The Commentariat -- Feb. 22, 2013
GOP's Latest "Blame Obama" Sequester Con. Brian Beutler of TPM: "Senate Republicans along with influential conservative commentators [Karl Rove] are proposing to provide federal agency heads the flexibility they currently lack to allocate the sequester's cuts at their discretion.... The GOP proposal would give the executive branch more discretion over where to make those cuts for the remainder of the current fiscal year, which ends in September.... In effect, it's a sequester replacement bill minus the political cost of proposing specific alternative cuts to federal programs." ...
... Ed Kilgore explains the history of the "less stupidity" option which Rove, et al., & Senate Republicans are proposing. In the end, "... the 'less stupidity' option is facing a bipartisan veto, and worse yet, the knowledge that it would not actually happen is probably why Senate Republicans are proposing it in the first place. If that puzzles you, welcome to the wonderful world of budget politics, where reality is never close to the surface." ...
... Ernesto Londoño & Lisa Rein of the Washington Post: "After staying largely on the sidelines of the debate over deficit reduction, the U.S. military's service leaders have begun painting a stark picture of the toll a congressionally mandated budget cut could take on the readiness of the world's largest armed forces. The $46 billion dent to the Pentagon's fiscal 2013 budget ... [is] forcing commanders across the military to plan for painful reductions and argue that American lives and livelihoods are hanging in the balance.... The military's service chiefs are amplifying the months-long warnings of Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and others and providing what they have described as the specific and serious consequences of the across-the-board cuts." CW Note: this is the Post's top story. Kinda nice of them to do Obama's work for him, isn't it? ...
... Paul Krugman: "... the legacy of that year of living foolishly [-- 2011 --] lives on, in the form of the 'sequester,' one of the worst policy ideas in our nation's history.... The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing.... Unfortunately, neither party is proposing that we just call the whole thing off. But the proposal from Senate Democrats at least moves in the right direction, replacing the most destructive spending cuts -- those that fall on the most vulnerable members of our society -- with tax increases on the wealthy, and delaying austerity in a way that would protect the economy. House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that's bad about the sequester and make it worse...."
Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post: "Sequester is happening because Republicans in the supercommittee balked at raising adequate revenue.... No matter whose brainchild it was, Republicans voted for a deal that included the sequester as the enforcement mechanism. They can't now disown their vote by insisting it was the other guy's idea." ...
... Dear John (Boehner): We're Just Not All That into You." Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "A new survey from the Pew Research Center and USA Today [see link to USA Today story below] ... shows a failure to reach a deal [on the sequester] would lead 49 percent of Americans to blame congressional Republicans and 31 percent to blame President Obama. This isn't all that surprising.... Obama is much more popular than both Congress and the Republican Party, which means he's likely to come out on top in the blame game."
Donna Cassata of the AP: "Barring any new, damaging information, Chuck Hagel has secured the necessary votes for the Senate to confirm him to be the nation's next defense secretary. A vote ending the bitter fight over President Barack Obama's choice for his revamped second-term, national security team is expected next week. Hagel cleared the threshold when five-term Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama said he would vote for the former GOP senator from Nebraska...." ...
... MEANWHILE ... Morgan Whitaker of NBC News: "Led by Texas Senator John Cornyn, 15 Republican Senators are calling on President Obama to withdraw his nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, questioning his ability to handle the job along with how effective he could be without bipartisan support."
Zack Coleman of The Hill: "The front-runner to fill the vacancy atop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pledged to push ahead with actions to confront climate change during a wide-ranging speech Thursday. 'As President Obama said, climate change is a priority -- and we are going to take action,' Gina McCarthy, the EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, told attendees at the Georgetown Climate Center Workshop in Washington, D.C."
Susan Page of USA Today: "President Obama starts his second term with a clear upper hand over GOP leaders on issues from guns to immigration that are likely to dominate the year, a USA Today/Pew Research Center Poll finds. On the legislation rated most urgent -- cutting the budget deficit -- even a majority of Republican voters endorse Obama's approach of seeking tax hikes as well as spending cuts." ...
