Tag: TMC Politics

Aug 13 2015

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: Iran deal supporters have more cred. But opponents have the media-savvy

The true nature of the debate over the Iran nuclear deal announced last month is slowly coming into focus. Those who favor it are are backed by dozens of nuclear scientists and arms control experts, while opponents consist almost exclusively of bellwether politicians mugging for the camera and playing into the fears of the constituents they have whipped into a terrified frenzy.

That’s where the ever intensifying debate surrounding the nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran now sits, as a furious lobbying campaign – estimated to cost upwards of $40m – tries to buy enough votes in Congress to override the president and scuttle the historic deal. [..]

It’s entirely predictable, yet demoralizing, that actual experts are being largely ignored in the public debate over the opinions of politicians who are being fed talking points by lobbyists. Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of silencing Iranian experts in his own country’s intelligence agencies who are in favor of the deal.

Jill Richardson: Big Ag Spars with the First Amendment

The First Amendment may be inconvenient to some people at times, but it’s still the law of the land. Case in point: so-called “ag-gag laws.”

These are laws in Idaho, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa that prohibit people from taking photos or videos of farms without permission. They’re designed to prevent the exposure of cruelty to animals on factory farms.

According to the proponents of such regulations, mistreating animals is only a problem when people talk about it. Well, if the freedom of expression that the First Amendment protects is now optional, here’s what I’d like to get rid of: flimsy rhetoric intended to fool the public.

Efforts to hoodwink us all into tolerating animal abuse extends beyond abused livestock.

John Kiriakou: Let’s Talk About Torture

The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.

They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.

I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

Isaiah J. Poole: Those Republican Spending Caps Are Costing Us Jobs

The case for ending the federal budget spending caps known as the “sequester” has just gotten a whole lot stronger. It’s all about jobs.

At the request of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is currently running as a Democratic presidential candidate, the Congressional Budget Office this week released a letter that said that if these spending caps were eliminated, the economy would be able to add as many as 1.4 million additional jobs in 2016 and 2017. [..]

What would having up to 1.4 million additional jobs mean to the economy? Some insight into the answer came Wednesday from the Labor Department’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey – the “JOLTS” report in Washington-speak that many economic experts say Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen considers more valuable than the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report. That report said that in June there were 5.2 million job openings, while June’s unemployment report indicated there were 8.3 million people looking for work. That’s roughly two jobs for every three job seekers.

Robert Greenwald: Is Schumer Setting Us on Another Path to War?

The framework agreement that the U.S. and its international partners reached with Iran that blocks Tehran’s pathways to building a nuclear bomb is barely a week old, yet the usual suspects have already denounced it as a “bad deal.”

To the opposition of the Iran deal, President Obama recently stated, “Let’s not mince words: The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some form of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.” And now as the President is trying to broker the historic deal, Sen. Charles Schumer – who also voted for the Iraq war – is sabotaging the Iran deal, claiming the United States should call for a “better deal.”

Schumer was wrong about Iraq and is wrong about the Iran deal.

The reality is that those calling for “a better deal” have never offered a viable plan on how to get one. Opposing this deal and offering no alternative is putting us on the path to war, which we all know will come at a tremendous cost.

Aug 12 2015

Accountability

 Since President Barack Obama announced an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, the war hawks have been apoplectic, flooding the airways with fear mongering, demanding a “better deal,” whatever than means. Iran has signed on for a peaceful accord and accountability to the international community.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has been whining for 25 years that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in months, demanding sanctions and the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. What he never mentions is that Israel, unlike Iran, is not a signature of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the most poorly held secret that Israel has had nuclear weapons for years.

In an op-ed at The Guardian, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has called for the removal of all weapons of mass destruction from the Middle East putting pressure on Israel to account for its “secret” nuclear weapons.

We – Iran and its interlocutors in the group of nations known as the P5+1 – have finally achieved the shared objective of turning the Iranian nuclear programme from an unnecessary crisis into a platform for cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation and beyond. The nuclear deal reached in Vienna this month is not a ceiling but a solid foundation on which we must build. The joint comprehensive plan of action, as the accord is officially known, cements Iran’s status as a zone free of nuclear weapons. Now it is high time that we expand that zone to encompass the entire Middle East.

