Daily Kos

"It is hard for me to see how anyone who knows anything about history, about pharmacology, and about the fundamental human struggle for self-disclipline and the seemingly equally intense human need to reject it and replace it with submission to a coercively paternalistic authority—how any such person could escape the conclusion that the war on drugs is simply another chapter in the natural history of human stupidity."
     —Dr. Thomas S. Szasz in A Plea for the Cessation of the Longest War in the Twentieth Century: The War on Drugs

That book was written in 1988. The official "war on drugs," begun in a special message to Congress by Richard Nixon in June 1971, was only 17 years old then. This month, it turned 40. The anniversary coincided with yet another report in a long series of reports compiling evidence that the drug war has failed miserably. This latest report came from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Among its recommendations: Legalize marijuana.

The commission's efforts generated the predictable firestorm of controversy and got a predictable response from the current U.S. drug "czar," Gil Kerlikowske. And, predictably, we can expect a gutless response from most politicians, incumbents and candidates alike. All but a few will not confront the awful impacts of this disastrous so-called war, a war on some drugs.

The war didn't really begin in 1971, but decades earlier. It picked up steam under Nixon, was heightened under the first President Bush, and continues not only to consume vast resources, but also to cause profound and lasting harm without achieving what would be taken as the most elementary measure of success: reducing the use of drugs. In fact, the World Health Organization's 2008 survey of 17 countries found that United States has the highest illegal drug use in the world.

So what has it done besides gobbling up trillions of public dollars better spent on, well, just about anything else? It's curbed personal liberty, given felony records to millions of people not otherwise disposed to crime, broken up families by creating "drug orphans" who wind up in foster care, penalized hundreds of thousands by taking away their right to vote and their access to government-backed college loans, spurred real drug wars with inevitable bystander casualties in cities across the nation and in other nations as dealers try to seize and maintain market share, developed a forfeiture system that feeds arrests, diverted police from more important work and filled our prisons with non-violent convicts, sparking a prison-building industry and putting tremendous pressure on state budgets.

Take a look at just one aspect of what the drug war has accomplished. According to the most recent edition of an annual report from the Bureau of Justice, Prisoners in 2009, about half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses and about a fifth of state prisoners are. An earlier report put the drug inmate figure for local jails at about one-fourth. All in all, more than half a million of the 2.3 million convicts in the United States are in the slam for drug offenses.

The overall prison figures are revealing for what they say about America. A year ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted how vastly out of whack the U.S. incarceration rate is with the rest of the world. Between 1880 and 1970, the rate ran from a low of 100 to a high of 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. Since 1980, however, the rate has soared. Twenty years ago, it had risen to 458. By 2008, it was 753. America is No. 1. In France, the rate is 96; in Canada, it's 116; in England and Wales, it's 153; in Mexico, it's 209; and even in Russia, the next highest, it's 629.  At the state level, this is costing the nation about $52 billion annually, one out of every 14 tax dollars collected by the states.

Is that because violent crime has risen? No. A large amount of the increase comes from the drug war. Since 1980, thanks in part to minimum mandatory sentencing guidelines, drug incarcerations have not doubled, or tripled or quadrupled. They have grown 12-fold.

Few of the billions spent on prisoners of the war on drugs go to helping them beat the addiction many of them suffer from. And when they emerge from the slam, there's little help for them in readjusting to life outside or in getting a job. In fact, a recent study by the National Employment Law Project found that there is an active effort to keep them from getting a job. Sixty-five million Americans with criminal backgrounds (misdemeanors and felonies) are told upfront (and illegally) by many potential employers, including some of the largest companies, that their applications will be rejected because of their records. That number includes 15 million or so with nothing but drug convictions on their tab.

