The Commentariat -- July 25, 2013
Michael Shear & Peter Baker of the New York Times: "President Obama tried to move past months of debate over guns, surveillance and scandal on Wednesday and reorient his administration behind a program to lift a middling economy and help middle-class Americans who are stuck with stagnant incomes and shrinking horizons. Returning to the site of his first major economic speech as a young senator eight years ago, Mr. Obama lamented that typical Americans had been left behind by globalization, Wall Street irresponsibility and Washington policies, while the richest Americans had accumulated more wealth. He declared it 'my highest priority' to reverse those trends, while accusing other politicians of not only ignoring the problem but also making it worse":
... Here's the text of the speech. ...
... Greg Sargent: "Given implacable GOP opposition to his agenda, Obama has little choice but to try to seize the rhetorical and ideological initiative in hopes that it will make a difference in the spending fights ahead, and beyond that in the midterm elections. In service of that goal, Obama sought to frame the problems facing the country in as grandiose terms as he could.... Obama talked about declining wages and rising inequality not just as urgent moral problems, but as threats to long term growth and shared prosperity, and decried trends creating these problems that have been decades in the making. He noted that the deficit is falling faster than it has in decades. Obama then made the case against continued GOP austerity as a threat to the recovery and the middle class...." ...
... Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic: "... the reason Obama keeps calling for these steps is that congressional Republicans keep blocking them. And while versions of these ideas, or some of them, were in the Recovery Act, the evidence suggests they worked pretty well.... He's having at least some success working with less extreme members, like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Not coincidentally, Obama chose his words carefully, criticizing a 'a sizable group of Republican lawmakers' who have threatened not to raise the debt limit but also praising the 'growing number of Republican Senators [who] are trying to get things done.'" ...
... E. J. Dionne says this time is different. ...
... Court Harson of NBC News: "The Republican Party is no longer content being the party of 'no.' Now they've launched an offensive against nearly everything President Obama stands for -- vowing to slash funding for programs he supports. And that includes Obamacare -- they say they won't even agree to a budget beyond the end of the fiscal year if even a penny is used to fund the president's signature health reform law. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee puts it simply: 'His priorities are going nowhere.'" ...
... Sahil Kapur of TPM outlines some of the desperate attempts by conservatives to derail ObamaCare. Interestingly, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does not seem to be going along with the program. CW: It seems possible his Tea Party primary challenger could change that. ...
... Jonathan Easley of the Hill: "Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said Wednesday he opposes a plan endorsed by at least a dozen Republican senators to shut down the government to block funds for ObamaCare." The only other GOP senator to say he opposed the tactic is John McCain. ...
... Paul Krugman: "... think about [this] for a moment: the cause for which the GOP is willing to go to the brink, breaking all political norms, threatening the US and world economies with incalculable damage, is the cause of preventing people with preexisting conditions and/or low incomes from getting health insurance. Apparently, the prospect that their fellow citizens might receive this help is so horrifying that nothing else matters." ...
... To wit, David Morgan of Reuters: "With the Obama administration poised for a huge public education campaign on healthcare reform, Republicans and their allies are mobilizing a counter-offensive including town hall meetings, protests and media promotions to dissuade uninsured Americans from obtaining health coverage." CW: I guess this is the "Show 'Em You've Got the Courage to Get Sick & Die" Campaign. ...
... Norm Ornstein in the National Journal: "... to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation -- which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil -- is ... contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate ... takes one's breath away." ...
... Carrie Brown & John Bresnanhan of Politico: "Armed with a PowerPoint presentation and a direct line to President Barack Obama, [White House Chief of Staff Denis] McDonough has spent the past three months soothing Democratic anxieties over the most divisive health care expansion in decades. He meets every other week with [Max "Train Wreck"] Baucus, briefs vulnerable Democrats on the administration's progress and treks up to the Hill on a moment's notice to visit offices unannounced. McDonough's message: We've got this."
Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post: "The U.S. Senate approved a plan Wednesday to restructure the government's education loan program, tying interest rates to the market and imposing limits on how high those rates can go.... Some Democratic senators are already saying that they will have to take action on it again soon. The legislation, which still needs the approval of the House, would dramatically lower interest rates on nearly all new federal education loans taken out by undergraduates, graduate students and parents for the coming school year. But as the economy improves, those rates are expected to increase and could surpass the current rates within five years.... [Elizabeth] Warren [D-Mass.] introduced an amendment with Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) that would cap the new interest rates at the current rates. That amendment failed. So too did an amendment introduced by Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have authorized the new rates for just two years...."
