;)
The Commentariat -- June 23, 2014
Internal links removed.
Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Baghdad on Monday morning to urge the Iraqis to bridge their sectarian differences and to encourage them to form a new, inclusive government." ...
... The Guardian is liveblogging talks between Kerry & Al-Maliki, & other developments. ...
... Loveday Morris & Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "The 300 U.S. advisers authorized to assist the Iraqi security forces will find an army in crisis mode, so lacking in equipment and shaken by desertions that it may not be able to win back significant chunks of territory from al-Qaeda renegades for months or even years, analysts and officials say. After tens of thousands of desertions, the Iraqi military is reeling from what one U.S. official described as 'psychological collapse' in the face of the offensive from militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)." ...
... Alissa Rubin of the New York Times: "The Iraqi government said Sunday that Sunni militants had taken control of a major Iraqi post on the Syrian border, strengthening their ability to move men and supplies into Iraq's heartland. As the government tried to cast the setback in a positive light, saying troops had made a 'tactical' decision to withdraw, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to increase the pressure on Iraq's leadership by signaling that the United States was open to the selection of a new prime minister who could bridge the deep sectarian divides in the country." ...
... Rachel Maddow in the Washington Post: "After meeting with President Obama last week, congressional leaders emerged in rare bipartisan agreement: All said the president would need no further authorization from Congress for new U.S. military intervention in Iraq. They may agree on that, but they're wrong.... Beyond the 60-day window afforded by the War Powers Act, Obama will need overt congressional authorization for additional troops to protect the U.S. Embassy and U.S. personnel, for the several hundred military 'advisers' he has just announced, for air strikes by manned or unmanned planes or for any further military intervention." ...
... CW: There is an irony in the contrast between the right's bitter criticisms of Obama's "imperial presidency" and their acquiescence when an issue of war -- the means by which empires are usually built -- arises. As usual, what wingers really want is an imperial president, one who will use force to compel other countries to comply with U.S. interests.
David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times: "Three journalists working for Al Jazeera were convicted Monday by an Egyptian court and sentenced to seven years each in prison for conspiring to broadcast false news in order to destabilize Egypt. The journalists for the network's English-language channel -- Mohared Fadel Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian who has previously worked for CNN and The New York Times; Peter Greste, an Australian who has previously worked for the BBC; and Baher Mohamed, an Egyptian who has worked for other international news organizations -- have been in jail since December." ...
... Al Jazeera America: "Greste and Fahmy were sentenced to seven years in jail, while Mohamed was sentenced to an additional three years for possession of ammunition. Other Al Jazeera journalists being tried in absentia were sentenced to 10 years. Their names are: Alaa Bayoumi, Anas Abdel-Wahab Khalawi Hasan, Khaleel Aly Khaleel Bahnasy, Mohamed Fawzi, Dominic Kane and Sue Turton. Al Jazeera has always rejected the charges against its journalists and maintains their innocence."
Shaila Dewan of the New York Times: "... at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, which convened over the weekend [in Dallas], the subject of income inequality seemed to be on almost everyone's lips, and mayors wondered aloud how best to use their powers to help the lowest-paid workers." CW: Why a female Times reporter would write (in the lede, no less) that a female mayor "bellied up to the table" is beyond me.
Henry Paulson, one of Dubya's Treasury Secretaries, best known for kneeling down & begging Nancy Pelosi to save him from members of his own party who were fighting his efforts to save Wall Street is 2008 with a $700 billion bailout, is now begging Republicans to save the planet. "... it is perverse that those who want limited government and rail against bailouts would put the economy at risk by ignoring climate change.... Climate change is the challenge of our time," Paulson wrote in a Sunday New York Times op-ed. Thanks to MAG for the link. ...
... Paul Krugman is amused: "Given the state of U.S. politics today, climate action is entirely dependent on Democrats, With a Democrat in the White House, we got some movement through executive action; if Democrats eventually regain the House, there could be more. If Paulson believes that he can support Republicans while still pushing for climate action, he's just delusional." CW: Get on your knees, Hank. ...
... In his Monday column, Krugman writes, "A carbon tax [which Paulson advocates] may be the best thing we could do, but we won't actually do it. Yet there are a number of second-best things ... that we're either doing already or might do soon. And the question for Mr. Paulson and other conservatives who consider themselves environmentalists is whether they're willing to accept second-best answers, and in particular whether they're willing to accept second-best answers implemented by the other party. If they aren't, their supposed environmentalism is an empty gesture." ...
