;)
The Commentariat -- March 8, 2014
Internal links removed.
** Steven Myers, et al., of the New York Times: "An examination of the seismic events that set off the most threatening East-West confrontation since the Cold War era, based on Mr. Putin's public remarks and interviews with officials, diplomats and analysts here, suggests that the Kremlin's strategy emerged haphazardly, even misleadingly, over a tense and momentous week, as an emotional Mr. Putin acted out of what the officials described as a deep sense of betrayal and grievance, especially toward the United States and Europe." ...
... CW: A good example, a la Dubya, of why a "leadership style" -- however much Giuliani, et al., admire it -- based on grievance & hurt feelings -- is bad for the world. Moreover, if Myers' reporting is right, then the right wing might STFU about Obama's failure to anticipate Putin's actions. Putin himself didn't anticipate them. ...
... The Guardian is liveblogging developments re: the Ukraine crisis. ..
... Steven Myers: "Russia signaled for the first time on Friday that it was prepared to annex Crimea, significantly intensifying its confrontation with the West over the political crisis in Ukraine and threatening to undermine a system of respect for national boundaries that has helped keep the peace in Europe and elsewhere for decades." ...
... Steve Mufson of the Washington Post debunks John Boehner's fantasy that "the United States can help Ukraine by approving more gas export terminals" in the U.S. ...
... Liz Sly of the Washington Post: "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is taking advantage of the rift between Russia and the United States over Ukraine to press ahead with plans to crush the rebellion against his rule and secure his reelection for another seven-year term, unencumbered by pressure to compromise with his opponents."
Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "Edward J. Snowden ... said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, 'none of whom took any action to address them,' before he decided to give the documents to journalists. Mr. Snowden's comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday, amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far.... The agency has previously said its internal investigation ... found no evidence that he had brought concerns to the attention of anyone." ...
... Christian Davenport of the Washington Post: "After years of focusing on outside threats, the federal government and its contractors are turning inward, aiming a range of new technologies and counterintelligence strategies at their own employees to root out spies, terrorists or leakers. Agencies are now monitoring their computer networks with unprecedented scrutiny, in some cases down to the keystroke, and tracking employee behavior for signs of deviation from routine. At the Pentagon, new rules are being written requiring contractors to institute programs against 'insider threats,' a remarkable cultural change in which even workers with the highest security clearances face increased surveillance."
Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times on how the Justice Department got stuck investigating the Senate Intelligence Committee & the C.I.A., each of whom accuses the other -- probably rightly -- of spying on the other.
Gail Collins on women's reproductive health services, religious freedom (to impose your own beliefs on everybody else) & Texas.
Mattea Kramer in the Nation: "Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk.... Yet a careful look at budget figures for the US military -- a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57 percent of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40 percent of all military spending on this planet -- shows that such claims have been largely fictional." Kramer looks at the details & finds that the actual appropriations represent "a cut of less than 1 percent from Pentagon funding this year."
Charles Pierce: "There is no question that Aqua Buddha was the breakout star [at CPAC].... It was truly a stunning performance. A speech shot through with applause lines with almost no actual substance to it at all." ...
... CPAC, Where Reality Is Not Allowed in the Door. Dylan Scott of TPM: "Conservative radio host Michael Medved said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference that no state has ever banned gay marriage and any claim to the contrary is 'a liberal lie.' ... To be clear: 30 states have banned same-sex marriage in their state constitution, usually by legally defining marriage as between a man and a woman, according to the Human Rights Campaign." Other liberals lies: slavery used to be legal in the South, American women were not allowed to vote, and Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A. ...
... More Stupid Things Wingers Say. Tim Murphy of Mother Jones: "Top social-conservative strategist Ralph Reed compared President Barack Obama to segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference." CW: Let's add to Amanda Marcotte's list, linked below: "Making education fact-based & inclusive." ...
