The Ledes

Friday, September 6, 2024

CNBC: “The U.S. economy created slightly fewer jobs than expected in August, reflecting a slowing labor market while also clearing the way for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates later this month. Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 142,000 during the month, down from 89,000 in July and below the 161,000 consensus forecast from Dow Jones, according to a report Friday from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

New York Times: “Colin Gray, the father of the 14-year-old accused of killing two teachers and two students at his Georgia high school, was arrested and charged on Thursday with second-degree murder in connection with the state’s deadliest school shooting, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. In addition to two counts of second-degree murder, Mr. Gray, 54, was also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, according to a statement. At a news conference on Thursday night, Chris Hosey, the G.B.I. director, said the charges were 'directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.'” At 5:30 am ET, this is the pinned item in a liveblog. ~~~

     ~~~ CNN's report is here.

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The Ledes

Thursday, September 5, 2024

CNBC: “Private sector payrolls grew at the weakest pace in more than 3½ years in August, providing yet another sign of a deteriorating labor market, according to ADP. Companies hired just 99,000 workers for the month, less than the downwardly revised 111,000 in July and below the Dow Jones consensus forecast for 140,000. August was the weakest month for job growth since January 2021, according to data from the payrolls processing firm. 'The job market’s downward drift brought us to slower-than-normal hiring after two years of outsized growth,' ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, said. The report corroborates multiple data points recently that show hiring has slowed considerably from its blistering pace following the Covid outbreak in early 2020.”

The New York Times' live updates of developments in the Georgia school massacre are here, a horrifying ritual which we experience here in the U.S. to kick off each new School Shooting Year. “A 14-year-old student opened fire at his Georgia high school on Wednesday, killing two students and two teachers before surrendering to school resource officers, according to the authorities, who said the suspect would be charged with murder.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I heard Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) speak during a press conference. Kemp is often glorified as one of the most moderate, reasonable GOP elected public officials. When asked a question I did not hear, Kemp responded, "Now is not the time to talk about politics." As you know, this is a statement that is part of the mass shooting ritual. It translates, "Our guns-for-all policy is so untenable that I dare not express it lest I be tarred and feathered -- or worse -- by grieving families." ~~~

~~~ Washington Post: “Police identified the suspect as Colt Gray, a student who attracted the attention of federal investigators more than a year ago, when they began receiving anonymous tips about someone threatening a school shooting. The FBI referred the reports to local authorities, whose investigations led them to interview Gray and his father. The father told police that he had hunting guns in the house, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them. Gray denied making the online threats, the FBI said, but officials still alerted area schools about him.” ~~~ 

     ~~~ Marie: I heard on CNN that the reason authorities lost track of Colt was that his family moved counties, and the local authorities who first learned of the threats apparently did not share the information with law enforcement officials in Barrow County, where Wednesday's mass school shooting occurred. If you were a parent of a child who has so alarmed law enforcement that they came around to your house to question you and the child about his plans to massacre people, wouldn't you do something?: talk to him, get the kid professional counseling, remove guns and other lethal weapons from the house, etc.

Help!

To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, but Akhilleus found this new one that he says is easy to use.

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Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass.

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Tuesday
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The Commentariat -- Feb. 19, 2014

Internal links removed.

Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: "President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase earnings for 16.5 million low-wage Americans but cost the nation about 500,000 jobs, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday.... The CBO warned that raising the minimum wage could also cause employers to lay off low-wage workers or hire fewer of them.... The CBO acknowledged that its calculation is an estimate and said actual job losses could range from 'very slight' to as many as 1 million positions.... In a conference call with reporters,White House chief economist Jason Furman pushed back hard against the CBO's conclusions, saying its 'estimates do not reflect the overall consensus view of economists, who have said the minimum wage would have little or no impact on employment.' ... 'Whether it's Obamacare, a minimum-wage hike or a trillion-dollar stimulus bill charged to the nation's credit card, the bottom line is the president's big-government experiment kills jobs,' said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.)." ...

