The Commentariat -- June 21, 2012
My column in the New York Times eXaminer is titled "The Third-Party Zombie and Other Friedman Recyclables." The NYTX front page is here. ...
... I thought this parody of Friedman's column today was a hoot.
Paul Krugman on Ben Bernanke:
... Ben Pleases Willard. Jonathan Bernstein in the Washington Post: "... the Fed board agrees that the economy needs help, but ... has chosen not to provide it, at least right now.... There's plenty that the Fed could do, and ... they are the only game in town, given that Congress is not going to do anything helpful.... On Sunday, in a little-noticed part of his Face the Nation interview, [Mitt] Romney bashed 'politicians' who 'want to do everything they can just before an election to try and temporarily boost something' when they should be concerned about 'the potential threat down the road of inflation.' ... What we have here is Romney also benefiting from a presumption that he cares about economic growth, when ... he's explicitly expressing far more concern about inflation." ...
... Michael Grunwald of Time agrees with Bernstein, forcefully so, and not for the first time. "And so we beat on, boats against the current...."
Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian: Julian "Assange's fear of ending up in the clutches of the US is plainly rational and well-grounded." ...
... Chris Spannos of the New York Times eXaminer has an interesting play-by-play of how the New York Times changes its story -- in this case, the story of Julian Assange's application for political asylum.
One Reason ObamaCare Is Unpopular. Abby Goodnough of the New York Times: "In all, about $235 million has been spent on ads attacking the law since its passage in March 2010.... Only $69 million has been spent on advertising supporting it." Underwriting the anti-ACA ads: "an array of conservative groups, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($27 million) to Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS ($18 million), which includes the billionaire Sheldon Adelson among its donors, and the American Action Network ($9 million), founded by Fred V. Malek, an investor and prominent Republican fund-raiser." This is not about health care; it's about GOP politics. ...
... The Other Reason ObamaCare Is Unpopular. Adam Serwer of Mother Jones: "The latest study from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found that ... [media] coverage of the Affordable Care Act was dominated by rhetoric used by the law's opponents. According to Pew, 'the concepts used by opponents were nearly twice as common as those used by supporters.' ... Journalists are supposed to separate truth from falsehood, but instead spent the bulk of their resources speculating about 'politics and strategy.'" ...
... The overview of the Pew report is here, and it's very readable. CW: If the Supreme Court kills the Affordable Care Act or the individual mandate, blame the media's politicized coverage -- which turned the public against the ACA; the law's unpopularity provides cover for the conservatives on the Court. And this is all about GOP dominance -- nobody wins when health care loses, particularly the ACA which both medical personnel and the health insurance industry like.
Gasland. Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "For more than a year now, Republicans in Washington — and Mitt Romney on the stump -- have been pressing the case that the Obama administration is trying to squash an energy boom" [with excessive regulations]. But people who live in the areas where these fracking fabulous booms are taking place say there is no regulation & the gas companies do whatever they want.
Gail Collins on a few of the pitfalls of privatization. ...
... This is the Sam Dolnick series Collins refers to. (Links to the other two articles in the series at the top of the page.) Hell is a New Jersey halfway house owned by one of Chris Christie's "mentors."
This PBS interview of former President Jimmy Carter provides a good overview of the political situation in Egypt:
Barack Obama Is Tired of Dealing with You People. John Farrell of the National Journal: "... the assertion of [executive] privilege [in the "Fast & Furious" fiasco] is another sign of Obama's willingness to employ his presidential authority to circumvent Republican hostility and intransigence. It goes in line with the president's unilateral expansion of his discretionary authority in immigration cases, the undeclared cyber war against Iran, or the use of drones in attacks on terrorist targets.... In an election year, as Mitt Romney is discovering, an incumbent like Obama can stage an impressive display of presidential forcefulness." ...
... Andrew Rudalevige of the Monkey Cage has a nice little history of the use of executive privilege. ...
... Here's the Justice Department's statement. ...
... Dana Milbank explains the Holder-Issa standoff in a nutshell: "Republicans didn't have much on Holder -- it's one of those perennial disputes about how much the executive branch needs to divulge to the legislature -- so they did what sensible people usually do when they have an honest disagreement: They accused the attorney general of being an accessory to murder." CW: well, yeah, but at least one Republican on the committee accused President Obama of being in on the plot, too. ...
