The Ledes

Monday, October 7, 2024

Weather Channel: “H​urricane Milton has rapidly intensified into a Category 3 and hurricane and storm surge watches are now posted along Florida's western Gulf Coast, where the storm poses threats of life-threatening storm surge, destructive winds and flooding rainfall by midweek. 'Milton will be a historic storm for the west coast of Florida,' the National Weather Service in Tampa Bay said in a briefing Monday morning.” ~~~

     ~~~ New York Times live updates are here for what is now a Cat 5 hurricane. 

CNN: “This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work on the discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated. Their research revealed how genes give rise to different cells within the human body, a process known as gene regulation. Gene regulation by microRNA – a family of molecules that helps cells control the sort of proteins they make – ... was first revealed by Ambros and Ruvkun. The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor ... in Sweden on Monday.... Ambros, a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, conducted the research that earned him the prize at Harvard University. Ruvkun conducted his research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.”

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The Ledes

Sunday, October 6, 2024

New York Times: “Two boys have been arrested and charged in a street attack on David A. Paterson, a former governor of New York, and his stepson, the police said. One boy, who is 12, was charged with second-degree gang assault, and the other, a 13-year-old, was charged with third-degree gang assault, the police said on Saturday night. Both boys, accompanied by their parents, turned themselves in to the police, according to Sean Darcy, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson. A third person, also a minor, went to the police but was not charged in the Friday night attack in Manhattan, according to an internal police report.... Two other people, both adults, were involved in the attack, according to the police. They fled on foot and have not been caught, the police said. The former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault....”

Weather Channel: “Tropical Storm Milton, which formed in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, is expected to become a hurricane late Sunday or early Monday. The storm is expected to pose a major hurricane threat to Florida by midweek, just over a week after Helene pushed through the region. The National Hurricane Center says that 'there is an increasing risk of life-threatening storm surge and wind impacts for portions of the west coast of the Florida Peninsula beginning late Tuesday or Wednesday.'”

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Public Service Announcement

Washington Post: "Americans can again order free rapid coronavirus tests by mail, the Biden administration announced Thursday. People can request four free at-home tests per household through covidtests.gov. They will begin shipping Monday. The move comes ahead of an expected winter wave of coronavirus cases. The September revival of the free testing program is in line with the Biden administration’s strategy to respond to the coronavirus as part of a broader public health campaign to protect Americans from respiratory viruses, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), that surge every fall and winter. But free tests were not mailed during the summer wave, which wastewater surveillance data shows is now receding."

Washington Post: “Comedy news outlet the Onion — reinvigorated by new ownership over this year — is bringing back its once-popular video parodies of cable news. But this time, there’s someone with real news anchor experience in the chair. When the first episodes appear online Monday, former WAMU and MSNBC host Joshua Johnson will be the face of the resurrected 'Onion News Network.' Playing an ONN anchor character named Dwight Richmond, Johnson says he’s bringing a real anchor’s sense of clarity — and self-importance — to the job. 'If ONN is anything, it’s a news organization that is so unaware of its own ridiculousness that it has the confidence of a serial killer,' says Johnson, 44.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I'll be darned if I can figured out how to watch ONN. If anybody knows, do tell. Thanks.

Washington Post: “First came the surprising discovery that Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. But for roughly 60 years, the reason remained a mystery. Since the late 1960s, satellites over the poles detected an extremely fast flow of particles escaping into space — at speeds of 20 kilometers per second. Scientists suspected that gravity and the magnetic field alone could not fully explain the stream. There had to be another source creating this leaky faucet. It turns out the mysterious force is a previously undiscovered global electric field, a recent study found. The field is only about the strength of a watch battery — but it’s enough to thrust lighter ions from our atmosphere into space. It’s also generated unlike other electric fields on Earth. This newly discovered aspect of our planet provides clues about the evolution of our atmosphere, perhaps explaining why Earth is habitable. The electric field is 'an agent of chaos,' said Glyn Collinson, a NASA rocket scientist and lead author of the study. 'It undoes gravity.... Without it, Earth would be very different.'”

