The Commentariat -- Nov. 8, 2013
Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "The Senate on Thursday approved a ban on discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation and gender identity, voting 64 to 32 in a bipartisan show of support that is rare for any social issue. It was the first time in the institution's history that it had voted to include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the country's nondiscrimination law. Despite initial wariness among many Republicans about the bill, 10 of them voted with 54 members of the Democratic majority to approve the measure.... Speaker John A. Boehner has repeatedly said he opposes the bill...."
One party in one house of Congress should not stand in the way of millions of Americans who want to go to work each day and simply be judged by the job they do. Now is the time to end this kind of discrimination in the workplace, not enable it. -- President Obama, in a written statement
... Kate Nocera of BuzzFeed: "As the Senate passed the Employee Non-Discrimination Act on Thursday, just one Republican senator -- Indiana's Dan Coats -- took to the floor to oppose it. The silence from the Senate Republican caucus stunned social conservatives, who have been arguing that the legislation, which provides workplace protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees, will undermine religious liberty." CW: As far as I can tell, they're arguing that discrimination & gay-bashing in the workplace is protected by the First Amendment's establishment clause. ...
... Daniel Horowitz of Red State calls the Republican senators who voted for the bill "undocumented Democrats.... With leadership that refuses to fight on anything, leaves the carcass of the fractured conference to Democrat scavenging, and completely surrenders on even the most bedrock social/liberty issues, what is left of the GOP in the Senate?"
** Jackie Calmes & Robert Pear of the New York Times: " The Obama administration on Friday will complete a generation-long effort to require insurers to cover care for mental health and addiction just like physical illnesses when it issues long-awaited regulations defining parity in benefits and treatment.... In the White House, the regulations are also seen as critical to President Obama's program for curbing gun violence by addressing an issue on which there is bipartisan agreement: Making treatment more available to those with mental illness could reduce killings, including mass murders. In issuing the regulations, senior officials said, the administration will have acted on all 23 executive actions that the president and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced early this year to reduce gun crimes after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre.... The parity law does not apply to Medicare, according to Irvin L. Muszynski, a lawyer at the American Psychiatric Association." ...
... Michael Shear of the New York Times: "President Obama bowed Thursday night to mounting criticism that he misled the American people about the health care law, apologizing to people who were forced off their health insurance plans by the Affordable Care Act despite 'assurances from me':
We, in good faith, have been trying to take on a health care system that has been broken for a very long time. And what we've been trying to do is to change it in the least disruptive way possible ... everybody is acting as if the existing market was working ... the average increase on premiums in this individual market for somebody who kept their health care for awhile, the average increase was double digits. If they actually got sick and used the insurance, they might find the next year their premiums had gone up. Or the insurer might have dropped them altogether, because now they had a preexisting condition. -- President Obama, in the Todd interview (via Greg Sargent)
... Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post: "What Obama isn't offering is an apology for the cancellation notices themselves. Eliminating certain health plans from the market -- ones that the White House thinks are too skimpy -- is a feature, not a bug, of the Affordable Care Act." ...
... Zeke Miller of Time: "For the second time in as many months, President Barack Obama has dramatically changed his communications strategy for coping with the troubled rollout of his signature legislation." ...
... Brett Norman of Politico: "The Obama administration again called out states that have refused to expand Medicaid on Thursday, calling it a 'reckless' play to undercut Obamacare at the expense of their constituents' health. The White House held a conference call featuring officials in Florida and Louisiana who made the case for expanding the program and attacked those holding it up. President Barack Obama is traveling to the two states tomorrow on unrelated business, but the messaging is part of a larger drive to draw attention to the states that have refused to cover low-income people...." ...
... Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic: Yes, some people -- it's impossible to say how many -- will have to pay more for equivalent insurance under the ACA than they did in the good ole days. "The truth is that, until now, people in this situation have been among the few, fortunate souls for whom American health insurance is a bargain. They've been relatively healthy, and they've had relatively good incomes, making it possible to buy comprehensive policies at prices they could afford. But the practices that made insurance cheap for them made it expensive -- and in many cases unavailable -- for others. Their good fortune was the by-product of bad fortune for many others. As one ends, so must the other." ...
... Eugene Kiely of FactCheck.org: "Sen. Rand Paul says the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion may 'bankrupt' rural hospitals in Kentucky. But state health care leaders say its hospitals stand to benefit, since the expansion would provide insurance to those who otherwise wouldn't be able to pay their hospital bills." CW: This demonstrates why plagiarism is such a useful tool for Li'l Randy. He's more apt to get things right if he copies somebody else's work word-for-word. ...
It annoys the hell out of me. I feel like if I could just go to detention after school for a couple days, then everything would be okay. But do I have to be in detention for the rest of my career? ... I'm being criticized for not having proper attribution, and yet they are able to write stuff that if I were their journalism teacher in college, I would fail them.-- Sen. Rand Paul, reacting to press reports of his serial plagiarism (via Bob Costa of National Review; read the whole post)
... The Plagiarist, Ctd. Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed: "Several more sections of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's 2012 book Government Bullies appear to be plagiarized from articles by think tank scholars, BuzzFeed has found. As BuzzFeed previously reported, more than three pages of the book were plagiarized from The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, and another section of the Kentucky senator's book was plagiarized from a Forbes article. As was the case with the other cut-and-pasted jobs, Paul included links to the works in his book's footnotes but made no effort to indicate that the words themselves had been taken from other sources." ...
... Dave Weigel of Slate: Twenty-four hours after the Washington Examiner fired suspended Li'l Randy for plagiarizing one of his weekly Examiner columns, that bastion of journalistic integrity "Breitbart.com announced it would pick up the column. Its official announcement made no mention of the copied-text scandal...." Perfect. ...
... Hunter of Daily Kos: Paul's move to Breitbart "further demonstrates how little the actual sitting senator Paul knows or cares about journalistic or editorial ethics or anything we other inhabitants of the planet might recognize as shame.... He's just moving his regular output of writing from the racist-coddling, conspiracy-mongering Washington Times to an ideological burrow that has even fewer ethical restrictions on his work. And that is freaking hilarious."
... James Carroll of the Louisville Courier-Journal in USA Today: "Sen. Rand Paul's handling of recent plagiarism charges adds doubts about his readiness for a presidential campaign, some observers said Wednesday." ...
... Count Mike Huckabee Out of the Doubters Club. Huckabee is "appalled" that "liberals who have nothing better to do" are picking on Rand about "this nutty thing." ...
... Humor Break. Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times: "The campaign website of a Republican candidate for the United States Senate in North Carolina, Greg Brannon, who[m Rand] Paul supports, includes descriptions of various policy positions that match those of Mr. Paul's 2010 campaign website word for word.... A spokesman for Mr. Brannon did not respond to a emails about the similarities between the two sites Thursday, and Mr. Paul's office had no comment." CW: So, honor among thieves. Thanks to P.D. Pepe for the link.
Charles Pierce: Coming up on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, Ted Cruz warns President Obama he shouldn't have come to Dallas.
Catherine Thompson of TPM: "Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Thursday introduced legislation that would ban abortions nationwide for women more than 20 weeks pregnant, the senator's office announced." CW: If you can think of any senator who knows less about women's health issues than Graham, do tell.
Donna Cassata of the AP: "The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is pressuring the House to act on immigration legislation before the end of the year, calling the issue 'a matter of great moral urgency' that cannot wait. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, said in a letter to Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on Thursday that he was troubled by reports that immigration reform is delayed in the House since lawmakers have a responsibility to resolve the issue. Writing on behalf of the 450-plus U.S. cardinals and bishops, Dolan said they respectfully request that the House address the immigration issue as soon as possible."
Kim Severson & Winnie Hu of the New York Times: "...for millions of poor Americans who rely on food stamps, reductions that began this month present awful choices.... And for many, it will mean turning to a food pantry or a soup kitchen by the middle of the month.... The reduction in benefits has affected more than 47 million people.... It is the largest wholesale cut in the program since Congress passed the first Food Stamps Act in 1964 and touches about one in every seven Americans.... The cuts are also hurting stores in poor neighborhoods. The average food stamps household receives $272 a month, which then passes into the local economy." ...
