The Commentariat -- March 21, 2015
Internal links & defunct video removed.
We Are So Over Bibi. Julie Davis of the New York Times: "The White House is stepping up its antagonism toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite his victory in this week's elections, signaling that it is in no rush to repair a historic rift between the United States and Israel. The sharpened tone indicates that the Obama administration may be re-evaluating its relationship with its closest ally in the Middle East, having lost patience with Mr. Netanyahu in the closing days of an election campaign in which he spotlighted deep disagreements with President Obama over a Palestinian state and a nuclear deal with Iran." ...
... Josh Marshall of TPM: "Even if Netanyahu is 'winning' in his battle with the White House, he is actually losing, because his country's interest is to maintain as cordial and as close relations with the United States as possible - in a way that transcends partisan divisions within the US.... US policy should change. Not on security, which should remain just as robust, but on the policy of blocking all external diplomatic pressure on the reasoning that leaving the Israelis free to settle things with the Palestinians between themselves is only way to reach a settlement." ...
... Dana Milbank: "Without a Palestinian state, Israel can be either a Jewish state or a democracy but not both. If it annexes the Palestinian territories and remains democratic, it will be split roughly evenly between Jews and Arabs; if it annexes the territories and suppresses the rights of Arabs, it ceases to be democratic." Milbank takes this personally. It's a very good column. ...
... Ed Kilgore: "It's pretty ironic: just as Bibi Netanyahu seems ready to get over the recent unpleasantness with the Obama administration and get back to the status quo ante of unfriendly cooperation, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives is packing for a trip to Israel that is inevitably being called a 'victory tour.'... [John Boehner] may claim he's just another Catholic tourist going to the Holy Land for Holy Week. But I suspect it's Netanyahu's resurrection rather than Jesus Christ's we'll eventually hear him talking about."
White House: "In this week's address, the President called on Republicans in Congress to stop playing politics with law enforcement and national security and confirm Loretta Lynch as Attorney General of the United States":
... Trymaine Lee of MSNBC: Eric Holder finds the delay in Lynch's confirmation to be "almost inconceivable" & "a little strange."
Coral Davenport of the New York Times: "The Obama administration on Friday unveiled the nation's first major federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing, the controversial technique for oil and gas drilling that has led to a dramatic increase in American energy production but has also raised concerns about health and safety risks." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Joby Warrick has the Washington Post's report.
Tim Egan: Republican leaders like John Boehner, Scott Walker & Joni Ernst who come from lower working-class families "are working to keep the downtrodden down. They are traitors to their class, with all the strutting moral superiority that comes with the conversion."
Gail Collins: "... there's a movement afoot to kick Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill and replace him with a woman. Finally, we've got a current event that's not depressing.... A website called 'Women on 20s' has posted biographies of 15 notable women in American history and invited visitors to vote for a female face to put in Jackson's place. The goal is to get the job done by the anniversary of women's suffrage in 2020."
AP: "The Justice Department is investigating the congressional expenses and business dealings of Rep. Aaron Schock, and FBI agents have begun issuing subpoenas to potential witnesses, a person familiar with the case told The Associated Press on Friday." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
CW: I know I've let you down by not publishing "Your Louie Gohmert Weekly Reader" lately, so here's a bonus edition, where Louie says lots of crazy things:
... Travis Gettys of the Raw Story: "Louie Gohmert can't wait any longer: 'It's time to bomb Iran.'... Gohmert pushed bogus claims that Obama had 'threatened to shoot down Israeli planes if they had gone to take out Iran's nuclear capability,' and he also falsely claimed the president had told Nigeria the U.S. would not aid in the fight against Boko Haram until the country legalized same-sex marriage." With audio, because you probably can't believe Gohmert said anything this silly.
Presidential Race
David Koch home, Palm Beach.
... Matea Gold of the Washington Post: "One of the next stops on the 2016 trail: David Koch's 30,050-square-foot Palm Beach mansion. A group of White House hopefuls, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, are scheduled to make a pilgrimage to the oceanfront estate of the billionaire industrialist on Sunday afternoon."
More About E-Mails. Ben Kamisar of the Hill: "The Justice Department is defending former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from a motion to subpoena her private emails under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 'Such action is unnecessary and inappropriate under FOIA,' DOJ officials wrote in a legal briefing filed Thursday. Officials were responding to a case launched by Larry Klayman, the founder of the conservative watchdog group Freedom Watch.... The agency says that the Freedom of Information Act 'creates no obligation for an agency to search for and produce records that it does not possess and control.'" ...
... Here's the Politico story by Josh Gerstein. ...
... MEANWHILE, Trey Gowdy wants the whole server. Lauren French of Politico: "The chairman of the House Committee on Benghazi is formally requesting Hillary Clinton turn over her private email server to a third party for a 'neutral' investigation of its contents."
