The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has left the U.S. Supreme Court with an even number of justices. If they divide four-four on any case, the decision of the lower court stands, but it does not become settled law.
As things stand now, a divided court would not be the worst thing from the standpoint of liberals. They mostly like existing precedents and mostly oppose have them overturned.
My friend Bill Elwell wonders what would happen if President Obama or President Hillary Clinton simply refused to nominate someone to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to pack the Supreme Court with nominees of his liking. Bill asks: Would this be un-packing the Court?.
I don’t see how this would be any different, or any more obstructive, than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying that Republicans will automatically reject any Obama nominee, no matter who the person is.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the President the power to appoint Supreme Court justices, with the advice and consent of the Senate, but I find no wording requiring him to do so in a timely manner.
President Obama has already said that he intends to nominate someone to fill Scalia’s vacancy, but does he have a responsibility to nominate a second person or a third if the Senate rejects his first nominee? Of course this is a moot question if the Republicans are going to reject any nominee.
Negotiators for 12 Pacific Rim nations—the USA, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Peru and Chile—have finalized a Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.
Now it remains to be seen if the legislative bodies of these nations will ratify the agreement. President Obama has persuaded Congress to adopt a fast-track procedure for the decision-making process, which means that it will have three months from the time the lengthy and complicated text is submitted to vote it up or down.
My understanding is that if only two nations ratify the agreement—say, the USA and Vietnam—it will be binding on those two. Even if legislative bodies of major nations such as Japan, Canada or Australia reject the TPP, it won’t matter to Americans if the U.S. Congress approves it.
I don’t know the specifics of what’s been agreed to, but the leaked preliminary versions of the agreement show that it is a corporate wish list to be given the force of international law. The TPP undermines national sovereignty and overrides democracy.
LINKS
TPP Finalized by David Nakamura for The Washington Post. (Hat tip to my expatriate e-mail pen pal Jack)
Many of my Democratic friends think of Barack Obama as a well-meaning but naive and weak reformer. I think of President Obama as a shrewd and strong defender of the status quo.
Alfred McCoy wrote a good article for TomDispatch arguing that this is just as true of his foreign policy as his domestic policy.
The greatest threat to American world power is the rise of China. While the USA is dissipating its power through failed military interventions. China is extending its power by economic policies that add to its economic strength.
Obama hopes to counter China by leveraging American economic power through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which will create a global trade bloc from which China and also Russia will be locked out.
The question is how long this will be feasible. China’s economic power is growing. American economic power is a legacy from the past.
President Obama has been using America’s status as the planet’s number one consumer nation to create a new version of dollar diplomacy.
His strategy is aimed at drawing China’s Eurasian trading partners back into Washington’s orbit.
While Beijing has been moving to bring parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified “world island” with China at its epicenter, Obama has countered with a bold geopolitics that would trisect that vast land mass by redirecting its trade towards the United States.
During the post-9/11 decade when Washington was spilling its blood and treasure onto desert sands, Beijing was investing its trillions of dollars of surplus from trade with the U.S. in plans for the economic integration of the vast Eurasian land mass.
In the process, it has already built or is building an elaborate infrastructure of high-speed, high-volume railroads and oil and natural gas pipelines across the vast breadth of what Sir Halford Mackinder once dubbed the “world island.” [snip]
The Federal Reserve Board will soon decide once again whether to continue to hold down interest rates or to allow them to rise.
The board is in more or less the same position as a physician trying to decide whether to remove life support a patient who is in intensive care.
All the indicators are that the patient is too weak to be removed from life support. Yet the patient can’t stay on life support forever.
I used to criticize the Federal Reserve Board on the grounds that it preferred tight money and high unemployment to the possibility of inflation. That’s yesterday’s news. Now the Fed’s concern is how to get the country out of its long-term recession.
The historic Keynesian remedy for recession is to increase the money supply and hold down interest rates. The idea is that putting money in circulation and making credit readily available will encourage consumers to buy things and businesses to invest.
