Well-Publicized Anniversary

The 50th anniversary suggests much history of interest—at least to the usual types who bother paying attention to history.

Early this month, Charles Pierce noted efforts in Dallas to create a November 22 tourist event that would kind of ignore a little thing that happened fifty years ago.

But as Pierce says, "50 years ago 'civic leaders with deep ties to the city' of Dallas were a major part of the problem with the atmosphere when Kennedy came to town."

Earlier this week Sam Seder did a very interesting Majority Report interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., on "JFK's Vision of Peace." RFK Jr. shared some fascinating details about how JFK, surrounded by war hungry right-wing military brass, undertook secret diplomacy with Kruschev, who responded to the chance of finding a way out of the box his own hawks were creating. RFK Jr. also says that after the trip to Dallas, JFK had planned to announce withdrawal from Vietnam. Then LBJ was in the position of insisting he would not be known as the president who "lost Vietnam."

Text of the speech Kennedy was to have given in Dallas.

Some observations from Digby—

It occurred to me this week that very few people who are younger than I am can remember the Kennedy assassination --- which means that this commemoration is a lot like the memories of Roosevelt's death were to me when I was a little kid. Ancient history.

I was in the second grade in Wichita Kansas where my father was working for a defense contractor maintaining the nuclear missile silos. My teacher came into the room sobbing and told us all that we were going home, that the president had been killed. All the adults I saw for the next couple of weeks seemed to be shell-shocked, even my parents, who were big Kennedy haters.

...I don't think you can fully understand my generation without realizing that this was probably the most important national event of our young lives. The president was assassinated. To people my age that was not an abstract concern. It was something that happened. And it was only a few years later that it was further seared into our consciousness with the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the attempt on George Wallace. You have to understand that to kids who grew up in that time, this was normal.

People think the hippies were just a bunch of kids doing drugs (and they were) but there was a real message behind their "peace and love" campaign that sprang from this violence. And the young revolutionaries that everyone now sees as some left wing version of the Michigan Militia weren't responding to something like the horrifying prospect of health insurance for everyone. They were (at least in part) responding to the fact that our leaders were being killed. There was a sense of urgency. Something's happening here ...

I've been watching all these remembrances over the past couple of weeks realizing that it's the last time anyone will really care much about this. It will soon pass completely into the history books and that will be that. ...

Digby includes images of the "Wanted For Treason" handbill, and the full-page "American Fact-Finding Committee" ad that ran in the Dallas Morning News on November 22, 1963.

Pierce again, on the Warren Commission as

... a natural outgrowth of a mentality that had infected the government from the moment that the government decided that it would build, in secret, a weapon that would not only win World War II, but also have the potential to end civilization if it -- or the men who allegedly were in control of it -- ever ran amok.

A secrecy that could only become

... an irresistible impulse to treat the American people... like fragile children who must be protected at all costs from what their government found necessary to do on their behalf.
From this has come a hundred commissions and boards and gatherings of the shamans of the security state -- the slow bureaucratic response to the Watergate crimes, the Tower Commission on Iran-Contra, even the Simpson-Bowles budget commission -- all of which sprang from the notion that the nation's elite should conduct the nation's business in as quiet a manner as possible, so as not to disturb the horses or wake the children. The Warren Commission was the first of these, and it did its job very well....

There's that, and the fact that the types behind the 1963 "liberal treason" accusations were regarded then as beyond polite notice. Over the last fifty years, the money has not only bought its own media empire, it has also bought unlimited access to, and unquestioned respect from, Establishment media.

IOKIYAR

Charles Pierce—

Okay, poor bastard congresscritter gets busted for cocaine and becomes yet another casualty of our silly "war" on drugs. The traditional abject grovelling ensues.

"I'm profoundly sorry to let down my family, particularly my wife and son, and the people of Southwest Florida," Radel said. "I struggle with the disease of alcoholism, and this led to an extremely irresponsible choice. "... This unfortunate event does have a positive side. It offers me an opportunity to seek treatment and counseling. I know I have a problem and will do whatever is necessary to overcome it, hopefully setting an example for others struggling with this disease."

... Okay, so far, go with god, congressman. Best of luck in your struggle. Except, yeah, you know what's coming, right?

Well, Rep. Radel was one of many House Republicans who voted for a bill that would allow states to require all recipients of welfare to be drug tested prior to receiving benefits.

On second thought, to hell with it.

A white guy? Question answers itself.

Tea Party guy? Check.

