Tag: Opinion

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”.

Paul Krugman: Confronting the Malefactors

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

Ann-Marie Slaughter: Occupied Wall Street, Seen From Abroad

THE American mainstream media is gradually beginning to pay attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spinoffs springing up in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Seattle. But from the very beginning the movement has attracted extensive coverage from Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern news outlets and Twitter users – probably because they recognize the forces that are reshaping politics across their region.

Indeed, the twin drivers of America’s nascent protest movement against the financial sector are injustice and invisibility, the very grievances that drove the Arab Spring.

Joe Conason:How (and Why) to Co-opt Those Cops on Wall Street

If the pivotal moment of this protest continues to be a video of a high-ranking police officer brutally “macing” innocent women, then it is unlikely to grow far from its anarcho-bohemian roots. There are simply too many Americans who will never side with “hippies” against cops, no matter how wrong the cops may be. But if the sympathetic statements from labor leaders of the past few days turn into supportive action-and if teachers, bus drivers, firefighters, nurses and, yes, police officers show up to demand change-then this could be the beginning of something very, very big.

Don’t scoff too quickly: Last winter, hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers from around Wisconsin repeatedly joined the statehouse sit-in against Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on labor, even though their own unions were exempt from his proposed law-and even as their fellow officers were standing guard over the protesters.

Naomi Klein: Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

John Nichols: Should Obama Face a Challenge in the Democratic Primary?

The Illinois 10th Congressional District Democrats work in Barack Obama’s political heartland, the northern suburbs of Chicago, which so warmly embraced a young state senator’s bid for the US Senate in 2004 and the presidency in 2008. Long before Obama became a national phenomenon, he had liberals swooning in Glenview, Deerfield and Northbrook. But early last month, after President Obama overruled his own Environmental Protection Agency and scuttled anti-smog regulations, the blog of 10th District Dems featured a plaintive post: “Do I still believe his promises? I want to… I really want to.” Even as the grassroots group was spreading the word that “volunteers are needed for Avon, Antioch, Grant, and Lake Villa for President Obama’s campaign,” sincere activists were speculating on its website about whether President Obama is a “monumental fraud.” The frustration with Obama is real and widespread, extending from environmental issues to economics to foreign policy. “I’ve been going door-to-door a lot in the past few weeks” for Democratic candidates, says Sharon Sanders, a member of the group. “We’re only hitting Democrats, and they are so discouraged about everything-as I am.”

So what about a challenge to Obama? Should a progressive take on the president in the rapidly approaching Democratic caucuses and primaries?

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”.

Keith Olbermann: The Statement Released By The Wall Street Protesters – 2011-10-05

Amy Goodman: Policing the Prophets of Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street protest grows daily, spreading to cities across the United States. “We are the 99 percent,” the protesters say, “that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”

The response by the New York City Police Department has been brutal. Last Saturday, the police swept up more than 700 protesters in one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. The week before, innocent protesters were pepper-sprayed in the face without warning or reason.

That is why, after receiving a landmark settlement this week from the police departments of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as the U.S. Secret Service, my colleagues and I went to Liberty Square, the heart of the Wall Street occupation, to announce the legal victory.

Richard Wolff: Occupy Wall Street Ends Capitalism’s Alibi

This protest pinpoints how dysfunctional our economic system is: we must refashion it for human needs, not corporate aims

Occupy Wall Street has already weathered the usual early storms. The kept media ignored the protest, but that failed to end it. The partisans of inequality mocked it, but that failed to end it. The police servants of the status quo over-reacted and that failed to end it – indeed, it fueled the fire. And millions looking on said, “Wow!” And now, ever more people are organizing local, parallel demonstrations – from Boston to San Francisco and many places between.

John Nichols: The Politics of Occupy Wall Street: Bernie Sanders, Progressives, Big Unions Endorse; Obama’s Silent

The Occupy Wall Street movement’s political breakthrough came Wednesday, as leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus joined Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, in endorsing the burgeoning national challenge to corporate greed and corrupt politics.

On a day that saw thousands of union members, community activists and supporters of New York’s Working Families Party rallied in solidarity with the New York protests, Congressman John Larson, the Connecticut Democrat who is the fourth-ranking member of the party’s House Caucus announced that, “The silent masses aren’t so silent anymore.”

Dave Zirin: ‘If the South Would Have Won’: The NFL and Hank Williams Jr.

In our segmented, culturally segregated, 5,000-channel era, the NFL might be the last entertainment product that tries to be all things to all people. Black or white; Northerner or Southerner; male, or female: the NFL wants your passion and wants your money. Last week, for example, was a nod to the wallets of women everywhere, as all players were tinted in bright-pink to “raise breast cancer awareness.” The gravity of the issue didn’t stop Cowboys owner Jerry Jones from displaying his cage-dancing cheerleaders in a more straightforward display of breast-awareness, hold the cancer.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Nurses’ Prescription for Healing Our Economy

If you want to know just how bad things are for those hit hardest by the Great Recession, ask a nurse: They see more young men suffering heart attacks, more anxiety in children and more ulcers and stomach illnesses in people of all ages. Financial struggles are forcing more patients to forgo necessary medicines and treatments. A Princeton/Georgia State study reports a 39 percent increase in ER admissions for suicide attempts precipitated by home foreclosures, and a direct correlation between foreclosure rates and increases in emergency-room visits and hospitalization for hypertension, diabetes and anxiety.

