The Commentariat -- May 25, 2013
The President's Weekly Address:
... The transcript is here.
CW: In the Republicans' weekly address, Sen. Jim Inhofe speaks of the tornado that hit Moore. He doesn't just ignore climate change; except for asking for handouts, he pretty much ignores the rest of the country because the "Oklahoma Standard" ensures that Okies will take care of themselves. Bernie Becker of the Hill reports.
Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker: "The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen's private e-mail account secret, arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time.... Yesterday, hours after President Obama said, in a speech at National Defense University, that he had asked Attorney General Eric Holder to review the Justice Department's policies concerning investigations of the media, NBC News reported that the warrant to search Rosen's e-mail account was personally approved by Holder." CW: which part of the First Amendment don't you understand, Eric? Ah. The "freedom of the press" part. I said Holder was a mistake as soon as Obama nominated him. I'm still right. ...
... Michael Isikoff of NBC News: "The Justice Department pledged Friday to review its policies relating to the seizure of information from journalists after acknowledging that a controversial search warrant for a Fox News reporter's private emails was approved 'at the highest levels' of the Justice Department, including 'discussions' with Attorney General Eric Holder." ...
... D. S. Wright of Firedoglake: "During Attorney General Eric Holder's testimony before the House Oversight Committee he made an interesting statement in response to a question from Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA)... :
HOLDER: I would say this with regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. That is not something I've ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy. In fact my view is quite the opposite.
... Holder was under oath at the time raising the possibility of a perjury charge."
... Jed Lewison of Daily Kos: " Fox News chairman Roger Ailes yesterday released a statement describing that administration's actions as 'an attempt to intimidate Fox News.' But while Ailes and his team will no doubt try to spin this into a partisan confrontation, the First Amendment doesn't say that 'Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of The Fox News.' Especially given the AP phone records subpoena, the issue isn't some sort of political witch hunt against Fox. Instead, it's that the government put its desire to stop leaks ahead of the Constitutional right to freedom of the press without even giving the press a chance to defend itself. That's a problem that needs to be fixed." ...
... Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post, in a long Post op-ed: "... the Obama administration's steadily escalating war on leaks, the most militant I have seen since the Nixon administration, has disregarded the First Amendment and intimidated a growing number of government sources of information -- most of which would not be classified -- that is vital for journalists to hold leaders accountable. The White House has tightened its control over officials' contacts with the news media, and federal agencies have increasingly denied Freedom of Information Act requests on the grounds of national security or protection of internal deliberations." ...
... The Big Chill. Christine Haughney of the New York Times: reporters who cover national security say their sources are drying up. CW: So I guess this crackdown on leaks thing is working.
... The Press Is Really Whiney. Jack Shafer of Slate Reuters takes a contrarian POV: "... all this legal battering of the press, while real, hardly rises to the level of war.... Obama's wholesale deflation of their standing has made comrades out of ideological enemies. How else to explain Len Downie hollering 'Nixon' at the same time Fox News's Roger Ailes is invoking 'McCarthy' to denounce the Obama administration?" CW: I largely disagree with Shafer's conclusion, but he makes a number of valid points in reaching it. Also, he uses the phrase "prelude to a kiss-off." ...
... Also, as Schafer wrote the other day, Rosen is a lousy investigative reporter: "Rosen's journalistic technique, if the Post story is accurate, leaves much to be desired. He would have been less conspicuous had he walked into the State Department wearing a sandwich board lettered with his intentions to obtain classified information and then blasted an air horn to further alert authorities to his business." Plus, his big scoop-di-doo was stupid." CW: and it seems to me it did, at least marginally, cause a national security risk -- for no good reason -- & could possibly endanger some covert agents.
David Firestone of the New York Times: "The most striking thing about President Obama's speech on counter-terrorism yesterday was his eagerness to end the 'global war on terror' and redefine it as a series of smaller-scale skirmishes. And the most striking thing about the reaction of Republicans was their stated refusal to end it, their longing to keep it going as the pinnacle of national priorities.... Anti-terrorism is a definitional position for a party that spent decades using Communism as a foil and seemed lost after the Soviet Union fell." ...
