The Commentariat -- May 11, 2012
My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on "The Essential Mitt Romney." The NYTX front page is here.
Today Paul Krugman directly attacks David Brooks' most recent column. Krugman doesn't mention Brooks by name, so see if you can spot the direct refutation. "... claims that our problems are deep and structural offer an excuse for not acting, for doing nothing to alleviate the plight of the unemployed.... Inventing reasons not to do anything about current unemployment isn’t just cruel and wasteful, it's bad long-run policy, too." The last word: "David Brooks is off today."
Savvy Businessmen. Nelson Schwartz of the New York Times: "JPMorgan Chase's $2 billion trading loss, which was disclosed on Thursday, [see today's News Ledes] could give supporters of tighter industry regulation a huge new piece of ammunition as they fight a last-ditch battle with the banks over new federal rules that may redefine how banks do business. 'The enormous loss JPMorgan announced today is just the latest evidence that what banks call "hedges" are often risky bets that so-called "too big to fail" banks have no business making,'; said Senator Carl Levin...." ...
... Kevin Roose of the New York Times: "The news of JPMorgan Chase's estimated $2 billion loss stemming from a misguided hedging strategy in the bank's chief investment office has set off a spring-loaded schadenfreude cannon among the industry’s critics.... Since the shocking disclosure, [CEO Jamie] Dimon was flayed by industry analysts as well as media onlookers for having been a vocal opponent of the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul while at the same time overseeing risky trades that could hurt his bank's earnings."
Tim Egan remembers his mother. Perhaps he will cause you to remember yours. If she's still around, tell her something fulsome.
Ray Rivera & Sharon Otterman of the New York Times: "... in recent years, as allegations of child sexual abuse have shaken the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, victims' rights groups have expressed concern that [Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes] is not vigorously pursuing these cases because of his deep ties to the rabbis. Many of the rabbis consider sexual abuse accusations to be community matters best handled by rabbinical authorities, who often do not report their conclusions to the police." Guardian story here.
Peter Wallsten & Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "Some inconsistencies remain in Obama's stance [on gay marriage]. Though he thinks gays and lesbians should have the right to marry, he still says he views it as a states' rights issue at a time when many states are moving to tighten prohibitions on same-sex unions."
Presidential Race
Steve Kornacki of Salon: "At the very least, this makes Biden a major figure in what will go down as one of the Obama administration's signature moments, guaranteeing that his vice presidency will be remembered in history -- something that can't be said for many of his predecessors. But this also has the potential to generate newfound respect and appreciation for Biden among the younger, more culturally liberal party base, voters who until now have been conditioned to regard Biden as an almost comic figure -- the tone-deaf, gaffe-prone great-uncle of American politics."
NEW. Reader Bonnie has been catching up on some serious epistolary prose. ...
... Andy Borowitz reports on Mitt Romney's letter to the American people about his days as a merry prankster. The letter ends, "I hope when you vote in November, you won't judge me as the teenager who bullied one gay boy, but rather as the adult who fired thousands of people. Vote for me." ...
... Octogenarians Helen & Margaret correspond about Mitt's youthful hijinks. Helen doesn't think Mitt should be the one in three million people who becomes president. CW: Poor Helen! She seems unaware that it's Mitt's turn.
Felony bullying = Gang physically attacks a gay person.
Boyish hijinks = Romney-led gang physically attacks a gay person.
... See the Jason Horowitz WashPo story linked in yesterday's Commentariat. ...
... Emily Friedman, et al., of ABC News: Stu White, "one of Mitt Romney's closest friends and a high school classmate, has been asked by the Romney campaign to come out and offer 'supporting remarks' in defense of the candidate.... According to White, he knows of several other classmates that have also been approached by the campaign to counter the article.... One former classmate and old friend of Romney's -- who refused to be identified by name -- said there are 'a lot of guys' who went to Cranbrook who have 'really negative memories' of Romney's behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as 'like Lord of the Flies.' The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember it." ...
We were like a pack of dogs. This was bullying supreme. -- Phillip Maxwell, Friend of Mitt's ...
... David Muir of ABC News: "A high school classmate of presidential candidate Mitt Romney told ABC News today that he considers a particular prank the two pulled at Michigan's Cranbrook School to be 'assault and battery' and that he witnessed Romney hold the scissors to cut the hair of a student who was being physically pinned to the ground by several others." ...
... Benjy Sarlin of TPM: "Mitt Romney clashed with a state commission tasked with helping LGBT youth at risk for bullying and suicide throughout his term as Massachusetts governor over funding and its participation in a pride parade. He eventually abolished the group altogether."
... Kaia Mursi of Wonkette: "Mitt Romney is sorry if he hurt you when he went too far." ...