Given this widespread hardship and pain, it makes sense that nurses who are on the frontlines in our communities every day are leading an effort to hold Wall Street accountable for causing these economic troubles while raising hundreds of billions of dollars for vital human needs.

Jim Hightower: Something Big Is Happening: Occupy Together

To paraphrase one of Bob Dylan’s songs of youthful protest, “Something’s happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you Ms. Bellafante?”

A New York Times writer, Ginia Bellafante, is but one of many establishment reporters and pundits who’ve been covering the fledgling “Occupy Wall Street ” movement – but completely missing the story. Instead of really digging into what’s “happening here,” they’ve resorted to fuddy-duddy mockery of an important populist protest that has sprouted right in Wall Street’s own neighborhood.

In a September article, Bellafante dismissed the young people’s effort as “fractured and airy,” calling it a “carnival” in an “intellectual vacuum.” Their cause is so “diffuse and leaderless,” she wrote, that its purpose is “virtually impossible to decipher.” No wonder, she concluded, that participation in the movement is “dwindling.”

Whew – so snide! Yet, so wrong.

Ezra Klein: Who Are the 99 Percent?

“I did everything I was supposed to and I have nothing to show for it.”

It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.

Donna Smith: Protestors’ Message Pretty Simple and Clear: Enough Is Enough

No matter how the media folks seem befuddled by what they claim is a lack of clarity from those at the Occupy Wall Street and its solidarity events throughout the nation, I hear one clear and concise message from them all. I am not speaking for them, but I live where they live in life and in spirit. And there are millions more like me out here. Enough is enough.

Working people in this nation have always given themselves to a hard day’s work for honest pay at a living wage and decent benefits and modest time off for a brief annual vacation or to stay home sick when needed. But as the decades of assault on the working class have continued from the 1980s forward, workers have had to do more with less both at work and at home and have been expected to be cheerful, even grateful, while doing so. Enough is enough.

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”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day. Scroll down for the Gentlmen

Daphne Eviatar: Detention without end, amen

In a time of austerity, and with the planned drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, you might expect congressional proposals to reduce the military’s footprint around the world. You’d be wrong.

Instead, the defense spending bill passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and now heading for a vote in the full Senate would dramatically expand the U.S. military’s role in counterterrorism – potentially inciting more attacks on U.S. interests.

At the same time, it would very likely undermine the ability of our best-trained experts in counterterrorism to investigate, prosecute and bring to justice international terrorists from all over the world.

In addition, this defense authorization bill marks the first time since the McCarthy era that Congress has sought to create a system of military detention without charge or trial – including U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil.

(emphasis mine)

Dana Goldstein: New Public Health Report Underscores: Long Live the Condom

For women in the developing world, few public health strategies have the potential to be as transformative as increasing the rate of male condom usage.

This truth-more controversial than it sounds-is hammered home today by a New York Times report on a new study that found injectible hormonal birth control, such as Depo-Provera, can double a woman’s risk of contracting HIV from her male partner, even as it prevents pregnancy. This catch-22 is unacceptable. Expanding women’s economic and political power means empowering girls and women to avoid three all-too-common fates: early marriage, unintended pregnancy and HIV infection.

Yves Smith: New York Fed to Take Propagandizing to New Level With More Intense Social Media Monitoring

We can all look forward to higher quality trolls in comments courtesy of the New York Fed (assuming we don’t have them already) thanks to a more thorough blogosphere/social media monitoring program the Fed is planing to launch (hat tip reader Tom via TPM):

New York Fed Social Media Request for Proposal

The idea that the Federal Reserve is somehow lacking in share of voice in academic and popular discourse is laughable. I’ve gotten estimates from credible sources that the Fed now funds a full 1/4 of all graduate school research in economics. Bernanke, FOMC Board members, and the various regional Fed presidents have ready access to the media and take frequent advantage of it. Fed staffers regularly publish papers, some of which are appallingly close to propaganda as it is (a recent one I did not have the energy to shred tried to argue that foreclosures didn’t result in lower living standards. Fortunately, a New York Times op ed, “Foreclosures are Killing Us” effectively debunked it).

Amy Goodman: Policing the Prophets of Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street protest grows daily, spreading to cities across the United States. “We are the 99 percent,” the protesters say, “that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”

The response by the New York City Police Department has been brutal. Last Saturday, the police swept up more than 700 protesters in one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. The week before, innocent protesters were pepper-sprayed in the face without warning or reason.

That is why, after receiving a landmark settlement this week from the police departments of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as the U.S. Secret Service, my colleagues and I went to Liberty Square, the heart of the Wall Street occupation, to announce the legal victory.

Maureen Dowd: Man in the Mirror

The unlikely femme fatale from Jersey sashayed into a Trenton news conference and broke a lot of hearts. (Not Snooki’s or Barry’s, of course.)

Watching Chris Christie hold forth for an hour, it’s hard to know whether you want to hug him or slap him. There’s something both lovable and irritating about the man.

It’s not the puffed up body that’s off-putting. It’s the puffed up ego.

John Nichols: With Obama Veering Corporate On Trade, Democrats Need to ‘Distinguish Themselves From the President’

Barack Obama’s approval rating is hovering around 40 percent, falling as low as 38 percent in a recent Gallup survey and 39 percent in the latest McClatchey-Marist poll.

That’s bad. But it gets worse.

The new ABC News/Washington Post poll says that 55 percent of Americans now expect that whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 to take the presidency. Only 37 percent believe Obama will win.