Iran’s push for a ban on weapons of mass destruction in its regional neighbourhood has been consistent. The fact that it precedes Saddam Hussein’s systematic use of WMDs against Iran (never reciprocated in kind) is evidence of the depth of my country’s commitment to this noble cause. And while Iran has received the support of some of its Arab friends in this endeavour, Israel – home to the Middle East’s only nuclear weapons programme – has been the holdout. In the light of the historic nuclear deal, we must address this challenge head on.

One of the many ironies of history is that non-nuclear-weapon states, like Iran, have actually done far more for the cause of non-proliferation in practice than nuclear-weapon states have done on paper. Iran and other nuclear have-nots have genuinely “walked the walk” in seeking to consolidate the non-proliferation regime. Meanwhile, states actually possessing these destructive weapons have hardly even “talked the talk”, while completely brushing off their disarmament obligations under the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and customary international law. [..]

One step in the right direction would be to start negotiations for a weapons elimination treaty, backed by a robust monitoring and compliance-verification mechanism.

This could, in an initial phase, occasion the de-alerting of nuclear arsenals (removing warheads from delivery vehicles to reduce the risk of use) and subsequently engender the progressive disarmament by all countries possessing such WMDs. It is certainly a feasible goal to start this global project with a robust, universal and really genuine push to establish a WMD-free zone in the Middle East, if the relevant powers finally come to deem it not just a noble cause but a strategic imperative.

The world must demand the Israel account for its nuclear weapons and submit to inspections by the IAEA

Aug 12 2015

Punting the Pundits

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

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The GOP’s Contempt for Women

Republicans may be trapped in a death spiral from which they cannot escape.

During the Republican primary in 2012, one of Mitt Romney’s most damaging gaffes was saying that he would “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. If only that were the Republican Party’s biggest problem with women today.

Leading in the early polls, billionaire blowhard Donald Trump ignited a firestorm of controversy when he said that Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who moderated last week’s presidential debate in Cleveland, had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Trump was angry that Kelly had the gall to ask, among other things, how Trump justified his lengthy record of misogynist attacks on women. (“The big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he answered, ridiculously conflating political correctness with common decency).

However, Trump’s ugly bombast is a distraction from a far more serious problem for the GOP. Three years after Romney lost the women’s vote by a double-digit margin, in part because of his support for defunding Planned Parenthood, the presidential debates last week made clear Republicans have only become more disrespectful toward women’s bodies, more deranged in their hatred of Planned Parenthood, and more dismissive of female voters.

Bryce Covert: Freezing Offices Are Just the Beginning of Sexist Workplace Norms

The workplace was originally oriented around men, and that remains largely true today even though women claim half of the workforce. Consider office temperatures, a subject of much discussion of late. The Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak detailed the plight of D.C. women in summer, “the time of year desperate women rely on cardigans, pashminas and space heaters to make it through the workweek in their frigid offices. And their male colleagues barely notice.” Less than two weeks later, The New York Times reported on a new study that found most office buildings rely on an old formula from the 1960s to determine the ideal temperature. The short of it: Thermostats are programmed around the needs of a 40-year-old man who weighs 154 pounds.

This was back when just a third of women worked. Today, women make up nearly half of the labor force, and a little more than half of managerial and professional employees. Yet air conditioning is still being blasted into offices as if women weren’t there. Room temperature, however, is just one of many office norms that revolve around men but persist to this day. Some are year-round and can’t be solved with a Snuggie-like unequal professional dress codes, which were similarly cemented decades ago.

Lauren Carasik: Gutting schools won’t solve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis

Austerity measures will hurt the vulnerable to protect the wealthy

On Aug. 1, Puerto Rico defaulted on a bond payment, setting the stage for a protracted fiscal battle between the U.S. territory and its creditors. San Juan paid only $628,000 toward the $58 million on its Public Finance Corp. bonds, though it managed to pay nearly $500 million in other debt payments due on Aug. 3. The selective default may be a gambit because Puerto Rican residents, who are owed much of the overdue payment via credit unions, are unlikely to pursue the legal remedies that litigious hedge funds would be expected to aggressively undertake.

