The Commentariat -- Sept. 5, 2015
White House: "In this week's address, the President recognized Labor Day by highlighting the economic progress our country has made, and underlining what needs to be done to continue that growth":
Peter Baker of the New York Times: "President Obama and King Salman of Saudi Arabia met at the White House on Friday in hopes of moving past their differences four months after the king refused the president's invitation to visit amid concerns over American negotiations with Iran. During brief public remarks at the beginning of their meetings, neither of the leaders directly addressed the disagreement that has driven a wedge between their countries, namely the deal to lift sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program. Instead, they stressed a long history of cooperation and friendship between the United States and Saudi Arabia." ...
... Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), in a Washington Post op-ed, says he will vote against the Iran nuclear deal. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... David Herszenhorn of the New York Times: "Mr. Cardin's closely watched decision did not jeopardize the implementation of the nuclear accord, but it did raise the likelihood that the president would have to veto a resolution disapproving it this month -- a diplomatic embarrassment the White House is hoping to avoid.... Also on Friday, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, the only incumbent Democrat facing a possibly difficult re-election fight next year, said he supported the deal." ...
... Jonathan Chait: "The pro-Israel lobby organized an important constituency in American politics that shared a relatively unified understanding of its collective self-interest. A month ago, that lobby was gearing up for a massive national campaign to block the Iran nuclear deal, using every medium at its disposal.... The campaign has not only failed, it has appeared almost completely ineffectual, and its failure has left its members stupefied. "
** Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post: "If you've heard anything about the upcoming budget battle, it's probably that Republicans want to dramatically slash spending. Yay, fiscal conservatism! What you may not know is that many of their desired funding cuts would increase deficits in the long run." CW: Once again proving that ideology & stupid are a bad mix. I realize that some form of representative democracy is the best form of government humankind has devised. Again and again the Congress of the United States reminds us what a misbegotten species we are.
Shut 'Er Down. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), in a New York Times op-ed: "Since its formation, the Select Committee on Benghazi has been aimless and slow moving, not knowing what it was looking for or where. It has acted in a deeply partisan way, frequently failing to consult or even to inform Democratic members before taking action, and selectively leaking information to the press. After 16 months and more than $4 million, the committee has gained no additional insight into the attacks in Benghazi.... The committee is solely concerned with damaging [Hillary Clinton's] candidacy, searching for something, anything, that can be insinuated against her.... A committee that cannot tell the American people what it is looking for after 16 months should be shut down."
Elections Matter! A Lot! Ed Kilgore: Confederate legal theorists have proposed a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees that would require them to "have a clearly documented willingness to ignore both other branches of government -- the principle behind the receding Republican doctrine of 'judicial restraint' -- and stare decisis -- the principle against overturning well-settled Court precedent -- in pursuit of the 'original' meaning of the Constitution. That means treating SCOTUS as an all-powerful institution communing with eighteenth century Founders -- or worse yet, Con Con mythologies about those Founders -- and empowered to kill many decades of decisions by all three branches of government, precedent and democracy be damned.... [The theorists] are very clearly pointing the way to abolition of the entire New Deal/Great Society legacy via rulings by judges serving lifetime terms."
Presidential Race
Heidi Przybyla of USA Today: "Hillary Clinton plans to launch a new initiative this weekend as she seeks to weave women's issues into every facet of her campaign instead of using them in a separate silo as she did in her unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.... The rollout coincides with the 20th anniversary of the former first lady's 1995 speech to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, in which she proclaimed 'women's rights are human rights.'" ...
... Alex Seitz-Wald of MSNBC: "In an exclusive interview with NBC News/MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Friday, Hillary Clinton said she's 'sorry' there's been so much controversy over her private email server, but declined to apologize for the decision to use it. She also suggested that GOP front-runner Donald Trump is unqualified to be president and weighed in on the surprisingly robust challenge to her candidacy from Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders": (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
... Rosalind Helderman & Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post: "Hillary Rodham Clinton and her family personally paid a State Department staffer to maintain the private e-mail server she used while heading the agency, according to an official from Clinton's presidential campaign.... The private employment of [Bryan] Pagliano [-- who this week said he he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination rather than testify before the House Benghaazi! committee --] provides a new example of the ways that Clinton ... hired staff to work simultaneously for her in public and private capacities.... Pagliano did not list the outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he filed each year." ...
... Michael Hirsh of Politico: "If Clinton's long-running problem until now is that the public mistrusts her -- and the revelations about her private email server have only exacerbated this mistrust -- the emails themselves appear to leave the opposite impression. They are, for the most part, utterly mundane, the chatter of daily diplomatic life at a high stratum of society and, all in all, prosaic rather than pernicious. If there's plotting going on, it isn't happening here -- either that or Hillary Clinton has developed a very clever code. Does 'bring some skim milk' really mean 'destroy the documents'?"
