The Commentariat -- November 24

It feels pretty good to stop at least one shellacking this November. -- Barack Obama, on pardoning the National Thanksgiving Turkey

     ... BUT They're "Too Fat to Live." In case you're wondering why the President does this, here's "the (somewhat dark) history of presidential turkey pardoning" from Melissa Lee of Mental Floss.

Sarah Palin aims her class warfare artillery at Barbara Bush:

I don't want to concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing, because I don't think the majority of Americans want to put up with the blue-bloods -- and I want to say it will all due respect because I love the Bushes -- the blue-bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition. -- Sarah Palin

       ... Matt DeLong of the Washington Post has more.

Vice President Joe Biden, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, makes the case for ratification of the New START treaty. ...

... President Jimmy Carter in a Washington Post op-ed: "No one can completely understand the motivations of the North Koreans, but it is entirely possible that their recent revelation of their uranium enrichment centrifuges and Pyongyang's shelling of a South Korean island Tuesday are designed to remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future. Ultimately, the choice for the United States may be between diplomatic niceties and avoiding a catastrophic confrontation." ...

... AND in more important presidential opinionating, President Bill Clinton , in a Sports Illustrated op-ed, writes that he wants the 2022 World Cup to be played in the U.S.A.

Both Maureen Dowd & Bob Wright have terrific columns in today's New York Times that will have you painting peace signs instead of basting turkeys:

     ... Dowd writes about the con man who probably fooled Hamid Karzai & definitely fooled NATO & American intel & leaders, including Gen. David Petraeus, into thinking he was a top Taliban commander. They wasted months negotiating with & paying off this guy, whom they inexplicitly let get away. "And we wonder why we haven’t found Osama bin Laden," Dowd sniffs. (The backstory, which Dowd doesn't link, is here.). * ...

     ... Wright compares the Afghanistan War to the Vietnam War & concludes, "... in terms of the long-run impact on America’s economic and physical security, the Afghanistan war is as bad as the Vietnam War except for the ways in which it’s worse."

* Top Ten Ways to Tell Your New Taliban Friend Is an Imposter.

I don't think about Sarah Palin. -- Barack Obama, via ABC News ...

... Michael Shear of the New York Times writes a brief post that will pretty much save your reading Sarah Palin's latest contribution to literature.

** Todd Lassa of Motor Trend writes on of the best putdowns of Rush Limbaugh (& George Will, too) I've ever seen. A classic retort from somebody who knows what he's talking about to a blowhard or two without a clue. CW: but in Limboville, who cares about facts?

Eighty-eight years of the presidential vote, using county-level data:

You Knew This Was Coming. Peter Baker of the New York Times: Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, "t he top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee said Tuesday that he opposes ratification of a new arms control treaty with Russia because he considers its verification measures inadequate.... Administration officials ... disputed his characterization, saying the reformulated inspection system would provide what one called a 'more detailed look than ever before' at Russia’s nuclear arsenal." CW: expect a roll-out of more of these unsupported Republican assertions.

"We [Are Not] the People." Alan Fram of the AP: "Tea party backers fashion themselves as 'we the people,' but polls show the Republican Party's most conservative and energized voters are hardly your average crowd. According to an Associated Press-GfK Poll this month, 84 percent who call themselves tea party supporters don't like how President Barack Obama is handling his job — a view shared by just 35 percent of all other adults. Tea partiers are about four times likelier than others to back repealing Obama's health care overhaul and twice as likely to favor renewing tax cuts for the highest-earning Americans. Exit polls of voters in this month's congressional elections reveal similar gulfs."

Americans on Hypocrisy Watch. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling: "Most Americans think incoming Congressmen who campaigned against the health care bill should put their money where their mouth is and decline government provided health care now that they're in office." ...

... Steven Thomma of McClatchy News, in an article titled "New Poll Undercuts GOP Claims of a Midterm Mandate": "A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll. The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether." CW: when are weasly, scaredy-cat Democrats going to stop hiding from the fact that Americans are on their side? Americans want Democratic programs, and Democrats are afraid to run on them. What idiots! ...

... A Congressman with a Sense of Humor. Julian Pecquet of The Hill: "Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) is daring Republicans to make good on one of their top legislative priorities: repealing the healthcare law."  Ackerman will "introduce a series of bills" he calls, get this, HIPA-CRIT (Health Insurance Protects America -- Can't Repeal IT), which "will give Republicans a chance to 'put up, or sit down' on their campaign promise to repeal the eight-month-old law":

These bills will be their chance to at long last restore liberty and repeal the evil monster they've dubbed 'Obamacare.' -- Gary Ackerman

Ryan Grim: "By a double-digit margin, voters want Congress to amend the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that allows unlimited corporate spending on elections, a new poll paid for by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has found." CW: this is yet another issue where Democrats are in sync with popular opinion & Republicans are not.

