The Commentariat -- February 14

Short-sighted & Wrong-headed. Paul Krugman: House Republicans have decided to "focus [budget] cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy." ...

... Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post: "President Obama drew fire Sunday from congressional Republicans and independent budget experts for his reluctance to advance a plan that would tackle the nation's biggest budget problems in the spending blueprint he will submit to Congress on Monday." ...

... Lori Montgomery: "will roll out a $3.7 trillion budget blueprint Monday that would trim or terminate more than 200 federal programs next year and make key investments in education, transportation and research in a bid to boost the nation's economy and reduce record budget deficits." ...

... Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "President Obama ... on Monday released a fiscal year 2012 budget that projects an annual deficit of more than $1 trillion before government shortfalls decline to 'sustainable' levels for the rest of the decade." ...

... "Fighting Fire with Gasoline." Robert Reich in Salon on how Obama got the budget wrong: "Obama [has allowed] Republicans to frame the debate as how much federal spending can be cut and how to shrink the deficit. The President has to reframe the debate around the necessity of average families having enough to spend to get the economy moving again. He needs to remind America ... we’re still in a jobs crisis...." Reich offers a proposal on what the FY 2012 budget should look like. ...

... The President's budget proposal just came up online. Start here.

... AND OMB Director Jack Lew explains why his budget proposal is really, really a good one:

** Felix Salmon in a New York Times op-ed: "... the stock market is becoming increasingly irrelevant — a trend that threatens the core principles of American capitalism.... What the market is not doing so well is its core public function: allocating capital efficiently.... To invest in younger, smaller companies, you increasingly need to be a member of the ultra-rich elite [which don't trade on the NYSE]."

Happy Valentine's Day, Mr. President, Love forever, Fox "News." Here are the results of a Fox presidential match-up poll, via Brooklyn Mutt:

Obama 54% - Jeb Bush 34%

Obama 48% -  Mitt Romney 41%

Obama 49% - Mike Huckabee 41%

Obama 55% - Newt Gingrich 35%

Obama 56% - Sarah Palin 35%

... Here's a related story from Andy Kroll at Mother Jones: Republican dreams of a Jeb Bush run don't look so hot.

David Kirkpatrick & David Sanger of the New York Times report on the pan-Arab youth democracy movement which has been years in the making & centers on nonviolent techniques. ...

... Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times: "Governments across the Middle East are scrambling to step up political concessions, dole out financial benefits and — when that fails — deploy riot police in an attempt to ease instability and buy time.... Protesters from Morocco to Iran are setting aside the region's traditional religious and geopolitical divides to take on common culprits of corruption, police violence, political repression and vast gaps in wealth." ...

... Marc Lynch of Foreign Policy: "The Obama administration also deserves a great deal of credit, which it probably won't receive. It understood immediately and intuitively that it should not attempt to lead a protest movement which had mobilized itself without American guidance, and consistently deferred to the Egyptian people. Despite the avalanche of criticism from protestors and pundits, in fact Obama and his key aides -- including Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power and many others -- backed the Egyptian protest movement far more quickly than anyone should have expected."

Mark Lacey & James McKinley of the New York Times report some of the details of Gabriel Giffords' rehabilitation. ...

... Malcolm Ritter, a science writer for the AP, on Gabrielle Giffords' rehabilitation. "Too little has been revealed and it's too early to say if Giffords might be able to return to her job in Congress. One expert questioned whether that would be the best thing for her to do. Most people with such injuries have some level of impairment for the rest of their lives." ...

... which is why stories like this one, that Politico ran over the weekend, pretty much irritate me.

Right Wing News

Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones: "Two years ago, Tea Party Patriots got its start as a scrappy, ground-up conservative organization....Lately..., TPP has started to resemble the Beltway lobbying operations its members have denounced. The group's leaders have cozied up to political insiders implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and have paid themselves significant salaries. TPP accepted the use of a private jet and a large donation of anonymous cash right before a key election, and its top officials have refused to discuss how the money was spent. And recently, the group has hired several big-time fundraising and public relations firms that work for the who's who of the Republican political class...." Part 1 of a 3-part series.

The Koch Bros. Don't Have Funny Bones. Noam Cohen of the New York Times: they have gone to court to shut down a pretty harmless parody site. CW: kinda reminds me of Bill O'Reilly & Fox "News" suing Al Franken. The judge laughed their suit out of court. ...

... Speaking of lawsuits, here's one we like. Peter Finocchiaro of Salon: "Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers.... The NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue."

Mitt Romney lies even when he's telling the truth:

"President Obama has stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history, and that, my friends, is one inconvenient truth that will haunt this president throughout history." -- Mitt Romney ...

