Category: Politics

A quick guide to the debt ceiling crisis. Or, why it’s all the Republicans’ fault.

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, PoliticsLeave a comment
There must be a $1 trillion platinum coin in there somewhere. Photo (cc) 2016 by cweyant.

I imagine most readers of this blog understand the ins and outs of the debt ceiling fiasco, but in case you don’t, a brief explanation.

The debt ceiling is an extra, and entirely unnecessary, appendage to the work of passing budgets and appropriating money. Congress gets to debate what should go into the budget, and that’s an opportunity for those who want hold down spending to make their case and put it to a vote. But once the budget is passed, that’s the end (or at least it should be), and if the executive needs to borrow money to fulfill that budget, then so be it.

For the past century, though, congressional action has been needed to approve more borrowing, even though that borrowing is to cover spending that has already been approved, and in many cases has already taken place. No one thought much about it until recently, but in 2011 congressional Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama made concessions, and now House Republicans are attempting to do the same with President Biden.

The only other Western democracy that countenances this foolishness is Denmark. Try buying a car with a loan and then telling the finance company that your family has voted not to approve the monthly payments. Bye bye car.

You’ll note that this only happens when there’s a Democratic president and one or both branches of Congress is controlled by Republicans. President Trump ran up enormous deficits, and the debt ceiling was routinely increased on a bipartisan basis to accommodate those deficits. Other than a few rogue individual votes here and there, Democrats have never sought to exploit the debt ceiling, because — whatever their faults — they belong to a party that believes in basic governance.

Sadly, though, the debt ceiling negotiations have occasioned an outpouring of terrible both-sides media coverage. Gosh, why can’t Democrats and Republicans come together for the good of the country?

Click on image of post to follow link to the NPR story

The hypocrisy and phoniness surrounding this issue are why a lot of observers are calling on Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment, which states in part, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” Or to mint the coin.

In any case, if and when Democrats are fully in power again, they ought to repeal the debt ceiling so we can go about our business like a normal country.

Advertisement

Congratulations, CNN. You let Donald Trump put a police officer’s life in danger.

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics5 Comments
Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore

If you’re so inclined, you can sift through mounds of commentary on CNN’s alleged news event Wednesday night with Donald Trump. Tom Jones of Poynter has a solid account here. I thought beforehand that it would be terrible, but it was even worse than that.

If you saw it, or if you’ve just read about it, you know that the hall was filled with MAGA types who cheered Trump’s every utterance, whether it was his support of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists or his dismissal of E. Jean Carroll as a “whack job.” Carroll just won a $5 million jury verdict against Trump for sexually attacking her and for libel.

CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins was well-prepared and tried the best she could to hold Trump to account. Predictably, though, he shouted over her, spewing lies at such a rapid clip that she could only latch onto a few of them in an attempt to push back. It was a disgraceful night for CNN, and president Chris Licht ought to be fired. Then again, he was only doing what his corporate overlords want, and he seems quite pleased with himself today.

I do want to zero in on one moment. When Collins pointed out that people died on Jan. 6, Trump immediately cited Ashli Babbitt, an insurrectionist who was fatally shot by a Capitol police officer. Trump denounced Lt. Michael Byrd, who’s Black, as a “thug,” and by injecting him to the proceedings unbidden, he put the officer’s life and safety in danger at the hands of deranged right-wingers and white supremacists. Byrd told NBC News in 2021 that he’d gone into hiding. If he has since been able to resume his normal life to some degree, Trump has now shattered that.

“America was served very well by what we did last night,” Licht told his staff after the event, according to tweets by Brian Stelter, the network’s media reporter until Licht fired him. No we weren’t, and CNN’s current media reporter, Oliver Darcy, said so in his morning newsletter, writing, “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.”

A remarkable set of front pages mark Trump’s day in a New York courtroom

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics4 Comments

Tuesday was, as we keep being told, historic. We don’t know what will happen to Donald Trump next, and he may be faced with more serious charges in Georgia and Washington. These front pages, though, tell quite a story about the former president’s arraignment on felony charges in New York. (From the Freedom Forum’s indispensable Today’s Front Pages website.)

