Tag: TMC Politics

Jun 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

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: What We Can Learn From Lawrence of Arabia

As fears grow of a widening war across the Middle East, fed by reports that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) envisions a region-wide, all controlling theocracy, we found ourselves talking about another war. The Great War – or World War I, as it would come to be called – was triggered one hundred years ago this month when an assassin shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Through a series of tangled alliances and a cascade of misunderstandings and blunders, that single act of violence brought on a bloody catastrophe. More than 37 million people were killed or wounded. [..]

In America, if we reflect on the First World War at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of Europe and tend to forget another front in that war – against the Ottoman Empire of the Turks that dominated the Middle East. A British Army officer named T.E. Lawrence became a hero in the Arab world when he led nomadic Bedouin tribes in battle against Turkish rule. Peter O’Toole immortalized him in the epic movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.” [..]

But then and now, Lawrence’s understanding of the ancient and potent jealousies of the people among whom he had lived and fought generally was ignored. In 1920, he wrote for the Times of London an unsettling and prophetic article about Iraq – then under the thumb of the British. He decried the money spent, the number of troops and loss of life, and warned that his countrymen had been led “into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It… may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Not for the last time in the Middle East would disaster come from the blundering ignorance and blinding arrogance of foreign intruders convinced by magical thinking of their own omnipotence and righteousness. How soon we forget. How often we repeat.

Joshua Holland: The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies

Polls suggest that Americans tend to differentiate between our “good war” in Iraq – “Operation Desert Storm,” launched by George HW Bush in 1990 – and the “mistake” his son made in 2003.

Across the ideological spectrum, there’s broad agreement that the first Gulf War was “worth fighting.” The opposite is true of the 2003 invasion, and a big reason for those divergent views was captured in a 2013 CNN poll that found that “a majority of Americans (54%) say that prior to the start of the war the administration of George W. Bush deliberately misled the U.S. public about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.”

But as the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to urge the US to once again commit troops to Iraq, it’s important to recall that the first Gulf War was sold to the public on a pack of lies that were just as egregious as those told by the second Bush administration 12 years later.

Zoë Carpenter: Will the Government Finally Regulate the Most Predatory Industry in America?

When Dana Jones first heard about payday loans, she was struggling to pay for prescriptions for her mother, who had been struck suddenly with mental illness. She borrowed a small amount that first time-just $50, she remembers-and paid it back when she got her next paycheck. It seemed simple enough, so she began drawing regularly on short-term credit. “I really thought it was a loan that worked like any other loan I had gotten from finance companies,” said Jones, who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “I just didn’t know.” [..]

Some 200,000 households in Louisiana borrow from short-term lenders every year, as do roughly 12 million people in the United States. There are about as many payday loan stores in the United States as there are McDonald’s and Starbucks. Typically under $500, the loans are intended to provide small amounts of cash to tide borrowers over until their next paycheck. With interest rates as high as 700 percent, many borrowers end up under a mountain of unpayable debt instead. In Baton Rouge, 20 percent of bankruptcy cases involve payday loans.

Dave Zirin: Luis Suárez May Bite, but FIFA Sucks Blood

This is not a pro-Luis Suárez column. This is not an article in defense of his taking a chomp out of Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini during Uruguay’s 1-0 World Cup victory. This is not a piece that will make apologies for Mr. Suárez, who has some longstanding issues when it comes to getting peckish with opponents, so much so, it was reported that 167 people won a “prop bet” that he would bite someone during the World Cup.

Suárez should be suspended because what he did should not be a part of the sport and is, frankly, kind of gross. But for the sports media to climb their branded pulpits and say that Suárez demands suspension precisely because young, impressionable, wide-eyed youngsters the world over would emulate him and start adopting a particular kind of paleo diet on the pitch, is absurd.

Eugene Robinson: The Drone Dilemma

In our growing reliance on armed drones as instruments of war, how slippery is the slope we’re sliding on? Imagine that Vladimir Putin began using drones to kill Ukrainians who opposed Russia’s annexation of Crimea. If Putin claimed the targets were “members of anti-Russian terrorist groups,” what credibility would the United States have to condemn such strikes?

This scenario is outlined in a chilling new report released Thursday by a bipartisan panel of military experts. The use of drones against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, begun by the George W. Bush administration and greatly expanded by President Obama, risks becoming “a long-term killing program based on secret rationales,” the report warns.

In the hypothetical Ukraine example, the world would demand proof that the individuals killed were indeed terrorists. The report notes that “Russia could simply repeat the words used by U.S. officials defending U.S. targeted killings, asserting that it could not provide any evidence without disclosing sources and methods.”

David Sirota: How Corruption Shapes State Policy

A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Tennessee-a state that has been called the most corrupt in the country. That’s right, according to a 2010 Daily Beast analysis compiling data about convictions on charges of public corruption, racketeering, extortion, forgery, counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement, the Volunteer State is America’s single most corrupt. Similarly, a 2012 Harvard study lists Nashville as one of the nation’s most corrupt capitals.

Since I was traveling to the state for a conference about technology and innovation, I had a simple question on my mind: How does such rampant corruption shape state policy? [..]

