;)
The Commentariat -- April 7, 2014
"The Color of His Presidency." Jonathan Chait writes a long piece for New York on the invidious racism that continues to pervade American politics, writ large during the Obama era. "Once you start looking for racial subtexts embedded within the Republican agenda, they turn up everywhere. And not always as subtexts.... Conservatives are fixated on race, in a mystified, aggrieved, angry way...."
Jim Kuhnhenn of the AP: "This week, the president will sign an executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their pay with each other. The prohibition on the wage 'gag rules' is similar to language in a Senate bill aimed at closing a pay gap between men and women. That legislation is scheduled for a vote this week, though it is not likely to pass. In addition, Obama on Tuesday will direct the Labor Department to adopt regulations requiring federal contractors to provide compensation data based on sex and race. The president will sign the executive order and the presidential memo during an event at the White House where he will be joined Lilly Ledbetter, whose name appears on a pay discrimination law Obama signed in 2009."
Ginger Thompson & Sarah Cohen of the New York Times: "... a New York Times analysis of internal government records shows that since President Obama took office, two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases involve people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all. Twenty percent -- or about 394,000 -- of the cases involved people convicted of serious crimes, including drug-related offenses, the records show.... Mr. Obama came to office promising comprehensive immigration reform, but lacking sufficient support, the administration took steps it portrayed as narrowing the focus of enforcement efforts on serious criminals. Yet the records show that the enforcement net actually grew, picking up more and more immigrants with minor or no criminal records."
Erin Delmore of NBC News: "President Obama will attend a memorial Wednesday for the victims of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer confirmed on CBS's Face the Nation...."
Dylan Stableford of Yahoo! News: "Ahead of the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report that is expected to say the CIA misled the government and the American people about its interrogation techniques, Nancy Pelosi is placing the blame squarely on former Vice President Dick Cheney. 'I do believe that during the Bush-Cheney administration, Vice President Cheney set a tone and an attitude for the CIA," Pelosi said in an interview with CNN's 'State of the Union' broadcast Sunday.... Pelosi said she thinks Cheney, who has long defended the use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques, is proud of the CIA's misrepresentation." ...
... ** Dianne Feinstein Is a Crybaby Girl. Amy Davidson of the New Yorker: Former CIA Director Michael Hayden tells Fox "News"'s Chris Wallace that the Senate report on CIA torture is the product of girly emotions. So, not serious. "... if the intelligence community thinks that the controversy over our legacy of torture is just the result of some silly girlish feelings, then we haven't even begun to deal with the consequences of those years."
Katie Valentine of Think Progress: "Eight [Democratic] members of Congress sent a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy Tuesday, asking her to reopen investigations into water contamination in the three states. The EPA investigations in Pavillion, WY, Dimock, PA and Parker County, TX were all called off between mid-2012 and mid-2013, before the agency determined for sure what had caused each region's contamination."
"Oligarchs & Money." Paul Krugman: " I'm increasingly convinced that our failure to deal with high unemployment has a lot to do with class interests.... Modestly higher inflation, say 4 percent, would be good for the vast majority of people, but it would be bad for the superelite. And guess who gets to define conventional wisdom.... What's good for oligarchs isn't good for America." ...
... Brad DeLong: "The top 0.01% ... have not been enriched by the post 2008 era. What they have gained via a higher capitalization via low safe interest rates has been offset by what they have lost as a result of depressed profits, depressed by a low level of economic activity, a depression which has not been completely offset by downward pressure on wages. The top 0.01% would not be poorer absolutely (although they would be poorer relatively) in a high-pressure higher-inflation economy." ...
... CW: DeLong doesn't understand why the .01% want a depressed economy. I do: they want to continue to increase the economic distance between them & us. They want us to envy them, something we won't much bother to do if we're fat & happy ourselves. ...
... E. J. Dionne: "It's a shame that the Republican majority on the Supreme Court doesn't know the difference between an oligarchy and a democratic republic.... Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his four allies always side with the wealthy, the powerful and the forces that would advance the political party that put them on the court. The ideological overreach that is wrecking our politics is now also wrecking our jurisprudence." CW: I think Roberts, et al., do know the difference. And they prefer oligarchy.
Richard Escow in Nation of Change: In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Charles "Koch cites the following line [from a letter by Thomas Jefferson]: 'The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.' ... Jefferson wasn't saying that the government takes your liberty, but that liberty is lost when citizens become passive in the face of infringements on their rights.... Charles Koch may not understand Thomas Jefferson, but Thomas Jefferson would have understood Charles Koch very well. It was Jefferson, after all, who said the following: 'I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.'"
Ben Terris of the Washington Post: "About 600 of George H.W. Bush's closest friends, administration officials, political allies and family members headed to his presidential library in [College Station,] Texas this past weekend to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his presidency. Familiar faces such as former secretary of state James Baker, ex-chief of staff John Sununu, and onetime vice president Dan Quayle spent the time reminiscing about their glory days, eating heaping plates of barbecue and listening to live country music played by Clay Walker and Garth Brooks."
Bruce Smith of the AP: "In a little-known chapter of American history, a federal judge who was the son of a Confederate soldier and presided in the city where the Civil War began was the first judge in the nation to write that segregated schools are unequal schools since separate but equal became the law of the land. U.S. District Judge Waites Waring's opinions in cases ranging from opening the South Carolina Democratic primary to blacks, to equal pay for teachers and school desegregation made him a pariah in his hometown in the segregated South. A cross was burned in his yard, bricks were thrown through his windows and he received death threats."
David Carr of the New York Times has some questions for Comcast as its reps appear before a Senate committee to defend Comcast's proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable.
What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true? -- Chemist Sherwood Rowland, ca. 1970s ...
... Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker: "At a meeting in Yokohama, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest update on the looming crisis that is global warming. Only this time it isn't just looming.... Composed in a language that might be called High Committee, the report is nevertheless hair-raising.... Currently, instead of discouraging fossil-fuel use, the U.S. government underwrites it, with tax incentives for producers worth about four billion dollars a year.... The fact that so much time has been wasted standing around means that the problem of climate change is now much more difficult to deal with than it was when it was first identified."
Presidential Race
Hamlet, Enters Right. Peter Baker of the New York Times: "...Jeb Bush signaled on Sunday the kind of campaign he would mount if he ran for president: one arguing against ideological purity tests while challenging party orthodoxy on issues like immigration and education.... He said he would decide by the end of the year, in part on whether he thought that with a 'hopeful' message, he could avoid 'the vortex of a mud fight.'" ...
... Philip Rucker & Robert Costa of the Washington Post: Meanwhile, other GOP presidential hopefuls are "study[ing] up on issues and cultivat[ing] ties to pundits and luminaries from previous administrations." ...
... Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker has a long piece on this guy:
... Here Steve Peoples of the AP looks at what the prettiest boy in the GOP beauty contest -- Marco Rubio -- is doing to bolster his presidential creds.
Congressional Races
Juan Williams in the Hill: "Republicans want this year’s elections to be a repeat of 2010, a referendum on Obama and ObamaCare. They have no Plan B.... Meanwhile, Democratic messaging is picking up speed by forcing Republicans to cast votes against raising the minimum wage and blocking efforts to help the long-term unemployed. The top political prognosticators have rightly said this looks like a bad year for Democrats on Capitol Hill. But between the early success of the ACA and the introduction of the punishing Ryan budget, the GOP had a tough 24 hours on April Fools' Day. Early reports of the Democrats' demise are starting to look like hype."
Beyond the Beltway
Isaac Chotiner of the New Republic interviews/spars with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Steven M. Mazzacane of the Branford Seven: Sources say "... Ted Kennedy Jr. will run for [Connecticut's] 12th district [senate] seat, a seat now held by Democrat Ed Meyer. Meyer is retiring."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Under the watchful eye of Russian state television, several hundred pro-Russian demonstrators in the city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, a region of millions, declared on Monday that they were forming an independent republic and urged President Vladimir V. Putin to send troops to the region as a peacekeeping force, even though there are no obvious threats to peace in the area." ...
... Washington Post: "In Washington, the Obama administration expressed deep skepticism that the scattered uprisings and building takeovers in cities such as Donetsk and Kharkiv have been spontaneous. 'There is strong evidence suggesting some of these demonstrators were paid,' said Jay Carney...." ...
... AP: "Secretary of State John Kerry agreed Monday to meet with top diplomats from Russia, Ukraine and the European Union in a new push to calm tensions in eastern Ukraine, as the White House threatened further sanctions if Moscow intervenes."
War at Sea. AFP: "China showed off its new aircraft carrier to US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday, allowing him a first-hand look at a symbol of its growing military prowess. Hagel arrived in the port city of Qingdao, kicking off a three-day tour of China with a visit to the carrier at Yuchi naval base. He was the first foreigner allowed aboard the vessel by the often secretive People's Liberation Army (PLA), officials said." ...
... AP: "The U.S. will deploy two additional ballistic missile defense destroyers to Japan by 2017 as part of an effort to bolster protection from North Korean missile threats, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sunday."
New York Times: "Mickey Rooney, the exuberant entertainer who led a roller-coaster life -- the world's top box-office star at 19 as the irrepressible Andy Hardy, a bankrupt has-been in his 40s, a comeback kid on Broadway as he neared 60 -- died on Sunday. He was 93 and lived in Westlake Village, Calif.
Washington Post: " An Australian navy vessel searching for a missing Malaysian passenger jet has picked up deep-sea acoustic signals 'consistent' with those emitted by an airplane's black box, the leader of the multinational search operation said Monday."
AFP: "Last-ditch talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on salvaging a teetering, US-brokered peace process ended without a breakthrough Sunday, Palestinian sources told AFP."
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Reader Comments (18)
Re the clip that has Jeb Bush quoted that he would only get into the campaign if he thought he could avoid ideological purity tests and run with a more positive message: I never thought I'd say this, but three cheers for Jeb Bush. Good for him. Maybe if more Republicans start pushing back, the crazy fever will break. That would indeed be good for the country.
Victoria: Second your hopeful sentiment, but unfair as it might be, I find it hard to forget that Jeb is related to Dubbya and admit my venomous brush wants to paint the whole Bush tribe the same dark shade... but while I don't care for many of JB's support business-at-any-cost policies, not to mention nutso stand-your-ground legislation that I believe first surfaced in Florida under his watch, it might be entertaining to watch the relatively sane brother try to run for national office in a party that is now mostly crackers.
I just don't know why anyone who is not a greedy, power-hungry, race-baiting sociopath would want to do it....and I don't know where he would get his support, other than from the increasingly irrelevant Karl Rove and his buddies, who have lost control of the shambling monster they had a large hand in creating.
How ironic that the "best" and smartest Bush is (probably fatally) encumbered by his marriage to a severe alcoholic--who was arrested for shoplifting several years ago--and has a daughter who was/is? addicted to prescription drugs, and caught forging a prescription--also several years ago. His statements may be a disingenuous cover for an "ideological purity test." Then, of course, I must remember that David Vitter was re-elected.
I am sure that the Dems will try to make hay out of that if Jeb is nominated! Just as the Repugs will try to compare Hillary to Tammy Wynettte since she "stood by her man." However, it appears that the Dems are held to a higher standard--i.e., Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. Or maybe the voters EXPECT the Repugs to be down and dirty ass wipes, and the Dems to be more upright.
All the Bushes except H.W. share one ignoble quality (well, likely more than one) they have that slimy woman called Barbara as their mother. She is to parenting as Dick Cheney is to governing. I'm not sure where the quote from the other day, "Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated" – George Bernard Shaw, fits into my revulsion at her, but she is an abscess on the face of the excellent opportunities life has afforded her.
I, for one, will never forgive her for her nasty, unfeeling remarks about the people of New Orleans who ended up in Houston and other places after Katrina, having been largely unable to save themselves from disaster. She upped the ante on Marie Antoinette... (Of course now we hear that level of empathy avoidance daily from the schmucks in the not-so-grand old party, from the local level on up, so I guess she was simply a fortune teller--)
Re Supreme Oligarchs: The United States today is a largely hereditary, plutocratic oligarchy. The compact term is feudalism. All that remains is for the super rich to award themselves titles of nobility, declaring themselves God's anointed Rulers by Divine Right.
The first link in today's post (the Chait article) directs to the print version of the article. You might want to correct the link to
http://nymag.com/news/features/obama-presidency-race-2014-4
In this discussion, I'm going with D. C. Clark. What a shame our Constitution prohibits the granting of titles of nobility. As for the Bushes, their fault, dear readers, is not in their wives but in themselves.
The oligarchy of which D. C. writes is very much a Bush product. Look at their Supreme Court appointees: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Sam Alito. (David Souter, appointed by Bush Pere, was the accidental Justice; Clarence Thomas, the in-your-face response to his Souter misjudgment.) It is foolish to think that Jeb Bush would appoint a Souter rather than a Thomas. Jeb believes, as much as do his father & brother, that the small group of elites of which he is a member in good standing, should rule. One important avenue to that rule is control of the Third Branch of government.
