Government & Politics

Republicans clearly have no interest in dropping their favorite pastime, but Democrats could put a stop to this malicious behavior by changing the Senate rules and prohibiting, at long last, all filibusters on nominations.

New York Times

President Barack Obama is greeted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol Thursday. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

March 28, 2013 | Earlier this month, during one of his new across-the-aisle good-will tours, President Obama pleaded with Senate Republicans  to ease up on their record number of filibusters of his nominees. He might as well have been talking to one of the statues in the Capitol. Republicans have made it clear that erecting hurdles for Mr. Obama is, if anything, their overriding legislative goal.

There is no historical precedent for the number of cabinet-level nominees that Republicans have blocked or delayed in the Obama administration. Chuck Hagel became the first defense secretary nominee ever filibustered. John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was the subject of an epic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul. Kathleen Sebelius and John Bryson, the secretaries of health and human services and commerce, were subjected to 60-vote confirmation margins instead of simple majorities. Susan Rice surely would have been filibustered and thus was not nominated to be secretary of state.

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• Combined with last year’s revelations about secret “kill lists”—in which he personally selects and orders who will be killed by drones—the president’s well-cultivated public perception as an anti-war figure has been dramatically diminished.
• President Obama is the CEO of a state built on militarism, war and surveillance. 

Party for Socialism and Liberation

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March 29, 2013 | In a rare moment of honest questioning from the big-business media, in February, ABC reporter Jon Karl asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: “How does dropping a bomb on an American citizen without any judicial review, without any trial, not raise the very human rights questions, or more human rights questions, raised by something like waterboarding?”

President Obama is the CEO of a state built on militarism, war and surveillance.

The reporter noted the contradiction that President Obama repeatedly came out against torturing terrorist suspects, but now has insisted that it is legal to kill them. Carney failed to give a straight answer.

It is not just this single reporter who is struggling to wrap his head around the contradiction. A whole layer of rank-and-file Democratic party activists, many who proudly wear the “progressive” label, are increasingly showing their discomfort—or even disdain—for a policy that directly replicates Bush’s “War on Terror” legal doctrines.

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As president Obama visits Colorado to discuss guns, state GOP launches fight to protect batterers' gun rights.

David Sirota, Salon

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Jim Fuller

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01 April 13 | Every so often, disparate political events line up so perfectly that they create the possibility of real resonance. In these fleeting moments, a point which might have been lost to news cycle noise can break through and singularly shift momentum by introducing a new angle to an otherwise binary debate. President Obama’s Wednesday visit to Colorado could be one of those moments, thanks to the events surrounding his gun-control-themed trip.

In its preview story of the political week ahead, the New York Times notes that the president is “seek(ing) to regain momentum” on the gun issue as “a filibuster threat is growing in the senate” and as a two-week congressional recess is marked by a nationwide activist push by the National Rifle Association. To counter it, the president is heading to Colorado, a state made famous by two of the most high-profile gun massacres in history – and now the first state in the historically pro-gun West to pass serious gun regulations.

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• Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is New Zealand Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.
• It can happen here.  
• How Congress Could Fix Its Budget Woes Permanently

Ellen Brown, Public Banking Institute / Truthdig

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Mar 28, 2013 | Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .

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Related:

How Congress Could Fix Its Budget Woes Permanently, Ellen Brown, Web of Debt / Truthdig

• We are waking up from the long night of our delusion. We do not need to follow the prevailing economic orthodoxies, which have consistently failed and are not corroborated by empirical data.  We need a permanent money supply, and the money must come from somewhere. It is the right and duty of government to provide a money supply that is adequate and sustainable.
• After a thorough analysis of statistics from dozens of countries forced to apply austerity plans by the World Bank and IMF, former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz called austerity plans a “suicide pact.” 
• Austerity is a Scam
• The Myth of Living Beyond Our Means