;)
The Commentariat -- Nov. 12, 2012
Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "As he prepares to meet with Congressional leaders at the White House on Friday [to discuss the federal budget], aides say, Mr. Obama ... will travel beyond the Beltway at times to rally public support for a deficit-cutting accord that mixes tax increases on the wealthy with spending cuts. On Wednesday, Mr. Obama will meet with corporate executives at the White House.... Though many of them backed Mitt Romney, scores have formed a coalition to push for a budget compromise similar to the one the president seeks. He hopes to enlist them to persuade Republicans in Congress to accept higher taxes on the assurance that he can deliver Democrats' votes for future reductions in fast-growing entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid." ...
... CW: they are not "entitlement" programs! And cutting them -- except for inefficiencies -- is stupid, counterproductive policy. People are still going to get sick, & if they can't get medical care, they're going to get sicker. "Let's Have More Sick People" is not an economy-boosting plan.
What's going to happen on January 1? ... The deficit is going to dramatically reduce. There will be this intense austerity squeeze.... Washington is so obsessed with the debt and deficit, and right now they are freaking out, and markets are freaking out, about the spectre of an automatic, massive reduction in the deficit. No one actually cares about the deficit. -- Chris Hayes ...
... Paul Krugman: "The fiscal cliff poses an interesting problem for self-styled deficit hawks. They've been going on and on about how the deficit is a terrible thing; now they're confronted with the possibility of a large reduction in the deficit, and have to find a way to say that this is a bad thing." ...
... ** In his column today, Krugman builds on the blogpost linked above. Oh, and he implicitly backs up my disdain for the Let's Have More Sick People plan. Plus this: "Appointing [deficit scold Erskine Bowles to replace Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary], or anyone like him, would be both a bad idea and a slap in the face to the people who returned President Obama to office."
It won't kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires. It really won't, I don't think. I don't really understand why Republicans don't take Obama's offer. -- Bill Kristol, Editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard, speaking on Fox "News" Sunday ...
... of The Hill: "Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) on Sunday said Democrats were prepared to allow the expiration of all George W. Bush-era tax rates if Republican lawmakers objected to raising taxes on the wealthiest." ...
... Matt Yglesias of Slate: "The American political system is full of checks and balances, and the way the game works is that tie goes to the status quo. And in this case, the status quo is that the [Bush] tax cuts expire. Conservatives can perhaps console themselves with the realization that the expiration isn't an underhanded liberal trick. It's their own trick.... The House Speaker has no leverage on the Bush tax cuts. We should stop taking him seriously." CW: Yglesias suggests Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is stupid because he doesn't get this. Schumer is not stupid; he is the Senator from Wall Street. He is also the #3 man in the Senate, & he will try to lead Senate Democrats to "concede" to Republican demands, as if he's performing some heroic act of bipartisanship. Chuck Schumer is looking out for Chuck Schumer.
Ian Millhiser & Josh Israel of Think Progress: Ohio's GOP Secretary of State, the now infamous Jon Husted, has a plan to rig Ohio's vote in the Electoral College in 2016, one that he borrowed from an aborted plan proposed by Pennsylvania's Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. Under Husted's plan -- had it been in effect this year -- Romney would have received the bulk of Ohio's Electoral College votes. CW P.S. As Millhiser made clear in a post I linked yesterday, gerrymandering matters. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link.
"Huge Clusterfuck." Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica has an excellent write-up of all that went wrong with the Romney campaign's vaunted "ORCA" GOTV system, one that a Romney spokesperson boasted was far superior to the Obama campaign's "Narwhal" system. Thanks to Lisa for the link.
John Cassidy of the New Yorker has a pretty readable post on polling & forecasters of the presidential race.
Greg Sargent: "Republicans have long been mystified by Obama's ability to retain his bond with voters in defiance of conditions that self-evidently seemed to doom him. If they just prevented Obama from succeeding, he'd surely sink under the fundamentals.... The ultimate irony is that this miscalculation may have led Republicans themselves to unwittingly conspire in creating the narrative that enabled Obama to survive." ...
... Thanks for the memories, Orange Man:
... CW: I don't know who wrote this post in the National Memo, but it's one of the best I've seen of Monday-morning quarterbacking the presidential election: "Why did Mitt Romney lose? It couldn't be because the GOP is wrong on taxes, health care, women's rights, immigration, education, marriage, regulation, diplomacy, climate change, evolution, science, polling, jobs numbers, fashion, sex, Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, Meat Loaf. No, it had to be Hurricane Sandy, ORCA, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, mean ole Barack Obama actually daring to release negative ads, one New Black Panther, a mural in one polling place'."
Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian on the Petraeus Affair(s): "... the relationship between the now-former CIA Director and his fawning hagiographer should be studied in journalism schools to see the results reliably produced by access journalism and the embedding process." Read the whole column. Greenwald notes, "Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post, argued that Obama should not have accepted [Petraeus's] resignation.... Like most people in the media, Ricks has long been an ardent admirer of Petraeus, even turning his platform over to Paula Broadwell in the past for her to spread her hagiography far and wide." Thanks to contributor cowichan for the link. ...
