Is GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama?

By CHARLES BABINGTON | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama's re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth.

The latest Democratic complaint came after House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that when Congress raises the nation's borrowing cap in early 2013, he will again insist on big spending cuts to offset the increase. Boehner, R-Ohio, continues to reject higher tax rates, which Democrats demand from the wealthy.

That led Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to say Boehner is virtually assuring another debt-ceiling crisis as bad or worse than the one that shook financial markets nine months ago.

"The last thing the country needs is a rerun of last summer's debacle that nearly brought down our economy," Schumer said in a statement. In an interview, Schumer added: "I hope that the speaker is not doing this because he doesn't want to see the economy improve, because what he said will certainly rattle the markets."

(More here.)

Heading Into Talks With Iran, U.S. Sees Hopeful Signs

By MARK LANDLER, NYT

WASHINGTON — American negotiators, heading into a crucial round of talks with Iran over its nuclear program next week in Baghdad, are allowing themselves a rare emotion after more than a decade of fruitless haggling with Tehran: hope.

With signs that Iran is under more pressure than it has been in years to make a deal, senior Obama administration officials said the United States and five other major powers were prepared to offer a package of inducements to obtain a verifiable agreement to suspend its efforts to enrich uranium closer to weapons grade.

These gestures, the officials said, could include easing restrictions on things like airplane parts and technical assistance to Iran’s energy industry, but not the sweeping sanctions on oil exports, which officials said would go into effect on schedule in July.

The oil sanctions, which the Iranians are seeking desperately to avoid, are one of several factors that American officials believe may make Tehran more amenable to exploring a diplomatic solution. In addition, the recent decline in oil prices has magnified the pain of the existing sanctions on Iran; a new government coalition in Israel has strengthened the hand of its hawkish leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and Americans believe that recent blustery statements from Iranian officials are laying the groundwork for concessions by Tehran.

(More here.)

In politics, money can buy you anything

‘Metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln’

By CHARLES M. BLOW, NYT

We knew this day would come.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that a Republican “super PAC” was mulling over a plan to resurrect President Obama’s former pastor and spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., as a weapon against the president.

The proposal said that it would do what John McCain, whom it labels “a crusty old politician” (Ouch!), would not do in 2008.

It called for using Wright to “increase the unease” and “inflame the questions” among independents using the episode “that’s never been properly exploited.” How I love the use of sinister verbs.

(More here.)

It’s Their Party (and They Can Cry If They Want To)

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

Our subject for today is: Presidential nominating conventions — why are they still around?

Other possible subjects were: The Facebook phenomenon and why does its board of directors look like a reunion tour of the Backstreet Boys and their managers?

Or: The new sensation of dancing dogs on TV talent shows and how many of them do you think were ever made to ride on the roof of a car?

But, no, I think we should go with the conventions. The Republicans are having theirs in Tampa, Fla., in August and then the Democrats will be in Charlotte, N.C., at the beginning of September. The presidential nominees have been chosen, but there’s still a lot to look forward to. The speeches! The funny hats! And, um ...

Little-known factoids about the upcoming conventions:

• The Democrats have an official barbecue sauce. Actually, three. You can buy them on the official Web site, along with a bunch of T-shirts and a very fetching oven mitt.

(More here.)

Leading Psychiatrist Apologizes for Study Supporting Gay ‘Cure’

By BENEDICT CAREY, NYT

PRINCETON, N.J. — The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, who turns 80 next week, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.

He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.

The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies.

(More here.)

Boehner draws his sword

By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Friday, May 18, 11:27 AM

John Boehner thinks it’s kind of funny.

“It struck me as somewhat comical,” he told reporters Thursday morning, “that, you know, people are looking to me like I’m the guy carrying a sword around town, I’m going to bludgeon someone.”

Well, Mr. Speaker, maybe that’s because your rapier keeps setting off the metal detectors.

The bludgeon Boehner wields is his threat to revive the default standoff of last summer, a showdown that shattered consumer confidence and helped stall the economic recovery.

In a speech on Tuesday, Boehner said that “allowing America to default,” while not such a hot idea, would be better than raising the debt ceiling without “dramatic steps to reduce spending.” Added Boehner: “We shouldn’t dread the debt limit. We should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction.”

(More here.)

Fed’s Tarullo emerges as banks’ key federal foe on regulating risk

Joshua Roberts/BLOOMBERG - Daniel K. Tarullo, governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve, testifies at a House Financial Services joint subcommittee hearing Jan. 18 on the impact of the Volcker Rule on markets and the economy.

