Tag: Politics

Paul Ryan claims the protests heard so very loud and clear during the House Budget Committee chair’s town hall meetings in April had no influence on his thinking about Medicare.

Perhaps Ryan really does have a tin ear.

But the outcry over his plan to mess with Medicare, heard in Wisconsin communities from Milton to Kenosha, and at spring recess sessions in the districts of Republican freshmen from Pennsylvania to Florida, obviously influenced other Republicans.

Images from Kenosha – a historic factory town in Ryan’s district, where hundreds of people showed up to criticize his scheming to cut benefits for working Americans while giving billionaires and multinational corporations new tax breaks – were featured nationally on broadcast network news shows.

Cable news programs focused intense attention on the story. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz devoted much of a program last week to the outcry. (In addition to a blistering analysis of the congressman’s proposal by the host, this writer provided some on the ground reporting from Kenosha, including details of a brief interview with Ryan, who was typically dismissive of the popular discomfort with his plan.) But other networks — even Fox — at least touched on the congressman’s troubles.

The reporting was noticed in Washington where, last week, GOP leaders began almost immediately to distance themselves from Ryan’s plan to use Medicare funds to enrich the private insurance firms that have donated so generously to his campaigns.

Stephen L. Goldstein: “Shock Doctrine” Economics Ruining America

WARNING: Reading Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” will disturb your sleep and haunt your waking hours. If you’re a real American, it will make you want to scream – and do something to put “the bad guys” in their place. Everyone – especially Milton-Friedman, free-market lovers like Kingsley Guy – should read “Shock.” If enough people do so, it could save the country. If they don’t, our democratic/representative government and capitalism will be permanently replaced by the un-American, corporate-socialist state that has already taken hold – and it will be our own fault.

For 50 years, laissez-faire economist Friedman and his apostles at the University of Chicago have spread a doctrine based upon “the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending,” according to Klein. Even worse is how they do it: For Friedman and his minions, widespread disasters (natural and man-made) are opportunities to make money. While victims are really or figuratively bleeding, too shocked to realize what’s happening, in cahoots with lapdog governments, they impose “deregulation, privatization, and cutbacks” on economies as the formula for recovery. Promising prosperity for all, they deliver widespread poverty and oppression.

Brent Blackwelder Obama Should Back Off Risky Nuclear Loan Guarantees

Well before the catastrophe at Fukushima began unfolding, a familiar word was heard in discussions about plans to build a new generation of reactors in this country. That word: risk.

With President Barack Obama and Congress pushing ahead with efforts to offer up federal construction loan guarantees totaling $54.5 billion, what was the risk of taxpayers getting stuck holding the bag in the event these nuclear projects defaulted? And, why should taxpayers even be expected to assume such a risk?

Before those critical questions were satisfactorily addressed, we were sadly reminded of the other definition of risk when it comes to nuclear energy. The toll of Fukushima won’t be known for years, but assuredly the cost, both human and financial, will be huge.

As public debate over nuclear safety once again flares up – with industry’s familiar assurances that “it can’t happen here” – let’s not allow the financial risks inherent in this energy choice to be overlooked.

Michelle Chen; Watchdogs Probe Labor Abuses in China’s Tech Industry

Never underestimate the power of a good public shaming. Western electronics firms were mortified in 2010 by reports of gruesome suicides of young workers in China, employed by the multinational tech giant Foxconn. Since the company runs a network of plants that churn out glistening gadgets for Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard, the suicides scandalized tech brands that often market themselves as hip and progressive.

The months of damage control that followed led to promises to reform wages and working hours and to establish less Dickensian, more worker-friendly factory conditions. But has all that bad publicity (encapsulated most recently in a sensational theatrical production) paid off for workers?

This week watchdog groups have released a report to kickstart a global campaign to call attention to ongoing labor issues. The “Time to Bite Into a Fair Apple” campaign hopes to keep the pressure on both Chinese authorities and multinational firms to fulfill promises to make the manufacturing system more humane for hundreds of thousands of young Chinese workers.

Allison Kilkenny: NY Teachers Vow ‘Wisconsin-Style’ Protest

New York teachers are vowing to protest in the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to layoff thousands of educators.