I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day. I'm not kidding. There's a prison here in the Capitol … If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him. -- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. (Jennifer Bendery's interview of Pelosi for the HuffPost is worth reading)
Presidential Race
Michael Bender of Bloomberg News: "Mitt Romney's presidential campaign asked Florida Governor Rick Scott to tone down his statements heralding improvements in the state's economy because they clash with the presumptive Republican nominee's message that the nation is suffering under President Barack Obama, according to two people familiar with the matter."
"You Must Remember This":
... Unless You've Got ROMNESIA! David Corn of Mother Jones reviews Mitt Romney's long history of misremembering his past. Corn doesn't cover any new ground, so you've probably read it all before, but the article is full of helpful strings around the finger for Willard.
We are not going to talk about immigration, for Pete's sake. Gabriel Debenedetti & Patricia Zengerle of Reuters: Mitt Romney's presidential campaign fended off questions on immigration policy on Wednesday as the Republican challenger scrambled for a response five days after President Barack Obama's relaxation of immigration policy drew accolades from Hispanic voters. Questions on the Republican challenger's position on immigration dominated a campaign conference call Wednesday that was supposed to be about the economy. The call was cut off early after what a Romney staffer said were 'off-topic' questions."
News Ledes
Not Quite Junk. New York Times: "After putting banks on watch four months ago, Moody's Investors Service on Thursday slashed the credit ratings of 15 large financial firms.... Two United States banks that were hit hard in the financial crisis emerged with the lowest ratings. Citigroup and Bank of America are now rated only two notches above junk. While Morgan Stanley avoided a worst-case scenario of a three-notch downgrade, its rating slipped by two levels."
New York Times: "Hours after a jury began deliberating the child sexual abuse charges against Jerry Sandusky, lawyers for [Matt Sandusky] one of his adopted children, said Thursday that he had been abused by Sandusky and had offered to testify in the case." Philadelphia Inquirer story here. ...
... Philadelphia Inquirer: "After seven days of testimony, 50 witnesses, and accounts of serial abuse from eight young accusers, the jury in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse case began deliberations this afternoon."
New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to address whether the government still has the authority to regulate indecency on broadcast television, but it ruled in favor of two broadcasters who had faced potential fines for airing programs featuring cursing and nudity on narrow grounds."
ABC News: "Less than two weeks after taking a medical leave of absence following a seizure and a string of bizarre car accidents, Commerce Secretary John Bryson is resigning.... President Obama accepted Bryson's resignation Wednesday night and will meet with him at the White House this afternoon to thank him for his service."
Bloomberg News: "More Americans than forecast filed applications for unemployment benefits last week, indicating the labor market continues to struggle."
New York Times: "A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers." ...
... Al Jazeera: "The pilot of a Syrian MiG 21 fighter jet who flew his plane to Jordan has asked for political asylum on landing, Jordanian Minister of State for Information Samih al-Maaytah said. Syrian activists said it was the first defection involving an aircraft since the start of a 15-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad."
New York Times: "Egyptian election officials said Wednesday that they were postponing the announcement of a winner in last week's presidential runoff, saying they needed more time to evaluate charges of electoral abuse that could affect who becomes the country's next leader." Al Jazeera story here.
New York Times: "Spain successfully raised money at a bond auction Thursday amid high demand from investors, but at a punitive cost that underlined the country's financial fragility just hours before it planned to give more detail about the state of its sickly banks."
Guardian: "Julian Assange has spent a second night at the Ecuadorean embassy in London amid reports that a decision on his request for political asylum will be made on Thursday.... Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, will make a decision on Assange's application later on Thursday, the country's deputy foreign minister, Marco Albuja, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation."
Orlando Sentinel: "Sanford police Chief Bill Lee, who stepped aside temporarily three months ago amid a national outcry over his department's handling of the Trayvon Martin shooting, was fired Wednesday night. City Manager Norton Bonaparte Jr. dismissed Lee, effective immediately." ...
... Sentinel: "George Zimmerman's legal defense team released about a dozen documents, audio recordings and video of his statements to police about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin this morning.... The evidence was released through the website Zimmerman's attorneys set up for their client, Gzlegalcase.com." ...
