The Commentariat -- April 17

Michael Moore suggests you spend tomorrow, Tax Day, protesting corporate tax dodgers like GE, Bank of America, Citigroup, Exxon & Chevron -- who pay little or no federal income tax. MoveOn.org has a handy event finder here. ...

... Stephen Ohlemacher of the AP: " As Monday's tax filing deadline nears, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all." ...

... Jesse Drucker of Business Week: "For the well-off, this could be the best tax day since the early 1930s: Top tax rates on ordinary income, dividends, estates, and gifts will remain at or near historically low levels for at least the next two years. That's thanks in part to legislation passed in December 2010 by the 111th Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.... It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.... The true effective rate for multimillionaires is actually far lower than that indicated by official government statistics. That's because those figures fail to include the additional income that's generated by many sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies." Click through for related content on "How to Pay No Taxes." ...

... Papau in Firedoglake: "As usual the Democrats have allowed the debate to be on the GOP idea of smaller government using GOP themes and solutions – ignoring the left – indeed, ignoring their past leaders like FDR and their stated objective of helping the non-rich and corporate.... It is time to end “The More you make the Less You Pay” world of today...."

** The Government Is Not a Household. Ezra Klein: "When economic times are good, households should spend and invest more, while government should spend and invest less. When they’re bad, households need to cut back, and the government needs to step in." Besides, it's easier for the government to raise revenue than it is for it to cut spending.

Nicholas Kristof: "Youth movements have used ridicule & mockery to overthrow dictators, reduce crime, improve calculus scores and stop teenagers from smoking."

Speaking of mockery, Maureen Dowd derides Paul Ryan for relying on Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel Atlas Shrugged as the source of his economic philosophy. CW: Dowd is no Frank Rich. A good place to revive this chestnut from screenwriter John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-- John Rogers

D.C. Disappointment. Paul Schwartzman & Nikita Stewart of the Washington Post: "In the past week, the same [Washington, D.C. residents] ... who saw hope in [President] Obama’s jaunts across the city just before his inauguration ... have excoriated him for relegating the District to the status of bargaining chip in a broader budget game with House leaders."

Environmentalist Disappointment. Bill McKibben in Common Dreams: "... when the political going got a little tough, Obama didn't. By all accounts he watched from the sidelines as the cap-and-trade law went down to defeat last summer. He famously allowed vast new leases for offshore oil drilling weeks before the BP explosion. In the last couple of weeks, the administration has ably defended the Clean Air Act against ham-handed Congressional assault. But they've also done two things really beyond the pale: 1) Opened 750 million tons of coal beneath federal land in Wyoming to mining.... 2) Walked away from the global climate talks."

NEW. Tim Padgett of Time: "I think letting Catholic clergy have wives and families may well make the [Roman Catholic church] hierarchy ... more concerned about safeguarding youths than about protecting priests."

Ian Urbina of the New York Times: "Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats. The chemicals were used by companies during a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into rock formations deep underground. The process, which is being used to tap into large reserves of natural gas around the country, opens fissures in the rock to stimulate the release of oil and gas." CW: this is the procedure which the Times' new op-ed contributor Joe Nocera has devoted two columns (here and here) to hyping as safe, clean & cheap. The Times op-ed page ain't what it used to be.

Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "Days after President Obama called for forming a bipartisan group in Congress to begin negotiating a $4 trillion debt-reduction package, the parties have not even agreed to its membership. Yet six senators — three Democrats, three Republicans — say they are nearing consensus on just such a plan." CW Note: this link is not to the Times but to the article's republication in the Boston Globe, which the Times owns.

Big Brother Is Watching, and He Looks Like Mark Zuckerberg. Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times: "For Facebook users, the free ride is over. For years, the privately held company founded by Mark Zuckerberg ... put little effort into ad sales, focusing instead on making its service irresistible to users.... Today more than 600 million people have Facebook accounts.... Now the Palo Alto company is looking to cash in on this mother lode of personal information by helping advertisers pinpoint exactly whom they want to reach.... Facebook doesn't have to guess who its users are or what they like. Facebook knows, because members volunteer this information freely — and frequently — in their profiles, status updates, wall posts, messages and 'likes.' It's now tracking this activity, shooting online ads to users based on their demographics, interests, even what they say to friends on the site — sometimes within minutes of them typing a key word or phrase."

