;)
Monday
Sep232013
The Commentariat -- Sept. 23, 2013
A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, 'How do I know you won't sting me?' The scorpion says, 'Because if I do, I will die too.'
The frog is satisfied, and they set out. But in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp, 'Why?'
Replies the scorpion: 'It's my nature.'
-- Aesop (and others)
... ** Roger Simon of Politico: "There are scorpions among us. They sit in Congress, committed not to solving problems, but blocking solutions. They would take the food out of the mouths of children. They would put the insurance companies back in charge of health care. They would shut the government down, refuse to pay the nation's bills, destroy the trust that other countries place in us when they buy our bonds, they would do all this rather than give President Obama the slimmest of political victories. Why? It is their nature." ...
... ** Paul Krugman: "Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat. Hence the war on food stamps, which House Republicans have just voted to cut sharply even while voting to increase farm subsidies.... SNAP, in short, is public policy at its best. It not only helps those in need; it helps them help themselves. And it has done yeoman work in the economic crisis, mitigating suffering and protecting jobs at a time when all too many policy makers seem determined to do the opposite. So it tells you something that conservatives have singled out this of all programs for special ire."
Robert Pear of the New York Times: "Federal officials often say that health insurance will cost consumers less than expected under President Obama's health care law. But they rarely mention one big reason: many insurers are significantly limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals available to consumers. Even though insurers will be forbidden to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, they could subtly discourage the enrollment of sicker patients by limiting the size of their provider networks." ...
At heaven's door, St. Peter is probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. -- Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio), encouraging Ohio's Republican legislature to accept the Medicaid expansion provision of the Affordable Care Act
Practicality and compassion are both missing in the manufactured rage against the abstraction known as 'Obamacare.' -- E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post
... Carrie Brown & Glenn Thrush of Politico attempt to follow the history of Barack Obama's evolution on health insurance reform. They claim it all started when Obama aides needed to come up with something for him to say at a 2007 healthcare forum on a topic about which rival Hillary Clinton was an expert. According to Brown & Thrush, the aides thought Obama "probably wasn't going to get elected anyway," so it didn't matter WTF he said. CW: I wouldn't take this report as gospel.
Igor Volsky's "Compete Guide to the GOP's Three-Year Campaign to Shut down the Government." "Past Congresses have used the debt ceiling as a 'vehicle for other legislative matters' or nongermane amendments, but as the timeline [in this post] demonstrates, the Republicans that came to power after the 2010 midterm elections demanded something entirely different: they threatened to push the nation into default and shut down the government unless Congress approves deep structural budget cuts during a period of economic recession." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link.
Brigid Schulte & Paul Duggan of the Washington Post: "President Obama, addressing yet another memorial gathering after a deadly mass shooting, said Sunday evening that he senses 'a creeping resignation' in the United States that homicidal lunacy like the Washington Navy Yard massacre 'is somehow the new normal.' But he said ;it ought to be a shock to us all' and should spur Americans to demand 'a common sense' balance between gun rights and gun control. 'We cannot accept this,' Obama said of the Sept. 16 attack that killed a dozen people at the Navy Yard. 'As Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there's nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work'":
Coral Davenport of the National Journal: "President Obama sees his new global-warming regulations as a cornerstone of his legacy. Republicans see them as fresh political ammunition. On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled the first in a series of historic and controversial climate-change rules aimed at reining in carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation's top source of greenhouse-gas emissions.... An hour after Obama's EPA chief, Gina McCarthy, formally announced the climate rules, [GOP] strategists began linking them to 2014 Democratic candidates."
Christi Parsons of the Los Angeles Times: "President Obama travels Monday to New York for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, where he is scheduled to sit down with world leaders and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He will also address the General Assembly, focusing on the challenges in the Middle East, including the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Iran's nuclear ambitions and peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians." ...
... George Packer of the New Yorker: "In plain language [based on the U.N. investigative report], President Bashar al-Assad, along with other members of his regime, is a war criminal. His patron, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has been exposed as a liar.... A political solution leading to a new Syrian government has always been the Administration's official policy, but Obama has shown little energy in pursuing it.... The latest debate over the use of force has passed, while the war goes on. What remains on the table is the use of politics.
Joe Hagan of New York interviews Hillary Clinton. It's her first post-Secretary interview & a long piece (you'll have to click through as the single-page versions is screwed up [at 5:00 am ET]).