... CW: I don't know why it is so seldom mentioned, but programs like SNAP & Medicaid are so costly because these programs effectively subsidize employers who pay their workers less than a living wage. As Media Matters reported last year, "41% [of SNAP recipients] lived in a household with earnings from a job -- the so-called 'working poor.'" (Almost half of SNAP beneficiaries are children & eight percent are 60 years old or more.) Case in point: Wal-Mart: "Walmart's employees receive $2.66 billion in government help every year.... They are also the top recipients of Medicaid in numerous states." Now, get this: "One of the major beneficiaries of the nation's food-stamp program is actually a hugely profitable company: Walmart. Americans spend about 18 percent of all food stamp dollars at Walmart...." ...
... Catherine Rampell & Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times: "The White House has thrown its weight behind a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $10 an hour.... The legislation is sponsored in the Senate by Tom Harkin of Iowa and in the House by George Miller of California, both Democrats."
... Annie Lowrey of the New York Times: "Lost work: 6.6 million days. Back-pay costs: $2 billion. Private-sector jobs lost: 120,000. Those are just some of the costs of the 16-day partial government shutdown that ended last month, the Obama administration said in a detailed report released Thursday." ...
... Paul Krugman: The weak economy is costing the U.S. $1 trillion a year -- for years. Krugman aptly blames deficit scolds. "It's really a terrible story: a tale of self-inflicted harm, made all the worse because it was done in the name of responsibility. And the damage continues as we speak."
Mark Hosenball & Warren Strobel of Reuters: Edward "Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said. The revelation is the latest to indicate that inadequate security measures at the NSA played a significant role in the worst breach of classified data in the super-secret eavesdropping agency's 61-year history."
Second Amendment, Sí. First Amendment, No. Andrew Kirell of Mediaite. "Guns and Ammo Magazine, the 'world's most widely read firearms magazine,' has fired contributing editor Dick Metcalf after the publication received immense backlash for its December 2013 issue featuring his editorial advocating for gun control." After apologizing for running Metcalf's column, Guns & Ammo editor Jim Bequette "announced his own resignation earlier than anticipated." ...
... Hamilton Nolan of Gawker: "In Metcalf's column, which is extremely basic and mild by 'sane person' standards, he gently notes that it is not true that any regulation of guns is automatically an infringement of the Second Amendment.... Ad Age characterizes the backlash as 'stiff.' I might characterize it as 'indicative of the scary insanity present in the minds of many of those Americans who also, unfortunately, own guns." Nolan cites a few examples of said backlash, with commentary on each. "Thank god everyone involved in this is heavily armed."
Oh, My God! Sarah Posner in Mother Jones: "Next week, former President George W. Bush is scheduled to keynote a fundraiser in Irving, Texas, for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, a group that trains people in the United States, Israel, and around the world to convince Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The organization's goal: to 'restore' Israel and the Jews and bring about about the second coming of Christ.... Last year, Glenn Beck was the star of the group's fundraiser.... Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles' Sinai Temple, whom Newsweek has called the most influential rabbi in the country, tweeted, 'This is infuriating.'" ...
... Ed Kilgore: "... it sure appears W. is going back to the hard-core well of support from those who thought the invasion of Iraq was a divinely blessed first-step towards Armageddon."
New York Times Editors: "The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit erred badly last week when it stayed the remedies ordered by Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court to correct the civil rights violations associated with New York City's stop-and-frisk policy, including an independent monitor to review police practices. It also unjustly damaged Judge Scheindlin's reputation when it removed her from the case. A motion filed on Wednesday by Judge Scheindlin's lawyers seeks to have her removal vacated. The motion offers a strong argument that the three-judge panel moved with unseemly haste, acted on a skewed reading of the evidence and violated a court rule that gives judges accused of misconduct the opportunity to defend themselves."
