This Has Nothing To Do With Cost

It got Barack Obama past the 2012 election.  That is not insignificant:  it kept Paul Ryan from being a heartbeat from the presidency and as in the previous presidential election, the vice-presidential nominee posed a much more serious threat to the future of the Republic than did the presidential nominee.

Make no mistake about it: it is very unlikely President Obama would have been re-elected if Supreme Court Justice John Roberts had sided with the four right-wing Justices on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.  Republicans- and not just tea partiers- had been claiming for a couple of years that Obamacare demonstrated that its namesake is a despot who wants to destroy the Constitution. If the Court had ruled against the ACA, the right would have been emboldened while many moderate independents would have bought into the specious charge.

You may remember the self-contented applause and breast-beating after the Court decided National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.  ABC News quoted extreme conservative Steve King (R-Iowa) labeling the ruling "a chilling thing" and

found Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who had just left a House Democratic Whip leadership meeting, where party leaders  took in the news together.

As the news broke, she described “cheers in the caucus."

“I was so thrilled to hear that John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority five-four decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, or as I like to call it, finally, ‘Obamacare,’ establishing in the United States of America … the law of the land that health care, affordable quality health care is a right for all Americans,” Schakowsky said beaming. “It is the right decision for the American people. That’s the important thing.”

Schakowsky also described the reaction of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi as the decision became clear to the Democratic gathering.

“As a proponent of this legislation, one of the strongest that helped it pass, she was absolutely thrilled,” she said. “I’m so proud. I’m so proud of Nancy Pelosi, who was speaker of the House, guided it through the Congress, and I look forward to her being there as speaker to implement it in the next session.”

Roberts- disturbingly joined by the four liberal justices- struck a blow against use of the Commerce Clause as he ruled that the individual mandate could not be upheld by that constitutional provision, and bizarrely concluded that the mandate is a tax, rather than a penalty.

The long-range implications of rejection of the Commerce Clause have yet to be determine.  But at least, most of us thought, that portion of the decision striking down the requirement that states exp;and their Medicaid program would be of limited consequence because few if any states would turn down the opportunity to increase coverage of the poor when 100% of the cost would be borne by the Federal government the first three years, 90% thereafter.

Most of us would have been wrong.  As of May 22, 20014, 27 states had expanded coverage, three were considering expansion, and 20- 19 of them with GOP governors- were not then expanding coverage (map below from The Advisory Board Company).

The 20th state would be Virginia (whose governor is the recently elected Terry McAuliffe) in which the

General Assembly adopted a long-delayed state budget late Thursday, acting after an hours-long debate among newly ascendant Senate Republicans who fought among themselves over whether the plan threw up sufficient barriers to Medicaid expansion.

The Republicans, who gained control of the Senate Monday when a Democrat resigned from what had been an evenly split chamber, approved a spending deal hashed out by a bipartisan group of House and Senate negotiators.

But they first amended it in a way intended to make it harder to expand the federal-state healthcare program for the poor under the federal Affordable Care Act — Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s top legislative priority.

As midnight approached, the plan moved over for consideration by the House of Delegates, where it quickly passed. It was expected to then head to McAuliffe’s desk, but with no certainty that he would approve it and avert a government shutdown before July 1.

McAuliffe quickly issued a statement after the House vote: “When this budget reaches my desk I will evaluate it carefully and take the actions that I deem necessary, but this fight is far from over. This is the right thing to do for Virginia, and I will not rest until we get it done.”

The Senate vote came after Republicans huddled behind closed doors and argued — at times yelling, two participants said — over whether they should tinker with the budget deal and risk undermining it.

Some were incensed that legislators had returned to the Capitol from the farthest reaches of the commonwealth, expecting to pass a spending plan in time to avert a July 1 government shutdown, only to risk sinking the deal by amending it.

Well, of course, they had to "delay" passage.  They first had to bribe (successfully) a Democratic senator.  A few days earlier, The New York Times had reported

The resignation of a Democratic state senator in Virginia that flipped control of the Senate to Republicans set off charges on Monday of an unseemly deal and threatened Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s chances of expanding Medicaid under the president’s health care law.

State Senator Phillip P. Puckett’s sudden decision to step down from his seat after serving 16 years may tip a stalemate in favor of Republicans opposed to expanding Medicaid to 400,000 poor and disabled residents.

Democrats accused Republicans of masterminding Mr. Puckett’s resignation by promising him a plum job and speeding the appointment of his daughter to a state judgeship.

