Tag: Punting the Pundits

Darren Wilson was innocent. If only the city’s cops offered their own citizens the same due process he received.

Yesterday the Justice Department released the results of a long and thorough investigation into the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. The investigation concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove a violation of federal law by Officer Wilson. The investigation concluded much more. The investigation concluded that physical evidence and witness statements corroborated Wilson’s claim that Michael Brown reached into the car and struck the officer. It concluded that claims that Wilson reached out and grabbed Brown first “were inconsistent with physical and forensic evidence.” [..]

Unlike the local investigators, the Justice Department did not merely toss all evidence before a grand jury and say, “you figure it out.” The federal investigators did the work themselves and came to the conclusion that Officer Wilson had not committed “prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242.”

Our system, ideally, neither catches every single offender, nor lightly imposes the prosecution, jailing, and fining of its citizens. A high burden of proof should attend any attempt to strip away one’s liberties. The Justice Department investigation reflects a department attempting to live up to those ideals and giving Officer Wilson the due process that he, and anyone else falling under our legal system, deserves.

One cannot say the same for Officer Wilson’s employers.

David Cay Johnston: Another Obama regulator refuses to regulate

FERC chairwoman Cheryl LaFleur should lose her job for bias, incompetence or both

Hardly anyone has heard of Cheryl LaFleur, but she is one of America’s most powerful government officials, entrusted with vast authority to oversee the electricity, oil and natural gas industries. She chairs the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a tiny government agency with only 1,500 employees. Its budget is covered not by taxpayers but by the industries it regulates.  

Her sworn duties include making sure charges for electricity are always just and reasonable. That means suppliers should be reasonably compensated and customers should pay reasonable prices. But she has consistently ignored this responsibility. When presented with serial indicators of unjust prices, she puts on a blindfold and sits on her hands.

In a Feb. 18 letter to six senators and 13 representatives, LaFleur demonstrated beyond any doubt her fealty to electricity companies and disregard for consumers. The 19 legislators expressed alarm over the quadrupling of prices paid just to have power plants available in New England to supply electricity during peak times. The price was $1 billion and change five years ago. Last month’s auction hit $4 billion and would have been much higher but for price caps.

LaFleur, a Harvard educated lawyer, politely thanked the lawmakers for writing her about their concerns. She then told them that nothing could be done.

Mike Daisey: We can’t rely on corporations like Fox to care about ethics in journalism

We can get into trouble telling stories.

Few things evoke more high-handed, Puritanical moralizing than someone else doing something untoward that each of us has done ourselves – like telling a story that isn’t strictly or literally true. We condemn others’ embellishments, in part, because we’re the ones who didn’t get caught. [..]

But stories are not journalism, though (again, with the question of the nature of language) we call them that. There are, however, few forms of storytelling that have the specific aspirations that journalism does: it is the attempt to do the impossible and tell the literal truth – which is what makes it noble. Once we admit that every story is fiction, it makes the attempt to tell the truth so much more important; and when we as listeners take the risk to believe, it’s incredibly damaging when that trust is violated.

Bill O’Reilly’ and Brian Williams’ cases could not be more similar: both are prominent broadcast journalists in television at the top of their game; and both told war stories that contain inaccuracies so blatant that common sense says they lied. But one of these men has been heavily punished and the other will not only survive, but be rewarded because one asked for our trust, and then other never bothered to earn it nor care if he did.

It’s seed time for the 2016 presidential elections, when candidates try to figure out what they stand for and will run on.

One thing seems reasonably clear. The Democratic nominee for President, whoever she may be, will campaign on reviving the American middle class. [..]

The Democratic nominee will just as surely call for easing the burdens on working parents through paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave, childcare, elder-care, a higher minimum wage, and perhaps also tax incentives for companies that share some of their profits with their employees.

All this is fine, but it won’t accomplish what’s really needed.

The big unknown is whether the Democratic nominee will also take on the moneyed interests — the large Wall Street banks, big corporations, and richest Americans — which have been responsible for the largest upward redistribution of income and wealth in modern American history.

