;)
Wednesday
Mar272013
The Commentariat -- March 28, 2013
** James Downie of the Washington Post: "The White House’s apathy [toward too-big-to-fail banks] is particularly bizarre when ending too big to fail is not just good policy but good politics as well." Read the whole post.
Jennifer Epstein of Politico: "President Obama wants to see the Supreme Court rule on the merits of the same-sex marriage arguments they heard this week, he said Wednesday, even though his solicitor general suggested that the court should not be considering one of the cases under review." ...
... ** Separate and Unequal. Ron Brownstein of the National Journal on why the Supremes should rule on the merits: "In the absence of national rules from Congress or the Supreme Court, the country often has let 'the states experiment' with inimical courses for a very long time on questions at least as weighty. The most obvious is slavery, which existed in the South until the Civil War ended it almost nine decades after Vermont first banned the practice in its colonial constitution. After the war, Tennessee in 1882 ignited a burst of laws across the South mandating racial segregation. Even after the Supreme Court upheld these 'separate but equal' laws in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, few jurisdictions outside of the South followed.... The justices are waiting for a cavalry that won't arrive if they are hoping that the states will establish a common set of rules for same-sex marriage before the Court itself must act." ...
... ** Emily Bazelon of Slate: Paul Clement, who was defending DOMA for House Republicans had his "diciest moment [during yesterday's Supreme Court hearing] ... when Justice Elena Kagan ... said that 'for the most part and historically, the only uniformity that the federal government has pursued' is uniform recognition of marriages recognized by the states. Federal law has followed state law. 'This statute does something that's really never been done before,' Kagan continued, and the question is whether 'that sends up a pretty red flag.' Then she hoisted that flag.... 'I'm going to quote from the House report here: "Congress decided to reflect and honor collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality."' 'Does the House report say that?' Clement asked, before catching himself: 'Of course the House report says that. And if that's enough to invalidate the statute, then you should invalidate the statute.' Maybe that's the whole case right there." ...
... Richard Socarides of the New Yorker: "... the question of heightened scrutiny is the most important issue in [the DOMA] case. If the Court articulates a new and more forward-leaning standard of review in sexual-orientation-discrimination cases, as advocates hope, it would be truly transformative -- so much so that even if the Court decided not to rule in yesterday's Proposition 8 case, anti-gay-marriage laws would soon be doomed in any future litigation." ...
... Adam Serwer of Mother Jones: "However the justices rule, what was perhaps most notable in the two days of oral arguments concerning these marriage equality cases is that the lawyers for those opposing gay rights believe their side will ultimately lose this battle -- if not in the courts, than in the political realm." ...
Kate M. sends along this image:
... AND that reminds me: the Court's conservatives need a history lesson. Tuesday in Court Justice Alito said, "Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years." Actually, no, as The Week staff illuminated last year: "the institution has been in a process of constant evolution." Alito's definition of "always" (as in "that's the way we've always done it ["it" being whatever], so it's morally wrong to change it") is "as long as I can remember." Alito ascribes to the egocentric "history begins with me" school of thought.
Josh Gerstein of Politico: "During Wednesday's Supreme Court arguments on same-sex marriage, Chief Justice John Roberts asserted that President Barack Obama's decision to keep carrying out the Defense of Marriage Act after concluding that it was unconstitutional indicated that he lacked "the courage of his convictions.' But Chief Justice John Roberts was involved in an arguably similar situation back in 1990, when the George H.W. Bush administration refused to defend a legislative rider on affirmative action even as the underlying federal agency continued to abide by it."
Ezra Klein: "Sorry, Justice Scalia, there's no evidence that gay parents aren't great parents.... According to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, 400,00 children are living in the United States without permanent families.... We should be begging gay couples to adopt children. We should see this as a great boon that gay marriage could bring to kids who need nothing more than two loving parents."
Profile in Courage. Greg Sargent: "As best as I can determine, there is only one Democrat in the Senate from a red or swing state right now who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act back in 1996: Sherrod Brown of Ohio." ...
... Profile in Weasly, Smarmy, Lying Cowardice: Bob Shrum in the Daily Beast: "I wrote in No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner about Bill Clinton's 2004 advice to John Kerry that he should consider supporting a ban on same sex marriage. I'm obviously not the only source: Newsweek independently reported the story eight years ago. My book came out six years ago and no one denied the accounts then or since then -- until now. A Clinton spokesman told The New York Times that the anecdote was completely false. But the story is true and I stand by it."
The oft-married, childless Rush Limbaugh says gay marriage is inevitable because of the influence of the "gay mafia ... has inflicted the fear of political death" on opponents. Guess he's giving up on the sanctity of serial "traditional" marriage.
Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times: abortion is likely headed back to the Supreme Court as states purposely pass laws that are clearly unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade. "Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood..., said she thinks the Supreme Court will not take away women's right to choose. I hope she's right."
"Cruel & Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three-Strikes Laws." Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone: "Despite the passage in late 2012 of a new state ballot initiative that prevents California from ever again giving out life sentences to anyone whose 'third strike' is not a serious crime, thousands of people -- the overwhelming majority of them poor and nonwhite -- remain imprisoned for a variety of offenses so absurd that any list of the unluckiest offenders reads like a macabre joke, a surrealistic comedy routine."
Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times on CIA personnel moves described in yesterday's Washington Post: "A C.I.A. officer directly involved in the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of two detainees who were members of Al Qaeda has ascended to the top position within the agency's clandestine service.... The decision about whether to keep the officer in the job presents a dilemma for John O. Brennan, the new C.I.A. director, who said during his confirmation hearing last month that he was opposed to interrogation methods used by the spy agency in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks." ...
... Charles Pierce: "Jesus, what do you have to do to lose a job over this? Show up wearing a necklace of disembodied fingernails?"
Brad Plumer of the Washington Post: "a big, newly revised paper by the University of Chicago's Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse finds that ... as the wealthy have gotten wealthier..., that's created an economic arms race in which the middle class has been spending beyond their means in order to keep up. The authors call this 'trickle-down consumption.' The result? Americans are saving less, bankruptcies are becoming more common, and politicians are pushing for policies to make it easier to take on debt.... Cornell economist Robert H. Frank has been making this case for years."
David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post: "Both parties, it turns out, have made wide-ranging efforts to survey the public about smart ways to cut the budget. The public responded -- and then the politicians let most of the good ideas get away."
Senators McCain, Schumer, Flake & Bennet. If you get an outfit, you can be a Senator, too. I know the Senate is sometimes billed as "the world's most exclusive club," but I did not know the club had uniforms.... Cristina Silva of the AP: "A bipartisan group of senators crafting a sweeping immigration bill vowed Wednesday that they would be ready to unveil it when Congress reconvenes in less than two weeks after getting a firsthand look at a crucial component of their legislation: security along the U.S.-Mexico border. The four senators -- Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona and Democrats Chuck Schumer of New York and Michael Bennet of Colorado -- are members of the so-called Gang of Eight, which is close to finalizing a bill aimed at securing the border and putting 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship."
Gail Collins recalls a Senate Republican caucus full of "environmental worrywarts." Enter, right, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc.
"Evan Bayh in Drag." Charles Pierce: "Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota is rapidly moving to the top of the leader board for this year's Al From Trophy, which the blog hands out annually to its least favorite putative Democrat. (The scramble for the cup has become frenzied since the retirement of perennial contenders Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman, who were the Frazier and Ali of disreputable political sellouts.) Today, she pretty much told Michael Bloomberg to keep those (black) criminals in New York City in line before he spends all his (newyorkjew) money up in Jesusland to tell the people there what's what about their shootin' 'arns."
Chris Frates of the National Journal: "Republicans will continue to, as GOP Sen. John Barrasso put it, 'try to tear (Obamacare) apart.' And the GOP suspects it might get some help from moderate Democrats less concerned about protecting Obama's legacy than winning reelection. And much of that job falls to [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell, a brilliant defensive coordinator who will have to play flawless offense if he hopes to take control of the Senate next year."
Senate Races
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post: "Actress Ashley Judd has decided not to pursue a bid for the Kentucky Senate race, according to two sources familiar with her decision."
Martin Finucane of the Boston Globe: candidates to replace John Kerry of Massachusetts debate. Blah blah.
Matt Pearce of the Los Angeles Times: "A Wisconsin man could face years in federal prison if he is convicted of helping hacker collective Anonymous< take down Koch Industries' website during protests in the state's capital in 2011, according to an indictment revealed this week.... Officials said Eric J. Rosol, 37, of Black Creek, Wis., participated in an Anonymous-organized shutdown of Koch websites www.kochind.com and www.quiltednorthern.com on Feb. 27 and 28 in 2011."
Right Wing World
Thomas Edsall of the New York Times: "The Republican Party has begun to move to the left on social and cultural issues, as well as on immigration. Despite the warnings of mass defections of white evangelical and born-again Christians, these shifts will not be as costly as some people ... claim. The fact is that on pretty much every noncultural issue -- government spending, taxes, the regulatory state and national defense -- the Christian right holds orthodox Republican views virtually identical to those of mainstream Republicans. Its members are unlikely to bolt the party."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Bob Teague, who joined WNBC-TV in New York in 1963 as one of the city's first black television journalists and went on to work as a reporter, anchorman and producer for more than three decades, died on Thursday in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 84."
