The Commentariat -- January 24, 2012

President Obama & his staff develop the State of the Union address:

My column at the New York Times eXaminer is titled, "He Said/He Said -- Fact-Free Reporting at the New York Times." The NYTX front page is here. You can contribute to NYTX here.

William Galston of the Brookings Institution & The New Republic on "five things to watch for in the State of the Union address." CW: P.S. Ignore what he says about globalization and technology. For more on this, see ...

... Dean Baker in the New York Times eXaminer, who writes that "David Brooks' ignorance is showing again." Brooks makes the same error Galston does. Baker, an economist, explains why "it was not globalization and technology that led to the upward redistribution of income, it was conscious policy." Think, for instance, "free trade" agreements.

... Michael Scherer of Time: "Warren Buffet’s [sic.] secretary will sit nearby Michelle Obama at tonight’s State of The Union Address.... Buffet has famously said that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, since he benefits from a lower tax rate on investments, while she makes her money as regular salary. He finds this unjust. Mitt Romney wants to maintain this system, even as his top Republican rival now fights to lower Romney and Buffet’s effective tax rate to zero by eliminating all federal tax on investment income. Barack Obama, by contrast, wants to raise tax rates on those who make a lot of money from investments...." CW: See also the link to Greg Sargent's post in today's Right Wing World.

Nelson Schwartz & Shaila Dewan of the New York Times: "About one million homeowners facing foreclosure could have their mortgage burden cut by about $20,000 each as part of a long-awaited deal taking shape among state attorneys general, federal officials and the nation’s largest mortgage servicers. But a final agreement remained out of reach Monday despite political pressure from the White House, which had been trying to have a deal in hand that President Obama could highlight in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.... But ... Democrats in Congress, advocacy groups like MoveOn.org and several crucial attorneys general said the deal might be too lenient on the banks."

Sen. Rand Paul's skirmish with the TSA was a Constitutional moment! Sunlen Miller & Matt Hosford of ABC News: "The U.S. Constitution actually protects federal lawmakers from detention while they’re on the way to the capital. 'The Senators and Representatives … shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same….' according to Article I, Section 6." Thank you, Sen. Paul, for inadvertently teaching me something I didn't know. Also, I like your conspiracy theory. (See video.)

Prof. Jonathan Laurence, in a New York Times op-ed, on how to integrate Muslims into European culture. CW: I found myself in disagreement with many of his suggestions, but Laurence is an expert and I'm not, so it's worth considering his viewpoint.

Low-Income White People Don't Like Any of the Top 2012 Presidential Contenders. Jon Cohan of the Washington Post: "One group that continues to elude Obama in his moderate resurgence on favorability is whites with annual household incomes under $50,000. Since December, whites with higher incomes are up eight points in favorable impressions of the president; those under the $50K threshold are basically unmoved at 40 percent favorable, 56 percent unfavorable. This is also a group — whites with incomes under $50K — that’s moved away from Romney over the past two weeks, with his unfavorable numbers jumping from 29 to 49 percent (exactly where Gingrich is as well)."

Right Wing World

Lori Montgomery, et al., of the Washington Post: "Mitt Romney offered a partial snapshot of his vast personal fortune late Monday, disclosing income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year — virtually all of it profits, dividends or interest from investments.... According to his 2010 return, Romney paid about $3 million to the IRS, for an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent. For 2011, Romney estimates that he will pay about $3.2 million, for an effective rate of 15.4 percent. That’s in line with his earlier estimates, but sharply lower than the rates paid by President Obama and Romney’s closest Republican rival, Newt Gingrich." The New York Times story is here. ...

     ... Update: If you like reading Tax Returns of the Very Rich and Famous, Mitt Romney's are here.

... Greg Sargent: "I’m not sure the Obama campaign could have scripted this more perfectly. In a remarkable bit of good timing, President Obama is set to deliver a State of the Union speech focused on income inequality and tax unfairness on exactly the same day that Mitt Romney will reveal that he made over $40 million in the last two years — all of it taxed at a lower rate than that paid by middle class taxpayers.... Romney doesn’t just disagree with Obama on these fundamental issues; he personally symbolizes virtually the entire 2012 Democratic message. He is the walking embodiment of everything Dems allege is wrong with our system and the ways it’s rigged in favor of the wealthy and against the middle class."

... Meanwhile, the New York Times editors take a dim view of what is revealed by the one year's tax return Gingrich released: "He’s a shrewd broker of Washington influence, and about as 'establishment' — and cynical — as you can get." Here's a related Times news story with links to the Gingrich tax returns.

Nate Silver: Two polls of Florida GOP voters, the first "from Rasmussen Reports, puts Mr. Gingrich ahead [of Romney] by 9 points, 41 to 32. The second poll, from Insider Advantage, pegs Mr. Gingrich’s lead at 8 points. Both polls conducted all their interviews on Sunday in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Gingrich’s South Carolina victory."

"Newt Gingrich Was Deflated." Prof. Jonathan Bernstein, in the Washington Post: "Monday, without a hooting and hollering crowd, and with a moderator who mostly didn’t choose to get in a fight, the disgraced former speaker [Newt Gingrich] showed once again what a poor job he does when he engages with other candidates." CW: An interesting analysis of how little impact Gingrich's supposed debating skills would have in a general election. Also, on Sunday, a blimp flew low over my house, so low the passengers & I could wave to each other. It's the first blimp I've seen in Fort Myers in the nearly 12 years I've lived here. Since Newt Gingrich had just come to the vicinity, I immediately thought of him. But the blimp wasn't Gingrich. It was Democratic blue. ...

... Applause! Applause! So now Newt says he won't allow future debate moderators to instruct the audience to hold their applause:

In Florida, the Romney campaign is running this ad against Gingrich:

CW: quite a few readers have recommended Michael Moore's 1994 video "Newt and Mike Save America," which is a poem to Newt's hypocrisy:

News Ledes

President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address at 9 pm ET. U.S. News has a story here. ...

     ... Update. Politico: "President Barack Obama on Tuesday will urge Americans to come together on 'the defining issue of our time,' using his State of the Union address to emphasize economic fairness and set the agenda for his reelection campaign." Excerpts are here. ...

     ... Update 2. The Washington Post report on the SOTU address is here. New York Times story here.

Reuters: "Saudi Arabia's Gulf allies joined Riyadh on Tuesday in pulling out of an Arab League monitoring team to Syria, risking the collapse of a mission whose presence has not halted more than 10 months of violence. Envoys to the Cairo-based League will meet later in the day to discuss whether to call off the whole mission, Sudan's ambassador to the 22-member body said."

AP: "Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois could lose full use of his left arm and experience facial paralysis after a weekend stroke that required emergency surgery, but his physician said Monday the prospects for a complete mental recovery are strong. Dr. Richard Fessler said it likely would be 'very difficult' for the first-term Republican senator to regain movement in his left arm, and that his left leg and face also may be affected. Kirk was in intensive care at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he appeared to recognize those around him and was responding to verbal commands, Fessler said." The Chicago Tribune story is here.

AP: "The White House said Monday that it's delaying for one week the release of President Barack Obama's budget for the 2013 fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. The budget is traditionally released on the first Monday in February — which is Feb. 6 — but the administration has pushed the release to Feb. 13. An administration official said the later date was 'determined based on the need to finalize decisions and technical details of the document.'"

The Commentariat -- January 23, 2012

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on rank-and-file conservatives' mistrust of the mainstream media and how the GOP has created and stoked it. The NYTX front page is here. Make a contribution here.

Ha ha. A reprise, with backup by Les Deux Love Orchestra:

** CW: I haven't read all of Ryan Lizza's piece on "The Obama Memos" in today's New Yorker but I will. The bits I read are fascinating, even though I knew quite a few of them, some from Lizza's earlier digging into the nitty-gritty of Obama's career. ...

     ... John Hudson of The Atlantic has the Cliffnotes on Lizza's story, but read Lizza -- more fun.

Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine: President Obama is his own memorist, so it's no surprise the White House doesn't like outsiders muddying the waters by writing books about him, even largely favorable ones.

Joe Hagan in New York on "the coming tsunami of slime": "By almost every measure, the 2012 election is going to be the most negative in the history of American politics. In this, the post-hope election, the promise of Obama’s last campaign has been turned inside out. For all the Republicans’ attempts to emphasize the virtues of austerity, the animating force of their party is hatred of Obama, his 'Kenyan' ancestry, his 'socialism' and Chicago associates, and the charge that he ... landed us in an anxious, alien landscape that doesn’t feel anything like what people used to call 'America.'”

Our Long National Nightmare Might Be Ending. Paul Krugman: "... things ... would have been worse if we had followed the policies demanded by Mr. Obama’s opponents.... Republicans have been demanding that the Fed stop trying to bring down interest rates and that federal spending be slashed immediately — which amounts to demanding that we emulate Europe’s failure. And if this year’s election brings the wrong ideology to power, America’s nascent recovery might well be snuffed out." Read Krugman's explanation of "deleveraging," which is helping to pull us out of the crisis. He has more on deleveraging in this blogpost and in this one. I think it is important to see the federal debt in this light; that is, we have transferred some of the private debt to public debt, and that is what's necessary during a crisis.

Nino Sings Happy Birthday to Citizens United:

I don't care who is doing the speech -- the more the merrier. People are not stupid. If they don't like it, they'll shut it off.... If the system seems crazy to you, don't blame it on the court. -- Justice Antonin Scalia, at a South Carolina Bar Association forum

By nature, when a decision isn't unanimous, somebody is making a mistake.... There are real problems when people want to spend lots of money on a candidate ... they'll drown out the people who don't have a lot of money. -- Justice Stephen Breyer

CW: Bill Keller has a succinct overview of U.S. policy toward Iran. Keller is kind of a dim bulb, and I don't know enough to evaluate his basic premises, but if he's right, his column is helpful. The first comment, by a guy who uses the pseudonym "Winning Progressive" and is an Obamabot, adds a useful caveat to Keller's thesis. Any comments on the Keller piece, from those more knowledgeable that I, will be appreciated. Also, if I come across professional rebuttals by People Who Are Not John Bolton, I'll link them.

The Plot Thickens. Jim Yardley & Heather Timmons of the New York Times: a new assassination plot against novelist Salmon Rushdie -- or not? The supposed threat may have been invented to keep Rushdie from attending a literary festival in Jaipur, India.

Right Wing World

"'Grandiose' Idea? Not So Much. Ezra Klein: "I’m at a loss to name even one big idea animating [Newt] Gingrich’s campaign. He’s got the largest and most fiscally irresponsible tax cut in the race, but he doesn’t mention it much. His plans to cut spending are vague. He says he agrees with Ron Paul on the dangers of fiat money and the Federal Reserve, but he hasn’t proposed doing anything about it.... This seems typical for Gingrich’s career: His ideas on the big issues are standard-issue conservatism, and they’re mixed in with occasional flights of fancy (illuminate highways using orbiting mirrors that reflect moonlight), pure plays to resentment and fear (execute 19-year-olds who are stupidly trying to smuggle two ounces of pot from Mexico), and a lot of small, specific ideas, like the Louisiana port reconstruction." CW: see yesterday's Commentariat for "grandiose" context. Plus, you gotta read the one about executing small-time pot smugglers. What a stupid, nasty loon. ...

... John Cassidy of the New Yorker has a very good take on Newt's South Carolina win, and his prospects, complete with a well-wrought image of Mrs. Newt: "... the mannequin-like Callista..., her peroxide helmet seemingly held in place by a cryogenic freezing agent...."

Noam Scheiber of The New Republic: the South Carolina result was about Romney's weakness, not Gingrich's strength. "The story of 2011 was that Republicans had a frontrunner they weren’t in love with. Mitt Romney spent the entire year below 25 percent in national polls; a new Mitt alternative surged ahead of him every few weeks, only to collapse when it turned out he or she couldn’t pass an eighth grade civics class. The pundits concluded from this that Romney’s grip on the nomination was tenuous and that ... the race was a lot less stable than it looked.... That was the conventional wisdom up until New Hampshire, in any case, at which point a revisionist theory took hold. According to the theory, put forth by some of the smartest analysts around, Romney was much stronger than he appeared to be." The race looks a lot like the Obama-Clinton faceoff of 2008. ...

If I'm fortunate enough to become president, I'll care very deeply about it getting better in a big hurry. -- Mitt Romney ...

... Jonathan Chait of New York: "It’s not a bad plan at all. Though probably the smartest way to execute it involves pretending it’s not your plan and, say, doing a better job of concealing the fact that you’re desperately rooting for economic failure."

Don't Touch My Junk. Or My Leg. Or Any Part of Me! -- Rand Paul, before being carted off by local police after an "incident" with the TSA

Local News

Monica Davey of the New York Times: as Indianapolis prepares for its first Super Bowl ever, inside the statehouse, Republican legislators say they have the votes to pass an anti-union so-called "right to work" bill that would be the first such law passed in a decade. (Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels favors the bill and would sign it into law.) The National Football League Players Association, BTW, opposes the bill, which GOP legislators hope to get passed before the Super Bowl, despite Democratic "disruptions."

News Ledes

There's another Republican debate tonight, this one from Tampa.

      ... Update: The New York Times is liveblogging the debate here. ...

     ... Update: Here's the Times report on the debate.    

New York Times: "A wealthy supporter of Newt Gingrich will donate $5 million to a 'super PAC' supporting his candidacy, providing a significant infusion of cash to the group as it seeks to defend Mr. Gingrich in Florida ahead of next week’s Republican primary, a person with knowledge of the contribution said on Monday. The supporter, Dr. Miriam Adelson, is the wife of Sheldon Adelson, a longtime Gingrich friend and conservative ally who contributed $5 million to the super PAC, Winning Our Future, earlier this month. The couple has now given a total of at least $10 million to Winning Our Future."

AP: "Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown and his chief Democratic rival, Elizabeth Warren, have signed a pledge to curb political attack ads by outside groups in their Massachusetts Senate race. Under the terms of the deal, each campaign would agree to donate half the cost of any third-party ad to charity if that ad either supports their candidacy or attacks their opponent by name."

NBC News: "Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk underwent successful surgery on Monday after having suffered a stroke on Saturday night, his office announced Monday. Kirk underwent surgery to remove a 4 inch by 8 inch piece of his skull to relieve swelling in the brain, Dr. Richard Fessler of Northwestern Memorial Hospital told reporters late Monday morning in Chicago."

AP: "In one of her last acts in office, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords met Monday with other survivors and supporters more than a year after gunfire interrupted a spontaneous meet-and-greet with constituents outside a Tucson grocery store. As part of a bittersweet day, Giffords finished the meeting she had started on the morning of Jan. 8, 2011, by spending time at her office with others who had been at the scene of the rampage that killed six people and injured 13 others, including Giffords."

Yahoo! News: "The Justice Department has charged a former CIA counter-terrorism analyst [John Kiriakou] with revealing classified information to journalists, including the identity of a covert U.S. intelligence interrogator." After his stint at the CIA, Kiriakou became an ABC News analyst. ...

     ... Update: the New York Times story is here.

** New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days. But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies."

New York Times: "As they prepared for a debate [in Florida] Monday night, the [Romney & Gingrich] campaigns were trading charges over the Congressional ethics inquiry on Mr. Gingrich in the 1990s, over Mr. Romney’s tax returns and over whether Mr. Gingrich’s consulting work for the government-sponsored mortgage lender Freddie Mac amounted to lobbying." Washington Post story here.

New York Times: "The 27 nations of the European Union on Monday increased pressure on Iran over its nuclear program by agreeing to ban oil imports."

New York Times: "Denouncing a new Arab League peace proposal that calls for Syria’s embattled president to resign, the government emphatically rejected the plan on Monday, calling it a blatant infringement on Syrian sovereignty and evidence of a 'conspiratorial scheme.'”

New York Times: "Pakistan’s Supreme Court is waging a campaign of judicial activism that has pitted it against an elected civilian government, in a legal fight that many Pakistanis fear could damage their fragile democracy and open the door to a fresh military intervention."

Washington Post: "International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde warned of a '1930s moment' for the world economy if Europe does not solve its fiscal problems, and said Germany must contribute more money to stave off financial disaster."

AP: "Italian officials were clearing hurdles Monday to begin pumping some half a million gallons of fuel from the capsized Costa Concordia that threaten an environmental catastrophe, as divers continued the search for 19 people known missing."

Reuters: "A cache of ancient Jewish scrolls from northern Afghanistan that has only recently come to light is creating a storm among scholars who say the landmark find could reveal an undiscovered side of medieval Jewry. The 150 or so documents, dated from the 11th century, were found in Afghanistan's Samangan province and most likely smuggled out...."

The Commentariat -- January 22, 2012

My column in the New York Times eXaminer is on Tom Friedman's advice to Obama & Romney. The NYTX front page is here. You can contribute here.

Maureen Dowd, writing her book report on Jody Jodi Kantor's The Obamas, writes that President and Mrs. Obama feel victimized by the press and unappreciated by the public.

Glenn Greenwald: "... just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world’s largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets — all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement.... Many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill ... is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites (they have this power thanks to the the 2008  PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers).... It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these debates over various proposed laws have on that power.... The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process...."

Right Wing World

I think grandiose thoughts. -- Newt Gingrich, during last night's victory speech

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "The rebirth of Newt Gingrich, a notion that seemed far-fetched only weeks ago, has upended a litany of assumptions about this turbulent race. It wounds [Mitt] Romney ... and raises the likelihood that the Republican contest could stretch into the springtime.... Mr. Gingrich’s showing [in South Carolina] suggests that Mr. Romney may no longer be able to count on his rivals splitting the opposing vote into harmless parcels, or on the support he is getting from the party establishment to carry him past a volatile conservative grass-roots movement." ...

Steve Kornacki of Salon on what's next for the GOP presidential nominating process; Kornacki posits four plausible outcomes.

** New York Times Editors: "On Saturday, [South Carolina] veered in an extreme direction, and the outcome spoke poorly for a party that allowed itself to be manipulated by the lowest form of campaigning. Newt Gingrich won the primary by a decisive margin of 12.5 percentage points, and there is no mystery about how he did it. Two-thirds of voters interviewed in exit polls said they made their decision on the basis of the two South Carolina debates, where Mr. Gingrich exploited racial resentment and hatred of the news media to connect with furious voters." ...

... Or, as Driftglass puts it, the Great Klansman prevailed once again in South Carolinam "flying though the night to dance on the bones of Abraham Lincoln and promise to restore the rage-drunk, inbred remnants of the Confederate South to their former glory, but only if they are sufficiently sincere in their hatred of the usual suspects -- gays, Negroes, uppity women and, of course, the Liberal media which spreads their terrible lies."

... It's not that I'm a good debater. It's that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people. -- Newt Gingrich, in his victory speech last night ...

... Dave Weigel of Slate: "This was hilarious, and it was true. Gingrich had gained ground by punishing the media in Monday’s and Thursday’s debates.... The 'elite media' isn’t running stories about the personal scandals of those other guys, because those scandals don’t exist. That wasn’t the point: Gingrich was saying that all criticism of Republicans from the media should be suspect.... In his victory speech..., he warned [that the elite media] 'have been trying for half century to force us to quit being American and become some other kind of system.'" See this related story which I linked a few days ago; conservatives trust only right-wing news because people like Gingrich have been extremely successful in their campaign to discredit honest reporting. There really is a Right Wing World, and it really is a parallel meta-world where the fact-based world is feared and loathed. This is extraordinary, and extraordinarily bad for our democracy. ...

... "I Think Grandiose Thoughts." Charles Pierce credits this Romney campaign release as the "best press release of the night." Read it. You might treasure it as an "historical" document. If you're not sure of the meaning of "grandiose," here it is: "characterized by affectation of grandeur ... or by absurd exaggeration." ...

... Jonathan Bernstein in the Washington Post: "Newt Gingrich remains almost as implausible a nominee as he’s been from the beginning of the campaign."

Charles Pierce: "If he is to be nominated — and I still think he probably will be — Willard Romney will be nominated by a party that would move en masse to the other end of a subway car rather than listen to him talk any more." ...

... Jia Lynn Yang of the Washington Post: the best way to understand Mitt Romney may be to see him as a corporatist whose bottom-line mindset is designed to improve corporate efficiency -- but at a human cost to which the consultant in Romney gives little consideration. Yang wonders if Romney can overcome his efficiency-expert self. The evidence she presents suggests he hasn't even tried.

Josh Israel of Think Progress on how the three Republicans on the Federal Election Commission have made Citizens United even worse.

News Ledes

New York Times: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) has announced she will step down from her Congressional seat next week to concentrate on her recovery from a debilitating gunshot wound. "The remainder of Ms. Giffords’s term will be filled by the winner of a special election, to be held on a date determined by Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican. In November, the district will be redrawn in a way that further favors Democrats, which may scare away some Republicans." Ms. Giffords' husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, says he will not run for the seat.

New York Times: "Croats voted by a two-to-one margin on Sunday to join the European Union, signaling that the bloc retains its allure despite the debt crisis engulfing the euro currency that many of its members use."

Los Angeles Times: "Satirist Stephen Colbert’s push for protest votes in the South Carolina primary fell flat Saturday as former candidate Herman Cain took just over 1% of the vote in the GOP presidential primary." CW: I noticed in reviewing the county-by-county totals that you could tell where the college towns were: those counties had an unusually high count for "other."

New York Times: "Mitt Romney said Sunday morning that he would release his 2010 tax returns on Tuesday, bowing to that mounting pressure that might have helped lead to his defeat in the South Carolina primary on Saturday."

AP: "Joe Paterno's doctors said that the former Penn State coach's condition had become 'serious,' following complications from lung cancer in recent days. The winningest major college football coach, Paterno was diagnosed shortly after Penn State's Board of Trustees ousted him Nov. 9 in the aftermath of the child sex abuse charges against former assistant Jerry Sandusky. While undergoing treatment, his health problems worsened when he broke his pelvis — the same injury he sustained during preseason practice last year." ...

... ** Washington Post Update: "Joe Paterno, the former Penn State football coach who was among the most admired figures in the annals of collegiate sports but whose reputation was shattered in the wake of a child abuse scandal involving one of his longtime assistants, died Sunday morning. He was 85. The death was announced by his family." ...

     ... Update: the New York Times obituary is here.

New York Times: "Egyptian authorities confirmed Saturday that a political coalition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old group that virtually invented political Islam, had won about 47 percent of the seats in the first Parliament elected since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. An alliance of ultraconservative Islamists won the next largest share of seats, about 25 percent."