Tag: TMC Politics

Jan 21 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: Don’t be fooled by clichés: Obama will shape the future of the internet

The president will have to address net neutrality, the Patriot Act and cybersecurity this year. The platitudes in the State of the Union aren’t reassuring

Perhaps more than any other, the internet was the backdrop for much of President Obama’s State of the Union on Tuesday night – from healthcare to hackers, and from infrastructure to education. By and large, however, Obama stuck to empty platitudes that no one could disagree with (“we need to … protect our children’s information” and “I intend to protect a free and open internet”) rather than offering concrete new proposals.

But don’t let the president’s standard State of the Union clichés fool you: in 2015, the Obama administration will almost certainly re-shape the law around net neutrality, cybersecurity and the NSA. In doing so, the president will carve out the rules of the internet for the coming decade, and his choices over the next few months will significantly affect hundreds of millions of Internet users, along with his lasting legacy.

David Cay Johnston: Obama launches tax ploy against GOP

State of the Union address pushes tax reforms to set stage for 2016 electoral fight

The most political law in America is the federal tax code. Far from being grounded in sound economics and the Constitutional duty to promote the general welfare, it’s shaped by influence won with campaign contributions and lobbying. We are about to see just how political tax law is thanks to a savvy move by President Barack Obama to frame the 2016 election in ways that will help Democrats keep the White House.

In his State of the Union address, the president proposed a host of tax ideas Republicans have long advocated in order to force them to choose between Main Street and Wall Street. He believes they will side with the rich, whose campaign donations are increasingly significant in elections and whose companies provide jobs for friends and family of politicians.

But the president’s strategy is not foolproof. There is a clever way for congressional Republicans to turn his proposal into a trap for the Democrats.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Tobert Weissman: Five Years After Citizens United, Billionaires Are Buying Democracy

Five years after the Supreme Court’s disastrous 5-4 decision in Citizens United, there’s a lot to be angry about.

With election spending out of control, and super PACs empowering giant corporations and billionaires like no time since the Gilded Age, Big Money is not just influencing who’s elected to office in this country, but what elected officials do.

Consider how the new Congress has opened: A House of Representatives leadership effort to skirt normal procedure and rush through a repeal of key Dodd-Frank provisions to rein in Wall Street speculative activities. A House of Representatives vote to authorize construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. A House vote to handcuff consumer, health, safety, environmental and other regulatory agencies so that they cannot issue new rules to address corporate abuse and protect the American public. Another House vote to repeal the Dodd-Frank measure, after the initial rush effort failed to garner a needed two-thirds majority. Meanwhile, in the slower-moving Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has decided Keystone legislation will be the first significant matter taken up.

Joanna Moorehead: So Catholics needn’t breed like rabbits. Then let’s drop the contraception con

Whatever the pope says, the vast majority of us have already voted with our gonads and ignored the church’s nonsense

Clarity has never been a strong point at the Vatican. This is, after all, an institution that has chosen for centuries to communicate with its followers via erudite documents written in Latin, which must be first translated and then interpreted for us, the faithful in the pew.

But even by its own standards, this week’s papal pronouncements have been bewildering. We thought that, whatever else wasn’t clear, one thing we did know was that the church doesn’t approve of contraception. But during his in-flight press conference en route home from his Philippines trip, we hear Pope Francis telling us that we don’t after all have to breed “like rabbits”.

[..]

The truth is that the pope – a charismatic and decent-seeming guy whose finger is a good deal closer to the people’s pulse than his predecessor’s was – is tying himself in knots trying to appear “modern” at the same time as adhering to official teaching. And it simply won’t wash. The church has been peddling a nonsense on contraception for almost 50 years. The vast majority of us church-going, “faithful” Catholics have voted with our gonads and ignored it, and at some point (soon, please!) Rome is going to have to admit it has been wrong, and that the “contraceptive culture” is not about a lack of respect for human life, it’s quite simply about a sensible realisation that most couples can raise two, three or four children better, in every way, than they can raise 10, 11 or 12.

Richard Zombeck: Obama Opens Door for GOP to Blow It

President Obama announced some radically redistributive measures during the State of the Union on Tuesday. The Robin-Hood-esque plan proposes raising the taxes and cutting tax breaks on the super-rich and easing the burden on poorer Americans. Needless to say, members of the GOP are not pleased and haven’t been since the plan was announced last Saturday night.

Republicans, as a rule, hate tax increases, especially when they have an adverse effect on the very rich and corporations – such as making them slightly less rich. They also apparently hate tax cuts, especially when it would improve the lives of working families and the poor. [..]

The GOP could see the president’s proposals as an opportunity to work with him to improve the lives of regular Americans and make a real difference in people’s lives. They would get and most likely take credit for all of it.

If the last six years are any indication of what the next two will look like, however, the more likely scenario is that this severely divided and dysfunctional party that is the GOP will spin off into separate camps, subjecting the rest of us to a clown-car demolition derby rife with inane rants about socialism, anti-capitalism, and class warfare. In the meantime, the rich will get richer, the working class will continue to struggle, the middle class will disappear, and more people will be pushed into poverty.

Jan 20 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

Dean Baker: Democrats Take on Wall Street With Financial Transactions Tax

There has long been interest in financial transactions taxes among progressive Democrats. The list of people who have proposed financial transactions taxes over the years includes Representatives Peter DeFazio and Keith Ellison, along with Senators Tom Harkin and Bernie Sanders.

But the proposal last week came from Representative Chris Van Hollen, who is part of the party’s leadership. And Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi indicated that she also supports the proposal. This means that financial transactions taxes are now part of the national debate on tax and financial policy. [..]

The Democrats deserve a lot of credit for adopting this proposal. The financial industry is enormously powerful and will do everything it can to bury Van Hollen’s plan before it gains any traction. Look for a slew of economic studies showing that a tax of 0.1 percent on stock trades will be the end of the economy as we know it. The reality is that it just means the end of speculative finance as they know it, and this is a very good thing.

