;)
Wednesday
May282014
The Commentariat -- May 29, 2014
Internal links removed.
CW: Reality Chex got "disappeared" last night, & it appears I lost some content. Sorry for the inconvenience. Looks as if I'm back up & running. 'Til I'm not.
U.S. military action cannot be the only -- or even primary -- component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail. -- President Obama, in his West Point commencement address
Mark Landler of the New York Times: "President Obama on Wednesday tried to regain his statesman's mantle, telling graduating cadets [at West Point] that the nation they were being commissioned to serve would still lead the world and would not stumble into military misadventures overseas. Speaking under leaden, chilly skies, Mr. Obama delivered the commencement address at the United States Military Academy":
... E. J. Dionne locates the "Obama Doctrine." ...
... Fred Kaplan of Slate explains President Obama's policy to dummies pundits.
Wesley Lowery & Josh Hicks of the Washington Post: "An independent review of Veterans Administration health centers has determined that government officials falsified records to hide the amount of time former service members have had to wait for medical appointments, calling a crisis that arose in one hospital in Phoenix Ariz., a 'systemic problem nationwide.' The Inspector General's report, a 35-page interim document, prompted new calls for VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, a former general and Vietnam veteran, to resign a post he has held since the beginning of the Obama administration. Those calls from Capitol Hill included several members of Obama's own party, complicating what is already a political challenge for a president who has made veterans issues a legacy-defining priority after a decade of war." ...
... Mark Thompson of Time goes over some of the numbers. CW: Most damning, in my mind, is that Shinseki, his predecessor & other top VA officials received plenty of reports about these practices. Why Shinseki claims to have been unaware of the widespread & (internally) well-reported problem is a head-scratcher. ...
... Edward-Issac Dovere & Carrie Brown of Politico: "More and more Democrats -- including Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), John Walsh (D-Mont.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.), all of whom are up for re-election -- have joined Republicans in saying that the IG report is all the proof that they need that Shinseki should be fired." ...
... Jacob Siegel of the Daily Beast: "New whistleblower testimony and internal documents implicate an award-winning VA hospital in Texas in widespread wrongdoing -- and what appears to be systemic fraud.... High-level VA hospital employees conspired to ... manipulate hospital wait lists.... If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives' bonus pay. Documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight." ...
... Jonathan Topaz of Politico: "Sen. Richard Burr [R-N.C.] said on Wednesday that he isn't backing down from his recent attack on veterans' groups and even stepped up his assault, charging the organizations are more upset by his comments than they are by the scandal at the Department of Veterans' Affairs."
New York Times Editors on President Obama's decision to delay a report on immigration enforcement policies: "There is something ridiculous about the president's fear of halting a legislative process that has been motionless for nearly a year. And it's infuriating for him to insist that doing more through executive action to protect families and reset the system's warped priorities -- as he did in halting the deportations of thousands of young people brought to the country as children -- is impossible or too politically dangerous." CW: Exactly right.
** Linda Greenhouse: "... the [Supreme C]ourt's majority is driving it into dangerous territory. The problem is not only that the court is too often divided but that it's too often simply wrong: wrong in the battles it picks, wrong in setting an agenda that mimics a Republican Party platform, wrong in refusing to give the political system breathing room to make fundamental choices of self-governance.... The Republican-appointed majority is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda.... Instead of blaming our politics for giving us the court we have, we should place on the court at least some of the blame for our politics." Read the whole post.
Michelle Obama, in a New York Times op-ed, whacks "some in Congress" for their attempts to undermine federal nutrition programs: "... unfortunately, we're now seeing attempts in Congress to undo so much of what we've accomplished on behalf of our children."
Nate Cohn of the New York Times: Most political polls are junk polls. "Many of the surveys to date have been conducted by firms that use automated phone surveys and combine deficient sampling with baffling weighting practices."
What It Takes to Be a Tea Party Star. Dana Milbank reviews Ben Carson's divisive remarks.