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post: "... indications of progress are among a mosaic of developments that point to a profound shift across a swath of Afghanistan that has been the focus of the American-led military campaign: For the first time since the war began nearly a decade ago, the Taliban is commencing a summer fighting season with less control and influence of territory in the south than it had the previous year. 'We start this year in a very different place from last year,' Gen. David H. Petraeus ... said in a recent interview."

AP: "A '60 Minutes' investigation alleges that the inspirational multimillion seller 'Three Cups of Tea' is filled with inaccuracies and that co-author Greg Mortenson's charitable organization has taken credit for building schools that don't exist. The report, which airs Sunday night on CBS television, cites "Into the Wild" author Jon Krakauer as among the doubters of Mortenson's story...." Here is Mortenson's site, where he asks for contributions to what sounds like an eminently worthy cause. Mortenson's response to the "60 Minutes" piece is currently on the home page under the title "An Important Message...." CW: I first heard of Mortenson from Nicholas Kristof, who has promoted Mortenson & his work in several op-eds (here and here, for instance). I'll be interested to see the "60 Minutes" evidence that Mortenson is scamming the public.

Michael Slackman & Mona El-Naggar of the New York Times: a stark gray concrete Egyptian prison now holds some of the country's former elite including "Gamal Mubarak..., now prisoner No. 23, and his older brother, Alaa, leader among the business elite, prisoner No. 24; the prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, a patrician man who once said Egyptians were not ready for democracy; Zakaria Azmi, the president’s closest confidant; Fathi Sorour, the party loyalist and speaker of Parliament; and more.... The former president [Hosni Mubarak] is not in Tora Farm, but he has been detained, and if his health improves, he is expected there soon. Officials said Saturday that the elder Mr. Mubarak had been moved to a military hospital in Cairo and that, like all the others, he would be interrogated by a special corruption unit within the state prosecutor’s office."

CW: I usually skip the Civil War posts in the New York Times because many of them are pretty tactical and don't have direct relevance to today's news. This one, by Ed Ball, published April 11, is an exception:

... the stream of blood that started at Fort Sumter passed through Jim Crow and into the civil rights era, right down to the present. Southern whites, having gone down in the fight, turned their recollections into rage and resentment at being displaced — fuel for politicians ever since. Likewise, for blacks emancipation was not a jubilee, but rather the beginning of a long season of bitter disappointment. Black national memory in some ways is still commensurate with despair. Redemption turns out to be a false idol. It is said that the South lost the Civil War, but won the peace. That is, while slavery was ended, white supremacy grew into the law of the land.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) dismisses Republican complaints that President Obama's budget speech was too mean to them:

News Ledes

Al Jazeera: "Incumbent candidate Goodluck Jonathan is heading for victory by a landslide margin in Nigeria's presidential election.With most ballots counted in 35 of the West African country's 36 states Jonathan had tallied more than 22 million votes while his nearest rival Muhammadu Buhari, the country's former military ruler, had around 12 million. Formal confirmation of the result is not expected before Monday, but the margin of Jonathan's lead suggests he has secured election without requiring a runoff vote."

The Hill: "Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boldly predicted that Congress will vote to raise the debt ceiling next month, warning that failure to do so would bring 'catastrophic' consequences for the U.S. and global economies. Geithner, appearing on ABC's 'This Week,' said that if House Republicans were to push the vote to the brink or fail to raise the limit, it would 'make the last [financial] crisis look like a tame, modest crisis.'"

Reuters: "Saudi Arabia's oil minister said on Sunday the kingdom had slashed output by 800,000 barrels per day in March due to oversupply, sending the strongest signal yet that OPEC will not act to quell soaring prices."

The New York Times has more on the President's signing statement, which accompanied his signature of the FY 2011 budget bill, & which contained a provision limiting his employment of policy "czars." The signing statement contends that the provision is unconstitutional.

