The Commentariat -- November 30

This Will Not Turn out Well or Obama Signals He'll Cave Immediately. Glenn Thrush, et al. of Politico: "President Barack Obama emerged from his two-hour bipartisan summit Tuesday, saying he was encouraged by the 'extremely civil' atmosphere — and immediately assigned two cabinet members [Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner & OMB chief Jack Lew] to hammer out a deal on Bush-era tax cuts."

New York Times illustration.Bob Herbert deplores the death penalty. ...

... So does former Justice John Paul Stevens, as he writes in this compelling New York Review of Books review.

Military Trials Are Duds. Adam Serwer in the Washington Post: "In their entire history, only five convictions have been secured through military commissions, most through plea agreement, while civilian courts convicted hundreds throughout the same period. They've yielded light sentences, except in one case where the accused simply boycotted the trial. Even with the rules tilted towards the government, they have proven to be ineffective. They're expensive and more vulnerable to overturn on appeal than convictions in civilian court. Conservatives support them not because of their efficacy, but because they sound tough."

Eric Schmidt & Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The arrest on Friday of a Somali-born teenager who is accused of trying to detonate a car bomb at a crowded Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., has again thrown a spotlight on the government’s use of sting operations to capture terrorism suspects." Related news item here.

Allan Sloan of Fortune: privatizing Social Security is still a dumb idea "because retirees shouldn't have to depend on the market's vagaries for survival money," but Republicans will bring it up again anyway.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic: John McCain opposes repeal of DADT because he lost the presidential election & he's still having tantrums about it.

Andy Greenberg of Forbes interviews Julian Assange. Greenberg's cover story on Assange begins here. ...

... David Sanger of the New York Times: "The [WikiLeaks] cables about North Korea — some emanating from Seoul, some from Beijing, many based on interviews with government officials, and others with scholars, defectors and other experts — are long on educated guesses and short on facts, illustrating why their subject is known as the Black Hole of Asia." ...

... New York Times Editors: "After years of revelations about the Bush administration’s abuses — including the use of torture and kidnappings — much of the Obama administration’s diplomatic wheeling and dealing is appropriate and, at times, downright skillful."

... Roget Cohen of the Washington Post: the WikiLeaks cables further illustrate "the world George Bush left us. It exists everywhere but in his book, where facts are either omitted or rearranged...." ...

... Attila Somfalvi of Y-net News: In a meeting with journalists, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says the WikiLeaks leaks did not damage Israel, but he hopes Arab leaders will tell their own people what they say behind closed doors about their desire to attack Iran. ...

... CW: fortunately, there was bound to be funny stuff in the WikiLeaks cable, and this Guardian story fills the bill:  Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York," shocked" a U.S. ambassador with his "rude" remarks about the British press & his complaints about the "idiocy" of the country's corruption investigators. Although the ambassador expurgated her cable, apparently Andrew said, "'these fucking journalists, especially from the Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere...." ...

     ... Andrew's remark brings to mind a classic bit of literature a friend & I exchanged earlier today. The passage is believed to be of Australian origin:

I was walking along on this fucking fine morning, fucking sun fucking shining away, little fucking country lane, and I meets up with this fucking girl. Fucking lovely she was, so we gets into fucking conversation and I takes her over a fucking gate into a fucking field and we has sexual intercourse. [cited in Ashley Montagu, The Anatomy of Swearing, U. of Penn. Press pp. 314-315]

... Leak of a Leak. Paul Farhi of the Washington Post on how the New York Times got the WikiLeaks cables -- they didn't come from Julian Assange.

This proposal is a superficial panic reaction to the draconian cuts his deficit commission will recommend. A federal pay freeze saves peanuts at best and, while he may mean it as just a public relations gesture, this is no time for political scapegoating. The American people didn't vote to stick it to a VA nursing assistant making $28,000 a year or a border patrol agent earning $34,000 per year.
-- John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, on President Obama's salary freeze ...

... House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer wants to extend the pay freeze to non-combat military personnel. And he is so into cutting the deficit.

Georgia Gets Real. Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times: "During the centennial of the Civil War starting in 1960, Georgia celebrated the Confederacy and the view that the state had seceded in a valiant act of defending states’ rights against Northern aggressors. This time around, state historians are taking a different approach, declaring that Georgia seceded to defend the institution of slavery." ...

... "AND YET as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union. The events include a 'secession ball' in the former slave port of Charleston..., which will be replicated on a smaller scale in other cities. A parade is being planned in Montgomery, Ala., along with a mock swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy."

The World According to Brooks

David Brooks is aflutter over the WikeLeaks docudump. After posing a psychological "explanation" of why Julian Assange is such a bad boy, Brooks complains that Assange's bad behavior has upset the "world order."

The New York Times moderators again suppressed my comment on Brooks' column. So here it is:

First, let's establish that Julian Assange is not a traitor, as you obliquely suggest. He is not an American, so he cannot be a traitor to the U.S. He is not an American, so he cannot be a traitor to the U.S. He may be charged with espionage, but that is not a certainty.

Second, let's talk about how "secret" those documents WikiLeaks dumped really are: according to the Guardian, about three million people have access to these "secret" documents. Human nature & technology being what they are, it was downright ridiculous to expect 3 million people to keep this information secret. Allegedly, some low-level grunt was one of the three million not up to the secrets-keeping task. He was a tattletale waiting to happen. If it hadn't been he, it would have been someone else.