Steve M. on the problem of positive thinking: "... it's about conquering rather than coexisting in a society, and it's not healthy." ...
... Jesse Singal argues in New York that Elliot Rodgers' crimes were the result of mental illness, not of misogyny.
Michael Waldman of NYU's Brennan Center, in Politico Magazine: "How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment."
Claire Miller of the New York Times: "Google on Wednesday released statistics on the make-up of its workforce, providing numbers that offer a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man's world."
CW: Looks as if all or much of the Brian Williams interview of Edward Snowden is here, though it's divided into six short segments. Happily for me, I won't be able to listen. ...
... Erin McClam of NBC News: "A key claim by Edward Snowden -- that his unmasking of government spying programs has not hurt anyone -- was immediately called into question Wednesday by a former ambassador to Russia and a former top counterterrorism official." ...
... Michael Kinsley responds to New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan's criticism of his Glenn Greenwald book review. CW: When it comes to writers, including academic writers, the recriminations never end.
Jessica Taylor of the Hill: Tuesday's primary results make it appear Texas is now Ted Cruz's Texas.
Presidential Election 2016
Rick Perry, Blue-State Poacher. Caleb Hannan in a Politico Magazine piece on Perry's attempts to bolster his presidential creds by luring jobs away from states with Democratic governors. CW: What I don't get is this: how, exactly, does this make him more presidential? Are we supposed to infer that President Perry (perish the thought) would poach jobs from Mexico & Canada?
Bush's Brain v. Hillary's Brain. Peyton Craighill & Scott Clement of the Washington Post: "Two-thirds of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll disapprove of the Republican strategist raising questions about Clinton's age and health in advance of her potential presidential run."
Senate Races
Lexington Herald-Examiner Editors mock Mitch McConnell for his pretense that Kynect is "unconnected" to ObamaCare: "... it's no wonder that polls show many Kentuckians don't know that Kynect is a direct product of President Barack Obama's landmark law. How can average people be expected to understand if the Senate's Republican leader still hasn't figured it out, or at least is pretending there's no connection?" ...
... Brian Beutler of the New Republic: "The real political bombshell here is that the senator feels compelled to dodge accountability for his position at all." ...
... Update. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post exchanges e-mails with Jesse Benton, McConnell's campaign manager (on loan from Li'l Randy): "McConnell appears to have accepted the Medicaid expansion that has been so embraced by his state's residents, while drawing a distinction with the Obamacare health plans sold on the statewide exchange. Given that three out of four of the newly insured in Kentucky ended up on Medicaid, that probably makes political sense -- and also is newsworthy." CW: How does opposition to ObamaCare end? Not with a bang but a whimper. ...
... Greg Sargent: McConnell's "position is still gibberish: He still hasn't taken a position on whether he would actually support doing that, but barring further clarification, let's just say he wants Kentucky residents to think he would, or that he might. This provides an opening for Alison Lundergan Grimes to continue putting McConnell on the spot, should she choose to. Either way, for all practical purposes, this is a significant political concession."
Henry Decker of the National Memo: "Mississippi's Republican primary for U.S. Senate is heating up in its final week, with incumbent Thad Cochran and his right-wing challenger Chris McDaniel trading attack ads centered on a nursing home break-in that has roiled the bitterly negative race.... McDaniel is generally considered to represent the Tea Party's best chance of knocking off a Republican incumbent in the 2014 primaries."
Gubernatorial Race
Scott Bauer of the AP: "A person close to an investigation of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and other conservative groups said Wednesday that Walker's attorney is talking with the lead investigator about a possibl settlement that would end the probe." ...
... Jason Stein, et al., of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: "A legal civil war broke out Wednesday among targets of a John Doe probe, as a conservative group sought Wednesday to block prosecutors from having settlement talks with Gov. Scott Walker's campaign." AND, yes, as Nadd2 points out in today's Comments, even the Wall Street Journal editors have turned on Walker.
