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The Commentariat -- October 23, 2015
Internal links removed.
Word of the Day
Gonfalon (or gonfalone): "(from the early Italian confalone) is a type of heraldic flag or banner, often pointed, swallow-tailed, or with several streamers, and suspended from a crossbar in an identical manner to the ancient Roman vexillum." -- Wikipedia
Use "gonfalon" in a sentence: There they were, "a roomful of pompous asses, each flying the Gonfalon of the Daft right behind their self-important persons." -- Akhilleus
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Uh, I think some of Jimmy Jordan’s questioning. Well, when you say new today, we knew some of that already, about the emails. In terms of her testimony? I don't know that she testified that much differently today than she has the previous times she's testified. -- Trey Gowdy, responding to questions about what new information the Hillary Clinton interrogation yielded ...
Uh, sounds like an admission that the whole exercise was a multi-million-dollar nothingburger. -- Constant Weader
Michael Shear & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "Republican lawmakers sharply questioned [link fixed] Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday, seeking to build a case that the former secretary of state had been derelict in her duty to secure the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in the months before the 2012 terrorist attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. Mrs. Clinton's long-awaited appearance, billed by Republicans leading a select House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks as a critical moment in a monthslong inquiry, served as a replay of contested arguments from a series of previous congressional hearings and Sunday-morning talk shows." ...
... David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post: "Nine hours after it began, a House committee's questioning of Hillary Rodham Clinton has provided few new details about the 2012 attacks on American installations in Benghazi, Libya -- and, so far, no clear victory for Republicans seeking to trap Clinton in an admission of bad judgment.... The Republicans -- including Gowdy -- seemed to hurt their own cause at times. Several spent their 10-minute periods on oddball lines of questioning: One pressed Clinton repeatedly about an e-mail exchange between two State Department staffers that Clinton said she did not know. Others loudly remarked that Clinton was reading notes passed from aides, a common practice at Washington hearings." ...
... Hillary listens to "questions":
... CW: 7:15 8:15 pm ET & the Benghaazi! interrogation is still ongoing. (The prosecution finally ended at 9 pm ET.) Hillary laughed when Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) asked if "she was alone all night." The Congresslady said it wasn't funny. The whole thing was a shameful spectacle. Here's the New York Times' lowlights video ...
... If you missed seeing any of the inquisition, Charles Pierce provides an accurate synopsis of the morning session: "If it wasn't Congressman Jim Jordan finally getting around to Susan Rice and the talking-points and the offense against the Constitution inherent in getting something wrong on Meet The Press -- which is the only reason we aren't presently enjoying the leadership of President Romney pp then it was Congressman Mike Pompeo, fresh off getting dope-slapped by Andrea Mitchell on that very show last Sunday, intimating that American diplomats were meeting with al Qaeda operatives prior to the attacks on the compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. And that is not even to mention the efforts of Congresswomen Susan Brooks and Martha Roby, back-to-back, who didn't seem to wholly understand how you cannot judge a level of interest in something based on the aggregate number of e-mails that are written about it by various people. And then there was Congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, who said, 'In mah l'il opinion,' security wasn't that good around the Benghazi compound.'" ...
... Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post: "Republicans on the Benghazi Committee have repeatedly questioned why Sidney Blumenthal, a personal friend of former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, had her private e-mail address while Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens did not. While one can certainly question Clinton;s judgment in paying attention to Blumenthal's musings, there is a simple reason that an ambassador would not have the secretary of state's private e-mail address. It's called the chain of command. With nearly 200 ambassadors in the field, it would invite chaos if each could directly write the secretary of state." ...
... New York Times Editors: "The pointless grilling of Mrs. Clinton, who fielded a barrage of questions that have long been answered and settled, served only to embarrass the Republican lawmakers who have spent millions of dollars on a political crusade.... In a flailing performance, the committee's chairman, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, made it evident that he and his colleagues have squandered more than $4.6 million and countless hours poring over State Department records and Mrs. Clinton's email. They produced no damning evidence, elicited no confessions and didn't succeed in getting an angry reaction from Mrs. Clinton.... Now that the hearing, which was intended to be the climactic point of the Benghazi committee inquiry, is over, the Democrats who reluctantly agreed to join the panel when it was established in May 2014 should walk away." ...