 By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Brady Dennis, WashPost, Friday, May 18, 6:57 AM

Daniel Tarullo, the Federal Reserve’s point man on overhauling the financial system, has emerged as the most powerful figure wrestling with the nation’s biggest banks to make them take fewer risks that could endanger the economy.

Tarullo, a former Georgetown Law professor and Democratic Party acolyte who was appointed by President Obama to the Fed, is captaining the effort in Washington to make major banks hold more money in emergency reserve — a concern that has gained renewed urgency after JPMorgan Chase last week announced $2 billion in surprise trading losses.

Days before the losses were announced, JPMorgan’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, and executives from Goldman Sachs and other banks lit into the Fed’s plans to tighten oversight during a closed-door meeting with Tarullo in New York. With the executives at his sides, Tarullo sat poker-faced and largely silent. He told the titans of Wall Street that their views were just one perspective the Fed was considering.

In his first public remarks since the JPMorgan debacle, Tarullo said in an interview that the surprise losses buttress the case for tough new rules forcing banks to hold more in reserve.

(More here.)

America’s not perfect, but it’s certainly not in decline

By Ezra Klein, WashPost, Published: May 17

“Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned,” said President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union address, “doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

It was a “rah-rah America!” applause line for a president who needed to get the assembled Republicans out of their seats a few times over the course of the evening. But the line works literally, too. Whenever someone tells me that the United States is in decline, I have no idea what they’re talking about. And neither, I tend to think, do they.

The claim is maddeningly vague. What does it mean for the United States to be in decline? Are we talking about our geopolitical influence relative to other world powers? Our standard of living relative to other nations? Our current standard of living compared with some assumption about its appropriate rate of improvement?

Let’s flip the question: What does it mean for the United States to be on the rise? If it’s growing at a perfectly respectable 3.5 percent a year while China is growing at 8.5 percent a year, enabling China’s economy to surpass the U.S. economy in a decade or so, does that mean the nation is in decline?

My hunch is that’s how most Americans define decline. That’s a problem.

(More here.)

Analysis: Three states stand out in 2012 presidential election

By Paul West, LA Times
7:56 AM PDT, May 18, 2012

WASHINGTON -- The presidential candidates have just placed their opening bets, and three states stand out as keys to the 2012 election: Ohio, Virginia and, perhaps surprisingly, Iowa.

Romney’s first TV ad of the general election campaign, which debuts Friday, will air in four states, including Ohio, Virginia and Iowa. (Notably, it repeats his pledge to “end Obamacare,” the law based on his Massachusetts model). The Romney campaign wouldn’t confirm the scope of the buy but didn’t wave off an attempt to confirm James Hohmann’s report in Politico, which listed that trio of states, plus North Carolina. President Obama included Ohio, Virginia and Iowa in his most recent buy as well.

It is practically impossible for Romney to capture the presidency without carrying Ohio and Virginia. Obama took both in 2008, and if he wins either again, he’s almost surely going to being reelected.

Of greater interest in the Romney buy, however, were the other states he’s hitting.

One is Iowa, an opportunity state for the Republican challenger. In addition to taking four larger states away from Obama (Ohio, Virginia, Florida and North Carolina), he also needs to carry at least one more smaller, Obama ‘08 state. The former governor made a campaign stop this week in Iowa, which went narrowly Republican in the 2004 presidential election, then swung to Obama in 2008.

Thanks in part to a rebound in the farm sector, the state’s economy is humming, with an unemployment rate, at 5.1%, among the lowest in the nation. But Republicans made big strides in the 2010 election, recapturing the governor's mansion and gaining ground in the Legislature, and Romney clearly sees an opening.

(More here.)

An Easy Way to Fix What's Wrong With Washington

Posted by: Joshua Green on May 18, 2012, Busnessweek

Polls show that frustration with Washington has never been higher—and who could argue? Most Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. Most lawmakers openly concede that nothing will get done before the November elections. The leaders of both parties are already trading threats over the possibility of a national debt default next year.

Barack Obama got elected by promising to change the tone in Washington, but clearly he’s failed, as George W. Bush did before him.

That should be a clue that the partisan animosity consuming the political system doesn’t originate in the White House. Although the media will fixate on the presidential campaign, the winner won’t really matter, at least not from the standpoint of making Washington work again. The problem is Congress, specifically the Senate, and to narrow it even further, the filibuster. When invoked—and it’s invoked often—the filibuster forces the majority party to come up with 60 votes, rather than the simple majority ordinarily required to pass legislation.