Over the weekend, reports that Mr. Puckett was resigning to take a job on the Virginia tobacco commission enraged his fellow Democrats, who saw behind it the hand of Republican officials who control the commission.

The chairperson of the tobacco commission is a Repub member of the state's other legislative chamber, the House of Delegates.  Senator Puckett in effect admitted he accepted a bribe when

There was such an uproar that Mr. Puckett withdrew his name from consideration for the job late Monday.

Mr. Puckett said he had resigned because of family matters, including clearing the way for approval of his daughter, Martha Ketron, as a juvenile court judge. As a matter of policy, the Senate has declined to confirm direct relatives of lawmakers.

“At this point in my life, I feel that I cannot allow my political career to hamper my daughter’s future,” Mr. Puckett said in a statement.

Better to accept a bribe.  Republicans in the Commonwealth are so determined to prevent poor people from obtaining health care that they would offer a bribe to get more poor people to die.  In their defense, they did know who "the weakest link in the chain," as another Democratic state senator put it, is. David Atkins of There Is No Spoon/Hullabaloo/Ventura County Democratic Central Committee notes

Keep in mind that there is no fiscal advantage to Virginia whatsoever in rejecting the Medicaid expansion. Virginia Republicans simply despise the idea that underprivileged people might get health insurance. They really do want the poor to wither and die.

Or as Florida Representative Alan Grayson put it (video below) presciently over four years ago

The Republican health care plan: don't get sick.    The Republicans have a back up plan in case you do get sick ... This is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly! That's right, the Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.














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This War Isn't Being Lost. It Was Lost.

Appearing on Fox and Friends to exploit Iraq, the Berghdal release, and Barack Obama, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani contended

This situation should be a lesson for him, I mean he put his political objectives ahead of national security in deciding to run away in Iraq. He basically snatched defeat from the jaws of victory...

This is putting your political objectives ahead of national security, ahead of what’s in the best interests in the United States, what’s in the best interests of keeping the people secure, and I just think that this is going to be one of the blackest marks against him.

Giuliani never served in the United States Senate, never was an elected statewide official in New York, and was a substandard mayor, so his blather was merely blather.  John McCain, though, has been a war hero, United States Representative, United States Senator, presidential nominee of a major political party, and is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  He ought to know better (Cenk Uygur on McCain, way below).

But he doesn't.  Or perhaps he does, being clever enough that, Politico reports, he "did not explicitly advocate a U.S. strategy for helping the crisis now, remaining noncommittal on the potential use of airstrikes against militants in the country" when he

continued his blistering attack on President Barack Obama’s handling of Iraq on Friday, again calling for his entire national security team to be replaced and saying his decisions have been very costly.

“The president wanted out and now we are paying a heavy price,” the Arizona Republican said on MSNBC.

McCain said repeatedly that the U.S. “had the conflict won” after the 2007 troop surge, with Iraq maintaining a stable government and al-Qaeda extremists largely defeated.

But the Obama administration’s decision not to leave behind a residual force, he said, has caused the situation to deteriorate. Now, the senator said, “this has turned into one of the most serious threats to American security in recent history.”

McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also reiterated his call for the president to fire his entire national security team, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.

No, Senator. The Iraq war and surge have turned into one of the most serious threats to American security in recent history.

McCain (and the worthless Giuliani) seem to believe  that American forces have been withdrawn from Iraq by an eager President Obama. But as Fareed Zakaria explains, the Obama Administration (as did the prior crew) attempted to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri-al Maliki but

Maliki refused to provide the guarantees that every other country in the world that hosts U.S. forces offers. Some commentators have blamed the Obama administration for negotiating badly or halfheartedly and perhaps this is true. But here’s what a senior Iraqi politician told me in the days when the U.S. withdrawal was being discussed: “It will not happen. Maliki cannot allow American troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that its No. 1 demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq. And Maliki owes them.”

A little naive about McCain's hero, General David Wonderful, Zakaria is unaware that, as described here, the respite in crushing violence was brought about more by commanding generals George Casey and John Abizaid, who "exploited growing Sunni animosities toward al-Qaeda extremists by paying off Sunni militants to join the so-called 'Awakenin' in Anbar Province."

The Arizona senator saw a decline in violence and declared victory, imagining "the war is over"  (but not like the late Phil Ochs, below).   He misunderstood it as the end game, rather than as part of a process. Saddam Hussein kept in check al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was overthrown and is now roughly reconstituted as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), in part as a reaction to the Al-Maliki regime.  Al-Maliki, in turn, resists help from Washington, is allied with Damascus and Tehran, and the demonization of the Iraqi regime by McCain et al. is now conveniently missing.

