The Commentariat -- July 25, 2014

Internal links removed.

Look Out, Poor People. Paul Ryan Is Here to Help. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times: "Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, outlined a plan to combat poverty on Thursday that would consolidate a dozen programs into a single 'Opportunity Grant' that largely shifts antipoverty efforts from the federal government to the states." ...

... CW: Sounds like a Tenther Plan to me.

... Paul Waldman in the Washington Post: "... it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s still driven by the longstanding conservative desire to limit the help we give to the poor.... Ryan's plan assumes that the same Republican states that rejected the federal government's offer to insure poor citizens through the expansion of Medicaid -- in other words, who would rather see poor people go uninsured than get coverage from the government -- are now going to be spectacularly committed and creative in working to help those same poor citizens through their time of need.... One of the real dangers of Ryan's approach is that it would render the programs unable to deal with economic downturns unless Congress stepped in and supplied more money, which would be unlikely as long as Republicans control at least one house." ...

... Steve Benen: "In the interest of magnanimity, let's acknowledge some of the good stuff. Ryan bucks his party, for example, by endorsing expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), an issue on which Democrats can and should welcome the opportunity to work with him. He's also prepared to embrace sentencing reforms, which is heartening, and his recommendations on occupational licensing aren't bad, either.... [And] Ryan doesn't include any of the deep spending cuts to the safety net that have helped define the congressman's far-right budget proposals." But then, a person who needs help has to sign a contract (promising to be a better, more responsible person, I guess, with a sort of life coach who evidently determines what measureable markers constitute better-personhood. If the impoverished person doesn't meet her part of the deal, she'll be subject to some kind of "sanctions." So demeaning, threatening AND weird. Great. ...

... Annie Lowrey, in New York, explains how this "condescending and wrongheaded" program is supposed to work. It "presupposes that the poor somehow want to be poor; that they don't have the skills to plan and achieve and grow their way out of poverty.... It isolates the poor. Middle-class families don't need to justify and prostrate themselves for tax credits.... It threatens to punish the poorest and most unstable families for their poverty and instability.... It does not address the core problem of a lack of jobs -- or the problem of a lack of jobs paying a living wage and affording a middle-class lifestyle." ...

... As Emily Badger of the Washington Post puts it, "the idea is fundamentally punitive. It betrays the fact that Ryan's latest thinking has not strayed all that far from the simplistic notion that people in poverty are solely to blame for their own circumstances. An incentive system like this assumes that end goals such as employment are entirely within the control of a poor people if they would just try hard enough." ...

... for a party that does absolutely nothing, Republicans are awfully concerned about how much work other people do. -- Akhilleus, in today's Comments (read his entire comment)

... See today's Comments for the context on this:

... AND, according to House Democrats, the Ryan plan is not "revenue neutral," as Ryan claims. Bernie Becker of the Hill: "Ryan ... cast his new initiative as a plan that wouldn't roll back resources for the poor but would change how the money is delivered and spent.... Ryan also insisted that his new grant plan, which would consolidate 11 separate federal anti-poverty programs into one funding stream for participating states, was not a block grant.... Van Hollen, on the other hand, said that's exactly what the plan was, and he was surprised Ryan would do little more than dress up his previous ideas.... Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) added that two-thirds of the cuts in Ryan's latest budget would hit low- and middle-income families, and railed against the Wisconsin Republican's idea to block-grant the Head Start program for early education.... The 11 programs that Ryan wants to consolidate would get hit with 20 percent cuts, Van Hollen noted, even as Ryan said he envisioned a deficit-neutral plan."

... In his critique of Ryan's plan (linked above), Paul Waldman writes, "The devil would be in the details; what if a state decided to take its entire block grant and devote it to giving lectures to poor people on why they should get married?" Florida doesn't need a block grant for that. We have Sen. Marco Rubio, who's providing the life-coaching advice -- while also serving as a role model -- for free! ...

... Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post: In a address at Catholic University Wednesday Rubio said, "'I consider myself to be a child of privilege,"' because being 'raised by two parents who were married to each other ... led me to live my life in a sequence that has a proven track record of success.' Specifically, this sequence: Get an education, then a job, then marry and have children. Stick to that order and you'll be better off by virtually every measure, he said...."

Cristina Marcos of the Hill: "The House on Thursday narrowly defeated a Democratic motion to instruct House conferees on the Department of Veterans Affairs overhaul to simply adopt the Senate-passed bill. The motion offered by Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) was rejected in a close 205-207 vote, with 13 Republicans voting in favor. All 207 no votes were from Republicans." ...

... Burgess Everett & Lauren French of Politico: "Democrats and Republicans are struggling to agree on how to pay for [VA overhaul] legislation that could cost between $25 billion and $30 billion. That logjam is transforming the VA debate from one that united both parties to yet another fiscal fight, prompting the same type of partisan finger pointing that has become familiar after years of budget showdowns." ...

... The Hill story, by Martin Matishak, is here.

