;)
The Commentariat -- June 18, 2014
NEW. Ha! Mario Trujillo of the Hill: "The Washington Redskins' logo is disparaging and its trademark must be cancelled, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office wrote in a ruling Wednesday. The Redskins will continue to be able to use the name, but the team will not have all the legal benefits afforded to it when it is registered with the federal government.... The team can appeal the decision in court as it did in the past, and the trademarks will remain registered until after the review. The office made a similar ruling in 1992, but the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia reversed the board's decision after a lengthy litigation process in 2003. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) cheered the decision, going to the Senate floor to call for the team and its owner, Daniel Snyder, to end its use of the 'racist' name." Thanks to James S. for the link.
Mark Landler & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "President Obama is considering a targeted, highly selective campaign of airstrikes against Sunni militants in Iraq similar to counterterrorism operations in Yemen, rather than the widespread bombardment of an air war, a senior administration official said on Tuesday." ...
... The Worst People in the World -- Who Should Know to STFU -- Critique the "Obama Doctrine." Dick Cheney & Liz Cheney, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." If the Cheneys have no shame, you still would think even the editors of the WSJ opinion pages would know better.
... Katrina Vanden Heuvel, in the Washington Post: "Obama, himself 'right' on Iraq during the war's run-up, is also right today to resist calls for direct U.S. military action -- including airstrikes -- in Iraq.... Experience and history have (clearly) taught us that there is no military solution in Iraq. Only a political reconciliation can quell the unrest, and this requires more than bellicose calls for violence from 5,000 miles away." Vanden Heuvel is still knocking David Brooks. (See video & comments in the June 16 Commentariat.) Also, the major media for inviting neocons & other war hawks (McCain, Graham) to speak about the current crisis. ...
... Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast: "Joe Biden’s old suggestion about making three countries out of Iraq may or may not be the best solution here, but it sure doesn't look crazy now, even though he was sneeringly pooh-poohed by the people who swore that the war would lead to a garden of multiplying democracies." (Column also linked below.) ...
... Zeke Miller of Time: "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to step aside from his country as it gallops furiously toward civil war."
David Kirkpatrick & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "United States commandos have captured the suspected leader of the 2012 attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, White House and Pentagon officials said Tuesday. Apprehension of the suspect, Ahmed Abu Khattala, is a major breakthrough in the nearly two-year-old investigation into the attack, which also killed three other Americans, just two months before the presidential election in the United States." CW: Obviously, this is an Obama-led conspiracy to influence the midterm elections, which are coming up in a mere 4-1/2 months. Those commandos are Democratic stooges. * ...
... The Washington Post story, by Karen DeYoung & others, is here. (The Post broke the story.) ...
... David Kirkpatrick: Abu Khattala's "apprehension by United States military commandos and law enforcement agents may finally begin to address some of the persistent questions about who carried out the attack and why. Those questions have spawned a small industry of conspiracy theories, political scandals, talk radio broadcasts, and a continuing congressional investigation. Despite extensive speculation about the role of Al Qaeda in directing the attack in Libya, Mr. Abu Khattala is a local Islamist militant, with no known connections to international terrorist groups, according to American officials briefed on the criminal investigation and intelligence reporting, as well as other Benghazi Islamists who know him." CW: Oh. A broader conspiracy than I realized: it appears criminal investigators & intelligence officers are in the bag for Obama, too. ...
... Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "The weekend capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, one of the suspected ringleaders of the Sept. 11, 2012, assaults on a U.S. diplomatic compound and a CIA-run annex, gives Obama another I-told-you-so moment in Washington's scorekeeping culture. But the achievement is likely to do little to tamp down the partisan fervor surrounding the administration's public management of the deadly Benghazi attacks.... Within hours of the news that Abu Khattala had been captured, congressional Republicans congratulated the U.S. military, if not the White House. But the partisan concern shifted quickly to the questions of where Abu Khattala would be held, at a time when Obama is seeking to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and whether the president would extend legal protections given to civilians charged with crimes. The answers from the administration -- no to Guantanamo, yes to due process -- disappointed some prominent conservatives":
Obviously, he should be put on trial. I'd bring him to Guantanamo. Where else can you take him to? -- Sen. John McCain (R-Az.)