The USA invasion of Iraq has been understood, in most quarters, as a mistake. But we never acknowledged that the USA lost the war or that the surge was worthless, enabling the likes of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham to claim President Obama squandered victory and is losing the war. America the Exceptional.

Charles Pierce remarks

The fundamental problem with the American intervention in Iraq always has been the fundamental incoherence of the case its supporters made for it. It was WMD's. It was rape rooms. It was time for the spring planting of Democracy. It was because Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11. Mushroom clouds. Aluminum tubes. It was time to free the Kurds. That incoherence is why the case was made in such a mendacious fashion. It was the lies that held all the various brands of bullshit together.



















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Surging Into Disaster

"Surely, comrades, you don't want Jones back?"

It was a rhetorical question asked of the animals, now in control of the Animal Farm, by the pig Squealer, a persuasive orator serving under the leadership of Napoleon.  As expected, it drew no dissent.

Similarly, George F. Will, who had several questions he believed Chuck Hagel should be asked at his Senate hearing for confirmation as Secretary of Defense, asked a most interesting one: "If the surge had not happened, what would have happened in Iraq?"   It was a given that as an opponent of the action, the Nebraskan would have no satisfactory answer.

Senator Hagel had opposed the surge, which everyone at the time- and, oddly, even now- was to have assumed was a success.  A skeptical Will, at least, did not oppose Hagel's nomination.  The same cannot be said of Senator John McCain, who (though he opposed a filibuster) voted against the President's nominee.

At the time, The Huffington Post reported

On Thursday, McCain attempted to re-litigate whether the surge was the right decision, aggressively pressing Hagel on whether he stands by his past statements. He quoted Hagel as saying in 2007 that the surge was the "most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."

"Were you right?" McCain asked. "Were you correct in your assessment?"

"Well, I would defer to the judgment of history to sort that out," Hagel said.

"This committee deserves your judgment as to whether you were right or wrong about the surge," McCain responded, adding, "I want to know if you were right or wrong. That's a direct question. I expect a direct answer."

When Hagel continued to insist that the answer was more complicated than a yes or no answer, McCain grew frustrated.

"Will you please answer the question?" McCain said. "Were you correct or incorrect when you said that the surge would be the 'most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.' Were you correct or incorrect, yes or no?"

Hagel added that his comment about the "most dangerous foreign policy blunder" was not just about the surge, but about the overall decision to invade Iraq -- a belief he stood by because it took the U.S. focus off Afghanistan.

"Our war in Iraq I think was the most fundamentally bad, dangerous decision since Vietnam," Hagel said.

After Hagel was done speaking, McCain said "any casual observer" knows the surge was the "fundamental factor" in turning around the Iraq War, and was "led by two great leaders, Gen. [David] Petraeus and Amb. [Ryan] Crocker."

Even more telling than the support of Will or McCain for the surge, however, was Hagel's letter to Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) following his testimony, in which the nominee wrote in part

In the surge case in Iraq, we lost almost 1,200 dead Americans during that surge, and thousands of wounded," he continued. "Now, was it required? Was it necessary? Sen. McCain has his own opinion on that, shared by others. I'm not sure. I'm not that certain it was required.

Though right about the surge, Hagel was defensive, almost apologetic because, of course, no one was supposed to question its value.  To this day, the central narrative of the Iraq War was that it wasn't worth entering, but at least the USA, making lemons out of lemonade, gained something from the surge.

But additional American and Iraqi lives were lost, and Iraq is no better off now than it would have been otherwise.  The New York Times explains

Sunni militants consolidated and extended their control over northern Iraq on Wednesday, seizing Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, threatening the strategic oil refining town of Baiji and pushing south toward Baghdad, their ultimate target, Iraqi sources said.

As the dimensions of the assault began to become clear, it was evident that a number of militant groups had joined forces, including Baathist military commanders from the Hussein era, whose goal is to rout the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. One of the Baathists, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was a top military commander and a vice president in the Hussein government and one of the few prominent Baathists to evade capture by the Americans throughout the occupation.

“These groups were unified by the same goal, which is getting rid of this sectarian government, ending this corrupt army and negotiating to form the Sunni Region,” said Abu Karam, a senior Baathist leader and a former high-ranking army officer, who said planning for the offensive had begun two years ago. “The decisive battle will be in northern Baghdad. These groups will not stop in Tikrit and will keep moving toward Baghdad.”

