Tag: Punting the Pundits

Edward Snowden’s leaks are not isolated incidents – or, at least they won’t be when we look back on this era 10 years from now

Transparency is coming, whether the government likes it or not. The only question is whether they decide to bring it to the public before whistleblowers do it for them.

That’s the underlying message of Laura Poitras’ mesmerizing new documentary, Citizenfour about Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency that debuted at the New York Film Festival on Friday night. [..]

But what the government has failed to grasp is that Chelsea Manning and Snowden’s leaks are not isolated incidents – or, at least they won’t be when we look back on this era 10 years from now. There are 5 million people with security clearances in this country, and many of them are part of a new generation that is far more critical of the blanket secrecy permeating government agencies than the old guard.

It’s only now that we are finally starting to see the reverberations of Manning’s and Snowden’s whistleblowing. But one thing is for sure: there are many more potential whistleblowers out there, and if government officials do not move to make their actions more transparent of their own volition, then their employees may well do it for them.

Robert Kuttner: More Trade Agreements Won’t Fix Austerity

The U.S. economy is growing slowly and Europe’s hardly at all. The stock market lurch last week is a belated acknowledgement that our two economies share a common affliction, and Europe suffers more seriously. The affliction is austerity.

And yet the main remedy being promoted by the U.S. government and its European allies is a trade and investment deal known as T-TIP, which stands for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. According to the deal’s sponsors, T-TIP would help stimulate recovery by removing barriers to trade and promoting regulatory convergence and hence investment.

The proposed deal is not popular in the U.S. Congress, which has to approve negotiating authority. The administration, say well-placed sources, hopes to cram through the necessary approval during the lame duck session of Congress after the November 4 election. That still will not assure approval, because the deal is also increasingly unpopular in Europe.

There are several big things wrong with T-TIP.

A war-weary American public that a year ago resoundingly rejected US military intervention in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime now is rallying behind the use of force to destroy the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). In just three months, from June to September, support for US airstrikes in Iraq soared from % percent to 71%, and to 65% for airstrikes in Syria.

How did such an astounding turnabout occur? Certainly it wasn’t due to the persuasive powers of President Obama, who seems to have been reluctantly dragged into a conflict that he once acknowledged has no military solution.

The credit for selling Obama’s war on ISIS must go to the mainstream American media.

Day after day, night after night, the press relied on propaganda from both ISIS and the US government to whip up fear and a thirst for revenge in the American public. Gruesome beheading videos distributed by ISIS were played over and over. The media not only regurgitated official US messages but packaged them better than the government itself ever could.

Arvina Martin: Scott Walker lost his fight for voter ID. He’s still everything that’s wrong with the GOP

My governor’s ‘pro-business’ policies aren’t, he’s facing corruption charges and he tried to keep grandmothers from voting. He cares less about Wisconsin than running for president

When Scott Walker ran for governor of Wisconsin in 2010, he portrayed himself as an affable, thrifty guy, who brought his lunch to work in a brown paper bag just like the people he promised to serve. He promised in his campaign that his pro-business reforms would bring 250,000 jobs to the beleaguered state’s manufacturing base. And he swore he’d be different than all those other politicians who’d come before.

The governor that Walker became in office is decidedly a different character than the average Joe we saw on the campaign trail: a governor whose political aspirations lie far beyond Madison. Governor Walker is facing charges of illegally steering campaign donations and backing terrible environmental legislation from those donors. He couldn’t find it in his heart to reach out to LGBT Wisconsinites and congratulate them on their new right to marry. He’s still backing a voter ID law that would disenfranchise the state’s elderly, minority, and low income voters in the hopes that’ll it’ll keep him in office, even though the US supreme court blocked it in an emergency ruling on Thursday.

And that’s just in the last month.

Alba Morales: Kids Shouldn’t Be at Rikers, Period

New York State’s top corrections official said this week that he supports moving all adolescent inmates off Rikers Island. His statement raises hopes for an end to what the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a scathing recent report, called a “deep-seated culture of violence” against youth in the United States’ second-largest jail, where the vast majority of inmates are adults. [..]

