Tag: Opinion

The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”

What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever–they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century.

Ari Berman: How Obama Should Thwart GOP Obstructionism

This week President Obama is launching a media blitz in support of Richard Cordray, his nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Senate Banking Committee has confirmed Cordray, but the full Senate is likely to block his nomination this week, since Republicans have vowed to torpedo the CFPB director unless the Obama administration institutes changes that would cripple the agency. And without a director in place, the CFPB cannot assume many of its important new powers.

How will this prolonged standoff end? Unless the Obama administration changes its strategy, Cordray will likely suffer the same fate as other well-qualified nominees killed off by GOP filibusters, such as Donald Berwick, Peter Diamond and Goodwin Liu.

Frank Bruni: Familiarity Breeds Newt

In accordance with the rhythm of the Republican contest so far, it’s time to ask when Newt Gingrich, the unlikely race car of the moment, will run out of gas.

Much of the emerging thinking goes like this: He’ll be spared the sputtering by dint of the calendar. The caucuses in Iowa, where the latest polls show him in the lead, are less than a month away. Between now and then there’s too much gift shopping, gift giving, eggnog and “Auld Lang Syne” for distracted voters to travel the whole attraction-to-repulsion arc with him. The attraction endures. Gingrich contends. Mitt Romney, uncharacteristically, sweats.

I buy the contention and perspiration parts. But if they happen, I don’t think the sole or even principal explanation will be the lucky timing of Gingrich’s velocity. There’s something else – something more potentially advantageous – at work.

New York Times Editorial: Mr. Romney’s Missing Details

The biggest whopper in Mitt Romney’s fiscal plan comes right at the beginning of the description on his Web site: “We will level with the American people about what it will take to truly cut spending and balance our budget.” Actually, Mr. Romney never tells voters the full cost of his plan to balance the budget while cutting taxes: popular programs would be slashed or eliminated, vital state and local services would disappear, misery would be inflicted on the poor and the working class.

Such details would make the plan a hard sell as he runs for the Republican presidential nomination, so Mr. Romney presents it as a breeze, with little pain attached. Just cap spending, make the Bush tax cuts permanent and eliminate the estate tax, raise the retirement age for Social Security, and offer some lower-cost Medicare options. Before you know it, economic growth will return to 4 percent a year and military cuts can be called off.

Joe Nocera: Dr. Berwick’s Pink Slip

Dr. Donald Berwick was already in Massachusetts when I spoke to him Sunday afternoon. He was back in the Newton home where he’d lived for 30 years, being pleasantly interrupted during our conversation by his 2-year-old grandson. His last day in Washington as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had been Thursday. Friday was packing day. Saturday was moving day. And, by Sunday, he was already talking about his too-short, 17-month tenure as the nation’s top Medicare official in the past tense. Which, alas, it was. [..]

Of course, 17 months is hardly enough time to complete such a transformation, and it is hard to know if Berwick’s emphasis on quality will stick. What he needed, most of all, was more time – precisely what the Republicans wouldn’t give him.

By refusing to confirm him, Republicans won a pointless victory against the president. But, if the day ever comes when they – and the country – truly get serious about reforming Medicare, they may regret giving a pink slip to the best man for the job.

Patients who are treated at home by a doctor and nursing staff who know them intimately and can be available 24/7 are happier and healthier. This kind of care decreases the infections, mistakes and delirium, which, especially among the elderly, are the attendants of hospital care. And it is far more efficient. According to a 2002 study, for the patients treated by the Veterans Affairs’ Home Based Primary Care program, the number of days spent in hospitals and nursing homes was cut by 62 percent and 88 percent, respectively, and total health care costs dropped 24 percent. [..]

The fact that this care is possible at home means that the role of hospitals must change. Acutely ill patients who need operating rooms or intensive care will still be brought to hospitals. But they should be quickly discharged to the care of the doctors and nurses who know them best.

For too long the institutions that make up our health care system – hospitals, insurers and drug companies – have told us that “more is better”: more medicines, more specialists, more tests. To rein in spending and deliver better care, we must recognize that the primary mission of many an institution is its own survival and growth. We can’t rely on institutions to shrink themselves. We need to give that job to patients and their doctors, and move health care into the home, where it is safer and more effective.