David Cohen of Politico: "Bill Clinton says Lawrence Summers, his former Treasury secretary, did not deserve the criticism he received when he was under consideration to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve." ...
... Here's Bill Clinton, in the same interview with Fareed Zakaria, on President Obama's decision to go to Congress re: Syria & on the NSA leaks:
Frank Rich sees Rand Paul as a "valuable" voice in the Republican party. CW: Paul may be the "wacko bird" in the eyes of his party's hawks & chicken-hawks, BUT ...
Nobody Likes Ted. Evan McMurry of Mediaite: "Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said Sunday morning that he'd received opposition research from other Republicans about Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in advance of Cruz's appearance [Sunday] morning, a serious indication of how upset the GOP is with the Senator leading the risky charge to defund ObamaCare." ...
... Here's one reason Republicans Don't Like Ted. Jonathan Chait on how Ted Cruz turned the GOP ObamaCare defunding plan "from disaster to utter fiasco." ...
... Steve Benen: "... even if Senate Republicans felt overwhelming pressure from unhinged Tea Party activists and actually endorsed [Cruz's latest] scheme, they'd make it impossible to blame Democrats for the shutdown -- GOP senators would have created the shutdown by filibustering their own bill." ...
... CW: Last week contributor Keith Howard wrote, "I think any person with a functioning brain only needs to watch Cruz in action for a few minutes to conclude that he is a dangerous psychopath -- a completely selfish backstabber, vicious, untrustworthy, and void of any moral principle." (Howard has argued elsewhere that mincing words in unproductive.) I don't like to make derogatory comments about anyone's personal appearance, but Cruz does look to me like a Hollywood casting director's pick for the villain in a psychopath-on-the-rampage flick. For instance, looking at this picture of Cruz smiling & Sen. Mike Lee scowling, I think Happy Cruz looks a lot scarier than Angry Lee.
Whether or not you watched any of the Sunday shows, Charles Pierce's recap is well-worth a read. CW: What's discouraging is that regular, honorable Americans tune into those shows & have no fucking idea they are being had by the GOP AND the lovely hosts.
This map, developed by Deadspin, was first published several months, ago, but it's worth a look-see, as it does speak to our priorities:
Justin Rosario of Addicting Info links the map above to this clip, which I think is from the first episode of the first season of the HBO series "The Network Newsroom." The character, news anchor Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels, who just won a Emmy for his second-season performance) is obnoxious & the speech is holier-than-thou preachy, but the substance is well-taken:
News Ledes
New York Times: "Chancellor Angela Merkel scored a stunning personal triumph in Sunday's national elections in Germany, becoming the only major leader to be re-elected twice since the financial crisis of 2008 and winning strong popular endorsement for her mix of austerity and solidarity in managing troubled Europe."
Washington Post: " Kenyan security forces swept into an upscale shopping mall late Sunday to try to end a two-day standoff with heavily armed Islamist militants after a gruesome attack that reflected the surprising resiliency of one of Africa's most brutal insurgent groups. Authorities later said that most hostages had been freed, but they provided few details. It appeared that at least some members of Somalia's al-Shabab militia, which asserted responsibility for the attack, were still holed up early Monday in the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall, where they killed 68 people in the deadliest terrorist attack in Kenya in 15 years." ...
... Update: "By Monday evening, Kenyan security forces said they controlled much of the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall, although several militants from al-Shabab, a group allied with al-Qaeda, appeared dug in, determined to fight to the death.... Kenyan Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed said Monday that 'two or three Americans' and 'one Brit' were among the perpetrators of the attack. "
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Reader Comments (14)
@Keith: The year turns tooward "the winter of our discontent."
Frank Rich's elevation of Rand Paul from the "wackadoo" rung to several steps above on the political ladder was a most interesting read. Yes, one does have to admire Rand's consistency and passion but somehow I can't forget that this man wants a country without regulations. One of the messages we want our children to absorb is the ability to inhabit the policeman inside––be their own ethical voice. Rand seems to operate on this premise––keep government regulations to a minimum trusting that most people, corporations, (especially those oil folks) have that policeman inside and will do the right thing. Does he actually believe this? Or is it just a case of Randian individualism?
