The Commentariat -- May 11, 2015
Internal links removed.
Paul Krugman: Congressional Republicans are trying to figure out ways to undo Dodd-Frank, the better to please their Wall Street masters. But "almost nobody wants to be seen as a bought and paid-for servant of the financial industry, least of all those who really are exactly that."
Elise Viebeck of the Hill: "Michelle Obama gave a candid view Saturday of the challenges and emotional toll of being the country's first black first lady. Obama, speaking to graduates at Tuskegee University in Alabama, described insensitive media questions and derogatory remarks from political pundits that she said have kept her up at night."
Elise Viebeck: "Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Sunday that the United States is facing a new era in which a lone-wolf terrorist could 'strike at any moment.' 'We're very definitely in a new environment, because of ISIL's effective use of social media, the Internet, which has the ability to reach into the homeland and possibly inspire others,' Johnson said in an interview with ABC's 'This Week,' using the administration's preferred acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)." ...
... Amy Davidson of the New Yorker: Thanks in part to scaremongering politicians, Texans are confused about where the real dangers lie. One hint: Texas's open-carry laws.
Leonard Pitts: "Look, I get it: No one wants to be compared to [Tim] McVeigh. And I'll repeat: No one in a position of responsibility embraces his prescription of terrorist violence. But it seems to me beyond argument that in the philosophical struggle for the soul of conservatism, he lost the battle and won the war. Much of what now passes for conservatism proceeds from extremes of government loathing that would have stunned Ronald Reagan himself."
Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books: "The White House still maintains that the mission [to kill Osama bin Laden] was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan's army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration's account. The White House's story might have been written by Lewis Carroll." CW: Haven't read this & probably won't have time, but it's getting da buzz, so you might find it of interest.
Steven Mufson of the Washington Post: "The White House's willingness to push ahead with the nuclear accord with Beijing illustrates the evolving relationship between the world's two largest powers, which, while eyeing each other with mutual suspicion and competitiveness, also view each other as vital economic and strategic global partners."
Helene Cooper of the New York Times: "Saudi Arabia announced on Sunday that its new monarch, King Salman, would not be attending meetings at the White House with President Obama or a summit gathering at Camp David this week, in an apparent signal of its continued displeasure with the administration over United States relations with Iran, its rising regional adversary."
Presidential Race
Katie Glueck of Politico: "Jeb Bush on Saturday made a major overture to evangelical voters, seeking to reassure a skeptical voting bloc that when it comes to core beliefs about religious freedom and Christianity's role in the world, he's with them.... [Bush] made his pitch at a commencement address at Liberty University, a prominent symbol of evangelical Christianity in Lynchburg, Va., that has become a routine campaign stop for presidential hopefuls."
Mark Hensch of the Hill: "Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) said both he and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would have ordered the 2003 war in Iraq. 'I would have [authorized the invasion], and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everyone,' Bush told Fox News host Megyn Kelly in an interview that will air Monday night on 'The Kelly File.'... Bush also said he had no disagreement with his brother, former President George W. Bush, over the controversial military campaign." ...
... CW: Clinton should respond.
Simon Maloy of Salon: Ben "Carson, whose political identity and stardom are based entirely on his often outlandish attacks on President Obama, is hilariously unprepared to be an official candidate for the presidency.... Last week, he sat down for an interview with CNBC's John Harwood who laid down a series of rakes for Carson to step on, and Carson trod upon them with palpable gusto."
Gabriel Sherman of New York: "After being the subject of a spate of negative newspaper accounts about potential conflicts of interest and management dysfunction this winter -- long before Clinton Cash -- the Clinton Foundation wound up on a 'watchlist' maintained by the Charity Navigator, the New Jersey-based nonprofit watchdog.... Since March, the Foundation has embarked on an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to get removed from the list.... It didn't work." ...
... Steve Eder of the New York Times: "For decades [Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton's brother,] has tried to use his connections with his sister and her husband to further his [shady business] pursuits."
Bill Curry ran the board of presidential candidates this weekend. Here's part of his entry on Carly Fiorina, which I particularly enjoyed: "Listening to her one got a sense of what Sarah Palin would sound like had she gone to Stanford, as when she said the Founders didn't want a permanent political class when in fact they were all members of one. She vows to run government like a business, by which we assume she means one other than Hewlett Packard."
