The Commentariat -- December 16

Andy Rosenthal, the New York Times editorial pages editor, writes a number of posts opposing the "National Defense Authorization Act, which President Obama has indicated he’ll sign." You can start here and "back into" the earlier posts. CW: I'm not sure how a guy who seems so cognizant of and sensitive to the erosion of Constitutional rights and other important issues could be the same guy who hired Frank Bruni, Ross Douthat & Joe Nocera. I do think the publisher must have had a heavy hand in those personnel decisions. ...

     ... Update. "Politics over Principle." The Times editorial: "This is a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency. To start with, this bill was utterly unnecessary. Civilian prosecutors and federal courts have jailed hundreds of convicted terrorists, while the tribunals have convicted a half-dozen. And the modifications are nowhere near enough." (CW: we're seeing a lot of "politics over principle" coming out of the White House, aren't we?) ...

.. Here's Glenn Greenwald, way unsurprised by President Obama's decision to sign the bill into law, with a long exposition on how terrible & terrifying is this law against "terrorists." ...

... If you think "So What? It Can Never Happen to Me," read this story by James Grimaldi of the Washington Post. It nearly happened to the Speaker of the House: "The [FBI] considered a sting operation against then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich after sifting through allegations from a notorious arms dealer that a $10 million bribe might get Congress to lift the Iraqi arms embargo. The FBI ended up calling off the operation in June 1997. It decided there was no evidence that Gingrich knew anything about the conversations the arms dealer was secretly recording with a man who said he was acting on behalf of Gingrich’s then-wife, Marianne, according to people with knowledge of the investigation." All the feds "had" on Newt was an assertion about by an arms dealer about Newt's wife. If the same sort of assertion were made about you or your spouse, you can bet you'd be locked away for safekeeping till somebody got through sorting stuff out. ...

... You can read the original story here, by Joseph Trento of DC Bureau. Please at least click on the link to give Trento a hit. The Post describes the author of the scoop as "a nonprofit journalist" and provides no link. It wasn't hard to find because other for-profit writers aren't so stingey, but why can't the Post handle competition from nonprofits and give credit where credit is due?

Bernie Sanders talks to Al Sharpton about class warfare by the rich against the rest of us and on his proposed Constitutional Amendment to reverse Citizens United. The petition on the amendment is here (I also posted a link a short time ago):

Ilyse Hogue of The Nation: "... the speed of [Lowe's] surrender to an extreme group peddling outright bigotry should give us pause and force a closer look at how the landscape has shifted in a country that claims religious tolerance as a founding principle. Simply put, the bigots won way too easily." (See earlier Commentariats for more background, though Hogue includes the basics in her essay.)

John Sides of the New York Times on how the rich are different from the rest of us when it comes to politics. A Gallup study found that "The 1 percent cares more about deficits than the economy"; the 1 percent want government spending cuts while most of the 99 percent do not think spending cuts alone are the way to cut the deficit; "the 1 percent is vastly more politically active." CW: so now you know why Washington -- especially President Obama -- spent a year talking about nothing but "belt-tightening" (and he still is). The belt-tighteners are not speaking for you. The motivation has been attributed to "inside-the-Beltway pressure." No, it was Wall Street/big corporate pressure.

Prof. Gar Alperovitz, a friend of a friend, in a New York Times op-ed, suggests that the U.S. could move toward a bold new economic form: a kind of cross between capitalism & socialism, wherein governments at all levels, as well as individual citizen co-ops, would become the owners of a large percentage of big businesses. There are already quite a few such companies in existence or in the works.

Writer & personality Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. See links to obituaries in today's Ledes. Here's the Vanity Fair page on Hitchens, which includes a remembrance by Graydon Carter, video & links to some of his writings. Slate links here to some of Hitchens' best pieces for them. Here's a brief remembrance by Jacob Weisberg of Slate. And a funny one from novelist Julian Barnes. (The novel in question, BTW, was Metroland.) The Atlantic has a page of links to Hitchens' writings for them here. The Atlantic's literary editor Benjamin Schwartz has a remembrance here.

Fred Kaplan of Slate writes a post-mortem on the Iraq War that was.

Jim Fallows of The Atlantic: "... airlines and the FAA were engaged in a form of 'safety theater,' with their insistence that 'everything with an On-Off switch must be in the OFF position' on taxi, takeoff, descent, and landing." With lots o'links.

Right Wing World

The New York Times does a spot-fact-check of last night's GOP presidential candidates' debate. Here's the Washington Post's quick fact-check. ...

... NEW. Charles Pierce has as good a take as any on the debate, because it's mostly good for laughs.

