The Commentariat -- December 20
My column in today's New York Times eXaminer: "You might think the Sidney Awards are prestigious accolades for literary and journalistic excellence. You might think that, until you find out that David Brooks single-handedly chooses the recipients of the Sidney Awards.... As far as I can tell, the only prize money is the mention in Brooks’ column." The front page of the NYTX is here. ...
... REMINDER for those in the NYC area: the NYT eXaminer is holding a public discussion at 7:30 pm ET this evening at the Brecht Forum at 451 West Street, NYC, on how mainstream media coverage developed from the first days of OWS. More info here.
Steve Benen: "After days of meetings and delays, a broken promise to hold an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill, and a surprising number of pot shots at their Senate Republican colleagues, the House GOP came up with a convoluted scheme.... The way House Republicans have set this up, those who vote 'yes' are actually voting 'no' on the bipartisan Senate compromise. In fact, under this scheme, the House will hardly be voting on the Senate version at all... The new House Republican scheme is intended to raise middle-class taxes without making it look like House Republicans are raising middle-class taxes. In two weeks, Americans will discover in early January that their paychecks have shrunk, and because political journalism is largely broken, they’ll be told it’s the result of 'both sides' being unwilling to compromise. Those reports will be wrong." See also today's Ledes. Also see Right Wing World below for more on the "philosophy" behind the GOP moves.
Zeke Emanuel in the New York Times: "Premium support [plans, like the Wyden-Ryan plan] will not reduce the government’s costs without shifting those costs to older people who can’t afford them. Only a plan that transforms how we pay doctors and other health care providers can do that.... To address the root of the cost problem, we must change how we pay doctors and hospitals. We must move away from fee-for-service payments to bundled payments that include all the costs of caring for a patient, thereby encouraging providers to keep patients healthy and avoid unnecessary services. Medicare should announce that it will make this change by Jan. 1, 2022, and that it will begin by switching to bundled payments for cardiac and orthopedic surgery within one year and for cancer patients within five." ...
... Here's Paul Krugman from a few days ago, describing Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) as a "useful idiot" -- and explaining why that is. Krugman's POV is consistent with Emanuel's. CW: personally, I've thought for some time that Wyden was either stupid or corrupt. I'm not it matters which, if he's going to keep giving cover to anti-middle-class GOP tricks.
Joe Nocera: "On Friday, the waded into the Fannie/Freddie wars by filing a lawsuit against three executives from each company. The complaint charges them with making 'materially false' disclosures about the size of the companies’ subprime portfolios.... What it shows is how desperate the S.E.C. has become to bring a crowd-pleasing case. The complaint is extraordinarily weak." CW: I'm no expert, but I think Nocera is probably right. (If I read something credible to the contrary, I'll share it.) Then again, these guys paid Newt $1.6 million to shill on the Hill. Shouldn't they go to jail for that?....
... Update: here's a rebuttal (or pre-buttal) by Wall Street investigative reporter Gary Weiss, writing in Salon, re: one of the defendants -- Richard Syron, Freddie Mac's former CEO. Weiss reports that Syron has made a career of (and millions from) looking the other way.
James Goodale, who served as counsel to the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal editors (republished in the NYTX): "It is important for the First Amendment community to support [Julian] Assange. If Mr. Assange can be successfully prosecuted, other publishers can be too." Pinch Sulzberger, are you listening? ...
... Graham Nash & James Raymond (son of David Crosby) composed this song & released the video (Nash vocals) in support of Bradley Manning:
"Twitter Terrorism." Glenn Greenwald: "The Obama administration and The New York Times are teaming up to expose and combat the grave threat posed by a Twitter account, purportedly operated by the Somali group Shabab, and in doing so, are highlighting the simultaneous absurdity and perniciousness of the War on Terror.... At this point, there is an almost perfect inverse relationship between the seriousness of the Terrorist threat and the severity of the powers the U.S. Government claims in its name.... The War on Terror is not a means to an end; it is the end in itself." ...
... Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "Since September, at least 60 people have died in 14 reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions. The Obama administration has named only one of the dead, hailing the elimination of Janbaz Zadran, a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network, as a counterterrorism victory. The identities of the rest remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself. Because the names of the dead and the threat they were believed to pose are secret, it is impossible for anyone without access to U.S. intelligence to assess whether the deaths were justified.... 'They’ve based it on the personal legitimacy of [President] Obama — the "trust me" concept,' law Prof. Kenneth Anderson said. 'That’s not a viable concept for a president going forward.'”
