The Commentariat -- January 19

President Obama & Vice President Biden issue statements memorializing Sargent Shriver, who died yesterday. ...

... Rick Hertzberg remembers Sargent Shriver.

This Defies Conventional Wisdom. Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times: "... child rearing among same-sex couples is more common in the South than in any other region of the country...."

Christopher Beam: "As Simon & Schuster prepares to release O: A Presidential Novel, based on the Obama administration and starring a thinly veiled Barack Obama as the character 'O,' the publisher is trying to keep the identity of its anonymous author under wraps. Slate imagines a few possibilities." Happily for New York Times readers, Tom Friedman has been on hiatus; perhaps he was busy writing O. Beam thinks the Friedman book would read something like this:

The situation room was dark and shadowy. Five-star General Donald Patroclus was explaining the new Afghanistan strategy to O.
'Afghanistan is like a burrito,' he said. 'When you bite one end, a little bean juice is gonna come out the other.'
O looked intrigued. 'Go on.'
'So you need two things. First, you need to make a better tortilla. Wheat instead of cornmeal. Then you gotta wrap it tight. And then, just in case, you need napkins—lots and lots of napkins.'
'That makes perfect sense,' said O.
'But really, it's all about India. See, India's like a giant bag of Funyuns …'

     ... Read all of the "writers"' literary efforts. They're a hoot. AND, since we're doing Friedman, here's this from David Rees (click on the cartoon to see a larger image):

Okay, so while we're being uncivil to media personalities:

American economist Richard Wolff in the Guardian: " The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes. Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures." ...

... David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "Alone among the world’s economic powers, the United States is suffering through a deep jobs slump that can’t be explained by the rest of the economy’s performance.... One obvious [reason] is the balance of power between employers and employees. Relative to the situation in most other countries — or in this country for most of the last century — American employers operate with few restraints.... Study after study has shown that unions usually do benefit workers." ...

... There's more from Leonhardt on the U.S. jobs slump here. ...

... Edward Wyatt of the New York Times: "The new regulatory board charged with overseeing the stability of the financial system took its first big steps on Tuesday to set out tentative guidelines to limit trading by banks for their own accounts and to restrict the growth of the biggest financial companies. The Financial Stability Oversight Council ... created by the Dodd-Frank Act, also proposed rules as to which large financial companies that were not banks would be regulated by the Federal Reserve.... The recommendations made public on Tuesday are subject to revision based on public comments and the recommendations of various other state and federal regulatory agencies." ...

... Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post: "The nation's four biggest banks can grow even bigger, with the potential to add at least another trillion dollars onto their balance sheets before they even reach the limits imposed by the Obama administration, according to an administration study released Tuesday." ...

... Susanne Craig & Eric Dash of the New York Times: "Goldman Sachs executives ... are now poised to reap a windfall that was sown in the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008. Nearly 36 million stock options were granted to employees in December 2008 — 10 times the amount issued the previous year — when the stock was trading at $78.78. Since those uncertain days, Goldman’s business has roared back and its share price has more than doubled, closing on Tuesday at nearly $175." ...

... Eric Dash: "Industrywide, [bank] revenues are off 17 percent from their peak in 2007, and the latest figures are flat or declining.

Paul Krugman: "... in general right-wing think tanks prefer people who genuinely can’t understand the issues — it makes them more reliable. Doesn’t this apply to both sides? Not equally. There was a time when conservative think tanks employed genuine policy wonks, and when asked to devise a Republican health care plan, they came up with — Obamacare! That is, what passes for leftist policy now is what was considered conservative 15 years ago; to meet the right’s standards of political correctness now, you have to pass into another dimension, a dimension whose boundaries are that of imagination, untrammeled by things like arithmetic or logic." CW: I'm so glad to see Krugman coming right out & saying this -- it needed to be said. ...

... NEW. Ezra Klein: "Republicans have refused to play by [the] rules. They have claimed, as Doug Holtz-Eakin, Joseph Antos and James Capretta do in today's Wall Street Journal, that the CBO's work is now the product of 'budget gimmicks, deceptive accounting, and implausible assumptions....' They have created a separate world for themselves when it comes to this bill, a world where there are no accepted estimates except the ones they choose to accept (notably, they regularly mention the CBO results that they think help their case), where there is no neutral arbiter who can be relied on to set the premises of the debate, and thus, where policy debate is not really possible." ...

... NEWER. What about the Uninsured? This from Klein: "The lack of concern for how more than 30 million Americans will get their health-care coverage makes for an ugly contrast with the intense concern that Rep. Andy Harris -- a proponent of repeal -- found when he heard that his congressional health-care coverage wouldn't begin until a month after he took the oath of office." ...

... Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the AP: "Private health insurance plans catering to Medicare recipients are making millions by taking money the government sends in advance -- but isn't immediately needed -- and using it to make investments, federal investigators say.... In financial parlance, it's called 'playing the float.' In contrast with another government program that also deals regularly with health insurers, Medicare lets its plans keep the cash.... A Medicare official said ... little can be done to change the situation.... The inspector general's office disagrees."

Stephanie Cutter of the White House on the costs of repealing the Affordable Care Act:

Kate Nocera of Politico: "The pharmaceutical industry, which spent months cutting deals with Democrats to protect its interests, has remained mum on Republican repeal efforts.... This method of laying low makes perfect sense, according to Chris Jennings, who was senior health care adviser to former President Bill Clinton. Rather than support the repeal effort, which has little chance of becoming law, PhRMA and AHIP are saving their firepower for more practical targets." ...

