The Commentariat -- November 28

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer: "In his most recent New York Times op-ed column, Frank Bruni warns that the 'presidential race is shaping up to be … especially mean and mendacious.' But Bruni himself, if not mean, is certainly mendacious. His central premise is untrue as is much of the 'evidence' he provides to try to support it." The NYTX front page is here. ...

... Today's Off Times Square topic is "The Pits." You'll have to read it to get it. But of course you can write about any topic related to politics.

NEW. How to Attack Female Candidates. Libby Copeland in Slate: "A review of the advertising suggests that conventions of negative advertising against women are often different from the conventions of advertising against men." Here are some "common tropes" used to defeat a woman running for office: she's nutty, a power-mad bitch, a wicked witch, frivolous, deviant, uppity, a woman. With sample ads.

George Packer of the New Yorker talks to Occupy Wall Street protesters about why they're participating in the movement.

The Fed: a Banker's BFF. Bob Ivry, et al., of Bloomberg News: "The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret.... The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue."

Paul Krugman: "... two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions." Krugman explains to dummies why raising taxes on today's super-rich would make a big dent in the deficit as would "taxing financial transactions, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on."

Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times: Mayor Cory Booker brings doughnuts & coffee to Occupy Newark protesters. "Indeed, the Occupy Newark protest has unfolded with disarming civility in one of the nation’s grittiest cities."

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: "Just a little more than an hour after some House Democrats recently demanded an inquiry into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s ethics, Senate Republicans stepped up the pressure on Justice Elena Kagan to take herself out of the court’s decision on the health-care reform act. The process repeated itself a few days later. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) called for the release of more documents about Kagan’s role as President Obama’s solicitor general; the liberal group People for the American Way came out with another broadside against Thomas. Accusations about both justices, from the left and the right, show no signs of dissipating now that the Supreme Court has said it will review the constitutionality of Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010."

Aram Roston of the Daily Beast: Supreme Foods is the new Halliburton, a European-based company which services, has imported all of the U.S military’s food into Afghanistan, and its contract was extended by the Pentagon in 2010 for two years and $4 billion without the normal competitive bidding. But that’s just part of its business.... The rise of Supreme Group is a classic tale of a Pentagon procurement system still laboring to overcome decades of suspicions about overpriced hammers and toilet seats, conflicts of interests, kickbacks, and a revolving door between the government and private contractors.

Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker: "Americans have never met a hydrocarbon they didn’t like. Oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, tar-sands oil, coal-bed methane, and coal, which is, mostly, carbon—the country loves them all, not wisely, but too well. To the extent that the United States has an energy policy, it is perhaps best summed up as: if you’ve got it, burn it. America’s latest hydrocarbon crush is shale gas."

Right Wing World

Mitt v. Mitt. Here's a related AP story:

John Cassidy of the New Yorker: With Republicans facing the dismal prospect of voting for either Mitt or Newt, the Donald is thinking of making a comeback -- just in time for his release of a new book.

Max Read of Gawker on the New Hampshire Union Leader's endorsement of Newt Gingrich: "It must be a proud moment for Newt, to be included with such GOP luminaries as Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes and Pierre S. DuPont IV — all of whom received the coveted Union Leader endorsement and went on to illustrious careers as a television racist, a publisher of listicles, and a terrible Wall Street Journal columnist, respectively." Hilariously, TwitterWorld is totally confused to learn a "union leader" has endorsed Newt. With sample Tweets. ...

... Not So Fast, Skeptics. Nate Silver demonstrates that the Union Leader endorsement actually does help a New Hampshire candidate: "As it happens, although only three of the six Republicans endorsed by The Union Leader during this period won their primary, all six outperformed their polling."

News Ledes

New York Times: "A federal judge in New York on Monday threw out a settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Citigroup over a 2007 mortgage derivatives deal, saying that the S.E.C.’s policy of settling cases by allowing a company to neither admit nor deny the agency’s allegations did not satisfy the law. The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, ruled that the S.E.C.’s $285 million settlement, announced last month, is “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest” because it does not provide the court with evidence on which to judge the settlement. The ruling could throw the S.E.C.’s enforcement efforts into chaos...."

NECN: "Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts fourth Congressional District has said he will not seek re-election for 2012." Updated Boston Globe report here.

     ... Update: C-SPAN has video of Frank's full press conference here.

Reuters: "Police in riot gear began closing in early on Monday on some 2,000 anti-Wall Street activists who defied a midnight deadline to vacate an eight-week-old encampment outside Los Angeles City Hall as some protesters blocked traffic."

AP: "Since the lifting two months ago of a longstanding U.S. ban on gays serving openly in the military, U.S. Marines across the globe have adapted smoothly and embraced the change, says their top officer, Gen. James F. Amos, who previously had argued against repealing the ban during wartime."

Al Jazeera: "Egyptians have started casting their ballots in the first parliamentary elections since former president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in a popular uprising earlier this year. Long queues were seen outside many polling stations amid tight security arrangements as voters flocked to the polls on Monday morning." The Al Jazeera liveblog is here.

New York Times: "Warnings that the debt crisis in Europe could cause credit to dry up across the global banking system, endangering the world economy, multiplied on Monday despite fresh efforts by European leaders to prevent the euro monetary union from fracturing."

New York Times: "Millions of voters in [the Congo] ... streamed into the polls on Monday and already many are bracing for serious unrest."