Trevor Timm: Obama and Cameron’s ‘solutions’ for cybersecurity will make the internet worse

Drafting policies to imprison people who share an HBO GO password? Eliminating end-to-end data encryption? They can’t be serious

The current state of the US and UK governments’ ass-backwards approach to cybersecurity was on full display this week – culminating with British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Obama meeting to discuss the issue at the White House on Friday. When it comes to cybersecurity, it seems the UK and US want to embrace every crazy idea except what we know actually works. [..]

But just because Cameron’s been proven to be technically illiterate and may be attempting to publicly back away from his most radical proposal, that doesn’t mean that he won’t later push forward. FBI director Jim Comey proposed similar legislation to Cameron’s just a few months ago, and Cameron used eerily similar talking points in Washington on Friday as Comey did in late 2014. Plus, the rest of Cameron’s plan is downright scary for Internet privacy even without a formal encryption ban.

And then there’s the White House’s so-called solution to the cybersecurity problem, which they unveiled earlier this week. President Obama introduced it saying we had to do something about incidents like the headline-grabbing Sony hack, or the juvenile hijacking of US Central Command’s twitter account – but what he didn’t say was that those proposals wouldn’t have stopped those attacks at all.

Steven W. Thrasher: Obama should show black lives matter by hosting relatives of those killed by cops at his State of the Union

The president should use the political theatre of this address to focus American’s attention squarely on the loss of human life when police kill black civilians

Tuesday at President Obama’s penultimate State of the Union address, when Obama points for effect at someone sitting with the First Lady as her guest, every single guest around her should be a family member of someone killed by a police officer. [..]

This of course will never happen, but it’s what I want.

President Obama should use the political theatre of his “Skutniks” – the humans used to give a face to presidential pet problems since Ronald Reagan invited Lenny Skutnik to the State of the Union in 1982 – to focus American’s attention squarely on the loss of human life when cops kill black civilians. If President Obama wants us to believe that he thinks black life matters, it’s not enough for him to form a task force on 21 century policing: task forces and commissions are where serious reforms go to be forgotten.

Robert Reich: The New Compassionate Conservatism and Trickle-Down Economics

Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney are zeroing in on inequality as America’s fundamental economic problem.

Bush’s new Political Action Committee, called “The Right to Rise,” declares “the income gap is real” but that “only conservative principles can solve it.”

Mitt Romney likewise promised last week that if he runs for president he’ll change the strategy that led to his 2012 loss to President Obama (remember the “makers” versus the “takers?”) and focus instead on income inequality, poverty, and “opportunity for all people.”

The Republican establishment’s leading presidential hopefuls know the current upbeat economy isn’t trickling down to most Americans.

But they’ve got a whopping credibility problem, starting with trickle-down economics.

Nick Turse: The Golden Age of Black Ops

Special Ops Missions Already in 105 Countries in 2015

In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.  Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves in a life-or-death firefight.  It was the second time in two weeks that elite U.S. Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist Luke Somers.  And it was the second time they failed. [..]

Despite its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the planet is unknown to most Americans.  Unlike the December debacle in Yemen, the vast majority of special ops missions remain completely in the shadows, hidden from external oversight or press scrutiny.  In fact, aside from modest amounts of information disclosed through highly-selective coverage by military media, official White House leaks, SEALs with something to sell, and a few cherry-picked journalists reporting on cherry-picked opportunities, much of what America’s special operators do is never subjected to meaningful examination, which only increases the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.        

Ronald Weitzer: Diversity among police officers is key, but it won’t solve the problems with policing

Shared training and on-the-job socialization results in many similarities among officers regardless of race – including in how they treat non-white citizens

In Ferguson, Missouri, 50 of the 53 police officers are white in a city that is two-thirds African American. In Connecticut’s state capital, Hartford, 66% of the police department is white but only 16% of the residents are. And these are just two examples: despite progress over the past 50 years, many police departments remain predominantly white in cities and towns where the majority of the population is nonwhite. [..]

Why does this matter? Do police officers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds act differently while on the job? Do they have different kinds of relationships with minority communities? Aren’t all officers trained to do their jobs similarly and to treat all civilians the same regardless of race?

Research shows that, in general in the US, there is not a strong correlation, let alone a causal relationship, between an officer’s race and how officers treat members of the public when they respond to calls from civilians or stop and question them on the streets Statistics are, of course, not predictive of individual behavior, and studies of specific departments or communities vary. A 2004 study in Indianapolis (Indiana) and St. Petersburg (Florida) by Ivan Sun and Brian Payne, for example, found that black officers were more likely than white officers working in black neighborhoods to provide information, referrals to other agencies, and to treat residents respectfully, although the black officers were also more likely to use physical force against citizens in conflict situations. But, again, most studies find similarities overall in police behavior irrespective of officers’ racial background.

Jan 19 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

Suzanne Moore: Inequality isn’t inevitable, it’s engineered. That’s how the 1% have taken over

Who will look after the super-rich and think about their needs? It’s not easy for them: the 1% of the world’s population who by next year will own more global wealth than the 99%. Private security costs a fortune, and with the world becoming an increasingly unequal place a certain instability increases. It could be dangerous!

Very smartly, Oxfam International is raising such questions at the World Economic Forum at Davos, where the global elite gather to talk of big ideas and big money. Oxfam executive director, Winnie Byanyima, is arguing that this increasing concentration of wealth since the recession is “bad for growth and bad for governance”. What’s more, inequality is bad not just for the poor, but for the rich too. That’s why we have the likes of the IMF’s Christine Lagarde kicking off with warnings about rising inequality. Visceral inequality from foodbanks to empty luxury flats is still seen as somehow being in the eye of the beholder by the right – a narrative in which poverty is seen as an innate moral failure of the poor themselves has taken hold. This in turn sustains the idea that rich people deserve their incredible riches. Most wealth, though, is not earned: huge assets, often inherited, simply get bigger not because the individuals who own them are super talented, but because structures are in place to ensure this happens.