Some smart analysis by a conservative lawyer-pundit on what’s next for Trump

On By Dan KennedyIn Politics7 Comments
Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore

After months — years? — of anticipation, Donald Trump has reportedly been indicted (free link) by the Manhattan district attorney’s office on criminal charges that he paid off a porn star he’d had sex with in order to buy her silence ahead of the 2016 election. Hey, it could happen to anyone, right?

I don’t really have anything to add to the mountains of commentary that’s going to come our way. But I do want to recommend this recent edition of “The Ezra Klein Show.” The guest was Times columnist David French, an anti-Trump conservative of long standing who also happens to be a pretty sharp lawyer.

As French explained it, Trump faces criminal exposure on three fronts. The Stormy Daniels case is actually the weakest because it rests on some rather esoteric and unproven legal theories. I’m not going to get into it, but French’s explanation was clear and compelling.

The strongest of the three cases is that Trump corruptly tried to interfere with the 2020 vote count in Georgia, not just pushing Republican officials to overturn the results but threatening them if they refused. French is of the view that this one is close to a slam-dunk, as Trump was caught breaking the law on audio recordings.

Finally, there are whatever federal charges may come out of Trump’s actions during and before the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6 — seeking to overturn the election, putting Mike Pence’s life in danger and inciting a mob to violence. French seems to think that the case is reasonably strong but may prove too complicated when it’s put before a jury.

Also, I like to joke with my students about my Unified Richard Nixon Theory of Everything. Well, the Times is observing that Trump would be the first former president to face criminal charges. True — but that’s only because Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon before he could be indicted.

In 1983, The Boston Phoenix endorsed Mel King in his historic run for mayor

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics6 Comments

Mel King was a giant. I remember his 1983 Boston mayoral campaign against Ray Flynn as though it were yesterday. Flynn defeated King. But King, the first Black candidate ever to make a serious bid for the office, remained a force until his death this week at the age of 94. GBH News has the story.

On the eve of the 1983 election, The Boston Phoenix endorsed King. You can read the entire piece here courtesy of the Phoenix archives at Northeastern University.

And here is how it closes:

On matters of human decency, of character, or of integrity, who could choose between Ray Flynn and Mel King? It is only in the consideration of other qualities — the strength of commitment over time, the wisdom that comes with experience, the consistency of values — that the dramatic differences between the candidates emerge. Given these differences, we’d anticipate the inauguration of Ray Flynn as Boston’s next mayor with hope. But we’d anticipate the inauguration of Mel King with enthusiasm.

Boston has still not elected its first Black mayor. The city now has its first person of color as mayor, Michelle Wu, who’s Asian American. But it is disheartening to contemplate that in a place with such a lamentably racist past, not a single African American has ever held the top elected position. Mel King came close — and inspired a generation of Bostonians.

Tom Johnson on his role in the ‘October surprise’ story: ‘I care about my reputation’

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics5 Comments
Barnes told the historian H.W. Brands, above, about his Connally claims for a 2015 biography of Reagan, but no one took much notice. Photo (cc) 2022 by Larry D. Moore.

I got off the phone a little while ago with Tom Johnson, the former top executive at the Los Angeles Times and CNN who, along with several other people, confirmed that Ben Barnes had once told him that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign interfered with efforts to bring home 52 American hostages from Iran.

Barnes told The New York Times in a story published Saturday that he had accompanied his mentor, John Connally, a former Texas governor and Reagan supporter, on a mission to Middle Eastern capitals aimed at trying to prevent the hostages from being released until after the November 1980 election. The crisis was a significant factor in President Jimmy Carter’s loss to Reagan. The Reagan camp’s fear that Carter would find a way to bring the hostages home just before the election is often referred to as “the October surprise.”

What prompted Johnson to contact me was that I had expressed shock that he’d kept this story to himself until the Times’ Peter Baker spoke with him to confirm that he’d heard it from Barnes. “Unconscionable,” I called it. Johnson wanted me to know that there was more to the story. “This is not a cover-my-ass kind of call,” he said, adding: “I care about my reputation.” I thought Johnson made some worthwhile points, and I’ll lay them out here.

