;)
The Commentariat -- July 15, 2015
Internal links & defunct videos removed.
Afternoon Update:
Michael Shear & Julie Davis of the New York Times: "President Obama on Wednesday urged lawmakers to support the nuclear deal reached with Iran, saying that failure to put it in to effect would increase the likelihood of war in the Middle East and accelerate a nuclear arms race in the region that would threaten the safety of the United States. 'That's the choice that we face,' Mr. Obama said in opening comments at a news conference in the East Room of the White House. 'If we don't choose wisely, I believe future generations will judge us harshly, for letting this moment slip away.'"
Ziva Branstetter & Dylan Goforth of the Tulsa Frontier: "When President Barack Obama arrives in Durant[, Oklahoma,] today and travels to the town's high school to give a speech, he will apparently be greeted by residents waving Confederate flags." CW: Nothing racist about this demonstration of "heritage," of course. The Chocktaw Nation kicked these fine patriots off Chocktaw land. ...
You know, there are three branches of our government. You have the Supreme Court, the legislative branch and the people, the people and their ability to vote. -- Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, explaining the Oklahoma constitution to people she had better hope are even more ignorant than she, in the context of her refusal to follow a state supreme court's order to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the statehouse grounds
One has to wonder where Fallin sees her job fitting into this scheme. -- Constant Weader
Thanks to Akhilleus for the news from Oklahoma.
Joshua Partlow of the Washington Post: "Mexican authorities released the surveillance footage of [Joaquin] Guzman's dramatic prison escape on Tuesday night. From a hole in the shower floor, one of the small blind spots for the surveillance camera, Guzman's allies had built a hatch over a shaft dropping 30 feet underground and leading to a tunnel that ran to a small cinder-block house in the corn fields south of the prison." Includes video.
*****
CW: Okay, I know this is painful, but sometimes we must make sacrifices:
... For the both-sides report, Peter Baker of the New York Times does his usual best. ...
... Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "Republican leaders in Congress are crafting their attack plan against the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran. Lawmakers will have 60 days to review the deal after the White House delivers the text of the historic agreement to Capitol Hill. The GOP could seek to move a measure of disapproval, but it will be difficult to win a filibuster-proof 60 votes, much less the 67 required to overcome a presidential veto." ...
... Dana Milbank: Sen. Lindsey Graham went on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" early Tuesday to denounce the Iran nuclear agreement in dramatic terms. "But had Graham actually seen the deal? 'No,' he admitted. But Graham and his congressional colleagues are not reserving judgment until they know the facts.... This is legislating by reflex -- a mass knee-jerk by the Republican majority in Congress.... [Serious] considerations got lost in the reflexive response, kicked off by [Israeli PM Benjamin] Netanyahu, who proclaimed an hour before the deal was announced that, based on 'early reports,' it was 'a historic mistake.'... By about 9 a.m., House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had both reached conclusions. Boehner said that ... the deal would put Iran on 'a break-out threshold to produce a nuclear bomb,' and that it would 'only embolden Iran -- the world's largest sponsor of terror.' 'It sounds,' a reporter later said to Boehner, 'like you've already rejected it.' 'I want to review all the facts,' the speaker replied. Verdict first -- then the facts." ...
... ** American Self-Deceptionalism. Peter Beinart of the Atlantic: "When critics focus incessantly on the gap between the present deal and a perfect one, what they're really doing is blaming Obama for the fact that the United States is not omnipotent. This isn't surprising given that American omnipotence is the guiding assumption behind contemporary Republican foreign policy. Ask any GOP presidential candidate except Rand Paul what they propose doing about any global hotspot and their answer is the same: be tougher.... And recognizing the limits of American power also means recognizing the limits of American exceptionalism. It means recognizing that no matter how deeply Americans believe in their country's unique virtue, the United States is subject to the same restraints that have governed great powers in the past. For the Republican right, that's a deeply unwelcome realization. For many other Americans, it's a relief. It's a sign that, finally, the Bush era in American foreign policy is over."