“Mr. Mayor, it’s not going to happen, and enough is enough!” shouted Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, as he whipped up a roaring crowd at the UFT’s spring conference in midtown New York.

A ballroom-full of educators rose to their feet, clapping and chanting, “Enough is Enough.”

A surprise guest, Wisconsin State Sen. Jon Erpenbach, the man who led 13 fellow lawmakers out-of-state in order to block Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation, received a standing ovation from the crowd.

The UFT, along with many other unions, plan to draw tens of thousands of supports for the May 12 march from City Hall and other sites to Wall Street to oppose Bloomberg’s cuts and demand the big banks start paying their fair share.

When I first wrote about the bin Laden killing on Monday, I suggested that the intense (and understandable) emotional response to his being dead would almost certainly drown out any discussions of the legality, ethics, or precedents created by this event. That, I think, has largely been borne out, at least in the U.S. (one poll shows 86% of Americans favor the killing, though that’s hardly universal: a poll in Germany finds 64% view this as “no reason to rejoice,” while 52% believe an attempt should have been made to arrest him; many European newspapers have harshly criticized U.S. actions; and German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s declaration of happiness over bin Laden’s death provoked widespread criticism even in her own party). I expected — and fully understand — that many people’s view of the bin Laden killing is shaped first and foremost by happiness over his death.

But what has surprised me somewhat is how little interest there seems to be in finding out what actually happened here. We know very little about the circumstances of bin Laden’s killing, because the U.S. government has issued so many contradictory claims, which in turn contradict the reported claims of those at the scene. When I wrote about this on Monday, I said that the use of force would be justified if, as the U.S. Government claimed, he was violently resisting his capture. But that turned out to be totally false. It’s now beyond dispute that bin Laden was unarmed when killed and there was virtually no violent resistence in the house. Still, the range of possibilities for what actually happened is vast — everything from he was lunging for his AK-47 to he was already captured when shot (in front of his family) to the order from the start was to kill, not capture, him — and I personally don’t see how it’s possible to assess the justifiability (or legality) of what took place without knowing which of those are true.

David Sirota: The High Cost of Cheap War

It seems only fitting that in the very month the Terminator sci-fi franchise predicted the rise of militarized artificial intelligence, the Guardian of London reported on a British Ministry of Defence analysis warning that drone warfare may be creating an “incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality.”

The report’s life-imitating-Skynet idea of robots ultimately making combat decisions is certainly scary-but still a bit fantastical. The more frightening part of the analysis was its look at how roboticized war may already be prompting governments to “resort to war as a policy option far sooner than previously.”

The dynamic is not surprising-nations will inevitably be more willing to use warfare as a foreign policy tool if they possess instruments limiting the cost of waging war. By letting kids in Las Vegas drop remote-controlled bombs on kids in Pakistan, Yemen and now Libya, drones are one of those instruments. But they are only one of many. Indeed, while President Obama preposterously claimed this week that most Americans “know well the costs of war,” it’s quite the opposite: Most Americans have been insulated from those costs-and it’s no coincidence that as we’ve become more insulated, we’ve happily waged more frequent wars.

Joe Conason: Tough Enough

It is always a happy moment when Americans are reminded of our country’s greatness, especially when we are so often warned about its imminent decline-and the elimination of Osama bin Laden, fanatical murderer of thousands of Christians, Jews and Muslims, was certainly such a moment.

Especially for those of us who were living in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as those who died and their families, justice was finally done. From now on, the heroic pantheon associated with that infamous date will include not only the police officers, firefighters and rescue workers of 9/11, but the Navy SEALs and the military and intelligence officers who avenged them.

Everyone who feels pride and satisfaction in bin Laden’s fate must also acknowledge the bold action and sound priorities of President Obama, who has coolly and cleanly fulfilled a promise he made during his campaign. Maintaining the nation’s dignity and his own, he has handled the aftermath of the mission with precise correctness and stayed focused on the policy goals that guide his administration.

