Category: Politics As Usual
Your daily dose of Alan Grayson
The final solution
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest political ally has called for Israel to carry out a “thorough cleansing” of the Gaza Strip as a tenuous ceasefire between its Hamas rulers and the Jewish state frayed.
Speaking on Israel Radio, the far-right former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman called for Israel to reconquer the crowded coastal enclave to avoid “finding ourselves in two years with Hamas having aircraft and hundreds of missiles that will reach beyond Tel Aviv”.
His comments came as the Israeli Air Force attacked targets in the Gaza Strip after six rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel into the early hours of Monday morning. No one was injured. It was the first ceasefire breach since April.
Mr Lieberman suggested that neither the eight-day aerial campaign Israel launched in November with the stated goal of halting rockets from Gaza, nor the devastating Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 in which more than 1,100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died, had proven effective at quelling the violence.
“Without willingness to take things to their conclusion we merely increase the threats,” he said, adding that Hamas “has no intention of coming to terms with the Jewish presence in the land of Israel and therefore what is needed is to seriously consider conquering the Strip and carry out a thorough cleansing.” Mr Lieberman was number two on Mr Netanyahu’s electoral list during elections last January, and currently holds the post of chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee. Mr Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on Mr Lieberman’s statements. Yair Lapid, the centrist Finance minister, said the remarks were “irresponsible”.
Virtually Speaking Thursday
Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd — 6p PT/ 9p ET – June 27
Listen live and later: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/
American investigative journalist — economics and tax issues — and author David Cay Johnston talks with host Jay Ackroyd about debt peonage and neofeudalism.
Books
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill, is about hidden subsidies, rigged markets, and corporate socialism.
Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else, a New York Times bestselleron the U.S. tax system that won the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2003 Book of the Year award.
Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business is an account of how the junk-bond kings usurped mob control of the casino industry in the 1980s. Johnston discusses corruption in the industry and the role of the federal and state governments in that corruption.
The Fine Print: How Big companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind was released in September 2012.
Christie weasels out of making a decision… again
Dem gubernatorial candidate Barbara Buono is a real progressive. That’s why the national Dems won’t help her.
Christie is neither a moderate, nor politically brave. So he tries to split the difference. Barbara Buono, on the other hand, is an honest-to-God progressive. Obama is trying to help Christie get reelected and ignoring the Dem. You know what to do – give money!
Gov. Chris Christie said he would again veto a same-sex marriage bill if it reaches his desk, and that Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a ban on federal benefits for same-sex married couples will have no effect on New Jersey, one of a handful of states that allows civil unions.
Appearing on TownSquare Media’s “Ask the Governor,” program Wednesday night, Christie said he remains opposed to gay marriage but is willing to put the question to voters.
“What I’ve said all along is what I said when I vetoed the last one, ‘let the people decide,'” Christie said. “You’re talking about changing an institution that’s over 2,000 years old. The Democrats are putting an increase in the minimum wage on the ballot. That’s important enough to put on the ballot but gay marriage is not?”
Christie, who said he supports civil unions, also criticized the federal court for the ruling, levying a criticism typically reserved for New Jersey’s highest court.
“It’s just another example of judicial supremacy rather than having a government run by the people we actually vote for,” he said. “I thought it was a bad decision, but it has no effect on New Jersey at all so we move from here.”
Sen. Barbara Buono, the Democrat running against Christie for governor and the parent of an adult gay daughter, called for an override of Christie’s veto to be held Thursday. But a spokesman for Senate President Steve Sweeney said that won’t happen.
NSA collected email records in bulk under Obama
The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata “every 90 days”. A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.
The collection of these records began under the Bush administration’s wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by theNSA codename Stellar Wind.
According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA’s inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began “collection of bulk internet metadata” involving “communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States”.
Eventually, the NSA gained authority to “analyze communicationsmetadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States”, according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.
Snowden’s service
Snowden, apparently holed up in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, has disappeared from view. Perhaps one way to assess what he has done is to imagine how things would stand if he had never existed. I am not big on counterfactuals — hypothetical history is at once tantalizing and meaningless — but in this case the exercise may be useful.
We would not know how the N.S.A., through its Prism and other programs, has become, in the words of my colleagues James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “the virtual landlord of the digital assets of Americans and foreigners alike.” We would not know how it has been able to access the e-mails or Facebook accounts or videos of citizens across the world; nor how it has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; nor how through requests to the compliant and secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (F.I.S.A.) it has been able to bend nine U.S. Internet companies to its demands for access to clients’ digital information.
