Thursday Reads: Villager Gossip, A Priceless Art Discovery, The Troubled NFL, And The Psychopathic One Percent
Posted: November 7, 2013 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: "Double Down", bullying, Chris Christie, Clint Eastwood, fat hatred, fine art, gossip, hazing, Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito, Mitt Romney, Nazis, NFL, Obamacare, priceless paintings, psychopathy, Stuart Stevens, top 1% as psychopaths, Virginia governor's race 50 Comments
Good Morning!!
All the villagers are talking about the gossipy new book about the 2012 presidential campaign by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Double Down. I can’t bring myself to read it, but Pat J. said she is reading it, so maybe she can give us more detail on the story of Romney adviser Stuart Stevens vomiting backstage after Clint Eastwood’s embarrassing performance at the Republican National Convention.
Lawrence O’Donnell had Heilemann on his MSNBC show last night. O’Donnell “loved” book and was especially joyful about the anecdote about Stevens. I have to admit, it’s pretty funny. The Washington Post has a lengthy review of the book with some more interesting bits.
On Chris Christie:
According to the authors, Romney and his team were shaken by what they discovered about Christie during “Project Goldfish,” as the hush-hush veep search process was known. His “disturbing” research file is littered with “garish controversies,” the authors write: a Justice Department investigation into his free-spending ways as U.S. attorney, his habit of steering government contracts to friends and political allies, a defamation lawsuit that emerged during a 1994 run for local office, a politically problematic lobbying career that included work on behalf of a financial firm that employed Bernie Madoff. And that’s not to mention the Romney team’s anxiety about the governor’s girth.
For Christie, who is coasting to reelection on Tuesday and already laying behind-the-scenes groundwork for a 2016 presidential bid, the book’s revelations are a Drudge-ready public relations nightmare that will send his advisers scrambling to explain awkward aspects of his record and his personal life just as he is stepping onto the national stage.
Mitt Romney is apparently obsessed with fat people, and even criticized men on his staff if they went out with women that Romney deemed to be too “fat.” You can just imagine what he thought of Chris Christie. From an earlier WaPo article:
Romney initially crossed Christie off his short list. The governor’s vetting file was incomplete, and Romney had been bothered by Christie’s propensity to show up late at campaign events and by his lack of physical fitness, the book says.
“Romney marveled at Christie’s girth, his difficulties in making his way down the narrow aisle of the campaign bus,” the authors write. “Watching a video of Christie without his suit jacket on, Romney cackled to his aides, ‘Guys! Look at that!’”
It brings back memories of the tales about Romney bullying classmates in high school. What a horrible man he is! There’s much more gossip in the Post review if you’re interested.
Corporate media and talking heads have been busy trying to interpret Tuesday’s election results as helpful for Republicans. Supposedly the only reason Terry McAuliffe beat Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia and Chris Christie is now on the fast track to the White House–sorry Hillary.
Ed Kilgore at Political Animal: Tell Me Again Who Won in Virginia?
Before we get into any more election analysis, I have to make a preliminary objection to what we are hearing this morning about the Virginia governor’s race. Yes, we all play the expectations game, and Terry McAuliffe only won by two-and-a-half percent, which is less than most of the late polls anticipated. But to read this morning’s spin, you’d think he (and the Democratic Party) actually lost. The results are being widely read exactly as Ken Cuccinelli wanted them to be read: a negative “referendum on Obamacare.” Politico’s James Hohmann, in a piece entitled “Why Terry McAuliffe barely won,” draws bright red arrows pointing to an exit poll showing that 53% of voters said they opposed Obamacare. That’s entirely in line with about three years of polling about the Affordable Care Act, and doesn’t indicate any last minute “surge” against the law.
Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast: The Wrong Election Takeaways From Christie’s Win, Virginia, and More:
The conventional wisdom on New Jersey: Huge Chris Christie win sets him up to steamroll his way to the Republican nomination in 2016, proving that a more mainstream conservative can win in a blue state. The conventional wisdom on Virginia: Ken Cuccinelli’s stinging loss in a purple state in an off-off-year election against Terry McAuliffe, a flawed Democratic candidate, shows not only that he was too extreme but also that Virginia is inching its way into the Democratic column. As the Times put it in its headline, “McAuliffe Win Points to Virginia Changes.”
Well, God invented conventional wisdom so people like me could beat it down. In New Jersey, Christie doesn’t emerge from his victory nearly as strong as he appears to. And the Virginia outcome isn’t really very strong for Democrats, especially down the ballot. No, I’m not buying into the right-wing spin that Cuccinelli’s narrow margin of defeat really represents some kind of loss for Obamacare. It does not.
Read the rest at the link.
Peter Beinart at The Daily Beast: Chris Christie Is No George W. Bush, and 2016 Is Definitely Not 2000:
In the wake of Chris Christie’s reelection romp on Tuesday, the press is filled withcomparisons between the New Jersey governor and a pre-presidency George W. Bush. They’re both Republican governors who appear moderate and bipartisan compared to their party’s zealots in Washington. They’re both beloved by big donors. Each has made inroads among the Democratic-leaning constituencies with whom Republicans must do better. But there’s a problem with the analogy. It’s unlikely Christie can “win” the presidency by running as a second Bush, in part [because] America still remembers the first one.
Lots more at the link.
In other news…
Did you hear about the priceless art works stolen by the Nazis that were found in a dirty, run-down apartment in Munich, Germany? From NPR:
The revelation Monday that more than 1,000 paintings and prints seized by the Nazis during World War II were found in a Munich apartment has set off excitement in the art world and spurred anger among Jewish groups that German officials didn’t publicize the discovery when it was first made.
With a potential value of $1.35 billion, the trove of art contains previously unknown works by Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall; other artists represented include Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
The stash of art was reported by Germany’s Focus magazine Monday, under the headline “The Nazi Treasure” (Der Nazi-Schatz). Tax officials discovered the cache when they visited the cluttered Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, a descendant of a man who was an official in wartime Germany.