... CW: We're back to All Krugman All the Time. His review in the New York Review of Books of Tim Geithner's Stress Test is easy reading, even for us non-economists. If you thought Geithner was a weasly schmuck, Krugman will not disabuse you of the notion. ...
... ALSO in the NYRB, Steve Coll of the New Yorker reviews a book by Brad Stone, The Everything Store, about Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos. CW: If you think about it, you'll see a connection between Stone's book & Krugman's review of Geithner's. ...
... AND Sue Halpern reviews books by Glenn Greenwald & Luke Harding on the Snowden leaks.
Presidential Election 2016
Too Rich to Run? Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: Hillary & Bill Clinton "are established members of the 1 percent, leading lives far removed from the millions of middle-class voters who swing elections. [Hillary] Clinton has underscored the contrast with a series of stumbles in discussing her finances -- the latest in an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper published Sunday, in which she compared herself with other multimillionaires.... Multiple Obama campaign advisers -- who spoke only on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the Clintons -- said they fear [Hillary] Clinton's financial status could hurt her as it did Republican nominee Mitt Romney, whom Obama portrayed in 2012 as an out-of-touch plutocrat at a time of economic uncertainty."
... You can watch Diane Sawyer's full interview of Clinton, mentioned but not properly linked at the top of Rucker's piece, here.
Jeff Toobin has a long profile of Ted Cruz in the New Yorker.
Molly Ball of the Atlantic: Chris Christie's new campaign: liberalizing drug laws to treat rather than jail addicts: At the Faith & Freedom Coalition forum annual meeting, "he said, 'what works is giving those people -- nonviolent drug offenders, addicts -- the tools they need to be able to deal with their disease.' Christie drew a line between compassion for addicts and opposition to abortion: 'I believe if you're pro-life, as I am, you need to be pro-life for the whole life,' he said. The idea of changing the way drug offenders are treated is said to be personal to Christie. In April, he gave a speech in New Jersey where he said he had recently lost a friend to addiction...." ...
... CW: Unfortunately, this is the way with Republicans. They're against any sort of compassion for any group till they learn a friend or family member has it. So Christie has a friend who died because of drug addiction; Christie runs a state that needed federal disaster aid, etc. Apparently, Christie doesn't have any friends who are teachers, or need a pension, or smoke marijuana, or needed an abortion, etc. Republicans not only can't manage empathy for others; they think empathy is a bad thing. BTW, Christie's good friends in the private prison business must be pissed at him for this speech.
News Ledes
Washington Post: "Al-Qaeda renegades seized control of Iraq's main border crossing with Jordan late Sunday, sustaining their onslaught against crumbling Iraqi security forces as Secretary of State John F. Kerry arrived in Baghdad. The capture of the border crossing of Turabil late Sunday followed the fall of three more towns in western Iraq's Anbar province to the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)."
Guardian: "The Israeli military has carried out air strikes on targets inside Syria, including a military headquarters, in response to a cross-border attack that left an Israeli teenager dead. In all, Israel said it struck nine military targets inside Syria, and 'direct hits were confirmed.'"
Al Jazeera: "Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly expressed support Sunday for Ukraine's declaration of a cease-fire in its battle against pro-Russian separatists and called on both sides to negotiate a compromise."
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Reader Comments (16)
While Henry Paulson's attempt to act like a rational person regarding climate change should be regarded as at least a step in the right direction, a few things come to mind. First of all, he chose the NYT for his publication. Isn't he preaching to the choir a bit here? We accept the scientific evidence of climate change. Why doesn't he submit his radical views to the Fox News editors, or their sister darling the Wall Street Journal? Stick it there on Breibart.com and see how his fellow "Republican" brethren react to it...Secondly, while he admits that he's a "businessman and not a climatologist", I find it a sad and depressing fact that our discussion about reducing man-made effects on the climate, yeah that thing that we ALL need to even SURVIVE on this planet, always come second tier to economics. This is a dasturdely rebuke of our social organization, nationally and internationally. While certain tribes, almost all considered indigenous and thus "backward" still put mother nature first, we as a species have massively failed in priorities as we've built our lives around conspicious consumption. I think we can all agree that economic growth Growth GROWTH! is unsustainable in the long term.
