The Commentariat -- March 18, 2014

The Guardian is liveblogging events re: the Crimea catastrophe. Vladimir from the KGB is quite busy. ...

... Will Englund of the Washington Post: "Russia officially absorbed Crimea Tuesday afternoon, moments after President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia has no designs on any other parts of Ukraine. In a speech to a joint session of parliament, which he used to call for the 'reunification' of Crimea with Russia, he said that region has a special role in Russian history that makes it unique." ...

... Steven Myers & Peter Baker of the New York Times: "President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed a decree on Monday formally recognizing Crimea as a 'sovereign and independent state,' laying the groundwork for annexation and defying the United States and Europe just hours after they imposed their first financial sanctions against Moscow since the crisis in Ukraine began." ...

... Antoni Slodkowski of Reuters: "Japan will suspend talks on investment pact and relaxation of visa requirements as part of sanctions against Russia after Moscow recognized Crimea as a sovereign state, top government spokesman said on Tuesday." ...

... Kirit Radia of ABC News: "Russia's deputy prime minister laughed off President Obama's sanction against him today asking 'Comrade @BarackObama' if 'some prankster' came up with the list. The Obama administration hit 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials with sanctions today as punishment for Russia's support of Crimea's referendum. Among them: aides to President Vladimir Putin, a top government official, senior lawmakers, Crimean officials, the ousted president of Ukraine, and a Ukrainian politician and businessman allegedly tied to violence against protesters in Kiev." ...

... Dick Durbin Will Not Be Visiting the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast: "U.S. senators, congressmen and top Obama administration officials are sure to be on Vladimir Putin's sanctions list; a response to the Obama Administration's announcement on Monday that 7 Russian officials and 4 Ukrainian officials would be barred from holding assets or traveling to the United States." ...

... Bill Richardson, the former Secretary of Energy & U.N. ambassador, in a Time op-ed: "... the most powerful response [to the Ukraine crisis] from the West must come in the form of transatlantic energy security."

AP: "President Barack Obama pressed visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Monday to help break the logjam to elusive Middle East peace talks, acknowledging with a deadline fast approaching that the task ahead is 'very hard, it's very challenging.'"

** Josh Gerstein of Politico: "The U.S. government has acknowledged that it swept up huge volumes of data from e-mails in the U.S. for several years without any court approval, based solely on the orders of former President George W. Bush. In a court filings on Monday, government lawyers said that the Internet program ran in parallel with a program gathering so-called metadata about telephone calls. The counterterrorism efforts operated under presidential authority before a judge approved them in July 2004, said a 2007 court filing made public Monday by the Justice Department (and posted here.) CW: Just waiting for the outrage from the likes of Rand Paul & Ken Cuccinelli, who are, after all, suing the Obama administration over NSA surveillance.

Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services: ACA enrollment nationwide has reached "more than 5 million through the Federal and State-based Marketplaces since October 1^st." ...

... Dean Baker: "The Washington Post told readers that the Republicans are putting together an alternative to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Unfortunately it substituted Republican talking points for an actual description of the plan." ...

... Ed Kilgore: "Some more truth-squad work is also needed to point out the equally blatant contradiction between GOP complaints about high out-of-pocket costs in Obamacare plans and the eternal Republican commitment to MSAs, which are all about increasing the exposure of health care costs to consumers, which will allegedly increase 'individual responsibility.'"

Well, Maybe Everything Is God's Fault

Igor Bobic of TPM: "The stenographer who was carried off the House floor in October for an outburst in which she yelled into a microphone about God, Freemasons and a divided government explained in a video published Sunday that she acted on 'assignment' from the Holy Spirit. 'I did not have a breakdown,' Dianne Reidy said in the 38 minute long video, which also shows her husband. Identifying themselves as 'Bible-believing Christians,' Dan Reidy says the couple believes Dianne's voice was the instrument of a higher power." ...

... CW: The other day in a comment I complained that the Holy Ghost got short shrift. Apparently that's for the best. ...

... Continuing on with the supernatural theme, the MSM pitches in. Joe Coscarelli of New York: "After more than a week of wall-to-wall coverage on the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, much of it baseless speculation from vaguely defined experts, CNN today resorted to the most baseless of speculation from a certifiable non-expert about what supernatural' or conspiratorial explanations there could be for the disappearance." ...

Especially today, on a day when we deal with the supernatural, we go to church, the supernatural power of God. You deal with all of that. People are saying to me, why aren't you talking about the possibility — and I'm just putting it out there -- that something odd happened to this plane, something beyond our understanding? -- CNN host Don Lemon, interviewing the certifiable non-expert guy

Congressional Races

Vote for the Crook. Lauren McGaughy of the Times-Picayune: "Just three years after his release from federal prison, former Gov. Edwin Edwards is throwing his hat into the open race for Louisiana's 6th Congressional District.