But this time around, it didn’t happen. Banks and financial institutions invested in debt rather than in production of tangible goods and services. Savers invested in stocks and bonds because they couldn’t get any interest on their bank accounts, but this didn’t stimulate the real economy either, or at least not very much.
Doug Muder and Paul Waldman wrote about how the leading Republican candidates operate on the principle that “ignorance is strength”.
They not only are uninterested in the details of policy. They lack understanding of how a Constitutional government works. They seem to think that Presidents can do anything they want by decree, and the only qualities needed are decisiveness and average common sense.
Dr. Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump have no experience or interest in government. Senator Ted Cruz, although he holds public office, also manifests no interest in actually governing. The popular appeal of such candidates is a measure of the frustration of the American public with the present bipartisan consensus.
The Republican Party has much more grass roots strength at the state level than the Democrats. But except for those who think gun rights and the suppression of abortion are more important than anything else, they’re not governing in the interest of American working people.
The establishment Democrats and Republicans understand the workings of government better than the Tea Party Republicans do. But in their overall policies, they, too, are either disconnected from reality or powerless to change the direction of a government that is on automatic pilot for drone warfare, covert warfare and proxy warfare.
President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a step in the right direction, which he advocates with his usual eloquence and which is blindly opposed by most of the Republican leaders. Sadly it is insufficient to significantly mitigate global warming.
Source: Mother Jones
The plan is intended to reduce the burning of coal in electric power plants. This is a good thing because, of all the possible sources of energy, coal is the most destructive to the environment, to the health and safety of workers and to public health, and is the worst contributor to greenhouse gasses.
Even so, under the plan, the United States would still be burning a lot of coal by 2030. The chart at right is by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, and it shows that the reduction of power plant emissions from 2005 to 2030 will be less than half.
The plan is intended to reduceincrease the use of renewable energy, which is a good thing. Sadly it also is based on an energy strategy of fracking for natural gas and of Arctic and other ocean drilling for oil. This is in the context of a national economic strategy based on exporting raw materials rather than reviving manufacturing.
Obama’s plan is intended to increase energy efficiency, which is a good thing. The drawback is that making energy use more efficient makes it cheaper, and making it cheaper encourages people to use more.
The goals of the plan are to be achieved after Obama leaves office, so its success depends on whether his successors carry through with it.
I hate to think that Obama’s plan is the best that is economically and politically feasible, but maybe it is. Too bad for future generations that we couldn’t do more.
These are links to interesting articles I came across yesterday and today. I may add links during the day. The comment thread is available for general and off-topic comments.
Dan Price, the CEO of a small credit card processing firm called Gravity Payments, announced that he will raise the minimum salary of his firm to $70,000 a year over a period of three years while reducing his own compensation.
Many of his peers and business customers are infuriated, illustrating what Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776: “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action …”
The world’s coffee crop is threatened by drought, flooding and plagues of pests, caused by climate change, and by the vulnerability of the Arabica variety of coffee to disease and to changes in climate.
One reason that Al Qaeda and ISIS are strong is that US attacks on Muslim countries create the conditions of chaos in which they flourish. Another is that the US government has been more interested in undermining nations that happen to be enemies of Al Qaeda and ISIS that in fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Women of Kurdistan
The latest example of this is President Obama’s support of the Turkish government in its attack on the Kurdish people. The Kurds are dedicated and effective enemies of ISIS and support democracy, religious toleration and women’s rights, which are supposedly the ideals the US government represents.
But Kurdish nationalism threatens the unity of Turkey, and the support of Turkey is essential to the covert war being waged by the United States against Syria, whose government also is an enemy of ISIS.
The “war on terror” which the United States began on Sept. 12, 2001, is on the one hand so urgent that we Americans are being asked to give up basic Constitutional liberties, but on the other hand not important enough to distract from overthrowing regimes that Washington has targeted—first Saddam, then Qadaffi and now Assad.
Israel and Saudi Arabia are not friends and do not even have diplomatic relations, but they work in parallel when it is in their national interest to do so.
Why should not the governments of the United States and Iran work together against our common enemies, the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) and Al Qaeda?
