The Commentariat -- March 29, 2014
Internal links removed.
Reuters: "Russian president Vladimir Putin called Barack Obama on Friday to discuss a US diplomatic proposal for Ukraine and the US president told Putin that Russia must pull back its troops and not move deeper into Ukraine, the White House said. It was believed to have been the first direct conversation between Obama and Putin since the US and its European allies began imposing sanctions on Putin's inner circle and threatened to penalise key sectors of Russia's economy." ...
... ** Update: Peter Baker, et al., of the New York Times: "President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia reached out to President Obama on Friday to discuss ideas about how to peacefully resolve the international standoff over Ukraine, a surprise move by Moscow to pull back from the brink of an escalated confrontation that has put Europe and much of the world on edge. After weeks of provocative moves punctuated by a menacing buildup of troops on Ukraine's border, Mr. Putin's unexpected telephone call to Mr. Obama offered a hint of a possible settlement. The two leaders agreed to have their top diplomats meet to discuss concrete proposals for defusing the crisis that has generated the most serious clash between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War."
Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "President Obama assured the Saudi king Friday that the United States is not pursuing naively a negotiated resolution to Iran's nuclear program, and he discussed ways of strengthening Syria's moderate rebel forces now being battered by extremist groups inside the movement and by the Syrian military. Obama and King Abdullah, along with senior advisers, spoke for two hours at the royal desert compound outside this desert capital, his last stop of a four-nation visit to Europe and the Middle East."
Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian: "With minimal reference to Edward Snowden..., General Keith Alexander ended his NSA directorship and his 39-year army career on Friday.... But Alexander's run at the NSA will be forever linked to the revelations of its global surveillance dragnets." ...
... Aw, shucks. Shouldn't Alexander's career be forever linked to this? --
Keith Alexander's Hollywood-designed Information Dominance Center, modelled after Star Trek's Starship Enterprise.
Vice President Biden delivered this week's presidential address:
Alec MacGillis of the New Republic: "So: right now, we have passed a law meant to expand coverage to all Americans, and yet it does not reach the poorest of our fellow citizens in nearly half the states in the country. That, on its face, is a major policy failure. No one really wanted to say this during the law's drafting, but its underlying goal was to get coverage to people in red states where there was no local political will to address the problem. CW: An excellent piece. Thanks to P. D. Pepe for the link.
Mary Flaherty & Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post: "Maryland officials are set to replace the state's online health-insurance exchange with technology from Connecticut's insurance marketplace..., an acknowledgment that a system that has cost at least $125.5 million is broken beyond repair."
Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post: "The past couple of weeks have marked a turning point in American ugliness as the mob has turned its full fury on first lady Michelle Obama. From criticism of her trip to China to a recent 'tell-all' by former White House assistant press secretary Reid Cherlin in the New Republic about Obama's allegedly tyrannical behavior, the gloves have been removed."
AP: "General Motors is boosting by 971,000 the number of small cars being recalled worldwide for a defective ignition switch, saying cars from the model years 2008-2011 may have gotten the part as a replacement.... Of the cars being added to the recall, 824,000 were sold in the U.S."
The Guardian: "David Cameron has hailed the first same-sex marriages in England and Wales as sending a 'powerful message' about equality in Britain." ...
... Griff Witte of the Washington Post: "With the stroke of midnight, same-sex couples were, for the first time, permitted to marry in England and Wales, and many did in middle-of-the-night celebrations. The weddings united same-sex partners who have for a decade been allowed to form civil partnerships, but until now have been prohibited from tying the knot. The change is largely being taken in stride, with little rancor from opponents and a sense from supporters that same-sex marriage was long overdue."
Jonathan Chait on the question of whether or not there is such a thing as "a culture of poverty."
New Jersey News
** Salvador Rizzo of the Star-Ledger: "Gov. Chris Christie announced today that David Samson, whose chairmanship of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has come under fire in recent months, has resigned. Samson, a close ally of Christie and a former attorney general of New Jersey, is reportedly under investigation by the U.S. Attorney of New Jersey in the face of accusations that his law firm, Wolff & Samson, had enriched itself by lobbying for companies with business before the Port Authority." The New York Times story, by Mark Santora, is here. ...
... As Rachel Maddow pointed out some while back, "the annual budget for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is bigger than the entire budgets of 9 states." (CW: I don't think that's 9 states combined.)
New York Times Editors: "The only thing wrong with the resignation announcement on Friday of David Samson, Gov. Chris Christie's top appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was that it took so long."
Jason Grant of the Star-Ledger: Michael Critchley, "the lawyer for Bridget Anne Kelly, fired back today against allegations that largely blamed her for the George Washington Bridge lane closings, blasting the report commissioned by Gov. Chris Christie's office as containing 'venomous, gratuitous, and inappropriate sexist remarks.'" The Bergen Record report, by Michael Phillis, is here.
Gail Collins seems a tad unimpressed with Christie's complete exoneration & his pomposity & self-righteousness.
