The Commentariat -- August 26

I've put up a Krugman page on Off Times Square with lotsa links, including this one to today's column, titled "Bernanke's Perry Problem." Karen Garcia, Kate Madison & I have all posted comments. BTW, yesterday's thread was particularly good, my own contributions nothwithstanding: intelligent people sharing useful insights about difficult subjects. I highly recommend your reading it through. ...

     ... Update: it appears the Times moderators have again dumped Madison's and my comments on Brooks, so you'll have to read them on Off Times Square. Also, read some of the comments to Krugman's column; they're quite good.

... Neil Irwin of the Washington Post: The "Jackson Hole ... symposium, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, occupies a unique place in the world of economic policy. It brings together most of the globe’s top central bankers and many of the planet’s smartest economists."But not Paul Krugman. See also today's Ledes for Ben Bernanke's effect on in ternational markets.

Via Ezra Klein.

Jennifer Agiesta & Laurie Kellman of the AP: "Americans are plenty angry at Congress in the aftermath of the debt crisis and Republicans could pay the greatest price, a new Associated Press-GfK poll suggests. The poll finds the tea party has lost support, Republican House Speaker John Boehner is increasingly unpopular and people are warming to the idea of not just cutting spending but also raising taxes — anathema to the GOP...."

Tim Egan of the New York Times: "As president, [Obama has] been a sober, cautious, tongue-shackled realist — a moderate Republican of the pre-crazy, pre-Tea Party era. Having failed to come up with a Big Idea to guide his presidency, he will sink or swim now on strengths that don’t lend themselves to large rallies or passionate enthusiasm. Sobriety and moderation, by definition, are boring."

Karen Garcia on "a scandal within a scandal": How Iowa AG Tom Miller and New York Fed member Kathryn Wylde are both stymying New York AG Eric Schneiderman's efforts to hold financial institutions accountable for the mortgage debacle.

Ezra Klein: "Most people think that the Obama administration 'owns' Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and so it can basically tell them to do whatever it wants. That’s not how it works. The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the control of the newly created Federal Housing and Finance Authority. The FHFA is ... an independent agency, and right now it’s under the care of acting Director Edward DeMarco, a holdover from the Bush administration. Senate Republicans blocked the Obama administration’s nominee, Joe Smith, after he expressed some support for using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to heal the housing market. Any plan [to help underwater homeowners] would either need to go through him or through Congress. And both DeMarco and the Republicans in Congress seem mostly interested in limiting Fannie and Freddie’s short-term losses so they can be spun off from the government."

CW: Prof. Cornel West, in a New York Times op-ed, makes some good points about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., before he goes over-the-top, as he almost invariable does, and ends by warning us to be "coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle." (And you can bet the Times editors ratcheted down whatever was in West's first draft.) Here's one of West's more worthy observations:

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the [Obama] administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable. ...

... Roger Simon of Politico: "In the case of the King memorial, the controversy is whether the enormous statue of one of the greatest figures in American history should be stamped 'Made in China.' The 'Stone of Hope' statue of Dr. King was sculpted in China by a Chinese sculptor out of Chinese granite and shipped to the United States where it was assembled by Chinese workers. The Chinese workers were paid nothing -- which would seem to me to violate not only Dr. King’s principles but also U.S. anti-slavery laws -- though they were hoping to get paid something when they returned to China."

Greg Sargent has more on Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's "misguided ... crusade to get American business leaders to withhold political donations from all incumbents in Congress, to pressure them to produce a deficit reduction plan that deals with entitlements and revenues." Sargent writes, "As it turns out, Schultz is a big donor to the Democratic Party.... Democrats are far more in agreement with Schultz [on deficit control].... Punishing both parties equally for their current positions isn’t likely to produce the outcome Schultz wants." CW: or, I would wager, punishing Democrats much more than Republicans, etc.