I've lately considered this reality to be perhaps one of the driving manias of the 1%'s insatiable thirst for wealth accumulation over the last decades. They see the end game. The Club of Rome's infamous "The Limits to Growth" was published in 1972, and envisioned the crumbling of the hyper-capitalist system due to structural deficiencies coupled with finite resources. Enter the Reagan Revolution and neo-capitalism's triumphant deregulation regime leading to skyrocketing inequality. With a favorable tax code and the rise of wealth managers specialized in keeping the fortune in the family, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be influenced by the scientific consensus that climate change is real, and that the capitalist system in place today is structurally unsustainable. Thus there will come a time when the economic bonanza of easy cash will run its course, leaving a shrinking pie to a growing population. Hoarding dollars offshore seems like a savvy strategic choice for those with that option given the circumstances. It is a dog eat dog world out there, if you eat dogs.
And that takes me back to the Paulson piece, as he exerts his business wisdom in making the case for action on climate change. Lest we forget, he is first and foremost a Goldman Sachs approved businesman, and thus sees big $$$ flowing to him and his white male buddies with a little carbon tax, as Matt Taibi already foresaw:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=7
"... CW: There is an irony in the contrast between the right's bitter criticisms of Obama's "imperial presidency" and their acquiescence when an issue of war -- the means by which empires are usually built -- arises. As usual, what wingers really want is an imperial president, one who will use force to compel other countries to comply with U.S. interests."
A good example of this is Susan Collins during a congressional hearing on the situation in Iraq questioning General Dempsy and Hagel about "all those girls and women captured by the Boko Haram––it's terrible, just terrible and we haven't done anything about it. I don't understand why our military can't go in and find those girls." Collins was visibly upset––cheeks getting redder by the minute. Dempsy very patiently explained to this Senator that Nigeria was a sovereign country––we can't just go into countries willy, nilly and take over. We have done everything we are able to do in this situation. He then explained the terrain in that country and how difficult it would be to locate these women even if they could. Apparently this explanation did not sit well with Susan whose expression was one of anger and frustration. And yet this same little lady was complaining about the Obama administration's foray into health care among other things. They want a king when it suits; when it doesn't they stick the president at the bottom of a urinal and pee on him.
As Reality Chex was down for about 12 hours beginning Friday afternoon, I'm reposting this comment from Barbarossa/Bob Hicks, first published Friday:
In case you missed this:
On June 19,1939, the Mayo Clinic informed Lou Gehrig that he had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS. Ever since then, in this country, ALS is also called "Lou Gehrig's Disease."
Since nobody really knows what causes ALS, it continues to be very expensive to do research on its causes and treatment. As a PALS (Person with ALS), I'm doing my part to raise money for the ALS Association's research programs this summer and fall. Lou Gehrig only lived two years after diagnosis. So far, I've survived four years. I'll do all I can while I'm still relativelly functional
Here is a link to my page:
http://webga.alsa.org/goto/BobsWarriors
I know we're constantly bombarded with appeals for this or that cause. The ALS Assciation has a very good rating from Charity Navigator, with 72.4% of funds going where they should and only 11% on overhead. The CEO of the Georgia branch receives no salary.
Any amount you can give will be much appreciated.
Posted with permission.
How did The Paper of Record let this man go?:
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/iraq-war-2014-6/
PD,
They don't want just any king (no nee-groes, puh-lease). They want their king. They want a kind of Restoration, another Reagan. They all seem to forget that Reagan created one of the most unscrupulous administrations in modern times (until Dubya), that he raised taxes on numerous occasions, that he nearly tripled the deficit, that unemployment under Saint Ronnie was nearly 11%, far higher than under Obama, that he set the stage for Osama Bin Laden, and that he expanded the size of government exponentially.
But if there ever is a kind of GOP Restoration, it will make the corrupt, royalist dissolution of the English Restoration look like an exercise in Puritan sobriety.
Elections matter.
....also...
this business of putting an effigy of the president into a urinal. The right is always screaming about how badly the Decider was treated. I can't recall anything nearly this bad. Nor does anything written or said about Bush come anywhere near the kinds of things the right says and writes about Obama.
But my more specific question is what is it about conservatives that makes them so concerned with bathroom behavior and people's private parts? Last week Salon did a piece on Red State bathroom investigator Erick Erickson who is concerned that too many liberal men pee sitting down. Has he done a survey? Does he have cameras installed in public facilities for his personal viewing pleasure?