The island’s economy is buckling under a staggering $72 billion debt. In June, Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla urged investors to renegotiate the terms of repayment, calling the debt “unpayable.” But hedge fund investors, who bought up Puerto Rico’s distressed debt, are demanding austerity measures that would exact a toll on the public. And they have rejected proposals to restructure the debt, which would reduce their returns on investment but enable the economy to recover.

Megan Carppentier: Republicans have breathed political life into their very own Trump-enstein

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is little more than a walking, talking conservative blog comment section: he is the seething, narcissistic id of a political class which decries any legitimate claims of unequal or discriminatory treatment by non-white heterosexual men (including rape victims, African Americans and LGBT people) while claiming to be the true victims of, well, everything.

Trump is every profane Facebook commenter who calls women “cunts” while denying the existence of sexism; he’s that guy on Twitter who replies to strangers using #BlackLivesMatter to demand they discuss black-on-black crime.

But, Republicans, Donald Trump is not a witch – he’s you.

Marion Nestle: Coca-Cola says its drinks don’t cause obesity. Science says otherwise

These days, you almost have to feel sorry for soda companies. Sales of sugar-sweetened and diet drinks have been falling for a decade in the United States, and a new Gallup Poll says 60% of Americans are trying to avoid drinking soda. In attempts to reverse these trends and deflect concerns about the health effects of sugary drinks, the soda industry invokes elements of the tobacco industry’s classic playbook: cast doubt on the science, discredit critics, invoke nanny statism and attribute obesity to personal irresponsibility.

Casting doubt on the science is especially important to soda makers. Overwhelming evidence links habitual consumption of sugary drinks to poor health. So many studies have identified sodas as key contributors to chronic health conditions – most notably obesity, type-2 diabetes and coronary artery disease – that the first thing anyone trying to stay healthy should do is to stop drinking them.

Soda companies know this. For at least the last 10 years, Coca-Cola’s annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission have listed obesity and its health consequences as the single greatest threat to the company profits. The industry counters this threat with intensive marketing, lobbying and millions of dollars poured into fighting campaigns to tax or cap the size of sugary drinks.

But it is also pours millions into convincing researchers and health professionals to view sodas as benign.

Aug 11 2015

Ferguson: One Year Later Nothing Changed

It is one year since a young black man was gunned down by a white police officer on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri for jay walking. Michael Brown’s death and the subsequent cover up of his murder by the police and prosecutor’s office sparked months of demonstrations that were marked by more police brutality and violation of the constitutional rights of the protestors and the press.

Seven months later, the Justice Department cleared the white police officer, Darren Wilson, of civil rights charges. However, in a scathing report the police and the courts routinely demonstrated racial bias and violated the constitutional rights of the black citizens of Ferguson with illegal traffic stops, arrests without reasonable suspicion and excessive fines for minor infractions. Then Attorney General Eric Holder misguidedly thought that this report would effect change. The still mostly white Ferguson city council rejected the report and its reforms. And, as seen by this week’s violence, arrests of reporters and use of excessive police tactics during the demonstrations on the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, nothing has changed and once again there is a state of emergency in Ferguson and St. Louis County.

The state of emergency was precipitated by the shooting and critical wounding of an 18 year old black man by undercover police who claim that the young man was firing at them. The officers were not wearing body cameras and unmarked vehicle they were in was not equipped with a dash camera. So there is only their word.

In the original New York Times article, this quote, cited by Esquire‘s Charles Pierce, from State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, whose district includes Ferguson, was removed:

“After a year of protest and conversation around police accountability, having plainclothes officers without body cameras and proper identification in the protest setting leaves us with only the officer’s account of the incident, which is clearly problematic,” Kayla Reed, a field organizer with the Organization for Black Struggle, said in a statement. State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, whose district includes Ferguson, said on Monday that she was seeking information about the shooting. “I’m just trying to figure out the timeline of events and ensure that police officers are following protocol,” said Ms. Chappelle-Nadal, who has been active in protests here. The shooting, which came toward the end of an otherwise peaceful day, was another vexing turn for activists and the authorities alike. It was the second consecutive night of gunfire on West Florissant Avenue.

