;)
The Commentariat -- Feb. 7, 2013
Travis Waldron of Think Progress: to avert the impending sequester, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is introducing a bill that would balance spending cuts with revenue increases. CW: It's the only sensible proposal out there, which means it's never going to happen. ...
... This chart, which the CPC produced, shows what's happened so far:
... Greg Sargent: "Even if the parties reach a deal in the third round of deficit reduction to avert the sequester with something approaching an equivalent sum of spending cuts and new revenues, the overall deficit reduction balance would still be heavily lopsided towards Republicans. Yet they continue to insist on resolving round three only through cuts, anyway." ...
... Digby: "... at some point it would be nice if the president didn't open every negotiation, as he did again yesterday, by offering up a proposal that is, even if it's taken at face value with no further discussion, a GOP wet dream. He gives them a mile before the game has even started.... Since Democrats control one house of congress and the presidency, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that it would be this lopsided if the Democrats weren't pretty much on the same page."
President Obama nominates Sally Jewell to be Secretary of the Interior:
Vice President Biden swears in John Kerry as Secretary of State (again):
Annie-Rose Strasser of Think Progress: when you stop receiving mail on Saturdays, think of Congress. It is their incompetence that caused the USPS to have to make severe cutbacks. "An analysis in July showed that the USPS, without [an unnecessarily over-funded] pension requirement [imposed by Congress, the Post Office] would have a $1.5 billion surplus." ...
... Actually, it's worse than Strasser lets on. John Tierney, writing in Salon, details the way the Cowardly Congress has been undermining the USPS for decades, ever since it pretended to make the Post Office an autonomous agency. "... when I see Postmaster General [Patrick] Donahue hold a press conference to announce that he intends to eliminate Saturday mail delivery, I cheer him on. He's aware that he probably doesn't have the legal authority to take this step without congressional approval. He probably wanted to stir up a fuss and get the public engaged on all this. After all, efforts to fix the Postal Service's main problems have been kicking around Capitol Hill for many months, with the House of Representatives failing to take any action."
Michael Shear & Scott Shane of the New York Times: "The White House on Wednesday directed the Justice Department to release to the two Congressional Intelligence Committees classified documents discussing the legal justification for killing, by drone strikes and other means, American citizens abroad who are considered terrorists.... The decision to release the legal memo to the Intelligence Committees came under pressure...." ...
... New York Times Editors: "John Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser most responsible for the program, faces a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday as President Obama's nominee as C.I.A. director. He should be questioned closely about the strikes: their purpose, legal justification and relationship to broader American foreign policy aims." ...
... ** C-SPAN will carry the Brennan hearings live, beginning at 2:30 pm ET. ...
... Lindsey Likes Barack. Ginger Gibson of Politico: "Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will offer a resolution next week commending President Barack Obama's use of drones and the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. 'Every member of Congress needs to get on board,' Graham said. 'It's not fair to the president to let him, leave him out there alone quite frankly. He's getting hit from libertarians and the left...,' Graham added.... Graham said the resolution will allow for a debate about who the nation is at war with and what proper action during times of war is." ...
... Alex Pareene of Salon: "And now you know, officially, that it’s awful, because Lindsey Graham is for it." ...
... Stephen Marche of Esquire: "... what the Obama administration is doing with their legal defense of targeted killing ... [is making] the president into a sovereign. Their language hides this basic fact: The president now gets to decide when the law doesn't apply.... Tens of millions of people are ferociously defending the Second Amendment..., and yet they utter not one peep when its basic principles are shaken to their foundation. And let's be honest about why the right doesn't attack Obama for this outrageous violation of the founding principles of the country: They don't want to look weak, and they think that it only affects people they don't mind seeing die anyway." ...
... Ian Millhiser & Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress write a thoughtful piece on the "white paper" NBC uncovered that provides a legal excuse justification for killing Americans suspected of being terrorists. They suggest 5 ways to rein in presidential powers in this regard. ...
... Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker on "what we don't know about drones": "The New America study found that between 2004 and 2010, the U.S. carried out a hundred and fourteen strikes, which the study's authors estimated killed between eight hundred and thirty and twelve hundred and ten people. Of those, the study found, between five hundred and fifty and eight hundred and fifty -- roughly two-thirds -- were probably militants." ...
... AND, as Al Jazeera reports, "a new report Living under drones released by human rights researchers at Stanford and New York universities says ... that the number of 'high-level' targets killed as a percentage of total casualties stands at two per cent." With video. CW: it's worth noting that the two reports -- Filkins' & the Stanford-NYU report rely on the same data.
