;)
The Commentariat -- March 17, 2014
Internal links removed.
** Paul Krugman: "... race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics." ...
... Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times: "Climbing above the poverty line has become more daunting in recent years, as the composition of the nation's low-wage work force has been transformed by the Great Recession, shifting demographics and other factors. More than half of those who make $9 or less an hour are 25 or older.... Today's low-wage workers are also more educated, with 41 percent having at least some college, up from 29 percent in 2000." Greenhouse reports case studies in Chattanooga, Tennessee, of low-wage workers. CW: And they are workers, Paul Ryan, et al., not the culturally-warped lazy bastards of your convenient imaginations. ...
... Hank Stuever of the Washington Post: "HBO's observant documentary, 'Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life & Times of Katrina Gilbert' (airing Monday and available free online) ... [follows] a 30-year-old single mother of three young children who works full time in a Chattanooga, Tenn., nursing home for $9.49 an hour. CW: You should be able to watch it here. ...
... Annie Lowrey of the New York Times: "As incomes have diverged between the country's richest counties..., and its ones..., so have the life expectancies of their residents." CW: Remember Alan Grayson's characterization of the GOP healthcare plan: "Don't get sick.... If you do yet sick..., die quickly." Here's their social safety net plan: "You're on your own. If you can't support yourself, die quickly."
Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "Having failed to prevent a Russian-sponsored referendum in Crimea, the Obama administration and its European allies refocused their efforts Sunday on keeping Moscow from annexing the autonomous Ukrainian region and expanding its military moves into other parts of Ukraine." ...
... Julie Ioffe of the New Republic is certain Putin will now move to take Eastern Ukraine. ...
... Alan Cowell of the New York Times: "A day after a contested referendum, legislators in Crimea moved swiftly on Monday to begin the process of splitting from Ukraine, with the regional Parliament declaring that Crimea is an independent state, with special status for the city of Sevastopol. While the ballot on Sunday has been rejected in the West and by the government in Kiev, the legislators asserted that the laws of Ukraine no longer applied to Crimea and that state funds and all other state property of Ukraine in Crimea had been transferred to the new state. They also announced that the Ukrainian authorities had no power in Crimea." ...
... Carol Morello & Pam Constable of the Washington Post: "Crimeans voted overwhelmingly Sunday to leave Ukraine and join Russia, election officials in the breakaway peninsula said, with the extraordinarily high figures capping a one-sided campaign of intimidation and heavy-handed tactics that blocked most voters from hearing a vision for any alternative other than unification with Moscow. Shortly before midnight, with tens of thousands of people jamming Lenin Square and the streets of Simferopol, Crimean political leaders declared that 93 percent of voters had chosen to be reunited with Russia. Fireworks exploded overhead while a male chorus sang the Russian national anthem from a giant stage, and people screamed and hugged each other." ...
... Jon Swaine & Alan Yuhas of the Guardian: "Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin clashed over the Crimea referendum during a telephone call on Sunday, as the US president dismissed claims from his Russian counterpart that the vote was legal and warned him that Moscow would be punished." The White House readout is here. A "statement by the [White House] press secretary" is here. ...
... Michael Hirsh of the National Journal: "In recent weeks, as the standoff over Ukraine escalated, Hillary Clinton did something that she never did as secretary of State: She put considerable distance between herself and the president she served loyally for four years."
Eric Lipton of the New York Times: "The National Restaurant Association did not disclose upfront its role in helping draft and circulate a statement signed by more than 500 prominent economists, including four winners of the Nobel Prize, urging the federal government to reject the proposal by the Obama administration to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour...." ...
... CW: Yo, Eric. There are not "500 prominent economists" in the whole world, much less 500 prominent right-wing economists who would sign on to a letter about U.S. wage policy. Lipton mentions these winger "prominent economists" twice. Later in the piece, he notes that the letter was a response to one from "more than 600 economists" who favor the minimum wage hike. None of these pro-worker economists -- apparently -- is "prominent." Also, BTW, the organization that circulated the original letter didn't attempt to keep its participation secret.
Katy Waldman of Slate: Actor & activist Mariska Hargitay has produced a documentary, "Shelved, about the more than 400,000 rape kits gathering dust throughout the United States -- casualties of underfunded police departments and a culture that still struggles to take sexual assault seriously."
Via Driftglass, on whom I depend to watch the Sunday morning shows for me:
Steve Coll of the New Yorker has a good summary of the Feinstein-Brennan imbroglio. ...
... Apparently spying on Members of Congress, American lawyers & activists -- whoevah -- is just something the CIA does now and has always done. Never mind that "By law, the CIA is specifically prohibited from collecting intelligence concerning the domestic activities of U.S. citizens." (The citation is from the CIA's Website.)
