The Commentariat -- February 26

** "War on Women," Cont'd." New York Times Editors: "Republicans in the House of Representatives are mounting an assault on women’s health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception and life-saving cancer screenings and cut nutritional support for millions of newborn babies in struggling families. And this is just the beginning."

On Scott Walker. This is the eighth governor that I've worked with in one way or another -- four Republicans, four Democrats -- and this is the first governor who takes a clear public position that he will never negotiate. The other seven were willing to take the 70 or 80 percent of what they wanted.... That's what you need to do to make government work.... Any person not willing to settle for half a loaf has never been hungry. -- Tim Cullen, the only Democratic Wisconsin State Senator to whom Walker will speak

Dana Milbank says Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's conversation with Ian Murphy, a/k/a Fake Koch, shows that Walker is a hooligan. ...

... Scapegoating Fail. Greg Sargent: "Many commentators expected that conservatives would have an easy time turning Americans against public employees by foisting the blame for our economic woes upon them. Wisconsin is showing that this is turning out not to be so easy, after all."

Karen Garcia: "At the same time that President Obama announced a two-year wage freeze for federal employees, he is asking for an additional $128 billion to hire 73,000 more security force cops in Afghanistan."

Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times: the murder of four Americans by Somali pirates will likely change U.S. strategy towards piracy in the Gulf of Aden.

Gail Collins continues her Presidential Primary Book Club. This time, she reads (some of) Mike Huckabee's many books. He's changed.

In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it. -- Robert Gates

Tom Shanker of the New York Times: "Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of regime in that fashion again are slim." Here's the report from the Defense Department.

This is an extraordinary admission coming from a Secretary of Defense. I can't recall anything similar ever having been said, at least not while a war was ongoing. It is a scathing rebuke of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom Gates replaced. Rumsfeld is now on a book tour touting his laughable Remembrances of All I Did Right. Gates is saying, quite bluntly, "No, Rummy, you fucked up." -- Constant Weader

Right Wing World

The Real Reason Rep. Chris Lee Resigned from Congress. Remy Stern of Gawker learns that Lee apparently also solicited, via CraigsList, & had online chats with two transgender women.

News Ledes

Reuters: "A crowd estimated at more than 70,000 people on Saturday waved American flags, sang the national anthem and called for the defeat of a Wisconsin plan to curb public sector unions that has galvanized opposition from the American labor movement. In one of the biggest rallies at the state Capitol since the Vietnam War, union members and their supporters braved frigid temperatures and a light snowfall...." ...

... The Understory: "Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’” ...

... Washington Post: "The jobs of thousands of [Wisconsin] state and local workers slipped into deeper jeopardy Friday, as Gov. Scott Walker threatened to trigger as many as 12,000 layoffs beginning next week unless lawmakers enact his plan to strip public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights." ...

... Wisconsin State Journal: "The enormous 'protest village' that has taken hold inside the state Capitol the past two weeks will officially end this weekend. Capitol police announced Friday that they would kick out protesters and close the Capitol doors at 4 p.m. on Sunday, a move that would allow crews to begin cleaning up after possibly the longest and most intense protests in state history." ...

... AP: "The legislative gridlock [in Wisconsin] prompted the Wisconsin Association of Schools Boards to warn districts that they have until Monday to warn teachers of possible nonrenewal of contracts. That's because if Walker's bill becomes law, it would void current teacher collective bargaining agreements that lay out protocol and deadlines for conducting layoffs."

New York Times: as expected, "Ireland ousted its discredited government on Saturday, electing new leaders who pledged to restore faith in the country after the trauma of a calamitous economic collapse. With most of the votes counted after the general election on Friday, a coalition government of the center-right Fine Gael and the Labour Party was on track to win a comfortable majority in Parliament. The next prime minister is likely to be Enda Kenny, a career Fine Gael politician...." Here's the Irish Times report, with links to related stories & audio.

USA Today: "President Obama told German Chancellor Angela Merkel today that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi should surrender power immediately because of the attacks he has made on his own people.... Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton echoed Obama's demand in a statement saying that Gadhafi's government would he held 'accountable for its violation of human rights.'" ...

... New York Times: "The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday night to impose sanctions on Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and his inner circle of advisers, and called for an international war crimes investigation into 'widespread and systemic attacks' against Libyan citizens who have protested against his government over the last two weeks." ...

