Month: December 2012

He says exactly what he should:

“My comments 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive. They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights. I am fully supportive of ‘open service’ and committed to LGBT military families.”

That’s all I and HRC asked of him and all that could possibly be asked for. The rest is smears – and there will be more to come, knowing how fanatical and ruthless the Greater Israel lobby is.

This is fast becoming a litmus test of whether an American president can nominate a defense secretary without getting the blessing of the AIPAC chorus. Yes, we have sunk that far. But this could be a turning point for a saner Middle East policy.

According to the AP, Kerry will be nominated for Secretary of State. Assuming he's appointed, Massachusetts will have to hold a special election for his seat. Silver considers Brown's chances:

[I]t is difficult to view Mr. Brown as much better than even money: he is a Republican in Massachusetts who lost an election by a reasonably clear margin just last month. And if Mr. Brown wins, he could well face another competitive election in November 2014, when Democrats will have more chance to gear up from the race – and when Mr. Patrick will have finished his second term as governor and might be more likely to run for the Senate. One thing is for certain: if Mr. Brown is the senator from Massachusetts in January 2015, he will have earned it, having run for office four times in less than five years.

Harry Enten's gives Brown worse odds:

[Y]ou could argue that Brown's victory in 2010 was a fluke more than anything else. Brown's opponent, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, ran arguably the worst campaign the state had ever seen. She refused to do much of anything in the way of retail politics – and bragged about it. Coakley made herself an object of ridicule by stating that Boston Red Sox hero Curt Schilling was a member of the hated New York Yankees.

Brown, by contrast, rode his pickup truck around Massachusetts, winning over voters under the radar, and reversed a 30-point deficit in the closing weeks of the campaign. But it's improbable that Brown would catch such a break again.

Readers react to the LaPierre's remarkable press conference this morning:

I actually fell for it. I actually though the NRA would come out with some concessions – closing the gun show loophole, at the very least. I really should have known better. This morning Wayne LaPierre gave one of the most cynical and cowardly speeches I've ever heard. Blaming everyone and everything other than guns and access to them.

Another:

After reading the transcript of the NRA’s press conference where they had promised "meaningful contributions" to the discussion after Newtown, I’m surprised that I’m amazed, but I am. This is epistemic closure beyond the inability of the right-wing to believe the reality of last November’s re-election of Obama. For years, the NRA has been stoking fears of "jackbooted thugs" from the Federal government. Now they propose putting an armed government employee in every single school across America.

Clearly no sense of irony there. And, what could possibly go wrong? They blame movies and video games for violence in our country, but what effect do they have in other countries? As a nation, we experimented with the Wild Wild West and, surprisingly, decided that the rule of law was superior. These are the people who tell us constantly that the federal government is too big and intrusive and suddenly Congress is supposed to appropriate the money for putting people with guns in every school in America. Moreover, they say (and I quote) "There'll be time for talk and debate later. This is the time, this is the day for decisive action." This is clearly the longer version of "Ready, fire, aim!"

Another:

There are about 90,000 elementary schools in the United States.  Let’s say you pay one single-shift guard about $60,000 including benefits, taxes and overhead.  You’ve just spent $5.4 billion to do what? 

Everyone is appalled by what happened in Newtown, and no one want it to happen again.  There are no guarantees folks, and if take measures like the NRA is proposing, the very, very rare nutcase can just go to the playground or the school bus.  This is a diversionary proposal.  Not serious.

Another quotes LaPierre:

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Well, bullshit. Jared Loughner's rampage in Tucson was stopped when he had to pause to reload. Brave UNARMED citizens used that window of opportunity to pounce on him.

Another:

I remembered this from Columbine but had to go find it to verify. There was an armed officer on duty at Columbine. He wasn't able to stop anything.

Another:

You are witnessing the total implosion of the right in the United States: the defeat of Boehner’s ridiculous Plan B and this speech by the NRA.

The "craziest quotes" from the press conference rounded up here. My thoughts soon.

Noah Millman reflects on the Newtown murders:

[W]hat I find most terrifying about stories like Adam Lanza’s is not realizing that neither I nor my loved ones can ever be perfectly safe – I already knew that – but rather that I can all too easily imagine what it might be like to surrender to a horrible impulse. I can’t quite imagine my way into the mind of someone who picks off little children with a rifle, but any number of other horrors are mentally accessible. It only requires focusing intently on the normal rages and frustrations that bedevil anybody, and closing off everything else, including the access of other minds.

J.L. Wall adds:

The all-too-easy imagining he refers to is one of the purposes of literature, and the novel in particular—to bring us closer to those we are not, and who are not, but who could just as easily be. 

While the cable television serial may have become the home of the twenty-first century American anti-hero, the restrictions placed on film and television by rules and methods of pacing, of plot, of episode-length create a distance, even if only to the extent of window glass, between the audience and the protagonist that isn’tnecessarily there in fiction.  The novel, by contrast, meandering and digressive while at the same time plot-driven, is able to momentarily blur the distinction between the reader or author and the character.  In television and film, we watch, sometimes in intricate, sympathetic detail; but only in the novel do we find ourselves quite literally thinking with the character.

