The Commentariat -- March 1, 2014
Michael Shear & Andrew Higgins of the New York Times: "As Ukrainian leaders accused Russia of carrying out an armed invasion in the Crimea region, President Obama on Friday warned Russia not to intervene militarily, saying the United States would stand with the world to condemn a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty":
... Here's a transcript of President Obama's remarks....
... The New York Times is liveblogging events. ...
... Julie Pace & Matthew Lee of the AP: "U.S. officials said Friday that President Barack Obama may scrap plans to attend an international summit in Russia this summer and could also halt discussions on deepening trade ties with Moscow, raising specific possible consequences if Russia should intervene in Ukraine.... The administration's warning that trade talks could be halted came as Russian officials were in Washington for economic discussions with Obama advisers.... Separately, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he would not address specific U.S. options, "but this could be a very dangerous situation if this continues in a provocative way.' Asked about options in a CBS News interview, he said that 'we're trying to deal with a diplomatic focus, that's the appropriate, responsible approach.'" ...
... David Herszenhorn of the New York Times provides background: "Crimea, a multiethnic region populated by Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars, has been the focus of territorial disputes for centuries, and in recent decades it has frequently been a source of tension between Ukraine and Russia." ...
... Told Ya So, Part 1. McCain Reprises His Brilliant 2008 Performance. Jay Newton-Small of Time: "In response to reports of a Russian takeover in parts of Crimea, Arizona Senator John McCain said on Friday, 'We are all Ukrainians,' before calling for swift U.S. economic aid to Ukraine, condemnation of Russia at the United Nations, sanctions against Russian officials and the installation of U.S. missiles in the nearby Czech Republic.... McCain made his declaration in response to a question from TIME about his famous 2008 statement, 'We are all Georgians.' ... In the interview Friday, McCain said President Obama has 'been incredibly naïve' about Putin's goals. 'Putin wants to restore the Russian empire, that's his ambition, he's stated it many times. Therefore no one should be surprised,' McCain said. 'I predicted it and I'm not a genius. But I know Putin.'" ...
... CW: I'm trying to remember. Was it President Obama who said of Putin, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul"? Well, whoever it was, he surely was "incredibly naive."
... Told Ya So, Part 2. CNN: "In 2008, when she was the GOP vice presidential nominee, [Sarah] Palin questioned in a speech whether then-Sen. Barack Obama would have the foreign policy credentials to handle a scenario in which Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. 'After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence -- the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next,' she said in Reno, Nevada on October 21, 2008." Palin wrote Friday on Facebook, "Yes, I could see this one from Alaska.... I'm usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as 'an extremely far-fetched scenario' by the 'high-brow' Foreign Policy magazine." "In October 2008, Foreign Policy labeled Palin's prediction as 'strange.'" ...
... CW: Palin usually is "not one to say say Told Ya So" because Palin seldom gets anything right. And if you think she wrote that speech in October 2008 (or if she could find Georgia & Ukraine on a map), I have a bridge to nowhere to sell you. (At least she would know they're not in Africa, because she thought Africa was a country.) ...
... Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast: "Top [Republican] lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services said Thursday that the world would be better off if the Cold War was still on -- and if Obama wasn't cutting the defense budget." ...
I look back wistfully at the Cold War. There were two superpowers, they knew what we had, we knew what they had, mutually assured destruction meant something. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Now we have these people who are not rational, not logical, they're nuts. -- Sen. Jim Inhofe (RNuts-Okla.)
Your Official Friday Afternoon News Dump. Robert Pear of the New York Times: "The Obama administration said Friday that it would allow some people to receive federal subsidies for health insurance purchased in the private market outside of health insurance exchanges. The sudden shift was the latest in a series of policy changes, extensions and clarifications by federal officials trying to help beneficiaries and minimize political damage to Democrats in this election year. Federal officials said they had agreed to provide such assistance retroactively because technical problems had prevented consumers from using online exchanges to obtain insurance and financial aid in some states. Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon, a Democrat, had specifically asked the federal government to allow financial assistance, in the form of tax credits, for people buying insurance outside the state's troubled exchange." ...
... Dylan Scott of TPM: "More than a decade ago, Arkansas Rep. Josh Miller (R) was in a catastrophic car accident that broke his neck and left him paralyzed. Medicare and Medicaid paid the $1 million bill for his hospitalization and rehabilitation. But this week, as the Arkansas legislature has debated continuing its privatized Medicaid expansion..., Miller has remained steadfast in his opposition.... The difference, he said, is that some of the 100,000 people who have gained coverage through Arkansas's Medicaid expansion don't work hard enough or just want access to the program so they can purchase and abuse prescription drugs." (In the accident that critically injured Miller, "He was driving with a friend, alcohol was involved, but Miller said he couldn't remember who was driving.to the point that he does not know who was driving.... He was uninsured.") ...
... The Arkansas Times report, by Max Brantley, is well-worth reading, too, as it provides more detail. And this thought from Brantley:
A coldly rational person might say a cook in a fast-food restaurant, working long hours at low pay to feed a family, looks more deserving than an uninsured person injured on a drunken joy ride. I would not. No one should be pre-judged on a subjective merit test for health care.