I have a proposal: Let’s double US government funds devoted to promoting renewable energy. Let’s expand allocations for foreclosure prevention to help another million Americans keep their homes. Let’s launch a $10-billion infrastructure programme to repair crumbling roads and bridges. Let’s double the number of new maths and science teachers that President Obama hopes to train, bringing the total to 200,000. And let’s hire back all of those police officers fired by the city of Camden, New Jersey – already among the most dangerous places in the country before budget constraints compelled it to dismiss half of its police force in December.

While we’re at it, let’s reduce the deficit by about $40 billion.

This proposition is not voodoo economics. It is taboo economics. All of these things could be accomplished by trimming US military spending by just 10 per cent. Some of these suggestions (teacher training, Camden cops) are trifling items by the standards of Pentagon budgeting, together accounting for less than the cost of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet.

Robert Naiman: Now is the Time for a Full Afghanistan Withdrawal

After OBL: McGovern/Jones Push for Real Withdrawal Plan

Following the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the floodgates opened in Washington this week for reconsideration of U.S. plans to continue the open-ended war in Afghanistan.

Now Representatives Jim McGovern and Walter Jones have introduced the “Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act,” bipartisan legislation that would require the President present to Congress a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a clear end date for the war. It would require the President to submit quarterly reports to Congress on the progress of troop withdrawal, as well as the human and financial costs of continuing the war. The President would also have to report how much money U.S. taxpayers would save if the war were brought to an end in six months, instead of five, ten, or twenty years.

Andy Worthington: The Unjustifiable Defense of Torture and Guantánamo

With the reported assassination of Osama bin Laden, one of the most alarming responses has been a kind of casual and widespread acceptance that the death of America’s number one bogeyman would not have been achieved without the use of torture, and without the existence of Guantánamo.

This is wrong on both fronts, as Jane Mayer of the New Yorker explained in response to an early manifestation of the story, put out by torture apologists Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol.

Steve Rendall: Right-Wing Political Violence: More Terror, Less Coverage

On the morning of January 17 in Spokane, Washington, city workers found a backpack with a bomb that was set to go off along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. An FBI official (Spokane Spokesman Review, 1/19/11) called the bomb “a viable device that was very lethal and had the potential to inflict multiple casualties.” Another official told the Associated Press (1/19/11), “They haven’t seen anything like this in this country…. This was the worst device, and most intentional device, I’ve ever seen.”

On March 9, Kevin Harpham, a white supremacist with past links to the neo-Nazi National Alliance, was arrested and charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and possessing an improvised explosive device. The device contained shrapnel dipped in rat poison, which can enhance bleeding (Hate Watch blog, 3/10/11), and was set on a park bench where its impact would be directed toward marchers.

All but seven House Republicans voted for a budget plan last month that would eliminate Medicare’s guarantee to the elderly. It was always bad policy. But now that the vote has proved to be wildly unpopular, the party is suddenly running in the opposite direction.

On Thursday, Dave Camp, a Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he was no longer interested in pushing a plan that could not win support among the Democrats who control the Senate. Speaker John Boehner said Mr. Camp was just being realistic. Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, suggested the proposal would probably not be a part of the debt-limit talks that began Thursday because President Obama “excoriated us” for the Medicare plan.

These Republican leaders are trying to make it sound as if they were shocked by the Democratic opposition. In fact, their real surprise was how much bitter resistance the Medicare idea encountered among voters – the ones they claim share their fervent desire to dismantle much of the federal government.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Find True Centrism in the People’s Budget

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) People’s Budget ~ the strongest rebuke to the Robin Hood in reverse “Ryan Budget” that was passed by the best Republican House Citizens United can buy ~ is receiving some well deserved national attention as the budget debate now moves to the Senate.

The Nation immediately recognized the sense and sanity of the progressive plan to create a budget surplus in ten years–through tax fairness, bringing troops home, and investing in job creation, and others are now praising its strengths too.

“The Courageous Progressive Caucus Budget,” writes The Economist.  “Mr. Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not. I’m not really sure what ‘courage’ is supposed to mean here, but this seems precisely backwards.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman describes the People’s Budget as “the only major budget proposal out there offering a plausible path to balancing the budget… unlike the Ryan plan, which was just right-wing orthodoxy with an added dose of magical thinking-[it] is genuinely courageous because it calls for shared sacrifice.”