Of nearly 1,400 oil paintings, prints and other works, 1,285 had been stacked in a drawer, unframed. They include work by German expressionists such as Franz Marc and Max Beckmann, in addition to a previously unknown self-portrait by Otto Dix. The trove also includes Albrecht Dürer and Canaletto, who worked in earlier centuries — a detail that could make the collection’s origins even more difficult to explain.
The paintings were found in 2011, but the stunning and unprecedented discovery was just announced this week. A couple more links:
Max Fisher at WaPo: Why Nazi-seized art is only now resurfacing – and how it will change the art world.
Bloomberg: Nazi Art Trove Surprises Family Searching for 70 Years.
This will be a story to watch for anyone who is interested in fine art. We still don’t know for sure which paintings were found.
The NFL is back in the news, and, again, it’s not in a good way. It’s a story of racially charged bullying and hazing at the Miami Dolphins. Reportedly, a veteran player, Richie Incognito was told by someone at the team to “toughen up” rookie Jonathan Martin. Even the GM may have been involved. Incognito, who is white, chose to do so by leaving messages containing racial slurs on Martin’s voicemail. Martin, who is African American, ended up in the hospital for emotional distress and eventually left the team. If you can believe it, other Dolphins players and veterans of the team are supporting Incognito.
Here are a couple of interesting reactions to the story.
Valerie Strauss at the WaPo: If a 6’5, 312-pound Miami Dolphin can be bullied…
Jonathan Martin, the 6-foot-5-inch, 312-pound Miami Dolphin offensive lineman who left the NFL team because he was being bullied by at least one other player, has done a favor for school kids everywhere.
How can such a big guy get bullied? Because bullying behavior isn’t about physical intimidation. It’s about mind control and creating fear — and no one, not even very large professional athletes — are immune. That’s a useful message for kids and adults working to create safe climates at their schools.
So is the way Martin ultimately handled his problem. After many months of being a victim, he got up, walked away and later accused the Dolphins of creating and allowing an unsafe work environment. He is forcing the powers that be to take a look at the problem. As my Post colleague Sally Jenkins wrote in this column:
Turns out the real tough guy is Martin, whose decision to rebel against a vicious culture in the Dolphins’ locker room has triggered a league-level investigation of [suspended Dolphin Richie] Incognito, and, if reports are true, needs to extend to other veteran players and management as well.
In schools, the programs that work best in combating bullying are those that teach kids that they can’t stand by and watch bullies go after other students. Bystanders have to get help — and everybody in the school, adults included — have to be on the same page. That didn’t happen in Miami.
Veteran WaPo sportswriter Tom Boswell: Richie Incognito bullying allegations are the latest in long list of NFL problems.
Where are we? Where is pro football? The NFL doesn’t have a PR problem. It has a reality problem. And it may be a grave one. Every month — and it seems every few days — the NFL is inundated by new, barely suspected revelations. What has the NFL become? Or is this what it has been for some time? Is the truth coming out of the shadows?
The list is stunning. Its cumulative effect, not any one particular item, is the true confidence-shaking shock.
The NFL is now the league of murder charges against Aaron Hernandez — gang execution style. The NFL is the league of murder, then suicide, with Jovan Belcher killing his girlfriend and then shooting himself in the head in a parking lot by his stadium as his coach and general manager watched….
The NFL is the league where future Hall of Famer Junior Seau, barely retired, shot himself in the heart so his brain could be studied by science to help prove that chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a core part of football, with risk of brain damage down to the smallest kids who play it….
The NFL is the league of thug bullies such as suspended Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito, who allegedly extorted money, texted racist insults and made death threats to a younger teammate. It’s the league of $15,000 stripper parties in Las Vegas, paid for by intimidated, hazed rookies who don’t make the trip but pay the check even if it busts them.
The article is well worth a read even if you don’t follow sports.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about the studies that show that rich people are more narcissistic, less empathetic, more likely to be dishonest, rude, and thoughtless than other people. Here a long read at Alternet about the top 1% as functioning psychopaths: Inside the Psyche of the 1% — Many Actually Believe Their Ideology of Greed Makes for a Better World.
Do the rich and super-rich tend to be psychopaths, devoid of guilt or shame? Are the 1% lacking in compassion? Does their endless accumulation of possessions actually bring them little to no happiness? To each of these, the answer is “yes”—but a very qualified “yes” with lots of subtleties. Even more important is what these issues suggest for building a society which does not ravage the last remnants of wilderness and rush headlong into a climate change tipping point.
Check out the article to get all the details.
Those are my offerings for today; now what are you reading and blogging about? Please share your links in the comment thread.
Saturday: An Autumn Potpourri of Reads
Posted: October 19, 2013 Filed under: Crime, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Affordable Care Act, anti-leak software, Ariel Castro, Bill Russell, Boston Celtics, Boy Scouts, Cleveland Police Department, Dave Hall, Edward Snowden, Elias Acevedo, FBI, Fox News lies, Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Taylor, Goblin Valley State Park, guns, hunting, Laura Poitras, murder, NSA, Obamacare, political fund-raising, potpourri, rape, rock formations, Sean Hannity, Tea Party, Ted Cruz 29 Comments
Fall in New England
Good Morning!!
Isn’t that a gorgeous photo? It was taken in New Hampshire near Mount Washington in October 2011.
A potpourri is “a combination of incongruous things.” Well that’s what I have for you this morning. We’ll begin at Sea-Tac airport in Seattle where Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell, 79, was arrested by TSA police for having a loaded gun in his carry-on bag. He was held for about half-an-hour and then released. He has a permit for the gun. Russell was on his way to Boston where a statue of him will be unveiled on November 1.
Did you hear about the morons in Utah who destroyed a 170-million-year-old rock formation and made a video of themselves doing it? From the Deseret News:
Two men have come under scrutiny by the public and possibly by prosecutors after a video made the rounds online showing them pushing over an iconic rock formation.
The men were visiting Goblin Valley State Park last week when they said they noticed a precariously perched
boulder that was loose and worried it would fall on someone. The delicate “goblin” formation, also known as a “hoodoo,” is one of many that gives the park its name.