That’s really bad. And the numbers from the battleground states are even more unsettling, A new Quinnipiac survey of Florida voters finds that only 39 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the presidency, while 57 percent disapprove. Only 41 percent of those surveyed say they think the president should be reelected.

Polls are transitory. The president’s numbers can and probably will improve, especially if he stays focused on the message he has been delivering in recent days: invest in job creation, establish fairer tax policies that make the rich pay their share, defend Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But his decision to submit free-deals with South Korea, Columbia and Panama to Congress — deals that are opposed by organized labor and that even Obama-friendly analysts say threaten U.S. manufacturing jobs — could undo any progress for the president, especially in battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Wisconsin. Congressman Mike Michaud, D-Maine, says flatly that Obama’s move is not going to go over well with working people. “Does (Obama) want to create jobs at home with the American Jobs Act, or does he want to offshore them to places like South Korea? At a time of nine percent unemployment, I know what my constituents would prefer,” says Michaud. “There’s something wrong with this picture and the American people see right through it.”

Matt Stoller: Justice Democrats take on big banks

If you look, you can find a few Democrats who have been staging their own version of Occupying Wall Street. Three state attorneys general are now taking a wrecking ball to the party’s key policy axis: the bank bailouts. Each has pledged to investigate possible fraud in the securitization of trillions of dollars of mortgages – and made significant legal moves that suggest they are serious about doing so.

In the process, they have placed themselves squarely in the middle of a multitrillion-dollar fight over the nature of the financial system and the future of the Democratic Party.

In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to represent the party’s future – with his legion of shiny young organizers, his multimillion-person email list and his promise of structural changes to the political order. Today, his administration looks tired and brittle, trapped among a surly country, dissatisfied supporters, a still creaky banking system and a brutal reelection climate.

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”.

Bill McKibben: The Cronyism Behind a Pipeline for Crude

LATE last month, the Obama administration unveiled a new tool that lets anyone send a petition to the White House; get 5,000 signatures in 30 days and you’re guaranteed some kind of answer. My prediction: it’s not going to stop people from trying to occupy Wall Street. After the past few years, we’re increasingly unwilling to believe that political reform can be accomplished by going through the “normal channels” of democracy.

It’s easy to understand why. In the first few months of the Bush administration, the vice president’s staff held a series of secret meetings with energy company executives to come up with a new energy policy that, essentially, gave big oil everything it asked for. When journalists learned about the secret sessions, they became a scandal – environmental groups complained long and loud, right up to the Supreme Court, and rightly so. Important decisions should be made in the open, not behind closed doors by cronies scratching one another’s backs.

Bono: The F Word

I’ve been known to drop the occasional expletive, but the most offensive F word to me is not the one that goes f***. It’s F***** — the famine happening in Somalia.

Drought, violence and political instability have invited in the grim reaper on a scale we have not seen in 20 years… more than 30,000 children have died in just three months. The pictures from Dadaab look like a nightmare from centuries past. Yet, this is the 21st century and these pictures are real and, on the whole, unseen. The food crisis in the Horn of Africa is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe, but it is getting less attention than the latest Hollywood break-ups and make-ups.

ONE’s new film The F Word: Famine is the Real Obscenity isn’t a typical emotional emergency appeal. It’s about focusing the media spotlight on the tragedy unfolding. It’s about building political support in the US and around the world for interventions that will stop the suffering today and break the cycle of famine in the future. Most of all, it’s about taking action — because famine is man-made.

Robert Kuttner: Wall Street: From Protest to Politics

When elected leaders largely ignore a disgrace like the financial collapse of 2008, sooner or later popular protest fills the vacuum. The Wall Street protests are heartening — but also a measure of the utter failure of the usual machinery of democracy to remedy the worst pillaging of regular Americans by financial elites since the 1920s.

For three years, we have been wondering, where is the outrage? For a time, it was co-opted by the Tea Parties — a faux populism, attacking government, financed by billionaires, delivering nothing to the 99 percent of Americans not represented by Wall Street. Now authentic protest directed against the real villains is finally here.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Here’s Occupy Wall Street’s “One Demand”: Sanity

Even the sympathizers don’t always get it. I’m sure I get a lot of things wrong too, but here’s one thing I do understand: Change doesn’t begin with policy. It begins with perception. And you don’t change things by asking. You change them by acting.

But it begins with perception. “All money is a matter of belief,” as someone once said.

In the New York Times, Nick Kristof shows that he understands the #OccupyWallStreet movement more than most of his peers. “The protesters are dazzling in their Internet skills,” he writes, “and impressive in their organization.”

But like many other sympathetic observers, he misses their most important point when he says “the movement falters in its demands” because “it doesn’t really have any.”

Dean Baker: Bill Clinton Is Baaaaaaaaack!

Many people look back with fondness on Clinton years and there is good cause. The economy grew at an annual rate of almost 4.5 percent during his second term. The unemployment rate fell to a 4.0 percent as a year-round average in 2000. And the country saw strong real wage growth up and down the income ladder for the first time since the early ’70s.

This was all good news. However, it was unsustainable and Clinton’s economic team should have known it at the time. The immediate cause of the prosperity was the demand created by a $10 trillion stock bubble. While this gave some boost to investment, its main impact was on consumption. People spent based on their newly created stock wealth, causing the saving rate to fall below 2.0 percent, which at the time was the lowest level of the post-war era.

Robert Greenwald: There Are Many More Koch Brother Secret Sins

The Bloomberg news investigation into Charles and David Koch has uncovered unlawful and unpatriotic environmental crimes, political donations and business decisions benefitting Iran. There are so many secret sins committed by the Koch brothers no one story can cover it all.

