Tag: Punting the Pundits

To cash-strapped counties in the American West, Ken Ivory is offering what sounds like salvation. Underfunded schools, potholed roads, cuts to law enforcement-those can be reversed, the Republican state representative from Utah suggests in presentations to county commissioners, Tea Party groups, and Fox News viewers, if states force the federal government to turn over millions of acres of public land to local authorities.

Over the past several years Ivory has made himself the leading evangelist for the land-transfer movement, which is undergoing something of a resurrection in Western states. He’s also facing new accusations of fraud. In early June, the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability filed complaints in three states alleging that Ivory is scamming local governments out of thousands of taxpayer dollars every year by “making false statements” to convince them to support his nonprofit, “which exists primarily to pay him and his wife,” the complaint reads. What Ivory really has to offer, according to CFA’s Anne Weismann, is not salvation but “snake oil.”

Jessica Valenti: Jeb Bush can’t end the war on women with good domestic violence policies

Any Republican running for president in 2016 needs women voters to win, and the last few years of bone-headed statements and even more bone-headed policies – from “legitimate rape” to transvaginal ultrasounds, and from the wage gap to birth control coverage in insurance policies – haven’t made that easy. So perhaps it was inevitable that former Florida governor Jeb Bush would think that if he says “domestic violence” enough times, female voters will magically appear.

The difficulty for Bush is that other policies that he favors don’t protect women from domestic violence: they put victims at further risk. [..]

But while Bush passed the Family Protection Act while governor, which increased criminal consequences for abusers, increased funding for women’s shelters and his wife, Columba Bush, made working against domestic violence a big part of her tenure as Florida’s first lady, it’s going to take more to close the voting gender gap than focusing on just one women’s issue. Because one policy that affects women’s lives can’t be cleaved off from all the other, important policies that affect women just because they’re less ideologically convenient – especially when they’re interconnected.

Access to abortion, for example, makes it easier for women to leave their abusive partners.

Naomi Oreskes: The Hoax of Climate Denial: Why “Politically Motivated” Science Is Good Science

Recently, the Washington Post reported new data showing something most of us already sense: that increased polarization on Capitol Hill is due to the way the Republican Party has lurched to the right. The authors of the study use Senator John McCain to illustrate the point. McCain’s political odyssey is, in some dismaying sense, close to my own heart, since it highlights the Republican turn against science.

As unlikely as it might seem today, in the first half of the twentieth century the Republicans were the party that most strongly supported scientific work, as they recognized the diverse ways in which it could undergird economic activity and national security. The Democrats were more dubious, tending to see science as elitist and worrying that new federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health would concentrate resources in elite East Coast universities.

In recent decades, of course, the Republicans have lurched rightward on many topics and now regularly attack scientific findings that threaten their political platforms. In the 1980s, they generally questioned evidence of acid rain; in the 1990s, they went after ozone science; and in this century, they have launched fierce attacks not just on climate science, but in the most personal fashion imaginable on climate scientists.

Two reports published this month provide fresh evidence of the hard-to-justify high prices that many hospitals charge for common procedures. The prices drive up premiums for many privately insured patients and can be ruinously expensive for those who are uninsured or inadequately insured or who go to a hospital or doctor outside their insurance network.

A study published in the June issue of Health Affairs, a policy journal, found that the 50 hospitals with the highest prices in 2012, the latest data available, charged an average of 10 times what is allowed by Medicare, which was used as a baseline for cost. Although hospitals routinely complain that Medicare pays too little, the allowable charges under Medicare are what the government, after extensive analysis, considers the cost of the procedure plus a reasonable amount to invest in hospital improvements and keep up with medical inflation. [..]

High prices will hit millions of people who will remain uninsured in coming years for one reason or another despite passage of the Affordable Care Act, according to the Health Affairs study. Patients with private insurance who receive care out-of-network don’t generally benefit from their insurer’s negotiated discounts may have to pay a high proportion of the full charges.

David Sirota: Has America Changed Since Edward Snowden’s Disclosures?

Two years ago this month, a 29-year-old government contractor named Edward Snowden became the Daniel Ellsberg of his generation, delivering to journalists a tranche of secret documents shedding light on the government’s national security apparatus. But whereas Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers detailing one specific military conflict in Southeast Asia, Snowden released details of the U.S. government’s sprawling surveillance machine that operates around the globe.

On the second anniversary of Snowden’s historic act of civil disobedience, it is worth reviewing what has changed-and what has not.

