;)
The Commentariat -- Oct. 11, 2013
** Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion. The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials. But the red flags went unheeded.... The supervisor's cautionary note and the C.I.A.'s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors...." CW: Just jaw-dropping.
CW: I have been waiting since the debt ceiling crisis of 2011 for a teabagging Constitooshunal scholar to say this out loud, because I had a sneaking suspicion it's what they believe. As Charles Pierce points out, yesterday Rep. Jeb Hensarling (RTP-Texas) went there: " Andrea Mitchell was interviewing Rep. Jeb (Jeb) Hensarling of Texas, and she felt compelled to point out to Congressman Jeb that lifting the debt ceiling meant only that we would be paying bills for bills and programs that Congress already paid for. Congressman Jeb replied that 'this House' didn't vote for the stimulus, and that 'this House' didn't vote for Obamacare." Got that? It's nullification writ large: one Congress does not have to pay for the costs of laws written by previous Congresses. I wish Nancy Pelosi had thought of that; the national debt would have taken a deep dive if she had just written off the Iraq War & Medicare Part D &, well, every debt incurred by previous Congresses. ...
... Thomas Beaumont of the AP: "... veteran Republicans across the country are accusing tea party lawmakers of staining the GOP with their refusal to bend in the budget impasse in Washington. The Republican establishment also is signaling a willingness to strike back at the tea party in next fall's elections. 'It's time for someone to act like a grown-up in this process,' former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu argues, faulting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and tea party Republicans in the House as much as President Barack Obama for taking an uncompromising stance. Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is just as pointed, saying this about the tea party-fueled refusal to support spending measures that include money for Obama's health care law: 'It never had a chance.'" ...
... Paul Kane, et al., of the Washington Post: "House and Senate Republicans offered competing plans Thursday to resolve Washington's debt-limit and government shutdown crises, as President Obama held the latest in a series of meetings aimed at persuading them to accept at least short-term solutions with no partisan strings attached. The White House described President Obama's conversation Thursday afternoon with House Republican leaders as a 'good meeting,' but said no deal was reached to reopen the government. 'After a discussion about potential paths forward, no specific determination was made,' the White House said in a statement to reporters. 'The President looks forward to making continued progress with members on both sides of the aisle.'" ...
... Jackie Calmes & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "President Obama on Thursday rejected a proposal from politically besieged House Republican leaders to extend the nation's borrowing authority for six weeks because it would not also reopen the government. Yet both parties saw it as the first break in Republicans' brinkmanship and a step toward a fiscal truce." ...
... Update. If Republicans can be believed, the Times story is incorrect. Jonathan Strong of the National Review: "A group of key House Republicans came out of a meeting with President Obama, Vice President Biden and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew saying aides to both parties would begin negotiations this evening over a CR to end the government shutdown. 'The president didn't say yes, didn't say no. We're continuing to negotiate this evening,' House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan told reporters." Etc. Via Digby. ...
... Update 2. Oh. The Times has materially changed it story. Same link. ...
... Here's the AP version, by David Espo. If the Tea Party is in charge of Boehner, maybe Harry Reid is in charge of Obama. ...
... Ken Sweet of the AP: "The Dow Jones industrial average soared more than 300 points Thursday after Republican leaders and President Barack Obama finally seemed willing to end a 10-day budget standoff that has threatened to leave the U.S. unable to pay its bills. The news drove the Dow to its biggest point rise this year and ended a three-week funk in stocks. It also injected some calm into the frazzled market for short-term government debt." ...
... Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "Senate Republicans are unhappy with a House GOP plan to raise the debt ceiling for six weeks without funding the federal government. They are coalescing around their own proposal to pair a short-term debt-ceiling increase with a year-long stopgap to fund the government." ...
... Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "The White House announced Thursday night that President Obama has signed a bill that ensures the Department of Defense can pay death gratuities and related survivor benefits to the families of military service members who die in the line of duty." ...
... James Warren of the New York Daily News: "It would be 'more expensive for Americans to buy a car, own a home, and open a small business' if the 'chaos' of a debt default comes next week, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned Congress Thursday. Lew's early-morning appearance before the Senate Finance Committee was the first head-to-head encounter between an administration official and dubious Republicans since the federal government shutdown began Oct. 1." ...
... Mark Murray of NBC News: "The Republican Party has been badly damaged in the ongoing government shutdown and debt limit standoff, with a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finding that a majority of Americans blame the GOP for the shutdown, and with the party's popularity declining to its lowest level. By a 22-point margin (53 percent to 31 percent), the public blames the Republican Party more for the shutdown than President Barack Obama -- a wider margin of blame for the GOP than the party received during the poll during the last shutdown in 1995-96." ...
... Nate Silver! weighs in on shutdown polling & related phenomena. Via Jonathan Bernstein. ...
... Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post: "What's happening today is quite unlike the 'Contract With America' movement of the 1990s. The tea party is a grass-roots movement of people deeply dissatisfied with the United States' social, cultural and economic evolution over several decades. It's crucial to understand that they blame both parties for this degeneration.... This explains why the Republican Party has seemed so unresponsive to its traditional power bases, such as big business." ...
... Paul Krugman dispels a few debt-denier myths. ...
... Humor Break. "John Boehner Is Borrowing a Plan from Homer Simpson." Jonathan Chait: "Here's the best rule for determining what John Boehner will do in any situation: If there is a way for him to delay a moment of confrontation or political risk, he will do it. That's why Boehner's current plan is to raise the debt ceiling for six weeks while keeping the government shut down. Business is freaked out and will be furious with him if he triggers a default. So he's raising the debt ceiling for long enough to get them off his back. And tea-partiers will be furious if he abandons their quest to defund Obamacare by shutting down the government. So he's leaving that part in place.... Basically, his plan is to hide under some coats and hope it all works out somehow:"
Jennifer Medina of the New York Times: "With enthusiastic backing from state officials and an estimated seven million uninsured, California is a crucial testing ground for the success of President Obama's health care law. It is building the country's largest state-run health insurance exchange and has already expanded Medicaid coverage for the poor. Officials hope that the efforts here will eventually attract more than two million people who are currently uninsured." ...
... Lizette Alvarez of the New York Times: "First the [Florida] State Legislature roundly rejected the [Affordable Care Act], refusing to create a state insurance exchange and punting it to the federal government to run the new insurance market. It also rejected $51 billion in federal funds that was available over 10 years to expand Medicaid coverage for the state's poor. As the day neared for consumers to enroll in insurance plans, state officials announced that so-called navigators -- a group assigned to help people sign up -- would be barred from state health offices.... But blame this week shifted to the federal government. Its Web site remains so error-prone that the overwhelming majority of Floridians who have tried to buy affordable health insurance have had little luck. Anecdotal evidence across Florida, which has 3.5 million uninsured residents, the second highest in the country, indicated that few Floridians managed to enroll." ...
... Janine Reid in a Washington Post op-ed: "ObamaCare saved my family from financial ruin.... If I could get John Boehner and Ted Cruz on a conference call, I would explain this to them. I would tell them that, while they were busy trying to derail the Affordable Care Act over the past two years, [my son] Mason has again learned to walk, talk, eat and shoot a three-point basket."
Gubernatorial Race
Elizabeth Titus of Politico: "A chaotic episode erupted in the Virginia gubernatorial race late Wednesday, as The Associated Press published and then retracted a story that said court documents alleged Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe had lied to a federal official."
News Ledes
Reuters: " U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Afghanistan on Friday to advance negotiations with President Hamid Karzai on a bilateral security pact which have hit a wall over two issues that have become deal breakers for the Afghan government."
Washington Post: "The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based agency responsible for destroying Syria's chemical weapons, has won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Friday in Oslo."
New York Times: "JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, reported a third-quarter net loss of $380 million on Friday as it continued to grapple with a raft of regulatory and legal woes. The added costs dragged down JPMorgan's results as the bank posted a net loss of 17 cents a share. JPMorgan's earnings were eroded, in large part, by a legal expense of $9.2 billion."
AP: " The administration of Iran's new President Hassan Rouhani has cancelled an anti-Israeli conference as part of his outreach to the West and efforts to map out a new diplomatic path for Iran. The annual event was set up by Rouhani's predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and showcased the former president's vitriolic anti-Israeli rhetoric and promoted his anti-Israeli sentiments."
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Reader Comments (19)
Very happy to see Alice Munro win the Nobel for literature. Short story writing is, I think, the single most difficult thing in literature to master. Munro is as good as there is. She can communicate in a few pages what it takes others hundreds of pages to say. A most deserving recipient.
I am getting impatient for Philip Roth, however. :-)
Maybe I'm losing it. Maybe my dotage is catching up with me. But I'm beginning to enjoy the cat-and-mouse over the budget cum deficit set-to more than I enjoy cashing my SS checks. It has suddenly, strangely become fun.
@MAG & all:The few minutes of the upworthy.com video you
linked earlier is equal to a grain of sand on the beaches of Lake
Michigan compared to the documentary which it came from.
I urge everyone to watch the documentary "Samsara", which is
available on Netflix and Netflix Streaming. It's well worth your
time in my humble opinion. Beautifully filmed.
@Forrest: Agree. Appreciate the confirmation! After I posted that small segment, I decided to look further into 'Samsara' —it's my current Netflix film running, which I started watching last evening. It is breathtaking, the visuals are incredible...artful. The contrasts are shocking. I saw these same filmmakers have two earlier films, "Baraka' and "Chronos" that intrigue as well.