Jennifer Huget of the Washington Post: "Based on trends, half of the adults in the United States will be obese by 2030..., according to a report released Thursday on the international obesity crisis in the British medical journal the Lancet. Those changes include making healthful foods cheaper and less-healthful foods more expensive largely through tax strategies.... A team of international public health experts argued that the global obesity crisis will continue to grow worse and add substantial burdens to health-care systems and economies unless governments, international agencies and other major institutions take action to monitor, prevent and control the problem. Changes over the past century in the way food is made and marketed have contributed to the creation of an 'obesogenic' environment in which personal willpower and efforts to maintain a healthful weight are largely impossible, the report noted." CW: you can read the reports, published in the Lancet, beginning here, but you have to create a Lancet account.

Will Wilkinson of The Economist: "[Steve] Jobs's wealth, like that of other billionaire barons of the information age, was built in no small part upon an intellectual-property regime that I and many others believe to retard progress while concentrating massive rewards upon a privileged few, generating unfair and unproductive inequality." Wilkinson then goes on to "forgive" Jobs his success, and his refusal to share it a la Gates & Buffett because of the "the elegance of the Apple devices ... [which] offered the mass market dazzling technical progress with the sort of tastefully luxurious sheen usually reserved for the seriously well-to-do."

Seth at Enik Rising: don't confuse correlation with causation: a case study. Via Jonathan Bernstein.

Right Wing World

What Not to Read. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times reviews Dick Cheney's memoir: "... the memoir — delivered in dry, often truculent prose — turns out to be mostly a predictable mix of spin, stonewalling, score settling and highly selective reminiscences. The book, written with his daughter Liz, reiterates Mr. Cheney’s aggressive approach to foreign policy and his hard-line views on national security, while sidestepping questions about many of the Bush administration’s more controversial decisions, either by cherry-picking information (much the way critics say the White House cherry-picked intelligence in making the case to go to war against Iraq) or by hopping and skipping over awkward subjects with loudly voiced assertions."

Welfare Queens, 2012 Edition. CW: here's something President Obama should put in his arsenal, but won't. Ed Kilgore of The New Republic: Republican presidential candidates Rick Perry & Michele Bachmann have been attacking what were Republican-(including Reagan!)-led programs to aid the working poor. "Work is no longer enough, it seems, to avoid the moral taint of being a 'welfare bum.' And the cruelest irony of all is that, for so many, the work’s not available anyway.

CW: I think this may be the very first flat-out admission that Republican Tea Party policy is to take the U.S. all the way back to the Gilded Age:

Except for the Reagan Administration, to be quite frank, both Republicans and Democrats established a role for government in America that said yes we will have a free economy, but we will also have a strong government, which through regulations and taxes will control the free economy, and through a series of government programs, will take care of those in our society who are falling behind. That was the vision crafted in the 20th Century by our leaders. These programs weakened us as a people. -- Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), in a speech at the Reagan Library

CW: Since Nancy Reagan was sitting in the front row, future Republican vice-presidential nominee Rubio could hardly diss her husband. Or, as Jonathan Chait notes,

Rubio hilariously excludes Reagan from the pattern of presidents who accepted a government role in the economy. Conservative mythology insists that Reagan must always be correct, so Rubio lauds him for rejecting the twentieth century model of government, even though Reagan very much accepted the broad contours of the post New Deal state. Indeed, Reagan liked to boast that he voted for Franklin Roosevelt....

Photo via Politico.... Maggie Haberman of Politico: "David Limbaugh, the conservative author and brother of Rush, tweets an image you're likely to see again.... Perry spokesman Mark Miner emailed this response: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' As we reported recently, Perry himself also questioned on the stump the fact that Obama had never served in the military.... Obama was not actually 22 in that photo, he was in college." Haberman also links to this photo of Mitt Romney at around the same age:

That's Romney on the right. Photo via the Boston Globe.... This Globe caption accompanying the photo: "The main task of missionaries was to teach people about Mormonism, in the hope that they would choose to convert. The most common method of travel for the missionaries was the bicycle, and many of the missionaries in France rode motorized bikes."

Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "The contenders in the GOP field appear to be spending most of their time with those they think could be the solution to the country’s economic hardship (business owners) rather than those who are most directly experiencing the hardship (people out of work)." CW: note that this is a straight news report, not an opinion piece; i.e., this is the way it is.

News Ledes

President Obama on Hurricane Irene:

     ... www.Ready.gov

New York Times: "The State Department gave a crucial green light on Friday to a proposed 1,711-mile pipeline that would carry heavy oil from oil sands in Canada across the Great Plains to terminals in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast."

New York Times: "An arson attack on a casino in northern Mexico on Thursday that left 52 people dead has thrown a spotlight on the growth of gambling houses throughout the country and their role in organized crime. In what President Felipe Calderón called an act of 'true terrorists,' armed men in four vehicles — a Mini Cooper leading sport utility vehicles and a pickup truck — calmly drove up to the Casino Royale in Monterrey at midafternoon, dashed inside, ordered people to get out and set it ablaze with a flammable liquid."

New York Times: "The hurricane warning that was put into effect in North Carolina on Thursday was extended by the National Hurricane Center to Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey on Friday morning, indicating that preparations for the storm should be completed as soon as possible."

New York Times: "President Obama will cut short his Martha’s Vineyard vacation because of Hurricane Irene and return Friday night, as he urged Americans along the Eastern Seaboard to take precautions against the potentially 'historic hurricane' making its way toward the coast this weekend." See his statement above. ...

... Weather Channel: "Hurricane Irene is likely to be the most impactful hurricane to hit the East Coast in at least several decades! The latest computer model guidance confirms this extraordinary threat and the first hurricane warnings and hurricane watches have been issued for the East Coast." ...

     ... Update: "As Hurricane Irene bears down on the U.S. East Coast, its inital rain bands are already rotating into the Carolinas bringing intense rain squalls complete with gusty winds." ...

     ... New York Times Update: "Hurricane Irene was starting to spray the North Carolina coast early Friday afternoon as it headed for a destructive march up the Eastern Seaboard in an unusually broad path that could affect 55 million people."

AP: "A car laden with explosives detonated outside the United Nations' main office in Nigeria's capital Friday, flattening one wing of the building and killing an undetermined number of people."

Al Jazeera: "Rebel reinforcements have streamed into the Libyan capital, Tripoli, to join in the fight against Muammar Gaddafi loyalists, who are putting up strong resistance in some pockets of the city. Fighters from the port city of Misrata have joined fellow rebels who spearheaded the weekend assault that saw the Libyan capital swiftly overrun and Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound falling to the rebels." ...

... Al Jazeera's liveblog on Libya is here.

AP: "World stock markets were unsteady on Friday as jittery investors waited to see whether Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke would promise new steps to help the U.S. economy ward off another recession. Bernanke is due to deliver a highly anticipated speech at a conference later Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming." CW Note: see Krugman's column, linked in the Commentariat, on Bernanke's anticipated speech. ...

     ... No Surprises, No Nothin'. New York Times Update: "The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Friday that the economy is recovering and the nation’s long-term prospects remained strong, an upbeat assessment that offered little indication of any plans for additional measures to boost short-term growth. ...

     ... Update: the Times story has a new lede: "The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Friday that the political battle this summer over the federal government’s borrowing and spending had disrupted financial markets 'and probably the economy as well.'”

     ... NEW. Here's the text of Bernanke's speech, provided by the Federal Reserve.

New York Times: "The National Labor Relations Board issued new regulations on Thursday that require companies to put posters on their bulletin boards that inform employees about their rights to unionize under federal law.... Noting that many workers are unaware of these rights, the board said the new regulations are aimed at making it easier for workers to exercise their rights....  under the National Labor Relations Act, which sets rules for unionization efforts.... Business groups were quick to criticize the new regulations, which they said were part of the board’s pro-union tilt under President Obama." CW: Does this sound to you like a rule a Republican-appointed NLRB would issue. It's another reason for progressives to vote for Obama.

New York Times: "In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent [Ali Soufan] who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.... Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book ... seem hard to explain on security grounds. Among them ... is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web."