On the change side of the ledger, there is the politics of surveillance. For much of the early 2000s, politicians of both parties competed with one another to show who would be a bigger booster of the NSA’s operations, fearing that any focus on civil liberties risked their being branded soft on terrorism. Since Snowden, though, the political paradigm has dramatically shifted.

Eugene Robinson: You Can Call Him Jeb!

Substituting an exclamation point for his inconvenient last name, Jeb! has officially entered the presidential race. Why isn’t everyone else quaking in fear?

I can see why Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner who also downplays a familiar surname, might welcome Jeb Bush’s candidacy. If the general election is Bush versus Clinton, the dynasty issue becomes a wash. Americans would just have to deal with the fact that these two families are never, ever going away.

But while Clinton looks like a lock to win her party’s nomination, at this point Bush-who unveiled his Jeb! campaign logo Sunday-can’t even be considered the favorite to win his. He is certainly in the top tier of GOP candidates, and his fundraising prowess may eventually wear down his rivals. But all Bush managed to do in the long pre-announcement phase of his campaign was to send his polling numbers into a swoon.

Harvey Wasserman: Could John Kasich’s Anti-Green Legacy Propel Him to the White House?

Ohio’s Republican Gov. John Kasich has joined the 2016 herd: He has declared himself a candidate for the presidency.

But he may very well get the vice presidential nomination instead.

He may very well also be America’s most anti-green governor.

Kasich is an inveterate maverick. He recently created a characteristic stir by saying he would not have invaded Iraq. Over the decades he’s been a “budget hawk” congressman, hard-right Fox commentator, Wall Street speculator and now a second-term governor of the Buckeye State. Edgy and unpredictable, he’s gone against the GOP grain by supporting Medicaid and occasionally preaching compassion for the sick and the poor.

All of which could make him unacceptable for the GOP presidential nod.

But his stance on the environment is another story.

The Fast Track trade authority package was rejected Friday because two years of effort by a vast corporate coalition, the White House and GOP leaders — and weeks of deals swapped for yes votes — could not assuage a majority in the House of Representatives facing constituents’ concerns that more of the same trade policy would kill more jobs, push down wages and open a Pandora’s box of other damaging consequences.

Proponents of Fast Tracking the almost-completed, controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) say they are coming back this week for another try. And the White House was on full tilt this weekend trying to pressure House Democrats to flip their votes.

But the path to enactment of Fast Track remains unclear, even as the corporate coalition, White House and GOP leaders remain hell bent on finding it.

To understand what comes next, it’s worth unpacking what exactly happened on Friday and how we got there.

Robert Kuttner: The Real Meaning of Obama’s Trade Defeat

The proposed TPP was the latest in a series of deals that are mostly about the use of “trade” agreements to allow corporations to do end runs around national regulation. This is basically special interest legislation for elites. TPP, like NAFTA, included measures, such as sweetheart patent deals, that never could have won passage as separate legislation. The real interest group here is the corporate elite.

TPP is part of a broad ideology and set of ploys that reflects corporate dominance of the agenda. Public employees, such as those represented by SEIU, care about this, not just out of solidarity (though that’s important), but because “trade” deals have been used to promote privatization schemes and weaken financial regulation and create corporate hegemony sponsored by presidents from both parties. TPP is emblematic of the political domination by the one percent.

The labor movement is not motivated just by the loss of factory jobs but by the entire ideological assault on the security of ordinary wage earners and consumers. The picture of labor as a narrow interest group makes sense only if you buy the propaganda that TPP is mainly a trade deal.

Mark Weibrot: Germany is bluffing on Greece

Berlin is not going to force Athens out of the eurozone anytime soon

You can ignore all the talk of a “Grexit,” the bluff and bluster of right-wing German ideologues such as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble who would celebrate it, and repetitive, stubbornly dire warnings that time is running out. Did you notice that the much-hyped June 5 deadline for the Greece’s payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came and went, Greece didn’t pay and nobody fell off a cliff? Trust me, this is not a cliffhanger.

Although there have been numerous references to game theory in the ongoing commentary, it’s really not necessary if you look at the revealed preferences of those whom the Syriza government is polite and diplomatic enough to call its European partners. Take partner-in-chief German Chancellor Angela Merkel: If there’s one thing she doesn’t want to be remembered as, it’s the politician who destroyed the eurozone.

John Nicholss: The Magna Carta Said No Man Is Above the Law, But What About Corporations?