"It would be 'more expensive for Americans to buy a car, own a home, and open a small business' if the 'chaos' of a debt default comes next week, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned Congress ..."
Conversely, when interest rates rise, the price of bonds falls, and people who use T-bonds and T-bills as a significant part of their portfolios increase their wealth. Most of those investors are institutions (e.g. Vanguard), but many are in the .01%, most of whose income is discretionary (not needed for that car payment or mortgage payment).
A few weeks back Barbarossa asked about default, "Cui bono?" Oh, I don't know, could it be ... the rich?
Yep! Some weeks ago everyone was hyped up about guvm'nt spying on all us, reading our e-mails, tracking, tracing, monitoring...and NOW THIS jaw-dropping revelation as CW indicates: "The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access,.." and how did they follow through? As the late Gilda Radner put it: Never mind. As to our private cyber-postings. Pffft! Everyone. Relax!
P.S. to Forrest (again) guess my reply or 'posted' response disappeared into the nether, but yes... after I mentioned the Upworthy bit here and I went on to find that Netflix had the full documentary for 'Samsara'—it is fabulous! I, too would recommend its viewing to everyone. There are no words...
Noodge,
Hear, hear, on the Munro Nobel. Short story writing does indeed require a different lens and focal plane than novels. I'm not sure it's a faultless analogy, but it's a bit like comparing lieder with opera. As much as I love opera, there is something so exquisite about the lapidary, circumscribed perfection of sublime art songs. I'm thinking of Schubert's "Gretchen am Spinnrade" or "Die Erlkonig" which, in fewer than 150 bars, explodes with as much drama, tension, and pathos as you'll find in hundreds of pages of opera scores.
As for Philip Roth, I don't know, man. I thought after "The Plot Against America" that he was a shoe in, considering, of course, the reams of great stuff he's turned out over the years. I know he's not to everyone's taste (Thomas Pynchon is in line too, another tough one), but I'm certainly not unhappy that Munro took home the prize. But can you believe that she's only the 13th woman since 1901 to win this thing? Incredible.
In any event, a nice reminder that other things are going in the world besides the brainless exhibitionism and GOP pole dancing in DC.
The Nation published Rick Perlstein's latest, Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Four): Goalpost-Moving. I found it to be eye-opening, and, on reflection, true to my experience. You can find it here: http://www.thenation.com/blog/176585/thinking-conservative-part-four-goalpost-moving?rel=emailNation
@Patrick; You say that when interest rates increase, bond prices fall. That I can understand. If I want to sell a $100 bond paying 3% when new bonds pay 6% then I am going to be forced to sell for a price, say $80, that will allow the buyer to realize 6% return on my old bonds. What I don't understand is how this profits me if I hold $100,000,000 of the same bonds? How does the 0.01% benefit?
Cowichan: They (.01%-ers) have a lot of cash or near-cash liquidity, and can be in non-bond holdings (plus their equities, their bonds, their investor "partnerships", which are less liquid. Thin Romney.) When the price of bonds falls they can tap their cash and near-cash to afford to buy them cheap (from your 401K manager who can no longer hold them because of fund return rules? Maybe.)
The non-rich tend not to have as much fund flexibility or liquidity (not to mention not having the funds, period) -- so don't have as much opportunity to buy bonds when cheap.
If I actually was a finance expert, I suppose I'd be rich -- I'm not an investment expert, nor an economist -- but one way it seems that the .01% picked up most of the gains in the current recovery is by picking up assets when they were cheap, back in 2008. You have to have a lot o cash to be able to do that without breaking a sweat.
Had a longer answer to Cowichan, hit the wrong key and lost it, so will add to Patrick only that bond funds composed of bonds with laddered due dates allow significant manipulation within the fund itself; in bond funds such buying and selling takes place many times a day and portfolios can be turned over quickly. That's what drives the bond prices down. Low interest rate bonds in a fund get sold, so when rates go up, the funds, now composed of different, newer bonds, generate more interest income almost immediately. And as Patrick says, the wealthy don't have to sell any fund shares or any bonds they might own individually when prices are down; they can afford to wait...or buy...or they use a sale or two as a capital loss to offset income from some other source.
Mr. Hensarling of Texas is not much of an advertisement for the Texas schools, if he did in fact attend school in Texas or anywhere. Not only did he somehow miss any knowledge of the Civil War; he also seems to have skipped civics class. You know the class the Right is always saying never gets taught in our godless public schools, where he might have learned the divisions between and the responsibilities of each of our government's branches.
Maybe in this instance the Right is right...more likely though, despite all their protests, they have as much interest in teaching civics as they do in encouraging critical thought in our youth.
