Tag: Punting the Pundits

The deal to block outside ads in the Senate race is admirable, but futile: Citizens United has embedded big bucks in politics

Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren, are attempting some creative political jujitsu to end massive outside spending on advertising in their 2012 US Senate race. I applaud them and you should, too. But, their experiment, however laudable, is unlikely to work. [..]

Unfortunately, the candidates do not control this outside spending. The candidates would like the media to turn down such outside advertising. But the dirty secret every campaign year is that commercial broadcasters love – and, in fact, have come to depend upon – the money thrown at them in election years.

New York Times Editorial: So Who’s a Lobbyist?

Under the federal lobbying law, Newt Gingrich can legitimately claim that he is not a lobbyist. That alone demonstrates how much the law needs to be changed. [..]

The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 has three tests: 1) Do you make more than $3,000 over three months from lobbying? 2) Have you had more than one lobbying contact? 3) Have you spent more than 20 percent of your time lobbying for a single client over three months?

Only a person who has met all three tests must register as a lobbyist. So a former lawmaker who has many lobbying contacts and makes $1 million a year lobbying but has no single client who takes up more than 20 percent of his time would not be considered a lobbyist.

Congress has shown little interest in tightening these requirements, in part because lawmakers don’t want to close off a lucrative career in lobbying after they leave office. More than 400 former lawmakers have become lobbyists or consultants in the last decade.

George Zornick: Enforce Dodd-Frank: Break Up Bank of America

Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill provides a pretty clear mandate: if the federal government determines that a financial institution poses a “grave” risk to the financial system, the government is entitled to take action to mitigate that risk.

Specifically, if the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System makes that assessment, it can take action with the approval of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is part of the Treasury Department. The potential actions can range from limiting mergers and acquisitions, imposing conditions on how the institution does business or ordering it to liquidate. [..]

To that end, Public Citizen filed a petition (pdf) this week to the Federal Reserve and FSOC to break up Bank of America-a bank that’s clearly too big to fail, since it holds assets equal to one-seventh of the United States’ gross domestic product. It’s got the second-biggest holdings of any US bank and is interconnected with so many other institutions that few people-if any, even inside the bank-truly understand the complexity of those arrangements and dependencies.

Jennifer Abel: The bigger picture of Rand Paul’s brush with the TSA

Go Rand Paul, for refusing a patdown! But ordinary Americans will still be daily deprived of their constitutional rights by the TSA

The brouhaha over Senator Rand Paul’s refusal to submit to a full-body groping by blue-gloved minions of the Transportation Security Administration shows, again, how the more things change, the more they stay the same. [..]

For all that Rand Paul was right in refusing the TSA patdown, though, his proposed solution is little better than the status quo. Paul supports the creation of a “trusted traveler” program for frequent flyers who would be exempt from TSA procedures. That would surely be an improvement for frequent flyers like Senator Paul, but it still does not address the odious idea that the TSA’s routine treatment of passengers is acceptable.

Fourth amendment rights should not be special privileges, doled out only to those the government deems “trustworthy”. Or did 9/11 really change all that?

Ari Berman: Mitt’s Money Problem

“Romney, sinking in polls, says ‘banks aren’t bad people.’ ” That headline from the LA Times encapsulates, in a nutshell, why Mitt Romney is in trouble, both in the Republican primary against Newt Gingrich and in a possible general election campaign against President Obama. [..]

The key problem for Romney is that at a time when Americans are increasingly concerned about income inequality and the political voicelessness of the 99 percent, Romney is an unabashed proponent of Wall Street and the 1 percent. The fact that he paid only 13.9 percent in taxes on $21.6 million in income in 2010, that he had investments in offshore tax havens, that he profited at Bain Capital from bankrupt companies and shuttered steel mills, and that he believes corporations are people all reinforce this central weakness of his candidacy.

In the State of the Union address, President Obama promised a fresh investigation into mortgage abuses that led to the financial meltdown. The goal, he said, is to “hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.” Could this be it, finally? An investigation that results in clarity, big fines and maybe even jail time?