(More here.)

Magnate Steps Into 2012 Fray on Wild Pitch

By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY, NYT

Joe Ricketts, an up-by-the-bootstraps billionaire whose varied holdings include a name-brand brokerage firm in Omaha, a baseball team in Chicago, herds of bison in Wyoming and a start-up news Web site in New York, wanted to be a player in the 2012 election. On Thursday he was, though not in the way he had intended.

Word that Mr. Ricketts had considered bankrolling a $10 million advertising campaign linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., brought waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world.

Highlighting the perils of mixing partisan politics and corporate citizenship, the reverberations also swept through the Ricketts family’s business empire.

Liberal groups encouraged like-minded investors to drop their accounts with TD Ameritrade, the brokerage firm Mr. Ricketts founded. His family’s plan to seek public financing for improvements to Wrigley Field, home of their baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, ran into new political opposition. And he was forced to write a letter to reporters at his New York news organization, DNAinfo.com, assuring them he believed that “my personal politics should have absolutely no impact on your work.”

By early afternoon, Mr. Ricketts had announced that he had rejected the ad campaign as out of keeping with his own political style, a day after his aides indicated that it was still under consideration.

(More here.)

House to Consider Proposal to Bar Indefinite Detention After Arrests on U.S. Soil

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, NYT

WASHINGTON — The House is preparing to vote again on an unresolved legal controversy: whether the military may imprison terrorism suspects captured on United States soil without trial. The renewed debate comes as a federal judge has enjoined the government from enforcing a statute codifying the government’s powers of indefinite detention.

Lawmakers are considering amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. One of them, sponsored by Representative Adam Smith of Washington, a Democrat, and Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a Republican, would scale back a highly contested provision about indefinite detention created in last year’s version of the law, by saying it does not apply to domestic arrests.

The provision created last year expressed Congressional approval for the idea that the executive branch was implicitly given the power to detain, without trial, suspected members of Al Qaeda, its allies and their supporters when Congress in 2001 authorized the use of military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

That provision was hotly contested because it made no exception for United States citizens or for people arrested on American soil. Lawmakers could not agree on whether that authority already existed or should exist. Ultimately, they decided to leave the matter unclear, adding a line saying that the provision did not change the scope of detention authority granted in 2001 — whatever that was.

(More here.)

Don’t Climb Every Mountain

By FREDDIE WILKINSON, NYT

Katmandu, Nepal

ALL mountain climbs contain an element of risk. How a mountaineer chooses to approach that risk, using the sum of the physical, mental and emotional powers at his or her disposal, is the basic challenge of the endeavor. At its best, mountaineering rewards shrewd and independent decision making.

Sadly, events on the south (Nepalese) side of Mount Everest this season suggest that while the risks inherent in climbing the mountain have never been greater, a majority of Everest climbers are increasingly estranged from the decision-making process. Two intersecting trends are to blame: the rising number of people attempting the mountain, and the cumulative effects of global warming, which is slowly yet steadily drying out the Himalayas, resulting in rockfalls, avalanches and sérac collapses.

The sheer number of people courting Everest — this season, approximately 750 foreign climbers and local Sherpas, from 32 expeditions — has created a system whereby the entire climbing route is institutionally maintained. Approximately six miles of rope is strung up the mountain each April, secured by hundreds of snow pickets and ice screws. Sections of aluminum ladder are employed to span crevasses too wide to safely step across.

The principal organization responsible for this artificial trail is the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a professional cadre of climbing Sherpas known as the icefall doctors. Although important decisions are generally made by rough consensus among expedition leaders, and often guides and volunteers will help with maintaining the route, a vast majority of climbers simply start at the bottom of the mountain and go where the ropes lead them.

(More here.)

The Class Divide Deepens

By Ronald Brownstein, National Journal
May 17, 2012 | 12:53 PM

President Obama's embrace of gay marriage, as we noted in a recent post, has the potential to reinforce his support among well-educated white voters while deepening his difficulties among blue-collar whites. Divergent attitudes about the economy seem likely to harden that division as well.

On Wednesday, Gallup released new national results showing that while a plurality of Americans remains negative on their immediate financial situation, a strong majority expects to be better off one year from now. The variation in those attitudes follows tracks familiar from the gay rights debate.

As we noted, polls show much more support for gay marriage among college-educated white voters (especially women) than those without advanced degrees. Those upscale whites, Gallup found, are also somewhat more satisfied with their immediate economic situation and more optimistic about their trajectory over the next year.

