The Commentariat -- May 24, 2012
White House photo.CW: I loved this photo when the White House first published it, & I reproduced it here. Now Jackie Calmes of the New York Times writes about it.
My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on Jay Carney's lecture to the White House press corps on their "slothful, lazy" reporting. the NYTX front page is here.
Harry Reid Gets Tough. David Rogers of Politico: "In an interview with Politico, [Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry] Reid said he was open to a compromise that would salvage about four-fifths of the Bush-era tax cuts. But absent some concession on revenues, the $110 billion in spending cuts ordered by the debt agreement last August would go into effect."
Peter Orszag, who couldn't wait to publicly contradict Obama administration policies he felt failed to deal with "an unsustainable budget deficit" the minute he left his job as Obama's director of the Office of Management & Budget, now writes a column in Bloomberg News urging -- get ready -- more stimulus spending. (To be fair, Orszag is not being entirely inconsistent; he always embraced the Domenici-Rivlin deficit-reduction plan, which called for more stimulus.)
Irin Carmon of Salon on the Roman Catholic lawsuits re: contraceptive coverage: "Because the words 'abortifacient' or 'abortion inducing' sound so scary, the Notre Dame lawsuit makes sure to claim over and over again that, despite a political compromise and executive order specifically exempting abortion coverage from Affordable Care Act provisions, they are being forced to pay for abortion. It claims that 'many contraceptives approved by the FDA that qualify under these guidelines cause abortions,' which is false on multiple levels.... This struggle is part of a larger crackdown by the conservative hierarchy against liberal elements within it -- chiefly, women, including nuns." ...
... Scott Lemieux in the American Prospect: "Given the way the [Obama] program is structured, the religious freedom arguments being advanced by the lawsuits is not just wrong but Orwellian. As a federal judge recently pointed out with respect to a similar claim, the petitioners are asking for 'the right to use taxpayer money to impose its beliefs on others (who may or may not share them).' ... I wouldn't rule out the possibility that what should be considered frivolous arguments will be accepted by a bare majority of the Supreme Court." ...
... Angela Bonavoglia of The Nation: the reason the Vatican is cracking down on American nuns is that they really are liberal feminists who are challenging the patriarchy. CW: if I were a believing Roman Catholic, I would fast become a believing Episcopalian. The masses & belief systems are nearly identical, & Anglicans have religious orders, too. ...
... E. J. Dionne: "It turns out that many bishops, notably the church leadership in California, saw the litigation as premature. They are upset that the lawsuits were brought without a broader discussion among the entire membership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and wanted to delay action until the conference's June meeting.... Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, Calif., ... expressed concern that some groups 'very far to the right' are turning the controversy over the contraception rules into 'an anti-Obama campaign.'"
"The Secret Circus." Dana Milbank: "... Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan sees no cause for alarm. On Wednesday, he went before a Senate committee looking into the scandal and announced unequivocally that what happened in Cartagena was a one-of-a-kind event.... Not a single member of the panel, Democrat or Republican, accepted Sullivan's blithe and categorical dismissals. Yet no amount of bipartisan incredulity, and no piece of evidence the senators presented, would budge the ringmaster from his breezy insistence that the Cartagena Dozen were the only clowns in his circus.
Frances Robles of the Miami Herald: "A year before George Zimmerman killed a Miami Gardens teenager, he stood before a City Hall community forum with a grievance: Sanford cops are lazy, he told the then-mayor elect. The community college criminal justice major said he knew, because he went on ride-alongs with the Sanford police."
David Catanese of Politico: "Elizabeth Warren is largely unscathed by the weeks-long controversy surrounding her ancestry, according to a new Suffolk University poll released Wednesday evening. The survey shows the Massachusetts Democrat trailing GOP Sen. Scott Brown by a single percentage point, with Brown netting 48 percent to Warren's 47 percent. The result marks a measurable shift toward Warren since the last Suffolk poll in February, which had Brown up 9 points, 49 percent to 40 percent."
Democratic Primaries Can Be as Weird as GOP Primaries. These two candidates -- running in the Texas Congressional District that includes El Paso -- are apparently neck-in-neck:
... Tim Murphy of Mother Jones writes, "I'm fairly certain this is the first-ever attack ad to feature the phrase 'he was recently videoed publicly intoxicated being spanked.'"
Eli Lake in the Daily Beast: the Obama administration gave "Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning pair who wrote and directed The Hurt Locker," extraordinary access to top-level individuals & to documents "for their forthcoming film about the SEAL Team Six raid that killed Osama bin Laden," a film originally scheduled to come out right before the November election. Reporters & journalists organizations, who say "trained reporters" don't get the same level of access, are livid. AND the controversy is one more great vehicle for Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) to "investigate."