... Julian Borger of the Guardian outlines the key points of the agreement. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Joby Warrick of the Washington Post: "In a remarkable reversal, the goal of freezing Iran's progress toward a weapons capability was achieved not with warplanes but with handshakes." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... The New York Times is updating reactions to the international nuclear agreement with Iran. "The Iran nuclear deal was welcomed by world leaders like David Cameron of Britain, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Pope Francis." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Abby Ohlheiser of the Washington Post: "The fate of several Americans held in Iran, including a Washington Post journalist detained last July, remains separate from the historic nuclear deal announced Tuesday, even after U.S. officials repeatedly raised the issue with Tehran. After news of the nuclear deal, Jason Rezaian's brother and The Washington Post's executive editor renewed calls for the release of Rezaian, The Post's Tehran bureau chief, who is facing trial on charges that include espionage. Rezaian has strongly denied the allegations."
Katie Zezima of the Washington Post: "President Obama will announce a pilot program to bring broadband to low-income households, attempting to close a gap that leaves many without high-speed internet. The plan, called ConnectHome, will launch in 27 cities nationwide and is expected to reach 275,000 low-income households. The program will also come to the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, where Obama will speak Wednesday."
Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: "Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, told lawmakers Wednesday that proposals to increase congressional oversight of the central bank could cause collateral damage to the broader economy. Ms. Yellen's warning, delivered in prepared testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, marked an intensification of the Fed's opposition to the measures, mostly backed by congressional Republicans."
Josh Lederman & Nancy Benac of the AP: "... President Barack Obama called Tuesday for bipartisan action to revamp a criminal justice system riddled with inequities that result in unduly harsh prison sentences, particularly for minorities, and cost the government billions for unwarranted mass incarceration. 'In far too many cases, the punishment simply does not fit the crime,' Obama told a crowd of more than 3,000 at the NAACP's annual convention.... Obama ticked off statistics showing that the U.S. prison population has quadrupled since 1980 and doubled in the last two decades alone."
Katrina vanden Heuvel in the Washington Post: "... House Republicans are actively working to protect dark-money groups, inserting a provision into a spending bill last month to protect them from new disclosure requirements. But there is a simple way that President Obama can address the issue of dark money and advance the cause of transparency. The president should sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose their contributions to dark-money groups.... Such an order would not eliminate dark money. It would, however, expose de facto political contributions by powerful corporation that hold federal contracts, including JP Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, and Koch Industries. Moreover, with the 10 largest federal contractors receiving approximately $1.5 trillion from the government since 2000, an executive order would enable the American people to see where their tax dollars are really going."
Paul Krugman: "... only a combination of rigid preconceptions and sheer ignorance can explain the way right-wingers still go around sniggering about [President] Obama's green-energy promotion. Far from being a bust, that policy was at least a contributing factor to an energy revolution."
Jonathan Chait on the ridiculous gimmicks Congressional Republicans cook up to increase domestic spending without upsetting Grover Norquist. "In theory, they like cutting spending, but in practice, the only spending programs they actually specify for reductions are the ones aimed at poor people, which Democrats don't like to cut, creating a stalemate."
Mark Berman of the Washington Post: "Missouri and Texas, which have combined to carry out nearly all of the executions in the United States this year, are set to execute two inmates by lethal injection this week.... These executions would be the first since the Supreme Court said last month that a drug used in troublesome lethal injections could be used going forward. ...
... New Lede: "Authorities in Missouri executed an inmate on Tuesday night, making him the first person put to death by a state since the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on lethal injection last month."
Please Don't Feed the Animals People. Tara Culp-Ressler of Think Progress: "In a Facebook post published Monday night, the Oklahoma GOP suggested that the millions of Americans receiving food stamps this year should not be enrolled in the program because 'the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.'... Opponents of maintaining state and federal funding for social safety net programs have a long history of making comparisons between government beneficiaries and animals, which is widely considered to be a racially coded insult." ...
... Randy Brogdon, Oklahoma Republican party chair: Oh, sorry, didn't mean to offend. BUT "This post was supposed to be an analogy that compared two situations illustrating the cycle of government dependency in America, not humans as animals." You yahoos "misinterpreted" it. Something, something about "free market principles." CW: Yes, how could anybody find an analogy -- a mere literary device -- offensive? We must be stoopid. ...
... Ed Kilgore: "For a political party or an elected official or a great big adult political candidate to do so is offensive not because it 'offends' people or is 'politically incorrect' but because it is factually incorrect and hateful and certainly in conflict with the Judeo-Christian values that I am quite sure the Republican Party of Oklahoma believes it upholds."