Overall, Gallup found that 37 percent of adults say their economic situation has improved over the past year, while 42 percent said they are worse off and 20 percent describe themselves as essentially standing in place. On that measure, according to figures provided by Gallup, blue-collar whites are deeply discouraged: just 24 percent of non-college white women, and 26 percent of non-college white men say they are better off than a year ago. Nearly twice as many respondents in both groups say they are worse off than twelve months ago.

(More here.)

Apocalypse Fairly Soon

By PAUL KRUGMAN, NYT

Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality; they need to stop temporizing and, for once, get ahead of the curve.

I wish I could say that I was optimistic.

The story so far: When the euro came into existence, there was a great wave of optimism in Europe — and that, it turned out, was the worst thing that could have happened. Money poured into Spain and other nations, which were now seen as safe investments; this flood of capital fueled huge housing bubbles and huge trade deficits. Then, with the financial crisis of 2008, the flood dried up, causing severe slumps in the very nations that had boomed before.

(More here.)

Americans Elect's expensive search for independent candidate fails

By Matea Gold, LA Times
3:11 PM PDT, May 17, 2012

WASHINGTON -- A group behind a costly endeavor to field an independent presidential ticket this fall acknowledged Thursday that its efforts to nominate a candidate had failed.

Americans Elect succeeded in getting on the ballot in 29 states, but none of its prospective candidates received the minimum support needed to participate in a Web-based series of primaries that were to be held this month.

After its board met Wednesday to discuss its options, the group released a statement Thursday indicating that it would not change its rules, effectively disqualifying all the candidates from participating in an online nominating convention that was scheduled next month.

The future of the organization, which raised $35 million and spent two years trying to create a new method for nominating a presidential ticket, remains unclear.

“As always, we thank everyone who has helped build this organization and are grateful for the work, efforts, and trust so many people have placed in Americans Elect,” the group said. “We are continuing the Americans Elect mission of creating more choice in our political system, giving candidates unaffiliated with the nominating process of either major party an authentic way to run for office and giving the American people a greater voice in our political process.”

(More here.)

On Job Growth: A Modestly Strong Batch of New Data

By DAVID LEONHARDT



The latest batch of economic data has been slightly better than expected, causing Moody’s Analytics to raise its forecast for May job growth to 170,000, up from 165,000 last week.

“The best evidence comes from surveys of builders and manufacturers,” Moody’s economists write. The surveys suggest that “April’s slowdown in factory hiring was a temporary phenomenon.”

One sign of the likely strengthening of the job market since April, when the economy added only 115,000 jobs, came in this morning’s report on new claims for unemployment benefits. Last week, 370,000 people applied for initial benefits, compared with 389,000 a month earlier. Because last week included the 12th day of the month, it is the week on which the May monthly jobs report will be based.

(Original here.)

My recent epochal effort to find justice from an L. A. Times newspaper box

One would think that getting a Sunday Los Angeles Times would be a relatively simple process. One would think.

In this day and age one might also think that the Los Angeles Times and other major newspapers would have fancy vending machines that actually took debit cards or in the least swallow dollar bills and deliver change as necessary. But no. They still vend from the old-fashioned paper box that eats quarters and, if one is lucky, opens up so that one can take a newspaper.

One of the traditions of staying in the family beach house in Newport Beach, California, is to walk over to a little coffee shop nearby, buy a large half-regular, half-decaf coffee, and ask for enough quarters to feed the Los Angeles Times paper box on the side of the building with the hopes of getting a newspaper.

Last Sunday it swallowed the quarters but refused to open up. So what can a member of the dying breed of newspaper aficionados do but to dutifully call the phone number on the box? Which I did, only to get (of course) a recording listing a number of options like: "Press or say '1' if you want to talk to Timbuktu. Press or say '2' if your delivery person ran over your dog. Press or say '3' if your paper finally arrived not mangled, not soaking wet, and not through your broken front window. Press or say '4' if you're planning to play golf today. Press or say '5' if that's the number of fingers on your left hand. Press or say '6' if none of these applies to your stinking problem."

So naturally I pressed '6' and got another menu, to wit: "Press or say '1' if you want to talk to Timbuktu. Press or say '2' if your delivery person ran over your dog…," etc. At this point I pressed '7', '8', '9' and '0' in a rapid, highly calculated fashion and got — lo and behold — a real person! On the other side of the world! Though not Timbuktu. The Philippines, I think, judging from the accent. In other words, not Bangalorish or Mumbai-ish.

