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Wednesday
Jul102013
The Commentariat -- July 11, 2013
Linda Greenhouse writes a marvelous post on Justice Ginsberg's lonely dissent the Fisher v. the University of Texas. If you tie Greenhouse's argument to Scott Lemieux's excellent little dissertation on the resurfacing of Dred Scott in the Shelby County v. Holder decision (which Greenhouse does not do), what you'll find is that, in the interest of compromise, in 2009 even the liberal justices on the Court tacitly endorsed Dred Scott. Dissent matters. ...
** ... Tom Edsall, in the New York Times, "To understand the depth of the damage that the Supreme Court's June 25 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, has inflicted on the voting rights of African-Americans, you have to measure it against the backdrop of the takeover of state legislatures, primarily in the South, by the Republican Party.... What stands out, looking at the data, is how effective, in purely political terms, the Republican's 'white' strategy has turned out to be at the state level."
The disclosures of the last few weeks have made it clear that a secret body of law authorizing secret surveillance overseen by a largely secret court has infringed on Americans' civil liberties and privacy rights without offering the public the ability to judge for themselves whether these broad powers are appropriate or necessary. -- Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) ...
... Peter Wallsten of the Washington Post: "Lawmakers tasked with overseeing national security policy say a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congress's ability to rein in government surveillance. Members of Congress say officials have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more commonly, made statements that left some lawmakers with the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations." CW: worth reading the fine print. ...
... CW: The Accidental Whistleblower. The Wallsten article crystallizes the utility of Snowden's revelations. While I won't disagree with those who argue that Snowden is more leaker than whistleblower, he is certainly a whistleblower to the extent that he helped expose the Obama administration's misleading & untruthful statements to Congress -- apparently during classified briefings as well as in public testimony. In reading over the various interviews Snowden has given, it isn't clear that he was aware of specific misstatements or perjurious Congressional testimony, so the whistleblowing aspect of his leaks appears to be somewhat inadvertent. The closest Snowden comes to acknowledging whistleblowing is at the point he tells Glenn Greenwald, "we were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all publics, not just the American public, in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness, and I was actually a victim of that." In toto, his rationale for leaking the documents seems to be personal pique: "I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talked to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded." Nonetheless, one doesn't have to hold a whistleblower (or his obnoxious cheerleaders) in high esteem to appreciate the beneficial effects of -- in this case, at least some of -- his revelations.
Michael Scherer of Time: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to meet Thursday with his fellow Democrats to discuss taking extraordinary measures--commonly called the 'Nuclear Option'--that would do away with filibusters of some of the President's nominees facing Senate confirmation." Scherer provides a pretty good history on how Reid got to where he is (wherever that is).
Jonathan Chait: "... a hatred for lawmaking has emerged in the Obama years, first as a Republican tactic, and then as an apparently genuine belief system.... [Conservatives] Rich Lowry and William Kristol ... urge House Republicans to kill immigration reform, because passing it would involve legislating, and legislating is bad.... The hatred for legislating has gained a strong enough hold over the conservative mind as to render them unable to consider the merits of any bill at all." See also yesterday's Commentariat. ...
... Paul Waldman of the American Prospect: "... the lawmaking process -- you know, bills being written, introduced, voted on, that sort of thing -- has, in the House at least, been given over almost entirely to this legislative kabuki, where the point of the exercise isn't passing laws but making statements and taking positions. The current Congress is on pace to be the least productive in history when you measure by actual laws passed.... This reached its apogee when they took their 37th vote to repeal Obamacare a couple months back, in part because freshman Tea Party members hadn't had the chance to perform the ritual." ...
... Steve Benen catches a new pitch from Republicans desperate to think of an excuse (CW: other than "we hate Mexicans") to tank immigration reform: "Republicans have to kill immigration reform because of the delay in the employer mandate in health care reform. Does this make sense? I'm afraid not.... So why bother with this nonsense at all? Because Republicans aren't just looking for an excuse; they're also looking for a way to avoid blame.... Republicans are, in effect, hoping to say it's the White House's fault that they killed immigration reform...." ...