... Washington Post: "Army leaders in eastern Libya who have turned against Col. Moammar Gaddafi's regime are preparing to dispatch a rebel force to Tripoli to support the beleaguered uprising there, a top military official said Saturday in Benghazi." ...

... New York Times: "A powerful tribal leader has called for the downfall of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, posing what may be the most significant challenge yet to the president, an American ally, who has been struggling to quell a popular revolt for more than two weeks. The move by the tribal leader, Sheik Hussein al-Ahmar, raised fears that the antigovernment protests, which began largely as a youth movement, could take a more violent and unpredictable turn." ...

... New York Times: "A bold effort by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to prove that he was firmly in control of Libya appeared to backfire Saturday as foreign journalists he invited to the capital discovered blocks of the city in open revolt. Witnesses described snipers and antiaircraft guns firing at unarmed civilians, and security forces were removing the dead and wounded from streets and hospitals, apparently in an effort to hide the mounting toll."

... AP: "The embattled regime of Moammar Gadhafi is arming civilian supporters to set up checkpoints and roving patrols around the Libyan capital to control movement and quash dissent, residents said Saturday." ...

... New York Times: "One day after the United States closed its embassy in Tripoli and imposed unilateral sanctions against Libya, the United Nations Security Council prepared to meet in New York on Saturday to consider imposing international sanctions, including an arms embargo and an asset freeze and travel ban against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, his relatives and key members of his government."

New York Times: "The results of the [Irish] election will not be announced until late Saturday. But an early exit poll predicted a crushing defeat for Fianna Fail, one of modern history’s most successful political parties, which has been in power for almost 60 of the last 80 years, most recently from 1997 until the present."

ABC News: "In a job typically filled by a woman, the White House has chosen the first-ever man to be the next White House Social Secretary. Jeremy Bernard, who is openly gay, will be named Special Assistant to the President and Social Secretary."

Baghdad on Lake Mendota

Paul Krugman compares the situation in Madison, Wisconsin to "Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence." Krugman says:

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

The Times moderators are playing scrambled comments again today, so here's mine:

According to Tim Fernholz of the National Journal, Walker is really just faking the "budget crisis." Fernholz explains

... while Walker argues that his budget-repair legislation must be passed soon to avoid job cuts, the most controversial parts of his bill would have no immediate effect. The state's entire budget shortfall for this year -- the reason that Walker has said he must push through immediate cuts -- would be covered by the governor's relatively uncontroversial proposal to restructure the state's debt. By contrast..., his call to curtail the collective-bargaining rights of the state's public-employees, wouldn't save any money this year. [Emphasis added.]

As we learned earlier, Walker pushed through about $120 million in tax cuts, then cried "budget crisis." Now it turns out he has taken care of the budget shortfall by restructuring the debt. All those added "goodies": ending collective bargaining, giving himself the ability to give away power companies to his backers, cutting back health coverage for the poor -- those are what Walker described as "the bomb" he dropped on Wisconsin. That description, by the way, came in a prank call in which Walker thought he was taking a call from his financial backer David Koch.

To try to diffuse the "the bomb," Walker is now claiming,

I campaigned on (the proposals in the budget repair bill for Wisconsin) all throughout the election. Anybody who says they are shocked on this has been asleep for the past two years.

No. He didn't. PolitiFact rated Walker's assertion --

Walker, who offered many specific proposals during the campaign, did not go public with even the bare-bones of his multi-faceted plans to sharply curb collective bargaining rights. He could not point to any statements where he did. We could find none either.

During the prank call, Walker also revealed that he planned to trick state senate Democrats into returning to Madison, then declare the legislature in session & have the senate pass his draconian bill. Moreover, he told "David Koch" that, to ensure he got his way, he was going to keep sending pink slips (as Jon Stewart put it, "the streets will be pink with slips") to state workers. To him, those teachers and other state workers are just pawns in his little game of Destroy the Middle Class. His game strategy? Deception.

Funny thing, too. Walker has refused to talk with Democrats. He has refused to compromise with unions. But he can hardly wait to talk to David Koch. Really a man of the people, isn't he?