And people at a "Faith and Freedom" gathering take pains to pee on a likeness of the president, as if the thing were some kind of voodoo doll. What kind of faith are they talking about? Sounds kinda skeevy. Right wing Christian fundamentalism at work, I guess.
This obsession with urination habits of others makes me wonder about the developmental stage at which conservatives seem to be permanently stuck. Next thing you know, there'll be a party platform on pee-pees and wee-wees and diapies and poopie pants and maybe they'll have an official Party Pacifier to pass out at the next convention.
Sad, really.
@AK: I think it's all tied up with sex in some distorted way. The uproar some have about women nursing their babies in public as though breasts were purely sexual objects. Anyone who has had a connection with young children know that around five to seven approximately they love anything scatological––along with vomit and anything icky. We are still in a puritan culture in some parts of this country whose underbelly was always obsessed with "dirty stuff", sin and the devil. Arrested Development––wasn't that the name of a rock group?
@Akhilleus.
I'm not Freud. But.
Conservatives are definitely stuck at the toddler stage. Any parts of the body that are normally covered by clothing are disgusting/titillating, no matter the function those parts may perform (or may have performed, re: the navel, which reminds me that it isn't just conservatives who shudder at the sight of our more private parts: Playboy used to airbrush out their centerfolds' navels).
A good bit of this seems to have to do with the Garden of Eden story, where Adam & Eve learned a new feeling -- shame -- and covered themselves. Thanks to St. Augustine, the notion of original sin became embedded in the Christian ethos, & the fig leaf was a vain attempt to cover the source of the shame. As I recall, most Christians who believe in heaven think it's a place where we lose our earthly bodies & have only spiritual bodies, whatever they may be. This is because the natural body is a nasty thing.
We may be over the days when exposure of a lady's ankle was a shocker, or the days that my grandmother called chicken thighs "second joints" because "thigh" was a dirty word, but we aren't anywhere near past the phenomenon. So a mother discreetly breast-feeding her neonate in a public park or shopping mall is an exhibitionist (sometimes subject to arrest), and even a one-room unisex public toilet is suspect.
I think part of the obsession (potty training applies here) has to do with self-control. Any display -- private, quasi-public or public -- of sexuality or excretion implies or involves a certain loss of control. When we pee, we "relieve" ourselves. What, you can't hold it till you get home? You lack self-control. It's a shameful thing. And an awful difficulty for control freaks; i.e., conservatives. So, urinal "jokes." Peeing on the despised President is a way to mitigate the lack of control demonstrated by the act of urinating.
That will be 5 cents, please.
Marie
Editor's Note: @P.D. Pepe & I wrote our responses to @Akhilleus simultaneously. Looks as if we're in close agreement.
Marie,
The nickel is in the mail. And here I always thought shrinks cost an arm and a leg. Anyway, I've passed on your advice to Ross Douthat as well. He can use a little support in his struggle with his abject fear of female sexuality and his subsequent obsession with blow up dolls. His therapy might cost a bit more than five cents however.
But....
Your comment about Republicans' lack of empathy for other human beings, until, of course, someone close to them is having trouble (seriously, does anyone--ANYONE--believe that Dick Cheney would have a problem with throwing gays and lesbians into a pit and burying them alive were it not for his daughter?), reminded me of an outstanding report Lewis Black did on the Daily Show a few years ago.
It's the famous "Nazi Tourette's" bit. If you haven't seen it, it's a howl (link below). The idea is that Glenn Beck can hardly open his mouth to speak about liberals or progressives or Democrats or issues he hates without comparing everything to Hitler and Nazi Germany. "Glenn Beck uses more Nazi paraphernalia than the History Channel!"
To prove how ridiculous the situation had become, Black plays a clip of Obama's comments upon nominating Elena Kagan as a supreme. At one point the president mentions something about how her empathy makes her an ideal candidate. But for Beck, this was the last straw. Black follows this with a clip of Beck whining that empathy was what caused Hitler to think that people would be better off dead, ergo, genocide (we'll overlook the astounding assumption that the Holocaust was the result of an overflowing of human kindness). He goes on to say that "Empathy is responsible for some very, very bad decisions". Black's response:
"Glenn Beck, in one paragraph, manages to tie one of the most positive words in the English language to Hitler's genocide!"
The lack of empathy doesn't necessarily make one a sociopath, but there are far too many conservative icons who come across as textbook sociopaths to overlook the fact that movement conservatives have gone way beyond simple lack of empathy.
