The Commentariat -- November 23

The President Gets His "3 am Call." Michael Crowley of Time: "During a press gaggle on Air Force One today, White House press secretary Bill Burton said that national security advisor Tom Donilon woke the president at 3:55 am with the news of North Korea's artillery attack on a South Korean island." Crowley adds, "I see no sign that our children were unsafe because it was Obama and not Hillary who fielded it."

Appearing on Sean Hannity's nightly "Integrity in Journalism" show, journalism major Sarah Palin explains journalistic principles & ethics to Katie Couric (not named, but Couric is the object of this little lesson):

Megyn Kelly of Fox "News." Photo by Alexei Hay for GQ.... Greg Veis conducts an interview for GQ of Fox "News"' Megyn Kelly, who discusses the "nobility of journalism" and no, she did not have an affair with Brit Hume, but Hume was pleased about the rumor of one. Sample response:

My rule is, if anybody writes in asking for a head shot and compliments me or the show or just wants one, that's fine, they can have a head shot. But if they write anything perverted, they're not getting one. -- Megyn Kelly

CW: see photo which accompanies the interview. Not a head shot. Why would anyone be inspired to write "anything perverted" to Fox's own Miss School M'arm?

... Speaking of Right-Wing Integrity... Dan Vergano of USA Today: "An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say":

It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship.
-- Skip Garner, plagiarism expert

The Fed Fights Back. Sewall Chan of the New York Times: "Faced with unusually sharp ideological attacks after its latest bid to stimulate the economy, the Federal Reserve now faces a challenge: ... how to defend itself in a hyperpartisan environment without becoming overtly political. Caught off guard by accusations from Congressional Republicans, Sarah Palin, Tea Party activists and conservative economists, the central bank and its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, are pushing back, making their case on substantive grounds but also haltingly adopting the tactics of Washington battle, like strategically placed interviews, behind-the-scenes assuaging of opponents and reaching out to potential allies on Wall Street and Capitol Hill."

Broken Record: Paul Kiel of ProPublica: "The government’s mortgage modification program has ... failed to boost the number of modifications relative to the need... For homeowners, modifications are just as rare as they were before the program launched. The absolute number of modifications is higher now than it was then, but so are the number of defaulted loans." ...

... Abigail Field of AOL's Daily Finance: "Testimony in a New Jersey foreclosure case decided last week may spell big trouble for Bank of America.... If what one bank employee said on the stand proves to be accurate, paperwork problems it acquired when it purchased the failing mortgage provider Countrywide in 2008 could leave BofA on the hook for billions of dollars."

Alan Pyke of Media Matters: another day, another lie from the Newt: "... Gingrich claimed that the verdict in the civilian trial of embassy bomber Ahmed Ghailani — which will put Ghailani in jail for 20 years to life — is a miscarriage of justice and proves 'Attorney General Holder should resign....' Gingrich is not merely ignoring the record (his own, as well as judicial precedents and the history of stronger sentences from civilian courts than from tribunals). He's also ignoring the official Manual for Military Commissions, Rule 304 of which rules inadmissible any evidence gained through torture." ...

... Sorry, Newt. Greg Sargent & Adam Serwer: "The families of victims of the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa support the Obama administration's decision to try Ahmed Ghailani in civilian court, even if they were disappointed with the verdict, a spokesperson for the families tells us.... Edith Bartley..., a de facto media spokesperson for ... families of victims, [says] ... the families don't fault the Obama Justice Department's handling of the case. She also called on [right-wing] critics of Justice's conduct to stop turning the trial and verdict into a 'political issue,' which she denounced as 'unacceptable.'"

Fredreka Schouten of USA Today: "The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the past five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, government records show." ...

... Marc Ambinder, now of the National Journal: "The White House is coordinating a response to what it views as dramatically overblown press coverage of a policy that most Americans say they support." ...

... Luckily, and to no one's surprise, the White House enjoys the cooperative effort of Mr. Inside-the-Beltway, Howie Kurtz, who stands up for the TSA's new pat-downs & super-scans & blames "media frenzy" for the public uproar. Frenzied Media, get a grip.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic: "Probably the most serious long-term threat to American security is the possibility that terrorists will acquire an unsecured nuclear weapon. It's therefore terrifying that Republicans are holding up the START Treaty that secures that material.... Our security apparatus is filled with wildly expensive and/or intrusive measures that bring minimal benefit, but the one security intervention with an enormous cost-benefit ratio may get held up because you need the consent of an intransigent and largely insane party."

One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president. -- Al Gore, on why he had once supported corn-based ethanol subsidies

A full video of President Obama's press conference following the NATO summit has finally become available. If you missed it, it is worth your watching. I posted the President's opening remarks earlier, but the Q&A that follows is the interesting bit:

The Commentariat -- November 22

On the 47th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, career Secret Service officer Clint Hill remembers First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. CW: BTW, Hill doesn't offer much support for the one-bullet theory.

** In a stunning blogpost, Paul Krugman writes, "Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what [Barack Obama] said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts. And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth." ...

     ... CW: after newsman Walter Cronkite delivered an editorial on-air saying the Vietnam War could not be won, President Lyndon Johnson famously said, ""If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." President Obama should now be saying, "If I've lost Krugman, I've lost the United States of America."

Eric Alterman of the The Nation, with a little help from Van Jones, holds us as responsible as President Obama for the midterm election debacle. I don't buy his argument (which he just lays out there but doesn't bother to support), but I do appreciate his reference to ** this terrific essay by Marshall Ganz, first published in the Los Angeles Times, and now available on AlterNet. Ganz explains how Obama switched from being a "transformational" candidate to a "transactional" President. He must get back to advocating rather than merely trying to horse-trade.

