The Commentariat -- Oct. 18, 2014
Internal links removed.
** Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Saturday allowed Texas to use its strict voter identification law in the November election. The court's order was unsigned and contained no reasoning. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a six-page dissent. 'The prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters,' she wrote, undermines 'public confidence in elections.' Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent." CW: Hmmm. Once again, it's the girls against the boys, & this time not on a gender-specific issue.
Neil Irwin of the New York Times: "'The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me,' [Federal Reserve Chair Janet] Yellen said at a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. 'I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation;s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.'... But ... she stays away from the aspects of the inequality puzzle that have a close tie-in to the policies of the Federal Reserve.... It seems like Ms. Yellen offered this speech as a way to use her bully pulpit to cast public attention on an issue she cares about deeply, deliberately avoiding areas where inequality intersects with the policy areas under which she has direct control." ...
... See also, Connecticut gubernatorial candidate, in November Elections below. ...
... David Firestone of the New York Times: "Good luck distinguishing between good oligarchs & bad oligarchs." He's right. The opinions & preferences of the wealthy may sometimes line up with the public good, but they should not be given any more weight than yours or mine. See also, Bill Gates/Common Core.
White House: "In this week's address, the President discussed what the United States is doing to respond to Ebola, both here at home and abroad, and the key facts Americans need to know":
... Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response. Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his schedule on Wednesday.... Officials said Mr. Obama placed much of the blame on the C.D.C...." ...
... Julie Davis & Michael Shear of the New York Times: "President Obama on Friday named Ron Klain, a seasoned Democratic crisis-response operative and White House veteran, to manage the government's response to the deadly virus as public anxiety grows over its possible spread. Mr. Klain, a former chief of staff for Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joseph R. Biden Jr., is known for his ability to handle high-stakes and fast-moving political challenges. He was the lead Democratic lawyer for Mr. Gore during the 2000 election recount, and was later played by Kevin Spacey in the HBO drama 'Recount' about the disputed contest." ...
... CW: So Frank Underwood. Great. Maybe he can ruin the lives of some GOP loudmouths. ...
... CW: You'll be shocked, shocked, to read this. David McCabe of the Hill: "GOP blasts Obama Ebola czar pick. No sooner had the White House announced that it had selected Ron Klain to coordinate the administration's response to concerns about the Ebola virus than several congressional Republicans were expressing anger about the pick. Most highlighted Klain's past as a political operative." The lede to this story has been changed, but I prefer the original one, copied above. ...
... Joe Nocera on the CDC's "failure of competence.... When you think about it, many of the Obama administration's 'scandals' have been failures of competence. The Secret Service ... the Veterans Health Administration ... the Obamacare website.... [CW: I'd add Benghaaazi! & the IRS to that list.] The Republican right takes it as an article of faith that the national government can't do anything right.... And now comes the C.D.C. -- the most trusted agency in government -- thrust in a role for which it was designed: advising us and protecting us from a potential contagion. With every new mistake, it becomes, in the public eye, just another federal agency that can't get it right." ...
... Nate Silver looks at flight patterns coming out of West African countries to show why a travel ban wouldn't work. "... the next Ebola patient may be on a flight from London, not Liberia." ...
... Jonathan Cohn takes a more comprehensive look at why a travel ban, including one based on the nationality of the potential passenger, wouldn't work. One of his main sources: Bush administration Secretary of Health & Human Services Michael Leavitt, who studied the feasibility of a travel ban during an avian flu epidemic. Leavitt's conclusion: fageddaboudit. ...
... Your Ebola Chart of the Day is here. BUT never mind ...
... Kathleen Ronayne of the AP (Oct. 16): "U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky told a group of college students Wednesday the deadly virus Ebola can spread from a person who has the disease to someone standing three feet away and said the White House should be honest about that. His comments directly conflict with statements from world health authorities who have dealt with Ebola outbreaks since 1976." ...
... Here's more from Benjy Sarlin of MSNBC. ...
... Steve Benen: "At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, it's no longer clear just how much respect Rand Paul is due.... To assume Paul knows what he's talking about, and that he has more credibility that legitimate medical experts, is a mistake." ...
... Josh Marshall of TPM digs for the roots of Li'l Randy's Ebola truther moment. He finds some in a crackpot conspiracy theorists' organization called Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, of which both Rand & Ron Paul are a card-carrying members. Sounds like an upstanding professional group, doesn't it? It isn't. "... they suggested that President Obama was not simply a gifted orator but actually 'deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis developed by Milton Erickson, M.D.?' The group's journal has also claimed that humans have not contributed to climate change, that HIV does not cause AIDS, that abortion causes breast cancer, that undocumented immigrants are flooding the US with leprosy, [etc.]... The year before running for senate at their annual conference. 'I use a lot of AAPS literature when I talk,' he told the group in his speech." ...