Commenter Casey Laughman adds—

No, see, it's totally different because the people who should be drug tested are only those whose income is funded by taxpayers. Wait. What?

A Page From Ye Olde Playbooke

Contemptible, but in no way new: the meme that ACA rollout problems are "Obama's Katrina."

Its shtick that in fact has been used throughout this presidency, as Steve M.'s "Canonical List of Obama's Katrinas" shows. Steve does a backward rundown of the punditry: from the ACA trope of today's NYT, to all previous "Katrinas" (from 5/17/13 back to 6/30/08)—

Check the date on that last one. I love it -- Obama is such a terrible president that he had his first Katrina even before he officially became his party's nominee.

Commenter Knight of Nothing added, "Good lord, I had blocked-out how absurdly high that number was. Apparently for some, in fact Katrina was Obama's first of twenty-four Katrinas."

In response to today's NYT piece Driftglass re-posted this 2005 piece. Written post-Katrina—the real one, that killed and displaced thousands of people—and meant now as a reminder to right-wing operatives and media stenographers alike

... of exactly what a bloody, murderous slog of pure hubris and anguish the Bush Regime really was.

It is certainly well past time to remind them that regardless of how many layers of whitewash they slather onto the Bush Administration to create a blank scrim against which they can project their paranoid fantasies and panic-peddling fairy tales about the Failed Obama Administration being as bad or, perhaps even Worse Than Booosh!...

...a few of us will never go along to get along and will never, ever agree to forget what life was really like under the ongoing, train-wreck of failure, ruin, hopelessness, corruption, treason, round-the-clock Liberal-bashing and utter, prostrate media-complicity that was the Bush Administration...

No Low Too Low

Two videos here.

1. Fox host Stuart Varney smirks at the retraction of Australia's [newly wingnut] government of a previous pledge of climate change aid to developing nations. Video of Typhoon Haiyan devastation in Phillippines rolls in background.

2. A plea through tears, by Naderev "Yeb" Sano, a Phillippines' representative to U.N. climate summit. Who is on a hunger strike for "concrete pledges" to the Green Climate Fund; knowing the death toll, that the fate of relatives is unknown, and that his own brother has survived but is is trapped without food.

Shauna Theel notes—

The U.N. fund is intended to address a critical moral hazard of climate change: those who have contributed the least to climate change will suffer the most. The Philippines, for instance, is the third most vulnerable country in the world to climate change -- "particularly exposed" to "cyclones, flooding and sea level rise" -- yet it has much fewer carbon emissions than either Australia or the U.S. ...

The climate fund would help the Philippines lessen its vulnerability to the changes that are already locked in -- changes that are projected to include stronger tropical cyclones such as Haiyan -- by implementing measures such as smart construction and a more effective government response that could lessen the deadly impact of future storms. (Varney selectively quoted The New York Times saying "it is difficult to link any single weather event to climate change" to claim that the recent typhoon is not at all connected to climate change. However, he left out the second half of the sentence: the editorial board continued, "there is little doubt that rising sea levels caused by global warming will worsen the dangers.")

Varney is not alone in his callous response to calls for such aid. Many prominent conservative media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, scoffed at the climate fund when it was first proposed, saying developing nations simply wanted to "cash in" on "climate gold."

Half-bitten

Because until now, insurance companies never baited and switched, or canceled policies...

But absurd sound-bites count. The corollary being that a Dem won't get away with a clumsy one; it matters not one whit that no actual human being ever before would have imagined "liking" their insurance.

As Roy Edroso put it—

...about the latest Obamacare outrage -- that some people had their old policies cancelled, an event that could not have been foreseen unless you had been paying attention to the news when the ACA was passed three and a half years ago or at any time since. I'm thinking they have these things on a rotation schedule -- next week, I'm told, Routine 12 will be that your new Obamacare plan will have fewer providers than the one you have now. The week after that, it'll be that the laminate will wear off your plan ID card more easily than your old one. Eventually, it'll be "Benghazi" and "skree."

Specialty of the House

So special, indeed, when it's on the menu cooked up by this particular House.

Here's Tbogg, quoting Rep. Renee Elmers on the meme of the moment: Obamacare makes men pay for maternity benefits "they" don't "need," because "they can't give birth!"

And in another venue—

There's a reason why the Republicans blocked the president's attempts to fill vacancies on the federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit. They have made it a decades-long project to salt the federal courts with people like Janice Rogers Brown, and they are disinclined to allow anything as trivial as two presidential elections to stand in the way.