The sudden successes of the militant forces sent hundreds of thousands of people running, some literally, from the new outbursts of violence, panicked leaders in Turkey and Syria and revived memories of bloody American struggles to wrest the same places — Mosul and Tikrit — from jihadist fighters a decade ago.

By late Wednesday, the Sunni militants, many aligned with the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, were battling loyalist forces at the northern entrance to the city of Samarra, about 70 miles north of Baghdad. The city is known for a sacred Shiite shrine that was bombed in 2006, during the height of the American-led occupation, touching off a sectarian civil war between the Sunni minority and Shiite majority.

Militant commanders were reportedly threatening to destroy the shrine if its defenders refused to lay down their arms, while hundreds of Shiite fighters were said to be heading north from Baghdad to confront the attackers.

As Iraqi government forces crumbled in disarray before the assault, there was speculation that they may have been ordered by their superiors to give up without a fight. One local commander in Salahuddin Province, where Tikrit is located, said in an interview Wednesday: “We received phone calls from high-ranking commanders asking us to give up. I questioned them on this, and they said, ‘This is an order.’ ”

"History has already made a judgement about the surge, sir, and you're on the wrong side of it," Senator McCain told Chuck Hagel, as can be seen in the video below.  Unfortunately, McCain was half right: history has made its judgement and John McCain, and other true believers, were wrong.









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Twisted Marriage Arguments

After a state court ruled Pennsylvania's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, Republican Governor Tom Corbett, avoiding inevitable defeat, announced his administration would not appeal the decision.   President of Pro-Life Coalition of Pennsylvania Michael J. McMonagle was not amused and wrote in an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer

Civil marriage exists primarily to provide tangible benefits for children, not emotional benefits for adults. Thus, Corbett and Jones have decided to end the only legal relationship that unites children with their mom and dad. Their decision means that more children will be raised without a mom or a dad, adoption agencies that are faithful to Christian teaching will be forced to close, and there will be increased attacks on the civil and religious rights of citizens who don't support same-sex marriage.

Corbett is wrong to suggest that his decision does not conflict with his Catholic faith. The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is necessarily heterosexual. The conjugal relationship between husband and wife, because it is capable of creating a third person, reflects God's image in the Holy Trinity. Human life is sacred because human beings are created in God's image. Thus, the undermining of God's image through same-sex marriage undermines the sanctity of human life.

McMonagle's argument was a standard, conventional one opposing same-sex marriage.  Standard, conventional- and consistently rejected by the courts.  t is now 19 consecutive victories in court, with no defeats, for the proponents of gay marriage, a run reminiscent of John Wooden's run with the UCLA Bears in NCAA basketball in the 1960s.

Most, if not all, the Judges have cited the 14th Amendment in their ruling. But there is another common thread, one which serves as a rebuke to McMonagle's argument.

In December of last year, the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in New Mexico (none of whose statutes, it found, specifically prohibited the union) when, Think Progress' Zack Ford commented, the "Court rejected opponents’ claims that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples somehow promoted 'responsible procreation and childrearing' because procreation 'has never been a condition of marriage under New Mexico law.'”

The same month, another TP blogger reported that federal Judge Robert Shelby struck down Utah's prohibition of same-sex marriage when he observed

the ability to procreate is not “a defining characteristic of conjugal relationships from a legal and constitutional point of view.” Such an argument does not simply “demean[] the dignity” of same-sex couples, it also degenerates “the many opposite-sex couples who are unable to reproduce or who choose not to have children.” Indeed, under Utah’s argument for maintaining marriage discrimination, “a post-menopausal woman or infertile man does not have a fundamental right to marry because she or he does not have the capacity to procreate.”

The following month, a different TP blogger recognized the invalidation by federal Judge Terence Kern of Oklahoma's same-sex marriage ban and explained

The court cites the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last term in United States v. Windsor that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in finding that courts “must be wary of whether ‘defending’ traditional marriage is a guise for impermissible discrimination against same-sex couples.” Kern also rejected a host of arguments about marriage’s relationship to procreation, writing, “same-sex couples are being subjected to a ‘naturally procreative’ requirement to which no other Oklahoma citizens are subjected, including the infertile, the elderly, and those who simply do not wish to ever procreate.”