The adult criminal system is not equipped to take children’s needs and traits — and special rights — into account at any stage of the prosecution process. Unlike a juvenile court, the adult system is punitive by design. Once convicted in adult court, children acquire adult criminal records that can haunt them for the rest of their lives. A criminal conviction obtained at age 16 can prevent a person from getting a job decades later, and can make it difficult to obtain housing and student loans. In researching a recent report, I spoke to dozens of kids who had been prosecuted in the adult criminal justice system in Florida. They reported being confused by court proceedings, abused in the adult institutions where they were incarcerated, and plagued by records that branded them criminals for life. “I felt like my life was gone,” one 17-year-old, in adult prison for a crime he committed at 16, told me. I can’t imagine that New York’s children fare any better when put through the adult system.

People younger than 18 cannot vote, drink, or rent a car in any US state. Just this year, New York raised the age at which someone can buy cigarettes to 21. Yet the state continues to treat all 16- and 17-year-olds charged with crimes as if they were adults. Fortunately, there is a growing campaign to raise the age at which a person can be prosecuted as an adult in New York, and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has established a commission in support of that goal. Moving kids off Rikers Island would be an essential step, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that the better approach would be not to treat adolescents as adults in the first place.

The clergy gathered in the second-floor conference room at the First Baptist Church here were pondering whether this midterm election might be different from other midterm elections.

The five African-American pastors and bishops represented diverse theological traditions, but all were profoundly unhappy over what North Carolina’s ultra-conservative state government in Raleigh had done to reduce access to the ballot box, cut education spending, and turn back money to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The irony, said the Rev. Dray Bland, pastor of First Baptist on Apple-the street location distinguishes it from the predominantly white First Baptist Church downtown-is that measures designed to make it harder for voters to cast ballots may actually inspire a larger number to do so.  

Joe Conason: What Ebola Can Teach Us

Even if Africa’s Ebola emergency never mutates into a global catastrophe, those of us who live in the world’s most fortunate country ought to consider what this fearsome virus can teach us. The lessons are quite obvious at this point-and contain implications that are political in the most urgent sense.

The tea party mania for shrinking federal budgets and rejecting international organizations-both of which are bedrock policy among the current Republican leadership-is not only bad for our national prestige but also exceptionally dangerous to our health. At the insistence of House leaders, whose answer to every problem has been cutting government and reducing taxes, the United States has steadily starved the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

The disturbing consequence is that in both this country and the world, humanity lacks the full arsenal of weapons needed to combat Ebola and other potentially devastating outbreaks of tropical disease.

John Nichols: Chris Christie Defends The ‘Great American’ Koch Brothers

The Koch brothers like to meet in secret with their political minions. And, for the most part, the minions prefer to keep their interactions with the billionaire campaign donors on the down low.

But not Chris Christie.

The governor of New Jersey, who currently chairs that Koch-tied Republican Governors Association, and who well understands that a steady flow of dark money will be required to light up his 2016 presidential prospects, is elbowing everyone else aside in his mad rush to defend the billionaire brothers.

A Koch favorite who has appeared at secret summits organized in the past by the major donors to conservative causes and the RGA, Christie has been among their most vocal defenders in recent months. At the the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, for instance, he hailed brothers Charles and David Koch as “great Americans who are creating great things in our country.”

Now, as the 2014 midterm elections approach, no one is championing the Kochs more aggressively than Christie-even if that means he has to grab the spotlight from candidates the embattled New Jerseyan is supposed to be assisting.

George Zornick: The Elephant in the Room With Leon Panetta

In his widely read blog of Beltway goings-on, Chris Cillizza made the following fairly obvious point about former defense Ssecretary Leon Panetta’s Obama-bashing media tour:

  What’s fascinating about this gripe with Obama is how much it plays into a) the argument that Hillary Clinton made against him in the 2008 presidential primary and b) the argument Hillary Clinton will likely make when (sorry, if) she runs for president in 2016. That argument, in short: I have been there and done that. I know what it takes to move the levers of power in Washington-and I am willing to do whatever it takes to make them move.

In addition, Panetta’s criticisms mainly involve Obama’s reluctance to use military force-also a fault line between Clinton and Obama, particularly on the matter of arming the Syrian rebels.

But the Beltway press shouldn’t be afraid to explicitly ask if Panetta is serving as an agent of Clinton’s official-but-not-yet-official presidential campaign. It’s not just that his criticisms dovetail with Clinton’s and are no doubt politically convenient for her as she attempts to draw a difference with the Obama administration-there are explicit ties to the shadow Clinton campaign that should make this question fair game.

BILL MAHER’s recent rant against Islam has set off a fierce debate about the problem of religious violence, particularly when it comes to Islam.