Dana Milbank: "The party committees, as they are known, deserve much of the blame for the lamentable state of our politics. In recent years, these long-standing bodies - the DSCC, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee - have become leading causes of the dysfunction in Congress."

Susanne Craig & Kevin Roose of the New York Times: "Two years after the onset of the financial crisis, the stock market is recovering and Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again. And this means in some cases they are spending again — at times cautiously, but sometimes with a familiar swagger." With video. CW: how nice for them; their irresponsibility took away millions of Americans' livelihoods, but, hey, they're buying luxury cars & throwing lavish parties. ...

... David Dayan of Firedoglake on the best corporate profits ever: "This is something of a dream for corporate America – bigger profits without those meddling workers to pay....  'Uncertainty' is blamed for the lack of job growth, but corporations are sitting on giant mounds of cash while they bask in the glow of their strategy to increase their profit margins by cost-cutting.... In the other side of the funhouse mirror, American workers continue to have little hope for returning to the job.... But capitalism is working, and the great malefactors of wealth are happy. Happy Thanksgiving." ...

... Steve Benen: "It's pretty ironic that those complaining about the Obama administration's alleged 'anti-business' policies also happen to making money hand over fist. Corporate profits are up; all of the major Wall Street indexes are up; and private-sector job growth is up, but fat-cat conservatives and corporate lobbyists nevertheless ... were, apparently, outraged by the scourge of corporate prosperity." ...

... Here's why I love Digby. The Politico article to which she refers & which I ignored as crap, is here. As Digby says, she doesn't know if the article is cover for Obama so he can kowtow to business "or if it's just thuggish behavior designed to bend him to their will, but it really doesn't matter does it?" ...

... BUT Matt Yglesias' commentary suggests maybe we should all get a grip. Corporate profits aren't really at an all-time high if you adjust for inflation, which only makes sense.

Jordy Yager of The Hill: "The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary."

Tanya Somanader of Think Progress: Kentucky Senator-elect Rand Paul is really a loon, You can see why Paul's campaign suppressed the accompanying video, recorded in 2009, in which Paul shares his "insights on the inevitable coming of the thought police, a new Hitler, and 'martial law.”

Reversal of Styles. Fortunes: Status Quo

David Brooks makes the point that "For all of Washington’s talk, we are not on the verge of a budget breakthrough if a political strategy remains elusive." It appears my comment has been scotched again, even though I was pretty nice to Brooks today, tho here I've scrapped some of the nice:

This essay is a reversal of style for our Mr. Brooks. Brooks generally begins with substance & concludes with an insupportable spate of nonsense. Today he starts with balderdash but ends on a note of essential truth.

So he begins: This has been a great month for conversation. Right. If "conversation" is defined as two people standing in a room yelling at each other with their ears covered.

Next we read, These ... liberals are certainly not going to hand control of the government to the few remaining budget hawks and tell them to go remake the welfare state. We don't live in a welfare state. Our social safety net has more holes in it than do the safety nets of any other economically-advanced country, & more holes than many less affluent countries.

In the good ole days the leadership class practice[d] self-restraint. Yeah, those canings on the floor of the House were gentlemanly banter. The Civil War was a blip. The impeachment of President Clinton was a quaint anomaly.

Nowadays, Each party has its own version of who the evil elites are. First, it's facile, but not useful, to characterize self-interest as "evil." A banker or a businessman will argue that his first duty is to his shareholders, and the public be damned. It's his duty to water down regulations & invest in high-profit, if shady & ultimately nonproductive (to society), enterprises. Similarly, a union leader (there are a few left) will say his duty is to workers. Both would say they are doing their respective jobs, even though they are at loggerheads 99% of the time.

Second, and more important, one version of who the elites are is based on fact, & the other version is a set of cynical talking points designed to confuse the voting public & redirect their anger against those who would help them. This partly explains the midterm election results in which the Party of Banksters & Tycoons took over control of the House whilst their poor, unemployed & addled partisans railed against "socialism" & "Kenyan economics." Republicans & their secret backers are pure frauds.

ConservaDems, including President Obama, are frauds, too, but their stated ideals & policies -- as opposed to their legislative & executive actions -- come down on the side of the people. They claim to want to "bend the arc of history toward justice." That they oversaw a process that largely failed to do so also helps explain the midterm election results.

The real version of who the special-interest elites are is the one described by liberals & liberal Democrats. Throughout our history, liberals have moved the country toward the Revolutionary ideal of equal opportunity. They have met constant resistance from conservatives who want to preserve the inequalities of the status quo. Republicans today are carrying that conservatism to extremes not seen since the pre-income tax days of the Gilded Age. Conservatives want to turn the clock back on the the nation's foundational goals, and they are succeeding. Every single piece of legislation that increases inequality is a step backward. Until we have legislators who write laws to reduce the increasing disparity between rich and poor, Brooks' "evil elites," whoever they may be, are winning.

