Tag: Politics

Jun 12 2014

Militants March on Baghdad

This week an Al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, seized the Sunni dominated cities of Mosul, Iraq’a second largest city, and Tirkut, Sadaam Hussein’s ancestral home. The militants are now marching on Baghdad and have been reported to be about 100 miles north of Baghdad and have vowed to take the city to “settle accounts.”

Iraq Insurgency: Militants Plan To March On Baghdad After Seizing 2 Key Sunni Cities

The Islamic State aims to create an Islamic emirate spanning both sides of the Iraq-Syria border. It has been able to push deep into parts of the Iraqi Sunni heartland once controlled by U.S. forces because police and military forces melted away after relatively brief clashes.

Two senior intelligence officials told The Associated Press that an armed group led by al-Douri, the Naqshabandi Army, and other Saddam-era military figures joined the Islamic State in the fight. In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit that was overrun by militants Wednesday, witnesses said fighters raised posters of Saddam and al-Douri. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.

The involvement of Saddam-era figures raises the potential to escalate the militants’ campaign to establish an al-Qaida-like enclave into a wider Sunni uprising. That could only further the momentum toward turning Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic divisions in to a geographical fragmentation.

The Islamic State issued a triumphalist statement declaring that it would start implementing its strict version of Shariah law in Mosul and other regions it had overrun. It said women should stay in their homes for modesty reasons, warned it would cut off the hands of thieves and told residents to attend daily prayers. It told Sunnis in the military and police to abandon their posts and “repent” or else “face only death.”

In the north, Kurdish security forces took over the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled.

Iraqi Kurdish forces take Kirkuk as Isis sets its sights on Baghdad

In Kirkuk, truckloads of peshmerga fighters patrolled the streets, but sporadic clashes continued between Kurdish forces and Isis gunmen on the outskirts of the city. A Kurdish minister responsible for regional security forces survived a bomb blast as he drove to the city after visiting peshmerga units in the surrounding region, AFP reported. [..]

About 500,000 people have fled Mosul, home to 2 million, and the surrounding province, many seeking safety in autonomous Kurdistan.

Isis’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, said on Thursday that the group’s fighters intended to take the southern cities of Kerbala and Najaf, which hold two of the holiest shrines for Shia Muslims. [..]

Reports from Iraq have painted a confused picture of a rapidly developing situation with fighting reported in a number of key locations on Wednesday night and on Thursday, including on the outskirts of the city of Samarra, where government officials said Isis fighters had been driven back.

According to Army Staff Lieutenant General Sabah al-Fatlawi, quoted by Agence France-Presse, “elite forces” backed by air strikes pushed back a “fierce attack by Isis fighters who then bypassed the city heading towards Baghdad”.

Complicating the picture of the past few days were emerging suggestions that other Sunni insurgent groups, including Ba’ath nationalists, supporters of the executed Saddam, had played a role in the series of stunning setbacks for the Iraqi military.

The sudden collapse of the Iraqi army has raised international concerns about a rapidly widening regional crisis that has implications for Iraq’s powerful neighbours, Iran and Turkey.

This afternoon President Barack Obama said that he is watching this situation closely and is concerned

Speaking in the Oval Office after meeting with Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia, Mr. Obama said: “Iraq’s going to need more help. It’s going to need more help from us, and it’s going to need more help from the international community.”

The president said his national security team was working “around the clock” to determine the most effective aid. The United States, he noted, has given the Iraqi government military equipment and shared intelligence with it. [..]

“I don’t rule out anything,” Mr. Obama said, “because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria, for that matter.”

The reality: there is very little that Obama can do. This was dumped on his desk when he was elected. The Iraqi government insisted that all American troops leave.

The real shame of it is that the people who created this crisis, George W. Bush and Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, are war criminals Obama refused to hold accountable. The current crisis lies squarely at their feet and the members of Congress who voted to allow the illegal invasion in 2003.

The Fall of Mosul and the False Promises of Modern History

by Juan Cole

It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments. [..]

I hasten to say that the difficulty Baghdad is having with keeping Mosul is also an indictment of the Saddam Hussein regime (1979-2003), which pioneered the tactic of sectarian rule, basing itself on a Sunni-heavy Baath Party in the center-north and largely neglecting or excluding the Shiite South. Now the Shiites have reversed that strategy, creating a Baghdad-Najaf-Basra power base.

Mosul’s changed circumstances are also an indictment of the irresponsible use to which Sunni fundamentalists in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Oil Gulf are putting their riches. The high petroleum prices, usually over $100 a barrel, of the past few years in a row, have injected trillions of dollars into the Gulf. Some of that money has sloshed into the hands of people who rather admired Usama Bin Laden and who are perfectly willing to fund his clones to take over major cities like Aleppo and Mosul. The vaunted US Treasury Department ability to stop money transfers by people whom Washington does not like has faltered in this case. Is it because Washington is de facto allied with the billionaire Salafis of Kuwait City in Syria, where both want to see the Bashar al-Assad government overthrown and Iran weakened? The descent of the US into deep debt, and the emergence of Gulf states and sovereign wealth funds is a tremendous shift of geopolitical power to Riyadh, Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi, who can now simply buy Egyptian domestic and foreign policy away from Washington. They are also trying to buy a Salafi State of Syria and a Salafi state of northern and western Iraq. [..]