Profiles in Cowardice. Bernie Becker of the Hill: "The Senate's top tax-writers have promised their colleagues 50 years worth of secrecy in exchange for suggestions on what deductions and credits to preserve in tax reform. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the panel's top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), assured lawmakers that any submission they receive will be kept under lock and key by the committee and the National Archives until the end of 2064." Thanks to James S. for the link.
Brett Logiurato of Business Insider: "The House of Representatives voted against an amendment that would have severely limited the National Security Agency's ability to collect data on telephone communications by a 205-217 vote.The amendment would have barred the NSA from blanket collection of records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, including telephone records, 'that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.' It was co-sponsored by Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a libertarian Republican, and John Conyers (D-Mich.)." ...
... The New York Times story, by Jonathan Weisman, is here. ...
... Glenn Greenwald comments here.
John Hilsenrath & Damian Paletta of the Wall Street Journal: "The race to become the next leader of the Federal Reserve looks increasingly like a contest between two economists: Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen."
Obama 2.0. Mark Landler of the New York Times: "President Obama on Wednesday nominated Caroline Kennedy to be ambassador to Japan, moving to give a scion of America's most enduring political dynasty a diplomatic post that has often gone to political heavyweights."
Tom Edsall of the New York Times on the "Political Endangered Species List.... The dangers facing middle-of-the-road Democrats in swing districts is reflected in the exceptionally high casualty rate suffered over the past four years by the Blue Dog coalition of conservative and moderate Democrats." Edsall highlights the predicament of Patrick Murphy, the Democrat who defeated Allen West, "the notorious Republican Congressman from Florida who once described President Obama as 'a low-level socialist agitator,' before suggesting on another occasion that his supporters were 'a threat to the gene pool.'"
I don't think there's anyone in Congress who has a stronger belief in minority rights than I do. -- Rand Paul
John Lewis. -- Constant Weader
Should it be prohibited for public, taxpayer-financed institutions such as schools to reject someone based on an individual's beliefs or attributes? Most certainly. Should it be prohibited for private entities such as a church, bed and breakfast or retirement neighborhood that doesn't want noisy children? Absolutely not. -- Rand Paul, 2002, writing in opposition to the Fair Housing Act
It's not all about race relations, it's about controlling property, ultimately. -- Rand Paul, in 2012, defending his father's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later in the interview, Paul called the matter "an obscure issue."
I think we have really gotten beyond that now. We have an African-American President, African-Americans are voting at a higher percentage than whites. -- Rand Paul, June 2013, explaining why the Voting Rights Act is unnecessary
Paul] insists he will continue outreach efforts to black and Hispanic voters despite reports about a former aide's past connections to neo-Confederate groups. -- Chris Moody of Yahoo! News ...
... CW: in fairness to Li'l Randy, Moody notes that "Paul has championed legislation that would reform how the justice system handles drug laws, which disproportionately affect black men. In March, he co-authored a bill with Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy that would provide judges more flexibility in handling drug cases. Paul said he is planning further work on prison reform that would eventually reinstate rights to convicted felons who serve their time." In addition Paul has made numerous efforts to reach out to minority groups, though of course these efforts are also self-serving.
Sergi Loiko of the Los Angeles Times: "The latest bid by fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to leave a Moscow airport has run into bureaucratic hurdles, his Russian lawyer said Wednesday. Russian media reported that Snowden would be allowed to leave the transit zone where he has been holed up for more than a month following a government decision to consider his request for temporary asylum. But he was turned back at passport control because he did not have all the paperwork he needed, a Russian immigration official told The Times." ...
... Fox "News": "... now it appears that even with new legal papers, [Snowden] still must wait at the airport while Russian authorities consider his asylum request."
Max Siegel of the New York Times: "Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, formally inaugurated a new political party bearing the name of his antisecrecy organization on Thursday and declared his own unorthodox candidacy for a seat in the Australian Senate in national elections to be held here later this year." CW: just an excellent idea. I'm sure he's in it to represent the people -- at least all of those Aussies who can stop by the Ecuadorian embassy in London to air their grievances.