... CW: If you're looking for something to panic about, I suggest you freak out about the possibility that this nutjob could become president. ...
... Hey, maybe President Randy would make his old man the surgeon general! Ben Adler of Grist elaborates on Marshall's story: "Ron Paul, as it happens, has come out with what might be the most disturbing thing said by any conservative about Ebola." Paul thinks "liberty, not government, [is] the key to containing Ebola.... Rand Paul is shrewd enough not to say what Ron did about Ebola. But his belief system is the same. And his father's latest missive is a taste of the dangers a Rand Paul presidency would carry for the environment, public health, and public safety." ...
... MEANWHILE, more Texas crazy from Louis Gohmert, a bona fide elected representative of the people & until now, secret feminist, who tells us "... the CDC head, Frieden, is apparently the commander of the Democrats' new war on women nurses. Because, goodnight, they set them up, and then they throw them under the bus." (CW: Oddly, I think he's partly right on his main point, before he & Glenn Beck pivot deep into Right Wing World.
... Dana Milbank: "In an interview published Sunday night, [NIH Director Francis] Collins shared with the Huffington Post's Sam Stein his belief that, if not for recent federal spending cuts, 'we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this' Ebola outbreak. This should not be controversial. His conjecture was based on cold budgeting facts.... Yet conservatives pounced.... Who would say, given the economic catastrophe that an Ebola outbreak could cause, that spending tens of millions more for an Ebola vaccine is wasteful?" ...
... CW Answer: Dr. Ron Paul, for one.
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" for the LGBT-WMD Community":
... CW: If you can't figure out why your Fox "News"-watching acquaintances are so ignorant, watch the clips Colbert highlights.
From the Department of Inconsequential Matters. Did the plaintiff in this case really suffer from "intentional infliction of emotional stress" or is he just a guy who can't take a joke?
November Elections
Connecticut. Tatiana Schlossberg of the New York Times: "Thomas C. Foley, the Republican candidate for governor of Connecticut, paid $673 in federal taxes in 2013, despite personal wealth that allowed him to spend $11 million of his own money in a race for the same office in 2010.... The campaign released his 2010, 2011 and 2012 tax summaries last month; 2013 was the third year in a row that Mr. Foley effectively paid no federal income tax." ...
... CW: That should make you angry.
Florida. Gov. Rick Scott pumped out flood zones caused by rising sea levels so he won't have to admit sea levels are rising.
Nebraska. It's Willie Horton All Over Again:
... AND the charges the Republican Congressional Committee makes against Demcorat Brad Ashford are based on mighty thin "evidence." Nebraska's Republican governor supported the same sentencing bill Ashford did. ...
... Jose DelReal of the Washington Post: "The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blasted the ad on Friday afternoon, accusing the ad of 'race-baiting' and demanding that it be taken down." ...
... CW: One reason we may never get sensible sentencing laws: politicians are afraid if they vote for any bill that allows for any sort of early release, they will be Willie-Hortoned in their next election bid.
Nevada, I guess. Cliven Bundy's New Black Friend. CW: I do believe the real reason AG Eric Holder is resigning is he's a'skeert to face Cliven Bundy & his ranch hand candidate for Congress Kamau Bakari:
Texas. See the Supreme Court ruling linked at the top of the page.
Virginia. Washington Post Editors: GOP Senate candidate Ed Gillespie proposes a national healthcare plan "worse than Obamacare." CW: Hey, it will raise the deficit, has poor protection for people with pre-existing conditions, & will hurt poor people, leaving them with nothing but bare-bones catastrophic coverage. But otherwise it's great.
Presidential Election
Paul Waldman lists a few reasons why "there's no way [Rand Paul] (or any other Republican) could get a third of their votes in a presidential campaign.... No matter how much he reaches out, other people in his party are going to keep doing things like air this latter-day Willie Horton ad. Then there's the comprehensive Republican project to restrict voting rights, which African-Americans rightly interpret as an effort to keep them from voting. Then there's the fact that for the last six years, Barack Obama has been subject to an endless torrent of racist invective, not only from your uncle at Thanksgiving but from people with nationally syndicated radio shows. On his listening tour, Paul might ask a few black people how they feel about the fact that America's first black president had to show his birth certificate to prove he's a real American." ...