... Here's an overview of the CBO report & a link to the report. ...

... Laura Clawson of Daily Kos: "The Republican response to this CBO report ... relies on ignoring the many positive effects it predicts for a minimum wage increase while highlighting the major point on which it departs from economic consensus. As Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman pointed out on a White House media call, this is not, like budget estimates, a case where the CBO is the main authority in the field. We know stuff about this, because it's been widely studied, and there are other authoritative voices.... Republicans are ignoring -- or denying -- the fact that the CBO's 0.3 percent employment decrease estimate contradicts decades of economic research finding -- not predicting, but looking at cases where the minimum wage is actually raised and finding -- that employment doesn't decline in any meaningful way as a result of minimum wage increases. "

Peter Baker & Carol Davenport of the New York Times: "President Obama took another step to curb greenhouse gas pollution on Tuesday without waiting for Congress as he directed his administration to develop new regulations to reduce carbon emissions from the heavy-duty trucks that transport the nation's goods. Appearing in a grocery chain truck bay in this Washington suburb, the president said the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency would draft new fuel economy standards for trucks by March 2015 so that they could be completed a year after that...":

Peter Baker & Elisabeth Malkin of the New York Times: "President Obama travels to Mexico on Wednesday for a brief but politically fraught visit aimed at forging closer trade ties with America's two closest neighbors even as his party's leaders back home have vowed to undercut his efforts.... The whirlwind visit -- he will return to Washington on Wednesday evening without staying the night -- will offer Mr. Obama a chance to reassure his counterparts about his capacity to deliver at a time when he faces significant hurdles at home. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leaders in Congress, oppose legislation giving him authority similar to that of his predecessors to negotiate trade deals." ...

... Dana Milbank: "There's probably nothing that Obama could do in these midterm elections to match the [Koch brothers]' advantage. But at least giving it a try might prove more productive than his combination of foreign jaunts and unremarkable domestic speeches...." ...

... New York Times Editors: "The best thing the I.R.S. can do is to ignore both [conservative & liberal groups] and proceed swiftly ahead [with its modest plan to crack down on tax code abuse], making its proposed rules even stronger to squeeze the influence of money out of politics.... Secret money has become the scourge of the political system and needs to be eliminated regardless of the inconvenience to nonprofit groups, whatever their ideology. Republicans have blocked Congress from dealing with the problem, so now it is up to the I.R.S. to do its job." ...

... David Firestone of the New York Times: "Those who are worried about man-made climate change might be tempted to welcome the news that Tom Steyer, a Democratic billionaire, will spend $100 million this year to fight it.... But ... Mr. Steyer's donation ... will make plutocracy politics even worse. Big money pollutes politics whether it comes from the Koch brothers, with a hard-edged agenda against environmental or financial regulation, or from Mr. Steyer and his liberal friends. The cacophony of attack ads, with their dire warnings and scary music, prompt many people to just hit the mute button or tune out entirely. You can't fight pollution with more pollution."

Ellen Nakashima & Josh Hicks of the Washington Post: "The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.... But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized."

Burgess Everett of Politico: "A group of Senate Republicans is meeting quietly to plot an unusual strategy: passing a top Democratic priority. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has vowed to press the GOP on unemployment benefits -- forcing them to keep taking votes on a bill to extend aid to the long-term unemployed. But Republicans have rejected it twice since the program expired on Dec. 28. Sens. Dan Coats of Indiana, Rob Portman of Ohio, Dean Heller of Nevada and Susan Collins of Maine want a deal that could bring the Democratic drumbeat to an end. They gathered last week to plan how to revisit the cause when the Senate returns next week, hoping they can get Democrats to agree to their policy changes and finally move the red-hot issue off the Senate's plate."

$10.10 Is Not Enough. Teresa Tritch of the New York Times: "A higher minimum wage is needed and would help -- and for those reasons, a lift to $10.10 by 2016 is worthy of support. But the recommended amount is more a political calculation than an economic one. It is enough to embarrass Republicans for not going along, but not enough to risk alienating business constituents (with the notable exception of the notoriously low-paying restaurant industry.)"

Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Although the [Obama] administration expects many [ACA] enrollees to make their own way to the government's health care website or the state exchanges, [a] door-to-door effort [based on the model of Obama's voter-turnout machines] is aimed at people without computers, email addresses or the wherewithal to show up at health fairs and other enrollment events at Kmarts or grocery stores. Officials say the labor-intensive targeting program, while frustrating, could eventually add thousands of people to the rolls of the insured."

Twists of Anti-ObamaCare Obsession. Steve Benen: Republicans are now arguing that "job-lock" -- stuck in your job because to leave or change jobs would be financially devastating -- is a good thing.

New Tricks Just Like the Old Tricks. Jessica Silver-Greenberg & Michael Corkery of the New York Times: "A growing number of homeowners trying to avert foreclosure are confronting problems on a new front as the mortgage industry undergoes a seismic shift. Shoddy paperwork, erroneous fees and wrongful evictions -- the same abuses that dogged the nation's largest banks and led to a $26 billion settlement with federal authorities in 2012 -- are now cropping up among the specialty firms that collect mortgage payments, according to dozens of foreclosure lawsuits and interviews with borrowers, federal and state regulators and housing lawyers."

Chuck Schumer, Paragon of Probity. Especially When He Gets Caught. Rachel Abrams of the New York Times: "Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, has recused himself from reviewing Comcast's agreement to buy Time Warner Cable after the revelation that his brother, the lawyer Robert Schumer, worked on the deal. Mr. Schumer, who sits on the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, praised the merger of the country's two largest cable giants in a statement on his website on Thursday. On Friday, the magazine American Lawyer named Robert Schumer of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison its 'dealmaker of the week' for his work on the transaction."

An Historian & a Newspaper Columnist Walk into a Bar.... And Maureen Dowd comes out of it with a decent column: "... just as L.B.J. will always be yoked to Vietnam and McNamara, 43 will always be yoked to his careless misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and to Cheney. W. should know: Some landscapes cannot be painted over."

Alex Seitz-Wald of the National Journal reminds us how the Tea Party & Chicken-in-Chief John Boehner saved the Democratic Party from a split as wide as the Republicans' is now.

Igor Bobic of TPM: "President Barack Obama offered a mea culpa to an art professor last week after he said that 'folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.' Speaking at a January event on manufacturing and the economy in Wisconsin, Obama quickly qualified his remark by noting that 'there's nothing wrong with history. I love art history.' Professor Ann Collins Johns at the University of Texas at Austin took the opportunity to remind the President of art history's virtues via the White House website." ...

     ... CW: I guess my presidential apology -- which would have been a response to my complaint that Obama unfairly dissed bloggers (in October 2013) -- got lost in the mail:

Survival of the Dumbest. A Lowly Newt Positively Disproves Darwinian Theory. Rebecca Shabad of the Hill: "Newt Gingrich tweeted on Monday calling for Secretary of State John Kerry to resign because of Kerry's recent comments on climate change.... On Sunday, Kerry warned in a speech in Indonesia that climate change is a 'weapon of mass destruction' and is just as much of a threat as terrorism and poverty.... When Gingrich ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, he said global warming 'hasn't been totally proven.' Last month, on CNN's 'Crossfire,' which he co-hosts, Gingrich said the planet was warmer during the age of dinosaurs."

Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch: Ted Cruz sez marriage equality is "inconsistent with the Constitution" and "heartbreaking." Also, "they" (being judges of both parties & the Obama administration) are using "brute power" to "subvert our democratic system":

Rebecca Traister of the New Republic: "It's felt like an awfully retro week in American politics. In Texas, gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis hashed out 20-year-old details of her former marriage in a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile, while in Washington, wannabe presidential candidate Rand Paul diligently stirred a pot of about the same vintage, with comments about the 1990s marital troubles of his imagined future rival, Hillary Clinton.... [The] resurgence [of these stories] speaks not to some weird nostalgia for the '90s, but rather to a story without beginning or end: the way that women's lives are always -- have always been -- measured, weighed and judged via metrics of personal-public trade-off."

