Aug 01 2013
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Aug 01 2013
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
Click on images to enlarge
August 1 is the 213th day of the year (214th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 152 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1981, MTV, Music Television, goes on the air for the first time ever, with the words (spoken by one of MTV’s creators, John Lack): “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first music video to air on the new cable television channel, which initially was available only to households in parts of New Jersey. MTV went on to revolutionize the music industry and become an influential source of pop culture and entertainment in the United States and other parts of the world, including Europe, Asia and Latin America, which all have MTV-branded channels.
In MTV’s early days, its programming consisted of basic music videos that were introduced by VJs (video jockeys) and provided for free by record companies. As the record industry recognized MTV’s value as a promotional vehicle, money was invested in making creative, cutting-edge videos. Some directors, including Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Three Kings) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), worked on music videos before segueing into feature films. In the 1980s, MTV was instrumental in promoting the careers of performers such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince and Duran Duran, whose videos played in heavy rotation.
Aug 01 2013
So what did they talk about at that hastily called Congressional Democrat/Presidential caucus designed to eclipse Alan Grayson’s hearings on NSA spying during the last day before the August recess?
Why, what a swell guy Larry Summers is of course.
Obama defends Summers to congressional Democrats, says he’s not close to Fed chair decision
By Ed O’Keefe, David Nakamura and Paul Kane, Washington Post
Updated: Wednesday, July 31, 2:40 PM
In a tense exchange with Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) during a closed-door meeting with House Democrats, Obama defended Summers’ role in helping to restore the U.S. economy and “expressed frustration” with a growing negative campaign against him, according to one lawmaker who was present.
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The potential Summers nomination came up in separate meetings with both House and Senate Democrats, according to attendees. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Obama only discussed Summers when asked about the Fed selection process.“It wasn’t really about Larry Summers – it was about how important this decision is, the ramifications of who the chairman of the Fed is and is there for a long time to come and recognizing that there are differing views in our caucus on the subject and how we go forward, but understanding that whoever the president chooses will be received with great respect by our caucus,” Pelosi told reporters.
Obama also faced questions about Summers during a more than hour-long session with Senate Democrats. According to one Democrat present, the president appeared to grow frustrated at the questions about Summers and Yellen. Obama described their ideological differences on economic policy as “paper thin,” the senator said, requesting anonymity to describe the president’s private discussion.
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White House press secretary Jay Carney later said Obama was defending Summers as a valued former member of his economic team that helped craft policy to help the nation recover from the Great Recession.
Obama defends Summers, tells Dems: Don’t believe everything in HuffPost
By Mike Lillis and Peter Schroeder, The Hill
07/31/13 01:31 PM ET
“He gave a full-throated defense of Larry Summers and his record in helping to save the economy in the dark days of ’09,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said after the meeting. Obama, Connolly added, “felt that Larry had been badly treated by some on the left and in the press.”
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) said Obama told the Democrats “not to believe everything you read in The Huffington Post,” a reference to the liberal website that’s been critical of Summers’s record.
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After Obama held a similar meeting with Senate Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) acknowledged that Democrats have differing opinions about which candidate is best-suited to replace Bernanke. But he was quick to emphasize that the choice is ultimately Obama’s to make.“That decision comes from the president,” Reid told reporters in the Capitol. “And whoever the president selects this caucus will be for that person.”
…
Pelosi added she would ultimately back whomever the president selects. On Wednesday, Pelosi downplayed the Summers discussion.“It wasn’t really about Larry Summers,” Pelosi told reporters after the meeting. “It was about how important this decision is, the ramifications of being chairman of the Fed will be there for a long time to come, recognizing that there are differing views in our caucus on the subject and how we go forward, but understanding that whoever the president chooses will be received with respect by our caucus.”
At the meeting, Obama also argued that “it’s unfair to criticize Summers for the fact that the stimulus bill wasn’t even larger, because who amongst us thinks that you could have passed a larger stimulus bill?” Sherman said.
Don’t send Summers to the Fed
Felix Salmon, Reuters
Jul 24, 2013 14:59 UTC
The arguments for Yellen are very strong; the arguments against Summers are strong; the arguments for Summers are weak; and the arguments against Yellen are all but nonexistent. (While there are lots of people who think that Summers should not be Fed chair, there’s pretty much no one who feels the same way about Yellen.)
As a result, if Obama picks Summers, it won’t be on the merits; instead, it will be on the grounds that Obama likes Summers, and is in awe of his intelligence. (Summers is, to put it mildly, not good at charming those he considers to be his inferiors, but he’s surprisingly excellent at cultivating people with real power.)
What’s more, the move would be a calculated snub to bien pensant opinion. Never mind the utter shambles that Summers made of Harvard, or the way he treated Cornel West, or his tone-deaf speech about women’s aptitude, or the pollution memo, or the Shleifer affair, or the way he shut down Brooksley Born at the CFTC, or his role in repealing Glass-Steagall, or his generally toxic combination of ego and temper – so long as POTUS likes Larry, and/or so long as Summers is good at working key Obama advisors like Geithner, Lew, and Rubin, that’s all that matters.