There is also the issue of arresting reporters on bogus charges supressing freedom of the press:

Huffington Post, Washington Post Reporters Charged For Doing Journalism In Ferguson (UPDATE)

by Michael Calderone, Huffington Post

“You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident.”

Reporters from The Huffington Post and Washington Post have been charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer’s performance, a chilling setback for press freedom coming nearly a year after their arrests in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Huffington Post’s Ryan J. Reilly and Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery were arrested while working out of a McDonald’s on Aug. 13, 2014, just four days after white police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

Police claimed the journalists, who were covering the unrest that followed the police killing, didn’t leave the restaurant fast enough.  Reilly described a police officer shoving his head against glass during his arrest, while Lowery said an officer pushed him into a soda machine. Both Lowery and Reilly were quickly released and not charged with any crime at the time.

The decision to charge Reilly and Lowery now is especially surprising, given that St. Louis County settled just last week with two other journalists arrested while reporting in Ferguson.

Until recently, Reilly and Lowery believed their incidents with police were long over with. The Huffington Post reported last month that the St. Louis County Police Department filed incident reports in late April describing the two reporters as trespassing in the McDonald’s. Police referred their cases to the St. Louis County counselor’s office, which, given a one-year statute of limitations, had until Thursday to bring charges.

Peaceful, unarmed protesters and reporters doing their jobs are harassed and arrested. Now, the vigilantes have arrived:

Heavily-armed members of a controversial right-wing “patriot” group added an extra dose of unease to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, early Tuesday.

The Oath Keepers organization says its members – all former military, police and first responders – pledge to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

However, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar described their presence as “both unnecessary and inflammatory.”

Protesters and police confirmed that a handful of Oath Keepers with what appeared to be assault rifles, bulletproof vest and camouflage gear were seen early Tuesday on the streets of Ferguson, which was under a state of emergency following demonstrations pegged to the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.

Several protesters confronted members of the group, asking why they were allowed to openly carry weapons.

“I’m happy that we’re able to defend ourselves,” one Oath Keeper replied in footage from NBC station KSDK. “It’s been our right for a long time.”

The St. Louis County Police Department said it would consult with the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorneys Office about the legalities of the issue.

Missouri allows individuals with concealed weapons permits to openly display firearms, unless it is done in an “angry or threatening manner.”

Shawn McGuire, a spokesman for St. Louis County Police, said he did not believe officers had confronted the Oath Keepers or told to leave.

Holy crap on a pogo stick, protesters are arrested for lawful assembly, two reporters are being railroaded, black men are still being indiscriminately shot by white cops, yet, civilian white men, armed to the teeth are allowed to roam free on the streets of Ferguson, unchallenged by the police or courts. Seriously, nothing has been learned from last year. Not one damned thing.

Aug 11 2015

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Jeanne Theoharis: 50 Years Later, We Still Haven’t Learned From Watts

ON AUG. 11, 1965, a California highway patrolman in the Watts section of Los Angeles pulled over an African-American man, Marquette Frye, for drunken driving. When another officer began hitting Mr. Frye and his mother, who had rushed to the scene, onlookers started throwing stones and bottles.

The unrest escalated to looting and burning. In response, the police cracked down on the black community at large. When the violence ended a week later, 34 people had died and more than a thousand were injured, a vast majority at the hands of local police or the National Guard. [..]

The Watts uprising occurred 50 years ago this week, but its causes and distorted coverage seem painfully fresh in the context of Cleveland, Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. Perhaps most disheartening is the likelihood that commemorations of Watts will engage in the same disingenuousness King criticized years ago – a reflection not only of historical ignorance of black organizing and anger, but an unwillingness to understand similar organizing and anger today.

Scott Lemieux: Anti-abortion hysteria: the new norm for Republican presidential candidates

Roe v Wade wasn’t overruled in the 1992 US supreme court case Planned Parenthood v Casey, but the justices did give states the power to regulate and restrict the procedure. In the years since, many states did make abortion much harder to obtain without officially outlawing it. But the pro-life movement means to push until restrictions turn into bans. And as the electoral primaries heat up, it’s becoming clear that that radicalism has moved into the mainstream in the Republican Party. [..]