This would make more sense than trying to fight ISIS and Al Qaeda while making common cause with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates against the main enemies of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Tom Jansson cartoon for The Cagle Post
Maybe this is what President Obama had in mind. Maybe this is already U.S. policy. If so, good!
Americans criticize the Iranian government for giving weapons and other help to armed factions in other countries, but that is no different from what the Saudis, the Gulf emirates, Israel and the United States itself does. Iran’s current intervention in Iraq and Syria is at the invitation of the governments of those countries.
I think the violent conflicts in the Middle East, including the Sunni-Shiite conflict, would die down if Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, the USA and other countries agreed among themselves to stop giving weapons, supplies and money to the various battling groups.
Unfortunately that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. But I have to say the such an agreement is more likely than other nations agreeing to be neutral while the US government continues conducting bombing campaigns and arming its own proxies.
Iran and the United States are neither friends nor enemies. They are countries with their own interests, which sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict.
LINKS
Rethinking Iran by Kevin Schwartz and Arjun Singh Sethi for Counterpunch.
If you’re going to judge what a politician stands for, you’d do better to look at their advisers and supporters than their campaign rhetoric, and you’d do even better still to look at their record.
The presidential candidate Bernie Sanders served in the House of Representatives from Vermont’s at-large district from 1991 to 2007 and in the U.S. Senate from 2007 to the present, so he has a long record to go by.
Sanders has been a political independent, not a Democrat, for most of his political life, and is the only member of Congress to call himself a socialist. The 2016 Presidential campaign is the first campaign in which he has run as a Democrat to organize Congress.
His congressional record seems to me to be like a 1930s New Deal Democrat. He is a staunch defender of the New Deal programs such as Social Security, a champion of labor unions and an opponent of Wall Street.
While his voting record is favorable to abortion rights, gay rights, affirmative action and civil rights for African-Americans, he does not have a high profile on these issues as he does on bread-and-butter economic issues.
Liberals might have trouble with the fact that he was first elected to Congress as an opponent of gun control and still has reservations about gun control.
∞∞∞
Here are some highlights of his legislative and voting record:
He founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991 and chaired it for eight years.
In 2005, he joined with Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, to repeal the section of the USA Patriot Act requiring librarians to give the government information on patrons’ book-borrowing. It passed the House, but did not become law.
In 2010, he gave an eight-and-a-half hour speech against the Tax Relief, Unemployment and Job Creation Act of 2010, which extended the Bush era tax cuts. The speech drew nationwide attention and was later published as a book.
In 2011, he successfully introduced legislation calling for an audit of the Federal Reserve System’sbank bailouts, which revealed that the Fed had granted $16 trillion dollars in assistance to troubled banks, some of their foreign banks.
Everybody has met self-centered people who behave as if they are the only people in the world who matter, and everybody else exists only to carry out their wishes.
If they are sufficiently rich and powerful, they can get away with this for a certain amount of time. But in the end, they wind up isolated and friendless.
Unfortunately the United States conducts its foreign policy as if we Americans are the only people in the world who matter, and everybody else exists only to carry out Washington’s wishes.
This is bound to end badly.
Peter Van Buren, who was kicked out of the State Department for writing about the fouled-up U.S. occupation of Iraq, pointed out in an article for TomDispatch how this is playing out in current U.S. policy toward Iraq and the Islamic State (ISIS)
The fundamental problem underlying nearly every facet of U.S. policy toward Iraq is that “success,” as defined in Washington, requires all the players to act against their own wills, motivations, and goals in order to achieve U.S. aims.
The Sunnis need a protector as they struggle for a political place, if not basic survival, in some new type of Iraq.
The Shiite government in Baghdad seeks to conquer and control the Sunni regions.
Iran wants to secure Iraq as a client state and use it for easier access to Syria.
The Kurds want an independent homeland.
When Secretary of Defense Ash Carter remarked, “What apparently happened [in Ramadi] was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight,” what he really meant was that the many flavors of forces in Iraq showed no will to fight for America’s goals.
