Tag: Opinion

The drinking water in nine West Virginia counties has finally been declared safe, or mostly safe. But many people say they can still smell the licorice-like odor of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol-in the sink, in the shower, in the air, especially in neighborhoods close to the Elk River. [..]

More than a week since the chemical spill in Charleston, the state capital, contaminated the water supply for 300,000 people, there has been little solid information about the danger to human health-and little outrage from officials in Washington, who seem to expect West Virginians to take the whole thing in stride. I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would be if this had happened on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in one of the wealthier ZIP codes of Southern California.

Robert Kuttner: Chris Christie: The End Game

Let me go out on a limb here. Chris Christie will not run for president, and he is very likely not to serve out his term as governor of New Jersey.

The reason is very simple. Given everything we know about Christie’s style of governing, it is inconceivable that he did not know what his underlings were up to. [..]

Of course, it’s still possible that Christie will survive, and that everyone will stick to the story that the governor knew nothing and was not even curious after the fact. It’s possible that Christie will go on to win the Republican nomination for president.

It’s also possible that the missing traffic study will turn up and that global climate change is God’s revenge against homosexuals.

If Christie survives this — if he is not impeached, or forced to resign, or otherwise disgraced — then American democracy is even more damaged than it appears.

Ari Berman: Pennsylvania Ruling Shows the Problem With Voter ID Laws

Judge Bernard McGinley of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled against the state’s strict voter ID law today following a lengthy trial last summer. The law had been temporarily blocked since last October pending a full trial. The ruling is a big win for voting rights and a clear setback for voter ID supporters. [..]

What effect will the Pennsylvania ruling have in other trials against voter ID laws? Not much, argues law professor Rick Hasen. Pennsylvania’s law was blocked in state court, while challenges to voter ID laws in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Texas were filed under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires the plaintiffs to show persuasive evidence of racial discrimination. Update: The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is also challenging [North Carolina’s voter ID law in state court.]

But the substance here matters a lot. The new Voting Rights Act amendments introduced in Congress yesterday treat voter ID laws differently than other forms of voting restrictions, implying that voter ID laws aren’t as bad. Today’s Pennsylvania ruling suggests just the opposite. “Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election,” wrote McGinley. “The Voter ID Law does not further this goal.”

George Zornick: Cuomo v. Schneiderman: Will the JPMorgan Settlement Actually Help New York’s Homeowners?

When the federal government reached a large settlement with JPMorgan Chase over the securitization of shaky mortgages, advocates for distressed homeowners were pleased that billions of dollars were earmarked for states to resolve claims related to the financial crisis. That money seemed destined to help people who had been adversely affected by the bank’s misconduct.

But in New York, a power play by Governor Andrew Cuomo is endangering some of that relief. The New York Times reported this week that Cuomo wants the money sent to New York from the settlement-$613.8 million-to be diverted to the state’s general fund. Cuomo will announce his budget on Tuesday, and needs revenue to pay for a number of initiatives, from his universal pre-kindergarten program to future tax cuts for businesses.

This has set off a furious battle between Cuomo and New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that has already apparently gotten personal-and how it is resolved will have huge significance for distressed homeowners in the state. It could also have some non-trivial implications for any potential presidential run by Cuomo.

The really significant parts of Obama’s speech were the things he did not mention. He did not call for a full stop to the bulk collection of communication records, only a transfer of ownership. Instead, he endorsed the idea that data about millions of Americans should be stored and made available to intelligence analysts. Tellingly, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Mike Rogers, the NSA’s most ardent and prominent supporters in the Capitol, applauded the president for affirming that using metadata “is a capability that is ‘critical’ and must be ‘preserved.'” [..]

If Obama’s speech is a first step, it’s worth thinking about what forced him to make it, beyond the obvious (Edward Snowden). According to reports, it was not so much the programs revealed by Snowden that shocked the president but instead the public outcry that followed. It’s going take a lot more of the same to move the heavy feet of government further.