What followed was a video showing the men joking and laughing as Glenn Taylor, of Highland, topples the rock, narrated by cameraman Dave Hall, who says lives have been saved. A third man, identified as Taylor’s son, watches.
These two ignorant fools, who are Boy Scout leaders (!), thought the ancient rock formation was suddenly going to tip over and crush someone.
Utah State Parks spokesman Eugene Swalberg called the video disturbing. Possible criminal charges are being screened by the Emery County Attorney’s Office and the Utah Attorney General’s Office, he said….
The goblins date back more than 170 million years to the Jurassic Period, Swalberg said. The park, which gets more than 85,000 visitors per year, was dedicated in 1974 to protect the fragile formations, he said.
“There are some established trails in the park, but there are also areas where you can have self discovery and wander amongst the goblins,” Swalberg said. “That’s the beauty of Goblin Valley. It’s not meant to have people push over the goblins. It’s meant to enjoy.”
Check out the idiotic quotes from these guys in this Fox News story:
“This is about saving lives,” Dave Hall, who shot the video, told The Associated Press on Friday. “One rock at a time.”
The rock formation is about 170 million years old, Utah State Parks spokesman Eugene Swalberg said. The park in central Utah is dotted with thousands of the eerie, mushroom shaped sandstone formations.
In a video posted on Facebook, Glenn Taylor of Highland, Utah, can be seen last Friday wedging himself between one formation and a boulder to knock a large rock off the formation’s top. Taylor and his two companions can then be seen cheering, high-fiving and dancing….
“My conscience won’t let me walk away knowing that kids could die,” Hall said.
While safety was their motivation, Hall said, it was exciting to knock it over, and that’s why they reacted with high-fives and cheers in the video.
“You can’t have a rock the size of a car that you can push with one hand, and have it roll, and not have an adrenaline rush,” Hall said. “It was a crazy, exciting moment.”
What an asshole! If these fools don’t get criminally prosecuted, at least maybe the Boy Scouts will discipline them.
Boy Scouts of America spokesman Deron Smith confirmed the men are members of the organization, saying in a statement that the organization is “shocked and disappointed by this reprehensible behavior.”
Boy Scout troops spend countless hours in state and national parks, guided by the principle of leaving nature the way they find it, Smith said.
“The isolated actions of these individuals are absolutely counter to our beliefs and what we teach,” Smith said. “We are reviewing this matter and will take appropriate action.”
Moving on , , ,
NSA officials admit they put off installing the latest anti-leak software at the Hawaii facility where Edward Snowden stole thousands of top secret documents before fleeing the country and eventually accepting asylum in Russia.
Well before Snowden joined Booz Allen Hamilton last spring and was assigned to the NSA site as a systems administrator, other U.S. government facilities had begun to install software designed to spot attempts by unauthorized people to access or download data.
The purpose of the software, which in the NSA’s case is made by a division of Raytheon Co, is to block so-called “insider threats” – a response to an order by President Barack Obama to tighten up access controls for classified information in the wake of the leak of hundreds of thousands of Pentagon and State Department documents by an Army private to WikiLeaks website in 2010.
The main reason the software had not been installed at the NSA’s Hawaii facility by the time Snowden took up his assignment there was that it had insufficient bandwidth to comfortably install it and ensure its effective operation, according to one of the officials.
Due to the bandwidth issue, intelligence agencies in general moved more slowly than non-spy government units, including the Defence Department, to install anti-leak software, officials said.
In other related news,
Snowden told The New York Times in an interview that he turned all of his files over to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras when the three met in Hong Kong last spring; he said he didn’t keep any of the files and therefore China and Russia could not have gotten access to them. From HuffPo:
Snowden said he did not retain copies of the documents and did not take them to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” the Times reported. He said his familiarity with China’s intelligence abilities allowed him to protect the documents from Chinese spies while he was in Hong Kong.
“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he said….
The Times reported that in the interview, which it said took place over several days in the last week and involved encrypted online communications, Snowden asserted that he believed he was a whistle-blower who was acting in the nation’s best interests by revealing information about the NSA’s surveillance dragnet and huge collections of communications data.
The only problem with these claims is that Snowden actually gave copies of some of the stolen files to the Chinese government-supported newspaper The South China Morning Post in August, long after he supposedly turned everything over to Greewald and Poitras. So where did that data come from?
Whatever the truth is, we do know the files are in the possession of Greenwald, Poitras, Wikileaks, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and several other news organizations as well as the British security services which confiscated the files from Greenwald’s live-in partner David Miranda when he was passing through Heathrow airport. So we can be sure there’s no danger of unauthorized release of secret information. Right?
That was sarcasm, by the way, in case you didn’t pick up on it . . .
Bob Cesca had a good post yesterday on Ted Cruz and his future plans. He apparently feels emboldened by his success in shutting down the government for two weeks, and plans more destructive behavior next time. Cesca writes:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the chief architect of the tea party shutdown and subsequent debt ceiling brinksmanship, might have lost an endorsement from his home town newspaper, but he managed to raise $1.19 million during the third quarter — nearly three times the haul of the second quarter total. That period of time didn’t include the shutdown, but it included his filibuster, which, it turns out, had a very important purpose: the make money for Ted Cruz. He also beefed up his email database with a petition that gathered over two million names and addresses.
When asked who “won” the shutdown battle, Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) told Politico the winners were “the people that managed to raise a lot of money off this.” Now, I don’t know if that means the tea party necessarily “won,” but Cruz and the Heritage Action group, which pulled in $330,000, didn’t walk away empty-handed.
While Cruz and the others cashed-in, the shutdown ended up costing the federal government $24 billion. Via TIME, here’s a breakdown of just a few of the losses:
-About $3.1 billion in lost government services, according to the research firm IHS
-$152 million per day in lost travel spending, according to the U.S. Travel Association
-$76 million per day lost because of National Parks being shut down, according to the National Park Service
-$217 million per day in lost federal and contractor wages in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area aloneAnd we’re supposed to continue buying the line that the tea party cares about government spending and the national debt? That’s rich.
