;)
Friday
Aug092013
The Commentariat -- Aug. 10, 2013
The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care. -- President Obama, during a press conference yesterday
Charlie Savage & Michael Shear of the New York Times: "President Obama on Friday sought to take control of the roiling debate over the National Security Agency's surveillance practices, releasing a more detailed legal justification for domestic spying and calling for more openness and scrutiny of the N.S.A.'s programs to reassure a skeptical public that its privacy is not being violated." The Justice Department document is here. The NSA doc starts on page 24. So these would be the Friday docudumps. ...
... Ellen Nakashima & Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration on Friday asserted a bold and broad power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans in order to search for a nugget of information that might thwart a terrorist attack.... The release of the white paper appeared to do little to allay the concerns of critics in Congress and the civil liberties community who say the surveillance program violates Americans' right to privacy.... ' The administration's definitions defy 'any previous interpretation of the law,' said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. 'The way the government is interpreting relevance, anything and everything they say is relevant becomes relevant.'" ...
... Scott Wilson & Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: "President Obama said Friday he would pursue reforms to open the legal proceedings surrounding government surveillance programs to greater scrutiny, the administration's most concerted response yet to a series of disclosures about secret monitoring efforts. At his first full news conference in more than three months, Obama said he intends to work with Congress on proposals that would add an adversarial voice ... to the secret proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Several Democratic senators have proposed such changes to the court.... In addition, Obama said he intends to work on ways to tighten one provision of the Patriot Act -- known as Section 215 -- that has permitted the government to obtain the phone records of millions of Americans. He announced the creation of a panel of outsiders ... to assess the programs and suggest changes by the end of the year." ...
... Sen. Ron Wyden: "Many of the reforms proposed by the President stem from suggestions made by myself and my colleagues to deal with the severe threat to civil liberties posed by current surveillance authorities and programs.... Notably absent from President Obama's speech was any mention of closing the backdoor searches loophole that potentially allows for the warrantless searches of Americans' phone calls and emails under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." CW: see Guardian story, by Ball & Ackerman, linked below. ...
... New York Times Editors: "Fundamentally, Mr. Obama does not seem to understand that the nation needs to hear more than soothing words about the government's spying enterprise.... If the president is truly concerned about public anxiety, he can vocally support legislation to make meaningful changes, rather than urging people to trust him that the dishes are clean." ...
Here's the full presser:
... Here's the full transcript of the press conference. ...
... Digby: President Obama "seemed to have been saying today that Snowden's revelations ruined his plan to have an orderly investigation of the NSA programs even though there is no evidence that he was doing any such thing. Certainly, there is no evidence that there was any "plan" to inform the American people since the senators who were running around with their hair on fire were lied to right to their face in open testimony by the intelligence community. The president also claimed that he had signed an executive order that would have allowed Snowden to come forward without any fear of retaliation." Digby handily disposes if that claim.
... James Ball & Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian: "The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden. The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing 'warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans'." ...
... Ezra Klein: "If this conversation, and these reforms, are as positive for the country as Obama says they are, then it's hard to escape the conclusion that Snowden did the country a real service -- even if the White House can't abide crediting him with it."
Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "The State Department said that on Sunday it will reopen 18 of the 19 U.S. embassies and consulates in the Middle East and Africa that were closed last week because of terrorist threats. It said Friday that the embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, would remain closed 'because of ongoing concerns about a threat stream indicating the potential for terrorist attacks emanating from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.'" ...
... Adam Baron of the Guardian: "The US has stepped up the intensity of its drone strikes on suspected al-Qaida targets in Yemen, carrying out eight strikes in two weeks in response to fears of a terror attack in the capital, Sana'a."