Anybody who said that Barack Obama is a weak leader must eat their words in the light of the way he is pushing the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement through Congress.
Likewise those who said he is incapable of working with the Republican leaders in Congress.
I think people mistook his character because they mistook his priorities. The President is a tough fighter for things that matter to him.
It is just that issues such as closing Guantanamo Bay or defending Social Security were not among his top priorities. The TPP and the Trade Promotion Authority, aka Fast Track, are.
The TPP is supposedly a trade agreement, but based on what’s been leaked out about it so far, that’s not what it is.
It creates new international law that limits the power of sovereign governments to enact laws and regulations to protect public health, the environment and the well-being of their citizens/
And it sets up a mechanism by which corporations can have governments penalized if a tribunal rules that laws and regulations deny them their just profits.
Corporate executives say they will invest more confidently in countries if they have assurance that they won’t be subject to onerous laws and regulations and if they can have recourse to a special tribunal if national governments impose laws and regulations they think are unfair. No doubt!
That doesn’t mean that no investment will take place if they don’t get all these special protections.
My idea of a free trade agreement is an agreement among nations to lower tariffs and import quotas so that people within those countries can freely exchange goods and services. Most such barriers were eliminated years ago. That’s why almost everything you pick up in an American department store is labeled “Made in Vietnam” or “Made in Korea” or “Made in Bangladesh”.
Eliminating restrictions on currency manipulation, or demanding privatization of public services, is very different. This is a way of shifting governance from national governments to international corporations.
One oddity of American political life is the voter who support Democratic candidates because he or she doesn’t believe their campaign rhetoric.
I encountered this in 1992 when I talked to a United Auto Workers leader who was working to elect Bill Clinton for President because he was convinced that Clinton didn’t mean what he said about the North American Free Trade Agreement.
True, the UAW guy said, Bill Clinton said he’s for NAFTA, but he also said he is for a lot of other things, such as treaty protection of labor and environmental rights, that would negate NAFTA. So in effect, his reasoning went, Clinton is really against NAFTA.
But Clinton betrayed him. He pushed NAFTA though, just as he said he would. The part he wasn’t serious about was the protection of the labor and environmental rights.
I saw the same thing among supporters of President Obama. Every time Obama would do something such as offering to cut Social Security and Medicare as part of a budget-balancing deal, they would say this is something he “had to” do.
Really? “Had to”? Did somebody like the Luca Brazzi character in The Godfather put a pistol to his head and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse?
Hillary Clinton
Now we have the same thing with Hillary Clinton, but with a twist. She is trying to steal Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ thunder by talking about economic inequality, while signaling that she doesn’t really mean it to the Wall Street figures, who have made her rich by paying her six-figure fees to give speeches.
It will be interesting to see where Clinton comes down on the Trans Pacific Partnership. She historically has supported trade agreements and in her 2014 book called the TPP the “gold standard” for such agreements. Now she declines to take a clear stand.
A lot of the political commentary describes her “dilemma” over the TPP—the dilemma consisting of the politics of the TPP, not the merits of the agreement.
If she were to come out strongly against the TPP when her opposition might have some effect in defeating it, I would give her credit for a sincere change of heart. I don’t expect this to happen, but I would be pleased to be proved wrong. Otherwise I will view Clinton’s campaign rhetoric with the same skepticism that is being asked of her Wall Street supporters.
I don’t think this happens so much in the Republican Party because there is less of a disparity in the Republican Party between what’s said to the voters and to the financial backers.
Paul Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, has this to say about climate change.
Climate change is a controversy. What appear to be independent scientists say that the climate is warming due to greenhouse gases produced by human activity. This warming, apparently measurable, has many impacts on sea levels, and on plant, animal, sea, and bird life, as well as food supply for a heavily populated earth. [snip]
As far as I can tell the polluting corporations have sufficient think tanks and research institutes to neutralize the independent scientists. If one is not a climate expert, which I am not, one doesn’t really know. However, I have learned in my many years that an independent voice is far more reliable than a paid voice.