  • Johnson said he did not learn about Barnes’ account until 2017, some 16 years after his retirement. He, Barnes and several other people were attending a dinner when Barnes told his story, he recalled. Johnson also said that he considered the dinner to be off the record. Still, he added, he should have found a way to get the story to journalists without breaking that agreement, saying, “Clearly this is a serious ethical issue here…. Am I feeling terrible about not finding a way? Yes.”
  • Johnson also said that he urged Barnes to tell Carter, and that Barnes said he would. “I think everybody at the table felt that it reflected incredibly badly on Gov. Connally,” Johnson told me. “I encouraged Ben to tell President Carter before he dies, and he said he planned to.” Apparently, though, Barnes kept his silence (or not; see below) until he spoke with the Times recently.
  • The historian H.W. Brands actually interviewed Barnes and wrote about his claims some years earlier in his 2015 biography of Reagan. Brands responded to questions about that conversation with Barnes several days ago with the History News Network. “Connally conveyed to governments and influential people in the Middle East that it would ‘not be helpful’ — Barnes’s characterization — to the Reagan campaign if the hostages were released before the election,” Brands told HNN. He also said he was “surprised” that Barnes’ comments received little attention after his book, “Reagan: The Life,” was published.

All of this provides valuable context as to how and when Johnson learned of Barnes’ claims and why he didn’t say anything after he learned about them. I think it’s significant that he did not know about them until recent years. Johnson said he thought Barnes was going to speak with Carter, and that would have led to a major national story. Most important, Barnes’ claims had already been published in a book just two years earlier, and no one took much notice.

This is all fascinating stuff.

How a former top news executive helped cover up the Reagan campaign’s misdeeds

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics6 Comments
Tom Johnson, the former top executive at the Los Angeles Times and CNN, knew about Barnes’ allegations, believed them — and never said a word. Photo (cc) 2016 by the LBJ Library.

Please see this follow-up item.

If you were part of media and political circles in the early 1990s, then you were certainly aware of sensational accusations by Gary Sick, a top national security official in the Carter administration, that Ronald Reagan’s campaign had sabotaged efforts to bring the Iranian hostage crisis to a close during the waning weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign.

Jimmy Carter suffered a landslide re-election defeat at Reagan’s hands — an outcome that might have been different if he’d been able to celebrate the return of the 52 American hostages. Indeed, it was the prospect of such an “October surprise,” Sick argued, that led Reagan operatives to intervene with the Iranians and promise them weapons from Israel if they would agree not to release the hostages until Reagan was in office.

Sick’s charges could not be proven. But, on Saturday, The New York Times published a startling account (free link) about Ben Barnes, a former aide to the late Texas Gov. John Connally, who says that he and Connally were directly involved in working to delay the release of the hostages. Connally, a Democrat-turned-Republican who had served as treasury secretary under Richard Nixon, had run unsuccessfully for president himself in 1980 and was hoping for a plum appointment from Reagan. The Times’ Peter Baker writes of Barnes:

Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Why now? Barnes is 84; Carter, who’s 98, has entered hospice care. In Barnes’ telling, he was suffering from pangs of conscience. “History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes told Baker. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

Now, my apologies for leading with the background, which is something I always tell my students not to do. Buried deep within Baker’s story is a massive media scandal. Get a load of this:

Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.

All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.

Yes — Tom Johnson, a former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN, has known about Barnes’ story for years, believes it and sat on it. This is an unconscionable act on Johnson’s part. Barnes’ story can’t be entirely verified, but it tracks with what we already know and is the closest thing we’ve had to proof that the Reagan campaign deliberately prolonged the hostages’ agony for political gain. I mean, this is really shocking stuff.

It also fits with a pattern of Republican candidates for president interfering in American foreign policy and cutting deals with our adversaries in order to gain political advantage.

During the 1968 campaign, Nixon’s henchmen secretly threw a wrench into U.S. peace talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War and also took a half-million-dollar bribe from the right-wing junta then running Greece. As we all know, Donald Trump was happy to benefit from a Russian influence campaign in 2016, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had ties to Russian intelligence. Trump’s 2020 campaign featured his threat to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless officials there announced they were investigating Hunter Biden — an act that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Barnes has filled in an important missing piece of history and cast serious doubts on the legitimacy of Reagan’s presidency. Reagan kicked off more than 40 years of right-wing economics that have left us with declining wages, widening income inequality and the toxic belief that private interests should come before the public good. It’s disheartening to receive confirmation that it never should have happened.