From here on it was a contest of who could enunciate the clearest English. The street address got confused with the zip code and the phone number with the amount of money the machine ate. I thought I was going to be clever and tell her twice the amount I actually lost, so I said $3 instead of $1.50. Meanwhile, my cell phone minutes were adding up.

Of course, when the conversation was over and I being a natural-born sucker, I went back into the coffee shop, begged for another six quarters, plugged the machine and got stiffed again. So, I thought, the Los Angeles Times Company and I are even.

Except for the fact that the very next day I was at the same newspaper box, quarters in hand, relating this story to a gentleman who was attempting his luck at retrieving a paper from the box. His coins dropped, he lifted the lid and said, "Here, you deserve a free one today." I was not going to turn him down.

I'm not sure I'll ever get my money back, but at least I can be comforted by the fact that no doubt some poor slob in Timbuktu will go to his local post office and find a check in his name for $3 from the Los Angeles Times. Whereupon he'll be able to celebrate and eat for three days.

— LP

Idiocy and the national debt

Fun Plans for Summer Vacation

 By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

John Boehner wants to restart the debt-limit debate. This is big news. Remember all the fun we had last time: threats, brinkmanship, wobbling financial markets, torpedoed Grand Bargain? You can certainly understand why he misses it.

The weather’s getting nice. Maybe this time we could do it outdoors.

“Let’s start now!” the House speaker said during a “fiscal summit” in Washington on Tuesday. This is an annual event in which honchos from all political persuasions get together and agree that the national debt is too big.

We are getting into election season, people. We are going to be hearing a lot about the national debt. (Which is very big. Really, at that fiscal summit meeting they were totally in agreement on the bigness.)

(More here.)

A Judge’s Plea for Pot

By GUSTIN L. REICHBACH, NYT

THREE and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered a mass on my pancreas. It turned out to be Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. I was told I would be dead in four to six months. Today I am in that rare coterie of people who have survived this long with the disease. But I did not foresee that after having dedicated myself for 40 years to a life of the law, including more than two decades as a New York State judge, my quest for ameliorative and palliative care would lead me to marijuana.

My survival has demanded an enormous price, including months of chemotherapy, radiation hell and brutal surgery. For about a year, my cancer disappeared, only to return. About a month ago, I started a new and even more debilitating course of treatment. Every other week, after receiving an IV booster of chemotherapy drugs that takes three hours, I wear a pump that slowly injects more of the drugs over the next 48 hours.

Nausea and pain are constant companions. One struggles to eat enough to stave off the dramatic weight loss that is part of this disease. Eating, one of the great pleasures of life, has now become a daily battle, with each forkful a small victory. Every drug prescribed to treat one problem leads to one or two more drugs to offset its side effects. Pain medication leads to loss of appetite and constipation. Anti-nausea medication raises glucose levels, a serious problem for me with my pancreas so compromised. Sleep, which might bring respite from the miseries of the day, becomes increasingly elusive.

Inhaled marijuana is the only medicine that gives me some relief from nausea, stimulates my appetite, and makes it easier to fall asleep. The oral synthetic substitute, Marinol, prescribed by my doctors, was useless. Rather than watch the agony of my suffering, friends have chosen, at some personal risk, to provide the substance. I find a few puffs of marijuana before dinner gives me ammunition in the battle to eat. A few more puffs at bedtime permits desperately needed sleep.

(More here.)

'Teenage girls are cruel super-humans from a distant galaxy sent here to destroy us all'

The Winning Essays Are ...

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, NYT

Earlier this year, I announced an essay contest for teenagers about bullying. Some 1,200 essays later, we have our grand prize winner.

Before I get to her story, let me share a sampling of the entrants who wrote poignantly and powerfully about the suffocating ostracism of school corridors and cafeterias.

“For eight years, I have skipped lunch to get to the safety of the library, bury myself in books, and count the days till graduation,” wrote Alyssa Ahrens, 17, a high school senior in Indiana. “As of today, it is 64.”

Plenty of adults are skeptical about the fuss over bullying. “How come the thin-skinned kids nowadays can’t handle the bullying that made us better, stronger adults?” one man wrote to me on Twitter.

(More here.)

Coffee buzz: Java drinkers live longer, big study finds

Regular and decaf are equally good

By Associated Press, Published: May 16

MILWAUKEE — One of life’s simple pleasures just got a little sweeter. After years of waffling research on coffee and health, even some fear that java might raise the risk of heart disease, a big study finds the opposite: Coffee drinkers are a little more likely to live longer. Regular or decaf doesn’t matter.