The Magna Carta reminds us that no man is above the law.

And it should be celebrated for that.

But it should not be imagined that the Magna Carta established democracy, or anything akin to it.

The great British parliamentarian Tony Benn put it well several years ago when he noted, as this 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta approached, that we still do not have democracy. [..]

If we respect the notion that the rule of law must apply to all-the most generous interpretation of the premises handed down across the centuries from those who on June 15, 1215 forced “the Great Charter of the Liberties” upon King John of England at Runnymede-then surely it must apply to corporations.

And, surely, the best celebration of those premises in the United States must be the extension of the movement to amend the US Constitution to declare that corporations are not people, money is not speech, and citizens and their elected representatives have the authority to organize elections-and systems of governance-where our votes matter more than their dollars.

The fight over Trade Promotion Authority was never about Barack Obama, despite the best efforts of the White House and many in the media to portray it as such. The president’s effort to obtain congressional consent to “fast track” a sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which failed Friday amid a complex flurry of House votes, was about something that runs far deeper: frustration on the part of Americans with race-to-the-bottom trade policies as defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement and extended across ensuing agreements.

This is something the president and his allies need to recognize as they revisit fast track and trade issues-not just in advance of an expected “revote” on a key measure Tuesday but in the weeks and months to come. America is moving beyond the point where a politics of partisanship or personality is sufficient to secure support for “free trade” policies that have not worked and that will not work.

Eugene Robinson: Who Controls Iraq: President Obama or Islamic State?

Don’t feel bad if you’re confused about what the United States is trying to accomplish in Iraq. President Obama doesn’t seem to know, either-or else he won’t say.

Days after admitting that “we don’t yet have a complete strategy” for training Iraqi government forces-which are supposed to ultimately defeat Islamic State-Obama is sending an additional 450 troops to execute this unstrategized mission. That will raise the number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq to about 3,500. But what, realistically, is their goal? And how are they supposed to achieve it? [..]

Obama’s hesitancy suggests a deep skepticism about what, at this point, must be considered his war. That would explain why he keeps announcing we have no strategy. Maybe one does exist-but the president doesn’t think it will work.

Or perhaps Obama is playing for time. Maybe he has decided to do just enough to keep the Iraqi government from collapsing, while giving his generals every chance to make their far-fetched training program work.

The problem is that in any war, the enemy gets a vote. And nothing, so far, has altered the fact that Islamic State is far more in control of events than the president.

Roisin Davis: Iceland Jailed Bankers and Rejected Austerity-and It’s Been a Success

When the global economic crisis hit in 2008, Iceland suffered terribly-perhaps more than any other country. The savings of 50,000 people were wiped out, plunging Icelanders into debt and placing 25 percent of its homeowners in mortgage default.

Now, less than a decade later, the nation’s economy is booming. And this year it will become the first culturally European country that faced collapse to beat its pre-crisis peak of economic output.

That’s because it took a different approach. Instead of imposing devastating austerity measures and bailing out its banks, Iceland let its banks go bust and focused on social welfare policies. In March, the International Monetary Fund announced that the country had achieved economic recovery “without compromising its welfare model” of universal health care and education.

In 2003 the CIA captured a Pakistani named Majid Khan, took him to an overseas black site, and began to torture him. According to Khan, interrogators beat him, waterboarded him, and hung him from a beam naked for days. He spent most of one year in the dark. They threw ice water on him, deprived him of sleep, and subjected him to “violent enemas.” Even his memories of the abuse were not his own; the CIA has considered recollections of interrogation to be classified information, thus forbidding detainees from speaking or writing publicly about their experiences. Notes taken by Khan’s lawyers were finally cleared for release in May, and were reported by Reuters last week.

The grisly new details of Khan’s treatment indicate that we are still far from a public accounting of the full extent of the CIA’s interrogation tactics, much less accountability for the officials involved. But there is new movement in the Senate to reinforce the prohibition on torture, so that the CIA cannot do to others what it did to Khan.

Amy Kapczynski and Judith Resnik: No Fast Track for Unfair Trade Deals

This week, the House of Representatives faces a critical question: Should it endorse “fast track” approval of trade deals negotiated by the president? A massive new trade agreement — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“TPP”) — hangs in the balance. The agreement is shrouded in secrecy because under national security provisions, its text is classified. We do know that the agreement will be between the US and eleven other countries. From draft chapters released on WikiLeaks, we also know enough to want to slow down — not to speed up — deliberation on the treaty.