Ignoring the findings and recommendations of the Global Commission on Drug Policy will be the tried-and-true route taken by most politicians. It doesn't make a difference to them that the war on some drugs has failed in what was declared to be its primary mission of curtailing drug use, wasted vast sums of money in the process and overflowed our prisons with people who should not ever have been there. Those facts won't budge more than a few incumbents and candidates to step up and say: "My fellow Coloradans (or Kentuckyians or Pennsylvanians), this just isn't working and we have to change it." Instead, after nearly a century of this lethal ineffectiveness, most of our leaders seem determined to stay the course on the war on drugs no matter what.

If they won't listen to commissions and think-tanks, you would think they would listen to those who have actually tried to enforce these laws. For instance,  Jack Cole, formerly a narcotics officer with the New Jersey state police. He now leads Law Enforcement Against Prohibition:

...Cole argues that the violence inherent in prohibition inflates the black market all by itself. The math is simple, he says. When a drug is “dangerous to supply” under prohibition, “that creates an artificially inflated value that makes it worthwhile for this war to go on,” he told a journalist for Danish TV. ...

“Nothing worked,” says Cole. “When I was a young trooper, in 1970, at the start of the war, we considered an ounce of cocaine or maybe 7 grams of heroin a large drug seizure. What do we get today? We get individual seizures of 10 tons of heroin? Twenty tons of cocaine? One seizure each. And nothing changes on the street, except drugs keep getting cheaper, more potent, and far easier for our children to access. Now that’s a failed policy, any way you look at it.”

A failed policy. Except for the prison industry. And the drug cartels. "[A]nother chapter in the natural history of human stupidity." Could Dr. Szasz have nailed it any better?

The job creation situation is well known. Nearly 14 million Americans out of work, another 10.5 million underemployed, another 3, or 4, 5 million wanting to work but so discouraged they've disappeared from the ranks of those who get counted when the government is tallying the employment situation.

For those who actually have jobs, there's another problem: average wage growth is way down. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, in May 2007, before the Great Recession officially started, wages were, on average, rising at 3.8 percent annually. Last month, the annual growth was clocked at 1.8 percent, as the chart shows.

This is not news to Americans who have seen food and fuel prices on the rise. Or to seniors who saw no cost-of-living addition to their Social Security checks in the past year. As always, it's low-income Americans who take it in the neck since food and fuel take a higher proportion of their income than it does of the more affluent. If this increase in prices continues, it could add up to $175 billion for the year, yet another drag on the economy.

With so many workers still out of a job, there is no pressure on employers to offer even modest raises. And given the pace of job growth, 157,000 monthly for the first five months of 2011, full recovery is a long, long way off, which likely means wages will remain depressed as well. For many workers, the current drop puts another layer of hurt on the stagnant growth in wages over the past three decades.

Visual Source: Newseum

David Brooks writes 41 sentences of sonorous goop so he can take a lazy poke at Anthony Weiner in the 42nd.

Paul Krugman:

What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense. …

[C]reditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy. This is a negative-sum game, in which the attempt to protect the rentiers from any losses is inflicting much larger losses on everyone else. And the only way to get a real recovery is to stop playing that game.

Eugene Robinson:

Slender threads of hope are nice but do not constitute a plan. Nor do they justify continuing to pour American lives and resources into the bottomless pit of Afghanistan. …

The threat from Afghanistan is gone. Bring the troops home.

Bill Boyarsky:

Just how far to go in this purposeless war is the subject of the current internal debate in Washington, one that is so heavy in muddy language that it is impossible for outsiders to follow. But the truth is, it’s probably already settled. We’re stuck in Afghanistan as long as Obama follows his present policy.

On one side of the charade of a debate, according to The New York Times, are Gates and others in the Pentagon who favor a small beginning to the troop withdrawal that Obama promised to begin next month. On the other side, the Times reported, is Vice President Joe Biden and others who want a faster withdrawal, presumably something substantial that Obama can take to the voters in the 2012 presidential election. …

An increasing number of people want to know how long we’ll be in Afghanistan, not to mention why we are there. Hopefully, their ranks will grow, and Obama, worried about re-election, will listen.