Sarah Mimms of the National Journal: "House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that the House will not deal with funding the government before the August recess.... Boehner told reporters that the House will pass a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open sometime in September, avoiding a government shutdown that would otherwise occur on the last day of the month. The legislation would likely expire in early December, he said, punting decisions about the nation's spending to a lame-duck Congress just after the midterm election."

Lauren French: "The House Rules Committee approved a resolution Thursday allowing the full House to vote on authorizing a lawsuit against President Barack Obama accusing him of abusing executive authority. The 7-4 vote was split along partisan lines...." ...

... Paul Steinhauser of CNN: A CNN poll finds that "By a 57%-41% margin, Americans say House Republicans shouldn't file the suit. As with the question on impeachment, there's a wide partisan divide over the lawsuit.... Only 35% want Obama impeached, with nearly two-thirds saying the President should not be removed from office." ...

... CW: So why the suit? According to the poll (page 8), 75 percent of Republican respondents favor the suit.

Frances Robles & Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Hoping to stem the recent surge of migrants at the Southwest border, the Obama administration is considering whether to allow hundreds of minors and young adults from Honduras into the United States without making the dangerous trek through Mexico.... If approved, the plan would direct the government to screen thousands of children and youths in Honduras to see if they can enter the United States as refugees or on emergency humanitarian grounds. It would be the first American refugee effort in a nation reachable by land to the United States, the White House said, putting the violence in Honduras on the level of humanitarian emergencies in Haiti and Vietnam, where such programs have been conducted in the past amid war and major crises."

Nick Corasaniti & Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: "The United States Army War College determined in a preliminary review on Thursday that Senator John Walsh of Montana appeared to have plagiarized his final paper to earn a master's degree from the institution, and sent a letter to the senator instructing him that an investigative panel will meet next month to conclusively assess any culpability." The whole story is worth reading. ...

... CW: The paper was only 14 pages long. (I've never heard of a 14-page master's thesis, except perhaps in math & science fields where the "paper" might be one long equation.) He couldn't write 14 pages with plagiarizing half of it? I love the way Democrats are standing by this guy who IMHO did something just as bad, or worse, than did Anthony Weiner with his foray into dick pix. National Democrats couldn't dump Weiner fast enough. ...

... NEW. CW: Paul Waldman agrees with me here: "What the hell are the standards at the Army War College that you can write a 14-page paper and get a master's degree? Is it like that at the colleges the other services run? It might be OK if it was 14 pages of dense calculations for a degree in economics or something, but it reads like a paper written by a reasonably bright high school sophomore in his international relations class, not somebody getting an advanced degree. Not only that, there's no original research in it, which is usually a requirement of a graduate thesis." ...

     ... AND Waldman is with me on the PTSD "excuse" (see my comment to yesterday's Commentariat. Waldman write,

That's an insult to the thousands of veterans who have suffered from PTSD. It can be a terrible ailment, but one thing it doesn't do is make you plagiarize other people's work on your "thesis." What, did Walsh wake up in the middle of the night and think he was back in Iraq, in a firefight where the only way to save his comrades was to cut and paste a bunch of articles and then put his name on the top of the resulting paper? Give me a break.

     ... "Elvan," a commenter on Waldman's post asks a question I've had, too (but haven't expressed & would not have expressed as cleverly as Elvan did): "What faculty member couldn't detect such blatant plagiarism in this paper? Or is military science to science what military music is to music?"

... NEW. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post has a good piece on "John Walsh and how not to respond to a political scandal."

Paul Krugman: After years of dysfunctional government, the Democratic majority in the California state legislature grew large enough to override Republican obstruction & impose a mildly "liberal agenda." Conservatives predicted disaster; instead, California is doing very well. And then there's Kansas.

No Surprises Here. Paul Krugman Sen. Rob Portman (R-Wis.Ohio), rich guy & "debt disaster dead-ender," has written a Wall Street Journal op-ed on how we must curb entitlements, etc. "And it is an interesting piece -- it's a very good illustration both of the desperate desire to see a debt crisis, and what happens when someone (Portman, or more likely the staffer who wrote it) tries to be a Very Serious Person without actually understanding the numbers or having followed any of the analysis.... The main thing that struck me was the policy recommendations, written as if he knows nothing about the ongoing discussion of these issues over the past decade and more."

Winger Peter Suderman of Hit & Run (republished here in the libertarian Reason) thinks he has found the smoking gun in the Halbig anti-ACA case when he catches (via a commenter to another blog) Jonathan Gruber during a January 2012 talk saying, "... if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits." ...

... The Long Arm of the Kochs. Steve M. points out, "This was found by a guy at the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute and published on the blog of the Koch-funded Reason magazine, in support of a lawsuit pushed by the partly Koch-controlled Cato Institute. The Kochs and their bleeding-edge wingnut billionaire allies can't wait.... Their goal is to win this war. And it's total war." ...