The following month, federal Judge Orlando Garcia issued an injunction barring the state of Texas from enforcing its anti-gay marriage statute as he

rejected arguments from state Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office, which argued that each state has the right to define marriage as best fits the traditions of its citizens, that traditional marriage best supports the state’s interest in promoting responsible procreation and child rearing, and that same-sex marriage is a recent innovation that cannot be seen as a fundamental right that must be protected by the courts.

The following month (a pattern, perhaps?), the LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York celebrated the decision of Judge Arenda L. Wright to rule unconstitutional Virginia's ban on same sex marriage in which she

rejected the defendants’ arguments that the marriage ban could be justified by tradition, federalism, or the “responsible procreation” and “optimal child rearing” theories. Her analysis is by now quite familiar, following the lines of the recent decisions from Ohio, Utah, Oklahoma and Kentucky. 

And on and on and on. Procreation. Whether the argument is a Roman Catholic view that only marriage between a man and a woman is "capable of creating a third person (and) reflects God's image in the Holy Trinity," one more broadly Christian or a completely secular slant, the view that same-sex marriage cannot be permitted because of the importance to society of procreation has been slain. Notwithstanding other arguments against ssm, this one- unlike Lazarus- deserves to remain dead, at least in the minds of the nation's jurists.

Michael McMonagle's emphasis upon what he assumes is the importance of the marriage institution itself is noteworthy, as is the reasoning of a 23-year-old black college student, who wrote gay marriage supporter Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic

I believe that God, who created all people, has His own intention for what marriage is supposed to be. I believe He deliberately created two inherently different, non-interchangeable types of humans so that one of each could permanently join together and start a family. 

This reasoning has been turned on its head. Following the ruling in Kentucky, one of the plaintiff's lawyers, maintaining the marriage relationship extends beyond children, said the state's view "that marriage is designed to perpetuate the species is offensive... Most Kentuckians- on both sides of the issue view marriage as a social partnership, a spiritual bond, a commitment to navigate life together."

"A spiritual bond," she contends. Ironically, a portion of the argument of opponents, the sacredness of marriage, is being used to advance the cause of same-sex marriage.  I am far from convinced of the validity of that point of view, an emphasis on marriage which can be dangerous in the wrong hands (see "Santorum, Rick," as in the video below).   But it's working, and not for the supporters of what previously was termed "traditional values."

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/oW8P7p33hgE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


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There Is A Reason Paul Said "We All Sin...."

(Wikipedia): In Abrahamic contexts, sin is the act of violating God's will.





Last week, Jack Jenkins of Think Progress reported

The pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Los Angeles, California announced last month that he is now “gay affirming” and has accepted his son’s homosexuality, a declaration that is causing a rift in his local congregation and sparking controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention.

Jenkins, who should be applauded for specifying "Southern Baptist Convention" rather than the more general, misleading "Baptist," added

The finer details of Cortez’s new theological stance — particularly his exact feelings on whether or not homosexual behavior is sinful — were not immediately clear, although his insistence that LGBT couples should be accepted as they are is a notable departure from conservative Christian churches that refuse to condone the presence of same-sex couples in their pews.

The normally reliable (but if only "normally," could it be reliable?) Pew Research Center had conducted a poll (results, below) on the topic in March and May.  However, the article dated 6/9/14 on its website referred specifically to Reverend Cortez, suggesting the issue has gained increase salience among members of the SBC, which begins its annual convention today.

Pew asked respondents three questions:

- Do you personally believe that homosexuality is morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or is not a moral issue?

- Do you think it is a sin or not to engage in homosexual behavior?

- Do you personally feel that there is a conflict between your religious beliefs and homosexuality, or not?

An obvious question immediately arises: if one believes, as most scientific research has found, that homosexuality is a matter of nature and not nurture, does that make it morally acceptable or  not a moral issue?

Beyond that obvious fault in the survey, however, lies a trap into which Jenkins also fell.Asking someone whether homosexual behavior is a sin is analogous to asking whether the earth is warming. People may choose to believe what they wish, but it is not an issue of values or perspective: the earth is warming, and homosexual behavior is a sin.

That is not to argue that gay behavior is immoral or wrong, only that it is a sin.   But the publisher of one respected Bible commentary stated "underlying Leviticus is the biblical doctrine of sin. This seems clear both from specific words used... and from the punishments prescribed for offenses committed."

And there certainly are a lot of offenses, or sins, at least 76 listed in Leviticus, according to this blogger. They include "bringing unauthorized fire before God;" ""picking up grapes that have fallen in your vineyard;"seeking revenge or bearing a grudge;" "trimming your beard;" "practicing divination or seeking omens;" "working on the Sabbath." And don't even think about eating shellfish or pork.