George Zornick: The GOP Jobs Plan That Wasn’t

It’s been over three months since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and strengthened their caucus in the Senate. The central premise of the GOP midterm campaign was that it could create badly needed jobs-the Republican National Committee drove a bus through the lower 48 states emblazoned with the slogan: “Need a Job? Fire Pelosi!”

Now, after focusing its initial legislative efforts on repealing “ObamaCare,” pushing Tea Party-backed dreams like a balanced budget amendment, and fighting to strip regulatory agencies of their authority, the GOP has finally released a job plan…that consists of a balanced budget amendment, the repeal of Obamacare, and several assaults on regulatory authority.

Eugene Robinson: Torture Is Still Torture

It wasn’t torture that revealed Osama bin Laden’s hiding place. Finding and killing the world’s most-wanted terrorist took years of patient intelligence gathering and dogged detective work, plus a little luck.

Once again, it appears, we’re supposed to be having a “debate” about torture-excuse me, I mean the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, that were authorized and practiced during the Bush administration. In fact, there’s nothing debatable about torture. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, and there’s no way to prove that the evidence it yields could not have been obtained through conventional methods.

Leslie Savan: Torturism, the New Birtherism

Like the death of bin Laden, the death of birtherism was a long time coming, but when it finally came, it was swift and dramatic: President Obama rappelled down to the birther level to release his long-form birth certificate; at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner three days later, Obama and wingman Seth Myers broke down Donald Trump’s extraordinarily well-guarded ego, with jokes; and within hours, simply by announcing that bin Laden was dead, Obama sent Trump’s verkakte ideas to go sleep with the fishes.

If the narcissistic real estate mogul had become a 3-D avatar for the Obama-hating Republican base, you have to wonder where all their resentment and anger, augmented now by humiliation, go now?

The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, re-ignited the debate over “brutal interrogations” — by which it’s meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based — that waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation methods” produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden — are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.

But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been — as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said — that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.

Jim Hightower: GOP House Chooses Big Oil Over Granny

Now, let’s check today’s sports scores: 4, 10.7 and 21-and-a-half.

Those tallies are from the oil league, and the winner, of course, is the league’s powerhouse, ExxonMobil.

Four, as you might have guessed, is the $4 that Exxon is siphoning out of your wallet these days for 1 gallon of its petrol.

Next comes 10.7. That’s the $10.7 billion in profits that this oil giant has soaked up in just the first three months of this year – a new record, not achieved by any managerial genius, increased productivity or improvement in customer service, but solely by the jack-up in gasoline prices.

Finally, 21-and-a-half. This is the big score made by Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s CEO. The chief pulled down $21.5 million in personal compensation last year, making him the highest paid executive in the oil league and one of the most richly paid CEOs in the entire country.

Jill Richardson: I Never Promised You an Organic Garden

A story has been developing over the past month involving lies, toxic sludge, Hollywood celebrities, and poor, inner city school children. It centers around the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a group of environmentally conscious Hollywood celebs, and the “organic” school gardens they’ve been volunteering at for the past past couple years. Stars like Rosario Dawson, Amy Smart, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and Nicole Ritchie have generously adopted Los Angeles schools, visiting the schools and helping the children garden. What the celebs didn’t know is that their organization’s corporate donor – Kellogg Garden Products – sells both organic compost and soil amendments and ones made from sewage sludge. Seventy percent of Kellogg’s business is products made from sewage sludge. Sewage sludge is not allowed on organic farms and gardens.

In late March, the Center for Media & Democracy (CMD) wrote to EMA, alerting them that Kellogg products contain sludge, which may jeopardize the safety and the organic status of the gardens. As a result of the letter, John Stauber, founder of CMD, then met with Ed Begley, Jr., famous environmentalist and EMA board member, who was concerned about the possibility that sludge was used on the gardens.

Jeff Biggers: Arizona’s New Civil Rights Movement

Arizona’s Manufactured Crisis Turns into a Moral Crisis: Why Tucson’s Ethnic Studies Students Can’t Wait

Stumbling further into the quagmire of a national public relations disaster, drastic new measures by the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) officials have turned the “manufactured crisis” over the Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies Program into a troubling moral crisis for the city-and the country.

