July 2011 archive

The Bush Doctrine was that the world was our battlefield-we were at liberty to carry out drone attacks and unlawful interrogations throughout the world. But many Americans may be surprised to discover that far from fading away with the former president, these policies have in fact expanded and intensified under President Obama.

As The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill explained on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, Obama has succeeded in normalizing and legitimizing these policies that were considered illegal in the extreme only a few years ago. Recounting his recent investigation of increasing CIA involvement in counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, Scahill says we have to decide, “are we a country that operates under the rule of law or do we believe we’re emperors who can wage war on the world?”

Obama contradicts his own executive order that supposedly closed these CIA sites and ended rendition. He is doing it without the same scrutiny or criticism from his supporters, giving him a pass for embracing and expanding the same policies for which we loudly condemned Bush and Cheney. I won’t give these Obama supporters the dignity of calling them the left, because they have gone over to the darkest side of the right.

H/T Naomi Klein via Twitter

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Robert Reich: The Dangerous Hi-Jinks of the GOP’s Juveniles

I’ve spent enough of my life in Washington to take its theatrics with as much seriousness as a Seinfeld episode. A large portion of what passes for policy debate isn’t at all – it’s play-acting for various constituencies. The actors know they’re acting, as do their protagonists on the other side who are busily putting on their own plays for their own audiences.

Typically, though, back stage is different. When the costumes and grease paint come off, compromises are made, deals put together, legislation hammered out. Then at show time the players announce the results – spinning them to make it seem they’ve kept to their parts.

At least that’s the standard playbook.

But this time there’s no back stage. The kids in the GOP have trashed it. The GOP’s experienced actors – House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McDonnell – have been upstaged by juveniles like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann, who don’t know the difference between playacting and governing. They’re in league with tea party fanatics who hate government so much they’re willing to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States. Washington has gone from theater to reality TV – a game of hi-jinks chicken that could end in a crash.

Paul Krugman: Inflation Hawks Demand That Britain Leap Into Folly

The economist Adam Posen of the Bank of England gave a talk recently about British monetary policy that drives home a point I’ve been meaning to make: namely, that what’s happening in Britain on the monetary front right now is very much a teachable moment about monetary policy more generally.

The Bank of England faces the same kind of conflict between what it should be doing and what it’s under pressure to do that the Federal Reserve does, but in starker form. And if the Bank of England holds its ground, we should soon have a clear demonstration that one side is right and the other is wrong.

(Note: This is my second essay in support of the fasting California prisoners.  The first is here. The take away: prisoners on hunger strike for almost 3 weeks have requested your support in their struggle to end long term, 23 hour a day solitary confinement in California’s Special Housing Units.  I urge you to support them.  Details follow.)

Today is day 19 of the prison hunger strike.   This may be the most significant act of prisoner resistance in 40 years, since the Attica Uprising in 1971.

The LA Times reports:

Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux to Gap 101 miles

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Today’s Stage is pretty much steadily up hill with a dip after the feeding station and a full fledged descent at the finish following the Col de Manse, so theoretically at least there could be huge deltas as back markers struggle up hill and front runners zoom down.

There’s also the crash factor that could come into play especially if the winds are tricky or the weather is bad.

After consideration I have no reason to change yesterday’s assessment that if you’re not in the top ten now it’s extremely unlikely you’ll get there barring a catastrophic breakdown by a lot of teams and riders.  The gap between 10th and 11th is a full 1:37 and it’s 8:20 to Voeckler.

Whether he can hang on is, I think, the question of the day.  He’s not known as a climber though he did pretty good in the Pyrenees so this is probably the last chance for him to put some seconds in the bank on a Stage suited to his style.

Vs. will join the race in progress at 8 am.

• Jada Yuan Previews the Hell Out of the Tour de France in the New Yorker, 7/1/11 at 2:00 PM
• Le Tour 2011 official site
• Your The Stars Hollow Gazette Le Tour coverage tags-
• Le Tour
• Le Tour 2010
• Le Tour 2011

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

July 19 is the 200th day of the year (201st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 165 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1848, a two-day Women’s Rights Convention opens in Seneca Falls, New York. There the “Bloomers” are introduced.

The Seneca Falls Convention was an early and influential women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19-20, 1848. It was organized by local New York women upon the occasion of a visit by Boston-based Lucretia Mott, a Quaker famous for her speaking ability, a skill rarely cultivated by American women at the time. The local women, primarily members of a radical Quaker group, organized the meeting along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a skeptical non-Quaker who followed logic more than religion.

The meeting spanned two days and six sessions, and included a lecture on law, a humorous presentation, and multiple discussions about the role of women in society. Stanton and the Quaker women presented two prepared documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and an accompanying list of resolutions, to be debated and modified before being put forward for signatures. A heated debate sprang up regarding women’s right to vote, with many including Mott urging the removal of this concept, but Frederick Douglass argued eloquently for its inclusion, and the suffrage resolution was retained. Exactly 100 of approximately 300 attendees signed the document, mostly women.

The convention was seen by some of its contemporaries, including featured speaker Mott, as but a single step in the continuing effort by women to gain for themselves a greater proportion of social, civil and moral rights, but it was viewed by others as a revolutionary beginning to the struggle by women for complete equality with men. Afterward, Stanton presented the resulting Declaration of Sentiments as a foundational document in the American woman’s suffrage movement, and she promoted the event as the first time that women and men gathered together to demand the right for women to vote. Stanton’s authoring of the History of Woman Suffrage helped to establish the Seneca Falls Convention as the moment when the push for women’s suffrage first gained national prominence. By 1851, at the second National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, the issue of women’s right to vote had become a central tenet of the women’s rights movement.

The problem with Rupert Murdoch’s “philosophy” is that eventually something starts to “smell” really bad and they start digging. The more they dig, the more bodies they find. Like peeling an onion.

David Carr, “Media Equation” columnist for The New York Times, taks with Rachel Maddow about the News Corps record of unethical bullying and illegal business behavior and looks ahead to Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks testifying before British Parliament Tuesday.

There is a possibility that Ms. Brooks may not testify because of her arrest on Sunday.

Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel

By David Carr

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

snip

Litigation can have an annealing effect on companies, forcing them to re-examine the way they do business. But as it was, the full extent and villainy of the hacking was never known because the News Corporation paid serious money to make sure it stayed that way.

And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.

snip

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

snip

The complaint stated that the breach was traced to an I.P. address registered to News America and that after the break-in, Floorgraphics lost contracts from Safeway, Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly.

Much of the lawsuit was based on the testimony of Robert Emmel, a former News America executive who had become a whistle-blower. After a few days of testimony, the News Corporation had heard enough. It settled with Floorgraphics for $29.5 million and then, days later, bought it, even though it reportedly had sales of less than $1 million.

Murdoch’s tactics are not a secret. In an article from Forbes written in 2005, Peter Lattman described the business practices by Paul V. Carlucci, then head of the marketing division of News America:

Paul V. Carlucci takes no prisoners. The head of a marketing division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Carlucci once rallied his sales force by showing a film clip from The

Untouchables in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat.

I wonder if Mr. Carlucci is friends with Carl Palladino the former NY State gubernatorial candidate with a penchant for solving problems with a baseball bat?

If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:

(or why the left blogosfero is bankrupt).

This doesn’t really qualify as an essay. It’s just an observation about the left blogosfero and its many blindspots.  In this case the blindspot is the California Prisoners’ Hunger Strike, which is today on its 18th day.  These prisoners deserve our support. No doubt about it.  So I put up an essay about it at the Great Orange Satan.  How else to get the situation before a zillion people quickly? Would the denizens of the left step forward and fight for prisoners?  Cue: crickets.

My point: the prisoners need support, and they need it soon to bring about a humane and peaceful resolution of their grievances.  They need expressions of support.  From bloggers.  From blog readers. They need our help.  Otherwise many of them will be seriously injured by the fasting, and they may ultimately be force fed by the prison officials in scenes reminiscent of Northern Ireland.

Of course, you won’t be able to watch that.  It will be done “privately.”  But I digress.

The way GOS works now virtually assures that nobody will see,  much less react to the call for support.  See for yourself.

And the smaller blogs?  Let’s see.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Eurozone leaders race to end split on debt and Greece

By Laurent Thomet, AFP

9 hrs ago

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Paul Krugman: Letting Bankers Walk

Ever since the current economic crisis began, it has seemed that five words sum up the central principle of United States financial policy: go easy on the bankers.

This principle was on display during the final months of the Bush administration, when a huge lifeline for the banks was made available with few strings attached. It was equally on display in the early months of the Obama administration, when President Obama reneged on his campaign pledge to “change our bankruptcy laws to make it easier for families to stay in their homes.” And the principle is still operating right now, as federal officials press state attorneys general to accept a very modest settlement from banks that engaged in abusive mortgage practices.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Why Did Congress Waste Six Months?

The House Republican strategy to link a normally routine increase in the nation’s debt limit with a crusade to slash spending has already had a high cost, threatening the nation’s credit rating and making the United States look dysfunctional and incompetent to the rest of the world.

But that’s not the most awful thing about it.

What’s even worse is this entirely artificial, politician-created crisis has kept government from doing what taxpayers expect it to do, which is to solve problems that citizens care about.

The most obvious problem is unemployment. The best way short-term to drive the deficit down is to spur growth and get Americans back to work. Has anyone noticed that Americans with jobs can provide for their families, put money into the economy-and, oh yes, pay taxes that increase revenues and thus cut the deficit?