Holding Khattala on a ship shows the haphazard approach which comes from not having rational detention & interrogation policies. Naval vessels were never meant to be detention and interrogation sites. -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
Nor was Cuba. -- Tommy Vietor, former Obama aide & current Hillary Clinton advisor
You know who else kept detainees on ships? George W. Bush. -- Steve M.
Oh for God's sake. With all of these terrorists, we've had four or five convictions in military courts. We've had several hundred convictions in federal courts. Do the math. -- Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
* Update: Glad we nabbed a #Benghazi suspect, but the timing is questionable. Did they let him wander, waiting for the perfect political opportunity? -- Former Rep. Joe Walsh (RTP-Ill.) ...
... BECAUSE ... it's important to remember, he wasn't really hiding. -- Rory Cooper, aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor
... Jonathan Chait: "Khattala, reports the New York Times,'"told both fellow Islamist fighters and others that the attack in Benghazi was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.' He's part of the cover-up." CW: So it's a pretty vast conspiracy. ...
... OF COURSE Hillary is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy. Evan McMurry of Mediaite: "A couple co-hosts from Fox's Outnumbered Tuesday reacted to the apprehension of Ahmed Abu Khattala ... by wondering about the timing of the capture given former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's book tour and interview with Fox's Bret Baier later this evening." See? She's even sabotaging Fox "News" AND/OR boosting her book tour. ...
... CW: I'm pretty sure that using U.S. commandos & the FBI to help Hillary sell more books is an impeachable offense.
... Jed Lewison of Daily Kos does a nice job of taking down the unbridled hypocrisy of the Three Amigos (the group has gone radically gender-neutral by replacing Joe Lieberman with Kelly Ayotte [R-N.H.]). ...
... Michael Tomasky: "What a disappointment! The Republicans are all set to unveil their new select committee to keep the [Benghazi] attack in the news, and Obama has to go and bring the alleged ringleader to justice."
Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: "Federal Reserve officials, who have persistently overestimated the strength of the economic recovery, predicted last June that the economy in 2014 would finally grow more than 3 percent for the first time since the recession. The updated forecasts the Fed will publish on Wednesday are likely to reflect more modest expectations. The economy, after all, actually shrank during a wintry first quarter. High hopes are being replaced once again by disappointing data.... The continuing wait for faster growth has reinforced the concern of some critics that the Fed is retreating too quickly from its stimulus campaign." ...
... New York Times Editors: "The Fed has extracted about all the juice it can from low rates and continues to squeeze.... The basic problem -- spurring demand on the part of consumers and borrowers -- is outside its purview. Only Congress can provide the extra dollars for that, but lawmakers have been unwilling or unable to take action, even just to provide basics like federal unemployment benefits or highway and bridge repair. Given that failure to act, it is a wonder the economy has managed to grow at 2 percent."
Zeke Miller: "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lashed out at opponents of gun control regulations Tuesday, saying they hold a viewpoint that 'terrorizes' the majority of Americans.'"
One of the most important I think that can happen today, Lynn Jenkins's bill, an idea of fairness, the idea that when you look across the street from the Capitol, you see the Supreme Court, you see the statue sitting there, blinded in the process with the weights in- between. -- House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, talking about something
Dana Milbank: Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.), who is likely to become the next House majority leader, can't speak in public in full, comprehensible sentences: "... he is a native English speaker and he speaks fluently in private or in small groups. But put him in front of a crowd and his words come out as if they have been translated by Google from a foreign language.... It occurs when he is working from notes or making a prepared statement. What will happen when he takes questions as majority leader, which he seldom does now? ... He has had some high-profile failures as the party's top vote counter (on a couple of occasions, leaders lost or had to cancel votes they expected to win)...." ...
... CW: Seems to me McCarthy's double-speak (or half-speak) creates plausible deniability, a plus for any GOP leader, since the facts are seldom kind to Republicans.
Gregory Korte of USA Today: "It wasn't just a hard drive crash that led the Internal Revenue Service to lose Lois Lerner's e-mails from the time Lerner was in charge of holding up tax exemption applications from conservative groups. It was seven hard drive crashes, the lack of a centralized archive, a practice of erasing and reusing backup tapes every six months, and an IRS policy of allowing employees to decide for themselves which e-mails constitute an official agency record."