Mitch McConnell Has a Sense of Humor! Jay Newton-Small of Time: "Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he didn't mind a bit becoming the brunt of Internet jokes through the meme known as McConnelling. In fact, he found it amusing." ...

... But There Are Limits. Burgess Everett of Politico: "Mitch McConnell's campaign shrugged off an accusation by a Kentucky reporter who claimed he was barred from a campaign event and threatened with police action if he asked a question. Joe Sonka, an editor for Louisville alternative paper LEO Weekly, claimed on Twitter several times on Monday afternoon that the Senate minority leader's campaign manager, Jesse Benton, had barred him from a news conference held by McConnell."

Beyond the Beltway

Christopher Baxter of the Star-Ledger: "Records released today by a legislative panel investigating the George Washington Bridge lane closings link Gov. Chris Christie's chief political strategist to discussions about fallout from the scandal, and show that Christie's campaign manager was more in the loop than previously known. The emails and text messages were disclosed in a court filing by the committee in response to objections raised by the attorney for the campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who contended at a hearing last week that the committee had no evidence showing his client was involved in the closings." ...

... Ken Vogel of Politico: "A central figure in the George Washington Bridge scandal looming over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie quietly accepted a job at a top Republican consulting firm late last month. Bill Stepien, who ran both of Christie's gubernatorial campaigns, signed on to help the phone-banking and data giant FLS Connect with sales and strategy on its voter contact products, according to a source with knowledge of the relationship."

Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: "A candidate colludes with wealthy corporate backers and promises to defend their interests if elected. The companies spend heavily to elect the candidate, but hide the money by funneling it through a nonprofit group. And the main purpose of the nonprofit appears to be getting the candidate elected.... According to investigators, exactly such a plan is unfolding in an extraordinary case in Utah, a state with a cozy political establishment, where business holds great sway and there are no limits on campaign donations.... In Utah, the documents show, a former state attorney general, John Swallow [R], sought to transform his office into a defender of payday loan companies, an industry criticized for preying on the poor with short-term loans at exorbitant interest rates. Mr. Swallow, who was elected in 2012, resigned in November after less than a year in office amid growing scrutiny of potential corruption."

The Pro-Pollution Party. Mitch Weiss & Michael Biesecker of the AP: "Documents and interviews collected by The Associated Press show how Duke [Energy]'s lobbyists prodded Republican legislators to tuck a 330-word provision in a regulatory reform bill ... [that] allowed Duke to avoid any costly cleanup of contaminated groundwater leaching from its unlined dumps.... Passed overwhelmingly by the GOP-controlled legislature, the bill was signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory, a pro-business Republican who worked at Duke for 28 years.... The level of coordination between Duke and North Carolina's lawmakers and regulators had long been of concern to environmentalists. But when a Duke dump ruptured on Feb. 2 -- spewing enough coal ash to coat 70 miles of the Dan River with toxic sludge -- the issue took on new urgency."

News Ledes

NBC News: "The missing Malaysia Airlines jet's abrupt U-turn was programmed into the on-board computer well before the co-pilot calmly signed off with air traffic controllers, sources tell NBC News. The change in direction was made at least 12 minutes before co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid said 'All right, good night,' to controllers on the ground, the sources said."

New York Times: "United States Navy commandos seized a renegade tanker carrying illicit Libyan oil in the Mediterranean southeast of Cyprus on Monday, thwarting a breakaway militia's attempt to sell the oil on the black market. No shots were fired, no one was injured and the commandos captured three armed Libyans described by the ship's captain as hijackers."

New York Times: "Mary T. Barra, General Motors' chief executive, announced another round of wide-ranging recalls on Monday, a sign that the company was moving with a new sense of urgency on safety problems after it disclosed a decade-long failure to fix a defect tied to 12 deaths. The recalls, which cover 1.7 million vehicles worldwide for a variety of problems, come in addition to last month's recall of 1.6 million Chevrolet Cobalts and other models. In one of Monday's recalls, G.M. had alerted owners to the problem three years ago, but did not make a recall."

Los Angeles Times: "A 20-year-old student at a California community college, who authorities said had discussed an attack on the Los Angeles subway, has been arrested on a federal terrorism charge while trying to enter Canada for an eventual trip to the Mideast, where he planned to help a group wage holy war, officials said Monday. Nicholas Teausant, 20, of Acampo, Calif., was arrested at the border crossing in Blaine, Wash. He was planning to eventually join a terrorist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, according to Benjamin B. Wagner, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California...."

