The Commentariat -- January 6, 2012

My column in the New York Times eXaminer is on David Brooks' second love letter to Rick Santorum. The NYTX front page is here. Also, you can contribute to NYTX here. ...

... BTW, today's topic on Off Times Square relates to the "Elections Have Consequences" links below. We had quite a good discussion in the previous thread, so I'm hoping for the same today.

** Elections Have Consequences. Dahlia Lithwick in the Washington Monthly: "If you care about the future of abortion rights, stem cell research, worker protections, the death penalty, environmental regulation, torture, presidential power, warrantless surveillance, or any number of other issues, it’s worth recalling that the last stop on the answer to each of those matters will probably be before someone in a black robe. Republicans have understood that for decades now, and that’s why the federal bench — including the Supreme Court — is almost unrecognizable to Democrats today."

Edward Wyatt of the New York Times: "The new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau outlined a vigorous oversight and enforcement agenda on Thursday, saying that financial companies that take unfair advantage of consumers would face 'real consequences.' The director, Richard Cordray, who was appointed to the post on Wednesday by President Obama, encouraged consumers to contact the agency through its Web site [www.consumerfinance.gov] with complaints about banks, payday lenders and other financial institutions that they think have sold deceptive products or engaged in abusive behavior."

Floyd Norris of the New York Times: "For the first time in many years, manufacturing stands out as an area of strength in the American economy. When the Labor Department reports December employment numbers on Friday, it is expected that manufacturing companies will have added jobs in two consecutive years. Until last year, there had not been a single year when manufacturing employment rose since 1997."

Jake Sherman of Politico: "A year to the day since Ohio’s John Boehner and 87 eager freshmen took Washington by storm, House Republicans are bruised from battle, irritated with each other and have lost trust in their leadership. The president whose agenda they came to Washington to stop is vowing to spend the year scoring political points against Republicans now, and they don’t have much leverage against him."

Pat Garofalo of Think Progress: "... while corporate profits have rebounded to their pre-recession heights, setting a record in the third quarter of 2011, corporate tax revenue has yet to follow suit.... Corporate tax revenue has plummeted for several reasons, but one of the big ones is the growth of deductions, loopholes, and outright tax evasion that helps companies limit, or entirely eliminate, their income tax liability. 30 major corporations, in fact, paid no corporate income tax over the last three years, while making $160 billion in profits." CW: this story also falls in the "Elections Have Consequences" category. These companies aren't paying their fair share because Congress has decided they don't have to. Another good reason to support Sen. Bernie Sanders' Constitutional Amendment drive.

Ryan Reilly of TPM: "Federal law enforcement officials had been worried about the 'uncertainty' that a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would create for agents dealing with a terrorist attack.... But the signing statement issued by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve appears to indicate that it should be business as usual.... Broadly, the administration will interpret the law in a way that gives them the ability to wave [sic. "waive"] any military custody requirement and enact it in a way that allows counterterrorism flexibility."

Annie Lowrey of the New York Times: "Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years."

Julia Preston of the New York Times: "Obama administration officials announced on Friday that they will propose a fix to a notorious snag in immigration law that will spare hundreds of thousands of American citizens from prolonged separations from immigrant spouses and children."

Kevin O'Brien of the New York Times: "The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth."

Right Wing World

Offensive Quote of the Day. I'm prepared. If the N.A.A.C.P. invites me, I’ll go to their convention, talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. -- Newt Let-Them-Be-Janitors Gingrich

(CW: I so often have to resist the urge, after quoting one of these jackasses, to type, "Really, I'm not making this up." These bozos are so mired in racist, ethnic, religious & sexist stereotypes that their remarks defy credulity.)

The Editorial Board of the Boston Globe, which is New Hampshire's "big city" paper, endorses Jon Huntsman, Jr., in the GOP presidential primary. You may recall that Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, and just for the edification of Michele Bachmann, Boston is in Massachusetts. Read the endorsement to see why the Globe editors don't trust Romney.

Nate Silver: It's Friday, but the official Iowa Caucus vote is still too close to call.

Rick Ungar in the Washington Monthly on why he's glad he watched the candidates' Iowa speeches, particularly Newt's "kamikaze effort to take down Mitt Romney at any cost," Romney's "boring and barren ... canned repetition of [his] stump speech, and Santorum's "soulful and searing" victory speech:

Romney could hardly discuss his own family lineage, which includes his great-grandfather’s emigration from the United States to Mexico to avoid American anti-polygamy laws. Indeed, while Rick Santorum’s grandfather came to these shores to find freedom and opportunity, Romney’s grandfather returned to the United States to avoid the Mexican Revolution.

Elections Have Consequences. Brian Beutler of TPM: Mitt Romney's tax plan is a fucking disaster: "... the plan constitutes a major tax cut for wealthy Americans. But compared to today’s rates, Romney proposes effective tax increases for people making less than $40,000." Includes an interactive chart that shows the biggest break would be for those earning over a million a year, & the biggest tax increase would be for those earning less than $10,000 a year. And in case you're the last person in Amurrica who thinks Republicans care about the deficit, "The Romney plan would reduce federal tax revenues substantially."

