Quite the week. Another mass shooting, Kim Davis said she met the Pope, Russia drops bombs in Syria, and we dodge another government shut-down.
The shooting in Oregon was a huge tragedy, but the Right says the shooter was a member of a âwell-regulated militiaâ, so there is nothing we can do:
When He heard about the Kim Davis meeting, God tweeted:
The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects…
We avoided the shut-down, but expect to see it again in December:
Can cooler heads prevail in the GOP? Thatâs a no-Boehner:
The foreign policy conversation in the US remains fixed on the idea that we can dictate terms to whomever we want, where ever we want, on whatever timetable we want. And we love, love the idea of regime change:
With the Planned Parenthood hearings, the GOP made its real position clear:
It sounds like an old story, but the Wrongologist and Ms. Oh So Right are again headed to a wedding in Vermont, so there will be no new posts until Monday. Therefore, cartoons!
We canât ignore the visit of Pope Francis. Yesterday, he spoke to the Congress, and the usual spin ensued. Like the Liberty U folks when Bernie spoke there, the defining political issue for 90+% of Republicans is abortion. As long as the Pope remains with them on that issue, there’s no contradiction between their faith and political affiliation.
They will no more listen to this Pope on other issues than they did to John Paul II’s anti-war messages.
Liberals, including liberal Catholics, appreciate Francis because he says some things that they’ve believed for a long time. Itâs always nice when an authority figure affirms one’s beliefs. But the three Catholic POTUS candidates, Christie, Jeb, and Santorum, have already rejected anything Francis has to say on climate change and income inequality. As have all the GOP members of Congress regardless of their religious affiliation.
The Popeâs big job:
Brian Williams returned from banishment to anchor coverage of the Pope:
We may see a government shutdown this fall. One thing to keep in mind about the Republican debate over whether or not to risk a government shutdown for the âdefund Planned Parenthoodâ movement is that this isnât a fight over goals or principles. There isnât a single Republican presidential candidate who does not favor âdefunding Planned Parenthood:
The GOP is moving on to Carly:
Volkswagenâs CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday over the emissions cheating scandal, saying âIâm not aware of any wrongdoing on my part.â Strange choice of words, probably written by his PR team. This is a rogue company that undertook anti-social activities for profit. Anyone can see that this is the outcome we should expect if Mr. Market is allowed to run free:
Pope Francis, Russiaâs President Putin and Chinaâs President Xi walk into a bar…Well, it wonât be that type of week exactly, but all will be in the US over the next few days. There will be summits and mini-summits, and a few hallway meetings between them and individually, with Mr. Obama. But the game-changer is likely to be Pope Francis, who is bringing his message about Mr. Market, and how Mr. Market isnât working for the average Joe. In fact, many Republicans are suspicious of the Pope:
If the Pope wants to devote his life to fighting climate change then he can do so on his personal time.
Rep. Gosar, who has received campaign contributions of $12,500 from oil and gas companies and $28,850 from electric utilities, doesnât believe in climate change. Apparently, he would rather the Pope devotes his speech to abortion, Planned Parenthood, and to the threatened religious liberties of County Clerks.
This Popeâs message causes discomfort for people on both sides of the aisle. Conservative Catholics used to welcome Francisâ predecessors ecstatically, and with open arms, but that was in the old days, when Popes were Popes:
Even when in the Reagan Library, todayâs GOP candidates canât duplicate St. Ronnieâs message:
We will not have Sunday Cartoon Blogging this week, as Ms. Oh So Right and the Wrongologist will be in Vermont at a wedding. However, some are too good to pass up. There will be a 9/11 column on Friday. On to cartoons!
Kim Davis is out of jail. She remains on the case, however:
“I want you to go down to Morehead Kentucky, and instruct Kim Davis to stop putting words in my mouth”
Last week saw the incredible shrinking NFL Commissioner Goodell:
The surprising track races continue:
With Hillary looking weaker, Dems consider a relief pitcher:
The Iran deal now has a bullet-proof minority in the Senate. Time to get frisky:
At the time, Wrongo thought that awarding Mr. Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was a mistake. It was also a mistake for Mr. Obama to accept it. We will see if the Iran deal holds, and if it promotes peace in the Middle East.