Dean Baker: ‘Freedom’ Industries? Property Rights, Regulation, and Brain Dead Environmentalists

The company (incredibly named “Freedom Industries”) responsible for the massive chemical spill in West Virginia that left hundreds of thousands of people without drinking water declared bankruptcy yesterday. This means that all of the people who had to suffer through days without water, and some who became seriously ill from drinking contaminated water, will likely not be compensated by this company for the damage it caused them. [..]

People who don’t want polluters to be able to operate with impunity are no more nor less market fundamentalists than Bill Gates when he has people arrested for dumping waste on his lawn. The only difference is whose rights are being respected.

John Nichols: Beyond the NSA: What About Big Data Abuse by Corporations, Politicians?

Taking steps to end, or at the very least to constrain, the federal government’s practice of storing information on the personal communications of Americans is a good thing. There is every reason to respect initiatives that seek to prevent the National Security Agency’s metadata programs from making a mockery of the right to privacy outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.

But the moves that President Obama announced Friday to impose more judicial oversight on federal authorities who might “listen to your private phone calls, or read your emails” and the steps that may be taken by Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials to check and balance the NSA following the submission of proposals on March 28 ought not be seen mistaken for a restoration of privacy rights in America.

New York Times Editorial Board: When Children Become Criminals

New York is one of two states, the other being North Carolina, in which 16-year-olds are automatically tried as adults. This is the case despite overwhelming evidence that sending children into adult courts, rather than the juvenile justice system, needlessly destroys lives and further endangers the public by turning nonviolent youngsters into hardened criminals.

It is past time for New York to bring itself in line with the rest of the country. Gov. Andrew Cuomo took the first step in that direction this month when he announced that he would name a commission and order it to develop a plan by the end of the year for raising the age for adult criminal prosecution. The commission does not need to reinvent the wheel. But it will need to recommend changes in laws and procedures, and in this it can profit from studying Connecticut, which recently carried out raise-the-age legislation of its own.

President Obama claims the right to extrajudicially execute American citizens, keeps a so-called “kill list,” and has bragged he’s “really good at killing people.” This isn’t bluster. Obama has backed this up with action, having killed U.S. citizens – including a 16-year-old boy – without charging, much less convicting, any of them with a single crime.

The implications are profound (and profoundly disturbing), and raise questions about Americans’ constitutional right to due process, the most basic constraints on presidential power, and our treatment of whistleblowers. Indeed, how can anyone expect those who witness executive-branch crimes to blow the whistle when the head of the executive branch asserts the right to instantly execute anyone he pleases at any time?

All of this may sound theoretical, academic, or even fantastical, straight out of a dystopian sci-fi flick. But it isn’t. It is very real. After all, only a few months ago, the chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee publicly offered to help extrajudicially assassinate NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And now, according to a harrowing new report that just hit the Internet, top NSA and Pentagon officials are doing much the same, even after court rulings and disclosures have concluded that Snowden is a whistleblower who exposed serious government crimes.

Kevin Gosztola: Obama Lectures Those Outraged by NSA Surveillance Programs in Speech Announcing Reforms

The president delivered a speech on changes his administration would support to National Security Agency programs and policies, but what most stood out was not the announced reforms. It was how the speech focused on him and what he had done and how it seemed like he was lecturing Americans who have been outraged by what they have learned about massive government surveillance in the past six months.

President Barack Obama seemed deeply offended that anyone would think he had done an inadequate job or had enabled surveillance state policies. [..]

Obama’s version of his record as president sharply contrasted the history of support for spying as presented by The New York Times. Obama aides even anonymously told the Times that he had been “surprised to learn after the leaks…just how far the surveillance had gone.” So, it was fraudulent for him to claim to Americans that he was about to bring transparency and promote debate on government surveillance.

Tom Engelhardt: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

These days, when I check out the latest news on Washington’s global war-making, I regularly find at least one story that fits a new category in my mind that I call: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Take last Saturday’s Washington Post report by Craig Whitlock on the stationing of less than two dozen U.S. “military advisers” in war-torn Somalia.  They’ve been there for months, it turns out, and their job is “to advise and coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from the al-Shabab militia.”  If you leave aside the paramilitarized CIA (which has long had a secret base and prison in that country), those advisers represent the first U.S. military boots on the ground there since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident of 1993.  As soon as I read the piece, I automatically thought: Given the history of the U.S. in Somalia, including the encouragement of a disastrous 2006 Ethiopian invasion of that country, what could possibly go wrong?

