They Got Some ’Splainin’ to Do

By FRANK RICH
NYT

AS political theater, the Sonia Sotomayor hearings tanked faster than the 2008 Fred Thompson presidential campaign. They boasted no drama to rival the Clarence-Anita slapdown, the Bork hissy fits or the tearful exodus of Samuel Alito’s wife. There was rarely a moment to match even the high point of the Senate’s previous grilling of Sotomayor — in 1997, when she was elevated to the Second Circuit. It was then that Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri previewed the brand of white male legal wisdom that would soon become his hallmark at the Bush Justice Department. “Do you believe there’s a constitutional right to homosexual conduct by prisoners?” he asked. (She aced it: “No, sir.”)

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.

The hearings were pure “Alice in Wonderland.” Reality was turned upside down. Southern senators who relate every question to race, ethnicity and gender just assumed that their unreconstructed obsessions are America’s and that the country would find them riveting. Instead the country yawned. The Sotomayor questioners also assumed a Hispanic woman, simply for being a Hispanic woman, could be portrayed as The Other and patronized like a greenhorn unfamiliar with How We Do Things Around Here. The senators seemed to have no idea they were describing themselves when they tried to caricature Sotomayor as an overemotional, biased ideologue.

(More here.)

Pharisees on the Potomac

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

Like cats that have lost their whiskers, the Republicans seem off balance now that they have lost their talent for hypocrisy.

They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.

Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas’s false witness? When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton?

No one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.

Now when Republicans get caught flouting the principles they dictate, they are not able to practice hypocrisy with such impunity.

(Continued here.)

Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

Pushghar, Afghanistan

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

(Continued here.)

His Maternal Instinct

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT

KARACHI, Pakistan

She is an illiterate woman from the tribal areas of Pakistan who almost died in childbirth a year after marrying at the age of 12. She suffered a horrific injury during labor called a fistula that left her incontinent and smelly, and for the next 13 years she was confined to her house — never stepping outside for shame at the way she was leaking wastes.

He is a famous Pakistani ob-gyn who was educated in Ireland. After spending eight years there, he returned with plans to set up a fertility clinic for rich patients and zip around in a Mercedes-Benz. But he was so shattered by the sight of women dying unnecessarily in childbirth that he decided to devote his career instead to helping impoverished women like her.

So they met in one of the hospitals established by the doctor, Shershah Syed, and he has been helping the young woman, Ashrafi Akbar. She is scheduled to undergo a final repair of her fistula in that hospital today.

People in the West are properly outraged by Taliban oppression of women in parts of Pakistan. But some of the greatest suffering of women here isn’t political or religious. It comes simply from the inattention to maternal health care.

(More here.)

Swiss Minister to Meet Clinton Ahead Of UBS Deadline

By REUTERS

Filed at 5:14 a.m. ET

ZURICH (Reuters) - The Swiss foreign minister is due to meet U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on July 31, just days before a deadline to reach a settlement in a damaging U.S. tax case against UBS.

Micheline Calmy-Rey told the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper in an interview she would probably meet Clinton on July 31, adding she hoped that strong Swiss ties with the United States should help seal a deal for UBS soon.

"UBS employs more people in the United States than in Switzerland. Given these interests of the United States, I hope that a solution will be possible soon," she told the paper.

"Our relations are very good. That is also useful in the case of UBS," she said, pointing to Switzerland's recent mediation in the Turkish-Armenia conflict and its representation of U.S. interests in Cuba and Iran.

(Continued here.)

Inside Dr. Bernanke’s E.R.

As Obama considers reappointing the Fed chairman, a look at how he took on more power

By DAVID WESSEL

WSJ

On Wednesday morning, Sept. 17, Ben Bernanke and his lieutenants assembled. Lehman was in bankruptcy; AIG was not, only because the Fed had intervened. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at a nearly three-year low. Yields on the safest securities of all, short-term U.S. Treasury bills, fell nearly to zero because so many investors wanted to park their money there. “It was becoming clear that the markets were going into anaphylactic shock, and that we needed to do something,” Mr. Bernanke said in an interview a few weeks later.

The Fed could no longer cope with the Great Panic by itself. The Federal Reserve chairman had suspected for months that he and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would eventually end up asking Congress to spend substantial sums of taxpayer money to rescue the banks, as every other country had been forced to do in a major banking crisis. So far, Mr. Bernanke had deferred to Mr. Paulson on the timing of going to Congress, while Mr. Paulson had been reluctant to propose anything that Congress might, in an election year, reject. Mr. Bernanke saw this as the inevitable politics of responding to banking crises in a democracy. The most effective solution always called for lots of taxpayer money upfront. The usual political solution was to wait until the crisis was bad enough to dominate the headlines, even if that drove up the ultimate cost.