... Maybe Ricks has had a sudden change of heart. In a New York Times op-ed, he writes: "Our generals actually bear much of the blame for the mistakes in the [Iraq & Afghanistan] wars. They especially failed to understand the conflicts they were fighting -- and then failed to adjust their strategies to the situations they faced so that they might fight more effectively. Even now, as our wars wind down, the errors of our generals continue to escape public investigation, or even much internal review." CW: but, hey, we scrutinize their sex lives! ...
... Michael Crowley of Time: as Petraeus goes, so goes his military doctrine, not that he hadn't pretty much abandoned it anyway. ...
... Scott Shane & Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "High-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department were notified in the late summer that F.B.I. agents had uncovered what appeared to be an extramarital affair involving the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, government officials said Sunday. ...
... The Washington Post story, by Karen DeYoung & Sari Horwitz, is here. ...
... Eli Lake of Newsweek: Paula Broadwell "gave a speech last month asserting otherwise unreported information about the Benghazi attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.... The CIA Sunday denied her claim that prisoners were held at the annex, which has not been reported elsewhere. As her answer continued, Broadwell seemed to speak on behalf of Petraeus." With video.
... Jayne Mayer of the New Yorker examines the time line of who knew what when, & finds unanswered questions about motivations of key political players, including Petraeus. ...
... CW: I've believed from the get-go there is a plausible explanation for Petraeus's resignation, and that "Had an affair; no security breached" ain't it. BTW, since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) knew the contours of the story before the election, it would have been political malpractice for him not to have slipped word to Romney &/or Ryan, & nobody has every accused Eric Cantor or excessive propriety. And I'd be damned surprised if Eric Holder didn't give the President a heads-up, especially as he was likely aware -- via FBI Director Mueller -- that Cantor was in the loop. This was an October Surprise that didn't happen, either because Romney couldn't see the profit in it or because he couldn't figure out how to leak it in a way that wouldn't have his fingerprints all over it. ...
... Okay, Andy Borowitz has located a fellow who has that plausible explanation I was seeking: "The scandal involving former C.I.A. director David Petraeus took a startling twist today, as a leading right-wing conspiracy theorist claimed that Gen. Petraeus initiated his affair with author Paula Broadwell last year to avoid testifying about Benghazi this week."
A picture being worth a thousand words & all: Natalie Khawam (Jill Kelley's identical twin sister), David Petraeus, Scott Kelley, Jill Kelley & Holly Petraeus in Tampa, Florida. Photo by the Tampa Bay Times, via the New York Daily News.Adam Goldman, et al., of the AP, re: David Petraeus: "A senior U.S. military official identified the second woman Jill Kelley, 37, who lives in Tampa, Fla., and serves as the State Department's liaison to the military's Joint Special Operations Command, where among other duties, secret drone missions are worked on.... The military official ... said Kelley had received harassing emails from Broadwell....A friend of Kelley and Petraeus ... also said the two saw each other often, but the nature of their friendship was unclear." ...
... Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "The woman who reported to the F.B.I. that she had received threatening e-mails from a woman romantically linked to David H. Petraeus ... is a friend of Mr. Petraeus and his wife, Holly, who lives in Tampa, Fla.... The woman, Jill Kelley, 37, is 'a very well-known person of influence in the Tampa community,' active in community organizations that support military causes.... Tampa is the home of the military's Central Command, which Mr. Petraeus headed before serving in Afghanistan and then as C.I.A. director. It was during the Petraeuses' time in Tampa that they became friends with Ms. Kelley and her husband, Dr. Scott Kelley." ...
... Bill Hutchinson of the New York Daily News: Kelley is "the unpaid social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base." ...
... Matthew Solan, et al., of the Daily News have a lot more here. And it's a New York tab, so you know it's all tasteful. ...
... Five factoids about Jill Kelley & her family from Nina Strochlic of Newsweek. ...
... Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: neighbors in Charlotte, North Carolina, say Paula Broadwell is a good neighbor-soccer mom who dines by candlelight.
David Remnick of the New Yorker: "The effort [to halt climate change] should begin with a sustained Presidential address to the country, perhaps from the Capitol, on Inauguration Day. It was there that John Kennedy initiated a race to the moon -- meagre stakes compared with the health of the planet we inhabit."
Annie-Rose Strasser of Think Progress: "Zane Tankel, the CEO of Applebee's New York Franchise, Apple-Metro, is so dedicated to not spending money on his employees that he's refusing to hire anyone new. Why? Because he might have to provide them health care.... Studies have shown that a company that provides health care has a higher retention rate for its employees, reports more employee satisfaction, and draws the best employees to the job." ...
