The Commentariat -- May 29, 2014
Internal links removed.
CW: Reality Chex got "disappeared" last night, & it appears I lost some content. Sorry for the inconvenience. Looks as if I'm back up & running. 'Til I'm not.
U.S. military action cannot be the only -- or even primary -- component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail. -- President Obama, in his West Point commencement address
Mark Landler of the New York Times: "President Obama on Wednesday tried to regain his statesman's mantle, telling graduating cadets [at West Point] that the nation they were being commissioned to serve would still lead the world and would not stumble into military misadventures overseas. Speaking under leaden, chilly skies, Mr. Obama delivered the commencement address at the United States Military Academy":
... E. J. Dionne locates the "Obama Doctrine." ...
... Fred Kaplan of Slate explains President Obama's policy to dummies pundits.
Wesley Lowery & Josh Hicks of the Washington Post: "An independent review of Veterans Administration health centers has determined that government officials falsified records to hide the amount of time former service members have had to wait for medical appointments, calling a crisis that arose in one hospital in Phoenix Ariz., a 'systemic problem nationwide.' The Inspector General's report, a 35-page interim document, prompted new calls for VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, a former general and Vietnam veteran, to resign a post he has held since the beginning of the Obama administration. Those calls from Capitol Hill included several members of Obama's own party, complicating what is already a political challenge for a president who has made veterans issues a legacy-defining priority after a decade of war." ...
... Mark Thompson of Time goes over some of the numbers. CW: Most damning, in my mind, is that Shinseki, his predecessor & other top VA officials received plenty of reports about these practices. Why Shinseki claims to have been unaware of the widespread & (internally) well-reported problem is a head-scratcher. ...
... Edward-Issac Dovere & Carrie Brown of Politico: "More and more Democrats -- including Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), John Walsh (D-Mont.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.), all of whom are up for re-election -- have joined Republicans in saying that the IG report is all the proof that they need that Shinseki should be fired." ...
... Jacob Siegel of the Daily Beast: "New whistleblower testimony and internal documents implicate an award-winning VA hospital in Texas in widespread wrongdoing -- and what appears to be systemic fraud.... High-level VA hospital employees conspired to ... manipulate hospital wait lists.... If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives' bonus pay. Documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight." ...
... Jonathan Topaz of Politico: "Sen. Richard Burr [R-N.C.] said on Wednesday that he isn't backing down from his recent attack on veterans' groups and even stepped up his assault, charging the organizations are more upset by his comments than they are by the scandal at the Department of Veterans' Affairs."
New York Times Editors on President Obama's decision to delay a report on immigration enforcement policies: "There is something ridiculous about the president's fear of halting a legislative process that has been motionless for nearly a year. And it's infuriating for him to insist that doing more through executive action to protect families and reset the system's warped priorities -- as he did in halting the deportations of thousands of young people brought to the country as children -- is impossible or too politically dangerous." CW: Exactly right.
** Linda Greenhouse: "... the [Supreme C]ourt's majority is driving it into dangerous territory. The problem is not only that the court is too often divided but that it's too often simply wrong: wrong in the battles it picks, wrong in setting an agenda that mimics a Republican Party platform, wrong in refusing to give the political system breathing room to make fundamental choices of self-governance.... The Republican-appointed majority is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda.... Instead of blaming our politics for giving us the court we have, we should place on the court at least some of the blame for our politics." Read the whole post.
Michelle Obama, in a New York Times op-ed, whacks "some in Congress" for their attempts to undermine federal nutrition programs: "... unfortunately, we're now seeing attempts in Congress to undo so much of what we've accomplished on behalf of our children."
Nate Cohn of the New York Times: Most political polls are junk polls. "Many of the surveys to date have been conducted by firms that use automated phone surveys and combine deficient sampling with baffling weighting practices."
What It Takes to Be a Tea Party Star. Dana Milbank reviews Ben Carson's divisive remarks.
Steve M. on the problem of positive thinking: "... it's about conquering rather than coexisting in a society, and it's not healthy." ...
... Jesse Singal argues in New York that Elliot Rodgers' crimes were the result of mental illness, not of misogyny.
Michael Waldman of NYU's Brennan Center, in Politico Magazine: "How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment."
Claire Miller of the New York Times: "Google on Wednesday released statistics on the make-up of its workforce, providing numbers that offer a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man's world."
CW: Looks as if all or much of the Brian Williams interview of Edward Snowden is here, though it's divided into six short segments. Happily for me, I won't be able to listen. ...