Some days when I read the news, I can’t help but think of the late Chalmers Johnson; on others, the satirical newspaper the Onion comes to mind. If Washington did it — and by “it,” I mean invade and occupy a country, intervene in a rebellion against an autocrat, intervene in a civil war, launch a drone campaign against a terror outfit, or support and train local forces against some group the U.S. doesn’t like — you already know all you need to know. Any version of the above has repeatedly translated into one debacle or disaster after another.

When you look too long into the Abyss, said Nietzsche, the Abyss looks into you. “And,” adds comedian Brother Theodore, “neither one of us likes what we see.”

That’s what the economic pronouncements of Republican politicians are like nowadays. Instead of a governing philosophy, all one sees is a yawning intellectual abyss. Their core ideas are so unpopular and discredited that party leaders only express them in passing. But, without them, the party is reduced to a set of rhetorical and ideological tics in search of a host organism.

The newly negotiated budget agreement is a perfect example of this process in action. The GOP got some giveaways to its wealthy patrons. But instead of acting on principle, their other demands were merely a series of poses and stances with no unifying theme.

Amy Goodman: Fukushima Is the World’s Ongoing Warning Against Nuclear Energy

The impact of nuclear disasters can last for generations. Such man-made devastation offers a lesson to all of us

“I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world,” wrote the journalist Wilfred Burchett from Hiroshima. His story, headlined, “The Atomic Plague” appeared in the London Daily Express on 5 September 1945. Burchett violated the US military blockade of Hiroshima, and was the first Western journalist to visit that devastated city. He wrote: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.” [..]

Prime Minister Abe, leading the most conservative Japanese administration since World War II, wants to restart his country’s nuclear power plants, despite overwhelming public opposition. Public protests outside Abe’s official residence in Tokyo continue.

“It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation,” Wilfred Burchett wrote, sitting in the rubble of Hiroshima in 1945. The two US atomic-bomb attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have deeply impacted Japan to this day. Likewise, the triple-edged disaster of the earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear disaster will last for generations. The dangerous trajectory from nuclear weapons to nuclear power is now being challenged by a popular demand for peace and sustainability. It is a lesson for rest of the world as well.

Marjorie Cohn: Will Court Beat Back NSA’s Police State Desires?

Metadata collection as Fourth Amendment violation

Edward Snowden, who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed a secret order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), that requires Verizon to produce on an “ongoing daily basis … all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The government has admitted it collects metadata for all of our telephone communications, but says the data collected does not include the content of the calls.

In response to lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the program, two federal judges issued dueling opinions about whether it violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. [..]

This issue is headed to the Court of Appeals. From there, it will likely go the Supreme Court. The high court checked and balanced President George W. Bush when he overstepped his legal authority by establishing military commissions that violated due process, and attempted to deny constitutional habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees. It remains to be seen whether the court will likewise refuse to cower before President Barack Obama’s claim of unfettered executive authority to conduct dragnet surveillance. If the court allows the NSA to continue its metadata collection, we will reside in what can only be characterized as a police state.

John Robbins: Is the USDA Really Dumb Enough To Approve Agent Orange Corn?

Could this be the dumbest thing the USDA has ever done?

The Obama administration announced last week that it expects to approve corn and soybeans that have been genetically engineered by Dow Chemical company to tolerate the toxic herbicide – 2,4-D. They are planning this approval despite the fact that use of this herbicide is associated with increased rates of deadly immune system cancers, Parkinson’s disease, endocrine disruption, birth defects, and many other serious kinds of illness and reproductive problems.

Weed ecologists are unanimous in warning that approval of these crops will lead to vast increases in the use of this poisonous chemical. Researchers at Penn State say that in soybeans alone, planting of crops resistant to 2,4-D would increase the amount of 2,4-D sprayed on American fields to 100 million pounds per year – four times the current level. The researchers predict a cascade of negative environmental impacts, and add that the increasing use of the herbicide would actually worsen the epidemic of superweeds it is intended to address, by causing weeds to become resistant to multiple herbicides.