... CW: Tankel is as stupid as he is heartless. Most large employers will have to provide health insurance, so the playing field will be more-or-less level. People are not going to stop eating at restaurants (though you couldn't get me inside an Applebee's except by force), and if Applebee's has to raise the price of nachos by 50 cents to cover healthcare costs, so does everybody else. You can't make guys like Tankel give a shit about the health & well-being of their employees, but now they'll have to provide insurance or pay a penalty. Some people won't be decent human beings unless the law requires it. Now the law requires it.
The Half-Enlightenment Dawns upon Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.):
News Ledes
New York Times: "Israeli tanks made a direct hit on Syrian artillery units on Monday, the army said, responding to mortar fire that fell near an army post in the Israeli-held Golan Heights. It was the second consecutive day that Israel confronted fire along its border with Syria<."
New York Times: "Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo plans to ask the federal government for at least $30 billion in disaster aid to help New York City and other affected areas of the state recover from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy...."
AP: "The BBC's news chief and her deputy have 'stepped aside' while the broadcaster deals with the fallout from a child abuse scandal that forced its director-general to resign, the broadcaster said Monday. Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news and current affairs, and her deputy, Stephen Mitchell, have handed over their responsibilities to others for the time being 'to address the lack of clarity around the editorial chain of command,' the corporation said."
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Reader Comments (39)
This Petraeus, Broadwell, Kelley thing is really getting interesting like a... a... reality show or something. Can't wait for the wide-screen release. Will the Kardashians have a role it it?
I'm repeating this from yesterday's thread. It turns out it's important.
I never thought I'd have to say this on Reality Chex, but I guess I do. If you copy another person's writing -- whether or not the other person is a well-known writer -- give him credit.
If you want to add to the author's thoughts, here's how you do it:
{Joe Schmoe says "blah-blah." I think he's right as far as he goes, but there's more nuance to it than that....}
If you copy exactly what Schmoe says, put it in quotes. If you paraphrase, don't use quotes, but still credit Schmoe.
If you both copy and paraphrase, put any of the original writer's exact phraseology in quotes, and leave off the quotes for the parts your approximating; i.e.,
{Joe Schmoe says he's relieved Obama was re-elected, but he hopes "the Prez will stand up to the Orange Man and the Turtle."}
Generally, you'll want to identify Schmoe & where you found his writing: "In this week's Time magazine, columnist Joe Schmoe says "blah-blah."
If you're not sure how to give proper credit, ask me. I do it dozens of times a day.
Please.
Sister Mary Elephant
Moi?
I'm torn: Turns out I'm really taken by Sister Mary Elephant, but it seems she only comes out when the Constant Weader is justifiably upset with a poster's flagrant shortcomings. So...should I hope the Sister's nagging has its intended effect, or should I secretly pray that future Reality Chex contributors, despite the Sister's energetic admonitions, occasionally eschew facts and proper attribution?
I thought I'd left my Catholic upbringing behind, but it seems I still have a thing about nuns.
@James Singer
Perhaps that should be: "Moi?"—Miss Piggy!!!
Greetings. I'm a long-time lurker who loves your site (and the comments) and hopes you don't fold, though I can't give you one good reason not to! (Well, except your mostly excellent reader feedback.) Your recent "State of..." essay inspired me to share--rather, rant about--some of my vastly similar experiences at my music blog, where I've reluctantly removed my contact email and resorted to comment monitoring. Regardless, I still get people asking me how much some dirt-common 78 set is "worth" ($2.00, on average, if you can find someone who wants it--but they don't want to hear that), or can I please check someone's list of 558 record titles and rip everything not on the list? And so on. Back when my email was public, I dealt with any number of repost or "please rip" requesters who refused to take no for an answer and/or snarked bitterly and/or (in one instance) trolled my comment section because I pointed out I'm a blog, not a trading post. One person, who informed me that his sister was some important comic-industry person, asked for info on a 45 set (like that's my job to supply it), and I pointed out that the material is probably available on an LP, too. He wrote back, sarcastically explaining that 45s and LPs aren't the same medium. That's as close as "Thanks for your help" as the majority of time-wasters come.
Even with my email off, I still get a slow but steady stream of "Where can I find...?" messages from unspeakably lazy, zero-Internet-etiquette sorts, and it does all of no good to respond with, for instance, "You can find it the same way I find things--by searching them out," or "I'm not the Internet answer person," or "People like you are the reason I had to remove my email contact. Thanks a lot." Needless to say, nearly every time someone insists they've "looked everywhere" for a given record, it's an item all over eBay, Amazon, or available for free at Youtube.
And so I ignore such folks. Joyfully. I learned long ago that 90 percent of my time wasters won't bother me if there's any work involved in contacting me. They can demand the moon, but their seconds are precious.
Attribution-wise, an embarrassingly high number of fellow music bloggers swipe AllMusic essays (which are embarrassing enough to start with) and act as if they wrote them, perhaps without even realizing the implications of stealing someone else's words. So much of what constitutes Internet activity, after all, is simply digital regurgitation of sounds, images, and text, and I imagine many folks think it's not only their job but their duty to pirate everything in sight. I mean, that's what one does on the Net. Er, isn't it?