... ** Jamison Foser of Media Matters: "A clear, forceful statement of regret and denunciation of bullying could have been incredibly powerful -- a welcome and valuable contribution to ongoing efforts to reduce the kind of anti-gay bullying Romney once led.... Instead, Romney offers a perfunctory apology -- while laughing -- for 'hijinks and pranks' that 'might have gone too far.' ... Just yesterday, Romney indicated he still favors bullying of gays -- only now he prefers to use the law rather than a pair of scissors."
... Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs: "... there’s something especially troubling about this; it seems to reveal a privileged young man with no empathy at all for those who were different.... Perhaps even more disturbing: in this incident we see the special treatment granted to people like Romney. He suffered no consequences at all for his sadistic prank." CW: Romney was the governor's son. His victim later was permanently expelled when a student prefect caught him smoking a cigarette. ...
... Paul Waldman of the American Prospect: "Is there a correlation between the kind of cruel streak that makes you hold down a screaming, crying boy and cut off his hair, and the kind of cruel streak that makes you want to take away people's health insurance?" Waldman doesn't think so. Suppose Romney instead had stood up for the gay kid against other bullies. "Would that make it less abhorrent that he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or that he wants to cut social programs, or that he wants to cut protections for clean air and clean water, or that he thinks gay people should be second-class citizens? No. Whether he wants to do those things because deep down in his soul he's a cruel person and always has been, or because ... he believes in an ideology that is fundamentally cruel, doesn't matter a bit." ...
... Alec MacGillis of The New Republic thinks "the prep-school Mitt was an insecure figure, even a sort of misfit," & that explains "his oddly sensitive temperament." ...
... "The Content of His Character." Jonathan Chait of New York magazine revives a story of George W. Bush in 1965 -- the same year Romney & his gang attacked the gay student -- telling friends who made fun of a "queer" to "Shut up." "Why don't you try walking in his shoes for a while and see how it feels before you make a comment like that?" Bush said to his friends.
... AND Chait digs up exculpatory evidence: "... he also forcibly cut a dude's hair in college: 'At Stanford, he lured rival University of California students into a trap in which his buddies "shaved their heads and painted them red," according to a 1970 speech at Brigham Young University by his father, George Romney.' ... Maybe Romney didn't hate gays -- maybe he just hated hair. Or, other peoples' hair, anyway. Perhaps that is the deeper fixation: It is not enough for Romney to have perfect hair. Others must have terrible hair." ...
Right Wing World
Steve Benen: (For backstory, see yesterday's News Ledes.) "To offset the Pentagon cuts Republicans proposed but no longer support, the House GOP voted to find all of the savings by taking from programs that benefit struggling workers and families. Today's measure is nothing short of brutal, slashing food stamps, nearly eliminating job-training programs, eliminating health care subsidies, slashing the child tax credit, and taking school meals from 200,000 low-income children. And all of this would come on top of the spending cuts Democrats already agreed to as part of the same debt-ceiling deal. It's almost as if House Republicans want to collectively personify C. Montgomery Burns." ...
"GOP Leaves Debt Accord in the Dust." David Rogers of Politico has a good straight report on the bill.
Swiss Miss
May 9. Devin Henry of the Minn Post: "Michele Bachmann (R-Switzerland). Rep. Michele Bachmann lives in Stillwater, hails from Iowa and works in Washington, D.C. -- and as of March is a citizen of the country of Switzerland. Bachmann's spokeswoman confirmed that the third-term Republican and some of her family had became citizens of Switzerland." ...
... May 10. Devin Henry: "U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann intends to withdraw her dual citizenship in Switzerland, she said in a statement. Bachmann says she sent a letter to the Swiss consulate in Chicago asking for her citizenship to be withdrawn. She said she did so to make clear her loyalty to the United States." CW: Bachmann denies she is the model for the little Swiss girl who appears on the hour & bangs herself on the head on a brand of Swiss cuckoo clocks. Bachmann also has renounced Nestle's in favor of Hershey's chocolate, & she denies the voice on this recording is hers:
News Ledes
New York Times: "A judge in Virginia has cleared [J. Randolph Babbitt,] the former chief of the Federal Aviation Administration, of the drunken driving charges that cost him his job at the agency.
President Obama, in Nevada, spoke today on helping responsible homeowners:
Washington Post: "President Obama rolled into a modest hilltop neighborhood [in Reno, Nevada,] Friday to champion his administration's efforts to help underwater homeowners get back on their feet -- and to urge Congress to do more.... Obama announced a dramatic spike in the number of Americans who are taking advantage of federal programs that let them refinance their loans."
New York Times: In Greece, "Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza..., rejected calls to join a unity government, pushing Greece closer to new elections in a climate in which it is becoming increasingly difficult for any party to enforce Greece's debt deal with foreign creditors."
