The Commentariat -- Feb. 17, 2014
Frank Rich, in the New York Review of Books, on John Kennedy's legacy -- and on conservatives' attempts to deal with it. Here's a sample graf:
A more pressing conservative goal during the assassination anniversary has been to try to shield the current American right from any ties to the radical right of the 1950s and 1960s -- the Kennedy-loathing cadres who sped the ascent of the John Birch Society and the Barry Goldwater revolution within the GOP and who helped imbue Dallas with its reputation as a 'city of hate' well before Kennedy was killed there. (Some of these ties are genealogical as well as ideological: the Wichita oil man Fred Koch, a founder of the Birch Society, was the father of David and Charles Koch.) Such a connecting of dots between then and now is infuriating to the contemporary conservative establishment, which wants to maintain that radicalism is and will always be mainly a left-wing phenomenon in America. But these days it's hard to suppress all the evidence to the contrary.
On President's Day, let's hear from Not-President Romney on President Clinton & Not-President Clinton. Dylan Stableford of Yahoo! News: "Mitt Romney believes former President Bill Clinton 'embarrassed the nation' with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but doesn't think it will be a factor in 2016 if Hillary Clinton runs for president. 'I think Hillary Clinton, if she becomes a nominee, will have plenty to discuss about her own record,' Romney said on NBC's 'Meet The Press' on Sunday. 'I don't imagine that Bill Clinton is going to be a big part of it.'"
Larry Summers Speaks English, After All! "The United States may be on course to becoming a 'Downton Abbey' economy.... Those who condemn President Obama's concern about inequality as 'tearing down the wealthy' and un-American populism have, to put it politely, limited historical perspective.... It is not enough to identify policies that would reduce inequality. To be effective, they must also raise the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Tax reform would play a major role here.... Today's tax code allows a far larger share of the income of the rich to escape taxation than the poor or middle class.... Meanwhile, the ratio of corporate tax collections to the market value of U.S. corporations is near a record low, thanks to various loopholes.... It is ironic that those who profess the most enthusiasm for market forces are least enthusiastic about curbing tax benefits for the wealthy."
Paul Krugman: "During the Reagan years..., antitrust policy went into eclipse, and ever since measures of monopoly power, like the extent to which sales in any given industry are concentrated in the hands of a few big companies, have been rising fast.... It's time ... to go back to worrying about monopoly power, which we should have been doing all along. And the first step on the road back from our grand detour on this issue is obvious: Say no to Comcast."
E. J. Dionne: "There is a magnificent public policy that achieves many of the goals conservative politicians regularly extol. These include promoting work over dependency, reducing the cost of social welfare programs, fostering economic growth and strengthening families. The policy in question is raising the minimum wage.... There's a limit to how much taxpayers should be asked to subsidize employers. Lifting the minimum wage would help correct the balance." ...
... Jim Brunner of the Seattle Times: Mega-rich Seattle venture capitalist Nick "Hanauer has become a leading advocate for spiking the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. While that’s unlikely to happen on a national level, Hanauer is part of a panel appointed by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray working up a $15-minimum-wage plan for the city."
David Savage: "Companies that make generic drugs, the medications most Americans buy, are fighting to kill a proposed federal regulation that would require them for the first time to warn patients of all the known health risks of each drug they sell." CW: The 5-4 Supreme Court decision -- Mutual Phamaceutical v. Bartlett -- which led to this situation, is here. The conservatives on the Court all signed onto the majority opinion. When you read Savage's story, you will no longer wonder whether or not the conservatives on the Court have elementary reasoning skills. They do not.
New York Times Editors: North Carolina's "Department of Environment and Natural Resources has engaged in a series of maneuvers that seem designed to protect the state's largest utility, Duke Energy, from paying big fines for water pollution from coal ash ponds and meeting reasonable requirements that it move toxic coal ash to lined landfills away from rivers and lakes used for drinking water and recreation.... The recent events in North Carolina provide ample evidence that the E.P.A., which has belatedly agreed to issue a final rule by Dec. 19, should declare coal ash a form of hazardous waste and regulate it stringently."