But this is the story everyone will be talking about. We’ve documented many of the Koch brothers’ attacks on middle class families, and detailed their commitment to ending public education and resegregating communities.

Danny Schechter: Occupy Wall Street Has Been Battling the Cops; Now the Free Marketeers Take Their Shot

By its actions, Occupy Wall Street is puncturing myths like these:

l. The Myth that direct action against the center of financial power can’t be sustained.

2. The Myth that New York City is a bastion of liberalism and tolerance with its Mayor from Wall Street and its cops recipients of a well timed $4.6 million dollar donation from JP Morgan Chase whose bank up the street from the protest is guarded by — no guess needed– officers of the NYPD

3. The Myth that police violence only happens in other countries, not in the Big Apple where we are far too sophisticated to have a police department lead/encourage hundreds of protesters to cross a bridge via its roadway and then conveniently have buses and reinforcements on the other side to scoop them up.

They turned a bridge to Brooklyn into a bridge to jail without anyone having to pass GO or collect $200 as you would in a Monopoly game. The cops have a monopoly in this game, a monopoly on force — and use it.

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”.

Paul Krugman: Holding China to Account

The dire state of the world economy reflects destructive actions on the part of many players. Still, the fact that so many have behaved badly shouldn’t stop us from holding individual bad actors to account.

And that’s what Senate leaders will be doing this week, as they take up legislation that would threaten sanctions against China and other currency manipulators.

Respectable opinion is aghast. But respectable opinion has been consistently wrong lately, and the currency issue is no exception.

Ask yourself: Why is it so hard to restore full employment? It’s true that the housing bubble has popped, and consumers are saving more than they did a few years ago. But once upon a time America was able to achieve full employment without a housing bubble and with savings rates even higher than we have now. What changed?

Robert Reich: The American Jobs Depression, and How to Get Out of It

The Reverend Al Sharpton and various labor unions have announced a March for Jobs. But I’m afraid we’ll need more than marches to get jobs back.

Since the start of the Great Recession at the end of 2007, America’s potential labor force – that is, working-age people who want jobs – has grown by over 7 million. But since then, the number of Americans who actually have jobs has shrunk by more than 300,000.

In other words, we’re in a deep hole and the hole is deepening. In August, the United States created no jobs at all. Zero.

America’s ongoing jobs depression – which is what it deserves to be called – is the worst economic calamity to hit this nation since the Great Depression. It’s also terrible news for President Obama, whose chances for re-election now depend almost entirely on the Republican party putting up someone so vacuous and extremist that the nation rallies to Obama regardless.

Maajid Nawaz: US Drone Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki Reinforces Terrorists

In the extra-judicial killing of a US citizen accused of inspiring terror attacks, America has abandoned its own values

As Anwar al-Awlaki became the first individual to be summarily executed by his own government in the “war on terror” on Friday, we are reminded of the dark side in this relentless pursuit for security.

Awlaki was an evil man who preached against humanity. As a counter-extremism adviser, I dedicate all my energies to discrediting his ilk. I am under no illusion of the danger that he posed. I live with such danger every day, through my work. Awlaki’s desire to arbitrarily kill, deny rights and bypass due process is what made him evil. In summarily executing him in this way, the US has just called the kettle black.

Just as achieving liberty takes years of bloody struggle, its violation is rarely brought about overnight. Arbitrary detention, extraordinary rendition, targeted killings and “enhanced interrogation” – otherwise known as torture – are but some of the measures that have slowly been re-introduced into human practice by the US. Now, add to that list the summary execution of a citizen.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Can the Left Stage a Tea Party?

Why hasn’t there been a tea party on the left? And can President Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship?

That those two questions are not asked very often is a sign of how much of the nation’s political energy has been monopolized by the right from the beginning of Obama’s term. This has skewed media coverage of almost every issue, created the impression that the president is far more liberal than he is, and turned the nation’s agenda away from progressive reform.

A quiet left has also been very bad for political moderates. The entire political agenda has shifted far to the right because the tea party and extremely conservative ideas have earned so much attention. The political center doesn’t stand a chance unless there is something like a fair fight between the right and the left.

Robert Parry: Would the Founders Back Health Law?

Today’s American Right is fond of pushing the idea of “originalist” thinking by the Founders to rally opposition to government initiatives that address modern-day problems. The claim is that if George Washington, James Madison and other drafters of the Constitution didn’t anticipate something, the federal government must not act on it.

This approach, which fits with what conservatives call “strict constructionism,” has a facile appeal to many Americans, especially Tea Partiers who like to dress up in Revolutionary-era garb and channel the Founders’ supposed hatred for the federal government. The argument is sure to reappear as the rightist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court considers the new health care law next year.

However, the truth is that the Founders devised the federal government to be a powerful and adaptable entity with broad implicit powers, comparable to a sophisticated software platform that can handle a variety of tasks, anticipated and unanticipated.

Most significantly on this point, the Constitution gives Congress the power to “regulate commerce with foreign Nations and among the several states,” the so-called “commerce clause,” which traces back to the very first substantive presentation at the Constitutional Convention on May 29, 1787.

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

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

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

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour:GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain is a guest.

