The Commentariat -- Sept. 1, 2013
Sheryl Gay Stolberg & Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "One day after Mr. Obama stunned the world by halting what had seemed an inexorable push toward a cruise missile attack, [Secretary of State John] Kerry, who has been the administration’s most forceful advocate for intervention, was left to defend the surprising reversal in a string of appearances on Sunday morning talk shows. The appearances -- Mr. Kerry was a guest on five morning shows -- underscored the administration's tenuous position after a week of fits and starts over Syria." ...
... Craig Whitlock & Sean Sullivan of the Washington Post: "Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday that fresh laboratory tests indicate sarin nerve gas was used in an Aug. 21 attack in Syria that killed more than 1,400 people, the first time that U.S. officials have pinpointed what kind of chemical weapon may have been involved. Appearing on five television network talk shows, Kerry said blood and hair samples from emergency workers in east Damascus had tested positive for traces of sarin, a highly toxic nerve agent. He said that U.S. officials learned of the lab results in the past 24 hours, citing the evidence as yet another reason for Congress to pass President Obama's request to authorize the use of military force...." ...
... John Bresnahan of Politico: "The White House has sent Congress a draft resolution authorizing the use of American military force in Syria, with a narrow focus on interdicting chemical weapons -- or their use -- by the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The draft resolution, crafted by White House officials, does not set any deadline for U.S. action, but it is clearly written to assuage some congressional concerns over open-ended American involvement in the two-year-old Syria civil war. The proposed resolution is here." ...
... Jonathan Allen of Politico: "The White House has provided a classified version of its intelligence estimate on the Syrian government's reported use of chemical weapons to Congress and will host an interagency classified briefing for all interested House members on Sunday, according to a memo circulated to House Republicans on Saturday." ...
... Ernesto Londoño of the Washington Post: "President Obama said Saturday that the United States has decided to use military force against Syria, calling last week's alleged chemical weapons attack there 'an attack on human dignity,' but said he would to seek congressional authorization for an attack. The announcement puts off an imminent cruise missile strike, a prospect that had put the region on edge and stoked intense debate in the United States, where many dread getting dragged into a new war. It is not clear what the Obama administration would do if Congress declines to authorize a military operation":
... The New York Times story, by Peter Baker & Anne Barnard, is here. ...
... Josh Lederman of the AP: "Senior administration officials say President Barack Obama had planned to take military action against Syria without congressional authorization, but told aides Friday night that he had changed his mind." ...
... Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: the President's decision to put the question to Congress blindsided top aides like Susan Rice & Chuck Hagel. ...
... Mark Landler of the New York Times: "The Oval Office meeting [with top aides] ended one of the strangest weeks of the Obama administration, in which a president who had drawn a 'red line' against the use of chemical weapons, and watched Syrian military forces breach it with horrific consequences, found himself compelled to act by his own statements. But Mr. Obama, who has been reluctant for the past two years to get entangled in Syria, had qualms from the start."
The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. -- Barack Obama, December 2007 ...
... Ben Smith of BuzzFeed: "President Barack Obama's abrupt decision to hand over the choice to strike Syria to Congress ... has already struck a rare and dramatic blow against his own power. Presidents for decades have ignored the Constitutional requirement that Congress authorize acts of war, launching attacks from Kosovo to Libya without authorization. Presidents Bush and Obama took a 2001 authorization of the use of force against terrorists as a carte blanche for a global secret war from Rome to Pakistan; the last formal authorization came in 2003, for Iraq." ...
... Smith, et al., Irk Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian: "... what makes the celebratory reaction to yesterday's announcement particularly odd is that the Congressional vote which Obama said he would seek appears, in his mind, to have no binding force at all." ...
... Evan McMorris-Santoro of BuzzFeed: "Administration officials refuse to comment on what Obama will do if Congress doesn't authorize strikes on Syria. Officials say they're confident Congress will vote yes on Obama's war." ...
... According to Jonathan Allen: President Obama "is reserving the right to exercise his legal authority to launch limited reprisals in response to Syrian President Bashar Assad's reported use of chemical weapons, even if Congress turns him down."
Congress is now the dog that caught the car. -- David Axelrod
Meant to run this yesterday & forgot. Justine Sharrock of BuzzFeed: "The U.S. Army has been aware for years of a major security flaw in the system soldiers use to access computers -- and has done nothing to fix it, two sources, including an officer who alerted superiors to the risk, told BuzzFeed. Update: Roy Lundgren, the Army's Deputy of Cybersecurity, confirmed with BuzzFeed that the security failure exists and has the potential to provide users unauthorized access.... Today countless computers, and the soldiers who use them, remain vulnerable to a simple hack, which can be executed by someone with little or no security expertise." ...