... Update: details & video from ABC News.
AP: "Painter and sketch artist LeRoy Neiman, best known for evoking the kinetic energy of the world's biggest sporting and leisure events with bright quick strokes, died Wednesday at age 91."
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Reader Comments (10)
Marie has the perfect deconstruction of that fact free zone which is Tom Friedman's latest column. When I read his OpEd earlier in the day I wondered how he could be so lacking in basic information as to, for example, imply that the President has ignored the issue of rising Medicare costs or the long term deficit. Marie, bless her, explained it perfectly: the only source of information for Friedman - is Friedman. He interviews himself, and then writes his column. Or something like that.
I just wish it weren't true, so maybe he could read HER column. He might learn something.
Re: Tom the wanker. I don't know if you should call Mr. Friedman a wanker. That is a serious disservice to wankers everywere. Now a bloody,fucking wanker I would accept. I also believe that Tom could look into the cavernous black hole of his mind and realize the intelligent, centralist candidate that he is looking for is currently the standing president. You also quote him saying something about "spending good money"; that must mean his wifes fortune, right?
I think the idea, as Marie points out, that Friedman reads only Friedman is an eminently supportable one, which leads inevitably to Victoria's thought that after doing so, he interviews himself--again--for his next column. Solipsism triumphant. At least he didn't drop any of his usual gossipy insider nuggets about consulting with Bibi as to what color tie he should wear when he announces the next round of settlement expansion on the West Bank.
So what do we have? Along with Friedman, solipsist extraordinaire, we have one columnist addicted to snippy, snarky backbiting, and we have dueling right-wing pseudo-intellectuals one of whom spends his days shining the pope's squeaky red shoes and his nights with a blow-up doll, and the other obsessed over hippies from the 60s who have ruined his world with their free love, loud music, illicit drugs, and amorality.
Who could edit this crew?
But how much real editing goes on nowadays anyway? Are there any real copy editors left? Judging by the atrocious typos, awkward constructions, fact-free assertions and generally suspect grammar we read on many sites (including the Times), most contributors apparently have an open road to publication. No need to pass the grammar guides, fact checkers, copy editors or any other form of rational checks on misbegotten prose.
And while we're on that crazy subject (from which Friedman will never depart) of a third party candidate to bring both candidates to the middle and to control them both because, you know, they both do and say terrible things (Friedman being one of the worst of the "both sides do it" false analogists), let's not forget that it was a vanity third party candidacy who gave us the worst and most damaging administration in the history of the country. Had Ralph Nader stopped looking in the mirror long enough to realize his folly, the nearly 3 million votes he siphoned away from Al Gore, would have made it much harder for the Supreme Court and Bush to steal the election in 2000. No Bush, no Iraq war, no economic melt-down (at least on the scale we experienced), no Bush tax cuts, no torture, no spying on Americans, no....well, you get the idea.
But Friedman doesn't. Because if he had his way, a third party candidate would be floated who would drain votes from Obama, guaranteeing a Romney presidency. Four years later Friedman would be wondering where another third party candidate could be found to rid us of the horrors of Romney's disastrous approach to the economy (more money for the rich), jobs (the job creators are working on it...any day now), foreign policy (war with Iran), immigration (don't those big fences look great?), education (charter schools for everyone. If they can afford it), and the military (80% of the US budget sent to defunct weapons programs at the Pentagon).
After interviewing himself, he'd conclude that his idea was correct but someone else fucked it up.
@Akhilleus. Another problem with Friedman's practice of writing his columns by interviewing himself is that that the interviewee never tells the interviewer, "You know, I fucked up."
As for Ralph Nader's contribution to American history, I don't think he spent too much time looking at himself in the mirror. Rather, I would refer you to @JJG's comment re "bloody, fucking wankers." But I also think Nader provides a cautionary tale to those who think a Romney presidency would bring the revolution and out of the wreckage would arise a popular hero-leader with the qualities of a saint. Nader, as Akhilleus points out, brought us the Worse President in History, but his effort did nothing to change the trajectory of American politics. Whether or not Bush won the 2004 election is debatable (see Ohio), but he did win the popular vote. Obama's victory in 2008 has served, as far as I can tell, to move the country further right. Obama himself has been a conservative-lite candidate, and Republicans have tacked to way crazier.