... Dave Weigel has the background: "By late Thursday night, the entire conservative/libertarian blogosphere/twittersphere was crowing about the video.... The timing of the speech is important. Gruber said this in January 2012. It wasn't until May 2012 that the IRS issued a rule, clarifying that subsidies would also be available to the states that joined the federal exchange.... But this bolsters the libertarians' case. Gruber is acknowledged, by everyone, as an architect of the ACA.... It just happens that in early 2012, when [Halbig architect Michael] Cannon was barnstorming states to get them to avoid creating exchanges, Gruber was telling them they had better create exchanges or they wouldn't get subsidies." ...

... Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, who's usually fairly silly, makes a compelling prognostication that the conservative Supremes will pretend that they are preserving "legislative integrity" by taking literally the ACA phrase "an exchange established by the State." I also agree with her that if the Court takes the case, the law's best chance of survival lies with Justice Kennedy, because I think he may not be quite as mean-spirited as the other righty-rights on the Court.

NEW. Forgot this one. Caitlan MacNeal of TPM: "The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and two other groups on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Warren, Mich., who banned an atheist group from setting up a station alongside one run by a prayer group in the city hall atrium. Mayor Jim Fouts (R) said that the group's 'reason station' would be opposed to prayer and compared atheists to Nazis and members of the Klu Klux Klan."

News Ledes

** New York Times: "Russia has increased its direct involvement in fighting between the Ukrainian military and separatist insurgents, moving more of its own troops to the border and preparing to arm the rebels with ever more potent weapons, including high-powered Tornado rocket launchers, American and Ukrainian officials said on Friday."

New York Times: "Secretary of State John Kerry has proposed a two-stage plan to halt the fighting in the Gaza Strip that would first impose a weeklong truce starting Sunday, an official involved in the negotiations said on Friday. As soon as the truce took effect Palestinian and Israeli officials would begin negotiations on the principal economic, political and security concerns about Gaza, with other nations attending." ...

     ... Update: "Israel agreed to halt its military offensive in Gaza for 12 hours starting Saturday morning amid intense international efforts to seal a broader cease-fire deal and a new explosion of violence in the West Bank.... The announcement by the military came early Saturday, hours after Israel's security cabinet rejected Secretary of State John Kerry's proposal for a seven-day cease-fire in Gaza and further talks...."

... AFP: "Israeli fire Friday pushed the Palestinian death toll in Gaza to above 800, as Washington pressed Israel and Hamas to agree a week-long umanitarian ceasefire and thrash out a durable truce."

AFP: "The United States on Thursday said it had evidence Russian forces were firing artillery from inside Russia on Ukrainian troops, in what officials called a 'clear escalation' of the conflict. Moscow is also planning to 'deliver heavier and more powerful multiple rocket launchers' to the pro-Russian separatist forces in Ukraine, US deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said." ...

... AFP: "Ukraine's prime minister resigned after his governing coalition collapsed, plunging the former Soviet state into political limbo as it struggles to quell a deadly rebellion in the east.... Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said he was stepping down over the "dissolution of the parliamentary coalition and the blocking of government initiatives" after several parties walked out on the ruling group. The collapse of the ruling coalition paves the way for early elections to be called by President Petro Poroshenko within 30 days."

New York Times: "As a detachment of French soldiers reached the crash site in Mali of an Air Algérie jetliner, officials in Paris said Friday that the accident was most likely weather-related and that the distribution of the wreckage over a limited area suggested that the plane probably hit the ground intact."

Guardian: "The Washington Post's correspondent in Tehran has been arrested along with his Iranian wife and two American photojournalists. Iranian judicial officials confirmed on Friday that Jason Rezaian, who holds dual American and Iranian citizenship, had been detained and is under investigation."

The Commentariat -- July 24, 2014

Internal links removed.

Amie Parnes of the Hill: "State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Wednesday said blame for the crashed Malaysian Airlines flight 'lies directly at President [Vladimir] Putin's feet,' as the Obama administration looked to raise pressure Russia. Harf said Putin was responsible not just for the downed commercial airliner, 'but every incident we've seen' throughout the conflict. 'Period.'"

Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: "A decorated veteran of the Iraq war and former adjutant general of his state's National Guard, [Sen. John] Walsh [D-Montana] offered the Democratic Party something it frequently lacks: a seasoned military man.... But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh's 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh's master's degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors' works, with no attribution.... The breadth of Mr. Walsh's apparent plagiarism ... is startling...." His explanations/excuses are, well, conflicting. ...

... CW: I thought it was hilarious when Rand Paul got caught plagiarizing a few speeches. This is not hilarious. Walsh should resign.

Mike Lillis of the Hill: "President Obama is flat wrong to seek changes in current immigration law to manage the wave of migrant children at the southern border, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) charged Wednesday.... Obama has urged 'more flexibility' to expedite deportations of the migrant children, and the head of the Homeland Security Department clarified Tuesday that he's seeking changes to a 2008 human trafficking law to speed up the process."

