wasn't bad either!!
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/12/a-holiday-letter-from-john-boehner.html#ixzz2G0SSbp9k
Have a merry, one and all!
A very charming nativity narrative can be found in Sura 19 (in the Penguin Classics translation of The Koran by N.J.Dawood): Mary or Maryam. It sure does not follow the traditional gospel story! Lovely, though.