Eric T. Schneiderman: 50 Years After Selma, The Fight for Voting Rights Continues

On March 7, 1965, more than 600 civil rights demonstrators attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It was the first day of a planned 54-mile march to the state capitol in Montgomery to protest discriminatory voting restrictions against African Americans. [..]

Fifty years later, leaders from across the country are returning to Selma to mark one of the major milestones in our nation’s civil rights movement. Yet the sad reality is that — despite the considerable progress made in the last five decades — we are still fighting to ensure voting rights for every American.

According to the Brennan Center, 22 states have enacted some form of voter restriction since 2011. Around the country, states are enacting burdensome voter identification laws that disproportionately impact minority, elderly and student voters and scaling back early voting opportunities.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Netanyahu Speaks, Money Talks

Everything you need to know about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress Tuesday was the presence in the visitor’s gallery of one man — Sheldon Adelson.

The gambling tycoon is the Godfather of the Republican Right. The party’s presidential hopefuls line up to kiss his assets, scraping and bowing for his blessing, which when granted is bestowed with his signed checks. Data from both the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity show that in the 2012 election cycle, Adelson and his wife Miriam (whose purse achieved metaphoric glory Tuesday when it fell from the gallery and hit a Democratic congressman) contributed $150 million to the GOP and its friends, including $93 million to such plutocracy-friendly super PACs as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, Winning Our Future (the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC) and Restore Our Future (the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC). [..]

But Sheldon Adelson was not only sitting in the House gallery on Tuesday because of the strings he pulls here in the United States. He is also the Daddy Warbucks of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu is yet another of his beneficiaries — not to mention an ideological soulmate. Although campaign finance reform laws are much more strict in Israel than here in the United States, Adelson’s wealth has bought him what the historian and journalist Gershom Gorenberg calls “uniquely pernicious” influence.

Jared Bernstein: February Jobs Report: First Impressions

In yet another installment of the solid jobs reports we seen in recent months, February’s payrolls were up by 295,000 and the unemployment rate ticked from 5.7% to 5.5%, the lowest it has been since mid-2008, according to this morning’s job market update from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Still, while there’s no doubt the labor market is improving, and doing so at a faster clip than in recent years, there are still missing ingredients suggesting that the US job market is not as close to full employment — a truly tight matchup between jobs and job-seekers — as the low jobless rate suggests.

The good news is clearly the pace at which employers are adding jobs on net. Because the monthly data jump about a bit, what you want to do is smooth out some of the monthly bips and bops by averaging payroll gains over the short, medium, and longer term, as I do in the monthly jobs day smoother, shown below.

House Speaker John Boehner needs to decide whether he wants to be remembered as an effective leader or a befuddled hack. So far, I’m afraid, it’s the latter.

Boehner’s performance last week was a series of comic pratfalls, culminating Friday in a stinging rebuke from the House Republicans he ostensibly leads. Boehner wasn’t asking for much: three weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which was hours from shutting down. He came away, humiliated, with just seven days’ worth of operating money for the agency charged with keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks.

By any standard, the whole situation was beyond ridiculous. The government of the world’s leading military and economic power cannot be funded on a week-to-week basis. There was no earthly excuse for this sorry spectacle-and no one to blame but Boehner.

Robert Reich: Will the Democratic Nominee for 2016 Take on the Moneyed Interests?

It’s seed time for the 2016 presidential elections, when candidates try to figure out what they stand for and will run on.

One thing seems reasonably clear. The Democratic nominee for President, whoever she may be, will campaign on reviving the American middle class.

As will the Republican nominee — although the Republican nominee’s solution will almost certainly be warmed-over versions of George W. Bush’s “ownership society” and Mitt Romney’s “opportunity society,” both seeking to unleash the middle class’s entrepreneurial energies by reducing taxes and regulations.

That’s pretty much what we’ve heard from Republican hopefuls so far. As before, it will get us nowhere.

The Democratic nominee will just as surely call for easing the burdens on working parents through paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave, childcare, elder-care, a higher minimum wage, and perhaps also tax incentives for companies that share some of their profits with their employees.

