The Commentariat -- Nov. 15, 2012
Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "President Obama said in his victory speech last week that 'elections matter.' On Wednesday, he made clear how much the election matters to him -- and to the way he intends to govern in his second term. Appearing in his first post-victory news conference, the customarily cautious Obama spoke like a politician with nothing to lose after winning the last race of his life. Over the course of an hour, he struck an unabashedly populist tone in characterizing his second-term 'mandate' to help the poor and the middle class, and he warned his partisan rivals that voters had sided with his approach to the economy during the long campaign."
Ezra Klein: "The White House is saying, clearly, that they won't permit the top tax rates to remains where they are. They're taking House Speaker John A. Boehner's proposed deal and rejecting it."
President Obama responds to a question from Jonathan Karl of ABC News re: Senators John McCain & Lindsey Graham's criticism of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice:
... I'm happy to say NBC News made this their lede story for awhile: "President Barack Obama on Wednesday spiritedly defended U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice over her response to the September attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, assailing Republican criticism of her as 'outrageous.'" ...
... Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post: "McCain mischaracterizes [Susan] Rice's words and then assumes she should have all the information that is known now about the Benghazi attack. Her claim that there was a protest is clearly wrong, but within the context of that week, it was not off base, since it appeared in news reports quoting witnesses and even in the president's daily briefing.... Susan Rice's remarks five days after the attack appear to be a sideshow, especially because she had virtually no role in the key issues surrounding the Libyan mission.... Given that McCain was so quick to excuse [former Secretary of State] Condi Rice for making remarks of much greater import, it seems rather unsporting to quickly rush to judgment and mischaracterization in the case of Susan Rice."
Here's the President's full news conference:
John Parkinson of ABC News: "... the House Republican Conference voted [John] Boehner [R-Ohio] in to another two-year term as speaker. Boehner rejected the president's call earlier Wednesday for Republicans to quickly pass Senate legislation that would extend middle class tax cuts, and he alternatively called on the Senate to take up House-passed legislation to extend all of the current tax rates for one year." ...
... John Cassidy of the New Yorker: "In order to overcome Republican obstructionism, Obama must indeed be willing to go over the [fiscal] cliff, allowing the tax cuts to expire and the automatic spending cuts, which were agreed upon during the last go-around with the Republicans, in the summer of 2011, to go into effect."
... "What we don't need to do is cut benefits." -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz:
GOP Excuse 127: Professors. Blowhard William Bennett, Bush Pere Secretary of Education & Drug Czar, in a CNN opinion piece: Obama won because Marxist professors are teaching our young people to be socialists. ...
... GOP Excuse 128: Blackmail/Cover-up. "Betty Cracker" of Balloon Juice: Obama blackmailed Petraeus into going along with his phony explanation of the response to the Benghazi attack. Betty details how this excuse, posited by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post & Fox "News," works. Here's a sample of the "logic" behind this excuse: "The only way Obama could cover his ass in the Benghazi affair was to orchestrate a scandal to compromise the country's most prominent general, and he fiendishly used a wingnut ... GOP Excuse 129: Obama Gifts. Maeve Reston of the Los Angeles Times: "Mitt Romney told his top donors Wednesday that his loss to President Obama was a disappointing result that neither he nor his top aides had expected, but said he believed his team ran a 'superb' campaign with 'no drama,' and attributed his rival's victory to 'the gifts' the administration had given to blacks, Hispanics and young voters during Obama's first term." CW: if this is the GOP's idea of "outreach" to minorities & young Americans, I don't think it will work out too well. Romney's unremitting disdain of "the 47 percent" is pathological. ... ... Ashley Parker of the New York Times has more of Romney's remarks about all the "gifts" Obama gave to the moocher classes. ... ... Oh, look. #ObamaGifts is already a Twitter meme. ... ... ** Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times: "Now we know that Mitt Romney did not 'misspeak' when he whined to a big-money crowd that 47 percent of Americans mooch off government and 'believe they are victims.' He meant precisely what he said.... I guess Mr. Romney would not consider oil subsidies a gift. Or a tax system that allows him to pay a 14 percent tax rate. Or his proposal to build warships and warplanes and other fancy hardware that the military doesn't want or need.... It seems like no one in his party has figured out that it wasn't 'gifts' or bad luck that caused him to lose. It was his ideas." CW: Bobby Jindel seems to get it. ... ... ** Paul Waldman of American Prospect: Mitt Romney takes one last opportunity to be a jerk.... Romney seems appalled that Obama would be so diabolical as to pursue policies that were beneficial to people who then went to the polls to vote for him." ... ... Markos Moulitsas: "Romney rides off into the sunset, as big a dick as always." ... ... GOP Excuse 130: Obama Attacked Romney. President Obama's "whole campaign was a fear-and-smear attack to make Romney unacceptable and to blame George Bush for anything that happened while Obama was president. This was all personal: that Romney is a vulture capitalist who doesn't care about people like you, ships jobs overseas, is a quintessential plutocrat and is married to a known equestrian. An attack unanswered is an attack admitted to. -- Haley Barbour ... ... Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "A week after Mitt Romney fell short in his bid for the White House, Republican leaders offered tepid praise of his candidacy. But they quickly moved on and called for a new approach to the party's rebuilding efforts." Haley Barbour took an up-the-ass tack, suggesting the party needed to undergo "a proctological exam." Bobby Jindal rejected Romney's Obama Gifts excuse: "'I absolutely reject that notion. I don't think that represents where we are as a party,' Mr. Jindal said. He added, 'We have got to stop dividing the American voters.'" ... ... Philip Elliott of the AP: "Top Republicans meeting for the first time since Election Day say the party lost its bid to unseat President Barack Obama because nominee Mitt Romney did not respond to criticism strongly enough or outline a specific agenda with a broad appeal. In conversations at the Republican Governors Association confab in Las Vegas, a half dozen party leaders predicted the GOP will lose again if it keeps running the same playbook based on platitudes in place of detailed policies. Instead, they asserted, the party needs to learn the lessons from its loss, respect voters' savvy and put forward an agenda that appeals beyond the while [sic., white], male voters who are its base." ... ... Andy Borowitz: "Opting for a bold 'big tent' strategy to rebuild the party, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told reporters today, 'We need to welcome people who believe in different things than we do, like math and science.'" ** Linda Greenhouse: "... the vote in four states in support of same-sex marriage, and the run-up to Election Day that saw both Democrats and federal judges pushing back against Republican strategies devised to selectively minimize voter turnout ... are directly relevant to cases on the Supreme Court's current docket...." ... ... BUT law professor Nathaniel Persily, also writing in the New York Times, suggests that "a perverse outcome of the 2012 campaign may be that President Obama's victory spells doom for the civil rights law most responsible for African-American enfranchisement" even though "a campaign marred by charges of voter suppression and Election Day mishaps also makes the need for federal protection of voting rights clearer than ever.... Congress needs to enact national rules governing voter registration, provisional and absentee ballots, and voter verification and access in a new Voting Rights Act tailored to the problems confronting American democracy today." Here's Nancy Pelosi responding to a question yesterday from NBC News legacy Luke Russert: Barton Gellman of Time has the cover story on the Petraeus Affair that puts all the principals -- especially Petraeus -- in a bad light. ... Greg Miller & Sari Horwitz of the Washington Post: "The FBI’s handling of the investigation that forced CIA Director David H. Petraeus to resign came under new scrutiny Wednesday as FBI Director Robert S. Mueller faced questions on Capitol Hill and President Obama alluded to lingering questions about the course of the inquiry...." ... ... Mark Hosenball of Reuters: "A computer used by Paula Broadwell ... contained substantial classified information that should have been stored under more secure conditions, law enforcement and national security officials said on Wednesday. The contents and amount of the classified material -- and questions about how Broadwell got it -- are significant enough to warrant a continuing investigation, the officials said." ... ... Robert Burns of the AP: "Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday he knows of no other senior U.S. military officers being linked to the David Petraeus investigation that has ensnared the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen. Speaking at a Bangkok news conference, Panetta said he retains 'tremendous confidence' in Allen." ... ... Michael Schmidt, et al., of the New York Times: "The F.B.I. agent who helped start the investigation that led to the resignation of David H. Petraeus as C.I.A. director is a 'hard-charging' veteran counterterrorism investigator.... The agent, Frederick W. Humphries II, 47, took the initial complaint from Jill Kelley.... Mr. Humphries passed on Ms. Kelley's complaint to the cybersquad in the Tampa field office but was not assigned to the case. He was later admonished by supervisors who thought he was trying to insert himself improperly into the investigation.... Mr. Humphries in late October contacted Representative Dave Reichert, a Republican from Washington State.... [A Federal Law Enforcement Officer Association lawyer] took issue with news media reports that have said his client sent shirtless pictures of himself to Ms. Kelley.... The photo was sent as a 'joke' and was ... not sexual in nature." ... ... Lolita Baldor of the AP: "A U.S. official says the Army has suspended the security clearance of ... Paula Broadwell [who] ... held a high security clearance. Because her clearance was issued through the Army, it was the service's move to suspend it." ... ... Luis Martinez of ABC News: "Jill Kelley ... has lost the privilege of visiting MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa< without an escort.... Kelley ... had been granted unescorted access to the base under a program initiated by the Air Force unit that runs operations at the base.... [A] Defense official said Kelley's privileges ... have been taken away 'as she is involved in an ongoing investigation.'" Douglas Dalby of the New York Times: "The death of a woman who was reportedly denied a potentially lifesaving abortion even while she was having a miscarriage has revived debate over Ireland's almost total ban on abortions." CW: this needless, unconscionable death -- multiplied thousands of times over -- would have been/still could be in our future if the anti-abortion lobby gets its way. Right Wing World
