Of Politics and Economics, etc.

The New York Times comments moderators have been up to their old tricks all week. Last night, for instance, a couple of friends & I submitted our comments to Paul Krugman's & David Brooks' column at the same time. One of the three of us made it. The moderators have not read the other comments. My comments on Krugman's & Brooks' are below. After the comments, see also a letter I received from a Times staffer.

Paul Krugman writes about a House bill authored by Democratic Rep. Sander Levin & passed by a huge bipartisan majority. Here's the backstory. Though the bill is weak -- it doesn't force the Administration to impose sanctions on China for refusing to devalue its currency -- Krugman notes that the bill is "a signal at best — and it’s at least as much a shot across the bow of U.S. officials as it is a signal to the Chinese." 

The Constant Weader comments:

Squishy as the bill is, it has only passed one house, & Serious People say it may not leap the Senate filibuster.

Weak as the bill is, if it passes the Upper Chamber, it also has to get past the President. That, too, is a big "if." The purpose of the bill is to smack down the Administration, specifically Tim Geithner, who up until a few weeks ago was the chief "negotiator" with the Chinese. I'm not at all sure President Obama would sign a bill designed to humiliate Geithner. The President shows a distressing loyalty to his economic team, & to Geithner in particular.

Plus, the new face on economic negotiations with China is President Obama himself. Would he sign a bill that says, "Mr. President, you've done a lousy job here"? Gosh, maybe not, although it is possible the President would wrap the bill in a smile & call it another tool in his negotiating kit, another arrow in his quiver.

It seems to me the Levin bill is not aimed at China, as many news outlets characterized it. Its real targets are Tim Geithner & his boss.

Speaking of economic matters, David Brooks is impressed with fiscally conservative "New Republicans." 

First, here's a bit of the backstory:

Michael Crowley of Time: "Meg Whitman says she's running for governor of California to bring a sense of fiscal responsibility to Sacramento. But Whitman's own campaign ... has already pumped about $120 million of her estimated $1.3 billion personal fortune into the race. Yet ... she hasn't purchased much of anything yet."

AP: "California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman employed an illegal immigrant Mexican housekeeper for years even though the federal government alerted her in 2003 to the maid's dubious legal status, the worker and her attorney claimed Wednesday....

Brooks writes,

[Meg] Whitman has the personality type that you’re seeing more and more of these days.  The quintessential New Republican is detail-oriented, managerial, tough-minded, effective but a little dry. If Whitman wins her race, she’ll fit right in.

The Constant Weader thinks that's pretty funny:

Is that the personality type that hires an illegal immigrant to clean up its modest Colonial home, keeps her on for nine years, then fires her when it decides it would like to spend $120 million (& counting) to purchase the governorship of the nation's most powerful state? Is that the personality type that then rails against illegal immigrants once it has got rid of its own?

Is that the personality type that when called out for harboring an illegal immigrant blames her opponent -- without presenting a whiff of proof -- for "alerting the media" to its embarrassing indiscretion? "This is just classic smear politics," Meg Whitman said yesterday. "Jerry Brown is a career politician; it’s what they do."

"They," Ms. Whitman? Oh, Pot, they name is Kettle.

Sounds more like a personality disorder than a personality type -- maybe Republicanitis hypocritus.

It doesn't matter how many fingers Meg Whitman can flick in your face -- if she can't run her own little household, as the saying goes, how can she run the famously dysfunctional State of California?

Here's the letter, reproduced in full, which I received from the New York Times regarding their quixotic posting of comments:

Dear Ms. Burns:

Thank you for writing us and bringing your concern to our attention.  Mr. Brisbane [the Times' new Public Editor] is considering doing a column on The Times comment system at some point due to the high volume of complaints this office receives on a daily basis.

Your point regarding the arbitrary nature in which comments are allowed and what time they are approved has been a source of consternation for many and we will be looking into it in the near future. To our knowledge, The Times does not deliberately scramble the comments it approves, but we will be looking into the comment system as a whole.

We will keep your e-mail on file in the event that Mr. Brisbane decides to use it as a part of his upcoming column.  We will ask your permission before he does.

Once again, thanks for writing to us and expressing your concern.  It is much appreciated.

Best,
Joseph Burgess
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times

The Commentariat -- September 30

Classy! As your governor, you're going to be seeing a lot of me on the front page, saying 'Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell.'
-- Paul LePage, Maine's Republican gubernatorial nominee

E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post: President Obama "returned to his community-organizer roots to try to salvage an election" at his campaign rally in Wisconsin after disdaining "a mobilizing strategy for his first year and a half in office.... If Obama succeeds, will he continue to keep his supporters engaged and 'fired up' ...? Or will he go back to an insider strategy that helped bring him to the brink of this precipice?" ...

... Meanwhile, ConservaDems help Republicans, pretend to be Republicans, & Arianna Huffington says President Obama isn't much better:

     ... Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal writes that if ConservaDems running against their own party win, even if Democrats maintain a House majority, they "almost certainly won't have a functioning liberal majority."

New York Times Editorial Board: "Despite President Obama’s promises of reform [the overuse of the state secrets doctrine], the public still cannot reliably distinguish between legitimate and self-serving uses of the national security claims. Worse, some of the administration’s claims clearly have fallen on the darker side of that line."

In the absence of a draft, for a growing number of Americans, service in the military, no matter how laudable, has become something for other people to do. -- Robert Gates

Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times: "The United States is at risk of developing a cadre of military leaders who are cut off politically, culturally and geographically from the population they are sworn to protect, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told an audience at Duke University on Wednesday night." CW: no kidding. ...

