Tag: Punting the Pundits

It’s hard to say what is weirder:

A Sister of Mercy writing about the Kama Sutra, sexual desire and “our yearnings for pleasure.”

Or the Vatican getting so hot and bothered about the academic treatise on sexuality that the pope censures it, causing it to shoot from obscurity to the top tier of Amazon.com’s best-seller list six years after it was published.

Just the latest chapter in the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push American nuns – and all Catholic women – back into moldy subservience.

Even for a church that moves glacially, this was classic. “Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” by Sister Margaret Farley – a 77-year-old professor emeritus at Yale’s Divinity School, a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and an award-winning scholar – came out in 2006.

Michelle Chen: Unwelcome Guests: Work Visa Programs Cheat Global Labor, Build Global Capital

When immigration comes up in Washington, politicians either politely ignore the issue or engage in lively debate on how best to punish and get rid of undocumented workers. Yet lawmakers give a strikingly warm embrace to certain types of immigrants. Those are the “legal” ones who enter with special visas under the pretext of having special skills or filling certain labor shortages–like Silicon Valley tech jobs or seasonal blueberry harvesting. So what makes one kind of immigrant valuable and another kind criminal?

So-called guestworker programs attest to the arbitrary politics of immigration that has generated a perfectly legal, global traffic in migrant labor. A new report by the advocacy group Global Workers Justice Alliance reveals how various federal visa programs funnel workers into special high-demand sectors, like amusement park staff or computer programmers. Like their “illegal” counterparts, these workers are inherently disempowered: they may be dependent on employers for legal status in the U.S., have their wages regularly stolen, or suffer sexual or physical abuse. Many lack the access to the health care and overtime pay that citizen workers often take for granted. As products of globalization, they’re sometimes compelled to endure virtual indentured servitude to provide critical wage remittances to their families back home.

The economic logic is simple, according to the report: externalize the costs to those who can’t afford to challenge authority.

Liz Dwyer: American Students Need to Copy Canada’s Tuition Protests

In the past four months, the Canadian province of Quebec has become a hotbed of Occupy Wall Street-style protests-marches with hundreds of thousands of protesters, and battles with tear gas throwing, pepper-spraying police. And it all started over proposed tuition increases at Quebec’s public universities.

Indeed the Quebec Spring first blossomed in February when the government proposed hiking tuition from $2,168 to $3,793 over the next five years. Thousands of students went on strike and the government, led by Premier Jean Charest, decided to play hardball and crack down with the now-infamous Bill 78, a law that limits protest rights.

Since then the protests and student boycotts have only grown. Nearly 200,000 students across the province have gone on strike. And the situation has revealed deeper frustrations with the government’s willingness to bail out businesses but not help the average student-or citizen. On May 22nd nearly 400,000 people-a full quarter of Montreal’s residents-participated in a protest march.

Susan Casey-Lefkowitz: Black Out, Speak Out: Canadians Protest War on Nature and Democracy

After the fall of the Berlin wall, I worked with environmental groups in Eastern Europe. They were looking at good examples of democracy and free speech from around the world to help build their own democratic societies. Canadian freedom of speech, respect for environmental laws, and ability of the public to participate in decision-making was a shining model. Over the last decade that I have worked with partners in Canada how things have changed. I have seen firsthand how the expanding tar sands bubble in Alberta has not only skewed the economy of Canada, but also pushed the government, environmental laws and even free speech and democracy to bow to the oil industry. Today NRDC will black out our webpage – along with hundreds of other groups across North America – to speak out and protest what in Canada has become an all out attack on democracy and nature in order to safeguard the interests of the tar sands oil industry. See, Black Out, Speak Out in Canada for more. Tar sands oil is expensive and puts us all on a path of worsening climate change at a time when people across America are suffering from unusual heat, floods, tornados and other extreme weather. When tar sands starts to take away basic individual rights, it is past time to call a halt and focus on cleaner forms of energy.

Last week’s May jobs numbers were bad news, regardless of how you look at them. Job growth over the last three months has averaged slightly less 100,000 a month, roughly the pace needed to keep pace with labor force growth. The unemployment rate ticked up to 8.2% and the employment to population ratio is still just 0.4 percentage points above its trough for the downturn. And real wages almost certainly declined in May.

