The Commentariat -- Sept. 8, 2014

Internal links, graphic & related text removed.

Julie Davis of the New York Times: "President Obama will use a speech to the nation on Wednesday to make his case for launching a United States-led offensive against Sunni militants gaining ground in the Middle East, seeking to rally support for a broad military mission while reassuring the public he is not plunging American forces into another Iraq war." See also video of Chuck Todd's interview of the President in yesterday's Commentariat.

David Remnick of the New Yorker: "As the Middle East disintegrates and a vengeful cynic in the Kremlin invades his neighbor, Obama has offered no full and clarifying foreign-policy vision.

His opponents and would-be successors at home have seized the chance to peashoot from the sidelines. What do they offer? Unchastened by their many past misjudgments, John McCain and Lindsey Graham go on proposing escalations, aggressions, and regime changes. Rand Paul, who will likely run for President as a stay-at-home Republican, went to Guatemala recently and performed eye surgeries as a means of displaying his foreign-policy bona fides.

Julie Davis & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "What had once looked like a clear political imperative for both parties -- action to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants -- had morphed instead into what appeared to be a risky move that could cost Democrats their majority.... [Angus] King, a Maine independent who is a member of the Democratic caucus, warned Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, [that] ... unilateral action by the president might undermine the prospects for bipartisan agreement on a broad immigration overhaul for years to come. It was that concern..., White House officials said, that ultimately prompted the president to break the promise he made on June 30 in the Rose Garden to act on his own before summer's end to fix the immigration system."

Lobbying Tanks. Eric Lipton, et al., of the New York Times: "More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors' priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.... Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.... The line between scholarly research and lobbying can sometimes be hard to discern.... The think tanks ... have not registered with the United States government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal law...."

The Mind of Mitt. There’s no question in my mind that I think I would have been a better president than Barack Obama has been.... I think the president is really out of touch with reality when it comes to what's happening in the world.... I don't know whether you can't see reality from a fairway, but the president has not seen the reality internationally and domestically.... No question ... in my mind [that I would make a better president than Hillary Clinton].... Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are two peas in the same pod. -- Mitt Romney on "Fox 'News' Sunday"

William Finnegan of the New Yorker: A "Berkeley-University of Illinois study, commissioned by Fast Food Forward (a workers' association), found that American fast-food workers receive almost seven billion dollars a year in public assistance.... According to the progressive think tank Demos, fast-food executives' compensation packages quadrupled, in constant dollars, between 2000 and 2013.... Their front-line workers' wages have barely risen in that time, and remain among the worst in U.S. industry. The differential between C.E.O. and worker pay in fast food is higher than in any other domestic economic sector -- twelve hundred to one.... In Denmark McDonald's workers over the age of eighteen earn more than twenty dollars an hour -- they are also unionized -- and the price of a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States."

Charles Blow: "A damning report released by the Sentencing Project last week lays bare the bias and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it and disproportionately affect African-Americans.... As the Sentencing Project report makes clear, the entire government and media machinery is complicit in the distortion.... The effects of these [mis]perceptions and policies have been absolutely devastating for society in general and black people in particular.

Jonathan Chait: The worst government in the U.S. is local government. "... police militarization bore only the faintest responsibility for the tragedy in Ferguson.... Old-fashioned policing tools were all the Ferguson police needed to engage in years of discriminatory treatment, to murder Michael Brown, and to rough up journalists covering the ensuing protests. Police militarization was a largely unrelated problem that happened to be on bright display. Over the ensuing days, it grew apparent that demilitarizing the police might save the government some money but would not address the crisis's underlying cause, and the momentary consensus evaporated.... The town of Ferguson, while tiny in scale, is an Orwellian monstrosity. Its racially biased Police Department is the enforcement wing of a predatory system of government...."

Robert O'Harrow & Michael Sallah of the Washington Post continue the Post's fascinating -- and disturbing -- series on "Stop & Seize." "A cornerstone of Desert Snow's instruction rests upon two 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that bolstered aggressive highway patrolling. One decision affirmed the police practice of using minor traffic infractions as pretexts to stop drivers. The other permits officers to seek consent for searches without alerting the drivers that they can refuse and leave at any time."

David Cole, in the New York Review of Books, reviews Zephyr Teachout's Corruption in America. "Teachout's important new book reminds us that corruption -- in its more expansive sense of excessive private interest undermining public virtue -- poses very real risks to a functioning democracy, risks that were foreseen at the founding, and that have preoccupied politicians, statesmen, and jurists for the entire course of our nation's history. Today's Court has sought to deny those concerns through a definitional strategy that cannot be squared either with that history or with the actual effects of money on our politics.... Only when the Court begins to grapple with the full extent of the dangers of corruption will its campaign finance jurisprudence truly reflect the competing values at stake." Teachout is running in the Democratic primary against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a poster-boy for enabling political corruption. The primary is tomorrow; Cuomo -- who tried unsuccessfully to keep Teachout off the ballot -- is expected to win by a landslide.