At 7:30 p.m., after a day of nearly constant conference calls, the financial firefighters convened for the last session of the day. Mr. Bernanke and his Washington team were facing the Polcycom speakerphone on the conference table in his office. Timothy Geithner, then-still the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and not yet Treasury secretary, was on the phone from his office. Mr. Paulson was at his desk. More than a dozen Treasury aides stood around him to listen, or huddled in corners in separate conversations. Mr. Bernanke was usually soft-spoken and mild-mannered. He was not this time. “We can’t do this anymore, Hank. We have to go to Congress,” Mr. Bernanke said, according to a participant in the call. Mr. Paulson was uncharacteristically silent. He didn’t argue. He didn’t signal agreement. He didn’t tell Mr. Bernanke that he had come to the same conclusion and already had scrambled his staff.

(More here.)

Americans won't accept a 'long slog' in Afghanistan war, Gates says

The Defense secretary says forces must show progress in a year or risk losing public support, especially as casualties mount, with at least 50 U.S. and NATO deaths in July, the deadliest month yet.

By Julian E. Barnes
LA Times

4:47 PM PDT, July 18, 2009

Reporting from Washington — After eight years, U.S.-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next summer to avoid public perception that the conflict has become unwinnable, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a sharp critique of the war effort.

Gates said that victory was a "long-term prospect" under any scenario and that the U.S. would not win the war in a year's time. However, U.S. forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support.

"After the Iraq experience, nobody is prepared to have a long slog where it is not apparent we are making headway," Gates said in an interview. "The troops are tired, the American people are pretty tired."

Deep public unhappiness with the war in Iraq helped sink President George W. Bush's approval ratings, making him the most unpopular president in recent history, according to some surveys.

(More here.)

Obama Campaign Arm Doubles Down, Targets House Dems On Health Care

Sam Stein
HuffPost

Ignoring criticism - namely from Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid - that intra-party targeting was ineffective, Barack Obama's campaign arm is expanding its health care ad buy into the districts of key conservative House Democrats.

Late Friday night Organizing for America and the Democratic National Committee announced the expansion of the "It's Time" ad purchase, which uses personal stories of health care struggles to drive home the need for reform. The initial purchase was on national cable and in eight states with critical Democratic and moderate Republican Senators.

Now the scope of the campaign is expanding. The ad will appear in the media markets that overlap with the congressional districts of 15 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Eleven of those districts belong to Democrats, including Rep. Zack Space (Ohio), Rep. John Barrow (Georgia), Rep. Jay Inslee (Washington), Rep. Mike Ross (Arkansas), Rep. Bart Gordon (Tennessee), Rep. Baron Hill (Indiana), Rep. Charlie Melancon (Louisiana), Rep. Mike Doyle (Pennsylvania), Rep. Jim Matheson (Utah), Rep. Bart Stupak (Michigan), Rep. Jerry McNerney (California).

(Continued here.)

Iraq Restricts U.S. Forces

American Officials See Link Between Limits, Spate of Attacks

By Ernesto Londoño and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 18, 2009

BAGHDAD, July 17 -- The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops.

In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 -- the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers -- Iraq's top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to "stop all joint patrols" in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to "notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement."

The strict application of the agreement coincides with what U.S. military officials in Washington say has been an escalation of attacks against their forces by Iranian-backed Shiite extremist groups, to which they have been unable to fully respond.

If extremists realize "some of the limitations that we have, that's a vulnerability they could use against us," a senior U.S. military intelligence official said. "The fact is that some of these are very politically sensitive targets" thought to be close to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

(More here.)

The Fellowship Quiz

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

Lately, every day brings a surprise. You’re hanging out, waiting for the Independence Day fireworks to start, and suddenly there is Sarah Palin on TV, announcing that she’s quitting her job because she’s not a dead fish. And now we’re hearing that San Diego is under attack from giant flying squid with razor-sharp beaks.

And then there’s the string of weird political sex scandals. Illicit lust is not, in and of itself, a novelty in our nation’s capital. But over the past few weeks we’ve gotten one story after another about politicians whose extramarital affairs turned into public displays of strange behavior, conflict and hysteria.

For instance, the estranged wife of Chip Pickering, a very conservative, toothy ex-congressman from Mississippi, has filed a lawsuit against Pickering’s alleged mistress. Leisha Pickering blames the woman, Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd, for ruining her family and forcing Pickering to turn down an offer to succeed the departing Trent Lott in the Senate. If it weren’t for Creekmore Byrd, Mrs. Pickering contends, her husband would have been promoted and she would still be happily married.