According to the leaks, a key aspect of the TPP will be the provision of “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS). The name sounds innocuous, but its content puts at risk core elements of the American legal system — America’s commitment to open courts and equal treatment.

Domestic investors, along with ordinary people, bring claims to court when they believe that they have been harmed by government action. But under the ISDS provisions, thousands of foreign companies would gain the right to opt-out of the public court system and instead to use private, ad hoc arbitral tribunals to challenge any number of US laws that the companies argue harms their profitability.

Ari Berman: A Voter-Fraud Witch Hunt in Kansas

In fall 2010, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach held a press conference alleging that dead people were voting in the state. He singled out Alfred K. Brewer as a possible zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found the 78-year-old working in his front yard. “I don’t think this is heaven, not when I’m raking leaves,” Brewer said.

Since his election in 2010, Kobach has been the leading crusader behind the myth of voter fraud, making headline-grabbing claims about the prevalence of such fraud with little evidence to back it up. Now he’s about to become a lot more powerful.

On Monday, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill giving Kobach’s office the power to prosecute voter-fraud cases if county prosecutors decline to do so and upgrading such charges from misdemeanors to felonies. Voters could be charged with a felony for mistakenly showing up at the wrong polling place. No other secretary of state in the country has such sweeping prosecutorial power, says Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

Finally! At last! Bipartisan collaboration in Washington — and what a beaut! President Obama, the Republican Party, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, K Street lobbyists and giant multinational companies are all singing “Kumbaya” and working together to shove through Congress the fast-track legislation that will grease the wheels for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. [..]

On Digby’s Hullaballo blog, the pseudonymous Gaius Publius reports that the fast-track bill may also lead to another deal called the Trade in Services Agreement — TISA — that could remove regulation of everything from financial services to telecommunications to official checks and balances, leaving citizens and consumers at the mercy of unfettered greed.

WikiLeaks has released some of the proposed agreement’s chapters and what’s revealed, Gaius Publius writes, “should have Congress shutting the door on Fast Track faster and tighter than you’d shut the door on an invading army of rats headed for your apartment.”

Rep Keith Ellison: The link between police tactics and economic conditions cannot be ignored

The fatal encounter between Officer Wilson and Michael Brown on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri didn’t take place in a vacuum. Freddie Gray wasn’t the first black man thrown in the back of a van in Sandtown. Eric Garner wasn’t selling loosie cigarettes for fun. Harsh police tactics in black communities and a history of high rates of unemployment and poverty go hand in hand. [..]

Leaders in Washington and around the country should have responded to the growing crisis in African American neighborhoods by creating jobs, repairing infrastructure, avoiding bad trade deals that offshored good-paying jobs in many urban areas and investing in our kids. Instead Congress and state legislatures built prisons, passed trade agreements that sent jobs overseas, gave police weapons designed for warzones and passed laws that increased de facto segregation.

Robert Reich: How to Make the Economy Work for the Many, Not the Few #8: Make the Polluters Pay Us

Instead of investing in dirty fuels, let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the revenue so that it benefits everyone.

Each ton of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere costs our nation between $40 and $100, and we release millions of tons of it every year.

Businesses don’t pay that cost. They pass it along to the rest of us–in the form of more extreme weather and all the costs to our economy and health resulting from it.

We’ve actually invested more than $6 trillion in fossil fuels since 2007. The money has been laundered through our savings and tax dollars.

This has got to be reversed.

The President is asking for “fast track” authority to let the White House be the sole negotiator on the Trans Pacific Partnership, a giant twelve-nation trade agreement between the U.S. and Pacific Rim nations. Fast track passed the Senate in May, and could come up for a House vote as early as this week.

Trouble is, the provisions are secret, and the Obama administration won’t tell Congress or the people what’s in it. But thanks to a few chapters released by Wikileaks online last year, we already know it’s a disaster for U.S. workers-especially women.

According to the Washington Post, around 600 corporations and a couple of labor unions have seen a draft. A few members of Congress have seen parts of it in a “secure soundproof reading room,” where cellphones and note-taking are not allowed. The majority of congressmembers and the public have not, and those members who have been given that extremely limited access are forbidden to discuss it with the public.