Los Angeles Times Editorial on the Supreme Court's decision not to hear a challenge to California's offering of in-state tuition to students who have attended and graduated from a California high school regardless of their immigration status:

Neither the U.S. Supreme Court decision nor the California Supreme Court decision it is based on in any way resolves the conundrum that greets illegal immigrants once they receive a college degree. The law still does not allow them to take a job in the U.S. that matches their new skills, especially professional and high-skill jobs in which legal status is most likely to be checked. Perhaps when Americans realize how many smart, well-trained people are being forced leave the country to find suitable employment, they will finally press the government to pass coherent immigration reform.

Fareed Zakaria says we need a private infrastructure bank, backed with some federal money.

Leonard Pitts Jr. says it's easy to laugh at Sarah Palin for getting Paul Revere wrong and Michele Bachmann for saying the Founding Fathers ended slavery. But historical illiteracy is endemic:

The alarm bell has been ringing for years. Consider "Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century," a 2000 study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Researchers found that the majority of seniors at the nation's best colleges could not identify the words of the Gettysburg Address or explain the significance of Valley Forge. They did not know, the study concluded, because they had not been taught. History, the study said, was no longer a requirement in the nation's top schools.

And then, there is a 2006 assessment by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, often called the Nation's Report Card. It found that nearly 40 percent of high school seniors could not identify the purpose of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and only 14 percent could identify and explain a factor leading to U.S. involvement in the Korean War. …

[O]ur history is the master narrative of who we are.
It is a narrative of slaves and soldiers, inventors and investors, demagogues and visionaries, of homicide, fratricide and genocide, of truths held self-evident and of government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Laurie Penny describes with disdain a BBC program that surely will soon have an American counterpart:

Roll up for the youth unemployment show! If being one of almost a million young people out of work weren't humiliating enough, the BBC has now commissioned a programme pitting jobless graduates and school-leavers against one another while viewers watch and snicker. According to the careers website Graduate Fog, Love Productions is advertising for contestants on the show, which will see employers hiring or rejecting young hopefuls live on air.

Mocking the desperate and downtrodden has always made good television, and this new gameshow will not be the first to exploit the unemployed to boost ratings. Consider The Fairy Jobmother, possibly the ghastliest piece of poverty porn ever made, whose second series aired on Channel 4 this week. The programme's eponymous pantomime dame is Hayley Taylor, former manager of a private company contracted by the Government to bully the long-term unemployed into a dwindling selection of minimum-wage jobs.

Shahid Buttar:

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III does not deserve to have his term extended.

Mueller has presided over the resurrection of many long-discredited practices that violate the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans.

Yet the Obama administration has proposed extending Mueller’s term by two years. The Senate should reject the proposal. It sets a bad precedent, it concentrates too much power in the hands of the FBI director and it tacitly approves of Mueller’s wrongheaded moves.

Pat Buchanan says the "days of wine and roses are over" for the United States and the West.

Eric Alterman digs into one reason U.S. leaders are paralyzed in dealing with the most pressing problems of the day:

Aiding and abetting this political negligence is a Washington press corps obsessed with covering meaningless personal dalliances and punitive long-term entitlement cuts. But to really ask ourselves how we got here, to a point where the political debate has shifted so far away from what needs to be done now, there is perhaps no better place to start than to take a brief travelogue through the Washington Post’s supposedly left-leaning op-ed columns.

At Grist, Lisa Hymas introduces the 10 top "brownwashing" Republicans. That is, GOP politicians so worried about their right flank that they are "scrambling to distance themselves from past environment-friendly statements, initiatives, and votes."

10. Scott Brown

U.S. Senator from Massachusetts

Before: "Reducing carbon dioxide emission in Massachusetts has long been a priority of mine,'' he said in 2008 when, as a member of the state Senate, he voted in favor of his state joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a carbon-trading initiative in the Northeast. "Passing this legislation is an important step ... towards improving our environment.''

After: "I think the globe is always heating and cooling. It's a natural way of ebb and flow. The thing that concerns me lately is some of the information I've heard about potential tampering with some of the information," he said in December 2009, as the "Climategate" faux-scandal was raging. In April 2011, he voted to strip the U.S. EPA of its authority to regulate carbon dioxide. ...