John Bonifaz: Restore Democracy to the People with 28th Amendment

America is at a crossroads. Shall we be governed by people or by corporations?

If you thought we had already answered that question more than two centuries ago, you’re right. The framers of our Constitution were clear that we were to be a government of, for and by the people. They recognized that corporations were not people and that the Constitution did not guarantee corporations rights intended for people.

Yet, five justices of the current U.S. Supreme Court think otherwise. In their January 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, they ruled that corporations have the same free-speech rights as people and can spend unlimited amounts of their corporate money in our elections. No matter that corporations are artificial entities created through state corporate charter laws. No matter that corporations do not breathe, do not think and do not have consciences. No matter that corporations have advantages you and I do not: limited liability, perpetual life and the ability to aggregate and distribute wealth. According to these five justices, corporations are people.

New York Times Editorial: Pain in the Public Sector

Buried in the relatively positive numbers contained in the November jobs report was some very bad news for those who work in the public sector. There were 20,000 government workers laid off last month, by far the largest drop for any sector of the economy, mostly from states, counties and cities.

That continues a troubling trend that’s been building for years, one that has had a particularly harsh effect on black workers. While the private sector has been adding jobs since the end of 2009, more than half a million government positions have been lost since the recession.

In most cases, states and cities had to lay off workers because of declining tax revenues, or reduced federal aid because of Washington’s inexplicable decision to focus more on the deficit in the near term than on jobs.

John Nichols: A Republican Chooses Not to be Ridiculous: Ron Paul Trumps Trump

Ron Paul is far from perfect. But the Texas congressman and maverick GOP presidential contender brings to the 2012 race a record far more worthy of commendation than those of his competitors for the Republican nomination. [..]

Confronted with the prospect of a participating in a debate hosted by the second most absurd figure in American public life, Donald Trump, Paul simply said “no.”

The campaign of the candidate who, in the new Des Moines Register survey is running second in the field of GOP presidential contenders with less than a month to go before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, issued a delightfully snarky statement [..]

Ron Paul may not win the presidency, but he is winning the debate about the debate with Donald Trump.

But even if Trump will not have a serious presidential contender on his debate panel, he will not be alone.

The second most absurd figure in American public life will reportedly be joined December 27 by the most absurd figure in American public life: Newt Gingrich.

Ari Melber: Donald Trump’s Debate Power: It’s About Race

Yes, Donald Trump is back. His elevation as a moderator of a pivotal debate in Iowa on December 27 – the Republican candidates’ final joint appearance before voting begins – provides a sad but fitting coda to this unhinged primary season.

When the news broke over the weekend, the media largely reacted with lighthearted derision. The Times led the Trump news by announcing, “it’s officially a reality television Republican primary now,” while several commentators said the debate is basically an SNL skit that writes itself.  I’m all for mocking The Donald, but these waves of satire do risk obscuring the dark side of this news.

Let’s be clear.  In Republican politics this year, Donald Trump’s signature issue, and narrow-but-intense constituency, was built on a race-baiting effort to dislodge the President’s long-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health.*  

The political, military industrial, corporate class in Washington DC continues to re-make our constitutional republic into a powerful, unaccountable military empire. Yesterday the U.S. Senate voted 93 to 7 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 which allows the military to operate domestically within the borders of the United States and to possibly (or most probably) detain U.S. citizens without trial. Forget that the ACLU called it “an historic threat to American citizens”, this bill is so dangerous not only to our rights but to our country’s security that it was criticized by the Directors of the FBI, the CIA, the National Intelligence Director and the U.S. Defense Secretary! For the first time in our history, if this Act is not vetoed, American citizens may not be guaranteed their Article III right to trial.

The government would be able to decide who gets an old fashioned trial (along with right to attorney and right against self-incrimination) and who gets detained without due process and put into a modern legal limbo. Does anyone remember that none of the first thousand people the FBI rounded up after 9-11, and which were imprisoned for several months (some brutalized) were ever charged with terrorism? Does anyone remember that hundreds of the Gitmo detainees who were handed over to their American military captors in exchange for monetary bounties were found, after years of imprisonment, to have no connection to terrorism?