Beyond the Beltway
Mary Wisniewski of Reuters: "Declaring gun control 'essential' to public safety, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday proposed a gun shop ordinance that would videotape gun purchases and limit sales to one per month per buyer. The ordinance comes in response to a January court order invalidating a longtime ban on gun shops within the nation's third-largest city. The proposed law would require a 72-hour waiting period to purchase handguns and a 24-hour waiting period to purchase rifles and shotguns." ...
... The Guardian story, by Lauren Gambino, is here.
Aaron Deslatte of the Orlando Sentinel: "The coalition of groups trying to prove Florida's congressional map was intentionally gerrymandered to help Republicans turned to experts Tuesday who testified it was 'virtually impossible' to have drawn the maps without political bias.... 'In this case they did a really good job of following the recipe about how to do a partisan gerrymander,' [Jonathan] Katz[, a social scientist,] testified."
Lindsey Layton of the Washington Post: "The creation of the country's first all-charter school system has improved education for many children in New Orleans, but it also has severed ties to a community institution, the neighborhood school, and amplified concerns about racial equality and loss of parental control." CW: Just another part of the plan to increase inequality, IMHO.
Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post: "Republican governors in seven states -- Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Texas and Utah -- are either ignoring or refusing to comply with national standards meant to prevent sexual assault in prisons, according to new information from the Justice Department."
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Reader Comments (10)
JJG wrote yesterday, " WTF Marie what did you drive in college?"
First, let's stipulate that telling you what I drove in college will not help you learn to read my whole comment instead of just one part of it.
Second, I didn't own a car when I was in college, & most of the time I didn't have driving privileges with anyone else's car. I don't believe I had a driver's license until I was nearly 20. I learned to drive only because when I was 19 -- and couldn't drive -- I had to drive a car in a sort of emergency (even my emergencies are funny).
My husband & I bought a used Mustang when I was about 25, so that was my first car. We would not have bought a car then except we moved to Los Angeles from Chicago, & we couldn't get around very well without a car. When we first moved to LA, I took the bus to work. The one-armed man from the TV show "The Fugitive" sometimes took the same bus.
I never felt deprived during my auto-free days, & I never wished I had a car even as many of my friends got them for high-school graduation presents or whatever. My parents sent me to a good college instead of buying me a car. And, yes, it would have been an either/or situation. I never thought for a moment, "Gee, I shoulda got the wheels."
Moreover, in my auto-free college days, I never had trouble getting dates & I never found a young man more attractive because he had a car -- or a great car -- or he had money -- or lotsa money. I dated poor kids & millionaires' sons, & the parents' economic status never meant a thing to me.
I hope that satisfies your curiosity. Now, read the comment I wrote yesterday. The whole thing.
Marie
In Wisconsin (at least Madison and Milwaukee) the lawsuits are flying as thick and fast as the rumors about Walker's possible negotiation with John Doe prosecutors, who are now defendants in an unbelievable lawsuit to stop them from performing their responsibilities. Is Walker ratting out his big money supporters? Who will get thrown under the bus next (hint: not Walker) and by whom (so far, Walker has seen 6 of his supporters charged--most convicted, two in jail).
Why is the Wall Street Journal involved, and who is feeding them secret info? At least the WSJ 's editorials are calling attention to what his fellow state politicians all know: "Walker is for Walker."
Walker is treading a fine line between possibly having his reelection derailed and alienating the rich and powerful supporters of his presidential aspirations. As a skilled and slimy politician, he has a good chance of slithering out of this with everything going his way.
The scenario will have to play out, but as an example of the sleaze that follows Walker throughout his political career, it deserves to be highlighted and investigated in the national media. The problem is that it's harder to understand, even among those closely observing the whole confusing mess, than a bridge closing.
I'd love to close with a witty comparison between the New Jersey style and the Wisconsin style, but I'm drawing a blank. Walker doesn't really do things the way we've always done them in Wisconsin.
