The Commentariat -- March 23, 2015
Internal links removed.
Doc Fix. Sarah Ferris of the Hill: "The House is inching closer to a major deal on Medicare payments that could help cement a legacy for Speaker John Boehner. Boehner has spent two months quietly working with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to finally solve a Medicare payment problem that has eluded congressional leaders for more than 20 years. The House leaders are expected to unveil their $200 billion Medicare deal early next week. Facing little opposition so far, the proposal is bringing Boehner closer than ever to tackling his long-time goal of entitlement reform."
Surprise! "Jobs-killing" ObamaCare is actually an "unprecedented" jobs-creator. Alex Wayne of Bloomberg Business: "More than 90 new health-care companies employing as many as 6,200 people have been created in the U.S. since Obamacare became law, a level of entrepreneurial activity that participants say may be unprecedented for the industry."
E. J. Dionne: "It would be wonderful if conservatives really wanted to deal constructively with the predicament [of income inequality] they so passionately describe. But thanks to the House and Senate GOP budgets, we now know that conservatives and Republicans (1) aren't serious about the plight of working-class and lower-income Americans and (2) would actually make their situations much worse. Their spending plans fail even on conservative terms: They are not fiscally responsible.... I'd respect these folks a lot more if they said what they clearly believe: They think more inequality would be good for us. It almost makes you nostalgic for the candor of the Mitt Romney who spoke about the '47 percent' and the Paul Ryan who once divided us between 'makers' and 'takers.'"
Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "Republicans continue to excuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's anti-Arab remarks and open repudiation of the two-state solution, despite decades of bipartisan agreement that an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only way to resolve the Israel/Palestinian conflict." ...
... Josh Feldman of Mediaite: "John McCain slammed President Obama on Israel on CNN's State of the Union this morning, telling the president to 'get over your temper tantrum' with Benjamin Netanyahu because 'the least of your problems is what Bibi Netanyahu said during an election campaign.'" ...
... CW: What to do when John McCain lectures you about having a temper tantrum? Laugh your head off. ...
Jesse Byrnes of the Hill: "'I really do not need a lessons from people like Steve King on what it is to be Jewish or a Democrat,' [Rep. Steve] Israel [D-N.Y.] said on CNN's 'State of the Union.'... 'Steve King, who said America is a Christian nation, should not be lecturing Jews about how we should be Jewish,' Israel said.... King said during an interview Friday..., "... I don't understand how Jews in America can be Democrats first and Jewish second and support Israel along the line of just following their president.'" (See also yesterday's Commentariat.)
Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal (published in Market Watch: "Federal investigators are preparing to file criminal charges against Sen. Robert Menendez [D-N.J.] as early as this week, following a legal battle over how much the Constitution shields lawmakers and their aides, according to people familiar with the investigation."
Michael Shear & Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times: "When President Obama meets this week with Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan's new president, he will finally be sitting across from an Afghan leader who is not brooding, agitated, suspicious or openly belligerent toward his American allies."
Ben Brody of Bloomberg Politics: "If the government rejects a Confederate flag license plate, does that violate the First Amendment? What about one taking a strong stand on abortion, or something even more controversial? Those are questions that Supreme Court justices will take up on Monday when they hear argument in Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, a case originating in Texas that will test whether it is the government or drivers who are 'speaking' on specialty license plates -- and what either might be allowed to say.... Texas -- which does celebrate an annual Confederate Heroes Day -- asserted in a case brief that it 'is fully within its rights to exclude swastikas, sacrilege, and overt racism from state-issued license plates 14 that bear the State's name and imprimatur.'" ...
... CW: Seems to me that any racist boob has a First Amendment right to fly the Stars & Bars, but s/he shouldn't be able to force a government entity to tacitly sanction it by printing it up on official items. We'll see what the Supremes say. In addition, one wonders if a state has the constitutional right to emblazon officials items with the flags of "foreign" countries. ...
... Robert Barnes of the Washington Post has more on the suit. Adam Liptak of the New York Times on Texas's decision to disallow the plates.
