The Commentariat -- April 1, 2012

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on Ross Douthat's little screed about health care costing too much and how Obama & Congressional Democrats managed to hide the true costs. The NYTX front page is here. You can contribute here. ...

... AND do read this funny, short takedown of Tom Friedman by Hamilton Nolan of Gawker. Nolan perfectly captures Friedman.

New York Times Editors: "For anyone who still thought legal conservatives are dedicated to judicial restraint, the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the health care case should put that idea to rest. There has been no court less restrained in signaling its willingness to replace law made by Congress with law made by justices.... A split court striking down the act will be declaring itself virtually unfettered by the law. And if that happens along party lines, with five Republican-appointed justices supporting the challenge led by 26 Republican governors, the court will mark itself as driven by politics."

Nicholas Kristof persuades Goldman Sachs to get out of the sex-trafficking business.

Steve Hendrix of the Washington Post: "... in Libya, five months after the death of the man who managed to hold this country together by brute force, people are beginning to wonder whether there is any other way to do it."

Caroline Bankoff of New York magazine: George W. & Laura Bush's daughters, Barbara and Jenna, voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

CW: I read several posts in mostly respectable online journals & other media (PBS!) that highlighted this astounding figure: families earning less than $13,000 spend 9 percent of that income on lottery tickets. I too was shocked. So I read the study that generated all the foo-fah, which is here (pdf). I'll be darned if I can see where the study shows any such thing. Maybe you're a better reader than I.

Right Wing World

CNN: Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) no longer thinks it's a good idea to imply that the nation's top military brass are liars and perjurers when they claim cuts in defense spending are warranted.

Existential Dread, Right-Wing Style. Thanks to Jon Chait of New York magazine, I found out what conservatives are skeert of. Apparently the denizens of Right Wing World cite this passage often -- and even more often now that we have a black Muslim socialist in the White House:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. -- Anonymous (variously incorrectly attributed to de Toqueville & others)

CW: while I was mulching some giant crinum lilies today, my mind wandered to the Chris Mooney article I linked yesterday, & I came up with my own counter-theory about what's eating conservatives. I'm not ready to reveal it just yet, but I think I'll give it a whirl in polite company one of these days and see how many spit-takes it engenders. ...

     ... Update: just read the following. It feeds into my theory:

** "Stag Party." Frank Rich: "... the hostility toward modern women resurfacing in the GOP today was baked into the party before the religious right gained its power and before recriminalizing abortion became a volatile cause.... Unlike the angry Santorum, [Romney] has the smooth style of a fifties retro patriarch to camouflage the reactionary content [of his views about women]. In this sense, his war on women would differ from Rick’s — and Rush’s — only in the way prized by GOP spin artists like Noonan and Matalin. He would never be so politically foolhardy as to spell out on-camera just how broad and nasty its goals really are."

The way things are supposed to be in the marital realm.

News Ledes

New York Times: "The United States and more than 60 other countries moved closer on Sunday to direct intervention in the fighting in Syria, with Arab nations pledging $100 million to pay opposition fighters and the Obama administration agreeing to send communications equipment to help rebels organize and evade Syria’s military, according to participants gathered here."

New York Times: "The party of [Nobel Peace Prize winner] Daw Aung San Suu Kyi declared that she had won a seat in Myanmar’s Parliament on Sunday, an unofficial result that may herald a new era for the country as it moves toward democracy after decades of oppressive military rule."

AP: More details emerge about Osama bin Ladin's life in Pakistan in the years before U.S. Navy SEALS killed him.

The Commentariat -- March 31, 2012

My column in the New York Times eXaminer, delayed thanks to my lousy e-mail, is the second of a two-parter on the New York Times' response to the oral arguments in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The NYTX front page is here. You can contribute here.

President Obama's weekly address:

     ... The transcript is here. AP story here.

Cecile Richardson, President of Planned Parenthood, directs supporters to this video:

Gail Collins decides that the worst trend this political season is Americans Elect. CW: this pleases me a great deal inasmuch as Collins surely knows her worst-trend pick is a favorite of Tom Friedman.

Prof. Chris Edelson in Common Dreams: "Now, the Court stands poised to rely on the rhetoric of the Tea Party to stand in the way of Congress’s ability to deal with a truly national problem — if tens of millions of people without health insurance who pass on tens of billions in costs to other Americans isn’t a national problem, then what is? When the Court issues its decision, the question won’t be whether Americans might be forced to eat broccoli.... What we’ll really find out is whether Congress has the power to govern a nation, a problem the Framers seemed to have settled long ago.... The ultimate question, in fact, is whether the United States is a nation or merely a group of 300 million people who happen to share living space." Read the whole post. ...