Most of us – I count myself – are economically dyslexic. The economic climate is represented as a natural force, like uncontrollable weather. It’s a shame that the planet is getting hotter, just as it’s a shame that the rich are getting richer. But these things are man-made and not inevitable at all. In fact, there are deliberate and systemic reasons as to why this is happening.

Paul Krugman: Hating Good Government

It’s now official: 2014 was the warmest year on record. You might expect this to be a politically important milestone. After all, climate change deniers have long used the blip of 1998 – an unusually hot year, mainly due to an upwelling of warm water in the Pacific – to claim that the planet has stopped warming. This claim involves a complete misunderstanding of how one goes about identifying underlying trends. (Hint: Don’t cherry-pick your observations.) But now even that bogus argument has collapsed. So will the deniers now concede that climate change is real?

Of course not. Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

Before I get into that, let me remind you of some other news that won’t matter. [..]

The question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together, with the set of people insisting that climate change is a hoax pretty much the same as the set of people insisting that any attempt at providing universal health insurance must lead to disaster and tyranny?

Charles M. Blow: How Expensive It Is to Be Poor

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a study that found that most wealthy Americans believed “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

This is an infuriatingly obtuse view of what it means to be poor in this country – the soul-rending omnipresence of worry and fear, of weariness and fatigue. This can be the view only of those who have not known – or have long forgotten – what poverty truly means.

“Easy” is a word not easily spoken among the poor. Things are hard – the times are hard, the work is hard, the way is hard. “Easy” is for uninformed explanations issued by the willfully callous and the haughtily blind.

Allow me to explain, as James Baldwin put it, a few illustrations of “how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

Mary Turck: Today’s civil disobedience continues MLK’s legacy

Protesting injustice is the best way to celebrate King’s life

On Jan. 14, authorities in Bloomington, Minnesota, filed criminal charges against 10 members of the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis group in connection with a large-scale peaceful protest at the Mall of America last month. An additional two dozen protesters were arrested for trespassing during the Dec. 20 demonstration. They may yet be charged. City attorney Sandra Johnson has said she wants to make the organizers pay for police costs and for the mall’s costs incurred in the form of additional security. [..]

King wrote his letter to clergymen who called the protest that led to his arrest “unwise and untimely.” Apparently, the protest at the Mall of America was also untimely and inconvenient. On a busy Saturday before Christmas, the mall didn’t have time or space to welcome the #BlackLivesMatter protest. After all, it is private property, meaning that anyone who enters the mall with a purpose other than spending money may be declared a trespasser. But the mall also receives millions of dollars in public financing.

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham,” King reminded his critics, admonishing them for failing “to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.”

What would that kind of concern look like?

Robert Kuttner: The Politics of Gesture

Looking forward to Tuesday’s State of the Union address, we are seeing a somewhat bolder Barack Obama. The White House has already pre-announced or leaked several “fourth-quarter initiatives,” in the president’s words. Some of these can be accomplished by executive order; most will require legislation. [..]

The time to have fought for such policies was when Obama still had a majority in Congress. But back then, in 2010, he was promoting deficit reduction.

And there are two deeper problems. None of Obama’s proposals will fundamentally change the distribution of wealth and power in America. None addresses the structural erosion of decent payroll jobs.

With one hand, the administration proposes some useful, if marginal, help to working families. With the other, it is promoting trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), both of which will increase the power of corporations to weaken health, safety, labor and environmental regulations and increase the outsourcing of jobs.

Jason Wilson: ‘Cultural Marxism’: a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim

What do the Australian’s columnist Nick Cater, video game hate group #Gamergate, Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik and random blokes on YouTube have in common? Apart from anything else, they have all invoked the spectre of “cultural Marxism” to account for things they disapprove of – things like Islamic immigrant communities, feminism and, er, opposition leader Bill Shorten.

What are they talking about? The tale varies in the telling, but the theory of cultural Marxism is integral to the fantasy life of the contemporary right. It depends on a crazy-mirror history, which glancingly reflects things that really happened, only to distort them in the most bizarre ways.  [..]

The idea of a cultural Marxist conspiracy has also endured because, in the absence of a genuine clash of ideas about the way the economy should be run, it provides an animating idea for the political contest. For Cater to claim that Bill Shorten is a Marxist of any kind is laughable precisely because to the extent that the opposition leader is explicitly offering anything, it’s plainly just a slightly more cushioned version of the same underlying economic orthodoxy embraced by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey. Until that changes, the right will always be able to offer their story of victimhood and conspiracy with some hope of success.

Jan 18 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 this Sunday’s “This Week’ are: Director of Europol Rob Wainwright; and  former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

The roundtable guests are: ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd;  Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm; Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL); and Fusion‘s Alicia Menendez.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: British Prime Minister David Cameron; Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL); and White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer.

His panel guests are former Obama adviser Stephanie Cutter; Michael Gerson, Washington Post; Mark Halperin, Bloomberg; and CBS News Congressional Correspondent Nancy Cordes.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: This guest are: Charlie Hebdo‘s editor-in-chief, Gerard Biard; White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-NC) with his fainting couch.

State of the Union: The guests are: the new chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC); Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT); and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), new chair of the House Oversight Committee.

Jan 17 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 Supreme Court and Gay Marriage

For the second time in three terms, the Supreme Court has agreed to consider the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. The last time around, the justices declined to take up the broad question. This time, there is every reason for them to follow the logic of their own rulings over the past 12 years and end the debate once and for all. [..]

In the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Kennedy wrote that the Constitution protects “adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.” The opinion said it was not deciding the question of same-sex marriage, but Mr. Scalia begged to differ. If states may not use laws to express moral disapproval of homosexual conduct, he wrote in dissent, “what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising the liberty protected by the Constitution?”

Precisely.

Eugene Robinson: MLK’s Call for Economic Justice

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s economic message was fiery and radical. To our society’s great shame, it has also proved timeless.