Obviously, Cesca writes, they are going to do a repeat performance early next year. Read all about it at the link.
More wingnut news . . .
Via Kevin Drum, Eric Stern wrote at Salon about how he “fact-checked” Sean Hannity’s claims about Obamacare. Stern writes:
I happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity announced, “and six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.” Three married couples were neatly arranged in his studio, the wives seated and the men standing behind them, like game show contestants.
As Hannity called on each of them, the guests recounted their “Obamacare” horror stories: canceled policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on.
“These are the stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected.
But none of it smelled right to me. Nothing these folks were saying jibed with the basic facts of the Affordable Care Act as I understand them. I understand them fairly well; I have worked as a senior adviser to a governor and helped him deal with the new federal rules.
So Stern actually contacted three of these folks and it turns out they all lied. As Drum summarizes:
One of them was apparently just lying, and the other two hadn’t even checked the exchanges, where they would have found that they could get better coverage for considerably less than they’re paying now.
Unbelievable.
Did you hear the latest in the Ariel Castro story?
One of Castro’s neighbors has now been charged with rapes and murders. From the Guardian:
Increased scrutiny of missing person cases in a Cleveland neighbourhood following the arrest of kidnapper Ariel Castro led to charges against a neighbour for the murders of two women in the 1990s, the FBI said on Friday.
Elias Acevedo, 49, was charged late on Thursday with the kidnapping, rape and murder of his 30-year-old neighbour, Pamela Pemberton, found strangled in 1994, and another woman believed to be Christina Adkins, a pregnant 18-year-old who disappeared in 1995. He also is charged with the rape of two young girls.
“Because the public became more aware and investigators were determined and relentless, people were re-interviewed and there was an increased interest in these missing person cases,” FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson said.
Acevedo, who lived on the same block as Castro, was arrested in June at his Seymour Avenue residence after police questioned Castro’s neighbours and discovered that Acevedo was a convicted sex offender who had failed to report his current address.
Acevedo became a suspect in the Adkins and Pemberton murders after the FBI re-examined the disappearance of other missing women from the Seymour Avenue neighbourhood after Castro’s arrest, according to a statement from the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office.
Imagine if the Cleveland police had actually done their job years ago?
I’ll end with this wacky story from CBS Atlanta.
Bear climbs tree stand to meet hunter.
A video of a showdown between a hunter and a bear in Canada posted in May of this year is making the rounds on social media as of late.
The video, posted by Jeffrey Moffatt, shows a hunter in a tree stand with a bear at the bottom of the tree.
Much to the surprise of the hunter, the bear climbs the tree in about three seconds and comes face-to-face with the hunter. No need for a hunting rangefinder when the damn thing is 3 feet away from you!
The bear sniffs around and eventually decides the hunter wasn’t a threat and climbs down the tree.
Moffatt said on YouTube that he only had a bow and arrow – no firearm – and did not have any cell service in case the situation would have gotten worse.
You have to watch the video!
OK, those are my contributions for today. What stories are you following? Please post your comments and links in the thread below.
Tuesday Reads: Hostage Situation
Posted: October 8, 2013 Filed under: 2012 elections, Affordable Care Act (ACA), Barack Obama, Democratic Politics, Federal Budget, Federal Government Shutdown, Global Financial Crisis, morning reads, Psychopaths in charge, Real Life Horror, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: 14th amendment option, John Boehner, Obamacare, Robert Costa, Tea Party Caucus, US House of Representatives 50 Comments
Good Morning!!
I hardly know where to begin this morning. The insanity that has gripped the nation’s capital is so extreme that some kind of intervention may be necessary.
Is it possible for the UN or the IMF to step in and explain to Tea Party Republicans why the full faith and credit of the United States government cannot be held hostage in an effort to overturn the results of two elections? Or perhaps they could explain to House Speaker John Boehner that his frantic efforts to hold onto his speakership could end with voters replacing him with a Democratic Speaker in 2014?
As depicted in the cartoon above, the Republican majority in the House is being held hostage by around 30-40 delusional Tea Party wingnuts and their putative leader–John Boehner has no clue how to deal with the hostage crisis. It’s a mystery to me why anyone would even want that job, but to Boehner the job is apparently more important than the nation’s–and the world’s–economic well-being. Holding onto his job is apparently so important to him that he is willing to look like a complete fool rather than stand up to a bunch of crazy people in his own party.
Meanwhile, the media pundits are getting a little more restless–realizing that we really could reach the debt limit on October 17 without the House voting on a “clean” continuing resolution or an increase in the government’s ability to borrow to pay its bills.
Normally, I wouldn’t link to the National Review, but yesterday they published a piece by Washington editor Robert Costa, who probably has a pretty good idea what insane caucus in the House is up to. Costa writes:
Speaker John Boehner may be trying to finalize a plan to raise the debt limit, but House conservatives are already skeptical of his efforts. In interviews, several of them tell me they’re unlikely to support any deal that may emerge.
Costa goes on to quote a few of the wackiest of the wackos (emphasis added):
“They may try to throw the kitchen sink at the debt limit, but I don’t think our conference will be amenable for settling for a collection of things after we’ve fought so hard,” says Representative Scott Garrett (R., N.J.). “If it doesn’t have a full delay or defund of Obamacare, I know I and many others will not be able to support whatever the leadership proposes. If it’s just a repeal of the medical-device tax, or chained CPI, that won’t be enough.”
Representative Paul Broun (R., Ga.) agrees, and says Boehner risks an internal rebellion if he decides to broker a compromise. “America is going to be destroyed by Obamacare, so whatever deal is put together must at least reschedule the implementation of Obamacare,” he says. “This law is going to destroy America and everything in America, and we need to stop it.”
“Stay the course, don’t give in on it, that’s what the people in my district are saying,” says Representative Ted Yoho (R., Fla.). “We did a town hall the other day, and 74 percent of people said, ‘don’t raise the debt ceiling.’”
This despite the fact that polls show their ideas are poison to the American public. These people are truly insane, and they believe they’re winning. Nothing will stop them except throwing them out of their jobs. Here are some other reactions to Costa’s piece.