... Erin McClam of NBC News: "A key claim by Edward Snowden -- that his unmasking of government spying programs has not hurt anyone -- was immediately called into question Wednesday by a former ambassador to Russia and a former top counterterrorism official." ...
... Michael Kinsley responds to New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan's criticism of his Glenn Greenwald book review. CW: When it comes to writers, including academic writers, the recriminations never end.
Jessica Taylor of the Hill: Tuesday's primary results make it appear Texas is now Ted Cruz's Texas.
Presidential Election 2016
Rick Perry, Blue-State Poacher. Caleb Hannan in a Politico Magazine piece on Perry's attempts to bolster his presidential creds by luring jobs away from states with Democratic governors. CW: What I don't get is this: how, exactly, does this make him more presidential? Are we supposed to infer that President Perry (perish the thought) would poach jobs from Mexico & Canada?
Bush's Brain v. Hillary's Brain. Peyton Craighill & Scott Clement of the Washington Post: "Two-thirds of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll disapprove of the Republican strategist raising questions about Clinton's age and health in advance of her potential presidential run."
Senate Races
Lexington Herald-Examiner Editors mock Mitch McConnell for his pretense that Kynect is "unconnected" to ObamaCare: "... it's no wonder that polls show many Kentuckians don't know that Kynect is a direct product of President Barack Obama's landmark law. How can average people be expected to understand if the Senate's Republican leader still hasn't figured it out, or at least is pretending there's no connection?" ...
... Brian Beutler of the New Republic: "The real political bombshell here is that the senator feels compelled to dodge accountability for his position at all." ...
... Update. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post exchanges e-mails with Jesse Benton, McConnell's campaign manager (on loan from Li'l Randy): "McConnell appears to have accepted the Medicaid expansion that has been so embraced by his state's residents, while drawing a distinction with the Obamacare health plans sold on the statewide exchange. Given that three out of four of the newly insured in Kentucky ended up on Medicaid, that probably makes political sense -- and also is newsworthy." CW: How does opposition to ObamaCare end? Not with a bang but a whimper. ...
... Greg Sargent: McConnell's "position is still gibberish: He still hasn't taken a position on whether he would actually support doing that, but barring further clarification, let's just say he wants Kentucky residents to think he would, or that he might. This provides an opening for Alison Lundergan Grimes to continue putting McConnell on the spot, should she choose to. Either way, for all practical purposes, this is a significant political concession."
Henry Decker of the National Memo: "Mississippi's Republican primary for U.S. Senate is heating up in its final week, with incumbent Thad Cochran and his right-wing challenger Chris McDaniel trading attack ads centered on a nursing home break-in that has roiled the bitterly negative race.... McDaniel is generally considered to represent the Tea Party's best chance of knocking off a Republican incumbent in the 2014 primaries."
Gubernatorial Race
Scott Bauer of the AP: "A person close to an investigation of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and other conservative groups said Wednesday that Walker's attorney is talking with the lead investigator about a possibl settlement that would end the probe." ...
... Jason Stein, et al., of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: "A legal civil war broke out Wednesday among targets of a John Doe probe, as a conservative group sought Wednesday to block prosecutors from having settlement talks with Gov. Scott Walker's campaign." AND, yes, as Nadd2 points out in today's Comments, even the Wall Street Journal editors have turned on Walker.
Beyond the Beltway
Mary Wisniewski of Reuters: "Declaring gun control 'essential' to public safety, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday proposed a gun shop ordinance that would videotape gun purchases and limit sales to one per month per buyer. The ordinance comes in response to a January court order invalidating a longtime ban on gun shops within the nation's third-largest city. The proposed law would require a 72-hour waiting period to purchase handguns and a 24-hour waiting period to purchase rifles and shotguns." ...
... The Guardian story, by Lauren Gambino, is here.
Aaron Deslatte of the Orlando Sentinel: "The coalition of groups trying to prove Florida's congressional map was intentionally gerrymandered to help Republicans turned to experts Tuesday who testified it was 'virtually impossible' to have drawn the maps without political bias.... 'In this case they did a really good job of following the recipe about how to do a partisan gerrymander,' [Jonathan] Katz[, a social scientist,] testified."
Lindsey Layton of the Washington Post: "The creation of the country's first all-charter school system has improved education for many children in New Orleans, but it also has severed ties to a community institution, the neighborhood school, and amplified concerns about racial equality and loss of parental control." CW: Just another part of the plan to increase inequality, IMHO.
Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post: "Republican governors in seven states -- Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Texas and Utah -- are either ignoring or refusing to comply with national standards meant to prevent sexual assault in prisons, according to new information from the Justice Department."