As we celebrate King’s great achievement and sacrifice, it is wrong to round off the sharp edges of his legacy. He saw inequality as a fundamental and tragic flaw in this society, and he made clear in the weeks leading up to his assassination that economic issues were becoming the central focus of his advocacy.

Nearly five decades later, King’s words on the subject still ring true. On March 10, 1968, just weeks before his death, he gave a speech to a union group in New York about what he called “the other America.” He was preparing to launch a Poor People’s Campaign whose premise was that issues of jobs and issues of justice were inextricably intertwined.

Steven W. Thrasher: The police rely on fear and lobbying to defeat reforms. Protestors can’t let them do so again

For the first time in a long time, American police departments are on the defensive. They’re on the defense in New York, where, after the NYPD’s open insurrection against the mayor, 69% of New York “voters, black, white and Hispanic” disapprove “of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at funerals for two police officers” according to a Quinnipiac poll – and now, even some cops have started openly airing their disgust with their own union leadership. They’re on the defense in Washington, where they’re “on the hot seat” at President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. And they continue to be on the defense in municipalities across the country, as every new police shooting sparks intense national scrutiny on social and in traditional media.

Police departments usually rely on fear and lobbying to beat reforms back; police reformers can’t let them this time.

Police state apologists will try to sell fear, even though “20 years of falling crime and aggressive policing means that police violence – justified or otherwise – now appears to be a much larger share of all violence,” as Harry Siegel wrote in the New York Daily News. But while fear of crime has fallen as fear of police violence has risen, it’s still hard to argue with the good ol’ fear of terrorism.

Norman Solomon: Race, Leaks and Prosecution at the CIA

Condoleezza Rice made headlines when she testified Thursday at the leak trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling – underscoring that powerful people in the Bush administration went to great lengths a dozen years ago to prevent disclosure of a classified operation. But as The Associated Press noted, “While Rice’s testimony helped establish the importance of the classified program in question, her testimony did not implicate Sterling in any way as the leaker.”

Few pixels and little ink went to the witness just before Rice – former CIA spokesman William Harlow – whose testimony stumbled into indicating why he thought of Sterling early on in connection with the leak, which ultimately resulted in a ten-count indictment. [..]

As a prosecution witness, Harlow volunteered some information that may come back to haunt the prosecutors. With alarm spreading among CIA officials, Harlow testified, someone at the agency mentioned to him that Sterling had worked on the Operation Merlin program. In his testimony, Harlow went on to say that Sterling’s name was familiar to him because Sterling, who is African American, had filed a race discrimination lawsuit against the CIA.

Left dangling in the air was the indication that Harlow thought of Sterling as a possible leaker because he’d gone through channels to claim that he had been a victim of racial bias at the CIA.  Sterling’s complaint had received substantial coverage in several major news outlets. (The CIA eventually got the suit thrown out of court on the grounds of state secrets.)

Joe Conason: Why Violent Extremists Welcome Attacks on Islam

Whenever an act of horrific terror enrages the West, a predictable second act ensues. Furious commentators and activists on the right erupt with blanket denunciations of Islam, Muslims and their supposed plots to enslave us all under Shariah, urging that we ban the religion, stigmatize its faithful and restore the Judeo-Christian exclusivity of America. Sometimes a few even seek retribution in attacks on mosques, individual Muslims and anyone unfortunate enough to “look Muslim.”

Violent or merely loud, these are the useful idiots whose divisive blundering underscores the propaganda of al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and imitators around the world. They represent precisely the opposite of what we must do and say if we are to defeat Islamist extremism in all its manifestations.

David Sirota: The Windy City’s New Gift to Big Campaign Donors

On its face, Chicago’s municipal pension system is an integral part of the Chicago city government. The system is included in the city’s budget, it is directly funded by the city, and its various boards of trustees include city officials and mayoral appointees. Yet, when it comes to enforcing the city’s anti-corruption laws in advance of the Chicago’s closely watched 2015 municipal election, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is suddenly arguing that the pension funds are not part of the city government at all.

The counterintuitive declaration came last month from the mayor-appointed ethics commission, responding to Chicago aldermen’s request for an investigation of campaign contributions to Emanuel from the financial industry. The request followed disclosures that executives at firms managing Chicago pension money have made more than $600,000 worth of donations to Emanuel. The contributions flowed to the mayor despite a city ordinance-and an executive order by Emanuel himself-restricting mayoral campaign contributions from city contractors.

Jan 16 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: Wrong Responses to Charlie Hebdo

Leaders in Europe are justifiably trying to figure out what they should be doing to prevent terrorist attacks like the recent massacre at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Regrettably, some politicians are proposing the kind of Internet censorship and surveillance that would do little to protect their citizens but do a lot to infringe on civil liberties. [..]

Of course, governments can and should take steps to identify threats and prevent terrorist attacks through targeted intelligence gathering. But there is good reason to believe that widespread censorship and intrusive surveillance will only undermine personal freedoms and could even make us less secure.

Paul Krugman: Francs, Fear and Folly

Ah, Switzerland, famed for cuckoo clocks and sound money. Other nations may experiment with radical economic policies, but with the Swiss you don’t get surprises.

Until you do. On Thursday the Swiss National Bank, the equivalent of the Federal Reserve, shocked the financial world with a double whammy, simultaneously abandoning its policy of pegging the Swiss franc to the euro and cutting the interest rate it pays on bank reserves to minus, that’s right, minus 0.75 percent. Market turmoil ensued.

And you should feel a shiver of fear, even if you don’t have any direct financial stake in the value of the franc. For Switzerland’s monetary travails illustrate in miniature just how hard it is to fight the deflationary vortex now dragging down much of the world economy.

Dave Johnson: What You Need to Know When Obama Talks Trade

President Obama is likely to use the State of the Union to push for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the rigged “fast track” trade promotion authority. Here are some facts to counter the expected public relations campaign.