Obama's last offer to Boehner via Bob Woodward:
http://presspass.nbcnews.com/
Happy hunting.
Re Ricks on 'it's the generals fault!'. Beyond being the wrong man in charge and then not having the correct guide book there is the universal fact that it is the rarest of generals who can give a realistic answer to the question "How are we doing?" It seems that the prerequisite to higher command is a bottomless source of optimism. Or perhaps delusional optimism might be more correct. All generals believe the situation is solvable by more time, men, or bigger guns but in the meantime things are improving and in the near, if undefinable, future the enemy, who are near collapse, will surrender. This rule of warfare was obviously at work when Obama consulted the military before deciding on how to proceed in Afghanistan instead of talking with someone who knew the country, the people, their history and their politics. If he had, the troops would have come home in 2009.
The Petraeus FBI issue is troubling to me because no one mentions that it evidently did not take a court ordered search warrant for them to snoop into his email. The entire overreaction because of the "need to protect this country from terrorism" and it's use by people in power, and the munchkins working under them has eroded our constitutional right to privacy to the point where there is probably no secure form of communication. How can a person complain to the FBI through a friend who happens to be a member of the FBI and trigger such an intrusive search of the CIA heads email without a court order?
And why did someone from the FBI leak this to Cantor except to accomplish the absolute abuse of power of the snoops for political purposes. It's classical irony that the head snoop got snooped over what has turn out to be - at least I am not hearing that these were truly threatening emails- a private matter.
In my "neck of the woods" if someone "threatens" you by whatever means, you get the state patrol or city police involved. You don't "call" the FBI. WTF?
The last 11 years of fear in this country has to be put to rest and good common sense policy discussions need to be had on the federal government's intrusive involvement in our lives. The movement towards a more military state - with the militarization of our local police forces and the espionage involvement in U.S. citizens private lives needs to stopped or at least rolled back because as it presently exists is a very scary thing to contemplate.
@cowichan, where did you find this: "universal fact that it is the rarest of generals who can give a realistic answer to the question 'How are we doing?' " and this: "All generals believe the situation is solvable by . . ."? You are generalizing and making your statements appear as a 'fact', something the Repubs do all the time.
If one of my college students had submitted your comment for a grade, it would receive an Incomplete with a mandatory visit to an English Tutor for a rewrite with a one grade reduction before evaluation for content ~ and, I am not an English teacher.
Marie is providing a tremendous service to all of us and her request to give credit to sources is part of English 101 (not to mention high school first year). Generalizing (e.g., 'universal fact', 'all generals') is an attempt to by-pass the requirement to cite sources. I encounter this behavior frequently with my students which then creates extra time in the grading process. Marie's valuable time needs to be focused on the content of her wonderful blog and not on grading the comments.
That is all. Thank you. SME (there are many of us)
Cowichan,
What you're describing is another aspect of Clausewitz' fog of war. The ubiquitous optimism that seems an part of the outward makeup of so many in high command positions can be blamed for a myriad of stupid, ill-conceived, and delusional plans during many wars and it's one reason for the massive clusterfuck that is the Bush/Cheney/Neo-con legacy.
Clausewitz, in his study of past clusterfucks, expands the effects of the fog of war to all levels of the war machine, right back to the home front. He even goes so far as to declare that military intelligence is pretty much useless. Of course this was a century before high tech surveillance, but even that variety of intelligence must have some form of corroboration on the ground, something that B/C and Rumsfeld never felt compelled to do. "Make it up" was their motto. And the generals followed suit.
Anyone who has seen Eroll Morris' shattering documentary interviews with Bob McNamara, "The Fog of War", can support the conclusion that the former Secretary of Defense was in a fog of his own. Mostly a fog of misinformation, delusion about the nature of the enterprise (war), the role of war as an instrument of foreign policy, and the difficulty of clarity once you're in the middle of it all.
This is exactly what Clausewitz warned of, and what so many either deny or blithely ignore.
One harrowing episode out of McNamara's memories of the Vietnam War came as he was trying to assess the nation's level of support for the war. (I may not be recalling this exactly, but this is my memory of it.) He happened to look out the windows of his office in the Pentagon one day and saw a young man, a Quaker, it turned out, who poured gasoline over himself and struck a match to his clothing in protest of the war. As haunted as McNamara claimed to have been by this image of self-immolation, it didn't affect his prosecution of the war based on his gut feelings of the country's support and necessity of the action.
All complete bullshit.
Of course McNamara largely absolves himself by saying that he couldn't possibly have understood any of this without having gone through the war. I mean, he felt bad and all, but, what can you do?
But not all generals are willing to put on the smile and do the happy dance. Career military men in Hitler's wehrmacht were so distraught about following his lunatic war plans that they tried to dissuade him to cease and desist, by trying to blowing his ass up.