Laura Flanders: Heat from the Arts on Mayor Mike Bloomberg

It was Glass war, not class war, at Lincoln Center Thursday night, and Glass won, composer Philip Glass. It should come as no surprise that the maestro of mesmeric repetition has a knack for the “human mic.”

Occupy Museums, a group of roughly two hundred OWS-inspired protesters showed up outside the last performance of Glass’s Satyagraha Thursday. Satyagraha the opera tells the story of M.K. Gandhi’s early struggle against colonialism and segregation in South Africa. “Satyagraha” the word means “truth force.” Said the protesters to the opera-goers: “Mic Check. Mic Check: Let’s tell the truth… let’s tell the truth. Join US!”

It’s a pretty elite OWS spin-off for sure, but there was a precise policy target. In their call to action, organizers pointed up the irony of Satyagraha being performed at Lincoln Center, where in recent weeks people have been arrested and forcibly removed when they attempted to protest colonization of the arts by .001 percenter David Koch. (One of the theaters now bears his name.)

George Zornick: Keystone XL Isn’t Dead Yet

This week, Republicans in Congress have launched two different attempts to resurrect the delayed, and possibly dead, Keystone XL pipeline. One was clearly a public relations stunt, but the other could present a much more serious problem for pipeline opponents.

Early in the week, leading Republicans gathered to promote a bill by Indiana Senator Richard Lugar that would direct President Obama to act within sixty days on Keystone XL. The administration’s current policy is to push back action until early 2013 as alternate routes are studied, but the Republicans called for an immediate decision: “If the administration would simply get out of the way and let it go forward, it would create jobs almost immediately. Lots of jobs,” said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. (This is not true, unless you have a very low bar for defining “lots.”)

Lugar’s bill has thirty-seven Republican co-sponsors, but isn’t really that dangerous-it won’t find enough Democratic support to pass the Senate. It’s really just a way to publicly whack Obama for delaying the project, not a viable attempt to get it going again.

Frank Bruni: And Now … Professor Gingrich

OF all the please-God-not-Mitt surges in the Republican contest, Newt Gingrich’s is the strangest.

And that’s not because of his marital mishaps. Or his lobbying that’s somehow magically something other than lobbying. Or his peevishness, comparable to that of an 18-month-old separated from the lollipop he snatched when Mommy’s back was turned.

It’s Gingrich’s braininess – or at least his preening assertion of such – that doesn’t quite fit, breaking the Republican pattern of late. How does an ostentatious know-it-all fare so well in a party supposedly hostile to intellectuals and intellectualism?

Yesterday the shameful dinosaurs of the Senate – hopelessly out of touch with reality, for the most part, and haunted by specters of their own making – approved, by 93 votes to 7, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), which contains a number of astonishingly alarming provisions – Sections 1031 and 1032, designed to make mandatory the indefinite military detention of terror suspects until the end of hostilities in a “war on terror” that seems to have no end (if they are identified as a member of al-Qaeda or an alleged affiliate, or have planned or carried out an attack on the United States), ending a long and entirely appropriate tradition of trying terror suspects in federal court for their alleged crimes, and Sections 1033 and 1034, which seek to prevent the closure of Guantánamo by imposing onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, and banning the use of funds to purchase an alternative prison anywhere else. I have previously remarked on these depressing developments in articles in July and October, as they have had a horribly long period of gestation, in which no one with a grip on reality – and admiration for the law – has been able to wipe them out.

Dan Froomkin: Suskind’s ‘Confidence Men’ Raises Questions About Obama’s Credibility

Barack Obama is heading back onto the campaign trail, running as a champion of the middle class and even hoping to harness the Occupy movement’s public anger at Wall Street.

But the higher he soars with his populist rhetoric, the more he calls attention to the enormous gap between the promise of hope and change that he campaigned on in 2008 and the actions he has taken as president — especially regarding the economy, which is still stagnating, and Wall Street, which remains unpunished and unbowed even after causing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

As a result, voters will inevitably be asking themselves: Who is this guy, really? Does he mean what he says? Will he do what he says? And would a second-term Obama be different?

