The Commentariat -- June 13

I've posted an Open Thread on Off Times Square. Even if you don't comment, the threads are worth reading, as at least a thousand readers a day have discovered.

Robert Reich: "We’re in a vicious cycle in which lower wages and net job losses and high debt are causing consumers to cut their spending — which is causing businesses to cut back on hiring and reduce pay. There’s no way out of this morass without bold leadership from Washington to rekindle consumer demand." Thanks to commenter Pam Criscione for the link.

Paul Krugman explains why Sen. Joe Lieberman's idea to raise the Medicare eligibility age is "so bad, so wrongheaded, that you’re almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails." CW: The best thing about January 2013, no matter who wins the presidential election & who controls the House and Senate is that Joe Lieberman will be OUTTA THERE.

Here's our old friend Larry Summers giving another demonstration of how an economist admits he fucked up without admitting he fucked up. While he worked in the Obama Administration, Summers declared the 2008 stimulus package, like Goldilocks' porridge, "just right." (See, ferinstance, Summers' speech in July 2009, which Krugman highlighted in this blogpost.) But now, in a Washington Post op-ed, Summers finds that porridge was "too cold" & is promoting additional stimulus, mostly in the forms of a payroll tax cut to employers & infrastructure improvements. Oh, Larry, you are just too hot. ...

... And here's why Larry proposed primarily tax cuts instead of a more targeted & effective stimulus: E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post: "Last Thursday, Senate Democrats devoted their weekly policy lunch to a simple question: What proposals to spur job-creation have any chance of passing Congress, given Republican control of the House and the effective veto power the GOP has in a Senate where a simple majority no longer rules? ... The senators concluded that the only stimulative measures with any chance of getting Republican votes involve tax cuts. That’s why you’re hearing a lot of talk about extending the payroll tax cut another year, and perhaps extending it to the part of the tax that employers pay."

Felix Salmon of Reuters can't see much daylight between the testimony of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. When the views of a Democratic Secretary of the Treasury are indistinguishable from those of a big bank CEO, we no longer have to wait for the oligarchy to begin. It is here.

Big Brother, Chapter 'Leventy-'Leven. Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention."

David Hilzenrath of the Washington Post: "Regulators are having such a difficult time translating into action the Wall Street overhaul Congress ordered last year that they are cutting the investment industry-- and themselves-- some slack. New requirements governing certain financial instruments are scheduled to take effect on July 16, almost a year after enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act. But the Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday that it is providing 'temporary relief' from some of the provisions. With the deadline looming, the SEC said it will extend some temporary rules and offer relief from others that predated Dodd-Frank. At issue are 'security-based swaps,' a form of derivative."

For the New York Times, Scott Turow favorably reviews Tangled Webs, "James B. Stewart’s engrossing re-examination of a quartet of celebrated federal investigations, all of which culminated in convictions for lying: the insider-trading probe that ultimately ensnared the homemaking diva Martha Stewart; the complex inquiry to determine who leaked to reporters the identity of the former C.I.A. covert operative Valerie Plame Wilson, which led to the perjury conviction of the ex-vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis Libby; the long-running San Francisco grand jury probe into steroid use by athletes that implicated the sprinter Marion Jones and (after the book was finished) the home-run king Barry Bonds; and the Securities and Exchange Commission inquiries in which the reigning king of swindlers, Bernard L. Madoff, managed to gull overworked young investigators and keep his Ponzi scheme alive, prior to his ultimate undoing in 2008."

Darryl Fears of the Washington Post: "With wildfire season starting early and fires already raging across Arizona, the U.S. Forest Service is confronting a longtime problem that many inside and outside the agency think needs an immediate fix: The large tanker planes leased by the agency to fight such blazes have been flying, on average, about 50 years and are rapidly becoming unsafe to deploy. As worries deepen, the Forest Service is preparing — finally, critics say — to ask Congress this summer for money to replace its fleet of 18 large air tankers.... Owners and operators of private aviation companies that lease air tankers under contract or on a call-when-needed basis have been pressing for this kind of action since two air tanker crashes in 2002."