The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

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Jun182013

The Commentariat -- June 19, 2013

Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "Congressional budget analysts ... said Tuesday that legislation to overhaul the nation’s immigration system would cut close to $1 trillion from the federal deficit over the next two decades and lead to more than 10 million new legal residents in the country. A long-awaited analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that the benefits of an increase in legal residents from immigration legislation currently being debated in the Senate -- which includes a pathway to citizenship -- would outweigh the costs.... The report ... came just hours after Speaker John A. Boehner raised potential new obstacles for the bill, saying he would not bring any immigration measure to the floor unless it had the support of a majority of House Republicans." CW: okay, let's see how serious Republicans are about reducing the deficit. ...

... Steve Benen: obviously, action immigration reform will not pass if Boehner insists that "a majority of the majority" must approve whatever bill reaches the floor. "... just two weeks ago, nearly every member of the House Republican caucus voted to deport Dream Act kids."

Mark Landler & Peter Baker of the New York Times: President Obama's "main counterparts on the world stage are not his friends, and they make little attempt to cloak their disagreements in diplomatic niceties." ...

Jim Kuhnhenn of the AP: "Trying to tamp down concerns about government over-reach, President Barack Obama on Wednesday defended U.S. Internet and phone surveillance programs as narrowly targeted efforts that have saved lives and thwarted at least 50 terror threats. 'This is not a situation in which we are rifling through ordinary emails' of huge numbers of citizens in the United States or elsewhere, the president declared during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He called it as a 'circumscribed, narrow' surveillance program." ...

... Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "Challenged personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany about American intelligence programs that monitor foreigners' communications without individualized court orders, President Obama said Wednesday that German terrorist threats were among those foiled by such operations worldwide -- a contention that Mrs. Merkel seemed to confirm." ...

... Stephen Brown & Noah Barkin of Reuters: "German Chancellor Angela Merkel told U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday that government monitoring of Internet communications needed to remain within proper limits. 'I made clear that although we do see the need for gathering information, the topic of proportionality is always an important one and the free democratic order is based on people feeling safe,' Merkel said at a joint news conference with Obama."...

... New York Times Editors: "If the president is serious about declassifying some secrets, he should have said he would start with the [FISA] court. And at the top of the list should be its opinion that broadened the Patriot Act to allow the collection of every phone record, a power that surprised even the Republican lawmakers who wrote the act." ...

... Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "Top national security officials on Tuesday promoted two newly declassified examples of what they portrayed as 'potential terrorist events' disrupted by government surveillance. The cases were made public as Congress and the Obama administration stepped up a campaign to explain and defend programs unveiled by recent leaks from a former intelligence contractor."

John Harwood of the New York Times piles on, suggesting that the country would be more "united" if Obama had visited North Dakota & other red states. CW: might be nice if Harwood recalled the great success of Richard Nixon, who campaigned in all 50 states in 1960. (He "wound up wasting valuable time visiting states that he had no chance to win, or that had few electoral votes and would be of little help in the election, or states that he would almost certainly win regardless.") Harwood also fails to mention that Obama has visited all 50 states, if you include the year before he became president. And Harwood makes a big deal about Obama's not visiting Mississippi, but Michelle Obama has been there at least twice since her husband became president. ...

... MEANWHILE, contributor MAG highlights this piece by Charles Pierce: "Everybody thought his main job would be to disenthrall the country from the policies of George W. Bush. It has turned out that his main job has been to disenthrall -- haltingly, slowly, maddeningly discursively -- the country from the policies of the last previous Democratic president, and if there's been a more towering irony in American politics over the past several decades, I don't know what it is." ...

... CW: "Towering irony?" Not really. Pierce has ignored rudimentary American political history here. We have political, social and bureaucratic systems which dictate that change occurs slowly. (No, I don't like it, either.) Ike did not undo the New Deal and neither did Nixon. The fact that Obama & Congressional Democrats were able to undo so many of Clinton's failures -- failures of a generation ago -- is about par for the course. Pierce did not mention, BTW, that Obama also "undid" Clinton's failure to pass a health insurance law or that Obama somewhat undid some of Clinton's catastrophic financial-sector "reforms," too. Presidents -- and their contemporaneous Congresses -- seldom reverse the course of history; they only modify it. And what they modify is not likely to be the previous administration's errors but ones from a time long past. The New Deal may seem like the exception, and in some ways it was, but in fact, Roosevelt & Congressional Democrats were undoing longstanding Republican policies, not just Hoover's policies. Change in the U.S. tends to be generational. And that explains the changes Pierce does mention -- especially the Clinton-era anti-gay policies & laws. Americans elect people who represent their "values," and those values are slow to evolve.