All this is fine, but it won’t accomplish what’s really needed.

Scott Ritter: Bibi’s Blustery Blunder

On March 5, 1946, almost 69 years ago to the day, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech before an audience of thousands in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill was in Fulton at the invitation of Westminster College, where he spoke. He traveled there aboard a train, accompanied by President Harry Truman. In his speech, Churchill declared that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the [European] Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe… all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”  [..]

On March 3, 2015, the serving Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke before a joint session of the United States Congress about the existential threat to Israel and the world — including the United States — by what he termed Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Netanyahu was at the nation’s capital at the invitation of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ohio Republican John Boehner. Netanyahu, in a breech of protocol, had failed to consult the President of the United States, Barak Obama, about his visit. His appearance before the assembled elected political might of the United States Congress came little more than a week removed from a closely contested election in Israel where Netanyahu’s continued tenure as Prime Minister is anything but assured.

Netanyahu claims that his speech, which attacked a looming deal being negotiated by the United States, Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany with Iran over its nuclear program, was a wake-up call about a bad deal that would empower an out-of-control theocratic state sponsor of terrorism with a break-out capability to produce nuclear weapons. Netanyahu and his supporters claim he has a case. That may well be. But one cannot escape the highly politicized environment, both here in the United States and back in Israel, which surrounded his appearance before the United States Congress. The level of acrimony that exists between the White House and Netanyahu because of this speech is unprecedented in the history of these two nations. Winston Churchill left Fulton, Missouri in the company of President Harry Truman, arm in arm. Netanyahu leaves Washington, DC having received the cold shoulder from President Barak Obama, and the subject of acrimonious commentary from a White House that feels betrayed by an Israeli politician — not leader — who has hijacked American national security objectives for his own political use.

Mike Lux: The D.C. Centrists’ Straw Men

One of the tiredest clichés in all of American politics — and a favorite of D.C. “centrists” — is that economic populism is all about beating up on the rich and redistributing income instead of pursuing economic growth.

A note here before I get into the main point of this piece: In that sentence above I put “centrists” in quotation marks because in Washington, D.C., centrism seems to be about being in line with certain kinds of big-money special interests rather than supporting what the center of the country, in terms of voters, believes. D.C. centrists believe in cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits; not taxing Wall Street tycoons at the same levels as their secretaries; weakening regulations on the kinds of financial speculation that caused the 2008 financial panic; bailing out bankers when they get in trouble, and not prosecuting them when they break the law; and doing trade deals that have historically benefited mostly big business and created bigger trade deficits. Voters are in opposition to all those policies by very big numbers, so those positions certainly aren’t centrist to them, but that doesn’t seem to matter much to the insider D.C. “centrists.”

The latest exhibit appears in an article in The Hill, “Centrist Dems ready strike against Warren wing“: {..]

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell this Wednesday, and once again the fate of the Affordable Care Act will be in the nine justices’ hands. Unlike National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, the 2012 case that affirmed the ACA’s individual mandate but gutted its expansion of Medicaid, King turns not on the act’s constitutionality but rather on an statutory issue variously described as “bordering on frivolous,” “nested in a fictional history of Congressional intent,” and “fluff.” But like the prior case, whose result effectively denied health insurance to half of the 17 million intended to have been covered by the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, King, if decided against the government, could leave another 8.2 million uninsured and, effectively, send the ACA into its oft-cited “death spiral.” Naturally, the Kochs are pulling more than their fair share of strings.

The Kochs and their affiliated groups spent vast sums to try to stop the Affordable Care Act from passing in the first place; to unseat those that backed the law over the course of several election cycles; and more recently, to stymie the law’s implementation (e.g., killing Medicaid expansion in Tennessee last month). And the influence of the Koch network pervades nearly every part of the challengers’ case in King v. Burwell.

Jessica Valenti: College is too late to start teaching students about sexual assault

There are some essential life skills that high schools know they have to teach students. That’s why most offer classes like woodshop, home economics and drivers education. So I have to ask: Given that we’re keen to teach teenagers the basics they need to function in society, why do we still have no mandated education around rape?