(More here.)

Losing the Races

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

The Republicans are sending mixed signals and making missteps on race. While some bemoan the dearth of minorities in the party, others seem bent on ensuring it. At last week’s Young Republican National Convention, Michael Steele joked that he would welcome blacks to the party with “fried chicken and potato salad.” At the same meeting, the group threw racial sensitivity to the wind by electing a woman as its president even though she had a racially offensive exchange on her Facebook page.

Then there was the awkward juxtaposition of Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, going after Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, over racial language in her speeches. This is the same Sessions whose own nomination to the federal court was torpedoed after reports emerged that he had called the N.A.A.C.P. “communist-inspired,” but once joked that he had thought the Ku Klux Klan was “O.K.”

Finally, there was the acerbic Pat Buchanan, who suggested this week that Republicans should mount an all-out, reverse-discrimination assault on Sotomayor as part of an effort to win back the G.O.P.’s lost white voters. According to him, she’s “a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males.”

(More here.)

Who’s Afraid of Richard Burton?

Dick Cavett

NYT

He was sitting in front of his dressing room mirror after a tiring performance of “Camelot,” removing his make-up for the who knows how many thousandth time. Paler, with the greasepaint cleansed from the famous face, he managed to look, simultaneously, handsome, vibrant and worn.

“Richard has been entertaining the idea of doing your show, Mr. Cavett,” a man who appeared to be both valet and companion said.

“And letting the idea entertain him,” the Welshman intoned in that unmistakable voice.

In fact, Richard Burton was still pondering whether to do my show, and it was thought that my visiting him backstage informally might help.

I tried to imagine what fears or hesitations Burton might have about appearing with me. Could he be afraid that the rich voice, those rugged good looks, the manly erotic charm, the hypnotic blue eyes, the articulacy, the fine wit and the ready storehouse of classical and modern literary quotations and allusions were not quite enough to qualify him for sitting next to Cavett? (Did anyone think, just now, that I was describing myself?)

(More here.)

Targeting Terrorists

Washington is embroiled in a manic swing of opinion about the efficacy of covert action, including targeted assassinations. Richard A. Clarke on the delicate balance between the rule of law and running an effective intelligence agency.

By RICHARD A. CLARKE

WSJ

Not since 1975 when the Church Commission investigated Nixon-era abuses in intelligence agencies, have such unusual things occurred in the world of Washington intelligence agencies as in these past few weeks. The Democratic House of Representatives threatened to pass an intelligence authorization bill which the Democratic White House has promised to veto. The former Democratic congressman who now heads the Central Intelligence Agency has been having a public disagreement with leading House Democrats about whether the CIA lies to Congress. There is a controversy about a secret CIA program to do something most Americans presumably want the CIA to do, to kill al Qaeda terrorists. The attorney general is rumored to be looking for a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogators, even though the president seemed to have earlier told CIA employees that there would be no prosecutions about alleged torture. Former CIA employees are publicly trotting out the claim that all of this attention “hurts the Agency’s morale” and that damage could result in another successful terrorist attack on the U.S. Even seasoned Washington policy wonks are finding it hard to navigate their way through all of those stories and make some sense of what has been going on.

(More here.)

Don Monkerud: U.S. income inequality continues to grow

Don Monkerud

Capital Times

7/16/2009 5:48 pm

In June 2009, the U.S. economy saw its second steepest decline in 27 years. New jobless claims increased, business inventories fell and exports plunged as bad economic news persisted.

Will the once high-flying American wealth machine continue to produce the vast inequalities of the past?

Only two years ago, Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes magazine, declared 2007 "the richest year ever in human history." During eight years of the Bush administration, the 400 richest Americans, who now own more than the bottom 150 million Americans, increased their net worth by $700 billion. In 2005, the top 1 percent claimed 22 percent of the national income, while the top 10 percent took half of the total income, the largest share since 1928.

In June 2009, the Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Report estimated the number of the world's wealthiest people declined by 15 percent, the steepest decline in the report's 13-year history. The number of millionaires in the U.S. fell by 19 percent to 2.5 million people.

(More here.)

House committee investigating secret CIA counter-terrorism plan

The probe will look into a program to kill Al Qaeda leaders, and at Cheney’s possible role in hiding the plot from Congress. It marks a new level of scrutiny of Bush-era counter-terror efforts.