Third, let's not give the Times too many kudos for discretion. As we all well know, the Times' "discretion" during the build-up to the Iraq War led many Americans, including Members of Congress who were required to vote on matters concerning the proposal to go to war, to believe stories that just were not true. Instead, they were stories effectively dictated to a Times reporter by an Administration that was just plain making stuff up. I understand the bind journalists are in when it comes to matters of security, especially national security, but the Gray Lady has not always kept her skirts clean. That said, her redactions from the WikiLeaks cables, especially the redactions of names, may well have been the right thing to do. The decision to publish the cables was definitely justified.

Finally, we all should be able to agree the government is too damned secretive. Government secrets have become a cancer on our society, necessities in a limited number of cases, but abuse of the public good in many others. Right now, for instance, our Department of Justice, which is supposed to protect us, is invoking "state secrets" arguments in court to "protect" us from information that has long been in the public square. The victims of these so-called state secrets are real people who will not get a fair shake in court.

If you want to make a villain out of Julian Assange, then you should ask yourself first why what you call justifiable "specific revelations" have not been reported earlier. Why shouldn't we know, for instance, that "Afghan Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud took $52 million in cash when he visited the United Arab Emirates last year"? Or that Putin & Berlusconi are best buddies? Obviously, our government was keeping secrets that should have been in the public domain. Julian Assange may have been imprudent, but it can be argued that his imprudence was necessitated by the bad behavior of bureaucrats & high-level officials who punish honorable whistleblowers and deprive the public of the right to know.

The WikiLeaks document dumps, and many of the stories they tell, are stories without heroes. You, as a journalist, have a duty to put the Wikidumps into perspective. Your tut-tuts -- absent anything but a weak acknowledgment that a few of the stories might be worth airing -- are an abdication of your journalistic responsibility. So put yourself among the anti-heroes of This Week in Journalism.

The Commentariat -- November 29

I see [us Americans as] an insular people who are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.
-- Edmund Morris, historian, on "Face the Nation"

Paul Krugman comments on President Obama's decision to freeze the wages of non-military government employees:

Yep, that’s exactly what we needed: a transparently cynical policy gesture, trivial in scale but misguided in direction, and in effect conceding that your bitter political opponents have the right idea. ...

    ... That's all he wrote. Here's the backstory.

Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "As President Obama’s fiscal commission faces a deadline this week for agreement on a plan to shrink the mounting national debt, liberal organizations will unveil debt-reduction proposals of their own in the next two days, seeking to sway the debate in favor of fewer reductions in domestic spending, more cuts in the military and higher taxes for the wealthy.... On Monday, the progressive policy organizations Demos, the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation will unveil a liberal blueprint.... On Tuesday, a separate coalition ... — the Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future — will release a similar outline. Both plans are comparable to one recently proposed by Representative Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Democrat from Illinois who is a member of the Bowles-Simpson commission." CW: here's an overview of Schakowsky's plan, and here's a pdf of the detail. ...

... Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the AP: "Job-based health care benefits could wind up on the chopping block if President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans get serious about cutting the deficit. Budget proposals from leaders in both parties have urged shrinking or eliminating tax breaks that help make employer health insurance the leading source of coverage in the nation and a middle-class mainstay." ...

... Elisabeth Bumiller & Tom Shanker of the New York Times: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is attempting "... to contain the exploding cost of health care for nearly 10 million eligible beneficiaries against the pain and emotions of those who say they have already 'paid up front' with service in uniform, particularly those who deployed to America’s two current wars. The 10 million figure includes active-duty personnel, retirees, members of the National Guard and Reserves and their families."

Shannon McCaffrey of the AP: "At least 13 state lawmakers in five states have defected to Republican ranks since the Nov. 2 election, adding to already huge GOP gains in state legislatures. And that number could grow as next year's legislative sessions draw near."

American Exceptionionalism. Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post: "... with Republicans and tea party activists accusing President Obama and the Democrats of turning the country toward socialism, the idea that the United States is inherently superior to the world's other nations has become the battle cry from a new front in the ongoing culture wars. Lately, it seems to be on the lips of just about every Republican who is giving any thought to running for president in 2012.... Some, however, wonder whether Obama's conservative critics are sounding an alarm about the United States' place in the world - or making an insidious suggestion about the president himself." CW: Tumulty is a straight reporter, but her report zeroes in on the insidious us-against-them demagoguery that we will be subjected to for the next two years. ...

... New York Times Editorial Board: "... more than 70 percent of voters in Oklahoma still approved a state constitutional amendment [against the enforcement of Islamic law]..., apparently persuaded by anti-Islamic activists, and a few cynical politicians, that Oklahoma was about to be brought under Islam’s heel.... It is fear-mongering, of course, and all too successful.... The issue helped drive the high Republican turnout at the polls in Oklahoma.... The voters of Oklahoma were badly misled by demagogues into passing a profoundly un-American measure."

Michael Pollan & Eric Schlosser in a New York Times op-ed: "The Senate should pass the food safety bill that would allow the F.D.A. to prevent food safety problems, rather than respond only after people have become ill."

William Glaberson of the New York Times: "As part of his annual budget, New York’s chief judge [Jonathan Lippman] will propose a $100 million increase in state financing for lawyers who represent the poor in civil cases that deal with 'the essentials of life' like eviction and child support, according to people who have worked on the plan.... If approved by the Legislature, it would ... be a striking acknowledgment that the state’s court system is being overwhelmed by some 2.3 million people a year who cannot afford representation." CW: bear in mind that, with the exception of small claims, this still leaves out the poor & middle class who still cannot afford to bring suit against parties they believe have wronged them.

** Happy Birthday, Bush v. Gore. Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker: "Over [the] decade, the Justices have provided a verdict of sorts on Bush v. Gore by the number of times they have cited it: zero.... [But] Bush v. Gore would resonate.... The case didn’t just scar the Court’s record; it damaged the Court’s honor." For more on Bush v. Gore, listen to one of the dissenters below.