Love the map! Sent it to a few of my jock loving buddies. And yes, that video clip IS from the first season of "Newsroom" which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. Am not, however, a fan of Emily Mortimer––found her little hissy fits off putting. I hear the second season is much better than the first.
"The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it" (From Angels in America)
Here is what I wrote about Cruz back in Jan. I saved it because after observing this man who reminded me so much of McCarthy I felt we were going to discover someone who was willing to destroy in order to get what he wanted and was cagy enough to accomplish it.
Last night watched the gun hearings. Hearings like this can be dreary
especially if the congressperson whose turn it is uses that time to
grandstand. The grandstander of the hearing was Ted Cruz who began his
questioning with the ubiquitous thanking everyone and his brother and then
lugubriously addressed Mark Kelly assuring him that he and his family pray
for them EVERY day.(how long? Not long) Unfortunately the camera stayed on
Cruz; I would have loved to have seen Kelly's expression. So after this
initial sucking up Cruz gets into high gear and since he's beholden to the
NRA for all that campaign money he's on their side. This guy even has graphs
which he proudly displayed speaking as though no one could dispute his
findings (Whitehouse and that nice officer sitting next to Kelly and Kelly
himself did a good job of that). But listening to Ted try to make his case I
could sense that he fancies himself becoming much more than a Senator mit
graphs––those little beady eyes are cruising for the PRIZE. How long? not
long.
January 31, 2013
Barbarossa,
Somehow I doubt that a "glorious summer" is in the offing after the coming winter of our discontent. I do however forecast a further louring of clouds upon our house. If anything is destined to be "in the deep bosom of the ocean buried" it may be the hopes that we survive the current teabagger/conservamoron attacks in one piece.
By the way, I'm all in on Keith's preference for not mincing words, as likely regular readers have divined.
As for that picture of a smirking Ted Cruz being scary, it's probably even scarier because there are no lingering illusions that he's in this for anything other than a sort of Grand Guignol grandiosity generated by an affinity for anarchy; not so much the fresh view of the iconoclast as the cynical leer of the nihilist.
PD,
Agree about Lil' Randy. Consistency is admirable if what you're being consistent about are admirable things. I suppose admiration is in the ideology of the beholder, however. Nonetheless, Rich's larger point, that there is an opening for someone willing to walk a slightly different path is valid.
But remove Paul's rabid rabble of teabaggers from the mix and he'd be just another rookie backbencher rambling on about how much Ayn Rand means to him, which means, for him, that he will be tied to their idiocy in highly unappealing ways. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a similar progressive group that might back a less conventional candidate on the left. Way too many younger voters seem to have been bitten by the virus of a largely invalid, unworkable political theory (libertarianism) and have declared a pox on the other two houses.
I'd be all for a Republican candidate (not Randy) who sought to rein the party away from the brink of drooling insensibility. Where is that person, though? The litmus test still demands a requisite fealty to anti-choice, anti-immigration, racial profiling, and a whole lot of similarly unpalatable menu items.
Who knows? Lil' Randy might end up being a kind of stalking horse for other equally dangerous wingnuts, or he may be able to siphon enough votes from other candidates (but not enough to win the general election) to make 2016 another year of presidential defeat.
This doesn't, of course, preclude the likelihood that wingers may continue to win local and state races, control the courts, both Supreme and not so supreme, and continue to drag the country down the road to perdition, right wing style, of course.
Heather, at Crooks and Liars, tells us that MSNBC is "circling the wagons around Chuckie Todd. How very disappointing. I hope Rachel Maddow is not in one of those wagons. CT deserves everything he is getting--and more. Too bad the "librul" cable channel will not fire this conservative hack!
Thank you, Jonathan Alter, for taking a step back and speaking about what really has been going on!
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/jonathan-alter-corrects-medias-consta
Didn't think it high-toned enough for RC, so as followup to my earlier rat rant and Keith's response to it, part of which Marie refers to above, I sent this directly to Keith last week:
"And now that you mention him, Cruz does look like a rat. Wish I had the talent to depict him, cartoonish as he is, beady eyes, whiskers and all."
Today's picture shows him to be better-fed than I would wish, but still rattish, nonetheless.
The door was open, so I walked in. I'll stop now.
Kate,
Chuck Todd is not the only shit stain on the soles of the MSM's Gucci loafers. Fuzzy Gregory has also declared his unshakeable belief in never asking tough questions.