President Obama signed H.R. 1911, the 'Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013,' Friday:
In order to avoid a government shutdown, we need 60 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House to pass a continuing resolution. To get 60 votes in the Senate, you need at least 14 Democrats to join Republicans and pass a CR that defunds Obamacare. Right now, I am not aware of a single Democrat in the Senate who would join us. If and when defunding has 60 votes in the Senate, we will absolutely deliver more than 218 votes in the House. -- House Majority Leader Eric Cantor
As far as I know, that is the most definitive thumbs-down any GOP leader has given to the defund-Obamacare push thus far. -- Greg Sargent of the Washington Post
This could be the best of all possible worlds for Cruz, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio et al. They get the credit with conservatives for being willing to shut down the government to defund Obamacare but it never actually happens, and so they never have to take the blame for the consequences. -- Ezra Klein of the Washington Post
Paul Krugman thinks Rand Paul & Eric Cantor really don't know the deficit has fallen dramatically. And the American people, of course, don't know either, he guesses. CW: If Paul & Cantor don't know, it's wilful ignorance. They're supposed to know. They can't budget & legislate if they don't know. If they don't know, they should shaddupaboudit.
"Massive Resistance." Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg News: "Southern states and their cultural emulators are not fully competing in national politics anymore. Instead, they are a retreating army, leaving behind Washington where their representatives work not to pass legislation and shape the national destiny but to sabotage the oppressor, throwing wrenches in the Obamacare works and otherwise trying to hobble the federal leviathan. Meanwhile, back home, the resisters are pulling away from national political culture and hunkering down against the winds of demographic change." Via Greg Sargent.
Gail Collins tries to solve the Post Office's budget problems, which are in great part the fault of Congress. Who'd have guessed?
Ben Protess & Jessica Silver-Greenberg of the New York Times: "Government authorities are planning to arrest two former JPMorgan Chase employees suspected of masking the size of a multibillion-dollar trading loss, a dramatic turn in a case that tarnished the reputation of the nation's biggest bank and spotlighted the perils of Wall Street risk-taking. The former employees, who worked in London, could be arrested in the coming days, according to people briefed on the matter. The action, the people said, would involve criminal fraud charges."
Democrats Make Lousy Businessmen
Gubernatorial Race
Trip Gabriel of the New York Times: "Polls show the candidates [for Virginia governor] are neck-and-neck in the increasingly nasty race. Analysts predict the next occupant of the Executive Mansion in Richmond will be whichever candidate is getting less negative press on Election Day, Nov. 5." The article concentrates of Terry McAuliffe's business practices & his efforts to pull political strings to advance his interests. Things did not work out well. ...
... Senate Race
David Halbfinger & Claire Miller of the New York Times: "Even as Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark continued to promote his year-old Internet start-up, Waywire, the company was racing to find a buyer because it had effectively stalled out, according to people aware of the efforts, and because it feared that his election to the United States Senate this fall would strip the moribund venture of its main asset: Mr. Booker himself."
Local News
In an effective, no-nonsense letter, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) tells San Diego Mayor & serial sex offender Bob Filner to resign:
As we fight in the Senate to stand up for the men and women in our military who are survivors of sexual assault, I have heard their stories, seen the anguish in their faces, listened to them talk about the pain that will always be with them. Let me be clear: The latest revelations regarding your behavior toward women recovering from sexual assault -- women who desperately need our help -- have shaken me to my core.
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Reader Comments (6)
No doubt my pessimism about the "current culture" in America (and elsewhere where capitalism rules) has to do with my age (74) and growing up in a less cynical environment. That would be before Tee Vee, computers and "play dates" for hurried, over-scheduled children. Yes, there was immoral segregation in many states, but at least no pretense of equality. We were clearly in pre-Civil War mode.
I grew up in quite a friendly atmosphere in Madison, Wisconsin--close to Lake Mendota. By age 3, I, my friends and siblings were all swimming out to a raft at the beach without water wings in an unpolluted lake. For entertainment we went to the local swamp, caught water snakes and wrapped them around our arms for bracelets. Our mothers never knew.
After college I moved to Washington, D.C. where my husband and I worked for the Peace Corps and later for Gaylord Nelson, the Senator from Wisconsin. He was a liberal Democrat (who lived in a modest surburban house and knew all of his neighbors). Bill Proxmire, a weird but honest guy, was the other senator. Neither were money grubbers or took money from PACS. (Actually, I do not think PACS were much on the scene yet.) We worked on legislation like the Wild Rivers Bill (which passed the Senate and House and was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson) and partied with thoughtful people like Bill Moyers and Paul Wellstone.