There is good reason to be skeptical. To date, federal civil suits over mortgage wrongdoing have been narrowly focused and, at best, ended with settlements and fines that are a fraction of the profits made during the bubble. There have been no criminal prosecutions against major players. Justice Department officials say that it reflects the difficulty of proving fraud – and not a lack of prosecutorial zeal. That is hard to swallow, given the scale of the crisis and the evidence of wrongdoing from private litigation, academic research and other sources.

Robert Sheer: Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans … until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Joe Conason; Mitch Daniels: Bombast From the Past

Why the Republicans chose Mitch Daniels-the Indiana governor who once thrilled right-wing pundits as a 2012 hopeful-to deliver a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address is puzzling. His uninspiring remarks surely killed the Daniels fad, revived lately as Republicans fret over the unappetizing choices available in their primaries.

By shining the spotlight on Daniels, the Republicans risked losing much more than a political rescue fantasy. He isn’t merely a politician who looks like an accountant; he actually was an accountant-or at least he played one during the Bush years, when he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Listening to him drone on about fiscal rectitude just might have reminded voters of the true source of our national problems.

William Rivers Pitt: Staring at Empty Pages

The Occupy Wall Street movement should spend today doing a nice little victory lap, because it seemed for all the world like its members were ghost-writers on President Obama’s State of the Union speechwriting staff. Though he never directly mentioned the movement itself, Mr. Obama spent a great deal of time on Tuesday night underscoring many of Occupy’s most central themes: income inequality, tax fairness, and the need to rein in the illegal and immoral behavior of the nation’s largest financial institutions.

Talk is cheap, of course; despite all of Mr. Obama’s high-flown rhetoric, his administration is reportedly prepared to cut a disgracefully easy deal with the five banks most directly responsible for the financial meltdown, giving his so-pretty words a hollow ring [..]

Dan Kaufman: A Judge in the Dock

IN October 1998, British police officers arrested the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet while he was recuperating from back surgery at a London hospital. They were acting on an international warrant issued by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón seeking General Pinochet’s extradition to stand trial in Spain on charges of torture and murder. After a 17-month legal battle, General Pinochet was released on medical grounds, but Judge Garzón’s warrant paved the way for stripping the former dictator of immunity and prosecuting him in Chile. [..]

Yet Judge Garzón is now himself under legal attack for confronting Spain’s own dark history. He is on trial this week before the Spanish Supreme Court for daring to investigate crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War and the nearly four-decade dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. The case against him is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes.

Newt Gingrich clearly missed the rabid South Carolina crowds at Monday night’s debate. NBC asked the Tampa, Fla. audience not to cheer, and mostly they didn’t, leaving Gingrich listless without angry mob energy. He didn’t bash the media the way he did in last week’s Fox and CNN debates, and he tried to act presidential when Mitt Romney jabbed him about his work for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

But he failed. Presidents don’t pout. A sulky Gingrich complained the GOP campaign had become “unnecessarily personal and nasty, and that’s sad.” Gingrich objecting to “personal and nasty” is as believable as Romney pretending he does his own laundry. That’s really sad. But Romney had the better night, hitting Gingrich early and often for having to resign the House speakership “in disgrace” due to ethics charges. And when Gingrich tried to claim he left his leadership post voluntarily, Ron Paul double-teamed him with Romney. “He didn’t have the votes, that was what the problem was,” Gingrich’s former House colleague told the crowd.

Dana Goldstein: Scratching the Surface of Obama’s Education Rhetoric

In general, I was underwhelmed by the education sections of President Obama’s State of the Union address, which were long on platitudes and short on honest talk about the difficulties of implementing school reform.

Most notably, the president made an odd and surprising proposal to make dropping out of high school illegal before the age of 18:

   We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.

Obama has, thankfully, done more than his predecessor to focus attention on underperforming high schools. George W. Bush’s signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, put most of its emphasis on fourth and eighth grade test scores in just two subjects, reading and math, while Obama’s school turnaround programs include support for so-called “dropout factories,” high schools with a graduation rate of less than 60 percent. The administration has focused, however, on fostering management reform in those schools, by turning them over to charter-school chains or replacing their principals and teaching staffs. It seems to me, however-and to many innovative high school educators-that one can’t really address the drop-out crisis without making school much more engaging for low-income teenagers, whether or not they show an inclination toward making it to and through a four-year college. This means dealing head-on with curriculum, not just tinkering with how teachers are hired and fired, and by whom.