Guardian: "Best-selling American author Kevin Trudeau, whose name became synonymous with late-night TV pitches, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for swindling consumers through infomercials for his book about weight loss. As he imposed the sentence prosecutors had requested, district judge Ronald Guzman portrayed 50-year-old Trudeau as a habitual fraudster from early adulthood. So brazen was Trudeau, the judge said, he once even used his own mother's social security number during a scam. 'Since his 20s, he has steadfastly attempted to cheat others for his own gain,' Guzman said, adding that Trudeau was 'deceitful to the very core'." ...

     ... The Chicago Tribune story is here.

The Commentariat -- March 17, 2014

Internal links removed.

** Paul Krugman: "... race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics." ...

... Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times: "Climbing above the poverty line has become more daunting in recent years, as the composition of the nation's low-wage work force has been transformed by the Great Recession, shifting demographics and other factors. More than half of those who make $9 or less an hour are 25 or older.... Today's low-wage workers are also more educated, with 41 percent having at least some college, up from 29 percent in 2000." Greenhouse reports case studies in Chattanooga, Tennessee, of low-wage workers. CW: And they are workers, Paul Ryan, et al., not the culturally-warped lazy bastards of your convenient imaginations. ...

... Hank Stuever of the Washington Post: "HBO's observant documentary, 'Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life & Times of Katrina Gilbert' (airing Monday and available free online) ... [follows] a 30-year-old single mother of three young children who works full time in a Chattanooga, Tenn., nursing home for $9.49 an hour. CW: You should be able to watch it here. ...

... Annie Lowrey of the New York Times: "As incomes have diverged between the country's richest counties..., and its ones..., so have the life expectancies of their residents." CW: Remember Alan Grayson's characterization of the GOP healthcare plan: "Don't get sick.... If you do yet sick..., die quickly." Here's their social safety net plan: "You're on your own. If you can't support yourself, die quickly."

Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "Having failed to prevent a Russian-sponsored referendum in Crimea, the Obama administration and its European allies refocused their efforts Sunday on keeping Moscow from annexing the autonomous Ukrainian region and expanding its military moves into other parts of Ukraine." ...

     ... Julie Ioffe of the New Republic is certain Putin will now move to take Eastern Ukraine. ...

... Alan Cowell of the New York Times: "A day after a contested referendum, legislators in Crimea moved swiftly on Monday to begin the process of splitting from Ukraine, with the regional Parliament declaring that Crimea is an independent state, with special status for the city of Sevastopol. While the ballot on Sunday has been rejected in the West and by the government in Kiev, the legislators asserted that the laws of Ukraine no longer applied to Crimea and that state funds and all other state property of Ukraine in Crimea had been transferred to the new state. They also announced that the Ukrainian authorities had no power in Crimea." ...

... Carol Morello & Pam Constable of the Washington Post: "Crimeans voted overwhelmingly Sunday to leave Ukraine and join Russia, election officials in the breakaway peninsula said, with the extraordinarily high figures capping a one-sided campaign of intimidation and heavy-handed tactics that blocked most voters from hearing a vision for any alternative other than unification with Moscow. Shortly before midnight, with tens of thousands of people jamming Lenin Square and the streets of Simferopol, Crimean political leaders declared that 93 percent of voters had chosen to be reunited with Russia. Fireworks exploded overhead while a male chorus sang the Russian national anthem from a giant stage, and people screamed and hugged each other." ...

... Jon Swaine & Alan Yuhas of the Guardian: "Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin clashed over the Crimea referendum during a telephone call on Sunday, as the US president dismissed claims from his Russian counterpart that the vote was legal and warned him that Moscow would be punished." The White House readout is here. A "statement by the [White House] press secretary" is here. ...

... Michael Hirsh of the National Journal: "In recent weeks, as the standoff over Ukraine escalated, Hillary Clinton did something that she never did as secretary of State: She put considerable distance between herself and the president she served loyally for four years."

Eric Lipton of the New York Times: "The National Restaurant Association did not disclose upfront its role in helping draft and circulate a statement signed by more than 500 prominent economists, including four winners of the Nobel Prize, urging the federal government to reject the proposal by the Obama administration to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour...." ...

... CW: Yo, Eric. There are not "500 prominent economists" in the whole world, much less 500 prominent right-wing economists who would sign on to a letter about U.S. wage policy. Lipton mentions these winger "prominent economists" twice. Later in the piece, he notes that the letter was a response to one from "more than 600 economists" who favor the minimum wage hike. None of these pro-worker economists -- apparently -- is "prominent." Also, BTW, the organization that circulated the original letter didn't attempt to keep its participation secret.