As Tucson school officials appear to unravel daily with increasing controversy, Mexican American Studies (MAS) students and UNIDOS activists are now emerging as the calmest standard-bearers of civil discourse for the community.

Jim Goodman: Wisconsin’s Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker campaigned as the “nice guy” who carried his lunch in a brown paper bag, a regular guy who just wanted to cut state spending. That, apparently resonated with the electorate. After the election, Wisconsin met the real Scott Walker.

Governor Walker stated that Wisconsin was broke, yet in his first month in office he signed tax cuts for corporations that would put the state $117 million deeper in the hole. This caught the attention of the Wall St. Journal who exposed his “we’re broke” story as mere political grandstanding.

I’m sure he did want to cut spending, but apparently not on his corporate friends. Walker is clearly far more interested in making political hay than he is in sound fiscal policy.

Now to the opposite of cuts. Over a year after the biggest oil spill in US history and even as criminal investigations continue, BP is still receiving millions of dollars in government contracts.

That’s according to a new story by Jason Leopold at Truthout, who notes that only last week Air BP, a division of the oil company responsible for the oil spill causing problems in the Gulf of Mexico, was awarded a $42 million contract to supply fuel to Dover Air Force Base.

While Leopold was unable to confirm that that fuel was going to supply planes headed to Libya, what he did find was that the contract was given under “unusual and compelling urgency,” which means that the government found the need so important that they limited the bids.

Amy Goodman: Accomplish the Mission: Bring the Troops Home

On May 1, the U.S. president addressed the nation, announcing a military victory. May 1, 2003, that is, when President George W. Bush, in his form-fitting flight suit, strode onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln. Under the banner announcing “Mission Accomplished,” he declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

That was eight years to the day before President Barack Obama, without flight suit or swagger, made the surprise announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a U.S. military operation (in a wealthy suburb of Pakistan, notably, not Afghanistan).

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has become the longest war in U.S. history. News outlets now summarily report that “The Taliban have begun their annual spring offensive,” as if it were the release of a spring line of clothes. The fact is, this season has all the markings of the most violent of the war, or as the brave reporter Anand Gopal told me Tuesday from Kabul: “Every year has been more violent than the year before that, so it’s just continuing that trend. And I suspect the same to be said for the summer. It will likely be the most violent summer since 2001.”

Allison Kilkenny: Eighty-Nine Arrested Protesting Paul Ryan’s Medicaid Cuts

Capitol Police arrested eighty-nine disability rights activists on Monday following the group’s occupation of the Cannon House Office Building rotunda.

The disability rights group ADAPT staged the event to protest Representative Paul Ryan’s Medicaid cuts, which would force people with disabilities to live in nursing homes rather than in their own houses.

Additionally, the House-passed budget resolution would turn Medicaid into block grants and reduce the program’s spending by more than $700 billion over ten years.

New York Times Editorial: Party Like It’s 2013

Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee are having a campaign fund-raiser this week.

Starting on Wednesday, the committee’s majority is expected to pass bills to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the most important innovations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The bureau has one purpose: to shield consumers from unfair, misleading and deceptive lending. The purpose of the Republican bills is twofold. One is to deprive the agency of the power to fulfill its mission. Another is to attract campaign money. As long as the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats, the bills are unlikely to become law. But by advancing them in the House, Republicans can demonstrate how thoroughly they would dismantle reform if they controlled Washington and, in the process, rake in Wall Street donations.

Peter Rothberg: World Press Freedom Day

Nearly two decades ago, the UN General Assembly proclaimed May 3 as World Press Freedom Day as a reminder that free, independent press is essential to democracy and is a fundamental human right.

In honor of that occasion, the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has organized a conference today at the Newseum in Washington, DC, with a focus on how Internet and digital platforms are contributing to freedom of expression, democratic governance and sustainable development across the globe.

“TRUMP sat stone-faced at the WashPost table at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as Seth Meyers of ‘Saturday Night Live’ ripped him brutally. Definitely laughing at him, not with him. Was so awkward that some folks at his table stopped laughing and applauding.” From Politico Playbook on Sunday

Had I been at that table I would not have stopped laughing and applauding for one second. Donald Trump deserved no such courtesy.