Expecting high schoolers to fully grasp what sexual assault is without comprehensive education is ridiculous. Politicians still routinely demonstrate their ignorance around rape, the FBI only changed its outdated definition of sexual assault in 2011, and even the courts regularly muck up rape cases.

And while it’s wonderful that more and more universities are creating sexual assault orientations and mandating courses on consent, by the time young people reach college (assuming they go at all) it’s often too late. Nearly half of American teenagers are sexually active by the time they’re 17 years old and 44% of sexual assault victims are under 18 years old.

Keziyah Lewis: The people who could’ve prevented Tamir Rice’s death are the Cleveland police

Only in the flawed, racist, American justice system, could a black 12-year-old boy with a toy gun be blamed for his failure to prevent his own death.

But there wasn’t anything that Tamir Rice could have done to eliminate the possibility that he would die at the hands of a cop: there is a limit to how careful you can be when you live in a society designed to criminalize you. Rice’s identity as a young black male made him a potential police target from the day he was born. In the eyes of the justice system, which arrests, incarcerates, and executes black men and women at disproportionate rates compared to other races, he was always guilty of being a boy with dark skin. His punishment was just yet to be determined. [..]

If anyone could have exercised “due care to avoid injury” on that day, it was definitely not Tamir Rice. He had no control over the events that day because he had no control over his position in society as a young black male. The City of Cleveland defends officer Loehmann’s actions by claiming that, had Tamir and his family made different choices, the shooting could have been avoided. The truth is that Tamir was never given a chance – not by the Cleveland police on that cold November day, and certainly not by the society he lived in.

Rena Steinzor: Bad Feds, Deadly Meds

FDA must be equipped to regulate compounding pharmacies.

In December, the Department of Justice indicted 14 people who worked at the New England Compounding Center. The company manufactured drugs in insanitary conditions that produced a fungal meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people and made 751 gravely ill in 2012. One of the owners and a senior pharmacist face charges of racketeering and second-degree murder.

This small compounding company mixed (pdf) steroid injections in a so-called clean room where the air conditioning was shut down at night, technicians wore gloves with holes (pdf) in them and the ventilation system absorbed fragments from a recycling operation located nearby and owned by the same individuals. When employees complained about unsanitary conditions, managers said, “This line is worth more than all your lives combined, so don’t stop it.” Countless vials of the contaminated steroid drugs were shipped out to hospitals and other treatment centers in 20 states.

The indictments are good news. If convictions are obtained, they will serve as some deterrent to further misconduct within an industry that continues to be virtually unregulated.

Frank Underwood is known for deceiving people into acting against their own best interests. (We’ll miss you, President Walker.) Now we learn that this trait may extend to the series that features him.

The greatest betrayals on “House of Cards” can be found in the misleading arguments, presented as “truth,” that suggest that cutting “entitlements” is a necessity and raising taxes isn’t even an option.

The fact that Netflix has insisted upon heavy tax breaks for filming the show in Maryland may be merely coincidental. Here’s what’s not: We have learned that the series hired a leading “new Democrat” (read, “corporate Democrat”) as a consultant for the show’s most misleading episode.

The audience loves watching Frank Underwood deceive other characters. It’s less likely to appreciate being deceived itself, especially as some real-life Frank Underwoods are launching an attack against the party’s populist wing.

Paul Buccheit: Four Reasons Young Americans Should Burn Their Student Loan Papers

Fifty years ago students burned their draft cards to protest an immoral war against the people of Vietnam. Today it’s a different kind of war, immoral in another way, waged against young Americans of approximately the same age, and threatening them in a manner that endangers not their lives but their livelihoods.

There are at least four good reasons why America’s young adults- and their parents-should take up the fight against financial firms who are holding high-interest student loans that total more than the nation’s credit card debt, and more than the total income of the poorer half of America. [..]

Progressives have no shortage of important causes, but an attack on predatory student loan policies could be a unifying force for us, particularly if the power of social networking is employed.