Mr. Maher, who has argued that Islam is unlike other religions (he thinks it’s more “like the Mafia“), recently took umbrage with President Obama’s assertion that the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS, does not represent Islam. In Mr. Maher’s view, Islam has “too much in common with ISIS.” [..]

His comments have led to a flurry of responses, perhaps none so passionate as that of the actor Ben Affleck, who lambasted Mr. Maher, on Mr. Maher’s own HBO show, for “gross” and “racist” generalizations about Muslims.

Yet there is a real lack of sophistication on both sides of the argument when it comes to discussing religion and violence.

Amy Goodman: Texas Strips Women of Their Health and Rights

In Texas, how far women have come can be measured by how far they have to go. Scores of medical facilities have been shuttered in Texas, stranding almost a million women hundreds of miles from a health-care facility that they might need. The reason? These facilities provide, among other services, safe, legal abortions. Last week, the U.S. Appeals Court for the 5th Circuit affirmed Texas state restrictions on abortion access, closing 13 more clinics overnight. Overall, 80 percent of Texas abortion clinics have closed since the law went into effect.

Imagine the headline: “A Federal appeals court in Texas has ruled that 80 percent of gun stores in Texas must close.” Self-proclaimed patriots in Texas would be up in arms. But in the Lone Star State, not all rights are created equal. A woman’s right to choose, her right to terminate a pregnancy, her right to privacy, was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, more than 40 years ago, in its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

The Texas Legislature, along with Gov. Rick Perry and Attorney General (and current Republican candidate for governor) Greg Abbott, imposed laws in 2013 creating two significant barriers to the operation of clinics in Texas that perform abortions: First, doctors in the clinics were required to have admitting privileges in nearby hospitals. Second, a series of architectural standards were devised, applicable only to abortion clinics, mandating massive renovations to facilities in order to stay open.

Michael T. Klare: Obama’s New Oil Wars

Washington Takes on ISIS, Iran, and Russia

It was heinous. It was underhanded.  It was beyond the bounds of international morality. It was an attack on the American way of life.  It was what you might expect from unscrupulous Arabs.  It was “the oil weapon” — and back in 1973, it was directed at the United States. Skip ahead four decades and it’s smart, it’s effective, and it’s the American way.  The Obama administration has appropriated it as a major tool of foreign policy, a new way to go to war with nations it considers hostile without relying on planes, missiles, and troops.  It is, of course, that very same oil weapon. [..]

After suffering enormously from that embargo, Washington took a number of steps to disarm the oil weapon and prevent its reuse. These included an increased emphasis on domestic oil production and the establishment of a mutual aid arrangement overseen by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that obliged participating nations to share their oil with any member state subjected to an embargo.

So consider it a surprising reversal that, having tested out the oil weapon against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with devastating effect back in the 1990s, Washington is now the key country brandishing that same weapon, using trade sanctions and other means to curb the exports of energy-producing states it categorizes as hostile.  The Obama administration has taken this aggressive path even at the risk of curtailing global energy supplies.

Josh Horwitz: The Racial Double Standard on Gun Violence

One week ago, in an op-ed for the far right wing website World Net Daily, National Rifle Association (NRA) Board Member Ted Nugent commented on the violence that has made national headlines in Ferguson, Missouri, and stated, “The overwhelming majority of violent crime across America is conducted by young, black males who, sadly, are on the self-inflicted expressway to prison or an early grave-or more often than not, both.”

Where to begin… For starters, Nugent has blatantly misstated the facts. In truth, more whites are arrested for violent crime in the United States than blacks (even though African Americans are arrested for such crimes at a higher rate than whites). There are multiple socioeconomic and structural causes that increase an individual’s propensity for violent behavior. Pigmentation is simply not a factor.

But reading Nugent’s column brought an equally important point home for me. The way we talk about incidents of gun violence in this country — and the solutions we propose to stem future acts of violence — seems to be dramatically different depending on the race of those involved.

The fall of Kobani is a microcosm for a policy that is doomed to fail. It was an avoidable tragedy

Observing fighters for the Islamic State (Isis) march closer and closer toward the key Syrian town of Kobani over the past week has felt like watching a bitterly suspenseful action movie unfold. Unlike other central Syrian towns that have been pounded to the ground mostly out of sight, Kobani’s looming collapse sits in full view of anyone paying attention – journalists, refugees and Turkish military tanks planted over the border, just a couple of miles away. That very border, carelessly drawn a century ago, now determines life or death for the thousands of people on either side. Every day, Isis marches closer to the heart of Kobani, and every day, Kurds across the region grow more exasperated that everyone seems to know what scene comes next – “a terrible slaughter”, with “5,000 dead within 24 or 36 hours”.