David Atkins of Hallabaloo: Nothing less than Fort Sumter will do.
If you think this is insane–and it is–keep in mind that it’s only going to get worse from here.
Until Republicans are removed from control of all branches of government, the brinksmanship is going to get worse, and the demands are going to become more severe. The lunatics are running the asylum now, the revanchist movement is in full swing, and the Lost Cause is the name of the game.
Not even sequestration-level spending plus cutting Medicare and Social Security will do for these people–and that’s after losing an election. Try to picture where the Republican party was 30 years ago. Then 20 years ago. Then 10 years. Then today. Now picture 10 years from now. Anyone who thinks there’s going to be a retreat from the precipice is deluding themselves. If they lose in 2014, it will be because they didn’t hold firm against Obamacare. If they lose to Hillary in 2016, it will be because they didn’t shout loud enough about Benghazi.
If we don’t stop them somehow, the Tea Party crazies will try to refight the Civil War.
Josh Barro at Business Insider: Republicans Do Crazy Things Because They Have Crazy Beliefs. Barro responds to Georgia Rep Paul Broun’s claim that “America is going to be destroyed by Obamacare….This law is going to destroy America and everything in America, and we need to stop it.”
It’s one thing to oppose Obamacare. It’s quite another to believe it will “destroy America and everything in America.” As Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Avik Roy, a strong opponent of Obamacare, wrote last month:
The idea that we had a free-market health-care system before Obamacare, and a socialized one after, is completely and utterly incorrect. In 2010, before the passage of Obamacare, U.S.-government entities spent more per capita on health care than all but three other countries in the world. Obamacare adds to that spending by around 10 to 15 percent. Not good, to be sure, but not the whole kit and caboodle either.
The changes from Obamacare, good and bad, are marginal. It will not fundamentally change America….
But if you already believe something crazy — that Obamacare will destroy America — then it’s not additionally crazy to favor drastic, dangerous action to stop it.
Sarah Jones at Politicus USA: From Hostage Takers to Buffoons, House Republican Ineptitude Heads for Default.
Even a short term debt ceiling agreement is up in the air now. Not the actual debt ceiling limit, but a short term agreement. We can’t even do that now, if Robert Costa’s readings are accurate.
Costa tweeted, “One of my best House R sources thinks Boehner may, just may, be able to get votes for short-term DL ext, but even that is up in air” [….]
If you’re wondering how Republicans can be so out of it when the polls keep instructing them otherwise (as if the ONLY issue here is their own political survival, forget the people or this country), perhaps this level of utter cluelessness will be informative. When asked if the Republicans have their next move mapped out and if Boehner has any legislation drawn up regarding the debt ceiling, “Negatory,” Representative Pete Sessions replies. You see, it’s all about “messaging”. “We’re going to keep with our great, positive attitude and tell the president, ‘you’ve got to sit down and negotiate.’”
So, their great positive attitude involves tanking the economy and shutting down the government because they lost an election. Huh. Also: Only in Republican world is holding a gun to the country’s head before being willing to “talk” an act of good faith.
Republicans don’t understand this president very well at all, but then, we tend to project our own values onto others so this is understandable. They never should have threatened the country. They could have threatened anything but the American people and the democratic process, and this President wouldn’t have felt compelled to take a stand.
It’s really getting to be a cliche to point out that reports of Republican behavior are for real and not from The Onion. But seriously, it’s hard to believe The Onion can keep finding ways to exaggerate these people’s insanity. Apparently there was “outrage” after this 2011 Onion story; but does it actually seem crazy two years later to claim that what the Republicans are trying to do is going to hurt–even kill–some children?
A few more comments on the hostage situation from various pundits:
Washington Post Editorial Board: The House GOP has nothing to show for its government shutdown.
WHAT HAVE House Republicans managed to accomplish in a week of government shutdown?
Damage the livelihood of millions of Americans? Check. Government secretaries, food-truck operators, cleaners who work in motels near national parks: They’re all hurting.
Waste billions of taxpayer dollars? Check. It costs a lot to shut agencies, Web sites and parks, and it will cost a lot to reopen them. Meanwhile, the House has voted to pay the salaries, eventually, of hundreds of thousands of employees whom it has ordered not to work. That’s an odd way to manage an enterprise.
Interfere with key government operations? Check. The National Transportation Safety Boardcan’t investigate an accident last weekend on Metro’s Red Line that claimed the life of a worker. That could make future accidents more likely. On the other side of the world, U.S. allies from Tokyo to Singapore are wondering whether they can rely on a nation whose president has to go AWOL from a key summit meeting in their region.
Rattle the markets, slow an economy in recovery, interrupt potentially lifesaving research at the National Institutes of Health? Check, check and check.
Derail the hated Obamacare? Ch . . . — oh, no, wait a minute.
Because it’s not really about “Obamacare.” It’s about making government itself completely dysfunctional. I keep thinking about Dakinikat’s post yesterday and the pieces she quoted by Jonathan Chait and The Economist. Have we really reached the point where the gridlock in DC is so bad that our form of government is in danger of collapse? And what can we do about it? In order to change our system of divided government, we would need to call a Constitutional Convention. Even if we could get to that point in this atmosphere, the final result could be a lot worse than what we have now. I really believe the only way to save our form of government is to somehow throw all the Tea Party Republicans out of it. Is that possible?
Alex Altman at Time: Boehner Holds Weaker Cards In High-Stakes Political Poker
President Barack Obama says he will not pay House Republicans a ransom in exchange for re-opening the government or raising the debt ceiling. House Speaker John Boehner insists he doesn’t have the votes to do either without any White House concessions.
Both men are bluffing. And while Obama’s play is a risky one, Boehner’s bluff is worse: it just doesn’t look very credible.
In a Sunday interview with ABC News, Boehner said the U.S. faced the specter of its first ever federal default if Obama didn’t cave to GOP demands. “There are not the votes in the House,” Boehner declared, to pass a so-called “clean” bill to reopen the government. “The votes are not in the House to pass a clean debt limit,” he added. “And the president is risking default by not having a conversation with us.”