... Ron Brownstein of the National Journal: "One conclusion that jumps from the Pew Research Center/USA Today national survey released Thursday is that the coalition that reelected President Obama last fall remains in step behind him -- and is largely unified behind the key elements of his increasingly aggressive second-term agenda. But the poll also suggests that failure to generate more-rapid economic recovery could nonetheless strain the powerful coalition Obama has assembled."
Dubya speechwriter Michael Gerson, now a columnist for the Washington Post, takes a swipe at his not-ready-for-primetime party: "... last year's Republican primary process was entirely disconnected from the actual needs of the party. One candidate pledged to build a 20-foot-high electrical fence at the border crowned with the sign, in English and Spanish, 'It will kill you -- Warning.' Another promised, as president, to speak out against the damage done to American society by contraception. Another warned that vaccinations may cause 'mental retardation.' In the course of 20 debates and in tens of millions of dollars of ads, issues such as upward mobility, education, poverty, safer communities and the environment were rarely mentioned.... Candidates will need to do more than rebrand existing policy approaches or translate them into Spanish." CW: yes, Marco, he's talking to you.
Evan McMorris-Santoro of TPM: "Vice President Biden told an audience Thursday in Connecticut that things have changed in the gun violence debate -- the politician who has to worry now is the one who votes against new regulations on firearms purchases, rather than the one who votes for them.... Democrats are gearing up to make support for gun control a key plank in their 2014 platform.... It's worth noting that polling backs up Biden.... Guns are now a liability for the GOP rather than for Democrats." McMorris-Santoro has a clip of the speech. You can watch the whole speech here. ...
... McCain to Grieving Mother: "Tough." David Taintor of TPM: "At Wednesday's town hall, [Caren] Teves told [Sen. John] McCain that her son, Alex, was killed in the massacre, and she urged the senator to support a ban on assault weapons. McCain responded: 'I can tell you right now you need some straight talk. That assault weapons ban will not pass the Congress of the United States.' The crowd, many of whom appeared to be pro-gun, burst into cheers and applause at McCain's comments":
David Firestone of the New York Times: "The 13 Republican governors who have refused the expansion [of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act] know full well that they are giving away billions of dollars, hurting their own low-income residents, and forcing taxpayers to subsidize Medicaid programs in other states but not their own. Yet they are trapped by their years of furious opposition, issuing alarmist statements like this one, from Rick Perry of Texas: 'To expand this program is not unlike adding a thousand people to the Titanic.'"
Jon Huntsman in the American Conservative: "... conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry.... There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love. All Americans should be treated equally by the law, whether they marry in a church, another religious institution, or a town hall." ...
... Zack Ford of Think Progress: "Laura Bush Objects To Being Quoted Accurately Supporting Marriage Equality. This week, the Respect for Marriage Coalition launched a new $1 million print and television ad campaign highlighting bipartisan support for marriage equality. Unfortunately, it seems Former First Lady Laura Bush is not happy about being included in the ads.... The campaign has agreed to remove Bush from the ads."
Andrew Leonard of Salon on how right-wing governors are undermining higher education in the name of "fiscal responsibility" -- especially in the humanities, which wingers see as bastions of Marxism.
David Montgomery of the Washington Post: activist and heiress Naomi Pitcairn & Code Pink throw a posh going-to-prison party at the Hay-Adams hotel for convicted whistleblower John Kiriakou. CW: and I say to him, "Thank you for your service to our country."
Dashiel Bennett of the Atlantic: "Approximately 150 federal and state law enforcement agents launched a massive raid on one of the biggest perpetrators of government fraud in America: The Scooter Store. Yes, that's right. The nation's largest provider of single-person electric vehicles and power chairs is the target of a federal investigation, probably because many of the people who ride around their 'personal mobility devices' don't actually need them. In January, CBS This Morning ran a cutting exposé on the company, detailing how it 'railroads' doctors into prescribing the chair for their patients, most of whom are on Medicare or Medicaid. That way they can bill the government for their highly dubious medical device, while the patient gets a cool new scooter without paying for it, and The Scooter Store makes a nice profit." CW: This doesn't surprise me on bit. Their ads are really attractive come-ons. I'm delighted to see the feds cracking down on the perps behind the Scooter Store.