Robert Costa of the Washington Post: "House Republican leaders are adopting an agreed-upon conservative approach to fixing the nation's health-care system, in part to draw an election-year contrast with President Obama's Affordable Care Act. The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together.... This is the first time this year that House leaders will put their full force behind a single set of principles ... and present it as their vision."
Andrew O'Hehir of Salon: "On one hand, Irishness is a nonspecific global brand of pseudo-old pubs, watered-down Guinness, 'Celtic' tattoos and vague New Age spirituality.... On the other, it's Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Rep. Peter King, Long Island's longtime Republican congressman (and IRA supporter), consistently representing the most stereotypical grade of racist, xenophobic, small-minded, right-wing Irish-American intolerance. When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News."
CW: I meant to take an interest in #mcconnelling last week, but got distracted by Crimea & CIA spying & stuff. Now Ashley Parker of the New York Times has caught me up: "When Senator Mitch McConnell's re-election campaign released two-and-a-half minutes of video footage featuring him wordlessly smiling, it was most likely hoping to provide a friendly 'super PAC' with high-quality images of Mr. McConnell to use in ads. Instead, the campaign got a viral video sensation that exploded on the Internet last week, and even spawned its own term -- 'McConnelling.' ... Videos that edited his smiling face into famous sitcoms from the 1980s and 1990s began popping up..."
Beyond the Beltway
Illustration by Ashley Kroninger.
Seth Adams of GLAAD: "Guinness [Sunday] announced that the beer company would drop its sponsorship of the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade due to the parade's discriminatory rule that prohibits LGBT families and organizations from participating." ...
... Jack Pickell of the Boston Globe: "Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has released a statement announcing he will not participate in the annual South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade.... Late Saturday night, Walsh tried in vain to reach a compromise between parade organizers and an openly gay group of veterans seeking to participate. The now-decades-old controversy has led beer-maker Sam Adams to pull its support from the parade...."
Congressional Elections 2014
E. J. Dionne: "Obama and his party are in danger of allowing the Republicans to set the terms of the 2014 elections, just as they did four years ago. The fog of nasty and depressing advertising threatens to reduce the electorate to a hard core of older, conservative voters eager to hand the president a blistering defeat.... The hope-and-change guy needs to have one more act in him."
Déjà Vu All Over Again? Molly Ball of the Atlantic: "For Republicans, [Scott] Brown's entry is the latest in a run of recent good news, from a special election in Florida earlier in the week to unexpectedly competitive Senate races in places like Colorado and Michigan. For Democrats, Brown's reemergence heightens a very bad case of déjà vu. In 2010, Brown's special-election triumph was the first concrete sign of the political backlash Democrats were about to face over healthcare reform; in 2014, Republicans hope he is once again the avatar of their comeback season."
News Ledes
Washington Post: "Rachel 'Bunny' Mellon, the Listerine fortune heiress who married arts patron and philanthropist Paul Mellon, was a confidante of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and redesigned the White House Rose Garden, died March 17 at her home in Upperville, Va. She was 103.... At 101, she found herself improbably drawn into the legal battle of John Edwards, the former U.S. senator and presidential aspirant charged with violating campaign finance laws."
New York Times: "L'Wren Scott, a fashion designer whose creations were known for their discreet elegance... and her romantic partnership with Mick Jagger, was found dead on Monday in her Manhattan apartment. She was 49.... Two police officials said that the cause appeared to be suicide, but that the medical examiner had not yet made a determination."
New York Times: "The first turn to the west that diverted the missing Malaysia Airlines plane from its planned flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was carried out through a computer system that was most likely programmed by someone in the plane's cockpit who was knowledgeable about airplane systems, according to senior American officials." ...
... CBS "News": "Australia took the lead Monday in searching for the missing Boeing 777 over the southern Indian Ocean as Malaysia appealed for radar data and search planes to help in the unprecedented hunt through a vast swath of Asia stretching northwest into Kazakhstan." ...
... Guardian: "The last verbal communication from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane came from the flight's co-pilot, investigators believe. But in their Monday briefing Malaysian officials appeared to backtrack on Sunday's statement that the words 'All right, goodnight' were uttered after a communications system was turned off."
Share Article
Reader Comments (16)
Re: Lipton. Maybe it's just a case of trickle-down sloppiness from the editorial page.
Those weird economists.
The minimum wage acts as a bottom that many companies work off. To enlarge their selection pool, many companies hire at a rate a little higher than the minimum.