Right Wing World *

Steve Benen on the double standard Republicans apply to sex scandals: Weiner must go and it's "a failue of Democratic leadership" that they took two or three days to call for his resignation; but Republican leadership has never called for the resignation of Sen. David Vitter, who broke the law by making dates with prostitutes five years ago, or Sen. John Ensign, who probably broke the law by paying off his mistress's husband two years ago. (Vitter is still serving; Ensign quit to avoid having to testify before the Senate Ethics Committee.)

Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: Presidential candidate & former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) says doctors who provide abortions to rape & incest victims (or any other woman) should be criminally charged. With video, in case you can't believe anyone would say such a thing.

* Is a dangerous place for reasonable, responsible people.

Local News

Eric Kleefeld of TPM explains how Wisconsin Democrats are countering the Republican dirty trick of running Republican challengers (that is, fake Democrats) to force Democratic primary recall elections.

News Ledes

New York Times: "President Obama said on Monday that if he were in Representative Anthony D. Weiner’s position, 'I would resign,' according to NBC, which conducted an extensive interview with him."

New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected a First Amendment challenge to a Nevada law that barred officials there from voting on matters in which they had a conflict of interest. Such legislative recusal laws are common, and a decision striking them down or even subjecting them to strict First Amendment scrutiny would have reshaped politics across the nation." You can read the decision, written by Justice Scalia, here.

New York Times: "Lulz Security, a group of hackers who have claimed responsibility for a number of recent online data breaches, claimed two more victims on Monday, including Bethesda Softworks, a gaming company, and the Web site of the United States Senate."

After meeting with his Jobs & Competitiveness Council (CW: which is a cruel joke on the American people) in Morrisville, North Carolina, President Obama will make remarks at 1:45 pm ET. Politico: "President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy. The catch? Nearly three years into Obama's presidency, the White House can't point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting." ...

     ... Updates: Washington Post follow-up story here. The transcript of the President's remarks is here.

AP: Republican presidential candidates will debate this evening at St. Anselm's College in Manchester, New Hampshire. It's the first debate in which usual frontrunner Gov. Mitt Romney will participate. ...

     ... The Hill Update: "Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) announced during Monday evening's presidential debate that she'd filed paperwork to run for president." AND here's the Washington Post story on the debate: "Given opportunities to critique one another’s stances, the seven competitors repeatedly deflected the questions to attacks on the president."

Reuters: "Rerouting ambulances away from overcrowded emergency rooms may be costing patients their lives, U.S. researchers say. For patients with heart attack, high levels of rerouting are tied to a three percent higher risk of death, they report in the Journal of the American Medical Association." CW: this is another consequence of people not having access to health insurance. Even though you yourself may have insurance, people who have no insurance are crowding the emergency room. They could kill you.

Off-Topic

Professor of Philosophy Costica Bradatan has an interesting essay in the New York Times "The Stone" on "philosophy as an art of dying." We're not talking batik here; Bradatan examines the famous death of a few famous philosophers, centering on the most famous of all -- Socrates. Bradatan posits, "Perhaps that to be a philosopher means more than just being ready to 'suffer' death, to accept it passively at some indefinite point in time; it may also require one to provoke his own death, to meet it somehow mid-way." Undeterred by the seriousness of the subject, I dashed off a comment, which at this writing has not been published. Here ya go:

Dying is just half of the job; the other half is weaving a good narrative of martyrdom and finding an audience for it.
-- Costica Bradatan

Quite right. Of course most people's favorite martyr-philosopher is the Jesus character of the gospels. The narrations are superb! I don't think there's any question but that the story of Jesus's death, particularly as told by the author of Mark, who wrote the first gospel (no, really, it wasn't Matthew!), is based in part on Plato's narration of Socrates' death. 