The roundtable, with George Will, ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper, Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace and Democratic strategist Mark Penn, debate the Cain surge, Gov. Rick Perry’s slump and Gov. Chris Christie’s big decision. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz joins the “This Week” roundtable and shares his ideas to fix Washington and bring America back.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer talks to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) about foreign policy, Campaign 2012, and the economy; Plus, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-MD) and Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) weigh in on the key issues of the week.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests, Nia-Malika Henderson, The Washington Post National Political Reporter, John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent, Rana Foroohar, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor and David Ignatius, The Washington Post Columnist, will discuss:

Is America Beginning A Long-term Decline?

How Is Chris Christie Making Mitt Romney Look Unacceptable?

Meet the Press with David Gregory:  Guests are Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

The Vice Chairman of the Democratic Caucus in the House, Rep. Xavier Becerra (CA); Republican strategist, Mike Murphy; Washington Post columnist, EJ Dionne; and the Wall Street Journal’s, Peggy Noonan will discuss the GOP candidates and the primary calendar changes.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, a former State Department official and national security advocate, Liz Cheney will no doubt cheer the assassination of American citizen, Anwar Al-Awlaki. And to continue the celebration former NSA and CIA Director, Gen. Michael Hayden and former congresswoman, Jane Harman join the party.

Michael Rattner: Anwar al-Awlaki’s Extrajudicial Murder

The law on the use of lethal force by executive order is specific. This assassination broke it – that creates a terrifying precedent

Is this the world we want? Where the president of the United States can place an American citizen, or anyone else for that matter, living outside a war zone on a targeted assassination list, and then have him murdered by drone strike.

This was the very result we at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU feared when we brought a case in US federal court on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki’s father, hoping to prevent this targeted killing. We lost the case on procedural grounds, but the judge considered the implications of the practice as raising “serious questions”, asking:

   “Can the executive order the assassination of a US citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organisation?”

Nicholas D. Kristof: The Bankers and the Revolutionaries

AFTER flying around the world this year to cover street protests from Cairo to Morocco, reporting on the latest “uprising” was easier: I took the subway.

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has taken over a park in Manhattan’s financial district and turned it into a revolutionary camp. Hundreds of young people chant slogans against “banksters” or corporate tycoons. Occasionally, a few even pull off their clothes, which always draws news cameras.

“Occupy Wall Street” was initially treated as a joke, but after a couple of weeks it’s gaining traction. The crowds are still tiny by protest standards – mostly in the hundreds, swelling during periodic marches – but similar occupations are bubbling up in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington. David Paterson, the former New York governor, dropped by, and labor unions are lending increasing support.

New York Times Editorial: The Supercommittee’s Stark Choice

In August, Congressional Republicans tried to box in Democrats and the White House by demanding huge deficit cuts in exchange for preventing a government default. Then they joined in the creation of a “supercommittee” on deficit reduction that they hoped would take taxes off the table and focus entirely on cuts in spending.

But that supposed victory has forced many Republicans into an equally tight corner. They are starting to realize that if they remain adamant, the resulting across-the-board cuts will disproportionately affect programs they support, starting with military spending.

The joint committee created by the debt-ceiling agreement is desperately groping behind closed doors for ways to cut at least $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit. Republican leaders want it all to come from spending cuts; Democratic leaders want a mix of cuts and revenue increases. If the two sides cannot agree, there will be automatic cuts, which largely spare social-welfare programs but would severely reduce military and security spending.

Maureen Dowd: Cooperation in Evil

MAYBE it’s the Mario Lanza in him. But Nino Scalia relishes being operatically imprudent.

The Supreme Court justice’s latest supreme lapse of judgment involves poking his nose in a local legal wrangle about the place where I slept for four years: the Catholic University dorms.

In a speech last weekend at Duquesne University Law School, a Catholic institution in Pittsburgh, Justice Scalia defended religion in public life.

“Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent on diversity in all other aspects of life, seems bent on eliminating the diversity of moral judgment, particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” the devout Catholic said

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”.

Robert Reich: America Faces a Jobs Depression

Keynes was right: only government can get us out of this jobs slump. And only taxing wealth can restore US prosperity

The Reverend Al Sharpton and various labor unions announced Wednesday a March for Jobs. But I’m afraid we’ll need more than marches to get jobs back.

Since the start of the Great Recession at the end of 2007, the potential labor force of the United States – that is, working-age people who want jobs – has grown by over 7 million. But since then, the number of Americans who actually have jobs has shrunk by more than 300,000.

In other words, we’re in a deep hole – and the hole is deepening. In August, the United States created no jobs at all. Zero.

America’s ongoing jobs depression – which is what it deserves to be called – is the worst economic calamity to hit this nation since the Great Depression. It’s also terrible news for President Obama, whose chances for re-election now depend almost entirely on the Republican party putting up someone so vacuous and extremist that the nation rallies to Obama regardless.

New York Times Editorial: Improving No Child Left Behind

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act focused the country’s attention on school reform as never before, but the law is far from perfect. The Obama administration is wise to address its flaws, since Congress is four years overdue in updating the law.

The Department of Education’s plan gives states that agree to several reforms – including stringent teacher evaluation systems and new programs for overhauling the worst schools – an exemption from many of the law’s requirements. It would permit the states to change the way they evaluate most schools for the purpose of compliance, allowing indicators other than just reading and math scores to be considered. And it would lift the law’s provision that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014, which was never going to happen anyway because there were so many loopholes.

The administration, however, must not allow the new waiver system to become a way for states to elude the purpose of the act, which is to raise student achievement across the board.

Eugene Robinson: Chris Christie’s Big Problem

Whether or not he lets himself be persuaded to run for president, Chris Christie needs to find some way to lose weight. Like everyone else, elected officials perform best when they are in optimal health. Christie obviously is not.

