The Commentariat -- June 15, 2013
The President's Weekly Address:
... Here's the transcript. AP story here.
Here's the link to Juan Cole's piece on arming Syrian rebels, which Kate M. discusses in the Comments. The kicker for me: Cole's reminder of the U.S. arming of Afghan jihadists in the 1980s, a policy that worked so well it brought us Al Qaeda & the Taliban & the long-term destabilization of both Afghanistan & Pakistan: "You never, ever want to encourage the rise of private militias and flood a country with high- powered weaponry." ...
... Dan Roberts, et al., of the Guardian: "The White House will use next week's G8 summit to seek international support for further intervention in Syria that may go beyond the limited military assistance announced on Thursday night, in an attempt to force the Assad regime and its Russian allies into meaningful peace talks."
Dana Milbank: "Where have all the liberals gone? ... With some exceptions, progressive lawmakers and the liberal commentariat have been passive and acquiescent toward the secret spying programs, which would have infuriated the left had they been the work of a Republican administration." ...
... Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian: "The National Security Agency's blanket collection of US citizens' phone records was 'not really the American way', Al Gore said on Friday, declaring that he believed the practice to be unlawful. In his most expansive comments to date on the NSA revelations, the former vice-president was unsparing in his criticism of the surveillance apparatus, telling the Guardian security considerations should never overwhelm the basic rights of American citizens. He also urged Barack Obama and Congress to review and amend the laws under which the NSA operated." ...
... AP: " Facebook and Microsoft Corp. representatives said that after negotiations with national security officials their companies have been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders to turn over user data. The announcements Friday night come at the end of a week when Facebook, Microsoft and Google, normally rivals, had jointly pressured the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on national security orders." ...
... Vindu Goel of the New York Times: "Facebook ... said that in the last six months of 2012, it had 9,000 to 10,000 requests for information about its users from local, state and federal agencies. Those requests covered 18,000 to 19,000 user accounts.... Facebook said it was legally prohibited from saying how many of the data requests were related to national security. But generally speaking, the vast majority of the law-enforcement data requests received by tech companies are for other matters, like local criminal cases."
Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast: Elijah Cummings stands up to Darrell Issa. It appears Issa is withholding as "sensitive" the testimony of a self-described "conservative Republican" IRS agent in the Cincinnati office who "said that he and he alone first 'centralized' the Tea Party cases, without any direction from any superiors and without any political motivation." Cummings has been pressing Issa to get over his "sensitivity." "For the right..., the potential high crimes and misdemeanors don't have to have taken place. They just need to have been presented as plausibilities on Fox and Friends.... And even if the case collapses, then it's all still good in a way, because it can be chalked up to a vast media conspiracy to protect Obama." CW: I think one thing that really pisses off Republicans is that in their hearts they know they're wrong.
I wonder what Marco Rubio's problem is with equal rights for gays. (Yeah, I asked that yesterday, too.) Think Progress catches him making the argument that laws protecting women & minorities are "established law," (video at link) but, as Steve Benen notes, Marco didn't see any reason to, um, establish new law protecting gays from employment discrimination; to wit, ENDA -- the Employment Non-Discrimination Act -- which now has 50 Senate co-sponsors.
An answer to the haters who made such racist remarks that Cheerios had to disable the YouTube comments section accompanying the ad. Watch all the way through:
Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress: "If you are going to base all your efforts to win political power on a single economic theory, as conservatism has over the last 30 years, you might want to make sure it works. But that's what's so surprising about supply-side economics: Despite the fact that its central claim has been belied by decades of economic experience, it persists.... Contrary to supply-side's central thesis, the wealthy are precisely the wrong people to whom to give tax cuts." Via Jonathan Bernstein.
Sensational News! Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "Employers will struggle to comply with the new health care mandates, drop insurance coverage, increase costs, and lay off workers! Low-income employees will be subject to sky high premiums, a health care mandate they can't afford, or go uninsured altogether!" Or so the AP reports. "But skip down to the end of the piece and you'll find a curious quote from Neil Trautwein of the National Retail Federation, which represents the very employers the AP claims are going to take advantage of the health law's impurities to increase health care costs for low-income workers while avoiding its penalties. He appears to disagree entirely with the AP's premise...." ...