"A Carter Won Obama the Election":
... CW: I happen to agree with President Carter. There's a perfect irony in this of course, since both Mitt Romney & his running mate Paul Ryan accused Obama of being "worse than Carter."
Local News
Before & After. Laura Bassett of the Huffington Post: "The Indiana state Senate on Wednesday advanced a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound procedure both before and after having a medication-induced abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy." CW: Every one of the SOBs who voted for this entirely unnecessary procedural hoop-jumping exercise should be required to have a brain MRI both before and after they vote for this crap. At their own expense. Meddling assholes.
News Ledes
AP: "The U.S. and its NATO allies revealed Friday they may keep as many as 12,000 troops in Afghanistan after the combat mission ends next year, largely American forces tasked with hunting down remnants of al-Qaida and helping Afghan forces with their own security."
AP: "The Pentagon on Friday grounded its fleet of F-35 fighter jets after discovering a cracked engine blade in one plane. The problem was discovered during what the Pentagon called a routine inspection at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., of an F-35A, the Air Force version of the sleek new plane. The Navy and the Marine Corps are buying other versions of the F-35, which is intended to replace older fighters like the Air Force F-16 and the Navy F/A-18."
Reuters: "Los Angeles County health officials have asked for federal assistance to analyze and contain an outbreak of tuberculosis within the city's homeless population, a spokeswoman for the county agency said on Friday."
Reuters: "Six tanks at Washington state's Hanford Nuclear Reservation are leaking radioactive waste, but the leak has not posed an immediate public health risk, Governor Jay Inslee's office said on Friday."
Reuters: "Boeing Co on Friday gave U.S. aviation regulators its plan to fix the volatile battery aboard its new 787 Dreamliner, even though investigators have not yet determined what caused the batteries to overheat on two planes last month."
Reuters: "Britain suffered its first ever sovereign ratings downgrade from a major agency on Friday, after Moody's stripped the country of its coveted top-notch triple-A rating, dealing a major blow to finance minister George Osborne<. Moody's cut Britain's rating by one notch to Aa1 from Aaa, with a stable outlook, blaming weak prospects for Britain's economy over the coming years which have thrown the government's deficit reduction strategy off course."
New York Times: "The Department of Justice has decided to join a lawsuit against Lance Armstrong and several associates that accuses them of using taxpayer money to finance doping on the United States Postal Service cycling team, according to a lawyer for Armstrong." CW: that is, the Department of Justice has decided to take another easy case while allowing the big banks to continue cheating. Thanks for looking out for me, Eric Holder.
Guardian: Oscar Pistorius will be freed on bail pending his murder trial. This is a liveblog. No stories are up yet. ...
... Update: Al Jazeera has the story here.
New York Times: "The European Commission delivered a bleak assessment Friday of Europe's economic prospects, saying that growth would be just 0.1 percent in the 27-nation European Union in 2013 and that the 17-nation euro zone would shrink 0.3 percent over the same period. The downbeat forecast, coming a day after data showed a slump in business activity in the euro area worsened unexpectedly this month, added to perceptions that Europe is continuing to struggle with the dual burdens of trying to stimulate growth while cutting spending to pare deficits and balance budgets."
Reuters: "A major winter storm headed northeast into the U.S. Great Lakes on Friday and threatened New England after blanketing states from Minnesota to Ohio with blinding snow, sleet and freezing rain. The storm dumped more than a foot of snow in Kansas on Thursday, forcing airports to cancel hundreds of flights and stranding motorists on highways."
ABC News: "Rapper Kenny Clutch has been identified by Las Vegas police as the man killed in a drive-by shooting on the Vegas strip, which set off a multi-state manhunt for the black Range Rover from which the shots were fired. Clutch, whose real name is Kenneth Cherry Jr., was the victim of the Thursday morning shooting in the valet area of the Aria Resort and Casino. Three people were left dead and three injured in the attack, including two who died when their taxi was struck by the careening sports car and exploded into flames."
Share Article
Reader Comments (7)
One serious error in judgment concerning the sequester may be the apparent bet made by the president and the Democrats that Republican underwear would be so tied up in knots over cuts to the Pentagon that they'd back down and make a deal.