Paul Krugman: "I have a message for the Scots [who will be voting on a referendum next week for independence from Great Britain]: Be afraid, be very afraid. The risks of going it alone are huge. You may think that Scotland can become another Canada, but it's all too likely that it would end up becoming Spain without the sunshine.

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.

Driftglass writes a lovely remembrance of yesterday's morning shows. ...

... AND Driftglass reflects on receding local and state government reporting, which fits in nicely with Jonathan Chait's post, linked above. As Chait writes,

Since 1910, state house elections almost perfectly track U.S. House elections. The correlation, to be precise about it, is 0.96. Which is to say virtually none of us -- even those of us who bother to vote -- form judgments of any kind regarding our state legislators.

... Support your local newspaper!

Marie's Sports Report

Andrew Keh of the New York Times: "Bruce Levenson, who has led the ownership group of the Atlanta Hawks since 2004, informed N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver on Saturday that he intended to sell the team, effectively cutting short a league investigation into an email that Mr. Levenson sent two years ago to fellow Hawks executives detailing his thoughts on how the team could attract more white fans." ...

... Margaret Hartmann of New York takes a cynical view of Levenson's "self-reporting." Want to spend more time with your family AND make wads of money? Just dig up one of your old racist e-mails!

Congressional Election

Elizabeth Drew of the New York Review of Books: "Whether or not the Republicans take control of the Senate, the ground there has already shifted to the right." CW: This is a long piece which provides an excellent review of "where we're at" politically. Drew is a master of the form. Her assessment of Hillary Clinton's critique of President Obama's Middle East policy is noteworthy.

A discouraging -- but not surprising -- note from Greg Sargent: "The new NBC/Marist polls released over the weekend put Mitch McConnell up over Alison Grimes by 47-39 and Tom Cotton over Dem Senator Mark Pryor by 45-40 in Arkansas, while Dem Senator Mark Udall leads GOPer Cory Gardner by 48-42 in Colorado."

Beyond the Beltway

Kimberly Kindy & Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post: "Instead of telling grand jury members what charges they believe police officer Darren Wilson should face [in the killing of Michael Brown, St. Louis county prosecutors] are leaving it open-ended for now and involving the grand jury as co-investigators. The prosecutor's office is also presenting evidence to the grand jury as soon as it receives it, rather than waiting until the St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI have completed their investigations. Police probes are typically completed before a case is presented to a grand jury, county officials said." (Link missing).

Jon Swaine of the Guardian reviews the differing accounts of the police killing of John Crawford III in a WalMart in Beavercreek, Ohio. Ronald Ritchie, the "witness" who called 911, has a credibility problem. State AG Mike DeWine (R) has refused to release surveillance video to the public, although Ritchie says he has seen it, & the Crawford family & their attorney also have viewed it. Another shopper, Angela Williams, died of heart failure after collapsing during the melee inside the WalMart that followed the shooting.

Kenneth Lovett of the New York Daily News: "In what many say is an alarming first, a private eye hired by Assembly Republicans placed a GPS device on a Long Island assemblyman's car for two months in an unsuccessful effort to prove the pol didn't live in his district. According to court transcripts, investigator Adam Rosenblatt said he was hired in March by attorney James Walsh, repping the Assembly Republican Campaign Committee, to find out where Assemblyman Edward Hennessey (D-Suffolk) actually lives. Walsh that same month was paid $3,000 by the GOP campaign committee.... State police say placing a GPS device on a vehicle is legal in mostcases...."

News Ledes

Washington Post: "Under huge international and domestic pressure, Iraq swore in a new government on Monday, opening the way for an expansion of U.S. military support to fight Islamic extremists in the country. The vote to approve a new cabinet came during a fiery late-night parliamentary session. Key positions, including those of the defense and security chiefs, were left open amid controversy over who would fill them. Now confirmed as prime minister, Haider al-Abadi said he would name candidates for those positions within a week."

Washington Post: "Hospitals in Colorado, Missouri and potentially eight other states are admitting hundreds of children for treatment of an uncommon but severe respiratory virus. The virus, called Enterovirus D68, causes similar symptoms to a summer cold or asthma: a runny nose, fever, coughing and difficulty breathing. But the illness can quickly escalate and there are no vaccines or antiviral medications to prevent or treat it."

Guardian: "US warplanes have carried out five strikes on Islamist insurgents menacing Iraq's Haditha dam, witnesses and officials said, widening what President Barack Obama called a campaign to curb and ultimately defeat the militants.... The leader of a pro-Iraqi government paramilitary force in western Iraq said the air strikes wiped out an Isis patrol trying to attack the dam -- Iraq's second biggest hydroelectric facility that also provides millions with water."