... Washington Post Editors: "THE HOUSE Select Committee on Benghazi further discredited itself on Thursday as its Republican members attempted to fuel largely insubstantial suspicions about Hillary Clinton&'s role in the 2012 Benghazi attacks.... An astoundingly large portion of ... the hearing focused on petty questioning related to Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal and other wastes of time.... If the hearing was useful at all, it was in filling out her larger vision for U.S. foreign policy." ...
... Amy Davidson of the New Yorker: "There were several ... rounds of questions, in which her interrogators manifested all of Washington's pathologies -- dysfunction, partisan squabbling, insularity -- in such extreme form that Clinton came across not only as a grownup, as her supporters had hoped, but as the most normal person in the room." CW: I don't think these guys have any idea how ridiculous they are. ...
... Josh Marshall of TPM (writing mid-inquisition): "Republican committee members just seemed pissed because this was supposed to be awesome - after all, a committee designed to bring down Hillary and circulate all those numskull conspiracy theories about Chris Stevens wearing a chest cam and how President Obama was watching everything happening live on his iPhone. Hillary's yet to get at all flustered and has even had the opportunity to gently explain to Republican members how the State Department works. She looks poised; they're radiating spittle. It all doesn't help that Chairman Gowdy is such a comical figure. But the real thing is that they're having their big moment - HILLARY ON THE STAND!!! - just as their credibility is collapsing. She's making them regret this is even happening." ...
... Sahil Kapur of Bloomberg: "During 8 hours and 20 minutes of testimony, Clinton deftly handled some hostile ... questioning from Republicans, keeping her cool and letting Democrats on the committee handle the political attacks. In the end, Republicans threw some red meat to their conservative base but failed to land a blow to Clinton's credibility.... Many conservative commentators were unimpressed, if not angry with the proceedings.... Another sign of the way political tides where turning: The Fox News Channel, which has taken a special interest in the issue of Benghazi in recent years, cut away from the hearing midway through while other networks continued to carry it live." ...
... Kevin Drum points to a moment in the proceedings where Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) imagines what Hillary was thinking. CW: This was one of several imaginary moments for the inquisitors where one or the other of them described what they supposed Hillary Clinton was really up to. It is not a "hearing" when the "testimony" comes from the fertile imaginations of the prosecutors rather than from the witness herself. ...
... Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg: The sole purpose of the Benghaazi! committee is to use "government funding to furnish content for conservative media. That's all.... None of [what the GOP members asked or said] is likely to have any effect on public opinion, except perhaps by dragging Congress's approval ratings even lower. But it will provide fodder for conservative talk radio." ...
... Shoulda, Coulda, Never Woulda. John Cassidy of the New Yorker: "... in the ... jousting between Roskam and Clinton about the wisdom of intervening in Libya in the first place, it was possible to glimpse an alternative path that congressional Republicans could have taken over the past three years -- a path that might have saved them from being accused (including by members of their own party) of conducting a witch hunt, and might even have served a public purpose. For ... the current reality in Libya calls into question U.S. policy decisions. The country is a divided, chaotic, and war-torn place, where rival militias are competing for power and jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, control substantial pieces of territory.... [There] are ... legitimate questions, and an old-school Republican authority on foreign policy -- someone like Richard Lugar -- would surely have been keen to gather answers to them.... Gowdy and his colleagues in the House were too small to go in this direction. They preferred to pursue a conspiracy theory that tarred the likely Democratic candidate in 2016, riled up the G.O.P.'s base, and helped the Party to raise money."
Steven Mufson of the Washington Post: "President Obama exercised his veto power Thursday for just the fifth time in his presidency, rejecting a defense authorization bill because of the way it would sidestep budget limitations for the military and because it would restrict the transfer of detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay. The White House said that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would tap an overseas contingency operations account designed for emergencies and war costs and use it as a 'slush fund' to avoid budget restrictions. Those restrictions -- known as sequestration -- would impose offsetting across-the-board cuts if spending passed certain levels."
A Fine Mess. John Bresnahan & Jake Sherman of Politico: "... the U.S. government is 12 days from reaching the debt limit without a clear plan of what to do. Boehner, McCarthy and other GOP leaders are refusing at this point to move ahead with a 'clean' debt ceiling bill insisted on by President Barack Obama. Senior leadership aides said they couldn't find the 30 Republican votes needed to join with all 188 Democrats to pass that proposal -- a bleak indication of the current state of play." ...