... Alec MacGillis of The New Republic: "... by attempting to sabotage a law of the land they reject [-- the Affordable Care Act --], Republicans have made it increasingly easy for their more outspoken members to argue against legislation many of their leaders support [-- like immigration reform]. No one said nullification isn't volatile stuff to play with." ...
... Dana Milbank on hearings the House GOP is conducting to get to the bottom of why Obama is delaying the employer mandate portion of the law they've voted 37 times to repeal: "In the case of the 'employer mandate,' even a number of liberals agree that it's a bad policy. Republicans could probably find support for repealing that provision, if they weren't hellbent on repealing the whole law. But it's so much more cathartic to call a hearing, assume a posture of umbrage, and use words such as 'calamity' and 'fiscal time bomb,' and 'socialism' and 'dictatorship.'" ...
... Russell Berman, et al., of the Hill: "Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) urged their House Republican colleagues to pass immigration reform legislation in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, with the Speaker arguing his conference would be 'in a much weaker position' if it failed to act. A divided House Republican conference met for more than two hours in the basement of the Capitol to begin hashing out a response to the sweeping immigration bill the Senate passed last month." ...
... CW: I love this Politico headline: "GOP Reaching out to Dems on Immigration." Remember, Politico is not supposed to be the Onion. There actually is some substance to the article: Boehner is trying to get Pelosi to fall for the piecemeal plan. I guess that would be BORDER SECURITY but no path to citizenship. There are ways Pelosi could finesse this approach, but only if Boehner were as stupid as he sometimes seems. And he isn't.
... Michael O'Brien of NBC News: "Former President George W. Bush waded ever so gently into the fierce debate in Washington over immigration reform, urging lawmakers to reach a 'positive resolution' on the issue, and warning against disparaging immigrants."
Peter Kasperowicz of the Hill: "The House on Wednesday voted to block the enforcement of light bulb standards that many say would effectively force people to buy more expensive compact fluorescent bulbs.... The government was authorized to impose standards for bulbs under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, although Congress has delayed implementation of the standards for several years." ...
... Joan McCarter of Daily Kos: "Obamacare repeal? Check. Abortion? Check. Gee, what other pointless distraction could House Republicans return to for the pointless umpteenth time? Of course. Back from 2011, and 2012, ladies and gentlemen: The Light Bulb War of 2013.... Because gawd knows the American people don't need to be saving money on energy bills if it means that we have to live in the 21st century and acknowledge that saving energy and money is a good thing." ...
... Steve Benen: "Not long after President Obama took office -- it's interesting how the radicalization of the GOP just happened to coincide with the Democrat's inauguration -- Republican policymakers began looking at the Bush/Cheney-backed energy bill as an authoritarian scourge that sought to take away Americans' light bulbs. By 2012, Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, and others insisted that the 2007 law 'bans' traditional incandescent bulbs, which in turn takes away consumers' choices. In case reality makes any difference at all, there is no 'ban' on the old bulbs, only a policy that makes bulbs more energy efficient -- a policy that's working." ...
... AND to Hell with Hungry People. Erik Wasson of the Hill: "The House will vote Thursday on a new farm bill in a major test for Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and the rest of the House GOP leadership team. The new bill includes updated subsidies for farmers but strips a reauthorization of the food stamp program that was included in the last farm bill."
Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "To the growing frustration of those who won a long and contentious internal administration debate over the issue of supplying arms [to the Syrian opposition], members of the Senate and House intelligence committees remain divided on the proposal to send light weapons and ammunition to the rebel forces. Although administration officials initially estimated that supplies would be distributed 'within weeks,' delivery has not begun. Briefings and personal calls to Capitol Hill this week from top-level officials, including Vice President Biden, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and CIA Director John O. Brennan, have failed to shake strongly held views, according to administration officials and committee members."
Did Mubarak Bureaucrats Take a Page from the GOP Playbook? Ben Hubbard & David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times: "... since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for many people across Egypt: Gas lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have returned to the street. The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role -- intentionally or not -- in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi."