... Tim Egan: "... In six months' time, the heartless practice of refusing to let sick people buy affordable health insurance -- private-sector death panels, the most odious kind of American exceptionalism -- will be illegal.... The law, as honest conservatives predicted, before they orphaned their own idea, is injecting competition into a market dominated by a few big names.... Out among the states that are actively building the foundations of Obamacare, the law seems to be doing what it was supposed to do.... As in 1935 and in 1965, the ossified right is warning once again of an impending end to American life as we know it. Thankfully, they're right." ...
... The Sky Is Falling. Again Aaron Carroll: "... history repeats itself when it comes to health care reform. Everyone acts as if what we're doing is crazy new, as if it's never been done before.... We're seeing the same thing again with respect to Medicaid and the ACA. Many of the claims about the expansion's imminent failure involve arguments that aren't new. In fact, they were the same as those being employed against traditional Medicaid decades ago." Carroll & his assistant Jaskaran Bains, provides examples of "media coverage of Medicaid when it was passed."
When all you do is talk to people who are owners, talk to folks who are Type A's who want to succeed economically, we're talking to a very small group of people. No wonder they don't think we care about them. No wonder they don't think we understand them. -- Rick Santorum, boy populist, explaining why Mitt Romney lost in 2012 ...
... Not. My. Fault. Veep first-runner-up Paul Ryan has quit blaming "urban voters" & claims he & Romney lost because of ObamaCare & ObamaRhetoric. ...
... CW: funny how it's always some kind of messaging problem & never the substance of GOP philosophy & policies.
RE: Smart Judicial Ruling against Obama. Pam Belluck of the New York Times profiles Judge Edward Korman, who made the Obama administration to make the morning-after pill available to women of all ages without a prescription.
RE: Stupid Judicial Ruling against Obama:
I expect consequences. So I don't just want more speeches or awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody's engaging in [sexual assault], they've got to be held accountable -- prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period. -- Barack Obama, May 7, 2013 ...
... Erik Slavin of Stars & Stripes: "Two defendants in military sexual assault cases cannot be punitively discharged, if found guilty, because of 'unlawful command influence' derived from comments made by President Barack Obama, a judge ruled in a Hawaii military court this week. Navy Judge Cmdr. Marcus Fulton ruled during pretrial hearings in two sexual assault cases -- U.S. vs. Johnson and U.S. vs. Fuentes -- that comments made by Obama as commander in chief would unduly influence any potential sentencing, according to a court documents obtained by Stars and Stripes."
Ben Fox of the AP: "The men undergoing forced-feeding [at Guantanamo] aren't permitted to speak to journalists, but Ahmed Zuhair knows what the experience is like. Until he was released from U.S. custody in 2009, he and another prisoner had the distinction of staging the longest hunger strikes at the prison. Zuhair kept at it for four years in a showdown that at times turned violent.... Zuhair, a former sheep merchant who was never charged with any crime during seven years at Guantanamo, stopped eating in June 2005, and kept up his protest until he was sent home to Saudi Arabia in 2009.... Zuhair spoke to The Associated Press in a telephone interview along with his lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York." ...
... Former Bush II attorney John Bellinger: three weeks ago President Obama announced he would appoint a special envoy "to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries." But the president has yet to appoint an envoy (or envoys) & it appears he's having trouble filling the job(s). Via Jonathan Bernstein.
Local News
Ben Pershing of the Washington Post: in Virginia, "neither major party nominated a woman for governor, lieutenant governor or attorney general this year. In fact, former attorney general Mary Sue Terry (D) is the only woman to have won statewide office in Virginia.... Terry ... ran unsuccessfully for governor against George Allen in 1993. She was elected attorney general in 1985 and won reelection in 1989.... Virginia is one of only seven states with no women in statewide elective office."
News Ledes
Guardian: "The Perth radio presenter Howard Sattler says he will pursue legal action against Fairfax radio after he was sacked for asking Julia Gillard whether her partner was gay. Sattler's live radio interview on Thursday night made international headlines after he asked the prime minister about Tim Mathieson's sexuality."
AP: "China's Cabinet has announced measures to curb the country's notorious air pollution, one of the many environmental challenges facing the country that are increasingly angering the public. The broad measures approved by the State Council include putting strict controls in place for industries that produce large amounts of waste and pollution, but it will likely be up to local governments to work out the details."
New York Times: "Iranian officials spent Saturday tallying votes in the nation's presidential election, with a surge of interest apparently swinging the tide in the favor of the most moderate candidate. With a fraction of the vote counted, the moderate candidate, Hassan Rowhani, was holding a strong lead, but it was uncertain whether he would exceed the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff next week." ...