... Colin Moynihan of the New York Times: "The Obama administration on Wednesday urged a federal appeals court to overturn a sweeping ruling by a district judge that blocked the government from enforcing a statute related to the indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects. Appearing before a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, Robert M. Loeb, a Justice Department lawyer, said a lawsuit challenging the statute should be dismissed because those who brought it -- including a former reporter for The New York Times, Christopher Hedges, who interacts with terrorist groups for his reporting, and several supporters of the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks -- had no real-world risk of being detained."
William Saletan of Slate: in the past two weeks the NRA has come up with eight "pathetic excuses" to oppose universal background checks. Saletan has the rundown.
Pretend President Rubio to Deliver Response to SOTU. Sarah Wheaton of the New York Times: "Senator Marco Rubio will give the Republicans' response to the State of the Union address, party leaders announced on Wednesday. Mr. Rubio ... will deliver his speech in both English and Spanish, according to a news release from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, after President Obama appears before Congress on Tuesday."
It turns out it is not an inaccurate slur to say, "Most Republicans are racists." According to Tom Edsall, writing in the New York Times, an academic study found that 79 percent of Republicans manifest "racial resentment." Here's something I didn't know: 72 percent of voters in the 2012 presidential election were white. That would mean, I reckon, that the percentage of white voters during off-years is even greater.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg: "... documents [filed in a lawsuit] reveal that JPMorgan, as well as two firms the bank acquired during the credit crisis, Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, flouted quality controls and ignored problems, sometimes hiding them entirely, in a quest for profit."
E. J. Dionne squints & sees a thin silver lining in Eric Cantor's speech. ...
... BECAUSE, as Dionne points out, contra Cantor's language about helping the middle class, out there in the hinterland, conservative Republican governors like Sam Brownback of Kansas & Bobby Stupid-Party Jindal of Louisiana are putting into practice a "Red State Model" of cutting taxes & services (& making taxes more regressive) which they claims will "spur economic growth." (The linked site is a firewalled Wall Street Journal story; if you can't get there from here, Google <wall street journal red state model>.
What About Bob? Carol Leonig & Jerry Markon of the Washington Post: "Sen. Robert Menendez [D-N.J.] raised concerns with top federal health-care officials twice in recent years about their finding that a Florida eye doctor -- a close friend and major campaign donor -- had overbilled the government by $8.9 million for care at his clinic, Menendez aides said Wednesday.... [Dr. Salomon] Melgen came to the attention of fraud investigators amid complaints from other local eye doctors alleging that his treatments were often unnecessary, a waste of money and sometimes harmful to patients' eyesight, the two former federal officials and several doctors said. CW: what I think puts Menendez on particularly shaky ground is that Melgen is not a constituent; Menendez could probably justify "constituent service," but the Menendez-Melgen Mutual Beneficial Society sounds is just an old-fashioned bribery arrangement.
Local News
Josh Israel of Think Progress: "Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William Howell (R) killed the Inauguration Day sneak attack by Senate Republicans who hoped to pass a massive mid-decade gerrymander. Howell ruled that the Senate's amendment to a House bill making minor technical corrections to the House legislative maps ... was a 'vast rewrite' and would 'stray dramatically' from the legislation's original purpose.... Virginia Senate Republican Leader Tommy Norment blasted Howell's ruling Wednesday, saying: '... The Virginia Senate Republican Caucus remains committed to correcting the egregious hyperpartisan [2011] gerrymander that has resulted in the current tortuously drawn Senate districts.' The 'hyperpartisan' maps passed on a 32-5 bipartisan vote in 2011, with Norment voting for the maps."
Going Transvaginal. Jillian Rayfield of Salon: "A Republican legislator in Michigan has proposed legislation that would require women to go through an invasive procedure known as a transvaginal ultrasound before they could get an abortion. The bill, which was introduced by Republican state Rep. Joel Johnson and co-sponsored by 22 other lawmakers (including two Democrats), requires the 'performance of a diagnostic ultrasound examination of the fetus at least two hours before an abortion is performed.' ... NARAL Pro-Choice America grades [Michigan] an 'F'), and Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has recently signed into law a slew of measures that generally increase restrictions on abortions."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Eddie Ray Routh, accused of killing Chris Kyle, the author of 'American Sniper,' had been released from a hospital over his parents' objections just days before the shooting, his lawyers said."
New York Times: "An insurance company that paid Lance Armstrong millions of dollars in bonuses for winning the Tour de France sued him Thursday in a Dallas court, seeking its money back because Armstrong was stripped of his Tour titles and admitted using performance-enhancing drugs for all seven of his Tour victories."