@Akhilleus "Gretchen am Spinnrade" indeed! As a spinner, I absolutely *had* to learn that gem, and, although I don't speak German, I can say with confidence that I excel at lieder. (I have tapes of my "Frauenliebe und Leben" from when I was 17 and headed for Curtis that I contend prove my point.) In my view, the modern American equivalent is anything by Ned Rorem. I couldn't agree with you more: the ability to craft a perfect short piece of art, whether unadorned prose or poetry set to music, is a rare gift. Kudos to Alice Munro. (In my view, she's far more deserving of her Nobel than Obama EVER was of his. Just sayin'.)
And thank you for addressing one of the "lesser" news items of the day. Life does, indeed, go on -- for some of us, at least. I'm one of the (somewhat) lucky ones: I'm able to pule and whine this week about having to de-skunk my house, my car, my dog, my life -- but then I watched Chris Hayes this morning talking to a woman who works at the Statue of Liberty and who was forced onto unemployment after Hurricane Sandy. She was finally able to return to work this July, only to be furloughed due to the shutdown. She says she lives paycheck to paycheck and she has no idea how she's going to manage. She doesn't even know if she can get unemployment this time (due, of course, to the shutdown). There are millions like her; each story is different in the details, but in the overall cause and effect they're all the same.
What we need is a deus ex machina, but what we have is "President Pivot" as one blogger has called him, and the spineless Democrats, who can be counted upon to cave at the last minute. Also, too, the party of sociopaths and traitors. It is to weep.
I think I'll check with my library to see if they have a copy of Samsara (my thanks to forrest and MAG!).
Meanwhile, it's a beautiful day in my neighborhood, so I'm going to take my smelly sheltie for a walk and forget about the D.C. kabuki theater for a while.
@ Rose in Michigan--You should bring your Sheltie over to
Saugatuck for walkies. A friend has 2 of them and walks them
along the shore of Lake Michigan every day. (Sorry, Marie, know
should't do personals).
I've never studied anything about music, but I have a piece that I just love...Elly Ameling singing Auf flugen du Gasanges? Is it leider?
I watched the Carney press conference. Good lord. The meds I would have to take in order to spend 30 minutes with those idiots.
Ameling is a good remedy.
Also, too as Pierce says... I checked out "Barack" to see if it was the same movie that I just loved. Your "Barack" is not "The Boys of Baracka", but you should not miss mine. It's about some kids at risk in Baltimore and a program that sends them to Africa. It will break your heart. It came out about the same time that "The Wire" was running the season about the kids. It is a documentary.
Rose,
So lovely to come across another lover of lieder, liebe die lieder.
Your description of the Chris Hayes story puts me in mind of the inescapable, perpetual sadness of Die Wintereise: "I loved someone. She dumped me. I suck. I hang around outside her house and watch all her lovers troop in. I walked up to the living room window one night, during a blizzard, to look in and my nose stuck to the glass and broke off. I want to die."
I am a Ned Rorem fan in many of his musical venues, even his wild stuff, but the only liederesque piece I can recall is his take on the Silver Swan.
Still and all, a pretty neat piece.
Haley,
Auf Flügeln des Gesanges does indeed qualify as lieder. Mendelsohn was a genius (his sister too!) far beyond the warhorse stuff you're bound to hear of his canon on quotidian classical music stations.
As for Elly Ameling, what you got there is one of the Seraphim of Song, baby. She is a queen of lieder, joined by only a select few on the high, crenellated walls of musical genius.
Luxuriate in her every grace note.
I hope I am not abusing RC but you can stream a very good Danish political drama online: Borgen. Although I loved the Spacey series, Borgen is not as dramaqueeny. It is about a woman PM. You've missed two seasons, but KCET has good recaps of all episodes. The Link site will let you binge on the entire third season.
Had the distinct privilege of seeing Elly Ameling perform in San Francisco once.
The most beautiful, pure voice I have ever heard.
About music:
Sometime in the early 70s, at a Smithsonian folk festival on the National Mall, Utah Philips and Joe Glaser alternated, with others, on a very small stage. Between them, they collected and held a large audience daily from noon until dusk. No body left. It may have been the greatest demonstration of bladder control in concert history.
Sometime near the end of their combined gig, Joe Glaser got into one of his song-story sets. “Up there,” he said gesturing over his shoulder toward the center of DC, “is the Willard Hotel. That’s where a lady named Julia Ward Howe wrote this song ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.” Glaser that day was accompanied by a marvelous harmonica player. I have no idea who he was, but he was pitch perfect with a mournful “Battle Hymn.” And he began to softly play back up to Glaser’s narrative. “Most folks know the song as ‘John Brown’s Body.’ It’s about an insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, which is just up the river from here, to free the slaves. At Harper’s Ferry that day,” Glaser said, “the slaves lost. General Lee had more soldiers than God had.”
It was the most moving performance I’ve ever seen.