An Apple executive said, “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.” But almost the entirety of corporate profits are being spent on stock buybacks to enrich executives and shareholders, rather than on job training.

Mary Tirck: US sells prisoners to the highest bidders

Willacy strike highlights larger problems within the prison-industrial complex

On Feb. 20 prisoners at the Willacy County Correctional Center refused to work and eat breakfast, to protest inadequate medical care at the for-profit Texas tent prison. The situation soon escalated into a riot, with inmates setting fire to some of the tents and at least three injuries. Guards used tear gas to quell the uprising.

A day later, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) said the Willacy facility, which houses mostly undocumented immigrants – many held for illegal border crossing and low-level offenses – was uninhabitable and its 2,800 prisoners would be moved to other facilities.

The Willacy prison fiasco highlights the problems of privatizing prisons and prison services across the U.S. Instead of protecting their limited rights, state and federal governments are selling prisoners to the highest bidder.

Criminal alien requirement (CAR) prisons such as Willacy only magnify the routine abuses of private prisons. CAR prisons are almost entirely filled with low-security immigrant prisoners serving time before being deported. The overwhelmingly majority of Willacy prisoners were convicted only of illegal re-entry into the United States. Most of the other prisoners are there for low-level drug crimes.

John Nichols: Mr. Spock Was a McGovernite: Remembering Leonard Nimoy’s ‘Live Long and Prosper’ Politics

The tributes to Leonard Nimoy that have filled newspaper front pages and television broadcasts since his death Friday have begun to reveal a measure of the man’s remarkable reach, which extended far beyond his development of perhaps the most enduring and beloved character in modern science fiction.

He was a dedicated artist who acted on stage and screen, directed plays and films, wrote poetry and earned praise for his photography; a generous donor to the arts and many causes; a proud Screen Actors Guild- American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) member; and an early champion of diversity and pay equity-as was revealed in recent reports on how Mr. Spock advocated for equal pay for Lt. Uhura (actress Nichelle Nichols).

So perhaps it will not come as a surprise that, at the height of his initial fame, Nimoy was an ardent McGovern man.

A few days ago Walmart, America’s largest employer, announced that it will raise wages for half a million workers. For many of those workers the gains will be small, but the announcement is nonetheless a very big deal, for two reasons. First, there will be spillovers: Walmart is so big that its action will probably lead to raises for millions of workers employed by other companies. Second, and arguably far more important, is what Walmart’s move tells us – namely, that low wages are a political choice, and we can and should choose differently. [..]

But labor economists have long questioned this view. Soylent Green – I mean, the labor force – is people. And because workers are people, wages are not, in fact, like the price of butter, and how much workers are paid depends as much on social forces and political power as it does on simple supply and demand.

What’s the evidence? First, there is what actually happens when minimum wages are increased. Many states set minimum wages above the federal level, and we can look at what happens when a state raises its minimum while neighboring states do not. Does the wage-hiking state lose a large number of jobs? No – the overwhelming conclusion from studying these natural experiments is that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little or no negative effect on employment.

Charles M. Blow: CPAC: Hackneyed and Hollow

I never know how to set my expectations for the Conservative Political Action Conference, also known as CPAC.

I try to approach it with as much of an open mind as I can muster, understanding that I am at odds, fundamentally, with many conservative principles and conservatives’ views about the role, size and scope of government, but also realizing that apart from a debate setting, this may be the best place to take the temperature of, and hear from, the broadest range of conservative leaders.

I still think, perhaps naïvely so, that people can be ideologically opposed but intellectually engaged, that a good idea makes the best bridge.

So I do my best to follow the speeches – from afar (thank you, live streaming!) – and wait to hear something that jolts my consciousness or challenges my sense of things.

But once again this year, I was disappointed.

There remains in the Republican Party, as evidenced by the speakers at this event, a breathtaking narrowness of vision and deficit of creative thought.

Robert Kuttner: Is Hillary a Sure Thing in 2016?

You hear two competing stories about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016. According to the first, she has a lock on the nomination and the election.