The study of 400,000 people is the largest ever done on the issue, and the results should reassure any coffee lovers who think it’s a guilty pleasure that may do harm.

“Our study suggests that’s really not the case,” said lead researcher Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute. “There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking.”

No one knows why. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer. The most widely studied ingredient — caffeine — didn’t play a role in the new study’s results.

(More here.)

Doubt Cast on the ‘Good’ in ‘Good Cholesterol’

By GINA KOLATA, NYT

The name alone sounds so encouraging: HDL, the “good cholesterol.” The more of it in your blood, the lower your risk of heart disease. So bringing up HDL levels has got to be good for health.

Or so the theory went.

Now, a new study that makes use of powerful databases of genetic information has found that raising HDL levels may not make any difference to heart disease risk. People who inherit genes that give them naturally higher HDL levels throughout life have no less heart disease than those who inherit genes that give them slightly lower levels. If HDL were protective, those with genes causing higher levels should have had less heart disease.

Researchers not associated with the study, published online Wednesday in The Lancet, found the results compelling and disturbing. Companies are actively developing and testing drugs that raise HDL, although three recent studies of such treatments have failed. And patients with low HDL levels are often told to try to raise them by exercising or dieting or even by taking niacin, which raised HDL but failed to lower heart disease risk in a recent clinical trial.

(More here.)

G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama

By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG, NYT

WASHINGTON — A group of high-profile Republican strategists is working with a conservative billionaire on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the “super PAC” era and attack President Obama in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from.

Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the plan would “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” the strategists wrote.

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”

(More here.)

A DVR Ad-Eraser Causes Tremors at TV Upfronts

Auto Hop skips all the ads recorded on most prime-time network shows. Some reviewers have called the feature a dream come true for consumers.

By BRIAN STELTER, NYT
Published: May 16, 2012

Broadcast television executives came to New York this week, as they do every year, to talk up their new TV shows in front of advertisers.

This year, they are having to talk about yet another technology trying to tear them down.

The disruptive technology at hand is an ad eraser, embedded in new digital video recorders sold by Charles W. Ergen’s Dish Network, one of the nation’s top distributors of TV programming. Turn it on, and all the ads recorded on most prime-time network shows are automatically skipped, no channel-flipping or fast-forwarding necessary.

Some reviewers have already called the feature, named Auto Hop, a dream come true for consumers. But for broadcasters and advertisers, it is an attack on an entrenched television business model, and it must be strangled, lest it spread.

(More here.)

How Mitt Romney gets away with his lying

By Greg Sargent, WashPost

Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a big speech in which he accused Obama of lighting a “prairie fire of debt.” It’s a good line, and it has received widespread media coverage.

Romney’s speech has already been dissected by Jonathan Chait and Steve Benen. They note that it’s entirely at odds with conventional understanding of how deficits work, and utterly disconnected from context, rendering it almost unquantifiably misleading.

But I wanted to make another point. If you scan through all the media attention Romney’s speech received, you are hard-pressed to find any news accounts that tell readers the following rather relevant points:

1) Nonpartisan experts believe Romney’s plans would increase the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

2) George W. Bush’s policies arguably are more responsible for increasing the deficit than Obama's are.

(More here.)

Republicans Pledge New Standoff on Debt Limit

By JONATHAN WEISMAN, NYT

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner on Tuesday set the stage for a bruising election-year showdown on fiscal policy, vowing to hold up another increase in the federal debt ceiling unless it was offset by larger spending cuts.

His combative comments came on the same day the Republicans’ presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, hit President Obama hard on his fiscal stewardship in a speech in Des Moines, suggesting that Mr. Romney and Congressional Republicans see an opening to attack the president on the mounting federal debt and the size of the government.

Mr. Boehner’s stance threatened to throw Congress back into the debt-limit stalemate that consumed Washington in 2011, but this time at the height of a campaign that Republicans are trying to make a referendum on Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy.

“A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” Mr. Romney said, “and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

The Boehner comments, made at a fiscal summit meeting in Washington, were the first public shot in what promises to be the most consequential budget fight in a generation. On Jan. 1, nearly $8 trillion in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts are scheduled to take effect.

(More here.)

Democrats’ Odds of Retaining Senate Improve

By NATE SILVER, NYT

When we last took an overview of Senate races in December, Republicans appeared to be slight favorites to take control from Democrats, with a net gain of four to five seats representing the most likely outcome.