Gov. Paul LePage (Campaign Photo)

7.  Paul LePage

Governor of Maine

Before: In 2006, as mayor of Waterville, Maine, he signed his city on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, committing to cut the city's greenhouse gas emissions and push for broader climate action.

After: In September 2010, while running for governor, he said, "I don't know [if] global warming is a myth or not. ... I will say this: I do not believe in the Al Gore science." ...

3. Fred Upton

U.S. Rep from Michigan

Before: "Climate change is a serious problem that necessitates serious solutions," he said in April 2009. And his website declared, "I strongly believe that everything must be on the table as we seek to reduce carbon emissions."

After: But in December 2010, while angling to become chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he wrote, "On Jan. 2, the Environmental Protection Agency will officially begin regulating the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This move represents an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs ... This presumes that carbon is a problem in need of regulation. We are not convinced." And a few days later, he said, "I don't think that we have to regulate carbon to the degree we have a carbon tax or you have a cap-and-trade system."

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:

There's little more exciting to me than municipal wi-fi -- munipialities creating free hot zones for their residents to enjoy.

But forever carrying water for Big Business, the GOP isn't happy with consumers getting free Internet.

A Texas Congressman has introduced a bill that impose a nationwide prohibition on municipally-sponsored networks.

Dubbed by the Author, Representative Pet Sessions (R-Texas), the Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005, the bill prohibits state and local governments from providing any telecommunications or information service that is "substantially similar" to services provided by private companies.

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Note: Kossack Tyto Alba provided the photo of the little sawhet owl in tonight's new Night Owls banner. "She got caught over in the Santa Ynez River valley in a barbed wire fence. She healed up fine and was put back where she came from."

Several GOP presidential candidates have been reversing their previous public stances on climate change so they can gather up the all-important ignoramus vote in the Republican primaries. But Rick Santorum doesn't have to. He himself has been an ignoramus on the subject all along, perhaps the most anti-environmental candidate in the field, which is saying a mouth full.

When you're already hip-deep in in craziness, how can you distinguish yourself? Double-down, of course. Here's Santorum Wednesday on Rush Limbaugh's radio show:

There’s a variety of factors that contribute to the earth warming and cooling, and to me this is an opportunity for the left to create—it’s a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. It’s been on a warming trend so they said, “Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer,” just like they did in the seventies when it was getting cool, they needed the government to come in and regulate your life because it’s getting cooler. It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life, and I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.

Next thing you know Santorum will be quoting the late Petr Beckmann, an electrical engineering professor who taught at my alma mater and called environmentalists "watermelons," that is, green on the outside and red on the inside. Calling for policies that might give us a chance to put on the brakes before we reach the tipping point of runaway global warming is the province of green stalinists, it would seem.

As Santorum knows but isn't about to say while trolling for votes in the intellectual backwoods of America, "junk science" in the field of anthropogenic climate change is the kind that has been paid for by the Koch Brothers and Big Energy ever since James Hansen first raised the alarm more than two decades ago. At first, its progenitors denied even the theory of greenhouse-gas warming, then they denied it was happening, then they denied people were causing it, then they denied it was happening at a scale worthy of note, then they denied anything could (or should) be done about it. Santorum remains trapped in the early versions of denial like a bug in amber, having apparently not been effectively schooled about the latest version.

While the nuances and extent of the impacts are, of course, still being studied, there simply is no debate among scientists over whether or not human-caused climate change is real. It is. And as my colleague Laurence Lewis stated it bluntly and accurately this week, it's the most important issue humanity has ever faced. Not all the mutterings of GOP climate denialists, in Congress or on the presidential campaign trail, can alter that fact.

At The Guardian, Rory Carroll writes Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the 'devil's experiment':

It was 1946 and orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades.

The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin.

"They never told me what they were doing, never gave me a chance to say no," [Marta] Orellana said this week, seated in her ramshackle Guatemala City home. "I've lived almost my whole life without knowing the truth. May God forgive them."