The President and the Congress have stacked the deck against the American people. As Brooks concludes in his one great truism, Just don't expect the big change to emanate from Washington in the near term. This is Mr. Brooks' first acknowledgment that a core element of his "evil elites" work in Washington, D.C. Let us applaud him for at last recognizing this one true thing. Little by little, our Mr. Brooks may see the error of his ways.

The Commentariat -- November 23

The President Gets His "3 am Call." Michael Crowley of Time: "During a press gaggle on Air Force One today, White House press secretary Bill Burton said that national security advisor Tom Donilon woke the president at 3:55 am with the news of North Korea's artillery attack on a South Korean island." Crowley adds, "I see no sign that our children were unsafe because it was Obama and not Hillary who fielded it."

Appearing on Sean Hannity's nightly "Integrity in Journalism" show, journalism major Sarah Palin explains journalistic principles & ethics to Katie Couric (not named, but Couric is the object of this little lesson):

Megyn Kelly of Fox "News." Photo by Alexei Hay for GQ.... Greg Veis conducts an interview for GQ of Fox "News"' Megyn Kelly, who discusses the "nobility of journalism" and no, she did not have an affair with Brit Hume, but Hume was pleased about the rumor of one. Sample response:

My rule is, if anybody writes in asking for a head shot and compliments me or the show or just wants one, that's fine, they can have a head shot. But if they write anything perverted, they're not getting one. -- Megyn Kelly

CW: see photo which accompanies the interview. Not a head shot. Why would anyone be inspired to write "anything perverted" to Fox's own Miss School M'arm?

... Speaking of Right-Wing Integrity... Dan Vergano of USA Today: "An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say":

It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship.
-- Skip Garner, plagiarism expert

The Fed Fights Back. Sewall Chan of the New York Times: "Faced with unusually sharp ideological attacks after its latest bid to stimulate the economy, the Federal Reserve now faces a challenge: ... how to defend itself in a hyperpartisan environment without becoming overtly political. Caught off guard by accusations from Congressional Republicans, Sarah Palin, Tea Party activists and conservative economists, the central bank and its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, are pushing back, making their case on substantive grounds but also haltingly adopting the tactics of Washington battle, like strategically placed interviews, behind-the-scenes assuaging of opponents and reaching out to potential allies on Wall Street and Capitol Hill."

Broken Record: Paul Kiel of ProPublica: "The government’s mortgage modification program has ... failed to boost the number of modifications relative to the need... For homeowners, modifications are just as rare as they were before the program launched. The absolute number of modifications is higher now than it was then, but so are the number of defaulted loans." ...

... Abigail Field of AOL's Daily Finance: "Testimony in a New Jersey foreclosure case decided last week may spell big trouble for Bank of America.... If what one bank employee said on the stand proves to be accurate, paperwork problems it acquired when it purchased the failing mortgage provider Countrywide in 2008 could leave BofA on the hook for billions of dollars."

Alan Pyke of Media Matters: another day, another lie from the Newt: "... Gingrich claimed that the verdict in the civilian trial of embassy bomber Ahmed Ghailani — which will put Ghailani in jail for 20 years to life — is a miscarriage of justice and proves 'Attorney General Holder should resign....' Gingrich is not merely ignoring the record (his own, as well as judicial precedents and the history of stronger sentences from civilian courts than from tribunals). He's also ignoring the official Manual for Military Commissions, Rule 304 of which rules inadmissible any evidence gained through torture." ...

... Sorry, Newt. Greg Sargent & Adam Serwer: "The families of victims of the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa support the Obama administration's decision to try Ahmed Ghailani in civilian court, even if they were disappointed with the verdict, a spokesperson for the families tells us.... Edith Bartley..., a de facto media spokesperson for ... families of victims, [says] ... the families don't fault the Obama Justice Department's handling of the case. She also called on [right-wing] critics of Justice's conduct to stop turning the trial and verdict into a 'political issue,' which she denounced as 'unacceptable.'"

Fredreka Schouten of USA Today: "The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the past five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, government records show." ...

... Marc Ambinder, now of the National Journal: "The White House is coordinating a response to what it views as dramatically overblown press coverage of a policy that most Americans say they support." ...

... Luckily, and to no one's surprise, the White House enjoys the cooperative effort of Mr. Inside-the-Beltway, Howie Kurtz, who stands up for the TSA's new pat-downs & super-scans & blames "media frenzy" for the public uproar. Frenzied Media, get a grip.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic: "Probably the most serious long-term threat to American security is the possibility that terrorists will acquire an unsecured nuclear weapon. It's therefore terrifying that Republicans are holding up the START Treaty that secures that material.... Our security apparatus is filled with wildly expensive and/or intrusive measures that bring minimal benefit, but the one security intervention with an enormous cost-benefit ratio may get held up because you need the consent of an intransigent and largely insane party."

One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president. -- Al Gore, on why he had once supported corn-based ethanol subsidies