Mary Turck: Private prisons, public shame

Prisons should not be profit centers

Last month the state of Washington contracted with the GEO Group, one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the U.S., to move up to 1,000 inmates from the state’s overcrowded prisons to its correctional facility in Michigan, thousands of miles from their homes and families. This makes family visits and connection with the community harder, though studies show that inmates who receive more visits are less likely to re-offend after release.

Prisoners can’t vote in the United States and as a result they don’t have much sway over public policy decisions. But private, for-profit prison companies do, their voices amplified by big campaign contributions and millions spent on lobbying. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, some of the candidates’ ties to the prison-industrial complex raise a lot of questions. For example, the GEO Group has contributed heavily to campaigns of Florida senator and Republican contender Marco Rubio. And Republican candidate Jeb Bush’s support of for-profit prisons goes back to the 1990s, when he oversaw prison privatization as Florida governor.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is calling for criminal justice reform, which would reduce profits for private prisons and reduce mass incarceration. The election offers voters a choice between candidates who support the current system that allows corporations to profit from the misery of the inmates and those committed to fundamental reform, which includes changing inflexible sentencing laws and ending the for-profit prison system.

Amy B. Dean: Saving the charter school movement from itself

Charter schools are being used as a front for union bashing and privatization, but it doesn’t have to be that way

Advocates of charter schools argue that they are innovative laboratories of experimentation. But the reality is that over the past decade, the policies that led to the creation of these schools have been used to advance a political agenda: putting public resources into private hands, reducing accountability over how those resources are used and scapegoating teachers for the many problems that plague public education.

In doing so, many charter advocates have threatened to transform public education into a resource-scarce system that relies on philanthropy to function. That’s a shame. If charters were reimagined to respect their original objectives – to allow educators to experiment with new ideas, advance teachers’ voice in education and strengthen the public school system as a whole – they could yet live up to their potential.

Laura Finley> Supreme Court Protects Abusers, Fails Victims – Again

The Supreme Court has a very mixed track record when it comes to protecting women. As a domestic violence advocate, Criminologist, and activist for a decade, I am deeply concerned that the U.S still fails to prioritize women’s safety. Given that globally more women ages 15-45 die from men’s violence than of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined, far more needs to be done to protect women and girls. The courts can and should play a far bigger role in doing so.

In 2000, the court overturned part of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that allowed women to sue their abusers in federal court. So, we can sue darn near anyone for anything, just not the people who hurt us most deeply. In 2005, the court ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales that a town and its police cannot be sued for failing to enforce a restraining order. [..]

Yet the court screwed up again, although this time on a case not specifically about abuse. On June 1, 2015, in Elonis v. United States it ruled 7-2 that a man’s threats to his wife via Facebook were not such a big deal, as there was no indication that he intended to threaten her. In one of the first cases to address free speech via social media, the court rejected the “reasonable person” standard that is typical in cases of verbal threats.

Americans have acquired a fondness for worlds of make-believe. Torture was done by “a few bad apples.” Or, we must await the “verdict of history” to judge how our invasion of Iraq turned out. Or, America is besieged by hordes of crazed Islamist terrorists scaling the walls and dedicated to surpassing the horror of 9/11. Or, The Sniper salvaged American dignity and self-respect from that tragic fiasco. Or, that it was a brilliant CIA and valiant Seals who avenged a righteous America by storming Abbottabad to assassinate an infirmed old man in his bed.

This last is one of the threads of make-believe woven into the fabricated narrative about the Congressional psycho-drama this past week over electronic spying on Americans. That engrossing campfire tale has our noble representatives struggling to find the path of Solomonic wisdom that walks a tightrope between security and liberty. We awaited in suspense to see if the perilous feat would reach its goal. We agonized at word of the NSA being forced by obedience to the Law to shut down its all-seeing networks — thereby, for a few hours, leaving America exposed to the diabolical schemes of the bearded devils. The White House warned that we are playing “Russian roulette” with the country’s very survival. No one pressed the question of all six chambers in fact being uncharged.

Steven W. Thrasher: Black children are not even safe from police violence at a pool party

Over the weekend, a video surfaced that showed police in McKinney, Texas violently controlling kids on a suburban street and pulling a gun on a young black girl. After I heard about it, it took a few hours before I could screw up the courage to watch it, because I knew it would make me cry. And it did.

The video made me cry because it showed me how black children are not allowed to play. How they’re not allowed to just be fucking kids. How their play becomes criminalized and how they’re socialized to become black adults who internalize that their very breathing selves are criminal.