... Into the Abyss. Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly: "It is sometimes forgotten that state and local governments do the major work of delivering federally-funded domestic services in this country; the feds mostly cut checks and write regs. If a majority of the Supreme Court begins questioning the constitutionality of this relationship, we aren’t just looking at an invalidation of a Medicaid expansion, or even of Medicaid itself, horrid as that would be. We could be on the brink of having to reconsider our basic form of governing. I hope the Justices who so casually toss around contemptuous references to decades of precedents aren’t so arrogant as to throw us into that abyss." ...

... And so on the nation's highest court, satire replaced stare decisis in a slightly altered version of the Red Queen's jurisprudence in Alice in Wonderland: First the verdict, then the trial. -- Bob Shrum ...

... Read Shrum's post in The Week. It's a well-written & thoughtful summation of this week's high courtroom shenanigans. His speculation that striking the ACA would help President Obama's re-election bid is a stretch. Shrum isn't much of a pronosticator. On election day 2004, he assured us Kerry would win (though, to be fair, he hadn't taken account of the GOP's manipulation of the Ohio results). ...

... Jonathan Chait of New York magazine: "... the shock of the liberal analysts who expected a landslide does prove they misjudged the case, but their error lies not in underestimating the arguments, which they imbibed closely, but in overestimating the Republican justices."

... Reed Abelson & Katie Thomas of the New York Times: "Although it would be folly to predict what the court will conclude [on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act], policy experts, insurers, doctors and legislators are now seriously contemplating the repercussions of a complete change in course two years after the nation began to put the law into place."

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times: French "methods of combating homegrown terrorism ... are quite different [from those of the United States], stemming from different histories, legal systems and conceptions of the state.... With the largest number of Muslims in Europe — nearly 10 percent of the population, often concentrated in poorer neighborhoods — and closer proximity to the Middle East and North Africa, France has focused more on preventing the recruitment of potential terrorists through a regular infiltration of mosques and radical Islamic networks.

Ed Pilkington of the Guardian: "General Motors ... has confirmed that it is pulling funding from the Heartland Institute, an ultra-conservative thinktank known for its scepticism about climate change. The decision by the GM Foundation to halt its support for Heartland after 20 years underlines the new image the carmaker is seeking to project as part of its social responsibility programme.... The funding cut – just $15,000 a year – is small beer for the institute, which has a multi-million dollar turnover, largely from a single anonymous donor."

Michael Doyle of the Sacramento Bee: "San Joaquin Valley congressional candidate Jose Hernandez flew in space, but his astronaut identity is now under political fire. In a pointed new challenge, a Sacramento law firm is asking a judge to block Hernandez from describing himself as an "astronaut/scientist/engineer" on the June ballot. The lawsuit notes Hernandez has left NASA." Via Steve Benen. CW: Excuse me. After being drummed from his speakership for ethics violations & other stuff, Newt Gingrich is still Speaker for Life, but an astronaut is not an astronaut a year after he leaves the program to run for office? ...

... Here is Hermandez' response to the suit:

Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times: "Last December, in response to an Op-Ed column by David Brooks, [Charles] Snelling [of Allentown, Pennsylvania] contributed a 5,000-word 'Life Report' essay to nytimes.com, devoting the final section to his wife [Adrienne's Alzheimer's] disease and his role in managing it.... On Thursday..., Mr. Snelling killed his wife and himself...." The essay Snelling wrote is here. Washington Post story here. ...

... Coincidentally -- Susan Jacoby in a New York Times op-ed: "... end-of-life planning is one of the few actions within the power of individuals who wish to help themselves and their society. Too few Americans are shouldering this responsibility.... As someone over 65, I do not consider it my duty to die for the convenience of society. I do consider it my duty, to myself and younger generations, to follow the example my mother set by doing everything in my power to ensure that I will never be the object of medical intervention that cannot restore my life but can only prolong a costly living death."

Right Wing World *

** CW: I hope you all will read this article by Chris Mooney, much of it excerpted from his book The Republican Brain, and tell us what you think about it. Obviously, the country cannot go on like this, with a considerable percentage of the population incurably delusional.