New York Times: "Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper subsidiary, testified in the so-called Leveson inquiry into press ethics on Friday, facing close scrutiny about her ties to Prime Minister David Cameron before and after he took office." The Guardian is liveblogging the hearing, including livestreaming video here. ...
... An updated Guardian story is here.
Reuters: "JPMorgan Chase & Co, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, said it suffered a trading loss of at least $2 billion from a failed hedging strategy, a shock disclosure that hit financial stocks and the reputation of the bank and its CEO, Jamie Dimon. For a bank viewed as a strong risk manager that went through the financial crisis without reporting a loss, the errors are embarrassing, especially given Dimon's public criticism of the so-called Volcker rule to ban proprietary trading by big banks." Guardian story here. ...
... New York Times Update: "Regulators are investigating potential civil violations surrounding the $2 billion loss that JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Thursday, raising further questions about the trading activities at the nation's biggest bank."
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Reader Comments (6)
Some thoughts on Romney's bully story: It's almost as if Horowitz contacted the White House letting them in on this journalistic gem and they said, wait until Obama comes out of his closet on the gay business and the next day publish your story––how perfect is that?
Private boarding schools are rife with ghoulish tales–-mostly from the British writers––wasn't it Prince Charles himself who told us how he hated Eton, had his head pushed into toilets more than once? In my own neighborhood here in Wallingford, CT. we have Choate, the school that helped educate some of our best and brightest including JFK who was infamous in his "pranks" although in his case they were more devilish than dirty. He and his buddies, known as "The Muckers" almost got expelled for their hi jinx. But nowhere do I recall reading about the kind of gay bashing, hair shaving kind of humiliation. It seems to me that Romney, having been scorned himself, felt justified––or needing retribution––in returning the scorn. The case of empathy here appears to be lacking not only back then, but now in his lack of connection to those in need. For all his wealth, for all his history, what we may have here is a man trying desperately to accomplish something his father was unable to do; the irony is that his father would have made a decent president.
I read somewhere about Groton, another New England boarding school, the one I think George H. Bush attended and I recall that sometimes it seemed as if the school's most successful graduates were those boys who suffered most from the Rector's insistence on obedience and conformity.
It’s morning again in Right Wing World. *stretcccchhhh* Jump out of bed, have my coffee, read the Drudge Report, Washington Times, Breitbart, get worked up over liberal whining about some dead baby or other that supposedly could have been saved if only Republicans in congress hadn’t cut spending. Hmmmph. Baby was probably not white and not Republican. Good riddance. Just taking up space in my world. Oh well, better get going. A long day of yanking food out of the mouths of other babies, shoving the elderly in wheelchairs down flights of stairs (OMG is that fun! The look on their faces is GREAT!), locking the doors to health clinics for the poor around the country, then off to write an article about how the economy can’t be expected to return to former greatness if we’re going to take care of people out of work and how the poor are that way because of a lack of morals (love that David Brooks!). Damn lazy hippies. Probably use that money for drugs. Just have to let things run their course. It’s not easy being right all the time. Now where are my diamond studded cuff links? I hope Gomez or whatever the hell his name is has done a good job washing the Bentley. I found a mote of dust on the back rear wheel well last week. Almost fired the little taco-head. Mitt’s right. That’s just too much fun! Oh, can’t forget that speech before the Daughters of American Bigots this afternoon. Better go online to and collect a few fag jokes to start off the proceedings. Get them in the right mood before I pull out the Bible and sic Jesus on those dirty homos.
Is this an exaggeration?
Unfortunately it isn’t. This is the world of Mitt Romney, David Brooks, Paul Ryan and (if I say “countless” I might have to shoot myself so I’ll restrict myself to) a toilet bowl full of other misanthropes.
This morning’s stories have a pretty clear pattern if you pay attention. First, it was exhilarating to see Krugman punk our Mister Brooks. Bobo must be peeing all over himself this morning. Does he really think he can go toe to toe with a Nobel economist with lies and pure BS?
Yes.
In other news Paul Ryan and his cronies on the Hill are also ready to wet their $5,000 suit pants. They tried an arrogant stunt back when they purposely stalled the debt crisis talks. Instead of working to solve the problem, they kicked it down the road with a little poison pill they were sure would get them everything they wanted. They never expected that Democrats wouldn’t go along with the GOP’s insincere plan to reduce the debt by cutting the Pentagon’s budget. It was a completely idiotic plan to begin with. They remind me of the guy in the cartoon who, sitting on a board suspended off the edge of a tall building, begins sawing away at that board, without realizing that he’s on the wrong side of the cut. Did they really think that they could bully the Democrats into going along with them just because they could trot out the “We’re the Defense Party and they're for Terrorists” gambit once again?