     ... BUT Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post writes, "Romney's statement is technically correct but lacks context, making it meaningless. He attributes some job losses to Obama that are arguably not Obama's fault. And just using raw numbers is misleading, especially when, placed in context, the job losses under Obama are about the same at this point as under Romney's hero, Ronald Reagan."

Haley Barbour might not have given much thought to black civil rights BUT Michael Scherer of Time reports that he has a consistent history of favoring a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. With video. CW: this is good with me, but how good will it be for Republican presidential primary voters?

Don't Pick on Palin. CW: as is my habit, I've tried to stay in the Palin-free zone, but Andy Barr's February 12 Politico story on the political costs of criticizing Sarah Palin is germane to the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Besides, it's about two of the worst presidential candidates ever:

Rick Santorum, in a little-watched Web radio interview, on why Palin wasn't attending CPAC: “'I have a feeling that she has some demands on her time, and a lot of them have financial benefit attached to them.' He added that Palin had 'other business opportunities' as well as 'all these kids' to look after as a mother, both of which caused constraints on her time.

Sarah Palin on Fox "News": "My kids don’t hold me back from attending a conference. I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. I’ll let his wife call him that instead.”

Local News

Rick Scott & the nasty rich guy Charles Montgomery Burns. A number of writers have pointed out Scott is meaner than Burns; Scott looks & acts like super-villain Lex Luthor. Karoli of Crooks & Liars: Florida Gov. Rick "Scott's budget is so draconian to the poor and middle class and so enriching to corporations and their wealthy overlords that he makes Simon LeGree look charitable. And as Ed Kilgore notes, the entire budget is intended to redistribute wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 10%."

Steve Benen: "The governor's plan cuts billions from already-underfunded public schools, cuts billions from Medicaid, would close a third of the state's public parks, and would eliminate every penny of funding that currently goes to assist the homeless and prevent teen suicides."

The President's speech this morning in Baltimore:

     ... Here's the transcript from the White House.

News Ledes

Buh-bye, Birther Bill. Arizona Republic: "An Arizona Senate committee rejected a proposal to require candidates for the presidency to show their birth certificates. The bill by Republican Sen. Ron Gould of Lake Havasu was defeated in a 3-to-5 vote Monday by the Senate's judiciary committee.... The bill was aimed at making President Barack Obama prove his nationality by birth.

New York Times: "The House on Monday voted to reauthorize and extend through Dec. 8 three ways in which Congress expanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterterrorism powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.... Sixty-five Democrats voted for it..., and 27 Republicans voted against it...."

AFP: "The possible heirs of Egypt's uprising took to the streets Monday in different corners of the Middle East: Iran's beleaguered opposition stormed back to central Tehran and came under a tear gas attack by police. Demonstrators faced rubber bullets and birdshot to demand more freedoms in the relative wealth of Bahrain. And protesters pressed for the ouster of the ruler in poverty-drained Yemen." ...

... AP: "Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has expressed support for the tens of thousands of protesters in Iran's capital, saying they "deserve to have the same rights that they saw being played out in Egypt and are part of their own birthright." ...

... NBC: "Clashes between Iranian police and tens of thousands of protesters wracked central Tehran on Monday with security forces beating and firing tear gas at opposition supporters looking to evoke the recent popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia."

AP: "Egypt's military rulers called for an end to strikes and protests Monday as thousands of state employees, from ambulance drivers to police and transport workers, demonstrated to demand better pay in a growing wave of labor unrest unleashed by the democracy uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak's regime." ...

... AP: "More than 1,000 people protested in Yemen for a fourth straight day Monday, demanding political reforms and the ouster of the U.S.-allied president in demonstrations inspired by the upheaval in Egypt."

... AP: "Egypt's ambassador to the United States says Hosni Mubarak may be in 'bad ealth,' the first word on the 82-year-old ousted president's health."

The Commentariat -- February 13

Yesterday, I linked to Joby Warrick's fascinating WashPo account of the behind-the-scenes workings of the Obama Administration as it wrestled with the rapidly-changing situation in Egypt. Today, here's an account by Helene Cooper and others of the New York Times: "A president who himself is often torn between idealism and pragmatism was navigating the counsel of a traditional foreign policy establishment led by Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Biden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, against that of a next-generation White House staff who worried that the American preoccupation with stability could put a historic president on the wrong side of history." ...

... CW: if these reporters' accounts are relatively true -- and remember, they are stories that Administration CYA sources are spoonfeeding the media after Mubarak's unceremonious departure -- then we are better off with Obama as President than we would have been with Hillary Clinton. This sort of difference between Obama & Clinton, again -- if true -- is the reason I favored Obama over Clinton in the primary. ...