** Jeff Shesol, in the New Yorker, on Justice Scalia's narrow, rigid reinterpretations of the English language, a "skill" he has used for decades to twist interpretations of laws to his liking. When does "creation science" have nothing whatever to do with religion? When Nino gets out his dictionary. Now, in Elena Kagan, Scalia has met his match:
What Kagan has done [in the Abramski v. U.S. straw purchase case], in a neat twist on Scalia's analogy, is to highlight the ambiguity and contingency of language. And that, for Scalia, is something that can never be acknowledged, because it would lay bare the game he plays. His approach has always been to reach for a dictionary; find, in one edition or other, a definition that drives toward his predetermined decision; and express, eyes wide with disbelief, utter amazement that anyone could even think of seeing it any other way.
News Ledes
Guardian: "Islamist militants have attacked Iraq's largest oil refinery in the city of Baiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, as Iran raised the prospect of direct military intervention to protect Shia holy sites." ...
... New York Times Update: "Refinery workers, eyewitnesses and an Iraqi Army officer reported the seizure of Iraq's biggest oil refinery by Sunni extremists on Wednesday after army helicopter gunships failed to repel their attack. But other Iraqi officials, including the commander of the garrison defending the refinery in Baiji, asserted that fighting was still going on inside the huge grounds of the facility, which had been shut down by the violence."
AP: "Ukraine's president said Wednesday that government forces will unilaterally cease fire to allow pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country a chance to lay down weapons or leave the country, a potential major development to bring peace to the country."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Georgia inmate Marcus Wellons was put to death late Tuesday for the 1989 rape and murder of a Cobb County teenager in the state's first execution where the source of its lethal-injection drug was cloaked in secrecy. Wellons' execution received heightened scrutiny because it was the first one in the country to be carried out since a botched execution occurred in Oklahoma seven weeks ago."
Share Article
Reader Comments (13)
When McCain was running––pretty lamely, I might add––he said on numerous occasions we should definitely close GITMO. And sometime back in those "Bomb, bomb Iran" times Linsey Graham whose hair was a different shade of pale, voiced the same urgency. What a difference some years make in this political soupcon of those without memories. It won't matter a wit if the Obama administration turns out to be right about Benghazi or have anything else go according to Hoyle––we will have rude slurs, more lies, rampant hypocrisy until the cows come home and we have a new president which if it's Hillary the game of drones and dorks will begin all over again.
Three cheers for Kagan––could see during her conformation hearings she was someone to reckon with.
WORDS MATTER.
Dana Milbank's column brought laughter over my morning coffee. I had often thought the group photo ops had a strange element as Cantor delivered yet another of his whiny diatribes. There was the ever-present Kevin McCarthy hovering in the background. In fact, each time he maintained the identical mien/expression/pose again and again. Making me wonder, why don't they just get one of the life-size photographic cardboard cut outs for the guy?
Quite likely, his fellow cohorts have been aware of his nonsensical babble when in front of a live mic, resulting in a directive..."Hey, Kevin, just stand there, look pretty (and shut up)."
But, if he succeeds Cantor, the McCarthyisms should make for hilarious episodes on the Daily Show—as they attempt to translate whatever the hell he says!
The Michael Tomasky article linked above does a very nice job of attacking the notion that "terrorists" have to be tried in military courts. Turns out: (1) They mostly haven't been; and (2) The conviction rate in civilian courts is extremely high.
And I liked his reasoning:
"I don’t know about you, but I rather like the idea of a guy who works for Xerox, otherwise known as a citizen of the United States, passing judgment on someone like Mostafa. That is what we do. Well, that is what we do at our best, when we’re lucky, when a bunch of war-mad demagogues don’t succeed in scaring Americans into thinking that we have to abandon our best principles to keep the country safe."
@MAG: Poor Kevin––his fractured banter reminds me of that other guy, you know the one who was "The Decider" and now paints cats and dogs and himself in the bath. My favorites:
"I'm also mindful that man should never try to put words in God's mouth. I mean, we should never ascribe natural disasters or anything else, to God. We are in no way, shape or form should a humble being, play God."