American women, then, face a stark choice. Two of the frontrunners would seek to extinguish a woman’s right to choose entirely. If Scott Walker had his way, women who get pregnant would potentially face a state-imposed death sentence. Given that the next president could be in a position to replace Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer – two of the members of the razor-thin five-vote majority supporting Roe v Wade – Americans who don’t want to return women to the reproductive dark ages should vote accordingly come November.

Dean Baker: Disciplining Corporate Directors: The Real Culprits in CEO Pay

More than five years after the passage of Dodd-Frank the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally issued rules on disclosure of CEO pay last week. The financial reform law required that corporations make public the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of a typical worker at the company. Corporate lobbyists have spent the last five years complaining that this disclosure would impose an enormous burden. After much delay, the SEC finally decided to carry through with the requirements of the law and issued specific rules for the disclosure.

This is likely to provide useful information for people interested in trends in inequality, but it does not directly address the issue. At most it will serve to provide some degree of embarrassment to the companies where this ratio is most out of line. It’s worth thinking more carefully about why CEO pay got so ridiculous and how it can be reined it.

The most obvious story is that there is no effective check on CEO pay. While most workers have bosses who don’t want to pay them a nickel more than they have to, CEOs don’t live in that world. The pay of CEOs is determined by corporate directors who decide their compensation package.

Mark Morford: Coca-Cola Asks: How Stupid Are You, Really?

It’s a pertinent question, sadly: Just how dumb are you, average American? How gullible, how blindly trusting of corporate double-speak, of murky science, the idea that companies famous for making drinks that burn rust off your car really care about your health?

If you’re the Coca-Cola company (or the NRA, or Monsanto, or RJ Reynolds, or Taco Bell, et al), the answer is: Very. You are very stupid. Still. Now and forever. They are counting on it.

Here’s a big story from the NYT not long back, re-confirming a whole raft of studies that point to one rather significant truth, one known to nutritionists and educated fitness gurus for years: While exercise – regular, vigorous, addictive, sweaty, heart-racing, OMG take an Instagram of me exercise – is wildly essential for a whole range of human happy, it’s not actually the key to weight loss.

For that, it’s all about the food. Portion control, better choices, minimal processing, real ingredients. It’s about dramatically reducing the garbage, the chemicals, the excess sugar, the oversized portions, the eating until you’re “stuffed.”

Tom Englehardt: Where Did the Antiwar Movement Go?

(Or What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices)

Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy.  It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer as time passed.

My best guess: it was the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of graduate school where I had been studying to become a China scholar and was then working as a “movement” printer — that is, in a print shop that produced radical literature, strike posters, and other materials for activists.  It was, of course, “the Sixties,” though I didn’t know it then.  Still, I had somehow been swept into a new world remarkably unrelated to my expected life trajectory — and a large part of the reason for that was the Vietnam War. [..]

Admittedly, American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century equivalents of the movies of my childhood.  Such films couldn’t be made.  After all, few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines advancing amid a pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the horizon, or the cowboy galloping off on his horse with his girl.  Think of this as onscreen evidence of American imperial decline.

In the badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of slaughter never ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes unnerved drone video analysts.  Could there be a sadder tale of a demobilized citizenry than that?

Aug 10 2015

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial: The Pentagon’s Dangerous Views on the Wartime Press

The Defense Department earlier this summer released a comprehensive manual outlining its interpretation of the law of war. The 1,176-page document, the first of its kind, includes guidelines on the treatment of journalists covering armed conflicts that would make their work more dangerous, cumbersome and subject to censorship. Those should be repealed immediately. [..]

A spokesman for the National Security Council declined to say whether White House officials contributed to or signed off on the manual. Astonishingly, the official pointed to a line in the preface, which says it does not necessarily reflect the views of the “U.S. government as a whole.”

That inane disclaimer won’t stop commanders from pointing to the manual when they might find it convenient to silence the press. The White House should call on Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to revise this section, which so clearly runs contrary to American law and principles.

Paul Krugman: G.O.P. Candidates and Obama’s Failure to Fail

What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates only named President Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile G.O.P. favorite, came up only four times.

Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just keeps failing to fail. And that’s a big problem for the G.O.P. – even bigger than Donald Trump.

Robert Borosage: Change Must Come

The contrast between the Republican disarray and the continued economic growth has rekindled a celebratory sense among Democrats. President Obama heads into his last months in office having, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s formulation, “failed to fail” the way market fundamentalists predicted. He notes that Obama’s jobs record stacks up with that of Reagan’s “Morning in America” that conservatives tout as the gold standard. The jobs report also strengthened pressure on the Federal Reserve to begin raising interest rates – slowly and cautiously – around September. That too would signal that the economy has finally recovered and its time to unwind emergency measures.

But what is roiling American politics is the simple reality that most Americans are a long way from celebrating a recovery that most haven’t enjoyed. In area after area, this economy is failing Americans. [..]

The reality is that the rules have been rigged. The very structures of this economy – from its trade and tax policies to its corporate governance to the assault on workers to the starvation of public investment in everything from decent schools to modern infrastructure – are skewed to favor profits over wages, the few over the many. This won’t get changed by politics as usual. Getting the growth we need for full employment and for lifting people into the middle class will require fundamental reforms. And, as Sanders noted, that is the debate that Republicans failed to address. Their circus is drawing a big crowd, but the show appalls.

Robert Reich: The Outrageous Ascent of CEO Pay

The Securities and Exchange Commission just ruled that large publicly held corporations must disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers.

About time.

For the last thirty years almost all incentives operating on American corporations have resulted in lower pay for average workers and higher pay for CEOs and other top executives.

Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers.

Now, the ratio is over 300 to 1.

Not only has CEO pay exploded, so has the pay of top executives just below them.

Robert Kuttner: Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, And the Power of Disruption

It was a good week for disruptive innovation. Three protestors affiliated with Black Lives Matter shut down Bernie Sanders yet again, this time at a Seattle rally Saturday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump escalated his disruptive impact on the Republican presidential field, with a post-debate remark implying that Fox reporter Megyn Kelly was menstruating when she asked him provocative questions, fittingly, about his coarse put-downs of women.

The two forms of disruption invite comparison.

BLM is disrupting the most progressive candidate in the Democratic field. Why? Because in the year since the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the issue of systemic violence against blacks has still not broken through to become a first-tier issue, even among liberals.  [..]

Trump is a caricature of things that more mannered Republicans have been getting away with for years. He smokes out what the Republicans really stand for. No wonder they are worried. “An out of control car driving through a crowd of Republicans.”

Trump isn’t nice. Neither is Black Lives Matter. The Democrats should be grateful for the form of creative disruption being visited upon them.

Aug 09 2015

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are: Real estate magnate Donald Trump; former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR): Gov. John Kasich (R-OH); former Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX); and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).

The roundtable guests are: ABC News analyst Matthew Dowd; ABC News contributor Donna Brazile; Republican strategist Sara Fagen; and Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, managing editors of Bloomberg Politics.

Face the Nation: Host John Dickerson’s guests are: Bernie Sanders (I-VT); Real estate magnate Donald Trump; former HP CEO Carlie Fiorina; retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson; and NAACP president Cornell William Brooks.

His panel guests are: Susan Page; Jonathan Martin, Ed O’Keefe and Michael Gerson.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: Sunday’s guests on “MTP” are: Real estate magnate Donald Trump; Gov. John Kasich (R-OH); Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL); Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO); human rights advocate Martin Luther King III; and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young.

The panel guests are: David Brooks, The New York Times; Hugh Hewitt, “The Hugh Hewitt Show“; Heather McGhee, Demos; and Andrea Mitchell, NBC News.

State of the Union with Jake Tapper: Mr. Tapper’s guests are: Real estate magnate Donald Trump; former HP CEO Carlie Fiorina; and Gov. John Kasich (R-OH).

His panle guests are: fromer Rep Bakari Sellers (D-SC); Republican analyst Ana Navarro; CNN political commentator Patti Solis Doyle; and former state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA).

Aug 08 2015

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: We’re a year into the unofficial war against Isis with nothing to show for it

This Saturday marks one full year since the US military began its still-undeclared war against Islamic State that the government officials openly acknowledge will last indefinitely. What do we have to show for it? So far, billions of dollars have been spent, thousands of bombs have been dropped, hundreds of civilians have been killed and Isis is no weaker than it was last August, when the airstrikes began.