Paul Campos, in Salon: "The failure to convict Michael Dunn for shooting Jordan Davis to death in the course of an argument over whether the 17-year-old and his friends were playing their car stereo too loudly illustrates that, as a practical matter, hot-blooded murder is often perfectly legal under Florida law -- and that of many other states as well. Criticisms of the jury fail to appreciate that the prosecution was faced with an almost impossible legal burden in this case, and only Dunn's decision to fire three more shots at a fleeing vehicle (after he had already emptied seven of the bullets in the gun's clip when killing Davis) kept him from escaping any punishment at all.... [Stand Your Ground] laws, in effect, put the victim rather than the killer on trial, which is exactly what happened in this case."
Igor Volsky of Think Progress compiles a few lowlights from a Fox "News" panel discussing climate change, which indirectly helps explain why Americans are so stupid about science -- they listen to Fox:
New Jersey News
Shawn Boburg of the Bergen Record: "The Port Authority's executive director on Sunday asked authorities to investigate the involvement of some of the agency's police officers in the George Washington Bridge lane closures. Executive Director Pat Foye's request for an investigation by the Port Authority's inspector general was spurred by two reports on Sunday, including one in The Record [linked in yesterday's Commentariat], that raised new questions about whether some officers at the bridge knew about the political motivations behind the lane closures or were used to deliver a message to the mayor of Fort Lee. The request ... represented a new front amid an ongoing effort by legislators and federal prosecutors to find out who -- besides a deputy chief of staff in Governor Christie's office and a high-ranking Port Authority executive -- knew the true reasons behind lane closures...."
Richard Brodsky in the Star-Ledger: "The interesting question is whether Gov. Chris Christie will survive Bridgegate. The important question is whether the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will survive Bridgegate, and whether it should." A New York State law has reined in state authorities. "The law was written to include the Port Authority, but legally it can take effect there only if both states enact it." New Jersey should do so now. Brodsky, a former New York assemblyman, wrote the state's Public Authorities Reform Act.
** Trick o' Chrisco. Elizabeth Drew in the NYRB: Chris Christie appears to be using Dick Nixon's playbook: setting up the "issue" surrounding Bridgegate & other scandals as being nothing more than answering the question, "What did he know & when did he know it?" "But this isn't really the issue. The issue is whether the governor can be held accountable for what happened at very high levels in his administration.... There is much still to be discovered, and the full extent of his administration's dealings on the bridge and the use of Sandy money and perhaps issues still unknown should be exposed. It would be an historic mistake, and one with national implications, if the issue of accountability were narrowed down to simply what Governor Christie knew and when."
Elsewhere Beyond the Beltway
Erik Schelzig & Tom Krisher of the AP: "Now that workers have rejected the UAW in a close vote, attention turns to whether the GOP can fulfill its promises that keeping the union out means more jobs will come rolling in.... On the first of three days of voting at the Chattanooga plant, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker all but guaranteed the German automaker would announce within two weeks of a union rejection that it would build a new midsized sport utility vehicle at its only U.S. factory instead of sending the work to Mexico.... Union leaders said after the vote that the senator's statements -- coming in concert with threats from state lawmakers to torpedo state incentives if the UAW won -- played a key role in the vote."
News Ledes
New York Times: "An environmental activist critical of the Olympic Games who was sentenced to three years in prison last week has gone on a hunger strike, members of a public oversight committee who met with him in jail said Monday. Yevgeny Vitishko, a member of the Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus, a regional environmental activism group, has refused food since Feb. 11, calling his sentence politically motivated..., a member of the oversight committee, confirmed."
Guardian: "North Korea's leadership is committing systematic and appalling human rights abuses against its own citizens on a scale unparalleled in the modern world, including crimes against humanity, a United Nations report has concluded. The UN's commission of inquiry on human rights in North Korea has been gathering evidence for almost a year -- including in an unprecedented series of public hearings in four cities around the world, which heard sometimes harrowing testimony from North Korean escapees. Its report cited the country's system of secret prison camps, deliberate starvation and a complete lack of free thought as among probable crimes against humanity." ...
... New York Times Update: "A United Nations panel has served notice to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, that he may be personally held liable in court for crimes against humanity committed by state institutions and officials under his direct control. A letter conveying this notice forms part of a report by the panel to the United Nations Human Rights Council, released on Monday after a yearlong investigation."