Washington Heights, New York, 7.30 am

Navneet Alang asked Tim Carmody of The Verge whether the Internet is getting worse as we become more dependent on big services like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and Google’s suite of products:

This is the paradox of the contemporary internet, in which the structures through which social, political and commercial activity occur are monetized in ways that seem, if not exploitative, then at least remarkably traditional and counter to the web’s early goals.

Anil Dash makes related arguments. Felix Salmon explains why these complaints fall on deaf ears:

[A]s the number of people online has exploded, there’s always going to be a feeling that things were much better and more civilized back when Usenet was actually useful, or when links hadn’t been monetized by Google, or when everybody freely gave out their email address because no one worried about spam. But any network becomes messier as it grows, and one of the things that Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest do is that they declutter the web and make it user-friendly.

Pareene is out with his annual hack-list. He includes MSNBC among his targets, and the insights are sprinkled throughout. My faves:

MSNBC, we’re told all the time, is the liberal Fox News. That’s reductive and stupid. It isn’t. MSNBC isn’t the liberal Fox News for two very important reasons: It usually demonstrates a greater respect for the truth than Fox News, and it’s not as good as Fox News…. Lawrence O’Donnell seems to be trying to win a bet with someone that Piers Morgan isn’t the biggest asshole with his own TV show…

But it's not hard to guess which show he likes the least:

"Morning Joe" is the world’s most self-satisfied television program. It is a place where Harold Ford Jr. is treated as a person whose insights and opinions are worthy of being taken seriously. It’s a show with so little respect for its viewers that Mark Halperin is asked on to explain politics every day. "Morning Joe" is very sure that it is fun and outrageous, instead of depressing. They joke, or "joke," about how they are all drinking alcohol at work, on TV! They banter! Sometimes someone swears!

And then there's the man himself:

There’s also Joe’s titanic self-regard, best exemplified by his apparent belief that he and Michael Bloomberg would have made a successful presidential ticket. Scarborough, a moderate conservative television personality, still believes himself to be a Real Man Of The People sort of guy. But the ideology of "Morning Joe" is the ideology of the elite center, a group of people who hold opinions that are deeply unpopular on both ends of the political spectrum and who have convinced themselves that they represent a secret majority of Americans. (Or at least "Real" or "Regular" Americans.) Hence, Harold Ford.

Read the whole thing. It's pure Pareene. I had no idea that Mika got one fourteenth of Joe's pay before she found out and freaked. Puts some of the sexist banter in a new perspective.

(Photo: Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski host the 'Morning Joe' show on MSNBC on April 7, 2009 in New York City. By Charles Ommanney/Getty Images.)

I’ve known David Kuo since he worked in the Bush White House as Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. When he was working there, he suffered a brain seizure while driving and, without his extraordinary wife, Kim, taking the wheels from him, they might both never have survived.

But they have. David was diagnosed with brain cancer and left the Bush administration, reflecting in his conscience on his work there. The result was a book, Tempting Faith, that came out at almost the same time as The Conservative Soul. We found ourselves estranged from modern Republicanism and united by faith in Jesus. Thus a friendship was born, and it’s one I have treasured deeply. We have talked together, joked together, laughed together and prayed together. And the cancer has come and gone and come back again. When I saw him last, he had difficulty walking very far. And then I got an email from him with the following news:

In the last four weeks two new tumors have grown. Both are in the same area as previous tumors. One is located directly on the motor pathway that controls my left leg. The other is at the front of the cavity created by previous surgeries. The news knocked the wind out of us, gave us vertigo. Frankly we are still spinning. In all the scenarios we could come up with this wasn’t one of them. My physical state, even taking into account the blood clots and bleeding brain, was on the upswing. Those sensory seizures had stopped. We were crushed. All the suffering from the surgery and it did nothing but weaken me? All the hope for the viral treatment and nothing?

He has helped me so much over the years in my own spiritual journey; and it would be true to say simply that I love him and am proud to have him here. Watch his previous videos here, here, here and here. Read some of his writing here.

Jeff Madrick says, deal or no deal, we're going over:

Taking $700 billion of buying power out of the economy in its current state, as the fiscal cliff does, would be a body blow, leading to outright recession and unemployment rates of up to 10 percent or higher. Economic recovery would not be immediate, and unemployment rates could well remain above 8 percent indefinitely even once recovery had begun.

But a compromise that reduces that impact to $300 billion, or even $200 billion, by reinstating many tax cuts and reducing spending cuts, will still rob the economy of a huge amount of buying power at a time when it needs every penny. The result will be tepid growth in 2013, just when the economy seemed to be gathering momentum—and little progress on reducing unemployment.

(Photo: Kyle Mitione of the USA competes in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series Qualifier at Riverside Oaks Golf Resort on February 4, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. By Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)