Naturally.
Finally, Rat Bastard Willard and his horde of evil advisors are whining about everyone picking on Mitt for something he doesn’t even remember. He just wants to get back to serious issues. So what if some gay kid got beat up. Who freakin’ cares? Oh, but just in case it did happen, he would have apologized, but in fact, he really isn’t apologizing for any such thing. Does he really think this is all going to go away?
Of course.
Why?
The MSM sucks. Royally. That’s why. If anyone besides Krugman picked up the economic crisis ball and ran it back down the throats of liars like Brooks, it would go a long way towards leveling a playing field that the media has helped tilt in the direction of the Republicans. Same thing with the Ryan budget plan. MSM organizations tout his genius and explain, helpfully, no doubt, that there are problems coming from both sides. Well, no, actually, there aren’t. All the problems in this instance have been caused by the Right. Ryan created his plan and his budget purely as instruments of ideology and then expected to have no qualms blaming Democrats for all the problems he and his fellow ideologues have caused. Hey they get away with that all the time so why should this time be any different? The media NEVER calls them on it.
Finally, Romney the Gay Bashing, Lying, Bullying Rat has always been gotten out of jams and last night NBC bent over backwards to help him with this one. In their “report” on the criminal assault perpetrated by Romney, Brian Williams obsequiously asked if any of us could possibly recall every little thing we did in high school. I mean, c’mon. Was this really that bad? Yes, Brian. It was. And Id think most normal people, or ones who aren't lying, would recall a criminal assault on another person that they had planned and carried out. And to help Rat Boy even further, this piece about Romney’s attack on a gay classmate was turned into an “all kids do silly things when they’re young” story by including a reference to President Obama’s memoirs recalling his drinking and drugging days. Another commenter in the piece blew the whole thing off as “boyish hijinks”. No big deal.
So no wonder perpetrators of hate, economic and physical assault, and other crimes on the Right think they can get away with it.
They almost always do. On one side we have the standard MSM outlets too afraid to call a thing by its real name. On the other, we have the Dominant Right-Wing Media Empire dedicated to calling it anything but and then putting the blame on those who try to tell the truth.
In other bad news it looks like Switzerland doesn’t want Michele Bachmann. Studies found that her presence in that country would drop the national IQ by 10 to 20 points. They’re neutral but they don’t want to be neutralized.
Damn.
PD,
Thanks for that reminder of all those tales of prep and boarding schools. It brought to mind one of my favorite essays, one by George Orwell, written as a recollection of the horror of St. Cyprian's the school he attended as a boy. One passage in particular seems as if it could have been written about rich, privileged bullies like Romney:
He describes life at St. Cyprian's as
"...a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly."
Some boys no doubt take those experiences and become better men for it. Romney could have been one of them. But there are so many indications that he has run the course of his life since prep school with the exact same sense of righteous privilege of the rich to dominate, bully, and humiliate those under them, "...getting the better of them in every way" as Orwell relates.
Once again, do we really want yet another spoiled, privileged, bullying rich kid in the Oval Office? We did that already. Twice. He turned out to be the dead-last worst president in the nation's history. Additional confirmation not necessary. Romney may believe that he deserves to be president, deserves to win, deserves to be in the position he's always held in life, that of the winner.
But as Clint Eastwood says in "The Unforgiven", before shooting Gene Hackman, "Deserves got nothin' to do with it."
Today's puzzle: Could the whole Cal "hair" thing be apocrypha delivered by a then-proud father?
How in the world could Mitt Romney, who I believe spent only his freshman year at Stanford, have gotten involved in an anti-Cal prank--termed at the time RF's or ratfucks, as I remember--when he had been on campus for only about five weeks? Frat rush was not until spring--it was the fraternities who usually promulgated such clever fun-- and the Big Game around which such hi-jinks revolved was played in early November..for Romney, 1964. Was he really that connected, unlike the vast majority of eleven hundred classmates who were still stumbling their way to an eight AM freshman comp class on Stanford's vast campus? Or is it something he heard about and claimed he was a part of? Vicarious chest pounding kinda like saving the auto industry... Or did someone make the whole thing up?
Where are the investigative journalists when you really need one? This one could turn into a Pulitzer.
How do you think Mitt RawMoney would handle the "BULLY Pulpit" if crookedly (of course) elected POTUS?
Just wonderin'
@ Ken Winkes. In a 2007 Boston Globe story that does not recount the head-shaving incident, the reporters do explain how Mitt fell in with like-minded Stanford preppies from the get-go and participated in or organized other complicated anti-Cal pranks. The reporting looks solid & the story seems plausible to me. See what you think.
Marie