Any state with that potential in its midst can have a bright economic future, and the encouraging news is that Tennessee’s dirty politics didn’t stop Chattanooga’s efforts. But an exception to a rule is not a rule unto itself. In general, corruption’s deleterious effect on public policy is a serious problem-and not just a purely political problem either. It is a destructive force that can make or : [break an entire local economy.

Jun 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

Jessica Valenti: The US supreme court’s abortion buffer zone ruling protects a gauntlet of horror

Abortion clinics are not safe places – anti-choicers have ensured that – and if women are going to be free from harassment, the fight must go on

Imagine trying to walk into a building, trying to get a medical treatment – and someone screams at you. Someone is two inches from your face – two feet from the front door – and that someone is videotaping you, calling you a whore. There’s ketchup poured in the snowbanks around you, made to look like spurted blood. You try to take a step forward, but people block your way, yelling that you’re going to be “mother to a dead baby”. They hold signs in your faces, whisper “murderer” in your ear as you pass. Maybe they shove you.

Don’t believe portrayals to the contrary – from anti-choice activists and the news media – that these kinds of protestors outside abortion clinics are not grandmas praying, or kindly “counselors” who just want to talk reasonably to women. These people wait outside clinics to shame and to harass; they are there to scare.

Despite the horrifying experiences of women across the country trying to obtain abortions, the US supreme court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a Massachusetts law providing a 35-foot buffer zone outside of clinics is unconstitutional, and violates protesters’ first amendment right to engage in “personal, caring, consensual conversations” with women seeking abortions.

Personal, caring and consensual?

Peter van Buren: Shredding the Fourth Amendment in Post-Constitutional America

Four ways It no longer applies

Here’s a bit of history from another America: the Bill of Rights was designed to protect the people from their government. If the First Amendment’s right to speak out publicly was the people’s wall of security, then the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy was its buttress. It was once thought that the government should neither be able to stop citizens from speaking nor peer into their lives. Think of that as the essence of the Constitutional era that ended when those towers came down on September 11, 2001. Consider how privacy worked before 9/11 and how it works now in Post-Constitutional America. [..]

In Post-Constitutional America, the old words that once defined our democracy are twisted in new ways, not discarded. Previously unreasonable searches become reasonable ones under new government interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. Traditional tools of law, like subpoenas and warrants, continue to exist even as they morph into monstrous new forms.

Americans are told (and often believe) that they retain rights they no longer have. Wait for the rhetoric that goes with the celebrations of our freedoms this July 4th. You won’t hear a lot about the NSA then, but you should. In pre-constitutional America the colonists knew that they were under the king’s thumb. In totalitarian states of the last century like the Soviet Union, people dealt with their lack of rights and privacy with grim humor and subtle protest. However, in America, ever exceptional, citizens passively watch their rights disappear in the service of dark ends, largely without protest and often while still celebrating a land that no longer exists.

Scott Lemieux: Justice Scalia’s ahistorical legal view informs his recess appointment opinion

Scalia wants to make 18th century practices work in our government. But that’s disastrous in the 21st century

It doesn’t matter which theory of executive power that the conservative political views of Antonin Scalia require him to advance at any given time. His way of advancing them remains consistent: the US supreme court justice makes highly tendentious historical arguments in a tone suggesting that only a fool could disagree with him.

Scalia’s concurrent opinion issued as part of Thursday’s court ruling on the constitutionality of presidential recess appointments is no different.

The case, NRLB v Canning, brought to the high court one question: whether a three-day recess of the US Senate was long enough to justify President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. While the constitution normally requires Senate approval of executive branch appointments, there is one exception: Article II empowers the president to fill up “all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate” without its approval, though such appointments expire at the end of the Senate’s term.

Dean Baker: Bankers Could Go To Jail

Morning Edition had a strange piece discussing how regulators can punish banks for breaking the law. The piece focused on the various fines and regulatory measures that can be imposed as penalties when banks are found to have broken the law. Remarkably it never considered the underlying logic of the punishment and the likely deterrent effect on criminal activity.

While banks are legal institutions, ultimately it is individuals that break the law. The question that any regulator should be asking is the extent to which the penalties being imposed will discourage future law breaking. As a practical matter, the immediate victims of the measures mentioned in the piece are banks’ current shareholders. Since there is often a substantial period of time between when a crime is committed and when regulators discover it and succeed in imposing a penalty, the shareholders facing the sanction will be a different group from the shareholders who benefited from the original crime. This makes little sense either from the standpoint of justice or from the standpoint of deterring criminal activity by bankers.

Amy Goodman: [The Egyptian Counterrevolution Will Not Be Televised The Egyptian Counterrevolution Will Not Be TelevisedThe Egyptian Counterrevolution Will Not Be Televised]

Egypt sentenced three Al-Jazeera journalists this week to severe prison terms, in court proceedings that observers described as “farcical.” Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were charged with fabricating news footage, and thus supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which was ousted from power in a military coup a year ago and labeled a terrorist organization. Along with the three jailed journalists, three other foreign journalists were tried and convicted in absentia. Greste, who is Australian, and Fahmy, who is Canadian-Egyptian, received seven-year prison sentences. Baher Mohamed, who is Egyptian, was dealt a 10-year sentence, ostensibly because he had an empty shell casing in his possession, which is an item that many journalists covering conflicts pick up off the street as evidence. The prosecutors called that possession of ammunition. The harsh, six-month pretrial imprisonment, the absurd trial itself and now these sentences have generated global outrage. A movement is growing to demand clemency or release for these three journalists. But while the words of the Obama administration support their freedom, the U.S. government’s actions, primarily in pledging to resume military aid to Egypt, send the opposite message.

Jun 26 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

Robert Sheer: One Court, Indivisible, Votes Liberty and Justice For All

This week’s unanimous Supreme Court decision affirming a robust Fourth Amendment protection for cellphone data is an enormously important victory for privacy rights in the digital age. It is also a reminder that support as well as opposition to civil liberty these days can come from unexpected quarters. Or maybe it is no longer much of a surprise that our constitutional law professor turned president cares so little for the protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights. [..]

Now, about the NSA and its rummaging, might Edward Snowden come to be viewed as the contemporary James Otis?

Dean Baker: The Sharing Economy and the Mystery of the Mystery of Inequality

Last week I had a fascinating 3:00 a.m. cab ride from San Francisco airport to a hotel in downtown Oakland. My cab driver was an immigrant from Pakistan who was putting two kids through college. After working for years as a driver he managed to save enough money to buy his own cab, and more importantly to buy the medallion that gives him the right to operate a cab in San Francisco. The medallion cost $250,000. He is still paying $2,300 a month on the loan to get the medallion in an addition to annual fee to the city of $1,500. [..]

I apologize for the Thomas Friedman-esque digression, but there is a point. My cab driver was complaining about all of these expenses because he has to compete against two ride services, Uber and Lyft, that have largely escaped the same set of regulations. These companies and their drivers are not subjected to the same set of rules that are imposed on traditional cab services. This has put my cab driver and others like him at an enormous disadvantage, and made Uber the latest Wall Street wonder with an implicit market capitalization of $17 billion.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a business can makes lots of money if it is exempted from the regulations that apply to its competitors. This is largely the story of Amazon’s success. It avoided collecting sales taxes in most states for most of its existence.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: A Secret Plan to Close Social Security’s Offices and Outsource Its Work

For months there have been rumors that the Social Security Administration has a “secret plan” to close all of its field offices. Is it true? A little-known report commissioned by the SSA at the request of Congress seems to hold the answer. The summary document outlining the plan, which is labeled “for internal use only,” is unavailable from the SSA but can be found here.

Does the document, titled “Long Term Strategic Vision and Vision Elements,” really propose shuttering all field offices? The answer, buried beneath a barrage of obfuscatory consultantese, clearly seems to be “yes.” Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA’s critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors.

Sadhbh Walshe: The Pentagon’s slush fund is arming a War Zone on Main Street. Let’s end the local-cop addiction to backyard battle

We’re winding down conflicts abroad, but America’s militarized police forces have access to a veritable firearms sale funnelling from Washington on down to the local station house

A few years ago, the police chief in Keene, New Hampshire (population: 23,000) announced plans to patrol the hamlet’s “Pumpkin Festival and other dangerous situations” with a 19,000-pound armored vehicle called the BearCat (price tag: $285,933, courtesy of a federal Homeland Security grant).

The cops in nearby Nashua had already purchased one of the so-called “rescue vehicles” – typically reserved for Swat missions and, you know, IEDs – with hundreds of thousands in drug forfeiture money, but given that the town of Keene has had just three homicides in the last 11 years, some locals thought the gun ports, rotating hatch, battering ram and tear-gas deployment nozzle all might just be a little much.

“The police are already pretty brutal,” said one resident. “The last thing they need is this big piece of military equipment to make them think they’re soldiers.”

Jessica Valenti: It’s still revenge porn when the victim is a man and the picture is of his penis

Consent culture requires that we take it seriously when a woman shares photos of a conservative NSA defender’s private parts

When we think of “revenge porn”, what usually comes to mind is a terrible ex-boyfriend who posts naked pictures or videos of a woman he wants to humiliate online. And to be fair, that’s the most common image of this crime because that’s the form revenge porn most often takes. This week, however, we’ve seen not one but two men lose their jobs (and possibly their careers) after consensually-shared pictures of their genitals were made public by women seeking to embarrass them. [..]

No matter how you feel about these men and their politics or work, let’s be clear: they are being punished for acts of which they were the victims. Jennifer “Ruby” Roubenes Allbaugh, the woman who posted Kuhn’s alleged picture, told a reporter that she was seeking “revenge” and tweeted “I hate you, AJK”. The Twitter user who outed her relationship to Schindler and apparently allowed a third party to post the picture of his penis only refers to herself online as Leslie, but she tweeted on Tuesday, “I wanted to inform his wife & embarrass him”.

Revenge porn, which will soon become illegal in New York state and was already made so in several others, is meant to shame, humiliate and potentially ruin the lives of its victims.

Lola Okolosie: Gary Oldman showed how far ‘anti-PC brigade’ sentiment has come

The view of political correctness as humourless language policing is so normalised, it can be used as a cover for bigoted language

“Our world has gone to hell,” declared Gary Oldman in a recent interview with Playboy magazine. These days people won’t take a simple joke about being a “nigger” or a “fucking Jew”, according to Oldman; it’s considered bad form to name women, especially those in positions of power, “fucking useless cunts”, and, when in a rage, you can’t even call gay men “faggots”. What or who can we blame for this awful state of affairs, Gary? Political correctness and the liberal dictatorship, of course. [..]

PC language is widely viewed as an encroachment on individual freedom. In this sense, the persistent rightwing offensive on the concept has won out. The argument goes that offensive language is so because those taking offence choose to; equality, therefore, is the right to demean and abuse minorities if the fancy takes you. Political correctness as humourless language policing is an idea so normalised that blatantly racist, sexist, ableist and homophobic slurs can be protected under the rubric of free speech. It has become banal and even tyrannical to try to argue for language and behaviour that respects women and minorities.

Jun 26 2014

Water, Water Everywhere But Not A Drop to Drink for Detroit’s Poor

Also posted at Docudharma and Humanitarian Left

Most Americans take water for granted. We get up in the morning shower, brush teeth, flush the toilet, run water to drink, clean and on and on. What would you do if you couldn’t do those things? How would it effect you daily life? You ability to work? Support yourself and your family? How would it effect you health?

Those questions are all being faces right now by hundreds of thousands men, women and children, not in some third world country, but Detroit, Michigan.

In March, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department is resuming efforts to shut off water service to thousands of delinquent customers.

Crews will be targeting those who have received a shutoff notice and whose bills are more than two months late. Customers with late bills can avoid a shutoff by entering into a payment plan. Typically, it takes a payment of 30% to 50% of the amount owed to start such a plan. [..]

There are 323,900 DWSD accounts in Detroit. Of those, 150,806 are delinquent. Some of those delinquencies are low-income customers who are struggling to keep their utilities on, said some who work in providing assistance to those in need.

But agencies aiding the mostly low income families currently without water are short on cash

“The need is huge,” said Mia Cupp, director of development and communications for the Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency. “There are families that have gone months and months without water.”

The group is among a handful of local agencies that provide assistance to those who need help with their water bills. The Water Access Volunteer Effort, a Detroit-based nonprofit, is another. [..]

The organization has very limited resources. Cupp said the group raised about $148,000 during a charity walk; that money could go to helping people pay water bills. [..]

Mayor Mike Duggan’s spokesman John Roach referred to the Water and Sewerage Department questions about how the city handles community outreach to inform residents about programs to help with water bills. Detroit’s Human Services Department used to perform outreach but no longer does, Latimer said. So the water department is finalizing an agreement with The Heat And Warmth Fund, or THAW, to do so, he said. THAW provides low-income Michigan residents with emergency energy assistance.

Jill Brunett, vice president for marketing and communication for THAW, confirmed that the group is in talks with the water department. She said the extreme weather this winter increased heating bills, putting a strain on finances.

Al Jazeera reported that the average Detroit water bill is nearly double the national average of $40 per month (pdf). Tho add insult to injury, DWSD said it would again raise rates, this time by 8.7 percent.

A coalition of groups including the Detroit People’s Water Board, Food and Water Watch, Blue Planet Project and Michigan Welfare Rights Organization have appealed to the United Nations for assistance (pdf)

“We are asking the UN special rapporteur to make clear to the U.S. government that it has violated the human right to water,” said Maude Barlow, the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and a key member of the coalition that put the report together. In addition to creating international pressure to stop the Detroit shutoffs, Barlow said, the UN’s intervention could lead to formal consequences for the United States. “If the US government does not respond appropriately this will also impact their Universal Periodic Review,” she said, “when they stand before the Human Rights Council to have their [human rights] record evaluated.”

Two of those activists, Maureen Taylor, state chair of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and Meera Karunananthan, international water campaigner for the Blue Planet Project, spoke with Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman about Detroit’s water crisis.



Trancript can be read here

The US may be the wealthiest country in the world but it is rapidly turning it’s cities into third world slums, endangering thousands of lives.

Jun 25 2014

Cops Need a Warrant to Search Your Cell Phone

The US Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the police need a warrant to search the contents of cellphones seized from people they have arrested.

The opinion of the court, delivered by chief justice John Roberts, recognised that many owners of modern cellphones “keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives”, which may disclose a uniquely large volume of personal information if searched.

“Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience,” Roberts wrote. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans the privacies of life.

Reading his ruling from the bench, Roberts went on: “The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the founders fought. Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple – get a warrant.”

As with the court’s ruling earlier this year limiting the use of GPS tracking by police, this is quite a victory for privacy in the modern age an the Fourth Amendment.

Jun 25 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

Heidi Moore: Wall Street and Washington want you to believe the stock market isn’t rigged. Guess what? It still is

Michael Lewis woke up Average Joe investors, but the fat cats are still trying to lull you into financial submission with their intellectual dishonesty

Most Americans don’t think much about the stock market, and that’s just fine with Wall Street. Because once you wake up to how screwed up the stock market really is, the financial industry knows you’re likely to get very nervous and take your money out. [..]

Let’s get one thing straight: Investor confidence is not the problem. The screwed-up stock market is the problem. It’s time to break down the polite fiction that investing in the stock market is something that sane, rational, sensible people do. It is a high-risk contact sport for your money.

If you know that, you’re ahead of the game.

And the more you read about the new game in town, the more nervous you should get about high-frequency trading (HFT).

Lauren Wilson: Net Neutrality’s Impact on Free Speech

Safeguarding free speech rights cannot be left to the whims and bottom lines of self-interested corporations. And if corporate interests are allowed to pick winners and losers online, it does not require much guesswork to predict who the winners and losers will be. The winners will be those who can afford to pay to play and those speakers who do not wish to threaten the system that has allowed corporate interests to amass such disproportionate control of our government and of our daily lives. Translation: The winners will be deep-pocketed content companies and those who look like the men in charge at ISPs.

The losers will be the young up-and-comers, the black and brown creators who lack access to capital and the connections to get their ideas off the ground, and anyone who dares to speak truth to power. Closing the Web is a step backwards not only for freedom of speech, but also for diversity of thought. Gutting Net Neutrality means regressing toward a shameful era in our history when the ideas and beliefs of the majority were unabashedly valued over those of minorities. Gutting Net Neutrality means that revolutionary Internet ideas, which have historically come from cash-poor outsiders, will die in their infancy.

Without an open Internet, investors might not have backed Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight or Ezra Klein’s Vox. Without an open Internet, and without the prospect of investment in his visionary reporting, we may never see what else Ta-Nehisi Coates could do. We should not have to live with this fear.

Jessica Valenti: There is no internet ‘outrage machine’ – just these outrageous rape apologists

Hey, conservative columnists: don’t court controversy by whining about ‘privileged’ victims and then feign surprise at the backlash. Your time’s up

Feminists are used to being called hysterical over-reactors. So I wasn’t surprised to read The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argue on Monday that the controversy over George Will’s recent Washington Post column on “privileged” rape victims was part of the Internet “outrage machine”.

There’s no doubt that online arguments can be head-bangingly awful. (I’m on Twitter, I know!) But what Friedersdorf’s column ignores is that writers like Will – out-of-touch conservative white men fearful of the shifting culture – court and revel in such controversy, perhaps knowing it’s likely their last gasp of relevance.

Let’s call it the “backlash machine”: the old guard pumping out deliberately regressive ideas about women while they still can.

Katrina vnaden Heuvel: Why Obama Needs to Ignore ‘Armchair Warriors’ and Focus on the Global Economy

As Iraq blows up (again) and tensions rise in the Ukraine and in the South China Sea, the United States’debate is focused on military intervention. Neoconservatives, having learned nothing from the debacle they caused in Iraq, indict the president for not intervening in Syria and for leaving Iraq. Liberal interventionists, having learned nothing from the calamities now visited on Libya, call for modulated bombing in both. The beleaguered administration sends planes to the Baltic states and Poland, ships to Asia, token troops to Baghdad, sustains hundreds of bases around the globe and is accused of withdrawing from the world. Commentators fret over whether the war-weariness of the American people will keep the “indispensable nation” from doing what must be done.

When you have a hammer, as the adage goes, everything looks like a nail. The United States’ hammer is the most sophisticated military in the world-and nails appear in infinite variety across the globe.

Virtually absent from the debate is any awareness of how much the United States’ commitment to police the world detracts from dealing with the real security needs of its people and the globe. Last week, Richard Trumka, president of the AFLCIO, delivered a short address that reminded us of what is being lost in the muscle flexing.

Clara Long and Alice Farmer: Obama pledged to limit the practice of detaining minors. What happened?

Being ‘thoughtful and humane’ is a political liability, apparently, as the US continues to hold migrant kids on the border – despite plenty of options

There’s no reliable evidence that putting families who enter the US illegally into detention centers actually deters unauthorized immigration. But there’s plenty of evidence that it can cause children in those families severe harm – from anxiety and depression, to long-term cognitive damage. That’s one big reason that family detention for immigration violations is banned under international law.

So it was disturbing to hear late last week that the Obama administration plans to open more family detention centers, starting with a 700-bed center in New Mexico, to tackle a surge in unauthorized migration across southeastern US border.It appears that the White House has come to view being “thoughtful and humane” as a political liability. The new move to ramp up family detention comes in response to criticism that the administration’s lax immigration enforcement “created a powerful incentive for children to cross into the United States illegally”, as Senator John Cornyn of Texas put it last week.

Bryce Covert: For Women’s Office Wear, Who’s Making the Rules?

Today, clothing companies seem to have figured out how to design suits and work clothes for women’s bodies. But women’s choices still come fraught with tripwires they might not even know are there. Is your clothing too brightly colored? Do you leave the collar of your shirt out of the suit jacket or tucked in? Skirt or pants? You should wear heels, but not stilettos. You shouldn’t look frumpy, but don’t dare show cleavage. Don’t “dress like a mortician,” but also avoid your “party outfit.” Wear a nice suit, but not always an Armani one.

Not to mention the invisible line separating dowdy and slutty. Hillary Clinton, whose fashion choices never cease to fascinate us, is a living example of how difficult it is to chart these waters: for so long chastised for dressing in sexless turtlenecks, she got an entire article written up the one day she showed a very small amount of cleavage.

The fact that women are faced with an unclear dress code while men know what they should wear-a suit if it’s a formal workplace, dress shirt and pants if it’s business casual-is one more sign that the workplace has still not totally dealt with the fact that women will be half of the inhabitants. That we endlessly discuss female politicians’ fashion choices and single out female employees for their clothing faux pas marks them as aliens entering someone else’s territory-they are an other, an outlier, and their clothing is one more reminder of that fact.