Contributor P. D. Pepe wonders why people with different views don't sit down & talk civilly about their differences. Well, here's Al Sharpton trying to chat politely with Joe the Plumber, who is running for Congress based on the idea that "regular people like him" should be running the country:
... I think this answers her question.
Presidential Race
Mitt Romney Promises Not to Reduce Unemployment. Steve Benen: although Romney earlier criticized President Obama for not being able to bring the unemployment level down to 4 percent, in an interview yesterday, Romney promised that his policies would bring the unemployment rate down to about 6 percent by the end of his first term if he is elected president. But the CBO already predicts that unemployment will average 6.3 percent in 2016 & the OMB puts the figure at below 6 percent by the end of 2016. "In other words, Romney is promising to deliver results we're likely to get anyway. The myth of this guy's competence has been greatly exaggerated."
Right Wing World *
Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic explains racism to white people. He's right. ...
... Dave Weigel of Slate: "Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake spend around 1100 words teasing out the uncomfortable questions about Barack Obama's piss-poor Kentucky/Arkansas primary results." Yes, Obama's blackness is probably something that causes a few white voters to shudder.... 'No poll or election result can divine voters' motivations,' [Cillizza & Blake write]. Really? No poll? How about the exit polls from Appalachian states that were conducted at the end of the 2008 Democratic primary? ... Long before they knew anything about how Obama would govern..., a sizable number of Appalachian whites ... confirmed that they would vote against the guy because they didn't like his skin color." ...
... On an unrelated note, Jonathan Chait reports on a new conservative attempt to rewrite history to -- preposterously -- credit modern Republicans with championing the civil rights movement. This incredible fantasy is not the product of a crazy guy in his basement, either; the revisionist "history" is the cover story of the National Review. ...
... Jonathan Bernstein on the same subject. ...
... AND Ed Kilgore on the same subject; especially read his last graf, which helps explains why conservatives can get their heads around absolutely crazy notions. ...
... CW: I would add there's a tribal thing that facilitates this kind of nuttiness. It goes like this: (1) A prominent conservative writes something totally untrue but the lie makes conservatives look good; (2) Everybody -- left, right & center -- knows it's a lie; (3) Liberals ridicule the liar and the lie; (4) Conservatives react by defending the liar; (5) Then they defend the lie; (6) They are all invested in the lie, so they cannot ever admit it is a lie; (6) The lie becomes a Right Wing World "fact." ...
... Finally, here's Al Sharpton on the topic:
... CW: The one good thing about the National Review story -- we need to be reminded again & again how acceptable it was among conservative white "intellectuals" & other elites to openly express the same repugnant racist views that shock us today when we hear them mimicked by backwoods buffoons.
* Where fantasies pass for facts, so no wonder everyone is INSANE.
News Ledes
In Iowa, President Obama urged Congress to invest in clean energy:
New York Times: "The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that a criminal defendant may be retried even though the jury in his first trial had unanimously rejected the most serious charges against him. The vote was 6 to 3, with the justices split over whether the constitutional protection against double jeopardy barred such reprosecutions."
New York Times: "The Senate passed a major bipartisan bill on Thursday to prevent drug shortages and to speed federal approval of lifesaving medicines, including lower-cost generic versions of biotechnology products. A similar bill is on a fast track to approval in the House, perhaps as early as next week. President Obama, consumer groups and pharmaceutical companies strongly support the legislation."
Washington Post: "The Senate held two votes Thursday on measures to ensure that student loan rates for millions of college students do not double in July -- and at the conclusion of the legislative action, the issue remained exactly where it began: stuck. The measures, one offered by Democrats and the other by Republicans, each failed to reach the 60-vote threshold necessary to move forward, as the parties remain at loggerheads over how to pay for the $6 billion loan subsidy."
Washington Post: "Jeffrey E. Neely, the embattled General Services Administration regional commissioner who planned a lavish Las Vegas employee conference that cost more than $800,000, has left the agency, a GSA spokesman said."
Washington Post: "As Egyptians turned out to vote on the second day of a landmark presidential election Thursday, early indicators showed the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate taking the lead among the presumed front-runners. The Brotherhood is the most organized and efficient political force in Egypt, and Mohammed Morsi's campaign team went so far as to predict a possible outright victory...."
Think Progress: "Senate Democrats are advancing legislation to beef up equal pay protections for women, the latest salvo in the election-year battle for women voters. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is set to file cloture Thursday on the Paycheck Protection Act, which would strengthen protections for women who sue for pay discrimination. The move puts Republicans in an uncomfortable position...."
