On the two-year anniversary of the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the President speak to troops at Fort Bliss, and discusses that part of ending wars responsibly demands standing by those who have served.
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Scooped by Dennis Richards onto Government for the People |
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"When politicians want to turn scandals into metaphors, actual details of wrongdoing or incompetence no longer matter. In fact, the details of the troubles swirling around the White House this week are bluntly contradicting Republicans who want to combine them into a seamless narrative of tyrannical government on the rampage. The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines. The tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, never a scandal to begin with, has devolved into a turf-protection spat between government agencies, and the e-mail messages Republicans long demanded made clear that there was no White House cover-up. The only example of true government overreach was the seizure of The Associated Press’s telephone records, the latest episode in the Obama administration’s Javert-like obsession with leakers in its midst. Many of the Republicans who have added this action to their metaphor blender were also the ones clamoring the loudest for vigorous investigations of national security leaks."
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"Don’t forget the lies "But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover. Think about his two main 'achievements', if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies. I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where."
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"How can we keep from building a new inequality on top of the old one?" "A little pocket of Los Angeles County tucked into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains reflects a crucial facet of suburban life. There’s tiny, wealthy Bradbury, a town that prides itself on having one of the richest ZIP codes in Los Angeles, where a house is on the market for $68.8 million. A couple of miles to the east is Azusa. This modest suburb is more than two-thirds Latino, a town of working families whose incomes and home values are a sliver of the wealth nearby. These towns represent extremes of social inequality, but in Los Angeles and other areas, they reflect a defining pattern of contemporary suburban life. Nationwide, rich and poor neighborhoods like these house a growing proportion of Americans, up to 31 percent compared with 15 percent in 1970, according to a recent study by Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. Meanwhile, iconic middle-income suburbs are shrinking in numbers and prospects. Today’s suburbs provide a map not just to the different worlds of the rich and the poor, which have always been with us, but to the increase in inequality between economic and social classes."
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"Many companies have retained lobbying firms that employ former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping tax legislation." "Restaurant chains like McDonald’s want to keep their lucrative tax credit for hiring veterans. Altria, the tobacco giant, wants to cut the corporate tax rate. And Sapphire Energy, a small alternative energy company, is determined to protect a tax incentive it believes could turn algae into a popular motor fuel. To make their case as Congress prepares to debate a rewrite of the nation’s tax code, this diverse set of businesses has at least one strategy in common: they have retained firms that employ lobbyists who are former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping any legislation. No other lawmaker on Capitol Hill has such a sizable constellation of former aides working as tax lobbyists, representing blue-chip clients that include telecommunications businesses, oil companies, retailers and financial firms, according to an analysis by LegiStorm, an online database that tracks Congressional staff members and lobbying. At least 28 aides who have worked for Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, since he became the committee chairman in 2001 have lobbied on tax issues during the Obama administration — more than any other current member of Congress, according to the analysis of lobbying filings performed for The New York Times. 'K Street is literally littered with former Baucus staffers,' said Jade West, an executive at a wholesalers’ trade association that relies on a former finance panel aide, Mary Burke Baker. 'It opens doors that allow you to make the case.'"
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"There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. With rapid-fire visuals, he shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way, and issues a rallying bipartisan cry that will resonate with many in the U.S. and beyond.
Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system." Delete the scoop?
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Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, which contributes to widening economic inequality, economists say.
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"After a 17-year freeze imposed by the gun lobby, government research on the causes and prevention of gun violence must resume." "But by the early 1990s, C.D.C. gun research had advanced to the point that it contradicted N.R.A. ideology. Some studies found, for example, that people living in a home with a gun were not safer; they faced a significantly elevated risk of homicide and suicide. The N.R.A. denounced the research as 'political opinion masquerading as medical science,' and in 1996, Congress took $2.6 million intended for gun research and redirected it to traumatic brain injury. It prohibited the use of C.D.C. money 'to advocate or promote gun control.' Since then, similar prohibitions have been imposed on other agencies, including the National Institutes of Health."
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"Suffering from incredibly low approval ratings, US lawmakers are now less popular than cockroaches. We ask some groups more beloved by the US for advice."
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"Connoisseurs of democratic decadence can savor a variety of contemporary dystopias. Because familiarity breeds banality, Greece has become a boring horror. Japan, however, in its second generation of stagnation is fascinating. Once, Japan bestrode the world, jauntily buying Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach. Now Japanese buy more adult diapers than those for infants. America has its lowest birth rate since at least 1920 — family formation and workforce participation (which hit a 30-year low last year) have declined in tandem. But it has an energy surplus, the government-produced overhang of housing inventory is shrinking and the average age of Americans’ cars is an astonishing 10.8 years. Such promising economic indicators, however, mask the country’s democratic decadence, as explained by the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth in the Dec. 24 Weekly Standard: Deficit spending once was largely for investments — building infrastructure, winning wars — which benefited future generations, so government borrowing appropriately shared the burden with those generations. Now, however, continuous borrowing burdens future generations in order to finance current consumption. Today’s policy, says DeMuth, erases “the distinction between investing for the future and borrowing from the future.” It is now as clear as it is unsurprising that most Americans will be spared the educational experience of 'fiscal cliff'-related tax increases and spending cuts, which would have been a small but instructive taste of the real costs of the entitlement state."