These kinds of threats have worked for Boehner before,
But this is now a less credible threat. A few days before Boehner went on TV to talk tough about the threat of default, he was reportedly confiding to fellow Republicans that he would never allow it. Failure to hike the debt limit would unleash a chain of economic calamities, if not the first ever federal default. Boehner doesn’t want that to be his political epitaph.
To be sure, there are plenty of House Republicans who are willing, if not eager, to hold the line. But if the votes aren’t there for clean bills, that’s only because Boehner hasn’t allowed them to come forward. As Speaker, he and his leadership team control the floor. A clean bill to reopen the government, and a companion measure to lift the debt limit, would draw unanimous or near-unanimous support from the chamber’s 200 Democrats; all but five are on record supporting such a vote. Nearly two-dozen Republicans are also publicly on board. Some say the number is far higher. If Boehner let a clean funding bill hit the House floor, “it would probably get 300 votes,” New York Representative Peter King, a Republican who has been critical of the party’s shutdown strategy, told TIME last week.
Jamelle Bouie at The Daily Beast: Five Boehner Quotes—From One Interview—That Explain Everything.
To watch John Boehner speak Sunday—in a segment with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos—was to watch him issue talking points from another dimension, where legislative hostage-taking is routine and the American public is eager to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States. The interview was rife with dishonesty, but there were five statements—in particular—that stood out for their recklessness and/or brazen disregard for the truth.
I won’t excerpt any more from this one. You need to go read the whole thing–it’s not long.
In my opinion, it’s an open question whether the insanity of the Tea Party can be beaten. Certainly, our democratic Republic cannot survive much more of this. The best solution would be for the Democrats to really hold their ground this time and for President Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment and abolish the debt ceiling unilaterally. But do the Democrats and Obama have the guts to do it? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Now it’s your turn. What stories are grabbing your attention today? Please post your links on any topic in the comment thread.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: October 1, 2013 Filed under: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Barack Obama, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Fourteenth Amendment, health insurance exchanges, John Boehner, meteor, Obamacare, science, Tea Party Extremists 61 Comments
Good Morning!!
It’s October first in the good ol’ US of A, and one Senator, one ex-Senator, and thirty Republican House members, with the help of the weakest Speaker of the House in history, John Boehner, have managed to shut down the government. And yet, despite the concentrated efforts of these terrorist blackmailers, the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare, continues onward, with health care exchanges opening today. Wall Street is nervous, but still not really accepting that Republicans are really trying to crash the economy.
Despite the claims of John Boehner that he and the Tea Party Republicans are just “listening to the American people,” the American people don’t support what they are doing. Bloomberg: Americans by 72% Oppose Shutdown Tied to Health Care Cuts.
In a rejection of congressional Republicans’ strategy, Americans overwhelmingly oppose undermining President Barack Obama’s health-care law by shutting down the federal government or resisting an increase in the nation’s debt limit, according to a poll released today.
By 72 percent to 22 percent, Americans oppose Congress “shutting down major activities of the federal government” as a way to stop the Affordable Care Act from going into effect, the national survey from Quinnipiac University found.
By 64 percent to 27 percent, voters don’t want Congress to block an increase in the nation’s $16.7 trillion federal borrowing limit as a way to thwart implementation of the health-care law, which Obama signed into law in 2010 with a goal of insuring millions of Americans, known as “Obamacare.”
A majority of the public, 58 percent, is opposed to cutting off funding for the insurance program that begins enrollment today. Thirty-four percent support defunding it.
That’s pretty much it for national politics news today. As an American, I feel really embarrassed that a small number of wingnut terrorists have been permitted to take over the government of a nation of 300 million people. What else can you call it but a coup? And of course it won’t end here. We are approaching the debt limit, and a couple of weeks from now the GOP will most likely hold us all hostage again. At Policymic, Drew Mendelson writes:
I spent some time on the topic of the debt ceiling last year. I won’t repeat that except to note that we are approaching the limit of $16.7 trillion set last year on how much debt the federal government can maintain. Since government sending continues to outpace its income, we will need to borrow to pay some of our debts. Unless the debt ceiling is raised, once we hit it we will no longer be able to borrow and will likely default on some of that debt. The resulting catastrophe of frozen credit, climbing interest rates, and a stalling economy could bring a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
Conservative icon Ronald Reagan once warned that “the full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar.”
I can’t imagine that even the hardest core in either party wants that. But the threat of it could give the Republicans (or maybe just its Tea Party faction) an opportunity for hostage-taking far more ominous than in the budget resolution battle. We went to the brink on the debt ceiling last year and ended up passing an increase but at the cost of maintaining most of the sequester cuts in the process.
This doesn’t have to happen. It’s time for President Obama to use the Constitutional option and raise the limit on his own. Back to Mendelson:
Does President Obama have to put up with this? Some say no. There is a range of opinion on whether or not the Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives the president the power to bypass Congress and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said earlier this year: “Well, you ask the Republicans …we always passed the debt ceiling. When President Bush was president, as he was incurring these massive debts, and the Republicans weren’t saying ‘boo’ at the time.… In fact, if I were president, I’d use the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the debt of the United States will always be paid.” [….]
Our cautious President obviously doesn’t want to do it. But experts say he has the power.
in a July 2011 New York Times op-ed piece, law professors Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule argue that even without the Fourteenth Amendment the president would have the power to override the debt ceiling based on “the necessities of state, and on the president’s role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order, charged with taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
As Mendelson writes, we are going to find out pretty soon whether President Obama will use the power he has to stop Congress from holding the entire country hostage to the fantasies of a few extremists.
As of today, the President and Democrats in general are the winners in this ugly little drama, according to NBC News’s Michael O’Brien:
The shutdown of the federal government is poised to reshuffle U.S. politics, as Americans observe one of the starkest examples of political dysfunction since the last shutdown in the mid-90s.