An increase in the minimum wage pushes up wages for many workers making a little more than the minimum. From $7.25 to $1010 is a good push that will improve the lives of millions of Americans.
The BLS labor report for February 2014 shows the wages paid and the numbers of production and non supervisory workers by industry group.
Retail, avg. wage $14.22, employees, thirteen million.
Hospitality, avg. wage $11.96, employees, twelve point eight million.
Add to these workers the chicken pluckers, hospital cleaning staffs, bank tellers and many new hires and perhaps fifty million Americans will benefit from the increase.
Walmart alone, moving new hires from nine to eleven dollars will give the entire retail industry room to increase wages all across the country.
Trickle down economics never reached workers, an increased minimum wage will.
"Shortly before midnight, with tens of thousands of people jamming Lenin Square and the streets of Simferopol, Crimean political leaders declared that 93 percent of voters had chosen to be reunited with Russia. Fireworks exploded overhead while a male chorus sang the Russian national anthem from a giant stage, and people screamed and hugged each other"
This description sounds a lot like another circus theater that's been in action for more than a few decades: North Korea. I'm sure Kim Jong-Un is looking on with praise and even a little jealousy as Putin throws his weight around the region and stares down the evil West with zero regard for actual diplomacy. I sure hope Kim Jong-Un isn't getting any ideas after the magistral pseudo-invasion coupled with propaganda smokescreens and opposition blackouts.
I'm feeling like Putin just opened an unpredictable yet unavoidable can of ideologue worms. We should try to keep our eyes open for the rogue maniacs with a serious bone to pick and decades of subservience under "illegitimate" political forces.
Krugman's column on GOP dog whistle politics raises some additional questions about how racial animosity informs (and in many ways forms) conservative ideology.
I've been reading a lot of apologies for Ryan's loathsome remarks during an interview with paragon of virtue and eminent wingnut finger-wagger Bill Bennett, you know, the guy who has been whining for years about the demise of righteousness and purity of character and moral compasses. The guy whose own compass seems to have been in the shop for a couple or three decades. The guy who railed publicly against gambling while blowing millions at the gaming tables. The guy who declared unequivocally that Sarah Palin was ready to be president. Yeah. That guy.
So we'll get back to this asshole in a minute.
But what about Lyin' Ryan's claims that he simply misspoke when he spouted off about lazy blah people? I'm not concerned about whether or not he lied about being "inarticulate". He did lie about that, no question (something new). What I've been saying, for some time, is that I don't think his dog whistles are anything of the kind. I think he really believes this stuff. He really believes blacks are lazy and undeserving of the kind of assistance he got from the government when he needed it. He really believes that he has a handle on the "culture of work" and they don't. Seriously? Culture of Work in Ryan's House of Representatives where no Republican has done a lick of work since 2008? Oh, that culture of work?
But anyway, it seems Brian Beutler at Salon agrees that Ryan, and most conservatives, don't play the race card anymore as a strategy, the way Lee Atwater suggested when he said it was better to talk in code and say things like "tax cuts" and "reduction in social programs" because those things would hurt black communities far more than white ones, and it was more effective than simply shouting "nigger, nigger, nigger" all the time, which might get you into trouble outside the deep south.
But a generation after that piece of shit was pouring poison into the political water supply, today's conservatives actually believe what Atwater was plying simply as a strategy. It's not clear that Atwater wasn't a racist, but he understood how to fire up the real racists and he made no bones about it. But he also knew that it was strategic to do so. Today's wingnut Solons (oxymoron alert) seem to have forgotten that the racist card was a joker. It wasn't part of the actual pack of cards. It allowed the GOP to stack the deck. Today they think they're playing fair and square and simply saying what's true (probably why Rand Paul wants to let business owners deny access to African-Americans).
But here's the real kicker, as Beutler mentions.
In 2005, Bob Herbert, in a Times column wrote about Atwater's scheme and how useful it was for Reagan, Poppy Bush, and plenty more slimy Republicans. He also wrote about a right-wing radio screamer who offered a suggestion for dramatically reducing crime in America. Kill all black babies. Kill them all and crime will whither away.
The name of this conservative keeper of morality?
Bill Bennett.
The Kool-Aid has done its job. They really do believe this shit.
I find the Boston parade story pretty despicable. Who the hell is in charge of this function? What kinds of people ban a group of gay veterans who want to march in this parade? Boston's signature is "The Cradle of Liberty," but it's also known as "BeanTown" (because of it's excessive import of sugar from the West Indies–-the Bostonians baked their beans in molasses) so maybe all that bean eating through the ages has resulted in some of its residents emitting a whole lot of gas that has gotten into the atmosphere of this fine city. I recall during the civil rights era in the sixties how certain sections of Boston fought like hell to keep their segregated buses and schools intact. It was during this time that Elizabeth Hardwick, writing for the start-up publication of the NYRB said this:
"Boston–––wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming––has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade."