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"Congress approved a plan to end Washington’s long drama over the “fiscal cliff” late Tuesday after House Republicans surrendered to President Obama’s demand to let taxes rise on the nation’s richest households. The House voted 257 to 167 to send the measure to Obama for his signature; the vote came less than 24 hours after the Senate overwhelmingly approved the legislation. House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) and most other top GOP leaders took no public position on the measure and offered no public comment before the 10:45 p.m. vote. Boehner declined even to deliver his usual closing argument, leaving House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) to defend the measure as the “largest tax cut in American history.” The bill will indeed shield millions of middle-class taxpayers from tax increases set to take effect this month. But it also will let rates rise on wages and investment profits for households pulling in more than $450,000 a year, marking the first time in more than two decades that a broad tax increase has been approved with GOP support."
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Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) has about 100 Republican members he can count on if and when the Senate-passed fiscal-cliff bill hits the House floor, according to an analysis by The Hill.
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The Congressional Research Service withdrew a report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth after senators raised concerns.
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"History shows that candidates have different ways to score in presidential debates and change voters’ minds, but that it is very difficult to fundamentally alter the direction of a campaign."
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"With soaring costs, stagnating incomes and little help from the government, there is only one way to pay for higher education: debt." "Consider another dubious distinction: student debt is almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy proceedings. We’re a long way from the debtors’ prisons Dickens described. We don’t send debtors to penal colonies or put them in bonded labor. Although personal bankruptcy laws have been tightened, the principle that bankrupt individuals should be allowed a fresh start, and a chance to discharge excessive debt, is an established principle. This helps debt markets work better, and also provides incentives for creditors to assess the creditworthiness of borrowers. Yet education loans are almost impossible to write off in bankruptcy court — even when for-profit schools didn’t deliver what they promised and didn’t provide an education that would let the borrower get a job that paid enough to pay back the loan."
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Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and supporters of libertarian causes, are exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers.
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"States are restricting undercover operations by activists in response to exposés that industry groups say have led to unfair scrutiny." "But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms. Critics call them 'Ag-Gag' bills. Some of the legislation appears inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business advocacy group with hundreds of state representatives from farm states as members. The group creates model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that in the past have included such things as 'stand your ground' gun laws and tighter voter identification rules. One of the group’s model bills, 'The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,' prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to 'defame the facility or its owner.' Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry."
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"An enormous leak of confidential financial records has revealed the identities of thousands of wealthy depositors — including European officials and corporate executives, Asian dictators and their children, and even American doctors and dentists — who have stashed immense amounts of money in offshore tax havens. The leak of records, mainly from the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and Singapore, covers 2.5 million files that disclose proprietary information about more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and agents, including the wealthiest people in more than 170 countries.
Dennis Richards's insight:
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Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, which contributes to widening economic inequality, economists say.
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The president proposed taking royalties from offshore oil and gas leasing to fund the research.
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"Vice President Biden on Thursday gave the strongest hints yet on what the White House's gun violence task force is considering, and said he would present his recommendations to President Obama by Tuesday. 'There is an emerging set of recommendations not coming from me, but coming from the groups we have met with,' Biden said at the opening of a meeting with sportsmen and wildlife interest groups -- the first of three meetings he held Thursday on gun violence. He said he would be focusing on the recommendations that 'relate primarily to gun ownership, and the type of weapons we own.'"
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"The trillion dollar coin is emerging as a surprisingly serious proposal by the political left to avoid the looming fight over the debt ceiling. It’s also the political equivalent of the nuclear option — something that may be technically practical, but would lead to all kinds of unpredictable political fallout. So much so that it’s very likely to remain in the realm of liberal fantasy."
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"Starting bipartisan talks in the Senate to put pressure on the House may become a more formalized process as President Obama and lawmakers grapple with other fiscal deadlines."
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"The House on Tuesday evening took a step toward approving the Senate's "fiscal cliff" legislation after a day in which Republican opposition to the bill seriously threatened its passage. Members took up a rule allowing for an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill that passed 408-10. All but two Republicans voted for the rule, even though most Republicans were expected to oppose the bill itself. Final passage of the bill was expected before midnight, with the help of most Democrats. Earlier Tuesday evening, the House Rules Committee sent the Senate-passed "fiscal cliff" bill to the floor. After a day of lengthy internal GOP wrangling over whether to amend the Senate-approved bill, House GOP leaders decided that they did not have enough support to pass an amendment with Republican votes alone. "
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"The Senate approved a bipartisan agreement early Tuesday morning to let income taxes rise sharply for the first time in two decades, fulfilling President Obama’s promise to raise taxes on the rich and avoiding the worst effects of the “fiscal cliff.” The agreement, brokered by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), passed 89 to 8 in a highly unusual New Year’s morning vote. It now heads to the House, where leaders have not guaranteed passage but top officials believe it could win passage in the next few days."
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During the debate, Romney bumbled his way through a cringe-inducing attempt to graft what he thinks should be 2012 talking points onto his 1952 sensibility.
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