... Mark Thompson of Time: Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicts that the number of military suicides will keep rising.

Dana Milbank: NOW President Terry O'Neill confronts Alan Simpson in the Catfood Commission meeting room, urging him to resign. Simpson changes the subject to trashing former labor leader Andy Stern. Let's go to the videotape:

Unhinged. Maggie Haberman of Politic, September 29: "New York Republican gubernatorial nominee Carl Paladino alleged Tuesday that Democrat Andrew Cuomo was unfaithful to his ex-wife years ago.... Paladino offered no proof of his claim, despite requests for substantiation, and he made it minutes after angrily declaring his 10-year-old daughter—a child from his own affair 10 years ago—off limits to the press." ...

     ... Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: "Hours after the phone interview [with Politico] was conducted, Mr. Paladino nearly came to blows with a New York Post reporter who confronted him about the comments." Here's the videotape:

      ... Update: Oh, goody! The Atlantic has made the corniest possible animated version of the confrontation between Paladino & reporter Dicker. Where is Taiwan when we need them? ...

      ... See more about Paladino on the Campaign 2010 New York page.

Constantly Creepy. CNN: Andrew Breitbart protege James O'Keefe, "a conservative activist known for making undercover videos, plotted to embarrass ... CNN correspondent [Abbie Boudreau] by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating 'palace of pleasure' and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show."

     ... Here is part of the outline O'Keefe prepared. Take a look at page 3, which details his props for the "seduction." They include, "a condom jar, dildos..., lube, ceiling mirror...." It goes on. Breitbart & O'Keefe -- the Woodward & Bernstein of the right.

Barton Gellman writes the cover story for Time on the "twisted patriotism" of right-wing militias.

Jonathan Martin & Keach Hagey of Politico: "With the exception of Mitt Romney, Fox now has deals with every major potential Republican presidential candidate not currently in elected office.... The matter is of no small consequence, since it’s uncertain how other news organizations can cover the early stages of the presidential race when some of the main GOP contenders are contractually forbidden to appear on any TV network besides Fox."

Ryan Reilly & Rachel Slajda of Talking Points Memo describe a right-wing conspiracy theory gone mainstream Republican that non-whites are lolling around welfare offices cooking up voter fraud schemes. These allegations are so offensive in content & tone I can't bring myself to type them. Oh, and they're untrue.

Tim Egan of the New York Times talks to his old friend Jeff Dowd, the model for the Dude in the film "The Big Lebowski," about California's Prop 19, a ballot initiative that would legalize marijuana.

CW: something I missed in the Pew religious knowledge survey: 41 percent of Americans can't name the Vice President of the United States.

Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post: the Federal Trade Commission has instituted new rules to rein in scams & shady practices of many debt settlement companies, companies that claim to help consumers manager & reduce their outstanding debts.

The Commentariat -- September 29

Here's the third of three articles based on Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars.

Fred Kaplan of Slate gets something out of Obama's Wars that Woodward may not have fully understood -- how the Afghanistan war may end.

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post warns businesspeople who are hoping for Republican victories to be careful what they wish for. He singles out Sen. Jim DeMint as an example of a Republican legislator who is bad for business, but he says that all Republican obstructionism is a net loss for the economy. Here the backstory from Politico: "South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint warned Monday evening that he would block [i.e., place a hold on] all legislation that has not been cleared by his office in the final days of the pre-election session.

"Power without Responsibility." Dana Milbank writes a serioius column: as top Administration officials leave the White House, Valerie Jarrett gains even more influence over the President. Jarrett, however, has been his advisor on areas where he has made the biggest blunders: his relationships with Wall Street & with liberals. Oh, & Desiree Rogers was her idea.

Ticket to Ride. Arianna Huffington promises to provide "Sanity Buses" to take people from New York City to Washington, D.C., October 30, for Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity":

     ... Politico Update: In Richmond, Virginia, President Obama "endorses" the Stewart rally (& bores the kid seen on the right of the shot):

Michael Barbaro of the New York Times: "As he mounts an outrage-filled campaign for governor of New York, Carl P. Paladino has vowed to forcibly rid Albany of the wayward officials and misbehaving bureaucrats..., promising to 'take out the trash.' But some of the people whom Mr. Paladino has recruited to run his campaign are plagued by checkered pasts.... [His] driver was jailed over his driving record; his campaign manager has tax troubles; and a strategist is charged with stealing $1.1 million." See more stories on the New York gubernatorial race on the New York page of Campaign 2010.

"Ya Can't Drive." You've probably heard President Obama use this metaphor a number of times. He used it again yesterday in Madison. Here he was speaking in May:

     ... It turns out "ya can't drive" is more than a metaphor. Republicans really can't drive:

     ... Although Sen. John McCain blamed illegal immigrants for purposely causing accidents on Arizona highways, it appears that it's his own voters who don't know how to drive. According to a Daily Beast analysis, "Nine of the 10 worst-performing states [i.e., had the most accidents per capita] went for McCain, while nine of the 10 best performers voted for Obama." The states with the worst drivers were North Dakota (the worst), Montana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alaska, Missouri, Delaware, Idaho & Texas. The best were Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, Ohio, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, & -- best of all -- Connecticut.

Glenn Beck. New York Times photo.Mark Leibovich has a profile of Glenn Beck to be published in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. CW: it's unlikely I'll read it.

CW: this New York Times story by Damien Cave peaked my interest because Al Capone reputedly used to stay in the house I live in now. But the real thrust of the Cave's article, about a re-enactment of a Capone trial, is that things haven't changed much in South Florida in the eight decades since the real trial.