By Greg Miller
LA Times

4:15 PM PDT, July 17, 2009

Reporting from Washington — The House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation today into a secret CIA effort to assemble paramilitary teams to kill Al Qaeda leaders, a probe that will focus in part on whether agency officials were instructed by former Vice President Dick Cheney to hide the program from Congress.

The program, launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was ended by new agency Director Leon E. Panetta last month shortly after he learned about it, and before it became operational.

The investigation is aimed at determining whether CIA or other officials violated laws that require the executive branch to keep Congress fully informed of "significant" intelligence activities. It opens a new front in the ongoing scrutiny of the agency's counter-terrorism efforts under the Bush administration.

Members of Congress didn't learn about the program until June 24, when Panetta arranged emergency briefings with the intelligence committees in both chambers. Panetta told lawmakers then that Cheney had instructed the CIA not to share information about the program with Congress.

(More here.)

The Al Qaeda Paradox

Steve Coll

The New Yorker

Compared with their position in the period from 2002 to 2004, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, such as Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia (which has been involved in hotel bombings similar to the attack today on the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton in Jakarta), have become politically marginalized. Opinion polling, election results, and theological discourse all describe an Al Qaeda network that has been rejected by the great majority of Muslims. Al Qaeda has largely brought this outcome upon itself. Unlike Hezbollah and Hamas, it has never developed a political strategy that appealed successfully to the craving among many Muslims for justice and better governance. Al Qaeda runs no schools or hospitals and it competes in no trade-union elections. It operates no semi-legitimate political front, as Hezbollah and Hamas do.

Why has Al Qaeda isolated itself in this way, particularly when there are alternative models, such as Hezbollah, lying in plain sight? There is a strong millenarian streak in the belief systems of Osama bin Laden and some of his colleagues; they believe that God ordained the war they are fighting and that its outcome is in many ways predetermined. Also, bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, simply lack political skills. They are modern men, but, unlike the leaders of Hezbollah, they lack a vision of modern politics. They have randomly murdered far too many of their own potential followers. Their idea of justice is abstract and distant—it involves the punishment of unbelievers, some of them living far away, and not the righting of wrongs close at hand, whether those wrongs are unemployment, or routine local problems such as grazing, or boundary disputes. Al Qaeda has been up and running formally for twenty-one years now. By this point in the history of the Soviet Communist movement, Lenin had seized control of a great state. By this point in the history of Cuban Communism, Castro was in Havana. And Osama? He’s hunkered down along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a fugitive “guest” with a price on his head, waiting for death, embedded in a political economy that is a cross between Gaza and the New Jersey of “The Sopranos.” By the lights of its own announced ambitions in 2001, then, at least in political terms, Al Qaeda has failed.

(More here.)

Dogfight over Raptor typifies defense excess

Pentagon doesn’t want more F-22s. So why is Congress funding them?

USA Today

Let's see if we have this right: The nation is struggling with an unprecedented $1.7 trillion budget deficit and fighting two wars against low-tech guerillas who have no aircraft. But Congress wants to keep building more and more copies of a hyper-expensive fighter jet that was designed for Cold War aerial battles against a country — the Soviet Union — that no longer exists.

Crazy? Yes, but this sort of thing has long been business as usual on Capitol Hill. For decades, members of Congress have insisted on saddling the Pentagon with weapons it doesn't want, or building more than military officials say they need. Just one example: The Crusader self-propelled howitzer, a hulking gun designed for battles with the Soviet Union, was kept alive by Congress for years after the Soviet Union collapsed. The Pentagon finally succeeded in killing the Crusader in 2002.

This sort of waste is shortsighted in peacetime. But it's outrageous in times of war such as now. Dollars spent on unnecessary jets divert resources from low-tech, less glamorous items — body armor, mine-resistant vehicles and unmanned aerial drones — that can save troops' lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(More here.)

What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?

Jamison Foser
MediaMatters

In the weeks since President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, one question has consumed the news media, particularly conservatives in the media: Imagine what would happen if a white man had said the reverse of Sotomayor's famous (and famously distorted) "wise Latina" comment. Media commentators have insisted that such a white man would be denounced as a racist and run out of town on a rail.

That's nonsense. First of all, Sotomayor's actual comments were far more innocuous than the media's portrayal of them would suggest; she was merely noting the importance of judicial diversity in cases involving discrimination, a sentiment that is consistent with statements by numerous prominent conservatives. Second, as Reason magazine's Julian Sanchez has noted, "[I]t would be weird for a white man to say it because it's probably not true that the experience of growing up as a white male in the United States specifically enhances one's understanding of what it means to be a disfavored minority."