Frida Berrigan: Ten Years of Guantanamo Demands Our Action and Our Outrage

In a world full of injustice-from battered women to clubbed seals to the Club of Europe, from neglected children to nuclear weapons to mountain top removal, from torture at Guantanamo to torture at Bagram to torture in Chicago’s prisons to the torture of the death penalty, from famine in Somalia to deforestation to families being broken by Arizona’s immigration laws-how do you choose what to work on?

Most people choose what affects them most personally, what they feel like they can change, what breaks their heart. Some people choose what seems most strategic: if this small thing changes here, it might move all these other things along in the right direction. Some people race from topic to topic to topic, needing to be everywhere and in the middle of everything. Some combo of the first and second stance seems like the right place to be, right?

David Sirota: Celebrating the End of Kids’ Wall Street Dreams

Amid fears of high youth unemployment creating a “lost generation,” there is suddenly a bright spot: Apparently, fewer young people are going to work in the industry that destroyed our economy.

That’s the word from The New York Times, which reports that since 2008, “the number of investment bank and brokerage firm employees between the ages 20 and 34 fell by 25 percent,” as banks have laid off young people and slowed college recruiting.

For young Wall Streeters, this is a bummer. But for society as a whole, it’s cause for celebration because it may finally allow America to counter the destructive Gordon Gekko-ization of youth culture.

Robert Naiman: War-Weary Republicans Rebuke Romney on Afghanistan

On Wednesday night, the Senate adopted by voice vote an amendment introduced by Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley calling on President Obama to speed up U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was a watershed event towards ending the war. The previous high water mark of Senators calling for expedited withdrawal was 27; the previous high water mark on a vote was 18. The vote is a green light from the Senate to the White House for a faster military withdrawal that would save many American and Afghan lives and (at least) many tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. [..]

The Senate vote – which saw John McCain standing alone in vocal opposition – is more evidence that on key issues of war and military spending, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Buck McKeon haven’t been speaking for Republicans generally. Big media should take note, and make more room on their playlists for Republicans like Rand Paul, Walter Jones, Justin Amash, Tim Johnson and Grover Norquist who want to turn a corner on a decade of endless war and unchecked military spending.

Millions of employees mounted Great Britain’s first General Strike in many years today after the government threatened to impose more cuts in retirement benefits and pay for public workers.

It was a smash success. As many as two million strikers proved that the public’s patience with the unjust fiscal regime known as ‘austerity economics’ has its limits. It highlighted the important role unions can and must play in the fight for a more just and stable economy.

And it raised an important question for the United States: Could it happen here?

Jeffrey L. Fischer: The Bill of Rights Doesn’t Come Cheap

ON Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Williams v. Illinois, the latest in a string of cases addressing whether the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause – which gives the accused in a criminal case the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him” – applies to forensic analysts who produce reports for law enforcement. In other words, should an analyst responsible for, say, a fingerprint report have to show up at trial to face questions about the report?

A logical application of the law produces an easy answer: Yes. The court has defined a “witness against” a defendant as a person who provides information to law enforcement to aid a criminal investigation. That is exactly what forensic analysts do.

Subjecting forensic analysts to cross-examination is also good policy. According to a recent National Academy of Sciences study, forensic science is not nearly as reliable as it is perceived to be. DNA specimens, for instance, are sometimes contaminated; fingerprint, ballistics and even run-of-the-mill drug and alcohol analyses depend on human interpretation and thus are subject to error. Worse, investigations over the past decade have revealed outright incompetence and fraud in many crime labs. So it makes sense to subject the authors of lab reports to cross-examination – a procedure the court has called “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”

Jesse Eisinger: Wall Street Is Already Occupied

Last week, I had a conversation with a man who runs his own trading firm. In the process of fuming about competition from Goldman Sachs, he said with resignation and exasperation: “The fact that they were bailed out and can borrow for free – It’s pretty sickening.”

Though the sentiment is commonplace these days, I later found myself thinking about his outrage. Here was someone who is in the thick of the business, trading every day, and he is being sickened by the inequities and corruption on Wall Street and utterly persuaded that nothing had changed in the years since the financial crisis of 2008.

Then I realized something odd: I have conversations like this as a matter of routine. I can’t go a week without speaking to a hedge fund manager or analyst or even a banker who registers somewhere on the Wall Street Derangement Scale.