But hats off to the mayor and to the other concerns like Sam Adams that are joining in the protest.
@P.D. Pepe: I think O'Herir's piece, linked above, is instructive. Worth remembering: the hero of All This Shit -- Ronald Reagan -- was Irish. I'm Irish myself, & I'm neither proud nor ashamed of it. It's an accident of birth. As with any culture, there are great Irish heroes -- like the monks who saved ancient literature -- and there are despicable Irish jerks -- like the Northern Irelanders who scream at school children because their parents are a slightly-different religion. People are people. That's something Paul Ryan just doesn't get.
Marie
@Akhilleus. I think the great thing about Krugman's column is that it appears in the New York Times. He has had the guts to write about the ugly truth that otherwise the Gray Lady dare not speak its name.
I wonder if Bennett is aware that killing all white babies would reduce crime even more. Clearly, his prejudice makes it impossible for him to think in that frame, while it's easy for him to say, albeit facetiously, that killing all black babies is a crime prevention plan.
Marie
Probably a naive and simplistic one, but I have a question for any constitutional scholars here. Is there a way for "us," the citizens in this country, to initiate and vote on a referendum to reduce bread-and-butter benefits for members of Congress, e.g. healthcare, pay, perks? Corporate management reduces the benefits of its workers every year. Why can't we do the same to people who seem bent on destroying us?
Love that "Full House" credit sequence starring Mitch McConnell (as "Uncle Mitchy") grinning like an idiot. Either he's been testing out some medical marijuana (for research purpose only, y'understand) or his Dulcolax finally kicked in. Either way, he's as happy as Larry as my mother used to say.
I thought Republicans only smiled like that after taking food off the tables of poor kids.
Lived with an Irishman man (my husband) for nearly thirty years, he used to say there were three kinds of Irish: shanty, pig-in-the-parlor, and lace-curtain. In recent years, I've come to think there are two more categories to add. The Good Irish and the Pissant* Irish. Obviously, the examples of the what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-them in the latter group is disturbing extensive with O'Reilly, Hannity, Ryan, et al...you know the ones. (Googling Irish politicians in the U.S. brings up quite a list, even Sarah Palin is (partly) Irish on her mother's side.)
Thanks be to the saints for such as Charlie Pierce and Tim Egan.
*Pissant is an epithet for an inconsequential, irrelevant, or worthless person, especially one who is irritating or contemptible out of proportion to his or her perceived significance. (source Wikipedia).
P.S. to Ak: Have you seen the film documentary on Lee Atwater? A smooth operator to be sure! Atwater allegedly got religion at the end, but too little, too late.
Nancy,
Great idea! All we need is a Constitutional amendment.
Under Article 1, section 6, "The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States".
Congress routinely raises its own salary whenever that single vacation home on the lake is not enough, or if the bribery...ooops..."campaign" checks are late. That's not to say that the public has no influence. In 1873 congress passed an act that raised the salaries of the president, the Supreme Court justices, and (shhh.....) their own. Congress, in that instance, voted themselves a 50% pay raise. The public furor that accompanied the "Salary Grab Act" caused congress to back down.
That time.
Of course you might think there should be some kind of controls on how often can pick our pockets and how much they can grab. In 1789, the states were sent a copy of the 27th amendment for ratification. It was finally ratified in 1992. This amendment allows that congress can certainly vote itself a raise, whenever it wants, but that the raise (or any change in salary--up or down) won't take affect until the next congress is sworn in. (This is why congressional deviants who allowed the government to be shut down still collected their salary.) But this didn't worry the members back in the glory days of excess that were the Bush Debacle. Since most congressional jobs are a lock, having to wait a year or 6 months for that $5,000 bump is no biggie and in those days Congress voted themselves a new raise every couple of years.
I have no problem in general tying congressional salaries to productivity. The only problem is who will decide what's productive and what's not? To some, members of congress who vote to give a poor kid in a public school a baloney sandwich at lunch, deserve a raise. For others, members of congress who rip that sandwich out of the kid's mouth, throw it on the floor and stomp on it are deserving of more money.
In any event, we'd need an amendment to change the way congress gets paid, since the Constitution says they get their dough from the Treasury no matter how ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and no matter how idiotic they look when grinning like idiots.
MAG,
I've seen several pieces on Atwater, but none were full length documentaries. I'll look for it if I'm in a particularly masochistic mood.
