Month: August 2013

More bipartisan comity — establishment of religion edition

by digby

Why?

The Obama administration and congressional Republicans have found something to agree on: Town councils should be allowed to open their meetings with a Christian prayer.

Lawyers for the administration and two groups of lawmakers from the House and Senate, nearly all Republicans, separately made that argument in briefs to the Supreme Court this week. The high court should relax the constitutional limits on religious invocations at government meetings, they argued.

The case could lead to a major change in the law on religion that would go well beyond prayers at council meetings.

Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that the town of Greece, N.Y., near Rochester, had crossed the line and violated the 1st Amendment’s ban on an “establishment of religion.” For years, the town supervisor had invited a local minister to deliver an opening prayer at the council’s monthly meeting. Members of the audience were encouraged to join in the prayers.

Two residents, one Jewish and one an atheist, had complained for several years that the prayers were offensive and inappropriate. Until they sued in 2008, only Christians had been invited to lead the prayers.

Looked at through the eyes of a “reasonable observer,” the town’s prayer policy “must be viewed as an endorsement of … a Christian viewpoint,” the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals said in ruling against the town.

The justices agreed in May to hear the town’s appeal this fall.
[…]
In the current case, the Obama administration has told the court that Greece’s practice should not be considered an endorsement. The town council’s opening of its meetings with a Christian prayer “does not amount to an unconstitutional establishment of religion merely because most prayer-givers are Christian and many or most of their prayers contain sectarian references,” wrote U.S. Solicitor Gen. Donald Verrilli Jr.

He noted that the House and Senate had official chaplains and that the court in 1983 upheld opening prayers in state legislatures. If local councils may have religious invocations, the law should not require them to “closely police the content of prayers,” he said.

Eighty-five House members and 34 senators joined two friend-of-the-court briefs that also urged the court to make clear that prayers and religious invocations are constitutional. They had not expected the administration would weigh in as well.

The administration’s filing was “a surprisingly conservative brief, and it came as a pleasant surprise,” said Ken Klukowski, a lawyer for the Family Research Council, who filed the brief for the House members. “It’s gratifying that even the Obama administration recognizes that courts are not qualified to censor prayers.”

Even the liberal Obama administration …

The article says there’s speculation that the administration joined this case in order to stave off a worse case down the road. That’s how these people win over the long haul — one capitulation at a time.

And anyway, it’s entirely possible they really believe the arguments in this case and support it on the merits. After all, they didn’t have to submit a brief in this case at all.

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QOTLM(Quote of the last millennium): Arthur Young

by digby

“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

—Arthur Young; 1771

There are more quotes along this line in this piece of “recovered history” by Yashal Levine. He makes the observation that libertarian style laissez faire capitalism was created and is always protected with the help of the state’s “men with guns”:

[D]espite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!

Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.

It’s a fascinating piece filled with interesting quotes from people of the time. Frankly it’s not all that different from what today’s uber-capitalists are saying:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

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Now THIS was political drama

by digby

39 years ago today:

I was young then. It seemed normal. How much did that warp my thinking about American politics over the years I wonder?

Then this, which also wasn’t really normal, but happened:

Those were interesting times. Of course years later I also watched a president’s Grand Jury testimony about unauthorized fellatio on TV so it’s all relative. Let’s just say that the American presidency has been something of a soap opera for a long long time now.

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Good for Gupta

by digby

I think this could be a pretty big deal.  It’s not that it matters so much that an individual doctor has changed his mind on pot, but that it’s this doctor, one who is also a well known TV celebrity and highly respected by the media:

Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called “Weed.” The title “Weed” may sound cavalier, but the content is not.

I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning.

Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled “Why I would Vote No on Pot.”

Well, I am here to apologize.

I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana.

We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.

I hope this article and upcoming documentary will help set the record straight.