Local News
Rosalind Helderman & Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post: "Jonnie R. Williams Sr., the wealthy benefactor who is at the heart of a federal investigation into Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, is stepping down as chief executive of Star Scientific Inc., the dietary supplement maker announced Thursday.... A criminal probe [of the McDonnell-Williams transactions] is ongoing." ...
... More Bad News for Bob. Helderman & Leonnig: "Home renovations and landscaping were performed at Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell's Richmond area home last year by the brother of [Jonnie R. Williams, Sr.].... Two people familiar with the criminal probe said Donnie O. Williams, 56, was interviewed about the work by federal prosecutors in recent weeks.... Donnie Williams, a former sheriff's deputy, told prosecutors that he believed he was doing the work at the McDonnells' home for free last year, at the request of his brother, the two people said. Williams eventually was paid for the work." ...
... Emily Schultheis of Politico: "As the possibility of a federal indictment swirled around scandal-plagued Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell this summer, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli was planning a 'dramatic' break from the sitting governor in which he would use the Virginia state Constitution to try to remove McDonnell from office, a prominent state political analyst reported Thursday. According to Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, Cuccinelli planned to employ a never-before-used section of the state Constitution to deem McDonnell unfit to govern." The Sabato (et al.) report is here. ...
... John Harris & Anna Palmer of Politico: "The old saying about victory having a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan turns out not to be quite right. The paternity suit over Cuccinelli's narrow loss is vigorously under way."
AP: "Betsy Hodges, a Democratic member of the Minneapolis City Council, emerged as the winner of the race for mayor of Minnesota's largest city Thursday night. Hodges received the most votes of the 35 candidates but fell shy of an outright majority. Minneapolis uses a ranked-choice system, which allowed voters on Tuesday to make up to three choices of candidates on their ballots. Ballots were reassigned as candidates were deemed out of contention." The Minneapolis Star Tribune story is here.
News Ledes
Washington Post: "Two U.S. admirals -- including the director of naval intelligence -- are under investigation as part of a major bribery scandal involving a foreign defense contractor, Navy officials announced Friday night. Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the service's top intelligence officer, and Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, the Navy's director of intelligence operations, were placed on leave Friday and their access to classified material was suspended, the Navy said in a statement."
Bloomberg News: "Payrolls in the U.S. increased more than forecast in October, a sign that employers were optimistic the world's biggest economy would weather the effects of the federal government shutdown. The addition of 204,000 workers followed a revised 163,000 gain in September that was larger than initially estimated, Labor Department figures showed today.... The median forecast of 91 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a 120,000 advance. The jobless rate rose to 7.3 percent from an almost five-year low."
Reuters: "U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and fellow big power foreign ministers headed to Geneva on Friday to help clinch an interim nuclear deal with Iran and ease a decade-old standoff, with Israel warning they were making an epic mistake." ...
... The New York Times has an updated story here. ...
... New York Times: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly opposes the interim Iranian nuclear program deal being negotiated in Geneva.
AP: "Syria's main Western-backed opposition group has refused to participate in talks in Moscow with Syrian government organizations on resolving the country's humanitarian crisis, the Russian Foreign Ministry and opposition figures said Friday."
New York Times: "Standard & Poor's on Friday cut its credit rating on France by one notch, saying the government's current policy initiatives did not appear capable of addressing impediments to economic growth."
Washington Post: Federal prosecutors have obtained evidence that with the help of high-ranking U.S. Naval officers, Glenn Defense Marine has been bilking the U.S. government for years. "The case is shaping up as the biggest corruption scandal to hit the Navy in years. Two Navy commanders have been arrested ... and charged with feeding inside information to Francis, as has a senior agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In addition, a Navy captain who has not been charged but is under investigation was relieved of his ship's command last month. Court papers suggest that still more officers could be implicated."
Reuters: "Egypt will hold parliamentary elections 'between February and March', to be followed by a presidential vote in early summer, Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy said on Friday."
AP: "The strongest typhoon this year slammed into the central Philippines on Friday, setting off landslides and knocking out power and communication lines in several provinces. At least four people died."
Share Article 