With Kobani in hand, Isis will control a strategic stretch of territory linking its self-proclaimed capital in Raqqa to its positions in Aleppo along the border with Turkey, a Nato country. And yet no one seems to be lifting a finger to stop it.

Joan Walsh: Fox News’ weapon of fear: How the right hopes to terrify America before Election Day

For Republicans, public paranoia about Ebola, ISIS and the scary immigrant “other” is a plan to sweep the midterms

Republicans need one last stroke of luck to take back the Senate and sweep the midterms: They have to find an ISIS fighter who crossed the Mexico border as a juvenile asylum-seeker last summer, who’s since come down with Ebola.

No doubt the folks at Fox, along with James O’Keefe, are hard at work searching for their secret weapon. [..]

This is all the right can come up with as a closing argument in the 2014 midterms. They have no policy agenda and demography is against them, but fear will always be with them. Ironically, to the extent that we have anything to worry about in the government’s handling of Ebola, it might have to do with GOP-imposed cuts to the CDC, the NIH and medical research generally. We don’t have a Surgeon General because of GOP obstruction. Republican governors have weakened the public health infrastructure with budget cuts and their petulant rejection of federal Medicaid expansion. And the fear of foreigners, particularly Africans, stoked by Ebola panic is counterproductive, too, because the only way to contain the disease is for the U.S. to support caregivers in the places ravaged by it so they can respond more effectively.

Valerie Braman: The real victims of Tom Corbett’s move to screw over teachers will be the children of Philadelphia

But bashing educators is integral to the political playbook of America’s most vulnerable governor and his Republican party

Philadelphia School Reform Commission chairman Bill Green declared on Monday that my teachers union needs to “share in the sacrifice”.

And then the unelected, unaccountable entity charged with school oversight for the fifth largest city in the United States – in a last-minute meeting that took only 17 minutes and entertained no public comment – voted unanimously to cancel its contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and demand new healthcare contributions from its employees.

Of course, Green’s words sounded awfully familiar: Republican governor Tom Corbett said the same in August, when he declared – not for the first time – that it was up to the teachers of Philadelphia’s public schools to fix the funding crisis that Corbett created through tax breaks for corporations, his refusal to tax Marcellus Shale drillers, the abandonment of an equitable state school funding formula and $1bn in budget cuts to education funding in Pennsylvania (in which poorer districts like Philadelphia were disproportionately hit). [..]

Starving the public education system and demanding that teachers personally make up the shortfall is not about the kids or the classrooms, or some considered ideological position, or even about budgetary savings. Cancelling contracts for people who educate your kids is about politics, plain and very cynical.

Karuna Jaggar: The NFL’s breast cancer scam sells bunk science to profit off pink clothes

Ribbons and shoes aren’t just a distraction from the league’s sexism, misogyny and violence against women. Its Breast Cancer Awareness stunt is based on deadly misinformation

Like many other large brand names, the National Football League has long tried to use its alleged commitment to breast cancer to distract the public from its misdeeds around this time of year – particularly concerning women. Don’t look at the unchecked domestic and sexual violence, the extraordinarily high rates of brain disease that ruin careers and families, or the poor pay and working conditions for cheerleaders. Look over here at this enormous pink ribbon on the field! Look at the players wearing pink helmets and gloves and shoes! You can even buy your own! See how much we care about women?! [..]

If the NFL truly cares about the health of its female fans, it will stop spreading bunk science to women at cancer risk. If the league cares at all about the health of its own employees, league officials will confront concussions and ensure that their cheerleaders are fairly paid. And if Roger Goodell and Co really care about the health of all women, it will focus on violence against women at the hands of some of those employees and stop using pink ribbons as a distraction. Because the NFL may be good at selling little pink footballs and forcing players to wear pink cleats, but it’s terrible at public health.

The kindest word one can apply to Attorney General Eric Holder’s record is “undistinguished.” Now that his time in office is drawing to a close, it’s clear that his failure to pursue criminal bankers will always overshadow his other accomplishments in public memory. But President Obama’s tenure is not yet over, and his next pick for attorney general could help reshape both the nation and his own legacy.

Two candidates could be truly transformative as the next Attorney General: Former regulator William K. Black and Labor Secretary Tom Perez.

