The Commentariat -- August 2

The President speaks moments after the Senate passed the debt/deficit bill. He has since signed the bill into law:

C-SPAN image.

I've posted an Open Thread for today's Off Times Square.

For you serious wonks, here's the text of the debt/deficit bill. It's 74 pages. CW: I won't be reading it. ...

... CW: this commentary (mind you, this is analysis, not straight reporting) by John Schoen of NBC News is a good example of what's wrong with the MSM. Look at this sentence:

Consumers, investors, and business owners and executives have watched in horror as their government used the threat of an unprecedented default as a political bargaining chip.

    ... "the government used the threat of ... default as a bargaining chip"? The government? No, it was not the government. It was the Republican party. Fucking irresponsible.

... The Obama presidency in a nutshell by the best nutshell scribe ever, Rick Hertzberg (read his entire commentary):

Obama’s seeming refusal to hold [the Fourteenth Amendment] in reserve ('like the fire axe on the wall,' in Garrett Epps’s words) is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating negotiating strategy—indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most disappointing aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has allowed deficits and debt to supersede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household that must 'live within its means.' (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now — a lack of demand, not a shortage of capital — higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich.

     ... Hertzberg will conduct a live chat on the debt ceiling at 3:00 pm ET today.

... ** Nate Silver: in view of the substantial majority of Representatives who voted for the debt/deficit bill, it is evident that "Mr. Obama could have shifted the deal tangibly toward the left and still gotten a bill through without too much of a problem. For instance, even if all members of the Tea Party Caucus had voted against the bill, it would still have passed 237-to-193, and that’s with 95 Democrats voting against it. Specifically, it seems likely that Mr. Obama could have gotten an extension of the payroll tax cut included in the bill, or unemployment benefits, either of which would have had a stimulative effect." ...

... Paul Krugman: "... what we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have."

... Jackie Calmes & Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times have a blow-by-blow on high-level negotiations on the debt-deficit deal over the past several days. ...

... The New York Times has a chart that outlines how the deficit reduction would work unde the bill the Senate should pass today. ...

... Kate Zernicke of the New York Times: "While Tea Party groups and members of the Tea Party caucus in the House loudly insisted that they would not support any increase in the debt limit, many rank-and-file Tea Party voters did support it. In interviews and in recent polls, many voters said they backed the Tea Party in the midterm elections because they wanted a change from the status quo, or because they felt that the government spent too much money, but not because they considered reducing the federal debt the nation’s biggest concern." ...

... Joe Nocera has a pretty good column on what a terrible effect the Tea Party hostage deal will have on the economy: "America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse." ...

You need to set a thief to catch a thief. -- President Franklin Roosevelt, on his appointment of Joe Kennedy as S.E.C. chairman ...

... Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times on the revolving door between the S.E.C. & the Wall Street firms the S.E.C. is supposed to police. CW: looks like that revolving door is hitting the rest of us in the ass.

Prof. Tera Hunter on the real story of slave families in the American South. (CW: near the end of her essay, I think Hunter confuses Bachmann with Palin. It was Bachmann, not Palin, who insisted the founders fought against slavery. Update: e-mailed back-&-forth with Hunter, & she says Palin makes the claim in her latest book. If you don't think being a scholar is tough, consider that -- Hunter had to read Palin's book!)

CW: I haven't read it yet, but this long New Yorker piece by Nicholas Schmidle on "Getting bin Laden" looks interesting.

AND, just because we deserve some fun:

FBI artist's rendition of D. B. Cooper, via the Seattle P. I.Casey McNerthney of the Seattle Post Intelligencer: "The FBI has what it calls 'our most promising' lead to date for a suspect in the infamous 1971 D.B. Cooper case – the nation's only unsolved commercial airplane hijacking. The name of a man not previously investigated was given to the FBI, and an item that belongs to him was sent for fingerprint work at the agency's Quantico, Va...." ...

     ... Update: "The man investigated as a suspect in the D.B. Cooper case ... has been dead for about 10 years, and a forensic check didn't find fingerprints on an item that belonged him, an FBI spokesman told seattlepi.com Monday." ...

     ... Update 2. Katharine Seelye & Charlie Savage of the New York Times have the story here.

News Ledes

New York Times: "After dealing with the debt crisis, Senate negotiators tried and failed Tuesday to end a stalemate over temporary funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, leaving 4,000 F.A.A. employees out of work and relying on airport safety inspectors to continue working without pay. The partial F.A.A. shutdown, which began July 23 and is likely to continue at least through Labor Day, has also idled tens of thousands of construction workers on airport projects around the country."

C-SPAN says the Senate is to vote at noon on the debt/deficit bill. No link. But if you want to watch the vote, C-SPAN is airing the Senate session here. At 12:15 pm ET, the Senate is voting. Update: the voting is still ongoing @ 12:34 pm ET, but C-SPAN reports that the Senate has passed the bill. CW: An interesting mix of "no" votes from the far right & the left (including Gillibrand of New York who is certainly positioning herself for a run for higher office). Update 2: at about 12:40 pm ET, Dick Durbin declared the bill passed. ...

     ... Update 3: at 2:00 pm ET Jay Carney just reported that President Obama has signed the debt/deficit bill into law. ...

     ... Update 4: here's the Washington Post story.

Reuters: "The 'Great Recession' was even greater than previously thought, and the U.S. economy has skated uncomfortably close to a new one this year. New data on Friday showed the 2007-2009 U.S. recession was much more severe than prior measures had found, with economic output declining a cumulative of 5.1 percent instead of 4.1 percent. The report also showed the current slowdown began earlier and has been deeper than previously thought, with growth in the first quarter advancing at only a 0.4 percent annual pace. The data indicated the economy began slowing in the fourth quarter of last year before high gasoline prices and supply chain disruptions from Japan's earthquake had hit, suggesting the weakness is more fundamental and less temporary than economists had believed."

AP: "The legislation [to raise the debt limit], which easily passed the House on Monday, is virtually assured to clear the Senate shortly after noon Tuesday by a bipartisan tally. The White House promises Obama will sign the measure into law." CW: the AP now characterizes the bill as "bipartisan legislation." Here's the New York Times story, which has been updated to reflect the Senate's passing the bill.

** Two Victories for Equal Rights:

     New York Times: "The Obama administration issued new standards on Monday that require health insurance plans to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without co-payments or other charges. The standards, which also guarantee free coverage of other preventive services for women, follow recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences and grew out of the new health care law."

     AP: "An incredulous federal judge on Monday rejected the state's claim that a new Kansas statute that denied Planned Parenthood federal funding did not target the group, ruling that the law unconstitutionally intended to punish Planned Parenthood for advocating for abortion rights and would likely be overturned." CW: read this for the state's essentially pejurious defense of the law.