Barney Frank, the unrepentant $2.4 million crypto bro

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics2 Comments

Give us a break, Barney. Meanwhile, I hope and expect The Boston Globe is going to dig deeply into what Frank was doing at Signature. From The New York Times:

Mr. Frank, who received more than $2.4 million in cash and stock from Signature during his seven-plus years on the board, left the job on Sunday as regulators dissolved the board. He said on Monday that the bank was the victim of overzealous regulators. “We were the ones who they shot to encourage others to stay away from crypto,” he said.

A feisty speech by a good and decent man kicks off the 2024 presidential campaign

On By Dan KennedyIn Politics3 Comments
Then-candidate Joe Biden campaigning in Nevada. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.

The problem with the Republican lie that President Biden is frail and has lost his fastball — amplified all too often by our timid media — is that, on occasions like the State of the Union address, millions of Americans can see that he’s fine. More than fine.

Biden delivered an excellent speech last night, coming across as vigorous and feisty as someone decades younger and quite possibly trapping Republicans into promising that they won’t cut Social Security and Medicare — as they were threatening to do a few months ago, notwithstanding Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s shouts of “liar” when the president reminded them of it.

Writing at the liberal website Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall summed it up:

He lead [sic] them into a trap which they could only spring on themselves and they did so to a tee. I don’t know how else to describe it. He brutalized them in a bear hug of bipartisanship. He thanked them for their moment conversion and agreement not to cut Social Security.

Biden got energy from the angry and unhinged responses. Kevin McCarthy spent the second half of the speech trying to shush his members, the same feral radicals who tortured him for a week last month. The whole tableau spoke more than a thousand words.

It was beautiful.

The behavior by a number of Republicans in the chamber, led by Greene, would have been stunning just a few years ago, but we’ve gotten long past that. Two pundits from the center-right make that clear. First up: Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark, a leading source of Never Trump conservative commentary:

Back in 2009, when South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” in the middle of an address by President Barack Obama to a joint session of Congress, sensibilities were shocked. Wilson’s outburst became a days-long story, and he was formally reprimanded by the House.

Nowadays, though, the House Republican Conference has a whole contingent of Joe Wilsons: boorish loudmouths whose lack of impulse control is only matched by their desire for attention. Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to face a reprimand for their shouts and jeers last night. Biden encountered several “You lie!”-like objections without batting an eye or missing a line in his scripted remarks.

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush put it this way:

In this hyper-polarized era, the goal of the survival-minded politician is not so much to offer grand visions as to expand his own coalition, even if only a little, while squeezing his opponents where it hurts most. Like a boxer trying to goad his antagonist into leaving open a vulnerable spot for a counterpunch, Biden’s plan was to invite Republicans to make dangerous mistakes. This was a speech not of lofty phrases but of cunning ploys; not one for the ages, but one that will reverberate long enough to make a difference in November 2024.

Finally, two excerpts from commentary on the farther right. Here’s the lead of today’s editorial in the Washington Examiner, headlined “A Banal Failure of a State of the Union”:

The best thing that can be said about President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address last night is that a record-low number of people wasted their time watching it. It was a laundry list of nanny statism, promising that not even the tiniest detail of people’s lives will be free from federal interference — not “resort fees” nor “targeted advertising” on social media.

David Harsanyi writes at The Federalist:

Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, Joe Biden took to the podium tonight to take credit for solving a slew of problems he helped create.

Biden’s speech reminded me that, above all else, he is a good and decent man. I thought the content was excellent and his delivery nearly so. His 2024 re-election campaign is now under way — and, last night, it got off to a strong start.

WSJ columnist: Russian interference got Trump elected in 2016

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics3 Comments

Well, well, well. Someone needs to translate this into English, but I think that Holman Jenkins — a hard-right columnist for The Wall Street Journal — is saying that the Russians got Donald Trump elected in 2016. Here’s a free link. Jenkins’ main purpose is to rip the FBI for inserting itself into the electoral process, but this tumbled out in the process:

The fictitious email [between Debbie Wassserman Schultz, then head of the Democratic National Committee and Leonard Benardo of the Open Society Foundation] referred to a presumably equally fictitious conversation between the Clinton campaign’s Amanda Renteria and Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch about making sure the Clinton server investigation didn’t “go too far.” The words found their way into a Russian intelligence document, which found its way to the FBI, becoming the justification for FBI chief James Comey’s chaotic actions in the 2016 election, which likely elected Mr. Trump.