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Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts. — Anonymous
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. — Edward R. Murrow
Publisher & Editor: Marie Burns
I have a Bluesky account now. The URL is https://bsky.app/profile/marie-burns.bsky.social . When Reality Chex goes down, check my Bluesky page for whatever info I am able to report on the status of Reality Chex. If you can't access the URL, I found that I could Google Bluesky and ask for Marie Burns. Google will include links to accounts for people whose names are, at least in part, Maria Burns, so you'll have to tell Google you looking only for Marie.
Share Article 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 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...."
The Beauty Queen Meets Popeye
The New York Times moderators nixed my comments on both Frank Rich's column and Maureen Dowd's. So you get a two-fer today.
"I can see the White House from my house." Art by Barry Blitt in the New York Times.Frank Rich: "Sarah Palin’s amateurism and liabilities are her badges of honor, and Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so." CW: this doesn't bode well at all. It appears we are going to be subjected to at least two more years of Ponifications on Palin. ...
... Oops. Nate Silver assures me my fears are justified. Based on Palin's Google traffic, Silver concludes, "If and when Ms. Palin declares her candidacy for the White House, it could consume much of the media oxygen literally for months. For that matter, if Ms. Palin declines to run for office, it could also be a huge story. And, of course, until her mind is made up, there will be plenty of articles that attempt to anticipate Ms. Palin’s decision."
The Constant Weader comments:
What no one mentions, because it is so not politically correct to say so, is what a very liberal septuagenarian wrote to me today about Sarah Palin: "I have to tell you that she is a smasher. Her sexiness MUST be a BIG factor in what's going on."
If Sarah Palin didn't look like her generation's Sophia Loren, she would be -- perhaps -- Alaska's sitting governor, a ditzy woman unknown outside her own state. Bristol Palin would not be dancing with the stars and a younger Palin child would not be known for dissing one of her mother's young detractors with homophobic slurs. They would all be part of one big, troubled family in what for us in the Lower 48 is a far-off place. Had a story about the family and its matriarch ever made it in a mainstream media outlet, we would read with amusement, and with gratitude that we weren't quite THAT bad.
A few years ago, I thought the American people were to be congratulated for getting beyond the "Miss America" 1950s mentality. We have pretty much ditched the pageant, which in my childhood was An Event watched by millions on black-and-white TVs & a guaranteed front-page Sunday morning photo of the teary-eyed tiara winner on every American newspaper willing to hold the presses for the finale. But the allure of the pageant is still with us, re-purposed -- thanks to John McCain -- to fit our political landscape. Now a Miss Alaska runner-up is poised to be President of the United States. Instead of a rose-bedecked beauty-queen in tulle whose most political remark is a wish for world peace or an expression of admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt, we will get a thoughtless, gun-toting Neo-con from whom no one in the world, least of all Americans, will be safe.
It does make a reasonable person long for the fabulous 50s when the President was a sensible older gentleman & the President-in-Waiting, though every bit as good-looking and charismatic as Sarah Palin, came with a brain and a coterie of those dreaded intellectual elites.
Maureen Dowd: President Obama "aims to position himself as a statesman. He wants to come across as the grown-up in the room, disciplining puerile Republicans who would 'mess with nuclear weapons and screw up alliances.' The Republicans may help Obama if they act so vindictive, entitled and puffed up that they turn off the voters who just anointed them." But, Dowd concludes, after failing to take stands against Republicans earlier, Obama represents a case of "Popeye pulling out the spinach too late."
The Constant Weader remarks:
Bad news, Ms. Dowd. Popeye will not eat his spinach. Today in Lisbon, the President ticked off a litany of venerable American statesmen, American military leaders and foreign ministers who were begging Senate Republicans to Pass. the. Damned. Treaty. Then, as the canned spinach began to mold, the President covered for the Defector-in-Chief, Sen. Jon Kyl. As the AP reports,
Obama suggested he was encouraged that Kyl, the Republican point man on the issue, had not publicly said he wants to see the treaty rejected -- just that there wasn't enough time during the current lame-duck session to get it done. 'I take him at his word,' Obama said.
Therein lies the reason Americans do not trust anyone in Washington. We all know Jon Kyl is lying, that his "concerns" about a time crunch are all about politics. He wants to delay the ratification vote until the next Congress is in session and Republicans have an even larger stranglehold on the Senate. But, the President says, "I take him at his word." If we know Jon Kyl is lying, then we know President Obama is lying, too, and he is lying from his bully pulpit on the world stage.
Ratifying the New START treaty is an imperative, but being straight with the American people is even more important. Dwight Eisenhower could speak the truth. So could Jimmy Carter. But for the last several decades, the White House has been occupied by men who told the American people what they thought the American people wanted to hear, not what they knew. Ronald eagan denied the truth of the Iran-Contra arms deal. Bush Pere promised "Read my lips. No new taxes" (in fairness, it's to his credit he reneged on that promise). Bill Clinton pointed an accusing finger at us & said, "I did not have sex with that woman." And Bush-Cheney. Well. I can't count the lies.
A country in crisis needs a candid, can-do President. We need someone who will fight to the finish and eat all his spinach. So far, it appears Popeye has abandoned ship.