Just a quick one, to make up for a pathetic paucity of posts today:
- Kerry Tries to Reassure Israel and Saudis on Mideast Policy (NYT) — That’s gonna be a tough sell. Have you read what the Saudis are saying about us? Prince Turki al Faisal, the former Saudi ambassador in Washington, said this recently: “The current charade of international control over Bashar’s chemical arsenal would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious, and designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down, but also to help Assad butcher his people.” Whoa.
- Obama Tells Merkel That U.S. Is Not Tapping Her Phone (NYT) — The Germans are not pleased.
- Vatican suspends ‘bishop of bling’ (BBC) — Broad-minded as he is, Pope Francis can only take so much…
- Fired White House Aide Admits He Was Twitter Troll (NPR) — Amazingly, this guy was 40, not 14…
- Man arrested for stealing Chihuahua from Pets Inc. (thestate.com) — It was kind of a slow news day locally.
- Post-shutdown, Cruz returns to Texas a hero (WashPost) — The Post is leading with this at the moment. I guess this is more of a shock to people in Washington than to us in South Carolina.
Related Posts
That was kind of an unusual assortment for one of my fronts. But it was a boggy, soggy, squitchy sort of news day.
There was an interesting lack of agreement among major news sources as to what was the big story of the day. Some went with Merkel’s phone. The NYT went with Kerry mending fences, which I think was the right call. (I used their Merkel story as well because they led with the denial, which seemed to advance the story further.)
The WashPost led with the Cruz story, which is more of a step-back story than anything I’d consider as a lede any day.
NPR led with something about dogs getting sick from eating beef jerky. But they’re quirky.
I would have used the Reality Check story, but that happened yesterday. I still need to do a post about that. Last couple of days have been hectic…
Yes Brad, your posting has been sporadic lately, at best…
Well… it’s not going to get much better this week.
I spent most of a day at the Reality Check thing, and I’m about to go spend the rest of today at the Results Summit. In between, I’ve got a lot of ADCO stuff to do. Tomorrow’s definitely going to be a catchup day…
We should all “friend” him, and defeat him with love and compassion.
It’s a great idea, Silence. However, I’d rather stay alive.
Doug, weren’t you impressed by all the many posts on his page that express sympathy for the young woman who is paralyzed?
Yes, just like the parents who “apologized” in The State and said their son was a a church going lad who just had some bad luck.
How can this person possibly value our society. He is clearly not a part of it, nor do his friends seem to be. I don’t have an answer for this that doesn’t involve more money than anyone seems willing to spend, but something needs to be done or his society is likely to end up going to war with ours.
If I pay my taxes to prevent someone from hurting me, isn’t that extortion? And what prevents them from raising the price of my safety?
Isn’t all taxation extortion, basically? The ol’ federal, state and local protection racket.
It’s best to picture government as a 1930’s gangster, just for all purposes, really. Dapperly dressed in pinstripes, a fedora and wing tip shoes, smoking a cigarette. Maybe leaning up against a building with an .45 automatic bulging in a shoulder holster, or in a trenchcoat pocket.
“Nice 5-points you have here. It’d be a real shame if something were to happen to it….”
Can we create a country for the 750, 000 Texans who vote, and let the rest choose where they want to be? That that percentage of people can elect national representatives from that state is truly scary. Why are the rest not voting?
If it makes you feel any better, ally Sen. Mike Lee isn’t faring as well as Sen. Cruz back in his home state.
Unfortunately, SC is probably more like Texas than Utah.
If we created a country for those 750,000 Texans, then EVERYONE would start wanting their own independent country…and we can’t have people practicing self-determination all willy-nilly.
And considering the recent economic success of Texas, they would probably continue to have a problem with illegal immigrants trying to get in.
Karen, keep in mind that the 750,000 number is “how many votes it generally takes to prevail in a statewide Republican primary — which is tantamount to being elected, considering that no Democrat has won statewide office here since 1994.”
It’s not about a majority of voters in the state. It’s about what it takes to get the nomination. Still, an appallingly low figure.
But keep in mind that this is what causes the cognitive disconnect for Tea Party folks such as Sen. Cruz. They talk about representing the will of “the people,” when they probably couldn’t get on a general election ballot if all voters were voting in the primary. A majority of a plurality (and even the dominant party in a state generally represents only a plurality of voters — there are quite a few of us independents) is far from a majority of the whole, but the former is usually what these folks represent.