But first, of course “trade” is a good and necessary thing. We all trade with others. This is how people, businesses and even countries “make a living.” Critics of our country’s current trade policies are not “anti-trade”; they are anti-trade deficit. They are opposed to the use of so-called “trade” agreements to promote the interests of the largest multinational and Wall Street corporations at the expense of America’s working people, its middle class, its domestic “Main Street” companies, our environment and the country’s long-term economic health.

David Cay Johnston: Elites fight back against mismeasure of poverty

New initiative by charitable organizations seeks to update statistics on financial hardship

Our understanding of poverty is starting to undergo a transformation, thanks to new research and the backing of wealthy and powerful interests.

United Way chapters in six states and the Rochester Area Community Foundation in New York are putting financial hardship in 21st century America on their volunteers’ and donors’ agendas. Since these organizations represent business leadership as well as prosperous and generous families, the development suggests that the power structure in these places is working to redefine what it means to be in need.

Their separate initiatives hold the promise of addressing one of the worst black marks on American society: A third of U.S. children live in poverty, giving us one of the worst child poverty rates among developed countries. This rate also acts as a tax on the country’s future that will be paid in lost economic output, increased demand for social services and human misery. Lowering the child poverty rate, on the other hand, will ease taxpayer burdens by producing fewer tax eaters and more tax payers.

George Zornick: Perhaps the Most Important Question About the Democratic Party Right Now

Over at U.S. News & World Report, Pat Garofalo has a very interesting piece up that asks “Are Democrats Trolling the Left?” This question deserves some serious consideration, because the answer could tell us a huge amount about American politics over the next several years.

In recent weeks, had Washington had re-formed with a Republican Congress, Democrats made a sudden left turn on economic policy. House Democrats, led by Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen, proposed a middle-class tax cut that would be financed by higher taxes on wealthy CEOs along with a small tax on financial transactions. Meanwhile, President Obama is preparing to ask Congress for a bill that would allow workers to earn up to seven paid sick days per year.

There’s an optimistic way to look at this: Democrats learned a lesson during the 2014 midterms about failing to offer a bold economic agenda, and have finally seen the light on some good policies that tackle income inequality and an ever-growing financial sector directly.

Cori Cryder: Why do Republicans insist on keeping cleared men at Guantánamo?

Pity the Guantánamo Bay detainee: he is the easiest target for the politicians who wish to be seen “doing something” about terrorism, but who are entirely indifferent to these men’s lives or whether continuing our failed policies there will make anyone safer.

The latest example: four Senators, who on Tuesday introduced another bill seeking to cut off any funding which could allow detainees – including men long cleared for release by federal agents – to leave this legal black hole. One of the four is John McCain, who campaigned for president in 2008 saying that the detention center at Guantánamo needed to be closed. [..]

This legislation is nothing but a transparent effort to score political points and keep the post-9/11 fear-industrial complex spinning. Its passage would damage America’s world standing and destroy the lives of dozens of cleared prisoners and their families – but in a Republican-controlled Congress, there is a real risk that it could pass.

Jan 16 2015

Why Do These Two Clowns Still Have Thier Jobs?

Both CIA Director John Brennan and White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough should be fired for violating the constitutional separation of powers in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s spying on congressional aids who were looking into the CIA’s roll in torture. Now The CIA’s internal panel, with all the members close allies of Brennan or CIA insiders, released its report that concluded its own innocence and accused the Senate staffers of stealing the documents. From Tim Cushing at Techdirt

Now that the long-delayed CIA Torture Report has been released, it’s time to find someone to blame. Not for the torture, of course. There will apparently be no punishments handed down for the abuse uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Also, apparently, there will be no huge international fallout. Remember just a few short weeks ago when we were promised increased terrorist activity if the report was released? Still waiting…) But there will be some noise made about the Senate’s alleged impropriety.

One-man transparency army Jason Leopold reports at Vice that the Senate allegedly stole documents from the CIA — documents they weren’t supposed to have access to. But the credulity of this assertion really depends on how much you trust the source. [..]

So, the CIA took it upon itself to perform an investigation no one asked for in order to clear itself of allegations that it had spied on Senate staffers. Chalk that one up to active disinterest by the administration in pursuing any allegations of wrongdoing associated with the Torture Report. Several months ago, the Senate claimed the CIA had hacked its computers and accessed Torture Report work-in-progress but the DOJ declined the invitation to investigate further.

Now, the CIA is claiming it was blameless (you know, other than the torture), based on its own internal investigation. The OIG report alleging CIA abuse of Senate computers was reviewed by the CIA’s in-house Accountability Board and determined to be “riddled with errors.”

The CIA’s accusations against the Senate boil down to a bundle of classified internal CIA documents known as the “Panetta Review.” [..]

Now, let’s suppose that all of the CIA’s allegations are true. If so, should the Senate be held accountable for actions it took that resulted in the exposure of CIA wrongdoing? Obviously, the CIA feels it should. But the documents “improperly accessed” were internal CIA documents that showed the agency was lying to its overseers about its interrogation techniques. Without this “improper” access, it’s likely the Torture Report wouldn’t have been as devastating. Large amounts of CIA wrongdoing would have remained undisclosed.

What’s included in the Panetta Review is information the Senate Intelligence Committee should have had access to in the first place. But the CIA deliberately and wrongfully withheld information that contradicted the narrative it was feeding to its overseers. If the Senate is to be punished for its wrongful access, then it follows that the CIA should be held accountable for its deliberate misrepresentation of its torture programs. Instead, there’s now a chance the investigators will pay for their (mild in comparison) misconduct while the agency walks away clean.

That’s not all, it seems Brennan was in cahoots with the White House, specifically, his good buddy, McDonough.

White House Knew CIA Snooped On Senate, Report Says

By Ali Watkins, The Huffington Post

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report (pdf) by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.

The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before ordering CIA employees to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands.

Brennan’s consultation with McDonough also came before the CIA revealed the search to then-Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose staff was the target of the snooping.

