Tag: Politics

Dec 05 2014

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial: It Wasn’t Just the Chokehold

Eric Garner, Daniel Pantaleo and Lethal Police Tactics

One route to justice for Eric Garner was blocked on Wednesday, by a Staten Island grand jury’s confounding refusal to see anything potentially criminal in the police assault that killed him.

But the quest will continue. The fury that has prompted thousands to protest peacefully across New York City, and the swift promise by the Justice Department of a thorough investigation, may help ensure a just resolution to this tragedy. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton, too, have vowed that necessary changes will come from Mr. Garner’s death, promising that the Police Department will respond and improve itself, and redouble efforts to patrol communities in fairness and safety.

But among the many needed reforms, there is one simple area that risks being overlooked. Besides the banned chokehold used by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who brought Mr. Garner down, throwing a beefy arm around his neck, there was lethal danger in the way Mr. Garner was subdued – on his stomach, with a pile of cops on his back.

Richard )RJ)Eskow: Why Demographics Can’t Save the Democrats – But Populism Can

In his examination of former Virginia Senator Jim Webb’s potential presidential candidacy, New York Times commentator Thomas Edsall explored Webb’s potential appeal to “voters convinced that Wall Street owns both parties, voters tired of politicians submitting to partisan orthodoxy and voters seeking to replace ‘identity group’ politics with a restored middle- and working-class agenda.”

Edsall’s essay quotes political scientist Morris Fiorina on the Democratic Party’s “upscale capture” and Joel Kotkin’s characterization of the party’s controlling bloc as an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition led by “gentry liberals.”

It certainly appears that the Democratic Party establishment has been enjoying the best of both worlds for some time now: a perception of liberalism and idealism among the party’s core constituencies, along with all the money, support, and opportunities for post-political employment that Wall Street and its affiliated institutions can provide.

Their good times may be coming to an end. The party’s leadership has pinned its electoral hopes on demographic shifts – often described as the “rising American electorate’ of women, young adults, and people of color – and the cultural shifts that have brought issues like marriage equality to the fore.

Lalit Kundani” Understanding the Real Role of a Grand Jury

From my training in law school to my years as a prosecutor, I was taught that Lady Justice draped a blindfold across her eyes because she was a stalwart of equality, remaining impartial in all situations, and judging facts instead of people. I was encouraged to remember this, to practice this, to swallow it whole, and repeat it. As a concept, it was lofty and idealistic. It was noble. The idea that justice was literally blind.

Then came Wednesday’s instant replay of injustice in Staten Island, after a grand jury — the second in less than 10 days — returned a “no true bill” against a white police officer who killed an unarmed black individual. But, unlike Ferguson, this time it was all on tape. And whether you wear a blue uniform or a black robe, make no mistake: this was vile, plain and simple.  [..]

But that’s not the vile part. The vile part is how this case and the Ferguson case were completely mismanaged for the purposes of (not) returning a grand jury indictment.

A grand jury is not responsible for finding guilt or innocence. More importantly, a prosecutor is not responsible for proving someone is guilty before a grand jury. The sole function of a grand jury is very limited and minimal. Is there enough evidence to at least justify an arrest in this case? A “yes” answer does not mean you think the person is guilty. A grand juror can believe a defendant is not guilty of a crime yet still return an indictment. Doing so only means that that there is enough evidence (probable cause) to let both sides have their day in court, to let them argue in front of a judge and jury, with lawyers representing each side, with the right to cross-examine witnesses and tell both sides of the story. In other words, an indictment simply lets justice run its due course.

Jessica Valento: #CrimingWhileWhite is exactly what’s wrong with white privilege

In the wake of protests in Ferguson, Missouri following both the killing of Michael Brown and the grand jury’s refusal to indict the police officer who did it, and the killing of 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, and the appalling lack of charges in Eric Garner’s homicide at the hands of a New York City police officer, many white people have been asking how, exactly, they can help.

It’s a vital question, and I get it: I want to help, too. I’m just not so sure #CrimingWhileWhite is the best way to do it.

This latest viral hashtag started on Wednesday night after the Garner decision came down and, using it, white people have detailed crimes they’ve committed without much trouble (let alone violence) from authorities. The hashtag is meant to be a glimpse into the incredible world of white privilege, where you can shoplift and get away with it, dine and dash with impunity, tell a cop to fuck off or even have one [drive you to the ATM for bail money https://twitter.com/Dr24hours/… on the way to jail.

John Nichols: Bernie Sanders’s Bold Economic Agenda Seeks to Transform Politics

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will “make a decision within the first few months of 2015” on whether to bid for the presidency of the United States. It is not certain that he will run. And, if the independent senator from Vermont does decide to run, he says he has yet to determine precisely how he might do so: as a challenger to presumed front-runner Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination or as an insurgent independent taking on both major parties. Sanders has in recent months spent a good deal of time in the first caucus state of Iowa and the first primary state of New Hampshire, and he acknowledges that this has stoked speculation that he is likely to go the Democratic route. He also declares, “I will not play the role of a spoiler”-tipping a fall 2016 race to a right-wing Republican. Yet, the senator expresses deep frustration with the failure of the Democratic Party to adopt positions that are sufficiently progressive and populist to build a movement to change the debate and the direction of the country.

Sanders explained in an interview with The Nation that he is convinced, after visiting not just Iowa and New Hampshire but Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina, Mississippi, California and other states, that “there is a real hunger in grassroots America for a fight against the greed of the billionaire class, which is wrecking havoc on our economic and political system.”

Zoë Carpenter: Can the Military Fix Its Sexual-Assault Problem on Its Own?

After an Army drill sergeant was accused of raping or assaulting a dozen female soldiers while deployed in Afghanistan and in a bathroom at Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood, it seemed like the military justice system worked the way it was supposed to. The accused, Angel Sanchez, was tried at a court-martial. In September, he was convicted on multiple counts, sentenced to twenty years confinement and given a dishonorable discharge.

But testimony from two of Sanchez’s victims suggested that despite two decades of promises to enforce a “zero tolerance” policy toward sexual assault, the military is still hostile to service members who report sex crimes. One private testified that a high-ranking officer told her company that no one would graduate “if any more sexual assault cases” were reported. Another victim said a Lieutenant Colonel told her and other trainees “not to make any more allegations.” As a result, she said, “I have issues of trusting those who are in charge of me.”