That should be a great relief: Some of them are just like us! Just because you are deranged doesn’t mean you are irrational, after all. Wall Street is already occupied – from within.

Jason Linkins: Senate ‘Secret Santa’ Effort Won’t Actually Solve America’s Problems, According To Political Science

According to this Reuters report, Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) are trying to set up a “Secret Santa” gift exchange with the members of their august body, and while “no one predicts” the effort “will unleash unprecedented bipartisan tidings of comfort and joy,” it’s still seen as a “political test” of whether senators can do anything at all that does not end in everyone setting fire to one another. So far, Franken and Johanns have signed up 58 members, so this is still two votes short of cloture. [..]

At any rate, I wish our senators all the best in their attempt to manufacture Christmas cheer, but what I’d really like to know is how I can get hooked up with the Federal Reserve’s “Secret Santa” exchange, which seems much, much cooler.

The Occupy L.A. encampment didn’t look like an enterprise with a future. The skateboarders hurtling through the crowd, the soccer ball in the air, the treehouses, the young men and women sleeping in tents and in the open air made the place look more like a low-budget vacation at the beach than a protest movement.

Occupy L.A. was closed down early Wednesday morning by hundreds of Los Angeles police officers who arrested more than 200 in a comparatively peaceful operation that contrasted sharply with the conduct of cops in New York, UC Davis and other places. But its legacy is likely to be much more lasting than the abandoned tents and makeshift structures left behind at Los Angeles City Hall.

For in its two months of existence, Occupy L.A. showed a resiliency and purpose that could make some of its participants leaders in a great confrontation over economic injustice in the 2012 election. The same is true of the many Occupy movements, from Wall Street to Harvard Yard to Chicago, to Denver to Philadelphia, to Berkeley, Davis, UCLA and other places.

In other words, the election could be the next step for the Occupy movement.

Williams Rivers Pitt: A Gut-Check Moment for Mr. Obama

When George W. Bush left office, and John McCain went down to defeat, there was a sense among a great many Americans that a tremendously dangerous  nightmare was over, that years of wildly violent, constitutionally questionable, unbelievably expensive and morally appalling over-reaction to 9/11 were behind us, that an America which didn’t use the NSA to spy on virtually anyone, an America that didn’t indefinitely detain people without due process of law, that didn’t torture, that didn’t consign millions to death and maiming by way of wars based on lies and the desire to make money while winning elections…a lot of people thought that America might show its face again.

But that was Hope and Change and all that stuff. The dreary fact of the matter is that the slash-and-burn attitude taken towards the US Constitution by the Bush administration did such tremendous damage to the most basic underpinnings of this society that it was widely feared there would be no going back. After all, any politician who has gotten to the point where the office of the President is even a possibility is a politician absolutely drenched in hubris, ego, and a desire for personal power. It cannot be any other way; there are no angels flying in that rarefied atmosphere of American politics, and my rule of thumb for many years now has been that a politician most people have heard of is, to one degree or another, an utter and complete bastard, for only utter and complete bastards have the will and ruthlessness to achieve such heights…and when it comes to presidents and serious presidential contenders, multiply that by a factor of ten. I’ve met a great many of them on too many campaign trails, and trust me, almost none of them are people you’d like to be stuck in an elevator with, much less allow them to run the country.

Jim Hightower: It Takes People Power to Make Clear That Corporations Are NOT People

In the Nov. 8 elections, the national media gave extensive coverage to a proposed “personhood amendment” to Mississippi’s state constitution. This was an extremist anti-abortion ballot initiative to declare that a person’s life begins not at birth, but at the very instant that a sperm meets the egg. However, extending full personhood to two-cell zygotes was too far out even for many of Mississippi’s zealous antagonists against woman’s right to control her own fertility, so the proposition was voted down.

Meanwhile, the national media paid practically zero attention to another “personhood” vote that took place on that same day over a thousand miles from Mississippi. This was a referendum in Missoula, Mont., on a concept even more bizarre than declaring zygotes to be persons with full citizenship rights.

