The New Mundane (Petty Grotesquerie)

There are days when we might simply shrug and say, “Yeah, it happens.” But, you know. This happened:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) hasn’t yet met with Supreme Court nominee Merrick B. Garland for what has been a long anticipated encounter between the former Judiciary Committee chairman and the federal appeals court judge he has long praised.

But when the meeting does happen, don’t expect Garland to succeed in convincing Hatch to support his nomination, because Hatch has already declared that it won’t.

“Like many of my Senate colleagues, I recently met with Chief Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court. … Our meeting, however, does not change my conviction that the Senate should consider a Supreme Court nominee after this presidential election cycle,” Hatch wrote in an op-ed published on the website of the Deseret News early Thursday morning and later removed. It remains available in a Google database.

The headline for Mike DeBonis’ Washington Post report is straightforward: “Sen. Orrin Hatch reacts to meeting with Merrick Garland before it occurs”.

Look, the simple fact is that once upon a time politicians used to at least pay lip service to the notion of statesmanship. Certes, the Utah Republican knows this after thirty-nine years in the United States Senate.

It seems futile to complain about such petty grotesquerie; we probably ought to be thankful Republicans aren’t calling for Second Amendment solutions to the Garland nomination. Nonetheless, it’s worth reminding that the presidential contest is neither the only evidence of Republican unfitness to govern nor any manner of surprise. Republicans have labored hard to achieve such depths. The presidential contest is symptomatic. Orrin Hatch’s continued descent is emblematic.

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Image note: Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT), left, is flanked by House Speaker Ryan (R-WI), right, while signing the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act of 2016, on Capitol Hill, 18 May 2016, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

DeBonis, Mike. “Sen. Orrin Hatch reacts to meeting with Merrick Garland before it occurs”. The Washington Post. 26 May 2016.

The Conservative Lesson

A question arises: Is self-harm ever funny?

Certes, there are complications to the question; obviously, it is harder to justify self-harm if one also hurts others along the way, but here we’re not talking about going on a slashing spree amid a cutting habit. This one falls more under inspiring terrorists while wrecking your life for the sake of your own stupid masculinity.

Never mind.

Yesterday morning, via USA Today:

The videos show Planned Parenthood’s senior leadership partaking in a widespread and organized violation of state and federal laws forbidding partial-birth abortions and profiteering from the sale of fetal organs and tissues, which is why multiple state and federal investigations, including a select committee in Congress, continue to investigate Planned Parenthood’s abortion practice and financial interests in harvesting body parts. Contrary to the liberal shibboleth that the videos were “edited” (by which they mean to insinuate, “doctored”), the Center for Medical Progress has been far more transparent than any major news network in making the unedited conversations available to the public, and forensic analysis verifies their utility as evidence.

David Daleiden penned an op-ed in defense of his Center for Medical Progress, which is perhaps more familiar as the right-wing operation that doctored up some videos that succeeded in causing a ruckus. Congress held hearings, then slated some more because the first round was such a disaster. A terrorist murdered three people, wounded several more. Eleven states have investigated the infamous claims against Planned Parenthood, and all eleven have cleared the organization. In Texas, officials even convened a grand jury.

So Daleiden decided to … what? Pitch his case one last time? Rub it in? Set up for his victory lap?

That was Monday morning. A few hours later, Daleiden and co-conspirator Sandra Merritt got the news:

A Houston jury investigating alleged misconduct by Planned Parenthood declined to charge the women’s health provider, announcing instead felony charges for the leaders of the anti-abortion organization that targeted Planned Parenthood with it’s widely debunked series of “sting” videos in 2015.

The grand jury said they did not find evidence of illegal activity on the part of Planned Parenthood after reviewing the covert videos meant to misleadingly implicate the women’s health provider in the illegal trafficking of fetal tissue ....

.... David Daleiden, the 26-year old president of The Center for Medical Progress, and Sandra Merritt, founder and CEO of the fake tissue procurement company created to misleadingly gain entry into abortion clinics, were indicted for “tampering with a governmental record,” while Daleiden received an additional indictment for “the purchase and sale of human organs.” The first charge is a second degree felony and the second is a Class A misdemeanor. As the Houston Chronicle notes, a second-degree felony carries a punishment of up to 20 years in prison.

(Tesfaye)

They did this to themselves.

Worth Keeping an Eye On

Sometimes it feels nearly head versus wall:

Progressives are angry at the president for caving in to Republicans on the CRomnibus budget bill, and rightly so—the rollback of post-Great Recession regulations on financial derivatives is simply inexcusable. But there is a way for President Obama to win back his party’s base with a bold strike on behalf of the middle class: Raise the overtime pay threshold.

Overtime pay is to the middle class what the minimum wage is to low-wage workers. In 1975, more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week, but by 2013, that number had dropped to less than 11 percent. That’s because the income threshold at which employers are required to pay overtime has been allowed to erode to only $23,660 a year, less than the poverty line for a family of four. The 89 percent of salaried workers who now earn over that threshold can be forced to work unlimited overtime hours for no additional pay at all ....

.... But it doesn’t have to be this way: President Obama could raise the overtime threshold to $69,000—enough to cover the same 65 percent of salaried workers that it covered 40 years ago—and with no prior congressional approval. Because unlike the minimum wage, the overtime threshold is set through the Department of Labor’s existing regulatory authority.

(Hanauer)

And if we find ourselves thinking there must be a catch, there probably is. The first thing to mind, for instance, is that American corporations will revisit the question of which jobs they need to keep close by, and which can be shipped overseas. Then again, even the executives will hedge before they send their expense reports to Bangalore.

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Hanauer, Nick. “Give Americans the overtime pay they’ve earned”. The Hill. 18 December 2014.

A Drop-Dead Cool Endorsement

Because it’s New Hampshire. That’s why.

Or because it’s Scott Brown against Jeanne Shaheen. Oh, wait, that actually explains more than you might think, but only if your sense of humor is picking up a shift for your rational thought.

The op-ed begins on a discordant note. “As is usual with poll-driven politicians,” writes Marshall Cobleigh in New Hampshire’s Foster’s Daily Democrat, “Jeanne Shaheen is running television commercials and writing op-ed pieces addressing the dominant problem facing America — skyrocketing gasoline prices — but providing no real solutions.”

Gas prices? Shaheen, New Hampshire’s Democratic senior senator and still narrowly a favorite for re-election next week, has not been saying much about gas prices. The toll at the pump has not been “skyrocketing” this year — around the country, it’s actually down an average of $0.40 per gallon since the November 2012 election.

The op-ed continues with no more strangeness. Cobleigh cites numbers on congressional votes to expand energy exploration from “Rep. Roy Blunt,” but Blunt has been a senator from Missouri since 2011. There’s a reference to offshore drilling moratoriums, but nothing about the reversals to those policies since 2010.

What’s the matter with the column? Probably that Marshall Cobleigh has been dead for five years. In February 2009, the former speaker of New Hampshire’s often-Republican state House was felled by congestive heart failure. This op-ed is a reprint of a column Cobleigh wrote in July 2008, when Shaheen was running her first successful Senate campaign. Buzz Dietterle, the FDD’s opinion page editor, says that the New Hampshire GOP submitted the column (which originally ran in the conservative Union Leader) ....

(Weigel)

You know what? Never mind. It’s not Scott Brown. It’s not the New Hampshire GOP. And it’s not even New Hampshire itself.

It’s America.

Welcome to it.

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Weigel, David. “Politician Who Has Been Dead Since 2009 Just Weighed In on New Hampshire Senate Race”. Bloomberg. 27 October 2014.