PM Nouri al-Maliki can only get Iraq back by allying with nationalist Sunnis in the north. Otherwise, for him simply brutally to occupy the city with Shiite troops and artillery and aerial bombing will make him look like his neighbor, Bashar al-Assad.

Jun 12 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Ana Marie Cox: Don’t fear the Koch brothers. Fear an election that caters only to billionaires

Forget right or left. Dark money in politics means you’ll never know which ‘independent’ candidate’s views were on the market

Popular sentiment may tie the GOP and the infamous Koch brothers to unregulated campaign financing – while Democrats rail against it – but the post-Citizens United world can’t be understood within the framework of party politics. Citizens United isn’t good for one party and bad for another; it’s good for rich people and bad for everyone else.

The Koch brothers’ place in American politics as the big-spending bogeymen changing electoral outcomes with gobs of cash will find some help this week with the release of the documentary Citizen Koch and the book Big Money (by Politico reporter Ken Vogel), a good portion of which narrates the battle between the Koch brothers and Karl Rove for the soul of the Republican Party, such as it is.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Washington’s Cold Shoulder for Defrauded Students and Soldiers

President Obama signed an executive order Monday limiting student debt payments to 10 percent of their income, telling an audience in the East Room of the White House that he and his wife only paid off their law school loans about 10 years ago.  “This is why I feel so strongly about this,” the president said. “This is why I’m passionate about it.”

We’ll take him at his word, although it means disregarding the principle that says that those who truly feel passionately about something rarely feel the need to declare it. We’re glad he feels so strongly about an issue that is both an economic crisis and a moral challenge.

Diane Ravitch: Vergara Decision Is Latest Attempt to Blame Teachers and Weaken Public Education

Judge Rolf M. Treu, who decided the Vergara case, declared that he was shocked — shocked! — to learn from Professor Raj Chetty and Professor Thomas Kane of Harvard about the enormous harm that one “grossly ineffective” teacher can do to a child’s lifetime earnings or to their academic gains.

How did he define “grossly ineffective” teacher? He didn’t. How did these dreadful teachers get tenure? Clearly, some grossly incompetent principal must have granted it to them. What was the basis — factual or theoretical — that the students would have had high scores if their teachers did not have the right to due process? He didn’t say.

 

John Nichols: Eric Cantor Loses to a Conservative Who Rips Crony Capitalism

The DC-insider storyline about this being a great year for the Republican establishment might need to be rewritten. And the rewrite might even require pundits, Republican chieftains and Democrats who are trying to figure out the politics of 2014 to consider complexities they had not previously entertained.

House majority leader Eric Cantor, the face of the GOP establishment and one of its most prodigious fundraisers, lost his Virginia Republican primary Tuesday to a challenger who promised, “I will fight to end crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.”

Dave Brat, who defeated the number-two Republican in the House by a 56-44 margin, ripped big business almost as frequently as he did the incumbent. “I am running against Cantor because he does not represent the citizens of the 7th District, but rather large corporations seeking insider deals, crony bailouts and a constant supply of low-wage workers,” declared the challenger.

Cantor dismissed Brat as a “liberal college professor.”

That was false-at least the liberal part.

Wenonah Hauter: Trans-Atlantic Trade Deal a Field Day for Fracking

U.S. and EU negotiators recently began a new round of negotiations on the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. Because the talks are happening behind closed doors, the public is left largely in the dark about the nature of the discussions over a deal also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

So what, exactly, do we know?

Officially, not much. But an EU negotiation position “on raw materials and energy” was leaked to the Huffington Post in May. The text amounts to a wish list of demands from Big Oil and Gas that would lock in any of their investments in fossil fuels in general, and shale gas and fracking in particular.

Article C of the document states that no restrictions should apply to the “exports of energy goods” between the transatlantic trade partners. Any request, for example, for an export license to ship natural gas from the United States to the EU would be approved “automatically.”

That means no questions asked, even if this arrangement could lead to environmental damage from widespread use of fracking, increased gas prices for U.S. consumers, increased import dependency, and other problems.

Ben Wolcott: Austerity and the Employment Rate

In 2010, after an initial round of coordinated stimulus from both wealthy and developing countries, deficit hawks around the world regrouped. Pointing to growing deficits and debt, they demanded that countries reverse course and begin moving toward balanced budgets. The deficit hawks argued that deficit reduction could be accomplished without impairing growth because of the effect it would have in boosting confidence among businesses and consumers.