Beyond the Beltway
Sarah Nir of the New York Times: "Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered emergency measures on Sunday to combat the wage theft and health hazards faced by the thousands of people who work in New York State's nail salon industry. Effective immediately, he said in a statement, a new, multiagency task force will conduct salon-by-salon investigations, institute new rules that salons must follow to protect manicurists from the potentially dangerous chemicals found in nail products, and begin a six-language education campaign to inform them of their rights.... The new rules come in response to a New York Times investigation of nail salons -- first published online last week -- that detailed the widespread exploitation of manicurists, many of whom have illnesses that some scientists and health advocates say are caused by the chemicals with which they work."
News Ledes
New York Times: "The consequences of General Motors' long-delayed recall of defective small cars hit a grim milestone on Monday, when the company's compensation fund said it had approved the 100th death claim tied to faulty ignition switches. The toll far exceeds the 13 victims that G.M. had said last year were the only known fatalities linked to ignitions that could suddenly cut off engine power and disable airbags."
ESPN: "The NFL has suspended New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady four games for his role in deflating footballs for the AFC Championship Game, the league said in a statement Monday. The Patriots will also lose a first-round pick in 2016 and a fourth-round pick in 2017 and have been fined $1 million."
New York: "Former President Jimmy Carter was forced to end his trip to South America early on Sunday due to health concerns. "President Carter was not feeling well and has departed Guyana to return to Atlanta today," the Carter Center announced."
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Greg Sargent in WAPO has an interview with Elizabeth Warren in which Warren fires back at Obama as he intensified his push-back against her and other critics of the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
There's too much secrecy with this deal, but we're told we'd get it if we read it. Except, we can't read it.
In addition, she points out that it could ultimately result in the weakening of financial regulations. See also, Paul Krugman that CW linked above.
"WARREN: It’s possible to punch holes in Dodd Frank without directly repealing it. For example, harmonization of the capital standards and leverage ratios could be adjusted to help the big banks without ever directly contradicting Dodd Frank. But the effects of Dodd Frank would be severely undercut."
A time lapse review of government hatred.
The Leonard Pitts article linked here today uncovers a dirty truth in Right Wing World that simply cannot be hidden, denied, or gotten around. And if anyone needs corroboration of how bad things have gotten, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, et al. More on that anon.
The entire right has been co-opted by extreme hatred. Even those who still consider themselves the political missing link, moderate conservatives who, like the ivory billed woodpecker, may not be extinct yet, but upon whom no eyes have set in many a moon, cannot shake the stink of that skunk spray.
As Pitts notes, hatred of government has been baked into the Confederate DNA. They owe at least as much to Timothy McVeigh as they do to Ronald Reagan, at least so far as their burning desire to hurt the government (except for the parts that shoot people and blow shit up). If Reagan was their rhetor, McVeigh was their life coach. He turned the anti-government bombast promoted by the Reaganites into a bricks and mortar demonstration of the power of paranoia. He showed them how to turn the hope into reality.
But whence such enmity? How do you get from a backlash to the New Deal to the Wall Street Journal touting a political incompetent and illogical ideologue, Ben Carson, for president purely on the strength of his insulting Barack Obama at a public event? How the fuck does that happen?
Here's the time lapse version. New Deal. Conservatives hate it. Poor people getting handouts. Bankers told to get straighten up and fly right. Social Security. Work programs. Help for MORE poor people. Then, fuck me! REGULATION! The idea that government should do more than shuffle papers, clear the brush for corporations, and mind their own damn business became so hard for conservatives to handle that in 1953, one of the wingnut godfathers, Russell Kirk, in his anti-government screed "The Conservative Mind" (supply your own jokes), screamed that school lunches were a "vehicle for totalitarianism". 8 oz. of milk and a baloney sandwich and next thing you know, the kids are trading comic books for Trotsky. Social Security, to Kirk and his followers was "remorseless collectivism".