** Paul Krugman: Rep. Ron "Paul [R-Texas] has maintained his consistency by ignoring reality, clinging to his ideology even as the facts have demonstrated that ideology’s wrongness. And, even more unfortunately, Paulist ideology now dominates a Republican Party that used to know better. I’m not talking here about Mr. Paul’s antiwar views or his less well-known views on civil and reproductive rights, which would horrify liberals who think of him as a good guy. I’m talking, instead, about his views on economics." CW: This really is a must-read, because Krugman so succinctly explains why Ron Paul is a disaster waiting to happen. Short version: "Great Depression, here we come." ...

... Steve Kornacki of Salon: "... if you need further proof that Ron Paul is starting to make Republican elites uneasy, here’s Exhibit A: Sean Hannity went after him hard on Wednesday night.... Hannity’s preferred strategy has been to ignore Paul, so it’s telling that less than three weeks before the Iowa caucuses he felt the need on Wednesday to bring Bill Bennett on his show for a segment of unsaturated Paul-bashing."

... William Broad of the New York Times: Newt Gingrich is ready to carry his Armageddon scenarios & sciencey-fictiony stuff into the policy arena. He's up for nuclear war, which he will "pre-empt" by attacking nuclear-armed countries! That's the plan. Help!

** Liar for Hire. Jim Rutenberg & Mike McIntire of the New York Times: "As [Newt] Gingrich runs for president, he is working to appeal to Republican primary voters suspicious of big-government activism, especially in the realm of health care. But interviews and a review of records show how active Mr. Gingrich has been in promoting a series of recent programs that have given the government a bigger hand in the delivery of health care, and at the same time benefited his clients. During the Bush administration, he was a leading Republican advocate for the costly expansion of Medicare, which many in his party now regret. And he and his center pushed some policies that are reflected in Mr. Obama’s health care record — a record Mr. Gingrich regularly criticizes on the campaign trail. All the while, his center functioned as a sort of high-priced club where companies joined him in working the corridors of power in Washington and in state capitals."

** Matt Yglesias of Slate: "Paul Ryan’s Medicare Scheme. His new proposal is less radical than his last one, and it just might pass if Obama loses." CW P.S.: Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who is co-sponsoring the newest Ryan Medicare scheme, is a dangerous loose cannon -- a "progressive" who can be had. He's another politico who fancies himself a "big thinker" a la Gingrich, but Wyden's thinking is pretty fuzzy-headed and often counter-productive and wildly impractical, especially when he allows Republicans to help him "tweak" his plans. ...

... NEW. Sam Baker of The Hill: "Democrats and their allies quickly united against the Medicare proposal introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). As he introduced the plan Thursday morning, Wyden insisted that there was plenty for Democrats to support. But lawmakers, the White House and healthcare interest groups took a hard line against the proposal, even linking it to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich."

Local News

AP: "Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s boundary-pushing foray into Arizona’s immigration enforcement over the last six years met its most bruising criticism when the U.S. Justice Department said the lawman’s office carried out a blatant pattern of discrimination against Latinos and held a 'systematic disregard' for the Constitution." ...

... NEW. The New York Times story, by Marc Lacey, is here. ...

... Jeff Biggers in Salon: "... a real clock may be finally ticking for the countdown of the nearly 20-year reign of America’s self-proclaimed 'Toughest Sheriff.' One federal department is not even waiting: Within hours of the DOJ announcement, the Department of Homeland Security terminated Maricopa County’s access to immigration status data under the federal Secure Communities program."

News Ledes

New York Times: "The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought civil actions against six former top executives at the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying that the executives did not adequately disclose their firms’ exposure to risky mortgages in the run-up to the financial crisis.... The agency filed complaints against three former executives at Fannie Mae – its chief executive, Daniel H. Mudd; chief risk officer, Enrico Dallavecchia; and executive vice president, Thomas A. Lund. Freddie Mac’s former chief executive, Richard F. Syron; Patricia Cook, its chief business officer; and its executive vice president, Donald J. Bisenius, were also named in a separate complaint."

New York Times: "Retreating from their harsh partisan sniping, and perhaps fearing public rebuke, Congressional leaders said Thursday that they had agreed on a large-scale spending measure to keep the government running for the next nine months. But an accord on extending a payroll tax holiday set to expire at the end of the month remained elusive, with Democrats weighing a possible short-term extension, setting the stage for another fight with Republicans over how to pay for it." ...

     ... Update: "As the House headed toward a vote on a $1 trillion spending measure that would avert a government shutdown, Speaker John A. Boehner said Friday that House Republicans would insist on including the Keystone XL oil pipeline in any legislation that extended the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits."

ABC News: "Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary said today that he did not actually witness former coach Jerry Sandusky penetrating a young boy in the shower, but saw activity he believed was sexual and told as much to head coach Joe Paterno.... McQueary was the first of five witnesses that will testify today in a hearing before District Judge William C. Wenner to determine what Penn State officials knew about Sandusky's alleged child sexual abuse on the Penn State campus." ...