The new information suggesting the White House was aware of — and did not stop — the CIA’s computer snooping is unlikely to improve the existing distrust between Senate committee members and the executive branch. Feinstein has said that the CIA’s computer search likely violated the constitutional separation of powers, an allegation the White House has declined to directly address.

John Brennan Exonerates Himself with Sham Investigation

By Dan Froomkin, The Intercept

The outrageous whitewash (pdf) issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.

But what the report really does is provide yet more evidence of Brennan’s extraordinary impunity.

The panel concluded that CIA officials acted reasonably by scouring Senate computer drives in early 2014 when faced with a “potential security breach”. (That “breach” had allowed Senate staffers investigating CIA torture to access, more than three years earlier, a handful of documents Brennan didn’t want them to see.) [..]

But the CIA yesterday also released a redacted version of the full report of an earlier investigation by the CIA’s somewhat more independent inspector general’s office (pdf). And between the two reports, it is now more clear than ever that Brennan was the prime mover behind a hugely inappropriate assault on the constitutional separation of powers, and continues to get away with it.

Most notably, the official who ran the CIA facility where the Senate staffers had been allowed to set up shop wrote in a memo to the inspector general that Brennan, after speaking with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough about the errant documents, called him and “emphasized that I was to use whatever means necessary to answer the question of how the documents arrived on the SSCI side of the system.” [..]

And it was Brennan who made the paramount error in judgement here, when he decided that finding out how a series of embarrassing, revelatory CIA documents found their way into the hands of congressional overseers – really not such a bad thing – was somehow more of a threat to national security than respecting the independence of a separate branch of government, recognizing whose job it is to provide oversight over who, or honoring the spirit of an agreement between the agency and the Senate.

The whitewash was very much by design. Brennan stocked the panel with three CIA staffers and two of the most easily manipulated, consummate Washington insiders you could possibly imagine: former senator Evan Bayh, whose reputation as an unprincipled opportunist is legend; and Bob Bauer, whose lifelong mission has been to raise money for Democrats, not take stands. Then, with in-your-face chutzpah, Brennan called it an “accountability board”.

Far from “clearing” anyone of anything, the panel’s report is just the latest element in a long string of cover-ups and deceptions orchestrated by Brennan.  [..]

The panel’s report can also be seen as Brennan’s total assault on David B. Buckley, the CIA inspector general who wrote the first, highly critical report on the incident – and who suddenly resigned a few days ago and is “out this week” according to his office. The report didn’t just bat down the inspector general’s conclusions as “unsupported”; it belittled them. In a recommendation that simply dripped with contempt, the panel concluded that “it would be better” if the inspector general’s office “kept more complete records of interviews.”

Meanwhile, the full (though redacted) inspector general’s report fleshes out a lot of the details of the previously-released executive summary, which generally concluded that the CIA had improperly accessed the Senate computers.

The CIA and NSA have become rogue agencies that need to be reigned in not just by congress but ny the executive branch, as well

Jan 15 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

Gaius Publius: What’s Going On With Oil Prices? Triads & Consequences

As most people know – certainly everyone with a car – oil prices have plunged in the last six months. [..]

At the same time, the dollar – by many accounts a “petrocurrency” in two solid senses – has been strong. Normally, when your currency is pegged to something and that something goes down, your currency goes down as well. Yet the dollar is strong, and among the currencies in the tank is the Russian ruble. Are these things connected?

At the other same time, the money-center “too big to fail” (TBTF) banks have gotten Obama, almost all Republicans, and most Democrats to whip for and approve the “Citigroup rider” – an amendment written by Citigroup itself – to put taxpayers back on the hook for that portion of their derivatives “plays” (bets) that the Dodd-Frank bill disallowed. Are these things connected?

What’s going on? No one knows for sure, but this certainly gets your attention, doesn’t it?

This piece is an attempt to wrangle many of the puzzle parts into some semblance of order. We’ll adjust our thinking as events evolve, so stay tuned. For now though, these are the dots I think are currently connected. They are many.

Seumas Milne: Paris is a warning: there is no insulation from our wars

The official response to every jihadist-inspired terrorist attack in the west since 2001 has been to pour petrol on the flames. That was true after 9/11 when George Bush launched his war on terror, laying waste to countries and spreading terror on a global scale. It was true in Britain after the 2005 London bombings, when Tony Blair ripped up civil liberties and sent thousands of British troops on a disastrous mission to Afghanistan. And it’s been true in the aftermath of last week’s horrific killings at Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

In an echo of Bush’s rhetoric, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared a “war of civilisations” in response to attacks on “our freedoms”. Instead of simply standing with the victims – and, say, the vastly larger numbers killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria – the satirical magazine and its depictions of the prophet Muhammad have been elevated into a sacred principle of western liberty. The production on Wednesday of a state-sponsored edition of Charlie Hebdo became the latest test of a “with us or against us” commitment to “our values”, as French MPs voted by 488 votes to one to press on with the military campaign in Iraq. To judge by the record of the past 13 years, it will prove a poisonous combination, and not just for France.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: On Tuesday, Will Obama Stand Up for Social Security?

The president will deliver his State of the Union speech next Tuesday amid a new flurry of Republican attacks on Social Security. Will he stand firm and defend the popular program, or step aside and let the attacks continue? [..]

At a minimum, the president must take a firm stand against the Republicans by drawing a line in the sand and opposing any cuts to Social Security.

That’s not to say he will. He may remain silent on the issue, forgoing an opportunity to draw a sharp distinction between the parties. Or he may offer Republicans a new “Grand Bargain.” But that could create a rift with members of his own party, and would further weaken the once-striking political advantage his party once enjoyed on this issue.

Social Security is a critical issue for Americans. The Republicans’ unexpectedly fierce attacks on it offer the president an opportunity to set the political tone for the next two years. Next Tuesday we’ll see whether he seizes that opportunity.