What About Bob?

Update below.

In trying to understand Bob McDonnell's motivations, I came upon this blogpost by Chris Graham of the Augusta Free Press.

In Graham's view, McDonnell reasoned that during his trial "he’d turn federal prosecutors into overreaching partisans, not only beating the rap against the corruption charges, but using it as the basis for a political comeback, talking openly with reporters during breaks in his trial about his plans to run for governor in 2017, if he didn’t somehow end up on the national Republican Party ticket in 2016."

I couldn't find any other references to McDonnell's chats with reporters during breaks, so I contacted Graham re: his source. Graham said he heard it from a local reporter, who mentioned it on-air when reporting the verdict. 

Graham's assertion makes sense, assuming the local reporter wasn't blowing smoke, & there's no reason to think s/he was. McConnell didn't take the plea deal because a felony conviction obviously would have put the kibosh on his future political plans. No presidential candidate is going to choose a convicted felon as his running mate, and Virginia voters might take note of his criminal record, too.

So McDonnell figured, as Graham hypothesizes, that he would "beat the rap," and that an acquittal in a failed prosecution would make him seem like an avenging hero -- the vindicated victim of government overreach. It fits right into the Reagan/GOP "government is the problem" philosophy.

The strategy might have worked, too, if McDonnell had not opted for a defense that exposed him as a cruel husband & extraordinary phony. Since the gifts themselves were legal under Virginia law, all Bob had to do was demonstrate that there was no quo for the quid in the quid pro quo -- that his acceptance of the gifts had nothing to do with the minor and ordinary efforts he made on giftor Jonnie Williams' behalf. After all, promoting Virginia businesses was part of the governor's job.

As for the appearance of impropriety, it's easy to believe that a governor working his heart out to serve his constituents would drop the ball on some personal matters -- like family finances & even adequate communication about them with his wife. "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying enough attention to this stuff," and "I didn't give Maureen enough support & guidance when she tried to take up the slack" might be a lame defense, but it's one with which we can all identify.

The truth may be that Bob saw himself as a victim of his wife's greed and carelessness. Incapable of accepting any personal blame for the debacle, Bob scapegoated the wife he already held in low esteem. Blaming Maureen wasn't entirely beyond the pale, anyway. It appears she was indeed a grasping, unhappy, unstable person who initiated & exploited the relationship with Williams.

One of the rules of life & politics is that you keep your marital problems to yourself. It's implied right there in the marriage vows. Secular law, to some extent, also recognizes this principle. In most circumstances, one cannot be forced to testify against her or his spouse in a criminal trial. Bob & Maureen were in just such a circumstance. But instead of asserting the spousal privilege, Bob did just the opposite -- he used the trial to savage his wife.

His testimony & that of the witnesses the defense called constituted a long-running demonstration of psychological spousal abuse. If this is the way he treats his wife on the public record, some jurors must have felt, then he probably treated her a lot worse in private. (The testimony of one of the McDonnell daughters suggested as much.) Intuitively, some of the jurors -- especially the women -- probably blamed Bob for being a prime cause of his wife's instability. I do.

The low regard in which he held his wife is not all that surprising, BTW. It was pretty clear to many women, even while he was maintaining his family-man pretense, that Transvaginal Bob holds all women -- except maybe the mythic Virgin Mary -- in low regard.

For years, Bob followed the marriage rules. He mugged with Mo for the cameras. He featured his family in campaign ads. He spoke and wrote about Christian family values. He appeared to be a partner in a normal, loving marriage. If the marriage was indeed a sham, it was a sham both Bob & Maureen kept secret. But all that seems to have changed when, in Bob's view, Maureen did something so egregious she got Bob in big trouble. The criminal charges seem to have pushed Bob over the edge. His long-simmering rage against his wife boiled over. He used his criminal trial as a vehicle to make public what he viewed as his personal trials.

As the AP reported, "Bob McDonnell's attorney, Henry Asbill, said his client did not receive a fair trial and will appeal. Asbill reiterated his previous statement that prosecutors sought to criminalize routine political behavior."

The appeal may be successful. His lawyers will likely argue -- as they did before the trial judge -- that the judge's jury instructions defined "criminal corruption" & conspiracy too broadly. An appellate court could agree. But in my view, it was not Bob who didn't get a fair trial. It was Maureen.

The final irony, of course, is that Bob was so blind in his hatred for his wife & so raw in his denunciation of her that his courtroom performance ended his political career. Oddly, he never saw that coming. Oblivious to the damage he caused himself, Bob McDonnell was still planning future political triumphs right up till the moment a court clerk read the first "guilty" verdict. The trouble is, more than half of voters are women voters. Women are not going to vote for Bob McDonnell again. Ever.