The question of whether the military is doing enough to stamp out not only sex crimes but also retaliation against those who report them was raised again Thursday by the release of a 136-page report by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon estimates that 19,000 service members were assaulted this year, down from 26,000 in 2012. Only one in four of those crimes were reported, though more victims came forward to report assaults than in previous years. About two-thirds said that after reporting crimes against them, they were retaliated against by their superiors or peers.

Dec 04 2014

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board: A Search for Justice in the Eric Garner Case

The Staten Island grand jury must have seen the same video everyone else did: the one showing a group of New York City police officers swarming and killing an unarmed black man, Eric Garner. [..]

The imbalance between Mr. Garner’s fate, on a Staten Island sidewalk in July, and his supposed infraction, selling loose cigarettes, is grotesque and outrageous. Though Mr. Garner’s death was officially ruled a homicide, it is not possible to pierce the secrecy of the grand jury, and thus to know why the jurors did not believe that criminal charges were appropriate.

What is clear is this was vicious policing and an innocent man is dead. Another conclusion is also obvious. Officer Pantaleo was stripped of his gun and badge; he needs to be stripped of his job. He used forbidden tactics to brutalize a citizen who was not acting belligerently, posed no risk of flight, brandished no weapon and was heavily outnumbered.

Eugene Robinson: What America’s police departments don’t want you to know

Michael Brown’s death was part of a tragic and unacceptable pattern: Police officers in the United States shoot and kill civilians in shockingly high numbers. How many killings are there each year? No one can say for sure, because police departments don’t want us to know.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police – defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.

The true number of fatal police shootings is surely much higher, however, because many law enforcement agencies do not report to the FBI database. Attempts by journalists to compile more complete data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as 1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like Brown, were unarmed. [..]

Liberals and conservatives alike should be outraged at the frequency with which police in this country use deadly force. There is no greater power that we entrust to the state than the license to take life. To put it mildly, misuse of this power is at odds with any notion of limited government.

David Cay Johnston: Real world contradicts right-wing tax theories

California raised taxes, Kansas cut them. California did better

Ever since economist Arthur Laffer drew his namesake curve on a napkin for two officials in President Richard Nixon’s administration four decades ago, we have been told that cutting tax rates spurs jobs and higher pay, while hiking taxes does the opposite.

Now, thanks to recent tax cuts in Kansas and tax hikes in California, we have real-world tests of this idea. So far, the results do not support Laffer’s insistence that lower tax rates always result in more and better-paying jobs. In fact, Kansas’ tax cuts produced much slower job and wage growth than in California.

The empirical evidence that the Laffer curve is not what its promoter insists joins other real-world experience undermining the widely held belief that minimum wage increases reduce employment and income.

Steven W. Thrasher: The Eric Garner decision confirms a holiday of horrors. ‘Tis the season for more protest, not less

Pretending that we should keep calm and carry on – that we even can – is a bigger fantasy than Santa Claus

On Wednesday evening in New York City, as dusk fell into night, another grand jury failed to indict another police officer for killing another unarmed black man in America – this one a bona-fide homicide caught on camera. On Wednesday night in New York City, we protest. And then they planned in this same town – on this, the same night in America when the law continued to allow cops to kill black men – to light the most famous Christmas tree in the country. [..]

And, yes, the protesters should be peaceful – but we need to be disruptive. Because the same structural racism exists in New York City that does in Ferguson, as it does everywhere in the United States. As President Obama said on Wednesday night: “This is an American problem.” And no holiday lights should be lit while the light of justice is snuffed out for so many.

Of course nobody wants to watch a mirror image of the violence that erupted in Ferguson fewer than 10 days ago. But the Rockefeller Center tree lighting makes for a primetime-TV image of this country, next to New York’s protest, which is sadly like the surrealism of the Obama-next-to-protests split- and the irony of the Season’s Greetings-banner-over-the-riot-gear-cops photo. It’s a diptych of injustice on steroids.

Seums Milne: Cuba’s extraordinary global medical record shames the US blockade

From Ebola to earthquakes, Havana’s doctors have saved millions. Obama must lift this embargo

Four months into the internationally declared Ebola emergency that has devastated west Africa, ]leads the world in direct medical support http://www.theguardian.com/wor… to fight the epidemic. The US and Britain have sent thousands of troops and, along with other countries, promised aid – most of which has yet to materialise. But, as the World Health Organisation has insisted, what’s most urgently needed are health workers. The Caribbean island, with a population of just 11m and official per capita income of $6,000 (£3,824), answered that call before it was made. It was first on the Ebola frontline and has sent the largest contingent of doctors and nurses – 256 are already in the field, with another 200 volunteers on their way. [..]

But the island is still suffocated by the US trade embargo that has kept it in an economic and political vice for more than half a century. If Barack Obama wants to do something worthwhile in his final years as president he could use Cuba’s role in the Ebola crisis as an opening to start to lift that blockade and wind down the US destabilisation war.

Jessica Valentii: If we truly valued motherhood, we would actually do something to help pregnant women

We’ve all heard the platitudes: Motherhood is the most important job in the world. If mothers made a parenting salary – we’re chefs, chauffeurs, housekeepers and office managers! – we’d be bazillionaires.

Come on. We’re not even willing to let a pregnant woman hold on to a job.

On Wednesday, the US supreme court will hear arguments in a case to decide whether the Pregnancy Discrimination Act requires employers to provide accommodations for pregnant workers. The case stems from former UPS worker Peggy Young, who was put on unpaid leave after her doctor recommended she not lift packages heavier than 20 pounds.

All the Hallmark-card sentiment in the world doesn’t change the reality that whether you’re in the highest court in all the land or at the neighborhood playground, pregnant women get treated like second-class citizens and mothers are expected to “do it all” with little more than a condescending pat on the head.

Dec 03 2014

Punting the Pundits

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

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Net neutrality essential to our democracy

In May, HBO comedian John Oliver opened his segment on net neutrality by saying, “The cable companies have figured out the great truth of America: If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.” He then delivered an incisive thirteen-minute monologue that was anything but boring, drawing more than 7 million views on YouTube. Indeed, as Oliver demonstrated so effectively, while net neutrality may seem like a dull subject, protecting it is essential to not only the future of the Internet but also the future of our democracy.

Net neutrality is, simply put, the fundamental principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. There are very few level playing fields in American life, but in a nation plagued by inequality, the Internet has remained open, free and fair-a powerful equalizing force that has allowed good ideas to flourish whether they came from a corporate board room or a college dorm room. This equality of opportunity is at the core of net neutrality. And it is under relentless attack by major telecommunications companies seeking yet another advantage to tighten their grip on the market.