The US government admitted to the experiment in October when the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, issued a joint statement apologising for "such reprehensible research" under the guise of public health. Barack Obama phoned his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, to say sorry too.

Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in the US, uncovered the experiment while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s.

The Guatemalan study went further by deliberately infecting its subjects. Not only did it violate the hippocratic oath to do no harm but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials. ...

Guatemala's official inquiry, headed by its vice-president, is due to publish its report in June. "What impacted me the most was how little value was given to these human lives. They were seen as things to be experimented on," said Carlos Mejia, a member of the inquiry and head of the Guatemalan College of Physicians.

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On this date at Daily Kos in 2006:

Tom DeLay is formally resigning as of June 9, 2006. Today, he gave his far[e]well address to Congress. You can read the full transcript here, and watch the video here.  Predictably, he spent quite a long time extolling the virtues and performance of the Republican party while lashing out at liberalism.

At Mother Jones, Tim Murphy writes The Michele Bachmann Fact-Checking Challenge:

CNN has an interview up today with Ed Rollins, the veteran conservative political consultant whom Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has tapped to run her presidential campaign. Rollins, who guided Mike Huckabee's campaign to a victory in Iowa in 2008, predicts that the Minnesota GOPer's campaign will take more or less the same approach. That's not surprising; this is surprising:

Asked about Bachmann's past controversial comments, Rollins said the congresswoman would "have a good team around her and we'll basically make sure that everything is 100 percent fact checked."

Fact-checking is all the rage these days; even Cosmopolitan is doing it! But it's also tedious and time-intensive; to give you a sense, it took me three weeks to nail down all of the details in this article about imported insects that eat invasive plants. If Rollins really wants to 100-percent fact-check everything his candidate says before she says it, that's fantastic. It would probably be a first in American political history—and given Bachmann's record, a Herculean task.

It's also unclear just which comments Rollins intends to fact-check. CNN's link to "past controversial comments," for instance, actually directs you to a Bachmann gaffe in which she says the American Revolution began in New Hampshire. That's wrong, but it's not "controversial." Controversial would be saying something like "almost all, if not all, individuals who have gone into the [gay] lifestyle have been abused at one time in their life, either by a male or by a female"—which Bachmann did say, in 2004, in the same speech in which she expressed the hope that a breast-cancer-stricken Melissa Etheridge would take advantage of her illness to quit being a lesbian.

And then there's the sheer scope of Bachmann's factually challenged statements, which, even in the political world, are in a category of their own. ...

At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

We can end mountaintop removal mining. Right now. Immediately.

At first glance, this may seem like the worst possible time to address such a problem. After all, we are talking about people's jobs -- not to mention the half of all electricity in the United States that comes from coal. But the situation isn't that simple.

Demand for coal is down by 3%. If you compare that decline to the drop in your 401k, it may not seem all that large. It's huge. For 125 years the demand for coal has known only one direction -- up. This fall in demand is the largest on record. With industry closing plants or reducing shifts, and with individuals being more conscious of their power usage, the need for power is actually going down (one of those things we've been told could never happen). Hopefully, both individuals and businesses will take advantage of the funds now available to improve the efficiency of their heating and cooling, so that even when the economy recovers the trend toward lower power consumption will continue.

In the past 33 months, 446,000 Americans have been laid off from their state and local government jobs. In the third quarter that begins July 1, as many government entities begin their new fiscal year, the forecast says another 110,000 will lose their jobs.

Though tax revenue is starting to rise, states are still wrestling with multi-billion-dollar budget gaps. Federal stimulus funds helped minimize job cuts until now, but that money essentially runs out on June 30.

So states are planning to slash funds for education, social services and local governments, as well as downsize their payrolls even more, in the coming fiscal year.

And that's the good news.

The bad news is that local governments are in even worse shape. Not only are they losing state aid, but they are finally feeling the fallout from the mortgage meltdown. Property tax assessments, a major funding source for municipalities, have only started to drop.