Holder’s refusal to pursue criminal action against his former Wall Street clients was matched only by his contemptuous dismissal of the criticism engendered by his inaction. He attempted to disguise this inaction with false claims which earned widespread rebukes. He ran out the clock on a number of criminal prosecutions. He oversaw the indictments of twice as many government leakers than in all previous administrations put together, insisting that they required “very aggressive action.” He didn’t feel the same way about the bank fraud which decimated millions of lives and nearly destroyed the economy.

As economist Dean Baker reminded us after his departure, the problem isn’t that Eric Holder never put Robert Rubin, Lloyd Blankfein, or other chiefs of lawbreaking banks behind bars. The problem is that he never even tried.

Cenk Uygur: What Has Obama Done for You Lately?

an anyone tell me what President Obama’s second-term goals are? What has he accomplished? What would he like to accomplish?

A little bit of immigration reform? Wow! What else? Still waiting.

I’ve never seen a guy want to coast this much as president. Even Bush who couldn’t wait to get out of office and be an ex-president was at least still trying really bad ideas to the end. What in the world is President Obama’s agenda?! [..]

The base has been eviscerated. There is no vision. The approval ratings have been battered. And President Obama hasn’t really done anything colossally wrong yet. That’s why you have Fox News invent nonsense non-scandals like the IRS because they don’t have anything real on him. His biggest real problem has been that he has continued George Bush’s foreign and economic policies. Of course, the right-wing doesn’t want to criticize him for that. But what if he does at some point make a real mistake? The roof is going to cave in.

We have a do-nothing president to match our do-nothing Congress. Gee, I wonder why nothing gets done in Washington? Imagine a progressive president fighting to fix the insane economic inequality in the country or to end the senseless drug war or best of all battling to get money out of politics. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Well, that’s not the president we have. We have one who is coasting. But God knows what he’s coasting toward.

David Dayen: Secrets of the bailout, exposed: Why you should be watching the AIG trial

To this day, information on the banks’ heist and how it went down is pathetically scant. That’s about to change now

The AIG bailout trial began in Washington last week. This is a case where one ruthless, reckless corporate CEO, AIG’s former chieftain Hank Greenberg, argues that his company wasn’t treated as well during the bailout as those of other ruthless, reckless corporate CEOs. So there’s no real rooting interest for anyone with at least one foot planted in reality.

But as I wrote recently, regardless of the outcome, this trial should matter to every American. In fact, just in its first week, we’ve learned a lot of new information about how the bailout architects- then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, ex-Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, and former president of the New York Fed Timothy Geithner – conducted themselves amid the chaos of the financial crisis. And it doesn’t reflect well on any of them, with concealed information, bait-and-switches, and favorites played among financial institutions. As these three prepare to take the stand this week in the case, we should be pleased to finally have this debate about the bailout in public.

The European Union’s finding that Apple negotiated a sweetheart tax deal with the Irish government was no surprise. In 2013 the US Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, which I chair, first made Apple’s special tax deal in Ireland public as part of our probe into Apple’s tax avoidance schemes.

Though Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, later claimed “we have no special tax deal with Ireland”, and the company again denied negotiating a tax break even after the EU’s findings, what we found last year was damning. The way Ireland taxed Apple’s income resulted in a tax rate of less than 1% and allowed Apple to set up three Irish subsidiaries with no tax residency in any country.

Still, last week’s EU release is immensely significant. Why? Because it adds important information to the public’s record, and it promises to raise the pressure, both political and financial, on Apple and other companies that use similar gimmicks to shift their tax burden on to other taxpayers and leave governments less able to fund education, national security and other important priorities

Gary Younge: Carmen Segarra, the whistleblower of Wall Street

One Federal Reserve employee’s refusal to play along with a rigged financial game has made her a true modern dissident

Carmen Segarra, in the spirit of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden before her, is like the greengrocer who said no. Segarra, a former employee of the New York Federal Reserve, was fired after she refused to tone down a scathing report on conflicts of interest within Goldman Sachs. She sued the Fed over her sacking but the case was dismissed by a judge without ruling on the merits because, he said, the facts didn’t comply with the statute under which she had filed. Segarra is now appealing.