Last week, as New York found itself in the icy grip of the polar vortex, another deep freeze seemed to be settling over the Empire State – this time between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio – and crystallizing two competing visions for the future of the Democratic Party.

First came dueling news conferences last Monday. Cuomo stood before the Albany press corps, announcing his plan to cut taxes by $2 billion, while de Blasio was in a Harlem classroom, joined by a bevy of labor leaders who pledged their support for his signature policy initiative: funding universal pre-K for 4-year-olds (and after-school programs for all middle schoolers) by increasing the income taxes of New Yorkers making over $500,000 a year by about a half-percentage point. [..]

If de Blasio persuades the governor and state legislators to support him, this will become the model for how to fund crucial priorities in a progressive, sustainable way – and a lesson for Democrats around the country who want to meaningfully address the growing concern about inequality.

Lynn Parramore: How the Big Cell Phone Companies Are Getting Away with Ripping You Off Each Month

If you live in America, there’s a good chance you’ve not been overjoyed by your wireless plan. Simply by using a device essential to your daily life, you have been screwed. Let us count the ways.

If you overestimate how many voice minutes, text messages and data usage you need, you get screwed. If you underestimate, you also get screwed. If you have a contract, you get screwed if the service ends up being bad. If you don’t have a contract, you may find that a company can suddenly raise prices, and so you may get screwed there, too. Studying your bill often reveals still more ways you have been screwed. Did someone with a foreign number text you? Unlucky you! Did you download a ringtone thinking it was free? Oops! You’re screwed. Your bill is a maze of fees: activation fees, upgrade fees, early-termination fees, 411 fees, mysterious third-party fees, fees no one can understand. Customer service is mostly a joke.

Why is this happening to you? Because of a game called Oligopoly.

Zoë Carpenter: Pro-Choice Advocates Plan Offensive in the States

Three years ago, when he was elected governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback promised to sign any anti-abortion bill that landed on his desk. He’s kept his word, signing a handful restrictive measures to force doctors to give medically unsound information to their patients, impose crippling licensing requirements on clinics and divert funds from health providers to crisis pregnancy centers, among other things.

Now, Brownback is facing a re-election campaign that looks decidedly tougher than most expected, and pro-choice activists are eyeing the race as they seek to reverse the momentum of anti-choice laws sweeping the states. Some early polls show Brownback trailing his Democratic challenger, a little-known state representative named Paul Davis who has voted against many of the anti-choice bills.

“Even if Governor Brownback is put on defense because of his abortion stance, that would matter significantly,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.  [..] “There’s a perception that because Kansas is deep red, he’s safe as an anti-choice politician.”

Katha Pollitt: Christie: A Bully’s Bully

Oh, how we love those Republican “straight-shooters.”

I wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s press conference to go on forever. And, at 114 minutes, it almost did. I wanted to know more about traffic studies, and Christie’s workout and his personal trainer, his four-hour middle-of-the-night heart-to-heart with his wife, the tight-knit family atmosphere he cultivates at the office and how that had no bearing at all on whether he knew what was going on there. I especially wanted to know more about the governor’s feelings. We know he felt “blindsided,” “humiliated” and “embarrassed” by high-level close associates who arranged for a four-day traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge last September, possibly to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, who hadn’t endorsed him for re-election. And we know he was unhappy (“I am a very sad person today. That’s the emotion I feel”) that, as he tells it, all by themselves deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly, Port Authority appointee David Wildstein and other operatives cooked up their retribution scheme, which snarled school schedules and may have contributed to the death of a 91-year-old woman waiting for an ambulance. We know he felt personally betrayed and fired Kelly without even meeting with her because she had “lied” to him. He mentioned her “lies” thirteen times. But there was so much he didn’t tell us! For example, when he said “mistakes were made,” did he know he was quoting Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, or did that particular obfuscatory use of the passive voice just pop into his head? And what about “I am not a bully”? That has a Nixonian ring to it as well. Maybe if he hadn’t fired all those people, they would have told him that if you have to tell people you’re not a bully, you probably are one.

