Tag: Punting the Pundits

There is nothing Republicans would rather the American people forget more than George W. Bush, who doesn’t even have a bit-part at the GOP convention opening in Tampa.

But W’s ghost may be there, anyway.

The National Weather Service says tropical storm Isaac is now heading for New Orleans, and Isaac is projected to become a Category 1 hurricane by the time it makes landfall late Monday or early Tuesday.

Isaac is very likely to revive memories of the Bush administration’s monumental incompetence in dealing with the needs of Americans caught in Hurricane Katrina.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Why Is God Punishing The GOP With Storms? Three Wrath-Provoking Possibilities

When Hurricane Gunter tormented Republicans during their 2008 convention, one of the ecancellations caused by the storm was a speech from outgoing President George W. Bush. He’s the one who famously said he didn’t need to ask his ex-President Dad for advice because “there is a higher Father I appeal to.”

Apparently that Father didn’t find President Bush all that appealing. In fact, the storm’s path shifted away from the convention immediately after his speech was cancelled. Hello, down there, is anybody listening?

This year’s Republican Convention is also being forced to shorten and change its schedule as a fearsome wind and rain bears down from the ocean. “ … A destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand. The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet.” The theological world is ablaze with speculation about what might have motivated God to send a hurricane against the Republican Party’s National Convention for the second time in a row.

Okay, maybe it’s not ablaze with speculation. But it should be. After all, it was Republican preacher Pat Robertson who expressed the idea that hurricanes and storms are God’s way of registering disapproval with ghuman behavior. By that reasoning, it’s clear that the GOP has displeased the Supreme Being again mightily this year.

But why? Unlike some, we claim no special answers about the nature of ultimate reality or the Deity, much less the specifics of His preferred policy proposals. But here are three possible sources for all this windborne wrath: [..]

Roger Cohen; Obama’s Team of Idolizers

NEW YORK – When Barack Obama was on the presidential campaign trail the first time, he used the title of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln biography, “Team of Rivals,” to describe the entourage he would seek at the White House, a combative group from across the political spectrum who would challenge his every idea. [..]

Well, four years have passed and Obama has adroitly steered the bankrupted United States he inherited away from the precipice but has not provided a “different future” worthy of the hope invested in him; and that imagined team of rivals became a team, or rather a coterie, of idolizers.

There is only one star in the galaxy at this White House and his name is Barack Obama. Everyone in the Sun King’s court has drunk the Kool-Aid.

Eugene Robinson: The Great Medicare Switcheroo

TAMPA, Fla.-Who knew? In the hall-of-mirrors parallel universe where the Republican National Convention is taking place, the GOP stands tall and proud as the party of Medicare.

I’m still a little confused about the historical timeline in this alternate reality. Was it President Goldwater who signed into law the nation’s health care guarantee for seniors? Was it President Dole who made sure the program remained solvent? Did John McCain win in 2008?

It must be that in RNC World, the past simply doesn’t exist. There is no other explanation for all the Great Society rhetoric coming from Republicans who once claimed to favor small government, limited entitlements and a balanced budget.

There will be two big stars at the Republican National Convention, and neither of them will be Mitt Romney. One will, of course, be Paul Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate. The other will be Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who will give the keynote address. And while the two men could hardly look or sound more different, they are brothers under the skin.

How so? Both have carefully cultivated public images as tough, fiscally responsible guys willing to make hard choices. And both public images are completely false.

I’ve written a lot lately deconstructing the Ryan myth, so let me turn today to Mr. Christie. [..]

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Why Subsidize CEOs?

By now, most Americans recognize-and resent-that top corporations compensate their executives in ways that are simply indecent. Eye-popping salaries. Outlandish bonuses. Lavish stock options. Golden-nay, platinum-parachutes. What fewer realize about this obscene compensation is that we’re all paying for it. Literally.

Last week the Institute for Policy Studies released a blockbuster report exposing how US taxpayers subsidize executive compensation, and revealing some of the worst offenders.