Valerie Tarico: Righteous Abortion: How Conservative Christianity Promotes What It Claims to Hate

One of the great ironies of American society is that most abortions in the U.S. are caused by conservative Christians. Read the statistics: Forty nine percent of pregnancies in this country are unintended, a rate that has been painfully stable for almost 30 years. Almost half of those pregnancies end in abortion. Or, to turn it around, over 90% of U.S. abortions are the result of accidental pregnancy. U.S. rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion far exceed any other country with similar economic development.  So does our rate of religiosity.  The fact that we are outliers on both is not a coincidence.

Three aspects of conservative Christianity promote abortion:  pro-natalism, an obsession with sexual sin, and an emphasis on righteousness over compassion.

Mary Bottari: Scott Walker’s Plutonomy: An Economy for the One Percent

While volunteer after volunteer from each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties marched into the state’s election board to deposit over one million signatures for the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Walker was no where to be found.

At the hour petitions were being deposited on January 17, Mother Jones revealed that Walker was scheduled to attend a high-dollar fundraiser in the heart of the New York’s financial district at 339 Park Avenue — the towering headquarters for global financial giant CitiGroup. The $5,000 per couple fundraiser was hosted by none other than Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, former CEO of AIG.

Walker’s choice to be on Wall Street the day of the recall filing is so astounding, for many it goes far beyond the notion of a tin ear. “Walker could not have sent a clearer signal to Wall Street, that he is on the side of the 1 percent ready to do their bidding and take the heat,” said Scot Ross of the Wisconsin group, One Wisconsin Now. Ross points to the data his group compiled to support his claim that Walker is constructing an economy that only the 1 percent could love.

For months, a massive federal settlement with big Wall Street banks over their role in the mortgage crisis has been in the offing. The rumored details have always given progressives heartburn: civil immunity, no investigations, inadequate help for homeowners and a small penalty for the banks. Now, on the eve President Obama’s State of the Union address-in which he plans to further advance a populist message against big money and income inequality-the deal may be here, and it’s every bit as ugly as progressives feared.[..]

As we noted last week, many progressive groups have begun a massive petition drive to push back against the settlement and demand fair investigations. Moreover, attorneys general in California, New York, Delaware, Nevada and Massachusetts have previously said they won’t be a part of any deal that offers civil immunity.

So the deal is far from done-but it’s certainly moving towards an undesirable conclusion. We’ll have plenty more in this space all week.

John Nichols: GOP Slates Antilabor Zealot Daniels for SOTU Response

The Republican Party is so determined to advance the extreme antilabor agenda of its Wall Street funders and front groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council that it shoved aside John Boehner (might have teared up), Paul Ryan (last year’s man) and vaguely interesting governors such as New Jersey’s Chris Christie and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley (both backing a loser for president) in order to make way for Indiana Governor Daniels to deliver the response to Tuesday’s State of the Union address by President Obama.

The choice of Daniels, who is currently leading the fight to enact an antilabor “Right-to-Work (For Less)” law in Indiana,  sends a powerful signal at a time when the Republicans who would be president are stumbling over one another to proclaim their enthusiasm for “Right-to-Work” legislation, their disdain for public employees and their unions, and (in Newt Gingrich’s case) their determination to turn the clock back a century in order to eliminate child labor laws. Only Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich are more closely linked in the public’s mind with the union-bashing frenzy that has so energized Republican governors and legislators. And Daniels is, arguably, the most aggressive union basher of all. Having already stripped Indiana public employees of collective bargaining rights, he is now aiding and abetting the efforts of Indiana Republican legislators to undermine the rights of private sector workers.

Roger Cohen: The Sarkozy Effect

LONDON – In the other election of 2012, the one more imminent, there are only two words worth remembering. The first is leadership. The second is change. The rest, as the French say, is du blah-blah.