Some of us out here in the world, living as we have nearly our whole lives in a huge national experiment in which millions of baby boomers smoked pot, some for decades, know very well that it is not only fairly benign as drugs go (certainly less lethal than alcohol) but that it can be powerful medicine. The science has obviously been rigged forever and our policy is being run by drug warrior entrepreneurs whose livelihoods depend upon their ability to confiscate property from American citizens with no due process. And there’s always that bunch of puritans who see any form of pleasure as something to be banned  — holding hands with those who gleefully tweak the racist lizard brains of Americans to portray pot as a drug of crazed people of color. It’s nuts and that’s nothing new. Watch Reefer Madness to get a sense of just how stupid this whole thing has been from the get-go.

When legalization of medical marijuana first began in California I fretted that there was going to be a backlash and that we’d end up going back to full prohibition. The storefront dispensaries weren’t very sophisticated and they sometimes seemed designed to scare the straights into calling for restriction. And there’s been a back and forth on just that basis here with the combined efforts of the feds and certain local jurisdictions resulting in various clampdowns and threats to close the dispensaries on trumped up charges.

But they haven’t succeeded completely and as time goes on it looks less and less likely that they will. The fact that the rest of the country is following, either with medical marijuana or just plain old legalization has had a big impact here, I think. At some point it just seems inevitable and the anti-pleasure people move on to the next target.

The big problem we will face is with the federal government which is deeply invested in the drug war and has built up a massive permanent infrastructure to fight it. There’s a lot of money and ambition tied up in anti-marijuana efforts. And that’s where Dr. Sanjay Gupta can make a difference. He’s a member of the club, a political celebrity and one who is welcomed into all the Village salons as one of them. And he’s widely considered by them to be an “expert” on all things medical. He will get a hearing.

I’m not saying his change of heart will change federal policy in and of itself. But it could have an influence. So, good for him.

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Ellsberg, Kissinger, and the cultural danger of extreme secrecy in government

by David Atkins

I recently came across an old Kevin Drum column from 2010 that deserves more attention in the wake of the NSA revelations. There’s a corrosive cultural problem in government when there are too many secrets known by too few: those with knowledge of the secrets tend to be unpersuadable by those without said knowledge. Elite cliques begin to develop, their members start to believe that only they know all the answers, and anyone with an outside perspective becomes shunned as Not Serious.

Those who have read Chris Hayes’ book Twilight of the Elites will recognize this phenomenon in all aspects of our society’s elites. But I imagine that the phenomenon is at its worst among the privileged few who get to know the scary and exhilarating intelligence details unknown to the rest of us.

Daniel Ellsberg highlighted this danger in a conversation with Henry Kissinger, recounted in his book Secrets:

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.

“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.

It is possible that the world is so terrifying that anyone privileged enough to know the details would support what the NSA is doing. But the problem is that none of us mere mortals have any information on that one way or another, and asking us to just trust the privileged few is wholly unacceptable. It’s not just that it’s a violation of the basic principles of our democracy. It’s also that financial, military and governmental elites haven’t exactly had the greatest track record. There’s no reason to believe them when they say they need these powers, and there’s no reason that even if they’re sincere in their conviction that their wisdom and judgment is superior to that of the wisdom of crowds.

Too much classified information in too few hands is dangerous. Not just as a matter of abuse of power, but also as a matter of corrosive culture. If terrorists came within inches of perpetrating another 9/11 and were only stopped because the government happened to read their emails in a broad sweep with only the wisp of a FISA warrant, then that’s something we should know about. It’s information our government should trust us with. If not, the elites need to stop pretending they need overreaching authority over our lives.

It’s a matter of trust. Right now trust in the wisdom of our elites is at an all-time low, and for good reason. If the people in power won’t trust the public with scary information, why should we trust them with scary new powers?

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QOTD: Crazy pants edition

by digby

“It’s crazy pants – you can quote me,” said Will McCants, a former State Department adviser on counterterrorism who this month joins the Brookings Saban Center as the director of its project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.

What’s crazy pants?

U.S. officials insisted Tuesday that extraordinary security measures for nearly two dozen diplomatic posts were to thwart an “immediate, specific threat,” a claim questioned by counterterrorism experts, who note that the alert covers an incongruous set of nations from the Middle East to an island off the southern coast of Africa.