Kate Dries of Jezebel: It's all Bridget Kelly's fault because she's an emotional, incompetent girl & Bill Stepien dumped her or something. Dries lays out the "evidence" of Kelly's instability that for some unknown reason caused her to think dumping on Fort Lee drivers would make everything all better. ...
... CW: C'mon, people. No wonder those high-priced lawyers can't figure out the motivation for the bridge closings: the person who caused them is a hysterical female prone to acting out in bizarre ways. It's impossible to tell what such whack-jobs will do for no apparent reason.
Alec MacGillis of the New Republic picks out & analyzes some tidbits from the report. Interesting.
Elsewhere Beyond the Beltway
Zack Ford of Think Progress: "Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday that the 322 same-sex marriages that took place on Saturday in Michigan will be recognized by the federal government. A federal judge had ruled that Michigan's ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional but had not stayed his ruling, so the marriages took place during the window when the amendment was unenforceable."
Josh Israel of Think Progress: "Once again, Ken Dentzer, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) handpicked Secretary of State, has unsuccessfully attempted to mount a massive purge of Florida';s voter rolls. And once again, he has been forced to abandon this effort due to his lack of an accurate list of who is and is not eligible to vote. In a memo, Dentzer told the state's local election supervisors that the purge would be postponed until 2015."
Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times: "Reeling from embarrassing bribery, corruption and voter fraud scandals, the [California] state Senate took the unprecedented action Friday of voting to suspend three Democratic lawmakers from office pending the resolution of criminal charges against them. The paid suspensions of Sens. Leland Yee, Ronald S. Calderon and Roderick Wright all but guarantee Democrats will not regain their supermajority in the Senate this session. And the controversies are expected to become anti-incumbent campaign fodder in other districts in this year's elections. The bipartisan 28-1 vote came two days after Yee was arrested in his hometown of San Francisco and charged by federal authorities with conspiracy to traffic in firearms without a license and accepting campaign funds in exchange for political favors." ...
... Joe Coscarelli of New York: "After a federal indictment came down against him this week, [Leland] Yee instantly became one of the most insane political characters in recent memory, accused by the FBI of everything from taking donations in exchange for favors to palling around with a Chinatown gangster named Shrimp Boy and attempting to smuggle guns. Yee, a Democrat, just happens to be a vocal anti-gun and video-game-violence crusader."
News Ledes
Los Angeles Times: "More than 100 aftershocks have been reported since a magnitude 5.1 earthquake rattled Southern California on Friday night. Most of the aftershocks have been small, but some were strong enough to be felt in the areas around the epicenter in northwestern Orange County. Meanwhile, officials surveyed the damage, which for the most part was considered minor."
Los Angeles Times: "A Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft searching the South Indian Ocean reported Saturday seeing 'three suspicious objects' that could be debris from the long-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The announcement came as China stepped into a more proactive role in the frustrating 3-week-old search for the plane. Beijing has been publicly critical of Malaysia's efforts to find the Boeing 777, which disappeared March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Out of 227 passengers, 153 were Chinese."
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Reader Comments (11)
Good for Kathleen Parker to come to the first lady's aid but for her to categorize Reid Cherlin's piece as a "Tell all" which contains a description of Michelle as "tyrannical" is simply not true. No where in the piece does he use that word nor does one get the sense that she fits that description. I read the piece yesterday and came away with a first lady that maps out her role pretty thoroughly and expects her staff to make this happen. And it's the staff that seems to be in flux––this paragraph, for me, says it all:
"...time with Mrs. Obama was coveted as a badge of insiderdom. “Everyone sort of stands at attention in a different way, or they try to make the joke, or they try to be the one noticed, or they try to get the smile,” says a former employee. “And that’s in part a yearning for acknowledgment that you’re part of this, something bigger, and that she knows who you are.” Another former employee put it more bluntly: “They don’t want to work for her; they want to be friends with her.”
And talking about tyrannical: Chris Hayes had a do-to the other night with a Jennifer Stefano of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch bro's backed group. She screeched, she accused Hayes of not knowing the facts, she was practically foaming at the mouth. I wanted to deck her. Alex MacGillis mentions this tirade in piece below where he posits that the ACA will be a failure until Medicaid expands in the red states:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117194/obamacare-will-be-failure-until-medicaid-expands-red-states
"the person who caused them is a hysterical female prone to acting out in bizarre ways. It's impossible to tell what such whack-jobs will do for no apparent reason." Marie.
I'm not one to point out writing or composition errors but isn't "hysterical" redundant?
My insider information says that post dumping Ms. Kelly wanted to close the Lincoln Tunnel but Governor Crispy Creame overruled saying, "That's too damn obvious."
@JJG: It is true that the root of "hysterical" is the Greek word for uterus, & the behavior associated with "hysteria" has traditionally been associated with female mental disorders (long believed to be caused by a wandering uterus or something), & -- sometimes -- female orgasm. In the 19th century, this "disease" was often called "female hysteria."