Weirdly, a Utah group is attempting to set up a recall of Wisconsin's Democratic state senators. Contra that effort, I'd suggest Badgers check out the state constitution to see what-all it says about impeachment and/or recall of a governor. If Cheeseheads don't want the Koch brothers as their de facto governor, they should get someone in the governor's mansion who isn't the Koch boy's puppet.

The Commentariat -- February 25

YOU SHOULD READ THIS. More to the point, President Obama should read this. Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times, reviews Bing West's The Wrong War. "West shows in the most granular, detailed way how and why America’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing.... What we have created..., West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse."

This is actual news, but it's a also a pretty hilarious post by Samantha Henig of the New Yorker: Ian Murphy, a/k/a "Fake Koch" may run for the recently-vacated Congressional seat once held by Rep. Christopher Lee (R-NY) of Craig'sList nude-torso fame.

David Johnston of Tax.com: "Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.... Thus, state workers ... are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin."

Sen. Obama, November 2007: "When I'm in the White House..., I'll walk on that picket line with you":

     ... Put on those comfortable shoes, Mr. President. Fulfill your campaign promise. -- The Constant Weader

Lisa Mascaro of the Los Angeles Times: "Spending cuts approved by House Republicans would act as a drag on the U.S. economy, according to a Wall Street analysis that put new pressure on the political debate in Washington. The report by the investment firm Goldman Sachs said the cuts would reduce the growth in gross domestic product by up to 2 percentage points this year, essentially cutting in half the nation's projected economic growth for 2011." CW: that is exactly the plan. Republicans want the economy to be in the tank as election season approaches. And Senate Democrats & President Obama are blithely playing into Republican hands.

Alexander Bolton of The Hill: "Senate Democrats want to put the Social Security trust fund in a lockbox and insulate it from a broader budget-cutting package designed to reduce the national deficit." Even Kent Conrad has gotten behind the lockbox concept, though of course he still wants to tinker with Social Security in a separate action not related to deficit reduction.

Julie Pace of the AP: "As corporate profits rise and Wall Street earnings soar, President Barack Obama is pressing American business leaders to create more jobs and find ways for struggling middle-class families to share in the nation's economic recovery. Obama says the private sector has to do its part to ensure that 'we're not simply creating an economy in which one segment of it is doing very well, but the rest of the folks are out there treading water. I don't know exactly where your future customers come from if they don't have jobs," Obama said Thursday during the first meeting of his newly created jobs and competitiveness council." Here's the full transcript of the President's remarks.

     ... CW: this is a laughable charade. After the federal government, through numerous Congresses & several presidents, including this one, set up an economic structure in which the rich get richer & the poor get poorer, Obama tells business leaders to forget about all that, be nice & "do the right thing" by American workers. They won't "do the right thing," President Obama, because you all fixed it so they didn't have to.

"Jackboots for Obama." Karen Garcia gets a "creepy," e-mail inviting her to participate in "an intensive training program" for Organizing or America, an arm of the DNC. The comments are great, too.

Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker on ditching DOMA: "The Obama Administration ... had been left with one argument — an argument that undermined states’ rights and asserted federal dominion in order to shore up a position that it didn’t want to defend on substantive grounds.... No wonder it was ready to cut DOMA loose." ...

** Jeffrey Toobin, also in the New Yorker, explains the meaning of "heightened scrutiny," and concludes,

Holder is now on the record, with Obama’s explicit approval, advocating a legal standard that will almost certainly result in bans on same-sex marriage being declared unconstitutional. So here’s the bottom line: Holder’s letter locks Obama in. Sooner rather than later, the President will officially change his position and endorse the right of same-sex couples to get married.

Mark Landler & Helene Cooper of the New York Times: "As the Obama administration grapples with a cascade of uprisings in the Middle East, it has come to a stark recognition: the region’s monarchs are likely to survive; its presidents are more likely to fall.

Right Wing World

... Is Dangerously Deranged. Ryan Reilly of TPM: "Witnesses tell TPM that Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) laughed when an elderly man at his town hall meeting this week asked 'Who's gonna shoot Obama?' Mark Farmer of Winterville, Georgia ... said in an e-mail to TPM..., 'I was gravely disappointed in the response of a U.S. Congressman who also laughed and then made no effort to correct the questioner on what constitutes proper behavior or to in any way distance himself from such hate filled language." ... Reporter Blake Aued, who was at the town hall and originally reported on the incident confirmed to TPM that Broun was "chuckling a little bit." ... After laughing at the question, Broun reportedly said 'there's a lot of frustration with this president.'" ...

