Tag: Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Washington – It’s hard to argue with President Obama’s call for Bashar al-Assad, the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator, to step down. But it’s also hard to discern any logic or consistency in the administration’s handling of the ongoing tumult in the Arab world.

It is obvious that Assad, like Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi, has no intention of surrendering power voluntarily. It is also clear that Assad’s savagery is a match for Gaddafi’s. Both used armored columns to put down peaceful protests. Both ordered assassinations and arrests. Both used naval vessels to shell cities that had become hotbeds of unrest.

So do we give Assad the Gaddafi treatment? Does Obama follow up his statement with a barrage of cruise missiles? Do we involve ourselves in yet another Middle Eastern war?

William Rivers Pitt: The Unacceptables

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure. ~ Mark Twain

And so begins again the Herculean task of wrapping my poor, abused mind around yet another crop of Faustian caricatures lined up to scrap and scrape for the Republican presidential nomination. They seem to get worse every year, but this time around, there are definitely a lot more bananas in the bunch.

Let’s see. We have Newt Gingrich, who pointedly continues to declare that he remains a viable candidate, despite having blown four tires and an engine immediately after leaving the starting line. We have Rick Santorum, whose name, when Googled, is given a whole new definition that appears at the top of the search engine list (presumably despite the best efforts of Mr. Santorum’s campaign and supporters). There is Ron Paul, whose much-ballyhooed libertarianism fails to encompass his desire to give the Federal government whole and complete control of a woman’s reproductive process.  There is Jon Huntsman, who seems like a fairly balanced guy (he has openly declared his belief in evolution and global warming), which means he is utterly doomed in the GOP primary chase. There’s Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Thaddeus McCotter, and Buddy Roemer, too…and if you said “Who?” to any or all of those names, you’re far from alone.

Edward B. Barbier: Economics is Always the First Casualty of Politics

Both the past wild week of debt negotiations in Congress as well as the debt downgrade of the US by Standard & Poor represents once again the Barbier dictum: Economics is always the first casualty of politics.

In my opinion, the Obama Administration made a fundamental mistake earlier this year in not endorsing the Bowles-Simpson plan on deficit reduction that called for a combination of revenue increases, spending cuts and entitlement and tax reforms as the basis of a plan for deficit reduction over the medium term, while at the same time arguing that there is the need for continued government spending on selected infrastructure and investment opportunities in the short term while continuing to be in recession.  From the beginning of the 2008-9 recession, such short-term government spending needed to be supported by a number of economic incentives and policies to stimulate private sector investment, too.  However, as long as the US economy remains in a recession with lack of consumer or private investment spending, public sector spending in the short term is necessary.  But by adopting the Bowles-Simpson plan immediately, the Obama Administration would have signaled to the markets and the rating agencies that tackling US deficits and debt in the medium and long term, once economic recovery had started in earnest, would be the main priority.

The essential vote on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel that ruled that the individual-coverage mandate in President Obama’s healthcare reform is unconstitutional did not come from a reactionary Republican appointed by Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.

Rather, it came from respected jurist whose two appointments to the federal bench-first as a judge for the Northern District of Georgia in 1994 and then to the 11th Circuit in 1997-were made by then-President Bill Clinton. No, Judge Frank Mays Hull is not a raging lefty, but nor is she a right-wing judicial activist. A former law clerk for Judge Elbert Parr Tuttle, who as the chief justice of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1960 to 1967 led the court in issuing a series of epic decisions on behalf of civil rights, Judge Hull has a reputation as a moderate defender of the rule of law who has earned reasonable marks for her pragmatic and decidely mainstream interpretations of the Constitution.

Connie Schultz: Are You Angry Enough to End a War?

Keep cool, Daniel Webster once said. Anger is not an argument.

Wise advice, but it sets an impossible standard if we reflect on the loss of 30 Americans in a single incident in Afghanistan. Perhaps only prolonged and widespread anger will bring an end to this relentless loss of American lives.

Last Saturday, in the single deadliest loss for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, 30 American men were killed after a rocket-propelled grenade took down their Chinook helicopter. Twenty-two of the dead were Navy SEALs, many of them from SEAL Team Six, which carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although the Pentagon said none of the dead participated in that raid. Seven Afghan soldiers and an Afghan interpreter also were killed.