Local News
** Dahlia Lithwick of Slate on "What's the Matter with North Carolina."
CW: I'm tardy on this story, but here it is anyway: Martin Weil & Freedom du Lac of the Washington Post on Morgan Lake, whose car was hit -- twice -- by a tractor-trailer on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge & forced over the side & into the bay. "In 2010, Travel + Leisure magazine named it one of 'the world's scariest bridges.'" Lake tells her amazing story:
... The Post has a follow-up story, with video of Lake in the water, here.
AP: "A federal judge on Wednesday swept aside lawsuits challenging Detroit's bankruptcy, settling the first major dispute in the scramble to get a leg up just days after the largest filing by a local government in U.S. history. After two hours of arguments, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes made clear he's in charge. He granted Detroit's request to put a permanent freeze on three lawsuits filed in Ingham County, including another judge's extraordinary decision that Gov. Rick Snyder trampled the Michigan Constitution and acted illegally in approving the Chapter 9 filing."
WeinerGate, Ctd.*
Michael Barbaro & Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: "The racy online conversations that have jeopardized Anthony D. Weiner's campaign for mayor of New York began with an angry Facebook message, according to the editor of a blog who has communicated with the young woman involved. Not long after Mr. Weiner resigned from Congress, the 22-year-old woman reached out to express her disappointment in him. Mr. Weiner eventually responded and, at his urging, their exchanges veered from politics to sex within a week, as he demanded dozens of explicit photographs, said Nik Richie, the editor of The Dirty, the blog that first documented the exchanges.... Mr. Richie's account ... cannot be independently verified."
Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times: "Hate to say it, but you can't trust a woman whose husband has been screwing around."
Gail Collins: "... there is a point in political scandals when bad behavior stops being a joke and just becomes sad and depressing. We have reached that point with Anthony Weiner."
mistermix of Balloon Juice: "Weiner is an idiot but he didn't do anything illegal, his wife has forgiven him, and the question we ought to be asking is if he's capable of being a working mayor or whether he'll just be a show pony the way he was in the House."
Weiner's Big Boner. CW: It seems to me Weiner's mistake was not the sexting dickpics & making false promises to strange women less than half his age. That might be stupid, callous & a little risky, but he's a politician, & stupid, callous & risky is what politicians do. No, mistake was marrying & having a child. Surely he was self-aware enough to realize that wedding vows were not going to change behavior that he certainly engaged in regularly during the decades he remained single. Had the Dirty published these Tweets & e-mails involving an unmarried New York congressman, they probably would have stayed at the level of the Dirty, Gawker & similar gossip sites. The New York Times wouldn't have touched the story with a ... well, you know. If he had never married, Weiner would still be making raucous speeches in the House, & he would probably also be running for mayor of NYC, since he long ago said that was his dream job.
BuzzFeed IDs the woman Weiner was sexting.
* Bear in mind, it's never-ending.
News Ledes
AP: Virginia "Johnson, half of the renowned Masters and Johnson team, was remembered Thursday as one of the key figures in the sexual revolution. Johnson, whose legal name was Virginia Masters, died Wednesday of complications from several illnesses at an assisted living center in St. Louis. She was 88."
AP: "The owner of a natural gas drilling rig aflame off of Louisiana's coast said preparations were under way for the possible drilling of a relief well to divert gas from the site and bring the well under control. Adam Bourgoyne, a former dean of Louisiana State University's petroleum engineering department, said such an effort is a complicated task that could take weeks to complete."
AP: "Deposed politician Bo Xilai will go on trial on charges of corruption and abuse of power within weeks, wrapping up a festering scandal that China's new leaders want disposed of as they cement their authority. Bo, 64, was a rising political star who ran the metropolis of Chongqing until he fell from power last year in a scandal that saw his wife convicted of killing a British businessman. On Thursday, the official Xinhua News Agency announced that he was charged with bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power and will stand trial in the eastern city of Jinan."
Washington Post: "Closing arguments in the trial of [Bradley] Manning, a former intelligence analyst in Iraq, begin Thursday."
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Reader Comments (14)
Re: Vietnam. Yesterday, I asked my Vienamese doctor (who escaped Vietnam at 14 withh his parents) if he had been back to Vietnam. He said four times.
