Tag: Politics

Feb 15 2015

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 Sunday’s “This Week” are:  Rep. Adam Kinzinger (D-IL); and Rep. Adam Schiff (D- CA).

The guests at the roundtable are: Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; Republican strategist Ana Navarro; Washington Post national political reporter Robert Costa; and Politico editor and co-founder Jim VandeHei.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough;  Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN); and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA).

His panel guests are: Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal; Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic; Peter Baker, The New York Times; and CBS News Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: The guests on Sunday’s “MTP” are: Veterans Administration Secretary Robert McDonald; Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI); and Comedian Dana Carvey.

The roundtable guests are: Joe Scarborough, MSNBC host; former White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod; April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks; and Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post.

State of the Union: The guests announced for Sunday’s CNN are: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in a pre-taped interview with Dan Bash; former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta; former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI); Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT); John Stanton, BuzzFeed; Matt Yglesias, Vox; and Democratic Strategist Ben LaBolt.

Feb 14 2015

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

Jessica Valenti: Marriage equality didn’t end homophobia. LGBT people face discrimination every day

As state after state makes same-sex marriage legal, it’s easy to be placated by the notion that we’re nearing true equality. For heterosexual cisgender people, marriage equality has become a self-congratulatory rallying point, a string of victories we point at to prove that things can, in fact, get better. We love the wedding pictures and the joy of excited couples together for decades who are finally able to get married.

But let’s not make it rain celebratory rice just yet. Marriage equality is far from the only indicator of how well we’re doing in tackling LGBT issues, and, despite some policy hurdles we’ve surmounted, homophobia in all its forms remains a pervasive force in LGBT people’s daily lives – even in so-called progressive enclaves.

Steven W. Thrasher: ‘Everyone’s a little bit racist’ doesn’t excuse ongoing police violence

On Thursday, FBI director James Comey gave a long and searching speech called “Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race” – complete with deep meditations on race, predictable but annoying equivocations, and harmful misdirection about the violence of policing.

It also included – in an unquestionable first for an FBI director giving a public speech – quotes from the oversexed, cursing puppets of the Broadway musical Avenue Q. (Who knows if FBI brass have quoted them in private before; if only J Edgar Hoover could have lived to see this!) [..]

And while it was encouraging to hear Comey say that Americans need some actual goddamned government statistics on how often cops kill people rather than relying upon sites like KilledByPolice.net, it didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that he was so convinced only after he “listened to a thoughtful big city police chief express his frustration with that lack of reliable data” who “didn’t know whether the Ferguson police shot one person a week, one a year, or one a century.”

Does it matter? Isn’t one lost life one too many

Hugh Muir: In praise of … Jon Stewart

“Where will I get my news each night,” lamented Bill Clinton this week. This might have been a reaction to the fall from grace of Brian Williams, America’s top-rated news anchor, who was suspended for embellishing details of his adventures in Iraq. In fact the former US president was anticipating withdrawal symptoms for the impending departure of the comedian Jon Stewart, who – on the same day as Williams’s disgrace – announced that he will step down as the Daily Show host. [..]

Bill Clinton does not mourn alone.

Eugene Robinson: Obama’s Ambivalent War Logic

President Obama’s request to Congress for authority to use military force against the Islamic State explains his view of why to fight this war. But it doesn’t really tell us how.

Obama has asked to be liberated and constrained at the same time. He wants no geographical boundaries placed on his ability to go after the Islamic State and “associated persons or forces.” But he also asks that Congress rule out “enduring offensive ground combat operations” and wants the war authority to expire after three years.

This is walking an awfully fine line. One has to wonder whether the president is trying to satisfy both hawks and doves in Congress-or displaying his own ambivalence about using military force in a situation where, he has said, there is “no American military solution.”

David Sirota: Border Security Is Not an Immigration Cure-All

With the opening of the new Congress, Republican lawmakers have been promising a renewed focus on border security as a supposed cure-all for America’s broken immigration system. Left unaddressed, though, is a simple question: How does border security address the status of millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States?

The answer is that it probably won’t, according to a person who knows a thing or two about immigration: Felipe Calderon.

In a recent interview, the former Mexican president told me that he believes the crackdown on undocumented immigration combined with intensified border security has prompted large numbers of undocumented Mexican laborers to remain in the U.S. permanently-even as many prefer to go home-out of fear they will never be able to return.

Joe Conason: Big Lies, Little Lies and the Punishment of Brian Williams

The harshest penalties usually tend to be brutal, vengeful and excessive-even when the offender is a celebrity journalist like Brian Williams. Suspended without pay from his post as the “NBC Nightly News” anchor for six months, Williams may be facing the end of his career in television news, which would be roughly equivalent to capital punishment.

Williams is in the public dock for telling a false story about his experiences covering the American invasion of Iraq; the disclosure humiliated him, his colleagues and his network when exposed. For the time being, at least, he has lost the trust of many in his audience. Enforced absence from the job he loves-and wanted all his life-is a sanction that will sting far more than the barbed jokes, ugly headlines and lost millions in salary. Off air, he may find time to engage in serious introspection, issue a forthright apology and hope for redemption.