This year, for example, Verizon challenged the regulations governing net neutrality in court – and won. In response, the FCC proposed an approach that would allow Internet service providers such as Comcast to charge websites a fee to deliver their content at higher speeds. The new rules would essentially create a two-tiered Internet-a “fast lane” for the rich, and a slow lane for everyone else.

Sophie Khan: Swapping guns for Tasers won’t stop cops who kill black people. What can?

Would Michael Brown still be alive if cops were trained to reach for their stun gun, rather than their gun-guns?

Maybe, in the case of Michael Brown.

But, as evidenced by the recent deaths of Israel Hernandez in Miami Beach, Florida, and Dominique Franklin Jr in Sauk Village, Illinois, stun guns are no guarantee that the overreaction of a law enforcement officer won’t result in the death of an innocent civilian.

On Friday, a report on the United States by the UN Committee against Torture offered clear evidence that Tasers are as lethal as firearms. In the cases of Hernandez and Franklin, both men were unarmed and tasered in circumstances where there was no real or immediate threat to the life of – or risk of serious injury to – the officer. The committee’s evaluation of the use by US law enforcement officials of stun guns – commonly referred to by the brand name Taser – calls on the authorities to “revise the regulations governing the use of such weapons with a view to establishing a high threshold for their use … and subject to the principles of necessity and proportionality.”

In other words, the reputed non-lethality of stun guns is absolutely no reason for them to be drawn under vastly different circumstances than an officer would draw his gun.

Amanda Marcotte: Instapundit trying to pass off “men’s rights” BS as if it were political thought again

Glenn Reynolds, aka “Instapundit”, is one of the biggest voices out there trying to integrate “men’s rights activism” with mainstream conservatism. Not that mainstream conservatives have any love for feminism, of course, but the MRA hyper-focus on blaming all the world’s ills on the fact that women won’t meekly submit to male authority as MRAs want them to is a bit much even for some of the biggest anti-choice misogynists on the Republican side of the aisle. But Reynolds keeps pushing and his latest entry, for USA Today, is about accusing feminists, in collusion with Obama, of stealing good jobs from working class men. [..]

The entire piece is a breathtaking work of bad faith, but this might be the worst of it. If anyone in this equation was against government spending to create jobs, it wasn’t the feminists. It was conservatives like Reynolds. Reynolds hates the stimulus package he pretends to defend against the evil, man-hating, job-stealing feminists. But he will pretend to support it in order to attack feminists for mounting a basic criticism of it.

Lindsay Abrams: U.N. climate talks open with a terrifying reminder: We’ve already blown through two-thirds of our carbon budget

As global climate talks kicked off Monday in Lima, Peru, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stepped forward to remind delegates of just how much is at stake in the negotiations. The world, Pachauri warned, has already used nearly two-thirds, or 65 percent, of its carbon budget, the approximate amount of greenhouse gases we can emit into the atmosphere if we want to maintain a reasonable chance of remaining below 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

We don’t have much left to work with. And crucially, given the way we’re growing, we’re running short on time: [..]

But it’s worth remembering, now more than ever, that it’s going to take “substantial and sustained” reductions in emissions, on a global level, to keep things from getting much hotter – and to lessen our odds of climate catastrophe:

Falguni A. Sheth: White supremacy lives on: Ferguson decision confirms absence of legal and moral justice

With “no indictment” announced against Darren Wilson, a perverted natural order of things was affirmed. Here’s why

For days, large swaths of the U.S. and the globe waited to hear whether the grand jury would indict Office Darren Wilson. For a week, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon had declared a state of emergency, calling out the National Guard to “maintain peace and protect those exercising their right to free speech.” Today, he repeated the same message.

“Together we are all focused to make sure that the necessary resources are at hand to protect lives, to protect business and to protect free speech.” [..]

The natural order, for Gov. Nixon, is one in which police violence will continue to be seen as “stopping criminals,” and preserving “freedom” for the whites of Ferguson. In the meantime, the black citizens of Ferguson and their supporters across the globe will ascribe an enormous, though rather different, symbolism to the verdict: No indictment confirms the continued absence of legal and, indeed, moral justice.

Yet, it is hard to imagine that even had the grand jury indicted, that their decision would have much of an effect on the institutional, deeply embedded problem of state-endorsed, police-led racial violence in Ferguson, St. Louis or anywhere else in the U.S.

Jessica Valenti: If tech companies wanted to end online harassment, they could do it tomorrow

If someone posted a death threat to your Facebook page, you’d likely be afraid. If the person posting was your husband – a man you had a restraining order against, a man who wrote that he was “not going to rest until [your] body [was] a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts” – then you’d be terrified. It’s hard to imagine any other reasonable reaction.

Yet that’s just what Anthony Elonis wants you to believe: That his violent Facebook posts – including one about masturbating on his dead wife’s body – were not meant as threats. So on Monday, in Elonis v United States, the US supreme court will start to hear arguments in a case that will determine whether threats on social media will be considered protected speech.

If the court rules for Elonis, those who are harassed and threatened online every day – women, people of color, rape victims and young bullied teens – will have even less protection than they do now. Which is to say: not damn much.

Dec 03 2014

Abusive Cop Co-Chairs Obama’s Reform Commission

By appointing a police chief with a history of overseeing an abusive police force, President Barack Obama has crested another farce of a commission much like his Cat Food Commission that was chaired by a corporate shill and a right wing curmudgeon.

Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey, one of two co-chairs apppointed by President Obama to head a commission on ways to demilitarize local police, is known for leading repeated bloody and abusive crackdowns on protesters when he was Washington, D.C.’s chief a decade ago, according to a civil rights attorney who won millions in damages for 100s of citizens attacked by D.C. police.  

“If the president’s idea of reforming policing practices includes mass false arrests, brutality, and the eviscerating of civil rights, then Ramsey’s his man. That’s Charles Ramsey’s legacy in D.C.,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), speaking of the ex-D.C. chief and current Philadelphia Police Commissioner. “Obama should immediately rescind his appointment of Commissioner Ramsey, who is a mass violator of civil rights and civil liberties.”  [..]

More than a decade ago, when Ramsey was the D.C. police chief, he lead numerous crackdowns and mass arrests of protesters-starting in 2000. His most high-profile assault was in September 2002 at Pershing Park, where demonstrators protested World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings. The police locked down the park and arrested everyone there-400 people-including journalists, legal observers and bystanders.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund sued and won millions for protesters. The April 2000 protest settlements totalled $13.7 million and Pershing Park/2002 settlement was $8.25 million. Verheyden-Hilliard said the settlements highlight a larger and especially bloody pattern of police crackdowns on protesters ordered by Ramsey. She listed the following six events in an e-mail that “are demonstrative of his leadership and the force under his command.” The first example is an earlier three-day World Bank/IMF protest from spring 2000 in downtown Washington.

If this is Obama’s idea finding credible and transparent solutions to the militarization of civilian police forces, his thinking is warped, sick joke and a slap in the face to the Americans who expect the police to serve and protect not violate their civil rights.

Dec 02 2014

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: Obama’s Ferguson response will leave assault rifles and vehicles of war on American streets

On Monday, one week after the American criminal justice system failed Michael Brown, US attorney general Eric Holder and President Obama had eloquent and powerful words for those in Ferguson and across the country who have been protesting the killing of another unarmed black teenager by a white cop, along with the militarization of this country’s local police forces. Yet on the same day, with the White House grabbing the opportunity to put forth a substantive plan for changing the relationship between law enforcement and the people it is sworn to protect, the Obama administration indicated that hardly anything might change at all.

Holder, in a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, warned that if distrust between police and American citizens doesn’t change, it could “threaten the entire nation”. And Obama, in Washington, tried to assuade his many critics by saying, “There have been commissions before, there have been task forces, there have been conversations – and nothing happens. What I try to describe to people is why this time will be different.”

Why, then, as the White House finally released its report on the militarization of police, did it largely defend the variety of federal programs that funnel billions of dollars of weaponry and high-tech surveillance gear to local police every year? The report offered (pdf) four milquetoast recommendations that included giving local police more money for body cameras and sensitivity training, while leaving every program – including the controversial Defense Department initiative known as 1033 that has sent assault rifles and armored mine-resistant vehicles to local cops – almost completely intact.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: The revolution will be live-tweeted: why #BlackLivesMatter is the new model for civil rights

The events of the past few months, now simply referred to as Ferguson, have touched off nationwide protests of a scale not seen in a half-century. From billboards to T-shirts, protest banners and news headlines – all emblazoned with the words #BlackLivesMatter – we are witnessing the makings of a social movement of the 21st century kind. The revolution that Gil Scot Heron famously said, “would not be televised”, is today, in fact, recorded and tweeted.

The Godfather of Rap and soulful Black Power poet and musician could never have imagined that a hashtag would be the rallying cry of a new generation’s quest for racial justice in the United States of America. [..]

Black Power has given way to #BlackLivesMatter, the devolution of a movement for resources and recognition to a fight to exist, free of state-sanctioned violence. This is the “rearest of rear-guard positions one can imagine,” historian Andy Seal writes at his blog, “petitioning for the right not to die prematurely, a mark of retreat from the larger hopes and assertive agendas” of the 1960s and 1970s.

Or could it be that this is the wrong way to look at it? What if this moment is also a return to first principles: the necessary assertion of the humanity of black life by the democratic crowd beyond the legal fictions of equality

Sen. Bernie Sanders: An Economic Agenda for America: 12 Steps Forward

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.

The long-term deterioration of the middle class, accelerated by the Wall Street crash of 2008, has not been pretty. Today, we have more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth. We have one of the highest childhood poverty rates and we are the only country in the industrialized world which does not guarantee health care for all. We once led the world in terms of the percentage of our people who graduated college, but we are now in 12th place. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is collapsing.

Dean Baker: The Paid Vacation Route to Full Employment

The economics profession has hit a roadblock in terms of being able to design policies that can help the economy. On the one hand we have many prominent economists, like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, who say the problem is that we don’t have enough demand to get us back to full employment. There is a simple remedy in this story; get the government to spend more money on items like infrastructure, education, and clean energy. [..]

The other side of the professional divide in economics doesn’t have much to offer on full employment because they say we are already there. The argument goes that people have dropped out of the labor force because they would rather not work at the wage their skills command in the market. In this story, we may want to find ways to educate or train people so they have more skills, but unemployment is not really a problem in today’s economy.

The notion that seven million people (the drop in population adjusted employment since the start of the recession) just decided they don’t feel like working, doesn’t pass the laugh test outside of economic departments and corporate boardrooms. This leaves us stuck with a policy prescription — more stimulus — that has zero political prospect any time in the foreseeable future.

Richard Brodsky: Shut It Down: Boehner as Moderate

It’s a sign of how far right the Republican Party has moved that John Boehner is the standard bearer for moderate Republicans. But there’s a new meaning to the word “moderate” that illuminates the new political reality for the GOP and for the country. [..]

Boehner is making no secret of his willingness to throw his weight around to stop what he believes are self-destructive political tactics. His Tea Party wing doesn’t disagree with his policies, they’re infuriated by what looks like civil conversations with Obama and reluctance to use his new majority to slowly redefine the Federal government. Now, if you believe that American liberty and economic prosperity are endangered solely by the Federal government it’s foolish to do anything but shut it down, no matter how unpopular that may be with swing voters. After all you don’t get revolutions by increment, you have to change the paradigm. But the political cost of a shutdown has Wall Street and big donors scared. They’re banking on Boehner to keep tactics out of the headlines.

Dave Johnson: Is the Democratic Party Relevant Anymore?

Many Democrats examining what happened in the 2014 midterms are asking, “What did the voters want?” But the right question is why only 36.4 percent of potential voters bothered to register and vote? Obviously Democrats did not give those voters a good enough reason to take the trouble. Is the Democratic Party relevant anymore? [..]

Democrats were considered the majority party from the time of Roosevelt’s New Deal until the 1980s. All they had to do to win was to get a high-enough voter turnout. Democratic operations were more about getting out the vote (GOTV) than giving people reasons to vote for Democrats instead of Republicans. They just assumed most people agreed with them — because most people agreed with them. But that time has passed.

Dec 01 2014

From the First Shot, the Fix Was In

We don’t know who set fire to the buildings in Ferguson, Missouri last week but we do know who fired the first shot, one of several that killed an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, on a hot August day. We also know that a grand jury that was impaneled to determine if the white police officer, Darren Wilson, 28, should be charged, was misled by the prosecutors in the case. At the very start that were handed to laws that applied to the case. One of those laws, a 1979 Missouri statute, was found to be unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1985.

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell blasted St. Louis County assistant district attorney Kathy Alizadeh on Wednesday for taking weeks to tell the grand jury in the Darren Wilson case she made a major mistake regarding police officers’ right to use legal force.

“With prosecutors like this, Darren Wilson never really needed a defense lawyer,” he said.

O’Donnell said that early on in the jurors’ deliberations, Alizadeh handed them a copy of a 1979 Missouri statute saying police were “justified in the use of such physical force as he or she reasonably believes is immediately necessary to effect the arrest or prevent the escape from custody.” However, he explained, the Supreme Court found those kinds of statutes to be unconstitutional six years later. [..]

The worst part of Alizdeh’s actions, O’Donnell said, was that she did not explain how the Supreme Court decision struck the state statute down after letting jurors carry it with them for weeks.

“You will not find another legal proceeding in which jurors and grand jurors are simply handed a law, and then weeks later, handed a correction to that law,” he said. “Then the grand jurors are simply left to figure out the difference in the laws by themselves. That is, actually, something you would do in a law class.”

O’Donnell said that early on in the jurors’ deliberations, [Assistant D.A. Kathy] Alizadeh handed them a copy of a 1979 Missouri statute saying police were “justified in the use of such physical force as he or she reasonably believes is immediately necessary to effect the arrest or prevent the escape from custody.” However, he explained, the Supreme Court found those kinds of statutes to be unconstitutional six years later….

“She was taking the hurdle that Darren Wilson had to get over in his testimony, and flattening it,” O’Donnell argued. “She was making it impossible for Darren Wilson to fail in front of this grand jury.”

This was just one of many stunning events, called “errors” and “failures” by the mainstream media, but smack of a conspiracy to protect a white police officer from prosecution.

1. Wilson washed away blood evidence.

In an interview with police investigators, Wilson admitted that after the shooting he returned to police headquarters and washed blood off his body — physical evidence that could have helped to prove or disprove a critical piece of Wilson’s testimony regarding his struggle with Brown inside the police car. He told his interrogator that he had blood on both of his hands. “I think it was his blood,” Wilson said referring to Brown. He added that he was not cut anywhere. [..]

2. The first officer to interview Wilson failed to take any notes.

The first supervising officer to the scene, who was also the first person to interview Wilson about the incident, didn’t take any notes about their conversation. In testimony more than a month after the incident, the officer offered his account from memory. He explained that he hadn’t been equipped with a recorder and hadn’t tried to take any written notes due to the chaotic nature of the situation. He also didn’t write up any notes soon after the fact. [..]

3. Investigators failed to measure the likely distance between Brown and Wilson.

An unnamed medical legal examiner who responded to the shooting testified before the grand jury that he or she had not taken any distance measurements at the scene, because they appeared “self-explanatory.”

“Somebody shot somebody. There was no question as to any distances or anything of that nature at the time I was there,” the examiner told the jury. [..]

4. Investigators did not test Wilson’s gun for fingerprints.

Talking with police investigators and before the grand jury, Wilson claimed that Brown had grabbed at Wilson’s gun during the initial incident in the police car and that Brown’s hand was on the firearm when it misfired at least once. [..]

5. Wilson did not immediately turn his weapon over to investigators after killing Brown.

A detective with the St. Louis County Police Department, who conducted the first official interview of Wilson, testified to the grand jury that Wilson had packaged his own service weapon into an evidence envelope following his arrival at the police station in the wake of the shooting. [..]

6. An initial interview with investigators was delayed while Wilson traveled to the hospital with his superiors.

The same St. Louis County Police Department detective also testified that while he had intended to conduct his initial interview with Wilson at the Ferguson police station, a lieutenant colonel with the Ferguson Police Department decided that Wilson first needed to go to the hospital for medical treatment. [..]

7. Wilson’s initial interview with the detective conflicts with information given in later testimony.

In his first interview with the detective, just hours after Brown’s death, Wilson didn’t claim to have any knowledge that Brown was suspected of stealing cigarillos from a nearby convenience store. The only mention of cigarillos he made to the detective was a recollection of the call about the theft that had come across his radio and that provided a description of the suspect.

Law professors and legal the manner in which St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch conducted this grand jury, questioning the unusual press conference presentation of the non-indictment and legal procedures were followed appropriately, adequately or fairly.

Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law, said the entire announcement “read like a closing argument for the defense,” while Susan McGraugh, an associate professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, said she was “furious” when she watched it.

“Bob McCulloch took a very defensive posture,” McGraugh said. “It was a poor choice to be so confrontational in presenting a grand jury verdict that he had to know would upset a large number of people. He should have left out the editorializing.” [..]

The astonishing rarity of a grand jury declining to indict a suspect has led many to believe that McCulloch did not make a sincere effort to prove probable cause.

“The prosecutor did not want an indictment, and he passed the buck to the grand jury to make that decision,” said Cohn, who is also a former president of the National Lawyers’ Guild. “It was clear the prosecutor was partisan in this case, and not partisan in the way prosecutors usually are, which is to get people indicted.” [..]

Even Supreme Court Antonin Scalia understands the purpose of the grand jury should not be a trial in secret.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.

   It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available. In his press conference, McCulloch said that the grand jury did not indict because eyewitness testimony that established Wilson was acting in self-defense was contradicted by other exculpatory evidence. What McCulloch didn’t say is that he was under no obligation to present such evidence to the grand jury. The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson.

Political analyst and author, Earl Ofari Hutchinson suggested that President Barack Obama take cue from one of his predecessors Pres, George H. W. Bush and look no further than Rodney King:

In August 1992, nearly three months to the day after the four LAPD officers that beat black motorist Rodney King were acquitted on nearly all charges by a jury with no blacks on it, Lourdes G. Baird, the United States Attorney for California’s Central District, stepped before a battery of news cameras and reporters and announced that three of the officers would face federal charges. The charges were violating King’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable arrest and with depriving him of his 14th Amendment due-process rights during his March, 1991 arrest. The four would face up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines if convicted.

The Justice Department’s decision to prosecute rested squarely on two compelling legal and public interest points, neither of which significantly involved any need to proof racial animus. The legal charges were that the officers who beat King acted under the color of the law. This violated a near century old federal statute that makes it a crime to deprive any person of a Constitutional right under the color of law. The statute specifically targeted police officers and public officials who abuse their authority and violate public trust by physically victimizing citizens. [..]

Brown as was King was unarmed. Brown and King were not charged with a crime when detained. Brown as King received injuries after he ceased resisting. Brown as King was abused during an official stop. These, as they were with King, are compelling civil rights violations.