A reader links us to this site, Win with Women 2012, which promotes female Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate.
Right Wing World
I find some of those articles about divergence or control of the generals to be kind of offensive to me. And here's why. One of the things that makes us as a military profession in a democracy is civilian rule. Our civilian leaders are under no obligation to accept our advice; and that's what it is. Its advice. It's military judgments, it's alternatives, it's options. And at the end of the day, our system is built on the fact that it will be our civilian leaders who make that decision and I don't find that in any way to challenge my manhood, nor my position. In fact, if it were the opposite, I think we should all be concerned. -- Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on GOP presidential candidates' pledges to "listen to the generals"
CW: Jonathan Chait has this exactly right: "Republicans have grown increasingly concerned about the low tax burden on the middle and lower tiers of the income spectrum. The middle-class tax cuts were the price of admission [in earlier tax-cut deals] in order to get the good stuff for the rich folks. It’s become a price of admission fewer Republicans are willing to pay." Read the whole post. ...
... I'd add: throughout our history, we've held to a Platonic ideal that those who govern should do so for love of country; they should not be overly-compensated for the privilege of governing. But in the past two decades, people have gone into government precisely to get rich. Today, holding elective office is the dues they pay to get to K Street, Wall Street, a teevee show, or -- if they're high enough up the food chain -- the lecture circuit and big book deals. It isn't just that they're in the pockets of the rich today. If they have not already made themselves multi-millionaires thanks to insider-trading and sweet lobbying jobs for their spouses, they have big bucks in their sights. Tax cuts for the rich are part of the Congressional pension plan. ...
... CW: Greg Sargent implies there's some question here, but I don't think so: John Boehner cannot control his caucus of know-nothings, even on issues that should be no-brainers like raising the debt ceiling & extending the payroll tax. This isn't horrible; Harry Reid can't control ConservaDems in the Senate, either. What is ridiculous is Boehner's pretense that he never backed the Senate version of the payroll tax extension. "CNN quoted a source over the weekend saying that Boehner had called the Senate compromise a “good deal” on a conference call. Meanwhile, Roll Call reports that Boehner was in touch with Mitch McConnell while the Senate deal was negotiated, suggesting the possibility that he may have been supportive before his caucus rebelled."
Driftglass explains the Republican nominating process: "... once again the party's leading hustlers and lunatics scramble up another, dangerously-teetering mountain of lies and pious claptrap to compete for the right to lead an army of bitter morons into another round of Conservative failure and catastrophe."des
NEW. Peter Finocchiaro of Salon describes this as Mitt Romney's "charm offensive." Finocchiaro's assessment: "Emotionless political robot or not, Mitt did alright." CW: I'm glad if someone is going to rate a Romney performance as "alright," he misspells "all right":
$167 Is Not Zero. The DNC just put out this fine video that nails Romney's hypocrisy on middle-class tax cuts. What it does not show is what big tax cuts he has, my dear, planned for himself:
Ron Paul's Turn. Jim Rutenberg & Richard Oppel of the New York Times: "Emerging as a real Republican contender in Iowa, Representative of Texas is receiving new focus for decades-old unbylined columns in his political newsletters that included racist, anti-gay and anti-Israel passages that he has since disavowed. The latest issue of The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative publication, reprised reports of incendiary language in Mr. Paul’s newsletters that were published about 20 years ago.... On Monday, his deputy campaign manager, Dimitri Kesari, reiterated that Mr. Paul 'did not write, edit or authorize' the language."
Adam Serwer of Mother Jones on Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio's warped concept of civil rights. "If they call me names, my civil rights have been violated." Serwer asks, "Has a statement more symbolic of runaway right-wing victimhood ever been uttered? It's all there, the lack of empathy, the narrative of persecution, the ludicrous sense of self-pity, even the comically distorted understanding of the law. Naturally, the statement also actually helps confirm what Arpaio's critics are accusing him of—any sheriff thin skinned-enough to think it's illegal to call him a name is probably also enough of a megalomaniac to arrest people for criticizing him." ...