Finally, the media debate over Sotomayor has provided a depressing reminder of what does happen to prominent white men who make racist, sexist, and homophobic comments: MSNBC, among others, puts them on payroll and trots them out to opine on matters of race and gender.

MSNBC's history in this regard is well-known. The cable channel gave Michael Savage his own television show, and then had to fire him when he told a caller to "get AIDS and die." It gave Don Imus a television show, and then had to fire him when he called members of the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." It gave Chris Matthews a television show on which he had to issue a bizarre apology after making one sexist comment too many. (No such apology has been forthcoming for his habit of suggesting minorities are not "regular" people.)

(Continued here.)

‘Birther’ Movement Dogs Republicans

Ten Members of Congress Sign on to Presidential Birth Certificate Bill

By David Weige, Washington Independent, 7/17/09 6:00 AM

Kris Kobach campaigns in Wichita, Kans. (YouTube: WichitaLiberty)

Kris Kobach is a law professor with degrees from Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and a veteran of George W. Bush’s administration who, after Sept. 11, helped craft the policy on domestic registration of foreign visitors to the United States. In May, he announced a run for Kansas secretary of state, campaigning for photo ID requirements at the voting booth. He’s considered a clear front-runner for the job. But over the weekend, Kobach spoke at a Republican Party barbecue and committed a minor gaffe. According to the Lawrence Journal-World, Kobach “asked what President Obama and God had in common, with the punchline being neither has a birth certificate.”

Kansas Democrats pounced. “While Kris Kobach has in the past associated himself with extremists who frequently show poor taste,” said state Democratic Party Executive Director Kenny Johnston, “his latest attempt at humor has gone too far.” Kobach told the Democrats to “lighten up” before walking back the comment, explaining that “until a court says otherwise, I believe Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen.”

Kobach could have offered another defense. The joke was not his. One month earlier, Rush Limbaugh made the same remark on his radio show. “Barack Obama has one thing in common with God,” Limbaugh said. “Know what it is? God does not have a birth certificate either.” And Limbaugh may not have been writing his own material, either. At Patriot Depot, a conservative web site that sells books by Glenn Beck and signs designed for anti-tax Tea Parties, buyers can pay $10 to get two bumper stickers that read: “Obama & God Have ONLY ONE THING in Common: NO BIRTH CERTIFICATE! The Difference Is God Doesn’t Think He’s Obama!”According to a salesman for Patriot Depot, the company has sold “hundreds” of this and another birth certificate sticker since advertising them with the conservative opinion sites GOPUSA.com and Townhall.com.

(Continued here.)

Conservatives for sale

Mike Allen, Politico.com

The American Conservative Union's remarkable demand is contained in a private letter to FedEx provided to POLITICO. Chairman David Keene is pictured here. Photo: AP

The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then the group’s president flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.

For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)”

The conservative group’s remarkable demand — black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as “pay for play” — was contained in a private letter to FedEx , which was provided to POLITICO.

The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25072.html#ixzz0LXKZyvME

Kennedy’s Absent Voice on Health Bill Resonates

By MARK LEIBOVICH
NYT

WASHINGTON — As a divided Senate tangles over health care legislation, there is bipartisan consensus on one point: Ted Kennedy could make a big difference, if only he were here.

“He would lend a gravitas to the issue that we’re kind of missing right now,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Mr. Harkin’s Republican counterparts similarly invoked Mr. Kennedy in criticizing a health care measure the committee approved Wednesday with only Democratic support. “It is a very one-sided, very liberal bill,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah. “I know that Ted would not have done that had he been able to be here.”

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, has not been on Capitol Hill since April. Colleagues routinely lament his absence, which has been especially painful to Mr. Kennedy, the committee chairman, who has spent much of his career trying to expand health coverage.

(Continued here.)

Cleric Says ‘Crisis’ Has Caused Loss of Public Trust

Pro-government militiamen fired tear gas at opposition demonstrators as anti-riot police looked on behind them during a rally in front of Tehran University on Friday.

By ROBERT F. WORTH and ALAN COWELL

BEIRUT, Lebanon — As thousands of opposition protesters chanted in the streets of Tehran on Friday, the former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani assailed the government’s handling of the post-election unrest, saying it had lost the trust of many Iranians and calling for the release of hundreds of protesters and democracy advocates arrested in recent weeks.

Mr. Rafsanjani, speaking to a vast crowd at Tehran University that included the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi and many of his supporters, called for unity and reconciliation in his prayer sermon. But he also said doubts about the election “are now consuming us” and called for a new spirit of compromise between the opposition and the government.