Coral Davenport of the New York Times: "Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma are among the most vocal Republican skeptics of the science that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, but a new study to be released Thursday found that their states would be among the biggest economic winners under a regulation proposed by President Obama to fight climate change. The study, conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Rhodium Group, both research organizations, concluded that the regulation would cut demand for electricity from coal -- the nation's largest source of carbon pollution -- but create robust new demand for natural gas.... The demand for natural gas would, in turn, drive job creation, corporate revenue and government royalties in states that produce it, which, in addition to Oklahoma and Texas, include Arkansas and Louisiana." ...

     ... This is just one of many ways, of course, that the rank ignorance of "leaders" like Perry & Inhofe hurt their states, & in Inhofe's case, hurt all of us.

Wendy Koch of USA Today: "Spurred by a boom in oil-carrying trains and several recent tragic accidents, the Obama administration proposed stricter rules Wednesday for tank cars that transport flammable fuels."

Neither the canons of construction nor any empirical analysis suggests that congressional drafting is a perfectly harmonious, symmetrical and elegant endeavor. ... Sausage-makers are indeed offended when their craft is linked to legislating. -- Judge Andre Davis, 4th Circuit

... E. J. Dionne: "We are confronted with a conservative judiciary that will use any argument it can muster to win ideological victories that elude their side in the elected branches of our government.... The extreme judicial activism here is obvious when you consider, as the 4th Circuit did, that even if you accept that there is ambiguity in the law, the Supreme Court's 30-year-old precedent ... held that in instances of uncertainty, the court defers to federal agencies rather than concocting textual clarity when it doesn't exist." ...

... Everything Is Obama's Fault, Ctd. CW: Re: a link I posted yesterday to an apologia for the D.C. court's decision, I wrote that the author Michael Cannon provided a good preview of "how Republicans will sell the chaos they've engendered." Well, lo & behold, Dave Weigel reports that Cannon is already at it, & in so doing, "drain[ing] the national strategic chutzpah reserve": In a conference call, Cannon told reporters, ""If 5 million people lose subsidies, it is because the administration I think recklessly was offering them subsidies that it had no authority to offer. If that causes dislocation, if that causes disruption, I think that responsibility lies with the administration." Piggybacking Cannon's Blame Obama message, Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) said, "This means that the President has been misrepresenting the true costs of health coverage to millions of American families." CW: So that's the party line: you people are screwed because Obama promised you something he couldn't deliver legally. ...

... Oh, please, let's not forget Scott Brown, arguably the person most responsible for the legislative screw-up. By Weigel's reckoning, "Scott Brown Has the Single Most Chutzpah-Rich Response to Halbig.... Yesterday, he reacted as if Halbig was now the law of the land and Democrats had just raised taxes on people.

The court's ruling means that people receiving subsidies for their insurance coverage will lose those subsidies. Either they will have to dig deeper into their own pockets to pay the full cost of their insurance, or taxes will have to be raised on all of us to make up the difference.

     ... According to the Brown campaign, 'in New Hampshire, premiums for those who have subsidies could jump 70-74 percent.' Of course, the state could prevent the subsidy hikes by doing something rather simple. It could create a state exchange. That way, even if Halbig were upheld, New Hampshire residents would continue to get the subsidies. But Brown isn't saying anything about New Hampshire creating its own exchange." ...

     ... Steve M. has a good post on the GOP strategy, which is gearing up now in anticipation of the Supremes siding with the D.C. court.

Frank Rich on the crises in Gaza, Ukraine & the U.S.-Mexico border.

New York Times Editors: "The attorney-client privilege is the oldest, broadest and most important of all privileges in the American legal system.... In recent years, the Bureau of Prisons has made limited email access available to federal inmates, but the price of that access ... is allowing the government to monitor and read all messages sent and received. As the Times reported on Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and around the country are taking advantage of this fact, freely accessing emails between inmates and their attorneys.... If the Justice Department refuses to change its policy, which undermines the constitutional right to counsel..., judges should ... disallow this unprincipled practice."

Nicholas Kristof explains the downsides of inequality to "idiots."

Kendall Breitman of Politico: Bloomberg rips Blitzer for being "insulting to America" & "trying to create dissension" when Blitzer asked him if he thought the State Department (or FAA) had disallowed flights to Tel Aviv "for political reasons." ...

... Keith Laing of the Hill: "The Federal Aviation Administration is extending a ban on U.S. airlines flying to Israel for another 24 hours, despite high-profile objections from politicians in both nations. The ban was originally issued on Tuesday afternoon, after rocket fire diverted aircraft near Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport. Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argued that the Tel Aviv was safe for passengers, and they complained that the ban would embolden Hamas leaders." ...

     ... Update: The ban has been lifted. See today's Ledes.

... If you listen to Michael Bloomberg's remarks to Blitzer posted here, you'll find he's criticizing the FAA & U.S. air carriers for not doing as good a job as Israel & El Al in providing a safe air travel experience. He never mentions this, which explains a lot ...