We would not be debating whether the United States really should have turned surveillance into big business, offering data-mining contracts to the likes of Booz Allen and, in the process, high-level security clearance to myriad folk who probably should not have it. We would not have a serious debate at last between Europeans, with their more stringent views on privacy, and Americans about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
We would not have legislation to bolster privacy safeguards and require more oversight introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Nor would we have a letter from two Democrats to the N.S.A. director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, saying that a government fact sheet about surveillance abroad “contains an inaccurate statement” (and where does that assertion leave Alexander’s claims of the effectiveness and necessity of Prism?).
In short, a long-overdue debate about what the U.S. government does and does not do in the name of post-9/11 security — the standards applied in the F.I.S.A. court, the safeguards and oversight surrounding it and the Prism program, the protection of civil liberties against the devouring appetites of intelligence agencies armed with new data-crunching technology — would not have occurred, at least not now.
All this was needed because, since it was attacked in an unimaginable way, the United States has gone through a Great Disorientation. Institutions at the core of the checks and balances that frame American democracy and civil liberties failed. Congress gave a blank check to the president to wage war wherever and whenever he pleased. The press scarcely questioned the march to a war in Iraq begun under false pretenses. Guantánamo made a mockery of due process. The United States, in Obama’s own words, compromised its “basic values” as the president gained “unbound powers.” Snowden’s phrase, “turnkey tyranny,” was over the top but still troubling.
One of the most striking aspects of the Obama presidency has been the vast distance between his rhetoric on these issues since 2008 and any rectifying action. If anything he has doubled-down on security at the expense of Americans’ supposedly inalienable rights: Hence the importance of a whistleblower.
Snowden has broken the law of his country. We do not know what, if anything, he has offered China or Russia — or been coerced or tricked into handing over. He has, through his choice of destination, embraced states that suppress individual rights and use the Internet as an instrument of control and persecution. His movements have sent the wrong message.
Still, he has performed a critical service. History, the real sort, will judge him kindly.
Let shooting victims sue
Activists are working on restoring the rights of gun victims to sue. Imagine the arrogance that led to Republicans exempting the gun manufacturers in the first place:
A BASIC function of law in a civilized society is to allocate the costs of harm to those who caused it. In the case of a gang shooting or terrorist attack, penalties are imposed on the gang member or terrorist. But what of the person who sold them their weapons?
In 2004, relatives of eight people shot in the Washington-area sniper attacks received $2.5 million dollars from the maker and seller of the rifle used in those shootings. That was a matter of simple justice. But the gun lobby had no use for that kind of justice. They went to work and, the next year, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, severely reducing the legal liability of gun manufacturers, distributors and dealers for reckless acts that send guns to the black market. The National Rifle Association called it “the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in 20 years.”
This kind of legislation encourages arms dealers to turn a blind eye to the lethal consequences of what they peddle, and rewards their breathtaking irresponsibility.
An executive at one top gun company admitted that it didn’t try to learn whether the dealers who sold its firearms were involved in the black market. “I don’t even know what a gun trafficker is,” he said in a court deposition reviewed by The New York Times.
The 2005 law is just one example of Congressional actions that have reduced gun-industry liability and gutted consumer protections. The result of all this legislation, as Jonathan E. Lowy, director of the legal action project at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, has noted, is that a defective BB gun can be recalled, but not a real gun with a similar defect.
Astounding
No, really. This is just awful:
When it comes to dashing the hopes of thousands of college-bound African Americans, you’d hardly think of President Obama as a culprit. Maybe the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court. But not Obama, the black Harvard law grad who likes to cite higher education as a path into the middle class and who pledges to make student loans more accessible to black scholars.
And yet, in what United Negro College Fund President Michael Lomax calls “a nasty surprise,” the Obama administration has begun denying student loans to disproportionately large numbers of black parents because of blemished credit histories.
Talk about audacity. Obama blames malfeasance by big banks for plunging the nation into a recession, then bails them out — and proceeds to punish black people for not making it through the economic maelstrom unscathed.
An angry-sounding Obama actually called Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling against a key part of the Voting Rights Act a “setback” for blacks. You want to know what a real setback is, Mr. President? It’s using some bureaucratic fiat to prevent black students from going to college.
Obama declared that he will press for restoration of the portion of the Voting Rights Act the justices ruled on. But let’s face it: He’s a lame duck. Why not leave as part of his legacy tens of thousands of newly minted black college graduates to carry on what is sure to be a decades-long struggle?
“We’re getting calls and e-mails from parents, at least two and three a day, saying the denial of their student loans is a disaster,” said Johnny Taylor, president of the Washington-based Thurgood Marshall College Fund. “You have black students from low-income households about to enter college or already there and pressing towards graduation, persisting just as Obama urged them to do, only to have his administration pull the rug out from under them.”