Outside the university’s prayer hall, police officers used tear gas and truncheons to disperse large crowds of protesters chanting anti-government slogans, and there were reports of at least 15 arrests. It was the largest street gathering by opposition supporters in weeks, witnesses said.

Mr. Rafsanjani, a powerful insider who supported Mr. Moussavi’s campaign, did not directly question the election results, which have been blessed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But he made clear that he believed Mr. Khamenei, who has blamed foreign powers for the unrest and called for an end to protests, should take a more conciliatory stance. Calling the election aftermath a “crisis,” Mr. Rafsanjani urged that restrictions on the press and on free speech be removed, in addition to the freeing of those detained since the election.

(Continued here.)

The Joy of Sachs

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

(Continued here.)

No Size Fits All

By DAVID BROOKS
NYT

If you visit a four-year college, you can predict what sort of student you are going to bump into. If you visit a community college, you have no idea. You might see an immigrant kid hoping eventually to get a Ph.D., or another kid who messed up in high school and is looking for a second chance. You might meet a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training or a 50-year-old taking classes for fun.

These students may not realize it, but they’re tackling some of the country’s biggest problems. Over the past 35 years, college completion rates have been flat. Income growth has stagnated. America has squandered its human capital advantage. Students at these places are on self-directed missions to reverse that, one person at a time.

Community college enrollment has been increasing at more than three times the rate of four-year colleges. This year, in the middle of the recession, many schools are seeing enrollment surges of 10 percent to 15 percent. And the investment seems to pay off. According to one study, students who earn a certificate experience a 15 percent increase in earnings. Students earning an associate degree registered an 11 percent gain.

(More here.)

Democrats Drop Key Part of Bill to Assist Unions

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
NYT

A half-dozen senators friendly to labor have decided to drop a central provision of a bill that would have made it easier to organize workers.

The so-called card-check provision — which senators decided to scrap to help secure a filibuster-proof 60 votes — would have required employers to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers signed cards saying they wanted a union. Currently, employers can insist on a secret-ballot election, a higher hurdle for unions.

The abandonment of card check was another example of the power of moderate Democrats to constrain their party’s more liberal legislative efforts. Though the Democrats have a 60-40 vote advantage in the Senate, and President Obama supports the measure, several moderate Democrats opposed the card-check provision as undemocratic.

(More here.)

Obama Tells Fellow Blacks: ‘No Excuses’ for Any Failure

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT

President Obama delivered a fiery sermon to black America on Thursday night, warning black parents that they must accept their own responsibilities by “putting away the Xbox and putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour,” and telling black children that growing up poor is no reason to get bad grades.

“No one has written your destiny for you,” he said, directing his remarks to “all the other Barack Obamas out there” who might one day grow up to be president. “Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children! No excuses! No excuses!”

Mr. Obama spoke for 45 minutes to an audience of several thousand people, most of them black, , clad in tuxedos and ball gowns, who had gathered in a ballroom of the Hilton New York to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s largest civil rights organization.

He was one part politician and one part black preacher as he spoke in lilting cadences, his voice quiet at times, thundering at others, in unusually personal terms. At one point, when his audience shouted back at him, repeating his words, he threw back his head and laughed, saying, “I’ve got an amen corner back there.”

(More here.)

The real price of Goldman’s giganto-profits

Matt Taibbi

Taibblog

Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein in Washington DC in November 2008 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Equity underwriting boomed during the period as dozens of banks raised money to strengthen capital and repay Troubled Asset Relief Program funds. The business reported record revenue of $736 million.via Article - WSJ.com.

So what’s wrong with Goldman posting $3.44 billion in second-quarter profits, what’s wrong with the company so far earmarking $11.4 billion in compensation for its employees? What’s wrong is that this is not free-market earnings but an almost pure state subsidy.

Last year, when Hank Paulson told us all that the planet would explode if we didn’t fork over a gazillion dollars to Wall Street immediately, the entire rationale not only for TARP but for the whole galaxy of lesser-known state crutches and safety nets quietly ushered in later on was that Wall Street, once rescued, would pump money back into the economy, create jobs, and initiate a widespread recovery. This, we were told, was the reason we needed to pilfer massive amounts of middle-class tax revenue and hand it over to the same guys who had just blown up the financial world. We’d save their asses, they’d save ours. That was the deal.

(Continued here.)

Will Iraq Be a Global Gas Pump?

The (re)making of a petro-state.