Sabrina Siddiqui of the Guardian: "Against the backdrop of a crushing debt crisis, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio took their presidential campaigns to Puerto Rico on Friday. They offered pointedly different views on how to best resolve the financial woes afflicting the US territory.... Speaking entirely in Spanish [sorry, Donald!] at a restaurant in San Juan, Rubio told around 150 people that allowing Puerto Rican municipalities to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection was not the solution to its problems.... Clinton stood firmly behind her stance [of extending bankruptcy protection] on Friday and, though she did not mention Rubio by name, sharply criticized Republicans in Washington over congressional inaction."
The Drs. Frankenstein Not Happy with the Monster. Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: "... the mammoth big-money network assembled by Republicans in recent years is torn about how best to defuse the threat Mr. Trump holds for their party, and haunted by the worry that any concerted attack will backfire." ...
... Sean Sullivan & Matea Gold of the Washington Post: "Officials with the Club for Growth -- a prominent anti-tax group that frequently targets Republicans it deems not conservative enough -- said Friday that the organization began reaching out to its network of donors in recent weeks to help fund an anti-Trump ad blitz. The organization's super PAC arm, Club for Growth Action, would run the ads, the group said.... But the group's pitch has been met with skepticism among some top GOP financiers, who believe that any effort to attack the real estate mogul could backfire.... Trump has criticized the Club for Growth for attacking him after previously talking to him about donating money....
Who knows more about growth than I do? -- Donald Trump
The stock market. -- Constant Weader ...
... ** Trump Is No Biz Wiz. S.V. Dáte of the National Journal: "As 'really rich' as Donald Trump is today, he might have been even richer if, instead of dabbling in skyscrapers and casinos, he'd simply taken his eight-figure inheritance decades ago and sunk it into the stock market. Had the celebrity businessman ... invested his eventual share of his father's real-estate company into a mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks in 1974, it would be worth nearly $3 billion today, thanks to the market's performance over the past four decades. If he'd invested the $200 million that Forbes magazine determined he was worth in 1982 into that index fund, it would have grown to more than $8 billion today.... That a purely unmanaged index fund's return could outperform Trump's hands-on wheeling and dealing calls into question one of Trump's chief selling points on the campaign trail: his business acumen."
Mark Hensch of the Hill: "Donald Trump is blasting Hugh Hewitt after stumbling over foreign policy questions in an interview with the conservative radio host. '[He is] a third-rate radio announcer,' Trump told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' on Friday morning."
Robert Schlesinger of US News: "The great Donald Trump experiment of 2015 entered a new phase this week with the exchange of attacks between the ersatz (Trump) and erstwhile (Jeb Bush )GOP frontrunners. Trump has been running a campaign so long on tone and posture as to be post-ideological. Bush has started systematically mounting a thoroughly conventional assault aiming to demonstrate issue by issue that Trump is an unsuitable standard bearer for the party. It's not so much a battle for the soul of the Republican Party as it is a struggle over whether the GOP needs a soul -- a core set of issues that define it -- at all. Instead Trump offers leadership -- snarling, angry and combative -- as an end instead of means." ...
... The Bodyguard: David Nakamura of the Washington Post: "Two weeks ago, [Trump bodyguard Keith] Schiller stepped between his boss and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos during a news conference and physically ejected the influential journalist...." This week, Schiller punched out a protester who grabbed Schiller from behind after Schiller wrested a banner from the hands of protesters. "'The Secret Service would not operate that way,' Ralph Basham, who oversaw the federal protective agency from 2003 to 2006, said of the fisticuffs outside Trump Tower. 'They're not a bunch of jackbooted thugs.'" Nakamura goes on to report on the system for providing Secret Service protection for presidential candidates. Clinton, because she is a former First Lady, is the only candidate who currently has protection. (No link.)
Beyond the Beltway
James Higdon, et al., of the Washington Post: "An attorney for jailed Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis said Friday that the marriage licenses issued by her deputies to several same-sex couples are invalid. 'They are not worth the paper they're written on,' Mat Staver said outside the Carter County Detention Center, where Davis is being held on a contempt charge." CW: So Kim the Incarcerated is still trying to impose her personal religious beliefs on others. Talk about tyranny, Ted Cruz. ...
... Lyle Denniston of ScotusBlog: "... even the judge conceded that those licenses, if issued, may not be valid, although he refused to decide that issue and left it to the lawyers for the same-sex couples to confront. ...
... Renee Graham of the Boston Globe: "Kim Davis ... isn't a religious freedom fighter. She's a homophobe, pure and simple.... Wrong and strong, Davis's actions are reminiscent of Alabama Governor George Wallace's infamous 'Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.'... Defying the rule of law didn't work for Wallace, and it won't work for Davis.... Davis is just the latest in a long, infernal line of fanatics to contort their so-called faith into an excuse for hatred and division." ...
... John Tierney of KGW Portland, Oregon: "A Marion County[, Oregon,] judge has refused to perform same-sex marriages and has asked his clerks to refer couples seeking same-sex marriages to other county judges. Judge Vance Day, a circuit court judge and former chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, is now facing an ethics investigation over that decision, according to the judge's spokesman.... Day hasn't performed any same-sex marriages since he joined the bench in 2011, but only stopped doing marriages of any kind this past spring. Judges in Marion County are not required to perform marriages...."