The problem is that such a bet would probably be a good one if the other side were just moderately rational. But they're not. Not even close. It's like playing chicken with an insane person. Just to show you he's not gonna lose, he'd rather crash head on into you killing himself as well as you. That'll show you!
So instead of dealing with people who have a modicum of political sense, you have raving madmen like Sen. Aqua Buddha shouting about bringing on the sequester. "Let it happen!" And it doesn't appear that there's a single adult on the other side who can rein in such nonsense.
In other darkened, oily corners of Right-Wing World, I see that famed philosopher and distinguished man of letters Ted Nugent has proclaimed that President Obama is the worst thing to happen to African-Americans since, well, since guys like Nugent started "importing" them to serve as slaves. According to the Nuge the president is solely responsible for the economic hardships suffered by black communities. Not a single mention, of course, of Republican fiscal perfidy.
This from the guy who once hinted that he might shoot the president if he were re-elected and who declared, on the subject of South Carolina flying the confederate flag, that "Those politically correct motherfuckers can take the flag down but I am going to wear it forever."
Rand Paul and Ted Nugent. Proud representatives of The Modern GOP.
Stay smart and classy, guys.
(This comment has spent time in a despamification camp at an undisclosed location. It has learned its lesson, dammit.)
The link to the Michael Gerson piece in the WaPo, better known in beltway circles as the "George W. Bush Retirement Home for Neocon Hacks Who Couldn't Get a Real Fucking Job to Save Their Miserable Lives", is instructive in several ways.
Gerson pretends to be one of the giants of the Republican Party who stood up to ideological finks like Grover Norquist (I can never quite lose the image of a fat, dyspeptic Sesame Street character whenever I hear that name) way back when. His thesis is that scurrilous liars and lamebrains have absconded with the integrity of the GOP, and he now bemoans its current address at the bottom of the political abyssal.
Of course Bush and his lackeys (Gerson, et al) had nothing to do with the current sad, benighted, duncified state of the party. He states, apparently without a hint of self-awareness, that Bush was only trying to change the direction of the party. Congratulations boys. Big score there!
(By way of background, Gerson is pretty well despised by many he worked with because of his penchant for stealing work from other writers, claiming to be the author of many pieces he had nothing to do with, and for incessantly seeking the spotlight as one of the brains of the Bush team. Heh-heh. A bit of an oxymoron there, no?)
But as he ticks off, with great sadness, the baleful lowpoints of the recent presidential cataclysm, he inadvertently displays one of the singular traits responsible for the GOP train wreck: its complete and utter disregard for anyone or anything outside the crenelated walls of Castle Republican.
In his opinion, Gerson declares that the "...Republican primary process was entirely disconnected from the actual needs of the party" full stop.
That's right Mike. Who cares about the needs of the country? If the greatest concern even of those who consider themselves disassociated from the insanity of modern conservatism is what's best for the party then they really haven't learned a single thing from their recent electoral woes.
It's what's best for us and fuck everyone else.
Well good luck with that, Charlie. We'll see you in 2016.
Re Gerson via Akhilleus: Cataloging the errors of Republican ways since Reagan--and history would suggest long before--does make for entertaining autopsies, many brilliantly performed by commenters working under Reality Chex' bright lights in its long-running series of political and philosophic CSI-like investigations of the mouldering body, but the party's corpse has some large, general problems attention to the many particulars sometimes hides.
Successful political parties succeed when they benefit their adherents, and in today's world, the Republican view of foreign policy, economics and social justice just won't wash. While nation states still exist and compete, their borders no longer coincide with either economic interests or the tribes of which they are composed. International corporations, private money and sovereign wealth funds reach and act across porous borders. Nor do the the beliefs or religions that animate so many fit neatly within lines drawn on a map. A foreign policy wont to identify an "enemy" with a particular nation does not recognize the world as it really is and hence cannot succeed. Tho' they might not be able to express it this way right now, polls suggest people sense it. That's why I'd wager the Iraq tragedy will remain much longer in the nation's memory than even Vietnam as the great foreign policy mistake it was.