—By Michael T. Klare
MotherJones

Has it all come to this? The wars and invasions, the death and destruction, the exile and torture, the resistance and collapse? In a world of shrinking energy reserves, is Iraq finally fated to become what it was going to be anyway, even before the chaos and catastrophe set in: a giant gas pump for an energy-starved planet? Will it all end not with a bang, but with a gusher? The latest oil news out of that country offers at least a hint of Iraq's fate.

For modern Iraq, oil has always been at the heart of everything. Its very existence as a unified state is largely the product of oil.

In 1920, under the aegis of the League of Nations, Britain cobbled together the Kingdom of Iraq from the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul in order to better exploit the holdings of the Turkish Petroleum Company, forerunner of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Later, Iraqi nationalists and the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein nationalized the IPC, provoking unrelenting British and American hostility. Hussein rewarded his Sunni allies in the Baath Party by giving them lucrative positions in the state company, part of a process that produced a dangerous rift with the country's Shiite majority. And these are but a few of the ways in which modern Iraqi history has been governed by oil.

(Continued here.)

Democrats Turn Up the Heat on Insurance Industry

By LAURA MECKLER

WSJ

WASHINGTON -- Democrats ratcheted up an offensive against health insurers Wednesday, proposing $100 billion in new fees on the industry, as health-care legislation took another step forward in the Senate.

Completing weeks of work, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passed its version of a health bill on a party-line vote. The bill will need to be merged with whatever the Finance Committee passes before it can move to the full Senate.

Finance Committee lawmakers are struggling to figure out how to cover the $1 trillion cost of expanding coverage. After one plan fell apart, Chairman Max Baucus began shopping a new package of taxes and fees, including the new proposal to impose a fee on insurers.

(Continued here.)

3 Days of the Sotomayor

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

DAY 1

JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN PATRICK LEAHY: Judge Sotomayor, welcome to you and your large and lovely family, including your mother, who I believe saved up to buy your first encyclopedia when she was a hard-working widow. Let me begin the opening statements by noting that you have more federal court judicial experience than any nominee to the United States Supreme Court in nearly a hundred years. And the Constitution — is that a great document or what? And now, the ranking Republican from Alabama.

SENATOR JEFF SESSIONS: Thank you, Chairman. Judge Sotomayor, let’s talk about empathy. I find it shocking that President Obama said that judges should have empathy. I hate empathy. My Republican colleagues hate empathy. In fact, I am proud to say that we’ve reached an all-time low in the “understands the problems of ordinary people” category.

SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Judge Sotomayor, if confirmed, you will join the Supreme Court with more federal judicial experience than any justice in the past 100 years. And, therefore, I will devote my time to complaining about the way the Bush administration pummeled our civil liberties.

SENATOR ORRIN HATCH: Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to point out that we once had a Hispanic nominee for something, and the Democrats filibustered him.

(More here.)

Chemicals and Our Health

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT

However careful you are about your health, your body is almost certainly home to troubling chemicals called phthalates. These are ubiquitous in modern life, found in plastic bottles, cosmetics, some toys, hair conditioners, and fragrances — and many scientists have linked them to everything from sexual deformities in babies to obesity and diabetes.

The problem is that phthalates suppress male hormones and sometimes mimic female hormones. As I’ve written before, chemicals called endocrine disruptors are believed to explain the proliferation of “intersex fish” — male fish that produce eggs — as well as sexual deformities in animals and humans. Phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates) are among the most common endocrine disruptors, and among the most difficult to avoid. They’re even in tap water, and levels soar in certain plastic water bottles.

They probably are not harmful to us adults, but it is another story for children. In girls, some research suggests that phthalates may cause early onset puberty. Most vulnerable of all, it seems, are male fetuses in the first trimester of pregnancy, just as they are differentiating their sex. At that stage, scholars believe, phthalates may “feminize” these boys.

(More here.)

Evil Spirits

By JAMES ABOUREZK
NYT

Sioux Falls, S.D.

SINCE taking office, President Obama has overturned several of George W. Bush’s executive orders. I would like to recommend he also overturn one of Theodore Roosevelt’s.

Fourteen years after the Great Sioux Reservation was established in western South Dakota in 1868, President Chester Arthur issued an executive order creating a 50-square-mile buffer zone on its southern edge, in Nebraska. This was meant to prevent renegade whites from selling guns, knives and alcohol to Indians living on the reservation.

The buffer zone was ratified as law when Congress divided the Great Sioux Reservation into smaller units in 1889. But when Roosevelt became president, the liquor industry convinced him that the buffer zone should be abolished, which he did through an executive order in 1904. This move was, however, illegitimate from the start, because an act of Congress cannot legally be reversed by an executive order.

