The Commentariat -- May 13, 2013
Robert Pear of the New York Times: "Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has solicited sizable donations from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and H&R Block, the tax preparation service, as part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to ensure the success of President Obama's health care law, administration officials said Sunday, even as a leading Senate Republican raised questions about the legality of her efforts.... The senior Republican on the Senate health committee, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said the fund-raising 'may be illegal.' He likened it to efforts by the Reagan administration to raise money for rebels fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, after Congress had restricted the use of federal money.... Administration officials said private donations were needed because Congress had provided much less money than Mr. Obama requested to publicize the new law and get people enrolled in health plans subsidized by the government." CW: yes, educating Americans about affordable health coverage is just like funneling money to rebels fighting another sovereign nation.
Joseph Stiglitz, in the New York Times: "America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities.... Total student debt, around $1 trillion, surpassed total credit-card debt last year.... merica — home of the land-grant university, the G.I. Bill and world-class public universities from California to Michigan to Texas — has fallen from the top in terms of university education. With strangling student debt, we are likely to fall further. What economists call “human capital” — investing in people — is a key to long-term growth." ...
... Here's One Reason for the High Cost of Higher Ed. Tamar Lewin of the New York Times: "... the median total compensation for the presidents of public research universities was $441,392, up 4.7 percent from the previous year’s $421,395. The median base salary, $373,800, was up 2 percent from $366,519 the previous year." The highest paid of all last year (largely because of his plum severance deal): "Graham B. Spanier, the president of Pennsylvania State University, who was forced out in November 2011 over his handling of a child sex abuse scandal involving a football coach." Creep.
Jonathan Weisman & Matthew Wald of the New York Times: Republicans plan to turn up the outrage machine over disclosures that some IRS personnel were targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. Also, looks as if the IRS (run, don't forget, by a Dubya appointee) didn't quite come clean, providing more material for the outrage machine. ...
... John McKinnon & Siobahn Hughes of the Wall Street Journal have more details on the extent of the IRS's targeting practices & what IRS honchos knew & when they knew it. ...
... Kevin Drum: "... even if, as seems likely, this whole thing turns out to have been mostly a misguided scheme cooked up by some too-clever IRS drones, it doesn't matter. Conservatives are right to be outraged and right to demand a full investigation.... What's really unfortunate about all this is that ... more than likely, though, Congress will step in to neuter them completely on this score, and the current Wild West character of 501(c)4 fundraising will continue unabated."
Peter Baker of the New York Times: Darrell Issa will be subpoenaing (a) any person who can spell Benghazi, (b) any person who cannot spell Benghazi but know it is not the name of a tiny dog. Also, Issa got into an on-air fight with former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering -- a Bush Pere appointee. CW: consider the foregoing a paraphrase. ...
... Kevin Liptak of CNN: Thomas Pickering, "the leader of a panel charged with reviewing September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, said Sunday that criticism of his report was unfounded and did not accurately reflect how his review was carried out." ...
... Jake Miller of CBS News: "Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, [a Republican,] forcefully defended the Obama administration on Sunday against charges that it did not do enough to prevent the tragedy in Benghazi, telling CBS' 'Face the Nation' that some critics of the administration have a 'cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces.'" With video. ...
... Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) tore into Fox News’ Chris Wallace and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) for obsessing over the talking points U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used when talking to the media in the days following the attack in Benghazi, Libya rather than focusing on identifying the perpetrators of the killings." With video.
... Jordan Chariton of Mediate: John McCain isn't ready to impeach President Obama over Benghazi, but he'd like to see the House pre-emptively impeach Hillary Clinton. Or something. With video. ...
... Michael Tomasky of Newsweek expects Congressional Republicans to try to impeach President Obama over Benghazi. ...
"SIX POINT THREE TRILLION DOLLARS!" Bill Keller: the Heritage Foundation's anti-immigration report "is an unusually stark sign of the transformation of Washington’s think tank culture into a more partisan archipelago of propaganda factories."
Alan Cowell of the New York Times: "A potentially toxic clamor for Britain to consider quitting the European Union appeared to be spreading within the dominant Conservative Party on Monday, even as its leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, prepared to meet with President Obama in Washington as an advocate of closer trade ties between the United States and the European bloc."
"E Pluribus Me." Tim Egan: Ted Cruz may consider himself to be the smartest guy in the room -- no matter what the room -- but his positions are illogical & inconsistent. "Senator Cruz probably doesn’t mind the title that’s been hung on him — most hated man in the Senate. I suspect he also relishes being called a 'wacko bird' (John McCain’s term) because, for now, it’s the avian wing that dominates his party."
Judd Legum of Think Progress: "Two major tech leaders have resigned from Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, FWD.us, in protest of the organization’s controversial decision to bankroll ads supporting Keystone XL and drilling in the Arctic National Refuge.... The strategy has alienated Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and David Sacks, the founder of Yammer."
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Reader Comments (5)
Just a few thoughts on Benghazi. I just watched MSNBC's MSM VSP interview Thomas Pickering (Mark Halperin et all.) They pressed him on the entire affair. His bottom line answer to it all is that he is prepared to go back to Issa's committee and answer questions as long as the entire interview is public and recorded so the answers as well as questions are preserved so they can be reviewed. What that tells me is that he is certain he and his committee acted professionally and thoroughly but he wants his defense of the report and comments about the entire thing to be available to the public so it is not able to be spun or twisted. I have seen Pickering being asked questions about this very "serious people's" issue over the last few days and I'd be prepared to take his assessment as the best answer to what happened - when and where.
The bottom line on this is -- witch hunt -- that this will not go anywhere because there is no smoking gun coverup on this. The editing of the emails was something that had to be done and I am glad it was done. Let's move on.
On the IRS thing. I think that this may be a blight on the administration. What the hell were those people thinking, conducting targeted investigations on specific types of entities, Tea Party, or not? Idiots!
@FromtheHeartland: I don't see how the IRS political behavior can be "a blight on this administration" unless evidence surfaces that someone in the Obama administration ordered or encouraged low-level IRS employees in Cincinnati to come down on conservative groups. It seems highly unlikely that an administration official would have done so.
The IRS has only two political appointees, as Jay Carney pointed out the other day, & the top dog is a Bush appointee who had planned to (& did) retire at the end of his stint. A temp is filling in as commissioner. Read Rick Unger of Forbes on this.
Marie
At this point, I'm ambivalent about the IRS and its alleged political motivations. Supposing this sort of 'review' may be more common than we think for a whole bunch of entities! This one, with all the Tea-Party related entities that apparently sprang up may have provoked more scrutiny. I would not be surprised to learn that other instances could be uncovered during past administrations, which doesn't necessarily mean it was wrong to look at these or any other entities. However, I seem to recall that included among Nixon's dirty tricks was gaining access to the tax records of political opponents (via IRS) to find useful & potentially embarrassing info.
Though, I'm not buying into the 'overzealous, lower-ranked-the-caseworkers did it' story either.
Much food for thought in Pierce's piece on the shooting in New Orleans. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Shooting_In_New_Orleans
If the current IRS brouhaha leads to closer scrutiny of all tax-exempt organizations who claim to be apolitical Obama can take the heat in the short term. Hell, he'll take heat for something 24/7 for the rest of his term because the alternative is unthinkable: no more Fox Network.