Paul Krugman: "Unfortunately, economic discourse in Britain is dominated by a misleading fixation on budget deficits. Worse, this bogus narrative has infected supposedly objective reporting; media organizations routinely present as fact propositions that are contentious if not just plain wrong.... Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University has dubbed this narrative 'mediamacro.'... An election [-- coming up in six weeks --] that should be about real problems will, all too likely, be dominated by mediamacro fantasies."
Coffee, Black, Please. Margaret Hartmann of New York: "As of today, Starbucks employees will no longer be writing '#RaceTogether' on cups, so it looks like you've missed your opportunity to end racism by harassing your local barista." Apparently they have some other great ideas to end racism in the U.S. Maybe you can come up with some suggestions. Maybe baristas could wear T-shirts that read, "You might be a racist if you ____(various)____. For example: ... "want a Confederate license plate so much you took it to the Supreme Court."
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Today, the New York Times published an article about Hillary Clinton's e-mails which in all likelihood is based solely on Republican sources. And a Fox "News" host called them out on it. (Via Evan McMurry of Mediaite) ...
The emails have not been made public, and The New York Times was not permitted to review them. But four senior government officials offered descriptions of some of the key messages, on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information. -- Michael Schmidt, New York Times
Can't the NY Times do better than this? No named sources and they didn't see the emails themselves and we are suppose to accept this as the facts?... This is what is wrong with journalism -- American people are fed what amounts to as gossip and the NYT is happy to feed it. And other journalists as they read this? Do they call the NYT out? nope, because for the most part this is so common no one sees it as a problem and / or they do it themselves. Anonymous sources should be used rarely, not routinely.... -- Greta Van Susteren of Fox "News"
Presidential Race
Boston Globe Editors: "Democrats would be making a big mistake if they let Hillary Clinton coast to the presidential nomination without real opposition, and, as a national leader, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren can make sure that doesn't happen. While Warren has repeatedly vowed that she won't run for president herself, she ought to reconsider. And if Warren sticks to her refusal, she should make it her responsibility to help recruit candidates to provide voters with a vigorous debate on her signature cause, reducing income inequality, over the next year." ...
... John Wagner of the Washington Post: "As [former Maryland Gov. Martin] O'Malley positions himself to challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, he is competing for support not only with the former first lady and secretary of state but with [Elizabeth] Warren, a onetime Harvard law professor whose devotees haven't given up on a White House bid despite her repeated pledges that she is not running. For O'Malley, the advantage of wooing Warren supporters was clear as he spoke to big and small crowds on his first visit to Iowa this year: They are among the most energized Democrats, and they are hungry for an alternative to the more centrist Clinton. What was less clear is whether O'Malley, who barely registers in most polls, will become their natural fallback if Warren stays out."
Anne Applebaum in Slate: "There were a number of odd things about the Hillary Clinton email debate, but to me this was the oddest: the widespread conviction that the secretary of state's communications personal or otherwise -- would have been 'safe' in the hands of the State Department." Besides the spectacular leaks by Chelsea Manning & Ed Snowden, "Last week, even while Clinton was defending her decision to delete her email, the State Department was quietly shutting down its servers in an attempt to clean them, once and for all, of the Russian malware that has plagued the whole system for months."
Katie Zezima & Robert Costa of the Washington Post: "Hours ahead of an expected Monday morning announcement at Liberty University, Ted Cruz told supporters just after midnight that he was launching a White House bid. 'I'm running for president, and I hope to earn your support!' he tweeted." ...
... Hey, you can watch Ted's Biggest Moment live! I'll pass. (Somebody was singing God music as I linked this.) ...
... Fred Barbash of the Washington Post lays out a number of reasons why Liberty "University" is the perfect venue for Cruz's announcement & March 23 the perfect day to do it. ...
... CW: An excellent piece, Fred, but Twitter -- the repository of millions of brief, trivial banalities -- is a good place, too. ...