You could argue that this is none of my business, but I disagree. Christie’s problem with weight ceased being a private matter when he stepped into the public arena-and it’s not something you can fail to notice. Obesity is a national epidemic whose costs are measured not just in dollars and cents, but in lives. Christie’s weight is as legitimate an issue as the smoking habit that President Obama says he has finally kicked.

Davis Sirota: How Baseball Explains Modern Racism http://www.truthdig.com/report…

Despite recent odes to “post-racial” sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America. Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive-and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability.

Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is.

Today, Major League Baseball games using the QuesTec computerized pitch-monitoring system are the most statistically quantifiable workplaces in America. Match up QuesTec’s accumulated data with demographic information about who is pitching and who is calling balls and strikes, and you get the indisputable proof of how ethnicity does indeed play a part in discretionary decisions of those in power positions.

Tim Karr: High Noon for Internet Freedom

As democracy movements worldwide struggle to speak out via the Internet, many here in the U.S. may have overlooked an effort in Congress to undermine this basic freedom.

It takes the form of an arcane “resolution of disapproval” now wending its way through the Senate. If it passes, the resolution would void a recent Federal Communications Commission rule that seeks to preserve long-held Internet standards that protect users against blocking and censorship.

The resolution would remove these protections. It was put forth by industry-funded members of Congress who don’t mind letting the few corporations who sell Internet access in America decide what we get to see, hear and read on the Internet.

Jeff Biggers: House Committee Censors Testimony of Appalachian Activists

The House Natural Resources Committee has some explaining to do.

In a blatant disregard of the concerns of affected West Virginia coalfield residents who actually live under the fallout of devastating mountaintop removal operations, a press release summary from the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources’ field hearing on “Jobs at Risk: Community Impacts of the Obama Administration’s Effort to Rewrite the Stream Buffer Zone Rule” completely deleted any mention of the official testimonies by Appalachian coalfield leaders Maria Gunnoe and Bo Webb. The press release reported exclusively on testimony from coal industry representatives, Big Coal-bankrolled politicians and hired coal industry supporters.

“Yesterday a House Natural Resources subcommittee tried its very hardest not to hear West Virginians’ concerns about the destruction and heartbreak of mountaintop removal in their communities,” noted Natural Resources Defense Council staff Melissa Waage. “Now the subcommittee leadership is trying to pretend these people don’t even exist.”

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”.

Paul Krugman: Phony Fear Factor

The good news: After spending a year and a half talking about deficits, deficits, deficits when we should have been talking about jobs, job, jobs we’re finally back to discussing the right issue.

The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality.

Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy.

Robert Sheer: The Men We Trusted to Lead Us

Now he tells us. On Wednesday Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to the nation’s unemployment rate as a “national crisis,” an obvious if depressing fact of life to the 25 million Americans who have been unsuccessfully attempting to find full-time employment.

But to finally hear those words from the man George W. Bush and Barack Obama both appointed to lead us out of the great recession is a bracing reminder of how markedly the policies of both those presidents have failed: “We’ve had close to 10 percent unemployment now for a number of years, and of the people who are unemployed, about 45 percent have been unemployed for six months or more,” Bernanke said. “This is unheard of.”

But why is Bernanke just now discovering this after having overseen the Fed’s purchase of trillions in toxic mortgage-backed securities from the too-big-to-fail banks that sacrificed people’s homes in a giant Ponzi scheme? Why did he throw all of that money at the banks without getting anything back in the way of relief for the people the bankers swindled?

John Nichols: Club for Growth Pressures Republican Candidates to Choose China Over US in Currency Manipulation Fight

Just when you think that the race for the Republican presidential nomination could not get any more cruel and unusual, the party plays the next card off the bottom of the czazy deck.

Remember when Rick Perry got in trouble for correctly pointed out that bigots would deny immgrant youth an education don’t “have a heart”? Things turned so ugly that Perry had to come out for heartlessness.

Now, Mitt Romney is in trouble for opposing Chinese currency manipulation that harms the US economy.

Romney’s otherwise lame economic plan featured robust criticism of China for its money machinations. Indeed, Romney called for a “Reagan economic zone” of countries that don’t manipulate their currency.

That did not sit well with the Club for Growth, the exceptionally well-financed conservative pressure group that takes bushels of money from Wall Street speculators-who, of course, like nothing better than a little currency manipulation.

Chris Hedges: The Best Among Us

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.  

Linh Dinh: Banker Brutality: Beyond Tony Bologna

At the Wall Street protest, a young woman carried a sign, “REVOLUTION IS FUN,” and I don’t doubt that she was having a great time, because it can be exhilarating to engage in a just and noble fight, and to feel that you are an agent of change, a participant in history even, and not just one of its faceless victims, as is the common lot. So fun, yes, at least for her, and at least up to that moment, until the violence explodes, as nearly always happens in anything approaching a political revolution.

The violence of September 24th, the 8th day of the anti-Wall Street Protest, appears to not have caused severe or permanent injuries, though it was brutal enough, and some outrage has even flared in the mainstream media. Anthony Bologna, a 28-year-veteran of the New York Police Department, has emerged as a clear cut villain. Without provocation, he pepper sprayed two young women in the faces, and for this he should certainly be fired, then locked up, but this commotion has overshadowed, at least momentarily, the real target and meaning of this protest. Though police brutality is never to be taken lightly, Occupy Wall Street is aiming to expose and hold to account goons much more vicious than any garden variety Anthony Bologna. Though they maim and cripple countless households, even entire countries, these bigger thugs are rarely condemned and never indicted. In fact, some are given plush jobs in the US Treasury, if not a Cabinet appointment.

