;)
The Commentariat -- March 23, 2014
Internal links removed.
In anticipation of President Obama's meeting with Pope Francis this Thursday, Jason Horowitz of the New York Times examines Obama's many interactions with the Roman Catholic Church.
David Sanger & Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times: "American officials have long considered Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company would create 'back doors' in its equipment that could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets. But even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from Huawei, classified documents [provided by Edward Snowden] show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors -- directly into Huawei's networks."
New York Times Editors: "Hobby Lobby ... and Conestoga Wood Specialties ... are not religious organizations, nor are they affiliated with religious organizations. But the owners say they are victims of an assault on religious liberty because they personally disapprove of certain contraceptives. They are wrong, and the Supreme Court's task is to issue a decisive ruling saying so. The real threat to religious liberty comes from the owners trying to impose their religious beliefs on thousands of employees."
David Morgan of Reuters: "The Obama administration will soon issue new Obamacare guidelines allowing people to enroll in health coverage after a March 31 deadline, but only under certain circumstances, according to sources close to the administration. The sources said the new federal guidelines for consumers in the 36 states served by the federal health insurance marketplace and its website, HealthCare.gov, would allow people to enroll after March 31 if they had tried earlier and were prevented by system problems including technical glitches." ...
... Lisa Zamosky of the Los Angeles Times has tips for last-minute ObamaCare shopping. ...
... ** Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico: "In the poorest state in the nation, where supper is fried, bars allow smoking, chronic disease is rampant and doctors are hard to come by, Obamacare rolls into town in a lime green bus. It took some real convincing by the Obama administration and a leap of faith by one state Republican official to get one of the nation's largest insurance companies -- Humana -- to set up shop across Mississippi. Virtually no other insurer was willing to do so, discouraged by the acute health needs here and most elected officials' outright hostility to the law. Four months and more than 200 bus stops later, enrollment numbers here remain dismal. Only 9 percent of the state's Obamacare-eligible population have signed up...." ...
... CW: I was about to cite Haberkorn's report as evidence that Politico does have some serious reporters (and it does) when I read this disclaimer at the bottom of the report: "This story was produced with the support of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, a program of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism's California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships." So, if you pay Politico to publish important content, they'll do so.
Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker on President Obama's Supreme Court "farm team": a group of Obama-appointed judges from which he might choose to replace a current justice.
** Gregor Schmitz of Der Spiegel interviews mega-financier George Soros on the future of Europe. The interview, which appears in the New York Review of Books, is excerpted from their upcoming book. ...
Nicole Flatow of Think Progress: "A Buddhist student and his family won a settlement last week against a Louisiana school district where the student's religion was ridiculed in class as 'stupid,' the teacher taught that evolution is 'impossible,' and that the bible is '100 percent true.' The court-approved consent decree prohibits future religious discrimination in a school district that had portraits of Jesus Christ in the halls and a 'lighted, electronic marquee' outside one school that scrolls Bible verses." Via Steve Benen. The underlying report, by Heather Weaver of the ACLU is interesting/disturbing, too.
... George Packer of the New Yorker on Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Rod Nordland of the New York Times: "... about 13 years after the Bamian Buddhas were blasted into rubble [by the Taliban], the world faces a new quandary: whether to leave the gaping gashes in the cliff where the giant statues once stood, to rebuild the Buddhas from what pieces were left, or to make copies of them.... Opinion is passionately split. The major donor countries that would have to finance any restoration say the site should be left as it is, at least for now. The Afghan government wants at least one of the statues rebuilt."
Beyond the Beltway
Paul Egan & Tresa Baldas of the Detroit Free Press: " The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, after first signaling it would not intervene in Michigan's gay marriage case until Tuesday, posted a new order late Saturday imposing a stay in the case until Wednesday. That means U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman's Friday order declaring unconstitutional Michigan's voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage is temporarily stayed, and clerks will no longer be able to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples before Wednesday at the earliest."
AP: "Rhode Island House Speaker Gordon Fox [D] is resigning from his leadership post and will not run for re-election, he said Saturday, a day after federal and state authorities raided his Statehouse office and home as part of a criminal investigation that they would not detail." ...
... Gregory Smith & Katherine Gregg have the Providence Journal story, with nothing further on the nature of the investigation. They do cite Steven O'Donnell, the superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police who said, "'Fox knows what's going on.... He's certainly aware of what happened' Friday and why it happened."