Hillary is sure to win the nomination, because there are no other plausible candidates, especially if Elizabeth Warren doesn’t get in. And Clinton begins with a overwhelming money advantage.

She wins the election because the Electoral College gives Blue states something close to a majority even before the campaign starts. The Republicans would have to run the table of every possible state. But the Republicans are deeply divided, with the candidates who appeal to the base far to the right of the general electorate. And the GOP Congress is rapidly alienating most moderate voters.

Game, set, match to Hillary, correct? Well, not so fast.

John Limbert: Netanyahu’s supporters (and critics) don’t really care what he says to Congress

There is a remarkable parallel between denunciations of Binyamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to Congress and of a possible nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1. Those who condemn the former haven’t heard it; and those who condemn the latter haven’t seen it.

Of course the fights are not about the contents of either a possible nuclear agreement or a future Netanyahu speech. The Israeli Prime Minister could outdo Demosthenes in eloquence. It won’t matter, because the political symbolism of the event will overshadow his words. Likewise a nuclear agreement with Iran could be one of history’s most creative settlements between adversaries. To its opponents, however, that will not matter either.

What matters is the existence of a speech or a nuclear agreement, not their content. The fact that Iran and the P5+1 may negotiate their way to an arrangement in which both sides can claim achievements will represent to its opponents (both in Tehran and Washington) a disaster. When both sides see the other as infinitely duplicitous and dishonest, anything they agree to, must in some unfathomable way contain a trick to cheat US. How, the argument goes, can one reach any agreement “with such people”?

The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.”

In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. [..]

We’re constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists, “lone wolf” extremists and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce “the prospect of a new global war on terror.”

But how serious of a threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the Internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then manipulate into joining? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this “threat” actually is? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to stopping?

Jeb Lund: The ‘War on Women’ is the latest war that Republicans at CPAC want to win

All political movements, to some extent, sound nonsensical to outsiders because groupthink elides the needs for certain connective thoughts to be voiced aloud. CPAC, a celebration of orthodoxy among a bullet-point-equipped faithful who all try to sound more stridently like everyone else than anyone else, magnifies this tendency to maddening degrees. Two separate subjects are mentioned with the causal relationship omitted. Facts appear without context; good things are named as though good outcomes inevitably eventuate. When cause-and-effect statements appear, they aren’t much better.

By this process, you can arrive at a conclusion like this: To win the War on Women, you better put a ring on it.

At CPAC, conservatives dedicated an entire panel to “The Future of Marriage.” One could be forgiven for assuming it tackled the issue via the sub-topic “Gays, and the Ickiness Thereof,” because that was the default assumption among those attending CPAC as part of an ongoing More Jaded Than Thou contest. Instead, the panel bypassed halting marriage equality and went straight for a return to celebrating a time when women had few stable life opportunities outside of marriage.

John Nichols: This Is Why Scott Walker Is Not Presidential Material

I have known Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker since he was a young state legislator. We used to talk a good deal about our differing views on how to reform things: campaign finance rules, ethics regulations, social-welfare programs.

We seldom reached agreement. But I gave him credit for respecting the search for common ground. And for understanding that a disagreement on a particular matter is never an excuse for ending the search-or for disregarding others who are engaged in it.

But that was long ago. Scott Walker has changed a great deal-and not, I fear, for the better.

He is deep into a political career that has seen plenty of ups and downs; and, now, he is grasping for a top rung on the ladder: the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2016.

Michelle Chen: Why the Disturbingly Sane Voices at CPAC Should Scare You

I’ve been covering the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, on and off for more than a decade. I’ve seen it in full jingoistic flower early in George W. Bush’s administration, when attendees could buy bumper stickers than said “No Muslims = No Terrorists” and hurl beanbags at toy trolls holding signs that said “The Homosexual Agenda” or “The Liberal Media.” I’ve seen it during moments of despair, when conservatives realized that Republican leaders wouldn’t enact the entirety of their kamikaze agenda. But I have rarely seen it as slick and sunny as this year, and that scares me.