Clausewitz also realized that the most important part of any war was the political element. And it still is. The fact that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld demanded happy talk and severely curtailed the use of pesky facts during their vicious but inept pursuit of war at all costs sent a message to everyone up and down the line. There may have been quite a few officers who were as distraught as those wehrmacht generals, but their complaints were kept under wraps.
Which brings us to our current situation in which fanstasy and happy talk are still substituted for an appreciation of both reality and the complexity of the world.
Republicans are still wed to a thought process that eliminates facts in favor of ideology and happy dances (the Charleston, I believe) that help them, in their own minds, dissipate the fog of governing and transport them back to a world that never was.
Nonetheless, any nation which declares an offensive war of choice, as Bush did, must do so with the understanding that no one will welcome them with flowers. And generals who go along with that idea and promote fantasy scenarios should be held culpable as well.
@fromtheheartland: I don't think we know that there wasn't a court order. (Correct me if I'm wrong, please.) As you probably know, there is a special court -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- that hears applications for warrants for wiretaps & other forms of eavesdropping that would otherwise be unlawful. I suspect the FBI got a warrant, tho we may find out otherwise.
Marie
@Mushiba & @cowichan. Thanks for the catch, Mushiba. Whether or not generals make valid assessments, given the analysis tools available to them, I'm sure their staffs make sophisticated assessments of "how we're doing" all the time. See this amazing PowerPoint slide as a case on point.
Marie
Oops! Updated to substitute commenter Mushiba for commenter MAG. I apologize to youse both.
A MONDAY DITTY*
Mad dogs and Congressmen (those of the R.W. variety)
out in the midday sun,
Play shoot the hoops and round the world
throw hard balls at opponents, just have so much fun!
Meanwhile we struggle with the BIG issues
that get buried in the sand––
Oh, for greater leadership, oh, for louder cries
to get us off this fiscal cliff and lend a helping hand.
AND––YES WE CAN!
* A nod to Noel Coward and all those mad dogs
This sent to the local paper this last night:
"Now that the election's decided, conservative pundits struggle mightily to understand why they lost.
Their explanations are many and instructive. They range from citing the demographic shifts in the country's population, which Republicans apparently hadn't noticed until this week, to "bewilderment," to Democrats "suppressed the vote" with negative ads about Mr. Romney, to one local candidate with a thousand yard signs who says his loss was the state and national party's fault because they didn't support him adequately.
Such explanations are revealing for what they don't say. They don't say many Republican candidates would like to see a federal ban on abortion and even contraception. They don't say their Presidential candidate said the Arizona mostly unconstitutional "Papers, Please" law was a "model for the nation” and suggested that undocumented immigrants "self-deport."
They didn't say Republican budgets impose austerity on the middle and lower classes but protect the wealthy, subsidizing the top 1% with immense tax breaks and corporations with tens of billions in handouts. By his actions, their multi-millionaire Presidential hopeful practiced patriotism by paying personal income tax at a rate lower than many in the middle class and no tax at all on the money and corporations he moved offshore.
And there’s more. Not a single conservative commentator has noticed that not everyone favors turning public services, everything from schools to parks to the post office into private, for-profit enterprises. Or that Republicans have been warring against unions and workers for forty years.
Oddly, no Republican (the Party that pretends to worship "Personal Responsibility") mouthpiece remembers their pet pizza huckster Herman Cain's injunction: "If you’re not rich, blame yourself."
Though now they want to blame anyone or anything but themselves, this time Republicans didn’t need help. They built their election loss of November 2012 all by themselves."
I used up my 300 word LTTE allowance so didn't have room for much more good stuff, but it'll do. BTW, the local candidate was John Koster and I couldn't be happier that in his races for Congress he has now lost FOUR times, the benefits of living in the blue part of a blue state. Maybe he will move to Canada. After last week's election, I'll stay here.
Ryan Lizza has a long thoughtful piece in the New Yorker on how some Texan Republicans are finding success in pulling Hispanics into the GOP. I hope some Democrats are paying attention and honing the message to undercut the Republican effort. Here's the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/11/19/121119fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all
Re: Vietnam and "The Fog of War." There were people like George Ball who tried like the very dickens to drum some sense into McNamera and the rest of the gung-hoers. Ball understood in order to convince his colleagues he would have to reassure them that abandoning South Vietnam was NOT a betrayal of their cold war principles:
"The position [above] does not suggest that the US should abdicate its leadership in the Cold War. But any prudent military commander carefully selects the terrain on which to stand and fight, and no great captain has ever been blamed for a successful tactical withdrawal...Politically, S.V. is a lost cause. The country is bled white from twenty years of war and the people are sick of it. the Viet Cong are deeply committed. Hanoi has a government and a purpose and a discipline. The government in Saigon is a travesty. In a very real sense, SV is a country with an army and no government. In my view a deep commitment of US forces in a land war in SV would be a catastrophic error. If ever there was an occasion for a tactical withdrawal, this is it!"
From Kai Bird's "The Color of Truth"
Marie, your statement that Medicare and Medicaid are not 'entitlements' is in a sense not correct. Here is the Wikipedia definition.