The word "hysteria" now, however, is applied to people of both sexes as well as to other stuff, and it is not gender-specific. Ergo, "That joke was hysterical." "Fear of ObamaCare has caused mass hysteria." It is still most often used, often as a put-down, to describe women, as in "She's just an hysterical woman." One of course could say, "she's just an hysteric," but in common usage, "hysterical female" or "hysterical woman" is quite acceptable.
Marie
@Marie; Thanks for the classical clarification. My father would grumble that he lived with six hysterics, which covered his wife and five daughters; the three boys were just simpleminded.
The "Wandering Uterus" has to be in the top five names for a female punk band.
"Tonight; opening for the Traveling Testicles, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, cats and dogs; let's give a big hand and a warm Cleveland welcome to Wandering Uterus!"
Nice to see K. Parker come to the defense of another "hysteric" (I just learned something there--thanks), even one from the D tribe, but I'd take her support more seriously if she were not the same columnist who last week when writing about the Hobby Lobby nonsense agreed that "corporations are people...and people are corporation." If not hysteric(al), Parker is often deluded.
On the ACA front, a response by my number-loving son to yesterday's NYTimes piece; also relevant, I think, to the New Republic article. BTW, I found some of the comments that followed the NR article as informative as the article itself.
"An odd article, he wrote, "Assessing it (is) a complex task...The evidence remains largely anecdotal; for every satisfied supporter, it seems, there is a disgruntled opponent."
Well, if you use anecdotal evidence, based on "supporters" and "opponents," that's true. It's kind of like saying "we have a politically divided country," (is that news?) but what if you use numbers (aka. "nonanecdotal evidence")? Some sample numbers: 1. WA state (which keeps track of enrollments off the "exchange") looks to gain a net of 470,000 insured (http://oic.wa.gov/about-oic/news-media/news-releases/2014/2-13-2014.html, then updated based on 3/24/14 numbers from www.wahbexchange.org ) 2. Gallup survey shows rapid decline in uninsured rate (http://www.gallup.com/poll/167798/uninsured-rate-continues-fall.aspx) since law enacted. 3. Or, go to obamacaresignups.net and see what actual compilation looks like (suggests several million net gain in insured for US)
This quote also shows an odd bias toward political (rather than policy-based) reporting “It’s been a big disappointment,” she said. “A lot of us voted for President Obama because we thought this was going to be a good thing.”...The policy reality is that what she voted for she would have gotten if her state government hadn't rejected the Medicaid expansion; other than showing her misinformation about who "disappointed" her (?due to media coverage not unlike this article), what else is the value of this quote? "
Of course, in all the discussion of the ACA I detect more instances of "Right" and "Left" brains (see yesterday's comments) at work. There's a lot of I really don't want to know the facts at work here, too.
@PD Watched the clip of the entire Chris Hayes/DiStefano jaw-dropping performance the other day. Whoooa!
All I could think was that the Botox craze has really, really gone too far! Watch it again, if you can stand it—(and pity the poor lip-reader), because when she lost it, DiStefano's mouth and words didn't appear to move in synch. At first thought something was wrong on the monitor—buffering, buffering... but 'twas merely a harridan-in-full hysterical mode!
Bet 'Americans for Prosperity' wish they had a digital age Rosemary Woods to erase this rant.
The long, torturous search for Flight MH370 has brought home something I had not fully appreciated before: The world's oceans are full of floating junk. I now wonder if there are any satellite photos that don't show large blue or green floating objects.
One more addition to the discussion of hysterics and to that cool band of "The Wandering Uterus." We do have that major surgical procedure known as the hysterectomy (removal of all or part of the uterus and sometimes the tubes and the ovaries––a clean sweep as it were). The word comes from the Greek "hustera" meaning womb plus ectomy from the Greek "Ektomé (excision) from "ek" (out) plus "temnein (to cut). Class dismissed–––now on to the club to hear the Traveling Testicles known for their big brass sounds and let's all have a ball!
Dear Bridget: This is where you get to end this whole bridge thing. Let's be honest, Bridget, you are, as Gail Collins said, "clearly a person of tremendously awful judgment" and we sincerely hope you never get another job anywhere near the public interest. But, that's another topic, another day. We've all heard and read the investigation report released by Christie. We assume you have as well. And if, Bridget, after being portrayed in the report in that special sleazy way male lawyers like to portray all women they wish to eviscerate, you are not personally ready to bury this lying fatass bully with the truth, then consider doing it for the rest of us who've ever had to endure being portrayed in public as unstable emotional wrecks incapable of a coherent thought or action beyond what a man might think of her. Do it, girl. They handed you the hammer. Now nail this coward to the toll booth on that bridge.
@Nancy: I'm not female, but I've always been upset by such male behavior. It just isn't fair, since I've worked for and with
males who exhibited "hysterical" behavior; I'd guess that most have.