As for deathbed conversions, I think they should be outlawed (don't really know how to go about that, though). You shouldn't get to be able to be a roundhouse, scum-sucking pig like Atwater your whole life, making money and personal fame and glory off the misery you cause others, then saying, "Geez, I'm sorry I was an asshole" and getting out of whatever horrible forever-fate you believe may await you, free and clear.
Another index of the success of the GOP's racist strategies is how many conservative "thinkers" have been trying to make light of Atwater's infamous comments about race. For a while some tried to deny he even said it, but when tapes were produced, they changed tactics and claimed that Atwater was actually a friend to blacks because what he really meant was that race no longer mattered. It was over. And how do they know?
Ol' Lee said so.
Another quote from that interview:
"My generation will be the first generation of southerners that won’t be prejudiced, totally….But what I am saying is that that has really been sublimated by a bunch of other issues." Oh yeah? Tell that to Trayvon Martin's mom and dad.
Yup. Race doesn't matter. It's all over. And what else do the wingnuts use as proof of Atwater's bona fides as a bridge to racial harmony?
He liked blues music and played guitar once with B.B. King. Well, pardon me all to hell. And here I was, all these years, thinking of what a consummate hypocritical motherfucker he was for doing just that.
Hey, just because Ronald Reagan had his picture taken with Ralph Abernathy didn't mean he was all sweetness and light when it came to race relations (remember how he kicked off his presidential campaign and what he did as governor).
No. Most conservatives, it seems, have racism or at least a warped, highly prejudicial idea of race (nearly the same thing in my book) bred into them. It's an essential component of their DNA. Because they can't see their genetic code it's invisible to most of them and they are incensed when called on it.
At least Atwater knew what a rotten piece of shit he was.
If there actually is some kind of retributive afterlife, I hope some vile thing is using his head for a guitar pick.
Reading today's comments reminds me of the link I have suggested before between the very human penchant to believe we are "saved," that is one of the elect, as the laziest of all means of achieving the illusion of superiority. By becoming a believer, you can become one of the elite without doing any work. Am thinking now that the same motive applies equally to racism. You get to be one of the "chosen" just by virtue of being not one of Them (black, brown, yellow or one of the many various stripes of infidel each religious belief creates). As Marie points out, all you have to do is get born, an activity during which you are certainly not the one doing the work.
Guess those two impulses and mind sets would make religious, racist white folks the laziest of all, inner-city or out. Think Mr. Ryan would agree?
The documentary of Atwater is called: "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story." It's riveting and at the end when he's dying from a brain tumor and repents you don't feel sorry for him at all which is saying a lot especially for people like me who easily forgive.
I'm also Irish, the D stands for Doyle––and half German. For years I'd accentuate the Irish side––Germans got such bad press for so long––now that I'm all grown up I find all that ethnic loyalty a little silly since a third generation whatever in this country is pretty well Americanized–––although on second thought my husband's Italian relatives still harbor in their bosoms the old country's ways and means even though they never really lived it.
@Re: Irish violence. When I was on Operation REFORGER 1981 (an annual exercise where units from the continental US deployed to Germany, used prepositioned equipment and participated in a war game simulating a Warsaw Pact invasion), I happened to be with the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards who were stationed in Northern Germany. This was during the Troubles. Both sides took it seriously and didn't play around. The sentry at the British front gate stood with his rifle (loaded with live ammo) on a rest aimed straight down the street. He kept his eye on the sight and his finger on the trigger. That had to be tedious. I have never forgotten that.
The regiment had had experience in Northern Ireland. From their experience, they had only contempt for the Irish. They told jokes where you could substitute black for Irish. A favorite "Irishman : a simple machine for turning Guiness Stout into piss."
I hope that the bitterness has subsided by now.
PD,
Thanks. I found the documentary on YouTube and Netflix.
Not sure that my forgiveness extends to scheming, dirty rat bastards like this guy. It was his bullshit that aided Reagan and assured us four more years of Republican idiocy under Poppy and helped set the groundwork for the current stupidity.
I have to say that in some pictures Atwater reminds me a little of Ted Bundy and I'm not the only one who connects him with murderous streak. According to Atwater's boss in the Reagan Gang, Ed Rollins, Atwater "...had these piercing eyes that— you know, and as I've always thought, those— those are the eyes of a killer."
Do tell?
Bundy worked for the Republican Party as well (in fact, his involvement with the GOP increased at the same time as his career as a serial killer started to take off....coincidence? hmmm...), but I think Atwater is responsible for a lot more damage. The evil Atwater and guys like him in the Republican Party spread is still racking up interest.
Hey, whaddaya know? Just talked myself out of forgiveness mode.