Before she left she secretly recorded her bosses and colleagues, exposing their “culture of fear” and servility when dealing with the very banks they were supposed to be regulating. The Fed is the government agency charged with overseeing the financial sector – a task it singularly failed to achieve in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. What emerges from Segarra’s tapes – released by the investigative website ProPublica – is a supine watchdog wilfully baring its gums before a known burglar so that he may go about his business unperturbed

It’s as though all the Fed employees were told to put a small sign on their desk saying “Under Capitalism Everyone is Equal Before the Law”, and Segarra took hers down. She has disrupted the game, and now everyone can peer behind the curtain; the Fed is the system, and lives within the lie.

Alexander Nekrassov: Why the spooks keep getting it wrong

Is an over-reliance on electronic surveillance why intelligence-gathering is failing both the West and Russia so often?

In an interview with CBS on September 28, US President Barack Obama admitted that US intelligence agencies had “underestimated” the activity of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

So suddenly, as if out of nowhere, civil war-torn Syria became “ground zero for jihadists around the world”, he said.

Indeed, as ISIL fighters occupied a third of Iraq under the very noses of western intelligence services that were supposedly monitoring the situation on the ground in the Middle East, the question everyone ought to be asking is: How come spooks get it wrong so often?

Obama’s statement was reminiscent of the one he made back in 2010, when he told US security chiefs that an attempted airliner bomb attack was the result of a “screw up” by intelligence agencies.

In the past decade, intelligence agences worldwide have failed spectacularly, having missed the devastating financial crash and failing to foresee the consequences of the invasion of Iraq – not to mention those elusive WMDs. They also appeared to have missed the Arab Spring by about a thousand miles and could not predict what would happen in Egypt and Libya once their strong leaders were removed.

Robert Parry: NYT’s Belated Admission on Contra-Cocaine

Nearly three decades since the stories of Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine trafficking first appeared in 1985, the New York Times has finally, forthrightly admitted the allegations were true, although this belated acknowledgement comes in a movie review buried deep inside Sunday’s paper.

The review addresses a new film, “Kill the Messenger,” that revives the Contra-cocaine charges in the context of telling the tragic tale of journalist Gary Webb who himself revived the allegations in 1996 only to have the New York Times and other major newspapers wage a vendetta against him that destroyed his career and ultimately drove him to suicide. [..]

Although the Times’ review still quibbles with aspects of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury-News, the Times appears to have finally thrown in the towel when it comes to the broader question of whether Webb was telling important truths.

If critics of income inequality are wondering why the growing gap between rich and poor hasn’t been a more potent political issue in the upcoming elections, a new study offers some answers: Americans grossly underestimate this inequality. That’s one of the key findings of a survey showing the gap between CEO and average worker pay in America is more than 10 times larger than the typical American perceives.

In the report, Harvard University and Chulalongkorn University researchers analyzed survey data from 40 countries about perceptions of pay gaps between rich and poor. In every country, respondents underestimated the size of the gap between CEO and average worker pay. In the United States, for example, the researchers found the median American respondent estimated that the ratio of CEO to worker income is about 30-to-1. In reality, the gap is more than 350-to-1. [..]

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, one of the researchers who conducted the study said Americans’ inaccurate beliefs about the pay gap may be the reason economic inequality hasn’t become more of a political issue.

Joe Conason: Those Budget-Busting, Job-Killing GOP Governors

Even as Republicans boast of their chances to take over the United States Senate come November, their party’s governors across the country are facing dimmer prospects. From Georgia to Alaska, right-wing ideological rule imposed by GOP chief executives has left voters disappointed, disillusioned and angry.

The problem isn’t that these governors failed to implement their promised panaceas of tax cutting, union busting and budget slashing, all in the name of economic recovery; some did all three. The problem is that those policies have failed to deliver the improving jobs and incomes that were supposed to flow from “conservative” governance. In fact, too often the result wasn’t at all truly conservative, at least in the traditional sense-as excessive and imbalanced tax cuts, skewed to benefit the wealthy, led to ruined budgets and damaged credit ratings.

Eugene Robinson: Secure the People’s House

Put a taller fence around the White House complex and lock the doors.

Then get rid of the dry rot in the Secret Service bureaucracy, restore staffing to reasonable levels, adopt the latest technology and develop new protocols to replace the ones that didn’t work. But don’t use the recent shocking lapses in presidential security as an excuse to further separate Americans from the symbols of their government.

Actually, “shocking” is an understatement. I still can’t get my mind around the fact a man could climb over the White House fence, run across the North Lawn, barge through the main entrance and make it all the way down the hallway to the ceremonial East Room before being stopped. Minutes earlier, fortunately, President Obama and his family had departed the premises by helicopter.