Peter van Buren: America Is Open for Business in Iraq

The current American war in Iraq is a struggle in search of a goal. It began in August as a humanitarian intervention, morphed into a campaign to protect Americans in-country, became a plan to defend the Kurds, followed by a full-on crusade to defeat the new Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS, aka ISIL), and then… well, something in Syria to be determined at a later date. [..]

In the meantime, Washington’s rallying cry now seems to be: “Wait for the spring offensive!” In translation that means: wait for the Iraqi army to get enough newly American-trained and armed troops into action to make a move on Mosul.  That city is, of course, the country’s second largest and still ruled by the new “caliphate” proclaimed by Islamic State head Abu Bakr alBaghdadi. All in all, not exactly inspiring stuff.

You can’t have victory if you have no idea where the finish line is. But there is one bright side to the situation. If you can’t create Victory in Iraq for future VI Day parades, you can at least make a profit from the disintegrating situation there.

Michael Winship: You Have the Right to Remain Obnoxious

Here in New York City, the past few weeks have been fraught. First, in early December, protesters took to the streets to protest a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict a policeman involved in the choking death of African-American Eric Garner. The police were attempting to place Garner under arrest for selling loose cigarettes.

The protests made cops angry, especially because of certain anti-police chants and an assault during one of the demonstrations against two police lieutenants on the Brooklyn Bridge. But their anger escalated into fury on December 20 when two officers were gunned down in their patrol car by a seemingly deranged assailant from out-of-town who may have thought he was exacting revenge for police killings of African-American men. [..]

The homicides and the Brooklyn Bridge assault are serious crimes. But here’s the thing: The right of free speech the police are angry about when it comes to the demonstrators is precisely the same right of free speech they’re using to harass de Blasio. And it’s that same ideal of free speech, no matter how noxious it might seem, for which those police in Paris died last week.

Jan 14 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

Cheryl Contee: If California truly leads the nation, we can elect a black woman to the US Senate

Here in California, it’s been a blockbuster week in politics: Barbara Boxer is finally stepping down as perma-Senator after over 20 years; former San Francisco mayor and current lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom is running for governor; and attorney general Kamala Harris gunning for Boxer’s soon-to-be-vacated seat. Why does it matter?

There’s certainly something compelling about Harris’ daring bid for US Senate: there are only one in five senators are female in this Congress; and there are only two black Senators currently (Cory Booker of New Jersey and Tim Scott from South Carolina). If Harris won, she not only would contribute to the growing number of women in power, but having three actual black senators at one time would make history because, to date, two is the best we’ve been able to achieve as a nation. In America’s entire history, only eight black people have ever been senators and of those, only half were actually elected, rather than appointed. Yet African-Americans make up about 13% of the population, according to the 2013 census. True proportional representation would see black senators in the double digits in Congress.

Ekise Vincent: France’s political elite never champions virtues of a multicultural nation

After the attacks that have left Paris soaked in blood, a series of fears and questions now grips France. The attackers – the Kouachi brothers and their ally, Amedy Coulibaly – were killed by the forces of law and order. Their deaths might have brought an end to the climate of anxiety, but just the opposite is happening, with a very unpleasant stench, a gas, hanging over France.

The context, the backdrop, is known. There’s been the very strong advance in recent years of the ideas of the Front National; the economic crisis continues; and in this environment, how does one limit and fight against what we call the amalgames, those infernal shortcuts in public opinion: jihad = Islam = immigration?

Will life carry on as before or are we going to witness huge political and sociological jolts?

Jessica Valenti: Women can’t end sexism in the workplace just by showing up

Feminists insist that the more women, people of color and LGBT individuals are visible, the better off – and more egalitarian – the world will be. But is simple representation the best answer to sexism?

Women are still scarce in many places of power: there’s a dearth of women in Congress, a lack of female experts on the Sunday morning talk shows and a shortage of women CEOs, law partners and bylined reporters. (One scholar is even studying what the lack of women in comments sections does to the public debate.)

The push for eventual parity, however, often means that the first women in traditionally male spaces – be it politics, gaming or even firefighting – are saddled with the responsibility of taking abuse until a critical mass is reached and (hopefully) the culture shifts, and of making that space more woman-friendly.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: Free community college isn’t a joke for families who spend half their income to send a child

In the United States today, the odds of getting a degree are more tightly linked to family income than ever before, thanks to skyrocketing college costs and insufficient and misallocated federal and state financial aid funds. Although the federal government distributes about $170bn a year in financial aid to many types of students attending many types of schools, many low-income families still have to pay too much. Low-income families often end up paying about 40% of their family income for a member to attend community college – and, for four-year colleges, the bill can add up to a whopping 59% of a family’s earnings. Even middle-class families may be asked to spend or borrow a quarter of their annual income to finance one child’s attendance at a public university, while the costs of a private one are yet higher.

As a result, many families of modest means are unable to afford college. Students from middle- and low-income families have also become more likely to drop out from public colleges and universities, leaving with debts they can’t afford to pay back rather than degrees. But these are more than just personal tragedies: they represent a significant loss to America’s economy and competitiveness for decades to come.

Katruna vanden Heuvel: On Bill Moyers’s Legacy

After more than forty years on the air, Bill Moyers has turned off his microphone. While the longtime face of public broadcasting had threatened to retire in the past, this time he has assured us that we have heard his final farewell. His voice and regular presence will be deeply missed, but his legacy, and his impact on public life will surely live on.

During his storied career, the former White House press secretary and newspaper publisher produced groundbreaking reports on subjects ranging from the Iran/Contra scandal and the Iraq war to economic inequality and the corrosive influence of money in politics. His relentless commitment to the truth made Moyers the target of vicious attacks from Republicans, who for decades have sought to dismantle the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but he never backed down. Always fearlessly independent, Moyers provided an invaluable counterpoint to Washington’s conventional wisdom. Yet his true legacy is far greater than the stories he covered or the politics he espoused. Indeed, Moyers constantly reminded us of journalism’s indispensable role in our democracy.