Today, the tiny Nebraska hamlet of Whiteclay has four liquor stores, ostensibly to serve its population of 24, but really more for the bootleggers and alcoholics living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just across the border. The result has been murders, spouse beatings, child abuse, thefts and other undesirable consequences of the free flow of alcohol into the reservation.

(More here.)

College Athletes Stuck With the Bill After Injuries

By KRISTINA PETERSON
NYT

After years of concerns about inadequate health coverage for college athletes, the National Collegiate Athletic Association started requiring universities to make sure their athletes had insurance before competing.

But the association never established clear standards for that coverage when it introduced the rule four years ago, leaving colleges to decide for themselves. While some colleges accept considerable responsibility for medical claims, many others assume almost none, according to a review of public documents from a cross section of universities and interviews with current and former athletes, trainers, administrators and N.C.A.A. officials.

University officials say they go out of their way to inform students about the limits of insurance. Yet the situation has confused and frustrated athletes and their families, some of whom have had to shoulder large and unexpected medical bills.

“I thought I would be covered,” said Erin Knauer, a Colgate University student who piled up $80,000 in medical bills after injuring her back and legs in training for the crew team. Insurance has covered less than a third of the cost because of the way her condition was diagnosed. “You never think you’re going to rack up that much of a bill.”

(Continued here.)

Smiling GOPers Ought to be Frowning

By Craig Crawford | July 14, 2009

CQ

Watching Lindsey Graham's gotcha grin as he needled Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with disingenuous and rhetorical questions you had to wonder what was so funny.

Does the Republican senator think it is amusing that he and his party's condescending tone toward the Hispanic woman was costing them ethnic votes with each passing hour of Tuesday's Judiciary Committee hearing?

It is not that the Republican inquiries were out of bounds in legal terms. But a confirmation hearing like this is a political forum.

Even if they vote for her, the fallout for Republicans could reach well beyond Hispanic voters. They are coming across as a bunch of snarky and bitter old white men who cannot bear the thought of their kind losing power.

(More here.)

Chamber of Commerce Pushes Increase in Gas Tax

By JOSH MITCHELL

WSJ

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday that it will attempt to do what a string of economists and urban planners couldn't: persuade lawmakers to raise the federal gasoline tax to pay for better roads.

The new push by the powerful business lobby, which includes a six-figure ad campaign, comes as Congress has begun debating how to pay for repairs to the nation's highways, bridges and mass-transit systems. Boosting the 18.4-cent federal tax on a gallon of gasoline by roughly 10 cents a gallon would cover the growing funding gap while creating jobs and improving mobility, Chamber officials said Wednesday.

"Just damn do it," Chamber President Thomas Donohue said Wednesday at a news briefing, at which he called on Congress not to delay action on a new highway bill as the Obama administration has proposed. Wednesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee backed a plan to put off debate on new highway funding for 18 months, extending current funding levels until then.

(More here.)

Beyond the Palin

Why the GOP is falling out of love with gun-toting, churchgoing, working-class whites.

Rick Perlstein

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Jul 20, 2009

The conservative opinion elite is divided—irreconcilably so—about Sarah Palin's decision to quit the Alaska governorship. One faction says good riddance: The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer had already judged her unfit for national office 24 hours before her announcement, and The New York Times's Ross Douthat now refers to her "brief sojourn on the national stage" in the past tense. On the other side, the Post's William Kristol called Palin's quitting a "high-risk move" designed to catapult her to greater public prominence. Taking the longer view, though, the clash is symptomatic of the deepest strategic debate in Republican circles since the disciples of the Reagan revolution captured Congress in 1994.

For decades it has remained a Republican article of faith: white, lower-middle-class, "heartland" masses, fundamentally socially conservative, were an inexhaustible electoral resource. So much so that Bill Clinton made re-earning their trust—he called them the Americans who "worked hard and played by the rules"—the central challenge in rebuilding Democratic fortunes in the 1990s. And in 2008 the somewhat aristocratic John McCain seemed to regard bringing these folks back into the Republican fold so imperative that he was moved to make the election's most exciting strategic move: drafting churchgoing, gun-toting unknown Sarah Palin onto the GOP ticket.

But beneath the surface, some Republicans have been chafing at the ideological wages of right-wing populism. In intel-lectual circles, writers like David Brooks and Richard Brookhiser have argued for a conservatism inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the least democratic of the Founding Fathers, over one spiritually rooted in Thomas Jefferson, the most democratic. After Barack Obama's victory, you heard thinkers like author and federal judge Richard Posner lamenting on his blog that "the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party."

(Continued here.)