If the French decide leadership is more important in a time of crisis they will grit their teeth and re-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. If they want change from a president never close to their hearts, they will – as Samuel Johnson said of second marriages – embrace hope over experience and elect the Socialist candidate, François Hollande.

Rumor has it that on Monday, after months of negotiation with big banks, the White House may announce a settlement that would let the banks off the hook for their role in the foreclosure crisis-paying a tiny fraction of what’s needed in exchange for blanket immunity from future lawsuits.

We hope these rumors are untrue.

President Obama has the ability to stop and change the direction of this sweetheart deal. He should reject any deal that benefits the one percent and lets the big banks get away with their crimes. Instead, the president should stand with the 99 percent and push for real accountability and a solution that will help millions of people in this country.

Here are the hard facts about the housing crisis we face:

    3.5 million Americans are homeless.

    18.5 million homes sit vacant.

    Since 2007, more than 7.5 million homes have been foreclosed.

Default and foreclosure rates are now several times higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

Dean Baker: The Surefire Way to End Online Piracy: End Copyright

The popular rebellion against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was an impressive display of democracy in action. The opponents of the bill were able to use the web and various social media venues to educate the public about the specifics of the bill. The resulting flood of emails, phone calls and letters caused the bill’s Congressional sponsors to cut and run.

While this revolt against the entertainment industry’s effort to rein in the web was inspiring, there is a real issue at stake. It is getting ever harder for creative workers to get paid for their work.

This is seen most clearly in the music industry. Sales of recorded music in the United States dropped from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $7.7 billion last year. If sales had kept pace with inflation and the growth of the economy they would be over $23 billion today.

Ellen Cantarow: Shale-Shocked: Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement

This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.

Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” for short.

Jim Hightower: America’s Class Divide

What planet does presidential wannabe Rick Santorum live on? When it comes to grasping the situation of America’s hard-hit workaday majority, this sweater-vested ultra-right-winger is further out than Pluto.

In a recent debate, Santorum assailed a tax plan proposed by front-runner Mitt Romney. It wasn’t the plan’s details that caused Rick to stamp his tiny feet, but Romney’s expressed intent to help the “middle class.”

Tut-tut, chided the ideologically-pure Santorum, Republicans mustn’t use such language, for it creates an impression of class warfare. After all, he lectured: “There are no classes in America. We don’t put people in classes.”

Sure, Rick — today’s jobless economy, a national epidemic of union busting and wage knockdowns, absurd tax giveaways to the super-rich, the ongoing Wall Street bailout, inexcusable corporate subsides, rising poverty, the slashing of anti-poverty programs and a decade of falling incomes for the vast majority, while the elite 1 percent makes off with triple-digit increases in its wealth — there’s no class war happening. Just close your eyes, hum a happy tune … and live on Pluto.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: What Newt Learned From Nixon

Conservatives may denounce class warfare, yet by shrewdly combining the politics of class with the politics of culture, Newt Gingrich won his first election in 14 years, humbled Mitt Romney and upended the Republican Party.

He also exposed profound frailties in Romney as a candidate, throwing him badly off-balance on questions related to his personal wealth, business career and income taxes. Unless Romney finds a comfortable and genuine way of talking about his money, he will present President Obama’s team a weakness that they’ll exploit mercilessly. The country is thinking more skeptically about wealth and privilege in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Romney has not adjusted.

Gingrich skillfully set up his opponent to step on the landmine of class by transforming Romney from his self-cast role as a successful businessman into a heartless financier more interested in profits than in job creation.

After a long, dark period of stagnant progressive momentum and pay-to-play politics, this week saw a flurry of progressive victories that could upset the conventional wisdom about a post-Citizens United world.

This morning’s announcement by Harry Reid that the Senate is postponing the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) vote would have been almost unimaginable as recently as a week ago, when PIPA and its House counterpart, SOPA (the Stop On-line Piracy Act), were considered done deals. Only a handful of disgruntled geeks stood in the way of an industry power grab that would have blessed online censorship and stifled innovation. But the bills’ promoters failed to anticipate the power of “Blackout Wednesday” to popularize the outrage. Suddenly, it wasn’t just geeks. Congress started fielding calls from people unable to sell couches on Craigslist and harried parents of students desperate to consult Wikipedia for school papers. Thus sounded the death knell for the bills.