CW: See the update to my post on Joe the Plumber. To add irony to hypocrisy, it seems Joe would not if gotten his job at Chrysler but for the 2008 auto bailout, opposed by most Republicans.

Here is something I love about Paul Krugman. It is an argument I've been making for decades & one I often lost to my husband, whose writing was, well, abstruse.

Congressional Races

Matt Friedman of the Star-Ledger: "U.S. Rep. Rush Holt [D] -- a physicist who championed liberal causes but perhaps earned his greatest measure of fame by vanquishing a supercomputer in a round of 'Jeopardy!' -- said [Tuesday] he would not seek another term in November. In his surprise announcement, the 65-year-old Holt said he was leaving Congress for a 'variety of reasons, personal and professional, all of them positive and optimistic.'" CW: Too bad. Holt is one of the good ones.

Abby Livingston of Roll Call: "Former Rep. Joe Baca, D-Calif., apologized Tuesday for calling retiring Rep. Gloria Negrete McLeod a 'bimbo' earlier in the day. Reacting to the fellow California Democrat's retirement announcement to The Hill newspaper, Baca described her as a 'bimbo' and said outside interests were again spending money in a race he is running. But in a phone call to CQ Roll Call late Tuesday afternoon, Baca, who is running for the open 31st District and struggling to raise money, backtracked." CW: Would it be all right if I called Baca a "butthead"? Yeah, I think so.

Beyond the Beltway ...

... Or, Meet Your Honorable GOP Presidential Hopefuls

Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: "About 27,000 emails from the computers of one of Gov. Scott Walker's former top aides will be unsealed at 9 a.m. Wednesday, opening a view into a secret investigation that resulted in six convictions. Also being unsealed are 434 pages of other documents related to the 2012 conviction of Kelly Rindfleisch, who served as Walker's deputy chief of staff when Walker was Milwaukee County executive.... Rindfleisch was charged as part of a wide-ranging John Doe investigation led by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm.... Chisholm closed that probe in March 2013. But seven months earlier, he opened a second John Doe investigation, looking into campaign spending and fundraising in recall elections. That second investigation is ongoing, and Rindfleisch is also caught up in that one." ...

... Rosalind Helderman of the Washington Post: "Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has been eyeing a 2016 presidential run since his battles with labor unions made him a Republican star, is in the midst of dealing with the fallout of two criminal investigations at home that could complicate his move to the national stage.... Even if Walker escapes the e-mail release unscathed, he faces an additional inquiry from state prosecutors, who are believed to be looking into whether his successful 2012 recall campaign illegally coordinated with independent conservative groups."

Melissa Hayes of the Bergen Record: Governor Christie's former campaign manager and deputy chief of staff will not provide documents to a state legislative panel investigating the George Washington Bridge lane closures. Attorneys for both Bill Stepien, Christie's two-time campaign manager, and Bridget Anne Kelly, one of the governor's top aides, have told the New Jersey Select Committee on Investigation that their clients will not be turning over any documents. Tuesday was the new deadline set by the committee after it met last week and voted down party lines to compel both Stepien and Kelly to produce documents finding their constitutional arguments 'invalid' and the documents they hold 'necessary' and 'relevant' to the investigation. Both had invoked their constitutional rights against self-incrimination in declining to produce documents by Feb. 3."

All Shook Up. Bryan Walsh of Time: Something is causing a high increase in the number of earthquakes in Oklahoma. Some say it's fracking; others say it's the method of high-pressure wastewater disposal which oil & gas drilling companies use. (The state's seismologist, not surprisingly, thinks the cause might be natural. Uh-huh.) ...