I worked on a summer internship program for Wisconsin students to work in Congressional offices. Their experiences were uniformly positive. Somewhere along the line, during Vietnam (in my experience) things got complicated and nasty. They may have been so previously, but not in my little world. Then there were the assassinations--King and Kennedy and the Civil Rights murders.
I do not think the country ever really has recovered from those. I know I have not!
I see American politics now (both parties) as profoundly amoral and corporate and most politicians either bought off fully or on-the-way. We worship as solutions war and domination. The Shock Doctrine prevails. We are Empire. Yes, we have an inter-racial President, and look what that has wrought. And Republican governors across the country are taking us back to the Dark Ages. Money and greed rule. The poor are poorer and more hopeless. Yes, women have more rights, but the Republicans are seeing that much of that ends. And with the Supremes dissing the Voting Rights act, we are headed back to the poll tax, or its equivalent.
You may say it has been ever thus, and perhaps it has. However, to me, with all of our progress, now is the "worst bad time!" I am glad I will not live to see the global outcome of climate change or of the immoral economics of our sad little country. I think greed trumps fairness.
Oh Kate:
I wish I could say, please don't worry; but I can't.
I can point out, though, what Bernie Sanders is doing - in and for Vermont. He frequently returns to Vermont and is educating the people about what is really going on in DC and what Vermonters can do to protect themselves from all the toxicity, and how to create what the new democracy will have to be.
He has the meetings in town halls and UU churches, which look like the New England town meeting places anyway. He has appeared with Matt Taibbi, who does a very good job of describing the US financial system and how it is crushing our democracy.
Bernie is making the revolution start at home, one town meeting at a time. One idea that came out of the town meeting I recently went to was the idea of state owned banks, like the one in North (?) Dakota, which would keep tax money in the state, rather than sending it out to one of the 5 banks which control most of the money in the country, so the interest generated in VT could form the basis of low cost loans for residents of VT.
The revolution may be starting now, just maybe in a different form this time.
Keep da faith.
I don't think, Kate, that "it has been ever thus" but certainly we were kept in the dark about a whole lot of nefarious and sneaky dealings. It's interesting to me that "the nation" is so up in arms about all this surveillance business when nothing is secret anymore. People even need to tweet & text & Facebook continually as though their every movement is front page news. Our communication system is in full throttle––if there is a plane crash in East Haven we learn about it almost immediately; when Oprah is refused a purse of her choice in a high end store we hear about it. We are spread wide open–––and the money made flows freely with an eager eye out for the ratings.
I came across something Elizabeth Bishop (the poet) had written years ago that seems to me to be apt here. In her poem, "The Bight" she says she could look at the dock at low tide, the dredge, the pelicans, the shark tails "hung up to dry/for the Chinese restaurant trade"–––"All the untidy activity continues/awful but cheerful." Those last two lines were Bishop's favorite and she explains in a letter to a friend:
"My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives...But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy––to make life endurable and to keep ourselves "new, tender, quick" [George Herbert].
And years ago my husband asked me if I was happy about something. I quickly said, of course. Later I thought about that word "happy" and concluded that although I had moments of pure bliss, I couldn't sustain happiness knowing what I know. But I could be cheerful. You, Kate, and I and I think many others here, are from a generation in which we experienced "this nation" in full flower albeit the racial divide. Today the country's largest employers are retailers and fast food chains and unless we can create better jobs the prospect for "this sad little country" is nil. That's the biggy––that's the weight that's dragging this country down. So while the ice caps are melting, and our center is slowly giving way, let's get giddy, have another drink and do the best we can while we can. What else is there?
@Kate: This should add t your mood: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175734/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_how_to_fry_a_planet/
I sometimes wonder someone like the Koch brothers plans on doing once the planet is fried. Of course, there could always be a nuclear war over resources that causes "nuclear winter."
There's a bright side to this. Since I've been diagnosed with an incurable, always fatal disease (ALS) I won't be around to see how this plays out. BTW, Kate, we're the same age.
For those who are concerned by the Fukushima radioactive leakage this might be of comfort:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/10/the-fukushima-radiation-leak-is-equal-to-76-million-bananas/
Amy Davidson in the NewYorker on Obama's press conference yesterday. If not for her remarks read it for the comments.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/nsa-dirty-dishes-obama-press-conference.html