Gubernatorial Race
Maureen Dowd interviews California Gov. Jerry Brown.
Seema Mehta of the Los Angeles Times: Glenn Champ, "one of four gubernatorial candidates introduced to California Republicans recently, is a registered sex offender who spent more than a decade in state prison, convicted of crimes including voluntary manslaughter and assault with intent to commit rape.... Champ's rap sheet is lengthy. Court records show that in 1992, he pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed firearm. In 1993, he was convicted of two counts of assault with intent to commit rape and as a result was placed on the state's sex-offender registry. In March 1998, he accepted a plea deal on a charge of loitering to solicit a prostitute; later that year, he pleaded no contest to a voluntary manslaughter charge after hitting a man with his vehicle, for which he was sentenced to 12 years in state prison, according to court records."
Senate Race
Daniel Strauss of TPM (March 20): "North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis (R-NC) has listed two different colleges as his alma mater. Tillis, who's running in the GOP primary to face Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC), is a graduate of the University of Maryland but he actually went to the independent online school University of Maryland University College. Tillis' LinkedIn page listed the University of Maryland at College Park as where he got a Bachelor of Science Degree in Technology Management, Technology & Project Management. Similarly on Tillis's biography page on his House Speaker website, Tillis listed the University of Maryland as his alma matter and links to College Park's website. But according to officials contacted at both the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of Maryland University College, Tillis graduated from the University of Maryland at University College."
John Frank of the Raleigh News & Observer: "A day after questions surfaced about his alma mater, U.S. Senate candidate Thom Tillis said where he went to college shouldn't matter and dismissed suggestions he misled voters."
CW: Yeah, and I went to Harvard. A/k/a the Harvard Online School of Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning. But I admit I flunked out.
Right Wing World
So, what, it took us what 100 years to find the Titanic? It took us 2,000 years to find Noah’s Ark. Do we ever find Flight 370? -- Fox "News" anchor Bill Hemmer, right there on the teevee during a "news" show
It's impossible to exaggerate how stupid Hemmer's remark is. Steve Benen explains. -- Constant Weader
News Ledes
Washington Post: "With a burst of automatic weapons fire and stun grenades, Russian forces in armored personnel carriers on Saturday broke through the walls of one of the last Ukrainian military outposts in Crimea, then quickly overpowered Ukrainian troops armed only with sticks. The fall of the Belbek air base, along with the loss of a second Ukrainian air base Saturday near the Crimean town of Novofedorivka, removed one of the last barriers to total Russian control of the Crimean Peninsula."
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Malia, Michelle & Sasha Obama walk a section of the Great Wall of China. AP photo. CLICK ON PICTURE TO SEE LARGER IMAGE.
AP: "U.S. first lady Michelle Obama told Chinese professors, students and parents on Sunday that she wouldn't have risen to where she was if her parents hadn't pushed for her to get a good education. Mrs. Obama made her comments before hosting a discussion about education on the third day of a weeklong visit to the country aimed at promoting educational exchanges between the U.S. and China. She also walked a section of the Great Wall with her two daughters."
Guardian: "Images taken by Chinese and French satellites and separate sightings of scattered debris have become the focus of the search in the Indian Ocean for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370."
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Reader Comments (12)
Re; Got to be white to be right; " Jelani Cobb has an excellent essay in the New Yorker about black aspiration. CW: I completely disagree with his conclusions. If I get around to it, I'll explain why in the Comments section. ..." Marie from yesterday's paper.
I always look forward to Marie's logic and the material she cites to backup her writing so I was a little disappointed to see she did not get a "round two it" for me to ponder over.
I read all the essays I could find about the subject and my starting point would be; having a white person expound on "being black in America" is pretty damn useless. Not having the "right" color skin is the overwhelming factor of everyday life here in our land of the free. Most days, most ways I have the right color skin; Irish-English-German pink. Lucky me huh? I get all the breaks. Dropped into the south side of Chicago as a young black teenager forty-five years ago how would I have done? Probably not so good. Same guy, same dreams, same demons, same smarts, same dumbs but I'm the wrong fuckin' color. So it can't be internal forces that forge the huge gap between pink JJG and black JJG, the differences have to be external.
The writers of the essays as I read them are asking, "Is it possible to be positive in a negative world? Can one be better than average and is it a reasonable quest when the playing field is so tilted against you? Is the historical narrative of being black in America a true version or is it fiction?"