AP: "A furious storm system that kicked up tornadoes, flash floods and hail as big as softballs has claimed at least 25 lives on a rampage that began in Oklahoma days ago, then smashed across several Southern states as it reached a new and deadly pitch in North Carolina and Virginia. Emergency crews searched for victims in hard-hit swaths of North Carolina, where 62 tornadoes were reported from the worst spring storm in two decades to hit the state. At least a half dozen people died just in the Carolinas and Virginia and authorities warned the toll was likely to rise further Sunday as searchers probed shattered homes and businesses."

AP: "The operator of the crippled nuclear power plant leaking radiation in northern Japan announced a plan Sunday to bring the crisis under control within six to nine months and allow some evacuated residents to return to their homes. The roadmap for ending the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, presented by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata at a news conference, included plans to cover the damaged reactor buildings to contain the radiation and eventually remove the nuclear fuel."

AP: "The U.S. ambassador to Malta has announced his resignation following a State Department report that criticized him for neglecting his official duties and spending too much time writing and speaking about his Catholic faith. In letters sent Saturday to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and earlier in the week to President Barack Obama, Douglas Kmiec said he would leave his post on August 15, the date of the feast of the Assumption."

Whoops! Big Whoops!

In today's New York Times, Charles Blow blasts the House Republican/ Ryan/Tea Party budget: "More tax cuts would be gluttony in a time of starvation. That is not America. That is a nation about to be plundered, and a people laid to waste."

I wrote a comment to Blow's column, later published at #2. Reader Helen F. found a teensy-weensy problem with it, though. Check out that last sentence. On my honor, I am not a closet Republican shilling for Paul Ryan. I really, really, really meant "Progressive" there. Here's my comment, complete with any and all typos, including the error in the offensive last paragraph:

So if you're looking for an alternative budget plan that will help not only the poor but also the middle class, look no further than the Congress of the United States, where the Congressional Progressive Caucus has proposed a budget that moves toward balancing the budget at the same time it encourages job creation, clean energy and education, and it continues entitlement programs in full force.

Of course the rich, the super-rich and corporations will have to start paying their fair share of taxes to bring the CPC budget into balance, and we might have to quit fighting no-win wars around the globe, but are those caveats so bad? I don't think so.

With only four defectors from the Republican party, and not a single Democratic vote, the House passed the Ryan/Republican Tea Party budget today (Friday) that ends Medicare as we know it and reduces investment in social programs like Medicare and food stamps. The bill will go nowhere in the Senate (unless the Democratic leadership wants to get some of those Republican Senators on record voting for this anti-American bill). Even if the bill should pass the Senate, President Obama has promised to veto it.

With the House Republican bill dead in the water, we need to turn our attention toward a budget that will work for the American people. I say that budget is the Congressional Republican* Caucus budget. Let's stop talking about the bad guys long enough to focus on what the good guys have proposed.

* Uh, that should be "Progressive."

My comment on Gail Collins' column is still sitting in the holding pattern, so I'll post that, too. Collins noted, with some disappointment, that Mitt Romney failed to include in any of his books the story of his family trip to Canada during which he kept his dog strapped on the hood of the car. My comment:

Thanks for the laughs, Gail. Only you could find humor in ex-Governor Mitt.

Of course the biggest joke of all is that Mitt Romney is probably the best candidate Republicans can field this year. Since Mitt has been running for President since at least 2007 (what is he exploring again?), Republicans are already pretty tired of him. They're looking around longingly for somebody great like another Bush brother or Gov. Whatzhizname from Indiana who beat Wisconsin Gov. Walker to the punch on stripping those elitist union members of their collective bargaining rights. (He did it by executive order! He's bold! He did it on his first day in office! He's decisive!)