"They can get in line like those who have been here legally and have been working to become a citizenship in a legal manner."
"I always jest to people, the Oval Office is the kind of place where people stand outside, they're getting ready to come in and tell me what for, and they walk in and get overwhelmed by the atmosphere. and they say, 'man, you're looking pretty.' "
"It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life."
Yes, indeed. Bless his heart and we thought language like that would be gone forever, yet it looks like we are in for some more treats. I must confess, however, I am, at times, at a loss for certain words––could not for the life of me remember what you called those little fishies (anchovies) when making out my grocery list nor could I recall the name of those "little green things we put in our G&T's"––Limes, my husband says with a smile. So, I think a microphone put in MY face while looking out at a sea of other faces would probably reduce me into a blubbering idiot. Sort of.
Where's the Like button on this thing? ; )
The Hill just reported that the US Patent Office just cancelled the Washington Redskins trademark, calling it disparaging of Native Americans.
Since Jeff Shesol, in the New Yorker piece linked by Marie, made a point of raising Scalia's dishonest use of language in finding a right in the Constitution that had never been there before, I wanted to further dissect Scalia's approach, especially considering the very odd logical structure his opinion depends upon. It is, not surprisingly, more magical than material.
So, Scalia, in Heller, calls upon only one part of the Second Amendment "argument", the conclusion. As an argument, this amendment is an example of a simple premise-conclusion. The premise is:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,"
The conclusion is:
"the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Scalia is attempting to cut off the premise and allow only the conclusion to stand. A nice trick.
There are certain circumstances in which empty set premises (premises, as a rule do not require proof themselves in order for the statement to be logically valid) can be part of a valid argument containing an indisputable conclusion, "Nothing is both a horse and not a horse", but now we're leaving behind the world of common sense logic in which the founders dwelt and ascending into the realm of technical logic inhabited mostly by mathematicians and professional philosophers. I doubt even Scalia would try to pull off this sort of thing. It would be difficult, in any event without resorting to logical symbols and relationships which smack of intellectual arcana and automatically leave most readers in the dark.
So, the idea that Scalia, in Heller, leans on the second part of the Second Amendment (the conclusion) with no inclusion of the premise, seems, to me, to dissolve the logic undergirding the amendment as written by the founders.
Let me put it to you this way. There is, technically, a way to assume that a conclusion is valid iif (if and only if) there is no occasion in which any possible premise is false. Scalia might try to claim that but he'd have to be a much better technical logician than he appears to be, and he would have to try to explain that to the average reader (who probably wouldn't care as long as they got their guns). But if he tries to roll that in with Originalism, there is only trouble ahead. While I have no doubt that some founders had a grounding in basic logic, none of them would be obtuse (or arrogant) enough to try to make an argument to the world at large based on what would appear to many to be a trick, a sleight of hand. Their goal was to garner support, not encourage suspicion.
Thus is the intellectual feebleness of Scalia's opinion laid bare. In fact, the first part of the argument (the Second Amendment) is just as much a contingency as it as premise, making its excision even more illogical.
It's as if you made the statement "We will make gasoline cheap". Without a contingency or premises such as "Because everyone needs cars to get around and cars need gasoline to make them run..." the statement is a logical orphan. It has no context and nothing to support it. It's a slogan or a campaign promise. It's unconnected to anything in the real world. But this is the sort of verbal and logical legerdemain practiced by Scalia (and occasionally Roberts) all the time. Thomas's justifications tend to be circular arguments or simply resort to one of many logical fallacies.
As for word games, the kind played by Scalia tend to favor the dealer. As long as you set the ground rules and make sure there's very little chance someone else can beat you at your own game, you look like a genius. The magician holds all the right cards. The problem is the insularity, the ahistoricism, and the necessity of a rigged structure of such a game when applied to things like legal concerns in the 21st century.
I won't again belabor the argument that the founders, whatever else they "meant" (because we cannot truly know since we were not contemporaries; we did not share the same cultural and social stimuli or sense and understanding of word usage, application, and context. We can study what we think they might have meant, but knowledge of absolute, unimpeachable truth about what was in their hearts and minds is accessible only to the delusional.) by their actual words, they meant for us to be able to expand on those meanings as situations changed. Otherwise, why offer the chance to amend their work?