... CW: So there are not even 30 rational House Republicans. That's amazing. ...
... Keith Laing of the Hill: "Congress has less than a week to prevent a highway-funding shutdown, with federal transportation spending currently set to expire on Oct. 29. Lawmakers are scrambling to pass at least an extension of transportation funding by next Thursday to prevent an interruption. The Department of Transportation has warned that it will have to stop making payments to states and local governments for infrastructure projects in November if Congress does not reach an agreement. Lawmakers on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Thursday approved a bipartisan bill to spend up to $325 billion on transportation projects over the next six years. But that approach differs from a six-year bill approved by the Senate over the summer. House lawmakers had rejected the Senate bill, which authorizes funding for six years but only pays for three years of spending." ...
... MEANWHILE, in the Senate. Peter Sullivan of the Hill: "Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) are vowing to oppose any fast-track bill repealing only parts of ObamaCare, narrowing the path for the legislation to pass the Senate. The House is set to vote on Friday on a bill under a fast-track process known as reconciliation that would repeal several parts of ObamaCare. The reconciliation process allows a measure to pass the Senate with 51 votes, instead of the usual 60, and get through to President Obama's desk, where it would face a veto.... Their opposition puts the bill's future in doubt. There are 54 Republican senators, so if Cruz, Rubio, and Lee vote no, Republicans could only afford to lose one more vote and still have a simple majority. Centrist Republicans such as Sens. Mark Kirk (Ill.) and Susan Collins (Maine) have indicated opposition to defunding Planned Parenthood, which is also part of the reconciliation bill."
Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post: "Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said Thursday he will proceed with a run for House speaker, hours after major GOP factions pledged their support. 'After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as a one, united team,' he said in a letter to colleagues sent late Thursday. 'And I am ready and eager to be our speaker.'" ...
... Mike Lillis of the Hill: "Speaking to reporters Thursday in the Capitol, [Nancy] Pelosi said she's heartened that the discussions surrounding Ryan's candidacy have highlighted 'his respect for his family-work balance. That's very exciting because that's what we want for all of America's families,' she said. 'Members of Congress have paid sick leave -- it means a lot to the family-work balance,' she added. 'I hope that that respect for his particular situation would translate for a recognition of what that means to all of America's families.'" ...
... Lauren French & Jake Sherman of Politico: "Rep. Paul Ryan has agreed to delay a discussion about reforming the procedural motion used to remove a House speaker, a major concession to the House Freedom Caucus. The Wisconsin Republican, now the presumptive next speaker of the House, delivered the message to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussion.... Should he become House speaker, Ryan will set a deadline by which the House Republican Conference will change chamber and party rules."
** "Against Nature." Tim Egan: "... the most feckless Congress in history has just allowed ... the Land and Water Conservation Fund to die. With it could go thousands of projects nurtured along by people who had hoped that the chaos of a political party in a high fever would not reach into their favorite places.... Neighborhood playgrounds, walking trails bordering bustling cities, national parks, beaches, bridges, bike paths and birding sites are all imperiled by the imperious rigidity of a handful of congressional Republicans. For a half century, everything including the hugely popular Appalachian Trail and the memorial in Pennsylvania where Flight 93 went down on Sept. 11 has relied on money from this fund, generated by revenues from oil and gas leases.... Representative Rob Bishop of Utah, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee ... [is] the villain in this piece.... In a nutshell crammed with nutcases, this is your Congress. It's a place that doesn't work taking on something that does work, and killing it."
... CW: I'm no political strategist, but I think Democrats, for the most part, should quit running against their opponent Rep. Dick Neanderthal, & start running against the Republican party. There should be a unified, nationwide bumpersticker-style slogan that IDs all Republicans as rats to be thrown from the sinking ship Congress. Americans already have a low opinion of Congress, but I'll bet half of them don't really know why, what with the both-sides-do-it media standard. If Democrats vilified the Republican elephant the way confederates did the term "liberal," even low-information, i.e., most, voters would get it.
Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post: "A federal watchdog on Thursday sent the U.S. Secret Service a formal warning that its overworking of employees is jeopardizing security -- citing the discovery that two Secret Service officers were asleep at their posts, according to three government officials familiar with the findings. The inspector general who oversees the Secret Service issued a management alert, a formal designation that indicates investigators have found a problem so urgent or sweeping that it requires swift attention from senior management."