Katy Waldman of Slate: Actor & activist Mariska Hargitay has produced a documentary, "Shelved, about the more than 400,000 rape kits gathering dust throughout the United States -- casualties of underfunded police departments and a culture that still struggles to take sexual assault seriously."

Via Driftglass, on whom I depend to watch the Sunday morning shows for me:

Steve Coll of the New Yorker has a good summary of the Feinstein-Brennan imbroglio. ...

... Apparently spying on Members of Congress, American lawyers & activists -- whoevah -- is just something the CIA does now and has always done. Never mind that "By law, the CIA is specifically prohibited from collecting intelligence concerning the domestic activities of U.S. citizens." (The citation is from the CIA's Website.)

Robert Costa of the Washington Post: "House Republican leaders are adopting an agreed-upon conservative approach to fixing the nation's health-care system, in part to draw an election-year contrast with President Obama's Affordable Care Act. The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together.... This is the first time this year that House leaders will put their full force behind a single set of principles ... and present it as their vision."

Andrew O'Hehir of Salon: "On one hand, Irishness is a nonspecific global brand of pseudo-old pubs, watered-down Guinness, 'Celtic' tattoos and vague New Age spirituality.... On the other, it's Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Rep. Peter King, Long Island's longtime Republican congressman (and IRA supporter), consistently representing the most stereotypical grade of racist, xenophobic, small-minded, right-wing Irish-American intolerance. When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News."

CW: I meant to take an interest in #mcconnelling last week, but got distracted by Crimea & CIA spying & stuff. Now Ashley Parker of the New York Times has caught me up: "When Senator Mitch McConnell's re-election campaign released two-and-a-half minutes of video footage featuring him wordlessly smiling, it was most likely hoping to provide a friendly 'super PAC' with high-quality images of Mr. McConnell to use in ads. Instead, the campaign got a viral video sensation that exploded on the Internet last week, and even spawned its own term -- 'McConnelling.' ... Videos that edited his smiling face into famous sitcoms from the 1980s and 1990s began popping up..."

Beyond the Beltway

Illustration by Ashley Kroninger.

Seth Adams of GLAAD: "Guinness [Sunday] announced that the beer company would drop its sponsorship of the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade due to the parade's discriminatory rule that prohibits LGBT families and organizations from participating." ...

... Jack Pickell of the Boston Globe: "Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has released a statement announcing he will not participate in the annual South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade.... Late Saturday night, Walsh tried in vain to reach a compromise between parade organizers and an openly gay group of veterans seeking to participate. The now-decades-old controversy has led beer-maker Sam Adams to pull its support from the parade...."

Congressional Elections 2014

E. J. Dionne: "Obama and his party are in danger of allowing the Republicans to set the terms of the 2014 elections, just as they did four years ago. The fog of nasty and depressing advertising threatens to reduce the electorate to a hard core of older, conservative voters eager to hand the president a blistering defeat.... The hope-and-change guy needs to have one more act in him."

Déjà Vu All Over Again? Molly Ball of the Atlantic: "For Republicans, [Scott] Brown's entry is the latest in a run of recent good news, from a special election in Florida earlier in the week to unexpectedly competitive Senate races in places like Colorado and Michigan. For Democrats, Brown's reemergence heightens a very bad case of déjà vu. In 2010, Brown's special-election triumph was the first concrete sign of the political backlash Democrats were about to face over healthcare reform; in 2014, Republicans hope he is once again the avatar of their comeback season."

News Ledes

Washington Post: "Rachel 'Bunny' Mellon, the Listerine fortune heiress who married arts patron and philanthropist Paul Mellon, was a confidante of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and redesigned the White House Rose Garden, died March 17 at her home in Upperville, Va. She was 103.... At 101, she found herself improbably drawn into the legal battle of John Edwards, the former U.S. senator and presidential aspirant charged with violating campaign finance laws."

New York Times: "L'Wren Scott, a fashion designer whose creations were known for their discreet elegance... and her romantic partnership with Mick Jagger, was found dead on Monday in her Manhattan apartment. She was 49.... Two police officials said that the cause appeared to be suicide, but that the medical examiner had not yet made a determination."

New York Times: "The first turn to the west that diverted the missing Malaysia Airlines plane from its planned flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was carried out through a computer system that was most likely programmed by someone in the plane's cockpit who was knowledgeable about airplane systems, according to senior American officials." ...

... CBS "News": "Australia took the lead Monday in searching for the missing Boeing 777 over the southern Indian Ocean as Malaysia appealed for radar data and search planes to help in the unprecedented hunt through a vast swath of Asia stretching northwest into Kazakhstan." ...

