PND Commentary

"Within hours after the news broke that the Internal Revenue Service singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups that had applied for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status for extra scrutiny, conservatives were already complaining that the story wasn't getting enough play in the media. 'Imagine if this had happened under President Bush!' they cried. (For starters, it actually did. In that case, it was the FBI, not the IRS, that went after liberal groups under the pretense that they might be harboring al Qaeda terrorists.) Now that there are finally a couple of Obama administration 'scandals' for conservatives and the media to chew on, we're going to be hearing a lot of comparisons to what went on in prior administrations, so it will be useful to get our history straight." (05/13/13)

"One aspect that defines our current economy is that things are happening that shouldn’t be happening. I don’t mean that things are happening that are illegal or immoral. (Well, some of them are immoral, but that’s not what I mean.) Rather, things are happening that defy economic logic—a slippery term that really means, the economic patterns of roughly the past half-century. The first such logic-defying thing is that corporate profits are soaring even as corporate revenues limp along." (05/13/13)

"Five days a week, between 40 and 80 men and women in handcuffs and shackles are brought into Tucson’s DeConcini Courthouse, a high-rise that houses the U.S. District Court. The prisoners are dirty, hungry and sometimes injured from days spent walking across the desert before Border Patrol agents caught them entering the United States along the southern Arizona border without the proper documentation. Led into a second-floor courtroom, they sit quietly in neat rows on spectator benches and in the jury box. Across the courtroom sit two men in dark green shirts with 'Border Patrol' across their backs." (05/13/13)

"In the aftermath of the First World War, Britain and France famously created the modern Middle East by carving up what had been the Ottoman Empire. The borders of new states such as Iraq and Syria were determined in keeping with British and French needs and interests. The wishes of local inhabitants were largely ignored." (05/13/13)

"Looking for a quick fix to the deep inequality that so afflicts us? Stop your searching. We need to strategize instead for the long-term. A riveting new work from a leading historian helps us see how. The 79-year-old corporate gadfly Robert Monks, the former top federal regulator over America’s pension system, earlier this year opined that Corporate America operates 'for the personal enrichment and glorification of its manager-kings.' Too harsh a judgment? Hardly. Current standard corporate operating procedures only make sense if we acknowledge that America’s biggest private enterprises have essentially become the private preserve of an elite executive class." [editor's note: Although it's nice to see 'progressive' pundits figuring this out at last; now if they'd only realize that "more government" will not solve it! - SAT] (05/13/13)

"At the end of April, the San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee announced that Bradley Manning, a Nobel Peace Prize–nominated gay veteran and whistleblower currently languishing inside a military prison for releasing classified military documents to Wikileaks, would be a grand marshal at this year’s pride parade. But mere hours after the news broke, San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee President Lisa Williams released a statement rescinding the honor and calling the decision 'a mistake that never should have been allowed to happen.' The controversy has divided the LGBT military community and drawn significant attention to what some critics have seen as Pride’s backing away from contentious issues and embracing of corporate sponsors." (05/13/13)

"A test case between Cody Wilson and the US government could have implications for regulation of the internet. By now, everyone’s heard about the 3D printed gun that Defense Distributed demonstrated last week. The Texas-based group has been steadily working its way up the 3D printed firearms evolutionary ladder, making parts for guns, then guns themselves, then firing a gun, then making the plans for running up your own pistols on a nearby 3D printer. If Defense Distributed had set out to create a moral panic over 3D printing, they could have picked no better project." (05/13/13)

"Over the years when I’ve written about nanny-state laws like measures to ban grocery stores from giving away free plastic bags, scolds have sent e-mails in which they scolded me for not sharing the refined sensibilities and energy policies of 'Our Betters in Europe.' That’s been a stock phrase in my lexicon. It’s not a hit on Europeans. Some of my best friends are Europeans. It’s a hit on those -- American or European -- who seem to think that if Europeans do something, that action must be superior. Because Europeans do it." (05/13/13)