Troubling as his transgression was, I nevertheless hope for his redemption, too.

Feb 13 2015

Obama’s Blank Check for His Neverending War

In an effort to get approval for a war that has been going on for the last six months, President Barack Obama sent a request to Congress for authorization for the use of force (AUMF) in connection with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. There are some in congress, on both sides of the aisle in both houses, feel that this is just another blank check for the perpetual war against terror. During a panel hearing, Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) asked some very pointed questions about the language in the letter. The panel members were former Ambassador James Franklin Jeffrey, Rick Brennan, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Dr. Dafna Hochman Rand, former staff member on Obama’s National Security Council.

GRAYSON: Thank you. Section 2C of the president’s draft authorization for the use of military force reads as follows: The authority granted in subsection A does not authorize the use of US armed forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations. Ambassador Jeffrey, what does ‘enduring’ mean?

JEFFREY: My answer would be a somewhat sarcastic one. Whatever the executive at the time defines enduring as, and I have a real problem with that.

GRAYSON: Dr. Brennan?

Brennan: I have real problems with that also. Not only because it’s… I don’t know what it means. I can just see the lawyers fighting over the meaning of this. But more importantly, if you’re looking at committing forces for something that you are saying is either vital, or important interest of the United States, and you get in the middle of a battle, and all of a sudden are you on offense, or are you on defense? What happens if neighbors cause problems? Wars never end the way that they were envisioned. And so I think that that’s maybe a terrible mistake to put in the AUMF.

GRAYSON: Dr. Rand?

Rand: Enduring, in my mind, specifies an open-endedness, it specifies lack of clarity on the particular objective at hand.

GRAYSON: Dr. Rand, is two weeks enduring?

RAND: I would leave that to the lawyers to determine exactly.

GRAYSON: So, your answer is you don’t know, right? How about two months?

RAND: I don’t know. Again, I think it would depend on the particular objective, enduring in my mind is not having a particular military objective in mind.

GRAYSON: So you don’t really know what it means. Is that a fair statement?

RAND: Enduring in my mind means open ended.

GRAYSON: Alright, section five of the draft of the authorization of the use of military force reads as follows: In this resolution the term associated persons or forces means individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside ISIL, or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. Ambassador Jeffrey, what does “alongside ISIL” mean?

JEFFREY: I didn’t draft this thing. But,

GRAYSON: Nor did I.

JEFFREY: Nor did you, but I would have put that in there if I had been drafting it, and the reason is, I think they went back to 2001, of course this is the authorization we’re still using, along with the 2002 one for this campaign, and these things morph. For example, we’ve had a debate over whether ISIS is really a element of Al Qaeda; it certainly was when I knew it as Al Qaeda in Iraq in 2010 to 2012, and these semantic arguments confuse us and confuse our people on the ground, in trying to deal with these folks. You’ll know it when you see it if it’s an ISIS or it’s an ally of ISIS.

GRAYSON: How about the Free Syrian Army, are they fighting alongside ISIL in Syria?

Jeffrey: No, they’re not fighting alongside ISIL, in fact often they’re fighting against ISIL, and ISIL against them in particular.

GRAYSON: What about Assad, is he fighting for or against? It’s kind of hard to tell without a scorecard, isn’t it?Jeffrey: It sure is.

GRAYSON: Yeah. What about you Dr. Brennan, can you tell me what “alongside ISIL” means?

Brennan: No, I really couldn’t. I think that what, you know, it might be… the 9/11 Commission uses the phrase “radical islamist organizations” and I think maybe if we went to a wording like that, it includes all those 52 groups that adhere to this type of ideology, that threaten the United States. But we’re putting ourselves in boxes and as you said Sen… Congressman, I’m trying to understand what that means, what the limits are… who we’re dealing with, it’s very confusing.

GRAYSON: Dr. Rand.

RAND: Well, first of all, I believe that the confusion is probably a function of the fact that this is an unclassified document, so it’s not going to specify exactly which groups are considered associates; that would be for a classified setting. But second, as I said in the testimony, the nature of the alliances within ISIL are changing and are fluid, and those who are targeting, the military experts, know exactly who is a derivative, or an associate, or an ally of ISIS at any given moment.

GRAYSON: Why are you so confident of that? It seems to me that it’s a matter of terminology, not a matter of ascertainable fact.

RAND: Based on my public service. I’ve seen some of the lawyers (?) and some of the methodologies, and-(cut off)

GRAYSON: Okay. Here’s the $64 billion question for you, Ambassador Jeffrey, and if we have time, for you others. If you can’t tell us, you three experts can’t tell us what these words mean, what does that tell us? Ambassador Jeffrey.