... Charles Pierce: "Once again, as it is on so many other issues, it is out in the states where environmental issues are most directly being either ignored, or actively exacerbated, largely because state governments are cheaper and easier to buy. (Here's a nice story about the lagoons of pig shit currently afflicting Iowa.) There's a straight line to be drawn from unregulated exploding fertilizer plants in Texas to the decision by West Virginia's government to turn their already poisoned state into a repository for the toxic byproduct of an entirely new form of dirty energy extraction."

Beyond the Borders

Alan Travis of the Guardian: "Three high court judges have dismissed a challenge that David Miranda, the partner of the former Guardian journalist, Glenn Greenwald, was unlawfully detained under counter-terrorism powers for nine hours at Heathrow airport last August. The judges accepted that Miranda's detention and the seizure of computer material was 'an indirect interference with press freedom' but said this was justified by legitimate and 'very pressing' interests of national security."

Senate Race 2014

Natalie Villacorta of Politico: "Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown has parted ways with Fox News, fueling further suggestion that he is seriously considering a Senate run in New Hampshire."

Presidential Race 2016

Katie Glueck of Politico: Rand Paul pulls on some cowboy boots & steps into Ted Cruz territory.

News Ledes

New York Times: "Tony Blair is the latest high-profile person to surface in the British phone-hacking trial, a high-stakes criminal prosecution of shadowy practices at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World tabloid. Mr. Blair, the former prime minister..., offered to act as an 'unofficial adviser' to Mr. Murdoch and to Rebekah Brooks, the former head of Mr. Murdoch's British newspaper empire, who is one of eight defendants in the case and is expected to give evidence for the first time on Thursday."

Washington Post: "Members of the performance-art group Pussy Riot were attacked on a public plaza Wednesday by Cossacks brandishing whips and discharging pepper spray, a day after police picked them up and held them for nearly four hours without charges."

New York Times: "Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday that 25 people had been killed after hundreds of riot police officers advanced on antigovernment demonstrators mounting a desperate act of defiance in what remained of their all-but-conquered encampment on Independence Square in Kiev.... The [U.S.] State Department issued an urgent warning late Tuesday telling American citizens in Ukraine to avoid all protests, keep a low profile and remain indoors at night while the clashes continue." ...

     ... Update: "The security authorities in Ukraine offered the first indication on Wednesday that the deadly political violence afflicting Kiev had spread far beyond the capital, announcing a crackdown on what the Interior Ministry called 'extremist groups' that had burned down buildings and seized weapons nationwide." ...

     ... Washington Post Update: " With signs of turmoil evident within his government, President Viktor Yanukovych met with opposition political leaders Wednesday evening and announced that they had reached an agreement on a truce to end the fighting that broke out Tuesday and has left 26 dead. The two sides also said they agreed to resume negotiations toward a settlement."

Contributor Julie recommends this video, published Feb. 14, on the situation in Venezuela:

Reuters: "Venezuelan security forces arrested opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez on Tuesday on charges of fomenting unrest that has killed at least four people, bringing tens of thousands of angry supporters onto the streets of Caracas. Crowds of white-clad protesters stood in the way of the vehicle carrying the 42-year-old Harvard-educated economist after he made a defiant speech, said an emotional farewell to his family, and gave himself up to soldiers."

Guardian: "More than 500 Indian migrant workers have died in Qatar since January 2012, revealing for the first time the shocking scale of death toll among those building the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup."

Comments Off

Reader Comments (13)

In the new Broadway play with Bryan Cranston as L.B.J., “All The Way,” there’s a scene where ..."McNamara pushes Johnson to order “retaliatory” airstrikes after the Potemkin Gulf of Tonkin. Hubert Humphrey tries to slow them down, noting that they should not strike back “for an attack which may or may not have happened,” but Johnson, prodded by McNamara, frets about how Barry Goldwater would slam him if he went “soft on the military."