New York Times: "At a summit meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, regional leaders failed to signal any significant new steps to stimulate the sputtering regional economy or resolve the competing agendas of President François Hollande of France, who favors stronger action to spur growth, and his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has opposed aggressive moves to ease the pressure on Europe's weakest economies." The Guardian is liveblogging the summit. Their latest headline: new data show the current (2nd dip) U.K. recession is worse than predicted.
New York Times: "A brother of blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng ... has himself slipped through the security cordon around his village and made his way to the capital.... The brother, Chen Guangfu, said he came to Beijing to advocate on behalf of his son, who has been in police custody since fighting off a group of plainclothes officers who broke into the family home last month in their search for the escaped dissident."
AFP: "Egyptians swarmed polling stations< on the second day Thursday of a gripping presidential election in which candidates are pitting stability against the ideals of the uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak's rule."
ABC News: "During her keynote speech at the Special Operations Command gala dinner in Tampa, Fla., on Wednesday night, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that State Department specialists attacked sites tied to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) that were trying to recruit new members by 'bragging about killing Americans.'"
AFP: "Iran's navy said Thursday it saved an American-flagged cargo ship that was being attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Oman. An Iranian warship responded to a distress signal from the US-flagged Maersk Texas, a cargo ship of 150 metres (500 feet) and 14,000 tonnes, which was besieged by 'several pirate boats,' the navy said in a statement reported by the official IRNA news agency.... It was the first time the Iranian navy protected a US ship from pirates."
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Reader Comments (8)
The long, hot summer of 1966 was when the Republican Party changed its mind. Within the party there were many like George Romney and John Lindsay who championed Civil Rights, but the open-housing part of the law was blamed for the discord, the confusion and bitterness. According to Rick Perlstein in "Nixonland": "And so on the first anniversary of the riots in Watts, twenty-one months after the 1964 Johnson landslide, Goldwaterism became official house Republican policy on civil rights."
A bit of trivia: Last night I came upon a program, can't remember the name, hosted by Betty White. It consists of old people going around asking people on the street outrageous questions and/or doing outrageous things. An example: Two elderly women approach a young man. They say they think he's "hot looking" and would he be interested in a "three-way." The show seems to revolve around elderly people making fools out of themselves. Why is this funny?
I, too, love the picture Of Obama and the little boy touching the president's head and making a connection. Such a beautiful moment for both.
One more rant about lies. Why don't we have "talk shows" where there can be a dialogue between those that disagree, fleshing out this disagreement instead of cutesy "talk bites" that never go anywhere significant. Put the liar's feet to the fire and pursue! And none of the pablum sounding "Well, we agree to disagree." I never agree to disagree. It's illogical and a contradiction. If we disagree, then we disagree; there is no agreement there. Back up your statements with facts, not fabrications.
Re the Obama photo: I was taken by the Remington in the background. Limited edition.
Hmmm so the Republican Party is now the Civil Rights Party. Did I read that correctly?
So the party that is currently planning the most viciously and nakedly racist campaign in history, the party who used Willie Horton to scare white voters, and who, for laughs, send each other e-mail with pictures of the White House lawn littered with watermelons and images of Michelle Obama as a gorilla; the party that fielded a raft of candidates for president—not dog catcher, mind you—PRESIDENT, who are as alive to the fact and implications of racism as the branches of a hanging tree, is the best friend African Americans have ever had.
Well let's see.
One of those candidates owns a hunting lodge that used to be named “Niggerhead”. Another rips “blah” people as lazy grifters, while a third is proud of his derision of the current black president as the “Food Stamp President” who promises more food stamps, and probably, watermelon, to his black brothers and sisters in exchange for votes. Finally, we have an even bigger supporter of civil rights who, paradoxically, has called for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, whose son hopes for an America where businesses can tell black and other minority customers to take a hike, and who printed, in his newsletter, the opinion that order was restored to LA after the Rodney King riots, only when it was time for everyone in the black neighborhoods to pick up their welfare checks.
So tell me again how these KKK Grand Dragons comprise the Civil Rights Party?
Maybe it’s because this canard has been on sale now for quite some time. Remember how one of the Party’s great intellectual lights, Michele Bachmann drove the point home again and again about how the Founding Fathers, those saints, beloved of Teabaggers, strove mightily for civil rights and an end to slavery? Even the ones who owned slaves and who calculated the worth of blacks as a fraction of that of white citizens?
Mighty white of them.