This is why Lindsey has to run scared all the time. In a straight-up vote of the people of South Carolina, he would easily swamp his challengers. But because we have allowed parties to so dominate our electoral process, he has to pass this hurdle in a narrow segment of the population before he can face all the voters.
You could say that technically, he doesn’t “have to,” but practically speaking, he does. When was the last time SC elected an independent to the House, much less the Senate?
For someone to have a chance outside the two main parties (or, increasingly, outside ONE party in SC) would take a massive realignment of party voting patterns that we haven’t seen in this country since the shift in the 1850s that led to the election of 1860.
Didn’t we shift from being “Yellow Dog Democrats” (The Solid South) to Republicans just a few years back? Sometime around 1964, perhaps?
Also, what about the State’s Rights Democrats (Dixiecrats) didn’t we vote for some of them here?
Just like you’ve said you do, Brad, I almost invariably vote in the Republican primary, simply because whoever wins that is automatically elected in SC. Thus, I’ve voted for Sen. Graham many times, and have voted so in national election, when the Democratic challenger seemed like the worse choice. If Texas has similar primaries (and they may not), I would think that Republican candidates would have to worry about attracting or losing independent votes.
Watching CSPAN today, there are four executives from the IT companies responsible for the healthcare.gov website and each one is claiming their piece was working fine on October 1. Zero accountability. The head of the lead contractor just said they didn’t even start end-to-end testing until the last two weeks of September. This was a disaster that a junior programmer could have predicted. They are now claiming that they should have had months of testing before going live yet they all showed up in front of a Congressional committee in mid-September that everything was set to go.
I didn’t catch all of the story but apparently an extension has been granted for 6 weeks for registering for ACA. What happens if after the 6 week extension is up and the problems are still there? Another 6 weeks? Then another? Problems could have been avoided if the launch had been delayed for a year and if Republicans who tried to stop implementation of ACA had used common sense and understood that it would do on its own what they knew they couldn’t do by voting to defund it, maybe they wouldn’t be still wiping egg off their faces. Maybe the Peter, Paul, and Mary song, “The Lemon Tree”, should be changed to “The Lemming Tree” because the fruit of their labor is bitter indeed and it may not be possible to make enough sweet lemonade to repair the damage.
“Lemming tree very pretty and the lemming flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemming is impossible to eat.”
My sincere apologies to Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Whoa, now the WH is saying the date hasn’t changed and is what has been all along.
This is a giant mess. The whole buying insurance through the exchange thing is a four step process.
1. Log in and create an account, providing information.
2. Verify subsidy amount based on income.
3. Selection of plan.
4. Payment of premium.
We’re still stuck on the first step. Republicans have a golden opportunity to show the American people that government can’t do everything for you. However, I think they’re going to screw it up and basically say, let us be in charge so we can get this government thing running correctly. The correct answer should be, let us be in charge so YOU can be in charge of your own life.
Plenty of healthcare solutions are available that would probably help. A few ideas of the top of my head:
1. Eliminate the Certificate of Need laws.
2. Allow insurance to be purchased across state lines.
3. Put some limits (at the outer margins) on what lawyers can do to doctors on questionable facts.
4. Allow pharmacists to prescribe some (not all) drugs, rather than forcing doctors visits for everything.
Good ideas, Brian.
I don’t understand why Obamacare couldn’t have just said “if you want to sell insurance in this country, you have to offer three different plans that have these parameters and you cannot deny anyone coverage and you can base the rates solely on age band and smoking”. Then all the implementation would have shifted to the insurance companies. The $500 million spent on implementing a website could have gone to giving low income people vouchers to purchase the insurance — with no mandates.
How could that fail worse than this disaster?
Why eliminate CoN laws?
How does the tragic incident in 5-points differ from the guy who shot at “alleged” huligans in his neighborhood but struck and killed an innocent bystander differ? Didn’t the 5-Points guy claim some sort of self-defense?
Yup, it appears that he is saying he heard the clink of guns, which is why he shot.
Stand Your Ground must go!
Re #1, if what makes the US supposedly “exceptional” as a shining example of a “liberal democracy,” perhaps we should worry less about the offense we’ve given the Saudi kingdom and more about the offense we’ve given actual liberal democracies such as Germany, as the extent of our surveillance-state becomes ever-more widely realized.
Hey, we’re not listening to Angela Merkel’s phone calls. At the moment.