Update. What the Manicurist Says. Rosalind Helderman & Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post go behind the scenes to reconstruct how the McDonnell prosecution came about: "Six months before the McDonnells were charged, the first lady made a stark prediction: Her husband would go to jail, she said, and it would all be her fault."

The Commentariat -- Sept. 7, 2014

Defunct videos, photo removed.

"Stop & Seize." Michael Sallah, et al., of the Washington Post: "After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America's highways.... The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found.... Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of 'highway interdiction' to departments across the country.... A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network's chat rooms and sharing 'trophy shots' of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities." ...

     ... CW: Of course there couldn't possibly be any racial profiling here.

Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Among undocumented immigrants and activists working on their behalf, President Obama's decision to wait until after November's elections to make promised changes to immigration policy provoked raw anger. One group called the president's decision 'an affront' to migrant families. Another said Obama had 'prioritized politics over reform.'"

Dan Roberts of the Guardian: "As the US military returned to combat in Iraq this summer, a group of jurors in Washington DC were hearing arguments over a dark chapter of the last war. Though some elements of the 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad road junction by Blackwater private security guards remain shrouded in mystery even after a trial that lasted 10 weeks, prosecutors provided overwhelming evidence that the tragedy was one of the most one-sided encounters of the US occupation."

Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post: "The Justice Department released two decade-old memos Friday night, offering the fullest public airing to date of the Bush administration's legal justification for the warrantless wiretapping of Americans' phone calls and e-mails -- a program that began in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The broad outlines of the argument -- that the president has inherent constitutional power to monitor Americans' communications without a warrant in a time of war -- were known, but the sweep of the reasoning becomes even clearer in the memos written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who was head of President George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel." ...

... The memos are here & here.

Manny Fernandez of the New York Times: Texas state senator Wendy Davis, the Democratic nominee for governor, "has revealed her own deeply personal abortion story, writing in a memoir that in addition to the ectopic pregnancy in 1994, she ended a second pregnancy for medical reasons in 1997. Ms. Davis's descriptions of the abortions -- she and her then husband named the second unborn child Tate Elise Davis, who had a severe brain abnormality and to whom Ms. Davis dedicates the book in part -- have rallied Texas Democrats to her campaign."

It Takes a Village Idiot to find something to complain about in President Obama's brief side trip to Stonehenge. (As I recall, you can drive there from Newport, Wales, the site of the NATO meeting, in less than two hours.) I give you ...

... Maureen Dowd goes to a screening of the first episode of the upcoming season of Showtime's "Homeland." The first thing she thinks of: "The murderous melee that ensues [in the "Homeland" story] is redolent of President Obama's provocative remark at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in New York, talking about the alarming aggressions flaring up around the world and alluding to the sulfurous videos of the social-media savvy ISIS fiends beheading American journalists." It's a shame she has such a whiney voice. Otherwise, she would have been perfect for Chuck Todd's new panel of petty pundits.

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Whatever Happened to Jason Blair? Edition. Caroline Bankoff. of New York: "Just a little over a month after being fired for at least 41 instances of plagiarism, former BuzzFeed viral politics editor Benny Johnson has been hired as the National Review's first-ever social media director. He'll begin his new job on Monday.... The National Review also just happens to be one of the many publications Johnson plagiarized from while he was at BuzzFeed. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!"

News Ledes

AP: "The U.S. military said Sunday it launched airstrikes around Haditha Dam in western Iraq, targeting Islamic State insurgents there for the first time in a move to prevent the group from capturing the vital dam. The strikes represented a broadening of the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State militants, moving the military operations closer to the border of Syria, where the group also has been operating."

New York Times: Serena Williams won her 18th Grand Slam singles tennis title today. "The top-ranked Williams defeated Caroline Wozniacki, 6-3, 6-3, to capture her third United States Open final in a row and sixth over all."

New York Times: "The United States launched a fresh series of airstrikes against Sunni fighters in Iraq late Saturday in what Defense Department officials described as a mission to stop militants from seizing an important dam on the Euphrates River and prevent the possibility of floodwaters being unleashed toward the capital, Baghdad."

Guardian: "Ukraine's ceasefire was breached repeatedly on Sunday as shelling was audible in the port city of Mariupol, and loud booms were also heard in the regional centre Donetsk. The ceasefire, agreed on Friday, held for much of Saturday, but shelling started overnight."

Guardian: "A doctor who became infected with Ebola while working in Liberia is sick, but in stable condition at the Nebraska Medical Center, officials said Friday. Dr Rick Sacra, 51, is being treated at the largest of the United States' four special isolation units. It was built to handle patients with highly infectious and deadly diseases, according to Dr Mark Rupp, chief of the infectious diseases division at the center."