Tom Engelhardt: Terminator Drones and Washington’s Field of Screams

The Latest in Guarding the Empire

In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around.  Others countries are desperate to have them.  Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie.  Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents.  They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers.

As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them “the only game in town.”  As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and increase their funding drastically.  The U.S. Air Force is already training more personnel to become drone “pilots” than to pilot actual planes.  You don’t need it in skywriting to know that, as icons of American-style war, they are clearly in our future — and they’re even heading for the homeland as police departments clamor for them.

David Morris: GOP Goes Batty on the Postal Service

Will we let the Republicans destroy this most public of all public institutions?

In the next few days we may decide the future of the Post Office. The signs are not auspicious. President Obama has agreed to a plan to cut Saturday delivery. The Post Service’s management wants to close 2500 post offices immediately and up to 16,000 by 2020. Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced a bill that could end free door-to-door delivery.Republicans have been railing at the government post office for many years. But for most of us, it is a “wondrous American creation”.

“Six days a week it delivers an average of 563 million pieces of mail-40 percent of the entire world’s volume”, observes BusinessWeek. “For the price of a 44¢ stamp (the lowest postal rate in the world), you can mail a letter anywhere within the nation’s borders. The service will carry it by pack mule to the Havasupai Indian reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Mailmen on snowmobiles take it to the wilds of Alaska. If your recipient can no longer be found, the USPS will return it at no extra charge. It may be the greatest bargain on earth.”

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”.

Gail Collins: Happy Tidings From the Hill

In our never-ending battle to bring you good news from the world of politics, let’s focus today on the fact that Congress appears to have reached a deal to keep the government operating for seven more weeks.

Think of all the things you’ll be able to do in October if there’s a government. Camp out in a national park! Mail a letter! Fly to Omaha without fear that your plane will crash into a plane flying to Sioux Falls because of a lack of air traffic controllers! Wage war in Afghanistan!

Life doesn’t get any better than that.

New York Times Editorial: Killing the Recovery

The world has barely dug out of recession and the global economy is again slowing dangerously. Most leaders seem eager to make things even worse.

Instead of looking for ways to reignite growth, Europe’s leaders – and Republicans on Capitol Hill – are determined to slash public spending. Europe’s fixation on austerity is also compounding its debt crisis, bringing the Continent even closer to the brink. Meanwhile, China’s government, which is struggling to contain inflation without letting its currency rise, has been trying to slow domestic demand, allowing its trade surplus to balloon.

Each of these policies is wrong. In combination, they are likely to tip the world into a deep recession.

Marc Weisbrot: [The Eurozone: A Crisis of Policy, Not Debt

The European authorities’ doctrinaire decision to use debt issues to force austerity on Greece made the situation so much worse

Three months ago, I wrote here about the risks that the European authorities were posing to the US economy and asked what the US government was going to do about it. It was clear at that time that “the Troika” – the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – was once again playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship at that time with the government of Greece. They were trying to force the Greek parliament to adopt measures that would further shrink the Greek economy and therefore make both their economic situation and their debt problem worse, while inflicting more pain on the Greek electorate. The threat from the Troika was putting the whole European financial system at risk, since it raised the prospect of a chaotic, unilateral Greek default.

Bill McKibben: The Keystone Pipeline Revolt: Why Mass Arrests are Just the Beginning

Inside the growing movement to shut down the environmentally devastating tar-sands project

{}After two decades of scientists gravely explaining to politicians that global warming is by far the biggest crisis our planet has ever faced, and politicians nodding politely (or, in the case of the Tea Party, shaking their heads in disbelief), it was time to actually do something about it that went beyond reading books, attending lectures, lobbying congressmen or writing letters to the editor. With Texas on fire and Vermont drowning under record rainfall, it wasn’t just our bodies on the line.

The Keystone XL pipeline wraps up every kind of environmental devastation in one 1,700-mile-long disaster. At its source, in the tar sands of Alberta, the mining of this oil-rich bitumen has already destroyed vast swaths of boreal forest and native land – think mountaintop removal, but without the mountain. The biggest machines on earth scrape away the woods and dig down to the oily sand beneath – so far they’ve only got three percent of the oil, but they’ve already moved more soil than the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal, the Aswan Dam and the Pyramid of Cheops combined. The new pipeline – the biggest hose into this reservoir – will increase the rate of extraction, and it will carry that oily sand over some of the most sensitive land on the continent, including the Ogallala aquifer, source of freshwater for the plains. A much smaller precursor pipeline spilled 14 times in the past year.

Arun Gupta: The Revolution Begins at Home: An Open Letter to Join the Wall Street Occupation

What is occurring on Wall Street right now is truly remarkable. For over 10 days, in the sanctum of the great cathedral of global capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.

They have created a unique opportunity to shift the tides of history in the tradition of other great peaceful occupations from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the democratic uprisings across the Arab world and Europe today.

While the Wall Street occupation is growing, it needs an all-out commitment from everyone who cheered the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, said “We are all Wisconsin,” and stood in solidarity with the Greeks and Spaniards. This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or healthcare, or thinks they have no future.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Why They Hate Warren Buffett

Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.” That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.

Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless. Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public. I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.

