The Commentariat -- November 20

In yesterday's Commentariat, I linked to Nicholas Confessore's New York Times piece about Scott Brown's ties to Wall Street & noted Confessore's misstatements regarding Elizabeth Warren. Then I got mad: My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is titled "The Case against Elizabeth Warren, by Wall Street financiers, Karl Rove and the New York Times." Here's the lede:

When does a myth become a 'fact'? When the myth is reported as fact on the pages of the New York Times. That hardening of myth into fact is even stronger when the supposedly liberal 'paper of record' publishes a negative characterization of a liberal candidate. And if the paper piles on a series of misstatements, innuendo and Republican talking points, the myth becomes an indisputable truism.

... For a decidedly more positive view of Warren, Rebecca Traister see this long profile of the Massachusetts Senate candidate in the New York Times Magazine.

Harvard, Tuition-Free, Episode 2. Prof. Michael Sandel. Part 1: "Putting a Price Tag on Life"; Part 2: "How to Measure Pleasure": 

Power v. People

Sudhin Thanawala of the AP: "Video surfaced online Saturday showing an officer at a California university calmly pepper-spraying a line of several sitting protesters, who flinch and cover their faces but remain passive with their arms interlocked as onlookers shriek and scream out for the officer to stop. The chancellor of the University of California, Davis described the video images as 'chilling' and said she was forming a task force to investigate even as a faculty group called for her resignation because of the incident Friday....

..."At Saturday's news conference, UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza said the decision to use pepper spray was made at the scene. 'The students had encircled the officers,' she said. 'They needed to exit. They were looking to leave but were unable to get out.'" ...

... CW: Watch the videos. Spiculla's assertion that students cordoned off the police is a bald-faced lie. In the second video an officer smiles & casually chats briefly with a news cameraman whom he appears to tell to move back:

... Prof. Nathan Brown, in a letter to U.C. Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi describes what he observed. At one point, Brown writes, in part,

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

      ... CW: Brown is an assistant professor in the English Department. That means (a) he does not have tenure; (b) he works in a field where there are probably 100 qualified applicants for every university opening (my guestimate -- I could be way off). In other words, Brown really stuck his neck out. ...

      ... Jim Fallows of The Atlantic: "... this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population.... Less than two months ago, it seemed shocking when one NYPD officer cavalierly walked up to a group of female protestors and pepper-sprayed them in the eyes. The UC Davis pepper-sprayer doesn't slink away, as his NYPD counterpart did, but in every other way this is more coldly brutal." ...

      ... Digby: "Of course it's torture. It couldn't be more obvious. The question we have to ask ourselves if our society believes torturing of political dissidents is acceptable." Digby reviews the history of the 1997 Humboldt County, California, case in which police pepper-sprayed environmental activists, then swapped pepper spray on the eyes of protesters whom they had restrained. Comments on her post are quite good, too. ...

      ... Former policeman Peter Moskos in the Washington Monthly: "... trying to make policing too hands-off means people get Tased and maced for non-compliance. It’s not right. But this is the way many police are trained. That’s a shame. (Mind you, I have no problem using such less-lethal weapons on actual physical threats, but peaceful non-compliance is different.) ...

      ... In a column about the U.C. Davis crisis, Joan Walsh of Salon explains non-violent resistance to U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgenau, who says students locking arms is "not non-violent." Asshole. ...

... ** Nicholas Kristof: "I watched in downtown Manhattan last week as the police moved in to drag off protesters — and several credentialed journalists — and the action seemed wildly over the top. Yet in a larger sense, the furor over the eviction of protesters in New York, Oakland, Portland and other cities is a sideshow.... The high ground that the protesters seized is not an archipelago of parks in America, but the national agenda. The movement has planted economic inequality on the nation’s consciousness, and it will be difficult for any mayor or police force to dislodge it. ...

... Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic provides a roundup of video of "some of the other dramatic moments in the ongoing confrontations between Occupy protesters and police. Taken together, they paint a disturbing portrait that should at a bare minimum call into question the standards and practices police officers around the nation have developed for deploying pepper spray, which has only become a universal policing tool within the past 20 years. And they raise real questions about whether disproportionate police responses to the movement's intentional acts of civil disobedience have in some cases increased social disorder rather than restored calm." She does not include the sickening video the Guardian obtained, which is posted below ...

... Adam Gabbatt of the Guardian: "Protester and three-tour American veteran Kayvan Sabehgi was beaten by Oakland police during the Occupy protest's general strike on 2 November. Sabehgi, who was 'completely peaceful', according to witnesses, was left with a lacerated spleen." The incident is horrible to watch:

... Jonathan Larsen & Ken Olshansky of NBC News: "A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program 'Up w/ Chris Hayes.”' A pdf of the memo is here. CW: This is pretty astounding. If you can't watch the video, read the report & memo:

** Kalle Lasn & Micah White, Editor & Senior Editor of Adbusters, in a Washington Post op-ed: ". . . you cannot attack your young and get away with it. [NYC Mayor Michael] Bloomberg’s shock-troop assault has stiffened our resolve and ushered in a new phase of our movement. The people’s assemblies will continue with or without winter encampments. What will be new is the marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions — rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, 'occupy squads' and edgy theatrics. And we will see clearly articulated demands emerging, among them a 'Robin Hood tax' on all financial transactions and currency trades; a ban on high-frequency 'flash' trading; the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act to again separate investment banking from commercial banking; a constitutional amendment to revoke corporate personhood and overrule Citizens United; a move toward a 'true cost' market regime in which the price of every product reflects the ecological cost of its production, distribution and use; and with a bit of luck, perhaps even the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past." ...

... ** Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times: Portland, Oregon, Mayor "Sam Adams' sympathies are with the protesters, but he still sent police in after complaints about crime in the liberal city's encampment. 'As a mayor, I have responsibilities.' ... The decision to close them has been heart-wrenching for mayors in many cities — particularly in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, Canada, where bicycle-riding, carbon-hating politicians probably feel as much sympathy for the people in the camps as for the downtown business executives upset about threats to the holiday shopping season."

Obama v. Women: Robert Pear of the New York Times: "... after protests by Roman Catholic bishops, charities, schools and universities, the White House is considering a change that would grant a broad exemption to health plans sponsored by employers who object to [birth control] coverage for moral and religious reasons. Churches may already qualify for an exemption. The proposal being weighed by the White House would expand the exemption to many universities, hospitals, clinics and other entities associated with religious organizations. The prospect of such a change has infuriated many Democrats in Congress, who fought hard to secure coverage of birth control under the new health care law." ...

It just doesn’t make sense to take this benefit away from millions of women. Americans of all religious faiths overwhelmingly support broad access to birth control. -- Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Tim Noah of The New Republic reviews "Paul Starr’s compact but thorough 'Remedy and Reaction,'” a book about the history of American healthcare policy. 

Welcome, Greece. We're going to be Greece.... At some point, what's happening in Europe will happen here. -- David Brooks, on the PBS "News Hour," lamenting the impending failure of the Congressional deficit reduction supercommittee to make a deal ...

... Economist Dean Baker, in the New York Times eXaminer, explains why, in three easy-to-understand grafs, "the comparison with Greece is utterly baseless. People are making this comparison to advance their agenda for cutting Social Security and Medicare. It absolutely should not be taken seriously."

Peter Nicholas & Christi Parsons of the Los Angeles Times: Touring the Asia Pacific region last week, President Obama appeared before cameras with one national leader after another to praise joint efforts on economic growth, maritime security, copyright protection and other concerns. Conspicuously absent was a buzzword of these kinds of news conferences for the last decade: terrorism. That silence speaks volumes for the Obama administration's efforts to shift the U.S. focus away from a single-minded battle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups."

Right Wing World

 GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, Jr., likes his chances in New Hampshire:

Newt Gingrich ... is a Nigerian prince e-mail, send-me-your-bank-details guy. He does e-mail spam, fax spam, direct mail, sucker list, bottom-feeding, prey-on-the-gullible financial scams. -- Rachel Maddow ...

Paranoia, Exemplified. Alex Pareene of Salon: Oscar Ramiro "Ortega-Hernandez wanted to kill President Obama because Ortega-Hernandez thought himself the second coming of Jesus Christ and was convinced Barack Obama was the antichrist.... Because of a bad bit of reporting...., ABC initially said that police suspected Ortega-Hernandez had spent time at the Occupy DC encampment.... Police may have suspected that, but there’s been no evidence whatsoever that it’s the case.... But ... that ... has not stopped conservatives from … crying about liberal media bias against conservatives. So here we have a wholly invented right-wing meme based on fantasy and one out-of-context line from a now out-of-date news story, repeated endlessly in an attempt to unfairly smear a political movement they despise, and the fact that responsible media outlets aren’t repeating the smear is an example of the nefarious leftist media conspiracy." [Emphasis added.]

News Ledes

Reuters: "Spain's center-right opposition stormed to a crushing election victory Sunday as voters punished the outgoing Socialist government for the worst economic crisis in generations. The People's Party, led by former Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy, won an absolute majority in parliament and is expected to push through drastic measures to try to prevent Spain being sucked deeper into a debt storm threatening the whole euro zone."

Statement: "University of California President Mark G. Yudof today (Nov. 20) announced the actions he is taking in response to recent campus protest issues."

Oakland Tribune: "Police cleared an Occupy Oakland encampment at 19th Street and Telegraph Avenue Sunday morning. There were no arrests or injuries during the 8 a.m. raid in Oakland's uptown district, said Oakland police spokeswoman Johnna Watson."

Los Angeles Times: "The co-chairs of the congressional 'super committee' seemed doubtful the panel would reach a deficit-reduction accord by Monday's deadline, each blaming the other party's unwillingness to budge on the contentious issues of taxes and entitlement spending. In separate appearances on Sunday talk shows, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said they both held out hope for last-minute progress, but saw little chance of the impasse being broken." ...

... Washington Post: "The congressional committee tasked with reducing the federal deficit is poised to admit defeat as soon as Monday, and its unfinished business will set up a year-end battle over emergency jobless benefits and an expiring payroll tax holiday."

New York Times: "A police action to roust a few hundred protesters out of Tahrir Square on Saturday instead drew thousands of people from across Egyptian society into the streets, where the violence continued on Sunday. The confrontations were the most violent manifestation so far of growing anger at the military-led interim government."

AP: "The Arab League says it has rejected amendments proposed by Syria to a peace plan to end the crisis in the country, saying the changes put forward by Damascus alter the 'essence' of the plan. A statement issued Sunday by the Cairo-based organization says the league told the Syrian government that its proposals were also unacceptable because they introduce 'drastic changes' to the mandate of an observers' mission the league wants to dispatch to Syria to ensure the implementation of the peace plan."

AP: "The revolutionary fighters who captured Moammar Gadhafi's son and one-time heir apparent said Sunday they want to hold him in their town until a court system is established in Libya, and they demanded he be tried inside the country."