JEFFREY: That it’s very difficult to be using a tool basically designed to declare war or something like war on a nation-state, which has a fixed definition, against a group that morphs, that changes its name, that has allies, and other things. Do we not fight it? We have to fight it. Are we having a hard time defining it? You bet.

GRAYSON: Dr. Brennan?

BRENNAN: I’d agree with the ambassador. I think the issue we that need to be looking at is trying to broaden terminology and understand that it is a tenet, or organizations and groups that adhere to this ideology, and make it broad enough that if one pops up in a different country that is doing the same thing, that is a sister of this organization, the President has the authority to act.

GRAYSON: Dr. Brennan, I think you just described a blank check, which I’m not willing to give to the President or anybody else. But thank you for your time.

H/T John Amato at Crooks and Liars

Feb 13 2015

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

Paul Krugman: Money Makes Crazy

Monetary policy probably won’t be a major issue in the 2016 campaign, but it should be. It is, after all, extremely important, and the Republican base and many leading politicians have strong views about the Federal Reserve and its conduct. And the eventual presidential nominee will surely have to endorse the party line.

So it matters that the emerging G.O.P. consensus on money is crazy – full-on conspiracy-theory crazy.

Right now, the most obvious manifestation of money madness is Senator Rand Paul’s “Audit the Fed” campaign. Mr. Paul likes to warn that the Fed’s efforts to bolster the economy may lead to hyperinflation; he loves talking about the wheelbarrows of cash that people carted around in Weimar Germany. But he’s been saying that since 2009, and it keeps not happening. So now he has a new line: The Fed is an overleveraged bank, just as Lehman Brothers was, and could experience a disastrous collapse of confidence any day now.

Zoë Carpenter: FBI Director on Police Violence: ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’

About halfway through what was billed as a groundbreaking speech on race and policing, FBI director James Comey reached for the wisdom of musical theater. “I am reminded of the song ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’ from the Broadway hit, Avenue Q,” he mused. He went on to quote the lyrics. “You should be grateful I did not sing that,” he joked.

That bit of levity summed up the rest of Comey’s speech, which amounted largely to an excuse for systemic discrimination by law enforcement. He received praise for being “bold” in addressing the subject, in comparison to other law enforcement leaders; that’s a pretty low bar. “I worry that this important and incredibly difficult conversation about race and policing has become focused entirely on the nature and character of law enforcement officers, when it should also be about something much harder to discuss,” Comey said. That “something,” he explained, is America’s history of racism, and the “unconscious bias” that “we all-white and black-carry…around with us.” [..]

That’s not a conversation that Comey controls, however. People around the country are keeping it going, and they’re spending less time talking about “seeing one another” than about what can actually be done, right now. Police accountability measures are pending in more than a dozen states. In Washington, DC, activists with the #DCFerguson movement are organizing against the use of “jump outs,” a policing tactic that involves plainclothes officers in unmarked cars descending suddenly to conduct stop and frisks.

“We all have work to do-hard work, challenging work-and it will take time,” Comey said in closing. “So let’s begin.” But he has arrived late to an ongoing discussion, and few are waiting for him to catch up.

Michelle Goldberg: The Most Common Type of American Terrorist Is a White Man With a Weapon and a Grudge

Yesterday, an outspoken white atheist murdered three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We don’t yet know for sure whether this was a hate crime or whether the killer, Craig Stephen Hicks, had some other motivation; police have said the crime may have grown out of a dispute over parking. We do know that had Hicks been a Muslim and his victims atheists, few would be waiting for all the facts to come in before declaring him a terrorist. We know that there would be the usual calls for other Muslims to condemn the killings, coupled with the usual failure to take note of the many Muslims who did. And we know that demands for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins to distance themselves from Hicks are largely facetious, because no one really blames them. Violence perpetrated by Muslims is almost always seen as part of a global conspiracy, whereas white men like Hicks are usually seen as isolated psychopaths.

There is, of course, some truth there. An organized jihadist movement exists; an organized cadre of terroristic atheists does not. Yet in the United States, Islamophobia has been a consistent motivator of violence. Hicks’s killing of Yusor Mohammad, her husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, should not be treated like a man-bites-dog story, a reversal of the usual pattern of terrorism. After all, Muslims in the United States are more often the victims of ideological violence than the perpetrators of it.

Maria Margaronis: The New Greek Government Refuses to Agree to Unpayable Debts

At times the conflict between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone looks like a duel to the death. Last night, a seven-hour meeting of Europe’s finance ministers about Greece’s immediate funding needs ended in tetchy silence. There was no common statement; there wasn’t even (to borrow Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s phrase after his meeting last week with Germany’s Wolfgang Schaeuble) an agreement to disagree. On Twitter, Greece-watchers tried to come up with ways to marry Greece’s request for a bridge loan with the Eurozone’s insistence on an extension to the bailout memorandum, which the new governing party Syriza has promised to repudiate. Pier? Pontoon? Causeway? Schrödinger’s memorandum, simultaneously dead and alive?

Semantics will play an important part in any eventual solution, which will involve compromises and face-saving wording for both sides. But semantics can’t be all of it-something the Eurozone ministers may not yet have understood. The Syriza government is not just pushing for a better deal-they’re refusing to keep on playing the same self-destructive game, piling debt on unpayable debt tied to impossible conditions. The aim is to reclaim democracy and political possibility-and with them, human lives-from the failed and fatal dogmas of austerity. In this they are backed by 70 percent of the Greek people, twice the proportion that voted for them. Eighty percent also want to stay in the eurozone. The desire-perhaps quixotic, perhaps grandiose, but born of suffering and necessity-is not to abandon Europe but to change it.

Leslie Savan: Finally, Someone Pays for Iraq War Lies – Brian Williams

Everybody’s been asking whether Brian Williams can return as anchor of NBC Nightly News after his six-month suspension for exaggerating an attack on a helicopter ferrying him and an NBC camera crew to a military bridge site in Iraq back in 2003. It’s the big celebrity question of the week, totally replacing our collective wonderment over that weird hat Pharrell Williams (no relation) wore during his Grammys performance last weekend.

But just peaking above the surface in the past couple days is a far more important question: Will the media, prodded by what they’ve judged to be Williams’s “lies,” finally begin to question their own role in boosting the far more serious lies that led to hundreds of thousands of actual deaths in the Iraq war?

Jon Stewart, as usual, saw the ironies. After cracking some gentle jokes at his friend’s expense, Stewart allowed that he’s happy the media is piling on Bri Wi because ” finally someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq war.”

Feb 12 2015

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

Trevor Timm: When would an anti-war activist back arms sales? When he’s secretary of state

Secretary of State John Kerry has to be the worst anti-war activist in recorded history. Is there a military action – save one – that he hasn’t supported since he came to national prominence as an anti-war activist in the early 1970s? In the the past decade and a half alone, he’s voted for the war in Iraq, strongly defended drone strikes, was the chief advocate for the bombing of Syria in 2013, and was by far the most hyperbolic cabinet member calling for a years-long, multi-country war against ISIS.

And now Kerry has been privately telling lawmakers that he supports the US entering into a proxy-war against Russia by sending lethal weaponry to the Ukrainian military, even though the Obama administration supposedly does not yet have an official position.

He’s hardly alone. The US conventional wisdom machine in the US government is now hurtling towards sending offensive weapons into another foreign conflict, without the slightest concern for the devastating consequences it might bring.

George Monbiot: The careless, astonishing cruelty of Barack Obama’s government

Let me introduce you to the world’s most powerful terrorist recruiting sergeant: a US federal agency called the office of the comptroller of the currency. Its decision to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in one of the poorest, most troubled places on Earth could resonate around the world for decades.

Last Friday, after the OCC had sent it a cease-and-desist order, the last bank in the United States still processing money transfers to Somalia closed its service. The agency, which reports to the US treasury, reasoned that some of this money might find its way into the hands of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. It’s true that some of it might, just as some resources in any nation will find their way into the hands of criminals (ask HSBC). So why don’t we shut down the phone networks to hamper terrorism? Why don’t we ban agriculture in case fertiliser is used to make explosives? Why don’t we stop all the clocks to prevent armed gangs from planning their next atrocity?

Ridiculous? In fact it’s not far off. Remittances from the Somalian diaspora amount to $1.2bn-$1.6bn a year, which is roughly 50% of the country’s gross national income, and on which 40% of the population relies for survival. Over the past 10 years the money known to have been transferred to suspected terrorists in Somalia amounts to a few thousand dollars. Cutting off remittances is likely to kill more people than terrorists will ever manage.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The #RepublicanClassWar’s New Front: Social Security for the Disabled

Nine out of 10 Americans have fallen behind financially as the well-to-do — especially the ultra-wealthy — capture an ever-increasing chunk of our national income. This inequality threatens the entire economy’s future growth and stability. But whenever someone offers a solution to this growing problem, someone else on the right is likely to accuse them of “class war.”

Class war is precisely what we’ve been seeing for decades now — but it’s been waged for, not against, the wealthy. And Republicans have been its dutiful servants from the start.

It might make a good hashtag, come to think of it: #RepublicanClassWar.

The wreckage of this war can be seen all around us. Incomes for the top 1 percent of households have more than doubled since the 1980s. The top 0.1 percent has increased its share of this nation’s total wealth from 7 percent in 1978 to 22 percent in 2012, a level not seen since before the Great Depression. Ninety percent of American households saw no increase in their wealth after 1986.

There’s a war on — but the middle class didn’t start it.

Alexa Van Brunt: Prosecutors shouldn’t have immunity from their unethical – or unlawful – acts

It’s a tough thing to keep prosecutors accountable to the public, but some people are trying very hard to do just that in the aftermath of Ferguson. One of the grand jurors who failed to indict former police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, for example, wants to make public what happened in the grand jury room. But grand jury proceedings are secret, under both federal and state law, including in Missouri. So last month that juror took legal action seeking to break his silence. Meanwhile, an advocacy group filed a bar complaint against St Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch for alleged misconduct committed in that same process.

These attempts expose just how difficult it can be to hold prosecutors to any standard of conduct. Most misbehaving prosecutors are never brought to justice, thanks in large part to the law of prosecutorial immunity, which holds that prosecutors cannot be sued for violating citizens’ rights in the courtroom. Until we change that law, courts need to open grand jury records at the request of people like the Ferguson juror “John Doe”.

Bartlett Naylor: Loretta Lynch fumbled on HSBC years ago. Now she can prove no bank is too big to jail

As US senators move towards confirming Loretta Lynch as the new attorney general, the big question is what she will do about HSBC, which is embroiled in a massive tax evasion scandal. The world’s second-largest bank allegedly enabled thousands of Americans and other nationals to escape taxes by concealing their assets in HSBC’s Swiss affiliate, a business HSBC acquired when it purchased the Republic National Bank of New York.

Lynch has investigated the bank in the past, but there are many questions about her record on taking Wall Street offenders to task. She became the chief attorney for an ongoing probe into HSBC’s money laundering crimes in 2010, during her assignment as the US attorney for the eastern district of New York. At roughly the same time, the US government received a damning trove of evidence from French officials against HSBC regarding tax evasion.

Yet it is not clear whether she investigated the tax fraud. The key questions senators must ask is: What did Lynch know about the tax fraud? If she wasn’t aware, why not?

Michael T. Klare: Keystone XL, Cold War 2.0, and the GOP Vision for 2016

It’s a ritual long familiar to observers of American politics: presidential hopefuls with limited international experience travel to foreign lands and deliver speeches designed to showcase their grasp of foreign affairs. Typically, such escapades involve trips to major European capitals or active war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, however, has broken this mold. Before his recent jaunt to London and into the thickets of American vaccination politics, he chose two surprising destinations for his first trips abroad as a potential Republican candidate.  No, not Kabul or Baghdad or even Paris, but Mexico City and Alberta, Canada.  And rather than launch into discussions of immigration, terrorism, or the other usual Republican foreign policy topics, he focused on his own top priority: integrating Canada and Mexico into a U.S.-led “North American energy renaissance.”

By accelerating the exploitation of fossil fuels across the continent, reducing governmental oversight of drilling operations in all three countries, and building more cross-border pipelines like the Keystone XL, Christie explained, all three countries would be guaranteed dramatic economic growth.  “In North America, we have resources waiting to be tapped,” he assured business leaders in Mexico City.  “What is required is the vision to maximize our growth, the political will to unlock our potential, and the understanding that working together on strategic priorities… is the path to a better life.”

Feb 11 2015

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

Katrina vanden Heuvel: An Arms Race Won’t Help Ukraine

Nearly 70 years ago, a group of Manhattan Project scientists, having seen the power of nuclear destruction, created what they called the “Doomsday Clock.” It was a mechanism designed to warn the world of how imminent the threat of global catastrophe was becoming – the closer the clock moved to midnight, the closer we were to doomsday. Last month, the group of Nobel laureates charged with maintaining the clock changed its time to 11:57 p.m., denoting the closest we’ve been to doomsday in more than 30 years. Their reasoning is based not just on the world’s inaction on issues like climate change, but its provocative march toward a new Cold War.

Indeed, as catastrophe engulfs eastern Ukraine, the United States continues to stoke tensions with Russia, most recently by considering providing lethal weapons assistance to the government in Kiev. [..]

But arming the Ukrainian military is not in the best interest of the United States, nor is it in the best interest of Ukraine. It will only worsen a bloody crisis that has already claimed thousands of victims. As I have argued in the past, there is no military solution to this conflict, only a political one; and a new supply of U.S. arms will provide ammunition for Russian leaders who believe, fairly or not, that America is attempting to turn Ukraine into a military base near Russia’s borders. Indeed, as Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution writes, “If U.S.-provided weapons fail to induce a Russian retreat in Ukraine and instead cause an escalation of the war” – which they almost certainly will – “the net result will not be peace and compromise.”

Zoë Carpenter : Scientists: We Cannot Geoengineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, the volcano shot 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Those particles reflected enough sunlight to cool the earth by about one degree Fahrenheight-a temporary phenomenon, but one whose implications are still very much debated. Why not, some scientists have asked in the decades since, counter climate change by reproducing the effects of Mount Pinatubo-for example, by flying a plane into the stratosphere and spraying enough sulfate aerosols to turn down the sun?