>/div>

That giant sucking sound predicted by Ross Perot commenced 20 years ago last week. It is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) vacuuming up U.S. jobs and depositing them in Mexico.

Independent presidential candidate Perot was right. NAFTA swept U.S. industry south of the border. It made Wall Street happy. It made multi-national corporations obscenely profitable. But it destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of American workers.

NAFTA’s backers promised it would create American jobs, just as promoters of the Korean and Chinese trade arrangements said they would and advocates of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal contend it will. They were — and still are — brutally wrong. NAFTA, the Korean deal and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization killed American jobs. They lowered wages. They diminished what America cherishes: opportunity. They contributed to the very ill that President Obama is crusading against: income inequality. There is no evidence the TPP would be any different. American workers need a new trade philosophy, one that protects them and puts people first, not corporations.

Andrew Bacevich: The Misuse of American Might, and the Price It Pays

The United States no longer knows how to win wars, but it continues to start them.

The U.S. military is like the highly skilled, gadget-toting contractor who promises to give your kitchen a nifty makeover in no time whatsoever. Here’s the guy you can count on to get the job done. Just look at those references! Yet by the time he drives off months later, the kitchen’s a shambles and you’re stuck with a bill several times larger than the initial estimate. Turns out the job was more complicated than it seemed. But what say we take a crack at remodeling the master bath?

That pretty much summarizes the American experience with war since the end of the Cold War. By common consent, when it comes to skills and gadgets, U.S. forces are in a league of their own. Yet when it comes to finishing the job on schedule and on budget, their performance has been woeful. [..]

How can we explain this yawning gap between intention and outcomes? Fundamentally, a pronounced infatuation with armed might has led senior civilian officials, regardless of party, and senior military leaders, regardless of service, to misunderstand and misapply the military instrument. Force is good for some things, preeminently for defending what is already yours. Not content to defend, however, the United States in recent decades has sought to use force to extend its influence, control and values.

Ralph Nader: Medical Price Gouging and Waste Are Skyrocketing

An epidemic of sky-rocketing medical costs has afflicted our country and grown to obscene proportions. Medical bills are bloated with waste, redundancy, profiteering, fraud and outrageous over-billing. Much is wrong with the process of pricing and providing health care.

The latest in this medical cost saga comes from new data released last week by National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest nurse’s organization. In a news release, NNU revealed that fourteen hospitals in the United States are charging more than ten times their costs for treatment. Specifically, for every $100 one of these hospitals spends, the charge on the corresponding bill is nearly $1,200. [..]

Enacting a single payer, full Medicare-for-all system is the only chance the United States has of unwinding itself from the spider web of waste, harm, and bloat that currently comprise its highly flawed health insurance and health care systems. It’s time to cut out the corporate profiteers and purveyors of waste and fraud and introduce a system that works for everybody.

Norman Solomon: Why the Washington Post’s New Ties to the CIA Are So Ominous

A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos — who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder.

The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud” computing deal with the CIA.

The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”

More than 50 years after President Eisenhower’s warning, Americans find themselves in perpetual war.

In January 1961, US President Dwight D Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the nation of what he viewed as one of its greatest threats: the military-industrial complex composed of military contractors and lobbyists perpetuating war. [..]

Even with polls showing that the majority of Americans are opposed to continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new military-industrial complex continues to easily muster the necessary support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is a testament to the influence of this alliance that hundreds of billions are being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq while Congress is planning to cut billions from core social programmes, including a possible rollback on Medicare due to lack of money. None of that matters. It doesn’t even matter that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the US the enemy and said he wishes that he had joined the Taliban. Even the documented billions stolen by government officials in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated as a mere cost of doing business.

It is what Eisenhower described as the “misplaced power” of the military-industrial complex – power that makes public opposition and even thousands of dead soldiers immaterial. War may be hell for some but it is heaven for others in a war-dependent economy.