And this: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them" (Leviticus 20:13, ESV).    Sin (as opposed to evil, immoral, or bad behavior) has no meaning outside of a biblical context. Rarely does one say "it's a sin what Republicans are doing to President Obama" or "it's a sin what President Obama is doing to the country."

Sin is what the Bible says it is; otherwise, sin would not be sin.  It doesn't mean it's wrong, anymore than it's wrong to eat bacon, eating the fruit which has fallen off the tree in your backyard, or driving a city bus on Saturday or Sunday.   Though homosexual acts are forbidden by the Bible, abortion is more murky, and Scripture is silent on the matter of privatization of education, prisons, or other facilities or institutions, as reprehensible as the trend is.  What the Bible says on a matter need not be controlling, but let's be at least a little honest and acknowledge that certain things are "sin."  And then use the mind and the heart God gave you (if you so believe) and determine for yourself what is right and wrong, good or bad public policy.

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Money Talks, But Sometimes Profanely

The Koch brothers know how to get in front of a story.  They have announced a $25 million grant for the United Negro College Fund, which Steve M. notes is not coincidentally coming on the heels of the opening of a documentary which was

defunded and subject to de facto censorship thanks to the influence of billionaire David Koch of Koch Industries. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Citizen Koch examines how the billionaire Koch brothers used to wealth to exert influence in Wisconsin amid staggering union protests and a near-recall of its corporate-friendly governor.

And Steve-O recalls reading in September, 2010

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is setting a US record by giving $100 million - the largest philanthropic donation from someone his age.

The 26 year-old will appear on “Oprah” Friday to announce he’s giving the money to the Newark, NJ public school system. Newark can use the money - it’s one of the country’s weakest school systems – only half of its students graduate from its high schools.

Zuckerberg is a product of public schools and the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, but none of his schooling took place in New Jersey.

So why Newark? Why now?

Trailers for Sony Pictures Entertainment's film, "The Social Network" are flooding the new fall TV shows and reviews are hitting major papers.

The movie is based on the founding of Facebook – and Zuckerberg does not come off as a sympathetic character. (You can watch the trailer here)

Today the New York Times features its review, rating the film a "NYT Critics' Pick."(Disclosure: I haven't yet seen the film.) The Times loves the film, and does NOT love Zuckerberg. Manohla Dargis writes: "It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul." Zuckerberg is described as having "pathologically poor" people skills.

It just so happens that Friday – the day Z’s appearing with Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker on the Oprah show is the same day of the NY premiere of "The Social Network."

Steve M. recognizes that the Koch brothers are far more interested in climate change denial, suppression of labor, deregulation of the health care industry and corporate takeover of American government than they are in educating black Americans. He remarks

I guess that's how we solve the problem of chronic underfunding of education for minority-group members in America: just make lots and lots of movies about disreputable billionaires. The guilt money for non-white students will come flooding in! Problem solved!

Get to work, Hollywood.

Not so fast.   The push for education "reform" (a/k/a public school destruction) began, reports Owen David in The Nation, upon

Chris Christie’s rise to governor and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to reform the Newark school system.

Zuckerberg announced his massive gift, Christie and then-mayor Cory Booker by his side, on a broadcast of Oprah. The trio, Oprah said, were “putting politics aside to help turn around the failing public schools in Newark.”

Although Christie was cutting nearly a billion dollars from New Jersey’s education budget, including over $40 million from the Newark schools he found “absolutely disgraceful,” Zuckerberg’s fortune gave Booker the political cover to endorse Christie’s education politics. “Booker used that spectacle to pronounce that he was in favor of the school reform project,” says Junius Williams, a Newark attorney and civil rights veteran.

Booker’s team established the nonprofit Foundation for Newark’s Future to distribute the young billionaire’s gift and matching donations. One of its first mandates was to recruit a new superintendent. The state selected Cami Anderson, a hard-driving former Booker campaign adviser and New York superintendent who then oversaw education at Rikers Island. In a 2010 e-mail, Booker aide Bari Mattes wrote that the Broad Foundation, a big giver to education reform, was “very interested in knowing who the Superintendent is going to be.” Anderson’s lengthy reform pedigree satisfied Broad, which provided generous early funding.

But who would get the dough? As Mattes emphasized in another e-mail, “MZ’s money is not going in to classrooms.” It was soon clear that Zuckerberg’s money wasn’t going to patch holes in buildings that need a district-estimated $1.3 billion in repairs, or hire support staff for the fifth-poorest youth population in the country.