It was a vote on overturning last year’s democracy-killing decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the now-infamous Citizens United case. A narrow five-man majority had decreed that – abracadabra! – lifeless, soulless corporations are henceforth persons with human political rights. Moreover, said the five, these tongueless artificial entities must be allowed to “speak” by dumping unlimited sums of their corporate cash into our election campaigns, thus giving them a far bigger voice than us real-life persons.

Gail Collins: The Mitt Romney Pardon

It’s been superexciting watching one outsized, vibrant and deeply strange Republican candidate after another rise to the front of the presidential pack, then crash and burn. But now we’ve got to refresh the storyline.

Really, even the TV networks are starting new mini-seasons. And they’ve got zombies.

This is particularly important for Mitt Romney, who seems to be responding to the flip-flop critique by becoming more and more repressed. If we don’t do something to free him up, they’re going to have to start wheeling him around in a laundry hamper.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Giving Politicians a Good Name

Two politicians from different countries and with very different political pedigrees made news this week. Both spoke difficult truths and reminded us that we shouldn’t use the word “politician” with routine contempt.

The better-known story is the retirement of Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who was never afraid to make people angry-or to make them laugh. But more on Frank in a moment. Far too little attention has been paid on these shores to a remarkable speech in Berlin on Monday by the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski.

He offered what may be the sound bite of the year: “I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.”

It’s time for the US to re-examine the consequences of its dehumanizing, deadly attacks in Pakistan.

This weekend, Pakistan ordered the closure of the US drone base after a US attack killed 26 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border. This news will be welcomed by the people of Waziristan, where communities have borne the brunt of the “collateral damage” of the US covert drone war. But for many, this decision comes too little too late. For too long, authorities ignored the deaths of innocent civilians being “bugsplat” by drones. After a recent trip to Pakistan to investigate the human consequences of the US drone attacks, I had no idea how close I was to come to understanding the horror of it.

In Islamabad I took part in a jirga – the traditional Pashtun forum for public discussion and dispute settlement – where tribal elders and villagers from the Pakistan tribal areas (FATA) came to meet with us to explain their personal experiences of US drone attacks. Sitting just two rows behind me was a 16-year-old boy named Tariq Aziz. Listening to story upon story of the extrajudicial murder of innocent civilians and children, the heartache for loved ones lost and the constant terror instilled by the now familiar roar of drones overhead, I could not have imagined that Tariq and his family would soon suffer the same fate.

Maureen Dowd: My Man Newt

In many ways, Newt is the perfect man.

He knows how to buy good jewelry. He puts his wife ahead of his campaign. He’s so in touch with his feelings that he would rather close the entire federal government than keep his emotions bottled up. He’s confident enough to include a steamy sex scene in a novel. He understands that Paul Revere was warning about the British.

Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel. Newt Gingrich is a phony with gobs of historical grandiosity.

The 68-year-old has compared himself to Charles de Gaulle. He has noted nonchalantly: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” As speaker, he liked to tell reporters he was a World Historical Transformational Figure.

What does it say about the cuckoo G.O.P. primary that Gingrich is the hot new thing? Still, his moment is now. And therein lies the rub.

Jill Schneidermann: The Keystone XL Pipeline Project: Extremely Unskillful?

As thousands of people circled the White House to make known their objections to the multibillion dollar Keystone XL Project, I was again reminded of a comment by Jack Kornfield: “Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death, and loss, and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.”

The dedicated activists who gathered to communicate their views to the President and many others are trying to alert the world’s population to a critical basic truth about the Earth: fossil fuels are an exhaustible resource whose extraction is a perilous and foolhardy enterprise. What’s more, they are trying to wake us up to the fact that in our pursuit of energy sources, greed prevents us from acting skillfully.

Elizabeth A. Stanton: Spotlight Durban: Climate Change Gets Personal

It’s that time of year again.

This week marks the start of the 17th annual United Nations climate change conference, or Conference of Parties (COP). Held this year in Durban, South Africa, COP17 will bring together hundreds of official delegates along with thousands of demonstrators and other unofficial observers. It’s always possible that COP17 will reach an international agreement on a viable climate policy (17th time’s the charm!), but the complete lack of consensus seems likely to derail negotiations.