"... it's no wonder that polls show many Kentuckians don't know that Kynect is a direct product of President Barack Obama's landmark law. How can average people be expected to understand if the Senate's Republican leader still hasn't figured it out, or at least is pretending there's no connection?"
McConnell is caught in a snare of his own making and if the good people of Kentucky will wake up and realize their senator is full of it and has been he may just become that–-a has been and Grimes will prevail. This is one of the most interesting races and if McConnell is booted out I will again believe in justice or something.
And speaking of those "average people"–– Yesterday O'Reilly had his smiley side kick go forth to some yonder beach and question the young bucks and buxom babes to prove once again how dumb our college educated youth are. None of these young people knew the answers to these questions: What was the Civil War all about? Who won the Civil War? Who bombed us on Pearl Harbor in 1941? Who was the leader in Iraq that we killed? (one guy knew this), Who were we fighting in WWII? and so on and so forth. One girl when asked who George Washington was actually said she thought he was the second president, but wasn't sure. Fun in the sun with Dick and Jane.
Considering cultural filters (as I have been for two days, but promise to stop), I thought yesterday's reminiscence about those old movies particularly apropos. Was it PD who said to AK?
"Thanks for the black & white flickers––them Hollywood pichures sure packed a punch–-Cooper and Stewart portraying the honorable heroes fighting those greedy Koch-like look-alikes while Stanwick and Arthur (two of my favorites) cheered them on."
Reminded me of the comics I grew up with, which in retrospect seemed uncannily sensitive to the evils of wealth disparity. Are Scrooge McDuck and Richie Rich still around? Daddy Warbucks, an industrialist with a conscience, a scrupulous proponent of free enterprise who thought workers should be treated fairly. And then there was Veronica, whose family fortune I remember counted against her and was intended to make us root for Betty.
I grew up with these implied lessons about wealth distribution; they were embedded in the culture of the 50's and became part of who were.
I have little idea what current comics teach (most I see on Sunday and occasionally share with my grandchildren seem to lack both flavor and substance); I know nothing about video games (other than the ones I see advertised on TV and they often horrify me); and I'm not a great fan of current movies, so see few.
All that ignorance causes me to wonder what the cultural hammock we've created for our children is teaching them about economic justice. Very likely not what I learned. Guess I should be paying more attention.
@Marie; Ok, I struggled through your whole comment; I will admit to getting help with some of the bigger words. I also read every word of Elliot's manifesto. He was obsessed with material things and women and had very unbalanced set of values. Those values seem to have been reinforced by his parents efforts to help him. Contrast that with a potion of your second comment; "I never had trouble getting dates & I never found a young man more attractive because he had a car -- or a great car -- or he had money -- or lotsa money. I dated poor kids & millionaires' sons, & the parents' economic status never meant a thing to me." That quote comes from a person that is well balanced and grounded in values instilled by her parents and upbringing.
Your first comment states the BMW was not the cause of Elliot's murderous rage. My first comment was an opinion that the giving of the BMW was, again in my opinion, a symptom or clue as to the "why"of Elliot's final acts.
As to my "WTF" question; it was rhetorical. I thought it was humorous for you state it was a "used BMW" as opposed to a shiny new BMW. It takes a pretty high economic stratosphere for a college kid to look under the hood of a gift horse.
I think the real question that comes out of this latest rampage is the values that the young man developed growing up unhappy and unsatisfied in SoCal. Why are we teaching kids to value things that have no value? His actions were deranged, he was troubled, to say the least, but he did not get to that space by vacuum and his filter system was not filtering out the toxins. Let's call it a chemical unbalance that he dealt with all his life; he still was held captive by our hard driving media induced narrative that sells the cars that get the girls.
Ken,
A funny thing happens when you start to unravel pop culture iconography and whatever ideological underpinnings help create them.