... More Stupid Things, Ctd. Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post: "The Department of Justice's public affairs staffers think Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) could use a history lesson on the civil rights movement. On Friday, the day after Jindal compared [AG Eric] Holder to segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace at the Conservative Political Action Conference, DOJ employees mailed Jindal a copy of a book by civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). They inserted a yellow sticky note on page 199, where Lewis writes about Vivian Malone, one of the first African-Americans to integrate the University of Alabama, who walked past Gov. Wallace that day. Malone is Holder's late sister-in-law...." ...
... Ed Kilgore: "Comparing legal objections to Louisiana's highly dubious voucher program -- which is extremely light on any sort of educational accountability for use of tax dollars at conservative evangelical madrassas, to efforts to bar African-Americans from public schools -- is precisely the sort of rhetorical jiu-jitsu we've come to expect from conservatives trying to parry accusations of (and historical association with) racism." ...
... CW: I find disturbing the bellicose language these "religious freedom fighters" invoke. Is it any wonder that a few wingers feel justified in harming the President when they listen to elected officials make speeches like this?:
... Carrying on with the Crazy, Amanda Marcotte of AlterNet, in Salon, notes the many ways evil secularists are persecuting American Christians. Includes filling out paperwork, taking money from gays & doing what they ask. CW: Look, these want to be persecuted so they can be more like Jesus. But secularists refuse to cooperate by actually persecuting them. That's just mean. In fact, you might call it a form of -- persecution. ...
... Digby: "They're getting so filled with contradictions they are pretty much reduced to speaking gibberish." Digby wrote this in response to Paul Ryan's fake story about the boy who lost his soul because he got a hot lunch instead of a bag lunch (see yesterday's Commentariat). But her observation of course has a much broader application. ...
... CW: To prove that I am one secularist who is good at persecuting, I commend you to watch the clip of Ryan's delivery:
... Adam Weinstein of Gawker: "Ryan later ... [said] in a Facebook post that he regrets 'failing to verify the original source of the story.' What he doesn't seem to regret, however, is the fact that in stealing Maurice [Mazyck]'s story, he and [Scott Walker sidekick Eloise] Anderson used it to shit on everything [Mazyck] stands for today. [Maczyk is cofounder of the No Kid Hungry campaign.] They divorced it from the kindness he received and accepted. Their honesty problem isn't about attribution; it's about exploitation." ...
... Dana Milbank: The CPAC convention (and its offshoot convention of ultra-ultra conservatives "The Uninvited") shows not that the Republican party is engaged in civil war but in chaos. ...
... MEANWHILE, Down the Road. Josh Glasstetter of the Southern Poverty Law Center: "The Family Research Council's executive vice president, Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (retired), was caught on a 'hot mic' following a panel yesterday at the National Security Action Summit, which was held just down the street from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).... Boykin told [a] reporter that President Obama identifies with and supports Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and uses subliminal messages to express this support.... Now consider the fact that he once served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and is still viewed as a credible expert on terrorism by Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee." CW: Glasstetter reports an anti-Jewish comment by Boykin, but I think Boykin was being facetious.
Beyond the Beltway
Laura Vozzella & Rosalind Helderman of the Washington Post: "Maureen McDonnell comes across as insecure and sometimes erratic in hundreds of pages of e-mail exchanges among staff members at the governor's mansion and two management consultants at Virginia Commonwealth University. The consultants were brought in to bring order to the seemingly dysfunctional workplace that was Virginia's executive mansion. The messages portray the governor as willing to devote high-level staff to helping his wife cope but reluctant to delve into the problems himself." ...
... The AP story is here.
Sometimes, in the interest of journalism, political reporters must watch porn movies. Nate Sunderland & Jeff Robinson of the Idaho Statesman report on Gov. Butch Otter's (R) performance in what became a soft-porn movie. CW: There's no reason to think Otter had anything to do with the porn bit, but since Gale Collins very much enjoys writing about Butch Otter, it was awfully nice of the Statesman to provide her some humorous material.