The choice of Summers would also be the clearest signal yet that Obama feels that he did what needed to be done to deal with the financial crisis, and that financial reform is, for the rest of his presidency, going to be a very low priority. Summers is a deregulator in his bones; he didn’t like the consumer-friendly parts of Dodd-Frank, and his actions have nearly always erred on the side of being far too friendly to Wall Street. He considers monetary policy to be largely irrelevant in a zero interest rate environment, and there is no chance whatsoever that he would take a robust leadership role with respect to the Fed’s other big job, which is regulation. If you want to repeat all of the Clinton-era mistakes of financial regulation, you can’t do better than appointing Clinton’s very own Treasury secretary.
Not Even Wall Street Wants Larry Summers at the Fed
By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake
Monday July 29, 2013 7:59 am
One of the few potential justifications for President Obama picking Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve, despite the strong opposition to him from many liberals, was that Wall Street preferred him. According to a CNBC poll, though, this is not the case. Summers is even less popular with Wall Street than he is with liberal bloggers and Democratic senators.
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It seems the only real qualification Summers has going for him is that Obama really likes him. He is not the most experienced, the best qualified, the most popular, the easiest to confirm or the politically smartest choice.
Yellen/Summers and the Twilight of the VSPs
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
July 31, 2013, 6:31 am
Whatever happens with the Fed succession – and boy, did Obama’s inner circle make a gratuitous mess of this one – it’s been one heck of a revealing episode, and not just because of the sexism on display, which started out with thinly-veiled talk of “gravitas” and eventually went into full-blown masculinity panic.
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Anyway, it’s also clear that Summers made some pretty big mistakes in his campaign. Neil Irwin points to his silence on monetary policy, which was supposed to be cagey but ended up looking slippery; John Cassidy points to his failure to offer any kind of mea culpa for past errors, which arguably was about preserving gravitas but ends up making him seem unreformed.But why did Summers make these errors? In part because he is a whip-smart academic, the terror of the seminar room, who likes to play political operator – and as a political operator, he’s a great academic. But there is, I’d argue, a larger issue: Summers did not recognize the extent to which the political world has changed. He’s been carefully cultivating an image as a Very Serious Person, in a world where VSPness has gone from a source of cachet to being a liability on both right and left.
Think about it. Carefully cultivating a reputation for Seriousness does you no good on the right in a world where the Republican Party is more or less officially committed to crank economic doctrines, and where the GOP’s universally acknowledged intellectual leader is an obvious flimflam man.
Meanwhile, many if not all Democrats are well aware that the VSPs have been wrong about everything for the past decade or more, from the risks of financial deregulation to the fear of nonexistent bond vigilantes. Coming across as the return of Robert Rubin may have seemed savvy back in, say, 2008; it’s worse than useless now.
I suppose Summers might still get the job – but if so, it would be purely because the president is willing to spend a substantial amount of political capital on his behalf. The point is that behavior that was supposed to make Summers a safe choice has actually ended up making him unappealing to both sides.
Aug 01 2013
The insurance industry has come under fire previously for using other non-driving-related tools to predict risk – most notably, credit scores. In fact, in 2012, three members of Congress – Reps. Hansen Clarke (D., Mich.), John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) and Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) -proposed the Ban the Use of Credit Scores in Auto Insurance Act.
“There is an urgent need for the federal government to protect consumers from powerful auto insurance companies whose rate-setting policies are immoral, illogical, and unnecessary,” said Rep. Conyers at the time the legislation was proposed. (Like similar proposed bills in several state legislatures, the act didn’t receive the requisite support to make into law.)
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto…
Of course there was no support. Romney isn’t the only one who doesn’t give a damn about working class folks – you know, the vast majority of the population.
So what is wrong with charging more to higher risk drivers?
The trouble is the lumping of people into boxes that don’t fit. Kurt Vonnegutt’s hilarious grouping of people with the same birthday points out the problem.
Another way of looking at it would be higher rates for people with darker skins. Well why shouldn’t the Obamas and Conyers pay more? 🙂
Women used to be charged more for the identical item of clothing as men when it was bought in the women’s section. I suspect that got fixed when word got around.
Don’t really know if it was fixed. Obama and Larry Summers can tell you that women just are no good at financial matters like men are. [Yes, this is snark. Why do so many nitwits not get that on the internet?]
Best, Terry
Aug 01 2013
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
“Well, Doctor, what have we got-a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
~Benjamin Franklin~ 1787
While Bradley Manning awaits sentencing that could bring up to 136 years in prison, the perpetrators of the war crimes that he exposed and those who authorized those crimes remain free, some still have been appointed to high positions in the government. War crimes apologists hail Manning’s conviction but are silent about prosecution of the likes of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzalez, John Brennan, James Comey, and hundreds of others.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke with Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh on this morning’s Democracy Now!