In fact, not a cent of Zuckerberg’s money has gone toward hiring counselors, social workers or nurses. Meanwhile, “there have been DRAMATIC cuts to wraparound services,” wrote Mike Maillaro, Newark Teachers Union’s director of communication and research, in an e-mail. Last year, every attendance counselor in the district was eliminated.

Hawthorne Avenue reports losing eight support staff members since 2011, including a guidance counselor and two instructional coaches. The school has neither a music teacher nor a librarian.

Zuckerberg’s money would instead “create systemic education reform in Newark.” In 2011, it was reported that a full third of the foundation’s cash had found the pockets of consultants. As Dale Russakoff recently reported in a lengthy New Yorker article, that total now sits at about $20 million.

Though a smattering of grants have benefitted local causes—after-school yoga ($31,000), book drives ($1.2 million), new district schools ($2.1 million) and sundry others—over 40 percent of the money granted to organizations has left the state. Outside talent and recruitment agencies, for instance, raked in over $4 million to align district staffing with Anderson’s politics.

But the most consequential early grant landed close to home. In its first year, the FNF directed $1.86 million to a previously unheard-of consulting firm, Global Education Advisors, for a district audit. The company was founded by Chris Cerf, an adviser to Booker whom Governor Christie had just appointed to education commissioner. Cerf claimed his “very brief period” with the group wouldn’t influence his role, but in his official capacity he’d oversee every recommendation his former company made. (The audit also received FNF-directed funding from the Broad Foundation, whose “Superintendents Academy” Cerf attended in 2004.)

Unlike the Koch brothers, Mark Zuckerberg probably has meant well (below, photo from the UK"s Daily Mail of at least two other people who knew better).  In the New Yorker, Dale Russakoff commented "Zuckerberg was disarmingly open regarding how little he knew about urban education or philanthropy."  He longed for "transformational change" and naively thought that would be delivered through the reform movement- but especially by throwing bonuses at effective teachers, as he had done at Facebook which, evidently, he believed was a comparable situation.  He was taken in by Newark mayor Cory Booker and, Russakoff wrote, "posted a note on his Facebook page saying that Booker would focus as single-mindedly on education in his second term as he had on crime in his first." Zuckerberg may not have realized that the Mayor aimed to undermine the public school system by expanding charters and weakening tenure and seniority protections.  And to leave Newark for Washington, D.C., where he is now a U.S. Senator.

Perhaps the Koch brothers donation- though it is only a drop in the bucket filled with their fortune- will do some good, though obviously not nearly as much as their special interest largess will harm the 99%.  But the saga of the Zuckerberg grant in New Jersey must give pause to anyone who would assume that big money thrown at a public problem by billionaires will ameliorate, rather than exacerbate, social conditions.

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"Right Away" She Felt A Tingling All Over

Actress Eva Longoria is no ignoramus, dolt, imbecile or knucklehead.  She couldn't be, given that she was selected as a co-chairperson for President Obama's campaign and thus must have more going for her than talent and physical beauty.

But she does play one on TV.  The Daily Beast reports (video, below)

On Friday morning, former Desperate Housewives star and Barack Obama campaign co-chair Eva Longoria announced that there’s only one presidential candidate for whom she’d be willing to volunteer in 2016: Hillary Clinton.

“I was so exhausted after 2012,” Longoria said during the Latina Power panel at Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s 2013 Women in the World Summit, shortly after Clinton herself left the stage. “I was thinking I would never volunteer for another campaign, and then someone said, ‘How about Hillary?’ And right away I was like, ‘Unless Hillary runs.’”..

Longoria’s admission came near the end of a conversation about the power and potential of America’s fast-growing Latino community—a population that’s set to double by 2050. 

Admission, as Daily Beast reporter Andrew Romano termed it, is the right word.  Presumably, Longoria likes Mrs. Clinton because the latter supports comprehensive immigration reform, a cause dear to the actress' heart.  Presumably but not necessarily, because

A ninth-generation Texan, Longoria didn’t realize that she was “the Mexican” until leaving her home district in Corpus Christi to attend a gifted-and-talented school as a child. “I got on the bus and I had a tortilla, and everyone else had Pop Tarts,” she said. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ and they were like, ‘What is that?’ I kind of live on the hyphen between Mexican and American.”

But Longoria added that with legislation pending in Washington, “the tide is changing.”