Robert Kuttner: A Sick Job Market — and How to Cure It

Something is horribly wrong with both America’s employment situation and with the way we measure it. In case you missed the news, the economy generated just 74,000 payroll jobs in December, but the unemployment rate dropped by three tenths of a percentage point, from 7.0 percent to 6.7 percent.

How can that be? Simple: more and more people have just given up looking for work. The percentage of prime age people in the active work force is now just 62.8 percent, the lowest since 1978, a time when far fewer women worked. And the proportion of long term unemployed remains stuck at historic highs.

It’s a scandal that Republicans in the House keep blocking an extension of normal and customary unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. But unemployment compensation is a poor substitute for a job.

There are there convenient myths going around to explain what is occurring.

William K. Black: Rejoice! Chris Christie Will Never Be President

Christie’s aides should have read the Mitt Romney memo from 2012.

This week, Governor Chris Christie’s campaign for the presidential nomination blew itself up.  The suicide bomb was delivered by Christie’s staff and it was a variant on the same bomb that Mitt Romney triggered to destroy his campaign for the presidency.  Putting aside Romney’s vile dismissal of 47% of Americans as supposed freeloaders who take no personal responsibility, his most shameful and revealing phrase was “my job is not to worry about those people.”  The job of an elected official, of course, is to worry about all the people regardless of whom they voted for in an election or were even old enough to vote in the election.  An official who cannot get that most basic aspect of their job statement correct without hesitation is unfit for any position.  He is profoundly anti-American and he cannot honor any oath of office he takes.  Romney made clear that he flunked this most basic test.

Christie’s staff has made clear that it flunked the same test.  His entire group of aides flunked it after they had seen the disastrous results of Romney’s failure.  Recall the remedial humaneness training that the Republican “autopsies” of the 2012 election-cycle recommended?  Christie and his team missed the memo, missed the class on empathy, and channeled their inner Mittnasty to lash out at the people of their own state through an act of domestic terrorism.  They did not set out to kill and maim, but they did deliberately try to make the lives of tens of thousands of people miserable and they succeeded in doing so.  They did so in a manner so reckless that they put lives at risk and may have killed people.

Some Republicans are claiming Chris Christie isn’t really one of them. Some pundits are claiming, even as scandal erupts around him, that he’s a “different kind of Republican.” He’s more than that: He is the archetypal Republican, the incarnation of its arrogant, corporatist soul. [..]

It’s true that Republicans are hypocritical in word and deed. But while they may be false to an ideology, they’re always true to their mission: to promote and serve the interests of big corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals. And when it comes to that agenda, all of them — the Chris Christies as well as the Paul Ryans — are as extremist as the political climate will permit. Whether the subject is taxation, “corporate personhood,” or the future of the planet, there’s no room for either moderation or ideology in the service of corporate goals.

Eugene Robinson: Hard to See the Victim Here

You know a politician is having a bad day when he has to stand before a news conference and plead, “I am who I am, but I am not a bully.”

Frankly, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was unconvincing on that score Thursday as he attempted to contain a widening abuse-of-power scandal. Moreover, Christie displayed a degree of egocentrism that can only be described as stunning. His apologies would have sounded more sincere if he hadn’t portrayed himself as the real victim. [..]

That was the central message of Christie’s two-hour performance before reporters: I was betrayed by people I trusted. I’m the victim here. [..]

If voters see Christie’s pugnacious, in-your-face political persona as refreshing, he has a big future. If they see it as thuggish, he doesn’t. In that sense, you’re right, Governor. This is all about you.

David Sirota: Reefer Sanity Takes Hold in Colorado

Seven years before legal marijuana went on sale this month in my home state of Colorado, the drug warriors in President George W. Bush’s administration released an advertisement that is now worth revisiting. [..]

Why is this spot worth revisiting? Because in light of what’s happening here in Colorado, the ad looks less like a scary warning than a reassuringly accurate prophecy. Indeed, to paraphrase the ad, for all the sky-will-fall rhetoric about legalization, there haven’t been piles of dead bodies and overdoses. Nothing like that has happened since we started regulating and taxing marijuana like alcohol.