Me: "Are things getting better?"
Him: "Yes, slowly, but the communists never change. It's not as bad as it was,"
Me: "So the communists lied. They didn't make things better."
I realized then and there that we weren't totally wrong to intervene. I guess we were like big, clumsy guy who wants to help you but makes a mess of things. LBJ was too cautious in the way he we about it, IMO. I believe he said that he didn't want to stir up the American people. He also inerfered at the tactical level, when he should have stuck to strategy.
Now I don't feel so bad.
Marie:
Regarding Weiner
You said: "Bear in mind, it's never-ending."
I think you meant, "Bare in mind..."
Barbarossa: Maybe it wasn't wrong to intervene in VN the way we did, but it was unwise. I believe that it was more in response to domestic political forces than to our Cold War containment strategy. LBJ, a creature of the congress, had seen the power of GOP charges that Truman had lost China, FDR had lost eastern Europe at Yalta, UN advocates were card-carrying commies, etc. He allowed his NSC, DOD and the Joint Chiefs to use VN as a test-bed for a number of military innovations (vertical envelopment, counterinsurgency, field intelligence technology, electronic aviation countermeasures, and a long list of etc.s). They believed that no "raggedy-ass" country of small people could withstand that application of power. And, they were right, up to a point. As long as the US was willing to remain in VN and continue to apply that kind of force, the North could not prevail.The VC were basically cooked after Tet in '68, leaving the NVA as the enemy without the cover of an indigenous civil war.
So we had all of that going for us, but Hanoi had the strategic ace, the knowledge that we would not choose to remain there forever. And we did not. And they came south.
Yesterday (7/24) the President of VN visited Washington. His arrival at the State Department was honored by a US four-service honor guard, with two members of each service carrying the US flag and the VN flag. (I think the 4th service was the USCG; I don't believe the USMC was there; I could be wrong.) Inside the reception lobby, a US military string quartet in formal uniform played classical music. The red carpet was rolled out. It was very strange to see the red flag with the yellow star carried by US soldiers, next to the stars and stripes. But all wars must end sometime, and after that end countries are wise to resort to the norms of international relations and diplomacy. In the case of VN, it took longer than usual (1975-95), in major part because of the same domestic political forces that sucked us into the war -- fear that any kind of "accommodation" of a former enemy, that did not have the grace to lose, would hand the other political party a hammer that it would use to beat your party to death.
Wars are not all about domestic politics -- but I think that "wars of choice" are largely driven by that.
The ongoing obstreperous intransigence on the part of the GOP do nothings to anything coming out of this White House is not just the heel dragging and wailing of babies (although there is plenty of both), it's treason, pure and simple.
They can't win in the election booths so they change the rules making sure that millions of citizens who might decline to go along with their dreadful policies have to scale mountain peaks, swim oceans, and twist themselves into electoral pretzels before voting.
They can't win on the strength of their policy ideas (rich get everything, everyone else gets it in the neck, whites have rights, everyone else is a dangerous ingrate), so they do everything they can to make sure that policies that have popular support, proposed by the president and the party that were put in office by the democratic process, are left unfunded, with additional obstruction coming from GOP apparatchiks at the state and local levels who insist on passing laws, many of them unconstitutional, to force their failed and rejected policies down the throats of all other Americans.
They are supported by a minority of extremists who, as Marie notes, will have no problem agreeing to getting sick and dying as long as their hated enemy, that horrible nee-groe in their White House, loses.
In all wars, cultural as well as shooting wars, some people have to die. If it were just the wingnuts footing that bill, I'd call that a just ending, but their policies are ensuring that the weak and innocent of all political stripes will pay the price for their treason.
Can these craven reptiles become any more reprehensible?
I'm guessing yes.
Anthony Weiner is a mentally dysfunctional individual, is the only conclusion I can come to as more and more of his callous and school boy behavior is revealed. The obsessive nature of his behavior is most disconcerting and makes me wonder why anyone would consider a person of this nature to be mayor of one of America's premier cities.
Yes, I too got some yuks when this first came out, but Gail Collins hits the nail on the head, enough is enough.
Time for some obscure kvetching of minor importance; thus it's status as kvetching.