That light from the city on the hill isn’t a beacon. It’s the flash of gun fire.
The snuff video of two TV journalists this week got everyone talking about gun ownership and gun control for the umpteenth time. Phys.org pointed out that despite the fact the US ranks in the middle among other industrialized countries in virtually every form of crime, and only has 5% of the worldâs population, we have had 31% of the mass shootings since 1966.
Gun ownership is a part of our culture. We could have a conversation about why Americans need so many guns, but the current level of gun ownership is not going away. And there is a large disconnect between the current gun control proposals and the facts in the Virginia case. The TV killer wouldnât have failed any test, either now in place, or contemplated under the new proposals.
A simple solution to the problem of gun deaths would be to require gun owners to have liability insurance for any gun that they buy. Mr. Market (beloved by the right) would then come up with solutions to keep that liability insurance costs low enough that people could own their guns, but fewer third-party deaths and injuries would occur, and there would be compensation for victims. You could still carry guns, but you would have to be able to produce proof of insurance. Like driving a car.
On to cartoons. The gun culture has a new Caliph:
New media and old media loved talking about the killings, live on your TV:
Hillaryâs week didnât improve, so she got help:
Iâm you from 2015, Hillary. Iâve come back to help you set up your e-mail.
Biden called in a few favors:
Trumpâs week was fine. Republicans? Not so much:
Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation â about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest â to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yaleâs endowment.
He tells us that, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the universityâs operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes. He reported that private equity fund managers also received more than students at four other endowments; Harvard, the University of Texas, Stanford and Princeton.
He makes another great point, that university endowments are exempt from corporate income tax because universities support the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. The tax advantage also benefits the fund managers whose carried interest is taxed at lower capital gains rates rather than ordinary income rates. It isnât a coincidence that hedge fund managers return the favor to their large university clients. Kenneth C. Griffin gave Harvard $150 million in 2014. This year, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman of the private equity giant Blackstone, pledged $150 million to Yale toward a new student center. John A. Paulson, another hedge fund manager, topped both when he gave Harvard $400 million in June.
Maybe these university endowments need to do more to support students and faculty, and less to support fund managers, if they are to keep their tax-exempt status.
On to cartoons. With the email server and new polls, Hillary did not have a good week:
Maybe if the Obama years hadnât decimated the Democratic bench for an entire generation, we wouldnât have to rely on two senior citizens slugging it out for the chance to call the White House their retirement home.
Another senior, Mr. Biden, awaits the call, if Hillary falters:
Why is it that Republicans donât seem to pay a price for bad behavior? Like shutting down the government in 2013 didnât have a repercussion in the 2014 election, which brought the GOP the Senate to go with their control of the House of Representatives. Now, the Republican candidates are trying to outdo each other in provocative opinions. So, the presidential candidatesâ debate on Fox this week is shaping up to be a reality TV hostage show:
Nice little political party you have here…it would be a shame if something happened to it.
Huckabee tries out for 2nd banana:
But it got worse, after Huckabee indicated Thursday that if elected, he wouldn’t rule out employing federal troops to stop abortions from taking place in the US. Even though the Supreme Court has ruled against bans on abortion, Huckabee said past presidents have defied Supreme Court rulings. So, according to Huck, not only do fetuses have more rights than women, but fetuses have more rights than children.
Why, in this manâs religion, does the fetus have rights that no one else gets?
What it takes this year to be one of the final pols in the debate:
A killer dentist explains a few things:
Some think he deserves a prize:
Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press
And the cops vs. blacks beat went on:
We now have a fill in-the-blanks script for all mass shootings:
In recent years, many on the right talk as if they have inside knowledge of what the Creator wants us to think and do. As reported here last week, we have been arguing about the role of religion in our politics since the founding of the Republic. In 1789, George Washington declared a day of âpublic thanksgiving and prayer.â 12 years later, Thomas Jefferson abruptly canceled the ritual. The First Amendment, explained Jefferson, erected a âwall of separation between church and state.â
But Jeffersonâs contractor failed to make that wall strong enough.