Sounding like John Wayne on a 1950s movie set, Marine Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, offered his take on the tragedy:

“We grieve for our lost comrades and especially for their families, yet we also remember that the lads were doing what they wanted to be doing and they knew what they were about,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “This loss will only make the rest of us more determined — something that may be difficult for those who aren’t in the military to understand.”

And there it is, the timeworn admonition that only those who serve in the military understand the military mind, and the rest of us should just keep our opinions to ourselves.

Mark Engler: The Verizon Strike as the Next Wisconsin

The picket lines are up. This past weekend 45,000 Verizon workers on the East Coast, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), went on strike. The cause of the strike was the company’s attempts to win massive concessions from the unions. Verizon argued that the employees should give up gains they had won over many years of struggle and negotiation in previous contract fights.

As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Verizon Communications Inc. is seeking some of the biggest concessions in years from its unions.” Demands include the weakening of health-care benefits, cuts in pensions, reduced job security, and elimination of paid holidays such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This despite the fact that the company reported billions in profit last year, and that, in the words of New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, “Verizon’s top five executives received a total of $258 million in compensation, including stock options, over the last four years.” The unions argue that Verizon has made some $20 billion in profit in the same time period, and Citizens for Tax Justice has pointed out that the company has done so while paying little to nothing in corporate income taxes.

Michelle Chen: Target Comes Under Fire Around the World

The retail giant Target is under fire from all sides, for union-busting at home and labor violations overseas. The reports that have come out in the past several weeks highlight a continuum of cruelty in the global supply chain.

Though WalMart has long served as labor’s arch nemesis, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has lately zeroed in on Target as a new battlefield-with its hundreds of thousands of employees and recent expansion into the supermarket sector. Although UFCW Local 1500 recently lost a vote to unionize a branch in Valley Stream, New York, their campaign deftly exposed Target’s arsenal of intimidation and smear tactics, which ranged from anti-union websites to leaflets warning that a yes vote might ruin the company and force the store to close.

Barack Obama finally got the grand, bipartisan consensus he’s been working towards for two and a half years. His implacable, deep-seated hostility to the left half of the Democratic Party (“retarded,” said his boy, Rahm Emanuel) – which includes most of the Congressional Black Caucus – transformed a 2008 popular mandate for progressive change into its opposite: a de facto center-right governing coalition of Republicans, rightwing Democrats and Obama’s Executive Branch arrayed against roughly half the Democrats (on a very good day) in the House of Representatives, plus a handful of liberal Senators.

Obama’s unrelenting hostility to “entitlements,” which he vowed to put “on the table” for cutting two weeks before taking the oath of office in January, 2009, came to fruition this week, setting in motion a rolling implosion of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. It is a monumental catastrophe, worthy of a Mt. Rushmore in reverse (say, deep in a guano-filled bat cave). History will, without doubt, lay this ruin of a nation at the doorstep of Obama, the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse whose complexional characteristics neutered, neutralized or outright made insane the bulk of Black America and most of those whites that pass as “progressives.”

Bruce Dixon: Barack Obama and the Debt Crisis: a Successful Con Game Explained

What just happened? Did Barack Obama just save the world, and us from a looming debt catastrophe? Or has he just played good cop to the Republican bad cop in an elaborate hoax staged to circumvent the will of the American people and deal mortal blows to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security?

The phony debt ceiling crisis was, from beginning to end, a con. It was an elaborate and successful hoax in which the nation’s first black president, the Democratic and Republican parties, Wall Street and corporate media all played indispensable parts. The object of the supposed “crisis” was to short circuit public opinion, existing law, democratic process and traditions of public oversight, in order to deal fatal blows to Medicaid, Medicare, social security, job growth and public expenditures for the common good. It worked. We’ve been conned.

David Dayen: Balanced Budget Amendments Don’t Work: Look at State and Local Gov’t Stats

Republicans are barnstorming across the country in support of a balanced budget amendment. This, they say, will force government to “live within its means” and lead to surging economic growth, though I’m not really sure how they get from A to B. But we don’t really have to guess about the impact of a balanced budget amendment, particularly during recessions. Because we’re seeing the effects right now.

Since the technical end of the recession in July 2009, the public sector has 430,000 less jobs (pdf).

   Government employment is now 1.9 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery, a drop of 430,000 jobs. In contrast, government employment rose by 1.1 percent (or 232,000 jobs) during the equivalent part of the last recovery.

In a testament to how weak the last recovery was, private sector hiring is actually better in this recovery. But the government employment cutbacks counteract it.

As we know, state and local governments cannot print money and are limited by statute in their ability to run deficits. So instead of borrowing in a recession when faced with a budget shortfall, they raise taxes or cut spending. Increasingly during this recession, they opted for the latter. As a result, we are seeing a catastrophe in public sector jobs. These are teachers, nurses, sanitation engineers, cops, firefighters, all being put on the street because state and local governments have to balance their budgets. And while the federal government provided some aid in the stimulus package to help states and localities manage, that has mostly faded away. So more cuts are in the offing.

Michael Winship: The New Era of Hostage Politics

When I arrived in Washington this past Sunday, just as the debt ceiling crisis was approaching its climax, all the flags surrounding the capital’s Union Station stood at half-mast. I blackly joked with my brother and sister-in-law that maybe they’d been lowered to mark the death of the New Deal. (In fact, they honored the recent passing of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili.)

As for those throngs of sightseers, defying the malarial heat and clogging the DC streets and sidewalks? I imagined them engaged in that phenomenon known as “last chance tourism” — getting to a location before it disappears, like the melting glaciers of the Rockies.

But my bleakest fantasies aside, Washington and America still stand, although the shining city on a hill Ronald Reagan liked to extol has been graffitied with the intemperate sloganeering and mudslings of Tea Partiers and others of the right who believe the best government is none at all, and selfishly would have those in need huddle, jobless and hungry, in the dark. (What’s the old joke: how many laissez-faire economists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None — the market will take care of it.)

Like so many progressives, I tried, really tried to find a silver lining in the deal that finally was brokered, much as one occasionally hears news reports on the “upside” of global warming. (Wider shipping lanes in the Arctic — hooray!) Programs for the poor seem to be protected, for now. Medicare cuts allegedly don’t affect beneficiary payments. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy still expire in 2013! (I’ll believe it when I see it.)

If you were a spectator in a sky box seat looking directly down on the Washington debt debate, you’d be seeing a contest both narrow and off to one edge of the field — like watching a football game being played entirely between the 10-yard line and the goal line.

The big items that added trillions to the debt are not even on the field of debate. Because the two teams are not contesting them.

   

• Wars: When Obama expanded the Afghan war and asked for the largest military budget in world history, the GOP largely applauded. It was bipartisan.
• Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy: Obama extended them in December.
• Bank Bailouts: Bipartisan.
• Declining Tax Revenue: Resulted from recession and financial meltdown caused by years of bipartisan (Reagan/Clinton) deregulation of Wall Street. And by big companies like General Electric (whose CEO is Obama’s jobs chairman) dodging their taxes.

That’s the broad view — a perspective that sees our country in extreme debt and extremist “debate” because the leaders of the two teams collaborated in putting it there.

But this would not be your view if you were a mainstream reporter. Because reporting in elite U.S. media is not so much about relaying obvious and important facts as it is about positioning.

Ken Sofer: World Reacts to Debt Ceiling Debacle: “Irresponsible,” “Worst Kind of Absurd Theatrics”

The rhetoric over raising the debt ceiling has become increasingly harsh as Democratic and Republican congressional leaders trade barbs back and forth. But as the U.S. inches closer to defaulting on its debts for the first time in history, criticism of Congress is starting to come from beyond our own borders. From France and Germany to China and India, countries around the world are angry that American politicians play with the possibility of a U.S. default like a yo-yo with little regard for the international economic system that depends on American solvency.

Despite China’s traditional preference of staying out of the domestic affairs of other nations, senior Chinese officials’ frustrations are growing louder and louder. Stephen Roach, the non-executive chairman of Morgan Staley Asia, said senior Chinese officials told him the debt ceiling debte in the U.S. is “truly shocking.” “We understand the politics,” a Chinise official said, “but your government’s continued recklessness is astonishing.” And newspapers around the world are voicing discontent with Congress’s handling of the debt ceiling . . .

Frank Bruni: Taxes, and a Dangerous Purity

WHAT does the face of antitax absolutism look like?