... CW: Yeah, & how about Li'l Randy himself "standing by" his aide & co-author, the "Southern Avenger"? Plus, as Howard Fineman pointed out in the linked post, "Paul will have to deal with myriad nettlesome issues that come from his family's political roots in the libertarian, states' rights and nativist soil deep in some reaches of American politics." When you get right down to it, Rand Paul is a Southern white boy. He has pretty much let on in recent remarks that his inerest in bridging the GOP racial divide is about garnering votes, not about giving a whup about black Americans.
Beyond the Beltway
** Michael Schmidt, et al., of the New York Times: "The police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., two months ago has told investigators that he was pinned in his vehicle and in fear for his life as he struggled over his gun with Mr. Brown, according to government officials briefed on the federal civil rights investigation into the matter. The officer, Darren Wilson, has told the authorities that during the scuffle, Mr. Brown reached for the gun. It was fired twice in the car, according to forensics tests performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The first bullet struck Mr. Brown in the arm; the second bullet missed.... [Federal] officials said that while the federal investigation was continuing, the evidence so far did not support civil rights charges against Officer Wilson.... The officials ... said the forensic evidence gathered in the car lent credence to Officer Wilson's version of events."
News Ledes
AP: "Searchers found human remains on Saturday that could be those of a University of Virginia sophomore who has been missing since Sept. 13, police said. Further forensic tests are needed to confirm whether the remains are those of Hannah Graham, but Graham's parents were notified of the preliminary findings, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo told a news conference."
AP: "Police in the Seattle suburb of Auburn said Thursday that they believe they have found the body of missing actress Misty Upham, known for her roles in 'August: Osage County,' 'Frozen River' and 'Django Unchained.'"
Reuters: "The survivalist charged with murdering a Pennsylvania trooper and wounding another was spotted near his old high school carrying a rifle and with mud smeared on his face, police said on Saturday, five weeks after a manhunt for the suspect began. Eric Frein, 31, who is on the FBI's Most Wanted list, was spotted by a woman in a 'surprise encounter' while she was taking a walk, said Lieutenant Colonel George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police."
New York Times: On a trip to Milan to meet with European leaders, Vladimir Putin behaves badly.
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Reader Comments (10)
Sullivan, or somebody over there, comes up with an idea that I'm ready to buy on why Obama is letting NSA and the CIA get away with murder (and the long withheld CIA torture report) - the agency told him from day one that he would "lose the CIA" if he didn't protect them. Sullivan or whoever also thinks there is no one who can stop them. I think this is of a piece with Panetta's horrible attacks and the Secret Service breakdown and some agents complaints.
Anybody else buying?
I take umbrage at the dissing of Milton Erickson, a psychiatrist gifted in "intuitive" hypnosis. He did NOT found Neuro Linguistic Programming, I can assure you, and did not endorse it. That was a new age spin off from his inimitable work by a few who wanted to capitalize on Erickson's fame and make a bundle of $$$--of which Erickson had very little.
My husband and I had the privilege of studying with Milton Erickson in Phoenix back in the early 1980's--when he was in failing health, but still practicing. He was one of a kind and nobody could duplicate the methods he used, since they were intuitive and unable to be replicated--though we both learned how to put people in hypnotic trances through storytelling. He was a patient, non-judgmental and tolerant teacher.
Erickson's genius was in teaching his students to follow their own intuition and use their own experiences in working with patients. I found working with him immensely helpful--as did my husband. He was, in a word, empowering! NLP is anything but--a derivative attempt to use techniques without understanding the intuitive underpinning--and to sell books and training sessions. NLP was/is definitely not an empowering movement and has never drawn the most talented and creative therapists--only the greediest.
Rand and Ron Paul would be rather typical NLP practitioners, and certainly did not comprehend the depth of what Milton Erickson was teaching. He most definitely was not a member of the American Physicians and Surgeons organization. He was completely apolitical. I can hear him chuckling from the grave. He would have thought it a hoot! How soon we forget great men and worship imitation plaster replicas. I am glad I knew Milton Erickson, studied with him--and can correct the record.
Ron and Rand should shut their silly mouths before they get in trouble with those of us who know the real deal! But it is probably too late. I think most people know what fakes and phonies they are. No way is Aqua Buddha fit to be mentioned in the same sentence with Milton Erickson, except as one of his more disturbed patients! An unsuccessful cure, unfortunately! And now a hopeless, lying pol! Spare me.
The title of the Ebola story over on Faux News is "Senior Republicans Criticize Ebola 'Czar' Choice for Lack of Medical Background."
Typical winger logic, as Fox News commentators whose medical experience is taking aspirin for their Obama rage headaches are the ones responsible for fueling the Ebola scaremonger machine. And to further their hypocrisy, the 'Senior Republicans' shitting their diapers over Ebola couldn't qualify for their own debate standards.