Guardian: "John Kerry has accused the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, of stonewalling in peace talks and called on Russia to push its ally to negotiate with opposition leaders."
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Reader Comments (9)
Not sure if you guys caught Matt Taibbi's latest glimpse into the murky depths of corrupted Wall Street barons. It's a long one and puts together quite the web of networks that's created the uncontrollable juggernauts that exist today. Glad to know someone's doing the research because you sure as hell won't be finding this info. in our other "news" outlets.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-strikes-again-the-mega-banks-most-devious-scam-yet-20140212
With regards to Chris Wallace and his band of Sunday Merry Wo/men: Kimberley Strassel who can't figure out the global warming/climate change (but she's blond with a smile, Roger likes that) got her job with the WSJ straight out of Princeton when she was 22. Because she chose to be science-ignorant she got a degree in public policy and international affairs. Life has been great for her, why rock the boat?
Imagine a world with an app where you could immediately write to the members of the boards of directors of every advertiser of Chris Wallace's Sunday charades and say you won't buy their products if they are too lazy to find a scientist to comment about science. Do you really think Kimberley or George Will or even Chris take continuing education courses, let alone in science? I bet they haven't taken a science class in decades and the advertisers are too lackadaisical to hold their proxies(or talking head "experts") to a higher standard of knowledge than the audience.
I've done some checking about the writing addresses for boards of directors members for multi-national corporations and that information is really a pain to find in one place. I think the board members want their correspondence info hard to find otherwise they'd need to deal with the hoi polloi and that wouldn't be as much fun as hanging out at Davos, Aspen, Sun Valley or Augusta where non-white men need not apply.
Regarding the right's attempt to disown its past.
This new attempt by guys like the Kochs to remove themselves, their operatives, and their schemes from under the umbrella of Conservative Crazy from days past simply highlights the way that crazy has been (mostly) successfully camouflaged by a (slightly) more sophisticated cover. The depth and breadth of right-wing whacko-dom would be easily visible to more Americans if the press ever got out of bed in the morning and did it's fucking job, but that's an old and frustrating story.
Republican radicalism, far more than left wing radicalism, has transformed this country in ways the Weathermen never could. Left wing revolutionaries operated in very limited venues for a few years in the 1960's and were either hunted down, killed, imprisoned, or driven further underground. Their deeds don't even register as faint background radiation on any political Geiger counter today. But Right-wing radicalism pins the needle. And it started with their D-I-V-O-R-C-E from the world of facts.
In 2004, Ron Suskind published an interview with a smack talking Bush flack (very likely Karl Rove) who ridiculed the "reality based community" as something hopelessly out of touch with what conservatives in the White House had unleashed upon the world.
Connection with reality has never provided conditions necessary and sufficient for understanding and altering the world conservatives want to live in and control. Radicalizing that world required them to create their own dark world of paranoia and propaganda, and facts just get in the way.
William F. Buckley, even though he claimed, in a 1970 interview (linked below), that reality will always "assert itself on behalf of the conservative position" cites, as an example, the race riots of the late 60s which, he claimed, were foolish and futile. So, although he seems to acknowledge the importance of reality, he does so in a way that is at once reflexively tautological and willfully ignorant of the forces of reality at work in the country at that time.
The riots, while violent and chaotic, did have the salutary effect of focusing the nation's attention on a severe problem. And stating that reality would "assert itself on behalf" of conservatives isn't a whole lot different from Bush and Cheney (and Bircher) claims of American Exceptionalism, replete with religious overtones of "we can't lose because Jesus is on our side". So if one of the leading lights of modern conservatism couldn't wrap his head around reality, it ain't likely that Bad Toupée or the Tailgunner or either of the Kochs are making any effort to accommodate it now.
Their rejection of the world of facts and the search for their own "reality" has a long and sordid history in right-wing politics. One primary symptom of this is the famous "stabbed in the back" theory, still observable today. It was first employed by wingers in Germany after WWI was lost. In their solipsistic opinion, Germany was on the verge of winning and would have had they not been "stabbed in the back" by Bolsheviks, liberals, radicals, and, of course, Jews, thus arranging the game board for WWII.