It has a tentative beard, more shadow than shag, like an awkward weigh station on the road from callow to professorial. It wears blunt glasses over narrowed eyes that glint mischievously, and its mouth is rarely still, because there’s no end to the jeremiads pouring forth: about the peril of Obama, the profligacy of Democrats and the paramount importance of opposing all tax increases, even ones that close the loopiest of loopholes.

It belongs to Grover Norquist, and if you hadn’t seen it before, you probably spotted it last week, as he pinged from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, reveling in the solidarity Republicans had shown against any new revenue. The country was lurching toward a possible default, but Norquist was riding high. In between television appointments on Thursday, he met me for breakfast near Times Square.

New York Times Editorial: Meanwhile, Back in the Economy

The economy is in trouble, and Washington – fixated on budget slashing at a time when the economy needs more spending – seems determined to make matters worse.

On Friday, in the midst of the debt limit battle, the government reported that economic growth nearly ground to a halt in the first quarter of 2011, a far worse performance than previously estimated. The second-quarter growth number, a feeble 1.3 percent annual rate, is not nearly enough to stop unemployment from rising even higher.

Nor are there persuasive signs that absent more government support, conditions will turn around anytime soon. Indeed, they are bound to worsen if Congress approves deep near-term spending cuts as part of a debt-limit deal while letting relief and recovery measures

IF China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.

Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.

We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength – and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

Dana Milbank: Dangerous dealings with the Default Caucus

Twenty Republican lawmakers crowded the Senate TV studio last week to issue a threat: Meet their demands, or they will force the United States to default.

The only way to prevent the catastrophe, these Tea Party faithful said, was for the Senate to pass, and the president to sign, their plan to permanently cap spending at levels last seen in 1966, before Medicare made the nation soft.

“We want to make very clear: This is not just the best plan on the table for addressing the debt limit – this is the only plan,” first-term Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) said, vowing that “we’re otherwise going to be blowing past the debt-limit deadline.”

“We have a solution,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.). “It’s the only one that can be passed before the August 2nd deadline.”

This is the language of gangster films: Do as we say – or the girl gets it.

Mark Bittman: Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables

WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.)

Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.

And – not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending – a sane diet could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.

Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn’t matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas: A Doping-Free Tour de France?

SURVIVORS of this year’s Tour de France are to ride into Paris today after racing 2,131 miles over 23 days, including daunting climbs through the Pyrenees and the Alps. For the first time in years, evidence suggests that doping may not be playing the dominant role it once did.

More than any other sport, bicycling has been linked to drugs. Podium finishers in nearly every Tour over at least the last two decades have failed drug tests, admitted to doping or been linked to high-profile investigations.

Viewers have tended to regard the winners with a bit of disbelief.

But the sport appears to have turned the corner and is regaining some credibility, thanks to the antidoping efforts of a new generation of riders, managers and fans. There is, as yet, no conclusive proof of this, as one cannot prove a negative. Still, we now believe that cycling is cleaner than it has been at any time since 1990.

It was not surprising to hear the Republican presidential candidates repeat their tiresome claim that excessive government spending and borrowing were behind Friday’s terrible unemployment report. It was depressing to hear President Obama sound as if he agreed with them.

The Labor Department report showed virtually no job growth in June, with the unemployment level edging up to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent the month before. It seemed to confirm last month’s indication that the economy had stalled. After the report came out, the president went to the Rose Garden and said he hoped that a conclusion to the current debt-ceiling talks would give businesses “certainty” that the government had its debt and deficit under control, allowing them to start hiring again.

Certainty? That sounds like Mitt Romney, or any of the other Republicans who have concocted a phony connection between hiring and government borrowing.

Jane Hamsher: Breaking Point: Obama and the Death of the Democratic Party

According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Obama is proposing cuts to Social Security in exchange for GOP support for tax hikes.

Nobody ever says they want to “cut” Social Security or Medicare. They want to “save” it.  Just ask Pete Peterson, he wants to “save” it. Likewise AARP.  They don’t want reduced benefits for senior citizens, they want to “preserve” it for future generations.  If they have an enormous customer base they can market private “add-on” accounts and other retirement products to when Social Security goes bye-bye, I guess that’s just a happy coincidence.

Now if you think that this is something the President is doing because it’s the only way to get Republican cooperation you can stop reading here, because we’re going to disagree.  From the moment he took the White House, the President has wanted to cut Social Security benefits.  David Brooks reported that three administration officials called him to say Obama “is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending” in March of 2009.  You can only live in denial for so long and still lay claim to being tethered to reality.

Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks, Wimbledon and War

Last Saturday was sunny in London, and the crowds were flocking to Wimbledon and to the annual Henley Regatta. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website Wikileaks.org, was making his way by train from house arrest in Norfolk, three hours away, to join me and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for a public conversation about WikiLeaks, the power of information and the importance of transparency in democracies. The event was hosted by the Frontline Club, an organization started by war correspondents in part to memorialize their many colleagues killed covering war. Frontline Club co-founder Vaughan Smith looked at the rare sunny sky fretfully, saying, “Londoners never come out to an indoor event on a day like this.” Despite years of accurate reporting from Afghanistan to Kosovo, Smith was, in this case, completely wrong.

Close to 1,800 people showed up, evidence of the profound impact WikiLeaks has had, from exposing torture and corruption to toppling governments.

Assange is in England awaiting a July 12 extradition hearing, as he is wanted for questioning in Sweden related to allegations of sexual misconduct. He has not been charged. He has been under house arrest for more than six months, wears an electronic ankle bracelet and is required to check in daily at the Norfolk police station.

Johann Hari: Would You Trust a Management Consultant with the World’s Rainforests?

Our protests stopped David Cameron handing UK forests over to corporations. Now the rainforests are being handed to management consultants

The two most dreaded words in any office are the same – management consultants. Their arrival rumbles through a workplace like the approaching thwump-thwump of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, rattling our desks and making us all fear we will be picked up and gored at random. We’re right to be afraid – and scornful. According to “Rip Off”, a report on management consultants by David Craig, 170 organizations who used management consultants were studied in the 1990s by the Cranfield School of Management, and only 36 per cent of clients thought they had brought any value. We all know now that management consultants were threaded through the banksters and hedge funders who just crashed the global economy.

But now management consultancy has been taken to a whole new level, according to a startling new report by Greenpeace entitled: “Bad Influence: How McKinsey-inspired plans lead to rainforest destruction.” Management consultants have, in effect, been tasked with setting the future of the world’s rainforests – and facing accusations that they are using our money to draw up plans that will result in their more rapid destruction. Instead of stopping the loggers and miners, the report suggests they are aiding them.

Last month, with almost no fanfare, the federal government did a very decent thing: It canceled the deportation of a Venezuelan man after he married an American man in Connecticut and claimed legal residency as a spouse. But the government did not say that it was formally recognizing their marriage, because it cannot. The Defense of Marriage Act, which ranks with the most overtly discriminatory laws in the nation’s history, remains on the books, prohibiting federal recognition of legal same-sex marriages.

The deportation dismissal was an isolated act of kindness by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It is heavily outweighed by the continuing inequality imposed on thousands of same-sex couples who have been legally married in the five states – plus the District of Columbia – where it is already allowed. Likewise, the many couples who will take advantage of New York’s new marriage equality law will not be married in the eyes of Washington.

Maureen Dowd: When a Predator Collides With a Fabricator

SO what’s the moral of this Manhattan immorality tale?

That the French are always right, even when their hauteur is irritating?

They were right about Iraq and America’s rush to war. And they may be right about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and America’s rush to judgment.

In both cases, French credibility was undermined, so we resisted seeing things from their point of view.

John Nichols: What Michele Bachmann and Her Teapot ‘Patriots’ Do Not Know About America

The unsettling thing about Michele Bachmann’s failed discussion of the founders and slavery is not that the Tea Party “Patriot” knew so little about the birth of the American experiment that she made John Quincy Adams-the son of a somewhat disappointing founder (John) and the cousin of one of the true revolutionaries (Sam)-into something he was not.

Bachmann has for some time peddled the notion that the nation’s founding fathers worked “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” She is simply wrong about this. The last of the revolutionaries generally recognized by historians as the founders-signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and their chief political and military comrades-passed in 1836, with the death of James Madison. That was twenty-seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and twenty-nine years before the finish of the Civil War.

