The Commentariat -- February 9, 2016
Afternoon Update:
Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "President Obama on Tuesday sent his final annual budget proposal to a hostile Republican-led Congress, seeking $19 billion for a broad new cybersecurity initiative and rejecting the lame-duck label as he declared that his plan 'is about looking forward.' The budget for fiscal year 2017, which starts Oct. 1, would top $4 trillion, although only about one-quarter of that is the so-called discretionary spending for domestic and military programs that the president and Congress dicker over each year. The rest is for mandatory spending, chiefly interest on the federal debt and the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits that are expanding as the population ages."
Charles Pierce: "One thing about the Clinton team: because they've been the object of sophisticated (and well-financed) ratfcking for over 25 years, they've developed a real talent for opposition research their own selves." ...
... "Half a Dream." Charles Blow (Feb. 8): "... possibly the most damaging of Clinton's attributes is, ironically, her practicality. As one person commented to me on social media: Clinton is running an I-Have-Half-A-Dream campaign. That simply doesn't inspire young people brimming with the biggest of dreams. Clinton's message says: Aim lower, think smaller, move slower. It says, I have more modest ambitions, but they are more realistic. As Clinton put it Thursday in a swipe at Sanders, 'I'm not making promises that I cannot keep.' But the pragmatic progressive line is not going to help her chip away at Sanders's support among the young. That support is hardening into hipness."
*****
Presidential Race
It's a lovely, sunny morning in South Central New Hampshire, the temps are in the high teens & some schools are closed for election day. Get out & vote, people. ...
... Dan Balz, et al., of the Washington Post: "The first votes were cast Tuesday in New Hampshire following a final campaign blitz as candidates crisscrossed the state and leveled blistering attacks on rivals in a primary that appeared likely to set the tone for the wild nominating races ahead." ...
... Gail Collins & Arthur Brooks have a conversation about the New Hampshire primaries. Collins: "I was particularly offended by Marco Rubio's performance in Iowa. (That's a surprise, since I would have sworn nobody could top Ted Cruz.) He kept falling back on 'Jesus Christ who came down to earth and died for our sins.'... Marco Rubio instantly attacked the president [after Obama visited a Baltimore mosque] for 'pitting people against each other.' Now Marco Rubio is an all-purpose twit, but this was one of his worst moments. The guy who loves to wave his specific faith in the public's face. And he's shocked, shocked when the president demonstrates tolerance and compassion for an embattled religion."
Alan Rappeport of the New York Times: "With a snowstorm bearing down on [New Hampshire] and threatening to derail the final crush of campaign events on Monday, Republicans jockeyed for position in the hope of outperforming recent polls that suggest that Donald J. Trump is the favorite to win the state, with Senator Marco Rubio and a glut of establishment candidates locked in a battle for second place.... Hillary Clinton, speaking [Monday] morning to WBZ radio, a Boston station that reaches the voter-rich cities and counties of southern New Hampshire, said she was confident that her aides and volunteers were ready to help voters reach the polls on Tuesday no matter how bad the weather."
Contra Krugman & others, Citizens for Tax Justice, a progressive think tank, suggests Bernie Sanders' healthcare plan would be good for all but the wealthy: "A new analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' recently released 'Medicare for All' tax plan finds that Sanders' health-related taxes would raise an estimated $13 trillion over 10 years. The analysis also finds that the plan would raise average after-tax incomes for all but the top income groups." CW: As Krugman has argued, the cost savings for average Americans wouldn't necessarily make Sanders' Medicare for All a Panacea for All: unless it is incredibly well-structured & -managed (think V.A. here), there would be tradeoffs. ...
... Dana Milbank: "Bernie Sanders is no revolutionary." CW: Yeah, & I noticed Bernie combed his hair for the last debate (or maybe had the assistance of a hairdresser!). What a sell-out. ...
... Paul Waldman, in the American Prospect, has a much better take on Sanders' & Clinton's relationships with "the establishment." Yes, Clinton is a member in high standing, but a President Sanders would certainly work closely with the Democratic "establishment," most of whom share his goals, if not his optimism that those goals might be achievable. Neither President Bernie nor President Hillary would be able to "change Washington" in any meaningful way.