Trump’s faux candidacy for the Republican nomination for president leads in some polls, thanks to his willful embrace of the disgusting, dangerous and racist birther conspiracy lie that President Obama was not born in the United States and, thus, the illegitimate occupant of the White House. And when that was proved wrong – again – last week by the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate, Trump doubled down by questioning the qualifications of the president to go to Columbia and Harvard universities. This was another ugly insult in his ceaseless quest for attention.

E.J. Dionne Jr. Yes, we can turn the page

It seems appropriate that my wife and I got the news of the death of Osama bin Laden from our son last night. We had gone to bed early and he roused us to report what had happened.  It seemed a fitting way to get the news because the political consciousness of an entire younger generation of Americans – our son was 8 on Sept. 11, 2001, and our daughters are, respectively, two and five years younger – was so heavily shaped by the events of that day and all that came after.

While no one pretends that the threat of terrorism has gone away, one would like to hope that the country can now turn a page, to use the phrase Barack Obama invoked so powerfully during the 2008 campaign.  It’s why I think young Americans were especially animated by the news of bin Laden’s death. They do not want to be the generation whose experience is characterized by their country’s engagement in what seems like an endless series of foreign wars.  But neither do they relish coming of age at a moment when so many speak of the possibility of American decline. The events in Pakistan are not so much a remedy as a sign of hope that the United States can avoid both fates.

Laura Flanders: Searching for Closure at Ground Zero

Hours after the attack on the Trade Towers in 2001 I walked down to the site. I returned there again last night and found a loud crowd shouting mostly the words “USA, USA,” in the darkness to a clutch of news cameras.

While different in almost every other respect, what I found on both occasions were people searching. A decade ago, dust still on their skin, people were looking for safety, for loved ones, for explanation. This time, with a whole lot more breath in their lungs, people were looking once again-for others to be with and for closure.

James Harris: Second-Class Students

In a recent interview, Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Tony Smith shared with me one of the most mind-numbing statistics I have ever heard: According to the Alameda County Health Department, a black child born in West Oakland will, on average, die 15 years before a white child born in the hills of Oakland.

“Surely this must be enhanced or inflated for shock value,” I said to Smith. “This can’t be real.”

“That is a real statistic that exposes serious inequity along racial lines in Oakland,” said Smith. We sat for a minute talking about our hopes for our children and our hopes for Oakland schools, but the statistic stung me with a viscous dose of reality, which quickly transformed into deep concern and doubt about Oakland’s education system.

Richard A. Clarke: Bin Laden’s Dead. Al Qaeda’s Not.

THE United States needed to eliminate Osama bin Laden to fulfill our sense of justice and, to a lesser extent, to end the myth of his invincibility. But dropping Bin Laden’s corpse in the sea does not end the terrorist threat, nor does it remove the ideological motivation of Al Qaeda’s supporters.

Often forgotten amid the ugly violence of Al Qaeda’s attacks was that the terrorists’ declared goal was to replace existing governments in the Muslim world with religiously pure Islamist states and eventually restore an Islamic caliphate. High on Al Qaeda’s list of targets was Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. The protesters of Tahrir Square succeeded in removing him without terrorism and without Al Qaeda.

Thus, even before Bin Laden’s death, analysts had begun to argue that Al Qaeda was rapidly becoming irrelevant. With Bin Laden’s death, it is even more tempting to think that the era of Al Qaeda is over.

Starting this week, the talk in our nation’s capital will be dominated by whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling – as if we have any choice but to pay off our obligations. It will be a colossally foolish and self-destructive battle, another sign of how fanaticism and ideological obsession are rendering our country ungovernable.

Republicans, joined, it seems, by some terrified Democrats, are trying to use the debt-limit vote to force cuts in spending that they could not win on the merits. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the government could face the possibility of defaulting. Even if default doesn’t happen, global markets could punish us by demanding higher interest rates on our debt.