... Nicholas Kristof: "Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the [Middle East] region’s youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak." Kristof "suggest[s] four lessons to draw from our mistakes." ...

... Peter Baker of the New York Times: "For Mr. Obama, the challenge may be to define the spread of liberty and democracy as a nonpartisan American goal, removing it from the political debate that has surrounded it in recent years." ...

... Mubarak Doesn't Think Much of Arab Democracy. Reuters: "Hosni Mubarak had harsh words for the United States and what he described as its misguided quest for democracy in the Middle East in a telephone call with an Israeli lawmaker [former cabinet minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer] a day before he quit as Egypt's president." ...

... Neil MacFarquhar, et al., of the New York Times: "Now with Hosni Mubarak out of power, there are growing calls for an accounting [of his finances] to begin. Within hours of Mr. Mubarak’s resignation on Friday, Swiss officials ordered all banks in Switzerland to search for — and freeze — any assets of the former president, his family or close associates. In Egypt, opposition leaders vowed to press for a full investigation of Mr. Mubarak’s finances. Tracing the money is likely to be difficult because business in Egypt was largely conducted in secret among a small group connected to Mr. Mubarak."

As we salute and we cheer the coming of democracy in Egypt, it is time for democracy to come to our nation’s capital.... Take the opportunity to talk to three people and say, 'We need to bring democracy to the people of the District of Columbia.' -- Vince Gray, Mayor of Washington, D.C. (Via Ben Smith)

Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "A week from Tuesday, when the Supreme Court returns from its midwinter break and hears arguments in two criminal cases, it will have been five years since Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during a court argument." ...

... CW: I personally dislike Harvard Law Prof. Noah Feldman, because I think he's an insufferably pompous ass, but his New York Times op-ed in defense of Supreme Court Justices' politicking is at least an interesting read on the history of Supremely judicial politicking, and it's getting a lot of buzz. Update: as reader Jim T. points out, "the extension of [Feldman's argument] is the excuse '...everybody does it.'"

Katy Steinmetz of Time: "The Transportation Security Administration ... is field testing a new technology ... called Automatic Target Recognition, or ATR, [which] displays only a generic stick-figure image, rather than the actual outline of the traveler being screened.... An image only pops up if there’s something unusual detected on the body -- otherwise there’s just a big green screen that says 'OK.' ..."

Right Wing News

Boehner Bats for Birthers: says people & members of Congress have a right to be ignorant:

News Ledes

New York Times: "A lawyer for victims of sexual abuse by priests says he plans to seek depositions from Archbishop Timothy R. Dolan and other church officials over the lawyer’s accusations that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee, while Archbishop Dolan was its leader, moved $130 million off its books to avoid paying abuse claims."

Washington Post: "President Obama will ... propos[e] sharp cuts of his own in a fiscal 2012 budget blueprint that aims to trim record federal deficits by $1.1 trillion over the next decade. Obama would reach his target in part by raising taxes, an idea that Republicans refuse to consider. But two-thirds of the savings would come from spending cuts that are draconian by Democratic standards and take aim at liberal priorities, such as a popular low-income heating assistance program and community development block grants. Obama also targets the Pentagon ... by adopting $78 billion in savings proposed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. ...

... AP: "An administration official says President Barack Obama is proposing to cut $100 billion over a decade from the Pell Grant program through belt-tightening, but use the savings to keep the maximum college financial aid award at $5,550."

AP: "Egypt's military leaders dissolved parliament and suspended the constitution Sunday, meeting two key demands of protesters.... The caretaker government held its first meeting since the president was ousted and before it began, workers removed a giant picture of Mubarak from the meeting room." New York Times story here. ...

... Al Jazeera: "Scuffles have broken out in Cairo's Tahrir Square as soldiers tried to remove activists from the epicentre of Egypt's uprising which resulted in the president stepping down. Hundreds of protesters remained in the square on Sunday and organisers said they would not leave until more of their demands are met. Meanwhile, normality was slowly returning to the rest of Egypt, at the start of the first working day since Hosni Mubarak was toppled during the weekend." AP story here. ...

... (London) Telegraph: "Hosni Mubarak used the 18 days it took for protesters to topple him to shift his vast wealth into untraceable accounts overseas, Western intelligence sources have said.

... AP: "Yemeni police have clashed with anti-government protesters demanding political reform and the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Several thousand protesters, many of them university students, tried to reach the central square in the capital of Sanaa on Sunday, but were pushed back by police using clubs. It was the third straight day of anti-government protests."