That crisis reinvigorated President Bill Clinton and badly set back a then-resurgent Republican Party that had designs of retaking the White House in the 1996 elections. The GOP fell well short of expectations in that election, though some conservatives now argue that the party’s performance wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time.
Nonetheless, after two-and-a-half years of standoffs and gridlock, the fact that a shutdown has finally come to pass — 17 days before Congress must also raise the debt ceiling, no less — could upend politics with unforeseen consequences for many of this fight’s key players.
Read O’Brien’s take on the winners and losers in this battle as of today at the link. Spoiler: Obama is up right now, but he could hurt himself if he doesn’t step up and deal with the childish tantrums of the Tea Party Republicans over the debt ceiling.
Now I want to move on from the ridiculous and embarrassing battles in Washington DC to a story about women making a difference.
From PBS News Hour: World Pulse’s “web” of women keeps growing.
In her early 20s, Jensine Larsen was working as a freelance journalist in Burma and the Amazon region of South America, and learned that many of the stories affecting women weren’t being reported in the media. She then realized that women shouldn’t have to depend on the media to tell their stories.
“If we want to solve water issues and health care, the only way we can solve them is by listening to women,” she told the PBS NewsHour recently over the phone.
Larsen, a Portland, Ore., native, visualized a place where women could report for themselves, and founded World Pulse magazine, which came out with its first edition in 2004.
As technologies and social media evolved, so did World Pulse, and it launched an online component in 2007 with the goals of bringing women together and giving them a voice and the ability to improve their communities and their lives.
“We’re not about professional journalists, we’re more about that emerging woman leader who’s just coming online and has a powerful contribution to make,” Larsen said.
It’s an inspiring story–please go read the whole thing.
Finally, a little science news:
Ohioans who were outside late last night got a surprise from the Universe, according to the Columbus Dispatch: Meteor over central Ohio lights up night, phone lines.
The bright flash of light at 11:33 p.m. prompted some people to call Columbus police to ask what it was while officers chatted about the event over their radios.
“The initial trajectory suggests it passed over Columbus, Ohio, moving slightly north of west,” Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office told The Dispatch in an email. Cooke said there were some reports of sounds similar to sonic booms, which suggests some of the fireball’s fragments made it to fairly low altitudes.
NASA’s meteor camera in Ohio and Pennsylvania first detected it at 67 miles up, and it began breaking apart 41 miles above the earth. Cooke said it’s not yet certain, but it’s unlikely that the fireball produced meteorites on the ground given the “tremendous” speed at which it was moving.
“The fireball was so bright our meteor-detection software ‘went home to momma’ and thought it was seeing lightning,” Cooke wrote. “The fireball lit up the sky, so the detection software thought it was lightning and did not flag it as a meteor/fireball.”
According to the American Meteor Society’s website, Ohio was ground zero for the sighting. The society’s fireball coordinator, Robert Lunsford, said the fireball already had generated 900 reports to the society’s website, making it the third-most reported meteor event since the group began tracking them in 2005.
What was exciting was that this event happened at a time when lots of people were awake and looking up at the sky. I would just love to see a meteor! See a short video at the link.
Here’s another science story from The A Register: Egad! TUPPERWARE FOUND on ALIEN MOON: NASA shocker.
A NASA spacecraft sniffing the smoggy atmosphere of Titan has found traces of the chemical used to make plastic Tupperware boxes….
As if the place wasn’t nasty enough, space boffins now know that it is home to detectable quantities of propylene, which is a key ingredient in food containers as well as car bumpers.
NASA used Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) to scan the hazy atmosphere, measuring the heat radiation emitted as infrared light from the moon in a process that NASA described as being similar to “the way our hands feel the warmth of a fire”.
The first chemical the scientists discovered using the CIRS was propylene, which was identified in small quantities at various altitudes throughout the lower levels of the soupy hydrocarbon fog found in the moon’s noxious skies.
“This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene,” said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a paper describing the findings.
“That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom – that’s polypropylene.”
Geographer Franck Lavigne of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and his research group believe they have solved an 800-year-old puzzle: Deadly 13th-Century Volcano Eruption: Mystery Solved?
One of history’s great disaster mysteries may be solved—the case of the largest volcanic eruption in the last 3,700 years. Nearly 800 years ago, the blast that was recorded, and then forgotten, may also have created a “Pompeii of the Far East,” researchers suggest, which might lie buried and waiting for discovery on an Indonesian island.
The source of an eruption that scattered ash from pole to pole has been pinpointed as Samalas volcano on Indonesia’s Lombok Island. The research team, led by geographer Franck Lavigne of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, has now dated the event to between May and October of 1257. The findings were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It’s been a long time that some people have been looking,” said Lavigne. After glaciologists turned up evidence for the blast three decades ago, volcano experts had looked for the origin of the eruption everywhere from New Zealand’s Okataina volcano to Mexico’s El Chichón.
The previously unattributed eruption was an estimated eight times as large as the famed Krakatau explosion (1883) and twice as large as Tambora in 1815, the researchers estimate. (Related: “Tambora: The Greatest Explosion in History.”) “Until now we thought that Tambora was the largest eruption for 3,700 years,” Lavigne said, but the study reveals that the 1257 event was even larger.
Those are my offerings for today. What stories are you following? Please share your links in the comment thread.
Irrational Exuberance
Posted: August 22, 2013 Filed under: Tea Party activists | Tags: Affordable Health Care Act, Obamacare 21 CommentsSo, I am not exactly going to use the term “irrational exuberance” quite in the context that it was originally uttered by Alan Greenspan in 1996. Maybe
irrational mania or hate-driven zealotry or crazy-go-nuts gullibility are better terms. Whatever the case, the so-called “Tea Party” ginned up by the histrionics of folks like Ted Cruz , the low information and thought ability of Sarah Palin, and the whacko ideology of the neoconfederate Pauls believes that taking down “Obamacare” and our government is the be all and end all of their existence. There’s some articles today looking at their efforts. Why are they doing everything from crowing townhall meetings and running strange ads? There’s an interview there with one of the exhuberati that’s pretty damned strange.