Climate change impacts each nation differently, and each nation would have very different costs from lowering emissions to safe levels. This diversity of impacts complicates climate policy negotiations and makes it very challenging for rich and poor nations to find common ground. But the broad range of climate impacts expected around the world has another critical effect on negotiations, one that receives very little media coverage or scholarly analysis: there is an enormous range of likely climate impacts not just between countries, but within them.

Leslie Savan: Morning Joe: Newt’s a Flip-Flopper of Romnetic Proportions

Newt Gingrich is riding high right now, surpassing Romney in most polls, and if Herman Cain drops out because allegations of a 13-year-long extramarital affair on top of a bunch of sexual harassment charges are just too much for any fledgling pseudo-candidate, what’s left of the Cain train will probably hitch onto Newt’s caboose. (TPM: “among Cain supporters, Newt Gingrich has clearly been favored over Romney as a second choice.”)

But to Joe Scarborough, who served loyally in then-Speaker Gingrich’s 1994 “Republican Revolution,” Newt is one of those joke candidates, like Cain, who “should not be running for president of the United States.”

The Morning Joe host said Tuesday that he just thinks Gingrich is a flip-flopper of Romnetic proportions. He could barely stop laughing at Newt’s claim in a radio interview that he’s “a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney.”

Europe is now on the very edge of an economic abyss. And Germany is finding that it cannot survive as a smug island of fiscally conservative prosperity while the rest of Europe goes down the tubes. It is anybody’s guess whether Europe’s leaders will shift course in time. If they fail, it won’t be pretty. The fact that Germany’s fate is now more closely linked to that of its neighbors actually offers a ray of hope.

Until last week, Germany had been the safe haven. As speculators pulled money out of other countries, in a bondholders’ equivalent of a run on the bank, German government debt was oversubscribed, causing interest rates on German bunds (government bonds) to fall below 2 percent. The spread between German rates and the rates that “weaker” countries had to pay to sell their bonds was treated as a precise barometer of market confidence in a given nation’s debt.

Peter Van Buren: Thought Crime in Washington

Here’s the First Amendment, in full:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment.  The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism.  Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.

Michelle Chen: Health Workers Deliver First Aid to Protest Movements

Warning: Defending your rights may be hazardous to your health. Potential side effects can include rubber bullets, tear gas, and batons wielded with impunity.

The recent uprisings around the world illustrate the physical risks involved in intense street protests. At the same time, movements are also discovering the connection between health and activism in another way, through medical workers joining the front lines to deploy their skills and their conviction.

Amid the brutal clashes with security forces at Tahrir Square, barebones field hospitals have held the line, thanks to a grassroots network of Tahrir doctors. One volunteer, Ahmed Adel, who has been aiding wounded protesters since January, told Ahram Online, “Treating the injured protesters here again makes me feel the revolution is about to be completed.”

John Nichols: Barney Frank Took on Banks, Bigots and Bloated Pentagon Budgets

Barney Frank came to Congress as a liberal and will leave as such-not a perfect progressive on every issue but a steady liberal who served a term as president of the Americans for Democratic Action and whose latest rating from the defenders of New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society programs was a pure 100 percent.

That does not mean that there were not instances where Frank, a former Massachusetts legislator who arrived (to fill former the Rev. Robert Drinan’s seat) in 1980 and who will leave the House at the close of his current term, was always on the right (make that the left) side of the fight. But even where he was forced to accept compromises, he did so as a man of government who argued with passion and certainty that legislators should stand up to bankers, bigots and bloated Pentagon budgets.

Danny Schechter: Occupy Wall Street is All Over The Media: But for How Long?

First, they ignore you. Then, they ridicule you. Then, they realize you are a story and fall in love. So they build you up at first but then, all at once, tear you down

You may not have changed, but they have, addicted as they are to keep coming up with shifting story lines, more to fight their own boredom and fear of tune out, than the validity or importance of the topic.

In the same way, that political sound bites went from nearly thirty seconds to five, or that MTV style editing soon invaded the newsrooms with quick cutting and razzle-dazzle effects, to “cover news” while making it difficult to concentrate on, much less comprehend the fast paced presentation techniques.

When asked by researchers, audiences could barely tell you what they had just seen, much less what it means.