And thus it is and has (almost) always been! Competitive macho rules the day; common sense holds no sway. In fact, this almost always has been true, and sadly under-reported in the political realm--where war and aggression are worshipped--so perhaps, I should say, "common sense stayed in its cold, dead grave."

I worked in the Johnson administration--for John Gardner, who was Secy. of HEW (now HHS). He was a decent and thoughtful man, who could not abide Johnson's war mentality. So.....he resigned in 1968, as did I, after it became obvious that LBJ was in a Vietnam "war trance," from which he would never emerge.

Gardner went on to head the Urban Coalition and to found Common Cause in 1970. His only regret about working for LBJ was that the President became so sidetracked by Vietnam that he lost focus on his social agenda, thereby making further progress impossible. I agree with Johnson's daughter, Luci, that we should not forget LBJ's amazing savvy and persistence in getting Civil Rights legislation passed. How sad that he had such a "small" consciousness, and was so entranced with power, war and winning! What I call the "small penis complex." (Must say that is just an expression: I have no evidence!) I do believe that he died of a broken heart.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterKate Madison

@Kate: always thought that Johnson's need to prove his manly, military zeal was such a tragedy. Here was a man that wanted to change our society into something better, something for everyone in equal measure and he succumbed to the drums of war and did irrefutable damage to our country and to his own heart.

Kevin Roose published this piece in New York Magazine in which he describes his crashing a Wall Street Secret Society party. He gives us details with recordings of the Titans of Wall street revealing their greed, distain, and overall superiority. Frank Underwood would have been taking notes, fer sure, unless he consumed as much booze as it sounds these members apparently did. Some pretty raunchy jokes to boot.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe

Kate,

I wonder if Bryan Cranston's recent sojourn as mild mannered high school chemistry teacher Walter White who becomes the violent drug kingpin Heisenberg (in the series Breaking Bad) in any way informed his personification of LBJ. Both Walter White and LBJ started with good intentions but were pulled into dangerous worlds filled with corrupt individuals and were fatally contaminated with the will to power.

Someone somewhere must have written something about the dick measuring element that war cultivates (or vice versa). And I don't know if there's something about presidents who served vs. those who didn't. LBJ was in the navy for all of 6 months during WWII and only once saw any kind of action (as an observer on a flight near the war zone). Nixon was in the Navy a lot longer but was mostly a pencil pusher and manager of a food operation that flipped burgers and handed out cold beer to sailors returning from actual combat, something that caused him no small amount of shame. Bush...well...we don't even have to mention Bush. Or Cheney, chickenhawks of the first order. Reagan hallucinated that he was among the troops that liberated concentration camps in Europe, but he still took plenty of opportunities to encourage and support murderous conflicts in Central and South America.

But most of these guys were either pushed or went running to send others into harm's way to...what? Show how tough they were? Demonstrate their mettle? From fear of dishonoring some warped, bellicose vision of manhood?

At least Walter White knew how corrupt he had become and realized he'd have to pay for it. I can't think about Johnson and the war without conjuring up the image of that David Levine caricature of LBJ showing off his scar, shaped like the outline of Vietnam.


Johnson's scar

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

PD,

I read the Roose piece. A startling peek into the insular world of the vampires who suck the life's blood out of the rest of us. They don't make anything. They don't build anything. They don't contribute to the quality of any life but their own. They're moochers, in ways that the most accomplished welfare cheats could never hope to be.

But perverted moochers who need to tell fag and bitch jokes to reassure themselves of their manliness (while dressed in drag!), and who feel unfairly encumbered by the mere existence of the great unwashed masses whom they feverishly envision milling about outside their Long Island estates with pitchforks and nooses.

If only.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

Marie,

Thanks for the link to Krugman's piece on abstruse writing.

As a grad student, I spent many an irritating hour hacking through the underbrush of articles and tomes dedicated to obscurantist critical theorizing. A particular writer I recall, with an instant headache, one Stephen Heath, a British semiotician, must have been trying to win a contest. His pages had to be read and re-read over and over. Pages? Hell, it was murder just trying to get through a paragraph.