This is not about race, although I do believe it was a factor in this case based on Off. Wilson’s description of Mr. Brown own testimony. It is, however, about police excessive of force and law and for that there is a strong case against Off. Wilson. The Question is does Pres. Obama have the spine to give Michael Brown the justice he deserves.

Dec 01 2014

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Being Bad Europeans

The U.S. economy finally seems to be climbing out of the deep hole it entered during the global financial crisis. Unfortunately, Europe, the other epicenter of crisis, can’t say the same. Unemployment in the euro area is stalled at almost twice the U.S. level, while inflation is far below both the official target and outright deflation has become a looming risk. [..]

Why is Europe in such dire straits? The conventional wisdom among European policy makers is that we’re looking at the price of irresponsibility: Some governments have failed to behave with the prudence a shared currency requires, choosing instead to pander to misguided voters and cling to failed economic doctrines. And if you ask me (and a number of other economists who have looked hard at the issue), this analysis is essentially right, except for one thing: They’ve got the identity of the bad actors wrong.

For the bad behavior at the core of Europe’s slow-motion disaster isn’t coming from Greece, or Italy, or France. It’s coming from Germany.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson : Feds Need Look No Further Than Rodney King for the Case Against Wilson

In August 1992, nearly three months to the day after the four LAPD officers that beat black motorist Rodney King were acquitted on nearly all charges by a jury with no blacks on it, Lourdes G. Baird, the United States Attorney for California’s Central District, stepped before a battery of news cameras and reporters and announced that three of the officers would face federal charges. The charges were violating King’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable arrest and with depriving him of his 14th Amendment due-process rights during his March, 1991 arrest. The four would face up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines if convicted.

The Justice Department’s decision to prosecute rested squarely on two compelling legal and public interest points, neither of which significantly involved any need to proof racial animus. The legal charges were that the officers who beat King acted under the color of the law. This violated a near century old federal statute that makes it a crime to deprive any person of a Constitutional right under the color of law. The statute specifically targeted police officers and public officials who abuse their authority and violate public trust by physically victimizing citizens.  [..]

Brown as was King was unarmed. Brown and King were not charged with a crime when detained. Brown as King received injuries after he ceased resisting. Brown as King was abused during an official stop. These, as they were with King, are compelling civil rights violations.

Associate Attorney General Wayne Budd, who directed the federal investigation into the King beating case, issued this terse statement after the indictment of the LAPD cops was announced “The Department of Justice has a responsibility to vindicate the violation of the fundamental rights protected by the United States Constitution.” The indictment he said was the first step toward fulfilling that responsibility.

The Justice Department should take the same step in the Brown slaying it took 22 years ago in the King beating case. That is to fulfill its responsibility and prosecute Wilson.

Rick Salutin: Rioting Elites and a Nation Built on the Rule of Lawlessness

Contrary to what Barack Obama says about the U.S. being built on the rule of law, the country routinely resorts to official violence and illegality.

Barack Obama looked at his most clueless, responding to the riots and rage in Ferguson, Missouri. He hasn’t seemed so callow since the BP oil spill. Like he just wished it was over and could get on to the delights of his post-presidency. Or back to immigration reform and stalling that damn pipeline.

Using his slow voice, as if he’s explaining something so basic that it’s hard to understand, he declared that the U.S. is a “nation built on the rule of law” and added next day, he has “no sympathy” for those who go violent. The problem with this, at least for those in the streets, is the U.S. is not a nation of laws and resorts to official violence and/or illegality routinely.[..]

Obama and others like pointing to Martin Luther King Jr. as the model for peaceful protest. But King wasn’t a law-abider, he was a lawbreaker. He just did it non-violently, a preferable term to peaceful. His reasons were both pragmatic and principled. There was no way for protesters to match the firepower of the protestees — then or now. But more tellingly: you turn into them if you mirror their methods and then nothing’s been gained. In these protests I heard cries I hadn’t heard in a long time — Revolution! … By any means necessary! That’s not nostalgia, it’s despair, and loss of hope for change by normal, lawful means.

Robert Kuttner: The Cheap Oil Curse

Remember “Peak Oil?” The world was running out of oil, prices would soon skyrocket, and we had better find other fuels.

Well, that argument didn’t work out so well for environmentalists, did it? As oil reserves and those of other carbon fuels became scarce and prices rose, the law of supply and demand kicked in. The industry invested the profits from those higher prices in new technologies, and the oil barons found even more destructive ways to extract oil and gas — by exploiting the muck from tar sands, inventing hydro-fracking, and despoiling Third World sources.

So now, oil is cheaper than it’s been in years, about $66 a barrel. Regular unleaded gasoline can be had for well under $3 a gallon. [..]

Cheap oil, of course, is a curse. It promotes increased use of carbon fuels at a time when we should be investing massively in substitutes. And the apparent plenty of oil and gas takes the spine out of most politicians.

Robert Reich: Patrolling the Boundaries Inside America

America is embroiled in an immigration debate that goes far beyond President Obama’s executive order on undocumented immigrants.

It goes to the heart of who “we” are. And it’s roiling communities across the nation.

In early November, school officials in Orinda, California, hired a private detective to determine whether a seven-year-old Latina named Vivian — whose single mother works as a live-in nanny for a family in Orinda — “resides” in the district and should therefore be allowed to attend the elementary school she’s already been attending there. [..]

The nation’s attention is focused on the border separating the United States from Mexico, and on people who have crossed that border and taken up residence here illegally.

But the boundary separating white Anglo upscale school districts from the burgeoning non-white and non-Anglo populations in downscale communities is fast becoming a flashpoint inside America.

In both cases, the central question is who are “we.”

Nov 30 2014

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are: St. Louis Alderman Antonio French; former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly; and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb.

The roundtable guests are: Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; ABC News’ Cokie Roberts, and Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: Brown family attorney Benjamin Crump; Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic; Dr. James Peterson, Director of Lehigh University;  Sen.-elect Thom Tillis (R-NC); Sen.-elect Gary Peters (D-MI); and Archbishop Blase Cupich, Pope Francis’s first appointment in the United States.

His panel guests are John Heilemenn, Bloomberg Politics; Michael Crowley, Politico; and CBS News Congressional Correspondent Nancy Cordes.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: Some of this Sunday’s “MTP” guests are: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D); Sen.-elect Tom Cotton (R-AE); and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

H/T to The Hill

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are  Michael Huerta, head of the FAA; convicted felon and  former NYPD Police commissioner Bernard Kerik; Malik Aziz, the Deputy Police Chief of Dallas; Chief Thomas Manger, Vice President of the Police Executive Research Forum; and Chief James Craig from Detroit.

Her panel guests are: two presidential historians: Richard Norton Smith and Douglas Brinkley; and veteran Washington reporters Karen Tumulty and Peter Baker.

Nov 28 2014

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Pollution and Politics

Earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced proposed regulations to curb emissions of ozone, which causes smog, not to mention asthma, heart disease and premature death. And you know what happened: Republicans went on the attack, claiming that the new rules would impose enormous costs.

There’s no reason to take these complaints seriously, at least in terms of substance. Polluters and their political friends have a track record of crying wolf. Again and again, they have insisted that American business – which they usually portray as endlessly innovative, able to overcome any obstacle – would curl into a quivering ball if asked to limit emissions. Again and again, the actual costs have been far lower than they predicted. In fact, almost always below the E.P.A.’s predictions.

So it’s the same old story. But why, exactly, does it always play this way? Of course, polluters will defend their right to pollute, but why can they count on Republican support? When and why did the Republican Party become the party of pollution?

New York Times Editorial Board: The New G.O.P. Showdown Threat

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama announced with great gravity the other day that Republicans had decided not to impeach President Obama over his plan to allow millions of immigrants to remain in this country without fear of deportation through his executive authority. But that concession is not the end of the matter. He is planning much more serious mischief: using Congress’s power of the purse to pressure the White House into backing off.

Condemning the immigration action as “unlawful,” Mr. Sessions says he and other Republicans may filibuster any attempt to pay for government operations through the full fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1. Instead, he wants to pay for government through a series of short-term bills, possibly month to month, with each one trying to overturn Mr. Obama’s actions.

That raises the possibility of a budget shutdown fight every month for nearly a year. And Mr. Sessions’ voice will count in that fight – he is in line to be the new chairman of the Budget Committee. [..]

Once Republicans take over both houses of Congress next year, they have every right to pass an immigration bill of their choosing, which Mr. Obama would have a right to veto. But threatening to shut down the government or any part of it to achieve their aims is outrageous.

Nathan Woodliff-Stanley : Colorado Communities Are Making It a Crime to Be Homeless

Now is the time of year when poverty and homelessness are most prominent on the minds of many Americans. As families gather to eat together and give thanks for their lives, many of us also take time to think about the struggles of people who are less fortunate.

Less often do we think or even know about the extreme measures that are used by local lawmakers and police to criminalize the existence of people who are homeless and to target, harass, and drive people living in extreme poverty out of their communities. [..]

Aggressive policing, enforcement, and jailing for these offenses also cost money. That money would be better spent addressing the causes of homelessness, whether through adequately paying work, affordable housing, unemployment benefits, healthcare coverage, or better resources for substance abuse and mental health care, including for veterans with PTSD. At the very least, public spaces should remain public, civil liberties should be upheld even for those without a home, and people who are homeless should have access to basic services instead of being criminalized by restrictive ordinances designed to make them go somewhere else — anywhere else — wherever that might be.

Thor Benson: The Disenfranchisement of American Felons: Caught Once and Left Behind for Good

In many states in America, convicted felons who have done their time do not return to society with a clean slate, as they are barred from participating in the voting process. That’s true even in cases of nonviolent crime or those in which the accused were sentenced only to probation.

Iowa, Kentucky and Florida are three states in which convicted felons lose their voting rights, although Iowa does offer a long and complicated application process they can endure in an attempt to reclaim those rights. Nine other states (pdf) have similarly strict laws that either require a five-year waiting period before voting rights are restored after a completed sentence or deny future participation outright according to a list of specific felonies. An additional 19 states prevent people from voting during their prison term, parole or probation. According to The Sentencing Project, 5.85 million otherwise eligible voters have been disenfranchised by such laws. The history of voter disenfranchisement in America is long, complicated and deeply impacted by racism.

John Nichols: An Inconvenient Political Truth: That St. Louis Prosecutor Is a Democrat

What has not been much discussed is the fact that McCulloch is a Democrat-a member of the same party as President Obama, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon and Congressional Black Caucus chair Marcia Fudge, the Ohioan who on Monday evening referred to the failure to bring charges against Wilson as “a slap in the face to Americans nationwide who continue to hope and believe that justice will prevail.” [..]

As the elected prosecutor in suburban St. Louis County since 1991, McCulloch is a powerful player in Missouri Democratic politics. He has delivered sought-after endorsements to prominent figures such as Claire McCaskill, who had the prosecutor’s support when she challenged a sitting Democratic governor in 2004 and who is now Missouri’s senior senator. In August of this year, McCulloch helped a white challenger mount a successful Democratic primary challenge to St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley, the first African-American to hold the position. On the same day, McCulloch, who is white, easily saw off a Democratic primary challenge from Leslie Broadnax, an African-American attorney and municipal judge. [..]

There was no real chance to defeat McCulloch at the polls in the fall, as he ran without Republican opposition. But thousands of St. Louis County voters refused to vote for the incumbent. [..]

It is important to take primary elections seriously. And it is important to recognize the value of independent and third-party challenges to the two-party status quo.

There is a good argument to be made for electing prosecutors on a nonpartisan bais. But there is an even better argument to be made that elections for prosecutor positions- be they partisan or nonpartisan, be their primaries or general elections-must be recognized as some of the most vital contests on our ballots.

Media and political elites tend to focus on top-of-the-ballot races for president and governor and senator. But, if the experience of Ferguson and St. Louis County teach us anything, it is that at the bottom of the ballot, in races for local law-enforcement posts, the most fundamental choices are made.

George Zornick: Why Chuck Hagel’s Departure Really Matters

The New York Times reported that the United States will expand its mission in Afghanistan in 2015, with US troops participating in direct combat with the Taliban while American airpower backs Afghan forces from above. The shift, leaked anonymously to reporters ahead of a holiday week, is a big “oh, nevermind” to Obama’s very public announcement six months ago in the Rose Garden that US troops in Afghanistan would be shifting into a training and advisory role next year.

The president didn’t even make a glancing reference to the Afghanistan reversal in his remarks announcing Hagel’s departure. The administration would clearly prefer a limited public debate, and based on the media coverage so far, it is getting its wish.