... CW: also underlying GOP saber-rattling are two things: some Republicans are too simple-minded to think beyond knee-jerk machismo; others assume the public is too simple-minded to think beyond knee-jerk machismo, so talking tough is just good PR. As Jim Fallows wrote (linked yesterday), Obama treated his listeners as adults as he explained the complexities of American foreign policy; unfortunately, the opposition party is operating at the level of youthful video-war-games aficionados. ...
... "Steve Coll and Dexter Filkins talk to Amy Davidson about the speech Obama gave on Thursday":
Brian Beutler of TPM: "... in California, where the state government and advocacy groups are actually interested in doing Obamacare right, things are looking pretty good. They're standing up their exchanges and it turns out premiums for basic bronze and more comprehensive silver health plans will actually come in lower than anticipated. This is almost unambiguously good news for Obamacare.... "All the states trying to make the law fail will look very stupid and terribly craven if California pulls this off." ...
... Jeffrey Young of the Huffington Post has the data on which Beutler based his post. ...
... ** GOP War on Poor People. NEW: Robert Pear of the New York Times: "The refusal by about half the states to expand Medicaid will leave millions of poor people ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance under President Obama's health care law even as many others with higher incomes receive federal subsidies to buy insurance.... More than half of all people without health insurance live in states that are not planning to expand Medicaid." These states include Texas, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia. ...
... Paul Krugman: "The whole political calculus was supposed to be that Republicans in red states could point to the horrors of Obamacare and ride them to political victory. Instead, it looks as if we're going to see blue-state residents reaping the benefits of a functional health care system, while red-state residents are denied many of those benefits, for what looks like no better reason than mean-spirited spite -- because what's going on is, indeed, mean-spirited spite." ...
Oh Yeah? Don't be so smug, Krugman. The IRS is rifling through your most intimate medical files:
When people realize that their most personal, sensitive, intimate, private health-care information is in the hands of the IRS that's been willing to use people's tax information against political opponents of this administration, then people have pause and they pull back in horror. -- Michele Bachmann, May 20
Bachmann has made a sweeping claim.... There is no evidence to support this assertion, and she is simply scaring people when she repeats it on television. Bachmann thus continues her record-breaking streak of outlandish claims.-- Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, SO
Oh. Never mind. -- Constant Weader
Floyd Norris of the New York Times: "In the 84 years that the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has been calculated, it doubled during the terms of only four presidents before Barack Obama's election in 2008. This month that number rose to five as the index climbed to more than twice what it was when he took office." The other 4 presidents were FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan & Clinton. "... none came close to the average annual gain so far under Mr. Obama."
Gail Collins considers whether women or Ted Cruz have done more to get Senators working together again. And here's that moment Collins refers to "in the State of the Union address when President Obama called for more bridge repair projects and John Boehner failed to applaud" (unfortunately, the camera cuts away from Boehner quickly [I guess because he didn't applaud]):
... Jonathan Chait puts John McCain's outbursts against his Tea Party colleagues in context: "McCain is a cranky man in general, and the latest punks he told to get off his lawn include tea-party hoodlums Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.... McCain's disagreement over what appears to be a technical point of Senate process is actually a fundamental split over the party's approach toward Obama. The conservatives want to continue their stance of total opposition and instigating crises -- the stance that has defined the party throughout the Obama era -- while McCain wants to engage in compromise and negotiation." Read the whole post. ...
... Jonathan Bernstein disagrees with Chait's analysis: "... it's a combination of electoral incentives and personal vendettas." CW: I think they're both right.
Jonathan Easley of the Hill: "Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Friday that the 'Gang of Eight' immigration bill doesn't have enough votes to pass the Senate. The bill won approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 13-5 vote, but Menendez said it lacks the 60 votes necessary to clear the Senate -- despite the bill's four Republican co-sponsors."