Elections Have Consequences. If you think Mitt Romney will "move to the center" should he become president, as Nicholas Kristof argued in his wishful-thinking column yesterday (see my rebuttal of one aspect of it here), read Jonathan Bernstein's article in the Washington Monthly. Guess what? "Campaign promises set the presidential agenda, even when they don’t tell you which items will pan out and which won’t.... So as you listen to Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republicans..., don’t assume that it’s all meaningless, empty rhetoric that will be dropped once the campaign is over and governing begins. Don’t assume, either, that ... specific pledges made in the primary season will be left behind...." BTW, you can blame Steve Forbes for the deficit. (Read Bernstein to find out why.)

PolitiFact: "The Romney ad claimed that the NLRB told Boeing that it 'can’t build a factory in South Carolina because South Carolina is a right-to-work state.' The NLRB’s complaint started a legal process that could ultimately have resulted in a factory closure, but the NLRB as a whole didn’t tell Boeing anything. What’s more, the legal basis for the action centered on whether Boeing was punishing the union for staging strikes, not that Boeing had opened a factory in a right-to-work state." ...

... What's more Romney knows it's a lie. PolitiFact debunked the same claim when Romney made it in October 2011. CW: I'm not that crazy about PolitiFact, but they're right on this. ...

... Steve Benen has more on Romney's absurd claim that he created more than 100,000 jobs at Bain while President Obama has done little in the way of jobs creation. ...

... AND Paul Krugman devotes his column to Romney's big lies on jobs creation. He adds,

... after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class. And that reality is, of course, what all the blather and misdirection about job-creating businessmen and job-destroying Democrats is meant to obscure.

Mike McIntire & Michael Luo of the New York Times: "As [Rick] antorum’s standing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination has been energized by his strong showing in the Iowa caucus, so too has the scrutiny of his activities since leaving the Senate. When he left office he was not especially wealthy, but records show he wasted little time fashioning a lucrative post-government career based largely on income from businesses that had benefited from his work in Congress." ...

... Dan Eggen & Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post: "Rick Santorum has vaulted to the front ranks of the Republican presidential nomination race in part by depicting himself as a religious family man of lowly beginnings who would bring needed change to Washington. But that characterization leaves out two decades in which Santorum was a central and often high-ranking player in Washington politics, with connections to K Street lobbyists and a lucrative consulting career that made him a millionaire. In the Senate, for example, he played a pivotal role in advancing the controversial K Street Project, a highly organized effort to pressure industry groups and lobbying firms to hire Republicans for influential jobs and punish those who brought in Democrats.... After losing a reelection bid in 2006, he capitalized on his congressional experience by beginning a profitable career on K Street as an adviser to industry groups and lobbying firms...." ...

...Michael Shear of the New York Times: Rick Santorum got into a "Socratic exchange" on gay marriage with students in New Hampshire at the College Convention 2012. With video I won't be watching. ...

... Robert Mackey of the New York Times: "Writing in The Jewish Week on Monday, Douglas Bloomfield reminded readers that [Rick] Santorum told a man in Iowa six weeks ago that 'all the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis. They’re not Palestinians — there is no Palestinian — this is Israeli land.' ... Even Israel’s government calls the West Bank a 'disputed territory,' whose future status 'is subject to negotiation.'” With more video I won't be watching.

AND "Herman Cain Is Back and Weirder than Ever." The video below is not a parody. Cain released it himself. He is not stupid:

Local News

Scott Walker's Cronies. Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Three individuals -- including a former top aide to Gov. Scott Walker -- were charged Thursday with felonies as part of the ongoing John Doe investigation into Walker staffers. Tim Russell, a longtime Walker campaign and county staffer, was charged with two felonies and one misdemeanor count of embezzlement.... Also charged Thursday was Brian Pierick, Russell's longtime partner and a staffer at the state Department of Public Instruction, and Kevin Kavanaugh, Walker's appointee to the Milwaukee County Veteran Service Commission."

News Ledes

The President speaks at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He talks about the jobs reports, too:

New York Times: "The United States added a robust 200,000 new jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday, in a sign that the long-awaited economic recovery has finally built up a head of steam. The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent in December, from a revised 8.7 percent in November, the government said."

New York Times: "... in an unusual case of intraparty defiance, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey is holding up President Obama’s nomination of a judge to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the only time a Democrat has tried to block one of Mr. Obama’s judicial nominees. Mr. Menendez would not comment. But the nominee, Patty Shwartz, has been in a relationship for more than two decades with the head of the public corruption unit for New Jersey’s federal prosecutor. And that unit investigated the senator during his 2006 election fight, an inquiry Mr. Menendez has long contended was politically motivated.... The connection has led lawyers and judges in the state to speculate that Mr. Menendez is acting out of resentment, rather than any concern about Judge Shwartz’s qualifications."

New York Times: "An explosion tore through a densely populated neighborhood in Damascus on Friday, killing 25 people and wounding dozens more in the second attack in the Syrian capital in two weeks, Syrian television and other state media reported." Guardian liveblog here.

Reuters: "The Muslim Brotherhood won more than a third of the votes in the last stage of elections for Egypt's lower house of parliament, according to partial results on Friday, which show the Islamists are set to dominate the legislature."

Guardian: "Portia Simpson Miller has been sworn in for the second time as Jamaica's prime minister with a pledge to ease poverty, boost the economy, heal political divisions and drop the Queen as head of state."

New York Times: "Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan will be among those elevated to cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church in a Vatican ceremony next month, the Archdiocese of New York announced in a news release on Friday." Related AP story here.