German Lopez & Soo Oh of Vox: "Corey Jones, Freddie Gray, and Jessica Hernandez are just three of at least 1,425 people killed by police since August 9, 2014, the day of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri."
Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post explains to Bibi Netanyahu the real reason Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was palling around with Hitler: he wanted Hitler's support in securing a Palestinian state with himself as leader. Hitler nixed it. Tharoor cites numerous experts who debunk Netanyahu's claim. CW: And, you know, Bibi, 75 years later, the Palestinians are still seeking that state. Maybe you could do something about that. ...
... New York Times Editors: "The claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that a Palestinian persuaded Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe is outrageous. It is outrageous because the Holocaust is far too terrible a crime to be exploited for political ends, especially in the state linked so closely to the tragedy of the Jewish people. It is outrageous because the only apparent purpose is to demonize the Palestinians and the current leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and to give the impression that their resistance is based solely on a longstanding hatred of the Jews.... Mr. Netanyahu should have the decency to acknowledge that he was wrong and out of line."
O Canada! Paul Krugman: "On Monday, Canadian voters swept the ruling Conservatives out of power, delivering a stunning victory to the center-left Liberals. And while there are many interesting things about the Liberal platform, what strikes me most is its clear rejection of the deficit-obsessed austerity orthodoxy that has dominated political discourse across the Western world. The Liberals ran on a frankly, openly Keynesian vision, and won big.... [Justin] Trudeau ... has an opportunity to show the world what truly responsible fiscal policy looks like."
God News
Jack Healy of the New York Times: "Despite its deep opposition to same-sex marriage, the Mormon Church is setting itself apart from religious conservatives who rallied behind a Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, who cited her religious beliefs as justification for refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In a speech this week about the boundaries between church and state, Dallin Oaks, a high-ranking apostle in the church, said that public officials like Ms. Davis, the clerk in Rowan County, Ky., had a duty to follow the law, despite their religious convictions.... Elder Oaks said. '... when acting as public officials, they are not free to apply personal convictions -- religious or other -- in place of the defined responsibilities of their public offices. All government officers should exercise their civil authority according to the principles and within the limits of civil government.'"
Benjamin Mueller of the New York Times: How a Bible study group in upstate New York became a church so punishing that it killed one of its members & severely injured another in a "counseling session."
Jane Omara of USA Today (October 21): "The Vatican vigorously denied a report in an Italian newspaper Wednesday that Pope Francis has a small, curable brain tumor, calling the rumors 'totally unfounded.' The report in the Quotidiano Nazionale newspaper was "seriously irresponsible and not worthy of attention,' Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a statement. 'As all can see, the pope continues to exercise his intense activity without interruption and in an absolutely normal way.'" ...
... Laurie Goodstein & Gaia Pianigiani of the New York Times: "The Vatican newspaper on Thursday called the report 'unfounded' and 'completely irresponsible,' suggesting a conspiracy was behind it. Italian newspapers had a feast, running a barrage of headlines further fueling suspicion. The center-right daily Il Giornale declared, 'Church in chaos: Who wants the pope dead?'... 'The timing of this reveals an intent to manipulate and create unnecessary uproar,' the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, said."
Presidential Race
Annie Karni of Politico: "After a difficult summer slog, Hillary Clinton appears to be back on top. It began with Bernie Sanders, her chief Democratic rival, getting devastatingly lampooned on Saturday Night Live, the stage where Hillary Clinton had scored points just a few weeks earlier by gamely mocking herself. Then, the spectre of Joe Biden haunting Clinton's campaign disappeared, when the grieving vice president announced he would not compete in 2016. And on Thursday, sitting in the hot seat for a marathon 11-hour hearing, Clinton delivered a win by remaining calm and mostly unflappable as her Republican interlocutors on the House Benghazi committee became heated."
And Then There Were Three. Jonathan Swan of the Hill: "Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee is bowing out of the Democratic race for the White House." Includes Chafee's full statement.
