The Commentariat -- October 13

This Could Be Entertaining. Or Not. C-SPAN is carrying the debate between Delaware Senate candidates Chris Coons & Christine O'Donnell this evening. Update: and so they debated. New York Times story here. You can watch the debate here.

We probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. -- Barack Obama

Peter Baker interviews President Obama & his aides for the upcoming Sunday New York Times Magazine. Here's an edited transcript of Baker's interview of the President. Here's a slideshow of A Day in the Life.

And now for a few words from Meg Whitman's hometown newspaper:

Michael Leahy & Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post on how the Obama Administration fucked up off-shore drilling policy: "This article, based on dozens of interviews with people directly involved, reveals that fundamental questions weren't pursued because top administration officials generally accepted the conventional view of the industry's safety record. They were focused on the environmental issues - how drilling and a possible spill would affect sensitive habitats - and not on the engineering risks of exploration." This is a fascinating read which opens a window on the delusional hubris of the ruling class, a story made even more relevant by yesterday's news that the Administration has lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling.

Michael Powell & Motoko Rich of the New York Times: "This is not what recovery is supposed to look like.... Call it recession or recovery, for tens of millions of Americans, there’s little difference."

Showing Banksters the Love -- Again. Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: "The swelling outcry over fast-and-loose foreclosures has thrust the Obama administration back into the uncomfortable position of sheltering the banking industry from the demands of an angry public." ...

... Andrew Leonard of Salon: "White House advisor David Axelrod's attempt over the weekend to minimize the foreclosure mess as mere paperwork 'mistakes' was a massive misrepresentation of what's really going on. With Democratic politicians across the country calling for a nationwide foreclosure moratorium, Obama's reluctance to get out in front of the issue, so far, is yet another public relations disaster." ...

... Coming to a Neighborhood Near You. Robert Lewis in the Sacramento Bee: "The same industry whose lax lending standards led to the economic downturn is now being blamed by local officials for letting neighborhoods rot.... Many banks and other lenders are either unable or unwilling to handle the mass of houses left vacant by the foreclosure crisis. Many derelict houses are owned by lenders. Others are sitting in limbo."

The New York Times Editorial Board uses the Wisconsin senatorial race as Exhibit A to make the case that the American electorate has gone stupid. Wisconsin voters are about to reject the principled, independent-minded Russ Feingold for a know-nothing plastics manufacturer spewing "misinformation and simplistic solutions."

Boston Globe Editorial Board: "If there were a Nobel prize for governmental dysfunction, US Senator Richard Shelby would be in contention — but then so would the US Senate as a whole." BTW, Shelby claims he is not the senator who put a hold on a vote to confirm Peter Diamond's nomination to the Fed.

"Law and Order: SCOTUS Unit." Dana Milbank: the Supreme hear a habeas corpus case in which they show a remarkable fascination with CSI-style forensic evidence -- "the word 'blood' was uttered 60 times in the hour." CW: I thought questions like Scalia's, "Why wouldn't he wipe up the blood?" were more of the Agatha Christie genre.

Weird Story of the Day. Ray Rivera of the New York Times: "The mysterious military-grade explosives that were found in an East Village cemetery over the weekend are more than a dozen years old and were most likely stolen from a military base, the police said Tuesday." The cemetery, BTW, is located on East 2nd Street between First & Second Avenues.

American Amnesia

Maureen Dowd may hanker to move to the arts section of the Times because lately all she writes about is movies. She just saw "Fair Game," a film about the Valerie Plame affair, which she says "we should all remember." I'm mystified as to why the Times axed my brief comment, but I've reproduced it here:

We should all remember the Plame Affair? That happened way back in 2003, and it didn't happen to most of us.

Americans can't even remember back to September 2008, when the fruits of lazy laissez-faire government & greedy financiers burst the great American bubble for every single one of us. We are a nation without a memory. We live in the moment. The moment doesn't feel good, so the best thing to do is make it worse by bringing back the bubbleheads.

We don't have time to go to the movies right now. We have to go out and cheer on the clowns. Maybe after election day, we'll have time to go see "Fair Game." It might be a hit. After all, in a nation without a memory, it's not some boring old history lesson. The Plame Affair is a brand new story.

Here's the movie trailer:

The Commentariat -- October 12

It's Columbus Day, so what better occasion to use an ethnic slur to describe the Italian-American opponent of your boss, who also is Italian-American (I guess)? Carl Paladino's (of course) campaign manager Michael Caputo (sounds Italian, too, doesn't it?) calls Andrew Cuomo "a very oily kind of career politician."

Katrina vanden Heuvel in a Washington Post op-ed: "Even before Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau take on the most deceptive, exploitative consumer rip-offs in the financial services industry, Republicans are maneuvering to make the mission extremely difficult -- if not downright impossible.... The remarkable coalition that took on the financial titans during the reform debate, and then successfully waged a campaign for Warren's appointment to build the bureau, now needs to reinvigorate its effort to create a truly strong and independent agency."

Will Bunch in the Huffington Post: Tea partier say they got into the movement to "save American for their children & grandchildren." But if they are successful in electing their candidates,

... the children and grandchildren of the Tea Partiers (and the rest of us, unfortunately) would attend crumbling schools that lag increasingly behind other industrialized and emerging nations, assuming their school bus can even make it through traffic-clogged highways. Unable to find jobs, many will instead enlist to fight new wars overseas for the world's shrinking oil supply, while savvier nations reap the benefits of alternative energy.

Jim Rutenberg, Don Van Natta Jr. & Mike McIntire of the New York Times: "Anonymous" goes on the attack, mostly against Democrats. The writers ferret out a few of the anonymous donors to anodyne-sound front groups and what the donors' financial interests are in whacking certain candidates. Needless to say, the donors have their own pocketbooks, not the public interest, at heart. ...

... Tom Hamburger & Kim Geiger in the Los Angeles Times: "In a potential sign of Democratic unease with the White House midterm political strategy, some of President Obama's allies have begun to question his sustained attack on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has long claimed bipartisanship but is being increasingly identified as a GOP ally." ...

... Nick Baumann of Mother Jones: "If Democrats really want to criticize the Chamber of Commerce, they should stop harping on accounting and focus on the larger issue: the vast sums of money that domestic corporations are spending, without any disclosure or accountability."

Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times: "Let the political scholars debate whether this is the most contentious, partisan midterm election in modern memory, as some insist. But there is widespread agreement that it is certainly among the strangest."

Stephen Colbert discusses the Rich Iott case & his disappointment in Republicans. "Thankfully, dressing the President as a Nazi? Still okay":

Stephen Gandel of Time looks at the findings of Nobel Prize-winning economists Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen & Christopher Pissarides, all of whom are experts on employment & unemployment patterns. Generally speaking, Gandel notes, these economists would say the Democrats' approach to job creation is more effective than the Republicans'. ...

... Steve Benin is still pissed off at Richard Shelby, as he should be: Peter "Diamond's nomination has been pending since April.... The nomination has cleared committee, is ready for a floor vote, and if Shelby opposes Diamond, he can vote against him.... Shelby has decided one of the nation's most accomplished economists, a celebrated expert in employment policy, not only failed to earn his support, but is so offensive to Shelby's far-right sensibilities that he's forbidding the Senate from voting at all."

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, who -- among other anti-terrorist duties -- investigated the al Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. Cole when it was in Yemen, writes an op-ed in the New York Times about the investigation. Soufan concludes,

We long ago realized that if the American government had not let the Cole attack go unanswered, and if our investigation had not been so constrained, we could have undermined Al Qaeda and perhaps even averted the 9/11 attack. After 10 years, we need to finally put that lesson to use.

Glenn Greenwald: way back when, even Donald Rumsfeld knew Muslim terrorists don't "hate us for our freedoms"; they hate us for our support of Israel, for our backing of "Islamic tyrannies" -- Egypt & Saudi Arabia --  & most of all, for our occupations of Muslim nations. University of Chicago Prof. Robert Pape is scheduled to present evidence to Congress today that military occupation is the responsible for most suicide terrorism.

Historian Sean Wilentz in The New Yorker: Glenn Beck's paranoid view of American history derives from extremists who fell to the right of the old John Birch Society & who had no purchase on mainstream Republican views. Wilentz concludes this long article:

For the moment, though, it appears that the extreme right wing is on the verge of securing a degree of power over Congress and the Republican Party that is unprecedented in modern American history. For defenders of national cohesion and tempered adversity in our politics, it is an alarming state of affairs.

Greg Sargent: "... right wing commentators who claim lefty groups and unions are running ads funded by anonymous donors -- just as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other righty groups are doing -- are just flat out lying. This lie is so easily debunked that Joe Scarborough actually retracted it today (Monday) on Morning Joe after making the claim and getting corrected. Will Karl Rove and Fox News and others spreading this falsehood or letting it go unchecked do the same? ...

... AND, speaking of Joe Scarborough, check out his column in Politico on Newt Gingrich. If I recall correctly Scarborough rode into Congress on the Newt's 1994 train:

The same man who once compared himself to Napoleon (and grandly told his lieutenants that he was at “the center of a worldwide revolution”) now grabs cheap headlines by launching bizarre rhetorical attacks. The same politician who once saw himself as a latter-day Winston Churchill — sent by God to save Western civilization — now gets rich off political hate speech.

Matthew Wald of the New York Times: "Google and [Good Energies,] a New York financial firm, have each agreed to invest heavily in a proposed $5 billion transmission backbone for future offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard that could ultimately transform the region’s electrical map. The 350-mile underwater spine, which could remove some critical obstacles to wind power development, has stirred excitement among investors, government officials and environmentalists who have been briefed on it.