“Pondering 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.
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Trevor Timm: Obama’s troop increase in Syria is part of a troubling trend
When it comes to Syria, “no boots on the ground” was something of a mantra for Barack Obama. He has repeated it dozens of times, but not anymore. On Monday, he told the world at least 250 US troops would soon be fighting inside the country. With American military members now slowly streaming into multiple countries in the Middle East, we’re entrenched in yet another war and it’s unclear how we’ll get out of it.
To much less fanfare last week, the White House also reportedly loosened the military engagement rules in Syria, so that US servicemen are allowed more leeway to kill civilians as collateral damage in pursuit of Isis. Rightwing Republicans have been clamoring for this policy change for months, despite the risk of it completely backfiring on the US and creating many more terrorists than it kills. At the time, Democrats criticized the likes of Ted Cruz for demanding such a policy. Now there is near silence as the Obama administration has made it a reality.
Robert Kuttner: Let’s Hear It for Tax and Spend
There was a truly silly dogfight last week between the Clinton and Sanders camps on who was the worse offender when it came to possibly raising taxes on the middle class. Clinton had supported Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s proposed three cents an ounce tax on sugary drinks to pay for universal pre-kindergarten. Sanders countered that this was a tax increase on working people. [..]
Sanders, as it happens, has proposed a number of tax increases that would hit working families, including higher payroll taxes to finance his proposed Medicare for All program. My American Prospect colleague Paul Starr has calculated that all of Sanders’ tax hikes would add up to about $1.5 trillion a year. That’s about eight percent of GDP.
Most of these proposed taxes would hit the wealthy, but some would bite the working middle class. And as Starr observes, some of the proposed tax levels on the wealthy are so high that they are implausible economically, such as a top capital gains rate of 64.2 percent.
Behind this latest Clinton-Sanders squabble are several momentous policy questions.
Robert Creamer: Big Business Uses Universities in Last Ditch Effort to Kill Fair Overtime Rules
For decades corporate CEOs have used their political power to neuter the Federal Wage and Hour laws — first passed in 1938 during the New Deal to provide Americans a 40-hour work week and guarantee that most working people received time and half for overtime.
Last year, the Obama administration proposed new rules to put teeth back into the law so that it once again served its original intent.
But now big business is making one last desperate attempt to kill the new rules, and it is using a group of innocent-appearing “public spirited” shills to do its dirty work: America’s universities.
Business has recruited universities and colleges to file letters with the Department of Labor seeking to prevent implementation of the new tougher overtime rules — claiming they simply can’t afford it.
Rebecca Gordon: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t
The allegations against the man were serious indeed. [..]
None of it was true.
And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah — with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials — is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror.
So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname, Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in Guantánamo.
Amanda Marcotte: They have no idea what to do: The GOP lacks basic competence — just look at Kasich and Cruz’s “brilliant” plan to deny Trump the nomination
Donald Trump is blessed with incompetent enemies. Not since Jeb Bush dropped out of the race have we seen anything as comically pathetic as John Kasich and Ted Cruz openly conspiring to deny Trump the nomination through a half-baked plan to divvy up the remaining primary states in an attempt to deny Trump a large enough delegate lead to avoid a contested convention. The whole sorry affair is a reminder that the Republicans have a serious deficiency when it comes to competent leadership, which is one of the main reasons that Trump has been able to get as far as he has in this election season.
The Cruz/Kasich plan is something that could only be hatched by people whose confidence in their own cleverness is completely unmoored from any real world evidence for it. The idea is that, at this late stage in the game, each of them will “throw” certain states to the other through the magic of not doing local campaigning for a week. Kasich promises not to campaign in Indiana anymore and Cruz will, in exchange, not campaign in Oregon and New Mexico.
And….that’s it. They aren’t withdrawing their names from the ballot. Nor are their campaigns sending out messages to voters to vote for the other guy. The hope is that by Kasich simply removing himself from the campaign trail in Indiana for a whole week, the voters who were planning to go for him will beat feet to Cruz, edging him over Trump, who is currently in the lead in the winner-takes-most state. Brilliant plan, guys. Really top notch. It will be a total surprise when voters, completely unaware or indifferent to this plan, just vote for who they want and Trump wins anyway.
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