AP: "A blizzard of potentially historic proportions threatened to strike the Northeast with a vengeance Friday, with up to 2 feet of snow feared along the densely populated Interstate 95 corridor from the New York City area to Boston and beyond. From Pennsylvania to Maine, people rushed to stock up on food, shovels and other supplies, and road crews readied salt and sand, halfway through what had been a merciful winter. Before the first snowflake had even fallen, Boston, Providence, R.I., Hartford, Conn., and other New England cities canceled school Friday, and airlines scratched more than 1,700 flights, with the disruptions certain to ripple across the U.S."
AP: "A fired police officer who threatened to bring 'warfare' to the Los Angeles Police Department went on a shooting rampage that left a policeman and two others dead and set off an extraordinary manhunt Thursday that put Southern California on edge, led hair-trigger officers to mistakenly shoot innocent citizens and forced police to guard their own. The search for Christopher Dorner had three states and Mexico on alert before shifting Thursday afternoon to the snowy mountains around Big Bear Lake, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, where police found his burned-out pickup truck." ...
... The Los Angeles Times story is here with links to related stories. The paper has a firewall, perhaps with a 5-article limit.
New York Times: "Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told Congress on Thursday that the Pentagon had supported a plan to arm Syrian rebels that was developed last year by David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director at the time, and backed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then serving as Secretary of State.... The White House rebuffed the plan, rejecting the advice of most of the key members of Mr. Obama's national security team. The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions that as the fighting in Syria raged last summer, Mr. Petraeus developed the plan, which ... called for vetting rebels and training fighters who would be supplied with weapons."
AP: "President Barack Obama is promoting his second-term agenda to House Democrats, eager to keep them unified as a bulwark against a Republican majority on issues as diverse as the economy, immigration and guns. Obama was meeting with Democratic lawmakers Thursday during their retreat in Lansdowne, Va., a day after he held a closed-door session with Senate Democrats at their off-campus conference in Annapolis, Md."
Washington Post: "The shooter of an unarmed security guard at the Family Research Council headquarters last summer was on a mission to target organizations he viewed as anti-gay, and he obtained a gun days before he tried to carry out a plan to kill 'as many people as possible,' according to newly disclosed court documents."
New York Times: "The United States blacklisted several organizations in Iran on Wednesday, widening the American effort to pressure the government over its nuclear program and human rights abuses." ...
... AP: "Iran's supreme leader Thursday strongly rejected proposals for direct talks with the United States, effectively quashing suggestions for a breakthrough one-on-one dialogue on the nuclear standoff and potentially other issues."
Reuters: "Yemen's president has asked his Iranian counterpart to stop backing armed groups on its soil after coastguards seized a consignment of missiles and rockets believed sent by the Islamic Republic.... Iran has denied any connection to the weapons, found aboard a vessel off the coast on January 23 in an operation coordinated with the U.S. Navy."
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Reader Comments (13)
I am quite serious. Should one of these skeezy pseudo Christian assault proposals become law, it seems to me there is a good legal argument; forced, foreign object which defined as something other than a penis, invasive, and with no medical need. Sounds like a pretty neat fit for required elements describing a sex crime - specifically forcible penetration with a foreign object. In California (PC 289) has a prison sentence of 3,6 or 8 years.
Proposing these mandated assaults should require sex offender registration by every one of those twisted fucks. I dealt with a lot of bona fide sex offenders in my former life and the people supporting this crap are just as dangerous. Most of the sex offenders KNEW their actions were criminal and didn't attempt to justify their fantasies and perversions with Bible references and dulcet tones.
@Diane: I would agree wholeheartedly with you if it weren't for the makeup of the Supremes. I know that NARAL, et al., have been avoiding taking state cases to court because they are afraid of the outcome. On a Court that is 2/3rds Roman Catholic, & 5/9ths ultra-conservative RC, I don't think women's rights stand a very good chance. (Sotomayor has an iffy record here, too -- which is to say that even if Obama got to appoint another Supreme to replace one of the conservatives, abortion rights advocates would not necessarily face a friendly Court.) Imagine the questions Nino would ask, & Clarence the Porno King would probably demand to see a demo of the "procedure."
Meanwhile, I see by the reliable Wikipedia that 4 of the 6 justices of the Michigan Supreme Court are Republicans. The 7th seat is currently vacant, so Rick Snyder gets to fill that till the next general election. "As of the 2012 election, the court is headed by a 4-3 conservative Republican majority, with Robert P. Young, Jr. serving as Chief Justice. The announced resignation of Justice Diane Hathaway on January 21, 2013, is likely to create a further imbalance."
It looks to me as if women in general, & poor women living in GOP-dominated states in particular, are in for another bad decade.
