The Commentariat -- July 2, 2012
In response to P. D. Pepe's request in yesterday's Commentariat, my column in today's New York Times eXaminer does indeed take on Ross Douthat's duplicitous Sunday sermonette. The NYTX front page is here. ...
... Dean Baker explains -- again -- why Tom Friedman is still meaner than a junkyard dog. ...
... AND Prof. Hamid Dabashi takes on Nicholas Kristof's praise of sanctions against Iran.
NEW. CW: in the Comments today, contributor P. D. Pepe recommends historian Sean Wilentz's review of the latest volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. So do I. And I learned a new word: "adumbration"; hadda look it up.
** Jan Crawford of CBS News: Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations. Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy -- believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law -- led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.... The fact that the [conservatives'] joint dissent doesn't mention Roberts' majority was not a sign of sloppiness, the sources said, but instead was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him." CW: after all we've heard about how the Supreme Court is a fortress of secrecy, this report is stunning. ...
... Ian Millhiser of Think Progress speculates that the leakers included at least one conservative justice. "Crawford ... is a very well connected conservative reporter.... Moreover, as Linda Greenhouse points out, it is possible that the Court started springing leaks more than a month before Roberts handed down his opinion." ...
... John Cole of Balloon Juice thinks the leakers were "Kennedy's people ... because most of that Crawford piece reads like a mash note to him." CW: and yes, that's a reasonable premise.
** "Casino Capitalism." Robert Reich: "The real issue here isn't Bain's betting record. It's that Romney's Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine's MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein's Goldman Sachs -- a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, and the losers are most of the rest of us. The system is largely responsible for the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together. And these multimillionaires and billionaires are now actively buying the 2012 election -- and with it, American democracy."
Paul Krugman writes the truism of the day: "... the prospect of disaster, no matter how obvious, is no guarantee that nations will do what it takes to avoid that disaster. And this is especially true when pride and prejudice make leaders unwilling to see what should be obvious."
Matt Taibbi has a post on Barclay Bank's agreement to pay $450 million to resolve investigations of its interest-rate fixing. CW: Taibbi sees Barclays as just the first domino to fall. See also yesterday's News Ledes. ...
... In a follow-up post, Taibbi writes, "Another one bites the dust. The Royal Bank of Scotland is about to be fined $233 million (£150 million pounds) for its role in the Libor-rigging scandal. It joins Barclays as the first banks to walk the plank in what should be, but so far is not, the most sensational financial corruption story since the crash of 2008."
CW: Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post tries to put lipstick on the outsourcing pig. Bear in mind as you read Pearlstein's analysis that he never once discusses the U.S. government's pro-business, anti-union policies that makes outsourcing so attractive to businesses & the private equity firms that "help" businesses move jobs offshore, and he only obliquely alludes to interstate raiding & state anti-union laws. I'm hoping Dean Baker or Paul Krugman will give Pearlstein's essay a "real economist's once-over." ...
... Update: here's Baker's response. Essentially he seems to say, offshoring is great as long as there's full employment in the U.S.
Presidential Race
Mitt Romney -- Worse Than George W. Bush
I don't think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor. I'm concerned for someone who is moving from near-poverty to middle class. -- George W. Bush, October 1999, preparing to run for president & denouncing a House Republican proposal to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit
I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. -- Mitt Romney, January 2012
Tom Edsall in the New York Times on Mitt Romney's unwillingness to specify even the vaguest outlines of an immigration policy.
Rupert tweets re: Willard: "Met Romney last week. Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful."
CW: I couldn't find the Consortium article contributor Kate M. discusses in her commentary below, but this one by Robert Parry, titled "The Price of Political Purity," covers the same material.
Local News
America's Worst Governor Goes Rogue. Lexi Stemple of Fox "News": "Florida, the state the led the fight against President Obama's health care law, will not comply with the Supreme Court opinion. Gov. Rick Scott [RTP] tells Fox News that he and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, will work tirelessly to make sure the law is repealed. He feels that can be done by electing officials, like Mitt Romney, who have vowed to fight the law before 2014, when most of its provisions kick in. If that doesn't happen, Scott insists he still won't 'implement these exchanges that will increase the cost of health and make Medicaid worse.'"
News Ledes
AP: "The fired former chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corp.'s Macau casinos alleges in court documents revealed Thursday that billionaire Sheldon Adelson personally approved of prostitution and knew of other improper activity at his company's properties in the Chinese enclave."
Washington Post: "Mexico chose as its new president Sunday Enrique Peña Nieto, a dashing, disciplined campaigner who promised to bring peace and prosperity back to a country weary of drug violence and slow growth, according to official projections by election officials. As the new face of a political party once known for corruption, Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), completed a remarkable act of political rehabilitation, returning to power after 12 years on the sidelines."
AP: "Unemployment in the 17-country euro currency bloc hit another record in May as the continent teetered on the edge of recession because of its crippling financial crisis, official figures showed Monday. Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, said unemployment rose to 11.1 percent in May from 11 percent the previous month. May's rate was the highest since the euro was launched in 1999...."