Many economists argued against this drive towards austerity at the time. They noted and rigorously explained the fallacious logic in the idea that deficit reduction could be expansionary. They also pointed out how fiscal policy had already saved the economy from a second depression and that more stimulus would likely be necessary. However, now we have more than three years of data, so we no longer have to speculate. A simple picture can be worth a thousand words (or in this case, billions).

Jun 11 2014

NOW Calls For WaPo to Fire George Will

The president of the National Organization for Women, Terry O’Neill told Media Matters that The Washington Post needs to dump George Will for his column downplaying the prevalence of campus sexual assault and suggesting some college efforts to curb it “make victimhood a coveted status.”

The column has drawn complaints from numerous women’s rights groups and prompted National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill to call for Will’s ouster Tuesday.

“George Will needs to take a break from his column and The Washington Post needs to take a break from his column, they need to dump him,” O’Neill told Media Matters in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “It is actively harmful for the victims of sexual assault when that kind of man writes a piece that says to assault victims, ‘it didn’t happen and if it did happen you deserve it.’ That re-traumatizes victims. I can’t believe that Mr. Will has had this experience if he would put out such a hateful message.”

“We want him to back off and we want The Washington Post to stop carrying his column.”

O’Neill later added, “That is absolutely the kind of further attack on victims that just does such extraordinary harm … The media blaming women for the horrific rape of violence against women and sexual assault it is really shameful.”

Since Will’s column, the newspaper published an article titled “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married.”

The women’s rights group UltraViolet has started a petition telling The Washington Post to fire George Will

The Washington Post actually just published an opinion piece mocking sexual assault survivors and saying that women want to be raped.

The author, conservative columnist George Will, goes so far as to write that colleges are making “victimhood a coveted status” by taking public steps to curb sexual assaults on campus.

He even implies that non-consensual sex is not rape, when in fact it’s the very definition of rape!

George Will makes his living writing columns that many people disagree with. But his latest column has gone too far. Rape is a serious crime–accusing women of making it up and arguing schools shouldn’t be addressing sexual assault puts both women and men at risk. By publishing George Will’s piece, The Washington Post is amplifying some of the most insidious lies that perpetuate rape culture. It’s not just wrong–it’s dangerous.

Tell The Washington Post:

“Rape is real. No one wants to be a victim. Fire George Will.”

Jun 11 2014

It’s About the Constitution, Stupid.

During an hour “fireside” chat at this week’s Southland Conference on technology, entrepreneurship and southern culture, former Vice President Al Gore was asked about Eric Snowden by Sarah Lacey. His answer, when asked if Snowden was a hero or traitor, was quite clear:

   I hear this question all the time…I’m like most people, I don’t put (Snowden) in either one of those categories. But I will be candid – if you set up a spectrum, I would push it more away from the traitor side. He clearly violated the law (so) you can’t say OK what he did is alright. It is not.

   But what he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the Constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed. In the course of violating important laws he also provided an important service because we did need to know how far this has gone.

He then added his concerns about the mass surveillance by the NSA:

This is a threat to the heart of democracy. Democracy is among other things a state of mind. If any of us are put in a position where we have to self censor, and think twice about what we write in an email, or what we click on for fear that somebody reading a record of this may misunderstand why we looked up some disease or something, some young people who might otherwise get help with a medical condition, might think oh my gosh if I put down a search for bipolar illness I will be stigmatized if my online file is hacked or accessed by my employer. That kills democracy.

Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks ‘an important service’, says Al Gore

By Ewan MacAskill, The Guardian

Former vice-president argues whistleblower exposed ‘violations of US constitution far more serious than crimes he committed’

Asked if he regarded Snowden as a traitor or whistleblower, Gore veered away from the “traitor” label. He refused to go as far as labelling him a whistleblower but signalled he viewed him as being closer to that category than a traitor, saying: “What he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the US constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed.” [..]

Gore called on the internet companies to work with the public to help draw up a “digital Magna Carta” that provides protection of freedoms. “They need to pay attention to correcting some of these gross abuses of individual privacy that are ongoing in the business sphere,” he said.

Snowden’s hope of a return to the US is dependent on a change in a major shift in opinion that would allow him to escape a lengthy prison sentence. His supporters will seize on Gore’s comments to help make the case that he is a whistleblower and should be allowed to return to the US as a free man. Ben Wizner, Snowden’s US-based lawyer, said: “Al Gore is quite obviously right. Regrettably, the laws under which Snowden is being charged make no allowance for the value of the information he disclosed. Whether the NSA’s activities violated the law or the constitution would be irrelevant in a trial under the Espionage Act.”

This conversation about our privacy and the government disregard of the Constitution in the name of security is not over by a long shot.