However bad this story is, the usual gang of pundits cited in the media had their usual burst of over-reaction. There were many talking of a worldwide slowdown and a possible recession. This is a serious misreading of the jobs report and other recent economic data.

The main story of the apparent weakness of the last three months is the apparent strength of the prior three months. In other words, the story is still the weather. The relatively strong growth in jobs and other measures that was the result of a relatively mild winter meant that we would see weaker growth than normal in the spring.

Chris Hedges: Northern Light

I gave a talk last week at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University to the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Many in the audience had pinned small red squares of felt to their clothing. The carre rouge, or red square, has become the Canadian symbol of revolt. It comes from the French phrase carrement dans le rouge, or “squarely in the red,” referring to those crushed by debt.

The streets of Montreal are clogged nightly with as many as 100,000 protesters banging pots and pans and demanding that the old systems of power be replaced. The mass student strike in Quebec, the longest and largest student protest in Canadian history, began over the announcement of tuition hikes and has metamorphosed into what must swiftly build in the United States-a broad popular uprising. The debt obligation of Canadian university students, even with Quebec’s proposed 82 percent tuition hike over several years, is dwarfed by the huge university fees and the $1 trillion of debt faced by U.S. college students. The Canadian students have gathered widespread support because they linked their tuition protests to Quebec’s call for higher fees for health care, the firing of public sector employees, the closure of factories, the corporate exploitation of natural resources, new restrictions on union organizing, and an announced increase in the retirement age. Crowds in Montreal, now counting 110 days of protests, chant “On ne lâche pas“-“We’re not backing down.”

Bill McKibben: The Planet Wreckers

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it:  “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Joe Nocera: Turning Our Backs on Unions

“The Great Divergence” by Timothy Noah is a book about income inequality, and if you’re thinking, “Do we really need another book about income inequality?” the answer is yes. We need this one.

It stands out in part because Noah, a columnist for The New Republic, is not content to simply shake his fists at the heavens in anger. He spends exactly one chapter on what he calls the “rise of the stinking rich” – that is, the explosion in executive pay and what he calls “the financialization of the economy,” which has enriched one small segment of society at the expense of everyone else.

Mostly, he grapples with the deep, hard-to-tickle-out reasons that the gap between the rich and the middle class in the United States has widened to such alarming proportions. How much have technological advances contributed to income inequality? Globalization and off-shoring? The necessity of having a college education to land a decent-paying job? The decline of labor unions?

Wendell Potter: Guess Who Would Benefit From Privatizing Medicare?

If you think the idea of privatizing Medicare has gone away, that the health insurance industry has thrown in the towel on one of its biggest goals, there was fresh evidence last week that you would be wrong.

As I wrote more than a year ago — when Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) unveiled his plan to replace the Medicare system with one that would essentially be run by private insurers — Democrats would be foolish to think that Ryan couldn’t get the public to support the concept. I noted then that insurers would be investing heavily in efforts to convince people that Ryan’s plan represented the only way to save the Medicare program from insolvency.

One of the tried-and-true tactics insurers have used many times to influence public opinion is the enlistment of “third-party advocates” to disseminate industry talking points. Last week an industry friend in high places — Thomas Scully, who headed the Medicare program during much of the George W. Bush administration — weighed in on the matter. It is only a matter of time, Scully told Kaiser Health News, before politicians on both sides of the aisle endorse Ryan’s proposal of providing Medicare beneficiaries with a set amount of money every year to buy coverage from private insurers.

What might a reasonable, constructive presidential campaign look like?

To ask the question invites immediate dissent because we probably can’t even agree across philosophical or political lines what “reasonable” and “constructive” mean.

But let’s try an experiment: Can we at least reach consensus on the sort of debate between now and November that could help us solve some of our problems?  I’ll let you in on the outcome in advance: Ideology quickly gets in the way of even this modest effort.  