Likewise an economic system that channels as much wealth as possible to the few clearly does not meet the needs of the many. Today's NYTimes editorial suggesting taxes are not high enough recognizes this failure. In todays' world redistributing wealth from top to bottom rather than from bottom to top is not only necessary but a realistic assessment of the path to political success and Republicans remain bent on the exact reverse. The whole "job creator" mantra lost its traction before the 2012 election and the uprising against the silly claim that "corporations are people, my friend" is only more proof that the majority recognize that to the contrary, today's "corporations are not friends, my people."
People are tumbling to the increasingly obvious fact that Republican foreign and economic policy don't enhance but hinder the cause of social justice. The party's autocratic, hierarchical and authoritarian roots are all contrary to the good of the many and the whole. What the Republicans have missed in the last forty years is that the whole is getting bigger, becoming more informed and--the source of the party's fear and internal strife--is already massing at the gates.
I never knew pathology could be so much fun.
@Akhilleus, in re "Needs of the Party," Gerson:
When Mao sought to modernize through the Great Leap Forward, he caused millions to starve, through totally insane production plans. But a contemporary CC Party slogan meant to motivate the masses was "A good communist housewife does not need food to make a meal." Insane.
When Stalin wanted to modernize "Soviet agriculture" in 1932-33, he instituted a crash collectivization program in the Ukraine, where the farmers were themselves a source of political malcontent. Quotas went up, production fell, cadres made sure that quotas were shipped to the (non-Ukraine) cities. A success! Thousands were murdered to coerce farmers to reveal their grain stores, hundreds of thousands were forcibly relocated to Central Asia (where many starved) when their land was collectivized, millions starved in the countryside because the food had gone to the cities. A by-product for Stalin was many fewer troublesome Ukrainians.
These two large scale activities took place with foreknowledge of the consequences, for "the Good of The Party."
All I'm saying here is that history demonstrates that "party leadership" can go fully insane and knowingly perpetrate criminal policies believing that maintaining the leadership of the party is the highest national priority.
At the time, national leaders believed (or at least said) that anything that is good for the party is good for the people. That one delusion, that your faith in your vision is worth the sacrifice of other people, can be compellingly powerful against all reason and evidence.
If people can delude themselves about "Party knows best" on the scales noted above, they can easily do so when the stakes are not so high. We think we have learned from history, but many days I wonder ...
Apologies to all for the downer.
Well, well, ain't this interesting? Who'd a thunk something like this would happen in the Vatican?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/21/pope-retired-amid-gay-bishop-blackmail-inquiry
Boys will be boys, I guess. This makes the old joke that the Pope's phone number was VAT69 even more apt (back in the days before all digital numbers.
I'm not a Catholic, nor was I, but I'm following all of this with interest, especially the comments by ex-Catholics on RC. The one time I went to a Cathollic church was with my college roommate. I was shocked that part of the service was for the congregation to swear that they would never, ever read any of the books on the Church's forbidden list. Not much danger of that, since most of them were Eastern European Butte, Montana copper miners and their families. They just weren't into reading anything much.
Patrick,
Your review of the dark side of party fealty emphasizes what happens when parties demand that adherents serve the party (and those whom the party consider most deserving of its support) rather than parties serving its members and, by extension, some larger sense of good for the entire population.
The modern GOP in its current incarnation covets power and obedience above all else.
The problem is that traditional Republicans thought they could dragoon the crazies in their grasping for power and then their ideas stink and kick them down the back stairs. Instead they've invited pitchfork wielding loonies into their smoke-filled backrooms and have discovered that the maniacs now believe that their delusions should be adopted wholesale. Stalin would have taken them out and had them shot. I'm sure Rove and Boehner wish they could do that but it looks like the Modern GOP will, for the next decade or more, be described by a rabid confluence of competing forces.
The service of something greater, such as the good of the nation will suffer greatly.
Barbarossa,
Hey, don't diss those lists of banned books and movies the church used to publish. They were extremely useful directions on the roadmap to sexual sophistication and generally delightful debauchery. Plus, in the pre-Internet era, they saved burgeoning pervs like myself a shitload of time trying to uncover the best and hottest of the worst. "What's that Father? Don't see "Caligula"? No problem!!