Jun 11 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Ana Marie Cox: Congratulations, David Brat: your win over Eric Cantor is totally meaningless

Beating a House majority leader for the first time in 115 years doesn’t mean Washington needs to hail the conquering Tea Party hero … even if it already has

David Brat ran against Eric Cantor as the epitome of everything that’s wrong with Washington. It wasn’t a bad synecdoche; like the city, Cantor exuded southern efficiency and northern charm. By the standards of the Tea Party, however, Cantor simply wasn’t inefficient enough. They would like less done, please. [..]

So on the morning after, Brat is either the Tea Party’s white knight or its motley fool – at centerstage if also at the edge of the political spectrum.

But come the fall, Brat may be an historical footnote, having beaten the first sitting majority leader since the position was created in 1899, only to have gone on to lose the general election. . . .

Or Brat will be one of dozens of incoming freshmen Congressmen … which is to say, an historical footnote in the making.

Jessica Valenti: The only ‘privilege’ afforded to campus rape victims is actually surviving

Hey, at least we live in a world where victim-blaming misogynist dinosaurs masquerading as important newspaper columnists get the earful they deserve

Rape victims get called a lot of things. Sometimes it’s “slut”. For the 11-year-old gang rape victim in Texas, it was that she was a “spider” luring men into her web. It’s not all bad, though – thanks to anti-violence activists, those who have been attacked also get called “survivors” and “brave”. The last word I ever expected to hear to describe a rape victim is “privileged”.

Yet in the Washington Post late last week, columnist George Will wrote about campus rape, claiming that being a victim in college has become “a coveted status that confers privileges”, and that “victims proliferate” because of all these so-called benefits.

Heidi Moore: Wall Street’s virus has infected your college debt, and Obama’s doing zero

Private student loans reflect the very worst practices of our consumer credit culture. The same deeply system that brought down mortgages is now making personal debt too big not to fail

As President Obama takes to TV and Tumblr to stump for his program to make federal student loans more affordable, there’s another $150bn problem lurking behind the scenes: private student loans, which are built on giving students the worst possible deal.

There has been laser-like attention from Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren to the callous federal student loan system, which controls about $1tn of student debt – and rightfully so, because it is immense and it is broken. Students are taking on too much debt to absorb rising tuition (a more complex issue itself) and the high debt is endangering the economy.

Zoë Carpenter: What Won’t the GOP Do to Keep the Poor Uninsured?

When it comes to healthcare, Southwest Virginia is a desperate place. Many of the state’s poorest and sickest live in that pocket of coal country between US Route 19 and the Kentucky and Tennessee borders, where it’s so hard to see a doctor that a free mobile health clinic held each July at a county fairground draws hundreds. “Southwest Virginia is one of the worst places we go to,” said Stan Brock, the founder and president of Remote Area Medical, which runs that clinic and others throughout the country.

That corner of Virginia also encompasses the district of Phillip Puckett, who served as a Democratic state senator until Monday, when he suddenly resigned. His decision to step down appears to have been the result of a bribe offered by Republican colleagues bent on stopping the expansion of Medicaid. Puckett’s resignation gave Republicans the one seat they needed to take control of the Senate; it also put him in the running for a paid post on a state tobacco commission that is controlled by some of the very same Republicans. And it cleared the way for the chamber to appoint his daughter to a state judgeship. [..]

The question of what prompted Puckett’s mid-term resignation is tantalizing, and potentially important, but it’s also beside the point. The true scandal is that hundreds of thousands of Virginians – including more than 20,000 (pdf of Puckett’s own constituents – will be denied health insurance.

Molly Osberg: Would I like fry cooks and baristas with my $15 minimum wage? Damn right

Seattle’s breakthrough still makes me worry about off-the-books workers of the ‘informal’ economy for whom a living wage is already a fiction

This week’s announcement that Seattle will begin to roll out a minimum wage of $15 per hour – a figure that more than doubles the federal minimum, and would make it one of the highest government-set minimum wages in the world – is a long overdue course correction. And if we’re now in for a rolling battle over living wages on a “city-by-city basis”, as Kevin Roose writes at New York magazine, Bill de Blasio’s New York can’t be too far behind. When that day comes, more than robotic baristas or the high-pitched wails of franchise lawyers, I worry about those employed by the so-called informal economy, the off-the-books workers for whom the minimum wage was already a fiction.

Sadhbh Walshe: Orange is the New Black in real life is a prison epidemic of too many women in jail – and taxpayers like you in the red

The US imprisons more women than any country – and most of them for low-level crimes of poverty and addiction. But there is a better way

Spoiler alert: if the following questions intrigue you, you are caught up on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black – and you’re probably as excited as I am that season two has finally arrived. [..]