Beyond the Beltway
Francis Clines of the New York Times: "West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin [D], usually a reliable supporter of the National Rifle Association, vetoed a bill to scrap the current law that citizens have to get a permit and take gun safety lessons in order to legally carry a concealed weapon in the state.... Retention of the permit requirement was supported by more than 80 percent of respondents in a state poll. But statehouse legislators across the country have demonstrated more respect for gun lobbyists than for public opinion -- just as the national Congress did in refusing to enact safety precautions opposed by the N.R.A...."
News Ledes
Times-Picayune: "Richard White, the Kenner man accused of the Friday night (March 20) machete attack on a security checkpoint at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, died Saturday at 4:02 p.m., the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office announced. White, 63, was shot three times by JPSO Lt. Heather Sylve, stopping him as he chased TSA agent Carroll Richel with a machete near the Concourse B checkpoint." ...
... AP: "Authorities say the machete-wielding man who was shot at New Orleans' international airport after trying to attack passengers and security agents was carrying explosives at the time. Sheriff Newell Normand said suspect Richard White, who was shot three times by a security agent late Friday after approaching a security checkpoint spraying insecticide and brandishing a machete, was also carrying a bag loaded with six Molotov cocktails -- six Mason jars with cloth wicks soaked in gasoline."
Share Article
Reader Comments (10)
The Israel story needs another view. What they just did is exactly what America just did, put the 'right' wing in charge of their legislature. And they are going to pay the same price as we are going to pay, it's called hell.
And BTW, can the media stop using words like 'false, bogus'. The correct word is 'lie'.
That's the home for only one of the Koch brothers? Wow. But wait, is that only one pool I see? I'm disappointed.
I can never remember whether Palm Beach is in California or Florida. I hope Walker can find it, since he said to
Congress a few years ago "I don't even know where Cali is."
I see Walker is now touting his foreign policy ideas as a central part of his campaign, and the ideas seem to amount to "terrorism in the US would be terrible, so it's necessary to stand up to labor like Reagan did" or something.
So Speaker of the House John Boehner is going to tour Israel during the Holy Week? How convenient. It seems that Republican leadership in America is forging a strategic alliance with its right wing counterpart in Israel. I can't think of another situation where a party here has worked so closely with one in another country, and in the process ignored the processes of our own foreign policy machinery, i.e. the White House and State Department, to achieve different goals. This would seem to be a dangerous precedent and an awfully slippery slope.
If central casting was given a script with character depictions, both physical (head up posterior) and intellectual (always say the dumbest thing that comes to mind)— they would undoubtedly come up with (bad) actors who look the part like the two G's.
Gowdy and Gohmert.
Dear Dana Milbank:
I hope you never have the gall to write a column denouncing waterboarding as torture.
Re Israel and the Law of Return:
Every human being alive today, is descended from someone, who lived somewhere, 4000 years ago. Does that give any of the rest of us property rights anywhere?
@D.C. Clark, that all depends on your interpretation of your magic book. To be fair to the Israelis (although I am not in the mood), they are not the first or the last to play this game. In this place called America, the Spanish used the concept of the Christian duty to evangelize as an excuse to kill the natives and take their land.
No, this is not a new game, using religion as an excuse to kill and conquer. I would guess that about 85% of all of the worlds current war and war-like activity are religious based.
There are lots of Jews that are not proud of the fact the ultra religious of Israel are now capable of behaving like the bastards that for 2000 years used religion as an excuse to kill Jews.
Putting aside Netanyahu and Israel for a moment, I think it is a truly frightening possibility that, if the Dems don't nominate a candidate who will unquestionably and unconditionally support Israel even to the eventuality of war with Iran, the Ultra-Zionist Jewish American lobby and their minions in the media will relentlessly support and campaign for the Republican candidate.
In 2004, after the invasion of Iraq, Bush picked up 5 points among Jewish voters (19%-24%). Romney received 30% of the Jewish American vote in 2012. Ninety-Four percent of the Jewish vote is concentrated in 13 states. Those 13 states have the electoral votes to elect a President. Any one or two of them can swing an election.
So, it seems to me, we have a fu*ked if we do and fu*ked if we don't situation here. On the one hand we get a President who is willing to take us to war on behalf of Israel and perhaps, perhaps be a last line of defense against Republican destruction of 100 years of progressivism. And, on the other hand, we get a President who will go to war AND roll back workers' rights, women's; rights, immigrant rights, civil rights, voting rights..........
What Milbank doesn't say but I, as one of his fellow Jews will say, is that we need a place where we have a "right of return" because, as history has shown time and again, eventually we wear out our welcome wherever we have lived.
Wow! 20 republicans grifting the rubes checkbooks to run for the gold. Get out the popcorn, Sadie, and turn on the telly.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/236476-20-republicans-wholl-run-for-president
The Filters.