Chris Hedges is, as usual, over-the-top. But his critique of the current political structure is accurate. His solution -- pitchforks & torches -- not so much.

"A Little Help from His Friends." Jackie Calmes & Peter Baker of the New York Times: "... while [his] Asia trip had mixed results, forcing Mr. Obama to leave without the South Korean trade deal he had expected, the consensus with Europeans and Russians at the NATO summit in Lisbon about how to handle Afghanistan and missile defense gave him a more successful sheen — even if ultimate success, particularly in Afghanistan, remains problematic. Mr. Obama was able to lead on a world stage in a way that he has not been able to do lately at home. He did so with public and private assistance from his European and Russian counterparts, many of whom called the summit meeting historic."

More from Krugman: Alan Simpson "can't wait for the blood bath ... when debt limit time comes in April," and the rest of his Republican buddies are planning a slaughter.

James Rubin, former Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, in a New York Times op-ed: "... most of our international objectives on arms control and other matters can be met much more easily with domestic actions" than with treaties, which are much harder to ratify in the U.S. than they are in most countires. CW: maybe. It's true that domestic legislation requires a mere 60-40 vote in the filibustering Senate, whereas a treaty requires 67 Senate votes. But a domestic bill also requires passage by the House, which a treaty does not. In the next Congress, for instance, the chances of President Obama's getting anything tougher than a pro-American flag resolution passed are nil.

"Wall Street is Worthless." John Cassidy of The New Yorker: "... no advanced society has survived without banks and bankers.... Yet Wall Street’s role in financing new businesses is a small portion of what it does.... Many of the big banks have turned themselves from businesses whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to exploit day-to-day movements in the markets.... These activities shift capital into projects that have little or no long-term value, such as speculative real-estate developments in the swamps of Florida.... Despite all the criticism that President Obama has received lately from Wall Street, the Administration has largely left the great money-making machine intact." CW: while it lasts, listen to Cassidy's discussion of his findings in the right column. 

Warren Buffett has said it before & he says it again, "Read My Lips, Raise My Taxes":

Lon Montgomery of the Washington Post: Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) has released a deficit reduction plan she says "would cut nearly $430 billion from the deficit in 2015." Schakowsky is "one of the most liberal members of President Obama's bipartisan deficit commission." Her plan would "keep Social Security benefits intact, make deep reductions at the Pentagon and raise corporate taxes to target profits and excessive pay for chief executives." Here's Schakowsky's statement about her plan. AND here's a pdf of the details.

Art by Oleg Volk.Ashley Halsey of the Washington Post: "A cheap and simple fix in the computer software of new airport scanners could silence the uproar from travelers who object to the so-called virtual strip search, according to a scientist who helped develop the program at ... the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California....  The fix would distort the images captured on full-body scanners so they look like reflections in a fun-house mirror, but any potentially dangerous objects would be clearly revealed, said Willard "Bill" Wattenburg, a former nuclear weapons designer at the Livermore lab.... [He] said he was rebuffed when he offered the concept to Department of Homeland Security officials four years ago." ...

... Somebody up There Got to Him. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News: "... TSA's administrator John Pistole appeared dug-in Sunday, telling CNN they weren't going to change anything. But within hours, TSA issued a statement clarifying that the door is open to changes. It said security procedures 'will be adapted as conditions warrant' to be 'as minimally invasive as possible.'" ...

... Scott Shane of the New York Times: "... the [Obama] administration has appeared to be caught off guard by the outrage of some passengers. [TSA Administrator John] Pistole agreed on Saturday to demands from pilots that they be exempted from the searches, after critics noted that a pilot who wants to destroy a plane hardly needs explosives to do so."

... The new TSA procedures will kill more Americans on the highway. -- Prof. Steven Horwitz ...

... Jordy Yager of The Hill: "The recent public ire toward the TSA’s new pat-down and body imaging screening methods is likely to cause more people to drive automobiles and forego airline travel, say two transportation economists who have studied the issue. As the nation readies for one of the busiest traveling holidays, Steven Horwitz, a professor of economics at St. Lawrence University, told The Hill that the probable spike in road travel, caused by adverse feelings towards the ... TSA's new screening procedures, could also lead to more car-related deaths."

Prof. Tammy Schultz in a Washington Post op-ed, on why the Marines are the biggest backs of DADT -- and what to do about it.

Rick Hertzberg attacks Glenn Beck, Roger Ailes & Rupert Murdoch for Beck's hideous, three-hour defamation of financier & democracy-backer George Soros. He doesn't miss the irony of Ailes' calling NPR executives Nazis even as Beck was accusing Soros, a Jew who hid from the Nazis in plain sight, of "helping send the Jews to the death camps."

Mythbuster. Eric Ostermeier of Smart Politics uses damned statistics to shoot down conventional wisdom. An "hypothesis - emphasized repeatedly across the broadcast networks": in states with Republican governors, it will be much harder for a Democratic President to win the state. But an analysis of presidential races since 1968 shows that "Overall, Democratic and Republican presidential nominees have carried more states in which they did not control the governor's mansion ... than states in which they did...." ...

... BUT Matt Yglesias really has Our Political Science Lesson for the Day: "... the 'normal' outcome for a country with our political institutions and ideologically sorted parties is constitutional crisis and a collapse into dictatorship. So far it hasn’t happened here.... But we live in interesting times...."