It's Always the Staff's Fault. Glenn Thrush & Annie Karni of Politico: "Hillary and Bill Clinton are so dissatisfied with their campaign's messaging and digital operations they are considering staffing and strategy changes after what's expected to be a loss in Tuesday's primary in New Hampshire, according to a half-dozen people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Clintons -- stung by her narrow victory in Iowa -- had been planning to reassess staffing at the campaign's Brooklyn headquarters after the first four primaries, but the Clintons have become increasingly caustic in their criticism of aides and demanded the reassessment sooner, a source told Politico."
... On Rachel Maddow's show, Hillary responds to the Politico story:
I have no idea what they're talking about or who they are talking to. We're going to take stock but it's going to be the campaign that I've got. I'm very confident in the people that I have. I'm very committed to them; they're committed to doing the best we can.... We're moving into a different phase of the campaign. We're moving into a more diverse electorate.... So, of course it would be malpractice not to say, 'OK, what worked? What can we do better? What do we have to do new and different that we have to pull out?' ...
... Paul Waldman: "You can take that one of two ways: 1) of course, they're going to continually assess how they're doing and make adjustments if necessary; or 2) holy cow they're freaking out and everyone will get fired!" ...
... Jennifer Shutt of Politico: "David Axelrod took to Twitter on Monday to criticize Hillary Clinton's political strategy in New Hampshire, following news that her campaign is considering shaking up its staffing after an expected loss there. 'When the exact same problems crop up in separate campaigns, with different staff, at what point do the principals say, "Hey, maybe it's US?",' the former top aide to President Barack Obama tweeted." ...
... Pete Williams of NBC News: "In a letter disclosed Monday in a federal court filing, the FBI confirms one of the world's worst-kept secrets: It is looking into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server." ...
... Hillary, Not Necessarily "Cozy" with Wall Street. Kevin Drum: "I think it's safe to say that Clinton has hardly been a scourge of the banking industry. Until recently, her main interests were elsewhere. But if there's a strong case to be made for 'coziness,' I've failed to find it." ...
... BUT. Ben White of Politico: "When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks. Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman's workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. 'It was pretty glowing about us,' one person who watched the event said. 'It's so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.'... Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon dismissed the recollections a[s] 'pure trolling,' while the Clinton campaign declined to comment further on calls that she release the transcripts of the three paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, for which she earned a total of $675,000." ...
... Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post: Hillary "Clinton and her allies are making increasingly overt -- and clumsy -- appeals to feminist solidarity, as she struggles in her Democratic presidential primary battle against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The reactions ... suggest that it could be backfiring, at least in New Hampshire, a state proud of its tradition of electing women.... The gender question was inflamed over the weekend, after [Gloria] Steinem and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, both supporters of Hillary Clinton, made statements upbraiding women who are not.... Unlike in Iowa, where Clinton won women by 11 percentage points, she is struggling for their votes [in New Hampshire]." ...
... Roger Simon of Politico: "In Iowa, though Hillary won the women's vote overall, she lost women ages 30-44 to Sanders by a hefty 21 percentage points and women ages 17-29 by a stunning 70 percentage points.... Clearly, the Clinton campaign must now do something. So in order to win over women ages 17-29, it has brought out [Madeleine] Albright, age 78, and Gloria Steinem, age 81, as surrogates. And you can see why campaign consultants get the big bucks. The strategy? Shame women into voting for Clinton." ...
... Amanda Marcotte in Salon: "While it's always tempting to reach for cheap explanations when other women disagree, feminists need to resist the hags-vs-bimbos narrative with all our might.... Perhaps seeing a woman out there, every day, doing the hard work of being the President of the United States could go a long way towards showing that women really are more than these reductive stereotypes, that they are full human beings with the same complex, nuanced concerns that men are assumed to have without question." ...
... CW: Yup. Looked how well this worked out for black people. Finally racism is over. Probably Donald Trump will take today off from the campaign trail so he call attend a black history seminar & work on his proposed legislation for slavery reparations. Kum. Bye. Yaaaaaah!
CW: Here's one thing you can count on: every vote in the GOP primaries will be a vote against climate change abatement. Jeremy Schulman of Mother Jones on the Republican presidential candidates' opposition to climate science. Includes data about New Hampshire voters' views.