Reality alert: the United States female prison population has increased 800% in the last three decades. During that same period, the male prison population also exploded, but only at half the rate of the female one. The result is that today, the US imprisons more women than any other country in the world, two-thirds of whom are low-level, non-violent offenders guilty of crimes of poverty and addiction. They are our real-life Taystees and Pousses and Dayas – small-time offenders who rob stores, or forge checks, or use or sell drugs to feed a habit or feed their kids – and their languishing costs you hundreds of millions of dollars.

So let’s all emerge from our binge-watching and ask a different question: what, exactly, are we achieving with America’s great experiment in mass incarceration?

Jun 11 2014

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Loses to Tea Party Challenger

The Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary in Virginia’s 7th District tonight to Tea Party Challenger Dave Brat.

The conservative challenger’s victory halts one of the most meteoric rises in national politics, and illustrates the strong anti-incumbent fever that has taken over Cantor’s Richmond-area district. Cantor is the second House incumbent to lose this primary season – Texas GOP incumbent Ralph Hall was defeated by a tea-party backed challenger at the end of May.

And the idiot Democrats didn’t field a challenger because they thought the seat was not winnable. Stupid.

Correction: According to David Nir at Daily Los, there is a Democratic challenger Democrat, Jack Trammel, who, like Brat, is a professor at Randolph-Macon College.

This also throws Republican leadership into question.

Up Date:

HuffPo has piece that there was a crazy plan by former congressman Ben Jones (D-Ga.), better known as “Cooter” from Dukes of Hazzard, who ran against Cantor in 200:

Crossing party lines to vote in an open primary has a long tradition in the solidly one-party South, Cooter argues in his letter. “[B]y voting for David Brat in the Seventh District Republican primary, we Democrats, independents, and Libertarians can make a big difference in American politics,” he argues. “It is your right to cast that vote. It is an ‘open’ primary and it doesn’t preclude anyone from voting anyway they wish in November. It may be the only way to empower those who want to make a statement about the dysfunctional Congress and ‘politics as usual.'”

Who knew this may have been the reason for Cantor’s loss.

Jun 10 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dean Baker: Why Do Coal-mining Jobs Matter So Much More Than Jobs Lost to Trade?

When President Obama announced plans to curtail the use of coal over the next 15 years, major news outlets like National Public Radio and the New York Times rushed to do pieces on the prospective loss of jobs in coal-mining areas. There are a bit less than 80,000 workers directly employed in the coal industry. A large percentage of these jobs will be lost in the next 15 years due to these regulations.

While it is good to see the media paying attention to this job loss and its implications for families and communities, this concern is a striking departure from normal practice. This was demonstrated clearly last week when the Commerce Department reported a large jump in the trade deficit for April. The report, and the implied job loss, received almost no attention from the media.

Jonathan Turley: Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or traitor?

Whatever he may be, Snowden remains fascinating precisely because he proved to be the malfunctioning cog in the system.

It is hard to imagine that just one year ago, Edward Snowden famously walked away. He was a low-level employee of Dell contractor at a nondescript National Security Agency site. A non-entity by design. Just one of hundreds of thousands of people working in the burgeoning national security complex in the United States – the ultimate faceless cog. Now, one year later, he is a household name but the world remains divided on who Edward Snowden is. Is he a whistleblower or a traitor? It turns out that question is often answered not by how people view Snowden but how they view their government. [..]

So there you have it: hero or traitor. Take your pick. What is clear is that Snowden pulled back the curtain on new reality of living within a fishbowl of constant surveillance. People clearly don’t like it, even if they don’t like Snowden. They are left however with the same sense of frustration and isolation when it comes to their government. Snowden stepped outside of a system that many Americans now view as impenetrable and unchanging. Whatever he may be, Snowden remains fascinating precisely because he proved to be the malfunctioning cog, the one who walked away.

Ralph Nader: Minimum Wage Support Grows

During a recent talk at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson indicated his support for legislation in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage. “I will tell you we will support legislation that moves forward,” he said. Later in the talk, Mr. Thompson continued, “McDonald’s will be fine. We’ll manage through whatever the additional cost implications are.” It turns out that, contrary to the stale Republican talking points, one of the largest low-wage employers in the country does not have a problem with a higher minimum wage.

We have been vigorously advocating for a raise in the federal minimum wage for several years now. Much progress has been made in that time. Unfortunately, little of this progress has come in the halls of Congress, leaving cities and states across the country to do the work that our national leaders won’t do.

Juan Cole: Top 3 White Terrorist Attacks in America this Week

Our capitalist class may be becoming an absolute danger to ordinary Americans.  By promoting a doctrine of absolute right to gun ownership (which rather helps gun manufacturers) and at the same time encouraging people to hate the Federal government and resent paying taxes, they are creating a whole class of alienated far right shooters.

The American far Right, with its white supremacism, fascination with guns and explosives, profound hatred for the Federal government, poses the biggest terrorism threat in the country by far.  Worse, they receive support from right wing media in the U.S. because they hate taxes just the way the ultra-conservative media moguls doe.  Although their attacks are ideological, directed at civilian victims and violent, they are seldom categorized as ‘terrorists.’  Rather what they do is “mass shootings.”  In the meantime, plots hatched by Muslims in the U.S. during the past few years appear almost always to be a form of entrapment by the FBI.