Sandhya Somashekhar & Danielle Paquette of the Washington Post: "An anti-abortion group on Tuesday released an undercover video of an executive at Planned Parenthood sipping red wine while discussing in graphic detail how to abort a fetus to preserve its organs for medical research -- and also the costs associated with sharing that tissue with scientists. The video, filmed by a group called the Center for Medical Progress, threatens to reignite a long-standing debate over the use of fetal tissue harvested through abortions, and could add fuel to efforts seeking to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. In a statement, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood said the video misrepresents the organization's work." ...
... Here's Planned Parenthood's statement. CW: Sorry, PP, being reasonable, lawful & ethical holds no truck in right-wing world's view. Just looky here:
... Polly Mosendz of Newsweek: "Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Louisiana after a video surfaced claiming to implicate the organization in a scheme to sell the body parts of infants. 'Today's video of a Planned Parenthood official discussing the systematic harvesting and trafficking of human body parts is shocking and gruesome,' Governor Bobby Jindal said in a statement. However, the video is not nearly as straightforward as Jindal's explanation." CW: There is no matter too obscure, too discredited nor too crazy to incite Bobby Jindal to exploit. ...
... Also, Carly Fiorina. John McCain.weighs in, too. And Connie Chung, what are you doing? ...
... Scott Walker, et al.: me too, me too, me too. Surprisingly, they're calling on Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.
Jack Ewing of the New York Times: "The International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that it would remain involved in Greece's bailout only if eurozone leaders agreed on a plan that would make the country's debt manageable for decades to come. The aggressive stance sets up a stand-off with Germany and other eurozone creditors, which have been reluctant to provide additional debt relief. The I.M.F., in a report released publicly on Tuesday, proposed that eurozone creditors should consider letting Athens write off part of its huge debt or at least make no payments on its eurozone debt for 30 years." ...
... Josh Barro of the New York Times: "The I.M.F. memo amounts to an admission that the eurozone cannot work in its current form. It lays out three options for achieving Greek debt sustainability, all of which are tantamount to a fiscal union, an arrangement through which wealthier countries would make payments to support the Greek economy. Not coincidentally, this is the solution many economists have been telling European officials is the only way to save the euro -- and which northern European countries have been resisting because it is so costly.... If Greece stays in the euro, it will need much more financial support from the rest of Europe than was admitted in Monday's deal, and the I.M.F. is asking European governments to put that admission on paper."
Presidential Race
Mike Lillis & Cristina Marcos of the Hill: "Hillary Clinton took Capitol Hill by storm on Tuesday with a daylong series of friendly talks with congressional Democrats on the most pressing issues of the day.... Bernie Sanders ... hijacked a set of microphones -- usually reserved for Senate leaders -- after leaving a private meeting between the former secretary of State and Senate Democrats in the Capitol Tuesday afternoon. He then used the impromptu press conference to question Clinton's populist bona fides on a range of issues, including trade policy, the Iraq War, regulating big banks and tackling climate change." ...
... Jonathan Weisman & Nicholas Fandos of the New York Times: "Hillary Rodham Clinton unequivocally embraced the Iran nuclear deal in a meeting with House Democrats at the Capitol on Tuesday, according to people who were at the meeting. Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, reminded the Democrats, many of whom are nervous about the agreement, that she helped assemble the international coalition that imposed crippling economic sanctions on Iran. That, she told them, was what forced the Iranians to the bargaining table." ...
... Nicholas Fandos: "Hillary Rodham Clinton took her campaign to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, where she made overtures to Congressional Democrats and spoke cautiously -- and with a potential eye toward the future -- about the Iran nuclear deal announced earlier in the day." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Alan Rappeport of the New York Times: "Statements from [GOP] White House hopefuls warned of nuclear chaos in the Middle East, criticism of President Obama's abilities as a negotiator, and calls on Congress to stop the deal in its tracks." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Nick Gass & Adam Lerner of Politico rounded up all the GOP presidential candidates' statements about how horrible was the deal they hadn't read. ...