But don’t take it from me – that’s the conclusion of the US intelligence community itself. As the Associated Press reported a few days ago, the consensus view of the US intelligence agencies is that Isis is just as powerful as it was a year ago, and they can replace fighters faster than they are getting killed.

Like it does for every stagnant and endless war, this inconvenient fact will likely will only lead others to call for more killing, rather than an introspection on why continuing to bomb the same region for decades does not actually work. Perhaps we’re not firing missiles at a high enough rate, they’ll say, perhaps we need a full-scale ground invasion, or perhaps we need to kill more civilians to really damage the enemy (yes, this is an actual argument war mongers have been making).

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The GOP Debate: It’s What Oligarchy Looks Like

In the run-up to the first Republican presidential debate, a flurry of news stories about the candidates offered glimpses of oligarchy in action. [..]

John Kasich’s super PAC raised $11 million in a little more than two months. Out of 166 reportable contributions, 34 were for $100,000 or more. A number of donors gave $1 million or more.

Several leading Republican presidential candidates received most of their funding from a few high-dollar donors. Marco Rubio and Scott Walker each received most of their backing from just four donors. The campaigns of Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry have each largely been financed by a single donor.

Some political high rollers don’t understand why that might be a bad thing. Silicon Valley investor Scott Banister, who gave $1.2 million to Rand Paul’s Super PAC, said, “I’d think that the fact that I’m willing to spend money in the public square rather than buying myself a toy would be considered a good thing.”

Mr. Banister may be well intentioned, but many Americans would rather see him buy a toy than let American democracy become a plaything of the rich.

Steven W. Thrasher: Black lives don’t matter, apparently, to Republican candidates for president

Do black lives matter to the Republican Party?

The answer was a resounding no if the Thursday night Republican primary debate on Fox News accurately reflected their views.

As Americans across the nation have been talking about the one-year anniversary of the killing of Mike Brown this weekend – which brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of the national political consciousness over the past year – Fox News dedicated less than two minutes out of a two-hour political debate to questions about police violence, racism or any of the ways black America has been undeniably and uniquely under attack in modern society. [..]

No, black lives certainly didn’t matter last night. But to the Republicans and Fox News, neither did the lives of women, immigrants, homosexuals, or transgender soldiers. All Americans should be offended at how limited an idea of America came across in a major party debate, and that the frontrunner, Donald Trump, said we are a nation which “can’t do anything right.”

Megan Carpentier: Medical records must stay private – even for prospective presidents

The cyclical focus on each presidential candidate’s medical records – which has begun in earnest with Hillary Clinton this week and extended to Jeb Bush’s diet – is a political charade designed to allow their opponents to mine for political cudgels what in any other circumstance would be appropriately confidential medical records. But electing a president who later dies in office or becomes physically incapable of serving in the role is an entirely possible and provided-for (if not predictable) circumstance of the US political system, and no amount of listing candidates’ colonoscopy results will prevent it. [..]

The calls for candidates to release their medical records aren’t an attempt to assure the American people that the candidate will survive a four-year term if elected – no one can guarantee that. But it is an opportunity for a would-be president’s opponents and detractors to dig through the most intimate details of his or her life in order to take advantage of existing stigmas under the guise of transparency.

George Zornick: Rand Paul’s Eye-Roll Marked the End of the 9/11 Era

The attacks of 2001 are no longer the potent GOP rallying point they once were.

 Republicans didn’t bother to hold their 2004 nominating convention in some far-flung purple state where every county was going to count that November. The Bush-Cheney campaign, which started running advertisements featuring a charred World Trade Center literally one day after the president announced his re-election bid, had a much more potent idea. The RNC happened only three miles from Ground Zero, at Madison Square Garden. Dick Cheney thundered from the stage that “if the killers of September 11 thought we had lost the will to defend our freedom, they did not know America and they did not know George W. Bush.”