Winfield House, the residence of the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James.Business as Usual. Dan Roberts of the Guardian: "Barack Obama has rewarded some of his most active campaign donors with plum jobs in foreign embassies, with the average amount raised by recent or imminent appointees soaring to $1.8m per post, according to a Guardian analysis.... Career diplomats in Washington are increasingly alarmed at how [the practice] has grown. One former ambassador described it as the selling of public office. On Tuesday, Obama's chief money-raiser Matthew Barzun became the latest major donor to be nominated as an ambassador, when the White House put him forward as the next representative to the Court of St James's, a sought-after posting whose plush residence comes with a garden second only in size to that of Buckingham Palace....In total, nine sought-after postings in Europe, the Caribbean or Asia have been given to major donors in recent weeks, with a further three in France, Switzerland and Hungary earmarked to come soon." ...
... Alex Spillius of the London Telegraph writes a rather glowing -- and brief -- profile of Barzun.
A Friend of Ron Paul's. Molly Redden of The New Republic: "Recording a video of yourself loading a shotgun in a public park on the 4th of July, in D.C., (as [Adam] Kokesh did), where carrying a loaded weapon is illegal, and posting it on YouTube for your 75,000 some-odd subscribers, then insisting to news outlets that the gun was real as police are investigating the video -- that's a pretty sure way to draw the U.S. Park Police to your house and wind up arrested, particularly if you're holding onto a controlled substance (hallucinogenic mushrooms) while in possession of a firearm.... Kokesh, a former Marine and activist of six years, is like a one-man libertarian Code Pink.... His closest flirtations with the establishment were his Ron Paul-sponsored run for Congress in 2010, a tape of interviews with Occupy D.C. that he edited for maximum idiocy, and a brief-lived show with the Russian-American network RT." See also Wednesday's News Ledes. ...
... CW: In fairness to Ron Paul, I should have written "Former Friend": Kokesh "had fallen out of favor with Paulites -- in part, by shoving his way onstage as Ron Paul was preparing to give a speech, alarming Paul's security detail," Redden writes. For those of you so enamored of the "right to be left alone" aspect of libertarianism, maybe Kokesh is a better exemplar than Ed Snowden, although Snowden himself claimed to be gun-crazed: "... that’s why I'm goddamned glad for the second amendment. Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished." It is curious, isn't it, that quite a few people who say they want to be left alone also make extraordinary efforts to gain media attention?
Chuck Todd is not happy with All Zimmerman All the Time:
... Dumb Down the News! Matthew Cooper of the National Journal on MSNBC's declining ratings. One theory to explain the slide: the evening hosts are "too erudite, too sophisticated and too earnest to hook a wide swath of viewers."
Local News
Craig Jarvis, et al., of the Raleigh News & Observer: "Hours after Gov. Pat McCrory threatened to veto a controversial abortion bill unless his concerns about it were addressed, a House committee approved on Wednesday a new version of the bill that apparently answers the governor's questions.... The main changes were relaxing the proposed standards that abortion clinics would have to meet ... and allowing pregnant women to take abortion-inducing medicine at home after taking an initial dose at a clinic under a doctor's supervision. Most other provisions in the bill were left intact.... The new bill was worked into an unrelated bill and brought up in a House judiciary committee meeting without any advance notice."
... Under Turner's bill, "men taking the drugs would continue to be tested for heart problems, receive counseling about possible side effects and receive information about 'pursuing celibacy as a viable lifestyle choice.'"
Workers Trump WalMart. Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post: "D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city's minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city. The retail giant had linked the future of at least three planned stores in the District to the proposal. But its ultimatum did not change any legislators' minds. The 8 to 5 roll call matched the outcome of an earlier vote on the matter, taken before Wal-Mart's warning." ...