Scrooge McDuck was clearly an unrepentant money grubbing son of a bitch, no love for the oligarchs in that strip. Richie Rich I could take or leave. In spite of his great wealth and the ridiculously extravagant toys he had, he was never a spiteful little shit. He was more in line with the rich quirky characters from American screwball comedies of the 30's. They were rich, but, so what? At least they weren't assholes. And they were funny.
Daddy Warbucks is a special case. Yes he was for labor (to an extent) and yes his love for Annie was authentic, and it's hard to hate a guy who can love a little girl as much as he did, but he is a precursor of many current conservative trends. First, Harold Gray, the creator, wanted both Annie and Warbucks to stand for rugged individualism, conservative icons who bootstrapped their way through the world. Since he despised Roosevelt, he tended to portray liberals as lazy haters of the American way.
But Annie was only released from the drudgery of the orphanage because of Warbucks, and her adventures and place in the world rest mostly on access to his wealth (and his band of mercenaries and assorted weird henchmen). His money mostly came from his opportunism as a war profiteer. At one point, he was arrested and thrown in jail (for tax evasion!) by an unscrupulous pol (Roosevelt?) who was "hounding businessmen for their success"....a victim after any oligarch's flinty tax-hating heart.
Right on about Veronica. I wasn't a big fan of the Archie comics, but I did think Betty had an unfair advantage with her family's wealth, so I typically pulled for Veronica (my feeling is that after all those years Betty and Veronica probably ended up together. Same for Archie and Jughead.).
"Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" is now claimed by both sides. 'Baggers all envision themselves as the valiant Jimmy Stewart character (see Paul, Rand), and, as you say, Stewart himself was a pretty staunch Republican, but as a kid (and even now), I can't help but see the evil Edward Arnold and his group of tuxedoed cronies as scheming, cigar smoking right-wing oligarchs. And it's hard watching "Meet John Doe" not to imagine that 'baggers all see themselves as the simple, America loving John Does.
The funny thing about both films is how ambiguous the endings are. It's not clear what happens after the revelations of Mr. Smith. And the ending of John Doe is even more troubling. James Gleason (always so much fun to watch), turns to the rich guys who come up to the roof to see if Gary Cooper will commit suicide. When he doesn't, because of the intervention of members of one of the John Doe clubs, he says something like "There ya go. The people! Try beating that." But they've already been beaten. The rich guys don't exactly run away with their tails between their legs. Like the Kochs, they regroup and run some new scam. Capra was not exactly the liberal his pictures made him out to be.
As for today's cultural texts for children, I can say that books seem more diverse, demonstrated by the requisite wingnut wailing that the end is nigh whenever a book like "My Two Moms" or some other same sex family story is published. But as of a few weeks ago, the NY Times Book Review commented on the fact that publication of children's books by and about minorities was still woefully behind those of white authors and characters.
It's never just what it seems though. Recently I watched the newly released "Lego Movie" with a three year old. He was beside himself. It was cute and much better written than I had expected (lots of in-jokes for the adults). The main theme was to be yourself and not be a lemming, but the goal was to sell Lego blocks. It was a 90 minute commercial, albeit an entertaining one, for a huge multinational corporation.
I think much of what kids consume today comes from sources other than broadcast television, comic books, and more traditional books. The plethora of online stuff is overwhelming, and as with most online offerings, some is exceptional but a lot is dreck.
It's terribly unfortunate that there is no Mr. Rogers for kids today. (It's an indication of how good he was that conservatives despised him. Fox News called him "evil"!! I am not even kidding.)
The big difference I notice nowadays is how quickly children are expected (pushed) to grow up. If Archie and Jughead were sufficient entertainment 50 years ago, the offerings today are far more intense. It's nearly impossible to find current children's films rated G that are decent (ie, well done). Practically everything is PG (at least). And the PG-13 stuff may as well be R.
If Little Orphan Annie were still around, she'd be thankful she had no pupils in those big eyes.
Most People Who Watch Bill O’Reilly Are Rapidly Approaching Death—By Joe Coscarelli
' "The median age for Mr. O'Reilly's audience reached a new high, 72.1." The median! Fox News' success among senior citizens is well documented, but even more than a Democrat as president to fearmonger about, the network is coming to rely heavily on modern medicine. It may soon be time to reconsider Obamacare. '
or as PDPepe notes above, if they live in Kentucky, Kynet!
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/most-people-who-watch-bill-oreilly-are-over-70.html
This morning I heard President Obama in an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep. At one point, early on, the president said something that stood my hair on end.
Inskeep, referring to the major themes of other presidents' administrations (Reagan was against communism, Lincoln strove to maintain the Union), asked the president to offer an organizing principle for his own years in office.
The president then said, referencing the Reagan years, that we don't face an existential threat anymore.
Huh?
Sorry, Mr. President. You been sleeping? Or just trying to be nice. In fact, we face the most insidious existential crisis since the Civil War. Much more dangerous than the communism Saint Ronnie (patron saint of the narcoleptic) supposedly conquered (he didn't, of course. The Soviet Union collapsed from within), because this threat is already in the house.
Conservatives are the threat. Through their many arms, and with billions of dollars in resources, they seek to dismantle and destroy the American government and subvert the basis of what it means to be American. The manufactured Red Menace never had the slightest chance to do that, no matter how much screaming Koch senior and his Bircher buddies did, with their talk of people lying dead in ditches with commie bullets in their brains. The infiltrating commies that the red scares of the thirties and fifties promised were hiding under every bed never got a foot in the door. Most members of American communist parties were naive dilettantes. No serious communist threat ever existed in this country.
Today's enemies of America are already here. They're real and they're dangerous. Tailgunner Joe had a list of 200 some odd communists supposedly burrowed into the State Department. Today's haters of America have taken over an entire party. They have robust national media networks. They're supported by billionaires hidden behind right-wing Supreme Court rulings. They run the House of Representatives and they stand a good chance of taking over the Senate.
No existential threat? Sorry. This is an existential threat like you read about.
Nadd2,
Trying to follow the Trials of Scotty is a challenge. It's one lawsuit after another but it appears that at least four or five are all Koch initiated and paid for.
One lawsuit is to make the investigation into their illegal activities go away, the others seem to be in the interest of misdirection just to mess with people.
It makes me realize that, at bottom (and I do mean bottom), the Kochs don't necessarily care if Scott Walker, or any of their other flunkies, are actually in power as long as they can screw things up enough to make everything grind to a halt. If you hate government, by definition, you hate all kinds of governance. So better to initiate chaos and let everyone chase their tails while you scheme away.
I don't doubt for a second that the Kochs would drop Walker off the nearest cliff if their need for his paid services came to an end or if his continued presence became problematic for them. He must know that as well which is why he's playing Let's Make a Deal.
Wonder what the gun nuts will say about this one.
I can shoot this five year old in the head if I want! Because FREEDOM, goddamit.
Gun fondlers are so busy these days, parading into restaurants with loaded weapons and daring anyone to say a word to them (they must all consider themselves big men for doing this, knowing full well that most people would rather not confront armed, drooling imbeciles), deciding how to attack the parents of the victims of the latest serial killer, painting themselves as poor victims beset by mean libruls, insulting those grieving parents by stating, as one idiot did in an online rant "I don't care who gets shot as long as it's not someone I like", and, oh, this guy in Arkansas. A police officer. A drunk police officer who shot up his trailer with his kids in it and then pointed a gun to the head of his five year old son, then drew down on a deputy who showed up to see what all the fun was about.
What to do with this fool?
Paid leave. And, no doubt the NRA will be demanding he be given his stash of deadly weapons back in time for his next case of beer and next round of child endangerment. Maybe next time he'll actually get to shoot his own kid. Because FREEDOM!
The good ol' NRA and their testicle washers in state and federal politics. Ain't it grand?
Days until Next Mass Murder:......90. If we're lucky.