... Charles Pierce is pretty pumped about Cruz's big announcement: "Ted Cruz is an extremist fanatic. He represents politics and a vision of government that was out of date in 1860. He is connected, rhetorically for the most part, to the darkest manifestations of the American political Id. And he combines that with a kind of unendurable self-righteousness that has alienated even the other extremist fanatics in the conservative leadership elite. From an early age, Cruz has been taught that he is the hidden golden child of a fundamentalist America redemption.... The 2016 election has begun. The bar is set where you need a metal detector to find it." ...
(CW Note: I see where Fox "News"'s Chris Wallace "grilled" CIA Director John Brennan on why the Obama administration refused to call ISIS "Islamic extremists." So why is it left to Charles Pierce & Akhilleus to call Ted Cruz [or Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee, etc.] an "extremist fanatic"? Or, if you like, "extremist Christian fanatic.") ...
I just came back from New Hampshire where there's snow and ice everywhere. -- Ted Cruz, citing conclusive proof that climate change is not happening ...
... David Cohen of Politico: "California Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday called Sen. Ted Cruz not qualified to be president, citing what he called his ignorance on climate change. Brown, a Democrat, was appearing on NBC's 'Meet the Press' to discuss California's severe drought. His appearance coincided with news that Cruz, a Texas Republican, will announce his candidacy for president Monday at Liberty University in Virginia. 'That man betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of the existing scientific data. It's shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office,' Brown said after host Chuck Todd had played him a clip of a Cruz interview." CW: But, Jerry, it's snowing in New Hampshire! ...
... Andy Borowitz: "A disturbed Canadian man wants to try to get into the White House, according to reports. The man, who was born in Calgary before drifting to Texas, has been spotted in Washington, D.C. in recent years exhibiting erratic behavior, sources said.... Despite a record of ... bizarre episodes and unhinged utterances, observers expressed little concern about his plans to get into the White House, calling them 'delusional.'" CW: When I searched for an image of Cruz looking "disturbed," I had a lot of choice.
Charles Blow: Louisiana Gov. Bobby "Jindal has gone from being one of the most popular governors in the country to one of the least popular.... And in a desperate attempt at relevancy -- and press -- he has lately been sliding further into Islamic hysteria."
Senate Race
Marc Caputo of Politico: "Florida Rep. Patrick Murphy formally announced his campaign for Senate on Monday, saying he's ready to fight for the highly competitive seat regardless of whether or not Marco Rubio runs for reelection.... The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid have both signaled they support Murphy."
Beyond the Beltway
Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "A judge in Wisconsin struck down on Friday a state law that requires doctors performing abortions to secure admission privileges to nearby hospitals, temporarily blocking it. U.S. District Judge William Conley ruled that the measure, signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker (R) in July of 2013, violated the 14th amendment. 'The marginal benefit to women's health of requiring hospital admitting privileges, if any, is substantially outweighed by the burden this requirement will have on women's health outcomes due to restricted access to abortions in Wisconsin,' Conley wrote.... A spokesperson for Walker promised to appeal the decision."
News Ledes
Politico: "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has secured the requisite majority of parliamentary members to form a government.... Israeli President Reuven Rivlin continues to meet with factions Monday, with an announcement tasking Netanyahu to form his government expected later in the day. Representatives from Kulanu -- a crucial centrist swing party -- met with Rivlin to recommend that the Likud party's Netanyahu be tasked with forming a new government, giving the current prime minister the absolute majority of 61 votes in his favor."
Guardian: "The governor of a southern Japanese island, home to tens of thousands of American troops, has triggered a potentially bitter confrontation with Tokyo and Washington after he ordered a halt to the construction of a controversial US marine base. Takeshi Onaga, who was elected governor of Okinawa last December on the back of vowing to block construction of the base, instructed Japan's defence ministry to suspend work at the site after local officials found builders had damaged coral reefs when they laid concrete blocks to help conduct underwater boring surveys."
New York Times: "The evacuation of 125 United States Special Operations advisers from Yemen in the past two days is the latest blow to the Obama administration's counterterrorism campaign, which is already struggling with significant setbacks in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the volatile region, American officials said Sunday."
Guardian: "Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, who led the city-state for more than three decades, has died aged 91. Lee's son and current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, announced the news in the early hours of Monday morning local time, prompting a flurry of tributes from world leaders."