We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice. We don’t think the generals believe that their budget is really the right budget. I think there’s a lot of budget smoke and mirrors in the Pentagon’s budget. -- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Chair of the House Budget Committee

There’s a difference between having someone say they don’t believe what you said versus ... calling us, collectively, liars. My response is: I stand by my testimony. This was very much a strategy-driven process to which we mapped the budget. -- Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

CW: Evidently Ryan figures the Chair of the Joint Chiefs & other top brass are lying to Congress when they cut their own budgets because they are not planning ahead for this:

Alex Pareene of Salon: "When John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman join forces, you can be sure of one thing: It will involve state-sponsored violence. Today, they want us to arm Syrian rebels. Though, you know, what they really wanted to call for was actually bombing the hell out of Syria, until there is freedom. They’re just taking it slow.... Sadly, Joe Lieberman will be leaving the U.S. Senate soon, which means John McCain and Lindsey Graham will need to find a new fake-Democrat best friend to add a patina of “bipartisanship” to their endless demands for explosions and shooting and death."

CW: Let that sink in. Paul Ryan is insisting the Pentagon take more money than the brass calculate they need at the same time he is slashing social safety net programs. So dedicated is he to taking from the taxpayer to give to the defense contractors that he is willing to publicly accuse the nation's top generals of perjury. P.S. Defense expert Ryan has never served in the military. He has, however, been the beneficiary of social safety net programs.

Kevin Drum: conservatives don't trust science. "This is not because conservatives are a bunch of undereducated yahoos.... Conservative elites have led the anti-science charge and the rank-and-file has followed. This is presumably part of the wider conservative turn against knowledge-disseminating institutions whose output is perceived as too liberal (academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood) in favor of institutions that produce more reliably conservative narratives (churches, business-oriented think tanks, Fox News). More and more, liberals and conservatives are almost literally living in different worlds with different versions of consensus reality."

As Rick Santorum fades in the polls & party leaders begin endorsing Romney because he's going to win (and not because they like him), Sam Stein & Jason Cheris of the Huffington Post dump their Santorum stuff. It's a pretty good read.

Pink Bowling Balls. I apologize for not linking this timely. Eric Dolan of Raw Story: "Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Wednesday told a young man not to use a pink ball at a bowling alley in Wisconsin. 'You’re not gonna use the pink ball. We’re not gonna let you do that. Not on camera,' he said.... 'Friends don’t let friends use pink balls,' he added." ...

... Erin Ryan of Jezebel: "... maybe Rick Santorum's aversion to a man bowling with a pink ball is rooted in the fact that Rick Santorum is a genitalia-obsessed homophobe with a God complex and no self awareness clinging for his life to the flimsy idea that in order for the world to continue existing as Santorum wants it to exist, boys must not bowl with pink balls. Is there anything gender or sex-related about which this man doesn't have a complex?"

* Where it's so comfy to live because everything and everyone is predictable -- even the warmongers.

Local News

Bruce Vielmetti & Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "A federal judge in Madison on Friday ruled that portions of Act 10 - which removed most collective bargaining for most public employees - are unconstitutional. Though critics of the law welcomed the decision as a major victory, backers seemed unconcerned since it preserved a main limit on bargaining, and suggested broader restrictions would pass muster if applied to all state workers." ...

... Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post: "Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D) has made it official — he’s running against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) in this summer’s recall election." Journal Sentinel story here.

News Ledes

The Plot Thickens. Orlando Sentinel: "Tom Owen, forensic consultant for Owen Forensic Services LLC and chair emeritus for the American Board of Recorded Evidence, used voice identification software to rule out [George] Zimmerman [as the person crying for help on the 911 tape moments before Trayvon Martin was shot dead]. Another expert contacted by the Sentinel, utilizing different techniques, came to the same conclusion. Zimmerman claims self-defense in the shooting and told police he was the one screaming for help. But these experts say the evidence tells a different story."

New York Times: "The Muslim Brotherhood nominated its chief strategist and financier Khairat el-Shater on Saturday as its candidate to become Egypt’s first president since Hosni Mubarak, breaking a pledge not to seek the top office and a monopoly on power."

New York Times: "As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton worked hard on Saturday to focus attention on deepening security ties with the Arab nations of the Persian Gulf, she found herself having to deal with a surprising act of diplomatic defiance: the decision by the United Arab Emirates, an ally, to shutter the offices of an American-financed group that promotes democracy.

AP: "Maryland lottery officials announced early Saturday that their state sold what could become the world's largest lottery payout of all-time, but it wasn't immediately clear if that ticket holder would get sole possession of the $640 million jackpot or have to split it with other winners." ...

     ... Update: "Lottery ticket-holders in Kansas, Illinois and Maryland each selected the winning numbers and will split a $640 million jackpot that was believed to be the world’s largest such prize, a lottery official said Saturday."

Reuters: "The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a major cyber intrusion at an Atlanta-based payment processor that could expose millions of MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover cardholders to fraudulent charges. Processor Global Payments Inc said on Friday it had found 'unauthorized access' into its system early in March and notified law enforcement and financial institutions."