Marie
Re: USPO woes. Buried early yesterday (Feb. 6) in the NYTimes comments following the article on Saturday closures. Yes, I know I repeat myself but the pattern here bears constant and loud repetition.
"So...looks like the vultures are once again nearing the finish line and are about to cross it arms raised in triumph, leaving behind the usual wreckage.
As the article correctly states, the burden of billions in retirement prepayments imposed by Congress, a burden no other agency or private business has to shoulder, is wholly unreasonable, as many of the Congresscritters who wish to sell off the commons to the lowest bidder well knew. Of course, the USPS has other problems to which it should respond, but the the Congress that put the straitjacket on it won't allow it to move.
One wonders when the light will dawn? Private alternatives to public services are not always better, cheaper or more efficient. The private medical insurance mess we've lived through for the last two decades should have taught us something. Now, in our state, where we have privatized liquor sales, liquor is more expensive. Drivers' tests will soon be contracted out at another $100 a pop. And services the Dept of Ecology used to perform for hundreds now cost individual taxpayers thousands.
Yes, the vultures are still circling. They're killing the USPS, eyeing the banquet its carcass will provide.
And they're looking to do the same thing to our schools."
Here's a pretty informative discussion on the infamous "White Paper" and Obama's legal justification for the cold steel shower we've been raining down on people across the world. Watch out, it comes from Aljazeera with their clear bias inviting two American experts and the UN rapporteur on Human Rights leading the investigation into the legality of the US government's drone program.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/02/201326145922846950.html
It'll be extremely interesting to see what the United Nation's report comes up with, although its outcome will be irrelevant to the drone program because we're insulated from any international legal justifications. Grosso modo we can veto any international effort of condemnation. Pretty convenient.
What's to make of the fact that Lindsey Graham supports Obama's drone use? Well considering he doesn't actually have a fucking clue where and how the program operates, this support can only be chalked up in Right Wing World. An extremely important point raised in the linked discussion is the fact that most of our intelligence comes from regional secret service groups from countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. These countries clearly have their own political agendas and they're potentially selling us their assassination wish lists. I'd hope the CIA does their homework and we know (more or less) who's on the receiving end of our lethal drone strikes, but at the end of the day it's the locals that are scraping up the pieces and fabricating the final reports. Without true verification methods, we'll rarely ever know who that anonymous "third combatant" was that got liquidated instantaneously.
As the good Book says: "Bomb onto others as you would like to be bombed upon too"
Regarding the make up of courts around the country it's best not to forget that since Reagan set the all time record for judicial appointments (376), the federal courts have come under increasingly conservative control. During the Clinton and Obama presidencies conservatives in congress have held up appointments for no good reason other than to ensure that wingnut judges held sway.
And wingnut is the right word. Reagan's appointees were all highly conservative and most were probably not incompetent hacks but as the years rolled by any sense of comity or politic or competent choices were tossed aside.
By the time President Alfred E. Neuman began appointing cronies, buddies, and outright hacks to federal benches, the qualifications for such vital positions had dropped from at least a pretense at juridical competence to a pass or fail on conservative ideology and an ability to count to ten without removing their shoes and socks. Some of the individuals presented for confirmation were hardcore partisans, bible beaters, and John Birch types whose clear antipathy toward non-ideological rulings has stamped the United States federal court system with the unmistakeable imprint of the far, hard right.
And this is the gift that keeps on giving because these are lifetime appointments which, in many ways, are more dangerous than the conservatives on the Supreme Court. The Supremes hear a limited number of cases each year. The Reagan/Bush41/Bush43 army of right-wing judges hear tens of thousands of cases while fulfilling the role they have been assigned of forcing the country ever rightward.
And there is extremely little chance that Clinton and Obama appointees can or will exert an equal pull back to the center since few of their choices match the purely partisan, scorched earth ideological bent (yup, that's the word) of the conservatives currently ensconced for life in the federal court system.
In other words, help is not on the way.
Ken,
I think I may have mentioned before that I am a recipient of frequent e-mails carrying messages from the fringe.
One recent teabagger tear involved a vivisectioning of the Post Office for not being as efficient, responsible, and economically successful as Federal Express and UPS and other free market private sector companies.
Pointing out that congress had tied their hands in many ways only stirred up the rabble whose various responses went from accusing me of being socialist scum to denials that congress had anything to do with the Post Office to accusations that it was the Democrats who were trying to keep Republicans from fixing the system because of .....well, who knows why?
It's another example of how conservatives pull the plug on one of their many targets and then complain that they are incompetent because the water is draining out of the tub. It's one of their most frequently used ploys. Knock you down and then invoke some obscure law that imprisons you for sitting on the grass while throwing up their hands and denying any complicity.