Another objection that’s been raised is that this would only lead to a government shutdown or default, and Republicans would get blamed for that. Are you advocating that outcome?
The outcome we would like to see is that the American people don’t have to pay for Obamacare, however that comes to pass. It’s like driving from L.A. to San Francisco — there’s a million different ways to get there. We believe this approach is the last, best opportunity to prevent the American taxpayer from having to shell out the money and support Obamacare.
Think for a second. You’re a taxpayer, an ordinary American working woman. You’ve got to pay for a health-care system that Congress is exempt from. You have to participate in a health-care system that big business, political cronies, congressmen and their staffs do not have to participate in. That doesn’t sound like a democratic republic to me. That’s what’s got the grassroots upset. We are not serfs. We are citizens.
The House has had, what, 40 votes to repeal Obamacare, and what has that done? Besides given members of Congress a bloody shirt that they can wave on the stump back home and say, “I’m against Obamacare”? This effort to ensure right now that Americans don’t have to pay for Obamacare is the best way to go about it. It’s not just bloody-shirt-waving for the voters, it’s an actual, working thing.
For some reason, the right wing always seems to think they get to pick and choose what their tax dollars go for even though their representatives and our representatives do that for us as clearly outlined. They seem to think that they don’t have to pay for birth control or abortion services or whatever it is that drives them to hysteria while I have to pay for their wars, their Isreal at all costs policies, their police state, their gay conversion therapies, and their screeds and lies that basically outline state ownership of women.
The deal is that the anti-Obamacare movement will fail if it does not succeed now. Folks like Ted Cruz basically know this.
Cruz’s suggestion that conservatives can still win the defund fight is getting attention, but the really important quote here is Cruz’s concession that conservatives have not won “the argument” in a long time. Here’s why: Cruz almost certainly knows full well that this is the last chance to win the broader argument over Obamacare. Once the law’s benefits kick in, it will probably no longer be winnable.
Obamacare opponents cite polls showing Obamacare’s unpopularity to justify continued efforts to repeal and/or sabotage the law, whether through a government shutdown or through more prosaic methods. But, as even some Republicans are now acknowledging, the Republican position on health care is untenable as long as they fail to offer a meaningful alternative that would accomplish Obamacare’s core goals — expanding coverage to many millions of uninsured and protecting consumers and those with preexisting conditions from insurance industry abuse.
This is the argument conservatives are losing: As unpopular as Obamacare is, there is simply no evidence that this dissatisfaction translates into public support for repealing the law entirely and simply letting the “magic of the marketplace” ensure that everyone is covered. And a number of writers — Jonathan Bernstein, Aaron Carrol, Ezra Klein,Jonathan Cohn, and Paul Krugman — have already explained well why Republicans can’t offer an alternative to Obamacare that accomplishes what the law accomplishes, and why there’s simply no meaningful Republican alternative to embracing Obamacare’s general approach or essentially doing nothing.
For several years now, Republicans have been able to paper over this problem by making the political argument only a referendum on the lurid, nightmarish vision of Obamacare they have painted (with some success) for voters. But as even Cruz seems to recognize, the actual contours of the argument we’re having will only become clearer as Obamacare’s concrete benefits kick in — very likely rendering that argument unwinnable. That leaves Republicans in the position of hoping the law is a disaster and doing all they can to bring that about. But that posture only further underscores what makes the GOP position untenable in the first place. Cruz is absolutely right: time is running out.
Undoubtedly, the law will begin to morph into something else should the political and governance process in Washington work again. The absolute hysteria on the right caused by the law is nearly as bad as the attempts by the right to circumvent civil rights, gay rights or reproductive rights. The weird difference is this law has some component that is likely to benefit nearly every one. It isn’t aimed at relieving oppression of any one group. It’s aimed at solving a nationwide problem created by our very dysfunctional healthcare system that mostly became dysfunctional because of the system of paying for health care.
From the day the Affordable Care Act was enacted, every Republican in Congress and most Republicans in state and local governments have done everything imaginable to interfere with its implementation, and have systematically opposed the kind of legislative “fixes” that are normal for any major new law, while loudly cheering for its failure. Now we are told that executive measures to make the law work mean that it’s not the law of the land. So what exactly happened when the president signed this legislation on March 23, 2010? Does the legitimacy of a law depend on acceptance of it by its opponents? Think about the implications of that theory, and recall that not so very long ago Republicans tried to drive a president from office on grounds that his efforts to hide sexual impropriety threatened the very Rule of Law.
That last sentence deserves a second look because there are calls to impeach Obama over “ObamaCare”. This is another clear indication that the Tea Party and Republicans–n general–are rarely about the Constitution. What is their generally accepted definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Even Republican congress critters don’t seem to understand our Constitution.
Kerry Bentivolio is a Republican member of The House of Representatives from the great state of Michigan. He’s also clearly deranged. Bentivolio is the latest TEApublican to throw his voice in support of impeaching President Barack Obama. Speaking at a town hall meeting in his home district, the congressman told a constituent that essentially he doesn’t like President Obama, would love to impeach him, but he just doesn’t have any of the pesky evidence you need to actually convict a sitting president on impeachment charges.
“You know, if I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true,” Bentivolio told the constituents. “I feel your pain, I know, I stood twelve feet away from the guy and listened to him. I couldn’t stand being there, but because he is president I have to respect the office. That’s my job, as a congressman, I respect the office.” A dream come true, congressman? There used to be a time in this country where impeachment was considered such a drastic undertaking that even a president’s political foes took no glee in doing it.
All of this just isn’t rational under any logical paradigm. So, that just brings me back to the the conclusion that this is mostly about anger, hatred, and racism at a very visceral level. This is also what probably ties what should just be a basic economic policy issue to basic civil rights issues and it’s also what makes the Tea Party a mostly white movement tinged with strong elements of neoconfederates, christofascists, and gun toting preppers. These folks seem to like their social security and medicare and scream loudly when these programs are threatened. They only seem to hate it when folks outside of their ‘own’ might get access to something that they’re convinced doesn’t benefit them even when it likely does. That’s just plain crazy talking.
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