CPAC, for those lucky enough to be unacquainted, is the most important right-wing conference of the year, regularly drawing leading Republican politicians and aspirants. This year, all the likely Republican presidential candidates are here, including Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum. Perhaps because of that, there seems to have been a real effort to tone down the outrageousness. Poor Ann Coulter, once a reliable CPAC bomb-thrower, is nowhere on the program. There’s a conspicuous absence of Hillary Clinton nutcrackers and other Instagram-ready right-wing kitsch. Even Sarah Palin, who spoke Thursday night, was shockingly lucid and reasonable, devoting her remarks to the plight of veterans suffering overlong deployments, PTSD and backlogs at the VA.

Sleepy regulators in New England allow consumers to be robbed of billions of dollars

For decades Wall Street financial engineers, teaming up with electric power producers, have gamed wholesale electricity auctions to earn bigger profits than either a regulated utility or a competitive market would yield. This month they made a major advance in their campaign to get rich by subtly draining your wallet. Yet every major news organization ignored this.

This latest development took place in New England, which already has America’s most expensive electricity. February’s electricity auction saw the annual cost to customers rise to $4 billion, up from about $3 billion in last year’s auction and less than $2 billion in the 2013 auction. That $4 billion figure would have been much higher but for a rule capping prices.

By the way, that $4 billion is not for the electricity, which costs extra. The $4 billion price tag is for capacity payments made to owners just for promising to run their power plants in 2018 and ’19.

If that sounds bizarre, it’s because it is. It is comparable to government taxing us to pay auto dealers to keep enough cars and trucks on their lots to satisfy expected future demand.

John Nichols: The Activists Who Won Net Neutrality Must Defend It in 2016

The Federal Communications Commission has finally taken the necessary steps to preserve a free and open Internet by guaranteeing net neutrality.

With the commission’s 3-2 vote on Thursday, the issue is settled.

For now.

Then it will rise again. No, there will not be a mass outcry against net neutrality, the premise that all Internet communications should be treated equally. There will be no popular demand for ending net neutrality protections against the development of a two-tier Internet, where “paying” content (from multinational corporations and powerful special interests) moves on an information superhighway, while “non-paying” content (from grassroots groups and dissenting citizens) is diverted onto a digital dirt road.

But there will be campaign donations, lobbying and spin from telephone and cable companies that have too much at stake to give up on the fight for an end to rules that prevent them from subdividing the Internet for profit. Telecommunications conglomerates stand to make a lot more money if they can charge extra to move some communications more quickly-creating a circumstance where corporations and politicians with the right connections can pay for commercial and political advantages in the digital age.

Michele Simon: Big Beef’s jig is up

Federal dietary committee recommends eating less red meat. Will science finally trump politics?

You almost have to feel sorry for the beef industry. After enjoying decades of popularity as a staple of the all-American diet, the harsh realities behind unsustainable beef production and excessive consumption are finally coming to light.

The latest red meat scare comes from the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) a scientific body formed every five years to review the latest research available to tell the American public how to eat right. In the past, the committee’s work has been undermined by members with conflicts of interest with the meat, egg and dairy industries. But this year’s committee pulled no punches, even extending its reach to environmental considerations for the first time. The recommendations are not the final word on the matter. Later this year, the federal government will issue its formal Dietary Guidelines for Americans after reviewing the committee’s research and public comments. [..]

The meat lobby is not pleased.

Amy Goodman: TV Meteorologists Should Say It Loud and Clear: Climate Change Is Here

President Barack Obama issued the third veto in his more than six years in office, rejecting S.1 (Senate Bill One), the “Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act.” This was the new congressional Republican majority’s first bill this year, attempting to force the construction of a pipeline designed to carry Canadian tar sands oil to U.S. ports in Texas for export. A broad international coalition has been fighting the project for years. Climate scientist James Hansen, the former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in The New York Times that if the pipeline gets built, “it will be game over for the climate.”

This vote and veto came as much of the U.S. was gripped by extreme cold weather, with cities like Boston reeling from historically deep snowfall and Southern states like Georgia getting snowed in. Meanwhile, most of California braces for even more drought. The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.