If you think not, bear in mind that he has devoted his post-governorship to promoting private schools that rob from the poor & give to his elite benefactors. As governor, he also devoted himself to degrading public education & keeping Democratic votes to a minimum: despite pleas, he refused to change the rules for ex-felons to vote (Gore would easily have won in Florida, Nader aside, had ex-felons been able to vote in 2000). Oh, did I mention Bush v. Gore, an operation which Jeb engineered here in Florida? These people do not want those people to have any power whatsoever. Jeb Bush is as responsible for the Iraq War as is Dubya. Jeb put his brother in the Oval. That's how these thing work for the elites: they stick together. Sibling rivalry cannot top filial allegiance.
So, maybe no kings, but an informal monarchy in which the realm is passed from father to son & brother to brother. Babs may say this is a bad idea, but I suspect she's just tired of being Queen Mother & would as soon get herself to a nunnery.
Marie
P.S. If you want to know how the Bushes, et al., manage this, Chait's piece provides a clue, if not the whole answer. As long as Republicans can convince white "haves" that their smaller & smaller share of the pie has been reduced not by oligarchs & elites but by "those people," venial greed, Republican candidates will always have a voter base. As long as Republicans can use the tools at their disposal to keep those people from voting, their own voter base will rule the day.
@Nancy: I purposely link to the print version on multi-page New York articles because the print version gives you the whole article. It also includes all of the graphics that appear in the article.
Linking to the page you recommend calls up only the first of seven pages in this case, forcing the reader to either cursor thru or -- click on the print version.
Marie
Re: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Two hands in the Bush belong to Big Oil and Big Military. Think about it.
The Bush family and their cohort represent the top of the pyramid of power, the lords of the realm, so to speak, coveting and wielding power as if it were their ancestral right to do so, democracy being at best a minor nuisance. Remember, the core of the neocon philosophy is that some are born to rule, and the rest are there to serve the masters. No wonder Shrub loves neoconservatism.
But what of the bottom of the pyramid? Those whose backs support the life of ease, privilege, and power enjoyed by the masters? Last week I was wondering what Dubya was doing to celebrate the first month in which no American died in either of the wars he began for his own personal pleasure, wars that have killed, physically and psychologically maimed thousands, and displaced millions. My guess is that he took a nap, enjoyed the day. Maybe painted a picture of his toes. Such is the life of entitlement and comfort.
Noblesse sans oblige.
Down in the muck live millions of Americans shoved to the back of the bus by such as the Bush family, friendly ol' Jebby included.
Recently, in that paradigm of Right Wing World, the State of Louisiana, an innocent man, Glenn Ford, was released after serving 30 years for a crime he did not commit. He was railroaded through a lightning trial by the State of Louisiana and placed on Death Row. His lawyers had never tried a criminal case. One was just months out of law school.
There was no murder weapon, no witnesses. The state's "expert" witness never examined the body but nonetheless testified under oath that the shooter was left handed, like Ford. Hearsay was admitted as evidence. Black citizens were kept from the jury box and the all white jury returned the guilty verdict.
Guilty because black.
Ford spent the next 30 years of his life in the notorious Angola prison whose warden is under numerous indictments for mistreatment and imposition of inhumane conditions on its predominantly black population. Angola has been compared, unfavorably, to conditions on Hell's Island at the peak of its most inhuman treatment of prisoners.
In other parts of the country, rich white defendants walk or are given special privileges. A rich man guilty of child molestation is handled with kid gloves, but in Louisiana, an innocent man is dumped into a hole and left to rot until it's time to strap him to the electric chair.
It would be one thing if this were an unusual event but it seems every week we hear about another innocent man (almost always black) who has had his life ruined by drive-thru "justice".
And adding further insult to these atrocities is the way a section of the 14th amendment has been used to disenfranchise millions of voters (of course, mostly black). Congress, in an effort to expand the franchise, enacted the 14th amendment but because they feared southern attempts to pad their political power by adding freed blacks to census rolls while denying their right to vote, added a section that allowed for an equal disenfranchisement of those who had taken part in, or were engaged in, rebellion, or other crimes.