John Nichols: Getting Married ‘Where We Live’: Why Each Marriage Equality Ruling Is Historic

Marriage equality is not a new premise. The barriers are falling rapidly. Since the US Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, it has, in fact, become inevitable. Following on the Supreme Court ruling of last summer, the group Freedom to Marry says twenty consecutive rulings by state and federal judges have found state marriage bans unconstitutional-and more will do so.

Yet each state’s embrace of freedom and fairness matters. That was so very obvious on Friday night in Madison, a city that has for decades embraced and celebrated LGBT rights. Indeed, among the many jurists performing marriages Friday night was Dane County Judge Shelley Gaylord, who was first elected two decades ago to a municipal judgeship as an LGBT activist and lawyer.

Wisconsin should have been the first state in the nation to embrace marriage equality.

Joe Muto: Bowe Bergdahl is Fox News’ perfect villain for the propaganda machine

As Bill O’Reilly used to tell me, the only thing that drives more viewers than a hero … is a villain. Especially if you arrange to have ‘experts’ call him that on purpose

Booking guests for cable news can be a taxing job. You’re underpaid, overworked and constantly on deadline. It’s no surprise, then, that most bookers form a symbiotic relationship with PR people, “fixers” who specialize in connecting producers with the right expert, in possession of the right point-of-view, right away. The pitfall, of course, is that when someone is desperate to go on television, it’s usually a safe bet that they have an axe to grind. Ideally, the booking producer acts as a gatekeeper, to filter out those who are pushing an agenda.

There’s no such filter at Fox News Channel, where pundits are not only allowed to push an agenda but are very much expected to do so. Guests at Fox are booked specifically to advance the latest anti-government narrative – be it Obamacare or Benghazi, the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy or now the released Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl … or on some nights, all of the above.

Jun 09 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dean Baker: Fighting climate change with taxpayer dollars isn’t a fight against freedom – it’s a fight against the end of the planet

The conservative defense for climate denialism is at odds with political ideology

Conservatives like to project themselves as lovers of the free market. They believe that everyone should go out and fend for themselves, that the government shouldn’t be getting in the way of those with talent and ambition – and that it shouldn’t be wasting “their” tax dollars on people who are too lazy to get off their rears and earn their keep.

That story has a certain simplistic appeal and apparent logical consistency. Unfortunately it also has almost nothing to do with the reality of where conservatives actually stand on major political issues.

We got a rare chance to see the ugly truth behind the “rugged individualist” story earlier this year when the rancher Cliven Bundy briefly became a hero to the libertarian-leaning right. The government was harassing a hard-working rancher, went the story – a man who simply wanted to feed and water his cattle.

Paul Krugman: Interests, Ideology And Climate

There are three things we know about man-made global warming. First, the consequences will be terrible if we don’t take quick action to limit carbon emissions. Second, in pure economic terms the required action shouldn’t be hard to take: emission controls, done right, would probably slow economic growth, but not by much. Third, the politics of action are nonetheless very difficult.

But why is it so hard to act? Is it the power of vested interests?

I’ve been looking into that issue and have come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that it’s not mainly about the vested interests. They do, of course, exist and play an important role; funding from fossil-fuel interests has played a crucial role in sustaining the illusion that climate science is less settled than it is. But the monetary stakes aren’t nearly as big as you might think. What makes rational action on climate so hard is something else – a toxic mix of ideology and anti-intellectualism.

William Cohn: Fighting the Sunlight: The James Risen Case in Context

In what critics call its War on Journalism, the Obama administration has pursued leaks aggressively, bringing criminal charges in eight cases, compared with three under all previous administrations combined. It has also denigrated First Amendment jurisprudence by threatening journalists with criminal prosecution, including under the Espionage Act (a capital offense), for using leaked information. Raids of press offices and confiscation of reporters’ computers and notebooks have also occurred, revealing the divide between words and deeds.

The Fourth Circuit’s 2-1 ruling which the Supremes let stand, overturned the Virginia trial court verdict ruling that Risen was protected by a reporter’s privilege and could not be compelled to reveal the identity of his source for his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration which told of a bungled CIA effort in 2000 to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

Why is it so important? The 4th Circuit has appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in Virginia and Maryland, which is where the CIA and NSA are headquartered and where many national security reporters live and work. By eviscerating the privilege there, the government has made national security reporting that much harder at a time when other tactics such as mass surveillance are being used to scare off journalists’ sources. In fact, the Risen subpoena may be one of the last seen, as Big Brother will no longer even need to ask the reporter – as it will already know the source of the leak via its own snooping.