So, Wrongo is adding a book to his summer reading list. It is âOne Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian Americaâ by Kevin Kruse. The book tries to explain the religiosity in our politics. Kruse investigates how the idea of America as a Christian nation was promoted in the 1930s and ’40s when industrialists and business lobbies, chafing against the government regulations of the New Deal, recruited and funded conservative clergy to preach faith, freedom and free enterprise. He says this conflation of Christianity and capitalism moved to center stage under Eisenhower’s watch in the ’50s, when the words “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase “In God we trust” was inserted on the back of the dollar bill.
This week saw the USA Womenâs soccer team take Manhattan, the NYSE go dark, Greece on the verge of going dark, the Confederate flag comes down in Charleston and Trump jumps into the lead in Republican opinion polls.
Womenâs soccer is Americaâs new role model:
Stock Exchange glitch wasnât explained clearly, so speculation ensued:
This week, mass surveillance by the USA Freedom act replaced mass surveillance by the Patriot Act.
Itâs as if Kafka and Orwell collaborated on a novel that was too unrealistic to publish. The plot shows how the NSA operates a $multi-billion program in violation of the Constitution. But, EVERY element of that program is protected by national security secrecy, so no one knows about it. In addition, the managers of the program lie to Congress and hide the extent of the program from lawmakers.
Then an NSA contractor informs us that the illegal program exists. As the story unfolds, the contractor is pursued, is forced into asylum, and faces prosecution if he returns home. And he can’t use the fact of that illegal program to defend himself because of state secrecy. Here is Charlie Pierce on the new legislation:
The ambivalence about Edward Snowden, International Man of Luggage, all clears away at one simple point — without him, none of this happens. Without what he did, nobody looks closely enough at the NSA and its surveillance programs even to think of reforming them even in the mildest way, which is pretty much what this is. Without what he did, the conversation not only doesn’t change, it doesn’t even occur.
Without Edward Snowden, this timid effort to roll back from the politics of fear created in the wake of September 11, 2001 would not have happened last week in Washington. Instead of thanking Snowden for his public service and inviting him to come home, the US government is still seeking to arrest him and try him on charges that carry long prison sentences. Bring this hero home.
Is the new Act the same, or better than the old act?
Apparently, phone records were not covered by the founding fathers:
You didnât lose your privacy, it was transferred to Squillionaires:
In other news, Caitlyn Jenner dominated:
Denny Hastertâs indictment reminded us of who holds the moral high ground:
And Californiaâs water problems get executive attention:
The âknowing what we know nowâ argument from the right wing talkers was all over the news this week. They are trying to help Jeb Bush walk back his brotherâs decision to invade Iraq. It is a revisionist attempt to explain the past decisions of the Bush administration with the added benefit of indicting Hillary Clinton. After all, while a Senator from NY she voted to invade.
The reframe says that a decision based on âwhat we knew thenâ was righteous, that everyone who looked at the same information would have come to the same decision. These guys continue to defend the invasion, despite the fact that we know it was based on lies. Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didnât sit down with the intelligence community, ask for their best assessment of the situation, and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option.
They decided before the dust of 9/11 had settled to use it as an excuse to go after Saddam. As evil as he was, he had nothing to do with the attack. To make a case for the short little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and insinuating that Saddam was behind 9/11. From Lambert Strether:
And we played whack-a-mole with one fake WMD story after another: The yellowcake. The drones. The white powder. Judy Miller. Curveball. Cheney at the CIA. As soon as we would whack one story, another would pop up. And then Colin Powell, bless his heart, went to the UN and regurgitated it all (to his subsequent regret). Only subsequently did we come to understand (from the Downing Street Memo) that âthe facts and the intelligence were being fixed around the policy,â and that the reason it felt like we were playing whack-a-mole is that we were; Bushâs âWhite House Iraq Groupâ was systematically planting stories in our famously free press.
Yet the Neo-cons, including Jeb Bush, say they would still make the same decision.
Bush harkens back to a government that believed its own spin doctoring to the point where it wasn’t able to see the difference between a sales pitch and the hard evidence coming from the Intelligence community. Given the totality of the outcome of these decisions: America nearly bankrupted, hundreds of thousands dead, total conflagration in the Middle East, he spent the week dancing around, saying the intelligence was faulty, but everyone believed it. And saying while you wouldnât do it now, you would have done it then, is moral depravity.