... Guardian: "The last verbal communication from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane came from the flight's co-pilot, investigators believe. But in their Monday briefing Malaysian officials appeared to backtrack on Sunday's statement that the words 'All right, goodnight' were uttered after a communications system was turned off."

The Commentariat -- March 16, 2014

** Tim Egan: "... you can't help noticing the deep historic irony that finds [Paul Ryan,] a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish, using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy," the great Irish famine. ...

     ... CW: Egan must have been reading contributor Patrick, who wrote here a few days ago,

Ryan purports to be Irish (one big fightin' family), but seems oblivious that such an attitude was pretty much that of the landlord class in Ireland, and the Tories in the UK parliament, back in the mid-19th century and especially during The Famine. Their answers were to turn the poor off the land and to the roads, and to deny welfare to any who would not turn themselves into the workhouse. A requirement of the workhouse was that you had to divest of any asset -- you had to be totally destitute to receive help. Many thousands starved, millions emigrated, and that seemed like an acceptable solution to most of the (absentee) landlords and MPs. Anyone named Ryan should be shamed for suggesting a repeat of that solution.

The American Prospect publishes three reactions to economist Thomas Piketty's monumental work Capital in the Twenty-First Century. ...

     ... CW: A tiny, impossible dream of mine: Paul Ryan appears on "Press the Meat," & Greggers asks him, "So what about Piketty's results?" ...

... Here's an excellent, short piece by Martin Longman in Washington Monthly on Paul Ryan's "cartoonish" view of the dynamics of the inner-city economy.

Everything Is Obama's Fault, Ctd. Jonathan Martin & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "Democrats are becoming increasingly alarmed about their midterm election fortunes amid President Obama's sinking approval ratings, a loss in a special House election in Florida last week, and millions of dollars spent by Republican-aligned groups attacking the new health law. The combination has led to uncharacteristic criticism of Mr. Obama and bitter complaints that his vaunted political organization has done little to help the party's vulnerable congressional candidates." ...

... Maureen Dowd: Everything is Obama's fault, ctd.

Cultural historian Jackson Lears has a fascinating piece in the New Republic on Teddy Roosevelt's brand of progressivism. As Lears describes Teddy, the President was a cross between John McCain & Mitt Romney, with a dash of Sarah Palin. His progressivism seems to have been limited -- for the most part -- to campaign speeches.

More on the newly-released Clinton memos from Peter Baker & Amy Chozick of the New York Times. And from Cathleen Decker of the Los Angeles Times. (CW: I think the word she wants to use there is "chickenshit.") And a buncha stuff from Wall Street Journal reporters.

News Ledes

New York Times: "With malicious intent strongly suspected in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, American intelligence and law enforcement agencies renewed their search over the weekend for any evidence that the plane's diversion was part of a terrorist plot. But they have found nothing so far, senior officials said, and their efforts have been limited by the Malaysian authorities' refusal to accept large-scale American assistance."

New York Times: "The Army general prosecuted in the military's most closely watched sexual assault case has agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges in exchange for the dismissal of accusations that he twice forced his longtime mistress into oral sex, threatened to kill her and her family, and performed consensual but 'open and notorious sexual acts' with her in a parked car in Germany and on a hotel balcony in Tucson. The new guilty pleas, outlined in a document obtained by The New York Times, are expected to be entered by Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair in military court at Fort Bragg, N.C., as soon as Monday morning."

New York Times: "A signaling system was disabled on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet before a pilot spoke to Malaysian air traffic control without hinting at any trouble, a senior Malaysian official said Sunday, shedding new light on a question important to determining why the plane turned far off its planned route and disappeared over a week ago with 239 people onboard."

Washington Post: "Crimeans started voting on their future Sunday after a hasty and one-sided campaign featuring intimidation and heavy-handed tactics that blocked most voters from hearing a vision for any alternative other than unification with Russia. The peninsula's two main cities, Simferopol and Sevastopol, look as if annexation had already been decided and accomplished, with Russian flags flying from government buildings, storefronts, trollies and public squares."

Reuters: " The U.S. government will ask Austria to extradite Ukrainian industrialist Dmytro Firtash to face charges filed in a Chicago court arising from an investigation into international corruption, U.S. prosecutors said on Friday. One of Ukraine's most influential oligarchs, Firtash, 48, was arrested in Vienna on Wednesday. On Friday, a court there ordered him held and set bail at $174 million (125 million euros).... "Firtash's arrest is not related to recent events in Ukraine," they said in a reference to the political crisis between Ukraine and Russia."