But frankly, I don’t think we’re worried enough about Saudi Arabia. But the point isn’t “Oh, we’ve offended the Saudis.” The point is that the Saudi’s are right to be upset. They’re right. By backing off, and seizing the Russian “solution,” we’ve given Assad all the room he needs to keep crushing his opposition, and killing all the people he wants to.
As the WSJ said, “It’s a rare occasion when a Saudi royal has the moral standing to lecture an American President, but this was one of them.”
Listening to Merkel’s phone calls to me isn’t nearly as serious a breach of trust as leaving France hanging on dealing with Syria.
Interestingly, I read a piece this morning saying that parents who don’t monitor what their kids are doing with their mobile phones are asking for trouble (“Blame Parents, Not Kids, for Sexting,” WSJ)
It suggested such products as My Mobile Watchdog, Mobile Spy and Net Nanny Mobile.
Of course, the Germans would be deeply offended by any analogy that made us the grownups and them the teens. But my point in mentioning it is that you might want to keep tabs on people you care about, just as you do with your enemies — if you can, without hurting anybody.
That said, I don’t like the idea of monitoring a head of state’s phone. Some things should be respected.
Of course, heads of state speak on encrypted lines when they’re trying to speak confidentially. One thing I’m not clear on… were these encrypted calls, or en clair? If they were encoded, that would be more reason for the Germans to be upset.
This may provide an answer to my question:
Assad was winning the war before the chemical weapons attacks of last August, and nothing the US was going to do unilaterally (assuming Obama had gone ahead with US response) after the attacks was going to change that, short of major military commitment, and the risks of igniting a wider, even global war. Moreover, there has never been wide consensus that what might replace Assad would be anything other than a radical Islamic state, given the ever-increasing predominance of these elements within the opposition.
So it posits a false choice that did NOT exist to imagine that not making the agreement would somehow significantly alter the dynamics in the Syrian Civil War. I totally agree that the world should not turn its back on the Syrian problem certainly in terms of the refugee issue for example, as well as continuing efforts to bring parties to the negotiating table. The agreement over chemical weapons may only bring us a millimeter closer to peace, but when parties negotiate and talk, the channels of communication are at least open. I can’t imagine that a unilateral (and perhaps merely symbolic) US bombing of a few sites would have changed Assad’s position significantly, nor would it have done any more at bringing Syria closer to peace.
And please, like the Saudis and their oppressive regime don’t have their own interests and game they’re playing in trying to get the US to arm the rebels or go all-in to overthrow Assad? Our President has to look out for American interests, American security, not Saudi interests.
And finally, there’s this: Obama’s case for a military response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons was to achieve one goal: to prevent Assad from ever using chemical weapons again. In his televised speech to the nation in early September, Obama said:
“The purpose of this strike would be to deter Assad from using chemical weapons — to degrade his regime’s ability to use them and to make clear to the world that we will not tolerate their use.” But he also said “We cannot resolve somebody else’s civil war through force…I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.”
So is it not true, then, that the internationally-monitored dismantling of chemical arsenals in Syria is accomplishing the very goal Obama set? If so, please stop saying that the agreement per se is allowing Assad to crush his opposition. That’s simply not true. The only thing that would change that would be a major military intervention, and there was no option on the table for the US to “resolve somebody else’s civil war through force,” as the President made clear.
I was never felt better about a vote for POTUS than I did the day Obama decided he would not go it alone and launch a strike without congressional authorization. I predict that precident will be cited by future congresses whenever the issue of launching an attack against a foreign nation comes up. And look how well this has worked out. The very limited goal we set to get rid of the chemical weapons has apparently been achieved for virtually zero cost. As Phillip explained we never had a goal of intervening in the Syrian war. Obama gets an A+ on this dicey issue.
On the other hand the ongoing eavesdropping stuff is proving to be a huge embarrasment for the administration.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that South Carolina’s Second District Representative, Joe Wilson, has no leadership qualities about him.
Joe is a follower. He follows whatever prevailing trend he thinks will get him reelected. He is currently following the Tea Bagger faction of the Republican party in Washington. Joe, running unopposed in the 2012 election won with 96% of the vote. That means 4% of the voters took time to write in someone else’s name instead of punching a button for Joe.
The current state of politics in Washington is abysmal! The atmosphere in DC is toxic! I am disgusted with this “Us vs. Them” mentality in DC. Congress and the President failed in the government shutdown.
That’s why I’ve decided that I am not voting for a Republican or a Democrat for US Congress for the next three elections. Republicans and Democrats are not part of the solution. They are the problem!