Tag: TMC Politics

“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:

Up with Steve Kornacki:Joining Steve will be: Jordan Fabian, Political editor at Fusion; Lorella Praeli, a director of advocacy and policy for United We Dream; Ryan Enos, a political scientist and assistant professor of government at Harvard University; Judy Pino, communications director for the conservative Hispanic group the LIBRE Initiative; Rev. William Barber, president, North Carolina NAACP; Gerrick Brenner, executive director of Progress North Carolina; Penda Hair, co-director at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization; North Carolina State Senator Linda Garrou (D); Rashad Robinson, executive director at Color of Change; Josh Barro, columnist for Bloomberg View; Alexis Goldstein, former vice president at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank; Liz Kennedy, counsel at Demos; and Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter covering Wall Street and finance for ProPublica and columnist, The New York Times.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Guests on “This Week” are House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) and committee member Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), join Atlantic national correspondent and Bloomberg View columnist Jeffrey Goldberg to debate the latest news from Boston and Syria.

The  powerhouse roundtable tackles all the week’s politics with ABC News’ George Will, ABC News contributor and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, ABC News political analyst and special correspondent Matthew Dowd, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Clare McCaskill (D-MO), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC); The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan, Harvard University’s David Gergen, plus CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, John Dickerson and Clarissa Ward.

The Chris Matthews Show: This Sunday’s guests are Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor; Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst; Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor; and Lesley Stahl, CBS News 60 Minutes Correspondent.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: MTP guests are Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); former British Prime Minister Tony Blair;  Rep. Peter King (R-NY); Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MI).

Joining the roundtable the guests are  Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), GOP strategist Mike Murphy, NBC’s Chuck Todd, and former counselor to the president, Karen Hughes.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are  Sen. Dan Coats (R-Intel Cmte) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Intel Cmte); former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns.

The political panel with Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

In this week’s segment of “What We Know Now,” Up’s new host Steve Kornacki the human element in how our clothes are made and the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh that killed 340 people. His guest Starlee Kine, contributor to “This American Life;” Ed Cox, chairman of the NY Republican State Comittee; former Rep. Nan Hayworth, (R-NY); and Timothy Naftali, former Director of the Nixon Presidential Library discuss what they have learned this week

Bangladesh factory collapse: police detain owners, as death toll exceeds 350

by Syed Zain Al-Mahmood in Dhaka for The Guardian

Reports of workers being ordered to Rana Plaza building on day before collapse despite cracks appearing and jolts being felt

Police in Bangladesh have detained two factory owners for criminal negligence over the deaths of at least 352 workers at an eight-storey building that collapsed on Wednesday – a day after warnings had been given that it was unsafe.

Two engineers who had been involved in issuing building permits for the Rana Plaza complex in Savar, just north of Dhaka, were also being held. The owner of the building was being sought by police, who have put border authorities on alert and arrested his wife in an attempt to bring him out of hiding.

On Saturday around 30 survivors were found and police say that as many as 900 people remain missing, trapped dead and alive under the twisted steel and concrete, through which rescue teams were still searching last night using electric drills, shovels, crowbars and their bare hands. Anger at the collapse has sparked days of protests and clashes, with police on Saturday using teargas, water cannon and rubber bullets on demonstrators who burned cars.

French Gay Marriage Bill Approved By France’s Parliament

from Huffington Post

Gay marriage has been legalised by the French parliament on Tuesday after weeks of divisive national debate on the issue.

The Socialist-majority assembly passed the measure by a large margin of 331-225.

Despite large and vocal public protests against same-sex marriage, polls suggest 55-60% of the public are in favour, reports the BBC.

And Then There Were Ten

by Dorothy J. Samuels, The New York Times

Rhode Island’s Senate – including all five Republican members – voted 26-12 on Wednesday in favor of legislation to allow same-sex couples to marry. Once Gov. Lincoln Chafee signs the bill, which is expected to happen next week, marriage equality will be the law in every New England state (Rhode Island plus Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) – a meaningful victory for civil rights and a proud distinction for the region.

“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 Tork Times Editorial Board: Congress Rushes to Aid the Powerful

Congress can’t pass a budget or control guns or confirm judges on time, but this week members of both parties found something they could agree on, and in a big hurry: avoiding blame for inconveniencing air travelers. The Senate and House rushed through a bill that would avert furloughs to air traffic controllers, which were mandated by Congress’s own sequester but proved embarrassing when flights began to back up around the country.

Then lawmakers scurried out of town, taking a week’s vacation while ignoring the low-income victims of the mandatory budget cuts, who have few representatives in Washington to protest their lost aid for housing, nutrition and education. Though they are suffering actual pain, not just inconvenience, no one rushed to give them a break from the sequester, and it is clear that no one will.

Charles M. Blow: The Morose Middle Class

The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm.

An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released Thursday found that while most Americans (56 percent) hold out hope that they’ll be in a higher class at some point, even more Americans (59 percent) are worried about falling out of their current class over the next few years. In fact, more than eight in 10 Americans believe that more people have fallen out of the middle class than moved into it in the past few years.

The poll paints a picture of a group that is scared to death about its station in life.

The Senate will not vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, CISPA, that was passed by the House last week.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, “believes that information sharing is a key component of cybersecurity legislation, but the Senate will not take up CISPA,” a committee staffer told HuffPost.

A staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee said the committee also is working on an information-sharing bill and will not take up CISPA.

“We are currently drafting a bipartisan information sharing bill and will proceed as soon as we come to an agreement,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Thursday.

CISPA Is ‘Dead for Now,’ Thanks to a Left-Right Coalition for Online Privacy

by John Nichols, The Nation

What brings the most seriously libertarian Republican in the US House, Michigan’s Justin Amash, together with Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota?

What unites long-time Ronald Reagan aide Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, with liberal firebrand Alan Grayson, D-Florida?

What gets steadily conservative former House Judiciary Committee chair James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, together with progressive former House Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan?

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which has for 222 years promised that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That’s an old commitment that members of Congress swear an oath to uphold. [..]

CISPA actually won 288 “yes” votes in the House, but the 127 “no” votes-coming from principled members on both sides of the aisle-sent a strong message to the more deliberative Senate. In combination with a grassroots campaign spearheaded by tech-savvy privacy activists and a threatened veto by President Obama, the bipartisan House opposition appears to have convinced Senate leaders have signaled that they plan to put the legislation on hold. The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday suggestion that CISPA looks to be “dead for now.”

ACLU: CISPA Is Dead (For Now)

By Jason Koebler, US News

The Senate will not take up the controversial cybersecurity bill, is drafting separate legislation

“I think it’s dead for now,” says Michelle Richardson, legislative council with the ACLU. “CISPA is too controversial, it’s too expansive, it’s just not the same sort of program contemplated by the Senate last year. We’re pleased to hear the Senate will probably pick up where it left off last year.”

That’s not to say Congress won’t pass any cybersecurity legislation this year. Both Rockefeller and President Obama want to give American companies additional tools to fight back against cyberattacks from domestic and foreign hackers.

But cybersecurity legislation in the Senate, such as the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act of 2013, has greater privacy protections than CISPA does. Richardson says that bill makes it clear that companies would have to “pull out sensitive data [about citizens]” before companies send it to the government and also puts the program under “unequivocal civilian control,” something CISPA author Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., was unwilling to do.

Even if the Senate gets something done, Rogers and other CISPA supporters will likely have to compromise more than they’ve been willing to over the past year as Obama has made it clear he will veto legislation that doesn’t have more privacy protections.

CISPA Is Dead. Now Let’s Do a Cybersecurity Bill Right

by Julian Sanchez, Wired

Americans have grown so accustomed to hearing about the problem of “balancing privacy and security” that it sometimes feels as though the two are always and forever in conflict – that an initiative to improve security can’t possibly be very effective unless it’s invading privacy. Yet the conflict is often illusory: A cybersecurity law could easily be drafted that would accomplish all the goals of both tech companies and privacy groups without raising any serious civil liberties problems.