Will Hutton: The Facts Are Clear: This Cruel Austerity Experiment Has Failed

While the human cost of economic stupidity is all too visible, the world’s leaders are paralyzed by their dogma

Last week was an awesome warning of where go-it-alone austerity can lead. It produced some brutal evidence of where we end up when we place finance above economy and society. The markets are now betting not just on the break-up of the euro but on the arrival of a new economic dark age. The world economy is edging nearer to the abyss, and policymakers, none more than in Britain, are paralyzed by the stupidities of their home-spun economics. Yanis Varoufakis, ex-speechwriter for former Greek prime minister George Papandreou and now an economics professor in the US, said last week: “There is precisely zero chance of austerity working. It is the same as thinking you can escape from gravity by waving your arms up and down.”

It could hardly be more sobering. Money has flooded out of Spain, Greece and the peripheral European economies. Signs of the crisis range from Athen’s soup kitchens to Spain’s crowds of indignados protesting in the streets against austerity and a broken capitalism. Youth unemployment is sky-high. Less visible is the avalanche of money flowing into hoped-for safe havens in the US, Germany and even Britain. The last time the British government could sell government bonds at interest rates as low as today’s was in the early 1700s.

Charles M. Blow: Darkness in the Sunshine State

Florida ought to know better. And must do better, particularly on the issue of voting and discrimination.

But, then again, we are talking about Florida, the state of Bush v. Gore infamy and the one that will celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, with a statewide holiday on Sunday.

What am I getting at? This: Few states in the union have done more in recent years to restrict and suppress voting – particularly by groups who lean Democratic, such as young people, the poor and minorities – than Florida.

John Nichols: Progressive Faith Renewed by Recall Vote

Last Saturday, when my mom and I drove into the valley where our ancestors settled more than a century and a half ago, we were greeted by a huge “Barrett — June 5” sign.

Hand-painted with care, in Wisconsin red and white, and displayed in front of a farmhouse on the turn that leads into Wyoming Valley, it was a powerful reminder that June 5’s Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election has its roots in the rural regions and small towns of the state.

That’s where the progressive movement of a century ago took shape. This was the movement for which my great-grandfather and his friend John Blaine campaigned in Boscobel and Blue River, in Lone Rock and Spring Green and across the farm country of Grant, Lafayette, Richland and Iowa counties.

The White House must be telling itself there are still five months between now and Election Day, so the jobs picture could brighten. After all, we went through a similar mid-year slump in 2011 but came out fine.

But however you look at today’s jobs report, it’s a stunning reminder of how anemic the recovery has been – and how perilously close the nation is to falling into another recession. [..]

Republicans will have a field day with today’s jobs report, taking it as a sign that Obama’s economic policies have failed and we need instead their brand of fiscal austerity combined with more tax cuts for the wealthy.

But that’s precisely the reverse of what’s needed.

Robert Alverez: Nuclear Tuna and NPR’s Trivialization

NPR shouldn’t trivialize the risk of radioactive tuna from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Yesterday, National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story asserting that cesium-137 from the Fukushima nuclear accident found in Bluefish tuna on the west coast of the U.S. is harmless.

It’s not harmless. The Fukushima nuclear accident released about as much cesium-137 as a thermonuclear weapon with the explosive force of 11 million tons of TNT. In the spring of 1954, after the United States exploded nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the Japanese government had to confiscate about 4 million pounds of contaminated fish.

Radiation from Fukushima spread far and wide. Like American hydrogen bomb testing, the Fukushima nuclear accident deposited cesium-137 over 600,000 square-miles of the Pacific, as well as the Northern Hemisphere and Europe. With a half-life of 30 years, cesium-137 is taken up in the meat of the tuna as if it were potassium, indicating that the metabolism holds on to it.

Jessica Valenti: What Would George Tiller Do?

The late doctor trusted women. It was his philosophy and practice.

Today is the third anniversary of Dr. George Tiller’s assassination. On May 31, 2009, Tiller was shot and killed by Scott Roeder while he served as an usher in his Wichita church. Tiller was one of the only abortion providers in the country to provide late-term abortions. He often wore a button that said “Trust Women.”

I wonder, if Dr. Tiller were alive today, what he would think about the unwavering attack against women’s reproductive freedom and bodily integrity-if he could ever of imagined that American women would still not just be fighting for the right to abortion but for birth control. Or that there would be a national debate on whether or not it’s appropriate to call a woman who wants contraception coverage a “prostitute.” I imagine that even for a man who had seen a lot of misogyny in his life, the current climate against women would be shocking.

Since Tiller’s murder, the legislative agenda against reproductive justice-and common-sense decency-has been staggering.

Robert Weissman: The Transparently Secretive Chamber of Commerce

Well, the Big Business guys are transparent about one thing: They can’t stand the idea of the public holding them to account for their attempts to buy elections and influence policy, or even that they be prevented from corrupting the government contracting process through campaign spending.

The latest: They are so terrified of having their political spending disclosed that they are pushing in Congress legislation that would prohibit the government from requiring contractors to disclose their campaign-related spending.

Senator Susan Collins, R-Maine, is carrying their water, with the Orwellian “Keeping Politics Out of Federal Contracting Act,” a bill that recently passed the Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs and may well become law unless the public demands otherwise. To take action to stop this abomination, go here.

It has been clear for years that the Obama administration believes the shadow war on terrorism gives it the power to choose targets for assassination, including Americans, without any oversight. On Tuesday, The New York Times revealed who was actually making the final decision on the biggest killings and drone strikes: President Obama himself. And that is very troubling.

Mr. Obama has demonstrated that he can be thoughtful and farsighted, but, like all occupants of the Oval Office, he is a politician, subject to the pressures of re-election. No one in that position should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners located far from a battlefield – depriving Americans of their due-process rights – without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle.

Nick Turse: The Pentagon Detours to Terminator Planet

U.S. military documents tell the story vividly.  In the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa, an unmanned mini-submarine deployed from the USS Freedom detects an “anomaly”: another small remotely-operated sub with welding capabilities tampering with a major undersea oil pipeline.  The American submarine’s “smart software”  classifies the action as a possible threat and transmits the information to an unmanned drone flying overhead.  The robot plane begins collecting intelligence data and is soon circling over a nearby vessel, a possible mother ship, suspected of being involved with the “remote welder.”

At a hush-hush “joint maritime operations center” onshore, analysts pour over digital images captured by the unmanned sub and, according to a Pentagon report, recognize the welding robot “as one recently stolen and acquired by rebel antigovernment forces.”  An elite quick-reaction force is assembled at a nearby airfield and dispatched to the scene,  while a second unmanned drone is deployed to provide persistent surveillance of the area of operations.

And with that, the drone war is on.

E. J. Dionne: The Stakes in the Walker Recall

Recalls and impeachments are a remedy of last resort. Most of the time, voters who don’t like an incumbent choose to live with the offending politician until the next election, on the sensible theory that fixed terms of office and regular elections are adequate checks on abuses of power and extreme policies.

The question facing Wisconsin’s citizens is whether Gov. Scott Walker engaged in such extraordinary behavior that setting aside his election is both justified and necessary.   [..]

Walker seems to enjoy a slight advantage in the polls, having vastly outspent his foes up to now. Barrett, however, should have enough money to level the competition in the final days. This recall should not have had to happen. But its root cause was not the orneriness of Walker’s opponents but a polarizing brand of conservative politics that most Americans, including many conservatives, have good reason to reject.

Joe Conason: Why Cory Booker Got Bain Capital So Wrong

Cory Booker’s emotional televised plea to “stop attacking private equity” may have been the single greatest service he could perform for the Romney campaign. His immediate attempt to revise his remarks on behalf of President Obama, for whom he is supposed to act as a surrogate, only highlighted his earlier insistence that the harsh campaign criticism of Bain Capital, which he specifically defended, is “nauseating.”

But the Newark mayor’s feelings must be influenced by his own relationship with Wall Street, private equity and Bain. America’s financial titans have been very, very good to him.  [..]

But whatever he says about capital, the Newark mayor also knows that it takes a lot of money to win public office, like the U.S. Senate seat that may be in his future. What everyone else should know is that he expects to raise that campaign money from the same people and firms that have backed him from the beginning.

No reporter has ever asked him as far as I know. I don’t know if any will ask this time around. What did you mean by “Change” anyway? He ran a whole campaign on it and does anyone really know what Barack Obama meant he was going to change?

I’m in the camp that he hasn’t changed a damn thing. People will counter with Lilly Ledbetter. It’s a lovely law, but does anyone really believe that’s what was meant by the grandiose statement “Change”?

Of course I use Lilly Ledbetter as a symbol. President Obama obviously has more accomplishments than that. He really did change the laws and many people’s perceptions on gay rights for example. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is history. The government is no longer defending the Defense of Marriage Act. And the President of the United States is finally for gay marriage. But did people really think Senator Obama meant he would change gay rights legislation? Is that what the 2008 election was about?

Jim Hightower: Who Needs Wall Street Giants?

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and the handful of other behemoths of Wall Street that dominate American banking – who needs them?

After enduring years of insatiable greed by the slick-fingered hucksters who run these gambling houses; after watching in dismay as their ineptness and avarice drained more than $19 trillion from America’s household wealth since 2007 and plunged our real economy into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Depression; after witnessing their shameful demands for trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to save their banks and their jobs; and now after seeing them return immediately to business as usual, including paying multimillion-dollar bonuses to themselves — we have to ask: Huh!?!

Oh, no-no, cry the banking titans, don’t even think of looking behind the curtain! Trust us, say these Wall Street alchemists, for we are essential to juicing the economy with our complex abracadabra investment schemes.

Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks, War Crimes and the Pinochet Principle

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s protracted effort to fight extradition to Sweden suffered a body blow this week. Britain’s Supreme Court upheld the arrest warrant, issued in December 2010. After the court announced its split 5-2 decision, the justices surprised many legal observers by granting Assange’s lawyers an opportunity to challenge their decision-the first such reconsideration since the high-profile British extradition case from more than a decade ago against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The decision came almost two years to the day after Pvt. Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. The cases remind us that all too often whistle-blowers suffer, while war criminals walk.

Assange has not been charged with any crime, yet he has been under house arrest in England for close to two years, ever since a “European Arrest Warrant” was issued by Sweden (importantly, by a prosecutor, not by a judge). Hoping to question Assange, the prosecutor issued the warrant for suspicion of rape, unlawful coercion and sexual molestation. Assange offered to meet the Swedish authorities in their embassy in London, or in Scotland Yard, but was refused.

Bill Boyarsky: Who Will the President Kill Next? It’s a Secret

The revelation that President Barack Obama is personally selecting names for a kill list of suspected al-Qaida terrorists is a striking illustration of what actually occurs behind the White House’s closed doors.

The New York Times revealed Tuesday how the president “has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.” He insists “on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.”

The Times described how more than 100 members of “the government’s sprawling national security apparatus” meet in a video conference to go over potential nominees for the death list and “recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” The nominations then go to the White House where Obama, guided by his top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, approves names added to the list.

Willaim Pfaff: The Age of Drones

Counterinsurgency is out. Drones, assassination teams, targeted killings and special forces are in. A New York Times report on May 27 described the “existential debate” going on inside the faculty at West Point, the national military academy. Counterinsurgency doctrine from Vietnam-and the Philippines “insurgency” of 1899-1902-was refurbished by Gen. David Petraeus in the closing period of the Iraq War, and, combined with a sharp increase in troop strength (the “surge”), it was credited with ending the war there by confirming the Nouri al-Maliki Shiite government unsteadily in place.

After taking office as president, Barack Obama looked for a comparable success in Afghanistan. After consultations in Washington, and with Petraeus and the new commander of U.S. and Allied forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the president authorized a new “surge,” patterned on what seemed to have worked in Iraq. However, he added an important clause: The American troop reinforcement would be withdrawn in 18 months.

Hence his assurance to NATO officials in Chicago last week that U.S. (and NATO) combat forces are on their way out.

Memo to the Earth Summit: ‘Green Economy’ should not mean monetizing nature

The 1992 Rio Earth summit established “sustainable development” firmly in the global political lexicon – even though the term meant, and continues to mean, different things to different people. For Stephan Schmidheiny, a CEO who was appointed chief adviser for business and industry at the summit and subsequently set up the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, it apparently means continuing with business as usual: in February, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the deaths of thousands of workers at his asbestos-cement factory.

As the Rio+20 anniversary conference approaches, a battle rages over the definition of another term: “green economy”. “A green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication” is a key conference theme. It sounds good, but what does it mean?

Allison Kilkenny: Student Movement Dubbed the ‘Mexican Spring’

A coalition of thousands of mainly university students, unionized workers, and farmers in Mexico City have taken to the streets to demand greater freedom of speech and also to protest the possible return of power by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

One banner read, “I have a brain, I won’t vote for the PRI.”

The PRI is a member of the Socialist International, but don’t let the name fool you-the party is actually quite “centrist” (the term pundits usually use to describe center-right parties) in most of its policies. PRI’s main rival is the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). (Mexican Spring poster in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, via @mexicoOWS).

Dubbed the “Yo Soy 132” movement (Twitter users can follow protest updates by searching #YoSoy132), or the “Mexican Spring” by observers, this latest wave of protests marks the third large student demonstration in less than a week.

Mary Bottari: Is “Right to Work” Next on Walker’s Agenda?

Many are wondering if making Wisconsin a “Right to Work” state is next on Governor Scott Walker’s agenda if he wins the recall election on June 5. Right to Work laws weaken unions by allowing members to opt out of paying dues. Workers get the benefit of working in a union shop (higher wages, better benefits), but are not required to pay their fair share for union representation. Right to Work laws have been used effectively in the South to bust unions and keep wages low, which is why they are dubbed “Right to Work for Less” laws by opponents. The recent push for this legislation is emanating from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), where corporations and right-wing legislators vote as equals behind closed doors on “model” legislation.

This issue is newly on the radar of Wisconsin voters due to a video released earlier this month by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel showing Governor Walker having a frank conversation with his largest campaign contributor shortly after he was elected. Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks asks Walker how he will make Wisconsin a “red” state and if he will “work on these unions” and “become a Right to Work” state. Walker replies that the”first step” will be “to divide and conquer” Wisconsin unions through a budget bill dealing with public sector workers. One month after the video was filmed, Walker “dropped the bomb” and introduced his bill to strip some 380,000 public workers of 50 years of collective bargaining rights, starting a race to the bottom in wages and benefits.

Then Make Them Wear Diapers

You get them.  The letters from Obama or Debbie Wasserman Schultz.  The calls from state Democratic candidates telling you what’s at stake.  

They show up around election time with increasing frequency – sort of like Obama’s speeches about “change,” and his embrace of progressive principles.

In 2007, I gave what was for me, a lot.  And I ended up feeling like Charlie Brown after Lucy snatches the football away – fooled again.

No more.

Mr. Obama, Ms. Wasserman Shultz, Mr. Reid and the rest of you, here’s what you have to do to get my money this time.  And you’d better start now.

Stand for something besides compromise

New York Times Editorial: End of the Charade

The airwaves are already filled with blaring political attacks masquerading as “issue ads,” such as the one in the Missouri Senate race that ends with, “Call Claire McCaskill. Tell her Missouri doesn’t need government-run health care.” This ad, and dozens like it, is sponsored by the United States Chamber of Commerce, which likes to claim that it is merely educating voters about the issues rather than telling them how to vote.

The airwaves are already filled with blaring political attacks masquerading as “issue ads,” such as the one in the Missouri Senate race that ends with, “Call Claire McCaskill. Tell her Missouri doesn’t need government-run health care.” This ad, and dozens like it, is sponsored by the United States Chamber of Commerce, which likes to claim that it is merely educating voters about the issues rather than telling them how to vote.

Chris Hedges: The War on Gays

The sentencing of Dharun Ravi for the hateful abuse that may have driven his gay roommate at Rutgers, Tyler Clementi, to commit suicide, or Barack Obama’s public acceptance of gay marriage, prevents many of us from seeing that life for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people is getting worse-much worse.

No one understands this better than the gay activist and pastor Mel White. White, along with his husband and partner of 30 years, Gary Nixon, founded Soulforce, an organization committed to using nonviolent resistance to end religion-based oppression. White and hundreds of Soulforce volunteers protest outside megachurches that preach hatred and bigotry in the name of religion. White travels to communities where young gays, lesbians, bisexuals or transgender people have committed suicide. He holds memorial services for them in front of the church doors. He accuses the pastors of these churches of murder. His books “Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America” and “Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tell Us to Deny Gay Equality,” are two of the most important works that examine the innate cruelty and proto-fascism of the Christian right. White, more than perhaps any other preacher in the country, has pulled young men and women back from the brink of despair, from succumbing to the tragic fate of Tyler Clementi. And White is scared.

Robert Fisk: The Going Price of Getting Away with Murder… Would $33m Be Enough?

La Clinton hath spoken. Thirty-three million smackers lopped off Pakistan’s aid budget because its spooks banged up poor old Dr Shakeel Afridi for 33 years after a secret trial. And, as the world knows, Dr Afridi’s crime was to confirm the presence of that old has-been Osama bin Laden in his grotty Abbottabad villa.

Well, that will teach the Pakistanis to mess around with a brave doctor who is prepared to help the American institution that tortures and murders its enemies. Forget the CIA’s black prisons and rendition and water-boarding, and the torture of the innocents in the jails of our friendly dictators. Dr Afridi was just doing the free world a favour. And WOW, Dr Afridi got shopped by Leon Pannetta when he was CIA boss, and now Barack Obama is accused of letting him down.

Quick quiz: What’s a good five-letter description of Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, that ends in “y”?

The obvious choice is, of course, “bully.” But as a recent debate over the state’s budget reveals, “phony” is an equally valid answer. And as Mr. Christie goes, so goes his party.

Until now the attack of the fiscal phonies has been mainly a national rather than a state issue, with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as the prime example. As regular readers of this column know, Mr. Ryan has somehow acquired a reputation as a stern fiscal hawk despite offering budget proposals that, far from being focused on deficit reduction, are mainly about cutting taxes for the rich while slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. In fact, once you strip out Mr. Ryan’s “magic asterisks” – claims that he will somehow increase revenues and cut spending in ways that he refuses to specify – what you’re left with are plans that would increase, not reduce, federal debt.

Ethan Cox: In Quebec, A Revolution of Love, Hope and Community

In almost every report on the social movement now sweeping Quebec, including my own, words like conflict, crisis and stand-off figure prominently. Anger is omnipresent. The anger of protesters, the anger of government, the anger of those supposedly inconvenienced. Pundits scream about mob rule, anarchy in the streets and the dissolution of society as we know it.

Don’t get me wrong, there is anger present of course. But that is not what you see if you take to the streets, or watch on CUTV’s live stream. Pundits can’t stop bemoaning the inconvenience to “ordinary” Montrealers posed by these protests. But I wonder, are there any “ordinary” Montrealers left to inconvenience?

Glen Ford: Obama’s War: Criminalize the Left

Like no other president in modern times, Barack Obama is determined to criminalize the Left opposition through relentless reshaping of Constitutional notions of law. Whistleblowers are domestic public enemy number one. “Having knowledge of government wrongdoing is criminal, in the eyes of this administration.”

The Obama administration is methodically erecting the legal structures of a police state. The president late last year smoothed the way for bipartisan passage through Congress of a preventive detention bill that is so vaguely worded, a federal judge in New York last week ruled that it is likely to be successfully challenged on Constitutional grounds. And in Richmond, Virginia, a three-judge appeals court heard Justice Department lawyers argue that reporters can be compelled to reveal the identities of whistleblowers in so-called national security cases.

Bruce A. Dixon: Corey Booker and the Hard Right’s Colonization of Black American Politics

A new black political class has arisen, one with only nominal connections to black voters or communities Their careers and orientation are corporate through and through. Some prominent black Democrats have actually been operatives of the hard right for decades, like Newark’s Corey Booker.

On the first weekend in May, Newark mayor Corey Booker appeared alongside Fox News host Juan Williams and ultra-conservative Republican governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana to sing the praises of charters and school privatization, and the evils of organized teacher and parent power at the annual conference of the Alliance for School Choice.. It’s not a big step for Corey Booker, it’s the place he’s been all along, since his first late 1990s gig as a founding board member of the Bradley Foundation’s Black Alliance for Educational Options. What’s new is that in 2012 black Democrats with national profiles like Booker can appear in public spouting pro-corporate right wing dogma alongside such creatures, and hardly anyone notices. What has happened to Democratic party politics, to black politics?