Possibly climate change is occurring because of solar activity or because of activity inside the earth itself. The attention should not be on the cause but on the fact. First establish the fact, then look for the cause.
My view of this is that life depends on climate, and it doesn’t take a lot of change in one direction or the other to create problems for life. This fact makes climate change an important issue, and corporations should stop paying people to lie about it. [snip]
Climate change, if real, is clearly a much greater threat than Muslim terrorists or alleged Chinese and Russian hegemonic aspirations. Therefore, Washington should spend some of the one trillion dollars Washington blows on the military/security complex on arriving at the best conclusion about climate change and its remedies, if any.
The United States is a strange country. The population accepts the destruction of privacy and civil liberty out of fear of essentially non-existent terrorists created by propaganda, but ignores the threat of climate change presented by independent scientists, a threat amplified by the ongoing multi-year drought in California and the western US.
Those who accept the reality of human-caused climate change are the U.S. Department of Defense, Pope Francis and Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, who has announced his country’s intention convert to solar energy for its needs by 2040-2050.
Anyone who voted twice for Obama and was baffled twice by what followed — there must be millions of us — will feel that this president deserves a kind of criticism he has seldom received. Yet we are held back by an admonitory intuition. His predecessor was worse, and his successor most likely will also be worse.
One of the least controversial things you can say about Barack Obama is that he campaigned better than he has governed. The same might be said about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but with Obama the contrast is very marked.
Governing has no relish for him. Yet he works hard at his public statements, and he wishes his words to have a large effect. Even before he ascended to the presidency, Obama enjoyed the admiration of diverse audiences, especially within black communities and the media. The presidency afforded the ideal platform for creating a permanent class of listeners.
I am more disappointed in Barack Obama than in anyone else I ever voted for. His speeches are often eloquent and wise, but his actions have no seeming connection with his words. He is conciliatory toward his American political enemies, and tough with his core supporters.
I read The Audacity of Hope in 2008 and was under no illusion that Obama was a progressive reformer. In that book, he presented himself as one who understood both liberals and conservatives and, by showing his reasonableness, could reconcile the two. This was either hypocrisy or naivete.
What hoped for was that Obama as President could restore the country to normal after the excesses of the George W. Bush administration—a country in which the President respected the Constitution, didn’t start wars and kept his distance from Wall Street. But none of these things happened.
There are three possible explanations of this. One is that the entrenched power of Wall Street and of the covert military-intelligence complex—the so-called deep states—are too powerful to overcome, and that Obama is the best we can hope for. I hate to believe that because it means there is no hope for my country.
Another is that Barack Obama has certain character flaws that make him ineffective. The third, which is what I tend to believe, is that Obama’s intentions are not what his liberal supporters think they are. Although he ran on a platform of hope and change, he is a very effective defender of the status quo.
David Bromwich, writing in the June issue of Harpers magazine, examined the Obama record in terms of his character. The article worth reading, but it is behind a pay wall, so you have to buy the magazine or go to a public library to read it. I subscribe to the magazine, so I can provide the highlights.
As I think about it, I can understand why the governments of the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia preferred to permanently silence Osama bin Laden than to question him or put him on trial. I don’t like this, but I can understand it.
The most damning thing about Seymour Hersh’s article on the killing of Osama bin Laden was how President Obama panicked when a helicopter crashed, and broke the U.S. agreement with Pakistan on the agreed-upon cover story on the bin Laden killing.
I strongly disagree with Barack Obama’s policies and priorities, which I think are very different from what his supporters think they are, but I always thought of him as exceptionally cool and self-controlled. Apparently not. Of course revealing sensitive security information for political purposes isn’t new.
The video embedded above is most of an interview of Seymour Hersh by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Below is a link to the full interview, with a transcript.
Below is a link to an interview with Jeffrey Sterling, who either is a brave whistleblower who is going to prison because he revealed corruption and incompetence in the Central Intelligence Agency to investigative reporter James Risen, or a victim of injustice who was convicted on circumstantial evidence.