Zoë Carpenter: When it Comes to the GOP’s Race Problem, Scalise is Just a Sideshow

Greg Billings stood in the cold outside the National Republican Club on Tuesday, holding a photo of current House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and, just behind his left shoulder, Klu Klux Klan wizard David Duke. “Is this your GOP?” Billings’s sign read. Somewhere inside the club Scalise was due to meet with Republican donors.

“Those type of people having access to power is disturbing to me. I don’t like people with those connections making policy decisions,” said Billings.

News that the third-ranking Republican in the House addressed a group of white supremacists in 2002 broke in late December; since then we’ve learned that the Louisiana representative also voted multiple times against declaring Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, and tried to squash a resolution apologizing for Louisiana’s role in slavery. Regarding the first revelation, Scalise claims not to have known he was addressing a room full of racists. Civil rights advocates, lawmakers, and even several conservative commentators have called for him to step down or at least demonstrate some commitment to racial equality. So far other GOP leaders are standing by him

Jan 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: Banning all encryption won’t make us safer, no matter what David Cameron says

Prime Minister David Cameron has quite literally called for the end of privacy on the Internet as we know it: in a radical speech on Monday he said that, since threats of terrorism existed in the world, there should be no “means of communications” that the UK “cannot read.” He appears to be suggesting that he’s in favour of outlawing the use of end-to-end encryption – which, in turn, could ban some of the most popular texting messaging apps in the world, including WhatsApp and iMessage.

We all knew it was only a matter of time before the world’s governments started using the tragedy at Charlie Hebdo, a rallying cry for free speech rights, to justify more censorship and speech-chilling surveillance. It’s particularly galling, though, that Cameron and other world leaders are leading the charge so swiftly after the historic unity rally in Paris over the weekend. You remember it: the one that was supposed to show solidarity with the murdered cartoonists’ devotion to press freedom.

New York Times Editorial Board: Choke First, Ask Questions Later

The policy couldn’t be clearer: “Members of the New York City Police Department will NOT use chokeholds,” says section 203-11 of the department’s Patrol Guide. But as last July’s fatal police assault on Eric Garner showed, reality is messier than the rule book – and more dangerous for civilians.

A new report from the department’s inspector general, released Monday, suggests that this much-reviled, supposedly disavowed tactic has never gone away; that officers sometimes use it as a first, not last, resort against those who verbally resist them; and that systems set up to investigate and punish those who abuse their power are unreliable and ineffective.

For a citizenry that rightly demands professionalism and accountability from its armed officers, this is not reassuring.

Dean Baker: Idea for Tackling Inequality #27,653: Stop Subsidizing It

It’s rare that a week goes by in Washington without some major conference on inequality. This usually involves some prominent people, who get six or even seven figure paychecks, speculating on why inequality has grown and what we can do about it. These exercises illustrate the basic problem.

Most of the discussion assumes that inequality is something that happened. By contrast, the more obvious story is that inequality is something that was done; it was the result of policies that had the effect of redistributing income upward.  [..]

But economists get really confused when they’re asked about free trade in professional services. They apparently only studied policies that lower the wages of less-educated workers.

The same story applies to the Federal Reserve Board and its plans to raise interest rates this year. The point of raising interest rates is to slow the economy and keep people from getting jobs. This deliberate weakening of the labor market not only hurts the people who are unable to get jobs, it also hurts all of those who are already working by reducing their bargaining power.

Chris Weigant: Petraeus Must Be Prosecuted

The New York Times disclosed over the weekend that federal prosecutors have recommended that the Justice Department bring charges against former general and CIA director David Petraeus. Unless President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder (or his successor) want to be seen as flaming hypocrites, Petraeus must now be prosecuted.

Another president might have had some leeway. If this revelation had been made two weeks after President Hillary Clinton or President Jeb Bush got sworn in, they’d have a range of options to plausibly consider, which would include refusing to prosecute. Obama, as a result of his own administration’s actions, doesn’t really have this option available to him.

What Petraeus is accused of is leaking classified documents to a journalist. That’s a very specific crime, falling under the Espionage Act of 1917. Since that law’s passage almost a century ago, a total of 11 people have been prosecuted for doing exactly the same thing that Petraeus is accused of. Of those 11, seven have been prosecuted by the Obama administration. In other words, in the first 92 years of the law, four people were charged, but since 2009 seven more have faced (and received, in some cases) jail time for leaking classified documents to journalists.

Rep. Alan Grayson: Our Trade Policy Is Insane

Trade is a simple concept. You sell me yours, and I’ll sell you mine.

That’s not what’s happening.

What’s happening is that day after day, month after month, and year after year, Americans are buying goods and services manufactured by foreigners, and those foreigners are not buying goods and services manufactured by Americans. We are creating millions — no — tens of millions of jobs in other countries with our purchasing power, and we are losing tens of millions of jobs in our country, because foreigners are not buying our goods and services.

What are they doing? They’re buying our assets.

So we lose twice. We lose the jobs, and we are driven deeper and deeper into national debt — and, ultimately, national bankruptcy. That is the end game.

This is not free trade; it’s fake trade. We have fake trade.

Kasia Lipska: When Diabetes Treatment Goes Too Far

One of my elderly patients has Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. He takes a number of medications, including insulin to control his blood sugar levels. A few years ago, he was driving when his blood sugar suddenly dropped. He felt lightheaded for a moment, and then ran into a tree.

There are roughly 11 million Americans over age 65 with diabetes. Most of them take medications to reduce their blood sugar levels. The majority reach an average blood sugar target, or “hemoglobin A1C,” of less than 7 percent. Why? Early studies showed that this can reduce the risk of diabetes complications, including eye, kidney and nerve problems. As a result, for more than a decade, medical societies, pharmaceutical companies and diabetes groups have campaigned with a simple, concrete message – to get below seven. Many patients carry report cards with their scores to clinic appointments. Doctors are often rewarded based on how many of their patients hit the target.

All of this sounds great. But, at least for older people, there are serious problems with the below-seven paradigm.

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