... New York Times: "The Palestinian leadership announced Saturday that it planned to hold presidential and parliamentary elections by September, apparently a response to the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt calling for greater democracy and government accountability." ...

... AP: "Bahrain's leaders promised Sunday to expand media freedoms in another apparent attempt to quell plans for the first major anti-government protests in the Gulf since the uprising in Egypt. The tiny kingdom of Bahrain is among the most politically volatile in the Gulf and holds important strategic value for the West as the home as the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet." ...

... AP: "Heavily outnumbered by riot police, thousands of Algerians defied government warnings and dodged barricades to rally in their capital Saturday, demanding democratic reforms a day after mass protests toppled Egypt's autocratic ruler." ...

     ... (London) Telegraph: "Internet providers were shut down and Facebook accounts deleted across Algeria on Saturday as thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were arrested in violent street demonstrations."

AP: "US researchers said Friday they have found that people who used two specific varieties of pesticide were 2.5 times as likely to develop Parkinson's disease. The pesticides, paraquat and rotenone, are not approved for house and garden use."

Familiar Bedfellows

Frank Rich: Irving Picard, the special bankruptcy trustee for the Bernie Madoff estate, may yet prove to be the man who exposes Wall Street -- and in particular, JP Morgan Chase -- for their criminal (or at least actionable) misdeeds that created the financial crisis. And Jamie Dimon, Chase's CEO is "sick of" the "constant refrain" of people badmouthing bankers.

Here's my response to Rich's column:

There’s a good reason Bernie Madoff is the only financier doing time. Sen. Dick Durbin explained it back in April 2009 when he tried unsuccessfully, at the height of the financial crisis, to get mild bankruptcy reform through the Senate:

And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.

 It is hardly surprising that the Congress is underfunding the S.E.C. – they don’t want the S.E.C. catching any big-time crooks. Those crooks are Congress’s bread-and-butter.

But the Congress needn’t have worried. Just as in the days when No One Would Listen to whistleblower Harry Markopolos, the S.E.C. is still pretty much sitting on its hands. Every once in a while, they nab some small-time (by Wall Street standards) crook in a $2,000 suit, but they keep their hands off the big boys. After all, the S.E.C. – in fact, all of the so-called “regulatory agencies” – are beholden to the crooks, too. Most of the high-ranking regulators come from Wall Street, and after they do their “public service” stint, they’ll be right back on the Street, raking in the big bucks.  Just yesterday, Eric Dash of the Times reported that "Joseph Jiampietro, one of the government’s top deal makers during the financial crisis, has joined Goldman Sachs as a senior investment banker covering the financial services industry...." Dash describes Jiampietro as the FDIC's "main liason to hedge funds and broader Wall Street community,” and he adds, “Mr. Jiampietro is the latest in a parade of top federal official to leave Washington for Wall Street." Prior to "his stint in Washington," Jiampietro was an investment banker. Do you really think Mr. Jiampietro's "stint in Washington" had anything to do with public service?

The chair of the S.E.C. – Mary Schapiro – has a long history as a regulator, beginning way back in the days when Ronald Reagan appointed her to sit on the S.E.C. You might think that would make her a tough cookie. Not really. Like the rest of her regulator colleagues, she’s in it for the dough. Back in 2008, her last year as head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s (ha ha ha) self-policing arm, Schapiro hauled in compensation of $3.3 million. According to Wikipedia, “on departure from FINRA, she received additional lump sum retirement benefit payments that brought her total package in 2008 to $8,985,334 (about the same as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein made in that year.”

You might suppose that kind of payout would raise eyebrows in the Senate, which had to “advise & consent” to Schapiro's appointment to head the S.E.C. After all, the Senate regularly puts on hold for months or even years confirmation votes for minor appointments. But, no, in the wake of her big payoff and again during the height of the financial crisis, the Senate cleared Schapiro with a voice vote. The Senate in its wisdom Dr. Schapiro would follow that part of the Hippocratic Oath that reads “first, do not harm.” Just think of the great job Schapiro will get with all those marketable “on-the-job” skills she’s acquired at the S.E.C.

Which, to follow Frank’s structure, brings us back to Bernie Madoff. It is hardly surprising that Irving Picard is the prime mover in connecting the dots between Madoff and his enablers at JPMorgan Chase. Despite Mr. Markopolos’ many pleas to the S.E.C. and the extensive documentation he sent them, it wasn’t the S.E.C. that brought down Madoff. It was Madoff’s own sons who told the F.B.I. that their father was running a Ponzi scheme. Where was the S.E.C.? They had previously “investigated” Bernie Madoff. They didn't find a thing. They wouldn’t, would they?