Are we ever going to change? And judge a man not by the color of his skin but by the color of his character as MLK said.
Character is created by society. Asking or telling or begging young black men to have character without a template or mold to form that character is; in my pink way of thinking, all bling, no soul.
The consent decree in the religious discrimination of the Buddhist student in Louisiana is quite thorough. The $4,001 for the plaintiff and 40K for the lawyers seems a bit asymmetrical. However, the win was significant and the 40K was well spent. Perhaps the child's family will pursue civil damages.
Too bad the decree didn't go a step further and require "monitors" to ensure the provisions of the decree were followed to the letter. In jails/prisons, the monitor provision ( sometimes even onsite monitors) are standard.
I am sitting here regaling my husband with the hilarious bits of information cited on RC this Sunday morning: Gordon Fox (apt. name) who is in the middle of a criminal investigation; Glen Champ, the registered sex offender and lover of guns and prostitutes, has the audacity to run for governor (and who do you think will ever vote for this guy? I hate to think); Thom Tillis (the "h" in his name lends an air of literary flavor, and the two T's makes for a fun alliteration if one wanted to take the time to do a ditty) who lies about his college background (do these people not think this would be checked?) but says, heck, where one goes to school shouldn't matter. Then why did you fabricate, Mr. Tillis, please tell us; Finally we have Bill Hemmer whose sense of history is so overwhelming it's enough to take your breath away. All these coupled with C.W.'s witty remarks gave the two of us here some good laughs––and we thank you.
@JJG: Cobb does a good job of mitigating his overarching complaint with a series of "on-the-other-hand" disclaimers, but he still ends up complaining that successful blacks are at best condescending to those who are mired in poverty through no fault of their own and that the successful blacks are calling out black "losers" in particular, while not delivering the same message to white "losers." Notably, Cobb finds his own parents "guilty" of this same bias.
Well, yeah. Black leaders have "skin in the game," so to speak, when it comes to encouraging young blacks to succeed. I don't see anything wrong with that.
In the end, Cobb indicts Obama for what I see as realism: black people still face more of a challenge than do white people on "making it" in the U.S. There are reasons for this set of challenges that don't include racism: they are, one could argue, "cultural" differences. And I'm not talking here about the "culture of laziness" that Ryan sees as the "real reason" for low achievement.
Let's stipulate that there are a few cultural differences between blacks & whites. At the same time, I would be hard-pressed to identify the tenets of "white culture" or "black culture" because I think it is ridiculous to suggest that there is a white culture and there is a black culture. Cobb himself tacitly admits to this when he talks about his father's admonition not to "be common." (And, inadvertently revealing his own snobbery, Cobb finds his father's teaching ironic because his father had only a third-grade education.) If there are racial differences between black & white culture, they are far less distinctive than differences among ages, regions & economic strata.
When I lived in Chicago in the 1970s, I used to take the bus partway to work, & when I became pregnant, I would sit in a front seat. After the bus driver & I came to recognize each other, we would occasionally chat. The driver was black, & we had normal conversations about whatever. On one occasion, an elderly black man, whom the driver knew, got on the bus. The two of them spoke a language I could barely understand. This, I surmised, was the way the driver spoke at home. What he had done to get a good job as a city bus driver was learn to speak my vernacular.
You might not think it fair that the driver had to learn to "speak white" to get his job, but that is the kind of compromise that every worker makes. I had a (white male) lawyer friend once who wore his hair in a long ponytail. When he went to court, however, he donned a "short wig," to please the court, as it were, & a jury, if there was one. The short wig bridged the cultural gap between the lawyer's preferred dress code & the general code. I imagine you have made many compromises to please your clients: if a guy wants you to put Greek columns on the front of a mid-century modern house to "make it more elegant," you say, "Doric or Corinthian."
People who need work, whatever their color, have to make myriad compromises to fit into the "dominant culture" or rather, the culture of their employer. And I would not say that culture is white; it's what it is. It will be different in different places. This means learning & practicing the skills of getting & holding the kind of job you want -- skills that obviously vary by the job. And some of those compromises are vaguely "cultural" compromises: a man probably can't wear dreadlocks to sell IBM business systems.