Hard on the heels of this bullshit we get Class A hypocrite and dipshit philosophical blockhead, Ayn Rand, spreading her anti-government fantasies like the plague on a slave ship. Bill Buckley, soon after, began the reconditioning of John Bircher style baying at the moon into some semblance of a vaguely respectable political platform. Fast forward a few years and Lewis Powell delivers his sermon on the memo. It was not missed by wingers who are now in the midst of hippies and free love and rock and roll and all sorts of unacceptable uppitiness.
Soon thereafter we get the glut of "think tanks" designed to provide "intellectual" firepower for the ground troops in the war on the government. The Cato Foundation prepares it's infamous Policy Handbook for Congress, described by the Washington Post as "A soup-to-nuts agenda to reduce spending, kill programs, terminate whole agencies and dramatically restrict the power of the federal government." And don't forget who funds Cato: the Kochs! Bingo! This handbook was memorized by the Bush criminals and is still on the nightstand of every Confederate in Washington.
A few years later Ronald Reagan took the action that perhaps more than any other insidious wingnut scheme, ramped up the hatred in ways not previously possible. Shivving the Fairness Doctrine removed all the stops to organized attacks on the government from the right across all media platforms. Little more than a decade earlier, the Supreme Court, in the landmark Red Lion case, unanimously supported the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine. But Reagan wanted it gone. Congress tried to reverse Reagan's FCC hatchet men but he vetoed that vote. And, voila, Rush Limbaugh and hate radio took off like a prairie wildfire spreading anti-government spores across the landscape. This was the sort of stuff that Tim McVeigh devoured while concocting his way of making the word flesh.
The killing of the Fairness Doctrine led also to the rise of hate television in the form of Fox "News", and those of you who appreciate black humor are free to smile ruefully at how the death of fairness in broadcasting gave birth to a media giant which laughingly bills itself as "Fair".
But how to corral all the disparate right wing groups under this umbrella of hatred for the government? The religious nuts, the Grover Norquist bathtub fetishists, the oligarchs, the social conservatives, the knuckleheads, the racists, the misogynists, the pundits, the media moguls, the self-pitiers, and the "victims"?
Easy.
Anti-government rhetoric, as Newt Gingrich discovered, was a Swiss Army Knife for haters of all stripes. Anti-government sentiment was the one size fits all excuse for anything you wanted to do. Make government the fall guy and you can blame all your lies, all your policy clusterfucks, all your philosophical inanities and economic failures, virtually anything you want, on the government. And people.will.buy.it.
But now that beast is out there roaming around. The genie is out of the bottle and no one can put it back in. So what we get--because what matters is not smarts, or experience, or achievement, or even philosophical consistency, but demonstrated hatred of government--are rank, ignorant incompetents posing as presidential timber. Imbeciles and scary people whom no sane person would allow to run a reunion committee meeting, never mind the country. But they are all the GOP has to offer. They are the BEST they have to offer, which is really fucking scary. The only thing that ties all these jamokes together is their hatred, distrust, and paranoia of the government. They have no idea what to do with it except shit on it and shut it down.
Because once you make hatred your central platform, you have nowhere to go but down. And the next Timothy McVeigh? There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands of them, big and little, all bolstered and emboldened by "leaders" who claim to hate government as much as they do. Cliven Bundy may not have killed anyone, but make no mistake that his patron saint was more Saint Timothy than Saint Ronald.
At this point it's not if, it's when. Because you can't escape your DNA.
The Most Seriousest Winger of them all.
I probably don't need to go on another rant about the stunning incompetence and philosophical and political inconsistency of the riders in the current GOP Clown Bus (the car had to go, too many floppy shoes hanging out the windows), but one clown in particular offers an excellent example of a truly unserious candidate from the right, so rant I will.
It's a guy touted by many in the media for some time now. In fact, he was being given the Very Serious Person nod by magazines like Time when he had barely two years under his belt as a senator with zero legislative accomplishments: Li'l Randy.