That question was held up for scrutiny on Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences, which released a study (funded, in part, by the CIA) of two ideas for staving off the worst effects of climate change via technological manipulation of the climate: to remove carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it elsewhere, or to reflect sunlight away from the planet by what’s known as albedo modification, à la Mount Pinatubo. The unequivocal message from the committee was that the world cannot expect to geoengineer its way out of the climate crisis

Rebecca Gordon: Saying No to Torture: A Gallery of American Heroes

Why was it again that, as President Obama said, “we tortured some folks” after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe. That’s why we don’t shame or punish those who were too scared to imagine doing anything else. We honor and revere them. [..]

Though you’d never know it here, no level of fear in public officials makes acts of torture (or the support of such acts) any less criminal or more defensible before the law. It’s remarkably uncomplicated, actually. Torture violates U.S. and international law, and those responsible deserve to be prosecuted both for what they did and to prevent the same thing from happening the next time people in power are afraid.

Some of those who rejected torture, like CIA official John Kiriakou and an as-yet-unnamed Navy nurse, directly refused to practice it. Some risked reputations and careers to let the people of this country know what their government was doing. Sometimes an entire agency, like the FBI, refused to be involved in torture.

Eleanor Smeal: Trade Must Not Trump Women’s Human Rights

Any deal that forces women and human rights to take a backseat to profit and trade should be a non-starter. But right now, the United States is negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement with 11 nations including Brunei, a country that recently adopted a vicious new penal code threatening the rights and lives of women, lesbians, and gay men.

Just recently in his State of the Union, President Barack Obama reiterated one of our core American values: respect for human dignity. It is our commitment to this principle, said the President, which has led the U.S. to “condemn the persecution of women” as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.

So, why are we conducting business as usual with Brunei?

Daphne Eviatar: 9/11 Defendants Claim Military Commission Translator Assisted CIA Torture

It didn’t take long for the Guantanamo military commission in the 9/11 case to stumble again — this time when two of the accused co-conspirators said they recognized a translator in the courtroom from their time in a CIA black site.

This is the first time since August that the commission at Guantanamo has met in this case of the five accused masterminds of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The case has repeatedly stalled over concerns that the government is spying on defense counsel, most recently by trying to turn a defense team member into an FBI informant. Previously, defense lawyers claimed their computers were being monitored and they discovered that the supposedly private rooms where they meet with their clients were all wired for audio and video surveillance.

Now, unbeknownst to their own lawyers, two defendants — Ramzi bin al Shibh and Walid bin Attash — claim they recognize a new translator assigned to the commissions as someone who was also a translator at a CIA black site where they were tortured. They say they can’t trust him.

Ellen Brown: Why Public Banks Outperform Private Banks: Unfair Competition or a Better Mousetrap?

In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned bank, “is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003.” The article credited the shale oil boom; but as discussed earlier here, North Dakota was already reporting record profits in the spring of 2009, when every other state was in the red and the oil boom had not yet hit. The later increase in state deposits cannot explain the bank’s stellar record either.

Then what does explain it? The BND turns a tidy profit year after year because it has substantially lower costs and risks then private commercial banks. It has no exorbitantly-paid executives; pays no bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no private shareholders; and has low borrowing costs. It does not need to advertise for depositors (it has a captive deposit base in the state itself) or for borrowers (it is a wholesome wholesale bank that partners with local banks that have located borrowers). The BND also has no losses from derivative trades gone wrong. It engages in old-fashioned conservative banking and does not speculate in derivatives.

Feb 10 2015

How Big Pharma Markets to Doctors

John Oliver opened the second season of HBO’s “This Week Tonight” with a humorous but sobering segment on how big pharmaceutical companies market their drugs to doctors, spending an estimated $24 billion per year in direct marketing.  In his witty but serious way, he explains that 70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug, and spent $329 billion, $1000 per person, on those medications in 2013. John quipped, “Walter White could have made more money cooking up rheumatoid arthritis medication.”

Big Pharma tactics include everything from lunch, to sexy sales reps to expensive dinners with other doctors who pitch the sale as “thought leaders.” The drugs are often pushed for “off label” use, that is, use that the FDA has not approved and most of the reps know very little, if anything, about the drugs that they’re pushing.

Drug companies are like high school boyfriends, they’re more interested in getting inside you than in being effective once they are there.

One a the good things that the Affordable Care Act did is it created a web site, OpenPaymentsData.CMS.gov that which enables average citizens a chance to search for perks given to doctors by pharmaceutical companies.

Feb 10 2015

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

New York Times Editorial Board: Reform After the Ebola Debacle

The World Health Organization’s anemic performance in handling the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa may yield one positive outcome: sweeping, and long overdue, institutional reforms to improve its ability to respond more quickly to the next outbreak of a lethal infectious disease. Scrambling to answer growing criticism, the W.H.O.’s executive board recently endorsed changes to enhance the agency’s rapid response capabilities.

The reforms call for well-trained public health workers to rush to the aid of beleaguered countries and an emergency fund to support their initial operations, among other advances. One big question, which can only be answered in practice, is whether the organization’s 194 member states will set aside their typical politicking on behalf of national self-interests and allow it to function as the global health leader it ought to be.

Robert Reich: Back to the 19th Century

My recent column about the growth of on-demand jobs like Uber making life less predictable and secure for workers unleashed a small barrage of criticism from some who contend that workers get what they’re worth in the market.

A Forbes Magazine contributor, for example, writes that jobs exist only “when both employer and employee are happy with the deal being made.” So if the new jobs are low-paying and irregular, too bad.

Much the same argument was voiced in the late nineteenth century over alleged “freedom of contract.” Any deal between employees and workers was assumed to be fine if both sides voluntarily agreed to it. [..]

So it’s not surprising we’re once again hearing that workers are worth no more than what they can get in the market.

But as we should have learned a century ago, markets don’t exist in nature. They’re created by human beings. The real question is how they’re organized and for whose benefit.

Mark Weisbrot: Environmental Movement Has Held Back the Keystone XL Pipeline, for Good Reason

Ditching the Keystone XL pipeline should be a no-brainer. The 1,179-mile pipeline extension would carry some of the world’s dirtiest oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas. And it shouldn’t be necessary to repeat this, but since we have a Congress controlled by a party that denies the reality of climate change, it is:  97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity has warmed the Earth. The evidence of climate disruption is all around us, from warming ocean surface and land temperatures, melting Antarctic ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and increasing heat waves and other changes in extreme weather events. [..]

This is important because it is estimated that if we are to have even a 50 percent chance of avoiding the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming that scientists have set as an upper limit, at least two-thirds of the world’s proven reserves of oil must remain unexploited. Keeping this oil in the ground will be one of the great struggles of future years, since oil companies could lose hundreds of billions of dollars of assets, and they are politically powerful.  But the longer any oil stays undeveloped, the less likely it is to be used: exploitation delayed is exploitation denied. And since the oil from Canada’s tar sands brings much higher carbon emissions than the average oil produced today, it is a prime candidate for staying in the ground.

Bill Boyarsky: Playing Politics With Measles-That’s Pretty Sick

Observing the Republican Party tangle itself up in the politics of measles is rare good news for Democrats who feared they were mired in a losing streak after the GOP gained control of Congress.

Some of the Republican presidential hopefuls are so desperate to win votes from the hard right-wingers who will dominate the phony media show known as the 2016 Iowa caucuses that they are pandering to those who believe that children are harmed by vaccinations against measles. The Iowa caucus-goers constitute a thin but influential slice of the electorate that will determine the 2016 Republican presidential nominee. Since Iowa is first and political writers are enamored with the place, the caucuses have a disproportionate influence on debate around the country on issues such as the measles epidemic.

At the heart of this particular debate is the question of whether parents should be required to have their children vaccinated. [..]

For them, It’s a race toward the right, inflaming and politicizing an issue that scientific evidence-and a majority of Americans-say is not an issue at all.

Ralph Nader: Large Foundations: Rethink Your Priorities

The number of large foundations has been consistently increasing. Some of these foundations are bulging with billions of dollars in assets that could be contributed to nonprofit “good works.” It is potentially the golden age of philanthropy, but unfortunately many areas of recognized need are too often ignored by foundation boards and their executives. Organizations with track records of effective advocacy and accomplishment stand ready to take on neglected problems of our society. Unfortunately, these groups lack adequate foundation support.

When foundations do donate to important areas, such as energy policy, they often award grants to the same organizations that are not original, motivating or making necessary waves. Year after year, these bland organizations are seen as the “safe choice” for donors who are timid about new ideas and groundbreaking approaches. Cushy relationships, as has been demonstrated in the energy/environmental field, often amount to an annuity of contributions for lackluster studies and reports from the same old recipients futilely running over the same old ground.

Robert Creamer: Meet IL Governor Bruce Rauner — Poster Boy for War on Middle Class

Last fall, Illinois GOP candidate Bruce Rauner spent $63.9 million — $27.3 million of his own money — to buy the right to occupy the Illinois Governor’s mansion.

Now that he’s in office his first moves have confirmed that he is the poster boy for the War on the Middle Class.

Rauner is a hybrid of the worst traits of Mitt Romney and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. In fact, you could say he personally embodies the reason why — even though our economy has grown 77% in the last 35 years — the wages of ordinary Americans have been stagnant or actually declined. [..]

Rauner’s first major assault on the middle class was an executive order giving state workers who are covered by labor contracts the choice to benefit from those contracts without paying a “fair share” contribution to support the union that negotiates and administers them.

Feb 10 2015

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Freed

After serving 23 months in federal prison for exposing the Bush administration’s torture program, former CIA analyst John Kiriakou told Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman he would do it again and called for the prosecution of CIA officers who tortured prisoners.

In 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the agency’s use of waterboarding. In January 2013, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer involved in the torture program to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. In return, prosecutors dropped charges brought under the Espionage Act. Kiriakou is the only official to be jailed for any reason relating to CIA torture. Supporters say he was unfairly targeted in the Obama administration’s crackdown on government whistleblowers. A father of five, Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA as an analyst and case officer, leading the team that found high-ranking al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in 2002. [..]