Kyle Cheney & Jason Millman of Politico: "Republicans have fended off accusations for years that they'd gut Medicare for seniors and end the program 'as we know it.' Not Ben Carson. The former neurosurgeon acknowledges he would abolish the program altogether. Carson, who now leads the GOP field in Iowa according to the latest Quinnipiac Poll, would eliminate the program that provides health care to 49 million senior citizens, as well as Medicaid, and replace it with a system of cradle-to-grave savings accounts which would be funded with $2,000 a year in government contributions. While rivals have been pummeled for proposing less radical changes, Carson hasn't faced the same scrutiny -- and his continued traction in polls has left GOP strategists and conservative health care wonks scratching their heads." ...
... So What? The Crazier the Better: Eliza Collins of Politico: "Ben Carson has a nine percentage-point lead on Donald Trump in Iowa, according to a new Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll out Friday. In the poll -- the second this week to find the retired neurosurgeon moving ahead of the billionaire real estate mogul -- Carson leads with 28 percent of likely Republican caucus goers, followed by Trump at 19 percent."
Eli Stokols of Politico: "The main super PAC backing Donald Trump is shutting down amidst increasing scrutiny of its ties to Trump's campaign. Trump, who has made his independence from wealthy donors a cornerstone of his anti-establishment presidential campaign, never officially blessed the Make America Great super PAC." ...
... The Washington Post story, by Matea Gold is here: "After The Washington Post reported this week on multiple connections between Trump and the Make America Great Again PAC, Mike Ciletti, the Colorado-based operative running the group, said he had decided to close up shop."
Boo Hoo. Most Interesting Man in Politics Could End Up Out of Politics. Shane Goldmacher & Anna Palmer of Politico: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies are quietly ratcheting up pressure on Rand Paul to pay more attention to his Senate reelection next year -- and less to his flagging 2016 presidential candidacy. So far, those efforts have stopped short of urging the Kentucky senator, whose presidential bid McConnell has formally endorsed, to outright abandon his national campaign." CW Note to Mitch: The election is more than a year away. Li'l Randy has plenty of time, whenever he drops out of the presidential race, or is drummed from the debate stage, to run a Senate campaign.
Beyond the Beltway
Reuters: "One person has been killed and two others wounded by gunfire on the campus of Tennessee State University in Nashville, police have said. The shootings, which occurred just before 11 pm local time on Thursday, appeared to have stemmed from a dispute over a dice game in a courtyard, the Metropolitan Nashville police department said." ...
... The Tennessean story, by Jordan Buie, is here.
Jon Herskovitz of Reuters: "Texas sent agents to Planned Parenthood facilities on Thursday seeking documents, the group said, calling it a 'politically motivated' move that comes on the heels of the state's Republican leaders barring it from receiving Medicaid money. Members of the Texas Office of the Inspector General made unannounced visits at Planned Parenthood health centers in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, staying in some cases for several hours and giving Planned Parenthood 24 hours to deliver thousands of pages of documents stored at its facilities across the state, the organization said." ...
... Danielle Paquette & Sandhya Somashekhar of the Washington Post: "Texas health investigators on Thursday served orders for hundreds of documents at Planned Parenthood offices across the state, including patient records and employee addresses. The move came three days after the state announced plans to pull public funding from the organization, energizing the national debate over the nonprofit's fetal tissue donation program."
News Ledes
Boston Globe: "Thomas G. Stemberg, who cofounded Staples Inc. and invented the office superstore, died Friday at his home in Chestnut Hill, two years after he was diagnosed with gastric cancer. He was 66. Intense and driven, he was credited with revolutionizing the way office products were sold, creating a chain that now has $22.5 billion in annual revenue and more than 2,000 stores, and at one point employed as many as 91,000 people."
New York Times: "The strongest hurricane to ever assault the Western Hemisphere slammed into Mexico's southwest Pacific Coast on Friday evening.... The storm, named Hurricane Patricia, was packing winds of about 165 miles per hour as it struck land, having slowed considerably from earlier speeds of about 200 miles per hour as it spun toward a coastline dotted with tiny fishing villages and five-star resorts...."
Washington Post: "Early Friday, the behemoth Hurricane Patricia became the strongest hurricane ever measured by the National Hurricane Center. Patricia is forecast to make landfall on Mexico's west central coast late Friday with destructive winds, torrents of rain, and a devastating storm surge." ...
... The Weather Channel's story is here.
New York Times: "Forty-two people were killed and eight others were injured on Friday morning when a bus and a truck collided on a road in southwestern France, according to local officials."
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