"An entitlement is a guarantee of access to benefits based on established rights or by legislation. A "right" is itself an entitlement associated with a moral or social principle, such that an "entitlement" is a provision made in accordance with legal framework of a society. Typically, entitlements are laws based on concepts of principle ("rights") which are themselves based in concepts of social equality or enfranchisement."
In other words an entitlement is a basic human right. The problem here is that the our 'right' uses the word to infer that it means something else. They infer that entitlement is something that anybody other than themselves expect from government by greed, laziness or anything else where they share the costs. Of course there is the basic racist based hypocrisy of expecting to receive the entitlement, as long as you are white. AND THAT IS THE REAL PROBLEM.
Remember that I don't want the government to mess with my Medicare.
Re: Yes sir, three bags full, sir: @ Cowichan; A good deal of the time your writing logic escapes me but, "Hey, he's Canadian,A?" plus I enjoy the outsider's view. Today's posting I understood completely and agree with completely.
If I may add to it I believe the civilian leadership is part of the problem as well. The Neocons wanted the answers to their questions to be the answers they wanted so they kept on asking the questions until the generals got the answers right.
Add that to the ideas that any war is better than no war at all and that war is a money maker for the MIC; how can you expect honest, quality individuals to make it to the top?
@Marvin Schwalb. I don't disagree with your assessment, but I object to the use of the term "entitlements" for the reasons you cite at the end of your comment. Besides, the term "entitlement," as Calmes used it, is misleading in another way: not all "entitlements" are equal.
What I mean here is that most of us pay into the Medicare & Social Security funds all of our working lives. It's true that these are essentially insurance policies, & they are not distributed equally in the way other insurance policies -- like annuities -- are. I may pay in more & get back less from Medicare & Social Security -- or vice versa. But Social Security benefits are based partially on what an individual pays in. Medicare, too: workers all pay a Medicare payroll tax, and when they become eligible for Medicare, they pay a premium, which I guess is based on ability to pay. My Medicare premium is higher than was my private insurance premium before I turned 65 (although I think my Medicare deductible is considerably lower, so Medicare may be a better deal).
By contrast, Medicaid, food stamps, school lunch programs, aid to families, etc., are programs that the actual recipients may not have prepaid in taxes. That isn't always true, of course. A person may have been a long-time taxpayer, then become unemployed & need Medicaid & food stamps or other government assistance. The idea of these & other "entitlement" programs is to help people become taxpayers, to tide people over in periods of personal crisis, and to help seniors & children live their lives at a level of comfort that conforms, as you say, to our conception of a "basic human right."
However, "entitlement" is a Republican term, & middle-class Americans -- almost all of whom are receiving, have received or will receive benefits from "entitlement" programs -- recoil at the word because, again as you say, Republicans use it to mean "a giveaway program poor (read black) people think they are entitled to." By refusing to use the word "entitlement" but by calling these programs "social safety-net" programs, you rob the right of a useful red flag.
By the way, this isn't a red flag that works only on the gullible middle-class white masses. When Mitt talked about the "irresponsible" 47 percent, he was demonstrating he fell into the trap set by Frank Luntz or Newt Gingrich or whoever decided on the term "entitlement" to malign social programs. Obama, too, has used to use the word "entitlement"; I think/hope he's learned better, but his promise to "reform" Medicare, Medicaid, etc., suggests he may have gotten the language right but not the concept.
When the media use the term "entitlement," they are just playing into the Republican game plan: they are raising a red flag for people who are sure they are the "makers," not the "takers" -- the lazy blah people who are taking advantage of taxpaying makers such as they. That's why I object when NYT reporter uses the term "entitlement" as if it were an anodyne word. It isn't.
Marie
@Marie and Mushiba re: facts and stats; How about I preface an unsubstantial statements with "In my opinion..."?
"In my opinion that Ken Winkes is one smart guy who writes as well as anyone posting here."
"In my opinion that Marie Burns has a rare combination of wit and wisdom that one rarely sees in writing these days."
BUT "It's a fact that I am still awaiting Mr. Moneybags tax free gift even withstanding the poetic prodding of PD.Pepe"
"In my opinion the book " Ten Thousand Day War" about Vietnam is topical to today's comments.
While the "official" Veteran's Day (or as my dear parents referred to it--Armistice Day) was yesterday, I believe that it is not too late to say to all of the commenters, readers, and/or lurkers reading these comments, if you served in the military, THANK YOU for your service. And now the pitch . . .
Current TV is airing an ad narrated by Trace Adkins for the Wounded Warrior Program. Since the elections are over--for at least six months or so--if any of you have some spare money to send to a good cause, I truly believe it would be greatly appreciated by the individuals being helped by this program.
It is truly galling to me that the "true American" patriot chickenhawks that so proudly sent these young men and women to fight in foreign lands, can't seem to take a million here and there from the MIC bastards and properly fund the programs so necessary to the resumption of any semblance of a normal life for those who have returned so horribly maimed in body or spirit.