While the tactical decision to pull down popular sites in protest of these bills were tailored to the Internet blackout bills, the other two major victories this week-the rejection of the massive Keystone oil pipeline and the submission of 1.9 million signatures to recall union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker-were also made possible by fusing old-school community organizing with innovative netroots strategies.

New York Time Editorial: Egypt’s Economic Crisis

In the year since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted, Egypt has faced many challenges: the military-led government’s brutality against protesters and pro-democracy groups, its resistance to handing power to civilian leaders and the rise of Islamists in the country’s first free elections. Now worsening economic conditions are further sabotaging hopes for a democratic future.

The country’s foreign currency reserves have fallen from a peak of $36 billion to about $10 billion and could run out entirely by March. The currency is under severe pressure, and a steep drop in the exchange rate could bring painful inflation and more social unrest. Youth unemployment is about 25 percent, a dangerous situation where 60 percent of the citizens are 30 and under.

Egyptians want jobs, education and a say in governance. Many are justifiably angry about the military’s autocratic control – and will be angrier still if economic conditions deteriorate further. They aren’t the only ones with a stake in the outcome. Egypt is the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East. Its success, or failure, will have a huge impact on the region and beyond.

John Nichols Forget Romney, Gingrich Is Running Against ‘Liberal Media’-and It Might Work

Fifteen years ago, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich was arguing that President Clinton’s personal foibles were fair game for political debate, and ultimately justification for impeachment.

Now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination as a “moral values” candidate, Gingrich is suddenly facing charges, raised by an ex-wife, about his own personal foibles. Those questions arose on the eve of the final debate before the critical South Carolina primary, in which Gingrich has surged to a top-tier position. The former Speaker needed one more opportunity to distinguish himself as the meanest dog in the GOP junkyard-a socialist-ripping pit bull as compared with the French poodle that is Mitt Romney.

And he got it in Thursday night’s last pre-primary debate. [..]

The man who raised tough questions about Bill Clinton’s shaky claim to moral authority blamed a media personality for asking tough questions about his shaky claim to moral authority. Then Gingrich announced that he was “tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

Reasonable people can debate whether Obama has been “protected” by the media.

On Thursday night, however, that wasnt what Newt Gingrich was really complaining about.

What he was really complaining about was John King’s refusal to protect Newt Gingrich.

Maureen Dowd: Opening Newt’s Marriage

Right now, you are probably asking yourself whether two divorces, a history of adultery and an ex-wife who says you asked for an open marriage would be enough to disqualify a person from becoming president of the United States.

O.K., pretend that was what you were asking yourself.

Sex was one of the topics very much on the minds of voters as South Carolina prepared to go to the polls on Saturday. Also, there was the big debate, in which Newt Gingrich said that asking about the open marriage thing was “despicable.” That was also when Mitt Romney slipped and referred to health reform in Massachusetts as “Romneycare,” which I enjoyed very much.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the campaign, Herman Cain announced that he was endorsing “the people” for president. On behalf of the people, I would like to say that, if elected, we promise to balance the budget, release Mitt Romney’s tax returns and pass a law against driving to Canada with an Irish setter tied to the roof of the car.

Multiple marriages and even adultery are not automatic disqualifications for the presidency. If they were, the country would have a very different roster of former presidents and candidates. But when a political party decides that moralizing about personal conduct is as important as public policy, it inevitably makes some of its leaders vulnerable to the worst charges of hypocrisy.[..]

For too many Republicans, it’s not enough that Americans are free to pray in the house of worship of their choice; they want all children to be required to pray in school. They want to impose their own ideas about sexuality and abortion on everyone. And they love to accuse Democrats of being insufficiently pious. (Rick Perry’s exit from the race on Thursday may mean no more ads accusing President Obama of a “war on religion” and liberals of believing faith is a sign of weakness. Or, it may not, depending on how desperate the other candidates get.)

When Republican officials then get caught violating one of the Ten Commandments, they make an enormous show of contrition and repentance and ask for the public’s forgiveness. But as the hypocrisy level continues to rise, that forgiveness may become much harder to provide.