"Obama says some Americans are paranoid, fretting about an imagined tyranny lurking behind the corner. Progressives cheer as he mocks his lowly subjects. Yet some among them embrace one of the most despotic state powers imaginable: the draft. The draft is military slavery. It cannot be justified on any basis. Ever. It is wrong in and of itself, just like aggressive war." (05/10/13)

"I hope you all have been following the entire kerfuffle over the Heritage Foundation’s 'researchers,' a man named Jason Richwine, who has been outed as a proponent of the idea that Hispanics are genetically inferior people born with a hardwired low IQ. The Heritage Foundation is playing the 'how could we have ever known?' card, but no one of any IQ is buying it, since he’s been on about this belief for a long time. Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress has a post up analyzing why conservatives keep circling back to this IQ horseshit, even though it’s unscientific and racist as all get-out." (05/10/13)

"The tired Benghazi circus staged by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee earlier this week did have one legitimately intriguing moment: Gregory Hicks, a senior diplomat at the State Department, claimed he was intimidated and then demoted for questioning the administration’s response to the September 2012 attacks. This was a new bit of information, and fleshed out heretofore-anonymous claims in the right-wing media that Benghazi whistleblowers were being cajoled and silenced by federal authorities." (05/10/13)

"Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first of many hearings on comprehensive immigration reform. In the seven and a half hour hearing, senators debated 32 of the three hundred proposed amendments to the bill, and adopted 21 of the changes. The proposals ranged from plans to correct technical immigration issues, to Sen. Ted Cruz’s amendment to triple the number of border control agents, to Sen. Jeff Sessions’ proposal to construct a 700 mile, double-layered fence along our Southern border. Thankfully, most of the extreme amendments were voted down, but there’s still cause for concern over the proposals they accepted." (05/10/13)

"It is one of the oldest and thorniest questions of the digital music era: How much should artists and musicians be compensated for the Internet broadcast of their songs? And who gets to decide that rate? You might think in the nearly two decades since music first began streaming over the Internet that some kind of consensus about paying artists would have emerged. But about the only thing most Internet radio stakeholders can agree on is that the current system makes no sense." (05/10/13)

"More than 100 of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo are starving themselves to death. Twenty-three of them are being force-fed. 'They strap you to a chair, tie up your wrists, your legs, your forehead and tightly around the waist,' Fayiz Al-Kandari told his lawyer, Lt. Col. Barry Wingard. Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo for 11 years, has never been charged with a crime." (05/11/13)

"President Obama nominated Tom Wheeler the next chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Grant Seiffert, the president of the Telecommunications Industry Association enthused: 'He has the proven ability to transcend a broad range of industry perspectives to reach balanced outcomes.' Indeed. Wheeler, 67, is the former head of -- and chief lobbyist for— -- the National Cable Television Association and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. Or, as Obama spins it, 'He’s helped give American consumers more choices and better products.' (He’s also helped give the president more than $245,000 in bundled contributions for his re-election campaign.)" [editor's note: Too little, too late, Joel! The time to slam Obombya for corporatist hypocrisy is long past! - SAT] (05/10/13)

"The big social media sites all recommend people they think you should add to your network. In most cases, it's pretty obvious, at least on the surface, how the recommendation algorithm works; Twitter offers you a few people it suggests you follow, and says they're followed by people you already follow. But after joining LinkedIn a couple of years ago, I found its recommendations to be not just highly accurate, but disturbingly so. That isn't to say they don't recommend people I don't know, but often they'll recommend someone I do know, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they did it." (05/10/13)

"We live in an interconnected world: to actually boycott all Israeli products, or those with significant Israeli components, is well nigh impossible -- not to mention unjust. A blanket boycott of all things Israeli fails to make an elementary and crucial distinction between the Israeli government -- which is pursuing policies decent people must condemn -- and Israelis as individuals, who may or may not agree with the policies of their government." (05/10/13)