Guardian: "Mississippi's only reproductive health clinic was handed an eleventh-hour reprieve from closure late on Sunday, thwarting attempts by social conservatives to create America's first abortion-free state. In a ruling handed down just hours before the Jackson Women's Health Organisation was due to start turning away women seeking terminations, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking a law that would have shuttered the centre."
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Reader Comments (12)
I just finished reading Robert Parry's article in Consortium: "The Liberal's Enduring Dilemma: Whether to Vote for Disappointing Centrists."
He interviews Sam Brown, an anti-war activist in 1968, who declined to support Hubert Humphrey. In hindsite he is regretful.
Here is what he has to say:
..."There is a larger lesson from his youthful choice, Brown believes, understanding the danger of political purity. Brown, who later in his career ran the government ACTION agency for President Jimmy Carter and headed the U.S. mission to the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe for President Bill Clinton, worries that a return of this attitude among young activists could lead to Mitt Romney defeating President Barack Obama in 2012.
Brown said that on every important issue, “this guy [Obama] is 100 times better than the alternative” and that activists should put aside whatever disappointments they feel about Obama – and not repeat the mistake of 1968."
Listen up, disappointed Liberals! And don't forget the most important difference: The Supremes.
Re: Marie's column as "where the white knight is talking backwards to the red queen on her head,... remember feed your head." Logic and proportion have fled the Republican party and their mouthpieces continue with smoke and magic mirrors. Where are the Democratic responses to the fractured fears? Why isn't Marie's column next to Mr. Doubtthat's? Yesterday I wrote of the people I work with as, "ignorant not dumb". Obama needs to change that to informed and mad as hell. Hire Ms. Burns and get your rabbits ass out of a hole.
Re: Kate, disappointed; No, mad as a wet rattlesnake,Yes. To me "disappointed " texts out as sad, slump-shouldered, resigned, "oh well, could be worse". That needs to be changed to, "No more MFBS" But then again I'm not a Liberal, I'm a Voter of Conscience.
Re: Summertime past; Doris Sams sure looks like a ballplayer to me, I hope the boys of "Field of Dreams" give her the mound.
Am I correct or delusional?
The MSM, and wing nutnuts hung the term Obamacare on the President, hoping they could have a handy bulls eye to unseat him.
Now, all say ACA or The Affordable Care Act.
The wingnuts and MSM do not want the words Obama and affordable in the same sentence.
Mae Finch
Sean Wilentz, one of my favorite historians (his "The Age of Reagan" is masterful), has written an excellent piece in "The New Republic" ––"Efficacy & Democracy: Why [LBJ] should matter, Not least to [Obama]." I'd give the link, but in the past my posts with links would disappear and go up to heaven with the unwanted dogs and cats, so maybe Marie can check this essay out and give the link if she deems it appropriate.
Marie, your listing of Rick Scott as 'Americas worst governor' is debatable. There is serious competition for that title.
To respond to Mae's comment about the importance of words, I would paraphrase Cornel West's argument and say that "words matter".
Demeaning phraseology has been a powerful and effective way of changing the minds of right-wing followers. Yesterday my wife's father was telling me something about a former "democrat governor" of our state. He used the phrase several times. I'm not in the business of insulting my father-in-law so I gently repeated his references replacing the noun with the correct adjective, the only way to refer to the Democratic Party. It made no difference. He went right on with his terminology as if I hadn't said a word. Now this guy is a wonderful man. He wouldn't go out of his way like that to insult me if he realized that I took it that way. But he also watches Fox 24/7.
Republicans have used the term "democrat party" purely as an insult. As I've said to several other people (not my father-in-law--it's just not worth the battle), use of this term suggests one of two things, you're either ignorant or insulting. "Which are you"? But I guess I'll have to add one other choice:
Brainwashed.
And very successfully, I might add.
They're great at it. We're not so great.
But they sit up all hours of the night coming up with nasty little things like this to try to tweak and bolster their message. If you can't win an argument on its merits, lie, cheat, and, by all means, insult your opponents. And encourage your supporters to do the same. Civil discourse be damned. They're out to destroy us any way they can. They can't win the debate but they can sure change the terms of the debate long enough to derail democracy.
But we can't take the "sticks and stones" approach. Words DO matter. What they call us MATTERS. Fox knows this probably better than we do. Their internal style guide has eliminated references to the Democratic Party and replaced it with what they really mean:
Undemocratic traitors.
Akhilleus: I love that phrase– "Words Matter"––I tend to say that frequently. They were right about the sticks and stones, but wrong about the words.
How admirably you handle your father-in-law. My husband's cousin who happens to be an art historian, erudite and educated, will often say, "I feel so badly about..." Like you, I will reply with, "I'm sorry you feel bad about..." but it never seems to make a difference. Of course in your case it's a political blunder that is done purposely and deliberately.
@Marie: thanks so much for posting the Wilentz link. I, too, had to look up the word "adumbration" and when I got to "dilatory Max Baucus," it gave me pause––did he mean just slow to act or intended to cause delay? Maybe both?