“And I think it’s in the hands of women,” she said. “The messaging is in the hands of women, because we’re just better at it.”

And on second thought, Clinton's stance on immigration reform does not separate herself from other likely Democratic contenders, nor even from (arguably) any national Democrats, for whom support for illegal immigrants undocumented workers is a must.

Other than that issue, and the claim that women are better at "messaging," there is little known of Ms. Longoria's views on issues.   Perhaps that doesn't matter, because Clinton's stance- as compared to that of Joe Biden,  Martin O'Malley, Brian Schweitzer, Andrew Cuomo (gasp) or any other Democrat tangentially interested in the presidency- appears of little interest to her.

We've been here before, when some activists preferred a particular candidate because of demographic factors.  In this case, it's gender, as it was race previously.  There are a hundred reasons that was a bad idea, one of which is reflected in a story from the Boston Globe which begins

US Drug Enforcement Administration investigators have visited the homes and offices of Massachusetts physicians involved with medical marijuana dispensaries and delivered an ultimatum: sever all ties to marijuana companies, or relinquish federal licenses to prescribe certain medications, according to several physicians and their attorneys.  

The stark choice is necessary, the doctors said they were told, because of friction between federal law, which bans any use of marijuana, and state law, which voters changed in 2012 to allow medical use of the drug.

The DEA’s action has left some doctors, whose livelihoods depend on being able to offer patients pain medications and other drugs, with little option but to resign from the marijuana companies,where some held prominent positions.

The Globe this week identified at least three doctors contacted by DEA investigators, although there may be more.

“Here are your options,” Dr. Samuel Mazza said he was told by Gregory Kelly, a DEA investigator from the agency’s New England Division office. “You either give up your [DEA] license or give up your position on the board . . . or you challenge it in court.”

Mazza, chief executive of Debilitating Medical Conditions Treatment Centers, which won preliminary state approval to open a dispensary in Holyoke, said the DEA investigator’s visit came shortly after state regulators announced the first 20 applicants approved for provisional licenses for medical marijuana dispensaries.

Labeling the DEA's action "just stupid," Charles Peters asks

Would it be that hard for Eric Holder to whistle up the DEA and say, look, dudes, how about not doing this part of your jobs for a while. (It's exactly what he did as regards marriage equality and the Defense Of Marriage Act. When the states started acting on their own, he declined to use DOMA to interfere.) These doctors are being asked to choose between their ability to prescribe drugs that help with the symptoms of, say MS, and their ability to prescribe marijuana for medicinal purposes. This is not a choice any physician should have to make -- and certainly not under the force of federal law -- and the DEA's meddling in medical practice is way outside its brief, and it is both clumsy and utterly inappropriate...

The president should pull them back from this. He knows better.

We have a  president who as a candidate supported labeling of genetically modified food ingredients and of a food's country of origin "because Americans should know where their food comes from" who now has a Food and Drug Administrator who

reportedly likened the problem of overuse of antibiotics in livestock—which can lead to drug-resistant bacteria in animals as well as in humans—to having your “hair on fire”; but late last year, when the FDA finally took steps to address the problem, its program was voluntary. The FDA has also failed to deliver on Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to label genetically modified food.

And it's not just a matter of unfulfilled promises. On some food policy issues, the Obama administration has actually managed to lose ground. In 2012, the USDA began the regulatory process of allowing poultry lines to increase their speed from a maximum of 140 birds per minute to 175. At the same time, the program decreases the number of required federal food-safety inspectors, who are responsible for spotting unsanitary or diseased birds, on each line from four to one.

“What is the Obama administration’s food policy?” asks Dave Murphy, head of the group Food Democracy Now and a prominent Obama supporter during the 2008 campaign. “The answer, I’m afraid, is that it’s status quo and industrial agribusiness as usual.”

So unlike on same-sex marriage, Barack Obama appears to have devolved, rather than evolved, on drug and agricultural policy.  He has done so without fear of political retribution from Democrats who have loyally backed him partly because, as one GOP Senator once admitted, "If he was for it, we had to be against it."

With nearly unwavering devotion from his left flank, President Obama has been concerned primarily with his right flank.  And now, even before she is nominated- much less elected- Hillary Clinton has the luxury of hearing from breathless admirers like Eva Longoria.

Activists from Hollywood usually have little worthwhile to add to the political debate, though there are some notable exceptions.  Celebrity admirers like Longoria who support Clinton because- oh, maybe just "because"- would encourage a President Clinton to avoid progressive policy. We've only recently been down this road- and it's a dead end.








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