I'm not among that huge core of liberals who fell back in love with President Obama after his American Values Budget speech (it was a good speech), but Obama sure looks good when you hold him up next to Paperback Romney. I wonder if Mitt noticed Barack (or ghostwriter Bill Ayers) wrote a children's book last year. If Mitt noticed, let's hope we'll get a children's book from him, too. I'd suggest he base it on that glaring omission from his No Apology tome. A family trip to Canada with an Irish setter strapped to the roof of the car sounds like great fare for the kids. There's probably a moral for them in there somewhere, too.

P.S. After having had literally hundreds of my comments axed or held back by Times moderators and after hearing the same stories from many other Times would-be commenters, I've decided to start some kind of Alternate Times Comments page for those of us who get whacked from the Times comments pages. Stay tuned. I'm not 100 percent sure I'll be able to manage it, but I will give it a try. 

The Commentariat -- April 16

President Obama's weekly address:

     ... Related AP story here. ...

... Richard Stevenson of the New York Times: "... the budget debate that became fully engaged last week is about far more than accounting and arcane policy disputes. What is under way now is the most fundamental reassessment of the size and role of government — of the balance between personal responsibility and private markets on the one hand and public responsibility and social welfare on the other — at least since Ronald Reagan and perhaps since F.D.R."

The first advice I'm going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that, just because they are military men, their opinions on military matters are worth a damn.
-- President John F. Kennedy

** Filmmaker Oliver Stone & historian Peter Kuznick in the British New Statesman "on how the US president can learn from precedents for peacemaking set by Mikhail Gorbachev and John F Kennedy." Here, from the essay, is a pretty fine summary of the Obama presidency:

Surrounding himself with Wall Street-friendly advisers and military hawks, he has sent more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan; bailed out Wall Street banks while paying scant attention to the plight of the poor and working class; and enacted a tepid version of health reform that, while expanding coverage, represented a boondoggle for the insurance industry. And he has continued many of Bush's civil rights abuses, secrecy obsessions and neoliberal policies that allow the continued looting of the real economy by those who are obscenely wealthy.

Steve Kornacki of Salon: in voting to "end Medicare as we know it," as House Repubicans did Friday afternoon, they gave an election-year gift to Democrats. What's weirdest about it is that the bill has no chance of becoming law. "... this was a vote that Republicans insisted on -- but that will only help Democrats." ...

... Thursday, the House voted to permanently defund Planned Parenthood. Family planning expert & former Planned Parenthood executive Clare Coleman, in a Washington Post op-ed, debunks five myths about the organization. Happily, Coleman was able to include another reminder that Sen. Jon Kyl doesn't mind dissembling on the Senate floor; i.e., he says things that "are not intended to be factual."

** "A crime was definitely committed in this case, but not by me." CW: I've linked to several articles about the Supreme Court's egregious 5-4 decision in Connick v. Thompson, but I missed the most important one of all -- this April 9 New York Times op-ed by John Thompson himself. If you've read any of the articles I've linked, reading Mr. Thompson's story in his own words will make you angry all over again. 

Leslie Kauman of the New York Times: "In the past month, the nation’s focus has been on the budget battle in Washington, where Republicans in Congress aligned with the Tea Party have fought hard for rollbacks to the Environmental Protection Agency, clean air and water regulations, renewable energy and other conservation programs. But similar efforts to make historically large cuts to environmental programs are also in play at the state level as legislatures and governors take aim at conservation and regulations they see as too burdensome to business interests."

Scot Kersgaard of the Colorado Independent: "Today the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength slammed Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) for comments he made Thursday ridiculing ‘rich liberals’ calls to raise taxes on millionaires like themselves." Includes the full statement from the Patriot Millionaires & related content. CW Note: I don't know & haven't been able to find out exactly what Hatch said. I'm still looking. Update: okay, I found Hatch's comments on "rich Democrats," which begin about 17:30 min. into this video. I had to listen to a lot of Orrin Hatch's bloviating to find this.

Joe Nocera is a friend of oil & gas billionaire T. Boone Pickens. If you read Nocera's second column touting the safety & wisdom of natural gas drilling, published in today's New York Times, please read some of the comments, too. Comment #1, by Steven from Texas, is particularly good.