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Reader Comments (18)
It's frustrating that it is impossible to determine if a narcissistic asshole like Cruz really believes there is no climate change or just lies. My best guess he believes it because it makes him feel so special.
And BTW, this winter is the warmest on record. That of course is the entire planet, not NH (or NJ!). It's interesting that the term 'polar vortex' is now a daily part of the weather report.
See Juan Cole's Translation from thr Vulcan of Obama's interview with Huffington Post on Saturday
Just thought you'd like to know what your $500 per Israeli in US foreign aid is supporting, The article is from Ha'Aretz but is firewalled so copy and paste the following into your browser to read the piece from other sources.
The army closed a mess hall to women and barred a female officer from entering when new recruits of the ultra-Orthodox Nahal battalion were having lunch, the Israel Defense Forces said.
The video depicting McCain's hot headed temper is quite something. So, the irony is that this man who loses control time and again now has the chutzpah to criticize Obama whose ability to keep his fury under wraps is well known. Does he know that Pro-Likud phone banks reminded voters that Netanyahu's opponents had the support of "Hussein Obama." Does he know that Sheldon Adelson pays for a right-wing paper in Israel that gins up whatever Bibi wants? Will anyone put their verbal finger on McCain and press him on these issues and chide him for his remark? We wait in anticipation.
Perhaps the Palestinians can now take their campaign for statehood to the UN once more where they may not face a reflexive veto from the US. My fingers are crossed but one is yearning to poke a certain senator in the chest good and hard.
@Dave Feldman: Apparently the no-girls-allowed policy is a result of this: Guardian (March 12, 2014): "Israeli lawmakers passed a contentious law on Wednesday meant to draft ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military – the culmination of a drive for reforms that has resulted in mass protests by the religious community in Israel and beyond."
Marie
Religion provides such special benefits. You have an excuse to hate and kill, take over territory that belongs to others and an excuse to have others do the dirty work for you (Israel passes law to conscript ultra-Orthodox Jews into military). But the other part was displayed nationally in America yesterday with the news coverage of the funeral of the seven ultra-orthodox children who tragically died in a fire in Brooklyn. The photos show thousands of people at the funeral. They were all men. (yes there probably were women but they were not allowed anywhere need the caskets.)
Re:Time changes but not man, Shakepiere's villain has been buried anew.
I have read "RIII" was a political hack job by our language's best hack. But tell me the words that follow don't strike true for some of today's political players?
“But then I sigh, with a piece of Scripture
Tell them that God bids us to do evil for good;
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stolen out of Holy Writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III
Rest in peace, old bones, the flesh of life has fallen away,
Good or evil, the world joins you some day.
JJG,
The Bard's words do indeed ring true when applied to too many of our current proponents of "naked villany".
The difference, of course, is that Shakespeare's villains were, at least, interesting. Our contemporary would be Richard the Thirds are too stupid and predictable to carry even a five minute middle school entr'acte, never mind a Shakespearean history play.
Speaking of which, Marvin has a point about "narcissistic asshole" Cruz and his brothers in ignorance soon to join him on the GOP Clown Express.
Cruz has zero legislative accomplishments. Zero. Perhaps for most recently minted congress critters this isn't a terrible thing, but if you're putting yourself out there as the guy to run things it is. Especially if what laws you have proposed make Howdy Doody look like a desirable alternative.
I've read through the bills Cruz has put forward since he's been in the senate (so you don't have to...). Not a single one has become law. Not a one. But the reading is illuminating. Plenty of bills that seem to think the UN is a hotbed of terrorists waiting to murder us in our beds. Bills instructing the Sec'y of State of pay up to $5M for any information about terrorists, Benghazi, etc. Bills against gay people, bills to make it harder to vote, another bill on Benghazi, bills that do things that are already law, bills that support the Constitution, bills that support writing bills. In other words, stupid stuff. Really stupid. Pandering to the base of idiots or reinforcing how much he loves 'merica and hates anyone he doesn't think loves 'merica just like he does.
Not a single legislative achievement. Just posturing. No grand vision. Nothing to make life better for anyone, no ideas about improving the economy or employment or, god forbid, the environment (oh, a bunch of resolutions about how important it is to give Big Energy carte blanche, because freedom). Cruz's legislative portfolio doesn't even rise to the level of dilettante. He isn't even an amateur. He's a fraud. He's running on name recognition alone. He's the Kim Kardashian of politics. The only difference is, he hasn't shown everyone his ass, thank god, although that's probably not beyond him.
He has shut down the government. That's all he's done. And even at that, he blamed other people when the bad reviews started coming in. Almost all the rest of his notoriety has come from a blizzard of lies and his non-stop yapping, like an annoying, yippy little dog who can't find his chew toy.
It almost doesn't matter whether he believes his own bullshit or not, but the fact that he seems to exist in an alternative universe makes him a dangerous person.
Just think, for a second, what it would take for an ostensibly smart person (Harvard grads are collectively shaking their heads) to not only ignore facts, but to make up your own and try to pass them off as truth. Either it's a complete con job, or the person in question has suffered some kind of psychotic break. Is this really the guy you want controlling the nuclear codes? We've denied AngryTantrum Man McCain access to those codes (which has made him even angrier) but now we have the possibility of someone who is either a flimflam man or a dimwit, or both (and I don't mean just Cruz--which passenger on the GOP Clown Express could not, truthfully, be described this way?) able to start a war on a whim, like the last Republican president.
Naked villany, indeed.
I'm really trying hard not to start feeling too verklempt over the Hillary '16 road show.
Her tendencies toward secrecy, toward control, and the constant anesthetic haze of Clinton solipsism that discounts anyone ever finding out stuff you don't want them to know, do not fill me with sanguinity.
She really does need some opposition, and I don't mean a Chump of the Month (those old enough to recall Muhammad Ali's glory years remember the chumps Ali feasted on while waiting for matches with guys like Joe Frazier and Ken Norton). She needs some serious competition. If she reels off primary after primary with no one to test her, to keep her chops up, she could be caught off guard in the big one either by whichever of the clowns survive the bloodletting on the right, and/or some unexpected revelation that can be made to look like treason. And that could be a traffic cam showing her running a red light in front of the Pentagon.
Decades of bad blood and hatred on the right and in the media, just waiting to resurface in all their vicious vainglory, won't make things any easier. The media won't bother to follow up on Ted Cruz's denial of climate change (because there's snow in New Hampshire in March), but they'll run barefoot over broken glass if they think there's another Clinton Gotcha out there somewhere.
Where's the Advil?
Moreover, where the hell is the Democratic Party?
It appears that one of the most closed (until very recently), secretive, xenophobic and self absorbed nations in the world, historically given to self-serving pronouncements designed to shield itself from inconvenient truths, is far more advanced in its thinking about climate change than wingers in this country.
Communist China has, through their top weather official Zheng Guoguang, chief of the country’s meteorological administration, issued some pretty desperate sounding statements about the need to address climate change, and not in 20 or 30 years after 8,000 more studies (per the GOP), but right now, today.
This is a textbook example of a paradigm shift and of facts prevailing over ideology.
But not for American wingnuts.
So Red China can look at the facts and decide it's time to act, but Confederate "leaders" in this country are throwing snowballs around the senate chamber to "prove" global warming is a hoax and offering ludicrous assertions about ice in New Hampshire as proof of how cold it is, on the tail end of the warmest winter, worldwide, on record (as Marvin notes in an earlier post), 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, and the warmest since global temperatures have been recorded beginning in 1880.
Aristophanes wasn't even half right.
One more thought on the Cruz Missile launched today in Virginia. Oh yeah, Virginia, not Texas (or Calgary or even Cuba).
Cruz launched his missile of brainless extremism into America from a silo at the home of an historic bigot and Christianist idiot, Jerry Falwell. You 'member ol' Jerry, right? He's the guy who said gays deserved to die from AIDS, who said feminists hate men, who questioned Martin Luther King's patriotism and sincerity, who announced that public schools were an abomination and that all schools would eventually be run by fundamentalist Christians, who believed that global warming was a liberal plot to destroy America, and who stated (spoiler alert for all you newly minted wingnut Likud lovers) that the antichrist coming to destroy the world would be a Jew.