When a Wolfowitz or Cheney dies actually fighting for his country, I wonder will his last thoughts be of Homer's famous words,"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," or will they come to the realize the wisdom of Wilfred Owens sagaciousness in calling it "the old lie?"
Dean Baker has a great piece up at Fire Dog Lake regarding "entitlements" and the Washington Post's take on them.
http://my.firedoglake.com/deanbaker/2012/11/12/post-in-hyper-drive-on-effort-to-cut-social-security-and-medicare/
To JJG: In my opinion you are the bee's knees and am so glad you haven't besmirched your opinions with a "humble" preface which makes MY knees buckle––if one gives an opinion there's nothing humble about it––– that's just my opinion.
@Jacquelyn: I used to give, for many years, to The Paralyzed Veterans until someone told me their program was run poorly and money was going elsewhere other than to the veterans. I'll do some research on the Wounded Warrior Program.
@Marie,
Thank you for your comment. I needed to do a bit more work on this. That is a fair statement that "I don't think we know that there wasn't a court order.” We don't know that the FBI didn't get a subpoena for "wiretapping" the email account of Broadwell. I suspect very strongly that they did not. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, "Warrant applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are drafted by attorneys in the General Counsel’s Office at the National Security Agency at the request of an officer of one of the federal intelligence agencies. Each application must contain the Attorney General’s certification that the target of the proposed surveillance is either a “foreign power” or “the agent of a foreign power” and, in the case of a U.S. citizen or resident alien, that the target may be involved in the commission of a crime."
See - http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/courts_special_fisc.html
This case certainly did not meet those standards as it was presented to the FBI. Remember, Petraeus only became an issue after Broadwell's emails were looked at. I think we know - at least that is how I took several bits of news this morning - that Petreaus gave authorization for review of his email.
I suspect that the FBI did not go to any type of court to get a look at Broadwell's email. The FBI did not need to. The FBI has the ability to issue National Security Letters to internet/telephone providers to look at emails without letting the email user know, and in cases of internet "crime" the FBI has almost exclusive jurisdiction to investigate. See - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11843648
The non-public nature of this type of investigation is what troubles me as it seems that the inevitable conclusion was that after investigation, this (broadly referring to the "harassing, or threatening emails") was not a crime and as to this point no charges have been filed against anyone. I am suspicious that the emails sent from Broadwell to Kelly were not in fact anything other than warnings to Kelly that she should be careful about compromising Petraeus by acting too friendly to him and they may have been "possessory." I read somewhere this morning that the "affair" was over about 4 months ago. Hell, I digress and all of that is beside the point. Those emotions are of course something Broadwell could correctly identify with because of her relationship with Petraeus.
Time will tell as far as what the real story is.
I am just very uncomfortable that this country has “legitimate” legal processes in place that compromise our privacy protections against unlawful search and seizure, without making the process public. It is a very very rare case when a normal search warrant coming from a state court or a federal district court is not accessible to the news media, particularly after it is acted upon. However, the NSLs are an entirely different beast.
For an in depth discussion/critique of NSLs and the FISC, see - http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/ACLU_Testimony_Before_the_HJC_Regarding_the_Patriot_Act.pdf
@fromtheheartland. Update: according to the Wall Street Journal, "the [FBI] agents spent weeks piecing together who may have sent [the harassing e-mails]. They used metadata footprints left by the emails to determine what locations they were sent from. They matched the places, including hotels, where Ms. Broadwell was during the times the emails were sent.
"FBI agents and federal prosecutors used the information as probable cause to seek a warrant to monitor Ms. Broadwell's email accounts."
The WSJ article doesn't say otherwise, so I assume the court granted the warrants.
Marie
@ Mushiba; Restricting ourselves to Iraq and Afghanistan, can you give an example of one general asking for a reduction in troop levels or a reduction in arms or less time? Can you quote generals expressing a pessimistic outlook on a campaign? Can you name a general who gave a forecast that was correct? In Afghanistan victory has been just around the corner for 11 years.
@ Constant Weader; I'm with Julian Borger. The power point presentation makes a pretty wall hanging. Were it realistic there would be a large flashing sign dead center, "CORRUPTION". As long as corruption is the core value of Afghan institutions there will never be a resolution of the war.
@JJG, using the phrase, in my opinion (or, I believe or, I think) is a valid way to differentiate between fact and opinion. However, even opinion needs to be supported with some type of credible source, although certainly not always. It then is up to the reader to determine if a person who always states an opinion is a valid source of information. I consider Marie's opinions valid because I trust the sources she uses to form those opinions.
@Cowichan, the point I was making is that a generalization is not helpful in forming an opinion and can make something a 'fact' when that is not the case. I have no desire to research the questions you ask because that was not the point I was making. It may very well be that there is valid support for the generalizations you made and, thus, moving them into the fact column. If you had framed your comment as JJG suggested, "In my opinion …", I would not have reacted as I did.