... Sharrock Update: "The United States Army's Deputy of Cybersecurity Roy Lundgren ... say[s] the best fix is to make soldiers aware of proper conduct, instead of fixing the technology itself.... The hack allows users with access to shared Army computers to assume the identities of other personnel, gaining their securities clearances in the process, and having their activity logged as that user." CW: this seems to be the same thing Edward Snowden did to access accounts & download top-secret data which someone at his level would not have clearance to access. Thanks to safari for the links.
Der Spiegel: The NSA ... hacked into Al Jazeera's internal communications system, according to documents from former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden...."
Karoli of Crooks & Liars lays out the evidence: the "IRS scandal didn't happen to the Tea party; It was invented by the Tea Party."
Nick Renaud-Komaya of the Independent: "A sign outside St. John's Anglican Church ... [in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada] has been viewed over 1,000,000 times after a user of the social entertainment site Reddit posted a photo of the sign online, the Huffington Post reports."
Dahlia Lithwick of Slate: "When courts can't even get the easy [rape] cases right, we're in big trouble." Last week was "a spectacularly awful week in rape."
Senate Race
Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: "Mary Cheney, the younger sister of Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Senate candidate, sharply criticized her sister's stance on same-sex marriage.... Posting on Facebook on Friday evening, Mary Cheney, who is gay and married her longtime partner last year, wrote: '... I love my sister, but she is dead wrong on the issue of marriage.' Their father..., Dick Cheney, supports same-sex marriage.... 'I am not pro-gay marriage,' Liz Cheney said in a statement [Friday] responding to an apparent push poll against her in Wyoming. 'I believe the issue of marriage must be decided by the states, and by the people in the states, not by judges and not even by legislators, but by the people themselves.'" ...
... CW Translation: "I believe whatever it takes to win this seat in a state where I can't even get a fishing license; if it hurts my little sister's feelings, tough."
Local News
So Transvaginal Bob Is a Crook AND a Liar. Carol Leonnig & Rosalind Hilderman of the Washington Post: "Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell was aware of gifts and financial help provided by a wealthy Richmond area businessman during the same months the governor and his wife took steps to help his company..., contrasting with an assertion by McDonnell's attorneys that he was in the dark about the extent of the gifts [businessman Jonnie] Williams bestowed on his family.... Attorneys for the governor and first lady Maureen McDonnell argued to federal prosecutors two weeks ago that the governor should not be charged with any crimes, in part because of this ignorance...." Williams is apparently cooperating with investigators; McDonnell's attorneys say Williams -- whom McDonnell has described as a friend -- is not credible. Federal officials could decide this month whether or not to charge McDonnell.
Maureen Dowd profiles Cathy Lanier, the police chief of the District of Columbia.
David Halbfinger of the New York Times: "As he oversaw the city's $85 billion pension system, New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, [Jr., a candidate for mayor,] steered the funds into a diverse range of new investment categories.... Yet performance was lackluster: nationwide, more than half of large public pension funds outperformed the five city funds.... Meanwhile, the city's roster of fund managers, and their fees, tripled -- and Mr. Thompson collected more than $500,000 in campaign donations from them.... [Records & interviews] suggest frequent overlap of Mr. Thompson's political ambitions and the comptroller's operation, and that like many pension overseers at the time, he raised campaign money aggressively from those seeking business from his office." ...
... CW: seems to be a more serious lapse than tweeting penis pix. Just sayin'.
News Ledes
Los Angeles Times: "Egyptian prosecutors Sunday ordered deposed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi to stand trial on murder-related charges, stepping up the military-backed government's purge of the Muslim Brotherhood amid weeks of unrest that have deeply divided the country.... Prosecutors referred Morsi and 14 others, including Essam Erian, former deputy of the Brotherhood's political wing, to criminal court on charges of inciting deadly violence during a December protest outside the presidential palace.
Guardian: "Radiation levels 18 times higher than previously reported have been found near a water storage tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing fresh concern about the safety of the wrecked facility."
BBC News: "Veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost has died at the age of 74 after a suspected heart attack while on board a cruise ship."
AP: "Nelson Mandela was discharged from the hospital on Sunday while still in critical condition and was driven in an ambulance to his Johannesburg home which has been set up to provide intensive care, South Africa's presidency said.... President Jacob Zuma said in a statement Sunday that Mandela's condition "is at times unstable. His home has been reconfigured to allow him to receive intensive care there,' ..."