... Guardian Update: "The moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani has won the Iranian election and will succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, Iran's interior minister announced on national television on Saturday. Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar said Rouhani had secured just over the 50% of the vote needed to avoid a runoff, after a turnout of 72%."
AP: "... jellyfish-shaped balloons that Google released this week from a frozen field in the heart of New Zealand's South Island hardened into shiny pumpkins as they rose into the blue winter skies above Lake Tekapo, passing the first big test of a lofty goal to get the entire planet online. It was the culmination of 18 months' work on what Google calls Project Loon, in recognition of how wacky the idea may sound. Developed in the secretive X lab that came up with a driverless car and web-surfing eyeglasses, the flimsy helium-filled inflatables beam the Internet down to earth as they sail past on the wind."
AP: "Protesters will press on with their sit-in at an Istanbul park, an activist said Saturday, defying government appeals and a warning from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the two-week standoff that has fanned nationwide demonstrations to end."
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Reader Comments (4)
I really have my ass in a sling about the whole idea of "aiding" the Syrian rebels in this horrendous civil war. Next stop: Iran! Juan Cole has written a passionate piece about Bill Clinton's (in my mind) strategic, and nutty criticism of Obama for not getting into the midst of this frenzy. Here it is: www.juancole.com
The title and introduction:
Obama should Resist the Clintons & Europe on Syria
..."Former president Bill Clinton criticized President Obama on Thursday for his inaction in regard to Syria. This step seems extraordinary and surely has something to do with positioning Hillary Clinton to run as a more hawkish New Democrat against anyone in the Obama circle in 2016. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton appears to have pushed for arming the Syrian rebels, but could not get Obama’s backing for the move. Bill Clinton’s criticism is extremely unfair, since there are many bad situations in the world in which the US cannot fruitfully intervene, and Clinton knows this sad truth all too well."
@Kate: Clinton's reputation suffered when an American helicopter was shot down in Somalia and eighteen soldiers were killed, but it was undiminished when he refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide. In Bosnia, he got little credit for the lives he saved. Gary Bass, a Princeton professor who has written about humanitarian intervention says that the general rule is that every time a President sends troops to save lives overseas he risks political disaster; if he stays out, even in the face of calamity, there is little downside. "The political price is always heavily slanted against intervention when there is no core national-security interest involved," Bass says.
My own thoughts on this tend to lean toward non-intervention for several reasons: the mixture of sects in that country is extraordinarily complicated resulting in Iran and Hezbollah behind the Alawites while the Saudis, the Qataris and the Turks behind the Sunnis which suggests a much wider war which could go on for years plus the rapid growth of Al Qaeda in Syria is enough to make one tremble. And the biggest problem is once we dip our brush onto Syria's palate, how do we walk away from that unfinished landscape? When do we stop? We are already sending aid and contrary to its own rhetoric, according to Dexter Filkins, we are also secretly providing limited military support while the CIA operatives are training small numbers of Syrians to train other rebels and are passing on time-sensitive intelligence that the rebels can use to attack Assad's forces.
Do we really want to engage in another middle eastern country? Haven't we learned our lesson? Our bridges are falling down here while storms keep coming our way and many of OUR people need help. Is this enough of an argument? I just don't know.
@Kate: “U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is opposing the U.S. decision to send arms to the Syrian rebels and says there can be no certainty of chemical weapons use in Syria without an on-the-ground investigation.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/un-chief-opposes-obamas-decision-to-arm-syrian-rebels.php
@Kate and PD; We Americans hold a myth that everything is fixable with enough time and money. It's a noble belief but not realistic in my mind. Some actions can not be undone. Some decisions are carelessly made and the results are non-reversible. I spent several hours forcing my self to turn every page and study every photo image of James Nachtwey's "Inferno" recently. He chronicles the wars and famines of the 1990's in brutal black and white. The photos don't need captions. I wanted to shut the book and push it away the images are so disturbing. I don't know what Mr. Nachtwey's thoughts are; for me the book makes the viewer bear witness to the horrors that exist in the world everyday.
We go into Syria for what?
To slaughter the innocents; to set up a New Order, destroy the infrastructure; bring truth, justice and the American way to another country that was created by British surveyors out of the old Ottoman Empire?
The world is overcrowded; the gap between the poor and the rich grows ever wider. The Arab Spring is a result of economics not faith. The shifts of climate will add to the world's problems.
The answer is not in more warfare; the answer is in a more equable division of the world's resources and population decline.
Both religion and greed would never accept those answers so I believe we have reached that point of non-reversible decisions.