Eugene Robinson: Change They Don’t Believe In

You know-it-alls who think unemployment is the most urgent crisis facing the nation are wrong, I’ve learned from watching a zillion Republican campaign ads on television this week. All you deficit hawks, rise-of-China worrywarts and alarmed observers of the Iranian nuclear program are wrong, too, and should stop bothering yourselves with trifles.

One of Mitt Romney’s spots ends by laying out the nation’s top priority in no uncertain terms. Voters should support Romney, the narrator says, because “beating Obama is the most important issue.”

Am I the only one to find that weird? I understand why trying to engineer President Obama’s defeat would be an urgent priority for Romney, who wants to move his family into the White House, but why should it be more important to voters than, say, boosting the economy or reducing the debt? Why shouldn’t the focus be on policies and results?

David Sirota: Ron Paul and Our Selective Definition of Bigotry

If they have any value at all anymore, presidential election campaigns at least remain larger-than-life mirrors reflecting back painful truths about our society. As evidence, ponder the two-sided debate over Republican candidate Ron Paul and bigotry.

One camp cites Paul’s hate-filled newsletters and his libertarian opposition to civil rights regulations as evidence that he aligns with racists. As the esteemed scholar Tim Wise puts it, this part of Paul’s record proves that he represents “the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe … the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man’s property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings.”

The other camp tends to acknowledge those ugly truths about Paul but then points out that the Texas congressman has been one of the only politicians 1) fighting surveillance, indefinite detention and due-process-free assassination policies almost exclusively aimed at minorities; 2) opposing wars that often seem motivated by rank Islamophobia; and 3) railing against the bigotry of a drug war that disproportionately targets people of color.

Joe Conanson: Tax Day: Will Romney Make April Fools of Republicans

Mitt Romney’s latest flip-flop is almost complete. Having vowed a month ago not to release his federal income tax returns, the Republican presidential front-runner conceded during Saturday night’s debate that he would “probably” release his returns, and then on Tuesday afternoon finally said he will do so-in April, long after he is likely to have secured his party’s nomination. With characteristic arrogance, he excused the delay by suggesting that April 15 is the traditional date when public officials supply this information, which is certainly true if you’re already president.

Even more galling was Romney’s suggestion that he will reveal only his 2011 return, which would allow him to control the narrative, of course, by paying a higher rate this year than in years past. Having admitted that he pays as little as 15 percent-or around the same effective rate as a family earning $60,000 a year.

On December 30, the Montana Supreme Court delivered a New Year’s gift to the nation, upholding a century-old ban on corporate political expenditures in state elections. The decision has gone underreported amidst the hoopla of the Republican primaries-even as super PAC spending skyrockets and there is an emerging understanding of its corrosive impact-but the Montana case sets up the first direct challenge to the disastrous Citizens United decision as we approach its second anniversary.

Free Speech For People – a national non-partisan campaign challenging the fabrication of corporate rights under the US Constitution-filed a friend- of-the-court brief in the Montana case. It led a coalition that included the American Sustainable Business Council, a network of more than 70,000 businesses across the country; the American Independent Business Alliance; and a local supermarket business and non-profit corporation.

George Zornich: Keystone XL Is Dead-Again

For the second time in as many months, the Obama administration has rejected the Keystone XL pipeline – a hugely controversial project that would traverse the length of the country from Nebraska to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying heavy and dirty tar sands oil from deep in Canada. [..]

But Republicans successfully revived the project during the end-of-year negotiations on the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance. Democrats desperately wanted these measures, and the final bill included a provision that would force the State Department to issue a decision on Keystone within two months.

Today – less than even one month since the payroll tax cut bill was passed – the State Department announced they were denying the permit. In a statement, President Obama endorsed that decision: “As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment.”

Leslie Savan: Colbert Raises Cain

Stephen Colbert, the all-but-declared candidate for the president of the United States of South Carolina, and Jon Stewart, the man in charge of the Colbert Super PAC, are not technically, legally, or otherwise coordinating campaign plans-as they stated at one point in perfect unison last night. But in a frenzy of non-coordinatism, these two citizens united to get Stephen on the SC ballot, even though the ballots have already been printed and write-ins aren’t permitted. How? By running an ad equating a vote for Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race in last month but is still on the ballot, as a vote for Stephen Colbert. [..]