Cheney has as much declared that his efforts at reorganizing the world had been (at least partially) scuttled by forces that sought to stab Neocons in the back. And today Cruz and Paul and their 'bagger legions all claim that their brand of conservatism would wipe America clean of infidels if they hadn't been "stabbed in the back" by RINOs and the liberal media.
Facts occasionally matter, but not to these guys.
Conservatism has, for well over half a century, been the dominant extreme, radical, revolutionary force in the political world. (This is not Edmund Burke's conservatism, no matter what Bobo wants you to believe.) What is more radical and extreme than launching a war based on lies against a sovereign country that had not emitted even a whiff of militaristic overtures? Facts didn't matter to Bush and Rove and Cheney, they didn't matter to Koch père or the Koch fils, and they will likely never matter, for years perhaps, to anyone with an (R) after their name. Even a seemingly moderate guy like Mittens had not the foggiest notion about the conditions of well over half of all Americans (it's actually more like 70%); no connection with the realities most Americans face, and didn't care that he didn't know. And he was the MODERATE one.
Screwball conspirators circa 1963 have not died out nor have they ameliorated their dangerous psychoses. They've grown even more radical and, as an extra bonus, they now have real power. It was one thing for fruitcakes on the fringe to lumber down loony lane over JFK in the 60's, most of them were never going to Washington. But the gun toting, Bobo watching, industry gobbling, small animal torturing tyros who grew up listening to radical conservative fairy tales at the knees of these crackpots do have power and influence. There's no getting away from that. Or from their continued, radical split with the real world.
And that's a fact.
From Conversations with William F. Buckley, middle of page 27.
Citizen,
It's just as ludicrous for these pretend journalists to comment on science, sans the most basic understanding of that subject, as it is for winger commentators and screamers to blather on about the economy with not even a crayon scribbled map of that region ("Balanced budget amendment! NOW!!")
It's no different than asking the kid who bags your groceries what he or she thinks about the latest advances in nuclear medicine (barring, of course the possibility that one of their parents practices nuclear medicine).
Might as well stop third graders at the local schoolyard and ask them what they think of the Treaty of Versailles in relation to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
At least if they answered "I don't know" you'd be getting an honest answer.
Interesting report this AM:
“Missouri's 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase (PTP) handgun law, which required all handgun purchasers to obtain a license verifying that they have passed a background check, contributed to a sixteen percent increase in Missouri's murder rate, according to a new study.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140215122532.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28Lat
James,
It's just another shibboleth of right-wing purity. Immediate, no check weapons purchases. Right up there with battling the ACA, making choice nearly impossible, and putting as many roadblocks as can be managed in the path of any potential Democratic voter.
In other words, my state is more pure wingnut than yours. Pretty soon there'll be a wingnut scale for most people shot by stand your ground NRAers. The more people who get shot wandering where someone thinks they shouldn't be, or who play loud music, or don't salute the flag (US or Confederate) every time they pass by, the more bragging rights that state has at ceremonial wingnut gatherings where bonfires will be set up to roast effigies of Enemies.
@safari: Thanks much for the article on banking monopolies. One wonders how many of these corporate vampires played the game when they were little tykes sucking up all the money and places on that board of dreams and acquisitions. Throw that dice and see where you land!
"Banks, however, were never really regulated under those[ previous loose] laws. Only the Great Depression and years of brutal legislative trench warfare finally brought them to heel under the same kinds of anti-trust concepts that stopped the robber barons, through acts like Glass-Steagall and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. Then, with a few throwaway lines in a 1999 law that nobody ever heard of until now, that whole struggle went up in smoke, and here we are, in Hobbes' jungle, waiting for the next fully legal catastrophe to unfold."
In one of Bernie Sanders' town hall meetings in Vermont, he brought along Matt Taibbi, who gave a summary of the Rolling Stone article cited by safari. Bernie says we're already toast. Five banks basically own the US. Our only hope is to start and run small, locally owned and run financial centers.
While we are considering the lineage of the Koch boys, let us also examine the documents of Kristol Sr.; how did a Trotskyite escape the net of Tail Gunner Joe? As we look at "Conservatives" today all that can really be amazing is that any are left alive ... they eat thier young.