Yesterday President Obama signed "a bill designating the Congressional Gold Medal commemorating the lives of the four young girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing of 1963":
President Obama gave the commencement address yesterday at the U.S. Naval Academy (see yesterday's Commentariat for a link to a New York Times report on his speech):
Local News
J. J. Hensley of the Arizona Republic: "A federal judge's ruling that the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office engaged in racial profiling against Latinos could bring significant changes to the agency's controversial approach to immigration enforcement. U.S. District Judge Murray Snow issued a lengthy ruling that prohibits sheriff's deputies from using race as a factor in law-enforcement decisions, from detaining people solely for suspected immigration violations and from contacting federal immigration authorities to arrest suspected illegal immigrants who are not accused of committing state crimes." The decision is here. ...
... bmaz of emptywheel: "The decision is long at 142 pages, but it is beautiful and contains specific findings of fact and conclusions of law that will make it hard to reverse on appeal...."
News Ledes
New York Times: "One of the top officials in the Archdiocese of Newark has been forced out for failing to properly monitor the activities of a priest who had been forbidden from having contact with children, the archdiocese announced on Saturday. The dismissal of Msgr. John E. Doran, who reported to Archbishop John J. Myers, is the latest fallout from a sexual abuse scandal that stretches back more than a decade."
Boston Globe: "On this dreary, drizzly morning, thousands of runners and their supporters came out to finish what they started [-- the Boston Marathon --] jogging the final mile from Kenmore Square to the finish line and reclaiming the long-imagined moment they were denied."
AP: "Gay-rights campaigners and their opponents clashed at an unsanctioned rally in the Russian capital on Saturday, but a heavy police presence in kept the two sides apart at that country's first-ever gay pride march. Russian police said they arrested at least 30 gay rights campaigners and Christian Orthodox vigilantes in Moscow."
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Reader Comments (5)
More good news from Oregon for Obama Care. In spite of getting crazy and voting down fluoridation in our water supply, people are going all sane about Obama Care Insurance Exchanges. And there are lots! All at a better price than projected. Maybe the free market, in some way, does work after all, since several big insurers had second thoughts and lowered their policy rates after seeing how some of the smaller companies had worked it out. Also, we are getting very good press here. The Oregonian is really playing up how well the exchanges are working, and how surprising this is to the doubters.
Next stop: SINGLE PAYER!
Sad that Haynes Johnson has died. One of the best.
Have been reading Sarah Blakewell's 2010 meditative biography of Montaigne, a touchstone since college days, and thinking about the sorry state of our Fourth Estate, the press. (The Estates of the Clergy, Nobility and Commoners, so designated in France by the 1500's were added to by Montaigne himself who said the Fourth Estate consisted of lawyers--tho' he was one himself, I'd guess the addition was not intended as a compliment--but in the United States and Great Britain, the Fourth (ala Edmund Burke) usually refers to "the press.")
Journalism's much talked and written about troubles can only be added to by our Justice Dept.'s strong-arm (and I'd think, unConstitutional) tactics, but I think journalism's and our larger problem is that the real Fourth Estate is not the press but out-of-control corporatism. When corporate lobbyists write over ninety percent of a law intended to rein in derivative speculation (tonight's Chris Hayes), when our laws are written to fatten corporate profits and shield those extortionate profits from taxation, when we get the Affordable Care Act as a pale and expensive shadow of the single payer system we should have, and when most of the print media we'd like to preserve and protect is owned by and controlled by large corporations whose motive force, when it is not overtly political, is quarterly profit, K-Street, not the press, is today's Fourth Estate. Hell, it might be the First. These days, considering the quality of its reporting and its declining readership, I'd rank the press at five or six.
None of the above is offered as an excuse for what the InJustice Department has too often done before and since 9/11 in the name of national security. Just thinking.
BTW, some interesting traffic patterns developing up here in the country that's now missing a bridge. Notice it made us Maddow's lead story tonight, which also featured our increasingly unimpressive Congressman. But who give a f____ about infrastructure? Everyone knows such twaddle's just another liberal plot.
Have a fine weekend, All.
@CW;. "CW: also underlying GOP saber-rattling are two things we can't forget..." one more thingie; profit, there's money in bullets, big money.
Interesting infographics illustrating the genius of republican economic policies as practiced in Wisconsin.
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2013/05/wisconsin_emplo_4.html