     ... Lee Ferran of ABC News: "El Al, the national airline of Israel, has reportedly equipped its planes with some form of anti-missile tech since the mid-2000s, a move that came in response to an attack on an Israeli chartered aircraft in late 2002 in Mombasa, Kenya. Two shoulder-fired rockets narrowly missed their target then, and El Al and other Israeli airlines have been preparing for a repeat ever since. In the years following the failed attack, El Al turned to Flight Guard, a combination of several technologies reportedly including early warning systems and flares designed to confuse any heat seeking missiles." ...

... BTW, if Bloomberg found Blitzer's question "insulting to America," he probably would not think much of fellow Republican Ted Cruz's accusation ...

The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands. -- Sen. Ted Cruz

... AP: "State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf rejected Cruz's comments as 'ridiculous and offensive.' ... Cruz said later Wednesday he would block Senate confirmation on all State Department nominees until his questions were answered. Harf said, 'There's no place for these kinds of political stunts in confirming nominees for critical national security positions.'" ...

     ... Cruz's staff adds a little nah-ne-nah-ne-you-are-too: "Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Cruz, said the Obama administration's foreign policy was itself 'ridiculous and offensive.'" ...

... CW: I'm not sure if the Bloomberg-Blitzer exchanged occurred before or after Tailgunner Ted made his accusation. If after, Blitzer's question was appropriate, though he should have cited Cruz's charge when he asked Bloomberg if he thought the FAA's decision was "political."

Ted Johnson of Variety: "White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that President Obama and his staff chose not to do an appearance on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' on Wednesday because of 'more serious matters the president is dealing with on the international scene.'"

Beyond the Beltway

Michael Kiefer & Mariana Dale of the Arizona Republic: "The Wednesday afternoon execution of convicted murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood III took nearly two hours, confirming concerns that had been raised by his attorneys about a controversial drug used by the state of Arizona. Wood remained alive at Arizona's state prison in Florence long enough for his public defenders to file an emergency motion for a stay of execution with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, after the process began at 1:53 p.m. The motion noted that Wood 'has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour' after being injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs." ...

... Fred Barbash of the Washington Post: "Executions are 'brutal, savage events' -- and if society wants to carry them out, it ought to stop pretending otherwise, forget about lethal injections and return to 'more primitive -- and foolproof -- methods.' Like the guillotine -- or on second thought, the firing squad. That's the view of Alex Kozinski, one of the nation's most prominent appeals court judges, a Ronald Reagan appointee generally regarded as a libertarian conservative and, by standards of the judiciary, a bit of a 'troublemaker,' who likes to stir the pot. Kozinski dissented Monday from a decision of the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to stay the execution of Joseph R. Wood until Arizona told Wood more about the drugs that would be used in the execution and the personnel who would carry it out." ...

... Update: Josh Sanburn of Time has more on Wood's attorneys efforts to stop the execution-in-process.

Charles Pierce: "The United Nations treaty regarding the rights of the disabled is back. It went through a Senate committee easily (again) and, therefore, the Congress has another chance to join the rest of the world in being humane to people in wheelchairs, like Bob Dole, who sat there on the Senate floor and watched the nutball paranoid fringe of his party sell him out wholesale.... We have another chance to see if there are 60 votes in the United States Senate against being paranoid. I'm not betting on it either way." ...

     ... CW: Actually, the Constitution requires a 2/3rds vote to ratify treaties, not 60 votes. The rights of the disabled treaty got 61 votes in December 2012. A mere 38 of his fellow Republican Senators sold out Ole Bob Dole.

Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times: "In what will most likely be one of the last Nazi cases on American soil, an 89-year-old Philadelphia man [Johann Breyer] who served as an armed guard at Auschwitz during World War II died Wednesday, just hours before a judge ordered him extradited to Germany in the murders of 216,000 prisoners at the notorious concentration camp."

Congressional Race

Josh Israel & Scott Keyes of Think Progress: Meet "Baptist pastor and right-wing radio show host Jody B. Hice," the likely next representative of Georgia's 10th Congressional district. He calls the U.S. a "distinctly Christian society"; he supports radical "nullification"; he has "argued that women should receive permission from their husband before running for office"; he thinks people can "leave the homosexual lifestyle" & believes "there is a gay plot to recruit and sodomize children"; he says that Muslims do "does not deserve First Amendment protection; & he blamed "secularism" for the Sandy Hook massacre. Israel & Keyes say Hice is certain to best his Democratic opponent, Ken Dious. Here's Dious's biography. It's a sad country.

Presidential Election

Nia-Malika Henderson & Jackie Kucinich argue that Michele Bachmann should run for president -- as she hinted she might -- because "there has been almost no speculation about any GOP women being at the top of the 2016 ticket." They also mention Sarah Palin favorably for "upend[ing] stereotypes" of women's political potential. CW: What about the fact that both Bachmann & Palin are ignorant & stupid? Shouldn't a presidential or vice-presidential candidate be at least minimally intellectually qualified to handle the top job? The writers don't seem to think so. You can't take a paper seriously when its reporters suggest a doofus should run for president & another doofus was a model candidate. Have I mentioned the Washington Post sucks? ...