... Ed Kilgore contrasted the "Tell It Like It Is" Chris Christie from a few weeks ago with the "Tough Talking" Chris Cristie of yesterday.
Alan Rappeport: Donald Trump "is in a statistical tie with former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida in a Suffolk University/USA Today national poll of potential primary voters released on Tuesday." CW: Yeah, yeah, I know: early polling isn't predictive of the eventual outcome of the primaries, but in this case, it does remind us of how base the GOP base is. ...
... Ben Dreyfus of Mother Jones: Donald Trump tweeted -- & his campaign later deleted -- a "Make America Great" campaign message featuring Waffen-SS soldiers as exemplars of "greatness." His campaign blamed an intern for the tweet. CW: You're fired, kid. The stock photo the Donald/intern lifted is here.
CW: We've all been so terribly upset that Ted Cruz's book A Time for Truth didn't make the New York Times best-seller list that we forgot to read it. Seems Ted's fellow Republicans Mitch McConnell & Rand Paul are denying some of Ted's "truths." They are all such paragons of probity it's hard to know whom to believe, isn't it?
Beyond the Beltway
Manny Fernandez of the New York Times: "Jade Helm 15, an eight-week military exercise that has generated paranoia for months fueled by conservative bloggers and Internet postings, begins Wednesday in Texas and six other states: Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Utah.... The military exercise will train Special Operations troops in what Army planners call 'unconventional warfare.'... Much of the paranoia over Jade Helm 15 is the outgrowth of an anti-Obama sentiment that is widespread in Texas and parts of the Southwest.... Sindy Miller, who runs a hair salon on Main Street [in Christoval, Texas], said fears of a military takeover have been the talk of this West Texas town, southeast of Midland. 'They're worried that they're going to come in and take their firearms away,' Ms. Miller said. 'Martial law, basically. I try not to listen to all these conspiracy-theory-type people. All they're worried about is their beer and their guns.'" ...
... CW: If you want to know how successful the McConnell-Boehner-Ailes-Koch alliance has been at unifying the nation behind conservative ideals, this article should help. Their efforts have turned common ignoramuses into crazy ignoramuses. This bunch will go down in history as the worst source of domestic turmoil & anti-American sentiment in 100 years, maybe in 175 years.
Richard Winton & Joel Rubino of the Los Angeles Times: "In the two years since Gardena police officers fatally shot an unarmed man, city officials fought to keep graphic video of the killing under wraps.... Gardena's attempts to prevent the public from viewing the shooting met with defeat Tuesday, when a federal judge ordered the release of the recordings. In unsealing the videos, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson said the public had an interest in seeing the recordings, especially after the city settled a lawsuit over the shooting for $4.7 million.... The judge's decision was a response to a request from the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and Bloomberg, which challenged a blanket protective order that had prevented the release of the videos and other evidence in the court case.... After The Times published the videos online, 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski issued an order that 'the police car camera video footage shall remain under seal pending further order of this court.'" Includes video.
News Ledes
New York Times: "After a marathon session that stretched into the early hours of Thursday, Greek lawmakers narrowly approved a package of harsh austerity measures and economic policy changes that were required by its creditors as the terms of a $94 billion bailout package.... The vote was seen as a victory for the country's prime minister, Alexis Tsipras."
Denver Post: "Starting Wednesday morning, jurors will begin deliberating about whether James Holmes is guilty of killing 12 people and trying to wound 70 more.' The prosecution & defense presented their closing arguments today.
AP: "A team trying to fly a solar-powered plane around the world said Wednesday it is suspending the journey in Hawaii after the plane suffered battery damage during its record-breaking flight to the islands."
Reuters: "The United States handed back to Iraq on Wednesday antiquities it said it had seized in a raid on Islamic State fighters in Syria, saying the haul was proof the militants were funding their war by smuggling ancient treasures."
Reuters: "A 94-year-old German who worked as a bookkeeper at the Auschwitz death camp has been convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and sentenced to four years in prison, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials. Oskar Groening did not kill anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the second world war, but prosecutors argued that by sorting the bank notes taken from the trainloads of arriving Jews he helped support a regime responsible for mass murder." ...
... CW: For more on Groening, Politico Magazine publishes an adaptation of a section of Laurence Rees' book Auschwitz, a New History.
Share Article 