Those tax subsidies for executive excess add up to over $14 billion a year. That equals 12 percent of the planned savings from the deficit deal sequesters, 211,732 times the annual cost of hiring an elementary school teacher, or $46 for each American. In other words, says co-author Scott Klinger, “Every man, woman and child in America is buying a CEO lunch.”

Simon Johnson: One Man Against The Wall Street Lobby

Two diametrically opposed views of Wall Street and the dangers posed by global megabanks came more clearly into focus last week. On the one hand, William B. Harrison, Jr. — former chairman of JP Morgan Chase — argued in the New York Times that today’s massive banks are an essential part of a well-functioning market economy, and not at all helped by implicit government subsidies.

On the other hand, there is a new powerful voice who knows how big banks really work and who is willing to tell the truth in great and convincing detail. Jeff Connaughton — a former senior political adviser who has worked both for and against powerful Wall Street interests over the years — has just published a page-turning memoir that is also a damning critique of how Wall Street operates, the political capture of Washington, and our collective failure to reform finance in the past four years. The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, is the perfect antidote to disinformation put about by global megabanks and their friends. [..]

Mr. Harrison makes strong claims. All of his arguments are demonstrably false. If you think Mr. Harrison and the other defenders of megabanks have even the slightest veneer of plausibility, you must read Jeff Connaughton’s book.

On Thursday, Mitt Romney unveiled the latest in a series of bad ideas for taking government duties out of Washington and hiding them in the back rooms of state capitols. Mostly, Mr. Romney wants to allow states to quietly smother social programs the federal government has run for decades. In the case of his new energy policy, he wants to give states power to bypass Washington’s caution in burrowing for oil, gas and coal on federal lands.

States, he said, could accelerate the permitting process for energy extraction, resulting in far more production than Washington has allowed. That’s probably true because many states have traditionally been poor stewards of their resources. They are far more captive than the federal government to the energy and timber interests that have long pressed for this concession and have far less oversight by government inspectors and journalists.

No state, on its own, has an interest in preventing global climate change or reducing energy imports for strategic reasons. Those are national issues that need to be closely supervised by a government with broader interests than competing with the next state for oil leases. Bypassing those controls, which frustrates Mr. Romney and his generous supporters in the energy industry, are at the heart of his new energy policy.

Robert Reich: Romney’s Lying Machine

I’ve been struck by the baldness of Romney’s repetitive lies about Obama — that Obama ended the work requirement under welfare, for example, or that Obama’s Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare benefits.

The mainstream media along with a half-dozen independent fact-checking organizations and sites have called Romney on these whoppers, but to no avail. He keeps making these assertions.

Every campaign is guilty of exaggerations, embellishments, distortions, and half-truths. But this is another thing altogether. I’ve been directly involved in seven presidential campaigns, and I don’t recall a presidential candidate lying with such audacity, over and over again. Why does he do it, and how can he get away with it?

Richard (RJ) Escow: Banker Bill Harrison’s Bogus Brief for (Broken) Big Banks

Every day we rise and tell ourselves this will be a good day, free of that unique combination of predation, self-pity, mediocrity and disingenousness which characterizes the modern bank executive. And every day somebody proves us wrong.

Today it’s William B. “Bill” Harrison, Jr., the retired banker who engineered the mega-merger which created JPMorgan Chase. That means the capstone of Harrison’s career was the creation of an institution that has repeatedly broken the law, deceived its customers foreclosed on homeowners with a motley crew of college-aged temps known as “the Burger King kids,” received billions in public assistance …

… and still underperformed the Dow Jones average, dropping in stock value to $37.23 (Thursday’s closing price) from around $53 per share when it was created by Harrison in 2000.1 You’d have been better off buying Treasuries.

If that’s your idea of a stellar resume, you will no doubt read Harrison’s defense of mega-banks in the New York Times with great anticipation, an emotion which will be followed promptly thereafter by profound disappointment. Harrison’s apologia is as mediocre in its conception, as deceptive in its packaging, as vacant in its morality and as unimpressive in its execution as JPMorgan Chase itself.

