Tag: TMC Politics

Jul 05 2011

None of These People Are “Normal”

There are no more “normal” people in charge of government these days, nor are any of them reasonable:

Paul Krugman Not A normal Party:

But I’m unreliable and shrill, of course – you weren’t supposed to realize that the GOP had gone off the deep end that early in the game.

David Brooks: The Mother of All No-Brainers

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases.

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

Richard Cohen: A grand old cult

Someone ought to study the Republican Party. I am not referring to yet another political scientist but to a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like. The GOP needs an intervention. It has become a cult.

To become a Republican, one has to take a pledge. It is not enough to support the party or mouth banalities about Ronald Reagan; one has to promise not to give the government another nickel. This is called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” issued by Americans for Tax Reform, an organization headed by the chirpy Grover Norquist. He once labeled the argument that an estate tax would affect only the very rich “the morality of the Holocaust.” Anyone can see how singling out the filthy rich and the immensely powerful and asking them to ante up is pretty much the same as Auschwitz and that sort of thing.

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This intellectual rigidity has produced a GOP presidential field that’s a virtual political Jonestown. The Grand Old Party, so named when it really did evoke America, has so narrowed its base that it has become a political cult. It is a redoubt of certainty over reason and in itself significantly responsible for the government deficit that matters most: leadership. That we can’t borrow from China.

Time in House Could Be Short for Republican Newcomers

It is miles to go before the 2012 Congressional races begin in earnest, but already some of the 87 freshmen who helped the Republicans win back the House last year are bracing for a challenge from within the party. At least half a dozen potential primary challengers to freshmen are considering a run, and there is heated chatter about more.

In some ways, the freshmen are responsible for their own predicament. Many won their seats after successfully challenging establishment Republicans in primaries, proving that a combination of gumption and the right political climate could overcome the advantages of incumbency.

Now, to some of the impatient and ideological voters who sent them to Washington to change things, the new House members may be seen as the establishment, and they face the disconcerting prospect of immediately defending themselves in the political marketplace.

The White House and the Democratic leadership aren’t any better having dropped the ball and allowed a small “cult” of unreasonable people to dictate the game. Obama was suppose to be “the adult in the room” according to his fans. He could have easily had the upper hand in his first two years in office if he had listened to reason about the economy and put his “foot down” like an “adult”. There is little reason to think that the Democrats will listen to “normal” people now

Jul 05 2011

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.

Here is the first Punting the Pundits published July 5, 2010.

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

New York Times Editorial: More Folly in the Debt Limit Talks

Congressional Republicans have opened a new front in the deficit wars. In addition to demanding trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for raising the nation’s debt limit, they are now vowing not to act without first holding votes in each chamber on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

The ploy is more posturing on an issue that has already seen too much grandstanding. But it is posturing with a dangerous purpose: to further distort the terms of the budget fight, and in the process, to entrench the Republicans’ no-new-taxes-ever stance.

Frank Rich: Obama’s Original Sin

The president’s failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”

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“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so-and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation – so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope – would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The New War of Independence – Against Corporate Politics

This is the age of corporatized politics. That means we may admire our leaders, but we can’t depend on them. We’re paying the price for Thomas Jefferson’s unfulfilled desire to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

This July 4th, politics is too important to be left to the politicians. The stakes are too high and the system is too broken. Citizen action is everyone’s job now, and it will be as long as our political debate focuses on misplaced austerity and ignores the majority’s yearning for jobs, growth, and those things that government does best.

But the problem isn’t just with politicians, or even the system. The problem is dependence itself.

Jose Antonio Vargas: The America in Me

“You’ve been trying to write yourself into America,” my dear friend Teresa Moore said after she read an early draft of the essay I ended up submitting to the New York Times Magazine.

I first met Teresa in 1999, when I was a high school senior and wanted to freelance for YO!, short for Youth Outlook, the monthly magazine she edited. She was my very first editor, the one who can most attest to how much I struggled with writing, with finding just the right words, phrases and punctuation (should I use a comma or a dash or a semi-colon?) with trusting the texture and timbre of my own voice. Then and now, Teresa was always exacting, always insightful.

“You’re still trying to write yourself into America.”

Indeed, I am, perhaps now more than ever.

Holly Sklar and Scott Klinger: Real Patriots Pay Taxes

Some of our nation’s biggest corporations are planning a tax holiday and they want you to pick up the tab.