Trust Us, Ctd. Charlie Savage & Michael Schmidt: "... from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 'subjects' and wounded about 80 others -- and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records.... The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings. In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.'s internal investigation was the only official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been conflicting accounts about basic facts like whether the Chechen man, Ibragim Todashev, attacked an agent with a knife, was unarmed or was brandishing a metal pole. But Orlando homicide detectives are not independently investigating what happened." Includes links to documents obtained by the Times.

Cummings Comes Through. Josh Hicks of the Washington Post: "The House Oversight Committee's top Democrat on Tuesday released the full transcript of a congressional interview that he said 'debunks conspiracy theories' about the IRS targeting controversy. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the committee, produced a complete interview transcript in which an IRS manager in Cincinnati said he elevated the first tea party case that led the agency to begin singling out conservative groups for extra scrutiny." Here's Part 1 of the transcript (pdf). Here's Part 2 (pdf). Democrats have posted what they think are key pages of the transcript. ...

... Greg Sargent: "... Cummings had previously insisted Issa release the full transcript himself, arguing it would show that the Republican chairman's claims of White House involvement are false, and that Issa's own selective release of testimony was misleading the public. Issa refused, insisting that releasing full transcripts would damage the investigation. Cummings then asked Issa to detail what specifically in the transcript would do this, and demanded an answer by yesterday. According to Cummings..., Issa has yet to reply -- hence the decision to go forward with the release today."

The "New" GOP. Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "The House of Representatives on Tuesday approved the most restrictive ban on abortion considered by Congress in a decade, a largely symbolic vote that laid bare the deep ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans.... Just six Republicans voted against the bill; six Democrats voted for it." CW: worth reading Peters' piece to get a feel for the histrionics -- & for those of you who associate "histrionics" with female caterwauling, the term is apt here -- after passing the bill out of committee with not a single female vote, Republicans pushed their female members to do most of the speaking during debate on the House floor Tuesday." ...

... Parity! Katie Hiler of the New York Times: A class of eight astronaut trainees -- "the first NASA has named in four years, and the first group to include equal numbers of men and women -- were selected from 6,300 applicants and will start training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in August, the space agency said Monday." ...

... CW: For the second day in a row, we see the stark contrast in treatment of women between a male-dominated government entity -- this time NASA -- and Congressional Republicans. I won't call our GOP Congresscritters Neanderthals, as I think that might be unfair to Neanderthals. ...

... OR, as David Atkins writes in Hullabaloo: "In the constant internal GOP tug-of-war between 'tone it down to appeal to sane voters' and 'ramp it up for the wingnut base', guess which side is winning? ... Republican misogyny may doom them faster than their racism."

Stephen Ohlemacher of the AP: "The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year, according to a GOP senator. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says his office has learned that the IRS is executing an agreement with the employees' union on Wednesday to pay the bonuses. Grassley says the bonuses should be canceled under an April directive from the White House budget office. The directive was written by Danny Werfel, a former budget official who has since been appointed acting IRS commissioner.... The IRS said it is negotiating with the union over the matter but did not dispute Grassley's claim that the bonuses are imminent." ...

... CW: I hope IRS employee Lou Montoya gets a piece of the action. After both my financial adviser & my accountant told me I needed an attorney to get a new tax ID number (which they said I needed to defrost a bank account) & that it would take weeks to obtain, Montoya got me the new number in 20 minutes. And he was very nice about it.

Ben Smith of BuzzFeed remembers investigative reporter Michael Hastings. (See also Tuesday's News Ledes.)

Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic interviews Politico founders John Harris & Jim VandeHei. CW: I'm not sure why. I think we're supposed to get some insights into a couple of guys who eschew insights (tho they claim they're about to launch "a division devoted to 'deep, magazine-style journalism.'" Probably whatever Harris & VandeHei think "deep" and "journalism" mean is different from your concepts of the terms. ...

... Ed Kilgore figures "Harris and VandeHei think length will be the main and perhaps the only differentiator of the new long-form outlet"; that is, they reckon "deep journalism" = "more words." ...

... John Cole of Gawker: Harris & VandeHei both criticized Nate Silver. "Of course Silver wasn’t the lifeline for Politico - Silver basically said for months that Obama was going to walk away with the election, while the Politico staff needed a horse race so they could write the ten thousand inside baseball faux drama bullshit that they churn out every day just hoping for a link from Drudge or a call from the Morning Joe booking staff." ...

... Charles Pierce has a few choice words, beginning with "Fk you, you smug little prick." Pierce goes on: "But, by far, my favorite part of the interview comes when the Two Presiding Geniuses decide to pick another fight with Nate Silver that they have no hope of winning. You may recall that, at the end of the campaign, TBOTP [Tiger Beat on the Potomac] decided that Silver's fancy scienco-math wasn't for them, because it disagreed with what everybody was saying at John Harris's dinner table the night before. So they took off after him, and then Silver and the American electorate combined to kick their insidery asses all around the block." ...

... Nate Silver: "It's striking how preoccupied Harris and VandeHei are with the perception that Politico is too 'insidery'.... The perceptions of Beltway insiders, which Politico echoes and embraces, are not always very insightful or accurate. In other words, the conventional wisdom is often wrong, especially in Washington.... It would be one thing if Politico were to describe the conventional wisdom and then hold it up to a critical examination.... But in most ... pieces..., there's a lack of perspective -- in particular, a lack of perspective about the role that Politico plays in formulating the conventional wisdom which they then 'report' upon.... Harris and VandeHei seem to lack very much curiosity for the world outside of the bubble."

Maureen Dowd on Johnny 'The Executioner' Martorano, who turned government witness and copped to killing 20 men and women as part of Whitey Bulger's Winter Hill Gang." Read Gemli's comment. ...

... Shelley Murphy, et al., of the Boston Globe have a straight report on Tuesday's testimony. CW: like Gemli, I haven't been following the trial, but for those of you who want to up-to-the-minute details, the Globe has a liveblog, which is rich in 140-character "reporting." Here's Katharine Seelye's report for the New York Times on Martorano's testimony.

News Ledes

New York Daily News: "James Gandolfini, the New Jersey-bred actor who delighted audiences as mob boss Tony Soprano in 'The Sopranos' has died following a massive heart attack in Italy, a source told the Daily News." ...

     ... Update: Gandolfini's New York Times obituary is here.

Washington Post: "Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday suspended negotiations with Washington over a security agreement that would regulate the presence of U.S. troops here beyond 2014, apparently angered by the U.S.-backed initiative to start formal peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar." ...

     ... New York Times Update: "In a diplomatic scramble to keep alive the possibility of peace talks with the Taliban, American officials on Wednesday pressed the insurgents to backtrack on their effort to present themselves as essentially an alternative government at the office they opened Tuesday in Qatar, Afghan officials said."

AP: "Al-Qaida-linked militants detonated multiple bomb blasts and breached the main U.N. compound in Mogadishu, [Somalia,] on Wednesday, sparking gun battles with security forces that killed at least 12 people. U.N. personnel who reached the compound's secure bunker all survived, though officials hinted not all reached that bunker."

Reuters: " A lone, silent vigil by a man in Istanbul inspired copycat protests on Tuesday, as police detained dozens of people across Turkey in an operation linked to three weeks of often violent demonstrations against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. Overnight in Ankara, riot police used teargas and water cannon to disperse hundreds of people who had gathered in and around the government quarter of Kizilay. But in stark contrast to the recent fierce clashes in several cities, hundreds of protesters merely stood in silence in Istanbul, inspired by a man who lit up social media by doing just that for eight hours in the city's Taksim Square on Monday."