Elevating a Conversation about Torture. Jesse Byrnes of the Hill: "Donald Trump echoed a supporter during a rally on the eve of the New Hampshire primary Monday night who called his Republican presidential rival Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) a 'pussy.' Trump was touting his hardline stance against terrorists from the Middle East when he mentioned Cruz's response during the debate Saturday on the use of waterboarding. 'Honestly I thought he'd say, "absolutely" -- and he didn't,' Trump said.... 'She just said a terrible thing,' Trump said, stopping his own remarks at the arena in Manchester and pointing out a woman in the audience, beckoning her to raise her voice. 'You know what she said? Shout it out, 'cause I don't want to,' Trump continued. 'OK, you're not allowed to say -- and I never expect to hear that from you again -- she said ... he's a pussy.'" ...
... CW: See, if you even hint at exercising caution before torturing prisoners, you're a pussy. Cruz, BTW, is not opposed to waterboarding; he says it does not meet the legal definition of torture, but that h'd use it sparingly. During the last GOP debate, Trump said, 'I'd bring back waterboarding, and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.'"
Could you let go of my breast, please? -- WCBS reporter Marcia Kramer, to a Secret Service agent protecting Donald Trump, at a Manchester, New Hampshire, hotel
... Bad News, Good News. Jeremy Diamond of CNN: "'I can look at their faces and say, "Look, you can't come here,'" [Donald] Trump said after 30 year-old Darren Ornitz of Greenwich, Connecticut, asked the billionaire businessman -- who owns a home there -- whether he would be willing to personally bar Syrian children from resettling there." But he said it nicely. Because "I have a bigger heart than anybody in this room."
Shakezula (how I wish professional pundits would use their real names!) of LG&M: "A gay voter took Rubio to task for being a homophobic weasel.... 'A middle-age gay man confronted Senator Marco Rubio here on Monday over his opposition to same-sex marriage, pointedly asking, "Why do you want to put me back in the closet?" "I don't," Mr. Rubio replied. "You can live any way you want."' Provided that way you want to live doesn't involve the state recognizing your marriage, giving you the same benefits as opposite sex couples or you know ... being treated like a human being, whaddya complaining about?" BTW, Marco approached the voter in a diner; the guy didn't accost him. ... Also, too, at the same diner, Marco told a 92-year-old woman that Sen. Lindsey Graham (a "bachelor"!) isn't gay. Because that would be too horrible to contemplate. ...
... Ashley Parker & Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: Oooh! Marco Rubio & MSNBC host Joe Scarborough are having a feud! "In an election season marked by animosity, egos and insults, this feud ... follows two men from the swamps of Florida politics to a presidential cycle in which Mr. Rubio, 44, has emerged as a leading candidate, and Mr. Scarborough, 52, as one of his fiercest critics.... In an interview Saturday, Mr. Scarborough could not hide his disapproval of Mr. Rubio, describing him as 'programmed' and 'risk averse.' And after Mr. Rubio's debate performance on Saturday appeared to validate his critique, Mr. Scarborough took something of a victory lap. 'I've been criticized for saying Marco looks too robotic, too prepackaged, and too young,' he wrote in a text message. 'But everything I've said alone for months is now being repeated this morning by everyone else in the political world. My critiques weren't personal: they were right.'"
Paul Waldman in the Washington Post: "What's missing from much of the discussion [about Marco Rubio] is that Rubio is embracing some of the most lunatic ideas on the right -- and he's managing to do so without most in the media hearing the dog whistle.... [Rubio's] real message goes ... into the dark heart of the conspiracy theories and twisted loathing of Obama that has persisted on the right for the last seven years.... And there's no escaping the racial undertones of this argument, because that's where so many on the right find the explanation for Obama's supposed hunger to bring woe and misery down upon us.... In some of the debates it has become almost comical, as every question Rubio gets on any subject is answered with a diatribe about Obama's malevolent schemes.... Rubio was going to be the candidate of the future, yet he's presenting himself as the candidate who is as disturbed, as unsettled, and as angry as you are that the past is slipping away." ...