Marie,
Nice job on slapping around blow-up doll boy Douthat. His pique in the wake of the ACA passage may have been exacerbated by the discovery that his blow-up girlfriend has run off with one of the GI Joes he keeps in the toy box at the foot of his bed, along with his Legos (for use in building a replica of St. Peter's Basilica along with a little figurine with a funny hat to protect pedophiles) and his "Boys True Adventure" comic books from which he learned everything he knows about the world.
Douthat's personal difficulties and weirdness aside, the number of logical fallacies present in each column is becoming positively encyclopedic. That and the usual unsupported, inaccurate, and easily assailable descriptions of how things supposedly work in the real world (those comic books again).
So he's upset that Obama has spent too much time on health care? Rossy-poo, overhauling health care is not like straightening out the toys in your bedroom. It takes serious people and a lot of time, not to mention the effort required to battle the dragons sent out to kill it by your friends on the right. And bemoaning the fact that the result didn't fix everything is rich. It's like complaining that after pouring sugar in the gas tank, flattening the tires, machine gunning the doors and windshield, keying the paint job, pulling out the spark plugs and hiding a dead body in the trunk of your opponent's car, he didn't have it in show room condition and ready to win at the Indy 500 after only two days to repair all the damage.
And if he wants to talk about administration priorities that might not allow for 100% attention to every other problem before a president, what about Bush? His sole priorities for 8 years were, in order, eliminating taxes for the rich, removing regulation on corporations, lying to start a war then prosecuting two unpaid wars, torture, spying on Americans, pursuing an ideological purge of the justice department, and eliminating taxes on the rich. Maybe if he had reordered his priorities a bit we wouldn't have been run into the ditch we're in now. All presidents have priorities that command their attention. It's yet another one of Douthat's many hypocrisies that he claims that as a problem for Obama but denies or refuses to consider what truly bad prioritizing did to the country under Bush.
Anyway, I know that facts don't matter to these corrupt intellectual cardsharps like Douthat. Just once, maybe he could make his card tricks work. He's like an inept magician who tries fancy sleight of hand to wow an audience only to have the ace fall out of his sleeve.
So keep the spotlight on this loser. Dogs do better tricks. No wonder his blow-up girlfriend ditched him.
PD,
Here's a nice trick I learned some years ago concerning whether or not the use of badly is correct form. Replacing the verb (to feel) with the verb "to be" will give you an idea of whether your preferred construction makes sense. So in the case of "I feel bad" you can say "I am bad". Using this same trick for "I feel badly" gives you the ridiculous "I am badly".
Even well educated people make mistakes like this (not me, of course. Never, never, never....well, as the captain in Pinafore might say, "hardly ever") all the time, so we might cut them some slack.
Otherwise we might feel badly.
Akhilleus: Yeah, like sometimes my fingers, especially in the chilly days of winter, become pretty darn frozen and I FEEL BADLY, but after a dip in warm water or hands put before a blazing fire they, the fingers, once again can do their usual things.
After the Clinton impeachment trial Rehnquist would sum up his performance with an apt line from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe"––"I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well."
and yes, we all make mistakes–-I used to pronounce euphemism with an N rather than a M until one of my sons corrected me. My bugaboos along with "bad/badly are our pronouns which from what I hear ALL the time "me" has gone by the wayside––it's "the trip was great for Linda and I." And somehow "ings" have been put in moth balls. Minor grumbles, I'm sure.
PD,
Oh gracious.
"The trip was great for Linda and I" is abominable.
The litmus test is to remove "Linda" and leave the "I" to heft the weight of the proposition.
Would you really say "The trip was great for I?"
Beastly!
Who are these people? Recently there was an article in the Times concerning sentence diagramming. I learned this, and, I'm guessing, so did many of you. I have to admit that some of the more difficult sentences offered in the article required serious diagramming skills but the entire enterprise also improves one's grammatical sensibilities which would easily hop-skip over horrors like "The trip was great for Linda and I".
Repellent is too kind.
Villains lurk in lynch mobs.
Villians lurk in looting mobs
Villains lurk in corporations, hidden in the corporate structure and without personal responsibility. Their evil is anonymous. The Supreme Court says their structure is a person.
GlaxoSmithKline will pay a three billion dollar fine for the evil their structure comitted. That structure or a piece of paper called Articles of Incorporation bribed Doctors. This same anonymous thing promoted a dangerous drug for use by children without any study of safety. This thing called a corporation paid sales persons to promote the use of dangerous drugs for many uses for which they were not tested including mental problems.
This thing will accept three billion dollars as a cost of sales as the drugs promoted had sales of over twenty billion dollars and a really high margin.
I guess this is a win for the Government and for GSK.All the executives at GSK are safe from prosecution because it was the company, not them. The only losers are the people that overpaid or were damaged by the drug fraud. We will never know.
We do know that corporations are citizens and villains are safe within them.
Someone said, here I think; "I will believe corporations are citizens when Texas executes one."