The Commentariat -- November 30

This Will Not Turn out Well or Obama Signals He'll Cave Immediately. Glenn Thrush, et al. of Politico: "President Barack Obama emerged from his two-hour bipartisan summit Tuesday, saying he was encouraged by the 'extremely civil' atmosphere — and immediately assigned two cabinet members [Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner & OMB chief Jack Lew] to hammer out a deal on Bush-era tax cuts."

New York Times illustration.Bob Herbert deplores the death penalty. ...

... So does former Justice John Paul Stevens, as he writes in this compelling New York Review of Books review.

Military Trials Are Duds. Adam Serwer in the Washington Post: "In their entire history, only five convictions have been secured through military commissions, most through plea agreement, while civilian courts convicted hundreds throughout the same period. They've yielded light sentences, except in one case where the accused simply boycotted the trial. Even with the rules tilted towards the government, they have proven to be ineffective. They're expensive and more vulnerable to overturn on appeal than convictions in civilian court. Conservatives support them not because of their efficacy, but because they sound tough."

Eric Schmidt & Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The arrest on Friday of a Somali-born teenager who is accused of trying to detonate a car bomb at a crowded Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., has again thrown a spotlight on the government’s use of sting operations to capture terrorism suspects." Related news item here.

Allan Sloan of Fortune: privatizing Social Security is still a dumb idea "because retirees shouldn't have to depend on the market's vagaries for survival money," but Republicans will bring it up again anyway.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic: John McCain opposes repeal of DADT because he lost the presidential election & he's still having tantrums about it.

Andy Greenberg of Forbes interviews Julian Assange. Greenberg's cover story on Assange begins here. ...

... David Sanger of the New York Times: "The [WikiLeaks] cables about North Korea — some emanating from Seoul, some from Beijing, many based on interviews with government officials, and others with scholars, defectors and other experts — are long on educated guesses and short on facts, illustrating why their subject is known as the Black Hole of Asia." ...

... New York Times Editors: "After years of revelations about the Bush administration’s abuses — including the use of torture and kidnappings — much of the Obama administration’s diplomatic wheeling and dealing is appropriate and, at times, downright skillful."

... Roget Cohen of the Washington Post: the WikiLeaks cables further illustrate "the world George Bush left us. It exists everywhere but in his book, where facts are either omitted or rearranged...." ...

... Attila Somfalvi of Y-net News: In a meeting with journalists, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says the WikiLeaks leaks did not damage Israel, but he hopes Arab leaders will tell their own people what they say behind closed doors about their desire to attack Iran. ...

... CW: fortunately, there was bound to be funny stuff in the WikiLeaks cable, and this Guardian story fills the bill:  Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York," shocked" a U.S. ambassador with his "rude" remarks about the British press & his complaints about the "idiocy" of the country's corruption investigators. Although the ambassador expurgated her cable, apparently Andrew said, "'these fucking journalists, especially from the Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere...." ...

     ... Andrew's remark brings to mind a classic bit of literature a friend & I exchanged earlier today. The passage is believed to be of Australian origin:

I was walking along on this fucking fine morning, fucking sun fucking shining away, little fucking country lane, and I meets up with this fucking girl. Fucking lovely she was, so we gets into fucking conversation and I takes her over a fucking gate into a fucking field and we has sexual intercourse. [cited in Ashley Montagu, The Anatomy of Swearing, U. of Penn. Press pp. 314-315]

... Leak of a Leak. Paul Farhi of the Washington Post on how the New York Times got the WikiLeaks cables -- they didn't come from Julian Assange.

This proposal is a superficial panic reaction to the draconian cuts his deficit commission will recommend. A federal pay freeze saves peanuts at best and, while he may mean it as just a public relations gesture, this is no time for political scapegoating. The American people didn't vote to stick it to a VA nursing assistant making $28,000 a year or a border patrol agent earning $34,000 per year.
-- John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, on President Obama's salary freeze ...

... House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer wants to extend the pay freeze to non-combat military personnel. And he is so into cutting the deficit.

Georgia Gets Real. Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times: "During the centennial of the Civil War starting in 1960, Georgia celebrated the Confederacy and the view that the state had seceded in a valiant act of defending states’ rights against Northern aggressors. This time around, state historians are taking a different approach, declaring that Georgia seceded to defend the institution of slavery." ...

... "AND YET as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union. The events include a 'secession ball' in the former slave port of Charleston..., which will be replicated on a smaller scale in other cities. A parade is being planned in Montgomery, Ala., along with a mock swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy."