The Commentariat -- November 28

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer: "In his most recent New York Times op-ed column, Frank Bruni warns that the 'presidential race is shaping up to be … especially mean and mendacious.' But Bruni himself, if not mean, is certainly mendacious. His central premise is untrue as is much of the 'evidence' he provides to try to support it." The NYTX front page is here. ...

... Today's Off Times Square topic is "The Pits." You'll have to read it to get it. But of course you can write about any topic related to politics.

NEW. How to Attack Female Candidates. Libby Copeland in Slate: "A review of the advertising suggests that conventions of negative advertising against women are often different from the conventions of advertising against men." Here are some "common tropes" used to defeat a woman running for office: she's nutty, a power-mad bitch, a wicked witch, frivolous, deviant, uppity, a woman. With sample ads.

George Packer of the New Yorker talks to Occupy Wall Street protesters about why they're participating in the movement.

The Fed: a Banker's BFF. Bob Ivry, et al., of Bloomberg News: "The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret.... The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue."

Paul Krugman: "... two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions." Krugman explains to dummies why raising taxes on today's super-rich would make a big dent in the deficit as would "taxing financial transactions, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on."

Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times: Mayor Cory Booker brings doughnuts & coffee to Occupy Newark protesters. "Indeed, the Occupy Newark protest has unfolded with disarming civility in one of the nation’s grittiest cities."

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: "Just a little more than an hour after some House Democrats recently demanded an inquiry into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s ethics, Senate Republicans stepped up the pressure on Justice Elena Kagan to take herself out of the court’s decision on the health-care reform act. The process repeated itself a few days later. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) called for the release of more documents about Kagan’s role as President Obama’s solicitor general; the liberal group People for the American Way came out with another broadside against Thomas. Accusations about both justices, from the left and the right, show no signs of dissipating now that the Supreme Court has said it will review the constitutionality of Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010."

Aram Roston of the Daily Beast: Supreme Foods is the new Halliburton, a European-based company which services, has imported all of the U.S military’s food into Afghanistan, and its contract was extended by the Pentagon in 2010 for two years and $4 billion without the normal competitive bidding. But that’s just part of its business.... The rise of Supreme Group is a classic tale of a Pentagon procurement system still laboring to overcome decades of suspicions about overpriced hammers and toilet seats, conflicts of interests, kickbacks, and a revolving door between the government and private contractors.

Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker: "Americans have never met a hydrocarbon they didn’t like. Oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, tar-sands oil, coal-bed methane, and coal, which is, mostly, carbon—the country loves them all, not wisely, but too well. To the extent that the United States has an energy policy, it is perhaps best summed up as: if you’ve got it, burn it. America’s latest hydrocarbon crush is shale gas."

Right Wing World

Mitt v. Mitt. Here's a related AP story:

John Cassidy of the New Yorker: With Republicans facing the dismal prospect of voting for either Mitt or Newt, the Donald is thinking of making a comeback -- just in time for his release of a new book.

Max Read of Gawker on the New Hampshire Union Leader's endorsement of Newt Gingrich: "It must be a proud moment for Newt, to be included with such GOP luminaries as Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes and Pierre S. DuPont IV — all of whom received the coveted Union Leader endorsement and went on to illustrious careers as a television racist, a publisher of listicles, and a terrible Wall Street Journal columnist, respectively." Hilariously, TwitterWorld is totally confused to learn a "union leader" has endorsed Newt. With sample Tweets. ...

... Not So Fast, Skeptics. Nate Silver demonstrates that the Union Leader endorsement actually does help a New Hampshire candidate: "As it happens, although only three of the six Republicans endorsed by The Union Leader during this period won their primary, all six outperformed their polling."

News Ledes

New York Times: "A federal judge in New York on Monday threw out a settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Citigroup over a 2007 mortgage derivatives deal, saying that the S.E.C.’s policy of settling cases by allowing a company to neither admit nor deny the agency’s allegations did not satisfy the law. The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, ruled that the S.E.C.’s $285 million settlement, announced last month, is “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest” because it does not provide the court with evidence on which to judge the settlement. The ruling could throw the S.E.C.’s enforcement efforts into chaos...."

NECN: "Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts fourth Congressional District has said he will not seek re-election for 2012." Updated Boston Globe report here.

     ... Update: C-SPAN has video of Frank's full press conference here.

Reuters: "Police in riot gear began closing in early on Monday on some 2,000 anti-Wall Street activists who defied a midnight deadline to vacate an eight-week-old encampment outside Los Angeles City Hall as some protesters blocked traffic."

AP: "Since the lifting two months ago of a longstanding U.S. ban on gays serving openly in the military, U.S. Marines across the globe have adapted smoothly and embraced the change, says their top officer, Gen. James F. Amos, who previously had argued against repealing the ban during wartime."

Al Jazeera: "Egyptians have started casting their ballots in the first parliamentary elections since former president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in a popular uprising earlier this year. Long queues were seen outside many polling stations amid tight security arrangements as voters flocked to the polls on Monday morning." The Al Jazeera liveblog is here.

New York Times: "Warnings that the debt crisis in Europe could cause credit to dry up across the global banking system, endangering the world economy, multiplied on Monday despite fresh efforts by European leaders to prevent the euro monetary union from fracturing."

New York Times: "Millions of voters in [the Congo] ... streamed into the polls on Monday and already many are bracing for serious unrest."

The Commentariat -- November 27

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on "Ross Douthat's Mythbuster Fail." Boomer Alert: Douthat thinks you're delusional. And Kennedy was either a "mediocre" or a "disastrous" president; you get only those two choices. The NYTX front page is here.

The Hope poster is kind of faded and a little dog-eared. -- Barack Obama ...

... Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times: "... with unemployment stubbornly at 9 percent and consumer confidence at or near record lows, [Obama campaign operatives] are settling on a strategy that incorporates the combativeness of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 drive, the anti-Congress zeal of Harry S. Truman’s 1948 campaign and the disciplined focus of George W. Bush’s 2004 blitz against Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. The result is not your college-age daughter’s Obama campaign of hopeful, transcendent politics." ...

... Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "Nearly a year before Election Day, Republican presidential candidates and conservative action groups are already spending heavily on television advertising aimed at casting [President] Obama as a failure. Their tactics, the aggressive and sometimes misleading kind not typically used until much further along in a campaign season, have led to a spat with Democrats in what is shaping up to be the most costly election advertising war yet."

Finally, Someone Speaks up for the One Percent. John Kenney of the New Yorker: "We come from near and far, by any means necessary, some on private jets, others on extremely large private jets.... Our numbers may be smaller than those demonstrating in New York and other cities, but we are still a movement, coalesced around a cause, sleeping two and sometimes three people to a villa.... We’re angry. We’re angry at something we’re calling 'imagined frustration.' By this we mean that, except for Congress, the White House, banks, major lobbyists, and the editorial boards of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, no one is listening to us. And we’re tired of it." ...

... the tax code shouldn’t allow the wealthy the kind of loopholes that let them, essentially, force other taxpayers to underwrite donations to their pet causes. -- Scott Klinger of Business for Shared Prosperity ...

... How to Make Millions without Paying Taxes. David Kocieniewski of the New York Times: "From offshore havens to a tax-sheltering stock deal so audacious that Congress later enacted a law forbidding the tactic, [Ronald] Lauder has for decades aggressively taken advantage of tax breaks that are useful only for the most affluent.... 'There’s real truth to the idea that the tax code for the 1 percent is different from the tax code for the 99 percent,' said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Colorado...."

The political environment in the Republican primary ... basically means you can’t be authentic unless you’ve got a single-digit I.Q. -- Bill Clinton

Nicholas Kristof: "Obama has done better than many critics on the left or the right give him credit for."

Paul Krugman writes two blogposts refuting David Brooks' nonfactual (a/k/a big fat lying) assertion that taxing the rich won't make a dent in the deficit (here's Brooks, and BTW, here is James Kwak of Baseline Scenario also debunking Brooks' claim). In his first post on the topic, Krugman begins,

I’ve been getting the predictable hysterical reactions to today’s column. And it’s true — I’m a Sharia Jewish atheist Marxist who hates America! Bwahahaha!

But one thing actually worth reacting to is the assertion I keep getting that this is all a distraction, that even if we seized all the money of the top 0.1% it would make no difference to the fiscal outlook. Here’s a piece of advice nobody will take: before you make assertions about numbers, look at the numbers.

      ... Krugman goes on to, well, look at the numbers. What a concept! In his follow-up post published late Saturday afternoon, Krugman uses a recent analysis from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center to bolster his point:

Seriously, the notion that denying health care to the near-poor is a serious deficit-reduction policy, but raising taxes on the very rich is not, is not something you can justify at all on the basis of the actual numbers. Anyone [CW: like, say, Brooks] who says different is practicing, well, class warfare.

CW: Columnist as Self-Parodist. If you want to read how a columnist writes speculation and distortions to demonstrate that "both sides do it," read Frank Bruni's column, which ostensibly is about how politicians use speculation and distortions to misrepresent their opponents' positions. When Bruni can't find anything negative to say about Obama's campaign, he just speculates -- based on a speculative Politico story -- that Obama will use speculations and distortions to discredit his opponent. Undeterred by lack of evidence, Bruni also disparages an accurate remark Obama made in 2008. He throws in Democrats and Republicans on the Super Committee too in service of his false equivalency.

WalMart Rules. Will Evans of California Watch: "In a push to expand across California without interference, Wal-Mart is increasingly taking advantage of the state’s initiative system to threaten elected officials with costly special elections and to avoid environmental lawsuits. The Arkansas-based retailer has hired paid signature gatherers to circulate petitions to build new superstores or repeal local restrictions on big-box stores. Once 15 percent of eligible voters sign the petitions, state election law [forces]... City councils [to] either approve the Wal-Mart-drafted measure without changes or put it to a special election." Thanks to a reader for the link. ...

... Chris Hawley of the AP: "As reports of shopping-related violence rolled in this week from Los Angeles to New York, experts say a volatile mix of desperate retailers and cutthroat marketing has hyped the traditional post-Thanksgiving sales to increasingly frenzied levels. With stores opening earlier, bargain-obsessed shoppers often are sleep-deprived and short-tempered. Arriving in darkness, they also find themselves vulnerable to savvy parking-lot muggers."

Right Wing World

Newt, Inc. Karen Tumulty & Dan Eggen of the Washington Post: "Former House speaker Newt Gingrich transfigured himself from a political flameout into a thriving business conglomerate. The power of the Gingrich brand fueled a for-profit collection of enterprises that generated close to $100 million in revenue over the past decade...."

News Ledes

AP: "A record 226 million shoppers visited stores and websites during the four-day holiday weekend starting on Thanksgiving Day, up from 212 million last year, according to early estimates by The National Retail Federation released on Sunday. Americans spent more, too: The average holiday shopper spent $398.62 over the weekend, up from $365.34 a year ago."

Reuters: " France and Germany are planning a quick new pact on budget discipline that might persuade the European Central Bank to ramp up its government bond purchases...."

New York Times: "In center city Philadelphia, hundreds gathered outside City Hall in a show of solidarity ahead of a city-imposed Sunday evening deadline to clear a campsite there. The protesters braced for a police sweep, but it did not take place immediately after the 5 p.m. deadline, surprising few."

AP: "Bernie Fine was fired Sunday by Syracuse University after a third man accused the assistant basketball coach of molesting him nine years ago.... Zach Tomaselli, 23, of Lewiston, Maine, said Sunday that he told police that Fine molested him in 2002 in a Pittsburgh hotel room.... Tomaselli, who faces sexual assault charges in Maine involving a 14-year-old boy, said during a telephone interview with The Associated Press that he signed an affidavit accusing Fine following a meeting with Syracuse police last week in Albany. Tomaselli's father, meanwhile, maintains his son is lying."

Al Jazeera: "The Arab League has approved sanctions against Syria, which could include halting co-operation with the nation's central bank and stopping flights to the country. The 22-nation body voted 19-3 to impose the sanctions on the recommendations at its headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, on Sunday."

AP: "The [CW: extreme right-wing] New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in Sunday editions, signaling that rival Mitt Romney isn't the universal favorite and that the state's largest newspaper could reset the contest there with six weeks to go before voters cast their ballots." You can read the Union Leader's endorsement here.

The Commentariat -- November 26

My New York Times eXaminer column contrasts former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, who died yesterday, with the current crop of Times op-ed writers. See yesterday's Ledes for Wicker's obituary. The New York Times eXaminer's front page is here.

We have a Weekend Open Thread up for Off Times Square.

Christina Hoag of the AP: "Occupy LA, a 485-tent camp surrounding City Hall ... has remained largely a peaceful commune. Police arrive on site only when called in to investigate petty crimes. Marches have resulted in only about five spontaneous arrests — the other 70 or so involved protesters who deliberately got arrested to make a political statement. City leaders are now hoping that peace can withstand what could be its biggest test. The city has given campers a 12:01 a.m. Monday to clear out of the park, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at a Friday afternoon news conference." ...

... Stacey Patton in the Washington Post: Black Americans are greatly underrepresented in the Occupy movement. Patton suggests some reasons. "Beyond a lack of leaders to inspire them to join the Occupy fold, blacks are not seeing anything new for themselves in the movement. Why should they ally with whites who are just now experiencing the hardships that blacks have known for generations?" ...

... I’m not mad at the tea party for being so loud. I’m mad at the progressives for be ing so quiet the past couple of years and not having that fire and that intensity at the grass-roots level to give both parties something to respond to that’s not just cut, cut, cut. You hear people talking about a disappointment [in Obama] and this kind of thing. I’m still of the view it was never, ‘Yes, he can.’ It’s supposed to be, ‘Yes, we can.’ And the ‘we’ was not evident in a couple of those years. -- Van Jones ...

... Joseph Williams of Politico: "While still a high-value target for conservatives, the charismatic [Van] Jones has ... become a superstar of the resurgent left, founding — with MoveOn.org — the American Dream Movement, a grass-roots political force modeled after the tea party. His issue is no longer just green jobs, but to push back against the right’s domination of economic policy and social issues that he dates to the 2010 election." ...

... Naomi Wolf in the Guardian: "As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.... Logic ... implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces ... to make war on peaceful citizens.... Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams." ...

     ... In a post titled "How Bullshit Magically Turns into Fact," Karoli, who also writes for Crooks and Liars, debunks Wolf's "sources." Wolf may not necessarily be wrong, Karoli concludes, but she's got bupkus on which to base her conspiracy theory. ...

... CW: In yesterday's Off Times Square, Valerie L. T. recommended watching the Democracy Now! panel discussion about the Occupy Movement. She writes, "If you don’t have the time to listen to the entire show, I encourage you to tune in to hear William Greider and Naomi Klein. They start speaking about 24 minutes into the show." I have not yet had a chance to listen (supersize it; this is a fussy video I can't enlarge):

Tom Hayden in Nation of Change: "The pepper spraying of eleven UC Davis students is a startling visual revelation of a pattern repeated over two decades: the widespread use of a potent chemical compound to subdue political protesters, prison inmates and inner city youths, in spite of numerous warnings by health officials of potentially life-threatening effects."

Here's the First Family standing with the Occupy Black Friday boycott:

Oh God! Joel Siegel of ABC News: "Critics of President Obama felt little holiday cheer after the president did not thank God in his Thanksgiving-themed weekly Internet address. They immediately took to Twitter and the Internet to voice anger and disbelief.... Obama mentioned God once in a closing "God bless you," to Americans watching the Internet address. However, the President explicitly thanked God earlier in the week in his written Thanksgiving proclamation.... Three of the Republican presidential candidates – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – issued Thanksgiving statements that omitted any references to God. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry mentioned God in their statements."

Right Wing World

Reid Epstein of Politico: "To hear the Republican presidential candidates tell it, the U.S. Constitution is the guiding light of democracy, a bedrock document so perfect and precise that it shouldn’t be challenged, interpreted or besmirched by modern-day judges. Except for all the parts the GOP candidates themselves want to change. The same candidates promising to appoint strict constructionist judges clearly think the Framers, for all their wisdom and foresight, forgot a few things, which they now want to tack on with an array of proposed constitutional amendments that would bulk up the document." ...

... They probably got their ideas from John Hodgman:

Gail Collins reads Ron Paul: "Basically, Paul seems to want to revert to the 18th century, when every bank could set its own monetary policy and every community ran its own schools — presuming, of course, the community wanted to pay for them. 'The founders of this country were well educated, mostly by being home-schooled or taught in schools associated with a church,' he reasons. Those of us who were not born in the gentry could presumably go back to sewing and reaping hay."

CW: I tried to watch this video of David Brooks & Charlie Rose bewailing Obama's failure to force Democrats on the defunct Supercommittee to "cut entitlements," followed by Brooks' applauding Mitt Romney for his plan to partially privatize Medicare. I quit about halfway thru, but maybe you can tough it out. As Heather of Crooks & Liars asks, "Who needs Fox News when we've got PBS?"

The Ledes

AP: "Pakistan on Saturday accused NATO helicopters of firing on two army checkpoints in the northwest and killing 25 soldiers, then retaliated by closing a key border crossing used by the coalition to supply its troops in neighboring Afghanistan.The incident Friday night was a major blow to already strained relations between Islamabad and U.S.-led forces fighting in Afghanistan." New York Times story here.

AP: "U.S. Marines will march out of Afghanistan by the thousands next year..., senior U.S. military officers say. At the same time, U.S. reinforcements will be sent to eastern Afghanistan in a bid to reverse recent gains by insurgents targeting Kabul, the capital."

It's a Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood. "Black Friday's typical jostling and jockeying took a more ominous turn during this year's bargain-hunting ritual with a shooting, a pepper spraying and other episodes of violence that left several people injured."

Los Angeles Times: "The City Hall park where Occupy Los Angeles protesters are camped will be closed at 12:01 a.m. Monday, according to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, triggering what officials hope will be an end to the nation's largest remaining Occupy camp. But police might not immediately begin removing protesters who linger.... Officials hope in the coming days to help protesters move their belongings and to find beds in homeless shelters for those at the camp who need them."

AP: "Three American students arrested during a protest in Cairo caught flights out of Egypt early Saturday, according to an airport official and an attorney for one of the trio."

AP: "NBA players and owners ... reached a tentative agreement early Saturday to end the 149-day lockout and hope to begin the delayed season with a marquee tripleheader Dec. 25. Most of a season that seemed in jeopardy of being lost entirely will be salvaged if both sides approve the handshake deal."

Reuters: "Arab officials will prepare plans for sanctions against Syria on Saturday over its failure to let Arab League monitors oversee an initiative aimed at ending a violent crackdown on protesters seeking an end to President Bashar al-Assad's rule."