The New York Times Editorial: The Economy Slows

The economy still needs help and, specifically, a sustained focus on jobs and income. Instead, policy makers are gearing up for deep spending cuts, ignoring the damage they are likely to cause. Last quarter, cutbacks by governments at all levels took a chunk out of overall growth. If cuts of similar or greater magnitude become the norm, the slow economic pace of the first quarter also could very well become the norm. It’s nice to believe slowing growth is transitory. But as long as spending, jobs and incomes are at risk and policy priorities are skewed, it’s hard to believe in a turnaround.

Peter Dreier: Banks Should Pay for Foreclosures

The epidemic of foreclosures that began in 2008 has been devastating America’s families, communities and the state economy.

Nowhere is this more true than in California, where one in five U.S. foreclosures has taken place. Since 2008, more than 1.2 million Californians have lost their homes, and the number is expected to exceed 2 million by the end of next year. More than a third of California homeowners with a mortgage already owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Dear Media:

Since you have been busy this week with non-stop coverage of the royal wedding and the spectacle that is Donald Trump, I thought I would take it upon myself to fill you in on the less newsworthy items that you missed.  Clearly, the royal wedding of a country that is not your own, in addition to the frantic rantings of an ego obsessed real state tycoon, take priority over middle east turmoil, vicious attacks on labor, and deadly tornadoes ripping through the country.

I assume you haven’t heard-since there has been little to no coverage-that Wikileaks has released the Guantanamo Files, which include classified files on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees.  These documents shed new light on the six-year long persecution of a journalist because he worked for Al-jazeera, the unreliable evidence used to justify due-process free detentions, and the capture of children and men as old as 89.  Of course, I wouldn’t expect such large and important outlets to be bothered with such silly, insignificant revelations.

Michelle Chen: Anti-Union Forces Try to Knock Out New York City’s Hard Hats

On Thursday, construction workers held hard hats in thick hands in the glow of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. In honor of International Workers’ Memorial Day, they solemnly honored the sacrifices of fellow workers who had been injured or killed on the job. The scene embodied the heavy legacy of the city’s building trades: the labor that sculpted gotham’s majesty, muscular but embattled, angled precariously against the city’s powers that be.

Historically, the building trades unions have been known as shrewd political players and a formidable counterweight to developers and the city’s bureaucracy. But now, a civic organization and the real estate industry have teamed up to try to dismantle the construction unions’ political clout.

The Regional Plan Association has issued an extensive report (which as of this writing seems to have been taken down from the RPA’s home page and was only retrievable in cached form), which argues that the pending expiration of 30 city union construction contracts provides an opportunity to roll a little disaster capitalism down 5th Avenue.

Saul Landau and Jack Willis: Same Old from the Nuclear Gang after Fukushima

Wishful thinking about energy generation has apparently induced both temporary blindness and long-term amnesia.

The nuclear industry has promised the world cheap, safe, and clean energy for over 60 years.

As the Japanese government continues to extend its nuclear evacuation zone around the Daiichi nuclear complex in Fukushima, the pushers of nuclear power–including President Barack Obama–still demand that Congress approve ever-larger subsidies for new reactors.

Wishful thinking about energy generation has apparently induced both temporary blindness and long-term amnesia about the history of nuclear “mishaps.”

In 2009, the government subsidized the nuclear industry with $18.5 billion in loan guarantees, which failed to anticipate the total costs of “the next generation of plants.” The Nuclear Energy Institute–the industry’s lobbying group–now wants $20 billion more in loan guarantees to get the so-called “nuclear renaissance” underway.

The most recent national jobs reports show improvements in the labor market, but the employment gains and the falling unemployment rate are still largely the result of a decline in layoffs and firings of workers.

Hiring remains weak as the latest government report on job openings and labor turnover shows. In a job market still facing challenges, reducing the number of workers who are laid off or fired is essential to building a healthier labor market, strengthening the recovery and spreading its benefits. Mandating paid sick days is one policy that will help employers keep workers in jobs.

Job retention is as important as job creation in getting the economy back on track. That’s why it’s critical to have a better understanding of the policies that will help employers keep workers in jobs, including paid sick days policies.