Analysts don’t dispute the Obama administration’s narrative that it’s gleaned intelligence on a plot involving al Qaida’s most active affiliate, the Yemen-based Arabian Peninsula branch. That would explain why most U.S. posts in the Persian Gulf are on lockdown, including the U.S. embassy in Yemen, which on Tuesday airlifted most of its personnel to Germany in an “ordered departure,” the government’s euphemism for an evacuation.

But how, then, does it make sense for the State Department to close embassies as far afield as Mauritius or Madagascar, where there’s been no visible jihadist activity? And why is it that countries that weathered numerous terrorist attacks – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, for example – were excluded or allowed to reopen quickly?

At Tuesday’s State Department briefing, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said there were plans to keep 19 posts closed to the public through Saturday. But she had no answers when a reporter asked: “How did the countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean get into this?”

“We make decisions post by post,” Psaki said. “That’s something that is constantly evaluated at a high level through the interagency process.”

If ordinary Americans are confused, they’re in good company. Analysts who’ve devoted their careers to studying al Qaida and U.S. counterterrorism strategy can’t really make sense of it, either. There’s general agreement that the diffuse list of potential targets has to do with either specific connections authorities are tracking, or places that might lack the defenses to ward off an attack. Beyond that, however, even the experts are stumped.

I don’t think anyone has enough information to explain all this but if you had to make a guess just based on real world politics you’d have to think they were operating out of an “abundance of caution” not to have another Benghazi. If you watch Fox News, and I assume they do, you’d think that was the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. (They conveniently forget such unpleasantness as Lebanon, 9/11 and Iraq.)

Still, you have to wonder if these sorts of terror alerts don’t cause more trouble in the long run.  They fuel conspiracy theories and make everyone wonder just what is really going on.  It’s not all the Obama administration’s fault that the government has a reputation for crying wolf but it probably doesn’t do them all that much good to perpetuate it. (Colbert dealt with this in his usual masterful fashion.)

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La Noonan hits it out of the park

by digby

Peggy Noonan, worshiper of jesus dolphins and Ronald Reagan’s elegant feet, has outdone herself today with an imagined outline for one of the slated Hillary movies. Yes she goes there, and goes there in such magnificently lugubrious La Noonan fashion that I think this may just define her ouvre forever more.

It’s very long and you must read it all to fully appreciate it. But here’s just a tiny amuse bouche to whet the appetite.  We’ve done the early days at this point, in which the awkward, Eleanor-esque “ugly duckling” fails to properly wear a headband and repeatedly gets humiliated at the hands of the pretty girls who thinks she “comes on strong.” She’s met and married Bill, whose mother (in a “comic scene”) tarts her up to “look like a whore” and teaches Hillary that she has something to learn from women who didn’t go to Ivy League schools. Finally:

The Clintons take the White House. Burst of hope. Hillary has new first-lady role, one that recognizes the importance of women. She is not some Christmas tree ornament in the East Room but a serious policy official in charge or remaking U.S. health care. She will get the poor, the minorities, and the women covered. America says: Whuh? Hearings. Anxious Hill Republicans awed by her, unsure how to play it. It is Pat Moynihan of her own party, in the Senate, who defeats her bill. The Clinton White House forgot not to disrespect the ol’ crocodile.

Defeat, retreat, mascara. Triangulation: Is this good? Does it mean we’ve become what we hated? Or does it mean we’ve become practical? The point is power. Preserve it at all costs. Lincoln bedroom good place to park donors. You have to compromise to win.

Triumph. Economy good. Rope-a-dope Newt and the Contract With America nuts. Good legislation. Finally, everything good. The future all sunrise.

But woven throughout a sense of . . . women. Scene: A beautiful blond gives a last lingering look back at the Oval Office as she hurries away in the morning light. Hillary, on her way to a breakfast celebrating funding for women and children in poverty, sees. On her face we see surprise, confusion—she thought this was all over—and fear.

Then: Monica. Tears, “How could you ruin what we’ve built?” Scandal, horror, rage, slap.

The silence at Martha’s Vineyard.

Repair. Reading. Eleanor Roosevelt biographies. Scene: Hillary is alone, looking out the window of the residence. In the background, Bill’s televised deposition. She stares at the tourists at the fence. They want in. She wants out. They’re freer than she is, locked up in this cage, locked in by her choices. Scene: She’s with girlfriends late at night in the residence. They’re telling stories, commiserating, drinking wine. “When Joe and I had our hard time we decided to stay in it, work it through. We had a life, a commitment, kids, a reasonable amount of love and a big sloppy dog. Looking back we did all right.” Another, a tough talking New Yorker: “Look, fall in love with a guy who can dance the Shirelles, ya gotta expect he’ll dance with a few shirelles!” Hillary laughs, hugs her. The conversation continues.

A Senate seat opens up. Moynihan, the ol’ crocodile, is leaving.

She runs in New York, where they love her. The poor, the marginalized, women: They too have been hurt by life.

There’s more. So much more. She really put her all into it. So much so that I think someone should do a short movie about her, writing that column:

Scene: Noonan. Alone. Hungover. The stale scent of cigarette smoke and Hai Karate still clinging to what’s left of her sagging brazilian blowout. The mid-afternoon sun peeks through the crooked slatted blinds as she desperately tries to summon the energy to crank out yet another column about Hillary Clinton. It’s hard, so very hard. So many years. So many words. And she’s still there.

She stares at her own reflection in the dark computer screen, absently fingering the pearls she never removes from her swanlike neck, even to shower. “How did she do it? The woman didn’t even know how to wear mascara!” she whispers. Madness.

She closes her eyes briefly as the corners of her mouth turn up ever so slightly. “Ah, that’s it,” she sighs. “She’s ugly. Most women are ugly, at least compared to me. Doesn’t that explain it all?”

She hits a switch and the computer whirs to life. Noonan takes a long deep swig of her lukewarm latte and Makers Mark, flips her hair and starts typing.

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What do the warmongers think they’re trying to accomplish?

by David Atkins

Lindsey Graham and John McCain would like to reignite the Cold War, please:

President Obama should expand sanctions against Russian human rights violators, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Thursday.

The two senators issued a joint statement that said they “obviously agree” with Obama’s decision to cancel a planned meeting next month with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

But the two said Obama should go much farther.

They called on the president to finish the last phase of a European missile defense shield that’s been scrapped and push for a new round of NATO expansion to include Georgia.

“Now we must move beyond symbolic acts and take the steps necessary to establish a more realistic approach to our relations with Russia,” McCain and Graham said. “That means demonstrating to the Russian government that there will be consequences for its continued actions that undermine American national interests.”

Ignore for a moment that these gasbags have no problem with the egregious overreach of the NSA’s unconstitutional spying activities, and assume that Russia’s giving asylum to Snowden is something we should actually be upset about (it isn’t.)

What do these fools think their belligerent posturing is going to accomplish? Do they believe Russia will be scared into submission? Are they fool enough to believe Russia presents an actual military threat beyond nuclear proliferation?

Remember: these are supposedly the cooler, wiser heads in the GOP. Steve King is out there claiming that President Obama is too “weak” to have a summit with Putin.

For obvious reasons, the politics of the 21st century tend to focus our attention on domestic issues, the economy, and the nation’s policies toward asymmetric warfare. But never forget how detrimental and obnoxious the conservative approach is to relations with other powerful nation-states. Back before the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration’s greatest accomplishment was a tense standoff with China. Anyone want to wager what a Ted Cruz or Paul Ryan administration would look like in terms of our relations with Russia, China and the EU?

Let’s not find out.

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Dispatch from Torture Nation: another utterly obscene taser death

by digby

Summary execution for tagging now?

An 18-year-old skater died yesterday after Miami Beach Police officers caught him tagging a building and then Tasered him.

Details about the death are still murky, but what is clear is that Israel Hernandez died before dawn Tuesday morning after cops caught him spray painting near 71st Street and Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. Police have yet to comment on the killing, but an officer near the scene confirmed that cops had fatally Tasered someone. Hernandez’s friends on the Miami Beach skate scene are devastated.

“I just cant believe it,” says best friend Rafael Lynch, on the verge of tears. “I still have his hat and his board. They still smell like him. It’s crazy.”

Update: MBPD has released a statement and incident report confirming that Hernandez died after being Tasered. Police chased Hernandez after catching him tagging a building and used the electronic weapon when he refused to stop.

I have said it too many times before but I’ll say it again. If a drug company put out a drug that “accidentally” killed as many people as the supposedly non-lethal taser has, it would have been withdrawn from the market without any question.

And, once again, this is supposed to be a substitute for lethal force. Has it ever been acceptable police procedure to shoot unarmed graffiti artists?

h/t to HR

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An optimistic report on Yellen-Summers

by digby

I don’t know how connected Major Garret is with the White House,  but this is interesting regardless:

Top White House officials concede that both Yellen and Summers are in the running, but it’s easier to find those willing to make the case for Summers. That’s not dispositive and could be a head fake. Summers is not only in the mix, but is probably leading among outside odds makers who have been sifting Obama’s recent rhetoric on wage disparity, anemic economic growth, and the ravages of long-term unemployment. There is also this. A senior official also said all the Democrats who signed the pro-Yellen letter have assured the White House they will back Summers. Preferences, after all, are not confirmation votes.

While Obama’s umpteenth “pivot” to the economy has a familiar ring to it, there is something economically and politically new here. Obama is telling Congress, for the first time since Republicans won the House, that he’s done with deficit-reduction politics. Debates over government shutdowns and default are too small, and Obama intends to use whatever rhetorical and policy leverage he has (the reaction to Tuesday’s proposed grand bargain suggests it’s minimal) to elevate growth and job creation over entitlement reform and sequestration.

That’s where the Federal Reserve pick fits in. In Obama’s interview with The New York Times, he said that the new Fed chair must understand that the central bank’s role is not about the technical balance of the money supply in relation to inflation and a strong currency. “I want a Fed chairman that can step back and look at that objectively and say, let’s make sure that we’re growing the economy, but let’s also keep an eye on inflation, and if it starts heating up, if the markets start frothing up, let’s make sure that we’re not creating new bubbles.”

This may be Bernanke’s most important legacy—the concept, now embraced by the president, that the Federal Reserve chairman can and should play a more active, anticipatory, and certainly remedial role in the future of the U.S. economy. Obama has almost no personal relationship with Yellen. This is counted against her. But she did, as the Senate Democratic letter points out, warn about a housing bubble before the market collapsed. And she gave an impassioned speech to the AFL-CIO in February about the Fed’s active role in the economy. Of the chronically jobless, she said: “These are not just statistics to me. We know that long-term unemployment is devastating to workers and their families.”

When White House aides talk up Summers, it is usually in the context of his relationship with Obama during the darkest days of the Great Recession, shaping policies Obama believes saved the country from another depression. That relationship is real and meaningful. But Summers did not anticipate the Great Recession, and some believe his advocacy for an end to Glass-Steagall helped set it in motion. Top administration officials disagree, but Obama’s criteria appears clear: seeing a crisis before it strikes and dealing with Fed policy outside of its historically abstract sandbox. If you place the Summers-versus-Yellen campaigning aside, and take Obama’s own words at face value, he’s leaning toward Yellen.

There are actually two piece of optimistic news in that. The obvious is that he thinks the president is leaning toward Yellen and on a thoroughly rational basis rather than the fact that he doesn’t want to have a beer with her.

The other is that he takes at face value the fact that Obama has decided that deficit reduction and “entitlement” cuts are no longer operative. We have been hearing that they’re still trying to negotiate a grand bargain (also known as a “big deal”) on spending and entitlements from other sources. If he’s recognized the folly of that it would be very good news for the American people — and the Democratic Party which would have something to run on aside from austerity one-upsmanship.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens in the next big Debt Ceiling Shakedown but there may be enough nervousness building on the right for them to seek a face-saving way out that doesn’t require another big bucket of shared-sacrifice from a population that had it up to here with it. Fingers crossed.