     ... Greg Sargent: "According to Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman, the situation has been looked into."

     ... Jim Galloway of the Atlanta Journal Constitution: "U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, just issued a sharp condemnation of a constituent who, at a town hall meeting this week, raised the prospect of violence against President Barack Obama.... Broun ... weighed in once it became clear that — this morning — the incident was developing national legs." ...

     ... Jennifer Epstein of Politico: during the State of the Union, Broun tweeted, "Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.” He letter said he "stood by his tweet." Epstein has more on the story.

Over in Right Wing World, they can't get their story straight about Obama's reaction to the Middle East uprisings. They're trying to zero in on something wrong with it, something a little more credible than Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories. So maybe my favorite is Matt Drudge who is so credulous, he believes a year-old statement from the ruthless dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who said he considered Obama a friend. Because they're Muslim brothers or something, I guess.

News Ledes

Democrats Blink. New York Times: "The prospect of an imminent federal government shutdown diminished Friday as House Republicans proposed a carefully calibrated stopgap measure that Democrats said could be acceptable. Under the proposal, the law now keeping the government open would be extended two more weeks, until March 18, at the price of $4 billion in new spending cuts. In the interim, House and Senate leaders would try to negotiate a broader plan to finance the government at reduced levels through Sept. 30."

Washington Post: "Government paramilitary forces opened fire Friday on protesters who swarmed the streets of Tripoli in what opponents hoped would be a final push to topple Moammar Gaddafi's regime. Witnesses described multiple casualties from the fiercest violence yet in the Libyan capital." ...

Jay Carney announces sanctions against Libya:

... New York Times: "Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the sanctions [against Libya] would be announced soon, but gave no specifics. Mr. Carney said the American embassy in Tripoli “has been shuttered” and that diplomatic and military-to-military relations were suspended. American allies and the United Nations also moved to isolate Libya diplomatically on Friday." ...

... New York Times: "International efforts to stem the bloodshed in Libya appeared to gain momentum on Friday, with the United Nations Security Council scheduled to meet to discuss a draft proposal for sanctions against Libyan leaders and NATO convening an emergency session in Brussels." ...

... Al Jazeera: "Muammar Gaddafi ... has said that al-Qaeda is responsible for the uprising against him, amid attacks by pro-Gaddafi forces against anti-government protesters in several cities. On Friday, tens of thousands gathered at cities in the country's east controlled by anti-Gaddafi forces for Friday prayers, expressing their desire for Gaddafi to leave office. In a speech made via telephone and aired on state television on Thursday, Gaddafi claimed that the protesters were young people who had been manipulated by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's leader, and were acting under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs." With video. ...

... National Journal: "The United States will support a British resolution to levy tough sanctions against Libya at the United Nations on Friday, but will try to dampen expectations that the world body will agree to them anytime soon. Until now, the administration refused to say that direct sanctions were on the table, preferring to present that option when a united front with European allies could be mustered against the Libyan regime."

AP: "Iraqi security forces trying to disperse crowds of demonstrators in northern Iraq killed 5 people Friday as thousands rallied in cities across the country during what has been billed as the 'Day of Rage.' The Iraqi capital was virtually locked down, with soldiers deployed en masse across central Baghdad, searching protesters trying to enter Liberation Square and closing off the plaza and side streets with razor wire." ...

... New York Times: "Defying attempts by Iraq’s government to curtail a day of nationwide protests, thousands of Iraqis took to the streets on Friday to call for more accountability from elected leaders."

Wisconsin state assembly Democrats react to a flash-vote engineered by Republicans, who passed Gov. Walker's collective-bargaining-killing budget measure:

... AP: "Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly took the first significant action on their plan to strip collective bargaining rights from most public workers, abruptly passing the measure early Friday morning before sleep-deprived Democrats realized what was happening. The vote ended three straight days of punishing debate in the Assembly. But the political standoff over the bill — and the monumental protests at the state Capitol against it — appear far from over."