And believe me, that’s saying something.

Eugene Robinson: For GOP, Storm Has Already Gathered

The uninvited participation of a hurricane at next week’s Republican convention would be superfluous. Buffeted by powerful internal winds, the party may be flooded with cash, but it’s already kind of a debris-strewn mess.

Who would have imagined that Topic A, in the days before GOP delegates gather in Tampa, would be abortion? Certainly the thought never crossed the minds of the convention planners who intended this four-day infomercial to be a nonstop indictment of President Obama’s performance on the economy. But the old line about the relationship between the political parties and their candidates-“Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line”-is so last century. [..]

But why does the Republican Party seek power? What does it really stand for? What does it hope to accomplish? What kind of America does it envision?

Keep an eye on that storm track as Isaac plows toward Florida. Maybe the elusive answers to those questions are blowin’ in the wind.

The economy will not recover until the housing market recovers, and the housing market will not recover until the broader economy recovers – a chicken-and-egg problem reflected, once again, in national housing figures. [..]

In the absence of aggressive debt relief efforts, it will be up to the Federal Reserve to keep mortgage rates low and expand its support for the flow of credit. It is also urgent for regulators at the Fed and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to complete new regulations, required under the Dodd-Frank financial reform, to define and ensure affordable, safe mortgages, an important step in reviving private mortgage markets.

Still, without far-reaching federal help, it will be years, possibly decades, before the housing market and the broader economy are restored to health.

Owen Jones: Getting Rid of Dubya Wasn’t Enough. The US Remains a Bully

The issue isn’t Obama, any more than it was Bush before him. The issue is US power

How easy it was to scrutinize US power when George W. Bush was in office. After all, it was difficult to defend an administration packed with such repulsive characters, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, whose attitude towards the rest of the world amounted to thuggish contempt. [..]

It was a bad dream that went on for eight years, and no wonder much of the world is still breathing a sigh of relief. But US foreign policy these days escapes scrutiny. In part, that is down a well-grounded terror of the only viable alternative to Barack Obama: the increasingly deranged US right. A deliberate shift to a softer, more diplomatic tone has helped, too. But it is also the consequence of a strategic failure on the part of many critics of US foreign policy in the Bush era. As protesters marched in European cities with placards of Bush underneath “World’s No 1 Terrorist”, the anti-war crusade became personalized. Bush seemed to be the problem, and an understanding of US power – the nature of which remains remarkably consistent from president to president – was lost.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Why Subsidize CEOs?

By now, most Americans recognize-and resent-that top corporations compensate their executives in ways that are simply indecent. Eye-popping salaries. Outlandish bonuses. Lavish stock options. Golden-nay, platinum-parachutes. What fewer realize about this obscene compensation is that we’re all paying for it. Literally.

Last week the Institute for Policy Studies released a blockbuster report exposing how US taxpayers subsidize executive compensation, and revealing some of the worst offenders.

Those tax subsidies for executive excess add up to over $14 billion a year. That equals 12 percent of the planned savings from the deficit deal sequesters, 211,732 times the annual cost of hiring an elementary school teacher, or $46 for each American. In other words, says co-author Scott Klinger, “Every man, woman and child in America is buying a CEO lunch.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Elizabeth Warren vs. Mr. Personality

Elizabeth Warren is the kind of person Massachusetts has always liked to send to the U.S. Senate.

She would instantly become a national leader, which appeals in a state that has sent to Washington Democrats such as John and Edward Kennedy and Republicans such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Edward Brooke. The Harvard Law School professor who warned of abuses in the financial system long before the economic crisis should draw suburban liberals who admire her seriousness as well as lunch-bucket Democrats who appreciate her populism. [..]

So why hasn’t one of this year’s most exciting Senate candidates put the election away? The obstacle is a Republican incumbent who is making voters forget that he’s a Republican. If former House Speaker Tip O’Neill preached that all politics is local, Sen. Scott Brown makes all politics personal. He’s running even or, in one recent poll, slightly ahead of Warren simply because so many voters like him.

Gregg Muttet: Mission Accomplished for Big Oil?

In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and occupation, U.S. troops finally left Iraq. In their place, Big Oil is now present in force and the country’s oil output, crippled for decades, is growing again. Iraq recently reclaimed the number two position in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), overtaking oil-sanctioned Iran. Now, there’s talk of a new world petroleum glut. So is this finally mission accomplished?

Well, not exactly. In fact, any oil company victory in Iraq is likely to prove as temporary as George W. Bush’s triumph in 2003. The main reason is yet another of those stories the mainstream media didn’t quite find room for: the role of Iraqi civil society. But before telling that story, let’s look at what’s happening to Iraqi oil today, and how we got from the “no blood for oil” global protests of 2003 to the present moment.

An inefficient health care system is costing $1.2 trillion, but many economists want to fix the budget by slashing it.

Economists tend not to be very good at economics, which is one of the main reasons that the world is facing such a prolonged downturn. Few economists were able to recognise the enormous imbalances created by housing bubbles in the United States and elsewhere, or to understand that the collapse of these bubbles would lead to a prolonged period of stagnation in the absence of a vigorous response by governments.

Economists’ grasp of economics has not improved since the start of the downturn. There is little agreement within the profession on the appropriate way to bring the economy back to its potential level of output. Nor is there even agreement as to whether this is possible.

Instead, many economists are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, yelling that we have to do something about budget deficits. This concern is bizarre since it is easy to show that the current deficit in the United States is almost entirely due to the collapse of the housing bubble. The loss of revenue from this collapse, coupled with the measures taken to offset the impact of the downturn, explain almost all of the rise in the deficit since 2007, when it was just 1.2 per cent of GDP.

Robert Reich: The Fanatical GOP

We’re witnessing the capture by fanatics of what was once a great and important American political party.

The Republican Party platform committee now includes a provision calling for a constitutional amendment banning all abortions, without an exception for rape or incest. This is basically Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s position. (At least the GOP platform doesn’t assert that women’s bodies automatically reject “legitimate” rapists’ sperm.)

Paul Ryan, Romney’s selection for vice president, has co-sponsored 38 anti-abortion measures while in the House of Representatives, including several containing no exception for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

But the GOP’s fanaticism goes far beyond the its growing absolutism about abortion.

Dennis Kucinich: Tilling the Ground for the Seeds of Terrorism

After more than 10 years of war against al Qaeda and the accompanying global “war on terrorism,” we have failed to learn that our actions create reactions. Our presence creates destabilization, then radicalization. Occupations create insurgencies. In Afghanistan, we have fueled the very insurgency we struggle to fight. [..]

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria — al Qaeda surfs instability created or supported by U.S. interventions. Al Qaeda is ready to exploit resentment toward the U.S. while capitalizing on the openings created by U.S. interventionism. As a result our U.S. tax dollars are being used to fuel the rise of extremism.

Have we learned nothing from the Soviet Union’s demise as a result of its adventure in Afghanistan? Will we continue to spend tax dollars to create even more U.S. enemies which will then be used to justify the expenditure of more U.S. tax dollars, thus setting the stage for an accelerated downward spiral for our economy and our own decline as a great power?

Shane Hayden; Giving In to the Surveillance State

IN March 2002, John M. Poindexter, a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, sat down with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency. Mr. Poindexter sketched out a new Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness,, that proposed to scan the world’s electronic information – including phone calls, e-mails and financial and travel records – looking for transactions associated with terrorist plots. The N.S.A., the government’s chief eavesdropper, routinely collected and analyzed such signals, so Mr. Poindexter thought the agency was an obvious place to test his ideas.

He never had much of a chance. When T.I.A.’s existence became public, it was denounced as the height of post-9/11 excess and ridiculed for its creepy name. Mr. Poindexter’s notorious role in the Iran-contra affair became a central focus of the debate. He resigned from government, and T.I.A. was dismantled in 2003.

But what Mr. Poindexter didn’t know was that the N.S.A. was already pursuing its own version of the program, and on a scale that he had only imagined. A decade later, the legacy of T.I.A. is quietly thriving at the N.S.A. It is more pervasive than most people think, and it operates with little accountability or restraint.

There’s something trying about an unforgiving man suddenly in need of forgiveness.

Yet Todd Akin is right. He shouldn’t have to get out of the United States Senate race in Missouri simply for saying what he believes. He reflects a severe stance on abortion that many in his party embrace, including the new vice presidential candidate. [..]

“I talk about one word, one sentence, one day out of place, and, all of a sudden, the entire establishment turns on you,” Representative Akin complained to the conservative radio talk-show host Dana Loesch on Tuesday as he spurned pleas from Mitt Romney and other G.O.P. big shots to abort his bid. He continued: “They just ran for cover at the first sign of any gunfire, and I think we need to rush to the gunfire.”

He’s right again. Other Republicans are trying to cover up their true identity to get elected. Even as party leaders attempted to lock the crazy uncle in the attic in Missouri, they were doing their own crazy thing down in Tampa, Fla., by reiterating language in their platform calling for a no-exceptions Constitutional amendment outlawing abortion, even in cases of rape, incest and threat to the life of the mother.

Bryce Covert: For Some Women, Discrimination Prevents Return to Work

Women have yet to recover in the recovery. While men suffered bloated unemployment levels during the “mancession,” the trends have since reversed. Since the beginning of the recovery (June 2009), men experienced more than quadruple the job gains made by women. This can at least be partially explained by the fact that men were climbing back from low employment levels, plus massive layoffs in some areas, such as education, where women hold the majority of jobs. But can it all be explained that way? A new study helps fill in the picture with what else might be at work: good old-fashioned discrimination.

There are some logical, if preventable, reasons for women’s employment struggles: first and foremost is the fact that austerity and budget cutting has lead to a historic loss of public sector jobs, and women, who are the majority of government workers, have born the brunt of those layoffs. We’ve lost about 600,000 public sector jobs since the recession ended, making for the smallest government workforce relative to our population since 1968. Much of those were public school teachers. For every ten jobs women gained in the private sector during the recovery, they’ve lost more than four public sector jobs. And yes, we might expect men to make faster job gains after experiencing such low levels of employment during the height of the crisis.

Alison Glass: No Person Shall Be Deprived of Life, Liberty or Property… Unless the Oil and Gas Industry Says So

Eminent domain, the government’s right to condemn (or take) private land for “public use,” has at times been a highly contentious topic because it can displace people from their homes to make way for construction of different projects, like highways or roads, civic buildings and other types of public infrastructure. However, what some may not realize is that several states have granted eminent domain authority to certain private entities, including oil and gas companies. These companies are using it as a tool to seize private land, which increases profits and benefits their wallets.

According to the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, in order to pursue eminent domain, the land must be taken for “public use” and the private property owners must receive “just compensation.” [..]

Traditionally, the “public use” provision referred to projects like roads, schools, parks and other public facilities that could be directly used by all. However, the meaning of “public use” has been loosely interpreted in recent years.

Jodi jacobson: As Romney and Ryan Dissemble, RNC Prepares Radical Anti-Choice Platform Based on Personhood

As of today, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan may find themselves in a wee bit of a bind.

For the past two days, the pair have been running around trying to assure the press and ultimately women voters that they really do believe in “real rape,” not just “legitimate rape,” that they are not as misogynistic as Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, and that, of course, a Romney-Ryan Administration would never eliminate rape and incest exceptions for abortion.

And, now it appears that, all the while, the people really in charge of the GOP-fundamentalist anti-choicers among them-have been writing a party platform that not only makes all of that a lie, but is in effect a promise to make the personhood of fertilized eggs the law of the land.

Michele Chen: Cultural Miseducation: Knowledge, Power and Ethnic Studies

This summer, Tucson students, educators, and activist did something rebellious: they celebrated books. These weren’t just any books, of course. They were the books that had been deemed contraband by school authorities, vilified as tools of a curriculum that promotes ethnic hatred. In other words, they were works like Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, Mexican White Boy, the play Zoot Suit, and Like Water for Chocolate. Texts that aim to foster critical thinking, political curiosity, and other dangerous behaviors.

The idea that these books are “subversive” was a pretext for a crackdown on Mexican American studies in Tucson. And once the controversy was broadcast across the country, Americans of all backgrounds saw exactly what these programs threatened: an ossified conservative establishment that masks social control as education.

But the school authorities probably weren’t just annoyed that the books contained radical messages. It was who was reading them that was really troubling: it was Latino youth learning about the conflicts and cultural survival that have carried through history. This has triggered an official campaign of oppression, involving a state-led McCarthyesque investigation. This set off a wave of resistance through legal challenges and grassroots protests using creativity and humor, culminating in the youth-led Freedom Summer.

Last week Vice President Joe Biden did a courageous thing, he promised an audience in southern Virginia that there will be no cuts whatsoever to Social Security in a second Obama Administration. He used the strongest possible language, telling customers at a local diner: “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.” [..]

However, Biden also lives in a city where calling for cuts to Social Security is the way to demonstrate your manhood. The bigger the cuts and the more frequent the calls, the higher your status. And, there are plenty of rewards for those politicians who go down fighting for Social Security cuts. Just check out the salaries for the lobbying jobs of the Blue Dog Democrats who have left office in recent years. [..]

In this amazing city, the people who want to take a hatchet to the Social Security and Medicare benefits that tens of millions of ordinary workers will need in retirement are considered courageous. The people who want to tax Wall Street speculation, who want to crack down on multi-billion dollar abuses by the pharmaceutical industry, and who want to go after CEOs who rip off their companies for tens of millions of dollars a year — well, they’re just crazy. After all, no one gets paid big bucks for going after people with money.

Richard {RJ) Eskow: A Tale of Three CEOs: Romney, Bain, and a Crooked Executive’s Overlooked Story

In the annals of Mitt Romney’s days at Bain Capital, one story seems to have escaped our collective memory. It involves Bain’s acquisition of a New York City drug store chain during Mitt Romney’s tenure there, and the hiring of a new president who would turn out to have pronounced criminal tendencies.

When the story of Duane Reade’s Anthony Cuti is put together with the better-known story of Bain’s relationship with a Medicare-defrauding lab testing company, it becomes a tale of two criminal CEOs — and of the presidential candidate who was involved in choosing them both. [..]

It certainly raises questions about Romney’s judgement, however. Isola was promoted from within, while Cuti was presumably selected after a thorough search. In both cases, Mitt Romney had responsibility for ensuring that the right person was selected for the job. It’s reasonable to ask whether this casts a negative light on a would-be president’s ability to judge human character and make good hiring decisions.

Ari Berman: Ohio GOP Admits Early Voting Cutbacks Are Racially Motivated

Earlier this month I reported how Ohio Republicans were limiting early voting hours in Democratic counties, while expanding them on nights and weekends in Republican counties.

In response to the public outcry, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who intervened in favor of limiting early voting hours in Democratic counties, issued a statewide directive mandating uniform early voting hours in all eighty-eight Ohio counties. Husted kept early voting hours from 8 am to 5 pm on weekdays from October 2 to 19 and broadened hours from 8 am to 7 pm from October 22 to November 2. But he refused to expand early voting hours beyond 7 pm during the week, on weekends or three days prior to the election (which is being challenged in court by the Obama campaign)-when it is most convenient for many working Ohioans to vote. Rather than expanding early voting hours across the state, Husted limited them for everybody. Voter suppression for all! [..]

Republicans were for reforms like early voting until Democrats started using them. “It just so happened that 2008] was the first time that early voting had been used in large numbers to mobilize African American and Latino voters,” Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Huffington Post. A federal court ruled on Thursday that early voting cutbacks in Florida-where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one among early voters in 2008 – [violated the Voting Rights Act. As Doug Preisse admitted on Sunday, Republicans are doing everything in their power to make sure 2012 isn’t a repeat of 2008.

Greg Mitchell: ‘Newsweek’ Cover: Niall Ferguson Hates Obama, Has Man-Crush on Ryan

Newsweek turned into a parody of itself months ago-call it what you will, NewsBeast, The Daily Weak, whatever-but is anyone even bothering to laugh now? This week, it follows (as if to balance the scales) its “Is Romney a Wimp” cover with a blast at Obama by ever-more-right-wing Niall Ferguson, titled “Hit the Road, Barack.” Since Newsweek seems inspired by Ray Charles, perhaps it will put Representative Todd Akin on next week’s cover under the heading, “What’d I Say?” Or the GOP congressman who skinny-dipped in the Sea of Galilee and “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.”

Would you be surprised if it did?

Can we finally say the thing we have not said so far?

Last week, a white supremacist shot up a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, killing six people and wounding three. It is considered likely that the shooter mistook the Sikhs, whose men wear beards and turbans, for Muslims. The massacre came a few weeks after a characteristically baseless charge by Michele Bachmann and several other conservative legislators that a Muslim aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ties to Islamic extremism.

The juxtaposition of those two events is emphatically not meant to suggest Bachmann somehow “caused” the Wisconsin rampage. No, the point is that we are looking for terror in all the wrong places. Or, perhaps more accurately, that we are not looking for it in all the right places.

Peter J. Hotez: Tropical Diseases: The New Plague of Poverty

[..] Poverty takes many tolls, but in the United States, one of the most tragic has been its tight link with a group of infections known as the neglected tropical diseases, which we ordinarily think of as confined to developing countries.

While immigration is sometimes blamed for introducing neglected tropical diseases into the United States, the real issue is that they are now, to varying degrees, also being transmitted within our borders. Without new interventions, they are here to stay and destined to trap people in poverty for decades to come. Fifty years ago, Michael Harrington’s book “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” became a national best seller. Today more people than ever before live in poverty in this country. We must now turn our attention to the diseases of this Other America.

Baher Azmy: Obama turns back the clock on Guantanamo

New rules from the Obama Justice Department threaten to return Guantanamo Bay to the legal black hole it was in during the early days of the George W. Bush administration. The rules, which began trickling out in May, are to be reviewed Friday in a hearing before a federal judge in Washington. They restrict lawyers’ access to detainees who have lost their initial habeas corpus petitions. The effect would be to wrest control of attorney-client access away from the courts and give the military nearly complete discretion to dictate if and when attorneys can visit detainees, how many attorneys may work on a case, what information lawyers may obtain and use in representing their clients, and where and how this information can be used.

In other words, far from closing the prison camp as he promised, President Obama is steadily returning Guantanamo to the secretive and hopeless internment camp that he vilified as a candidate. […]

Torture was President Bush’s legacy at Guantanamo. I hope that President Obama’s legacy will not be that he legitimized indefinite detention without charge and made Guantanamo a place where the United States sends Muslim detainees to grow old and die.

Carl Gibson: What Do Stoners and Mitt Romney Have in Common?

Every smart weed smoker knows that while you’re applying for jobs, it’s best to stay clean. While all smokers have unique remedies they swear to when it comes to getting THC out of your system in a hurry, we all know it’s best to just lay off until after passing that drug test when you’re looking for work. Mitt Romney should’ve kept his financial records clean in preparation for applying for the nation’s toughest job.

Mitt Romney has been eyeing the presidency for the better part of a decade. Knowing that his dad set a precedent with presidential candidates releasing multiple years of tax returns, one would think Romney would use the years in between presidential runs to be honest with his accounting and file clean tax returns if he really wants the nation’s highest office. There’s no test tougher than the arduous ones presidential candidates take, and a smart candidate would make sure he “pisses clean” when it comes to his own finances.