Yeah, that Jerry Falwell.
According to the Daily Cholera, Cruz's reception at Falwell's Liberty University (doncha just love those wingnut names? If they were to start a brand of peanut butter it would have to be named "Blood of the Tyrants Peanut Butter" or maybe "Patriot Butter") was quite a thing to see (I couldn't stomach it), even if, oops, attendance was mandatory for all students. When you have to start ordering people to cheer for you, things are not off to the best start, but look at Reagan. He got his start in one of the KKK capitols of the deep south. It's a must for Confederates if you want to prove how deeply you can hate.
Interestingly, Fox, who is never wrong, announced that Cruz would be introduced by the BB (Big Bigot) himself, Jerry Falwell. Just a teensy problem there....BB has been DOA since 2007. A mere technicality!
I'm sure there are plenty of bigots, haters, and frauds hanging around BB University to make sure Cruz's campaign will carry that stench to its bitter, fact-free, bug-eyed zealot's end.
@AK, I think they froze Jerry Falwell and he will be doing the intro for Cruz today. Power point being; "Look at Jerry and tell me there's global warming! I think not."
On RIII, when I'm thinking mad he is my favorite Shakespiereian villian. When I'm drinking mad I got to go with MacBeth. Both are more interesting than any of the wingnuts planning to run for office on the confederate side.
The Dems, god love 'em, need to worry more about All-Thumbs Hillary than they do about the Confederate Clown Car. Primarily because they might be able to do something about the former but not the latter. That, and whining and bitching about Republican idiocy is not (and never will be) a road to victory.
Yes, there is still ice and snow in New Hampshire. At 8 this morning, the wind chill was 1 degree. Enough already. But I think I preferred snowbanks that towered over me to the influx of Republicans from away who, once they announce their intention to run for the highest office in the land, will practically be summer residents. I used to enjoy the primary season in New Hampshire. Meeting Senator Paul Simon in a bar, fresh from his appearance on Saturday Night Live (yes, I'm going back a few years). John McCain, before he went nuts, speaking at the local community center in my town. Not meeting a friend at a cafe in Portsmouth because Michelle Obama was in there and there wasn't room to squeeze one more person in. Shaking Bill Clinton's hand on the street in Exeter and being amazed at the sensation of all that energy being turned directly on me for just a few seconds. Now, my Democratic friends and I look at each other in misery. All these nuts wandering around and no Democratic candidates for us to go listen to, assess, cheer. We (talking about my friends, not the state as a whole) all looked over Obama and Hillary very thoroughly in 2008; most of us went with Obama. I haven't spoken with anyone yet who is enthusiastic about Hillary. Resigned would be a better description. We're all so sick of being housebound and so tired already of the Republicans sucking all the air out of the room, I imagine viable Democratic candidates would get a hearty welcome.
As for global warming, send some up here, please. I've had enough of climate change for now.
It's Iago, my friend, Iago. He professes his love of country while destroying it.
The John Oliver clip brought to mind a recent article about day fines used elsewhere in the world, primarily Scandinavia (those commies), as well as being tried in the U.S. It's an interesting concept based on ones ability to pay according to their income - the bigger the income, the bigger the fine.
Left off a slash when entering the link on my remote.
This one should work for the article in The Atlantic about day fines.
The NYT Editorial Board does a good job of filleting Tailgunner Ted's campaign kickoff speech:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/opinion/imagine-president-ted-cruz.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad
I really appreciated the piece by John Oliver linked above. It is truly hard to see the difference between the activities Oliver describes and debtor's prison.
@Elizabeth: what a great job recounting your experiences with primaries in N.H. I never got to shake Bill Clinton's hand, but I can tell you that even from my vantage point sitting in the front at a fundraising luncheon the man was electrifying. And I can entirely relate to your reaction to Hilary, unfortunately.