But I should say my favorite martyr-philosopher's death was that of the Roman Seneca (the Younger). Philosophers & theologians of the day were much enamored of the idea of the "noble death." In the Socratic tradition, Cynic and Stoic philosophers began to see political martyrdom as a sort of bona fide for philosophers.  Persecution and execution, they reasoned, were proofs that the victim had sought justice and was righteous to the end.  Persecution was a badge of honor.  Martyrdom became the equivalent of a Ph.D. in philosophy. Using this "logic," a person didn’t even have to be very smart or very thoughtful to become a philosopher. Seneca saw the athletes' and gladiators' suffering and deaths as moral triumphs: a "reward [that] is not a garland or palm or a trumpeter ... but rather virtue, steadfastness of soul, and a peace that is won for all time...."

 Seneca also saw brotherly love as an incentive for a noble death.  Here he is in De beneficiis [7.12]:

But my end of friendship is to have one dearer to me than myself, and for the saving of whose life I would cheerfully lay down my own....

If you think that sounds an awful lot like a saying by the subject of the later-written gospels, you'd be right. (See John 15:13.) Presuming Seneca wrote "Hercules at Oeta" (scholars debate the authorship), he also wrote a play which not only extolled the noble death but also hypothesized that a resurrection might ensue if the dying philosopher were noble enough.

So how did Seneca himself die? In 65 C.E., Seneca earned his badge of courage in a personal tragicomedy.  The Roman Emperor Nero, whom Seneca had taught and counseled, accused Seneca of conspiring to kill him. Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide. Eager to oblige, Seneca first tried slitting his wrists, but that didn’t kill him. Then he drank hemlock a la Socrates. That didn’t work, either. He finally succumbed in what may have been the original accidental hot-tub death: He jumped into a hot pool in an attempt to make the blood from his slit wrists flow faster, but instead he suffocated from the hot steam rising from the pool.

Noble deaths really are not that good an idea. Or else Seneca needed a better narrator than I.

The Commentariat -- June 12

I've posted an Open Thread for today's Off Times Square. Update: see Karen Garcia's excellent comment on Dowd here; the Times moderators axed it, at least so far.

Maureen Dowd argues that "At a moment when powerful men are self-destructing by betraying their wives, [Newt] Gingrich is self-destructing by honoring his."

Know-It-All Tom Friedman explains the U.S. economic crisis to anyone who has just emerged from a coma that began prior to September 2008.

Chuck Mikolajczak of Reuters: "Don't be surprised if Wall Street racks up a seventh consecutive week of losses as the likelihood of more poor economic data and other disconcerting signals outweigh any thoughts that stocks are cheap." CW: the good news -- if Wall Street keeps taking hits, maybe to help out their BFFs, the Administration & the Congress will wake up & DO something to improve the overall economic picture. They obviously will do nothing when it's only ordinary Americans who are taking hits.

Scott Wilson & Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill are applying fresh pressure on the Obama administration to draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan faster than many military leaders say is responsible, forcing the president to balance his party’s demands with his generals’ on-the-ground assessment as he nears another milestone in the war."

Pakistani journalist Umar Cheema in a New York Times op-ed on the murder of investigative reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad & on his own abduction & torture for "upsetting the government" and "defying the authorities."

Michael Shear of the New York Times: "... there are signs that [Iowa's] influence on the nominating process could be ebbing and that the nature of the voters who tend to turn out for the Republican caucuses — a heavy concentration of evangelical Christians and ideological conservatives overlaid with parochial interests — is discouraging some candidates from competing there."

Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame" -- the Update. David von Drehle of Time: "More than half a century later, journalist Barry Estabrook has returned to those fields and reports that things are no better. Read the citation from Estabrook's book Tomatoland. CW: The Fort Myers News-Press has published several stories about the enslavement of farm workers in South Florida. Law enforcement has also uncovered sex slaves rings here. Most of these slaves are foreign-born.

Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life.... He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me -- which forced his resignation facing impeachment -- are now legal. -- Daniel Ellsberg

CW: So we have real slaves in America. In the "Democracy Now" segment I posted yesterday, we learned that because of the 40-year-old "war on drugs," there are more African Americans under correctional control than there were slaves in 1850. Income disparity between the rich & middle class is much greater now than it was in the Eisenhower years & that disparty continues to widen as tax policies encourage the establishment of an aristocracy. Millions of Americans are still living in poverty. American children go to bed hungry. K-12 education is getting worse for everyone but the elite, & higher education has become significantly less affordable. Big banks & large corpoations have more power than ever. Healthcare for middle-class Americans less than age 65 is becoming less & less affordable. The political parties can no longer work together because a good percentage of Republicans are nuts. Instead of the activist progressive Warren Court we have the activist regressive Roberts Court. Government services have been sharply reduced. Much of our infrastructure is half-a-century old and crumbling. Nixon's impeachable war crimes are no longer war crimes. We torture our prisoners. We're arguably engaged in three wars. Climate change is leading to severe weather patterns & all the Florida homes encumbered by underwater mortgages will soon be literally underwater. The United States was a 20th-century nation. The 21st century belongs to somebody else. ...

... BUT on to the important news. I know Anthony Weiner is in tweetment & we're all supposed to be politically correct. Well, Mr. Politically Incorrect himself & "Glee" star Jane Lynch do a reading of the Weiner tweets. Pathetically hilarious:

Right Wing World *

Gordon Gekko for President. Steve Benen: Mitt "Romney ... would just as soon hope people forget he was even a governor.... Businessman Mitt [is] running as a less ridiculous version of Herman Cain.... I think Romney’s biggest problem is that the message brings to the fore his key weaknesses — Romney’s record on jobs is atrocious.... During his tenure, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in jobs growth.... And this is the part of Romney’s record he’s most proud of. Romney slashed American jobs as if his career depended on it — and it did." Here's the hilarious -- and accurate -- Colbert segment Benen highlights in his post. All you need to know about Mitt Romney's vaunted business acumen:

* Where facts never intrude.

News Ledes

Al Jazeera: "The escalating military offensive in northwest Syria began after what corroborating accounts said was a shoot-out between members of the military secret police in Jisr al-Shughur, some of whom refused to open fire on unarmed protesters. A growing number of first-hand testimonies from defected soldiers give a rare but dramatic insight into the cracks apparently emerging in Syria’s security forces as the unrelenting assault on unarmed protesters continues."

Politico: "Rep. Anthony Weiner took several pictures of himself grabbing his privates, part of a new batch of embarrassing photos that surfaced online Sunday morning. The gossip website TMZ.com posted 11 photos it claimed were taken in the House member’s gym, a private exercise facility in the Capitol complex that is open to current and former lawmakers." The TMZ page is here.

New York Times: "Syrian troops retook control of a rebellious northern town on Sunday, smashing what remained of an armed uprising after thousands of residents fled into neighboring Turkey, barely escaping a force backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, according to residents and the Syrian state media."

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, in a photo released by her staff today. Staff did not identify the woman with her. Photo by P. K. Weis of SouthwestPhotoBank.Washington Post: "Two photos of a smiling Rep. Gabrielle Giffords were released early Sunday by her office, her hair shorn short but few other telling signs of her gunshot wound to the head. The Facebook photos, taken May 17 outside her Houston hospital, are the first clear snapshots of Giffords since the shooting five months ago during a constituent meet-and-greet in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson." Giffords' Facebook page is here. ...

... Washington Post: "U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords could be released from a rehabilitation hospital in Houston sometime this month, a top aide says, offering the latest indication that the Arizona congresswoman is making progress in recovering from a gunshot wound to the head."

New York Times: "The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy 'shadow' Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks."

The Hill: "The third-ranking House Democrat is breaking with party leaders who called for Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to resign. Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn (D-S.C.) issued a brief statement Saturday saying 'he stood by his earlier assertion that 'the full caucus should address this issue when we meet next week.”