Since then, however, Republican fortunes have diminished somewhat because of problems with the quality of some candidates and key retirements. Although Republicans are most likely to gain seats on balance because Democrats have considerably more incumbents up for re-election, the question of whether the Republicans will win enough to gain control now appears to be closer to a tossup. In fact, the outcome may depend on who wins the presidential election, as well as whether an independent Senate candidate who is favored in Maine will caucus with the Democrats.

The table below contains the FiveThirtyEight estimates of the probability of victory for each party in the 33 Senate seats to be contested this November. These forecasts, although they are informed by polling and other objective measures, are ultimately reflections of my best judgments and also account for “intangible” factors like candidate quality and the partisan orientation of the state. (We traditionally switch over to purely tangible factors in the summer, once polling becomes more robust and we post the official forecast model for the Senate.)

(More here.)

Romney’s Weasel Problem

Yearbook photo of Mitt Romney

By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT

You can wince at the cruelty of adolescence, as many did, after reading the Washington Post account of how a teenage Mitt Romney led a gang of prep school buddies to attack another boy. “Senseless,” “vicious” and “stupid” were the words used by witnesses quoted by name in the piece.

But to hold the 65-year-old presumptive Republican nominee for president accountable for what he may have done as a mean-spirited teenager is unfair. Because he acted like a bully then no more makes Romney a bully now than does that fact that young Barack Obama tried “maybe a little blow” make him a coke-head.

More troubling is Romney’s continued inability to honestly face up to his own life story and those inconvenient truths that interfere with the ideas of the vocal right-wing of the party whose standard he will soon bear.

On multiple occasions over the last year, Romney has shown a tendency to dodge, weave, parse or deny in such a way that it outweighs the original offense. It’s his weasel problem, a real character flaw.

(More here.)

Dancing With Derivatives

By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT

WASHINGTON

Jamie Dimon calls it “a doozy.”

And it was. A $2 billion credit derivatives trading bungle that could mushroom to a $4 billion loss.

The shining industry agitator against some of the tougher regulations on banks has suddenly become the shining example of why still tougher regulations may be needed.

After the economy nearly atomized in a cloud of cupidity, Dimon became known as America’s least-hated banker. But now the blunt 56-year-old Queens native who snowed Democrats in Washington with all his talk about not lumping in “good banks” with “bad banks” has fallen off his pedestal.

If Jamie the Great and his “good bank” can make such a gigantic blunder, sending déjà vu shivers down America’s back, what hope is there for lesser bankers?

As Noam Scheiber writes in The New Republic, “we now have ironclad proof — as if we really needed it — that everyone is capable of disastrous stupidity.”

(More here.)

Republicans Pledge New Standoff on Debt Limit

By JONATHAN WEISMAN, NYT

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner on Tuesday set the stage for a bruising election-year showdown on fiscal policy, vowing to hold up another increase in the federal debt ceiling unless it was offset by larger spending cuts.

His combative comments came on the same day the Republicans’ presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, hit President Obama hard on his fiscal stewardship in a speech in Des Moines, suggesting that Mr. Romney and Congressional Republicans see an opening to attack the president on the mounting federal debt and the size of the government.

Mr. Boehner’s stance threatened to throw Congress back into the debt-limit stalemate that consumed Washington in 2011, but this time at the height of a campaign that Republicans are trying to make a referendum on Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy.

“A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” Mr. Romney said, “and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

(More here.)

Romney’s Budget Fairy Tale

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

Mitt Romney delivered a speech today about the budget deficit. It’s hard to wrap your arms around Romney’s argument, because it’s an amalgamation of free-floating conservative rage and anxiety, completely untethered to any facts, as agreed upon by the relevant experts.

In the real world, the following things are true: The budget deficit was projected to top $1 trillion even before President Obama took office, and that was when forecasters were still radically underestimating the depth of the 2008 crash. Obama did propose temporary deficit-increasing measures, an economic approach endorsed in its general contours, if not its particulars, by Romney’s economists. These measures contributed a relatively small proportion to the deficit, and their effect is short-lived. Obama instead focused on longer-term measures to reduce the deficit, including comprehensive health-care reform projected to reduce deficits by a trillion dollars in its second decade. Obama put forward a budget plan that would stabilize the debt as a percentage of the economy. Obama has hoped to achieve deeper long-term deficit reduction by striking bipartisan deals with Congress, and he has tried to achieve this goal by openly endorsing a bipartisan deficit plan in the Senate and privately agreeing to a more conservative plan with John Boehner, both of which were killed by Republican opposition to any higher revenue.