Los Angeles Times: "The Los Angeles county coroner's office had yet to determine Tuesday night whether a body recovered from a fiery car crash was that of award-winning journalist Michael Hastings."

     ... Update: The L.A. Times has a newer story up now, with some details about the car crash.

Comments Off

Reader Comments (9)

Yesterday I wanted to give a link to part of Chris Haye's program "All In" in which he featured Katrinia vanden Heuval and her husband the Russian expert, Stephen Cohen discuss Putin and the Syrian situation. But I couldn't remember Stephen's last name and I sure wasn't able to spell Katrina's last name. Thanks to Marie for something connecting to Katrina I was able finally to find what I was looking for. I think it a good and startling discussion and what took me by surprise is Stephen's statement that he thinks we might be in another cold war with Russia. This discussion is several minutes into the video:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174852/katrina-vanden-heuvel-and-stephen-cohen-building-ramp-conflict-syria#axzz2Wbu21kxB

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe

Today on the Time's front page is an article about us, specifically Obama, getting along with all those foreign leaders. I'm surprised Maureen didn't latch onto this dissing "Barry" for his lack of rubbing the backs of all those heads of state and playing footsie with the females. I recall how FDR, the Brits and Truman thought they were warm and cozy with "Uncle Joe" as they called Stalin until he fucked them over royally. Here is something from Strobe Talbot that caught my eye and ear many years ago when I believed that warm and cozy relationships with foreign leaders were possible:


Strobe Talbott: July 18-02

"One of the obvious problems with personalized diplomacy, for all the hard work it may entail, is its intellectual laziness. It is the eternal fantasy of U.S. foreign policy that leaders can simply get together and talk things over like regular guys. After reading this memoir, I came across the following remark in a new book on the end of WWII, when an ailing FDR was thoroughly hoodwinked by Stalin at Yalta. Roosevelt’s claim, “I can
handle Stalin,” was part of what Eisenhower’s political advisor Robert Murphy acknowledged to be “the all-too- prevalent American theory” that individual friendships can determine national policy. “Soviet policy-makers and diplomats never operate on that level."

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe

Another perspective on the Snowden kerfluffle. http://www.nationalmemo.com/cyber-warfare-beats-the-other-kind/

As I suspected, Snowden exaggerated a wee bit if not a lot. Snowden wasn't an agent; he was a system administrator. In my last job, I was part of computer support for a major corporation that had several thousand computers. Yes, a sysadmin could theoretically go into any account. but they don't normally unless specifically requested to do so. Second, one sysadmin for half a million accounts? Don't be silly! No there are many sysadmins and they're usually compartmentalized. It is true that some of them have more power than the others. I think Snowden was hacking the system, not just doing what he was paid to do.

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterBarbarossa

Charles Pierce: "... I was struck with the thought that Barack Obama has spent five years in office undoing the legacy of a previous president, but just not the legacy of the president everybody supposed that he would have to unravel." From today's post titled aptly "Mr. Clinton Regrets."

Read more: Bill Clinton Obama Syria Intervention - Mr. Clinton's Regrets - Esquire

Clinton's musings made me think of an amusing line that somewhat paraphrases the NY Times motto, comes from the 2011 French film/a Sarkozy biopic...: La Conquête (The Conquest). There is one particularly hilarious scene as Sarkozy walks away from a rather disastrous interview, his character remarks, "All the crap I say is not fit for print."

Indeed. Could be said by so so many others in the public eye!

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterMAG

Gotta love Silver. He reduced Harris and VandeHei to their deserved status of mental midgets, then he pursed his lips and blew them away.

Another Chris Matthews leg tingling moment when Cummings released the full IRS interview transcript. If the TV media were on the job, this would be the time to confront Darrell Issa with his own bellicose lies.

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterDiane

Politico, with its highly circumscribed, "mirror, mirror" view of what's important in the world (why, whatever we see in the mirror, of course....oh look it's us!) and their way of reporting on what they then decide is important (their opinions) is strikingly similar to the mindset that Darrell (Cheap Crook) Issa brings to his committee investigations. The only things worth reporting on are those that serve to bolster his own opinions and prejudices.