The video (and the follow up interview with its videographer, Brandon Brooks) made me cry because they showed how a public space like a pool becomes the domain of a security guard with no accountability. Who calls the police. Who quickly assume guilt on every black child in sight.

It made me cry to see a gun pulled on these children. I only had a police officer begin to pull a gun on me once, but it scared the shit out of me and altered my interactions with police forever – and I was an adult. How scarred will these children be after such trauma?

Chris Weigant: SCOTUS Optimism

For political wonks, June is not the month to celebrate grads, dads, and brides, but instead the biggest SCOTUS month of the year. SCOTUS (for the un-wonky) stands for “Supreme Court Of The United States.” June marks the end of the Supreme Court’s yearly session, and it is when all the biggest decisions get handed down. [..]

Now, guessing which way the court will rule is always a risky proposition. Some even call it a fool’s game. Nevertheless, I’m going to go out on a limb today in a burst of (perhaps) foolish optimism, and predict that both decisions will actually be good news. We’ve already seen a flurry of “sky is going to fall” stories (especially over King) from liberals in the media, and my guess is that this trend is only going to increase, the closer we get to the end of the month. So I thought one article from a more optimistic perspective might be appreciated — even if my guesses turn out to be utterly wrong, in the end. That, of course, is always the risk you run when going out on a limb during SCOTUS season. Time will tell whether I’m right or wrong, but for now, here’s my take on these two cases, seen mostly through the lens of politics.

Smart economic growth should be an ally of those fighting against climate change

Many environmentalists believe that there is an inherent contradiction between a capitalist system that is predicated on growth and the limits imposed by a finite planet. They point not only to the devastation from climate change, but also to the increasing scarcity of water and other resources, and argue that we can’t continue on our current course.

True, business as usual is no longer sustainable. But the question is whether growth is the enemy or whether the problem is the specific course that growth has taken. I would argue that the problem is the latter and it is important to have clear thinking on the topic if we are to address both the immediate environmental crisis facing the world and the real economic problems facing billions of the world’s people.

When people hear the term “growth,” they tend to think of physical objects such as houses, cars and refrigerators. Growth can mean more of these products. While more cars and refrigerators are growth, this does not fully define the term as it applies to economics.

Newer and better treatments for cancer and other diseases are also growth. So is an increase in the number of people going to college or other getting other types of education. Better software is also growth. More and better performances of music, plays, and other types of live entertainment are also growth.

Robert Reich: Anticipatory Bribery

Washington has been rocked by the scandal of J. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker in the history of the U.S. House, indicted on charges of violating banking laws by paying $1.7 million (as part of a $3.5 million agreement) to conceal prior misconduct, which turns out to have been child molestation.

That scandal contains another one that’s received less attention: Hastert, who never made much money as a teacher or a congressman, could manage such payments because after retiring from Congress he became a high-paid lobbyist.

This second scandal is perfectly legal but it’s a growing menace.

Sen. Ron Wyden: Fixing the DMCA, Step 1: The Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act

Right now the U.S. Copyright Office is deciding whether Americans will be able to unlock phones and other devices they’ve paid for, whether farmers can repair their own tractors and whether Americans with disabilities will be able to access e-books and other electronic media.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in 1998, prohibits these activities when they involve breaking a technological “lock” that protects a copyrighted work (check out a primer on the DMCA here). However, digital locks prevent these and many other legitimate activities.

Every three years, the Copyright Office considers whether to grant exceptions to the blanket restriction against circumventing software that locks down access to copyrighted works. It wrapped up hearings last week on 27 exemption requests.  [..]

Modern technology is in constant flux, and the DMCA’s process isn’t keeping up.

That’s why I introduced the Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation (BDBI) Act to fix some of these major flaws.

Jason Edward Harrington: TSA’s failures start long before screeners fail to detect bombs in security tests

The agency fails covert tests 95% of times because it’s full of poor managers who can’t maintain a balance between security needs and passenger wait times

The recent news of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents missing 95% of covert tests by the Red Team – the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) group that purposely tries to sneak explosives past security – reveals a lot about the TSA, but it doesn’t mean your flight is in any more danger than it’s ever been.

In a statement that drew a lot of sarcastic fire from commentators, DHS secretary Jeh Johnson remarked that the test failure numbers “never look good out of context.” After living in fear of the dread Red Team for six years, allow me to give you that context: the Red Team tests are highly theoretical – like failing a postmodern philosophy exam – but the failure points to a deeper, systemic problem that needs to be addressed.