Jim Hightower: The GOP Congress Hates (Except When It Loves) Federal Spending

“You saw the House act,” Rep. Eric Cantor snapped to a reporter last Friday. Yeah, act like a petulant 4-year-old!

The majority leader of the GOP-controlled House has long been a whiney ideological brat who stamps his tiny feet in peevish anger whenever he can’t get his way on legislation. In this particular incident, Cantor tried to pretend that the House had approved more federal aid for thousands of Americans who’ve been devastated by natural disasters this summer. However, he had sabotaged his own “act” by slipping a poison pill into it.

You see, “federal aid” is a four-letter word to right-wing ideologues like Eric, so for weeks he had stalled the emergency funding that hard-hit families desperately need. Cantor and his fellow anti-government dogmatists in the House turned a straightforward humanitarian bill into their political football, insisting that any increase in funds must first be wholly paid for by cutting spending on other public needs. His ploy has become known as the “Cantor Doctrine” – budget purity first, people’s needs last.

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”.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Terrible Ten in Congress

According to the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey released on September 22, for too many people in Kentucky’s 5th District, 2010 was not a good year: nearly 27 percent of the district’s more than 175,000 people lived in poverty, including 34 percent of children and more than one in four women. Nearly 20 percent of the district’s constituents had no health insurance.

You might think that the good news for residents of the 5th is that their congressman, Republican Hal Rogers, has enormous power and influence over Congress’s spending decisions as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

You’d be wrong.

John Nichols; ‘Save the Post Office’ Movement Defends ‘the Human Side of Government’

When I started covering politics, Jennings Randolph was completing his tenure as the grand old man of Capitol Hill. The last sitting member of Congress to have arrived with Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 (as a member of the House), he was still sitting as a senator from West Virginia more than fifty years later. Perhaps as importantly, he had been born only a little more than a century after the Constitution was adopted.

Randolph recognized the connection between the Constitution and the New Deal, seeing in both an element of nation-building that focused on the affirmative role of government and the necessary role of the extension of the federal government that could be found in every hinterland hamlet and urban neighborhood: the post office.

Randolph was the great defender of the postal service that Ben Franklin had established and that the framers of the Constitution had seen fit to recognize as an essential project of the federal endeavor.

Sue Sturgis; Nationwide Rallies Aim to Save US Postal Service

Rallies are scheduled for today in every congressional district across the nation in support of the U.S. Postal Service, which is facing a financial crisis because of past congressional action. Participants will be asking lawmakers to approve a bill that’s been introduced to fix the problem.

In 2006, Congress passed a postal reform law that, among other things, required USPS — a self-funded agency that receives no taxpayer money — to pre-pay 75 years’ worth of retiree health benefits within just 10 years. The mandate, which no other federal agency is under, costs USPS $5.5 billion a year — and accounts for all of the Postal Service’s $20 billion in losses over the past four years.

Ed Pilkington: Wall Street Protests Reveal Slice of America’s Barely Tamed Brutality

One of the hardships of life as a reporter in New York City is that you so rarely get credited with the kind of heroism shown by colleagues in Helmand, say, or Baghdad. The assumption is that you’re spending time drinking gin martinis on the roof of Soho House (I prefer vodka) or dining at the Grand Central oyster bar (try the Rhode Island Cuttyhunks, they’re sumptuous), rather than dodging bullets in Tripoli.

I’d like to think that over the past few days perception of my job as a soft landing has started to change, and that its true nature as a tough, dangerous and – yes – heroic posting has begun to emerge. Take the events over the weekend in Wall Street. Admittedly, I wasn’t there, but that’s not the point. I could have been.

Maureen Dowd: Decoding the God Complex

Medical schools are starting to train doctors to be less intimidating to patients. And patients are starting to train themselves to be less intimidated by doctors.

We haven’t completely gotten away from the syndrome so perfectly described by Alec Baldwin’s arrogant surgeon in the movie “Malice”: “When someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn’t miscarry or that their daughter doesn’t bleed to death or that their mother doesn’t suffer acute neural trauma from postoperative shock, who do you think they’re praying to? … You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.”

But there have been baby steps away from the Omniscient Doctor. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has begun a new campaign to encourage patients to ask more pertinent questions and to prod doctors to elicit more relevant answers.

Paul Krugman: The Real Job Killer: Missed Opportunity

I’ve actually been avoiding thinking about President Obama’s latest cave-in, on ozone regulation; these repeated retreats are getting painful to watch.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s bad politics. Mr. Obama’s political people seem to think that their route to victory is to avoid doing anything that the Republicans might attack – but the G.O.P. will call Mr. Obama a socialist job-killer no matter what they do. Meanwhile, they just keep reinforcing the perception of mush from the wimp – of a president who doesn’t stand for anything.

Whatever. Let’s talk about the economics, because the ozone decision is definitely a mistake on that front. As some of us keep trying to point out, the United States is in a liquidity trap: private spending is inadequate for achieving full employment, and with short-term interest rates close to zero, conventional monetary policy is exhausted.

New York Times Editorial: Governing by Crisis

Thanks to some good luck and expert government accountants, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will limp, exhausted and nearly broke, to the end of the fiscal year on Friday. That removes its budget as the latest excuse for House Republicans to slash domestic programs they don’t like and momentarily defuses their threat to shut down the entire government to get their way.

But, make no mistake, the threat has hardly disappeared. In fact, the country will probably be wrung through several more near-shutdowns as the 2012 budget process stumbles along, all prompted by conservatives in the House who will use any choke point to achieve their obsessive goal of shrinking government.

Load more