When I was in college, I stood up in a class on the psychology of art to talk about how I viewed the work of Pieter Breugel, a Renaissance era painter from the Netherlands. I was intimately familar with his work, his style, and his history but because I came from a pretty blue collar background, I never heard anyone pronounce his name, which I got wrong. I was immediately corrected, loudly, by a rich kid who, although he learned how to pronounce the name in some prep school cocktail party art history class, didn't know shit about the artist or his work. He was the kind of guy who valued expedience over authenticity and flittered through college with his gentleman's C's leaving for a job with a six figure salary to start off. He never really cared about learning for its own sake, it was only valuable if it made him look good, got him laid, or helped him achieve certain social and economic goals.
This, in a way, is Rand Paul. A guy who uses buzz words and throws around concepts like he knows what he's talking about until you start listening carefully. As Marie has noted, never trust Rand Paul on history. Or anything else, for that matter.
How many flip flops do you have to see before you recognize that this guy is about as unserious as you'd want to see in a candidate for the local zoning commission? He has reversed himself on just about every major stand he took in his "libertarian maverick" days. Now it's all about expedience.
And like that prep school douche, he and his minions use social media to send out snarky bullshit comments about his opponents to demonstrate his superior nature.
He's had everything he ever needed handed to him and he believes that he can change his mind anytime he wants without having to account for it. If he's called on it, he simply declares that he never said any such thing or that he's being attacked by the media.
Mere hours ago, there was a report that he has flip flopped yet again! He is now in favor of programs to help combat the spread of bird flu, run by government agencies he has tried to cut! He's flip flopped on Iran, Israel, vaccines, immigration, the Civil Rights Act. He even sells flip flops on his website!
The fact that this guy, this inauthentic, malleable, arrogant schlub, a guy who is less intellectually reliable than the local gossip, has been and still is, considered presidential is a sad situation for the country, but sadder still for the GOP.
Compare this whiny will of the wisp with the authentic, rock solid, intellectually consistent (for decades, not just for a couple of months, like Li'l Randy) Bernie Sanders. Here's a truly serious guy who stands for something, who has thought it through carefully and is not about to throw it over for a three hour buzz on some wingnut website.
Rand Paul stood with idiot Tom Cotton, relaying to Iran that they couldn't count on a deal with the president to last very long. How long do you think you could rely on Rand Paul to stand by something he swore on a bible two hours ago?
It is truly sad that this little shit is considered, by anyone, to be a serious person. The fucking guy certifies himself to stick sharp objects in your eye, fer crissakes.
'nuff said.
News from the Lone Brain Cell State.
Marie links a New Yorker article, above, the outlines the difficulty of trying to determine what constitutes a real danger when you're busy restocking your survival shelter inventory to save your family from boogiemen.
The article points out that open carry laws in places like Texas allow individuals of less than noble intent to walk around armed like a character in a first person shooter video game and not be stopped and questioned.
But leave it to Texas to make it even harder to figure out what might be a really bad situation and what's made up wingnut baloney.
It seems that trying to bring guns into airports and being stopped by the TSA is very inconvenient. Right now it's a felony, but a new law may disallow you from being arrested for packing your half dozen weapons when you try to board a plane.
Because you never know when you might have to shoot that lady charging you $5.00 for the New York Times, right?
OR you might have to shoot someone on the way home from the airport. Just ask serial gunshot guy George Zimmerman, who according to a report on an Orlando TV statione, was taken to the hospital after someone tried (unsuccessfully it turns out) to shoot him in the head. No word in the report if Six Shooter George got off any shots of his own.
Just another day in Gun Crazy USA.
Test.
This article is for Kate and the other fellow RCers who always look past the fog and remember the SUPREMES! Maybe the writer is a tad bit optimistic as to the engagement of the typical American voter but at least the estimation that such a high percentage of Americans can see through the prestigious black robes and realize they've become merely glorified politicians is certainly a stephanie in the right direction. The brighter the light that gets shined into those shadowy hallways of supreme power the better.
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/supreme_courts_grand_ruse_ends_finally_americans_see_the_justices_for_the_political_hacks_they_are/
Some how the word "step" got changed to stephanie thanks to my French auto correct. Désolé
For those who are not aware, today is National Twilight Zone Day as it is every May 11. With all the crazy stuff we read about you'd think NTZD was every day. Even Rod Serling couldn't have thought this shit up.
@AK: Thank you. You have ended my day with all that food for thought and your Breugal remembrance warmed my heart.