The story told by Romney is one in which all of these things are either untrue or could not possibly be true.

Romney elides some inconvenient facts — for instance, by asserting “Then there was Obamacare. Even now nobody knows what it will actually cost,” which is literally true in the sense that precise cost estimates are always impossible, but sounds to his audience like a claim that the program will swell the deficit in vast, unknowable ways. But most of Romney’s speech doesn't even refer to the facts stated above. It's simply orthogonal to facts. It’s a story, one in which Obama increased the deficit because he loves big government and Europe and hates the private sector.

(More here.)

Where have all the candidates gone?

By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Published: May 15

The nascent third-party movement called Americans Elect assembled a dream team of prospective presidential nominees:

• Mike Bloomberg!
• Colin Powell!
• Chris Christie!
• Mitch Daniels!
• Condi Rice!
• Rick Santorum!
• Hillary Clinton!

There was only one problem: None of these candidates wanted the nomination. Neither did the other “draft” candidates who received support on the Americans Elect Web site, including Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Howard Dean, Donald Trump, Al Gore, Sarah Palin and David Petraeus.

(More here.)

Syrian rebels get influx of arms with gulf neighbors’ money, U.S. coordination

By Karen DeYoung and Liz Sly, WashPost, Published: May 15

Syrian rebels battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have begun receiving significantly more and better weapons in recent weeks, an effort paid for by Persian Gulf nations and coordinated in part by the United States, according to opposition activists and U.S. and foreign officials.

Obama administration officials emphasized that the United States is neither supplying nor funding the lethal material, which includes antitank weaponry. Instead, they said, the administration has expanded contacts with opposition military forces to provide the gulf nations with assessments of rebel credibility and command-and-control infrastructure.

“We are increasing our nonlethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, and we continue to coordinate our efforts with friends and allies in the region and beyond in order to have the biggest impact on what we are collectively doing,” said a senior State Department official, one of several U.S. and foreign government officials who discussed the evolving effort on the condition of anonymity.

The U.S. contacts with the rebel military and the information-sharing with gulf nations mark a shift in Obama administration policy as hopes dim for a political solution to the Syrian crisis. Many officials now consider an expanding military confrontation to be inevitable.

(More here.)

As Trained Afghans Turn Enemy, a U.S.-Led Imperative Is in Peril

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, NYT

COMBAT OUTPOST SANGESAR, Afghanistan — A burst of gunfire snapped First Sgt. Joseph Hissong awake. Then came another, and another, all with the familiar three-round bursts of an American assault rifle — and the unfamiliar sound of its rounds being fired in his direction.

The shooters were close. His first thought: “Are Taliban inside the wire?”

But it was not the Taliban. Over the next 52 minutes, as his company of paratroopers braved bullets and rocket-propelled grenades in the predawn darkness to retake one of their own guard towers in southern Afghanistan, they found themselves facing what has become a more pernicious threat: the Afghan soldiers who live and fight alongside the Americans.

The attack on Sergeant Hissong’s company, on March 1 at Combat Outpost Sangesar, left two Americans dead along with two Afghan assailants, but it was not the first time that Afghan solders had attacked forces from the American-led coalition, nor would it be the last of what the military calls “green on blue” attacks. Already this year, 22 coalition service members have been killed by men in Afghan uniform, compared with 35 for all of last year, according to coalition officials.

(More here.)

Romney is no economic savior

By Eugene Robinson, WashPost, Published: May 14

Republicans say they’re eager for the presidential campaign to turn away from “distractions” and focus instead on the economy. Someone should warn them that if they’re not careful, they might get their wish.

It is true that voters’ unhappiness with high unemployment and slow growth poses a challenge for President Obama as he seeks reelection. But for Mitt Romney and the GOP to take advantage of this potential opening, they’ll have to do more than chant the word “economy” like a mantra. They have to make the case that their policies will work better than Obama’s.

And what might Romney’s proposed economic policies be? Why, they’re basically the same as those of George W. Bush, only worse.

Just as Obama owns the recession and the slow recovery, Bush owns the financial crisis that sent the slumping economy over a cliff. But for all his sins — the gratuitous tax cuts, the off-budget wars, the defiance of basic arithmetic — Bush at least demonstrated a certain empathy for Americans who struggle to make ends meet. One of his budget-busting initiatives, for example, was expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs without worrying about how this much-needed new benefit would be paid for.

(More here.)