Few object to what technology companies and the government say they want to do in practice: pool data about the activity patterns of hacker-controlled “botnets,” or the digital signatures of new viruses and other malware. This information poses few risks to the privacy of ordinary users. Yet CISPA didn’t authorize only this kind of narrowly limited information sharing. Instead, it gave companies blanket immunity for feeding the government vaguely-defined “threat indicators” – anything from users’ online habits to the contents of private e-mails – creating a broad loophole in all federal and state privacy laws and even in private contracts and user agreements.

Given that recent experience has shown companies shielded by secrecy often err on the side of oversharing with the government, that loophole was a key concern. So why the gap between what the law permits and its supporters’ aims?

It’s a principle wonks call tech neutrality. Nobody wants to write a bill that refers too specifically to the information needed to protect current networks (like “Internet Protocol addresses” or “Netflow logs”) since technological evolution would render such language obsolete over time.

The original mission of the Central Intelligence Agency was to provide national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers. The National Security Act of 1947 established the CIA, affording it “no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad“.

The primary function of the CIA is to collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and to advise public policymakers, but it does conduct emergency tactical operations and carries out covert operations, and exerts foreign political influence through its tactical divisions, such as the Special Activities Division.

There has been considerable criticism of the CIA relating to: security and counterintelligence failures, failures in intelligence analysis, human rights concerns, external investigations and document releases, influencing public opinion and law enforcement, drug trafficking, and lying to Congress.

In his new book, “The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti tracks the transformation of the CIA and U.S. special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world’s dark spaces: the new American way of war. The book’s revelations include disclosing that the Pakistani government agreed to allow the drone attacks in return for the CIA’s assassination of Pakistani militant Nek Muhammad, who was not even a target of the United States. Mazzetti’s reporting on the violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan – and Washington’s response – won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. The year before, he was a Pulitzer finalist for his reporting on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. [includes rush transcript]

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: The 1 Percent’s Solution

Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close – at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.

Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics?

Ralph Nader: Boston, Texas and Corporate Criminal Justice

The Boston Marathon bombings killed three and injured more than 180. The West, Texas industrial explosion killed at least 14 and injured more than 180. Guess which one drew the greater media and law enforcement response?

If it turns out that the West, Texas explosion is the result of a “terrorist act,” expect federal law enforcement officials and the mass media to fly to Texas from Boston. But until then, don’t expect much.

One reason — our two tier criminal justice system. One tier for individuals. Another for corporations.

“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

Jared Bernstein: The Preferences of the Wealthy and Their Role in Our Politics

A critical concern of our time is not simply our high levels of income inequality and their negative impact on opportunity and mobility. It’s how inequality and immobility become entrenched in the system — how they replicate.

In a nation like ours, where the flow of money into politics keeps getting stronger, one way this occurs is through the political preferences of the wealthy. Of course, at any point in our history, the disproportionate policy influence of the wealthy has been a serious problem for our democracy. But in today’s America, two factors intensify this threat: the increased concentration of economic resources, and the increased access those resources have to the political system.

There’s yet another piece to this puzzle, however, kind of a riff off the old F. Scott Fitzgerald line about the rich being different from the rest of us (i.e., besides “they’ve got more money”). What are the political preferences of the wealth and how do they differ from those of the rest of us?

Robert Sheer: 277 Million Boston Bombings

The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim” is the way the New York Times defined the hideousness of the weapons used, and President Obama made clear that “any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.” But are we as a society prepared to be judged by that standard?

The president’s deployment of drones that all too often treat innocent civilians as collateral damage comes quickly to mind. It should also be pointed out that the U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal and, as our killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese demonstrated, those weapons are inherently, by the president’s definition, weapons of terror. But it is America’s role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our country’s refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the world’s nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston.

“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”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day

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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Austerity doctrine is exposed as flimflam

The austerity claque got it wrong. And the harsh bill is being paid by millions of Americans and millions more in Europe in jobs lost, homes foreclosed, families split apart, hopes crushed.

They can’t repay the costs of their folly. We don’t really need an apology. But could they at least get out of the way so we could get on with the jobs programs that we should have undertaken years ago?

Austerity has been tried and found wanting in practice. Instead of expansion and growth, Europe has been driven back into recession. With Britain’s credit rating downgraded, its economy contracting, its unemployment rolls soaring, its debts rising, three years of rosy forecasts shredded, Tory Chancellor George Osborne’s tears at the lavish funeral for Margaret Thatcher may well have been for the burial of his own reputation. Britain is “playing with fire,” warned the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, who told Sky News, “The danger of having no growth, or very little growth, for a long time, is very high. You get a number of vicious circles that come into play.”

Kathrine Stewart: The Rightwing Donors Who Fuel America’s Culture Wars

In general, US public opinion is trending liberal. Not that you’d know it from state legislatures bought by conservatives dollars

The laws and bills emerging from many of America’s statehouses are farther to the right than they’ve ever been. But the population overall continues to trend moderately leftward. How to explain this growing divergence between the government and the people?

Mostly, it’s about the money. [..]

In recent years, the relative impact of money on our political system has gone up. Part of this is due to the US supreme court: by identifying money with speech, it has endowed rich people and corporations to speak loudly in the public sphere. Another part is due to the privatization of the lawmaking process. Groups like Alec, SPN, and Americans United for Life now serve as de facto lawmakers in many state governments. Such organizations bring together in secret meetings big donors with the politicians who need their campaign contributions, and then provide the legislation, word for word, that will make the money move from one pocket to the other.

Since after 9/11, the United States has been engaged in a global war on terror (GWOT). Even as the illegal was in Iraq has allegedly ended and the one in Afghanistan finally begins to wind down almost 2 years after Osama bin Laden’s assassination, the US has widened its war in East Asia to the Arabian Peninsula and Africa sending in military on the ground as “advidsors” and unmanned armed drones to carry out “targeted strikes.” The world is now the battlefield for the US military and its contractors who are bleeding the American tax payer under the guise os keeping us safe. But are they keeping us safe? The reality is starting to surface. According to news sources the alleged Boston Marathon bombing suspect told investigators that the attack was spurred by their anger at America’s continued wars and its assault in Islam.

Yemeni journalist Farea Al-Muslimi testified before the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and human rights. He told the committee what American’s need to hear:

“Just six days ago, my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers.

“The drone strike and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine.

“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”

We needed to hear this a very long time ago, long before 9/11.

Jeremy Scahill, author and National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine, joined Amy Goodman in an interview on Democracy Now to discuss the his project Dirty Wars which has produced a documentary and soon to be released book,“Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.”

The book is based on years of reporting on U.S. secret operations in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. While the Obama administration has defended the killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why Abdulrahman was targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later. Scahill reveals CIA Director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, suspected that the teenager had been killed “intentionally.” “The idea that you can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever, to me, is a – we should view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country,” says Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine. Today the U.S. Senate is preparing to hold its first-ever hearing on the Obama administration’s drone and targeted killing program. However, the Obama administration is refusing to send a witness to answer questions about the program’s legality.

“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 Kuttner: Safe and Free

The emerging history of Dzohkahr Tsarnaev suggests that while the much-expanded national security establishment has been largely successful at thwarting organized assaults by terrorists, it cannot prevent a one-off attack by an extremist-influenced sociopath.

To do so would require turning our country into a police state.

When I was a graduate student, a refugee professor once told the class, “I grew up in Nazi Germany. It was a very safe place to walk the streets. Unless you were perceived to be an enemy of the state.”

How many more of us will have to be presumed enemies of the state in order for the rest of us to be safe from random bombers? After an attack like this, national security ratchets up, and never seems to ratchet back down. And some trade-offs are truly difficult.

Dean Baker: Deficits Are Bad and the Sun Goes Around the Earth

Most of us accept that the earth goes around the sun. This is impressive since we can look up in the sky and see the sun going around the earth. We believe the opposite because we have been told about the research of astronomers over the centuries showing that what we can see with our own two eyes is wrong. Instead we accept that the motion of the stars and planets can be much better explained by the earth going around the sun.

Suppose for a moment that astronomers and people who write on astronomy did not agree on earth or solar orbits. Imagine that a substantial group of these people, including many of the most prominent astronomers, insisted that the sun goes around the earth, as anyone can plainly see. In that case there would likely be huge numbers of people who refused to accept that the earth goes around the sun. This is the state of modern economics.