In a wide-ranging interview, Kiriakou says, “I would do it all over again,” after seeing the outlawing of torture after he came forward. Kiriakou also responds to the details of the partially released Senate Committee Report on the CIA’s use of torture; argues NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did a “great national service,” but will not get a fair trial if he returns to the United States; and describes the conditions inside FCI Loretto, the federal prison where he served his sentence and saw prisoners die with “terrifying frequency” from lack of proper medical care.

Transcript can be read here

Feb 09 2015

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

Paul Krugman: Nobody Understands Debt

Many economists, including Janet Yellen, view global economic troubles since 2008 largely as a story about “deleveraging” – a simultaneous attempt by debtors almost everywhere to reduce their liabilities. Why is deleveraging a problem? Because my spending is your income, and your spending is my income, so if everyone slashes spending at the same time, incomes go down around the world.

Or as Ms. Yellen put it in 2009, “Precautions that may be smart for individuals and firms – and indeed essential to return the economy to a normal state – nevertheless magnify the distress of the economy as a whole.”

So how much progress have we made in returning the economy to that “normal state”? None at all. You see, policy makers have been basing their actions on a false view of what debt is all about, and their attempts to reduce the problem have actually made it worse.

Charles M. Blow: Beyond ‘Black Lives Matter’

The Black Lives Matter protesters took some criticism for what others viewed as a lack of clear focus and detailed agenda. But in truth, raising an issue to the point where it can no longer be ignored is the grist for the policy mill. Visibility and vocalization have value.

In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities. [..]

But, as is often the case, there was no full resolution or reconciliation. The issue of police-community relations was raised but not solved. The memory of mistrust still wafts through the air like the smell of rot being carried by the breeze.

What was it all for? What came of it? Where do we go from here?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: More Evidence That ‘Centrist’ Solutions Can’t Save Us

We have become a profoundly unequal society. That reality is explored in new detail in a recent study from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Even more importantly, the INET study shows that it will take a dramatic shift in policy to restore the equilibrium. Unless we can build momentum for a new political agenda, we’ll be divided into a small minority with fabulous wealth and a permanent underclass with few hopes or prospects.

Unfortunately, our mainstream political dialogue shows no sign of adapting to these realities. As the INET study confirms, mainstream Democratic ideas won’t protect us from this dismal future.

Republican policies? Don’t ask.

Robert Kuttner: Will the Recovery Finally Translate into Better Wages?

The good news about the economy’s improved job creation dominated the weekend’s headlines. Many commentators concluded that the economy is finally shaking off the effects of the financial collapse of 2008 and the long period of stagnation that followed. [..]

In this recovery, the economy has been creating more low-wage jobs than high-wage ones. The shift from standard payroll jobs to temp and contract work continues.

The uptick in the measured unemployment rate, from 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent, suggests that discouraged workers are only just coming back into the labor force and we are a long way from full employment. Even at the present rate of improved job creation, it will be 2017 before we get back to the pre-recession level of unemployment.

The beginning of a process where job creation actually translates into improved living standards is long overdue, but there are several dangers ahead.

Gary Younge: Deluded and dysfunctional, the Republicans have lost the plot

Recently, in an effort to embarrass Republicans pandering to their scientifically challenged base, Senate Democrats proposed a series of votes on climate change. While most Americans and the overwhelming majority of scientists believe climate change is real and people are the primary cause of it, Republican voters are evenly divided on whether it exists at all, and reject the idea that we are responsible. [..]

As a means, bipartisanship is, of course, an admirable goal: the more politicians are able to work together, put the interests of their constituents first and get things done, the better. The grandstanding, bickering and procedural one-upmanship that characterises so much of what passes for politics is one of the things that makes electorates cynical and drives down voter turnout.

But as an end in itself, bipartisanship is at best shallow and at worst corrosive. For it entirely depends what parties are joining together to do. This is particularly true in America, where constituencies are openly gerrymandered, both parties are funded by big money, and legislation is often written by corporate lobbyists.

Michael Smerconish: Mr. President, Release the 28 Pages

Zacarias Moussaoui has just upped the ante on the White House to release 28 top-secret pages from a congressional report pertinent to a possible Saudi role in the events of 9/11. [..]

Moussaoui’s account of being a liaison between Osama bin Laden and members of the Saudi royal family was told to Philadelphia lawyer Sean Carter over the course of two days of questioning in October at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., and has only now been cleared for public release by the U.S. government.

Carter has been defending against a Saudi motion to dismiss his case, facing the unenviable burden of producing evidence of a Saudi link to al-Qaeda without the benefit of taking discovery. Moussaoui’s testimony was unforeseen. The man who once took flight lessons in Oklahoma and Minnesota in preparation for a terror strike contacted the federal judge presiding over the case and offered to provide information.

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