... Lisa Lerer & Drew Armstrong of Bloomberg News: "With a symbolic vote to repeal President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is starting a two- year campaign to undermine the law through piecemeal dismantling tactics and efforts to weaken public support." ...

... House Republicans Debate Healthcare Repeal. Dana Milbank: "In the debate's early stages, they avoided virtually all violent speech, instead resorting to less provocative insults to describe the health-care law.... The new GOP majority generally showed a skill that had been lacking in the Republican caucus for the past two years: self-restraint."

Emily Bazelon of Slate, a Connecticut resident, on why she loathes, loathes, loathes Joe Lieberman. Her friend Judy Chevalier writes that there's a "peculiar Connecticut liberal cocktail party game: 'I hated Joe Lieberman before you hated Joe Lieberman.'" ...

... Her colleague Dave Weigel notes that "Lieberman would have lost anyway." ...

... Here's the backstory: New York Times: "Saying his independent-minded approach to politics does not 'fit comfortably into conventional political boxes,' Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, made it official on Wednesday, formally announcing that he would not seek a fifth term in 2012." Here's the Hartford Courant story, with videos of Lieberman's announcement speech. Here's the text of Lieberman's speech, via the Courant.

AP: "A federal grand jury has indicted the suspect in the deadly Arizona shooting that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The indictment against Jared Loughner ... accuses him of attempting to assassinate Giffords and trying to kill two of her aides. It does not include two murder charges included in an earlier criminal complaint for the deaths of another Giffords aide and a federal judge." ...

... Richard Oppel, Jr., et al., of the New York Times: "The chief investigator for the [Pima County] sheriff’s department ... has for the first time publicly described the brief and gory video clip from a store security camera that shows a gunman not only shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords just above the eyebrow at a range of three feet, but then using his 9-millimeter pistol to gun down others near her at a similarly close range. The video ... also reveals that Judge John M. Roll appears to have died while saving the life of Ronald Barber, one of Ms. Giffords’s employees. Mr. Barber ... has since left the hospital." ...

... James Grimaldi of the Washington Post: "An old policy memo from the Clinton administration paved the way for accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner to buy his first firearm. Put in place by then-Attorney General Janet Reno, the policy prohibited the military from reporting certain drug abusers to the FBI, which manages the national list of prohibited gun-buyers.... The Reno policy told federal agencies not to report people who had voluntarily given drug tests for fear it would deter them from seeking treatment...." ...

... Diane Sawyer of ABC News interviews Mark Kelly, husband of Gabrielle Giffords:

     ... Here's a related story by Bradley Blackburn of ABC News. ...

... Denise Grady & Jennifer Medina of the New York Times: "In an exuberant e-mail to family and friends Tuesday, the mother of Representative Gabrielle Giffords described remarkable progress by her daughter. According to the e-mail, Ms. Giffords scrolled through photographs on her husband’s iPhone, tried to undo his tie and shirt and even began to look at get-well cards and pages of large-print text taken from a Harry Potter book.... Members of Ms. Giffords’s staff said they worried that the message ... might paint an overly optimistic picture of the congresswoman’s condition." ...

... Sam Dolnick of the New York Times: Rep. Gabrielle "Giffords’s aides opened ... the congresswoman’s district office [in Tucson], two days after the shooting..., and the office has stayed open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday since. It has been one of the staff’s few constants since a gunman opened fire at a community event on Jan. 8...."

Adam Liptak of the New York Times: the Supremes hear a state secrets case. "But the justices did not seem inclined to use the opportunity to give the lower courts guidance about its contours." ...

... ** Dahlia Lithwick tells the story much better: "the court today seized the opportunity to conduct a rollicking roller-derby smash-up on American contract law." ...

You say they're at fault, they say you're at fault. Under the state-secrets doctrine we can't resolve that question. Why don't we call the whole thing off? -- Chief Justice John Roberts

... Federal Judges Are Really Old. Joseph Goldstein of Slate: "Today, aging and dementia are the flip side of life tenure, with more and more judges staying on the bench into extreme old age. About 12 percent of the nation's 1,200 sitting federal district and circuit judges are 80 years or older...."

Local News

Joe Romm of Climate Progress: "$#*! My Texas AG Says: 'It is almost the height of insanity of bureaucracy to have the EPA regulating something that is emitted by all living things.' So the EPA shouldn’t regulate the discharge from living things.  I guess the Texas AG just wants crap all over the place.  Literally. [Insert your joke about sewage treatment here.]" Via this Krugman post: "... given the way we’re heading — with politicians arguing that the federal government has no right to ban child labor — don’t be surprised to see the anti-sewer movement making a comeback, and to see elected representatives, even if they know better, holding their noses and going along."

Kristofer Rios of the New York Times: "After fighting for more than a decade for better wages, a group of Florida farmworkers has hashed out the final piece of an extraordinary agreement with local tomato growers and several big-name buyers, including the fast-food giants McDonald’s and Burger King, that will pay the pickers roughly a penny more for every pound of fruit they harvest. Farm laborers are among the lowest-paid workers in the United States, and the agreement could add thousands of dollars to their income.... Some labor experts said the agreement could set a precedent for improving working conditions and pay in other parts of the agriculture and food industries, nationally and worldwide."