David Sirota: Why the Fat Guy Should Lose His Privilege

“Obesity is a national health crisis. … If current trends continue, it will soon surpass smoking in the U.S. as the biggest single factor in early death, reduced quality of life and added health care costs. … Obesity is responsible for more than 160,000 excess deaths a year. … The average obese person costs society more than $7,000 a year in lost productivity and added medical treatment.”-Scientific American, January 2011

Considering those troubling statistics, Advertising Age’s headline this week is welcome news: “Weight Watchers Picks a New Target: Men.” The story details how the nation’s biggest diet company is using the NBA playoffs to launch its first male-focused advertising campaign. Sounds great-except for one thing: Why only now?

This is a significant question in a country whose debilitating weight problem is more male than female-and “more” means a heckuva lot more. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, almost 70 percent of men are overweight, as compared with 52 percent of women. Yet, somehow, 90 percent of the commercial-weight-loss industry’s clients are female and, somehow, this industry hasn’t seen males as a viable business. How can that be?

Eugene Robinson: ‘Oh Yeah, Prove It’

Let’s see: The Arab world is in tumult, with worrying signs that a Libya-style descent into civil war may be happening in Syria, where the stakes are unimaginably higher. Nearby, the warring Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, may be forming a united front. Closer to home, new leaders are being tapped for the Pentagon and the CIA. The government is fast approaching its legal debt ceiling. Painfully high gasoline prices have put the nation in a sour mood. Tornadoes are wreaking death and destruction across the South.

So the leader of the free world summons the media for an important announcement-but not about war, peace or the economy. It’s about his birth certificate.

Gail Collins: Introducing the Things of Spring

Springtime Progress Report: Early this year, we learned that Utah was considering a bill to name a Browning pistol its official state firearm. Meanwhile in Washington, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey was pushing for a bill that would make it more difficult to sell guns to people on the terror watch list. I am excited to report that one of these pieces of legislation finally has been passed into law.

Yes! Utah now has an official state gun. It beat out Arizona, which this week bestowed its honor on the Colt Single-Action Army pistol.

Lautenberg’s bill, meanwhile, has gone nowhere whatsoever. It would require that gun purchases by people on the terror watch list be vetted by the attorney general’s office to make sure that arming the individual in question would not pose a danger to homeland security. Opponents point out that the terror watch list is not always reliable, and the bill might therefore force innocent Americans to go through an entire additional step while purchasing armaments and explosives.

Charles M. Blow: Silliness and Sleight of Hand

On Wednesday, he released his long-form birth certificate, but not without chiding the media and his detractors for their “silliness” in forcing the issue.

No sooner had he released it than Donald Quixote was off to his next windmill: the president’s college grades.

Donald Trump is still playing to suspicions of President Obama. And it’s no longer theoretical. It’s theological. For them, truth is no longer dependent on proof because it’s rooted in faith: faith that American exceptionalism was never truly meant to cover hyphenated Americans; faith in 400 years of cemented assumptions about the character and capacity of the American Negro; and faith that if the president doesn’t hew to those assumptions then he must be alien by both birth and faith.

This just in: President Obama has proved, yet again, that he is a natural-born citizen of the United States. Which we already knew-“we” meaning those of us who believe there is such a thing as objective reality.

Greg Mitchell: At 8th Anniversary of Bush’s Landing on the Deck: ‘Mission’ Still Not ‘Accomplished’

Sunday marks the 8th anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day, or as it might better be known, Mission Accomplished (NOT) Day. Coming on a weekend, there will be even fewer mentions of this in the national media than last year, and Keith Olbermann will not be on the air to update the usual close to his telecast when he marks exactly how many days since Bush declared victory (you do the math).

In my favorite antiwar song of this war, “Shock and Awe,” Neil Young moaned: “Back in the days of Mission Accomplished/ our chief was landing on the deck/ The sun was setting/ behind a golden photo op.” But as Neil added elsewhere: “History is a cruel judge of overconfidence.”

Nowhere can we see this more clearly than in the media coverage of the event. Even today, nearly eight years later, the often “overconfident” reporting from Baghdad and Kabul sometimes takes your breath away.   At least two U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq this week so far, and over 45,000 or our troops remain there today. (For a full accounting of costs of all sorts, go here [1].) .  So let’s return to the days of Mission Accomplished….