MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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The New York Times

Trying to Derail Obama. Again

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There have been political cartoons and breathless stories, including blatantly false ones by Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for President of the United States, about how President Obama paid ransom to get the Iran nuclear deal.

Now, along comes a corrective story in the form of a New York Times editorial:

The first thing to know about the latest controversy over the Iran nuclear deal is that the Obama administration did not pay $400 million in “ransom” to secure the release of three American detainees. Yet that’s the story critics are peddling in another attempt to discredit an agreement that has done something remarkable — halted a program that had put Iran within striking distance of producing a nuclear weapon.

The truth is that the administration withheld the payment to ensure Iran didn’t renege on its promise to free three detainees — a Washington Post journalist, a Marine veteran and a Christian pastor. That’s pragmatic diplomacy not capitulation.

A graphic accompanying the editorial in the New York Times

A graphic accompanying the editorial in the New York Times

“U.S. Sent Cash to Iran as Americans Were Freed” The Wall Street Journal first blared two and half weeks ago (the story is behind a pay wall), peddling a gotcha that the “Obama administration insists there was no quid pro quo, but critics charge payment amounted to ransom.”

A shame that Rupert Murdoch has turned a once-principled newspaper into another of his disreputable propaganda organs.

Please read rest of the Times editorial to get the background and full story of what happened in this case.

August 23, 2016
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The Company We Keep

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greece_3402538bMy son asked me a question the other day that still cuts very deep.

“How are you comfortable being in league with racists, xenophobes and reactionaries?” he asked.

What prompted the question was my support for Brexit.

I’ll admit it is true that the likes of Boris Johnson, the idiotic and racist former London mayor, and Nigel Farage who leads the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing political party, stoked anti-immigrant fervor to sell their successful campaign to get Britain out of the European Union.

And, let’s not forget our own resident bigot, one Donald Trump, the next president of the United States, was ecstatic at the outcome. Just yesterday, Marine Le Pen of the French racist National Front political party wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times praising the Brits’ courage for their Brexit vote.

The reactions to Brexit, especially in the media, have been hyperbolic. In a highly emotional editorial yesterday, the Times castigated Brexit proponents for “backing away from the false claims and dubious promises that they made in the run-up to the referendum to take Britain out of the European Union.”

I know the financial markets have been tantrumy since the vote but everything is going to be all right. The world on Friday and since has been no different than it was on Wednesday, the day before the Brexit vote. Despite corporations and the markets behaving the way they are, nothing is really being lost.

Let me rephrase that. Read More

June 29, 2016
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If it Walks and Quacks like a Duck . . .

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imageDespite his “good relationship with the blacks” and being the “least racist person” he knows, Donald Trump history of discriminating against people of color goes back to the beginning of his business career.

The New York Times, which over the weekend released a story about how DT devastated lives in numerous bankruptcies in Atlantic City, NJ while laughing all the way to the bank, released today this Times Insider piece from 1973 that showed Trump was “Accused of Antiblack Bias in City” at that time.

“The Department of Justice had brought suit in federal court in Brooklyn against Mr. Trump and his father, Fred C. Trump, charging them with violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in the operation of 39 buildings.

“The government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,’ ” The Times reported. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.”

As it is his won’t, DT bellowed like a stuck pig: The charges are “are absolutely ridiculous,” he said.

“We never have discriminated,” he added, “and we never would.”

It even turned around and sued the U.S. government for $100 million (or, as the Times noted, $500 million in today’s dollars). Yet, it quietly settled the lawsuit under terms that seemed to essentially acknowledge its guilt on the charges.

Over the weekend, as news of the Orlando atrocity came to light, DT was again at it, spewing racist, sexist and anti-muslim garbage in all directions. Yet, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and most of the GOP hierarchy and the party’s establishment insist this man is fit to be our next president.

June 13, 2016
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End of an Era, Indeed!

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The New York Times published the note below at the end of a strange story about the reburial of Richard III. I revered to Times journalists as a young journalist. Unlike many in my generation who came into journalism because of Woodward and Bernstein, Harrison Salisbury was my initial inspiration. Then, John F. Burns became a hero because, like Salisbury, he would go anywhere, cover any story. He seemed to always get to the scene way before any journalist of his day and cover the story longer and better than anyone. The Times says Burns is retiring and becoming a freelancer. He was the finest one. The attached story is a classic.

“With this article, John F. Burns concludes a distinguished career spanning 40 years with The New York Times, 39 of them with the international desk. Beginning with South Africa in 1976, Mr. Burns reported from 10 foreign bureaus and was chief of the Baghdad bureau during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Along the way, he wrote more than 3,300 articles and collected two Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting, one in Afghanistan and the other in Bosnia. His portrait of a cellist playing on Sarajevo’s main pedestrian concourse while artillery shells exploded nearby is considered a classic of modern journalism. He will continue to contribute to the international and sports desks, among others.”

 

March 27, 2015
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A Plug for Unions

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The New York Times published a story yesterday about a study (done at Harvard and elsewhere involving income data from millions of people) that found In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters. If you’re born in the bottom 20 percent in New York City, for instance, you’ll wind up on average around the 40th percentile. People in places like Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte are not so lucky. Brian Lehrer of WNYC invited listeners today to phone in to tell their upward mobility stories. He asked his listeners to tell him what personal factors and what outside factors made their rise in socio-economic class possible. If you grew up poor but made it to the middle class, how did you do it?

AUDIO:

Callers cited the usual—family, education, mass transit, (public) housing, “hard work”—in their rise to the middle class. Dorothy, 94, from Croton-on-Hudson, was the last caller:

Dorothy:     I was going to mention something that nobody has talked about and that is the role
that unions played in raising people from poverty to less poverty. That’s what
happened with my father. He came to this country . . . he and my mother both were
immigrants. I’m a first generation American. My father was lucky to get a job in a
factory . . . in a mill . . . a shop, I should say.

Brian:         Where did he come from?
Read More

July 23, 2013
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Souter's Harvard Talk

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Souter signing guest book inside Massachusetts Hall prior to delivering Harvard's 359th Commencement.

Text of Justice David Souter’s Harvard Commencement remarks (as delivered)

When I was younger, I used to hear Harvard stories from a member of the class of 1885. Back then, old graduates of the College who could get to Cambridge on Commencement Day didn’t wait for reunion years to come back to the Yard.  They’d just turn up, see old friends, look over the new crop, and have a cup of Commencement punch under the elms.  The old man remembered one of those summer days when he was heading for the Square after lunch and crossed paths with a newly graduated senior, who had enjoyed quite a few cups of that punch.  As the two men approached each other the younger one thrust out his new diploma and shouted, “Educated, by God.”

Even with an honorary Harvard doctorate in my hands, I know enough not to shout that across the Yard, but the University’s generosity does make me bold enough to say that over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States, and about what judges do when they apply it in deciding cases with constitutional issues.  I’m going to draw on that experience in the course of the next few minutes, for it is as a judge that I have been given the honor to speak before you.

The occasion for our coming together like this aligns with the approach of two separate events on the judicial side of the national public life:  the end of the Supreme Court’s term, with its quickened pace of decisions, and a confirmation proceeding for the latest nominee to fill a seat on the court.  We will as a consequence be hearing and discussing a particular sort of criticism that is frequently aimed at the more controversial Supreme Court decisions:  criticism that the court is making up the law, that the court is announcing constitutional rules that cannot be found in the Constitution, and that the court is engaging in activism to extend civil liberties.  A good many of us, I’m sure a good many of us here, intuitively react that this sort of commentary tends to miss the mark.  But we don’t often pause to consider in any detail the conceptions of the Constitution and of constitutional judging that underlie the critical rhetoric, or to compare them with the notions that lie behind our own intuitive responses.  I’m going to try to make some of those comparisons this afternoon.

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June 4, 2010
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“Enemies of freedom”

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Gaza Needs a George Orwell Now

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By Jim Sleeper – January 11, 2009, 12:48AM

Israel is barring independent journalists from Gaza, but The New York Times, relying on Palestinian correspondents there, reports that “Hamas, with training from Iran and Hezbollah, has used the last two years to turn Gaza into a deadly maze of tunnels, booby traps and sophisticated roadside bombs. Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership’s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, Israeli intelligence officials say.”

The Times account of how cruelly both sides are fighting underscores how badly we need reporting like George Orwell’s from the bloody Spanish Civil War in 1936. Orwell joined and fought for the democratic left against the fascist Franco, but he quickly found something his leftist readers didn’t want to know: Franco wasn’t the only evil enemy of freedom in Spain.

If a new Orwell informs us that Israel, although it’s hideously cruel and wrong, isn’t the only evil enemy of freedom in Gaza, will anyone want to know?

Continue . . .

January 12, 2009
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"A passion for justice"

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The Fed Who Blew the Whistle

Is he a hero or a criminal?

by Michael Isikoff

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 22, 2008

Thomas M. Tamm was entrusted with some of the government’s most important secrets. He had a Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance, a level above Top Secret. Government agents had probed Tamm’s background, his friends and associates, and determined him trustworthy.

It’s easy to see why: he comes from a family of high-ranking FBI officials. During his childhood, he played under the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, and as an adult, he enjoyed a long and successful career as a prosecutor. Now gray-haired, 56 and fighting a paunch, Tamm prides himself on his personal rectitude. He has what his 23-year-old son, Terry, calls a “passion for justice.” For that reason, there was one secret he says he felt duty-bound to reveal.

In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies—a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that “the program” (as it was commonly called within the office) was “probably illegal.”

Continue . . .

December 13, 2008
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Historic record*

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I had complained in a post earlier about the front page of The New York Times that carried the news of President-elect Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election. I felt that it was, at least, inappropriate and did not rise to standard of previous his Times front pages. I don’t know if this is driven by demand, which I assume to be the case, or the Times is proud of the page, but it has friend the page and selling it for a lot of money . . .

I’ve gathered images of a few historic New York Times front pages. They are not the most famous, or significant. They’re just the ones I found.

Here’s an election that compares to President-elect Obama’s victory . . .

Now, compare that to this:

Alright, I won’t say another word about it but . . . Something is not right.

November 10, 2008
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The New York Times presidential endorsement

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Editorial

Barack Obama for President

Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.

As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

Continue . . .

October 24, 2008
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