But Bachmann has never bothered by the facts. Until now.

Robert Parry: Neocons Want War and More War

The neoconservatives remain powerful in Washington in large part because of their continued influence inside leading opinion-setting journals like the New York Times and the Washington Post, two prestige newspapers that have pressed ahead with the neocon agenda despite serious blows to their credibility in recent years

Sometimes the New York Times and the Washington Post behave like two vintage ocean-liners competing to see which will edge out the other in a competition to become the flagship for American neoconservatism. Think of a cross-Atlantic race between the Titanic and the Lusitania.

The Times was pouring on the coal in Friday’s editions, pushing the Obama administration and NATO to finish off the war in Libya. The Times editors seemed most concerned at the prospect of negotiations to resolve the conflict without a clear-cut military victory over Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Mike Lux: Back to Where We Started

Two hundred thirty-five years ago, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted to declare independence from Britain. From our very earliest days, this country has been involved in a heated debate about our collective soul, a foundational debate about what we stand for and what kind of people we want to be. Our founding fathers had a dream, but there were people who were afraid to change and wanted to rely on the traditions and rulers that were in place. Then as now, the debate raged over equality and democracy and the nature of tyranny, over whether we were indeed one people with equal opportunities and rights or whether the elites should be able to do whatever they want.

From those terribly risky early days, when the odds were so steeped against us winning the revolution and then forming a new kind of democratic government that would last, we have had a hell of a run. We’ve survived and prospered as a country through some very shaky early days, through a horrendous civil war just barely won, through a Great Depression, through the terrible threat of Hitler and Japan in WWII, to become the most wealthy and powerful country in the world over the last seven decades. But we have come to a juncture serious enough to raise those old foundational questions again.

HE was born this way.

Bi.

Not bisexual. Not even bipartisan. Just binary.

Our president likes to be on both sides at once.

In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy – and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.

On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.

Mark Weisbrot: European Authorities Risking Financial Contagion in Greek Showdown; Where Is the U.S. Government?

The US had better be ready for the economic shock

The European authorities are playing a dangerous game of “chicken” with Greece right now. It is overdue for US members of Congress to exercise some oversight as to what our government’s role is in this process, and how we might be preparing for a Greek debt default. Depending on how it happens, this default could have serious repercussions for the international financial system, the US economy and, indeed, the world economy.

New York Times Editorial: Whose Stimulus?

Big businesses are telling Washington that they are willing to do their bit for the economy – if the price is right. Multinational companies say they could repatriate hundreds of billions in foreign profits and pump them into domestic investment and hiring, but only if Congress and the White House agree to cut the tax rate on those profits to 5.25 percent from 35 percent. They call their plan “the next stimulus.” Sounds more like extortion.

In the last five years American businesses have kept abroad more than $1 trillion worth of foreign earnings, according to government data. An article by David Kocieniewski in The Times last week noted that Microsoft has $29 billion offshore, Google has $17 billion and Apple has $12 billion.

Robert Naiman: Kucinich: Ensure Safety of U.S. Citizens on The Audacity of Hope

In many arenas of human endeavor, there is no plausible way to convince someone through abstract argument that an endeavor that appears to be incredibly difficult is nonetheless not impossible. There’s nothing for it but to create an example.

Efforts to get Members of Congress to do anything related in any way to the basic human rights of Palestinians that is not slavishly pro-Likud is a prime example of this phenomenon. Many are convinced – not without evidence that makes their position seductive – that it is an immutable law of the universe that all Members of Congress must always express fealty to right-wing views on this topic.

Frank Bruni: To Know Us Is to Let Us Love

IN the mid-1980s, when I was in college, what concerned and frustrated my peers and me was how few states had basic statutes forbidding discrimination against gay men and lesbians: laws that merely prevented someone from being denied a job or apartment on the basis of whom he or she loved. At that point only Wisconsin and the District of Columbia provided such protection. The decade would end with just one addition, Massachusetts, to that meager list.

Same-sex marriage? I don’t recall our talking – or dreaming – much about that. We considered ourselves realists. Sometimes idealists. But never fantasists.

John Nichols: Wisconsin Governor Walker’s Chief Judicial Ally Accused of Physically Attacking Jurist Who Defended Rule of Law

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, who mentored controversial Governor Scott Walker when both served as Republican legislators, has positioned himself as the primary defender of Walker’s radical anti-labor and anti-local democracy agenda on the court.

And it appears that the justice, whose unstable behavior and violent language has been highlighted in media reports, is willing to go to any length to protect Walker from legal accountability.

Justice Prosser, who retained his seat on the court only after the recount of results from an April statewide election that saw charges of fraud and political abuse aimed at the justice’s campaign, now stands accused of physically attacking a justice who disagreed with his push to make the high court an amen corner for the governor.

The Washington Post Editors work in a city and live in a nation in which huge numbers of poor and minority residents are consigned to cages for petty and trivial transgressions of the criminal law — typically involving drugs — and pursuant to processes that are extremely tilted toward the State.  Post Editors virtually never speak out against that, if they ever have.  But that all changes — that indifference disappears — when political elites are targeted for prosecution, even for serious crimes . . .

In some of these cases (Libby, Mubarak), the Post couches its defense of political elites in terms of concerns about the process while claiming they’re receptive to the possibility of punishment.  In others (Edwards), the concerns they raise are not invalid.  But whatever else is true, Post Editors are deeply and almost invariably disturbed when political elites are subjected to criminal accountability for their wrongful acts, but wholly indifferent — if not supportive — when ordinary Americans are mercilessly prosecuted for far less serious wrongdoing.

And it’s not just Post Editors, but their stable of Op-Ed columnists, who reflexively defend political elites when they break the law.  The late Dean of the Washington Press Corps, David Broder, was one of the first and most vocal advocates of one of the earliest expressions of elite immunity:  Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, and Broder repeated that defense in 2006 upon Ford’s death (“I thought and wrote at the time that he was well justified to spare the country further struggling with the Nixon legacy”).  The Post‘s Broder also vigorously defended President Obama’s decision to oppose prosecution of Bush officials:  “he was just as right to declare that there should be no prosecution of those who carried out what had been the policy of the United States government.  And he was right when he sent out his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to declare that the same amnesty should apply to the lawyers and bureaucrats who devised and justified the Bush administration practices.”

Maureen Dowd: An Archbishop Burns While Rome Fiddles

The archbishop of Dublin was beginning to sniffle.

He could not get through a story about “a really nasty man” – an Irish priest who sexually abused, physically tortured and emotionally threatened vulnerable boys – without pulling out his handkerchief and wiping his nose.

“He built a swimming pool in his own garden, to which only boys of a certain age, of a certain appearance were allowed into it,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told me recently. “There were eight other priests in that parish, and not one of them seemed to think there was something strange about it.”

Two years after learning the extent of the depraved and Dickensian treatment of children in the care of the Irish Catholic Church – a fifth circle of hell hidden for decades by church and police officials – the Irish are still angry and appalled.

César Chelala: UN Sharply Critical of US on Women’s Rights

The United Nations Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, has issued a very critical report of the U.S. on its policies on women’s rights. The report is based on a trip of the Special Rapporteur to the US from 24 January to 7 February 2011. During that trip, Ms. Rashida Manjoo broadly examined issues of violence against women in different settings. Her recommendations should provide fruitful material for the U.S. to improve its policies towards women.

As indicated in the report, “Violence against women occurs along a continuum in which the various forms of violence are often both causes and consequences of violence.” Domestic violence or Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is one of the most critical expressions of violence. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) 552,000 violent crimes by an intimate partner were committed against women in the U.S. in 2008.

Their husbands or intimate acquaintances are responsible for the majority of crimes against women. The Violence Policy Center states that the number of women shot and killed by their husbands or intimate acquaintances was four times higher than the total number of women murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined, according to an analysis of 2008 data.

James Hansen: Silence Is Deadly: I’m Speaking Out Against Canada-U.S. Tar Sands Pipeline

The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline, known as Keystone XL to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised. The scientific community needs to get involved in this fray now. If this project gains approval, it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster. The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities. Although there are multiple objections to tar sands development and the pipeline, including destruction of the environment in Canada, and the likelihood of spills along the pipeline’s pathway, such objections, by themselves, are very unlikely to stop the project.

An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC Fourth Assessment Report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO2). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels including tar sands are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize earth’s climate.