I'll give you an example, from Heath's book "Questions of Cinema".

"The position of realism is the position of intelligibility and the guarantee of intelligibility is the stability, the unity, of the subject; thus narrative appears as an obliteration or covering over of division, symbolic process: 'what distinguishes fiction films is not the "absence" of a special work of the signifier, but its presence in the mode of denegation, and it is well known that this type of presence is one of the strongest there are'."

And if you think that's bad....

"Secondly, inevitably, a broad conception is emerging of what might be the critical role of art, of a practice of cinema, and in terms precisely of a production of contraindications against the fictions of stasis which contain and mask structuring work, in terms of a fracturing of the vision of representation."

Wow. That must have been some killer weed. The really sad thing is that aside from a lot of the gobbledygook, now and then I'd come across some very good points. I just needed a pickaxe to pry them from the tundra of frozen verbiage.

As a grad student, I was told that this was the way to write. I tried. Really I did. But I sucked at it. It was just too much work to bury what you really wanted to say under a canopy of corkscrew constructions and metastasized secondary clauses. That is, if you actually had something to say. One of the granddaddies of the continental critical theory craze that swept through American universities in the 70's, Michel Foucault, actually complained that he wrote like that because he had to. Say what?

This style of writing is what you often come across in academic position papers spat out by the many right-wing (and some left-wing) ideology factories and "think tanks".

So basically, people write like this for one of two reasons:

a.) You don't care about the general public because you're only writing for other people who write like this, or
b.) You don't have a fucking clue what to say in the first place.

It's all about looking through a dark glassly.

Or something.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

Marie,

Thanks for the link to Krugman's piece on abstruse writing.

As a grad student, I spent many an irritating hour hacking through the underbrush of articles and tomes dedicated to obscurantist critical theorizing. A particular writer I recall, with an instant headache, one Stephen Heath, a British semiotician, must have been trying to win a contest. His pages had to be read and re-read over and over. Pages? Hell, it was murder just trying to get through a paragraph.

I'll give you an example, from Heath's book "Questions of Cinema".

"The position of realism is the position of intelligibility and the guarantee of intelligibility is the stability, the unity, of the subject; thus narrative appears as an obliteration or covering over of division, symbolic process: 'what distinguishes fiction films is not the "absence" of a special work of the signifier, but its presence in the mode of denegation, and it is well known that this type of presence is one of the strongest there are'."

And if you think that's bad....

"Secondly, inevitably, a broad conception is emerging of what might be the critical role of art, of a practice of cinema, and in terms precisely of a production of contraindications against the fictions of stasis which contain and mask structuring work, in terms of a fracturing of the vision of representation."

Wow. That must have been some killer weed. The really sad thing is that aside from a lot of the gobbledygook, now and then I'd come across some very good points. I just needed a pickaxe to pry them from the tundra of frozen verbiage.

As a grad student, I was told that this was the way to write. I tried. Really I did. But I sucked at it. It was just too much work to bury what you really wanted to say under a canopy of corkscrew constructions and metastasized secondary clauses. That is, if you actually had something to say. One of the granddaddies of the continental critical theory craze that swept through American universities in the 70's, Michel Foucault, actually complained that he wrote like that because he had to. Say what?

This style of writing is what you often come across in academic position papers spat out by the many right-wing (and some left-wing) ideology factories and "think tanks".

So basically, people write like this for one of two reasons:

a.) You don't care about the general public because you're only writing for other people who write like this, or
b.) You don't have a fucking clue what to say in the first place.

It's all about looking through a dark glassly.