Just scanned an article on the New Yorker site about the writer's fondness for a Barnes and Noble that offered him, in his youth, the solace of reading material on a much improved scale from the local gift shop whose primary literary inventory, no doubt, was on par with Jonathan Livingston Seagull and similar treacly offerings (apologies in advance to any JLS fans out here. Reading the backs of cereal boxes was more stimulating).
Having lived a large part of my life in close proximity to an obscene wealth of stellar bookstores, my current reduced state has been relieved largely by one of those Barnes and Nobles. It might seem a bit ungrateful of me, then, to complain, given the alternative, but I've been noticing over the last few years, a likely result of red state antipathy towards any philosophies not strictly concerned with Christianity, that the philosophy aisles have become philosophy shelves while the Christian/Religious aisles have tripled in size putting the squeeze on logic, epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, and pragmatism.
With every new visit I see less of Kant, more of Ayn Rand (an entire shelf of Rand books as compared to two books each by Aristotle and Plato), and a new avalanche of books bemoaning the state of America beset by heathens who will, naturally, spend eternity in the fires of hell. Or listening to endless loops of Limbaugh and Beck.
I prefer the fire.
But until then, is it too much to ask for less Holy Roller ranting and a little more Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell? (We'll ignore, for the time being, the aisles devoted to the Beck, Hannity, Gingrich, Coulter cabal).
Just another example of how right-wing agendas penetrate and adulterate, in my opinion, even the sanctity of bookstores.
Kvetching c'est finis.
This is just too funny not to pass on.
Wonkette, (wonkette.com) in her own estimable metier, noted that George H.W. Bush (the dad, not the asshole) has shaved his head to show his support for the child of a secret service agent. The child is undergoing treatment for cancer. A nice thing, really.
According to Wonkette, Mitt Romney, upon hearing about this, demonstrated his empathy by holding down a couple of high school students and shaving their heads.
Akhilleus, Re: Your kvetch.
In the words of my grocery store friend " I order vat sells".
With the Plutocrats financing round the clock propaganda pedaled by the likes of Rush and mimics. With the consolidation of news outlets into the hands of the Plutocrats. With nearly 80% of people responding to surveys of their news source reporting Faux. Is it any wonder they are buying books of the nature you describe.
Classic education is disappearing from our high schools and colleges, as the race is on to get a "relevant education" in order to get a job to pay back indentured servitude loans.
Unfortunately they are only getting training and not education.
P.S. Damn, I envy your vocabulary.
Barbarossa: Heaven preserve me from big clumsy samaritans. Or do you really think this casualty list justified?
http://www.vn-agentorange.org/edmaterials/cost_of_vn_war.html
Roger,
Is the Fox "News" number really that high? Christ on a hay wain. That's a lot of misinformed people out there, either that or hordes of Kool-Aid addicts.
I know what you mean about what sells but it would be nice if at least some space could be set aside, in the philosophy/religion area of a general interest bookstore, for writers who aren't replaying the latest outrages of the religious right or engaging in Left Behind type revenge fantasies. And the idea of all those people out there buying into Ayn Rand's solipsistic delusions calls for a triple shot of intellectual ipecac.
@cowiccan: I didn't say it was justified. When you're as far down the food chain as Patrick and I there's nothing you can do if your leaders screw up. I won't say we could have done enough to turn the tide, but there are many things we should have done differently. In Vietnam we had a standing joke: "There are nine principles of war, and we've violated all nine of them." I can't remember the source of this but it goes "Too many men to lose. Not enough of them to win."
Akhilleus, I can't quote you the source on the Fox news stat. because it so thoroughly blew my mind when I was reading it. What I do know is that in every hospital, public building, airport waiting area I've been in for the last 3 or 4 years has the TeeVee tuned to the local Faux station. Interesting coincidence ?????
Ak: I stopped buying books after Jim Harrison wrote "Off to the Side"and insinuated that I was a nerd (we went to school together,
maybe sixty years ago). But I think we were all mostly nerds in
high school, so I forgave him. My partner tells me that one of his
nephews is proud of the fact that he has a high school education and
has never read a book! He's going on to college where he will
undoubtably never read a book. What a sad future for the youth of
this country who now get all they want to know from the internet
and teevee sitcoms.
@Roger. We are educating our young, as my friend Curtis Zahn used to say, to "bolt fenders on Buicks," but it's ever been thus. We have no interest in activities that do not provide person-power to industries.