The Commentariat -- March 30, 2012

CW: Today's comments are extraordinary. Treat yourself.

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: "If the usual process occurs, the justices of the Supreme Court will gather around a large rectangular table Friday morning and, one by one, cast their votes on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care law. They will let the rest of us know the outcome in due time.... In a town where secrets are hard to keep, the Supreme Court is a striking outlier. The justices and their clerks know the outcome of cases almost immediately, but it’s rare for rulings to become known before the justices announce them." ...

... Paul Krugman: "... we don’t know how this will go. But it’s hard not to feel a sense of foreboding — and to worry that the nation’s already badly damaged faith in the Supreme Court’s ability to stand above politics is about to take another severe hit."

... Gene Robinson: Justice Anthony "Kennedy seemed to be genuinely looking for a principle that permitted a health insurance mandate but not a broccoli mandate. And [Solicitor General Donald] Verrilli gave him one. The market for health insurance is inseparable from the market for health care, he argued, and every citizen is a consumer of health care. Those who choose not to buy health insurance require health care anyway — often expensive care at hospital emergency rooms — and these costs are borne by the rest of us in the form of higher premiums." ...

... NEW. Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "The way to frame a Supreme Court argument meant to persuade Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is to talk about liberty. It is his touchstone and guiding principle, and his conception of liberty is likely to determine the future of President Obama’s health care law." CW: also, look for yet another snide remark from Scalia. ...

... Jack Balkin defines three limiting principles that justify "the individual mandate but doesn't give Congress unlimited power under the Commerce Clause." ...

... Ezra Klein interviews Constitutional Prof. Akhil Reed Amar, who makes it so simple even Scalia could understand it: "The limit is the Constitution. What Congress does has to be in the enumerated powers. One of those powers is the Interstate Commerce Clause. What are the limits on that power? It only applies to regulations that are interstate and commercial. So Congress has to be actually trying to address a commercial problem that spills over state lines. And that’s clearly true here. At any given nanosecond, millions of Americans are out of state.... And if ... any of these Americans fall sick, we go to a local ER. That’s an interstate issue. Similarly, if we don’t cover preexisting conditions, we have a lock-in for labor mobility — many workers will be unable to take better jobs out-of-state and thereby contribute more to their families and to the economy. And that’s what the Interstate Commerce Clause was all about: Getting rid of the impediments to genuine interstate commerce, to the free movement of goods and labor." ...

... Simon Lazarus of The New Republic defends Solicitor General Donald Verrilli against widespread criticism: "... having sat through the oral argument and re-read the transcript, I have to dissent. Especially on paper, Verrilli’s performance appears quite strong — and possibly more effective than that of his opponents, Michael Carvin and the justly renowned Paul Clement." CW: that's exactly the point I made the other day. The government may lose its case, but it won't be Verrilli's fault -- it will be the fault of Tea Party Justices using childish hypotheticals to claim that if they don't save America from ObamaCare, President Obama & the Democrats will make you eat bran & broccoli & force you to buy exercise equipment. ...

... David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix: "I have no idea where the justices will come down on the constitutionality issue. I just want people to back up and remember that when jackasses yap about the potential broccoli-gestapo tyranny that might in theory stifle the liberties of those handfuls of hypothetical Americans who wish to live free of health insurance, there are in reality millions of American children who, through absolutely no fault of their own, are in fact systematically denied access to basic health care every day." Read the whole post. ...

... Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker discusses some of the alternatives to the individual mandate -- none would be as good as the mandate, because the result would be to raise premiums & lower enrollment, but they would allow the law to function -- unless of course Scalia gets his way & strikes the whole law. Commenter Bill Kellett has a point: "So when OSHA demands safety glasses be worn they aren't requiring a product be purchased?"

     .... CW: every one of us buys stuff because the government says we must -- car buyers could save thousands of dollars if they didn't have to pay for all those pesky safety features; no, no one forces you to buy a car, but for perhaps the majority of American adults, a car is a practical necessity. Even if you take public transportation, you're paying for the federally-required features on the bus or the train. That is, the government requires almost everyone to buy -- or rent -- vehicular safety products: airbags, seat belts, horns! Moreover, if I take the city bus, it will never take me across state lines; the bus is not engaging in interstate commerce, but it must be built to meet federal safety standards, & I have to help pay for those features. It's a mandate.

 
Charles Pierce on Trayvon Martin and "the way of the gun." An excellent post. A commenter on the post, Katherine Harris, writes, "I just want someone to explain to me, without laughing, how a twenty-eight-year-old man with no affiliation with any kind of organization carrying a concealed weapon in any way constitutes 'a well-regulated militia.'" ...