So how 'bout every idiot without professional medical experience stop making hay out of a national security issue, step off their soap box and eat dirt.
@Kate Madison. Nothing to take umbrage about here. You're misreading Marshall. He writes, "they suggested that President Obama was not simply a gifted orator but actually 'deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis developed by Milton Erickson, M.D.'"
Sentence structure is a bitch. Marshall is not dissing Erickson; he's not making any comment about the quality & validity of Erickson's work one way or the other. The AASP claim is, "President Obama uses Erickson's techniques to hypnotize his (Obama's) listeners." The "bad thing" is the misuse of the technique, not the technique. Read this sentence where I've substituted some of Marshall's language but used more or less his structure, somewhat simplified: "they suggested that Marie Burns was not simply a gifted writer but actually 'copying her essays from the secret diaries of Kate Madison, M.S.W.'" Here it's easier to see that it isn't the "product" that's bad; it's the way Marie misused/stole the product.
As to whether or not Erickson developed the technique, Marshall is also silent. It's an AASP claim, not a Marshall claim.
Marie
@Haley Simon: Nah. I don't read Sullivan, so maybe he has some compelling "evidence" for his hypothesis.
BUT ...
... Obama didn't have any trouble getting rid of the "beloved" Petraeus when Petraeus was head of the CIA. (BTW, in checking to see when Petraeus resigned, I came across a winger conspiracy theorist who stated as if it were fact that Obama "took Petraeus out" because Benghaaazi! Something about gunrunning. Whatever. Also, learned from a comment to the post that Obama executed his gay lovers & Andrew Breitbart. Another mystery solved.)
... As I pointed out the other day, Obama officials leaked to Mark Mazzetti of the NYT a story that blew up one of Panetta's major beefs with Obama: that Obama should have listened to Leon & armed the Syrian rebels. The story made Obama look sensible & Panetta look like, well, John McCain. I knew that story was payback & so does Leon Panetta.
Not sure about the NSA, but he's moved people around there, too. Clapper seems like a jerk & he is a liar, but spooks tend to be jerks & liars -- it's part of their jobs, after all -- so maybe relatively speaking, Clapper is not so bad.
I'm sure Obama was overwhelmed when he came into office. But he isn't anymore.
Marie
And speaking of jerks and liars: Wasn't that Paul Bremmer's tiny head popping up on Colbert's video saying, "See? we were right about the WMDs"–––shameful, absolutely shameful!
The SC decision re: the Texas voting rules is–––oh, what the heck, I'll use that same word–-shameful, but here I'll add disturbing and I wonder whether Breyer was suffering from decision overload or what? Not like him at all. So can we conclude that only the females on this court understand what's going down in Texas?
Before I got to Joe Nocera's "failures of competence" piece, I was thinking exactly that. How so many government agencies have screwed up big time and of course Obama gets blamed "cuz he be the man in charge." Presidents count on smooth sailing from people they apoint to hold the helm steady. So who should we blame when things go awry? When Reagan was perfectly handled by James Baker he survived; after Baker left things fell apart, the center began to give way. It would be interesting to have a history of agencies falling apart and why.
What is so goddamned hard about this voter ID issue in Texas? The media has these Republican criminals on video and in print ADMITTING their end game is to deny people who might vote Democratic a vote. For the Supreme Court to validate their actions must have broken some law. Really?
Is there not a person, a police force, an agency in this country that can knock on Rand Paul's door and arrest him for fomenting panic over Ebola? He is a menace to society.
PD: you got me wondering about the definition of the word, shame. According to my cut and paste on google, shame is "a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior." If I may be so bold, they need to have a soul before they can have shame. 4 and a half of the Supremes have no soul and I'll leave it up to you to figure out which one has half a soul.
After my month of bicycle touring Norway, I have come to the conclusion that the world would be a much better place if everyone, including/especially the Supremes took a sabbatical from daily routines and responsibilities occasionally. I don't count their recesses. We need to rethink lifetime appointments for any job in government simply because these people on the Supreme Court are so far removed from the character building travails of youth that what they offer is boring regularity honed over a lifetime of toeing the line. Sometimes old wood gets dry rot. I look at Scalia and think he has dry rot. And he doesn't appear to have any shame about his sorry opinions about women, minorities, Democrats and all the 'little people'.
Afraid we'll be seeing more and more of this.
"Maine school board puts teacher on leave after she traveled to Dallas. The teacher, who has not been named, attended a conference 10 miles from the hospital where Ebola patients have received care. "
http://www.pressherald.com/2014/10/17/fearing-ebola-strong-elementary-teacher-on-leave-after-traveling-to-dallas/