Jun 25 2014

Obama, Barack Obama 007: License to Kill

Three years ago the Unites States on the orders of President Barack Obama assassinated a native born American citizen, Anwar al Awlaki, in Yemen, using the rational that he was an “immanent threat” and, well, because they could. To this day, other than al-Awlaki’s videos and writing, that are covered under the First Amendment, there has been no evidence that this man was an immanent threat to the security of United States. No evidence, no indictment, no trial. Just a clear violation of al-Awlaki’s rights as an American.

One of the memos that was used to justify this murder was released this week after the Obama administration’s loss of a FOIA request by the ACLU and the New York Times. Needless to say, the memo written by Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel, and now United States Circuit Judge, David Barron, is heavily redacted. The memo is, as the New York Times Editorial Board so blithely put it, “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories – some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law – that was clearly tailored to the desired result”.

Citing the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), that started the nebulous “global war on terror,” is hardly a defense for taking a man’s life without due process under our laws and wouldn’t hold water in any legitimate court like the Hague.

From Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian

The redacted version of the memo released Monday does not reveal much of the factual basis for the government’s claims that Awlaki represented an imminent threat to the United States.

In the disclosed portions, Barron’s memo does not explicitly vouch for the government’s case against Awlaki, referring instead to “the facts represented to us”. It refers instead to Awlaki as a “leader” who was “continuously planning attacks” against the US, without providing an evidentiary basis for claims central to the extraordinary circumvention of normal due process procedures. Nor do the public sections explain why capturing Awlaki was not feasible, nor why the Justice Department believes it need not have provided Awlaki with judicial process. [..]

The Justice Department memo “confirms that the government’s drone killing program is built on gross distortions of law”, said Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who challenged the Awlaki killing, who added that the “forced transparency comes years late”.

Rejecting a government argument that the release of the memorandum would chill attorney-client communications, the court wrote on Monday: “If this contention were upheld, waiver of privileges protecting legal advice would never occur. … We need not fear that OLC will lack for clients.”

The real in depth analysis of the memo comes from Marcy Wheeler, who dissects the memo paragraph by paragraph, here and here.

As Tim cushing at Techdirt writes, the “AUMF trumps all and rights are subject to revocation in times of war.”

The justifications listed below constantly cite 18 USC 1119(b), a law that simply states that it’s illegal for a US citizen to kill another US citizen residing outside US borders, making them subject to the United States’ laws on murder and manslaughter. But what looks simple and solid on the law books is apparently filled with loopholes and things Congress meant to make clear but apparently didn’t. [..]

On page 73, the DOJ notes that there’s actually no federal statute that grants the government the same “rights” (in terms of justified use of deadly force) local law enforcement agencies enjoy, but that doesn’t slow down the rationalizing. The DOJ looks back through legislative to find something that might apply to its drone attacks. But what it quotes here has nothing to do with executions. [..]

Technically, we’re not “at war” anywhere in the world. There’s no declared war, other than the one on terrorism, which the DOJ terms (using the AUMF wording) a “non-international armed conflict.” If this is the justification, terming anything a “war on…” would justify extrajudicial killing, because no one expects murder charges to be brought against them during normal acts of war (i.e., combatants killing other combatants).

Because the AUMF says we can detain a US citizen who is assisting our enemies, it also means we can kill a US citizen who does the same.

The question of what makes it legal to kill an American overseas is still unanswered.  

Jun 24 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

Jameel Jaffer: Obama’s ‘drone memo’ is finally public. Now show us the library of secret law

To this administration, transparency comes in the form of deleted pages. But too much of America’s legal excuse for killing an American citizen remains classified

Large parts of the memo – almost a third of it – have been redacted. The first 11 pages, which describe the government’s allegations against al-Awlaki, are redacted in their entirety. Throughout the remainder of the memo, citations, sentences and even whole paragraphs have been stripped out, in some cases to protect genuine sources and methods but in others to obscure the precedents underlying the government’s legal arguments. The redactions in the drone memo’s footnotes are perhaps the most disturbing, because they suggest the existence of an entire body of secret law, a veritable library of authoritative legal opinions produced by Justice Department lawyers but withheld from the American public.

In one instance, the long sought-after drone memo references another legal memo that concluded that al-Awlaki’s American citizenship did not “preclude the contemplated lethal action.” From this reference, we can deduce that the OLC authored a separate drone memo assessing – and dispensing with – the proposition that an American citizen had the right not to be deprived of his life without some form of judicial process. But that earlier memo, treated by the executive branch as binding law, is still secret.

The American public will not be able to evaluate the lethal drone program without far more information:

New York Times Editorial Board: A Thin Rationale for Drone Killings

The Obama administration on Monday reluctantly released its justification for killing an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, whom it considered a terrorist, in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. But the rationale provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care. [..]

Blithely accepting such assurances at face value is why these kinds of killings are so troubling, and why we have repeatedly urged that an outside party – such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – provide an independent review when a citizen is targeted. How did the Justice Department know that capturing Mr. Awlaki was not feasible, or that the full force of a drone strike was necessary? This memo should never have taken so long to be released, and more documents must be made public. The public is still in the dark on too many vital questions.

Robert Sheer: Where’s Saddam Hussein When the U.S. Needs Him?

John Kerry was doing his best “Casablanca” impersonation, pretending to be police Capt. Renault and was just shocked that Egypt is still a brutal military dictatorship despite our newly revived “historic partnership.”

A day after chatting it up in Cairo on Sunday with now-elected dictator Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who, Kerry assured the world, “gave me a very strong sense of his commitment (to) a re-evaluation of human rights legislation (and) a re-evaluation of the judicial process,” the secretary of state felt compelled to release a statement condemning that process. [..]

The fact that the lead victims of this suppression, the followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, eschewed violence in favor of peaceful civic organization and the route of elections carries an alarming message that the United States is not seriously committed to nonviolent means of bringing about social change.

From Egypt, it was off to Baghdad for Kerry to see whether Iraq’s bold effort in democratic nation building could be resuscitated in the face of imminent collapse. The problem there is that Kerry will have trouble locating a military strongman to back. The nostalgic choice might be someone like Saddam Hussein. He too was a secular military strongman who very effectively controlled religiously motivated parties, but he’s no longer available.

Dan Gillmor: The ‘right to be forgotten’ doesn’t mean we should be censoring Google results

Everyone does stupid things. But we shouldn’t all have the right to pick which parts of our history get deleted from the internet

The right to be forgotten has great allure – yet it isn’t as far removed from censorship as we might want to believe. This will be a true balancing test, of rights versus laws versus norms, and no matter how we resolve it some people will be harmed in some ways. I’m hoping we’ll establish new norms, where we are relentlessly skeptical of allegations, and where we cut each other considerable slack to be human. As my friend Esther Dyson has wisely advised, let’s have a statute of limitations on stupidity.

David Iglesias: Why the Benghazi trial should be held in the shadow of the Twin Towers

Ahmed Abu Khattala is not a war criminal, and his interrogation is not our tortured past. I have seen the worst of Guantánamo, and downtown Manhattan is the place for justice

I’m a former US attorney – yes, one of the eight dismissed during the Bush administration, which left such a stain on America’s reputation.

I’m also a former military commissions prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, where the Bush administration took a few attempts to create a fair system but where few war crimes have been properly prosecuted, even as trials such as that of the 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed languish.

Now, a man named Ahm-0ed Abu Khattala is finishing up a long trip from Benghazi to a New York courtroom, aboard a Navy ship under interrogation by a team of FBI investigators increasingly focused on gathering intelligence and evidence. [..]

And while it’s conceivable that both federal and military commissions could try Khattala for his alleged crimes, Benghazi was not a war, and the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his security detail wasn’t a war crime. Getting the KSM trial out of the shadow of the 9/11 attacks in downtown Manhattan was one thing, but that’s exactly where the Benghazi ringleader should be tried.

The Abu Khattala trial, like all terror prosecutions, should show the world that even the most heinous of crimes should be governed by the rule of law and be governed by precedent and procedure – not politics.

Jeff Winkler: ‘Soccer’ is a virus invading America. Where are all the rowdy football fans?

The US has World Cup fever. It has also replaced a sport’s wonderfully jingoistic hooligans with privileged, cultured followers who’d rather tweet their team’s score than cheer ’em on

Like tuberculosis or veganism, football – soccer, for us plebes – is a virus invading the urban centers of America, slowly destroying my country and its spirit. I mean this with no disrespect to the sport’s international fans. The game is not itself un-American: rather, its American appreciators are unpatriotic – and they are shaming the game’s great nationalistic fans abroad.

Perhaps you are expecting the standard American complaints against football: calling it futball, the frantic running, players crying (everyone knows there’s no crying in baseball), the aggressive metrosexuality, the low scores, France’s participation and, of course, games that simply end in ties. Admittedly, on days of particularly zealous patriotism – the Fourth of July, Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp special – I find the list of accusations against the sport rather incriminating.

But in most countries where watching the game of football is a regular occurrence rather than a quadrennial diversion, they understand – unlike Americans – that its purpose is to incite and, in part, appease the bloodlust of the disenfranchised masses. It’s only in the US that football becomes a wussy game for the effete elite.

Jun 23 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: The Hidden Cost of Trading Stocks

‘Best Execution’ and Rebates for Brokers

There’s no escaping the conclusion that the stock market is not a level playing field where all investors, large and small, have an equal shot at a fair deal.

A recent groundbreaking study found that undetected insider trading occurs in a stunning one-fourth of public-company deals. Experts have long debated the pros and cons of high-frequency trading, another pervasive practice, but there is no doubt that it gives superfast traders the jump on others in trading stocks. And the very idea of trading on a public exchange, where stock prices and trading volumes are visible to all, is being eclipsed by private trading of public stocks in off-exchange venues, called dark pools, usually operated by banks. [..]

Securities regulators clearly need to better enforce the best execution requirements on brokers, and require better disclosure on brokers’ routing decisions and the rebates they earn. If Congress won’t provide more resources for enforcement, rebates need to be passed along to the customer or eliminated altogether.