Or something.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

Kate, As happened with Iraq, the flames of Vietnam were fanned not only by political advisors but our news media, including the Paper of Record, pending its mea culpa with the Pentagon Papers. The media were just maintaining the practice begun by Hearst, Pulitzer et al., who tangled up the otherwise thoughtful TR in their web of lies. Nothing new under the sun.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterWhyte Owen

Ak & CW on Prof. K:

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterWhyte Owen

Re: Venezuela

As someone who has traveled to Venezuela many times in the last 25 years, and has friends there, I am quite concerned about recent events. One of my Venezuelan friends lives and works here in Massachusetts and has for 35 years. For the first time in all these years he is not visiting family due to the extreme violence. United States embassy personnel are now required to travel between the Simón Bolívar International Airport and Caracas via armored vehicle, and areas once relatively safe have travel restrictions. My last visit was in 2005, and even then I felt unsafe and had to be aware of my surroundings at all times.

Today I received an email from a friend in Venezuela. He writes, “Venezuela at this moment is under fire.....since Febrero 12 there are protests all around the country, the communist undercover groups are attacking with weapons all students in and everybody, many wounded, killed, tortured detainees, disappeared....today people had seen snipers on top of the buildings....this is crazy”. And, yesterday a friend sent me a link to a video titled “What’s going on in Venezuela in a nutshell”. It was put together by a Venezuelan living in the United States. Here’s the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFS6cP9auDc&feature=youtu.be&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEFS6cP9auDc%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&app=desktop.

As I read about events in Syria and Ukraine, and now Venezuela, I am reminded of a video, “Where in the World is Matt”, that Marie posted a while ago. Most people, like us in the United States, just want the freedom to simply live.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJulie

@Kate: i used to get angry whenever something reminded me of the wasted lives in my unit in VN. No more. I'm just resigned to it, since W did it in Iraq. I was depressed for months over that one.

Your post brought back a memory I can't shake: watching helplessly while a gutshot 20-year old just gave up and died. What for, LBJ? Why? That was in 1968, but it stays with me, and probably will the rest of my life.

Not to mention missing limbs, brain injuries, etc.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterBarbarossa

Can't get my head around the CBO estimate that a result of raising the minimum wage, our revered job creators would lay off half a mil workers. These workers, now, are apparently what keep these job creators afloat. So the job creators will lay the workers off because... and the result will be... We live in a strange fucking world.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJames Singer

@AK: Re: Johnson's scar and your comments. I have written about this before but I fear much of our getting into places we should have never gotten into (how's that for a non-abstuse sentence) stems from pure, unadulterated ignorance (something Walter White wasn't guilty of). Early in 1963 during a NSC meeting the only
person that disagreed with our remaining in Vietnam and the only person who
had any deep experience with that country was Paul Kattenburg, forty one,
who had spent the 1950's in Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer. Now
he had just returned from Saigon where he had gone to inspect as chairman of
the State Dept.'s Vietnam task force. His report was dismal, Diem was
finished,etc., we need to disengage––the whole U.S. policy, he decided, "was
just nonsense." Kattenburg later recalled with considerable bitterness,
"There was not a single person there that knew what he was talking
about...They didn't know Vietnam. They didn't know the past. they had
forgotten their history. They simply didn't understand the identification of
nationalism and communism...I thought, God, we're walking into a major
disaster."
Kattenburg, by the way, was dismissed from the VTF in 1964 largely at the
insistence of Bill Bundy who charged that his pessimism was "a disservice."

And this reminder is relevant to our conversation the other day regarding how we pick our ambassadors. I bet the one in Venezuela is having a few problems, especially if he doesn't speak the language.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe

Just looked up ambassadors in Venezuela: The United States and Venezuela have been without ambassadors in each other's capitals since 2010.

The late President Hugo Chavez accused the US of "imperialism" in Latin America.

In December 2010, he denied a visa to the man appointed to be US ambassador to Caracas, Larry Palmer, over remarks he had made about involvement between the Venezuelan government and Colombian Farc rebels. And now three of our diplomats have been expelled from the country being accused of bribery charges.

Thanks Julie for the information.

February 19, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe
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