It’s only fitting that Cain, whom Rachael Maddow earlier revealed as not a candidate but a brilliant performance artist, play host to performance artist Colbert’s frankly parasitic campaign. After all, the comedic Republican primary, with its clown car full of jokesters (from Romney saying that the $374,000 he made in speakers fees last year is “not very much” to Gingrich’s blowing audible racist dog whistles during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day debate) is as funny as anything out of Comedy Central.

John Nichols: Scott Walker Admits His Defeat Would Stall the GOP’s Antilabor Push

Even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was acknowledging Tuesday that the one million signatures that had been gathered on petitions seeking his recall and removal from office were all but certain to force him to face a new election.

Walker still thinks he will win that election.

But if he loses, and polling suggests that is a very real prospect, Walker has admitted that the anti-GOP agenda of Republican governors and presidential candidates will be dealt a blow.

Indeed, Walker suggests, Republican governors will be less inclined to attack public-sector unions. And he suggests that Democratic governors will also recognize that assaults on the rights, the benefits and the pensions of state, county and municipal employees and teachers are politically unwise.

E. J. Dionne, JR.: So Much for a Populist GOP

Members of the tea party insisted they were turning the GOP into a populist, anti-establishment bastion. Social conservatives have long argued that values and morals matter more than money. Yet in the end, the corporate and economically conservative wing of the Republican Party always seems to win.

Thus was Mitt Romney so confident of victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary that he left the state briefly on Tuesday for a fundraiser in New York City. And why not? The power of big money has been amplified in this campaign by the super PACs let loose by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and lax regulation.

You cannot watch the morning news shows in this state without confronting an intricately confusing blitz of ads, some paid for by candidates, others by the supposedly independent PACs. One kind is indistinguishable from the other.

From all evidence, the issue of economic justice isn’t going away. Break the news gently to Mitt Romney, who seems apoplectic that the whole “rich get richer, poor get poorer” thing is being discussed out loud. In front of the children, for goodness’ sake.

“You know I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” he told the “Today” show’s Matt Lauer last week. “But the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach.”

Actually, those blasts weren’t comimg from President Obama. That was Romney’s competition for the Republican nomination, sounding like a speakers’ lineup at an Occupy Wall Street rally.

Charles M. Blow: Newt Gingrich and the Art of Racial Politics

I’ll spare you the video. TMC

That’s the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him if his condescending remarks about the work ethic of poor black people are indeed condescending:

   Juan Williams:  Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also say poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed as at a minimum as insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?

   Newt Gingrich: No, I don’t see that (applause).

Gingrich went on to say that the children would be “getting money, which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.”

The first implication here is that elites are liberals, not men like Gingrich – whose net worth The Los Angeles Times has estimated to be $6.7 million, who was a history professor, who was paid $1.6 million dollars by Freddie Mac for “advice,” and who had a half million dollar line of credit at Tiffany’s.

If Gingrich isn’t among America’s elite, the word no longer has meaning.

New York Times Editorial: Taxes and Transparency

Barack Obama released his tax records when he ran for president in 2008. So did Richard Nixon in 1968. In fact, so did George Romney in that same campaign.

But, in 2012, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and onetime chief executive of a private equity firm, is still hedging about whether he will do so.

Candidates for the presidency are not legally required to release their tax records, but they generally have for many years now – because American voters have a right to know how the men and women who want to be president make their money.

Barry Lando: Iran, the U.S. and Israel: Blind Man’s Bluff

In a perilous spiral of assassinations, threats and counterthreats, leaders in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran keep ratcheting up the tension. What is most alarming about the situation is that the principal players and their advisers are engaged in an incredibly dangerous three-way game of blind man’s bluff.

None of them expresses a real understanding of the others-their motives, their concerns or their likely reactions. That’s true even for Israel and the United States: Though the U.S. risks being sucked into any conflict between Israel and Iran, the Obama administration is currently forced to guess what its supposed allies in Israel are planning.