I suppose the fact that they can come around once an issue comes home to them makes them less sociopaths than unthinking and uncaring assholes.
Still and all, a lot of them are borderline monsters.
Glenn Beck: Non empathetic or just pathological? You decide.
Some toddlers are smarter than others. This weekend we hosted my granddaughter, who is in the final laps of potty training (no accidents this weekend!) She has learned that any time she wants to get out of whatever it is her grandparents want her to be doing at that time, she just has to say "I need to go potty!" and she has an immediate pass away from the ongoing activity and location. She knows that, even if the attempt provides no outcome, she has a better than average chance of not having to resume her prior activity. She also knows that she can command immediate adult attention and cooperation, and she clearly enjoys that sense of power.
So, potty functions can serve many purposes other than nature's primary design. And people learn that at an early age.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/22/1307971/-GOP-Sen-Ron-Johnson-It-costs-too-much-to-fund-the-VA?detail=email
One of three senators who voted against the VA bill. Wisconsin, home of Fighting Bob LaFollette and progressivism but also the home of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy and Paul Ryan. Which Badger state will you be today?
I guess this creep got elected because he wasn't Russ Feingold. As the article points out, Johnson has never worked a day in his life-he hasn't had to.
Yes, the VA has problems, but nothing like what would happen if it were privatized.
It's not too late to donate to the ALS Association Walk to Defeat ALS(R).
You have until September 13!
Question.
What would happen to the VA health care system if by some slim chance in the distant future the whole medical-insurance industrial complex was turned on its head such that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system was implemented?
Would the currently separate VA system need to continue except for facilities that specialize in injuries/illnesses specific to military involvement?
Would exempting eligible veterans from paying the monthly premiums, copays, deductibles, co-insurance and out-of-pocket expenses be a sufficient benefit to compensate veterans for their service?
Any thoughts?
p.s. @Marie: you mentioned that you lost your gmail service late last week. Were you able to recover and retrieve from the period during that outage?
Earlier today, I was listening to NPR. It was a short report on Rand Paul's support of the return of voting rights to prisoners who have served their terms. This is a group disenfranchised by several states. The argument, however, was a puzzler. Paul was chastising Republicans because "we're supposed to be the party of family values and keeping the family together (my paraphrase)". He couldn't see how Republicans didn't see the nexus between family values and voting rights for former prisoners. Ahhh... me neither. I was unaware of the "whole family or nothing" voting requirement.
I guess Rand's pollster saw some Dem votes that he could snag along with that new voting block of recently released Aryan Brotherhood voters. I don't know, he may lose an equal number of righteous law and order Republican voters in exchange.
Its a conundrum. But then, like C. Pierce maintains, after 5 minutes nothing out the Paul's mouths makes sense anyway.
Diane,
I would amend Charlie's time period to 2 minutes.
Something else I would like to amend, or at least poke a sharp stick at, is Aqua Buddha's purloining of an Abraham Lincoln trope as his own (plagiarism being one of Li'l Randy's strengths, if you can call stealing from your betters, without attribution, a strength).
During his whiny, whine, whine to the Faith and Freedom Obama piss-onners, Li'l Randy went out of his way to steal some words from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Normally, ie, with ethical writers, such a reference would be taken for what it is, an homage, a recognition that your readers will get that you are referencing a respected source, but with a serial plagiarist like Aqua Buddah Boy, it's just another example of how he steals ideas and phrases with impunity. He's an intellectual manqué of the first order. A weak pretender, a charlatan, a...fucking clown.
To say "I believe that no nation, no civilization, can long endure that doesn't respect life from those that are not yet born to life's last breath," is a dramatically re-adjusted version of what Lincoln meant in his speech. Here's what Lincoln said:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
Lincoln's concern was that a nation not dedicated to equality (not a religiously controlled anti-choice entity operating on some fundamentalist diktat) could plunge the entire enterprise of a new nation into ruin.
For Li'l Randy, the right to boot people out of your place of business because of the color of their skin is an absolute must, civil rights going abeam of the wingnut conception of FREEDOM. A tad off the mark from Lincoln's meaning. But this is standard wingnut technique. Find a grand historical American sentiment and warp it so that your equally off axis adherents want nothing more than to sexually service you. That is, if sexual activity were authorized by god.
Two minutes are up.