Tom LoBianco & Ashley Killough of CNN: "Despite being backed by the monumental Right to Rise super PAC, Jeb Bush said Monday he would 'eliminate' the Supreme Court decision that paved the way for super PACs." CW: Oh, wow. Jeb! is practically a librul. Oh, wait, read on: "'If I could do it all again I'd eliminate the Supreme Court ruling' Citizens United, Bush told CNN's Dana Bash. 'This is a ridiculous system we have now where you have campaigns that struggle to raise money directly and they can't be held accountable for the spending of the super PAC that's their affiliate.'" So, um, the problem with Citizens United is that it doesn't give the politicians enough control over their big-bucks supporters.
Contributors today persuaded me to read David Brooks' column: President "Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I'm beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him."
Senate Race
Phil Willon of the Los Angeles Times: "Republican Senate candidate Rocky Chavez, an Oceanside assemblyman and former Marine colonel, abruptly dropped out of the race Monday evening just as the first GOP debate was about to begin.... He said it was crucial for a GOP candidate to survive the June 7 primary, and he insinuated that the top three Republicans in the race could splinter their party's vote and allow Democratic hopefuls Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Santa Ana to have the ballot to themselves in November. '... I think the best role I can fill for the Republican Party and moving the agenda forward ... is to run for my Assembly seat, since I'm not going to be running for the United States Senate,' Chavez said. With that, Chavez walked off the debate stage and out of the studio. Under California's top-two primary system, the two candidates who receive the most votes in the June primary, regardless of party, will face off in the general election."
Other News
Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "President Obama sends Congress his eighth and last annual budget proposal on Tuesday, a lame-duck executive's accounting of national priorities that Republican leaders have branded sight unseen: dead before arrival.... Breaking with a 41-year-old tradition, the Republican chairmen of the House [Tom Price (Ga.)] and Senate [Mike Enzi (Wy.)] budget committees announced that they would not even give the president's budget director, Shaun Donovan, the usual hearings in their panels this week.... But some new ideas that the administration previewed in recent weeks, including on cancer research, opioid abuse and military projects, could have more life than Republicans care to admit." CW: This is Joe Wilson's "You lie" on steroids. It's premeditated & institutional. This isn't John Boehner refusing to go to state dinners; it's top members of Congress refusing to perform the fundamentals of the people's business because the president comes from the other party is black.
Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times: "In the latest cyberattack targeting the federal government, an intruder gained access to information for thousands of employees at the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, but officials said Monday that there was no indication that sensitive information had been stolen."
Ekow Yankah in a New York Times op-ed: "White heroin addicts get overdose treatment, rehabilitation and reincorporation, a system that will be there for them again and again and again. Black drug users got jail cells and 'Just Say No.'" CW: The contrast is stark, but Yankah has unwittingly written into his essay one reason for the different responses that transcends racism: because of the economic disparity between black & white, crack use led to violent crime in way that, as far as I know, today's heroin epidemic has not. People of every race had more reason to fear black users than white.
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Nigel Duara of the Los Angeles Times: Reporters at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada's highest-circulation newspaper, are beginning to feel the heavy hand of its new owner, casino magnate & serious winger Sheldon Adelson.
Beyond the Beltway
Rob Kuznia of the Washington Post: "In California, once a national innovator in draconian policies to get tough on crime, voters and lawmakers are now innovating in the opposite direction, adopting laws that have released tens of thousands of inmates and are preventing even more from going to prison in the first place. The most famous is a landmark ballot measure called Proposition 47, which in 2014 made California the first state in the nation to make possession of any drug -- including cocaine and heroin -- a misdemeanor. More astonishing is the state's decision to show leniency toward violent offenders...." ...
... Mark Berman of the Washington Post: "Officials say that Washington [state] accidentally released as many as 3,200 prisoners earlier than scheduled over a period of more than a decade.... The early releases[, first caused by a coding error,] date as far back as 2002, but even though the Department of Corrections learned about the issue years ago, a fix wasn't made and the public wasn't notified until recent weeks.... according to corrections officials, dozens of the inmates released early in recent years committed crimes while they were out.... Questions remain about the sheer number of inmates involved, the length of time this error continued and why it kept happening long after authorities were alerted."
Oregonian: Militants are still holed up in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Here's a roundup of the latest developments.
News Lede
New York Times: "Artur Fischer, a German inventor who registered more than 1,100 patents, including the first synchronized camera flash and an anchor that millions of do-it-yourselfers use to secure screws into walls, died on Jan. 27 at his home in Waldachtal, in southwestern Germany. He was 96."