During the blizzard of lies in the run up to the Bush War of Choice (aka the Kill a Mooslim for Big Oil show), Fuzzy stated unequivocally and without the teeniest trace of embarrassment, that it was not his job to ask questions OR to fact check the weekly whoppers spat out by his "guests" (clients is more like it).
And those guys are considered middle of the road or even liberal journalists. Let's forget about the phalanxes of right-wing hacks. They're beyond the pale. Lies R Us all the time. But the so-called middle of the road people--like Todd and Gregory--should at the very least try to adopt a baseline journalistic stance that doesn't simply allow time for hacks and hustlers to come on and plug their wares unchallenged (or, in many cases, abetted).
Enough about these creeps. They're hopeless. But the damage they do is incalculable and arguably worse than the lying wingers they buttress. At least the wingers have a reason for lying. For Fuzzy n Todd to be agnostic about the truth is unconscionable.
But then again, in fairness, neither are real journalists. They're obsequious lackeys.
@PD & Ak; I thought Rich's article was an interesting read too. Are the expressions; "Damned by faint praise" and "a left-handed compliment" similar? Rich was conveying to the reader; "Watch out for this guy, he could gold-plate a turd, make ignorance seem savvy, and greed a virtue." That is the way I read it.
I have thought that it is much more difficult to convince people to be generous rather than selfish, inclusive rather than exclusive, xenophobic rather than universal. In short, if we humans have in our nature the ability to be both good and bad; bad is downwind, downhill and good is "it's own fuckin' reward."
I think Paul appeals to the downwind, downhill voter and the ride is a easy one but the arrival station is a place called, End of the Great Experiment USA.
If you get a chance read the articles about the decades of time in the anniversary issue of Vanity Fair. The one on the 1930's was written by Laura Hillenbrand and in my mind it seems possible we are headed for a repeat.
We can not forget a generation of Good Germans followed a house painter into hell.
Frank Rich states in re: Rand Paul, "He speaks as if he were thinking aloud". Yup, he's a stream of consciousness talker. He strikes me a lot like people I hung with in my youth who in the midst of a buzz, thought they were speaking TRUTH (myself included). As much as I like Rich, I wonder if he was desperately searching for someone on the right that might have a redeeming characteristic or two. Someone that might be acting out of something other than greed, a thirst for unlimited power, disdain for the majority of Americans or just plain evil. Lord knows, there is a magnificent absence of right leaning politicians (and a fair # on the left too) who act on behalf of their paymasters rather than their constituents.
Even if you should argue Rand's motives are less reprehensible than the current norm, his positions on Civil Rights, abortion, gun regulation, immigration are equally regressive. The end result is the same. I think he assumes a familiar persona of the easy going, not too smart stoner. It makes him seem harmless and more palatable in comparison to someone like Cruz, when they're both appalling. Destruction is destruction whether it comes with a grin or a sneer.
Re: getting my "innies and outies mixed up. Whoopsie, I meant to write "universal rather than xenophobic" rather than the other way around. My secretary has been removed from the office.
Diane,
Quite so, except for two things. First, Aqua Buddha talks like he's on a toot even when the buzz wears off (the kind you always wanted to avoid like the freakin' plague). Second--speaking of buzzes, I completely get the equating of the Tailgunning One with a sneer, a self-satisfied, sniggering, smartass sneer (a bit like Dubya's but without the vacant gaze), but on his best day, sour, dour little Randy is incapable of the tiniest hint of a grin. The guy must be the biggest buzzkill in congress. A half smart egotist who believes himself to be an unappreciated autodidact except that he's merely didactic.
Interesting sidebar to MSM veracity, I think. Earlier today the on-line NYT had a lengthy (four or five jumps) piece about Bill DeBlasio’s mis-spent youth as a commie sympathizer in Nicaragua. It was an obvious hatchet job: noble Reagan beset by hippies and the like. Then later I read Charles Pierce’s take down of the NYT piece, so I went back to the original (I like to re-think my thoughts every now and then) and the original was no place to be found. Here’s a link to Charlie’s piece: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/reagan-administration-sandinistas-092313
Here's a good run down on the details of the Kenyan situation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/world/africa/kenya-mall-carnage-shows-shabab-resilience.html?pagewanted=all
Found it. It's now buried in the NY/Region section. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.