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Reader Comments (10)
Re: Thompson and penis pix. I recall many years ago reading an argument by Nick von Hoffman in the New Republic that graft was the engine of local government, it’s what makes local government work. I think that’s more or less true. I doubt penis pix have a similar public benefit.
Well, so Obama is going to Congress for authorization. He should. If Congress says no, so be it.
Here is a link to an article by Hans Blix about the US taking unilateral action ANYWHERE:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/19174-the-west-has-no-mandate-to-act-as-a-global-policeman
This includes unilateral action in "bombing" (or whatever) Syria. This is the same guy who hit a wall with Dubya over invading Iraq. Hope Obama realizes this, but I doubt it. I am thinking his brain has been taken over by those little power devils, who deal in delusion. Not so different from Bush, after all. OUCH! Big worry: would Hillary decide differently? Doubt it, since she is a bigger hawk than Obama!
A coolly logical paper on Syria from the European Council on Foreign Relations with links to a letter from General Martin Dempsey to Senator Carl Levin setting forth the military options. Summary: any effective option starts at $1,000,000,000 a month.
http://ecfr.eu/content/entry/commentary_eight_things_to_consider_before_intervening_in_syria
So we're 17 Trillion dollars in debt. We are cutting back on Medicare, Social Security, Education, Infrastructure rebuilding and scientific research support. But now we can spend a Billion a month to " Teach Assad a lesson". This is a lowball estimate as all these operations escalate because " we can't let them get away with THAT".
These comments about the costs of military action have inspired me to don my imaginary beauty queen tiara & advocate for world peace. I differ from actual beauty queens in that (a) I'm not likely to win the real tiara, & (b) I have half a plan. Matt Yglesias wrote a piece last week urging actual humanitarian aid instead of humanitarian missiles. Of course that's a fantastic notion because ... military-industrial complex.
So the trick is to further capitalize humanitarian aid, to make it more profitable than manufacturing military equipment. I'll betcha Lockheed could assemble formaldehyde-laced cottages (think Katrina cottages) for displaced Syrians as well as it can put together billion-dollar F-35 fighter jets we don't need.
There's already a lot of that going on, of course; the billions we threw down the rabbit-hole in Iraq post-Mission Accomplished made some U.S. companies very rich. If the government would pay another billion a month for educators, doctors, agricultural consultants, civil engineers, home manufacturers, etc., etc., you'd suddenly find "aid" lobbyists coming out of the woodwork (see James Singer's comment on William Thompson above) handing fistfuls of dollars to Congressmembers. And that MOCs suddenly would be scrambling to think of new humanitarian stuff we could do.
Yes, yes, a lot of the so-called aid would go to fraud, waste and abuse, but aren't missiles waste & abuse? And missiles piss people off a lot more than does a team who comes in, employs a few locals & purifies the water supply.
Now, how to get the ball rolling?
I wear my imaginary crown proudly. Ya shoulda seen me in the talent contest.
Marie
"we live in a country in which most states privilege the rapist’s right to access his child over the mother’s right to be left alone." This is what Dahlia Lithwick of Slate has to say. God damn. Democrats agree mostly on politics and then close the big tent's door to exclude women's/human rights, because women's rights or human rights are too much work because of the opposition from religious groups. If you like work, it is nice to know that rebutting/changing ignorant misogynistic laws is a bottomless well of possibilities.
Now, we are going to march off toward some Syrian quicksand instead of fixing the broken laws right here in front of us.
Marie, I love you in a tiara and your gown is to die for. You have made a great observation, that being, we get more of the things we will subsidize with government aid.
However, in the macho military environment created by media to build enlistments for the volunteer military now existing , turning things from the status quo is hard to imagine, as you know.
But, the first step in building a better world is imagining what a better world would look like. Man can achieve what the mind can conceive.
A front page story in the Time's today that is sorrowful and troubling in all its ramifications:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/us/widening-ripples-of-grief-in-adoptees-death.html?ref=todayspaper
The death of David Frost, and all the subsequent ink about his Nixon interviews, brought to mind the stunning Watergate testimony of John Dean. It was a revelation of how government at the highest level works (or not). A sampling of it can be found here:
http://www.buyoutfootage.com/qtvue.php?z=http://c0026567.cdn1.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/pd_na_314-web.mov&x=192&y=144&t=Watergate%20Hearings