Almost everything we’ve been told about the killing of Osama bin Laden four years ago is a lie, according to Seymour M. Hersh. He reported in the current issue of London Review of Books that:
The raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound four years ago was done with the full knowledge of the Pakistani government. Helicopters carrying the Navy SEAL team were never in danger of being intercepted as they entered Pakistan.
Osama bin Laden was no longer in operational campaign of Al Qaeda and the raid did not yield a trove of valuable intelligence.
His location was disclosed by means of a tip from someone in Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), who wanted the $25 million reward offered by the CIA. In particular, interrogation and torture played no role.
President Obama broke promises to the government of Pakistan to keep the raid a secret.
Almost everything that has been reported about the details of the raid is untrue. It was more like a gangland-style execution than anything else.
The SEAL team was ordered to kill Osama, not to bring him back, which would have been feasible. He knew too much that the governments of the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia could not have afforded to make known.
How much credence does this deserve? Hersh’s article is based entirely on information from insiders who are not quoted by name. How can we be sure they’re telling the truth if we don’t know who they are?
It depends on how much you trust Hersh. You have to believe that he is an honest person, which I do, and that he is an experienced and capable reporter, which he is. I trust him more than I do the government. You also have to believe that the people he quoted are honest people who know what they are talking about.
A great deal of leaked information is from people who have an ulterior purpose, but I can’t see how anybody who talked to Hersh has anything to gain except the desire to make the truth known or to disassociate themselves from lies.
The lesson of this is not to assume that anything the government announces is necessarily true, unless it can be independently confirmed. This is not a new lesson, but it is an easy one—for me, at least—to forget.
I’m strongly against the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement and the fast track proposal for approving it, based on what I know of both.
I write this even though I admit I don’t know what will be in the TPP when it is finally submitted to Congress. I could be wrong in everything I say. I don’t think I will be, in fact I’m pretty sure I won’t be, but in this post, I link to arguments in favor as well as those opposed so you can judge both sides of the question.
President Obama was asked about the Baltimore riots in a press conference yesterday. Here’s part of what he said.
If you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty; they’ve got parents — often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves — can’t do right by their kids; if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead, than they go to college.
Baltimore 2015 (CNN)
In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks — in those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem.
And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.
If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what can we do — the rest of us — to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids; to make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons; so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense; that we’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs. That’s hard.
President Obama and other Western leaders gravely insult the Russian [1] people, as well as show base ingratitude, by snubbing V-E Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9.
The Red Army suffered more casualties in World War Two than the USA, UK, Commonwealth, France and all the other Western allies put together. More than 80 percent of the Germans killed in World War Two died fighting the Red Army.
If you remember the opening scenes in the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” reflect that the Normandy landings probably would have failed if the bulk of the German army had not been tied down on the Eastern front. Then reflect that (although this is not certain) the Red Army might well have made it to Berlin even if the Normandy landings had failed.
But boycotting the celebration of the 70th anniversary of V-E Day is more than just a personal rebuke to Putin. It is in a different category from a boycott of Olympic games or some other contemporary event. It is not just an insult to the valor and sacrifice of the Russian people.
Human beings resent insults to their honor more than they resent material injuries. I fear Russians will remember this insult for years to come.
Senator Rick Santorum was right, or at least partly right. Only a snob would think that you have to be a college graduate to be a success in life.
Now President Obama didn’t exactly say that in the 2012 campaign, not in so many words, but the focus of his policy is that high schools should make their graduates “college-ready” and that a college diploma is a key to economic success.
This is a red herring. It is a diversion from the real economic problems, especially the erosion of the wage-earning middle class.
Thomas Geoghegan pointed out in his new book, Only One Thing Can Save Us, that when the President says lack of higher education is the cause of economic inequality, he is writing off the 68 percent of Americans age 24 to 64 who don’t have college diplomas and never will.
Suppose, he asked, that Obama and the Democrats succeed in pushing the college graduation rate up to 35 percent or even 40 percent, which would be hard to do. Obama is still writing off the majority of working-age Americans.