Over and above Excuses such as Nos. 127-129-130 above, et al., here's why the GOP will never, ever get right. Tim Murphy of Mother Jones: "President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as 'Delphi' to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities. That's according to a four-hour briefing delivered to Republican state senators at the Georgia state Capitol last month." CW: the Republican party is a party whose candidates not only have to be "severely conservative," they have to be severely unhinged. To Form a More Perfect Union. Dana Milbank: "... a large number of patriotic Americans, mostly from states won by Mitt Romney last week, have petitioned the White House to let them secede.... It would be excellent financial news for those of us left behind if Obama were to grant a number of the rebel states their wish 'to withdraw from the United States and create [their] own NEW government' (the petitions emphasize 'new' by capitalizing it). Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. The balance is the opposite in blue states. The secession petitions, therefore, give the opportunity to create what would be, in a fiscal sense, a far more perfect union." ... ... Looks like students at UNC are putting their Marxist educations to good use. This map, which shows the density of signatories to the secession petitions, was plotted (and I use that term in its narrowest sense, my conspiracy theorist friends) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Current as of noon Wednesday, Nov. 14. Via John Sides of the Monkey Cage:
Local News America's Worst Governor Sees the Light. Maybe. AP: "Florida Gov. Rick Scott, one of the most vocal critics of the federal health care overhaul, is dropping his staunch opposition to the law. Scott said in an interview Tuesday with the Associated Press that he now wants to negotiate with the federal government. He said it's time for Republicans to offer solutions to help families after they lost their bid to defeat President Barack Obama." Thanks to James S. for the link. News Ledes AP: "In the midst of a political tempest that has engulfed his former CIA director and his top military commander in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama is traveling to New York City to view recovery efforts from the massive East Coast storm Sandy.While there Thursday, Obama will meet with affected families, local officials and first responders who have been dealing with the deadly storm...." ... ... New York Times Update: "President Obama got a look on Thursday at the muddy wreckage that Hurricane Sandy left in its wake, flying over ravaged neighborhoods in Queens, consoling devastated homeowners under tents and in the streets on Staten Island, and promising a strong and continuing federal role in the recovery." Reuters: "BP Plc is expected to pay a record U.S. criminal penalty and plead guilty to criminal misconduct in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster through a plea deal reached with the Department of Justice (DoJ) that may be announced as soon as Thursday, according to sources familiar with discussions." ... ... Politico Update: "BP will pay a record $4.5 billion in fines and plead guilty to a dozen felony counts under a deal with the U.S. government to settle criminal charges stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident that killed 11 workers and spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Federal prosecutors also announced new indictments against two BP supervisors for manslaughter and a former BP executive for hiding information from Congress and lying to law-enforcement officials." New York Times: "Israeli warplanes struck dozens of militant sites in Gaza< early on Thursday, the second day of Israel's deadly offensive against Hamas and other militant groups, and rockets fired from the enclave reached far into Israel, killing three civilians when one struck an apartment block in this small southern town." New York Times: "Completing only its second orderly hand-over of power in more than six decades of rule, the Chinese Communist Party on Thursday unveiled a new leadership slate headed by Xi Jinping, the son of a revered revolutionary leader and economic reformer, who will face the task of guiding China to a more sustainable model of growth and managing the country's rise as a global power." AP: "The 17-country eurozone has bowed to the inevitable and fallen back into recession for the first time in three years as a sprawling debt crisis took its toll on the region's stronger economies. And with surveys pointing to increasingly depressed conditions across the eurozone at a time of high unemployment in many countries, there are fears that the recession will deepen, and make the debt crisis even more difficult to handle." Washington Post: "An investigation into misconduct by Air Force trainers at a Texas base found that at least 48 female students were victims of sexual assault or other transgressions by their instructors, according to a report released Wednesday that dissected the culture that enabled the worst military sex-abuse scandal in recent history." ABC News: Rita Crundwell, "a former comptroller for a small town in Illinois, pleaded guilty to embezzling $53 million from city accounts to feed a lavish lifestyle that included a nationally known horse-breeding operation. All of Crundwell's items are up for auction by the U.S. Marshals, including 400 horses. Only $7 million has been recovered so far."