... Henry Decker of the National Memo is not so much into cheerleading Bachmann: In the last GOP POTUS Sweepstakes, "... her candidacy rapidly bottomed out and collapsed. It was exactly as crazy as you might expect; along the way, the campaign allegedly committed multiple campaign finance violations, and Bachmann allegedly fell under the 'unnatural,' 'Rapsutin-like' influence of a campaign advisor.... Bachmann has claimed that in 2012, she was a 'perfect candidate' who 'didn't get anything wrong' and was literally chosen by God -- so she's setting a pretty high bar when she promises to improve.... Still, it's unclear why Bachmann would bother to seek a four-year term in the White House. After all, according to her, we’re already in the End Times."

News Ledes

New York Times: "A series of explosions at a school run by the United Nations sheltering hundreds of Palestinians who had fled their homes for safety from Israeli military assaults killed at least 16 people on Thursday afternoon and wounded many more. The cause was not immediately clear."

Bloomberg News: "Jobless claims fell by 19,000 to 284,000 in the week ended July 19, the fewest since February 2006 and lower than any economist surveyed by Bloomberg forecast...."

Guardian: "A flight operated by Air Algérie carrying 116 people from Burkina Faso to Algeria's capital disappeared from radar early on Thursday, the plane's owner said." ...

... New York Times UPDATE: "An Air Algérie jetliner with 116 people on board crashed early Thursday in a remote area of Mali near the borders with Burkina Faso and Niger, officials said."

The Guardian is liveblogging developments in the Gaza crisis. More than 700 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, many of them children.

Reuters: "A powerful Ukrainian rebel leader has confirmed that pro-Russian separatists had an anti-aircraft missile of the type Washington says was used to shoot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and it could have originated in Russia. In an interview with Reuters, Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the Vostok Battalion, acknowledged for the first time since the airliner was brought down in eastern Ukraine on Thursday that the rebels did possess the BUK missile system and said it could have been sent back subsequently to remove proof of its presence."

Los Angeles Times: "The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday night lifted its ban on U.S. flights to and from Tel Aviv."

The Commentariat -- July 23, 2014

Internal links removed.

** Robert Pear of the New York Times: "Two federal appeals court panels issued conflicting rulings Tuesday on whether the government could subsidize health insurance premiums for people in three dozen states that use the federal insurance exchange. The decisions are the latest in a series of legal challenges to central components of President Obama's health care law. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, upheld the subsidies, saying that a rule issued by the Internal Revenue Service was 'a permissible exercise of the agency's discretion.' The ruling came within hours of a 2-to-1 ruling by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said that the government could not subsidize insurance for people in states that use the federal exchange.... The White House rejected the ruling of the court [in D.C.] and anticipated that the Justice Department will ask that the entire appeals court to review it." ...

... Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times reviews the various possibilities of what could happen next. ...

... ** Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: "It's important to understand just who these two [D.C.] Republican [judge]s are. Judge [Raymond] Randolph is a staunchly conservative judge who spent much of the oral argument in this case acting as an advocate for the anti-Obamacare side.... Judge [Thomas] Griffith has a reputation as a more moderate judge, but it is not clear that this reputation is deserved." Millhiser then goes into a lengthy & informative explanation of how utterly fucking stupid the Randolph-Griffith "reasoning" is. Well-worth reading & not difficult to understand. It comes down to this: the only phrase that matters in all the gazillion pages of the ACA is this one-line error -- "an Exchange established by the State" -- which all by itself proves Congress was just kidding about providing healthcare subsidies to all eligible Americans. As one brief filed in support of the ACA put it, "Randolph and Griffith's decision presumes that 'Congress sought to legislate into existence a massive new social program that it understood would immediately fail.'" ...

... Here's Millhiser's analysis of the Fourth Circuit's three-person unanimous opinion. ...

... Tom Goldstein of ScotusBlog in the Washington Post: "... the courts are required to uphold the [administrative] rule if the law is ambiguous and the administration's position is reasonable. The Supreme Court will probably uphold the rule under that lax standard.... The parties can ask all the judges of both of the courts of appeals that issued today's rulings to rehear the case.... It may be that both courts will see that Supreme Court review is inevitable and stand aside to let the Justices decide the issue. ...

I think if you look at simple math, it does. -- Harry Reid, Tuesday, when asked if the D.C. court's decision vindicated his decision to employ the "nuclear option" ...

... Danny Vinik of the New Republic on how Harry Reid's finally imposing the "nuclear option" may have saved the ACA. CW: Credit here really should go to Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.) & others who pushed Reid toward modifying the filibuster.