New York Times: Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, "the most widely followed barometer of the United States stock market, rose to a new high on Thursday, exceeding its 2007 peak, while most of the rest of the world could only look on in envy."
New York Times: Newtown shooter "Adam Lanza lived amid a stockpile of disparate weaponry and macabre keepsakes: 2 rifles, more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition, 11 knives, a starter pistol, a bayonet, 3 samurai swords. He saved photographs of what appeared to be a corpse smeared in blood and covered in plastic. Strewn about was a newspaper clipping that chronicled a vicious shooting at Northern Illinois University."
AP: "The U.S military says two nuclear-capable B-2 bombers have completed a training mission in South Korea amid threats from North Korea that include nuclear strikes< on Washington and Seoul. The statement Thursday by U.S. Forces Korea is an unusual confirmation."
New York Times: "Former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa was readmitted to the hospital overnight because of a recurring lung infection, President Jacob Zuma said in a statement on Thursday, appealing to people around the world to pray for him."
Reuters: "Cypriots queued calmly at banks as they reopened on Thursday under tight controls imposed on transactions to prevent a run on deposits after the government was forced to accept a stringent EU rescue package to avert bankruptcy."
Guardian: "A Brazilian doctor who has been charged with the murder of seven patients is being investigated in almost 300 other cases, according to health authorities investigating what could prove one of the world's worst serial killings. Virginia Soares de Souza is accused of cutting the oxygen to people on life-support systems and administering lethal doses of muscle-relaxing drugs in the Evangelica Hospital of Curitiba. Soares, a director of the hospital, was arrested in February along with three doctors and a nurse, who are suspected of conspiracy. Three other hospital staff have subsequently been charged in the case."
Reuters: "Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died in a mansion near London in unexplained circumstances last weekend, was found lying on the floor of the bathroom with a 'ligature around his neck', an inquest into his death heard on Thursday."
AP: "Oscar Pistorius can leave South Africa to compete in international track meets, a judge ruled on Thursday as he upheld the Olympic athlete's appeal against some of his bail restrictions."
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Reader Comments (8)
CW: I'm bringing forward this and another comment that got spammed a couple of days ago. My spam program is working much better, which unfortunately means I'm not checking it as often. Comment follows:
... CW: as I've said before in some form or another -- if Boehner were a patriot, he would seek out about 30 of his lease crazy members, and work with Pelosi to get some reasonable legislation through the House. If he can tell Harry Reid to go fuck himself, he can tell a bunch of disloyal Tea Party crazies the same."
excellent point.
Patriotism's got nothin' on tanning beds and 5 o'clock merlot's, not to mention the infamous check episode.
DaveS
Also, from March 26:
Yes, the rich are different from you and me---for starters, they do not give a fig for the unemployed or the effect of the sequester. And, despite Krugman's unremitting efforts, an overwhelming majority of the rich feel that the budget deficit is the most important problem facing the nation. Oh, and they have the clout to make the MSM and Congress to follow their views.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/25/rich-americans-politically-active_n_2949976.html
Calyban
When I read the commenters at Charles Pierce's piece about the ND senator, I think of a circular firing squad of Democrats. I remember back to the time of Al Sharpton's candidacy for Democratic president and fondly, or something less, think of Michelle Bachmann. The monolithic nature of American political parties is ridiculous.
A billionaire New York mayor has as much in common with me as a Saudi sheik.
I am reminded of the gay marriage discussion currently under way. This gay marriage takes our eyes away from the dead policies of Republicans and their equally-supportive-of-big-business Democrats like Shumer or Baucus or Feinstein. In most people's day to day world, they do not care about other people's bedroom activities.
Gay marriage is the perfect antidote for discussion about economic policies that enshrine unemployment as necessary. Same with guns. Let's keep the subject focussed on eliminating unemployment instead of considering it a cost of capitalism.
@citizen625: I think Pierce's point -- which I consider well-taken -- is that Heitkamp refuses to consider the national interest & is basing her "principled position" on her perception of the preferences of some portion of the 2.2 percent of Americans who live in North Dakota. So she would have violent, insane people able to avoid background checks all over the U.S. to try to please a few hundred rabid N.D. gun-rights advocates who probably wouldn't vote for her under any circumstances -- even if she gifted each of them with their very own personalized assault rifles. That's worse than stupid.
