;)
The Commentariat -- Jan. 13, 2013
An Extraordinary White House Friday Afternoon News Dump. Tim McDonnell of Mother Jones: "The National Climate Assessment is produced by the US Global Change Research Program, which is tasked with collating climate research from a wide variety of federal agencies and, every few years, distilling it into one major report. The latest, a first draft, is the third such report (the last was in 2009), product of a 1990 law that requires the White House to produce semi-regular updates on climate science to Congress. Today's report echoes the themes of earlier editions, and paints a picture that is all the more grim for being an unsurprising confirmation of the dangers we've come to know all too well." McDonnell lists the report's major findings. ...
... John P. Holdren & Jane Lubchenco explain the purpose of the report on the White House blog. It's all about "expanding the conversation."
... Ben Geman of The Hill: "A major draft federal report concludes that climate change is already affecting U.S. residents through heat waves, droughts and other changes, and warns that temperatures could increase as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit if global carbon emissions keep soaring. The third National Climate Assessment, released Friday, said there's 'unambiguous evidence' that earth is warming, and that climate change over the past 50 years is driven primarily by human activity, especially from burning fossil fuels.
The Eisenhower Presidency, Redux. Maureen Dowd, after dissing a number of the country's most successful female leaders (because that's what she does), Dowd get it right this time in this week's takedown of President Obama: "It's passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plummiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes.... Word from the White House is that the president himself is irritated, and demanding answers about the faces his staff is pushing forward. Unfortunately, he has only a bunch of white guys to offer an explanation of why the picture looks like a bunch of white guys."
I agree with practically everything Ross Douthat writes in his column today. I do.
Daniel Drezner in Foreign Affairs: "During the Cold War, the party of Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Reagan was strongly anticommunist, but these presidents took foreign policy seriously and executed their grand strategies with a healthy degree of tactical flexibility. Since 9/11, however, Republicans have known only one big thing -- the 'global war on terror' -- and have remained stubbornly committed to a narrow militarized approach. Since the fall of Baghdad, moreover, this approach has produced at least as much failure as success, leading the American public to be increasingly skeptical of the bellicosity that now defines the party's foreign policy.... The 2012 election was the nadir of the GOP's decadelong descent.... Since the knee-jerk Republican response has been to call for military action anywhere and everywhere trouble breaks out, the American people have tuned out the GOP's alarmist rhetoric." ...
... It's 'I Like Ike" Day! James Joyner, a self-described Eisenhower Republican, agrees with Drezner. So does Susan Eisenhower: "Ike's granddaughter and a Republican foreign policy leader in her own right, argues that 'the impact of the [Chuck] Hagel nomination could well be about the future of the Republican Party.... The Republican Party is now at a crossroads. Over the last decade moderate Republicans have felt increasingly out of place in its ranks. If the GOP confirms Hagel, it could bolster the idea of a 'big tent' Republican Party. A GOP-led rejection of a Republican war hero with impeccable centrist credentials, however, could well be a fatal blow to that concept, along with some of the party's longest and most successful traditions."
Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit. -- Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department
Now What? ... if we didn't have some history here I might be confident that the administration knows what it's doing. But we do have that history, and you have to fear the worst. -- Paul Krugman, earlier
There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default. Congress needs to do its job. -- Jay Carney, White House press secretary, in a statement
The White House insists that it is absolutely, positively not going to cave or indeed even negotiate over the debt ceiling -- that it rejected the coin option as a gesture of strength, as a way to put the onus for avoiding default entirely on the GOP. -- Paul Krugman, later
Here's Krugman on Bill Moyers' show, which aired Friday:
New York Times Editors: "... prematurely forcing through a COLA cut [in Social Security payments, as the Obama administration apparently plans to do,] would be unnecessary and unwise." Read the whole piece. CW: Krugman may think he's really influential, but once again Obama isn't listening. It looks here as if Obama & Jon Stewart got their economics training at the same school (see Infotainment).
Julia Preston of the New York Times: "President Obama plans to push Congress to move quickly in the coming months on an ambitious overhaul of the immigration system that would include a path to citizenship for most of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, senior administration officials and lawmakers said last week."