It is not condescending for father & mother figures to tell the kids to shape up -- to learn those life skills & to use them to their advantage. It's part of parenting, & people like Barack Obama, Michelle Obama & Bill Cosby are parental figures. To recognize that poor black kids have more to learn than poor white kids (at least poor white kids in some regions) is not discriminatory. It's factual.
Cobb & Coates (whom Cobb cites) fail to acknowledge this. Although they do so in as nuanced a way as possible, their equating Obama with Ryan is ham-fisted. And wrong, even before you go to motive, where there's no similarity at all.
Marie
After reading JJG and before CW's post above I read the piece in The New Yorker by Jelani Cobb. Not being familiar with her I googled and found reams about a William Jelani Cobb (he added the middle name which is Swahilli for powerful) but just a few from the New Yorker for a Jelani Cobb. I'm confused and the reason is that in the article from the New Yorker Jelani cites her education which is not the same as William's. So do we have two people here and is one female as I assumed?
Marie's story about her experience with the bus driver reminded me of when I was in Germany visiting my son who introduced me to their elderly gardner of long standing. At one point in our conversation I called him by his first name. I was told afterwards that this was never done, that you always referred to an elder by his last name. Cultural differences one learns. As to the rest of Marie's analysis I tend to agree especially the messages parents need to give to their children and yes, they are factual, not discriminatory.
Mystery solved, with a little more digging I have concluded that Jelani Cobb and William Jelani Cobb are one and the same and now I recall that I have seen him on some of the talk shows. He apparently is not married nor does he have any children––two factors to keep in mind when trying to evaluate a mindset.
Maybe I’m just crabbier than usual. If so I apologize. Now, two observations.
One: Whether Cobb has children or not is irrelevant. Not all medical reporters have cancer. Everyone, as far as I know, was a child once and likely have insight into how it played out in their maturation.
Two: Turkey shooting down the Syrian fighter potentially has far greater consequences than any blather about poor, poor Crimea. If it comes to End Times, no ship will be able to leave the Black Sea without a hallpass from Ankara.
The picture posted under the Sunday ledes makes me wonder how long it will take (if it already hasn't) for Fox and wingnut intelligentsia (I must have my little jokes now and then) to wax wroth over Michelle et filles en Chine.
Frolicking about on the Great Wall, a red flag that only haters of America could miss, of how the Obama family (Muslims, Kenyans, socialists, satanists, Nazis, and worst of all, nee-groes!), are training the girls to become Red Chinese moles in order that they may complete the family goal of destroying America begun by their Kenyan father.
Because what other reason could there be for a mom and her kids to be having fun walking the Great Wall?
Jeff Toobin's New Yorker piece about Obama's "farm team" for the SCOTUS, linked above, is a clear indication of how far to the right we have been yanked by a combination of aggressive, intransigent, militaristic, wingnut ideology, an ignorant, bovine press, and a disparate, uncoordinated, and defensive liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Sure there are a couple of potential justices I would not be unhappy with, but there is nothing to compare with or balance the ideological weight of the wingnut justices. I'm not suggesting that he put forward nominees that are as far out, uncaring of legal precedent, and arrogant as the Scalias, Alitos, Thomases, and, Robertses, but there is no one on that list that could merit, in my opinion, a decent comparison with a Douglas or a Marshall (Thurgood or John).
Also apologise for blowing the noun-verb agreement thing.
A Sunday of piling wood, writing another letter to the editor, watching basketball and, of course, twice so far looking in on RC. In other words, a typical retirement day but for the massive mudslide blocking my hometown river that has so far killed three, injured eight and left eighteen more unaccounted for.
Makes me think that while one measure of good writing is the ease with which an author weaves the particular with the general--Montaigne comes immediately to mind--wedding felt experience to common human themes, if we are to think well about it, the same must be true about how we look at the world.
Today, as I scan the headlines about the Ukraine, Syria, the still-missing Malaysian jet and an outbreak of Ebola, I'm reminded that the thousands directly and indirectly affected by these events, so far distant they enter my brain as data points and abstractions, are just as human as those along the Stillaguamish River, the dead, missing and forlorn, some of whom I might personally know.
@James: "One: Whether Cobb has children or not is irrelevant. Not all medical reporters have cancer. Everyone, as far as I know, was a child once and likely have insight into how it played out in their maturation."
I only meant, James, that he has not had the actual experience of fatherhood which is life changing just as a person not having to live with another person might not learn the art of compromise.