Tag: yep

Throwing Stones

John Kampfner makes some excellent points about the media’s own docility in the face of institutional power being what’s ultimately behind their suspicion of and outright derision towards Wikileaks:

All governments have a legitimate right to protect national security. This should be a specific, and closely scrutinised, area of policy. Most of our secrecy rules are designed merely to protect politicians and officials from embarrassment. Documents are habitually over-classified for this purpose.

[…]

Rather than throwing stones, newspapers should be asking themselves why they did not have the wherewithal to hold truth to power.

Throwing Stones

A Waste of Money and Time

Bruce Schneier gives a cogent opinion:

Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we’re done. Take all the rest of the money and spend it on investigation and intelligence.

This is exactly right, though it clearly elides the cesspool that our investigation and intelligence apparatus currently is, a critical problem that the government shows zero interest in taking on.
The 9/11 Commission pointed it out and the reaction has been to add another layer or two of middle managers and most definitely not to drain the swamp and rebuild a reactive and reasonably transparent national intelligence apparatus. Easier just to scan our junk, I guess. Kick all other cans down the road and then roundly blame the other party when the next big (but plainly avoidable) intelligence failure happens.

A Waste of Money and Time

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation […] want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. […] Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass, 1857.
Maximum yep.

Mr. Obama still has immense power, if he chooses to use it. At home, he has the veto pen, control of the Senate and the bully pulpit. He still has substantial executive authority to act on things like mortgage relief — there are billions of dollars not yet spent, not to mention the enormous leverage the government has via its ownership of Fannie and Freddie. Abroad, he still leads the world’s greatest economic power — and one area where he surely would get bipartisan support would be taking a tougher stand on China and other international bad actors.
But none of this will matter unless the president can find it within himself to use his power, to actually take a stand. And the signs aren’t good.

Paul Krugman, shrill as always.

Of the Zillionaires, by the Zillionaires, and for the Zillionaires

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

[…]

The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.

[…]

So we face a choice. Is our economic priority the jobless, or is it zillionaires?

Of the Zillionaires, by the Zillionaires, and for the Zillionaires

We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney’s hair and Tiger’s text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined… and it’s Keith Olbermann who should “pay the price” for being unethical?

Matt Taibbi, nailing it.

If Obama stood there and said ‘Republicans lied to you and now we’re going to put those lies to the test" would it be any worse for him?

Peter Daou
Nope. In fact, this is the one and only way to defeat them over the next two years. A few tweaks around the edges on Daylight Savings Time start dates and such aren’t going to pull voters any more than a year long sausage making festival over a bill that won’t enact until 2014 did.
Issue one had better be “Extend the Tax Cuts for Bottom 99%, but Not Top 1%.”

…granting ad arguendum that the 111th Congress engaged in liberal overreach, which Senators who win today would have lost had the Affordable Care Act included a public option linked to Medicare? The answer seems to me to be nobody. Which Senators who win today would have lost had the 111th Congress passed a cap-and-trade plan through reconciliation? Here, it looks like Patty Murray. Would a “scaled back” health care plan have saved Blance Lincoln? Clearly not.

Matt Yglesias makes a point that far too few will. They fail not because of some mythical “liberal overreach” (which really translates into “not enacting a GOP-approved slate of policies”) but because they operate from such a terrified, defensive crouch that every policy that emerges seems horribly compromised in some respect.
I’ve said all along that even one signature policy plus a bunch of spectacular failures at the hand of GOP obstruction is better than a whole passel of half-measures and partial, piecemeal victories that each require 25 minutes of explanation every time they’re brought up, and, of course, that most of the party ultimately just runs away from anyway.
For the thousandth time: It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. Maybe we’ll learn that over the next two years. Maybe not.