The President's Weekly Address
News Lede
New York Times: "A 12-mile-long oil slick spotted between Malaysia and Vietnam on Saturday afternoon is thought to be the first sign that a missing Malaysia Airlines flight with 239 people aboard went down in the waters between southernmost Vietnam and northern Malaysia, according to Vietnam's director of civil aviation."
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Reader Comments (6)
"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/us/politics/doctors-confident-in-their-healing-powers-rush-for-congress.html?google_editors_picks=true&_r=0". The GOP has so little credibility they hire doctors to add gravitas to their inanity. Then they transmute into Tom Coburn or Bill Frist. They are self-righteous, self-absorbed toads who know better than you do. Especially if you happen to be a woman. These guys don't have enough healer in themselves to stay their career of medicine past a decade or so. Think about these people: they waste social resources getting educated for 20 years, practice for a little over a decade and have so little vocational satisfaction they start over. No wonder they interchange with lawyers. This is what happens when Socratic schumucks get involved in healing. These academically gifted/compassion deficient people sound like the perfect backbone of the party of the compassionateless rich.
Given Snowden's release of information to date and his commitment to the Truth, why so coy about naming the "10 distinct officials" to who he reported his concerns. He remains a dickhead.
Perhaps I'm grasping at straws, but did you notice the audience reaction to Ryan's story of the boy and his brown bag lunch? It was met with dead silence. It's nice to learn that even CPAC attendees have a limit as to what they will cheer.
@Diane. Snowden's assertion is clearly part of his CYA campaign. I don't find anything he says credible. Most of Snowden's possible/probable lies -- like this one -- have been of the he-said/they-said variety. But a few are more damning.
For instance, Michael Isikoff of NBC News wrote last month, A "civilian NSA employee recently resigned after being stripped of his security clearance for allowing former agency contractor Edward Snowden to use his personal log-in credentials to access classified information, according to an agency memo obtained by NBC News. In addition, an active duty member of the U.S. military and a contractor have been barred from accessing National Security Agency facilities after they were 'implicated' in actions that may have aided Snowden.... While the memo's account is sketchy, it suggests that, contrary to Snowden's statements, he used an element of trickery to retrieve his trove of tens of thousands of classified documents...."
And this: Robert Mackey of the New York Times reported that in an interview with German TV., "Snowden told the documentary filmmaker Hubert Seipel that ... [Congressional] testimony from [DNI James] Clapper, in March of last year, [was] a prime factor in his decision to leak information to the public about the agency's work. 'I would say sort of the breaking point was seeing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress.'"
But Snowden's claim that Clapper's March 2013 false testimony was "the breaking point" that caused him to become a principled, patriotic whistleblower is pure bullshit, IMHO. Janet Reitman reported in Rolling Stone that "In April 2012, while working for Dell, Snowden reportedly began to download documents, many pertaining to the eavesdropping programs run by the NSA and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Eleven months later, he quit his job and accepted another, with Booz Allen, which he said he'd sought specifically for the broader access he'd have to the wealth of information pertaining to U.S. cyberspying." According to Glenn Greenwald, Snowden first contacted him December 1, 2012. So nearly a year before Clapper's testimony, Snowden began implementing his elaborate plan, & he contacted Greenwald three months before his supposed "breaking point." This is not he-said/they-said; this is Snowden contradicting himself.
Ed Snowden lies.
Marie
I'm passing on Snowden. Don't know if he's lying about the details; don't much care. Let it play out.
Meantime, did anyone notice Albertson's bought Safeway? That's worrisome.
Yes, James I noticed that Albertdaughter's bought Safeway. America: the land of barriers to entry for any and all businesses. Does it really surprise anyone that the second biggest shareholder of the Fox is a fundamentalist Saudi? Politics makes strange bedfellows and Saudi Islamic fundamentalists have everything in common with white, fundamentalist, fascist Republicans. Except of course the tan.