“Bradley Manning is now a martyr,” Assange says. “He didn’t choose to be a martyr. I don’t think it’s a proper way for activists to behave to choose to be martyrs, but these young men – allegedly in the case of Bradley Manning and clearly in the case of Edward Snowden – have risked their freedom, risked their lives, for all of us. That makes them heroes.” According to numerous press reports, the conviction of Manning makes it increasingly likely that the U.S. will prosecute Assange as a co-conspirator. During the trial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an “information anarchist” who encouraged Manning to leak hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents.
Statement by Julian Assange on Verdict in Bradley Manning Court-Martial
30 July 2013, 19:30 UTC
Today Bradley Manning, a whistleblower, was convicted by a military court at Fort Meade of 19 offences for supplying the press with information, including five counts of ‘espionage’. He now faces a maximum sentence of 136 years.
The ‘aiding the enemy’ charge has fallen away. It was only included, it seems, to make calling journalism ‘espionage’ seem reasonable. It is not.
Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions, and induced democratic reform. He is the quintessential whistleblower.
This is the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower. It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism. It is a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and must be reversed. It can never be that conveying true information to the public is ‘espionage’.
President Obama has initiated more espionage proceedings against whistleblowers and publishers than all previous presidents combined.
In 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform that praised whistleblowing as an act of courage and patriotism. That platform has been comprehensively betrayed. His campaign document described whistleblowers as watchdogs when government abuses its authority. It was removed from the internet last week.
Throughout the proceedings there has been a conspicuous absence: the absence of any victim. The prosecution did not present evidence that – or even claim that – a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley Manning’s disclosures. The government never claimed Mr. Manning was working for a foreign power.
The only ‘victim’ was the US government’s wounded pride, but the abuse of this fine young man was never the way to restore it. Rather, the abuse of Bradley Manning has left the world with a sense of disgust at how low the Obama administration has fallen. It is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.
The judge has allowed the prosecution to substantially alter the charges after both the defense and the prosecution had rested their cases, permitted the prosecution 141 witnesses and extensive secret testimony. The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him naked and isolated him in order to crack him, an act formally condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for torture. This was never a fair trial.
The Obama administration has been chipping away democratic freedoms in the United States. With today’s verdict, Obama has hacked off much more. The administration is intent on deterring and silencing whistleblowers, intent on weakening freedom of the press.
The US first amendment states that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. What part of ‘no’ does Barack Obama fail to comprehend?
Manning Verdict: Slow Death for Democracy
by David Gespass, Common Dreams
Hypocrisy and criminality are rife in the United States government and, in its eyes, the worst criminals are those who expose such evils. Among the many documents Manning released, for example, was the notorious “collateral murder” video, showing U.S. pilots killing a Reuters journalist, his driver and several others. Some have argued that, although unfortunate, the killing was justified in the heat of battle but the U.S. denied any knowledge of how the reporter, Namir Noor-Eldeen, died until the video was released. Reuters had simply asked how such events could be avoided in the future and was stonewalled. It is only thanks to Manning that the world knows exactly what happened.
There are two ways in which any government can seek to control security leaks. The first is by honesty and transparency, by allowing the public to know enough to make democratic decisions about how far is too far. That is the path that the United States, and this president, claims to follow. The second is by threatening draconian consequences to anyone who exposes questionable policies and practices to the light of day. That is the path the United States, and this administration, has chosen with the prosecution of Bradley Manning and others. No amount of sophistry can hide that truth, try as the administration might. The result, for Bradley Manning, is many years in prison. The result for democracy is a slow death.
The highest obligation we, as citizens, have is to protect the Constitution and the laws of this country. This is what two young men, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, have courageously done. They don’t deserve prosecution. They deserve medals and praise.
Aug 01 2013
Multiple sources tell CNN that another heated moment came when Rep. Ed Perlmutter of Colorado asked about rumors that Larry Summers is being considered to head the Federal Reserve, and told the president it is a bad idea.
Sources said the president got defensive and clearly upset, saying that he is sick of the Washington game and liberal press like the Huffington Post going off on Summers as not liberal enough.
The president reminded the room of Democratic lawmakers that Summers was a key part of his economic team as they tried to turn the economy around in 2009. He also made clear that he has made no decision for the Fed chief, but noted that top choices, including Summers and Janet Yellen, are so similar in qualifications you “have to slice the salami” pretty thin to see the differences.
http://politicalticker.blogs.c…
Just like slicing night and day.
I have read nothing but skimpy reports and opinion pieces about Janet Yellen but I am reasonably confident she is not dismissive of women overall like the ugly clod Summers, who has never been right about anything.
Imagine, just imagine, if instead of handing trillions to bankers and a bit of strained sympathy to their victims, the U.S. had given the crooks jail sentences [like Reagan did incidentally] and aided the victims.
Would we not be better off?
Best, Terry
Aug 01 2013
Our regular featured content-
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Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Write more and often. This is an Open Thread.
Aug 01 2013
Our regular featured content-
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Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Write more and often. This is an Open Thread.