... CW: What defines a Republican is his sociopathic certainty that he is uniquely "deserving" while others are unworthy.
Gail Collins: "The biggest difference between the fortunes of gay rights and abortion rights ... is that politicians who vote to limit women's rights to control their own bodies know that, for the most part, they're only hurting poor people. Low-income women are five times as likely to have an unintended pregnancy as their most affluent sisters. And the lawmakers who busy themselves throwing up barriers to abortion in their own states realize, deep in their hearts, that if their middle-class constituents want to end a pregnancy, they can get on a plane and go where it's easy to take care of the problem."
Dana Milbank performs a post-mortem on Dave Camp's tax reform proposal. The takeaway: Camp didn't do the politics right. ...
... A Congress Crammed with Mini-Cruzes. CW: In Partisan World, too many politicians don't do the politics right. Although officially as well as in their heart-of-hearts, they're politicians, they are inexperienced pols. They come from gerrymandered districts, so they don't really have to run for office; the only people they are required to cajole are fatcat donor-lobbyists. Then, if they're Republicans, their usual goal is to do nothing; John Boehner recently defined legislative "success" as repealing old laws, not creating new ones. Add to that mix hackery, hubris, & fear & loathing of the other, and it's little wonder we have a catatonic Congress. They simply don't know how to legislate. Ted Cruz is an exemplar, not an anomaly.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "We're still combing through the thousands of pages of previously withheld documents released Friday by the Clinton Library." Blake runs down "some of the most interesting things we have found. It will continue to be updated." ...
... Philip Rucker of the Post homes in on correspondence that shows how Hillary Clinton's aides worked to polish her image. I find these memos both amusing & baffling: For instance, in 1999, after Clinton had been in politics for decades, did she really need to be told -- in writing -- to "be real," along with other "style pointers," in advance of a meeting with Sen. Moynihan?
... Here's the Clinton Library page with links to the documents.
White House: "In his weekly address, President Obama said he took action this week to launch new manufacturing hubs and expand a competition to fund transformative infrastructure projects":
Gubernatorial Election
Reid Wilson of the Washington Post: "Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who on Thursday said he will run for an unprecedented fourth term in office, wants to challenge the notion that the state is unmanageable." ...
... CW: Sorry, I plumb forgot to link this yesterday. Anthony York of the Los Angeles Times: "Jerry Brown finally made it official Thursday: He's running for an unprecedented fourth and final term as governor. The announcement, widely expected, was made in minimalist Brown style, with a post on Twitter."
News Ledes
AP: "A group of knife-wielding men attacked a train station in southwestern China on Saturday, leaving at least 27 people dead and another 109 injured, the official Xinhua News Agency said, making it one of the deadliest attacks in China in recent years."
Guardian: "Iran's president said on Saturday the Islamic Republic has decided not to develop nuclear weapons out of principle, not only because it is prevented from doing so by treaties. President Hassan Rouhani also urged Iran's military leaders to let diplomacy prevail in dealing with potential foreign threats, in a clear reference to efforts to end the nuclear dispute and decades of hostile relations with the west."
Guardian: "Lawyers for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are seeking to have multiple charges against him dismissed. In a court filing late on Friday his lawyers said some charges were repetitive and that the number could sway jurors weighing whether to find him guilty and sentence him to death."
New York Times: "The newly installed, pro-Russia prime minister of Crimea declared on Saturday that he had sole control over the military and the police in the disputed peninsula and he appealed to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for help in safeguarding the region."
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Reader Comments (12)
I was drawn to this article because I have a few friends and one relative who are completely hooked on homeopathic nonsense, purchase and swear by organic everything.
". There’s a lot of criticism of creationism, but not so much of acupuncture, spiritual healing like reiki, homeopathy, organic food, and belief in the paranormal. That’s because neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on magical thinking, but the left dominates the skeptical movement. And while magical thinking on the right is dominated by religious belief, the brand on the left comes from pure ignorance of science and, perhaps, a weakness for nonreligious “spirituality.”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116781/whole-foods-pseudoscience-anti-rationalist-creationism
@Marie; You are on your game today. The quote about Puddy was from his secret boyfriend, "Pablow" or was it Henry Kissinger? Or was it from the cowboy president who always pushed the horse's tail aside to look into it's mouth?
""Top [Republican] lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services said Thursday that the world would be better off if the Cold War was still on..." And why wouldn't they? Their world view dictates that everything was better back when.
Last June Stephen Cohn told us he thought we might be getting into a new Cold War with Russia. This was a discussion around the Syria problem. But then he said something that stuck with me––that the struggles in the Middle East that look like a struggle for democracy are really struggles for power and Putin's moves are all about power and our dealings better be diplomatic and not the stink of war.
And I recall that funny incident with Putin stealing Robert Kraft's super bowl ring (Kraft backed down on his story, said Putin didn't REALLY take it, after the Bushies forced him to). Perhaps Putin was under the illusion that such a ring, symbolic of American's favorite sport and worth quite a lot of money would give him extra strength, extra power just like one of cartoon's super heroes. After all he told Kraft, "You could kill a lot of people with this ring" as he fingered it fondly on that bare knuckled finger.
@PD Pepe: Thanks for the reminder about the Super Bowl ring. It really was symbolic of Putin's various acts of international aggression. And very Wagnerian (or Tolkeinian. Or, as you suggest, comic-bookian!).
Moreover, it is hard to imagine any Western leader's stealing a piece of jewelry in the manner Putin did. If Angela Merkel accepted a ring as a gift during a public event, then learned later that she had misunderstood & the giver didn't mean for her to keep it, she would have returned it with apologies.
If Putin's theft of the ring can be put down to a "cultural difference," then I'm sticking with a culture that dictates at least minimal civility.
Marie
"Famous constitutional scholar, Glenn Beck..." Ak, I almost blew my coffee through my nose. When Glenn's book came out 4-5 years ago, I stood in an airport bookstore and read some of it. It had footnotes. If I had a lot of time to waste in my next lifetime, I'd go back and see just how spurious his pseudo-intellectual footnotes actually were.
Ajit Pai from the FCC (thanks James Singer) is exactly why BarryO needs to go to the Cheney school for presidential appointments and why they matter. Republicans hate competition; this alignment of Republicans against competition in the media should be railed at. They don't even want to study competition; they want to kill the infant of information before it gets the oxygen of dissemination.
@Re: Inhofe's fondness for the Cold War: "I look back wistfully at the Cold War."
I've always suspected he was crazy, but his remarks prove it. "Mutually Assured Destruction" wasn't as foolproof as he thinks. The world teetered on the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There were probably others. Awhile back I posted about how many nuclear weapons of all kinds we had. Somewhere some time when you have that many weapons, somebody will think it's a good idea to use one. Fortunately, it didn't, but it well could have.
We still have too many. It looks as if we may embark on a replay with that thug Putin. Ol' Jim and McCain would be ecstatic. <Shaking my head in disbelief about the people whom we elect.>
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/01/thomas_friedman_supreme_toady_also_shameless/
Patrick Smith writing in "Salon. " According to Smith, the US and EU aren't exactly innocent bystanders in Ukraine.
PD has linked to a New Republic piece on homeopathy and other pseudoscience nonsense (which seems to me to be more about a squabble between NR and the Daily Beast than a serious examination of kook science in America), so I’d like to offer a word about homeopathy.
My maternal grandfather was a homeopathic physician; he had a license from the great state of Alabama to prove it. He believed medical doctors were seriously dangerous, too willing to prescribe doses of opiates, arsenic (a popular cure for syphilis), and other lethal materials as drugs. Homeopaths believed that if you watered down these drugs, the diseases might kill you but the cures wouldn’t.
Grandfather also did not believe surgery had a major place in medicine, although he took out my mother’s tonsils on the kitchen table.
When he moved his tribe to California, California refused to recognize his homeopathic license. Instead, it granted him a pharmacist license. So he became an herbalist, growing and collecting, compounding and packaging, marketing and peddling an assortment of oils, leaves, and pulverized flowers and roots. Some of these potions were beneficial to his customers: calendula salve, willow bark, hemp infusions and teas, digitalis; others, probably a waste of customer time and money if you discount the placebo effect and assume there was some superior alternative. Which, for the most part, there wasn’t.
I think my grandfather was a charlatan; when I think of him, I see Frank Morgan. I like to think he knew that most of the “cures” he peddled were useless, but that a pocket watch for a heart was better than nothing.
Top treatment for junk science: Bob Park's Voodoo Science (Oxford U Press). Sadly, he has become ill and no longer writes his blog, which still has its archives available: http://www.bobpark.org
". There’s a lot of criticism of creationism, but not so much of acupuncture, spiritual healing like reiki, homeopathy, organic food, and belief in the paranormal. That’s because neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on magical thinking, but the left dominates the skeptical movement. And while magical thinking on the right is dominated by religious belief, the brand on the left comes from pure ignorance of science and, perhaps, a weakness for nonreligious “spirituality.”
This is EXACTLY the kind of bullshit used to divide people who might normally agree. Who the fuck do I hurt when I use and believe in acupuncture and homeopathy and organic foods? How's that institutional medical model you road in on working out for you? How much of your family money is going to the gains of the institutional medical model held up so high?
Until they started testing DDT in an exact and specific fashion, it was the cure all; BPAs are outlawed in European baby bottles, we don't care unless we see some direct causality. We can add dough additive azodicarbonamide (ADA) to flip flop manufacturing and also into our bread, but that's ok because we haven't seen direct causality of deleterious health benefits. But if I choose and experience over 30 years the benefits of acupuncture and homeopathy, then I'm a knuckle head?
Just to round out the picture of Josh Miller of Arkansas... he is still dependent on Medicaid for a caregiver although he is employed as a state rep ($15K annually) and has a business as a property manager. It's very possible he makes damn little and therefore I can't begrudge him the caregiver - but it sure does take some hard swallowing.