Right Wing World *

Why punish the most productive people? The people who have resources create jobs, not poor people. -- Rick Santorum, on President Obama's budget plan and those nonproductive poor people ...

... Irony Alert! Speaking at a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-everything Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum "was tripped up a bit when a student * asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, 'Fighting to make America America again,' was borrowed from the 'pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes.' 'No I had nothing to do with that,' Santorum said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that.' The student ... was referring to the poem 'Let America Be America Again.' When asked a short time later what the campaign slogan meant to him, Santorum said, 'well, I'm not too sure that's my campaign slogan, I think it's on a web site.' It was also printed on the campaign literature handed out before the speech." From Melanie Plenda of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader. Thanks to reader Haley S. for the link. Hughes' powerful poem stands as a perfect rejection of Santorum's Right Wing America:

     ... * Update: turns out that "student" was Lee Fang of Think Progress. CW: I love the kids at Think Progress.

Gail Collins continues her book reviews of the writings of presidential candidates. Today she concentrates on Romney rewrites. Here's a sample:

'Despite my affiliation with the Republican Party, I don’t think of myself as highly partisan,' Moderate Mitt wrote toward the end. This comes after 300 pages of unrelenting attacks on Barack Obama and every member of his party since Andrew Jackson. He blames Bill Clinton for everything from cutting military spending to presiding over an administration during which 'birth to teenage mothers rose to their highest level in decades.' I’m sure this week’s Romney does not regard that as a partisan statement even though teenage birth rates actually fell spectacularly during that exact period.

Conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker (late of "Parker-Spitzer") on Donald Trump:

In saner times, we’d recognize and dismiss the ravings of madmen, self-promoters and false prophets. Today, thanks to the democratization of the megaphone and the political bulimia we euphemistically call 'dialogue,” any old [birther] canard can enjoy 15 minutes of credibility. Sure enough, Trump’s challenge to Obama’s natural-born citizenship has gained traction among a disturbing number of believe-anythingers, outscoring others in GOP presidential preference polls.

* Where facts never intrude.

News Ledes

Washington Post: "The Federal Aviation Administration has suspended another air traffic controller allegedly caught sleeping on the job and is ending the scheduling system responsible for often putting sleepy controllers behind the microphone after just eight hours off duty. The FAA said a Miami-based controller who directs planes after they reach cruising altitude fell asleep on the job early Saturday. It was the seventh instance this year when FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt has suspended a controller for allegedly sleeping on the job." CW: does anybody think controllers suddenly started falling asleep on the job this year?

New York Times: Cuban President Raúl Castro," in a speech on Saturday heralding a battery of changes intended to lift the island out of economic despair and stagnant thinking, proposed that politicians be limited to two five-year terms in an effort to rejuvenate a political system dominated by aging loyalists of the revolution. At the top are himself and Fidel Castro, 84, who permanently gave up presidential power in 2008 and last month announced that he was no longer head of the Communist Party, either." AP story here.

AP: "An officer with Libya's rebels says after four days of holding back, his forces have advanced to a strategic oil town. Col. Hamid Hassy said Saturday that following scattered clashes with government forces, the rebels were now near the massive oil facilities of Brega. He said the rebels have brought with them engineers to repair any damage to the refineries and terminal which have already changed hands half a dozen times since fighting erupted a month and a half ago."

AP: "A suicide bomber disguised in an Afghan army uniform on Saturday detonated a vest packed with explosives at the entrance to a base in eastern Afghanistan, killing five coalition and four Afghan soldiers, officials said."

The Hill: "President Obama signed into law on Friday the hard-fought legislation to fund government and keep it running through the end of September.... But Obama took the key step of issuing a signing statement, a declaration of constitutional interpretation by a president of legislation he or she might sign into law. It essentially notified lawmakers that he would not abide by the section of the law defunding the establishment of so-called 'czars.'"

Eeeww. AP: "Los Angeles County health officials say the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease was found in a hot tub at the Playboy Mansion where scores of people became ill after attending a fundraiser in February. The Los Angeles Times says health officials presented their findings Friday at an annual conference at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta."