Tag: Punting the Pundits

Let’s hope the former Democratic senator’s new job as Obama campaign co-chair means Super Pacs’ days are numbered

“The president is wrong.” So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.Those four words recently headlined the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former US Senator – and now Obama campaign adviser – Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama’s recent announcement that he will accept Super Pac funds for his re-election campaign.

Matt Taibbi: Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

How about that race for the Republican nomination? Was last night’s debate crazy, or what?

Throughout this entire process, the spectacle of these clowns thrashing each other and continually seizing and then fumbling frontrunner status has left me with an oddly reassuring feeling, one that I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on. In my younger days I would have just assumed it was regular old Schadenfreude at the sight of people like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich suffering, but this isn’t like that – it’s something different than the pleasure of watching A-Rod strike out in the playoffs.

No, it was while watching the debates last night that it finally hit me: This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It’s as if all of the American public’s bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.

Leah Bolger: Need to Talk Sense to Netanyahu

Recalling President George Washington’s farewell advice against tying the United States too closely to any foreign nation, Veterans for Peace urges President Obama to publicly warn Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu against attacking Iran with the expectation of U.S. military support.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veterans for Peace

SUBJECT: You Need to Talk Sense to Netanyahu

We members of Veterans for Peace have served in every war since WW II. We know war. And we know when it smells like war. It smells that way now, with drums beating loudly for attacking Iran.

Gary Younge: Marriage Equality and the Civil Rights Inheritance

On the face of it, mixed-race and same-sex marriage rights are quite different. But look at who’s lined up in opposition and why

In the small hours of 11 July 1958, three policemen entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving, in Central Point, Virginia and found them in bed. When Richard pointed to his marriage certificate indicating that Mildred was his wife, they arrested them. Richard was white; Mildred was black and Cherokee. They were breaking the law, as laid down in Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which banned mixed-race marriage.

The case eventually went to the US supreme court, which, in 1967, ruled in favour of the Lovings:

   “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’, fundamental to our very existence and survival. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

So, six years after Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, mixed-race marriage was formally recognised as a civil right nationwide. (Some states kept their laws on the books, even if they were unenforceable. Alabama was the last to get rid of its anti-miscegenation law in 2000.) Said Mildred, many years later:

   “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me. Even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry.”

Mike Elk: Workers on ‘Journey for Justice’ Meet Newly Scared Minn. Labor Movement

Touring locked-out workers from four states stop in possible new ‘right-to-work’ battleground

Yesterday, locked-out union workers from five different American Crystal Sugar (ACS) facilities in Minnesota, North Dakota and Iowa, as well as locked-out workers from Cooper Tire, set out on a 1,000-mile “Journey for Justice” across the United States to raise awareness of their plight. The ACS workers are members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), while the Cooper workers are part of a United Steelworkers (USW) Ohio local.

The five-day-long trip will stretch through key battleground states for labor rights in America right now: Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. The story of these struggling workers represents much of what’s ailing the labor movement right now.

ACS locked more than 1,200 employees out out of their plants last August after BCTGM rejected proposed increases in healthcare costs and provisions that would allow the company to undermine the union by outsourcing work to nonunion workers. In November, Cooper Tire locked out 1,050 workers after they refused to agree to demands that workers take a wage cut to as little as $13 per hour, assume additional healthcare costs and eliminate pensions for new hires.

My expectations were low, but still it seemed odd: During the three-hour GOP debate last night in Mesa, Arizona-117 miles from Tucson, where a year ago Jared Lee Loughner shot six people dead and injured thirteen, including Representative Gabby Giffords-no one raised the issue of gun control. Not that I thought the candidates would touch the subject (even if a day earlier Newt had bully-boyed Chevy’s most energy-efficient car by saying, “You can’t put a gun rack in a Volt.” Watch this dude prove him wrong). After all, NRA-fearing politicians from Obama on down have been as silent on gun control post-Tucson as they were effusive over Giffords’s brief appearance in Congress last month, when she announced her resignation.

Nor did I expect anyone in the auditorium audience to risk life or limb by squeaking out a query on gun violence, banning high-capacity ammunition clips, or doing background checks on customers at gun shows. But I did hold out a sliver of hope that CNN would let either someone over the Net or moderator John King himself venture there. Apparently, though, King’s last run-in at a debate with Gingrich-who blasted him as piece of liberal-media detritus-left him gun shy.

Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto: Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Is Anti-Latino

Let’s call a spade a spade. Opposition to immigration is not a concern rooted in personal economic concerns. Neither is it a concern having to do with state’s rights. Anti-immigrant sentiment isn’t even about immigrants as a whole. As rigorous social scientific research shows, opposition to immigration is closely linked to the negative racial animus toward one very specific group, Latinos.

Over the course of the GOP primary season, anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a stump speech staple of the candidates. The focus of Republican candidates is to keep new immigrants out and get those here to leave. The Republican primary has become a quien es más macho contest of who has the biggest anti-immigrant badge. The top anti-immigrant badge of honor goes to Herman Cain and his advocacy for an electrified border fence, while Rick Perry lost out by having aided Texas college students who happened to be undocumented.

John Nichols: How Tuesday’s Primaries Could End It for Romney

On February 28, 1968, a Republican presidential prospect who just months earlier had led in the polls, announced that he was withdrawing from the competition.

George Romney-the governor of Michigan whom many Republicans had seen as the great hope for renewing the party in the aftermath of the sweeping rebuke the party had received after nominating right-winger Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964-had suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds to his candidacy and on that late February day he accepted that he was not going to be the Republican nominee or the president of the United States.

Forty-four years to the day after George Romney quit the national stage, his son, Willard Mitt Romney, could face a similar moment.

Ari Berman: The Buying of the President 2012: Meet the Super PAC Mega-Donors

The more we learn about Super PACs, the uglier the picture gets.

A new analysis by USA Today found that just five super-wealthy individuals have contributed 25 percent of the money raised by Super PACs since the beginning of 2011. The New York Times added that “two dozen individuals, couples or corporations have given $1 million or more to Republican super PACs this year…. Collectively, their contributions have totaled more than $50 million this cycle, making them easily the most influential and powerful political donors in politics today.”

The hierarchy is topped by Texas businessman Harold Simmons, a major funder of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, who has donated nearly $15 million to three different GOP candidates (Perry, Gingrich and Romney) and the Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads. He’s followed by Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who’s given $10 million to Gingrich’s Super PAC and says he may give an additional “$10 or $100 million to Gingrich” before the primary season is over. “Take away Sheldon Adelson and the pro-Gingrich ‘Winning Our Future’ PAC is just a federally registered lemonade stand,” Stephen Colbert joked.

The Federal Communications Commission should forbid television broadcasters from charging for campaign ads, and we, the public, should peacefully demonstrate outside the FCC offices at 445 12th Street SW, in Washington, D.C., until it does so.

Like the water or the air, the spectrum over which broadcasters transmit their wares is a finite resource that everyone depends on, and which needs to be regulated by government to prevent chaos and hoarding. But in licensing some corporations to dominate the airwaves, Congress inevitably excluded others. I can’t start a radio broadcast from my home because it would interfere with licensed stations. Because choosing some voices over others is inherently unfair, Congress in the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 established a general requirement that broadcasters act in the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” This conception of broadcasters as public trustees has been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court. The FCC could easily invoke this requirement to demand that campaign commercials be aired gratis.

Amy Goodman: New Obama Campaign Co-Chair: ‘The President Is Wrong’

“The president is wrong.” So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Those four words headline the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former U.S. Sen., and now Obama campaign adviser, Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama’s recent announcement that he will accept super PAC funds for his re-election campaign. Feingold writes: “The President is wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super PACs-organizations that raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and the richest individuals, sometimes in total secrecy. It’s not just bad policy; it’s also dumb strategy.” And, he says, it’s “dancing with the devil.”

Gail Collins: Four Dudes and a Table

The 20th Republican debate! I have now spent more time watching the Republican presidential candidates on television than two seasons of “Downton Abbey.” Perhaps it would be easier if Newt Gingrich wore a tuxedo.

Also, I am pretty sure the folks at Downton Abbey never spent an episode arguing about earmarks. Republicans, why are we still discussing earmarks? If the American people cared passionately about earmarks, wouldn’t they have elected John McCain?

My personal favorite debate moment on Wednesday night was when the candidates were asked to describe themselves in one word and Newt Gingrich said “cheerful.” Not an adjective you frequently hear when Newt is the topic, but you do appreciate the aspiration, particularly when Mitt Romney went for “resolute.”

Robert Sheer: The Gang That Couldn’t Bomb Straight

Here we go again. With the economy showing faint signs of life and their positions on the social issues alienating most moderates, the leading Republican candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, have returned to the elixir of warmongering to once again sway the gullible masses. The race to the bottom has been set by Newt Gingrich, the most desperate of the lot, who on Tuesday charged that “The President wants to unilaterally weaken the United States,” because his administration has dared question the wisdom of Israel attacking Iran and proposes a slight reduction in the bloated defense budget.

Let the good times roll with a beefed-up military budget justified by plans to invade yet another Muslim country. As Paul warned during the South Carolina primary debate as his presidential rivals threatened war with Iran: “I’m afraid what’s going on right now is similar to the war propaganda that went on against Iraq.” Indeed, the shouting match over which of the other GOP candidates most wants a war with Iran is in sync with the last Republican president’s 2003 invasion.

The last ten days or so we have seen Republicans, and their religious allies, wage a war against contraception-and bungle it badly. With poll after poll showing that a majority of Americans support contraceptive coverage in health reform, and with the 98 percent figure (of American women who have ever used contraception in the context of heterosexual sex) endlessly repeated in the media, the Republicans nonetheless push ahead with this attack, providing a welcome gift to the Obama reelection campaign and much material to political artists and comics. I have lost count of the number of parodies that have been inspired by that now gone viral picture of five male clerics testifying at the Congressional hearing called by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). A picture that of course immediately brings to mind another image of a similar tone deaf moment on the part of social conservatives,  the nine men surrounding President George W. Bush as he became the first president to sign a ban on a particular technique of performing abortion, in the case of so-called “partial birth abortion.”  It’s no wonder that the term “patriarchy” has made a comeback in the blogs! [..]

But while the media is momentarily fixated on the second big story this month of a losing fight against family planning (remember the Susan G. Komen Fund fiasco?), less attention has been paid to a related war that is not going well at all.  The assault on abortion that has resulted from the 2010 elections–the Republican takeover of Congress and many statehouses and governorships–has arguably produced the most serious threat to abortion access since the Roe decision in 1973.  What we mainly have heard about this situation are the statistics, the unprecedented number of abortion restrictions introduced and eventually passed in state legislatures at a time when one might assume politicians’ focus would be on the economy.

Medea Benjamin: Police Chief Timoney, Meet Bahraini Mothers

John Timoney is the controversial former Miami police chief well known for orchestrating brutal crackdowns on protests in Miami and Philadelphia- instances with rampant police abuse, violence, and blatant disregard for freedom of expression. It should be of great concern that the Kingdom of Bahrain has brought Timoney and John Yates, former assistant commissioner of Britain’s Metropolitan Police, to “reform” Bahrain’s security forces.

Since assuming his new position, Timoney has claimed that Bahrain has been reforming it brutal police tactics in response to recommendations issued by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry. He says that there is less tear gas being used and that while tear gas might be “distasteful,” it’s not really harmful.

I have no idea what country Chief Timoney is talking about, because it’s certainly not the Bahrain I saw this past week, a week that marked the one-year anniversary since the February 14, 2011 uprising.

Maureen Dowd: Rick’s Religious Fanaticism

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.

That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah.

“Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008. “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”

When, in heaven’s name, did sensuality become a vice? Next he’ll be banning Barry White. [..]

He told The Washington Post on Friday that, while he doesn’t want to fund contraception through Planned Parenthood, he wouldn’t ban it: “The idea that I’m coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a statement about my moral beliefs, but I won’t impose them on anyone else in this case.”

That doesn’t comfort me much. I’ve spent a career watching candidates deny they would do things that they went on to do as president, and watching presidents let their personal beliefs, desires and insecurities shape policy decisions.

Mullah Rick is casting doubt on issues of women’s health and safety that were settled a long time ago. We’re supposed to believe that if he got more power he’d drop his crusade?

Ellen Brown: How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street

In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,'” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end “too big to fail” but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled “systemically important” that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS).  Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt. [..]

The Houses of Morgan, Goldman and the other Big Five are justifiably worried right now, because an “event of default” declared on European sovereign debt could jeopardize their $32 trillion derivatives scheme.  According to Rudy Avizius in an article on The Market Oracle (UK) on February 15th, that explains what happened at MF Global, and why the 50% Greek bond write-down was not declared an event of default.

If you paid only 50% of your mortgage every month, these same banks would quickly declare you in default.  But the rules are quite different when the banks are the insurers underwriting the deal.

Rachel Signer: Occupying the SEC for a Stronger Volcker Rule

On Monday evening, around one hundred people gathered in Liberty Square in downtown Manhattan, preparing to march to the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission buildings nearby. Protesters carried signs reading, “We don’t make demands so this is a suggestion: Enforce the Volcker Rule.”

Occupy the SEC, a working group of Occupy Wall Street that includes former financial industry professionals, lawyers and concerned citizens, had been up until 5am the night before, editing and formatting a letter they had prepared as a public comment to the SEC. For months, OSEC met twice weekly to review the 298-page proposed Volcker Rule, conducting a diligent, line-by-line analysis of the document. Proposed as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Volcker Rule essentially aims to ban proprietary trading and ownership of hedge funds by banks. Between now and July, the regulating bodies involved-the SEC, the FDIC, the OCC, the CFTC and the Fed-are required to read public comment letters and issue final details on the Volcker Rule.

When members of OSEC viewed their letter on Monday on the SEC’s website, they were elated to see that at 325 pages, it was the longest letter by far. In comparison, the longest letter by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a group that represents the interests of securities groups, banks and asset managers, was 173 pages-although SIFMA submitted five letters in total.

Sarah Stillman: Nancy Grace, Policymaker

When the not-guilty verdict came down in the Casey Anthony trial last summer, TV personality Nancy Grace exploded in a cable news paroxysm for the ages: “Somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight.” The polarizing former prosecutor had massively expanded her national following with her nightly crusades against the 25-year-old Anthony, an unemployed single mom charged with killing her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. When, soon thereafter, Grace announced she would be joining the cast of Dancing With the Stars, critics had a field day. But her leap into the world of bedazzled spandex was not half as alarming as a less widely discussed foray, into the arena of panic-driven policymaking. [..]

On its face, the law sounds well-reasoned. Don’t all parents have certain de facto obligations vis-à-vis their kids-particularly alerting authorities when young lives may be on the line? Michelle Crowder, the 30-year-old Oklahoma mother who authored the Change.org petition, certainly thinks so. “I just decided to jump on there and do it,” she told Grace in an interview tag-lined “Breaking News: Outrage.” But others are not convinced. There is a long history of passing tough-on-crime legislation in the wake of a brutal crime and the results have been mixed, at best. Caylee’s Law is far from unique in transforming the name of an innocent young female victim into a rallying cry for crime-fighting reforms with dubious results. And Grace is only the latest pundit to spin her entertainment empire into a legislative one.

Tom Friedman of the New York Times is at it again, claiming that what America needs to fix our economic and political mess is a radically centrist third party. Radical in this case means conservative when it comes to belt-tightening. Friedman in Sunday’s Times urges a third party “to fill the space between the conservative Santorum (or even Mitt Romney) and the left-of-center Barack Obama.”

Friedman has written this column before.

This time, he has a coyly undeclared candidate, David Walker, formerly president of the austerity-mongering Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Walker, who served in a previous life as head of the Government Accountability Office, has been barnstorming around the country, denying that he is running for anything, blaming America’s woes on Social Security, Medicare, and Federal deficits. [..]

Austerity, as we see in Europe, is absolutely the wrong economic policy. It feeds on itself, driving the economy deeper into a hole. As GDP sags, wages and tax receipts sag with it, making budget balance a vanishing mirage. The more you cut the deficit, the more the economy falters, and the cycle repeats.

The combination of bad economic advice, a ballot slot bought and paid for by secretive private equity and hedge fund players, and a candidate who became a media figure courtesy of Peter G. Peterson, epitomizes everything messed up about our politics. How fitting that Tom Friedman should be its tribune.

George Monbiot: We Need to Know Who Funds These Thinktank Lobbyists

The battle for democracy is becoming a fight against backroom billionaires seeking to shape politics to suit their own interests

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers. [..]

The leading Republican candidates have all but abandoned the idea of mobilising popular support. Instead they use the huge funds they raise from billionaires to attack the credibility of their opponents through television ads. Yet more money is channelled through 501c4 groups – tax-exempt bodies supposedly promoting social welfare – which (unlike the superPACs) don’t have to reveal the identity of their donors. TomDispatch notes that “serving as a secret slush fund for billionaires evidently now qualifies as social welfare.” [..]

This is plutocracy, pure and simple. The battle for democracy is now a straight fight against the billionaires and corporations reshaping politics to suit their interests. The first task of all democrats must be to demand that any group, of any complexion, seeking to effect political change should reveal its funders.

John Nichols: David Koch Admits to Helping Walker Big-Time

Billionaire campaign donor David Koch, heir to a fortune and a political legacy created by one of the driving forces behind the John Birch Society, makes no secret of his enthusiasm for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

“What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He’s an impressive guy and he’s very courageous,” Koch explained in a recent conversation reported by the Palm Beach Post. “If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power.”

That’s no surprise. What is surprising is that Koch now appears to be bragging about how he and his brother Charles are using their vast fortune to fund an independent campaign aimed at “helping” Walker. Even in an era when billionaires such as the Kochs are emerging as key financiers of super PACs and other campaign vehicles, Koch’s admission will raise eyebrows – and questions about whether inappropriate coordination by a candidate, his campaign and a supposedly independent group might be the stuff of “scandal.”

Eugene Robinson: Rick Santorum could take Republicans down with him

Republicans haven’t quite thrown away what they see as a winnable presidential election, at least not yet. But they’re trying their best.

In GOP circles, there is more than a whiff of panic in the air. Unemployment is still painfully high, Americans remain dissatisfied with the country’s direction, even the most favorable polls show President Obama’s approval at barely 50 percent – and yet there is a sense that the Republicans’ odds of winning back the White House grow longer day by day. [..]

The issue, for Republicans, is not just that Santorum would lose in November. It’s that he could be a drag on House and Senate candidates as well. Imagine, say, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) trying to explain to his constituents why someone who doesn’t fully understand women’s participation in the workforce should be president.

Listen closely and you can hear the anguished cries: “Mitch! Chris! Jeb! Help!”

Ben Adler: Conservatives’ War on Women’s Sexuality

If you have been surprised to see an uptight prig such as Rick Santorum leading the Republican primary field in national polls, you shouldn’t be. Recent events have demonstrated that conservative positions on social issues are as much about repressing women and reversing the gains of the women’s movement as they are about saving the lives of the unborn.

The young people I saw at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington the week before last looked to me exactly like what you would expect from a bunch of college Republicans. They were dorks. They wore suits. Maybe some of the women’s suit skirts were short, but I was hardly scandalized.

But we learned last week that much of the conservative movement is still living in a different century-and I don’t mean the twentieth-with regard to women’s sexuality. Conservative bloggers were horrified that some young women at CPAC were dressed provocatively and engaged in loose sexual behavior with the young men in attendance.

Suddenly, manufacturing is back – at least on the election trail. But don’t be fooled. The real issue isn’t how to get manufacturing back. It’s how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren’t at all the same thing.

Republicans have become born-again champions of American manufacturing. This may have something to do with crucial primaries occurring next week in Michigan and the following week in Ohio, both of them former arsenals of American manufacturing. [..]

The fundamental problem isn’t the decline of American manufacturing, and reviving manufacturing won’t solve it. The problem is the declining power of American workers to share in the gains of the American economy.

George Zornick: Obama’s Plan to Save the Military From Cuts-at the Expense of Domestic Programs

As budget wonks comb over President Obama’s outline for fiscal year 2013, a startling White House plan has become clear: the administration is seeking to undo some mandatory cuts to the Pentagon at the expense of critical domestic programs. It does so by basically undoing the defense sequester that kicked in as a result of the Congressional supercommittee on debt. This wasn’t a featured part of the White House budget rollout, and for good reason-it undercuts the administration’s carefully crafted message of benevolent government action and economic fairness.

The process for this shift is complicated, and has been flagged by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Essentially, Obama wants to eliminate individual spending caps for both military and non-military spending, and institute one single discretionary spending cap instead. Here’s the basic rundown.

Tom Engelhardt: A Real-Life War Novel With No Plot and No End

If all goes as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A.  Only the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will ever filter back to our world.

After all, American war is heading for the “shadows” in a big way.  As news articles have recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration’s global spear will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces.  They are so secretive that they don’t like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired‘s Danger Room blog notes, “not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”  By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.

Although the special ops crew (66,000 people in all) exist on our tax dollars, we’re really not supposed to know anything about what they’re doing — unless, of course, they choose the publicity venue themselves, whether in Pakistan knocking off Osama bin Laden or parachuting onto Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to promote Act of Valor.  In case you somehow missed the ads, that’s the new film about “real terrorist threats based on true stories starring actual Navy SEALs.” (No names in the credits please!)

John Atcheson: US Running on Myths, Lies, Deceptions and Distractions

Republican Hypocrisy; Democratic Complicity; The Press’s Malfeasance; and Why You Don’t Have a Job and if You Do, Why it Doesn’t Pay Squat

The United States is headed for a plutocratic dystopia where a few gated communities sit like islands amidst a sea of bitterness, misery, and want.

Why?

Because the country is running on lies, myths, deceptions and distractions. Not surprisingly, they aren’t working very well for us.

Let’s run through a few of the most destructive lies and myths.

Fourteen months ago, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement members and our allies from National People’s Action and the New Bottom Line campaign met with Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller in Des Moines to discuss the national foreclosure investigation that he was leading.

Miller vowed to pursue a fundamental transformation of the mortgage servicing industry. He spoke like a people’s champion, like someone who would “knock it out of the ballpark” and bring the banks to justice.

But after he announced the details of his settlement with the banks last week, we felt Miller had struck out. [..]

Bold action in the face of grave injustice is not counterproductive – it is required.

If Obama and Schneiderman take these “people first” actions to deliver justice for millions of homeowners and everyday people, then maybe we’ll have something to celebrate.

John Nichols: A Politics That Says: The People Shall Rule

After she organized Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Lyndon Johnson, around the time she joined Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm in forming the National Women’s Political Caucus, Midge Miller got herself elected to the Wisconsin Assembly. [..]

The point of progressive public service, argued Midge Miller, was not to be a cog in the machine run by corporate and political elites. It was to make the machine work for the people.

So when Midge Miller’s stepson, Wisconsin Senate minority leader Mark Miller, found himself leading a legislative caucus that was being asked to rubber-stamp Governor Scott Walker’s attacks on collective-bargaining rights, civil-service protections and local democracy, he thought of Midge. “She believed that it was the first responsibility of legislators to protect the rights of the people,” said Miller. “She would never have been a part of anything that rammed changes like these down the throats of the people.”

George Zornick: Obama’s Plan to Save the Military From Cuts-at the Expense of Domestic Programs

As budget wonks comb over President Obama’s outline for fiscal year 2013, a startling White House plan has become clear: the administration is seeking to undo some mandatory cuts to the Pentagon at the expense of critical domestic programs. It does so by basically undoing the defense sequester that kicked in as a result of the Congressional supercommittee on debt. This wasn’t a featured part of the White House budget rollout, and for good reason-it undercuts the administration’s carefully crafted message of benevolent government action and economic fairness.

The process for this shift is complicated, and has been flagged by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Essentially, Obama wants to eliminate individual spending caps for both military and non-military spending, and institute one single discretionary spending cap instead. Here’s the basic rundown.

Ari Berman: Howard Dean Predicts Obama Re-Election, Democrats Retake House

No incumbent president since FDR has been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 8 percent. Despite that daunting precedent, an increasing number of political analysts and prominent Democratic Party figures are now bullish about President Obama’s re-election prospects. “Obama’s chances have definitely improved,” former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean recently told me. “If Mitt Romney’s the Republican nominee, I would say it’s a one- or two-point win for Obama.”

Dean also likes his party’s chances at the Congressional level. “I’m predicting flat-out that if Obama wins, Democrats take back the House,” he says. Other analysts have recently raised that possibility, even though GOP domination of the redistricting process gives Republicans a major edge in 2012.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Ann Coulter mocked the Obama administration for requiring health insurance to cover birth control by saying “birth control costs $20 a month; an abortion is $400 or $500 at the most, you don’t get insurance for that.” First of all, Coulter is wrong, or lying. Perhaps she’s never been without insurance herself and she doesn’t understand the difference between a co-payment and what something costs without birth control. Twenty dollars per month might be what one pays for the pill with insurance. Without it, you can pay over $100. This is, in other words, precisely what you have insurance for.

Lois Utley: Employees Need Birth Control Coverage Mandate

For the women employed by the former Hackley Hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, last week’s news couldn’t have been better. President Obama’s announcement that Catholic hospitals and educational institutions must provide contraceptive coverage to employees should mean those women will finally be getting back the insurance coverage for birth control they lost in 2007, when their hospital merged with a nearby Catholic hospital. That is, unless the Catholic Bishops and their allies in Congress succeed in unraveling the birth control coverage mandate for the hospital’s employees and millions of other American women.

Just as the Bishops had demanded, Obama announced that Catholic hospitals, colleges and social services agencies would not have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Instead, under what Obama characterized as an “accommodation,” the hospitals’ insurance companies would be required to offer the coverage at no extra charge to employees and their dependents. Insurers are expected to be willing to pay the birth control cost, since they save money by avoiding more costly pregnancy care.

Eugene Robinson: Pay Close Attention to China

China, for better or worse, is a serious country. The United States had better start acting like one.

I got a glimpse of the future Wednesday in the vast ballroom of a Washington hotel where hundreds of august dignitaries-and some journalists as well-gathered at a luncheon in honor of Vice President Xi Jinping, who is widely expected to become China’s top leader after a year-long transition.

Xi’s status is such that he was introduced by no less than Henry Kissinger, who spoke, not for the first time, of the Nixon-to-China breakthrough four decades ago. It is useful to remember that the country we now think of as a trillion-dollar creditor and the manufacturer of iPads was once a Maoist bastion, hermetically sealed against the capitalist influences of the Western world.

Richard Reeves: Comes the Revolution

LOS ANGELES-Andrew Breitbart, the publisher of Breitbart.com and a couple of other popular websites, set the tone for a program at the University of Southern California last Wednesday by calling George Stephanopoulus of ABC News a little rat with a runny nose.

He continued by equating mainstream newspapers and television news, National Public Radio, Hollywood and American universities with totalitarians around the world, citing Joseph Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, cultural Marxism and storm troopers.

He was joined by Jon Fleischman, founder of FlashReport.org, a popular website out here that aggregates and reports on California politics, government and cultural life. He offered the opinion that “President Obama represents the abyss. He is taking us over the socialist cliff.”