... Paul Waldman: The D.C. court's ruling "demonstrates just how willing Republicans are to lay waste to Americans' lives if it means they can strike a blow at Barack Obama and his health law.... Here, Republicans literally found a legislative drafting error in the ACA that they hoped could be used to deal a near-fatal blow to the law, and two Republican-appointed appeals court judges agreed with them.... If they succeed at the Supreme Court, people will die." ...

... Charles Pierce: "Millions of our fellow citizens have spent the last several months with a great weight lifted from their shoulders. Every ache and sudden twinge no longer felt like it could be the first step toward personal ruin.... They have been able to pursue happiness, like all of us have a right to do so, without feeling like they're running in leg shackles. All of these people have been tossed into uncertainty -- again -- because their government has been rendered dysfunctional by a political philosophy of nihilistic vandalism, which is being judged now by a judiciary fully politicized through a long game that has extended over decades." (Emphasis added.) ...

... Brian Beutler of the New Republic: "What the challengers have asked judges to do is to ignore the 'fundamental canon' and buy into the idea that the Democrats who passed the law unambiguously structured it to withhold premium subsidies from states that refused to set up their own exchanges, as some sort of high-stakes inducement. This is plainly false. It's the giant whopper underlying the entire theory of Halbig." Beutler sees the decision, if it should hold (& he doesn't think it will) as a huge problem for Republicans. CW Note: TNR has a new annoying subscription program that blocks access to the article. If the link doesn't work, copy & paste some of the quote into Google. Another work-around: open the page in a private window. ...

Another Sad Day for Paul.... Ha Ha. Jon Perr in the Daily Kos: "... as it turns out, the Paul Ryan budget that 95 percent of Congressional  Republicans voted for three years in a row depends on every single dollar Uncle Sam now raises to fund subsidies in all 50 states.... Obamacare reduces the U.S. national debt precisely because its savings and new revenues exceed the cost of the Medicaid expansion and health insurance subsidies that the New England Journal of Medicine found enabled 20 million Americans to get coverage. And without those revenues, the budget Paul Ryan and his math-challenged Republican colleagues in the House and Senate backed utterly falls apart." ...

... CW: So far all the liberal & moderate pundits I've read are in agreement that the D.C. ruling will be struck down. For example, Ezra Klein writes, "The Supreme Court simply isn't going to rip insurance from tens of millions of people in order to teach Congress a lesson about grammar."

     ... BUT Steve M. looks at the politics & predicts a horrifying scenario in which repeal of ObamaCare is inevitable. Given the nature of the Republican character, I find his prediction plausible if not necessarily likely. In another post, Steve explains why the optimistic views of Klein & others are "exceedingly naive." His rationale seems spot-on to me. ...

NEW. CW: Here's what I think conservative judges/justices will do to "justify" their reading of the phrase in question. At least a couple of commentators have suggested that even Justice Scalia would scoff at the D.C. circuit opinion. Why, just last month in an opinion he wrote that, "fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme." But Scalia also has said in interviews that legislation is the way to change the law, not judicial oversight. Ergo, he (& other conservatives) will put on their choirboy faces & argue that if the phrase is so inartfully put that it does not reflect the intent of Congress, then Congress should just change the law. Why, they need only omit or add a few words & the ambiguity would disappear! It is a perfectly logical argument, the intent of which, of course, is to blow up the ACA. ...

... How the "Intellectual" Wingers See It. This post in Forbes, by Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute "scholar" who has been the chief proponent of the case, is so full of illogical thinking you could write a thesis tearing it to pieces. But Cannon's big premise is this: Freeeedom! "Halbig Would Free More than 8 Million People from the Individual Mandate.... Halbig Would Free 250,000 Firms and 57 Million Employees from the Employer Mandate." If you tie Cannon's arguments to Steve M.'s scenario, you can see how Republicans will sell the chaos they've engendered & why Steve' prognostication isn't just a study in pessimism. ...

     ... Here's Cannon arguing that states "should be refusing to create exchanges." Via Dave Weigel:

      ... CW: It's hard to believe that a Koch-funded "intellectual" would be so duplicitous, arguing on the one hand that states should not establish exchanges & on the other that people in states who don't establish exchanges are ineligible for subsidies. Weigel describes Cannons' tactics as "Leninist."

... CW One More Thing. Blame Scott Brown. (Or Martha Coakley for being such a horrible candidate.) As you may vaguely recall, & as Adrianna McIntyre of Vox reminds us, "the law was passed through an unorthodox budgetary process and never went to conference committee, where messy drafting gets cleaned up." Why? Because Scotty's election deprived Senate Democrats of their 60-vote super-majority, so they had to pass the final version of the bill (to correspond with the House bill[s]) via the reconciliation process, which requires only a simple majority vote. (Oh yeah, & then Scotty lied about how the whole thing went down, making himself the hero/victim.) ...