As far as keeping the focus on unemployment, while that is a good thought, the fact is that Senators (and their staffs) should be able to walk & chew gum at the same time. If a person can't multi-task, she should not run for public office. Besides, any effort the Senate makes toward actually increasing employment will be shot down in the House.
Marie
As the wingers who sit on their mighty SCOTUS bench, high above us mere mortals, imperiously call upon history and tradition to support their backwardness regarding the topic of same sex marriage, it’s worth paying a visit to old friend Isaiah Berlin to see what he might have to say about their ponderous search for a way to guarantee the rightness of their views, and in doing so, give us all a great big historical raspberry.
Scalia, Alito, and Roberts have all called upon their own personal Clio, ancient goddess of history, to come to the aid of a pinched right-wing ideology (Thomas may do so as well but we’ll never know). They all seem worried about journeying into waters that don’t appear on their medieval sea charts.
The argument goes that a 2,000 year old tradition must not only carry weight, it must be called upon to provide the vectors required to escape the thorny problem of gay marriage (or gay anything, for that matter). In other words, they seek refuge from the modern world in the arms of tradition and history which, they seem to be declaring, know better than we, which seems a strong indication of their sense of a sort of historical inevitability. Conservatives have a long love affair with this idea going back way before Manifest Destiny made it not just okay, but necessary, to bilk, cheat, lie to, and murder Native Americans.
Also, right-wing ideology, sautéed in fundamentalist baloney grease, fairly screams “teleology”. The end results are already written and, according to them (and to Jesus), they win. They HAVE to win. More teleology. Now if this isn’t a commercial for historical inevitability, I’ve never seen a better one (wait, okay, maybe the Soviet Union under Stalin qualifies…).
So what does brother Berlin have to say about all of this? Funnily enough, in an essay titled “Historical Inevitability”, he thinks it’s all a load of crap. Not only that, he finds this attraction to and longing for support from such a theory to be immoral (his word) and reeking of intellectual indolence.
Why? For Berlin, the idea that history moves on in great waves toward some preconceived end (this is not the Hegelian historical dialectic, in case you were wondering; that’s another bottle of hot sauce entirely) precludes human agency. Berlin suggests that turning one’s responsibilities as a thinking actor on the stage of history to forces “beyond our control” (think of Scalia’s whining about how we must consider homosexuality in the same vein as murder because it’s always been considered a criminal offense, and who are we to say different?) would be a moral disgrace.
Aligning oneself with a theory that propagates the inevitable force of history rejects human agency and free will, being able to think for oneself and act on one’s beliefs to change the direction of history, and forces one to admit to being a slave to determinism.
Perhaps for Christians of a certain bent this is not as revolting as it might sound, but the way it should be. Ah yes! The Way it Should Be, strangely enough, seems to be a constant refrain in right-wing circles (see just about anything Ross Douthat has ever written. Even when he grudgingly admits that there are cracks in his ideology’s façade, he can be heard grumbling under his breath that it still sucks because it shouldn’t be that way, and whine, whine, whine).
And if the ConservaSupremes are still wedded to their deterministic view of history and the inevitability of their ideology, to the idea that forces of history will sweep us all along to a better right-wing world, to a world where human agency (at least by the little humans) and free will play no part, where it’s only for the Kochs and Scalias and Romneys and Jamie Dimons to say what’s what, where little people have no ability to change the world, I suggest they pay a call on Ms. Edie Windsor.
And wipe their feet before they go in.
"Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my 'liberal' individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom––social or economic––is increased."
Isaiah Berlin
Although he doesn't take up the issue of gay rights, he was convinced that individuals could not be free if they were poor, miserable, undereducated, and to some degree prevented from having equal access to the rights of citizenship.
@ Akhilleus: Wipe their feet, indeed! And come laded with roses, wine and apologies.
I apologize if you've seen this, but here is a poem to which my daughter pointed me about how popes are chosen: http://aspenanomie.tumblr.com/post/241861939
"If a person can't multi-task, she should not run for public office." CW - I realized a long time ago that a fast mouth, I don't have. Does that preclude me and mine from elective office? As my wife will assure me, I don't multi-task as well as her, does that preclude me as opposed to her from public office?
I will posit that we need more people with a single minded focus on effectiveness. The cellular leash and the attention span of the average tv commercial are a hindrance to normal people doing a turn in the public forum.
Fast mouth Shumer, Heitkamp is not. The survival skills of a New York prosecutor don't lend themselves to many places in many of the fly-over states. I don't pretend that my sort of self is good everywhere; neither should Shumer pretend his sort of self is good everywhere.