Re: turns out that the sky IS falling; I have been against murder by drone since I first heard about it. Surveillance by drone I understand; killing by drone seems to me to be just a way of streamlining due process. I'll wager we'll live to see drones in the skies of America. As to whether or not the drone operators will be conducting video "trials" before carrying out "legal decisions" remains to be seen. I have such little faith that modern life will be an improvement on what we have now.
If death by drone becomes Obama's historic legacy I would not roll over in my grave. In fact death by drone might be the dividing line in the future when the historians define the Republic and the Empire. We rule the skies but gave up heaven.
I don't know if Sister Elephant linked this somewhere where I didn't catch it, if so, my apologies. Four days ago the AP published a huge report about the last decade of our "War on Drugs" that has cost us taxpayers approx. $20 BILLION!
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/03/us-expands-drug-war-latin-america/1887481/
Some highlights of the piece:
"According to State Department and Pentagon officials, stopping drug-trafficking organizations has become a matter of national security because they spread corruption, undermine fledgling democracies and can potentially finance terrorists."
Concerning the faux war on drugs, I'll direct you to the superbly written book "Cocaine Politics" by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. Focusing on the Iran-Contra Affair, they spell out in plain English the historical complicity the US government has had when dealing with drugs and international relations. The constant clash between the CIA and the DEA is particularly revealing. And there's no reason to believe this complicity isn't alive and well today. Just look at the recent banking scandal of HSBC paying a nearly $2 billion fine for laundering drug money.
I think the Vietnam syndrome 'Destroy the village to save it' is well summarized by the Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield, head of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs:
"When the drug war turns bloody, he said, the strategy is working."
Re: the war on drugs. I'm curious to know what impact the legalization--or simple non-criminalization--of pot would have on our outrageously large prison population.
Re: Drone strikes. To me, this isn't black and white, but multiple shades of gray. For instance, much has been made of the targeting of an American citizen. Was that man wishing the United States good will? It appears that he was guilty of treason. Should he have been tried in absentia? If he hadn't been an American citizen, would that have made him a legitimate target? Or are drone strikes never legitimate, no matter what the targets are up to? After all, we invaded Afghanstan to take out Al-Queda.
Re: some ideas about droning; I agree with all of your questions Barbarossa. To expand on the thought; has the concept or definition of war changed? Can you wage war against a religion or a ideology? You were in Vietnam and faced a unknown enemy; don't you think that is some part of the equation we are discussing? "Kill everything that moves" seems to me to be a forerunner of death by drone. Marching Armies facing each other on a defined battlefield may be history. How does a country defend against a unknown threat? I personally believe in the "dragon tooth" theory that says blood spilled is sowing the ground for more blood spilled. Droning to me creates as many enemies as it defeats. I don't know about the rules of engagement in war but I thought in a declared war shooting a enemy without warning was good; shooting him in the back was better. Are we in a state of declared war? If we are; drone away. But if we are not perhaps droning is borderline illegal according to our laws. When do we declare peace? Islamic fundies will not. Until a sense of balance blankets the lands of Mohamed and his followers no longer feel threaten by us I'm afraid peace will not reign. Too bad; we could all use a little peace.
Just finished watching the Senate hearings for Brennan / CIA. He comported himself very well. He has both an earnest and pleasantly bland demeanor. The committee was pretty much lost in a love fest for him. Wyden was tough but fair, Chambliss was his usual not real bright self and Rubio rose to his full capacity: annoying prick. Rubio is sucking up all the fleeting attention that bolsters his high opinion of himself. He spent his 5 minutes attempting to rehabilitate Bush and the torture train and looked quite foolish doing so. He'll be returned to the minority shelf soon, to be taken out when it is beneficial. At the end, Susan Collins got in some snarky crap about hoping Brennan would be the leader of the CIA not the President's buttboy. Brennan was appropriately charming and still managed to get a reference to serving the President into his answer. I guess there is another "classified" session coming. Some of the Senators seemed to be foreshadowing a tougher line of questioning in that venue. Looks like a wrap for Brennan. Probably, Hagel would have done better with Brennan as his coach.
@James Singer. In my work life, I ran the Probation Division (Sacramento) that prepared sentencing reports. At least in CA, individuals using marijuana barely go to jail let alone prison. Marijuana leading to prison has to be heavy weight transport (#s of kilos) and sales, most usually with weapon involvement. Crack cocaine users took up lots of prison space, but that has changed in the last decade.
@james singer + diane
This seems like a good site for prison stats. related to drug possession. The sources are Dept. of Justice papers
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs