Tag: TMC Politics

May 16 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”.

Nicholas D. Kristoff: What Holbrooke Knew

When he was alive, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was effectively gagged, unable to comment on what he saw as missteps of the Obama administration that he served. But as we face a crisis in Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden, it’s worth listening to Holbrooke’s counsel – from beyond the grave.

As one of America’s finest strategic thinkers and special envoy to the Af-Pak region, Holbrooke represented the administration – but also chafed at aspects of the White House approach. In particular, he winced at the overreliance on military force, for it reminded him of Vietnam.

“There are structural similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam,” he noted, in scattered reflections now in the hands of his widow, Kati Marton.

“He thought that this could become Obama’s Vietnam,” Marton recalled. “Some of the conversations in the Situation Room reminded him of conversations in the Johnson White House. When he raised that, Obama didn’t want to hear it.”

E. J. Dionne Jr.: Lincoln would weep at the GOP’s 2012 field

Republicans are unhappy with their field of presidential candidates and yearn for someone who will come along to save them. But here’s what the GOP doesn’t want to confront: its problem lies not in its candidates but in itself.

The candidates appear much smaller than they are because the party’s primary voters and core interest groups insist upon cutting them down to size. To win a Republican nomination, a candidate has to move right, recant absolutely any past position that violates the current conservative catechism and never dare to speak the truth that solving our deficit problem will require new revenue – a.k.a. taxes.

Robert Kuttner: Strauss-Kahn and the European Left

Paris — The apparent self-destruction of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a New York hotel is emblematic of a European left that has ceased to be much of a progressive alternative, either in terms of lifestyle or policy alternatives. Strauss-Kahn was the Socialist front-runner to challenge French President Nicolas Sarkozy next year. Polls showed that Strauss-Kahn was the only socialist who could beat both Sarkozy and far right populist Marine Le Pen.

But even before this latest scandal broke, Strauss-Kahn didn’t seem like much of a socialist. Last week, the press caught DSK, as the local press calls him, and his wife tooling around in a borrowed $150,000 Porsche, which reinforced his image as wealthy playboy. In 2008, Strauss-Kahn barely survived a widely publicized affair with one of his IMF employees.

Bruce A. Dixon: The Black President and the Brown Vote

Can Barack Obama be re-elected without the overwhelming majorities he received in Latino communities across the country? The short answer is probably not. Detentions, deportations, raids, profiling and mass roundups of immigrants are at an all time high. The border wall that Obama originally campaigned against has been built with his endorsement, and generous federal contracts to jail detained immigrants have rescued the private prison industry. What happened, Latino activists are asking, to the president’s commitments to fairness, human rights and a path to citizenship? And what will happen to the Latino vote in 2012?

New York Times Editorial: Going Back on the Deal

Last year, Republicans refused to renew unemployment benefits unless the high-end Bush-era tax cuts were preserved. After the White House agreed to keep the tax cuts through 2012, they agreed to extend federal jobless benefits through 2011. Now, they want to renege.

The House Ways and Means Committee, on a strict Republican vote, recently passed a bill to let states use federal jobless money for other purposes, including tax cuts for business. This is a very bad idea at a time when the national jobless rate is 9 percent, and higher than that in 22 states. The $31 billion in yet to be paid federal benefits is desperately needed.

Amanda Marcotte: Men’s Health Cover Flashing GOP Congressman’s Tight Abs Reveals How Conservatives Worship a Cartoonish Hyper-Masculinity

Republicans fear that if they aren’t constantly shoring up masculinity and attacking the feminine, they might grow soft. This has dangerous effects.

At first, the June cover of Men’s Health seems par for the course for a magazine that aims to stoke male anxieties about physical perfection to sell products to men the same way that the beauty industry has done to women for decades: a half-naked man in ridiculously good shape, staring at the camera with eyes that dare you to look with awe, envy, and not just a little sexual interest. But if you look at the headline, the image becomes shocking. The man with the sort of abs that The Situation would kill for isn’t just some male model or athlete, but a Republican congressman from Illinois, Aaron Schock.

It’s a choice that suggests that the congressman intends to live up to his name. It seems incongruous for him to pose half-naked – not just because of his office, but because of his track record as an outspoken opponent of gay rights and an enemy of sexual liberation who voted to defund Planned Parenthood. Schock is constantly beating back Beltway rumours that he’s gay that spring up every time he shows up half-naked in public or wears turquoise belts with white jeans, a situation that would cause most people to rethink behaving in ways commonly associated with homoeroticism in public spaces.

May 15 2011

Poor Goldman Sachs, Those Laws Are Just Too Confusing

Poor Goldman Sachs. According to Megan McArdle, one of the Atlantic Monthly’s Wall St apologists, argued on CNN’s Your Money in a debate with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi that the laws were too confusing and it would be too hard to figure out ig they did anything wrong. While conversely,  she insinuates that those who the toxic assets were sold to should have known what they were buying. Let’s blame the victims.  Megan even admits that she hasn’t read all the documents while Taibbi has. How does Megan have any credibility on this is beyond comprehension. Here are some of the “high” points from the transcript of the video:

MCARDLE: What we have to do is disclose. It’s perfectly legal for a dealership to sell me a car I’m not going to like or that’s too expensive for me. It’s not legal for them to sell me a car that’s not what they represented it as.

And we set certain legal minimum standards and that’s what happened here. At least, John Losera and all the devils who are here argues that he actually has gone through these documents and says that a lot of these things were disclosed. That in fact Goldman laid out in very lengthy detail all of the ways in which this could go wrong. I haven’t read the disclosure documents personally.

TAIBBI: I have.

MCARDLE: There are two competing versions of the story.

VELSHI: Matt, you’ve read them?

TAIBBI: Well, I’ve read all the documents in this report and I’ve also talked to some of the principals in this entire story. I definitely know some of the client that is Goldman was talking about were completely blindsided by the fact that, for instance.

They were buying assets out of Goldman’s own book when they were told that Goldman was buying these assets off the street. They definitely did not make key disclosures that they were legally obligated to make.

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

By Matt Taibbi

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

What’s so hard to fathom, Megan? They committed fraud and then lied about the fraud. Lloyd Blenkenfein isn’t too big for a cell next to Bernie Madoff. The Justice Department and Eric Holder needs to get its act together.

May 15 2011

Obama Misses the Point, Caves to Drill, Baby, Drill

President Obama in his Saturday address to the nation, announced another cave to the right

. . the administration would begin to hold annual auctions for oil and gas leases in the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, a 23-million-acre tract on the North Slope of Alaska.

. . accelerate a review of the potential environmental impact of drilling off the southern and central Atlantic coast and will consider making some areas available for exploration. The move is a change from current policy, which puts the entire Atlantic Seaboard off limits to drilling until at least 2018.

. . provide incentives for oil companies to more quickly exploit leases they already hold. Tens of millions of acres onshore and offshore are under lease but have not been developed.

Not one of these actions will lower the price of gas at the pump or create jobs or cure our dependency on foreign oil, most of which comes from our northern neighbor, Canada. The cost of gas at the pumps is under direct control of the oil companies that are still being subsidized by tax payers even as they rake in billions in profits and use tax loop holes to pay no US taxes, instead they are receiving refunds. Crude oil prices are manipulated by speculation on the open market with little regulatory control by the government or the SEC. That so-called “revolutionary” Financial Regulation Bill is a sham. Just look at rising banking fees and your credit card bill, look at your shrinking pay check and the rise in cost of food, clothing and health care. I suggest you have a bucket handy.

Yes, tax payers are angry about the price of gas but we are also opposed to more drilling for limited resources that will not solve the immediate problem. Long term, we need to be investing in green energy, renewable solutions not investing in the oil companies. Short term, rein in the oil companies and speculators.

Americans are angry at the President for not regulating the speculators and oil companies. Americans are angry at for gouging at the pump.

Asked who is to blame, most Americans point to speculators and oil companies for the recent increase in gas prices, and three-quarters say that oil companies profits are too high.

Sixty-one percent of respondents say oil companies deserve a great deal of blame for prices, while 27% say they deserve some blame. Oil speculators also figure prominently in the blame game, with 59% saying they deserve a great deal of blame, while 31% say they deserve some blame.

Americans are angry with President Obama because again caves to the right and corporatists while ignoring what the American people are telling him and congress. Ignore us at your peril.

May 15 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: Ms. Amanpour has an exclusive interview with South Carolina’s Republican Tea Bag governor, Nikki Haley.

Need I say more?

On a more serious topic, the economy, she talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair, Former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman and former Congressional Budget Office Director and McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin about the battle over taxes and government spending.

Top foreign policy voices Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution and Anthony Shadid of The New York Times weigh in on the turbulent Arab spring.

The round table with the usual right wing suspects, George Will, Cokie Roberts and ABC News Political Director Amy Walter

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) discusses his plans to address the debt limit.

Plus: More from the CBS News Town Hall with President Obama on the Economy

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent, Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post Senior Political Editor, Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor and Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent. They will bat these questions around:

Which leading GOP candidate has the political chops to conquer his flaw?

Is the cost of a college education still worth the price?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Republican Presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich will be giving an exclusive interview.

The rountable guests Columnist for the Washington Post, EJ Dionne; columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan; senior political analyst for Time Magazine, Mark Halperin;  White House Correspondent for the New York Times, Helene Cooper;  and chief political writer for the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai.

The NYT’s really scraped the bottom with right winger Bai

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: The human hybrid turtle, talks = on raising the debt ceiling, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded spending cuts and changes to Medicare and Medicaid as part of the deal. Also, Rep, Paul Ryan (R_WI) will spread more of his toxic economic budget nonsense.

Former Clinton senior adviser and spokesman Joe Lockhart and former Bush strategy and policy adviser Michael Gerson will discuss the GOP presidential race.

Adm. Dennis Blair (Ret.) and Amb. John Negroponte will discuss Adm. Dennis Blair (Ret.) and Amb. John Negroponte.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Condoleezza Rice and Eric Schmidt join Fareed to argue the consequences of L’Affaire de bin Laden.

David Cay Johnston: Ryan’s $34 Trillion Tax Folly

If repairing your car cost 18 percent of your income, would you buy a new car? Of course you would.

Now imagine that your mechanic tried to persuade you to keep the jalopy with a clever tax argument: The costs of your annual car tax and registration would decline over time, saving you money. Keep the car long enough and you would save a third of a year’s income just in taxes.

That sounds appealing, unless you stop to think about how much more you would pay for repairs as your vehicle ages and breaks down ever more often.

Now imagine that your mechanic’s savings estimate relied on data that could be analyzed to determine how much of your tax savings would be offset by higher repair costs, but he did not give you those figures. So you do the analysis and find out that for every dollar of tax you save, you would spend $5 to $8 on repairs.

How would you react? Would you laugh out loud at your mechanic? Or get mad? Or walk away in disgust at his lack of candor? Would you not only buy a new car, but also look for a trustworthy mechanic?

This analogy describes the “roadmap” for future taxes and spending on Medicare being marketed by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Ryan is touting his plan to replace Medicare, the universal healthcare plan for older Americans, with a form of defined contribution plan. Ryan would replace universal care with a subsidy for older Americans to pay for health insurance in the private marketplace.

Robert Fisk: Why No Outcry over These Torturing Tyrants?

Christopher Hill, a former US secretary of state for east Asia who was ambassador to Iraq – and usually a very obedient and un-eloquent American diplomat – wrote the other day that “the notion that a dictator can claim the sovereign right to abuse his people has become unacceptable”.

Unless, of course – and Mr Hill did not mention this – you happen to live in Bahrain. On this tiny island, a Sunni monarchy, the al-Khalifas, rule a majority Shia population and have responded to democratic protests with death sentences, mass arrests, the imprisonment of doctors for letting patients die after protests and an “invitation” to Saudi forces to enter the country. They have also destroyed dozens of Shia mosques with all the thoroughness of a 9/11 pilot. But then, let’s remember that most of the 9/11 killers were indeed Saudis.

Ralph Nader: End the Land Mine Plague

Everyday around the world innocent people, many of them children, are killed or injured by millions of unexploded land mines and cluster bombs. Some of the cluster bomblets look like candy or a toy which attract a child in a field, orchard, schoolyard or by the roadside.

Powerful aggressor nations are responsible for most of these anti-personal weapons being laid from land or by air. Most recently, Libya’s rulers laid mines on the outskirts of Ajdabiya as part of its battle against the resistance.

In 2006, Israel laid huge numbers of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon each of which contains lethal bomblets. For many months after the ceasefire, the United Nations could not get Israel, to provide its cluster bomb algorithms to UN experts so they could safely neutralize these heinous weapons. In that period many Lebanese, adults and children, became cluster bomb casualties. (Visit http://www.atfl.org and see the Cluster Bomb Victims photo gallery.)

Rania Khalek: In America, Being Poor is a Criminal Offense

It takes a special kind of bully to target the most vulnerable and neediest families in society, which millionaire politicians like to argue are draining America’s treasury.  I am referring to Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), who recently introduced a bill that would require states to implement drug testing of applicants for and recipients of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.  This is reminiscent of Sen. Orrin Hatch’s (R-UT) failed legislation last summer to drug test the unemployed and those receiving other forms of government cash assistance, which ultimately died in the Senate.  So far, Boustany’s proposal is following the same fate as Hatch’s, but around the country states are taking matters into their own hands.

In at least 30 state Legislatures across America, predominately wealthy politicians are quite impressed with themselves for considering bills that would limit the meager amount of state help given to needy families struggling to make ends meet.  Many have proposed drug testing with some even extending it to recipients of other public benefits as well, such as unemployment insurance, medical assistance, and food assistance, in an attempt to add more obstacles to families’ access to desperately needed aid.

Art Levine: GOP-Style Democrats Slash DC Budget: Homeless, Poor Children at Risk

Except for white Republicans in Congress opposed to home rule, few people outside of Washington, DC – and even some white liberals who live in the District – bother to pay much attention to Washington’s local political battles.

But that changed briefly last month, when Mayor Vincent Gray and six members of the city council were arrested in high-profile protests against a Republican-driven federal budget deal that prevents the city from spending its own funds on abortions for low-income women. Congress has traditionally had authority over the Democratic-run District’s budget, but rarely directly interferes in spending. “Why are we the sacrificial lamb?” Gray had asked. Progressive media outlets praised Gray for seeming to stand up to Republicans and their distorted budget priorities.

Yet Mayor Gray and much of the rest of the city council are moving on their own to make the city’s disabled, youngest and neediest citizens the sacrificial lambs of the proposed new city budget, with two-thirds of the cuts targeting the poor. It’s yet another troubling sign of the rightward shift of state and national Democratic Party leaders. It’s a trend that can be seen everywhere, from Democratic legislators in Massachusetts voting to strip public employee unions of the right to bargain collectively to national Democrats meekly accepting GOP messaging on deficit cuts and tax breaks for the rich. Here in Washington, city services are already so strained before the proposed cuts that even families with young children seeking emergency shelter are routinely turned away, and, instead, are often given bus tokens to ride the buses all night with their toddlers and infants.

May 15 2011

If Only Ensign Had Listened

Just last month, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) resigned from the Senate after having decided that he would not run for re-election in 2012. Under investigation of the Senate ethics committee for charges stemming from an extramarital affair that led to bribery and FEC violations, Ensign made the announcement to resign May 3. The ethics committee released its report and has referred the case to the Justice Department

Tom Coburn Helped Cover Up John Ensign Affair: Senate Ethics Report

John Ensign Lied To FEC, Violated Campaign Finance Laws, Obstructed Investigation: Senate Ethics Panel

Panel Says Senator Was Warned on Illegality of Act

As Gaius Publius at AMERICAblog says,

Senate ethics complaints almost never come down to a resignation; it’s a ruler to the wrist and they move on.

It seems that John Ensign is the exception. If what Rachel Maddow says in the following report is true, this is a genuinely horrible human being, a sorry specimen – and not in a good way, since he’s apparently not sorry at all. Be prepared to be appalled.

A terrible human being. How did you fail thee? Let me count the ways. The horrid story starts at 5:05 in the clip. First it’s lurid, then turns cruel, then criminal.

Ensign couldn’t keep his pants on and figured he could buy his way out of the hole he had dug himself. Now he has ruined the lives of two families and stands to be indicted. Let’s see what transpires regarding Sen. Tom Coburn’s involvement and facilitation of this sordid C Street debacle.

May 14 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”.

Charles M. Blow: H.I.V. S O S

That’s the way scientists describe a striking and incredibly encouraging new finding of a large clinical trial released on Thursday that found that H.I.V.-infected people who took antiretroviral drugs were 96 percent less likely to pass on the disease than those who didn’t.

This is an extraordinary finding, coming in the year of the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic in America.

This now shines a harsh light on the cruelty-creep and passion-drift by federal and state governments whose lack of financing and fealty in the fight against AIDS has had the effect of either starving or restricting support, services and prevention efforts for people with H.I.V. and those at risk of contracting it.

Glen Greenwald: The Bin Laden Dividend

Numerous people have argued that one potential benefit from the death of Osama bin Laden is that it will enable the U.S. Government to diminish its war commitments in that part of the world and finally arrest the steady erosion of civil liberties perpetrated in the name of the War on Terror (as though any of that is the government’s goal).  By contrast, I’ve argued from the start that the bin Laden killing is likely to change nothing of any significance, except that — if anything — the resulting nationalistic pride, the vicarious sensations of power and strength, the substantial political benefits for the President, and the renewed faith in military force would be more likely to intensify rather than arrest these trends.  But that was definitely a minority opinion.

As but one example, this person (cheered on by Democratic Party commentators) — aside from falsely attributing to me numerous statements I never made, and thereafter refusing to post my response in the comment section — chided me for failing to realize that “Bin Laden’s death also makes things like closing the gulag at Guantanamo Bay seem likelier and more possible” and that it also “marks what could be the beginning of the end of many of the evils that Glenn Greenwald has consistently written about over the past decade, the opportunity to reassert the principles he determinedly wants to defend.” Andrew Sullivan argued that, in the wake of the bin Laden killing, “Obama will have the leverage to shift strategy drastically [in Afghanistan] in the coming year” and that the “average American” will conclude that “it is time to leave. With our heads high. And justice done.”  Numerous commenters and others have similarly insisted that bin Laden’s death will spawn reversals in America’s War on Terror policies over the last decade.

David Sirota: Has America Become a Nation of Cowards?

If the mission to neutralize Osama bin Laden were a blockbuster movie, the screen would have almost certainly faded to black as soon as the accused terrorist’s death was announced. No doubt, the credits would roll to Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and then a big “The End” would appear.

Alas, real life is not one of Hollywood’s many Pentagon-sponsored flicks — and as hard as President Obama tried to portray last week’s events as proof “that America can do whatever we set our mind to,” the mission and its cloudy aftermath have raised troubling questions about the “whatever” part.

Eugen Robinson: The Death of the bin Laden Myth

Years from now, I believe, we will look back and say the elimination of Osama bin Laden changed everything. To borrow Churchill’s assessment of the Nazi defeat at El Alamein, “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Attempted terrorist attacks in the name of fundamentalist Islam will surely continue. Most will be amateurish failures, such as the alleged plot disclosed Thursday in which two homegrown would-be jihadists-now in the custody of New York City police-ineffectually aspired to blow up a synagogue. Tragically, we are bound to see attacks by genuine terrorists as well. Some may succeed.

Still, it’s hard to overstate the significance of bin Laden’s killing. Operationally and psychologically, he defined the Age of Terror-not just for Americans and other targets of his depredations but also for the terrorists who followed his writ. With his last breath, an era died.

John Nichols: The Post-Wisconsin Game Plan

Mary Kay Henry had just spent a day talking with many of the thousands of Wisconsinites who had packed the State Capitol in Madison for the February protests against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s proposals to scrap collective bargaining rights and slash funding for public education and services. Now, as she waited in a legislative hearing room that had been turned into a makeshift studio for a Pennsylvania labor radio show, the new president of the 2.2 million-member Service Employees International Union was marveling at what she had seen. “It’s inspiring, so inspiring, but we have to pay attention to what’s happening here,” she said, in a calm, thoughtful voice. “We’ve got to take this national, and we’ve got to keep the spirit, the energy. We’ve got to do it right.”

Henry was not just speaking in the excitement of the moment. Even before the Wisconsin uprising and ensuing demonstrations in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Maine, SEIU had been drawing the outlines of a Fight for a Fair Economy campaign that would use the resources of the union to mobilize low-wage workers-be they union members or not-into a movement aimed at transforming a national debate that has been defined by conservative talking points and ginned-up Tea Party “populism.” After the frustrating experience of trying to get the Employee Free Choice Act through a supposedly friendly Congress in the first two years of President Obama’s administration, Henry and a growing number of labor leaders are coming to recognize that simply electing Democrats is not enough. A memo that circulated in January among members of the union’s executive board declared, “We can’t spark an organizing surge without changing the environment, so that workers see unions not as self-interested institutions but as vehicles through which they can collectively stand up for a more fair economy.”

Davis Swanson: Afghanistan: War Without End?

Obama promised no open-ended occupation – and to draw down forces from July. A 2.5% cut is hardly an encouraging start

Afghanistan was supposed to be the campaign promise that President Barack Obama actually kept. He said he would escalate that war, and sure enough he did. Is he now going back on promises he’s made as president, by proposing to withdraw 2.5% of US forces in July?

Here are the relevant promises:

   “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home … [O]ur troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” – President Barack Obama, 1 December 2009

   “I’m confident that the withdrawal will be significant. People will say this is a real process of transition; this is not just a token gesture.” – President Barack Obama, 15 April 2011

   “In July of 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out, bet on it.” – Vice President Joe Biden, quoted in Jonathan Alter’s The Promise

But let’s first review how we got here. When loyal Democrats heard candidate Obama say he would escalate the war as president, they mistakenly understood him to say he would end it. Progressive bloggers have planned a panel for next month to discuss their disappointment with this “broken promise” that was actually kept.

May 13 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”.

John Nichols: House Republicans Shred Constitution With Backdoor Proposal of Permanent War

House Speaker John Boehner, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Tea Party, and their circle even attempted — in unsettlingly bumbling manner — to read the document into the Congressional Record at the opening of the current Congress.

Now, however, with a backdoor plan to commit the United States to a course of permanent warmaking, they are affronting the most basic premises of a Constitution that requires congressional declarations of all wars and direct and engaged oversight of military missions.

The House Republican leadership, working in conjunction with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-California, has included in the 2012 defense authorization bill language (borrowed from the sweeping Detainee Security Act) that would effectively declare a state of permanent war against unnamed and ill-defined foreign forces “associated” with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney: Dear GOP: We Don’t Negotiate With Hostage Takers

Last week, 44 Republican Senators signed a letter to President Obama declaring that they will refuse to confirm anyone as a director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) “absent structural changes that will make the Bureau accountable to the American people.”

The changes they propose — which match legislation being considered today by the full House Financial Services Committee– would cripple the bureau and slow the reforms necessary to help avoid another financial crisis.

In other words, Senate Republicans have the CFPB, and if we ever want to see it alive, we have to meet their demands.

My good friend and colleague Barney Frank called this “the worst abuse of the confirmation process I’ve ever seen” and I couldn’t agree more.

Richard (RJ) Escow: To Learn the Game, the Left Could Use a “Weekend at Bernie’s”

Bernie Sanders may represent Vermont and have a New York accent, but right now he looks a little like a Texas Ranger. The motto for those Lone Star State lawmen — “One Riot, One Ranger” — comes from their legendary ability to face down a hostile crowd single-handed. Bernie just faced down something that may be even scarier that rioting cowboys in the Panhandle: a powerful Democratic chairman and his entire Committee.

Sen. Sanders isn’t a Democrat (he’s an Independent socialist who caucuses with them), but he has a lot to teach progressives inside and out the party about how to stand up for what’s right: Detach from party leaders, hang tough, and be prepared to walk away if you can’t negotiate something reasonable. He’s fighting for better policies — and ones that the public strongly supports. (Our American Majority project has more details.)

Let’s hope they’re paying attention across the country — and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ruth Marcus: Boehner’s Unreality Check Boehner’s Unreality Check

Washington – The news out of House Speaker John Boehner’s speech to the New York Economic Club was his demand for “cuts of trillions, not just billions” before the debt ceiling can be raised. Not just broad deficit-reduction targets, the Ohio Republican insisted, but “actual cuts and program reforms.”

That’s alarming enough. It is all but impossible to get this done in the available time. It certainly can’t be accomplished on Boehner’s unbending, no-new-taxes terms. And if the speaker truly believes that it would be “more irresponsible” to raise the debt ceiling without instituting deficit-reduction measures than not to raise it at all, we’re in a heap of trouble.

Even more alarming, because it has consequences beyond the debt ceiling debate, is the incoherent, impervious-to-facts economic philosophy undergirding Boehner’s remarks.

Gail Collins: Reading, ‘Riting and Revenues

American education is going to be reformed until it rolls over and begs for mercy. Vouchers! Guns on campus! Just the other day, the Florida State Legislature took a giant step toward ending the scourge of droopy drawers in high school by upping the penalties for underwear-exposing pants.

Today, let’s take a look at the privatization craze and the conviction that there is nothing about molding young minds that can’t be improved by the profit motive.

Enrollment in for-profit colleges has ballooned to almost two million, propelled by more than $25 billion in federal student loans, many of which are apparently never going to be repaid. More than 700 public K-12 schools around the country are now managed by for-profit companies. Last week, in Ohio, the State House went for the whole hog and approved legislation that would allow for-profit businesses to open up their own taxpayer-financed charter schools.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.; Will the Courts Wreck Health Care?

As if our political system was not having enough trouble already, we now confront the possibility that a highly partisan judiciary will undo a modest health care reform that is a first step toward resolving a slew of other difficulties.

As you watch the suits against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act work their way through the courts, consider that what you are really seeing is a great republic tying itself into as many knots as possible to avoid facing up to a challenge that every other wealthy capitalist democracy in the world has met.

May 13 2011

John McCain: Torture Doesn’t Work

Torture is a war crime. Water boarding is torture. If you advocate, authorize or perform it on another person, you are breaking not just US law but international law. Period. The President and the DOJ are obligated by law to investigate and prosecute war crimes. Under the law if they do not, they, themselves are complicit. There are no excuses.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who was tortured while a POW in Viet Nam, wrote an editorial in the Washington Post rejecting and chastising those who were making the claim that torture, specifically water boarding, was instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden. He then appeared on the Senate floor ans spoke for 20 minutes.

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden . . . began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed , who broke like dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included water boarding. He loosed a torrent of information – including the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was water boarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led to bin Laden, as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee who was held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were water boarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

Law professor Jonathan Turley appeared on MSNBC’s The Ed Show and addressed this on his blog

Last night on The Ed Show, I discussed the amazing speech and column by Senator John McCain on torture. One of the most notable aspects of the comments was McCain stating that the claim by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey that torture led to the location of Bin Laden is simply untrue and confirmed as false by CIA Director Leon Panetta.

As did Ron Paul in the recent Republican debate, John McCain confronted his colleagues over the effort to redeem torture by claiming that it was beneficial in this case. As he correctly notes, torture is a war crime not because it lacks any benefit in terms of intelligence but because it is immoral . . . . .

To the contrary, McCain points out that the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed resulted in demonstrably “false and misleading information.”

Where I part with McCain is his insistence that, despite it being torture (and thus a war crime), no one should ever be punished for the crimes. It is important to stand for principle but it is even more important to bear the responsibility that comes with principle. It may not be popular or convenient, but we are obligated to investigate and prosecute torture.

Glenn Greenwald is an absolute must read on the Nuremberg Principles:

Benjamin Ferencz is a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he prosecuted numerous Nazi war criminals, including some responsible for the deaths of upward of 100,000 innocent people.  He gave a fascinating (and shockingly articulate) 13-minute interview yesterday to the CBC in Canada about the bin Laden killing, the Nuremberg principles, and the U.S. role in the world.  Without endorsing everything he said, I hope as many people as possible will listen to it.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey then lamely attempted to rebut McCain through an op-ed by former Cheney speech writer, Marc A Thiessen. It does not change the fact that Mukasey, Gonzalez, Bybee, Yoo, et al and now, Holder, have excused, covered up and defended war crimes, thus making them all eligible for cells at the Hague.

May 12 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: The Only Real Solution for Budget Deficits: Job Growth

Scarcely a decade ago, the US was running a budget surplus, with unemployment at 4%. It had little to do with cuts or taxes

People in Washington have incredibly bad memories. The last time that the United States balanced its budget was just a decade ago. Even though this is not distant history, almost no one in a policymaking position or in the media seems able to remember how the United States managed to go from large deficits at the start of the decade to large surpluses at the end of the decade.

There are two often-told tales about the budget surpluses of the late 1990s: a Democratic story and a Republican story. President Clinton is the hero of the Democratic story. In this account, his decision to raise taxes in 1993, along with restraint on spending, was the key to balancing the budget.

The hero in the Republican story is News Gingrich. In this story, the Republican Congress that took power in 1995 demanded serious spending constraints. These constraints were ultimately the main factor in balancing the budget.

Fortunately, we can go behind this “he said/she said” to find the real cause of the switch from large budget deficits to large surpluses. This one is actually easy.

John Nichols: House Republicans Shred Constitution With Backdoor Proposal of Permanent War

House Speaker John Boehner, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Tea Party, and their circle even attempted — in unsettlingly bumbling manner — to read the document into the Congressional Record at the opening of the current Congress.

Now, however, with a backdoor plan to commit the United States to a course of permanent warmaking, they are affronting the most basic premises of a Constitution that requires congressional declarations of all wars and direct and engaged oversight of military missions.

The House Republican leadership, working in conjunction with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-California, has included in the 2012 defense authorization bill language (borrowed from the sweeping Detainee Security Act) that would effectively declare a state of permanent war against unnamed and ill-defined foreign forces “associated” with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The means that, despite the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan (which GOP leaders in the House have refused to officially recognize as a significant development), the Department of Defense will be authorized to maintain a permanent occupation of Afghanistan, a country bin Laden abandoned years ago, and a global war against what remains of bin Laden’s fragmented operation.

Glen Greenwald: The WikiLeaks Grand Jury and the Still Escalating War on Whistleblowing

The contrast between these two headlines from this morning tells a significant story: From The Guardian

Julian Assange awarded Australian peace prize

From NPR:

Case Against WikiLeaks Part Of Broader Campaign

As Julian Assange wins the Sydney Peace Prize for “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights,” NPR reports that “a federal grand jury in Virginia is scheduled to hear testimony on Wednesday from witnesses” in the criminal investigation of his whistle-blowing group, as “prosecutors are trying to build a case against [the] WikiLeaks founder whose website has embarrassed the U.S. government by disclosing sensitive diplomatic and military information.”  The NPR story — based in part on my reporting of a Grand Jury Subpoena served two weeks ago in Cambridge — explains what has long been clear: that “the WikiLeaks case is part of a much broader campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leakers.”

New York Times Editorial: Republican Demands and the Debt Limit

Even before the White House and the Republicans began talks on the debt limit, John Boehner made clear that he was looking for a political fight, not a compromise.

Then, in a speech on Monday, the speaker of the House said that Republicans would insist on trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for votes to raise the debt limit. He did not mention a time frame, but even a fraction of “trillions” in the near term could do huge damage to the recovery. He also did not offer specifics on how he planned to make those cuts. After the beating Republicans took for their plan to slash Medicare, he clearly decided generalities were politically safer.

There is no way to solve the country’s fiscal ills without an accurate diagnosis and rigorous prescriptions for a cure. Mr. Boehner’s speech was devoid of both.

Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein: Obama Health Law Unlikely to Stem Medical Bankruptcies

When President Obama kicked off his health reform push, he highlighted our research finding that 2 million Americans suffer medical bankruptcy each year, promising to end this disgrace. Our latest figures warn that his reform won’t stanch the flow of medical debtors.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed by Congress in March 2010 was modeled after Massachusetts’ 2006 health reform plan – a plan that’s now been up and running for more than three years. So Massachusetts offers a preview of what to expect when the ACA is fully implemented in 2014.

Unfortunately, medical bankruptcies haven’t dropped much – if at all – in Massachusetts. When we surveyed bankruptcy filers there in August 2009, 53 percent cited illness or medical bills as a cause of their bankruptcy, a percentage that’s statistically indistinguishable from the 59 percent figure we found in early 2007. Indeed, because the total number of bankruptcies soared in 2009, the actual number of medical bankruptcies increased from 7,504 in 2007 to 10,093 in 2009.

Why are so many people still suffering medical bankruptcies despite Massachusetts’ health reform? While only 4 percent of the state’s residents remain uninsured, much of the new coverage is so skimpy that serious illness leaves families with crushing medical bills.

Glen Ford: Libyan “Humanitarian” War Creates Humanitarian Crisis

Europe and America’s ghastly military intervention in Libya’s civil strife – supposedly for humanitarian reasons – has created its own humanitarian crisis, especially for Black African migrant workers trapped in that country. Whether by death at sea or by lynching at the hands of U.S.-backed “rebels,” the death toll among migrant workers and their families is certainly in the thousands – although the U.S. superpower and its European allies seem not to care in the slightest. Dead Africans – whether Arab or sub-Saharan, Muslim or Christian – are of no consequence to the rulers in Washington, Paris, London and Rome, who seek to strengthen their grip on the region and its resources by force of arms. In their mouths, “humanitarian intervention” is an oxymoron.

For the 72 Black passengers of a rickety vessel that ran out of fuel shortly after leaving Libya in late March, there was no humanity in NATO’s intervention. All but 11 died from thirst and starvation during 16 days of agony in the Mediterranean Sea. At one point, they passed very close to a NATO aircraft carrier, almost certainly the Carl Vinson. Two warplanes buzzed the stricken ship as the Africans on deck held up their babies to show their distress. But then the planes went back where they came from. The NATO fleet could not be bothered with rescuing otherwise doomed Africans – even though NATO claims the purpose of its mission is to save civilian lives. Clearly, the Black American commander-in-chief did not give his sailors and flyers the impression that Black lives matter. The dead included men, women and children from Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ghana and Nigeria.

Ari Melber: After White House Invite, Conservatives Get Tough on Soft Rapper

White House poetry night is one of those ceremonial events that you never hear about unless there’s a controversy. Or a fake controversy.  But today’s conservative kerfuffle over a White House invitation for Common — a socially conscious, mainstream hip hop artist and sometime actor (most recently in Tina Fey’s Date Night) — is interesting, since the faux outrage targets an artist who actually embodies many values of his critics.

In a different universe, where conservative culture warriors listened to music before demonizing it, Common would perform at pro-life rallies.  Take his famous duet with The Fugees’ Lauryn Hill, Retrospect for Life, which strongly questions abortion.  “Musta really thought I was God to take the life of my son,” he raps, “from now on, I’m using self-control, instead of birth control, because $315 aint worth your soul.”  The last line, comparing the cost of an abortion to the value of life, is a repeating hook. Common also uses the song to dialogue with his unborn child, saying “Knowing you the best part of life, do I have the right to take yours?,” and lamenting the thought of turning his “woman’s womb into a tomb.”

May 12 2011

The Price of Ownership

When the Republicans voted lock step on the Ryan Budget plan that would decimate the safety nets of Medicaid ans Medicare, they were not prepared for the harsh criticism from their own supporters and organizations that had praised their agenda in the past. During the Spring recess, House members faced angry constituents and a harsh press. On Tuesday, 42 freshmen sent a letter to the president asking that the Democrats forget that they used Medicare scare tactics fighting the Health Care Reform bill and back off holding them responsible for their votes on the Ryan Budget bill. Sorry, guys, no do-overs. You own it now.

Republican Budget Would Cause Millions of Americans to Lose Medicaid

By Jon Walker @ FDL

The House Republican budget written by Paul Ryan has received a huge amount of criticism for its plan to replace Medicare with a poorly indexed private voucher program that could result in more and more seniors every year being unable to afford health care. Less focus has been put on how equally devastating the Ryan plan would be to people who rely on Medicaid because the plan would stop federal funding for the program from keeping up with the increasing cost of actually providing people with care.

A study from be the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid(PDF) lays out three likely scenarios of what would happen if the Republican plan were implemented.

Critics Fear G.O.P.’s Proposed Medicaid Changes Could Cut Coverage for the Aged

By Jennifer Steinhauer @ NYT

While the largest number of Medicaid recipients are low-income children and adults, who tend to be far less politically potent voices in battles over entitlement programs than older voters, the changes to Medicaid proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House budget chairman, could actually have a more direct impact on older Americans than the Medicare part of his plan.

The House plan would turn Medicaid, which provides health coverage for the poor through a combination of federal and state money, into a block grant program for states. The federal government would give lump sums to states, which in turn would be given more flexibility and independence over use of the money, though the plan does not spell out what the federal requirements would be.

Beginning in 2013, these grants would increase annually at the rate of inflation, with adjustments for population growth, a rate far below that of inflation for health care costs. As a result, states, which have said that they cannot afford to keep up with the program’s costs, are likely to scale back coverage. Such a reduction, critics fear, could have a disproportionate effect on Medicaid spending for nursing home care for the elderly or disabled.

Critical Letter by Catholics Cites Boehner on Policies

By Laurie Goodstein @ NYT

More than 75 professors at Catholic University and other prominent Catholic colleges have written a pointed letter to Mr. Boehner saying that the Republican-supported budget he shepherded through the House will hurt the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable, and that he therefore has failed to uphold basic Catholic moral teachings.

“Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the church’s most ancient moral teachings,” the letter says. “From the apostles to the present, the magisterium of the church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.”

The letter writers criticize Mr. Boehner’s support for a budget that cut financing for Medicare, Medicaid and the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program, while granting tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. They call such policies “anti-life,” a particularly biting reference because the phrase is usually applied to politicians and others who support the right to abortion.

The shoe is once again on the other foot and it is up to the Democrats to make sure it causes permanent bunions, by making them own their votes and pay the price.

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