Still, Arpaio Is Not as Bad as This Guy: Robert Mackey of the New York Times re: "... a retired general who now serves as an adviser to the [Egyptian] military government’s public relations department. In comments published by the Egyptian newspaper Al Shorouk on Monday, the adviser, Gen. Abdel Moneim Kato, said that the protesters who came under attack by soldiers were delinquents 'who deserve to be thrown into Hitler’s ovens.'”
Justin Berrier with "Fox & Friends"' Stupidest Moments off 2011.
News Ledes
President Obama makes a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room on the House GOP's refusal to cooperate on the payroll tax & unemployment compensation extensions:
New York Times: "The on Tuesday proposed rules that would require the largest American banks to hold more capital — and to keep it more easily accessible — to protect against another financial crisis. But the Fed, the nation’s chief banking regulator, added that the final capital rules were unlikely to be more stringent than international limits that were still under development. That is a small victory for banks who warned that they would be severely disadvantaged if capital requirements here were stricter than those governing overseas banks."
Wired: "Accused WikiLeaker Bradley Manning sat in the same room with the man who undid his life on Tuesday, when former hacker Adrian Lamo took the stand on the fifth day of Manning’s pretrial hearing. Lamo, who turned Bradley Manning into the FBI and Army for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, denied in his testimony that he’d violated a journalistic or ministerial promise of confidentiality when he turned over the chat logs that led to Manning’s arrest." New York Times story here.
Women protest in Cairo against military violations of women. Reuters picture.New York Times: "Thousands of woman marched through downtown Cairo on Tuesday evening to call for the end of military rule in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking a female demonstrator on the pavement of Tahrir Square."
AP: "Encouraging signs out of Europe and a surprisingly strong report on the U.S. housing market drove the Dow Jones industrial average up more than 300 points Tuesday. It was the best day for stocks this month."
Reuters: "The Republican-led House of Representatives will set the stage on Tuesday for a showdown with Senate Democrats over a payroll tax cut extension that is becoming a proxy for 2012 election year battles." ...
... ABC News: "The House of Representatives is poised to reject a Senate-passed two-month extension of a year-end economic package, preferring instead to hold out for a year-long extension and to challenge Congressional Democrats in yet another political showdown over a popular tax break for the middle class." See also today's Commentariat. ...
... AP Update: "The House Tuesday rejected legislation to extend a payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for two months, drawing a swift rebuke from President Barack Obama that Republicans were threatening higher taxes on 160 million workers on Jan. 1." See video above. ...
... Think Progress Update: "This afternoon, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) appointed eight Republican lawmakers to serve on a bicameral conference committee meant to resolve the impasse over the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut, after the House rejected the Senate’s version of an extension today.... Many of the members Boehner appointed to the conference committee have voiced opposition to the concept of a payroll tax cut in the past." CW: sounds like a great plan.
AP: "Fierce winds and snow that caused fatal road accidents and shuttered highways in five states, crawled deeper into the Great Plains early Tuesday, with forecasters warning that pre-holiday travel would be difficult if not impossible across the region."
AP: "Iraq's Sunni vice president wanted by the Shiite-led government for allegedly ordering hit squads against government officials says he's innocent of any charges. Tariq al-Hashemi told a press conference in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil on Tuesday that he has not committed any 'sin' against Iraq. He described the charges against him as 'fabricated.'" ...
... Guardian: "Tariq al-Hashemi, had left Baghdad on Sunday for the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, presumably hoping the authorities there will not turn him in; earlier in the day, investigative judges in the capital had banned him from travelling abroad."
AP: "The [Philippine] government shipped more than 400 coffins to two flood-stricken cities in the southern Philippines on Tuesday as the death toll neared 1,000 and President Benigno Aquino III declared a state of national calamity."
Here's video from the Guardian on Piers Morgan's testimony before the Leveson inquiry panel in the British phone-hacking scandal:
The Guardian has a liveblog on Piers Morgan's testimony in the British phone-hacking scandal. Includes related content. ...
... Update: "Piers Morgan, the former News of the World and Daily Mirror editor, has repeatedly denied to the Leveson inquiry that he had any personal knowledge of or involvement in phone hacking or any other illegal practices at either paper."
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