Am I the only one who finds it just a little bit odd that the American officials loudly claiming Iran cannot be trusted to fulfill any deal are simultaneously pledging that they will not fulfill any deal? Is it possible they have such little self-awareness?
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry deserve a lot of credit for the nuclear deal with Iran, as do President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and the other diplomats who worked on the negotiations.
I think it is the best deal that can be expected. The Iranians have nuclear power plants, which they are not willing to give up. Any nation with nuclear power has the capability to develop nuclear weapons.
What the Iranians have done is to give up equipment and uranium stockpiles that would have enabled them to develop weapons-grade uranium and plutonium overnight, and to submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that they do not do so.
It is crazy for Republican Senators presidential candidates to threaten to torpedo the deal.
What made the economic sanctions effective against Iran in the first place is that they were supported by U.S. allies and the Security Council of the United Nations. Under the agreement, the other negotiating parties, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China and other countries will resume trade with Iran no matter what the U.S. government does.
The only ones who would be hurt if the U.S. government renounced the deal would be Americans who want to do business in Iran.
The problem of the spread of nuclear weapons is more than just Iran. Almost all industrial nations—Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and many more—have the capability to develop nuclear weapons.
Actually, it is a tribute to the world’s good sense that only nine nations are known to have nuclear weapons—the USA, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
The only way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons on a long-term basis is for the existing nuclear power to agree to disarm and to turn over control of nuclear materials to an international agency. Every nuclear-capable nation, not just Iran, should be open to the IAEA.
Is the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) un-Islamic, as President Obama has said? Or can we best understand the Islamic State as part of Islam as a whole?
It’s not for me, or for President Obama, to say who is a true Muslim and who isn’t. But the facts are that the vast majority of Muslims, including those who think it is right and just to kill blasphemers who insult Islam, are horrified by the killing of harmless people.
The reaction of the Iranian ayatollahs to the 9/11 attacks is a case in point. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini called upon all Muslims to kill the author Salman Rushdie for his allegedly blasphemous depiction of Mohammad in his novel, The Satanic Verses.
But in 2001, his successor, Ayatollah Khameni, strongly condemned the Al Qaeda’s attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Apparently, for him, suppressing blasphemy is one thing and killing the innocent quite another.
I of course condemn blasphemy laws and fatwas against alleged blasphemers. At the same time I can understand the distinction.
Graeme Wood wrote an enlightening and frightening article in the March issue of The Atlantic on the apocalyptic religious reliefs of the Islamic State, but falls for their claim that they represent a more authentic version of Islam than that held by the vast majority of Muslims.
Mohammad was a warrior as well as a prophet, but neither he or his immediate successors went around be-heading people on a regular basis. The rule of the first Islamic caliphs was in fact tolerable for most Christians and Jews because all they had to do was pay a special tax.
While President Obama is right about polarization and excessive partisanship, we also have too much bipartisanship around the wrong things—protecting Wall Street, perpetual war and secret government.
Conservative and Republican leaders are calling on President Obama to put American “boots on the ground” to resist Putin in Ukraine and the Islamic State (ISIS) in the Middle East.
And the President reportedly plans to ask for authorization to use military force against ISIS. Since he does not consider aerial bombing, drone strikes or Special Operations missions to be military force, it must be “boots on the ground” that he has in mind.
My question is: Given the failure of “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan and, before that, in Vietnam, why would you expect success this time?
Over the years, the American armed forces have taught insurgents in countries they occupy how to defeat us. The Pentagon has not learned how to defeat insurgents.
The U.S. military has the power to attack virtually any nation except Russia or China and reduce it to chaos. What is doesn’t have the power to do is to pacify the nation afterwards and make its people submit.
Or, as a friend of mine remarked during the Vietnam era, the United States had the power to kill all the North Vietnamese and kill all the South Vietnamese, but it didn’t have the power to make any Vietnamese do what the US wanted.
Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. This insanity is the real Vietnam Syndrome.
As things stand now, a divided court would not be the worst thing from the standpoint of liberals. They mostly like existing precedents and mostly oppose have them overturned.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 