Marie
Marie,
Yeah, and a Romney presidency would drag us a lot further to the right, likely to the edge of the sanity cliff (we're within a softball's heave now).
The problem with this imaginary savior rising from the rubble of another decade or more of right-wing effluence (Obama, although somewhat of a right-wing manqué, has, as you point out, promoted enough conservative causes to leave a bad taste in many mouths) and another five to ten years of conservative media propaganda, is that the party that would be needed to support and nurture such a deliverer is disappearing by the hour. The media that might herald the coming of this defender of democracy has already been hijacked by multinational conglomerates who seem content to allow our consumption of stories about flesh eating bacteria and horrible assaults on the right to carry concealed weapons into daycare centers, but not much more. Anything threatening their hegemony is right out.
I hate to be a buzzkill to those who think that hitting bottom will provide the necessary spark to relight the torch of true (not Fox style) liberty and democracy, but it's highly unlikely. What is much more likely is that a decade of RomneyEconomics will impoverish so many millions that we might have our own October Revolution. More likely it will be an 1848 style revolution in which those revolting will be shot down, imprisoned, tortured, and maimed while the corporate bosses and lords and ladies return to their thrones more empowered and emboldened than ever.
@Akhilleus. Exactly. Then, instead of crying that "the U.S. is becoming just like Greece," we can say -- with accuracy, unfortunately -- that the U.S. has become just like Egypt, where the military leaders who were part of the Mubarak government are now engaged in what Jimmy Carter says is -- if they succeed -- no different from a military coup. The fact is that, no matter what, you're always better off negotiating from a position of power, and the more power you have, the more likely you are to get the result you want. Even diminished power is better than no power.
As a known proponent of the " let's get it over with and reach the bottom" thinking , I have a problem understanding how in God's name are we ever going to put America back to work and reconstruct the middle class with a pseudo liberal in the White House. With Obama failing for eight years, how are we ever going to hold the Presidency in '16?
Radical change is needed in our economy, like huge increases in spending and taxation as well as increased mimimum wages and a rationalization of defense spending and strengthening of the safety net.
There is no current political organization that recognizes the countries needs and the damage being done to ever increasing numbers of American citizens. A weak President and a partisan Congress can keep the damage going for decades.
Akilleus: Yesterday I posted, but somehow the gods of sumition saw fit not to grant production of. What I said was that Andy Kroll's piece in "Mother Jones" was really, really good. An example of a journalist who not only knows how to dot his i's and cross his t's, but knows his history. Essays like this should cheer you, lest you think nobody writes well anymore; in betwixt the wankers there are those wonders.
@P. D. Pepe. I am the goddess, and I am now one pissed-off goddess. I got a copy of your post yesterday in an e-mail, which is supposed to mean it is posted to the site. However, I checked back not just in the comments section but also in my stats, and there is no sign of the comment you made yesterday. I'm reposting it here, & I'll be writing to the greater gods who pull my strings within the next 5 minutes. Thanks for letting me know the post never made it to the page.
Here's P. D. Pepe's post from yesterday:
I found Andy Kroll's piece in "Mother Jones" really, really good. It's long, but I encourage you all to read it. I had no idea that it took seven years to get McCain/Feingold to pass and then in a swift slight of hand the Supremes just abolished it. And as long as we are bringing up once again Cromwell, what he implored to Thomas More seems apt here:
"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken?"
PD,
It's not so much a disillusionment with the state of writing amongst the more careful citizens of le pays des belles lettres, but a not so vague ennui emanating from the frequenters to the houses of illiterary repute; the prevaricators, pretenders, hacks, and what Jaron Lanier once decried as "primitive retrograde activity".
There are decent and estimable writers afield but their work is too often occluded by the putrid smoke from the conflagration of feces spiked refuse that passes for literary achievement.
But your suggested reading is routinely excellent so I look forward to this article.
And Marie? When you get ahold of those reprobates, kick ass and take names. The same thing happened to me last week.
As the French say, "Fuck the begrudgers".