Fast forward twelve years to Thursday’s Republican presidential debate, the first of the 2016 campaign. Chris Christie was eager to capitalize on his experience as a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey following the attacks, delivering a saccharine line about how “the hugs that I remember are the hugs that I gave to the families who lost their people on September 11th.”

Senator Rand Paul, at that moment engaged with Christie on a debate about mass surveillance, then gave what we’ll unilaterally dub as the most monumental eyeroll in presidential debate history

 

Aug 07 2015

Punting the Pundits

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

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board: The Real Voter Fraud Is Texas’ ID Law

For years, voter identification laws have been sold as a sensible antidote to fraud at the polls. Many people, including Supreme Court justices, have bought that fallacious line, even though in-person fraud is essentially nonexistent.

Now, slowly but surely, such laws are being revealed for the racially discriminatory, anti-voter schemes that they are.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court panel unanimously agreed that Texas’ voter ID law had a discriminatory effect on black and Latino voters, and therefore violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was the first time a federal appeals court had ruled against such a law. It was also a sign that the Voting Rights Act remains functional, despite the 2013 Supreme Court decision that cut out a key provision requiring federal oversight of jurisdictions, like Texas, with histories of racial discrimination.

Paul Krugman: From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious

This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?

The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

Jeb Lund: Who will challenge Trump and his ilk now that Jon Stewart is gone?

Flipping over to the Daily Show following any political event has become something like American ritual for over a decade now, especially for those of us needing some kind of antidote to the wreckage lying before us on Fox News.

On Thursday night, as the first Republican presidential debate ended and Jon Stewart’s show began – only to disappear from our screens, for ever – things were no different, ritualistically. Next time, though, Fox’s friends will be onscreen unchallenged, and they won’t even have to try.

Stewart and Co couldn’t respond to the first official Republican party debate of course – the show was taped, and is no more – but it offered a fitting commentary anyway.

David Sirota: Hillary sucks up to the middle class: What her TPP flip-flop is really about

In her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has lately promoted herself as a populist defender of the middle class. To that end, she attempted to distance herself last week from a controversial 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would set the rules of commerce for roughly 40 percent of the world’s economy.

As with similar business-backed trade pacts, labor unions, environmental groups and public health organizations are warning that the deal could result in job losses, reduced environmental standards, higher prices for medicine and more power for corporations looking to overturn public interest laws. And so, in her quest for Democratic primary votes, Clinton is suddenly trying to cast herself as a critic of the initiative.

“I did not work on TPP,” she said after a meeting with leaders of labor unions who oppose the pact. “I advocated for a multinational trade agreement that would ‘be the gold standard.’ But that was the responsibility of the United States Trade Representative.”

The trouble, of course, is that Clinton’s declaration does not square with the facts

Heather Digby Parton: Fear & loathing at the GOP debates: Behold the the autocratic, xenophobic, war-hungry spectacle of the modern Republican Party

When I woke up yesterday morning I was excited and energized by the prospect of watching the first Republican primary debate. As I wrote here, they’re usually a fun cause for some celebration among political junkies of all stripes, particularly those who fall on the left side of the dial. These particular promised to be especially entertaining, due to the large number of debaters as well as the fact that it was going to feature a Reality TV Star in his first major appearance on the debate stage. Unfortunately, I woke up this morning with a hangover of epic proportions and the feeling that I’d been abducted by aliens and taken to a foreign planet. Let’s just say that spending three hours with Republican politicians and Fox News pundits and anchors wasn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it would be. [..]

These Republicans are running on fear and anger and nothing more. Even their various ways of saying “let’s make America great again” are demoralizing. It’s understandable. They know they are unlikely to win the presidency as long as their angry, fearful, conservative white base insists on insulting everyone who doesn’t look like them but they have no choice but to roll with it.

And the most depressing thing about that, brought home in living color tonight, is that the rest of us won’t have Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to help us through it.

Aug 07 2015

The Breakfast Club (Baby, We Were Born to Run)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

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This Day in History

U.S. embassies bombed in E. Africa; Congress OKs powers to expand the Vietnam War; The Battle of Guadalcanal begins; Kon-Tiki ends its journey; Comedy icon Oliver Hardy and news anchor Peter Jennings die.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

I say to you, friends, the best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.

Jon Stewart

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