Last year we finally got us one-a them newfangled iceboxes. You know, the kind that allows you to press a lever for ice and another for water. The height of luxury, I tells ya. But every now and then I press the water paddle and a light comes on telling me it's time to change the filter. Otherwise, I'm getting all the crap bleeding into the water and it's clear that the taste is markedly different. So, I head off to Lowe's, plunk down my $45 and we're back to water without anything to make it taste metallic or in any way distasteful.
But here's the rub: the water we get tastes great but it isn't the water that's under the house, that's coming from the aquifer; water untouched from the source. It's water that has been filtered, "improved".
Now this may be a desirable feature for those wanting to imbibe better tasting water, but those wanting their news straight, with no filters? Not so much.
The other day, I rented a film that came out last fall, "Kill the Messenger", a somewhat condensed narrative of investigative reporter Gary Webb, of the San Jose Mercury News, who, in 1996, after an extensive investigation, published a series of articles on the connection between the Ronald Reagan era CIA and the immense increase in crack cocaine distribution in this country, the proceeds of which went to help re-fund the Contras after Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Weinberger, Poindexter, North, et al, had been caught selling arms to our sworn enemy in order to fund death squads in Central America.
It's a pretty dense story, but let me get to the point.
Webb had uncovered a serious link between the CIA, Nicaraguan drug cartels, and the contras. Cocaine was streaming into this country, especially large urban areas like Los Angeles. Some of the profits extracted in blood and lives, went to fund the Contras. Even the CIA eventually admitted as much.
But when Webb's story broke, the LA Times, The NY Times, and the Washington Post, banded together with their government sources to kill the messenger.
Webb's sources suddenly appeared to change their stories, and when it was demanded that he come up with "innocents" who would go on record, his story was demolished. The point, only too obvious here, is, if you are doing a story about underworld gangsters, how many soccer moms or grocery store managers will be able to corroborate your research? If you're doing a story on drugs, you talk to drug dealers, not used car salesmen. This was the sort of thing used to question Webb's findings. Of course, all three majors attacking Webb interviewed only CIA representatives. Funnily enough, none of them corroborated Webb's findings that their organization was in bed with drug dealers who were blighting American cities (but especially black neighborhoods) with a crack cocaine epidemic.
So I started doing some research on my own, and I found an article from the Washington Post's "head" of investigative journalism (these days that's a bit like asking a mafia consigliere to investigate the Cosa Nostra), Jeff Leen, who was around in the 90's when the story first broke and the Post attacked Webb for the first time. He claims, in a WaPo article that appeared when the film came out, because how can the Post allow someone who scooped them once be unmolested into the next century, that he debated Webb and bested him handily, but his demands that Webb provide "extraordinary" (ie, inescapable, perfect) proof, has been ripped by far more serious (actual) reporters.
You may be familiar with the investigative reporter Robert Parry of Consortium News. Unlike Jeff Leen, a protector of right-wing status quo (how dare you criticize St. Ronnie!!), Parry is a true reporter who uncovered much of the very protected Iran-Contra hidden treasure that Reagan and his people tried to hide from the American public.
Here's what Parry has to say about Leen's highly partisan and cavalier dismissal of Webb's work:
"A different rule actually governs American journalism–that journalists need "extraordinary proof" if a story puts the US government or an "ally" in a negative light, but pretty much anything goes when criticizing an 'enemy.'"
The Ferguson disaster is a clear example of how this same sort of requirement is still in place today. White cop who kills a black kid? You better have unassailable, extraordinary proof of his guilt His innocence is a virtual given. Young black kid who is murdered? He was a dangerous gangster! He's black? No proof needed. QED. (Same with Palestinians.)
Parry concludes with this:
"Perhaps all one needs to know about the sorry state of today's mainstream journalism is that Jeff Leen is the Washington Post's assistant managing editor for investigations, and Gary Webb is no longer with us."
The fact that we have people like Jeff Leen filtering information for us is disturbing in the extreme, yet outlets like the Washington Fucking Post, aka Retirement Home for George Bush War Crime Supporters, put him in charge of "investigation".
I don't know exactly how much of what Webb claimed is the absolute truth, but do any of you truly believe that an organization involved in selling TOW missiles to our sworn enemies in order to fund murderous death squads, would decline the possibility of making billions off destroying black American lives in order to continue to fund those murderers?
I surely don't.
But the filters are out there. They make your news taste good. They filter out what the Bushes and Reagans and Romneys and McConnells and Boehners and Rumsefelds and Cheneys and Pauls and Ryans and Cruzes, and Walkers and Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Aileses don't want you to know about.
Those filters are changed every day. They don't want any chance of actual reality getting through.
God Bless America! We are awesomeness itself. Anyone who says different, gets filtered out.
P.S. By the way, you want to know what happened to Gary Webb after he went after the CIA? Found dead in his apartment a few years later. Two gunshots to the head. Two.
Authorities ruled it a suicide.