Conservatives and Originalists wish to force upon us a scriptural approach to the Constitution, ie that these are the absolute, unchanging words of our secular gods. There is a definite religious bent to this approach, a sense that they see themselves as high priests interpreting holy scripture, which cannot be questioned by the uninitiated.
How nice for them. But they must have missed those parts of the founders' writings which questioned the influence of religion in matters of state, ergo, the Establishment Clause.
Games and specious arguments, arguments in which the deck is stacked, cynical application of obscure definitions from dictionaries long out of print. These are magician's tricks. Not the measured, well tempered jurisprudence of the wise.
It's the result of juvenile arrogance, intellectual dishonesty, and a sense of victim entitlement. And if they're going to continue on in this way, perhaps we can inject a tiny bit of honesty by having the conservative justices appear in court wearing top hats and capes and carrying magic canes. Scalia can be introduced with spotlights and dramatic music as "Il Grande Nino!" as birds fly out of his hat, and bats fly out of his ass.
Think the founders would like that?
PD,
But you have not assumed the job of telling the rest of us how to live. Had that been the case, I would expect you to be able to distinguish basic parts of speech and call upon that ability when speaking to the public, extemporaneously or otherwise.
Now, where do I line up to become a citizenship? I losed a loss of life and I'm feeling a natural disaster coming on. But not from god. That wouldn't be right.
Because today's primary idea out here on RC is that Words Matter, I wanted to review the recent words of former, and possibly future candidate for president of the United States, one Rick Perry, governor of the great state of Texas and owner of a hunting lodge that once employed as its name, vicious racist slur, but we'll put those particular words aside and concentrate on his latest idiocy.
The GOP in Texas is very concerned with the level and amount of "gayness" out there in the world, and they, by jing, are going at it hammer and tong. Time to root out all that evil gay stuff. How? Conversion Therapy! That's how. What is it? No one really seems to know. Teabagger Champion Michele Bachman's husband Marcus has been working at it for years but he can't say definitively whether it's working or not, on him or anyone else.
Perry, when asked about such a silly, and potentially damaging enterprise, took the Fifth and said he'd defer to "The Experts".
Really? The Experts? Whoa. There are Experts on Gay Conversion Therapy? Oh, they must be the guys who are sent over from the GOP Experts Center. The ones the MSM is always calling for advice on things like how to fix the horrible shit in Iraq that these same experts caused in the first place, or the ones hauled before the cameras to talk about the evils of gun control after every mass shooting.
But according to just about every respectable medical organization and psychological group in existence (except, of course, for the GOP Experts, whoever the christ they are) is in agreement that this is a horrific idea and there is no such thing as "getting the gay out".
But no matter. Gays, war, income inequality, women, mass murder, immigration, who the fuck knows what else. The GOP always has an answer. They know ev-ery-thing.
Texas gets the gay out. Governor defers to "gay-out" Experts. Whaddaguy.
Things aren't going well for "good guys with guns:"
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/16/justice/arizona-church-shooting/
From Kisa Mlela Santiago's report: "The suspect also reportedly managed to get a gun that belonged to the priest away from him and use it against him."
This follows last week's Las Vegas Good Guy outside the Wal Mart getting shot recently. Do you have anything to add, Mr. LaPierre?
NiskyGuy,
Sorry, I couldn't finish your post. I'm having a hard time getting past that "gun that belonged to the priest" part.
It's written as if it the idea of a pistol packin' priest is no big deal.
Holy....
AK:
The story in my local print news paper (probably AP, but I don't have it with me so I didn't cite it) said something like the priest, responding to a burglary alert, got the gun from the rectory and went to investigate.
There is the problem of what is the priest going to do if the confrontation doesn't go well. That is very much a "not thinking things all the way through" problem with a significant moral dilemma at the end.
For the NRA, though, this describes the ultimate situation where the good guy with the gun scenario should work best. The priest was prepared, on his own turf, and the burglar wasn't alerted to his arrival. A 3-0 count with the bases loaded, so to speak. And it ended horribly.
CW: But "even the editors of the WSJ's opinion pages" are paid by the same jolly fellow who brings us Faux "news." Can't believe it doesn't make a difference.