Actually, you already pay for their routine tax avoidance through the use of tax havens in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. These accounting acrobatics cost the U.S. Treasury $100 billion a year. Now they want Congress to pass a special tax holiday for money they “repatriate” back to the United States.

There’s nothing patriotic about this repatriation being pushed by Google, Cisco, Pfizer and other companies in the Win America campaign. To sell the tax holiday, they claim it will produce a burst of jobs and investment. In fact, Congress passed a “one-time-only” tax holiday in 2004 with similar promises. Instead, it produced a burst of shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, which goosed the pay of CEOs.

Jul 05 2011

Countdown with Keith Olbermann

If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:

Watch live video from CURRENT TV LIVE Countdown Olbermann on www.justin.tv

Jul 04 2011

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”.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.:What Our Declaration Really Said

Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted.”

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country’s future we’re usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy’s give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe-or have convinced themselves-that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

We are closer to that point than we think, and our friends in the tea party have offered a helpful clue by naming their movement in honor of the 1773 revolt against tea taxes on that momentous night in Boston Harbor

Paul Krugman: Corporate Cash Con

Of tax cuts, tax holidays and trickle-down.

Watching the evolution of economic discussion in Washington over the past couple of years has been a disheartening experience. Month by month, the discourse has gotten more primitive; with stunning speed, the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis have been forgotten, and the very ideas that got us into the crisis – regulation is always bad, what’s good for the bankers is good for America, tax cuts are the universal elixir – have regained their hold.

And now trickle-down economics – specifically, the idea that anything that increases corporate profits is good for the economy – is making a comeback.

On the face of it, this seems bizarre. Over the last two years profits have soared while employment has remained disastrously high. Why should anyone believe that handing even more money to corporations, no strings attached, would lead to faster job creation?

New York Times Editorial: It Gets Even Worse

New anti-immigration laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are cruel, racist and counterproductive.

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following – and in some ways outdoing – Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.

The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.

Eugene Robinson: Assassination by robot: Are we justified?

The skies over at least six countries are patrolled by robotic aircraft, operated by the U.S. military or the CIA, that fire missiles to carry out targeted assassinations. I am convinced that this method of waging war is cost-effective but not that it is moral.

There has been virtually no public debate about the expanding use of unmanned drone aircraft as killing machines – not domestically, at least. In the places where drone attacks are taking place, there has understandably been great uproar. And in the rest of the world, questions are being raised about the legal and ethical basis for these antiseptic missile strikes.

David Swanson: Memoirs of Torturers

On September 18, 2009, seven former heads of the CIA publicly told President Barack Obama not to prosecute CIA torturers. On April 16, 2009, Obama had already publicly told Attorney General Eric Holder not to prosecute CIA torturers. On September 18th, Holder publicly reassured the CIA.

The coast was clear. The books started flowing. George W. Bush and John Yoo put their books out in 2010, Donald Rumsfeld in 2011, and Dick Cheney’s also later this summer.

Just as the torture techniques drifted down the chain of command from these dealers in death to the rank and file, so too the book contracts. The cogs in the machine are now documenting their bit parts in the past decade’s torture epidemic with pride and publishing deals.

Dave Johnson: The Not-So-Loyal Opposition

In the debt-ceiling debate Republicans are holding the country hostage again, demanding that the country shift to a radical pro-big-corporate/big-wealth agenda as the ransom. At the same time the Tea Partiers say don’t raise the debt limit, period, and let the country default, hoping that out of the resulting chaos and desperation they can rebuild the economy in an Ayn Randian, rule-by-the-rich vision.

Either way, this is a radical, unprecedented attempt to redefine our form of government, largely privatizing for a few the wealth of We, the People while stifling our voice. If we give in to this extremist vision of cut and gut, America will lose the engine that made us prosperous.

Jul 03 2011

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”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: This week a special rountable discussion about the Constitution with George Will, Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard University and Time magazine editor-in-chief Richard Stengel.

Immigration will be the topic of the second rountable with former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a first-generation American, former Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., who immigrated from Cuba as a boy, and Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the Washington Post.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: This week’s guests are Governor Deval Patrick (D-MA), Governor John Kasich (R-OH), Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who will disuss their views of what’s wrong with Washington.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Dan Rather HDNet Global Correspondent, Katy Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst and John Harris, Politico Editor-in-Chief who will discuss: How new media have affected modern politics and new media’s upsides

Meet the Press with David Gregory: We are spared Mr. Gregory this week. Instead you can watch the Men’s Final at Wimbledon

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Guests Steve Case, AOL co-founder and Chair of the White House Startup America Partnership, Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Harlem Children’s Zone CEO Geoffrey Canada, personal finance expert Suze Orman and entrepreneur Russell Simmons to discuss making it in America.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Fareed will have an exclusive interview with National Security Advisor, Tom Donilon.

New York Times Editorial: Unfinished Business: The Defense of Marriage Act

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.

Jul 02 2011

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”.

Dean Baker Deficit Talk Distracts, Employment Works

How to Make Short Work of Unemployment

Washington always does a superb job of focusing intently on problems that are of little importance. The current, end-of-the-world debt/deficit negotiations is a great case in point. President Obama and the Republican congressional leadership are heatedly negotiating a deal on the deficit that has almost nothing to do with the country’s real economic problem: mass unemployment.

The whole effort is a ridiculous charade that is intended to fix a problem that does not exist. There is no story of runaway spending or deficits, as everyone who has ever looked at the budget numbers knows. The deficit exploded, beginning in 2008, because the economy collapsed: end of story. Anyone who says otherwise either has never looked at the budget or is not being honest.

Charles Davis: Obama Loses His ‘Constitutional Law Professor Hat’

As a candidate for president, Barack Obama was a Distinguished Constitutional Scholar. As a president waging an illegal war, he’s just some guy who, gosh, isn’t really in a position to talk about that complex document he took an oath to uphold and defend.

At a press conference this week, NBC correspondent Chuck Todd — presumably under strict orders not to ask about Newsweek’sPrincess Di cover — questioned the erstwhile legal scholar about whether he felt the War Powers Resolution, which forbids the president from deploying troops without congressional consent except in cases of imminent danger to national security, and even then for only 60 days, passed constitutional muster.

Well, the president replied, “I’m not a Supreme Court justice, so I’m not — I’m not going to put my constitutional law professor hat on here.” And so he didn’t, declaring it irrelevant — “I don’t even have to get to the constitutional question” — as he was already abiding by the law in question, rejecting the claim his actions “in any way violate the War Powers Resolution.”

John Nichols: Medicare’s Still Delivering After 45 Years; The Only Serious Threat to Its Future is Paul Ryan

Forty-five years ago this week, the first Medicare checks were delivered, and the United States made a great leap forward.

Before Medicare was implemented – as a social-welfare program designed not just to deliver care but to poverty — one in five Americans lived below the poverty line.

After the program was implemented, and after related “War on Poverty” initiatives were developed, that number was cut almost in half. Poverty among seniors dropped by two thirds.

Why? Before Medicare, millions of elderly Americans could not afford to buy health care. They did not have access even to basic care. When they needed treatment for the inevitable ailments that are associated with aging, they and their families spent down what meager savings that retained and a stumble into poverty soon followed.

Allison Kilkenney: Budget Nightmares: Government Shutdowns, Slashed Tax Credits

Protesters flooded Minnesota’s Capitol grounds yesterday on the eve of a government shutdown in response to tense budget negotiations. The governor and Republicans must close a $5 billion gap for the next two-year budget cycle, but legislators are torn over how to accomplish that goal.

Though government officials and Governor Mark Dayton have kept the details of the negotiations largely secret, Minnesotans were quite vocal in their demands. Activists stated that they’re open to compromise, but don’t think the burden of the state’s budget woes should be dumped exclusively upon the shoulders of the poor.

Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap : Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction

In the year and a half since the Citizens United decision, Americans from all walks of life have become concerned about corporate dominance of our government and our society as a whole. In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court (in an act of outrageous “judicial activism) gutted existing campaign finance laws by ruling that corporations, wealthy individuals, and other entities can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.

Throughout the country people have responded by organizing against “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings.

The movement is flowering not in the halls of Congress, but at the local level, where all real social movements start. Every day Americans experience the devastation caused by unaccountable corporations. Thanks to the hard work of local organizers, Boulder, CO could become the next community to officially join this growing effort. Councilmember Macon Cowles is proposing to place a measure on the November ballot, giving Boulder voters the opportunity to support an amendment to the U. S. Constitution abolishing corporate personhood and declaring that money is not speech.