     ... New York Times update here.

New York Times: "The leading Republican presidential candidates largely shelved their contentious attacks on one another to deliver their closing arguments on Thursday night at the final debate before the nominating contests begin, but Newt Gingrich did not escape sharp questions about his record in and out of government and his ability to defeat President Obama."

New York Times: "Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62." Washington Post obituary here. Guardian obit here.

President Obama announced yesterday that he has assured, by executive order, that home healthcare workers would now be included in the same minimum wage and overtime protections afforded to other workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. CW: This is a progressive move Congress has refused to make. If you think it doesn't matter who's in the White House, here's as good an example as any of why that's wrong-headed:

... Here's some background that's pretty sweet:

The Commentariat -- December 15

The Constant Weader is on sick leave today ...

If this post looks familiar, it's because I ran the same thing last week. As you can tell from the cartoon portrait, I have two eyes, and this week the second one is in for a few bad days. Last week, I still had one eye working; this week, I have none that is ready for close-ups. So we'll see, so to speak, how it goes.

The Commentariat -- December 14

My column in the New York Times eXaminer on Maureen Dowd's takedown of Newt Gingrich is here. The NYTX front page is here. ...

... Dowd does a nice job of showing, not telling, us that Newt Gingrich is absolutely crazy.

** "Free the FDA." Prof. Daniel Carpenter, in a New York Times op-ed: "... for the first time in American history, a cabinet secretary — and by extension, a president — has overruled a drug-approval decision by the Food and Drug Administration.... The only solution, then, is to make the F.D.A. truly independent.... At the very least, President Obama and Ms. Sebelius need to clarify what their precedent entails. If they don’t, we can expect to see lobbies from all corners of society — drug companies themselves, safety advocates, groups of doctors and patients — walk directly away from an F.D.A. decision they don’t like and take their cases to the White House."

Time magazine's "Person of the Year" is "the protester." Begins here.

The Voter Fraud that Isn't There. Steve Benen: "... if the [Republican National Lawyers Association] thinks .. 311 cases [of alleged voter fraud] from the last decade — some of which weren’t from the last decade, some of which were cases that got thrown out of court, some of which may have very well have been innocent mistakes — justify a national campaign to restrict Americans’ access to their own democracy, they’re wildly misguided. Republicans support all kinds of new voting restrictions — voter-ID laws, severe limits on voter-registration drives, closing early-voting windows, strict new limits on absentee ballots — because they find it easier to rig voter eligibility than to win elections fair and square." (See also today's Local News below.)

I got a real problem with the mandated drug testing for unemployment insurance. We don’t demand drug testing for people getting farm subsidies. -- Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), on GOP requirements to pass a payroll tax cut

Conservatives Rethink the 14th Amendment. David Gans & Doug Kendall in Slate: "Justice Antonin Scalia created a firestorm last winter when he opined that the 14th Amendment does not protect women against discrimination on the basis of sex.... This view has been, until recently at least, a bedrock conviction of conservative originalists. In that sense then, the bigger news came at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in October when, confronted on his remarks by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Scalia backpedaled.... For a Justice famous for his blunt and unchanging conservative views, Scalia’s fancy footwork was fascinating, and telling." Read on.

I wish bigots would not inconvenience me. Los Angeles Times: The home improvement chain Lowe's "decided to stop advertising on the show 'All-American Muslim,' on [the]... TLC channel, after complaints by the Florida Family Assn...." Lowe's is the closest home improvement store to my house. Also, I've been avoiding Home Depot for years, ever since I found out they gave their incompetent CEO a huge golden parachute. Now what am I supposed to do? ...

... AND it gets worse. Per Tanya Somander of Think Progress: "The Muslim Public Affairs Council has published a full list of companies that FFA claims it persuaded to pull ads from the show. The list includes Airborne Vitamin, Bare Escentuals, Campbell’s Soup, Capital One, Cotton, Inc., Dell computers, Estee Lauder, Gap, Good Year, Hershey Kisses, Ikea, JC Penny, Kayak.com, McDonald’s, Nationwide Insurance, Old Navy, Pier One, Radio Shack, Sears, T-Mobil, Volkswagen, Wal-Mart, and Whirlpool. Click here to see the full list." I can't buy soup? What is the matter with these corporate honchos? In the spirit of the holiday season, a little kook shall lead them? And they're doing this over a show that probably has 80,000 viewers, of whom I will never be one. ...