In the same way that Jim Harris finds the idea of reporting on stolen pensions as beneath his interest (he being the arbiter of what's truly important and all) and even worse, boring, Darrell (Cheap Crook) Issa is dismayed that a full investigation into IRS handling of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) non-profits does not support his peyote vision of stealthy phone calls in the middle of the night from the White House to Cincinnati IRS managers ordering them to stick it to the teabaggers, an investigation that, to the contrary, entirely disproves his puerile mewlings.

Two more examples, if any more were needed, of the incessant navel gazing on the right. But there are plenty more if one were so inclined: "Let's stick it to women! They'll love us! Let's make anyone who doesn't look like us have to carry identification papers. They'll line up to become Republicans! Let's stick it to unions, old people, the poor, students. Fuck, let's stick it to everyone! They'll all want to join the good old GOP!"

Read the exclusive outcome of this master plan in Politico! And pay no attention that silly Nate Silver. We don't need polls. We just look in the mirror and all is revealed.

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

Marie writes, in accurate comment on Pierce's piece on Obama making good on Clinton: "Americans elect people who represent their "values," and those values are slow to evolve."

True enough, but also sometimes those values don't change much at all, or go backward. When I was a kid, the values that led the South to secede were trampled and done, by the Civil War and successive political, social, economic changes. (Where I live, Civil War ground is all around us. It is more than history.)

These days it seems like we are back around the Calhoun days, with governors recently talking secession, state legislatures talking nullification and voter suppression, and a general creeping increase in wealth going to the property owners at the expense of the workers, skilled or otherwise. Public education helped build this country, now it is being challenged and ignorance seems acceptable. On and on.

If progress comes dropping slow, that would be OK -- it is the retrograde movement that mystifies me.

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterPatrick

If the name of your 501(c)(4) group Tea Party Tards, Turds, Terrorists or whatever it seems like one of your goals is to celebrate the fact you are flaunting the purpose of the 501(c)(4) status. I would be more appalled if the applications were not examined - oh that's right they weren't (see Carl Rove's group). They have, or had at the time, a formal Tea Party Caucus in Congress and many candidates identified themselves as members of the Tea Party. That's a political designation. If a group named itself "Democrats Forever", I'm pretty sure that would have been a non starter for (c)(4) status.

The real haunting question is how much of the impetus for naming a group "Tea Party anything" was stupidity and how much was hubris.

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterDiane

Diane,

I don't think stupidity or hubris are involved (at least not directly) in naming your group Tea Partiers Against Obama, or Real American Patriots, or Teabagger Nation, or Come and Take Our Guns, Assholes, or some similarly bellicose wingnut cognomen.

The idea seems to be more about standing up and screaming at the top of your lungs that you hate what's happening to "your" America and that "those people" better watch out 'cause you're coming for them and you have guns and flags and bibles and, blah, blah, blah and you're not going away and the Kochs are giving you money to help elect your kind of officials and boot out the undeserving moochers, etc, etc.

It's really more an expression of antipathy and dismay that things aren't going the way you'd like them to go expressed via in-your-face antagonism and fueled by myths, untruths, half-truths, and a very large dose of don't know fuck all about much of anything except what we hear on right-wing radio (this is where hubris and stupidity come in).

And now they have the extra added benefit of being outraged, victimized by the hated collectors of TAXES, and just like ol' Darrell says, that Kenyan Commie tol' 'em to do it.

The really bad thing about all of this is that the IRS was doing their job. Maybe they didn't go about it in the best way, but now with all of this shit falling out of the skies around them, they will be nicely bullied into submission and let the Teabaggers and Astroturf conservative groups go about their "social welfare" work without the slightest bit of oversight. So once again, wingnuts get away with essentially illegal activity and get to paint themselves as victims harassed by an evil government into the bargain. And pay not a penny in taxes as they spend millions to elect morons.

Which is where a decent press and some stalwart Democrats should step up to the plate and tell it like it is.

When that happens, call me. I'll be working on my fantasy novel about what it would be like if we had serious reporters working stories like this and progressive politicians who don't run for the hills whenever the wingnuts start throwing cowpies at them.

June 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus
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