Generations after the Civil War, that "or other crimes" phrase has allowed blanket disenfranchisement of the very population the amendment was created to serve. And in another weird twist, states with enormous prison populations (Angola is like a small city) have created a new form of gerrymandering, "prison-gerrymandering", because although inmates, and even those released who are required to remain in the area, can't vote, they are still counted on the census and add significantly to the political power of that district.
Prisons in Louisiana are all for-profit meaning a lot of money changes hands the more citizens who can be imprisoned, even for minor offenses, and kept there as long as possible. The state hands out $25 a day to corporations who keep inmates in deplorable conditions (Angola uses left than half this amount). This is a good reason why Louisiana's prison population, about 6,000 in 1977, is now over 40,000. Louisiana locks up people at 5 times the rate of Iran. 20 times the rate of Germany. It is the prison capitol (and prison capital) of the world.
And most of those are poor blacks.
This is a state, run by incompetent hack Bobby Jindal, that was being held up by the GOP not very long ago as a model of what America could be if they took over.
No kidding.
So while the Jeb Bush lolls about and decides whether or not (ho-hum) he wants to be the next Bush king, millions are denied the ability to vote for or against that eventuality. A situation most desired by the GOP.
And before I forget, Mr. Ford, now a free man after being screwed by the GOP's Nirvana Land, is now eligible for some reparation. But unlike contributions from corporations to the GOP, reparations for destroying an innocent man's life is capped. Instead of being paid for all 30 years Louisiana wrongfully imprisoned him, Mr. Ford will only get 10 years reparation. And maybe not even that.
It appears that Louisiana is not finished fucking over Mr. Ford since they may still deny him any compensation at all. There's a possibility that even though he was totally innocent, they may still find him guilty of something.
Welcome to the the other America, brought to you by corporate America, the Supreme Court, the GOP, and evil rat bastards everywhere.
One law for the rich, another for the poor.
Watching "Cosmos" last night I was struck by how wonderfully Neil DeGrasse Tyson eviscerates conservative views of science (which, to them, is only useful if it can make money or better weapons). He makes sure to emphasize, wherever possible, the difference between systems and processes based on facts and those based on beliefs (and lies). The wingnuts must be beside themselves. Add to that that he's smart, an excellent communicator, a working scientist, and (horrors!) BLACK!
I hear they're demanding that they be allowed equal time to make their case for a 5,000 year old universe, where evolution doesn't exist, created in 7 days, but it will take a few days for Adam and Eve to ride to the post office on their pet dinosaur so their demands may not get to the producers in time.
What a shame.
(Funny how the concept of "equal time" was killed by conservatives who didn't think it valid or necessary when they had the microphone, but now...heh-heh.)
Oh..and one other great thing about last night's "Cosmos" (Alzheimer's is setting in I think) I forgot to mention...
Tyson spent a good deal of time early in the show extolling the excellence of Ibn Al Hazen, an Islamic scholar, scientist, and polymath from the middle ages who helped develop many of the methodologies still employed by scientists (the serious kind...not the bought-off wingnut kind).
So a show that debunks bullshit and hosted by a black man who praises a Muslim.
A trifecta for conservatives! What's not to hate?
@Jeanne, Citizen 625:Agree about Barbara Bush. My wife and I never could and still can't stand her, mostly because of her mean-spiritedness.
@CW: Agree on Jeb. He's of the John Roberts mold: talk smoothly in public but act much differently when getting some power. I, for one, will never forgive him for the 2000 election fraud. I heard song yesterday that fits: "God may forgive you, but I won't!"
Please watch:
http://youtu.be/CTz65D91oVM
When Bush, Chaney, et al, die and go to hell their eternal reward should be to watch this video, endlessly, forever.
DC
@Re: Jonathan Chait: Here in North Georgia, the racism isn't covert--it's overt. I've heard "Everybody ought to own one," " That nigger in the White House," "The last two elections were fixed!" Meaning a black man couldn't possibly be legitimately elected President. I sometimes push back, but what's the point? They're never going to change their narrow minds. Bx
Kate, I don't think Jeb needs to fear an attack on his wife - at least not by any Democrat. That would not be a good way to gain the hispanic vote.
Haley-
I agree with you on principle; however, Columba Bush has a fairly long list of questionable behavior and illegal deeds. On second thought, that would likely endear her to the Repugs! The Tea Partiers are likely to have problems with the fact that she is not fluent in English and appears not to give a shit about being a political wife. But they probably hate Hillary more than they dislike a Mexican immigrant.