First They Cheat You, Then They Cheat You. Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: often when banks make settlements for their own wrongdoing, they reduce their tax liability by deducting the cost of the settlements as business expenses. "Taxpayers, therefore, will likely lighten the banks' loads.... Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, [said] You can be sure the Wall Street banks consider tax consequences in negotiations and the government should, too. Any portion of a settlement that's intended to be a penalty should include language clarifying it isn't deductible.'"
Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog makes the case that James Yeager, the Tennessee guys who threatened to "start killing people" if President Obama expanded gun control, may not get his carry permit back. I hope he's right ...
... BUT I'm with Imani Gandy on this one: "If James Yeager had been Jalal al Yeager or Tyrone Yeager, who wants to wager that the response to his roid tantrum this week would have been vastly different?" ...
... Update: Apparently on the advice of his lawyer, Yeager has decided not to "start killing people," after all. According to his latest video, embedded on the linked Raw Story page, Yeager only plans to kill people when he gets angry. He says it is not time for violent action [against the government]. Perhaps he'll let us know when it is time.
... ** AND that leads to this fascinating read by Prof. Adam Winkler, writing in the Atlantic: "The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership -- and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers -- the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement." ...
... Joel Achenbach, et al., of the Washington Post: "How NRA’s true believers converted a marksmanship group into a mighty gun lobby."
"Don't Just Make a Living; Make a Mark." Robert Hooker of the Tampa Bay Times: "Eugene Patterson, a journalist who crusaded for civil rights in American society and higher standards in America's newsrooms, died Saturday after a long illness. The former editor, chairman and chief executive officer of the Times was 89. During his 41 years in journalism, Mr. Patterson won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, served as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors...." The Tampa Bay Times has more here. The New York Times obituary is here. ...
... Patterson's most famous column, published in the Atlanta Constitution September 16, 1963, was titled "A Flower for the Graves," & is republished here.
John Schwartz of the New York Times: "Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment. An uncle ... said that Mr. Swartz had apparently hanged himself.... At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library." ...
... Digby: "I'm pretty sure that one of the main [reasons for Swartz's suicide] was the fact that he was being pursued with single-minded, Javert-like obsession by the US Justice department over an alleged crime that hurt no one and which was not even being pursued by the alleged victim.... As we've seen with RIAA, the Manning case and Wikileaks, the government seems to be overreacting to 'computer crime' much like the authorities in the Salem Witch trials overreacted to some hysterical teen-age behavior.... We are supposed to be a democracy in which the government works for us, not the commercial enterprises and national security apparatus that apparently has the government obsessively chasing citizens who have the talent and the ideals to expose their crimes and shortcomings. This is a very ugly, very shameful episode." ...
... Taylor Berman of Gawker posts more commentary from Swartz's friends, along the same line.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee toots its own horn. And rightly so. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. Meanwhile, in ...
Right Wing World
Algebra Has a Well-Known Liberal Bias
Algebra Textbook: Distributive Property states that the product of a number and a sum is equal to the sum of the individual products of the addends and the number. That is, a(b + c) = ab + ac.
Eric Bolling of Fox "News": ... some textbooks are pushing the liberal agenda. [Holding up a Scholastic Books algebra worksheet above designed to "give students insight into the distributive property as it applies to multiplication."] Distribute the wealth! Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big ole bag of money, handing some money out.
Kimberly Guilfoyle of Fox "News," responding: My son is in kindergarten.... We're on high alert especially after this inappropriateness.
Constant Weader: Isn't it great that kindergartners are learning algebra?
News Ledes
Washington Post: "U.S. military fighter jets provided backup support to a failed French hostage rescue mission in Somalia, the White House announced Sunday in a rare public acknowledgment of American combat operations in the Horn of Africa. In a letter to Congress, President Obama said U.S. combat aircraft 'provided limited technical support' to French forces late Friday as they attempted to rescue a French spy who had been held captive for more than three years."
Washington Post: "Police in the northern Indian state of Punjab said Sunday that they have arrested seven men in the gang rape of a 29-year-old woman who was traveling alone on a bus, less than four weeks after the brutal rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus created a national outcry about the safety of women in public places."
Reuters: "Japan Airlines Co (JAL) said on Sunday that a Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner jet undergoing checks in Tokyo following a fuel leak at Boston airport last week had leaked fuel during tests earlier in the day."