@Marie, when that PowerPoint presentation was first shown, I used it in a classroom discussion on the prevalence of using obfuscation to intimidate people. One of the conclusions that the students reached was that many people would not question its validity for fear of appearing stupid. I believe this is a powerful tool that the military uses because it works to keep people from asking questions.
@JJG: You're very kind; only my opinion, of course. Another quotation from the Pizza Man is relevant here. "I don't have facts to back that up." Don't know why we should fret, though; didn't seem to bother him a bit.
I kept avoiding reading today's HuffPost bit on Grover Norquist, but finally caved and even watched the video clip. I just don't get the guy, the alleged influence he has had over
Republicans. If only he and Rove would disappear into the deep, dark night...taking along a bunch of others too numerous to name.
..such utter crap!
...for crying out loud...when grown man uses the phrase 'poopy head' that pretty well establishes what a mental midget he is.
HuffPost: Grover Norquist: Obama Won Because He Called Romney A 'Poopy Head'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/12/grover-norquist_n_2116219.html
Looks like Marie re-upped just in time.
News of the imminent shuttering of RC would have, as I told her, required my immediate enrollment in some kind of 12 step plan.
Either that or immersion into my own fantasy world where the president kills the pipeline, starts talking about global warming, sends a double helping each of Fuck You Pie to Boehner and McConnell, appoints Hillary Clinton to run the CIA, and lines up two nominees to the Supreme Court: Driftglass and Michael Moore. Finally, he rams through a change to the tax code the disallows Mittens and Lady Ann from getting a tax break on that fucking horse.
Hey, if you're gonna live in a fantasy world, it might as well be fun.
But to return to my original point, Marie has saddled up again in the nick of time (I don't think she was actually ever out of the saddle, but I must have my small literary conceits now and again) because things are moving fast.
Forget the midterms. Next week Marco Rubio gives a big 'ol "My shit doesn't stink so remember me...." speech at some a wingding to round up piles of cash for the Governor of Iowa, Terry Branstad.
Gingrich must be PISSED that it wasn't him.
And away we go.
@Mushiba; I am not a journalist. Not even a paid opinion writer. Just an opinionated old man with an obsolete computer. Other than what I specifically attribute to another, everything I write is opinion. I deny the possibility of possessing the ability to 'create fact'. Rather than write 'in my opinion' ad nauseum, I have changed my author name to 'cowichan's opinion'. Trust that is acceptable.
You may find this take on the Petraeus scandal interesting; I surely did, and it makes a lot of sense.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/the-sins-of-general-david-petraeus
Re: My opinion be damned; the general's girlfiend is going to mess up the other girlfiend of the general for fucking with the general and poor Paul Krugman who is actually writing about something that really does impact us all is pounding his head on his desk saying "If only economics had a sex scandal. The naked pie chart caught with its indexation exposed!" Now that's sexy! Poor Paul! Poor us. Here comes the cliff, all lemmings on board and accounted for. Wheeee!
"What, me worry?" quoting Alfred P Newman
I meant earlier to welcome Raul to the regularly visible section of our little group.
So, Raul, welcome.
Now that that's over with, hey, I've got these Bix Beiderbecke 78s, and I was wondering...
@cowichan, that's the spirit ~ I LOVE your new name!!
@JJG, I think you are onto something for our poor Paul.
@Raul, following Akhilleus (which many of us do), I welcome you to our forum.
@fromtheheartland-
..."Time will tell as far as what the real story is."
Not necessarily. We are in the Age of Conspiracy Theories (ACT), and are just beginning to hear some mumble about Petraeus, Broadland and Kelley--and whoever else was rolling around in the unmarital bed.
Remember, there are still active conspiracy theories about who really killed JFK. And lots about 9/11.
My own opinion is that Petraeus is a smart, extremely compulsive "little" (in stature) man who lives in the basement apartment of self awareness. His amour(s) look like Playboy babes compared to his wife, who looks like a perfectly nice, middle-aged woman--who obviously does not jog with him. I contrast him with Bill Clinton, who was/is so needy he will never have "enough." I think he knows that about himself, but cannot stop the compulsive behavior. Petraeus seems to me not to get any of this--except that he has besmirched his honor.
@Akhilleus and Mushiba, thanks.
Once, someone assured me that starting a sentence with "and" is a total no-no. And she was completely serious.
@Akhilleus and Mushiba, oops--that was me, posting on alphonsegaston's PC (she's my mom). I'd filled in my own info, but somehow it reverted to hers. She has a very protective PC.
I'm an eight-year Navy vet, I should mention. I manged to serve during a period of sustained peace, which was nice, of course. At the time, the allegedly pro-military Reagan was nickle-and-diming our benefits and periodically freezing and/or delaying our raises, giving me yet one more reason to dislike him.
On this (federal version of) Vets' Day, I'd have a happier memory of my service days if I weren't weeping over the lives and limbs lost because our Prez insisted on extending (and expanding on) the Bush/Cheney conqueror doctrine. I voted for him, but it was just as much a vote against the other guy.