Owen Jones: The CIA’s cute first tweet can’t cover its bloody tracks

As the agency strives to craft a cuddly new image, we mustn’t allow it to whitewash its history of torture and murder

In the latest CIA coup, America’s leading spooks have sent the Twittersphere into a frenzy with their chucklesome debut on social media: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” How droll! More than a quarter of a million people have retweeted what has been described as “the best first tweet possible”. No wonder: it’s one of the world’s most secretive organisations being self-deprecating, light-hearted, even – dare I say it? – cute. [..]

The agency’s first tweet provoked the New York Review of Books to launch a Twitter war, exposing the CIA’s recent record. The CIA had interfered with a recent Senate investigation into torture, the magazine pointed out, in CIA secret prisons established by President Bush. CIA operatives were given clearance to deprive suspects of sleep, slam them against walls, and use waterboarding and other forms of torture.

It’s in the CIA’s interests to craft a cuddly new image: as a team of glamorous, James Bond-style spooks who can take a joke. Given the abject failure of much of the western media to scrutinise its actions – at least until it’s too late – it may believe it can get away with it. But its record of torture, murder and subverting democratic governments speaks for itself. However savvy its Twitter campaign, that must not be forgotten.

Chase Madar: For US foreign policy, ‘left’ and ‘right’ have little meaning

Both political parties seek hawkish reputation

We all know our left from our right, don’t we? This skill, difficult enough in salsa dancing, turns out to be even trickier when applied to American foreign policy, where the difference between left and right is anything but simple.

Remember how in 2008, the candidate promising to expand the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan was Barack Obama, to the horror of GOP candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney? How come the most popular anti-war politician of the past 10 years isn’t a Democrat or even Ralph Nader but Ron Paul, a paleoconservative Texas Republican? How does it happen that Pvt. Chelsea Manning, a WikiLeaks source, gets far better treatment in the pages of The American Conservative, founded by Pat Buchanan, than in liberal Salon? Not even highbrow intellectuals are immune to this disorientation: The late ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, sympathetic biographer of left reformer Jane Addams, thought the Iraq War was swell and proceeded to muse about “just war” rationales for strikes against Iran. Historian and retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, an uncompromising anti-war public intellectual, identifies himself as a Catholic conservative.

What’s going on here? The difference between war lover and anti-interventionist, hawk and dove, is clearly more complicated than a simple left-right divide. We need a better map for this quirky landscape. Here are three things that scramble the tidy left-right spectrum in U.S. foreign policy.

Ray McGovern: Leaving the USS Liberty Crew Behind

Justifying the swap of Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bergdahl, President Obama cited a principle of never leaving U.S. soldiers behind, but that rule was violated in the shabby treatment of the USS Liberty crew, attacked 47 years ago by Israeli warplanes

On June 8, 1967, Israeli leaders learned they could deliberately attack a U.S. Navy ship and try to send it, together with its entire crew, to the bottom of the Mediterranean – with impunity. Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, a state-of-the-art intelligence collection platform sailing in international waters off the Sinai, killing 34 of the 294 crew members and wounding more than 170.

On the 47th anniversary of that unprovoked attack let’s be clear about what happened: Israeli messages intercepted on June 8, 1967, leave no doubt that sinking the USS Liberty was the mission assigned to the attacking Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats as the Six-Day War raged in the Middle East. Let me repeat: there is no doubt – none – that the mission of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was to destroy the USS Liberty and kill its entire crew.

Referring last week to the controversy of the swap of five Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bode Bergdahl, President Barack Obama claimed, “The U.S. has always had a pretty sacred rule: We don’t leave our men or women in uniform behind.” The only exception, he might have added, is when Israeli forces shoot them up; then mum’s the word.

Mr. President, try explaining that “pretty sacred rule” to the USS Liberty survivors. I know them well enough to sense the hollow echo that Obama’s claim will leave in their ears – and in the ears of the families of those who did not survive.

Jun 08 2014

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on this Sunday’s “This Week” are: House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI): Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D);  FiveThirtyEight.com editor-in-chief and ABC News special contributor Nate Silver; and a preview of Diane Sawyer’s exclusive interview with Hillary Clinton.

At the roundtable are Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK); ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd; Fusion’s “AM Tonight” host Alicia Menendez; former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D); Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot; and editor and publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: Senate Intelligence Committee chairperson Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA); Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA); and journalist David Rohde.

His panel guests are Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times; Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal; David Gergen of Harvard University; and Michael Gerson of The Washington Post.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: This Sunday’s dancing contest with “Lurch” is preempted for the Men’s Final of the French Open.

Must more interesting and better eye candy.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guest are Secretary Of State John Kerry; Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Three retired generals will debate the fine line with “bringing them all home” and “never negotiate with a terrorist”. They are retired Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who has kept in touch with the Bergdahl family; retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin; and retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton.

Her panel guests are Donna Brazile, Jackie Calmes and Ana Navarro.

Jun 07 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Heidi Moore: The fault in our starry-eyed ‘recovery’: 2014 looks like we’re going bust again

Wall Street and Washington hype is just that. Anyone who’s really been paying attention knows the truth about the economy

Forget the cheerleading from the White House. Nevermind the latest job numbers. Look at your wallets. Despite the persistent happy talk about a recovery, and the hundreds of charts that come along with it, the US economy is not getting better – it may actually be getting worse.

There are millions of Americans who hoped 2014 would be the year their financial lives would improve. After the struggle of a stagnant country since 2009, economic forecasts predicted that a real recovery was coming – that this this would be the year for a well-paying new job, a house, the year those Americans would pay off student loans or reduce their credit-card debt.

But nothing can really improve for us individually until everything improves for all of us economically. And, increasingly, that utopia looks distant. According to the numbers – and to an increasingly frustrated group of experts – the first few months of 2014 are turning out to be a bust, and there’s no reason to believe the rest of the year will be any better, for the haves or the have-nots.

Duncan Black: Guns aren’t meant to be fun

Open carry shouldn’t become a way for people to show off while risking deadly accidents.

It’s rare that I agree with National Rifle Association officials about anything. Recently, though, they rightly sent a message to gun owners in legal open-carry areas, suggesting that what is (and, in their view, should be) legal is not always appropriate. In particular, groups of people “toting a variety of tactical long guns” to fast-food restaurants and similar establishments might be, at best, demonstrating poor manners.

It’s difficult to know when something is really a trend, or whether in the age of the Internet social media just puts the spotlight on things that aren’t actually any more common than they are normally, but let me remind people that guns are scary. They’re scary because they’re capable of killing people, and because it’s not unreasonable, in certain contexts, to think that a person with a gun might be planning to use it. Why else would you have it with you? People are going to suspect you’re a bad guy with a gun.

Dave Zirin: Throw FIFA Out of the Game

MOST people associate FIFA, the organization that oversees international soccer, with the quadrennial joy of the World Cup. But as the 2014 tournament begins next week in Brazil, FIFA is plagued by levels of corruption, graft and excess that would shame Silvio Berlusconi. [..]

Under the iron-fisted leadership of Sepp Blatter, FIFA has been steeped in rotating scandals for so long, it’s difficult even to imagine its not being immersed in one public relations crisis or another. Mr. Blatter succeeded his mentor, the similarly scandal-plagued João Havelange in 1998. Under his stewardship, FIFA officials have been accused of financial mismanagement, taking bribes and projecting a level of sexism and homophobia that seems to come from another century.

FIFA’s corruption has been such an open secret for so many years that when new reports emerge, they tend to provoke more eye-rolls than outrage.

George Zorrnick: Will the EPA’s Climate Plan Lead to a Counterproductive Fracking Boom?

There’s little doubt the Obama administration’s big push to cut carbon pollution, announced this week, will lead to much less coal-fired power in the United States. That’s a good thing.

But what if states instead turn to natural gas-powered electricity instead? That’s certainly what the administration would like them to do-it’s explicitly laid out as an alternative in the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule, and Obama echoed that suggestion when he spoke on a conference call the day the rule was unveiled. For years, his administration has pushed natural gas as a fundamental part of America’s long-term energy strategy.

If that happens, it could be a disaster for the environment, according to some leading climate experts. Federal regulations on the extraction and transport of natural gas range from insufficient to nonexistent, and the resultant methane emissions from a bigger natural gas boom could neutralize the gains made by the EPA’s rule, and possibly even accelerate climate change in the short-term.

Richard Reeves: Welcome Home, Sergeant

If today’s Republican Party had been around during the Civil War, it would have tried to stop its own president, a fellow named Lincoln, from appointing Gen. Ulysses S. Grant commander of the Union Army because he drank on duty-quite a lot, apparently. And if the president was a Democrat, say Thomas Jefferson, the Republicans would be calling for hearings to find out the “real” reason he was sending Lewis and Clark into the wilderness to learn what was out there between the Mississippi and the Pacific.

So now it is President Obama and Sgt. Bergdahl. It could be Obama and anyone or anything. In fact, the Republicans and other conservatives have been bad-mouthing the president for years for not doing enough to get the wandering sergeant back from the Taliban.

Davis Sirota: Private Equity Is Becoming a Public Problem

A few weeks ago, a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission reported on what he called a “remarkable” amount of potentially illegal behavior in the private equity industry-aka the industry that buys up, changes and sells off smaller companies.

In its evaluation of private equity firms, the SEC official declared that half of all the reviews discovered “violations of law or material weaknesses in controls.” The announcement followed an earlier Bloomberg News report on how the agency now believes “a majority of private equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes.”

At first glance, many probably dismiss this news as just an example of plutocrats bilking plutocrats. But that interpretation ignores how such malfeasance affects the wider economy.

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