New York Times: "An Egyptian appeals court on Sunday overturned the life sentence of former President Hosni Mubarak for directing the killing of protesters and ordered a new trial, a ruling that could prolong a politically fraught legal battle over the fate of Egypt's deposed autocrat two years after he was ousted." Al Jazeera story here.
New York Times: "Israeli security forces evicted scores of Palestinian activists before dawn on Sunday from a tent encampment they had set up set up two days earlier in a strategic piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1, east of Jerusalem, where Israel says it plans to build settler homes." ...
... Al Jazeera Update: "Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has pledged to move ahead with building a Jewish settlement in a strategic area of the West Bank, speaking just hours after Israeli troops dragged anti-settlement protesters from the site marked for construction. The planned settlement, known as E1, would deepen east Jerusalem's separation from the West Bank, both war-won areas the Palestinians want for their state."
AP: "The battle to retake Mali's north from the al-Qaida-linked groups controlling it began in earnest Saturday, after hundreds of French forces deployed to the country and began aerial bombardments to drive back the Islamic extremists. At the same time, nations in West Africa authorized the immediate deployment of troops to Mali, fast-forwarding a military intervention that was not due to start until September." ...
... Update: "French fighter jets bombed rebel targets in a major city in Mali's north Sunday, pounding the airport as well as training camps, warehouses and buildings used by the al-Qaida-linked Islamists controlling the area, officials and residents said."
Al Jazeera: "At least 17 Pakistani soldiers have been killed and 11 wounded after a roadside bomb hit a military convoy in a northwestern lawless tribal area, officials said. The attack happened on Sunday in Dosali village in the North Waziristan tribal district, a stronghold of Taliban fighters."
AP: "Police said Sunday they have arrested six suspects in another gang rape of a bus passenger in India, four weeks after a brutal attack on a student on a moving bus in the capital outraged Indians and led to calls for tougher rape laws."
New York Times: "Thousands of Russians marched on Sunday in condemnation of the Russian Parliament's move to ban adoption of Russian children by American families, an event dubbed a 'March Against Scoundrels,' where participants chanted, 'Take your hands off children,' and carried posters showing the faces of lawmakers stamped with the word 'Shame.'"
Reuters: "The Vatican newspaper on Sunday stressed that children should be raised by a father and a mother after Italy's top appeals court granted a gay mother custody of her son.... The court ruled it was 'mere prejudice' to think that a child could not be brought up normally by homosexual parents.... Gay rights group Arcigay hailed the decision as a 'historic ruling' in Italy, where it is illegal for gay couples to adopt...."
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Reader Comments (7)
In keeping with my Hagel obsession, here is the link to a complete list of NeoCon politicians (who are fighting his nomination) who have never served in the military. There are so many that you have to choose alphabetically!
http://www.friedwire.org/fried111904pussies.html
There is also a list of Republican senators (current and former) who HAVE served in the military--ummmm......three!
http://www.friedwire.org/fried111904whoserved.html
Almost all of the NeoCons are from the Bush era;however, most are still players and are geared up for the battle with money and influence.
Say a little prayer for Chuck Hagel, or if you, like me, are an unbeliever, think good thoughts.
Maureen Dowd's use of the words "misogynistic leanings" caused my hair to stand up straight. Some of the commenters also took issue, but the strident sage of opinion commenters, Karen Garcia, assured us that feminine theories advocate the word can mean all sorts of things like plain old ordinary sexism and she, believe me, according to her, is never wrong. But back to Dowd: Obama wanted Susan Rice––she is a woman last time I looked. It was clear from the get go she would never be confirmed by all those Republican white guys and yet let's blame Obama.
Can't finish my post here as my mister is calling me to hurry –-we are leaving on a wee trip. Will leave you with an exchange I had with the now dead William Safire: Read from bottom up.
Madam-
Don't let my form response lead you into misandry.
-WS
Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008, 6:23 PM
Re: Misogynistic So with all due respect what is the point of my asking you questions that you never answer?
On 6/10/08 5:42 PM, "William Safire" <safireonlanguage@yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear Lexicographic Irregular, You were good to respond to my invitation for comments and suggestions. A great many other readers have pitched in, too. Although I can’t answer mail individually, I read every letter and am most grateful for yours. Sincerely, William Safire
---
To: safireonlanguage@nytimes.com
Date: Sunday, June 8, 2008, 11:18 AM
So if the words sexism and misogynist in some respects can be used
interchangeably, what is the word for women's hatred, prejudice, or dislike
of men? Do we have a separate word for that or do we revert back to the word
sexism? Thank you, sir, from a woman who loves men for the most part.