Referring to the healthcare reform law as "the behemoth known as the Affordable Care Act," the court said the case was not about the law's "constitutional authority." "Instead, we must determine whether the contraceptive mandate imposed by the Act trammels the right of free exercise -- a right that lies at the core of our constitutional liberties -- as protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. We conclude it does." The appeals court, widely regarded as the second-most powerful U.S. court after the Supreme Court, found the mandate was burdensome to business owners even if it does not require them to pay for contraception directly. "The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase," wrote Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. "It occurs when a company's owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan."

(Judge Brown is one of the lasting gifts to the Republic of former president C-Plus Augustus, and her record is a chewy blob of wingnut goodness. Nakedly ideological and utterly heedless of precedents that she doesn't like, Brown believes the New Deal to have been "a socialist revolution," and has called the federal government a "leviathan" -- which, like "behemoth," which she used in her opinion today, is a term for a biblical monster....

When conservative politicians tell you that the DC circuit has enough judges to do the work in front of it, this is what they mean. This ruling is preposterous on its face -- Companies do not have a right to freedom of religion. People do. -- and intemperate in its language. ... This has been a long march for these people, and they believe that only their victories are permanent ones. ...

Before the end of the day, a TSA agent was killed at LAX, where Charles Pierce happened to be in transit—

Well, that was certainly a strange way to end the week. We would be remiss, however, if we didn't point out how well the local police handled the mass exodus of tourists wandering down Century Boulevard on foot. It looked like the last scene in Fiddler On The Roof, except with rollerboards and cellphones. We also would be remiss if we didn't point out that the TSA agents who were the targets of this latest impromptu exercise of Second Amendment rights probably were working without pay a couple of weeks ago because Tailgunner Ted Cruz is the single biggest jackass to hit American politics since the voters of Long Island sent John LeBoutillier into early retirement. This was (again) a day to celebrate the singular courage of public employees....

Later: the shooter was found to be carrying "anti-government material."

About which, more may become known, eventually. Or maybe not, assuming it's the usual right-winger: a loner, influenced by no one, and so, a non-story.

Balancing Act

And a giant sigh of relief from Big Media: the longer the shutdown and threat to the economy, the more criticism of the GOP it might have been forced to air.

With predictable lack of proportion, the national health care exchange's website problems were deemed an instant Huge Scandal. Relieved and grateful, the media put their all into covering Republican tears—shed over the public's difficulty in accessing a service the blubberers had done everything possible to deprive them of.

After all, no big website launch ever had problems until now. And never mind that 36 states were allowed to refuse participation, forcing their residents to swamp the national site. And a contractor built the site, because we can't have government performing its own functions, when "business does better."

In other stories, a former Speaker of the House dies; cue fatuous hand-wringing over The Good Old Days of Bipartisan Cooperation.

Pierce weighs in, and commenter John Rogers adds—

I knew people in the Speaker's office at that time and [Chris] Matthews was basically a gopher, regardless of what he's telling people now.

Oh, and remember Ronnie's 3x5 cards? Most of the Tip and Ronnie meetings consisted of Tip listening patiently (if exasperatedly) to Ronnie reading off his cards. The cards were necessary because Ronnie's Alzheimer's (and aberrational behavior) were already showing themselves during the FIRST campaign. Efforts of the NY Times reporter I got this from to report on it were repeatedly spiked.

Followed by Susie Madrak—

How can you not love TipnRonnie, the moral midgets who passed the legislation that, for the first time, taxed unemployment benefits -- to pay for a tax cut for the rich? Good times.

Fair and balanced as we are, there is—what else?—a mere slap on the wrist for one Master of the Universe ("And this is just one bank")—

...Jamie Dimon will never suffer any consequences for this spectacular fail, his calls will always be returned, he will always have a roof over his head, unlike the thousands or millions of people his bank stole life savings from.

As San Francisco area BART workers went on strike— largely over work rules affecting both worker and passenger safety—reaction by local Masters of The Universe said oh so much about their sense of entitlement.

But when it comes to MOUs and "creative disruption," those guys are nothings—not when Big Time is back, and on a book tour.

Philip Toledano

Here CNN touts Cheney's interview with Sanjay Gupta. With extra added sympathy for Bush (He's had heart surgery, too...)

Lest Mr. and Mrs. America be outraged, CNN was careful to note about Cheney and his hack-free device—

SPOILER ALERT: Fans of the Showtime series "Homeland" might find it a familiar scenario. The vice president in that series died after terrorists hacked his heart pacemaker and instructed it to emit a lethal jolt of electricity.