     ... Update: Turns out that last year, law professor Abbe Gluck explained the Scott Brown factor just as I did above: "Because Senator Ted Kennedy died in the middle of the legislative process and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown, the statute never went through the usual legislative process, including the usual legislative clean-up process.... Because the Democrats lost their 60^th filibuster-preventing vote, the version that had passed the Senate before Brown took office, which everyone initially had thought would be a mere first salvo, had to effectively serve as the final version, unchangeable by the House, because nothing else could get through the Senate." Gluck says skipping the conference process was the cause of the wording error & in general made the ACA "a badly drafted statute."

CNN: "More than half the public says Obamacare has helped either their families or others across the country, although less than one in five Americans say they have personally benefited from the health care law, according to a new national poll.... A CNN/ORC International survey also indicates that a majority of Americans oppose the Affordable Care Act.... [But] 'Not all of the opposition to the health care law comes from the right,' said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. 'Thirty-eight percent say they oppose the law because it's too liberal, but 17% say they oppose it because it's not liberal enough. That means more than half the public either favors Obamacare, or opposes it because it doesn't go far enough.'"

Tom Edsall of the New York Times: "The amount of money flowing into federal campaigns ... doubl[ed] from $3.1 billion in 2000 to $6.3 billion in 2012.... Spending by secretive political nonprofits, which do not disclose donors, has exploded 13-fold, from $24.9 million in 2000 to $335.7 million in 2012.... Just as the Republican Party and Republican candidates moved from reliance on small-to-medium publicly reported donations to large, often undisclosed, contributions, the party's platform position on campaign finance law began to change [from advocating disclosure to opposing it].... The Republican appointees to the Supreme Court are now unanimously opposed to constraints on large donors.... The three Republican appointees to the Federal Election Commission ... have used their power to block the F.E.C. from issuing rulings that would require disclosure of donors to 501c 'social welfare' organizations." ...

... Edsall concludes, "the inexorably rising costs of campaigns suggest that as long as this situation endures, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will be the party -- or represent the interests -- of the little guy." Here's an "honest political ad" that makes the same point. Thanks to Bonita for the link:

Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times: "... across the country, federal prosecutors have begun reading prisoners' emails to lawyers -- a practice wholly embraced in Brooklyn, where prosecutors have said they intend to read such emails in almost every case. The issue has spurred court battles over whether inmates have a right to confidential email communications with their lawyers -- a question on which federal judges have been divided."

Jonathan Capehart (& President Obama) on "acting white."

Senate Race

Daniel Malloy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Businessman David Perdue stunned Georgia's Republican political establishment Tuesday by capturing the party's U.S. Senate nomination in his first run for office. The former CEO of Reebok and Dollar General toppled 11-term Rep. Jack Kingston by a narrow margin, setting up a battle of political newcomers with famous kin in the fall. Perdue's cousin, Sonny, was a two-term governor and Democratic nominee Michelle] Nunn's father, Sam, was a four-term U.S. Senator."

News Ledes

New York Times: "The United Nations Human Rights Council voted to establish an inquiry into human rights violations in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories at a special session on Wednesday in which the top human rights official, Navi Pillay, said Israel and Hamas had likely committed war crimes with indiscriminate attacks on civilians." ...

... New York Times: "As the death toll mounts and passions spike, the Foreign Press Association in Israel condemned on Wednesday what it called 'deliberate official and unofficial incitement against journalists' who are reporting on the fighting in Gaza. That includes 'forcible attempts to prevent journalists and TV crews from carrying out their news assignments,' the association said."

... New York Times: "Secretary of State John Kerry made a surprise visit to Israel on Wednesday, as he pressed his effort to forge a cease-fire to bring a halt to the bitter fighting in the Gaza Strip. Mr. Kerry's plane touched down at Ben-Gurion International Airport just a day after the United States Federal Aviation Administration suspended American civilian flights to Israel." ...

... Guardian: "International airlines halted flights to and from Israel indefinitely on Tuesday citing security concerns in an unexpected twist to the two-week-old conflict in Gaza." ...

     ... CW: Guess that puts something of a damper on the Summer Vacation Insurance Theory of War. ...

... Washington Post: "As Israel pummels Hamas's infrastructure inside Gaza, it is also trying to prevent attacks originating from the West Bank and Israel -- by obliterating the houses of the relatives of Palestinians who allegedly have harmed Israelis. In doing so, Israel's military has returned to a controversial policy of punitive demolitions that has displaced thousands of Palestinians over the years."

Washington Post: "Two Ukrainian fighter jets were shot down Wednesday over rebel-held eastern Ukraine in the same vicinity as a Malaysian airliner that was downed last week, Ukrainian officials said." ...

... Time: "U.S. intelligence resources tracked the 'specific missile' that downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a senior Administration official said Tuesday, saying intelligence adds up to a picture that 'implicates Russia' in helping to bring down the plane." ...

... Washington Post: "The Obama administration, detailing what it called evidence of Russian complicity in the downing of a Malaysian airliner, on Tuesday released satellite images and other sensitive intelligence that officials say show Moscow had trained and equipped rebels in Ukraine responsible for the attack."