The video of the UC Davis police officer pepper-spraying Occupy Davis protesters not only shows a trampling of First Amendment rights

As we grapple with this vandalism of the First Amendment, we should ask ourselves this: What if there had been no cameras on hand? What if we had only the word of the protesters and their sympathizers that this happened versus the word of authority figures that it did not? Is it so hard to imagine the students’ claims being dismissed, the media attention being a fraction of what it is, the public’s outrage falling along predictable ideological lines and these cops getting a walk?

That’s worth keeping in mind as legislators and law officers around the country move to criminalize the act of videotaping police in the performance of their duties.

David Sirota: Cities, the new hydrofracking victims

Despite devastating health risks, both parties are pushing to allow more drilling near urban areas

On the relatively rare occasions that city folk and suburbanites previously had to think about oil and gas drilling, many probably conjured images of grasshopper-esque rigs dotting remote landscapes like Wyoming’s mountain range, Alaska’s tundra or Oklahoma’s wind-swept plains. Most probably didn’t equate drilling with the bright lights of their big city, but they should have because urban America is fast becoming ground zero for the same fights over energy that have long threatened the great wide open.

With our nation’s still unquenchable (and still highly subsidized) thirst for fossil fuels, the false comfort of NIMBY-ism and the fairy-tale notions of “safety in numbers” is quickly vanishing in our cities, as controversial oil and gas exploration projects creep into metropolitan areas. Incredibly, this geographic trend is accelerating just as new drilling techniques are evoking serious concerns about excessive air pollution and about adverse effects on limited water supplies – problems that have plagued rural energy-producing regions for decades, but are sure to be even worse as they hit densely populated areas.

Mark LeVine: Not exactly deja vu all over again

As protesters continue to occupy Tahrir square, and the military continues the crackdown with impunity, divisions erupt.

As Egypt prepares for elections, Tahrir Square is a similacrum of its old self.

The world’s largest experiment in the effects of long term exposure to toxic tear gas seems, for the moment, to be winding down, as Egyptians prepare to vote for the first post-Mubarak cabinet. The SCAF and its political allies and bedfellows clearly hope that, as the smoke clears, enough Egyptians outside of Tahrir and other centres of protest will ignore the often grotesque violence visited on pro-democracy protesters and vote in a government that will reinforce – or at least not challenge – the decades-old patrimonial system.

That is surely what is behind this cruel experiment, with the Brotherhood leadership deciding it’s better to be an observer rather than a test subject.

But in the square, the effects of constant tear gas exposure on test subjects can now be documented, and while it’s produced a lot of injuries, strange flus and sheer exhaustion, it has only hardened attitudes against the SCAF and increasingly towards any political group that is perceived as having sold out the protesters.

Eugene Robinson: Romney Still Waiting for GOP Love

Moderator Wolf Blitzer opened Tuesday’s Republican debate by introducing himself and adding, for some reason, “Yes, that’s my real name.” A few moments later, the party’s most plausible nominee for president said the following: “I’m Mitt Romney, and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.”

But it’s not. Mitt is the candidate’s middle name. His first name is Willard.

And people wonder why this guy has an authenticity problem?

The debate, held at Washington’s historic DAR Constitution Hall, was focused on foreign policy. The subject matter seemed to offer Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, the opportunity to highlight his experience and perhaps begin consolidating his sudden front-runner status. But if he expected to dance rings around the others in the minefields of international politics, he was mistaken.

Michael Winship: DC as ATM: Newt, the Ultimate Beltway Swindler

You maybe should think twice when even Jack Abramoff thinks you’re beneath contempt. Not that Newt Gingrich cares.

Abramoff, America’s favorite convicted influence peddler, told NBC’s David Gregory that presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Gingrich is one of those “people who came to Washington, who had public service, and they cash in on it. They use their public service and access to make money.”

Newt, he continued, is “engaged in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains. The very things that anger the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches Washington and says why are these guys getting all this money, why do they go become so rich, why do they have these advantages?”

Why indeed? Granted, Abramoff’s in the middle of his promotion tour of confession and attempted redemption, a pot obscenely eager to call his kettle and former mentor black — especially if it sells books. But Casino Jack does have a point.