Or how about the claim that Ronald Reagan was a better friend to African-Americans than Barack Obama and that, in fact, this was so much the case that Reagan is actually our first black president? I kid you not. This was on (where else?) Fox News in an interview with Michael Reagan, son of Saint Ronald, on MLK day. Seriously. MLK DAY!
Down in the heart of Texas, a one-time slave state, conservative Christians don’t want any future Republicans to worry themselves sick about the history of slavery in this nation and so they wrote it out of school textbooks. Their goal was to delete any mention of the slave trade that enriched much of the South. So they came up with the anodized euphemism “Atlantic Triangular Trade Route” as if the human cargo being shipped to Southern ports, were no different than cocoanuts. Just another commodity to be bought and sold. No need to mention actual human slaves. Such bad manners.
But another former slave state, one that is Republican through and through, Tennessee, has done Texas one better. Republican Teabaggers in Tennessee, have been pushing a bill through the legislature that would OUTLAW references to minority experience. OUTLAW it. Why? Some uppity nee-groes, traitorous liberals, and slanderous historians will simply not quit referring to some founding fathers as slave owners and will not stop whining about how Andrew Jackson purged Native Americans in Tennessee. Besides, they want Tennessee children to learn the “truth” about history. And rather than leave stray and inconvenient facts flapping out in the breeze where anyone can see them, they are going the legalistic route to rewriting history and making it a crime for anyone to tell the actual truth.
But this is the Civil Rights Party.
And I’m Donald Duck.
In the first Terminator film, the psychologist interviewing Reese, the man sent back to save Sarah Conner, reviews the tape of Reese's incredible claims and concludes that "most paranoid delusions are pretty detailed but this one is amazing! I could make an entire career studying this guy."
I feel the same way about the many worker bees in the right-wing fantasy mills working day and night to remake history in their own warped likeness.
The Greek columns, the marble floors, the six priests, the three lower caste nuns all in their reverential garb, I recognize it now, its the Vatican West. Yes a truly supreme place.
PD,
'nother great suggested read. Nixonland is chock full of so much information from the dark side of politics during those equally dark days of 60s political mayhem that it's impossible to take it all in in one reading.
One anecdote that strikes me as particularly instructive comes from a chapter that effectively covers the birth of the modern GOP. Young Republican operatives were taught at their very own School for Scandal by such ethical stalwarts as Donald Segretti and Dwight Chapin, glorious graduates of what Pearlstein calls false-flag black operations for the sole purpose of undermining the enemy: Democrats, liberals, civil rights activists, you name it. The strategy was simple. Create an alias for yourself, join "the enemy", pretend to be on their side, find out all you can then fuck them. Many of the operatives in these groups were incredibly well funded and had offices, mimeo machines (for turning out counter-insurgency propaganda), walkie-talkies, and a host of bodies ready and willing to disrupt meetings, sow dissension, create disturbances wild enough to draw police attention, highly negative publicity, etc.
But there was no sense of higher purpose here for these apparatchiks, no belief in the idea that their cause was right. They knew their role and they fully understood that they were there to spread lies, and create confusion, an understanding reflected in the name they gave themselves: The Ratfucks.
One of the worst and most vicious of the Ratfucks was a young Republican who came up with a brilliant plan to deep six the candidacy of a Democrat running for state office in Illinois at the time. This Ratfuck joined the candidate's team, stole his letterhead then printed invitations to a campaign rally offering booze, sex, and wild partying. All free of charge. These invitations were distributed at communes, rock concerts, drug corners, etc. Needless to say, the terrible outcome had a deleterious effect on the candidate's campaign. He lost to a Republican. But the Ratfuck who ran this operation became famous in Republican circles as a guy who had no morals and played hardball.
The name of this Ratfuck?
Karl Rove.
Oh, and the sponsor and one of the chief suppliers of funding to the Ratfucks?
National Review publisher Bill Rusher. The same journal now pretending to be a friend to African-Americans and supporters of civil rights.
Yeah....
Oops...I meant Perlstein...not Pearlstein.
@Akhilleus; I love the moniker "ratfuck", it brings me back to a different time. Add "shit for brains" and "numbnuts" and you collectively described the current Republican Party membership. Quiz for the day; what do you call an old man who hates women, wears dresses, protects child molesters and claims divine knowledge. Starts with "P" ends with "e" and there's an"op's" in between. Give up? If Jesus visits his mom, she must start the conversation with; "Jesus, Jesus, WTF?"
That little exchange between Joe and Al is not my idea of a probing dialogue and don't you love the way it ended with "we are on the same page" crap? 999? Question, Joe: How would that work exactly? This guy needs to sit down around a table with people who have brains. Civility may be wished for, but I'd like some teeth baring at this point.