Way Beyond
Rick Lyman, et al., of the New York Times: "Thousands of migrants who have been bottled up in Hungary, demanding passage to the West, will be allowed into Austria and Germany, the Austrian chancellor said late Friday. Early Saturday, the first buses carrying them arrived at the Hungary-Austria border." ...
... The Guardian story, by Emma Graham-Harrison & others, is here. ...
... Update. Shawn Pogatchnik & Pablo Gorondi of the AP: "Thousands of exhausted, elated migrants reached their dream destinations of Germany and Austria on Saturday, completing epic journeys by boat, bus, train and foot to escape war and poverty. Before dawn, they clambered off a fleet of Hungarian buses at the Austrian border to find a warm welcome from charity workers offering beds and hot tea." ...
... Griff Witte & Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post: "Stepping back from a confrontation with asylum-seekers that drew condemnation from throughout Europe, Hungary will use buses to ferry thousands of migrants from Budapest to the border with Austria, a senior government official said Friday. The government's fierce attitude to asylum-seekers fleeing war and poverty sent more than a thousand of them on a long march across the nation in a bid to reach Western Europe, where they hope for better lives. The turnaround was a major admission of defeat for Hungarian authorities...." ...
... Anthony Faiola of the Washington Post: "Call him Europe's Donald Trump. Hungary's maverick Prime Minister Viktor Orban is emerging as the straight-talking voice of right-wing Europe, vowing to block a wave of desperate refugees from seeking sanctuary in the region. Continuing a wave of blunt statements rarely heard from heads of state on this side of the Atlantic, he warned Friday that Europeans now stand to become 'a minority in our own continent' if the floodgates are not immediately closed."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Ben Kuroki, a decorated Japanese-American gunner in the Army Air Forces of World War II, who was hailed on the American homeland at a time when tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans were confined to internment camps as supposed security risks, died on Tuesday in Camarillo, Calif. He was 98."
New York Times: The annual pillow "fight on the West Point, N.Y., campus turned bloody as some cadets swung pillowcases packed with hard objects, thought to be helmets, that split lips, broke at least one bone, dislocated shoulders and knocked cadets unconscious. The brawl at the publicly funded academy, where many of the Army's top leaders are trained, left 30 cadets injured, including 24 with concussions, according to West Point."
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Reader Comments (7)
I stumbled across a perceptive essay profiling then Senator Barack Obama, written in 2006. It was delightful to read knowing the author had no idea how things would turn out.
http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a9205/mr-obama-goes-to-washington-19329/
What's in a name?
From this morning's Washington Post:
"After the uproar over the new name for Mt. McKinley, CREDO mobile's petition asks the airport to go back to former name Washington National, which honored George Washington."
http://wapo.st/1EFLUv8
FYI outside the beltway folks: The airport is in Alexandria, on the Virginia shore of the Potomac. A short drive on George Washington Parkway from Mount Vernon.
@D.C.Clark: This will happen as soon as supporters of the measure (a) enlist Scott Walker as a spokesperson, & (b) prove irrefutably that Ronald Reagan was a black Communist, Nazi, Satan-worshipping serial child molester who tripled the deficit. As you will note, one of those factors is already in evidence, & it hasn't made a whit of difference to the Legend of Ronnie.
Marie
In the other Washington: big, brave arsonists caused extensive damage to a Planned Parenthood facility in Pullman (home to Washington State University, located in the eastern part of the state). I'd like to see all members of Congress, whatever their stance on abortion, come out strongly against such violence. But they won't, the cowards.
Also from the other Washington, near the other Mt. Vernon, this state supreme court decision (a heck of a Friday evening news dump):
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/state-supreme-court-charter-schools-are-unconstitutional
We are a divided state, divided east and west, a geographic and economic division that also largely defines our politics, the red to the sage-brush and agricultural east (much of the agriculture made possible by the damn govmint water projects, of course), the blue hugging the waters of Puget Sound.
Abortion clinic bombings and arsons tend to occur in the east. The supreme court resides in the west and apparently still suffers under the illusion that we are a common people and should have common schools as defined in our constitution.
Of course, our own Koch-Confederates are not happy. They have in mind something more along the lines of Walker's Wisconsin or Jindal's Louisiana, where tax dollars are happily diverted to private and religious schools without a second thought.
Fortunately, here in Washington the illusion that we are one people with common interests still lives....for now.
Re Building Inspectors:
Many years ago I installed a free standing fireplace in our townhouse. Did my due diligence, read up the codes, got the permits... Built a brick facade on the wall behind, brick and slate hearth, slate mantle, triple wall steel chimney...
Armed with copies of all relevant codes and regs, permits, my design sketches, dimensions and measurements, took a day off work and called the inspector.
Inspector arrived, took one look and said: "That's a beautiful job. My daughter in law has been after me to put one of these in her townhouse. How'd ya do it?"
Spent the next hour teaching the inspector how to do the job he came to inspect. Didn't charge him.
Re Trump no biz wiz:
It would be very interesting to adjust Le Donald's claimed net worth by all the debt he's been forgiven in his several bankruptcies. Also to see a list of the people he has thereby stiffed and for how much.