But it is against this new hawkish posture that Hagel’s departure should be understood and discussed. It is possible that it was the subtext to his resignation: Hagel came aboard to help manage a withdrawal from Afghanistan and shrink the Pentagon budget, and an anonymous US official told the Times Monday that “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus.”

Nov 27 2014

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Steven W. Thrasher: Obama failed Ferguson. The prosecutor is pathetic. Between the split-screen, the protesters get it

There we had Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, finally admitting on one side of the television that structural racism is real. There we finally had him saying that when it comes to police terrorizing black folks, “communities of color aren’t just making these problems up”. But, in nearly the same breath on Monday night after the grand-jury decision in Ferguson, as the people were taking to the streets in cities across the nation, the president also said he doesn’t believe unequal enforcement of the law is “the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials.”

It wasn’t just surreal, then, to witness Obama’s anti-Trayvon Martin moment at the very same time a split-screen on the other side of the TV showed police launching smoke bombs at protesters in Ferguson. It was heartbreaking. Because if that was reality rising up through the gap on Monday night, the reality is that legal discrimination is the norm – and our law enforcement officials refuse to acknowledge reality. [..]

So it was nothing short of a gut punch to see our African American president on the wrong side of the gap between the fantasy of what the law does and the reality that people live. Obama, in that moment, gave credence to the fiction that if citizens just faithfully adhere to being “a nation built on the rule of law”, the result will be justice. Perhaps he will finally go to Ferguson tomorrow, but today, we are a nation looking upon a pile of ashes, death and broken dreams.

New York Times Editorial Board: Mass Imprisonment and Public Health

When public health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that can spread rapidly throughout a population, like the flu or tuberculosis.

But researchers are increasingly finding the term useful in understanding another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon – mass incarceration. This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of modern times, concludes a new report released last week by the Vera Institute of Justice.

For many obvious reasons, people in prison are among the unhealthiest members of society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious diseases, drug abuse and other physical and mental stressors are present at much higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities also tends to be poor or nonexistent.

Emma Brockes: Stuffing? Vegetables that are BOILED? Must be the holidays. Eat weird, before it’s too late

It is only when you encounter other people’s holiday mythologies that the arbitrary and gross nature of your own become apparent. For a foreigner, Thanksgiving offers a particularly rich array of incomprehensible traditions – all those combinations of sweet and savoury, the 70s provenance of many of the dishes and the fetishisation of the turkey itself. What with that and the root vegetables, by 4pm on Thanksgiving afternoon, to the outsider it can all start to feel a bit Wicker Man – the creepy 1973 original, not the loveably camp Nic Cage remake.

I don’t claim to fully understand this American holiday – I have only lived in the US for seven years. But from my own experience of Christmas, I know too well the hysteria that can be brought on by deviating from the way things have always been done. There was, for instance, my dad’s heroic efforts one year, to suggest that we have steak instead of turkey on Christmas day, a well-meaning but egregious subversion of the first rule of the holidays: nothing is to change, ever. That includes the hour at which one eats, table settings, dress code, TV viewing, side dishes and whether or not you can set foot outside the house during the period of holiday lockdown. (The answer is, of course, always no.)

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Prosecute Now: The Justice Department Can Still Act Against Bad Bankers

It’s been a grim period for American justice. Despite compelling evidence of widespread bank fraud in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis — and despite all those billion-dollar settlements — prosecutors have not indicted executives at any major U.S. bank. This stands in contrast to the much smaller savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, which led to the conviction of more than a thousand bankers.

And as the Justice Department’s criminal division remained idle in the aftermath of 2008, the statute of limitations passed for most of bankers’ crimes.

But there’s a ray of hope: The bankers’ own deep-seated propensity for cheating and corruption may have given prosecutors a new opportunity to indict them. With the upcoming departure of Attorney General Eric Holder, there is the chance to forge a new approach toward Wall Street lawbreaking by pursuing evidence of wrongdoing wherever it may lead.

The stakes are high. As long as the bankers’ culture of corruption goes unpunished, the safety of the global economy — and of individual families’ well-being — remains at risk.

Kwei Quartey: Ebola’s Racial Disparity

The most effective treatment for Ebola might be having white skin.

American healthcare workers Nancy Writebol,  Kent Brantly, Craig Spencer, and Rick Sacra, as well as NBC cameraman Ashoka Mupko, were all beneficiaries of the medical sophistication of the U.S. hospital system.

All of them contracted Ebola in West Africa and lived to tell the tale, emerging from the hospital Ebola-free and appearing remarkably robust. They benefited from early diagnosis, prompt evacuation to the leading U.S. special isolation centers, and in some cases, treatment with convalescent serum and the experimental drug ZMapp.

The story is quite different for some other high-profile Ebola victims.

Martin Salia, a legal and permanent Maryland resident, was the medical director of Sierra Leone’s Kissy United Methodist Hospital and its only full-time physician. As one of a shockingly small number of doctors in that country-a mere 136 for a population of 6 million-Salia was a rare breed of physician capable of treating anything from orthopedic injuries to myocardial infarction. [..]

The physicians who have cared for these patients themselves would deny that any racial bias ever consciously entered into their decisions over choice of therapy. That, however, is exactly the trouble. Most racial bias among doctors is unconscious, meaning we must carefully consider whether our medical decisions reflect a double standard in the treatment of our patients-Ebola-infected or otherwise.

David M. Perry: Playing politics with the disabled

The disabled deserve the chance to work, save and be as independent as they can

The Achieving a Better Life Act (ABLE) is one of those rare good ideas that seem to have a chance of making it through Congress and becoming law. The bill is designed to tweak the tax code so that people on Social Security disability insurance (SSDI) can earn and even save some money without threatening their benefits. [..]

The House version of the bill operates with a narrower definition of disability than the Senate’s – a sign of a deeper political debate about just whom SSDI is supposed to cover. Initially, the House Ways and Means Committee advocated cutting other disability benefits (PDF) to pay for ABLE, potentially playing one group of disabled against another. The powerful right-wing Heritage Foundation has come out against ABLE and listed it as a lame-duck bill to quash.

The pressing need for the passage of ABLE and the rhetoric employed by its detractors illuminates some of the challenges of being disabled or caring for someone who is disabled in 21st century America. For a country whose rhetoric often emphasizes self-reliance and hard work, the status quo is built around limiting the independence of disabled people. But many conservatives seem unwilling to fix the situation for all disabled Americans, preferring to use the disabled as pawns in a political effort to identify and separate the worthy from the unworthy disabled and poor.

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