... MEANWHILE ... Rebecca Leber of Think Progress: "According to [multibillionaire] Charles Koch, the U.S. needs to get rid of the minimum wage, which he counts as a major obstacle to economic growth. On Wednesday, the Charles Koch Foundation launched a $200,000 media campaign in Wichita, Kansas, with a hint of expanding it elsewhere.... The Kansas ad does not specifically mention the minimum wage, but it does claim that Americans earning $34,000 a year should count themselves as lucky, because that puts them in the top 1 percent of the world. 'That is the power of economic freedom,' the ad concluded.... Although he deems low-wage workers part of a 'culture of dependency' on the government, Koch Industries is on the receiving end of oil subsidies, government contracts, and bailouts.... Koch maintained his and his brother's political efforts are not for their own benefit, but for the country's greater good." ...
... OR, as Digby rephrases "The Koch philosophy: You're richer than the average Somali so STFU."
Regina Medina of the Philadelphia Daily News: "Attorney General Kathleen Kane [D] is expected to announce Thursday that her office won't defend the state in a federal lawsuit that challenges Pennsylvania's ban on gay marriage."
Do as I Say, Not as I Do. Amber Sutherland & Carl Campanile of the New York Post: "Eliot Spitzer failed to vote in last year's presidential election -- just four days after penning a column proclaiming 'Why I Am Voting for Barack Obama.' ... A spokeswoman said Spitzer couldn't make it to the polls because he had to high-tail it to San Francisco to serve as a paid co-anchor of Current TV's round-table election coverage.... Any voter can show up in person at the local board office to fill out an absentee ballot up to a day before the election, according to a Board of Elections spokeswoman." CW: evidently the redemptive exercise does not require a stint performing extraordinary public service, such as bothering to pick up & complete an absentee ballot. ...
... Nevertheless, Spitzer is ahead in the first poll taken since his announcement. ...
... Sex & the City. Gail Collins: "Nobody knows what drove Spitzer to jump in. Did Weiner's entry trigger a case of disgraced-politician competitiveness? Is he bored? Did the fact that he's run through every possible cable news show option send him into a panic? He said that people were always coming up to him on the street and urging him to get back in the game.... Anthony Weiner said people were always coming up to him saying he should run. (Although some, Weiner added, also said: 'Spitzer! You're Governor Spitzer!') New York is a liberal place, but can there be that much hunger for sex-scandal-scarred candidates?"
News Ledes
New York Times: "The judge in the George Zimmerman trial agreed on Thursday to instruct jurors to consider a lesser charge of manslaughter against Mr. Zimmerman in addition to the second-degree murder charge he is facing. The prosecution presented closing arguments, and the defense is expected to do the same on Friday morning. The jury could begin deliberations as early as Friday."
New York Times: "Investigators said Thursday that they had linked the man believed by many to have been the Boston Strangler to DNA found in the home of a woman thought to be the Strangler's last victim in a string of unsolved murders that petrified this city in the early 1960s and has perplexed it ever since.... They identified a near-certain match with Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to the murders (and two more), but was never prosecuted for the crimes." ...
... Boston Globe: "Albert H. DeSalvo's body will be exhumed to allow for new forensic testing that may conclusively prove DeSalvo murdered Mary Sullivan in her Boston apartment in 1964, the last killing attributed to the Boston Strangler who terrorized Greater Boston for two years in the early 1960s."
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A lengthy, but quite interesting read...about the least-liked (or is he the lowest-ranked) Senator in the country. Things that surprised me and other not. But, in highlighting the Senator's net worth, which is quite, quite comfortable! In fact, it always puzzles me when I look at Congress's annually required financial disclosures...how does someone go from very modest incomes to these staggering accumulations? All the while they are presumed 'working hard for the people." Where did they find the time to what? build a multi-million business? Did they win the Lottery? (OK former Sen. Judd Gregg did—but, he was fine before that)? During their Congressional recess they invented an earth-shaking gizmo worth millions? They must have the most amazing financial advisers. Or something!! (I think its 'something.')
Check out, Jason Cherkis @ HuffPost on: Mitch McConnell's 30-Year Senate Legacy Leaves Kentucky In The Lurch (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/11/mitch-mcconnell-profile_n_3550173.html)