"Back in the benighted old days of the DSM-III -- the third iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the American Psychiatric Association’s official catalog of the mental illnesses -- my therapy patients included a 26-year-old man who came to see me due to his wife’s complaint that he’d 'gotten out of control of himself.' The attractive couple had recently been united for life in a grand ceremony in her hometown, followed by an even splashier party on the highest floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston. He was a commercial real estate agent, a rising star, and she was in law school." (05/09/13)

"When the Russian security service in 2011 asked the FBI to check up on Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- one of two brothers now suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing -- the request would have come as no surprise to a quiet, former FBI special agent in northern California. Michael di Pretoro had been sent to Moscow in 1994 as the FBI’s first legal attache, or 'legat,' in Russia. He had a daunting task: to establish formal cooperation between the FBI and the Russian police and security services. The bureau’s hope was that a successful liaison arrangement would help both countries fight Russian organized crime." (05/09/13)

"Today, in a revamped Campbell’s Soup building in an industrial and residential section of southwest Chicago, the New Era Windows Cooperative will celebrate the grand opening of its new factory. The journey to this moment has been a long and rocky one. Becoming a worker-owned cooperative is the latest chapter in the saga of the workers of Republic Windows and Doors, who gained the nation’s attention by occupying their factory (twice) and became a symbol of resistance in the face of corporate corruption and the economic crisis." (05/09/13)

"Let's grant that it’s possible to over-learn the lessons of Iraq. The Iraq war, as costly a blunder as it was, should not discredit any and all military interventions, but it should raise -- and has raised -- the bar for when such interventions are necessary. What appears to persist, however, is the belief that “bold” U.S. moves—nearly always assumed to be military action—can change the situation for the better, and produce the outcomes that we would like to see." (05/09/13)

"The question for people who live and work abroad is whether they can turn themselves into corporations. Corporations are, as lawyers have known for years, and as the now famous case of Citizens United reminded us, (even though it did so by being misread by many commentators) people just like the people who live in the house next door. Since corporations are people and have the same rights as people, the question people of the flesh and blood kind ask is why human persons are not entitled to the same tax benefits as Congress gives corporation persons." (05/10/13)

"College students today graduate with the terrible burden of an average of $25,000 in student-loan debt. That total increases with the rising costs of tuition, even at public colleges and universities, and by the actions of our own government in letting the rates for student loans rise. If nothing is done by July 1, the rates will rise again. ... That is why we are enthusiastically endorsing the first bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), which would lower student loan interest rates for one year to 0.75 percent, the same rate at which the government loans money to the banks through the Federal Reserve discount window. Student loan interest rates will double to 6.8 percent on July 1 without action." (05/08/13)

"In the last half-century of American politics, conservatism has hardened around the defense of economic privilege and rule. Whether it’s the libertarianism of the GOP or the neoliberalism of the Democrats, that defense has enabled an upward redistribution of rights and a downward redistribution of duties. ... The Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek is the leading theoretician of this movement, formulating the most genuinely political theory of capitalism on the right we’ve ever seen. The theory does not imagine a shift from government to the individual, as is often claimed by conservatives; nor does it imagine a simple shift from the state to the market or from society to the atomized self, as is sometimes claimed by the left. Rather, it recasts our understanding of politics and where it might be found." [editor's note: Though flawed, this analysis is at least thought-provoking reading - SAT] (05/07/13)

"In April, U.S. banks dusted off the dividend again, a trick they’d mostly abandoned during the financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase plans an 8-cent-per-share hike. Wells Fargo’s will be 5 cents. Same for Morgan Stanley. Bank of America will raise its dividend a penny. Some might celebrate the move: The banks are back! But there’s more to it. In this fairly anemic economy, dividends are yet another strategic, if counterintuitive, hedge that won’t get our loved and loathed financial institutions lending again anytime soon." (05/08/13)