... CW: But I will disagree with Pierce on one thing. If Americans want safer gun laws, the one way to get them is to eviscerate the NRA, because it is they who are purchasing politicians & writing all this legislation for them. So if you belong to the NRA -- QUIT.

An Etiquette Lesson for White Conservative Guys  

Elspeth Reeve of The Atlantic volunteers to help out Victor Davis Hanson, a white conservative guy who complains in the National Review of Interracial Etiquette that

The country is obsessed with decoding a scratchy tape to ascertain whether Mr. Zimmerman said 'cold, coons, goons, or punks,' with the idea that if the garbled word proves a racial slur.... No one can explain why Mr. Martin felt a need to so self-identify [as No Limit Nigga on his Twitter account]; no one seems to care; and no one can provide rules of the conditions under which (who says it, and when, why, how) society must deplore the use of such an epithet."

     ... CW: yes, I know you think VDH is an incredible asshole (almost always an appropriate slur when applied to goons & punks like VDH [and why does he need three names?]), but Reeve is more patient. She writes, "... the rules are pretty clear: if you're white, don't use the N-word. But even if Hanson thinks there's some blurriness left, there's a really, really clear-cut situation when you should not say the N-word, or any other racial slur, is when you're considering shooting an unarmed teenager who happens to be black."

Teresa Smith of the Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Journal: "... the [Canadian] government has announced it will phase out the [penny] beginning this fall. The decision, announced in Thursday's federal budget, came down to dollars and cents. Due to inflation, 'the penny's burden to the economy has grown relative to its value as a means of payment,' according to budget documents."

Right Wing World *

... NEW. Julie Davis & Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News: "A Republican Party web-based advertisement uses altered audio from U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments to attack President Barack Obama’s health-care law. In a spot circulated [Wednesday], the Republican National Committee excerpts the opening seconds of the March 27 presentation of ... Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, in which he is heard struggling for words and twice stopping to drink water.... A review of a transcript and recordings of those moments shows that Verrilli took a sip of water just once, paused for a much briefer period, and completed his thought, rather than stuttering and trailing off as heard in the doctored version." ...

... Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog: the RNC ad "... also sets back the effort to get the Court to become more transparent.... The Justices now have before them a perfect illustration of the gross distortion that can instantly be made of recordings of their proceedings. What is to stop the same misleading stunt being pulled with the Justices’ own oral argument questions and comments? Nothing at all. The Court made a special exception in releasing the oral argument tape for the health care arguments so promptly, and it probably will hesitate before doing so again. If there were any chance that the Justices would permit cameras in the Court, I do not see happening now." Thanks to contributor Dave S. for the link.

* Where the motto is "If the facts don't fit, change 'em."

Local News

NEW. Tim Jones of Bloomberg News: Wisconsin "Governor Scott Walker will face a recall vote June 5 after election officials in Madison cleared the way for an ouster election. The Government Accountability Board, meeting in the state Capitol today, unanimously found that petition signatures seeking the recall of Walker and Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, both Republicans, met the legal standard to force an election Walker, whose opposition to unions touched off public fury, may become the third U.S. governor to be removed from office."

News Ledes

New York Times: "President Obama has determined there is enough oil in world markets to allow countries to rely less on imports from Iran, a step that could increase Western actions to deter Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, an administration official said Friday."

New York Times: "Eight days after the police shot dead the self-confessed killer of four Jews and three French paratroopers in southwestern France, elite units on Friday raided localities in several parts of the country and detained 17 people described as Islamic militants."

Washington Post: "European finance ministers agreed Friday to bolster the total capacity of their bailout funds to nearly $1 trillion, a temporary measure that aims to convince investors that they are serious about continuing to help struggling countries repay their debts."

New York Times: "Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin on Friday endorsed the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, saying Republicans do not have the luxury of waiting until the party’s convention this summer to rally behind a nominee and start confronting President Obama."

AP: "The U.S. ambassador to Russia is perplexed over how a government-controlled television station seems to know his every move and concerned that his email and phone calls may be intercepted. In a series of tweets on Thursday, Michael McFaul said he encounters crews from the NTV channel wherever he goes."

Guardian: "A man who says he saw Trayvon Martin shot dead claims that the Florida teenager and his killer, George Zimmerman, were scuffling on the ground at the time with one on top of the other.... The anonymous man said he reported to police details of what he saw on the evening of 26 February, which included watching the gunman walking away from the fight apparently uninjured." Video of the interview, with CNN's Anderson Cooper, is here.