... Here's a little about the Florida Family Association, the group that has scared the bejeezus (or something) out of Dell Computers & McDonald's from Zack Ford of Think Progress: "Claiming a membership of 35,000 individuals, FFA’s only paid staff member is its president, David Caton, and it is not affiliated with any national organizations." They've also protested "Gay Days" at DisneyWorld, Miss Universe for promoting HIV/AIDS awareness, & TV shows for including anti-bullying messages. I'd go protest FFA, but it probably is the figment of one man's warped imagination, so I'd be standing out in front of some jerk's garage. Get a grip, corporate America. ...

... THEN there's this from Ben Popken of Adweek: "Should Lowe's need a crowbar to pull its head out of the sand, it can find one in its own aisles. On Saturday, the home-improvement company posted a note to Facebook explaining its decision to capitulate to an email campaign by the Florida Family Association and pull its ads from the TLC reality show All-American Muslim. As of this writing, the post has drawn more than 22,000 comments, a significant portion of which are racist and contain anti-Muslim/anti-Islamic hate speech. (Scroll down to see some of them.) So, why isn't Lowe's moderating its Facebook wall?"

Jason Zengerle of New York magazine on the amateur oppo researcher. Zengerle focuses on Andrew Kaczynski, a 22-year-old student at St. John's University on Long Island, who does oppo research for fun, but whose C-SPAN discoveries have provided embarrassing to Republican candidates, especially the Mittster. Here's a Kaczynski find -- Romney attesting that he's a "progressive":

Right Wing World

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post: "For a man who likes to tout his expertise as a historian, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a decidedly revisionist approach when it comes to his own history."

Let's not forget, only one president has ever cut Medicare for seniors in this country, and it's Barack Obama. We're gonna remind him of that time and time again. -- Mitt Romney ...

... Politifact: "The statement gets it wrong on every front. The Medicare belt was tightened in 1981 and 1982 under Reagan, in 1989 under the first President Bush and again in 1997 under Clinton. So Obama is in no way the only president to cut the program. Further, by specifying that Obama cut Medicare 'for seniors,' Romney seems to mean that the president slashed benefits, not just the program’s spending. That’s even more egregious. Other presidents have made changes to Medicare that reduced benefits for seniors, while the health care law Obama signed actually increases them. That’s a lot of inaccuracy in a single sentence."

... "(Another) Romney Lie on Health Care." Dishonesty AND Hyprocrisy. Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic: (a) Obama has not cut Medicare; (b) Bill Clinton cut Medicare payments; (c) Ronald Reagan cut Medicare payments; (d) George H. W. Bush cut Medicare payments. And the Big H for Hypocrisy: "Romney has lavished praise on Paul Ryan's Medicare reform scheme, most recently last week.... Ryan proposes to cut Medicare spending by more than Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Obama ever did."

FactCheck.org: Karl Rove's "Crossroads GPS distorts the facts in TV ads that attack two Democratic Senate candidates for their roles in the Wall Street bailout and the federal health care law: The well-heeled conservative group says Elizabeth Warren was appointed to oversee how tax dollars were spent for bank bailouts that "helped pay big bonuses to bank executives." That's absurd.... Another ad says Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson 'demanded a payoff' for voting for the new health care law and was 'accused of selling his vote, cynical what's-in-it-for-me-type politics.' That insinuation of personal corruption is false. Nelson demanded nothing for himself."

Media Matters: Obama family fails to wage anticipated Secular War on Christmas; Sean Hannity finds they're celebrating Christmas "too much." Audio.

Local News

Ryan Reilly of TPM: "Wisconsin’s voter ID law imposes the equivalent of a poll tax on individuals with out-of-state drivers licenses and discriminates against the poor, students and the elderly, according to a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday."

News Ledes

President & Mrs. Obama will speak to the troops & their families at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at 11:55 am ET. 

AP: "A Republican payroll tax cut bill that sailed through the House despite a White House veto threat is dead on arrival in the Senate, and it will soon be time for talks on a final package, [Harry Reid,] the Senate's top Democrat says." Washington Post story here.

AP: "China has imposed duties on imports of some U.S.-made vehicles, claiming damage from foreign automakers due to dumping and subsidies in the latest round of trade friction between the two countries. The Commerce Ministry said Wednesday that the duties would be imposed for two years on imported cars and sport utility vehicles with engine displacements of over 2.5 liters. The duties range from 2 percent to 21.5 percent."

Live Science: "Barely half of American adults are married, a record low for the country, a new analysis of Census data finds. Following that same trend, the median age at first marriage is older than ever for both men and women, with the median age of marriage for women at 26.5 and the median age for men at 28.7."

AP: "Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry collection sold for a record-setting $115 million — including more than $11.8 million for a pearl necklace and more than $8.8 million for a diamond ring given to her by Richard Burton — at a Christie's auction Tuesday night of memorabilia amassed by the late actress."