Michelle Chen: Pesticides and Farm Labor Yield a Bitter Harvest

Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto of card check legislation underscores the priorities of the powerful

Shortly after the group of Mexican “guestworkers” arrived at a Tennessee tomato farm, they realized that their job was killing them, literally. In addition to being crowded into filthy trailers with no source of clean water, they and their living quarters were regularly showered with poison. Despite requirements for protective equipment, they had to go into the fields while exposed to pesticides. Risking abuse and retaliation for challenging their boss, some tried to use cellphones to record the spraying. In the end, they got their evidence, but then got fired.

The workers’ struggle, which led to a lawsuit filed earlier this year, illustrates all the paradoxes of America’s natural bounty. No form of labor is more ingrained in humanity than farm work, but the people who grow our food are being eaten alive every day by the toxins of modern industrial farming. Though consumers are more anxious than ever these days about the effects of pesticides on the food we eat, they seldom consider the health hazards facing the workers who feed our consumption. Yet the further you get up the production chain, the greater the danger.

Maura Stephens: Gov. Cuomo: Do Not Lift Fracking Moratorium

Urgent Open Letter to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo: Do Not Lift Fracking Moratorium

Dear Governor Cuomo,

We just got word that you’re about to lift the fracking moratorium in the New York City and Syracuse watersheds. I’m almost apoplectic from shock, anger, grief, and terror.

A former farmer and trained environmentalist, researcher, and independent journalist, I have spent much of the last three years learning and writing about fracking. I am a cofounder of the Coalition to Protect New York, among other actively engaged organizations working to ban fracking in our state and elsewhere.

We do not trust the Department of Environmental Conservation to get things right on fracking. Even if it were a reliable and trustworthy agency, the DEC’s budget has been cut so drastically and its workforce decimated to the point that it’s virtually hamstrung.

Jul 02 2011

Countdown with Keith Olbermann

If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:

Watch live video from CURRENT TV LIVE Countdown Olbermann on www.justin.tv

Jul 01 2011

New Deadline For Debt Ceiling Bill: July 22

The White House is now saying that Congress must pass a bill by July 22 in order for the government not to default on its debt.

The Obama administration believes congressional leaders must agree to a deficit-reduction deal by July 22 in order to raise the government’s borrowing limit in time to avoid a default in early August, according to Democratic officials with knowledge of the negotiations.

The government needs a week or two to write and pass the necessary legislation and take the steps necessary to avoid missing a payment. “We’re down to the wire,” one official said.

Brain Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports Sen. Charles Schhumer (D-NY), in an telephone interview with reporters, said that while the Constitutional option is worth exploring, he thinks “it needs a little more exploration and study. It’s probably not right to pursue at this point and you wouldn’t want to go ahead and issue the debt and then have the courts reverse it.”

Legal scholars and other Democratic Senators have been taking a very close look at the 14th Amendment clause that forbids Congress from defaulting on US debt.

Republican economist Bruce Bartlett, who believes that the Republicans are playing with “the financial equivalent of nuclear weapons”, argues that Section 4 renders the debt ceiling unconstitutional, and obligates the President to consider the debt ceiling null and void.

If the Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling and the government stops paying its obligations, the first people who should not get paid is Congress.

Jul 01 2011

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”.

Paul Krugman: To the Limit

In about a month, if nothing is done, the federal government will hit its legal debt limit. There will be dire consequences if this limit isn’t raised. At best, we’ll suffer an economic slowdown; at worst we’ll plunge back into the depths of the 2008-9 financial crisis.

So is a failure to raise the debt ceiling unthinkable? Not at all.

Many commentators remain complacent about the debt ceiling; the very gravity of the consequences if the ceiling isn’t raised, they say, ensures that in the end politicians will do what must be done. But this complacency misses two important facts about the situation: the extremism of the modern G.O.P., and the urgent need for President Obama to draw a line in the sand against further extortion.

Eugene Robinson: Our Robotic Assassins

The skies over at least six countries are patrolled by robotic aircraft, operated by the U.S. military or the CIA, that fire missiles to carry out targeted assassinations. I am convinced that this method of waging war is cost-effective but not that it is moral.

There has been virtually no public debate about the expanding use of unmanned drone aircraft as killing machines-not domestically, at least. In the places where drone attacks are taking place, there has understandably been great uproar. And in the rest of the world, questions are being raised about the legal and ethical basis for these antiseptic missile strikes.

New York Times EDitorial: Ethics, Politics and the Law

The ethical judgments of the Supreme Court justices became an important issue in the just completed term. The court cannot maintain its legitimacy as guardian of the rule of law when justices behave like politicians. Yet, in several instances, justices acted in ways that weakened the court’s reputation for being independent and impartial.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr., for example, appeared at political events. That kind of activity makes it less likely that the court’s decisions will be accepted as nonpartisan judgments. Part of the problem is that the justices are not bound by an ethics code. At the very least, the court should make itself subject to the code of conduct that applies to the rest of the federal judiciary.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Defending the Supremely Powerful

The United States Supreme Court now sees its central task as comforting the already comfortable and afflicting those already afflicted.

If you are a large corporation or a political candidate backed by lots of private money, be assured that the court’s conservative majority will be there for you, solicitous of your needs and ready to swat away those pesky little people who dare to contest your power.

This court has created rules that will have the effect of declaring some corporations too big to be challenged through class actions, as AT&T consumers and female employees at Wal-Mart discovered.

David Sirota: Shining the Spotlight on the Corporate Pay Gap

We’ve long known that executive pay has skyrocketed during the last 40 years-and especially during the last 20. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the average CEO makes roughly 300 times the average worker-up from 100 times the average in the early 1990s and 40 times the average in the 1970s. In this new Gilded Age, we are inundated with stories about how executives-even in taxpayer-subsidized industries like banking-are paying themselves record salaries. This is nothing new-in fact, it’s lately been a bragging point for firms in their efforts to attract talent.

So, then, why is Corporate America suddenly so shy about compensation rates?

Joe Conason: Four Trillion for War-and Rising

Anyone paying attention to the costs of U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan must have known that the president badly underestimated those numbers on June 22, when he told the nation that we have spent “a trillion dollars” waging war over the past decade. For well over two years, we have known that the total monetary cost of those wars will eventually amount to well over $2 trillion, and might well rise higher, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and his associate Linda Bilmes.

What we didn’t know until this week is that the expense in constant dollars-leaving aside the horrific price paid by the dead, wounded, displaced and ruined in every country-will likely reach well over $4.4 trillion.

Jul 01 2011

Obama’s DOJ Still Covering Up War Crimes

Last week during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Gen. David Petraeus held that the US should keep the door open for torture. This week the Obama Justice Department determined that only two detainee deaths under investigation by specially appointed prosecutor, John H. Durham would warrant any further action:

The Justice Department announced Thursday that it was opening a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two terrorism suspects in C.I.A. custody overseas, but it was closing inquiries into the treatment of nearly 100 other detainees over the last decade.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that a two-year review by a specially appointed prosecutor, John H. Durham, had determined that any further investigation into that large group of cases “is not warranted.” The inquiry into the two deaths, though, could result in criminal charges against Central Intelligence Agency officers or contractors.

Intelligence officials saw the announcement as a vindication of sorts.

The stench of hypocrisy of President Obama is hard to ignore. His “looking forward” stand does not wash in the International courts nor does making flowery statements on International Torture Day when he is covering up the Bush regime and CIA war crimes:

As we mark the anniversary of the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture, I join people around the world in honoring the victims of torture, paying tribute to all those who are courageously working to eradicate these inhuman practices from our world, and reaffirming the commitment of the United States to achieving this important goal. . . . .

As a nation that played a leading role in the effort to bring this treaty into force, the United States will remain a leader in the effort to end torture around the world and to address the needs of torture victims.

That’s not just hypocrisy, it an outrageous lie. Since his election, Obama has made it clear that he would cover any and all crimes committed by the previous administration and since his inauguration has embraced and expanded some of those very same policies.

From Glenn Greenwald, it is now official, “torture crimes are now officially covered up”:

In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House —announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution:  (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., “good-faith” torturers).  The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a “preliminary review” to determine if a full investigation was warranted — in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.

It is very clear that those who ordered the use of torture will not be held accountable and with the appointment of Gen. Petraeus as director of the CIA, it will most likely continue under the Obama administration. Under the Nuremberg Principles and the UN Convention Against Torture, Mr. Obama could be prosecuted for war crimes and crmes against humanity.

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