Paul Krugman: The Big Green Test

Conservatives and Climate Change

On Sunday Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary and a lifelong Republican, had an Op-Ed article about climate policy in The New York Times. In the article, he declared that man-made climate change is “the challenge of our time,” and called for a national tax on carbon emissions to encourage conservation and the adoption of green technologies. Considering the prevalence of climate denial within today’s G.O.P., and the absolute opposition to any kind of tax increase, this was a brave stand to take.

But not nearly brave enough. Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax. But that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. A carbon tax may be the best thing we could do, but we won’t actually do it.

Yet there are a number of second-best things (in the technical sense, as I’ll explain shortly) that we’re either doing already or might do soon. And the question for Mr. Paulson and other conservatives who consider themselves environmentalists is whether they’re willing to accept second-best answers, and in particular whether they’re willing to accept second-best answers implemented by the other party. If they aren’t, their supposed environmentalism is an empty gesture.

Glen Ford: U.S. Funds “Terror Studies” to Dissect and Neutralize Social Movements

“In the language of ‘terrorism studies,’ the human beings involved in these social movements are ‘contagions,’ as in vectors of disease.”

The U.S. Department of Defense is immersed in studies about…people like you. The Pentagon wants to know why folks who don’t themselves engage in violence to overthrow the prevailing order become, what the military calls, “supporters of political violence.” And by that they mean, everyone who opposes U.S military policy in the world, or the repressive policies of U.S. allies and proxies, or who opposes the racially repressive U.S. criminal justice system, or who wants to push the One Percent off their economic and political pedestals so they can’t lord it over the rest of us. (I’m sure you recognize yourself somewhere in that list.)

The Pentagon calls this new field of research “terrorism studies,” which is designed to augment and inform their so-called War on Terror. Through their Minerva Research Initiative, the military has commissioned U.S. universities to help it figure out how to deal with dissatisfied and, therefore, dangerous populations all around the world, including the United States.

The Minerva Initiative was the subject of an article in The Guardian newspaper by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, an academic who studies international security issues. The Initiative seeks to sharpen the U.S. military’s “warfighter-relevant insights” into what makes people tick, and get ticked off at power structures, in regions “of strategic importance to the U.S.” Since the U.S. is an empire seeking global hegemony, and sees the whole world as strategic, the Minerva program’s areas of interest involve – everybody on the planet.

Robert Kuttner: Reforming the Federal Sweatshop

The White House is holding a summit Monday, June 23 on working families. The summit is intended to call attention to the fact that President Obama wants to raise wages and job opportunities for working Americans, especially for working women. This is a welcome initiative, though there is a great deal that the President could do by executive order without waiting for a deadlocked Congress to act.

The grotesque income inequality in our economy has at last some in for some overdue attention. For the vast majority of working Americans, there is only one source of income — wages and salaries. [..]

One of the tricks that corporations use to batter down wages is to contract out work, so that the true employer is not accountable to its workforce. What is shocking is that the most influential employer that resorts to this device is none other than the federal government.

Howell Willaims:Brian Schweitzer’s ‘gay-dar’ did pick up on something about Southern men

There’s long legacy of effeminate men in the South – and particularly the lisping, land-owning lads of yore

Everyone from Adam Smith to Karl Marx agreed that, to be a man, hard work was required. Masculinity was – and still is – defined in part by one’s ability to work. Slave owners’ refusal to produce wealth with their own heads and hands made their virility somehow questionable. The image of the southern dandy with his silk hat and seersucker suit satisfied a populist imagination that viewed effete southern slave-owners with disdain.

Today, that effeminate southern dandy lives on, if in modified form. Cantor is only the most recent southern Republican to have his sexuality whispered about. Rumors have swirled around Texas Governor Rick Perry (which he’s denied), despite his recent comments that being gay is like being an alcoholic: you can put the habit down if you try hard enough (spoken like someone who’s in recovery). And South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has dealt with similar backbiting for years – most recently when a rival in the Republican primary called him “ambiguously gay” – despite hilariously-worded denials. Whether Perry or Graham are practicing homosexuals isn’t the point: accusing them of being gay is part of a long history of questioning the virility – and thereby the abilities – of southern men in positions of power.

The truth is, the image of the southern elite is kinda gay, and Schweitzer’s not a homophobe – he was just boning up on some good ol’-fashioned populist elite-hating. Good luck to him at besting Hillary, though – she’s spent a lot of time with powerful southern men herself.

Jun 22 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: war criminal and former Vice President Dick Cheney; and  Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

At the roundtable are  Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MI); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL); ABC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Terry Moran; and Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Sen. Marco Rubio (R.-FL); Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-MI) and former deputy director of the CIA and CBS News’ Senior Security Correspondent Michael Morell.

His panel guests are Tavis Smiley of PBS; Robin Wright of the Wilson Center; David Ignatius of The Washington Post; and CBS News Political Director John Dickerson.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: This Sunday’s MTP guests are : Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY); Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense;  NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel; NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell; and NBC News Correspondent Kevin Tibbles.

At the roundtable are: E.J. Dionne, Columnist, The Washington Post; David Brooks Columnist, The New York Times; Katty Kay Anchor, BBC World News America; and Erika Harold . former Congressional Candidate (R-IL).

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY); Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA); journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Her panel guests are Donna Brazile, Kristin Soltis Anderson, Penny Lee, and SE Cupp.

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