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President's approval rating "soars"

Well, it's not exactly a sudden change.  It's inevitable thanks to a swift move by the White House -- reported by Andy Borowitz.

In a historic Oval Office ceremony on Thursday morning, President Barack Obama signed an executive order closing Congress, effective immediately.

The President said that the move would dramatically increase the efficiency of the federal government, noting how much he had accomplished since he stopped working with Congress in November.

Additionally, he said, the elimination of Congress would result in annual savings of more than five billion dollars, which Obama said would be refunded to American taxpayers.

Acknowledging that “some sticklers” would argue that the Constitution calls for three branches of government, the President said, “All this order does is reduce that number by one.”...Borowitz,NewYorker

The Netanyanu mess

It's Boehner's screw-up.  But -- more and more -- it has become a diplomatic mess blamed on Israel's prime minister.  About time. 

Mr. Netanyahu’s office confirmed Thursday that he had called Democrats and “other friends” in Congress in recent days, and that he “reiterated that the survival of Israel is not a partisan issue.” ...NYT

Netanyahu is "reaching out" to Democrats on the Hill, according to the Times.  Harry Reid reports a "candid conversation." 

Robert Kagan, in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, writes that Congress's invite doesn't break any laws but it's bad form and lousy politics.

Will Republicans be happy when the shoe is on the other foot, and a Democratic Congress invites foreign leaders to joint sessions in defiance of a Republican president’s wishes?

But whether the congressional leadership has thought this through or not, there is still time for the Israeli prime minister to do the right thing — and decline. ...WaPo

Eugene Robinson points out that the invitation has done nothing to enhance Boehner's reputation or guarantee his political future.  Quite the opposite.

If Boehner’s aim was to paint Obama as somehow soft on Iran, he failed at that, too. The speaker inadvertently turned the focus on himself and has had to spend the week explaining why he went behind the president’s back, not even giving the White House a heads-up until hours before the March 3 speech was announced. ...WaPo

As for what it does for Netanyahu himself?

Netanyahu, for his part, may have thought this was a way to boost his prospects in the upcoming Israeli election, scheduled for March 17. Or he may have fantasized that somehow, by openly siding with the Republican Party, he could snatch U.S. foreign policy out of Obama’s hands. Judging by the pounding he is taking from the Israeli media, he was mistaken on both counts. ...WaPo

For those of us who detest the arrogant Israeli prime minister and his destructive nationalism, the blow Netanyahu is suffering for his acquiescence in Boehner's scheme is gratifying, to say the least.

Tracking your car. Now tracking your genes.

President Obama on Friday will announce a major biomedical research initiative, including plans to collect genetic data on one million Americans so that scientists can develop drugs and treatments tailored to individual patients’ specific characteristics, administration officials said. ...NYT

Actually that's pretty cool and should have begun years ago.  There's something woo-woo mystical about western medicine that depends on the wisdom of some white-coated person who, thanks to insurance guidelines, spends four and a half minutes looking at a computer screen and forty-five seconds writing a scrip that will help cure Merck of its slight downturn in the Dow.

Federal officials described the project as a research consortium that would collect information from large numbers of people. The data could include medical records, laboratory test results, profiles of patients’ genes, and information about their diet, tobacco use, lifestyle and environment. ...NYT

Look who's fighting for Obamacare in Supreme Court

Greg Sargent reports that "more than a dozen states have filed their brief siding with the government in King v. Burwell, arguing that if Supreme Court sides with the challengers, it will result in millions losing coverage and collapsing insurance markets."

These states are not alone.  Look at who else is ready for a fight against Obamacare challengers:

Sam Baker reports that health insurance companies and hospitals have also filed major briefs siding with the government, arguing that upholding the challenge would hurt millions and unleash massive disruptions:

Health insurers said a ruling against the subsidies would have widespread and severe ripple effects, potentially throwing states’ entire insurance markets into chaos. Stopping the flow of subsidies “would create severely dysfunctional insurance markets” in 34 states, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s leading trade organization, said in its amicus brief. “It would leave consumers in those States with a more unstable market and far higher costs than if the ACA had not been enacted.”

…the consequences would spill well beyond consumers who personally lost their subsidies, AHIP argued. The industry organization warned of an insurance “death spiral” if the court rules against Obamacare.

Sargent points out the obvious, if sad, truth about this corporate-hugging Court: "It’s unclear whether the possibility of millions losing health coverage will weigh on Roberts, but the potential of business disruptions might factor into his thinking."

Can't argue with that.  We-the-people learned, way back in 2000, that we don't count for much with the profiteers on the bench of this for-profit Court.

Boehner's big boo-boo

Well, the latest Boehner boo-boo, anyway.  The guy is loaded with 'em.

John Boehner, thanks to the split in his caucus, is having to rely on House Democrats for some key votes.  That's just the way it's worked out for the Republicans:  their party has a major as well as a bunch of minor fractures which tend to annihilate their win in November.  So the last thing Boehner should be looking for is trouble with Democrats.

But now he's got trouble.  In a breach of protocol as well as good sense, Boehner  invited the widely detested Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to speak to Congress.  And now, thanks to the Boner, President Obama is getting some unusually strong support for his Iran policy.

President Obama’s relations with Democrats on Capitol Hill have never been especially close. But one man is helping to bring them a little closer together: Benjamin Netanyahu.

The decision by the Israeli prime minister to accept an unusual invitation from House Republicans to address a joint meeting of Congress has had the unintended effect of helping the president rally Democrats as his administration negotiates a delicate nuclear deal with Iran.

For months, the issue of imposing sanctions on Iran split many Democrats from the president, as they feared his posture was emboldening the government in Tehran to further develop its nuclear program. But Mr. Netanyahu’s planned speech, a provocation of the president that many Democrats found distasteful and undiplomatic, has helped shift the political dynamic. ...NYT

Once again John Boehner's having a hard time.  He deserves it.

The bipartisan -- and the deep and commonplace -- corruption in Congress

And throughout our government. 

Ken Silverstein is someone I'd call a quiet investigative reporter, and an equal opportunity muckraker.  In his latest investigation of Congressional (and other) corruption, he begins with one of the Democratic party's best and most highly respected senators:  Tom Daschle. 

Daschle is no longer in the Senate.  He has moved on to the reward system that provides a soft landing for insiders of all parties, genders, races, and flavors of elected representatives of the people. They wind up in the big time corporate world of the nation's capitol. Everything Tom Daschle has done since leaving the Senate has, Silverstein points out, has contributed to the dire straits in which America's formerly stable middle class finds itself.  Nice Tom Daschle?  Yes.

In October of 2014, former Democratic Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle and his wife sold their seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom house on Foxhall Road for $3.25 million.

It was not an unusually large haul for a member of Washington’s political elite, but it was a big step up from his financial circumstances in 2003. Daschle’s financial disclosure form—filed a year before he lost a race to John Thune, marking the first time in more than half a century that a Senate party leader failed to win reelection—showed his net worth to be between $400,000 and $1.2 million. It was a pitiful amount by congressional standards and led CNN to disparage him as a senator of “modest means.”

After leaving office, however, Daschle immediately began making millions by advising corporations. During the two years prior to his failed nomination to head Health and Human Services he netted $5.2 million, mostly from healthcare, energy, private equity and telecommunications companies. That included big compensation for speaking appearances (he is, according to his speakers’ bureau profile, “a tireless fighter for the common man”) and for authoring such works as, Getting It Done: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform, which was subsequently found to induce narcolepsy in laboratory rats.

There’s a common perception that government doesn’t work and that “partisan gridlock” has made things worse than ever. But when it comes to fundamental economic questions, there is no partisan divide in Washington and the system is “broken” only if you’re part of the growing slice of the population that’s poor or middle class, for whom average income has been stagnant for decades. ...Silverstein,TheIntercept[emphasis added]

Or take Louisiana Republican, Richard Baker.  Silverstein follows Baker up the lucrative corporate ladder in much the same way that he followed Daschle.

While Baker cleaned up, his financial sponsors were systematically ripping off his former constituents. For example, in 2012 Wells Fargo—a major campaign contributor to Baker and member of the MFA—settled a federal housing discrimination complaint over charges that it had allowed properties it foreclosed upon in minority neighborhoods of New Orleans to fall into neglect and disrepair, while carefully maintaining its stocks of foreclosed homes in white neighborhoods (Wells Fargo, as part of the settlement, agreed to pay $234.3 million in relief and compensation). ..Silverstein,TheIntercept

"Such Louisiana woes don’t appear to have affected Baker," Silverstein assures us. "He currently owns three properties in his home state, among them a waterfront lot."

And so it goes.  Worth remembering and repeating:  it was Silverstein who dug into the newly-arrived Senator Obama's relationship with Wall Street in an impressive article way back then*.  An excerpt from mid-January of 2008:

Since coming to Washington, Obama has advocated for the poor, most notably in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and has emerged as a champion of clean government. He has fought for restrictions on lobbying, even as most of his fellow Democrats postured on the issue while quietly seeking to gut real reform initiatives. In mid-September, Congress approved a bill he co-authored with Oklahoma’s arch-conservative senator, Tom Coburn, requiring all federal contracts and earmarks to be published in an Internet database, a step that will better allow citizens to track the way the government spends their money.

Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama’s senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on.

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*It's a pity that Harper's has chosen to wall the article off from all but subscribers.  I dumped my subscription when they did it.