Ha ha. Yes, like polyandry, a practice I might favor if the polyandress (sadly, not a word) didn't have to do the housework.
Safire used to call my husband to find out stuff about Italian usage. I sometimes answered the phone, & got off as quickly as possible. I was always polite (as was he, of course), though the angels of my liberal nature mightily urged me not to be.
Marie
So, if Big Mo, and others, think there are too may white dudes in the cabinet, who are the Black. Latina (white or black), Asian or white female candidates for Defense, CIA and Treasury? Isn't this the same commentary she has been writing for the past 4 years,i.e., "..he didn't call me!"
Re: "I think we better wait till tomorrow;" J. Hendrex. Report from Washington, hot off the presses; "When completed about a year from now, however—after considerable inputs from the public and expert reviewers—it will represent the most thorough, rigorous, and transparent assessment ever of climate change and its U.S. impacts."
Input from JJG;
Here I stand; water up to my knees,
everythings dead; the birds and the bees;
Heaven is hot and hell's frozen over
Mother nature is, you can't control'er.
Carbon is king, we play the fools;
Get what you get ignoring the rules.
Lord have Mercy! Dowd will go to her grave never finding that perfect Daddy she seeks with exhaustive fervor. Don't think she merits much more thought on most any subject.
From an optics / political standpoint, Obama's appointment of 2 women to the SC, is extremely significant especially in the face of the all-out-war that has been waged by Republicans. I would argue that in the small, serve-for-life group philosophy is more important than ethnicity. See Clarence Thomas. Hopefully, Obama hit the exacta with his 2 appointments.
Defense, State, etc appointments are significant but they are time limited and much less influential than the other 2 branches of government. A more representative Executive branch would be nice but I am more concerned about the policy positions both foreign and domestic. It doesn't concern me near as much as a more representative Legislative branch, not too mention a mentally sound Legislative branch. Hello - representatives of "the people". The praise heaped on Congress for having more women is like praising someone who stopped beating his wife for a month.
The furor over Obama's 1st few appointments serves no useful purpose. It is an effective way to stir our legitimate feelings of injustice around inequality. It foments a falsehood that 4 Cabinet appointments somehow "violate" diversity across the history of this Administration. It's easy to fall prey to the optics because the history of bias is true, insidious and current in the form of anti-abortion, anti-women actions that are happening at the state and national levels.
We have become so accustomed to the intransigence, outrageous stupidity and racism that informs our government and media, that it is quite easy to lose perspective.
I am wondering if people are aware that David Keene's (NRA President) "mentally unstable" son was arrested and imprisoned for a road rage incident in 2002 at age 20 in which he shot into a car on the GW Pkwy in D.C.
From D.C. Urban Moms and Dads:
..." David Michael Keene, was charged with attempted first degree murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison for firing a gun at another vehicle during a 2002 road rage incident. At the time of the incident, Keene was working with his father at ACU as an online communications director. Between the ages of 8 and 13, David Michael Keene was institutionalized seven times for “severe emotional problems,” including “a continuing problem with impulse control.”
Blog comment:
..."David Keene was, according to public statement by his own mother at his trial, committed to a mental hospital multiple times as a child, yet despite this, was able to get his hands on a gun--his father's? his mother's? his own? and use it to fire a bullet at the head of a motorist on GW Parkway in a fit of road rage.
Similarly to the Newton shooter, he was 20 at the time he shot at another motorist. All of which beggars the point that the NRA, with its current leadership, has no moral role in public policy"
And there is this from "Techyville:"
"...And Keene has still not come out to answer whether or not he agrees with the position of Lapierre, that violent videos, games and ‘evil’ people are the cause of the gun problem. If that’s the case, one wonders if Keene considers his son evil? Or is he is just one of thousands of people who gets emotional, and because of the availability of guns, made a decision he can’t take back."
*************
If this incident were more widely publicized (you can see the blogs appear in rather obscure venues), do ya think it would have an effect on public opinion about the necessity of gun control? And would people begin to demonize dear David Keene--whose namesake is one of those "evil people" Wayne LaPierre talks about?