And that bad news is compounded by worse news. Because even as sales and income tax revenues are rising in those states that have them, digging out of the financial quagmire so many of them have fallen into likely will take a couple of years or longer, perhaps much longer.

Property-tax revenue, which always takes time to adjust to fresh assessments of value, and which state and local governments depend on for much of their income, is, in many cases, only now showing reductions from the impact of the housing crash. Property taxes are a major funder of schools in every state. Not surprisingly, as we are all too well aware, teacher lay-offs are a major part of how many states—and not just Republican-dominated ones—are dealing with their financial crises.

While income and sales tax revenues have been rising, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities views state and local government prospects for fiscal 2012 to be as grim, if not worse, than the past two years. That, in part, is because most of the federal stimulus money these governments received as part of the Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in February 2009 has been spent, although some states have kept large amounts of these funds in reserve. Nebraska, for instance, still has available 38 percent of the federal dollars it received through the program.

Even so, 26 states are already projecting an aggregate shortfall of $75 billion in fiscal 2013. And that is after draconian cuts to government programs, including large numbers of lay-offs.

State and local government spending has a tremendous impact on infrastructure, schools, medical care and public services such as policing and fire fighting. Many of them carry out extensive regulatory tasks as well. Moreover, plenty of small businesses depend on them for their very existence. That fact is no doubt one of the reasons that some small businesses, according to the latest survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, are not only not hiring at their traditional levels during a recovery from recession, but have also begun laying off workers. This may be why initial claims for unemployment insurance remain stubbornly high.

It's a vicious circle. Fewer private-sector jobs, less tax revenue; less tax revenue, fewer public-sector jobs. And no end in sight. The Republicans' proposal for more jobs: Cut taxes. The Democrats': Cross fingers.

As noted Monday in Tenth anniversary of disastrous Bush tax cuts, Americans have seen economic inequality rise sharply because of the tax cuts enacted 10 years ago today. According to an analysis by Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress, those cuts have caused immense amounts of other damage, too, while pouring cash into the hands of those who already had the lion's share.

By the reckoning of Citizens for Tax Justice, the cost of that massive upward transfer of wealth was $2.48 trillion by the end of 2010. And, of course, still climbing since the cuts remain in place as a consequence of a Faustian bargain made last December.

Using a tool provided by the National Priorities Project, Jilani came up with 10 alternatives that could have been paid for with the money those harmful tax cuts made unavailable:

- Give 122.7 Million Children Low-Income Health Care Every Year For Ten Years

- Give 49.2 Million People Access To Low-Income Healthcare Every Year For Ten Years

- Provide 43.1 Million Students With Pell Grants Worth $5,500 Every Year For Ten Years

- Provide 31.5 Million Head Start Slots For Children Every Year For Ten Years

- Provide VA Care For 30.7 Million Military Veterans Every Year For Ten Years

- Provide 30.4 Million Scholarships For University Students Every Year For Ten Years

- Hire 4.19 Million Firefighters Every Year For Ten Years

- Hire 3.67 Million Elementary School Teachers Every Year For Ten Years

- Hire 3.6 Million Police Officers Every Year For Ten Years

- Retrofit 144.6 Million Households For Wind Power Every Year For Ten Years

- Retrofit 54.2 Million Households For Solar Photovoltaic Energy Every Year For Ten Years

That $2.5 trillion would have gone a long way toward repairing America's crumbling infrastructure, too, providing vast numbers of jobs in the process, an investment in our future.

In place of funding any one of these alternatives, however, millionaires got to lower their taxes by more than twice what the median American household earns in total income every year.

So, what are we hearing on the anniversary of this plutocratic miracle? Calls for still more tax cuts that would further reduce progressivity and hand over another chunk of money to the "job creators" who have done so well at that task with the previous cuts they have obtained.

We can see for ourselves what the cuts plainly have not done. They have, however, done what their promoters wanted them to do. The never-will-be-satisfied, cut-taxes-for-the-wealthy crowd is absolutely determined that the path to prosperity for the few in America will be strewn with economic catastrophe for the many. It's not a bug; it's a feature.

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Want to press Congress for higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires? Click Credo Action here.

At The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes:

The era of the modern sex scandal began in 1988 with Gary Hart, Donna Rice, the S.S. Monkey Business, and the Miami Herald. It seems almost quaint now, but back then it was de rigueur for the press to maintain that the sex scandal of the moment was not really “about” sex. What it was “about” was lying, which in turn meant that it was “about” something more important than sex, i.e., “character.”

The problem is that lying is an inherent part of adultery and, by extension, of any illicit or potentially embarrassing sexual activity or proclivity. By itself, the fact that a person has lied about sex tells you nothing about that person’s general propensity to lie. Unlike most citizens, prominent politicians like Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and Anthony Weiner make speeches by the hundred, give media interviews constantly, and have extensively documented public records. If the politician is a habitual or characterological liar, the public record will show it and the lying-about-sex is redundant. If the politician is not a habitual or characterological liar, his lying-about-sex is misleading—is itself a lie, in a way.

On MSNBC, the cable-news “home page” of my political tribe, one commentator said that one of the things Weinergate shows is that powerful politicians assume they can get away with things that regular people can’t. If they do assume that, they’re wrong. It would be more accurate to say that they can’t get away with things that regular people can. Look around you. Consider your friends, your work colleagues, your relatives, maybe even yourself.

The sex scandal does what it has always done: It titillates, it allows hypocrites to tsk-tsk publicly what so many of them engage in privately, and it allows the traditional and not-so-traditional media to avoid filling pages or air time with stuff that really matters. Not who a politician is tweeting, or actually trysting with but which moneybags he or she is actually in bed with when it comes to, for example, voting on a new energy policy or changing the tax rate for billionaires.

Alas, that stuff is just not as sexy as, well, sex or the hint of it. Think of all the intense time spent by so many clever minds this past weekend on trying to figure out who hacked Rep. Anthony Weiner and how. Wasted time not just because he wasn't hacked and somehow imagined he could bullshit his way out of the little mess he had made but, more importantly, wasted time that might have been spent digging into real scandals. Like the gigantic scam being run by the corporadoes in charge of our economy. But enough bashing the media—new and old—for its part in these affairs. What about the audience?

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:

By the time Ronald Reagan’s funeral rolls around on Friday, I wonder how deeply brainwashed about this “great president” we all will have become in our desire not to give the enemies of democracy and peace quotable ammunition in their efforts to keep George Bush in the White House for a second term. How far are we as people of the left willing to go while the avalanche of Reagan mythology spews forth from every cranny of television, radio, the press and Blogworld? ...

It is one thing to bite our tongues for a few respectful moments while Reagan’s fans sign the Icon’s commemorative guestbook, tell us what a fabulous leader he was and try to persuade us that we are all better for his having passed this way. It is quite another to repeat the bullshit ourselves.

How time flies when you're destroying progressive taxation, fabricating excuses to push the nation further into debt with trillion-dollar wars, deregulating the poor beleaguered corporations and complaining that any move to restore balance and reduce growing income inequality is unAmerican.

On the 10th anniversary of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (June 7), the first in a series of tax cuts by the Bush administration, Andrew Fieldhouse and Ethan Pollack at the Economic Policy Institute have produced a briefing paper that shows, in condensed form, the damage the cuts have caused:

1 The Bush tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy.

The Bush-era tax cuts conferred disproportionate benefits on those at the top of the earnings distribution,  exacerbating a trend of widening income inequality.

• In 2010, the top 1% of earners (i.e., tax filers making over $645,000) received 38% of the breaks in the 2001-08 tax  changes; 55% of the tax breaks went to the top 10% of earners (those making over $170,000).  

• The top 0.1% of earners (i.e., making over $3 million) received an average tax cut of roughly $520,000, more than 450 times larger than the share received by an average middle-income family.

• A multitude of tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited the wealthiest Americans. These cuts included lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, elimination of both the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions, lower marginal rates for the top two tax brackets, and lower estate tax rates and an increase in the estate tax exemption. For instance, individuals in or below the 25% tax bracket (single-filers making less than $83,000 and joint-filers making less than $138,000) received only 16% of the benefit from reducing rates on long-term capital
gains and qualifying dividends in 2005.4 Similarly, the top 5% of earners received 100% of the benefit from partially repealing the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions in 2006.

2 The Bush tax cuts did little for low-income families. ..

3 The Bush tax cuts never trickled down. ...

4 The Bush tax cuts were a poorly designed economic stimulus. ...

5 The Bush tax cuts failed to create strong long-run growth. ...

6 In the end, the Bush tax cuts cost a huge amount of money and significantly increased debt levels. ...

7 The Bush tax cuts were much more expensive than advertised. ...

8 The Bush tax cuts continue to be expensive. ...

9 The Bush tax cuts eliminated the most progressive federal tax:
taxes on large estates. ...

10 A decade of Bush tax cuts are increasing interest spending today. ...

Quite the wonderful decade if you were in the top 20 percent economically. Even better if you were in the top 10 percent. If you were in the top 1 percent, you needed a new vault. For the rest of Americans: Screw job. And one that we'll be paying the tax-cut piper for over the next several decades even if we cannot pressure our political leaders into reversing this massively destructive upward transfer of wealth. You can be certain they won't be doing it on their own.

Robert Reich writes Why Washington Isn’t Doing Squat About Jobs and Wages:

The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?

Republicans don’t want to do anything about jobs and wages. They’re so intent on unseating Obama they’d like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit — and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.

Democrats, meanwhile, don’t want to admit the recovery has stalled. They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don’t want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don’t think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.

But there’s a third reason for Washington’s inaction. It’s not being talked about — which is itself evidence of the problem.

The unemployed are politically invisible. They don’t make major campaign donations. They don’t lobby Congress. There’s no National Association of Unemployed People. ...

Well, that's certainly true.

But the politically invisible are supposed to have a champion in Washington. That champion, the elected Democrats, who are worried about votes in 2012 if the economy is still only anemically "recovering," ought to be taking every single opportunity there is to speak and act for those invisibles. Every day. And they ought to realize that more and more Americans have become, are becoming, invisible. Middle-class Americans.

This doesn't mean the gains achieved in the past couple of years should go unmentioned. President Obama was on the mark in his speech in Toledo last week in this regard. But it also means Democrats should not sugarcoat the very real problems faced by 25- to 30-million unemployed and underemployed Americans. They should speak for and about them boldly. Take responsibility for them. And point fingers. Otherwise, the fingers will inevitably, justifiably, point at them.

They should absolutely take note that the economic situation in January 2009 was a disaster inherited by the new administration. It was an acute disaster that can be laid mostly at the feet of the Bush administration, and a chronic one with its roots in voodoo economic theories and policies embraced over several decades. Every public chance they get, Democrats should point out the obstacles to fixing this acute and chronic economic disaster.

Not just the obvious obstacles on the floor of the Senate and House, the stubborn extremists who now run the Republican Party. But far more crucially, they need to inform the nation of the obstacles put up by plutocrats who have constrained regulatory agencies and concentrated the media into a tight little cabal committed to the distribution of baloney and bullshit. They should not pretend that if they don't mention this reality it will go away.

Some Democrats are already on the case. And huzzah to them for not having to have this stuff coaxed out of them by Rachel Maddow and a handful of other reliable people in the media. But more Democrats need to stand up. They should be making the plight of invisible Americans visible. Every day. They want to win elections? That is the way to do it.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:

James Carville, Scooter Libby  defender, via his wife:

Though my husband James Carville, a Democratic Strategist and Clinton supporter, shares neither political nor philosophical views with Scooter, he has deep respect for his intellect, his integrity, and joins me in the sentiments expressed here.

Among those sentiments are pablum like:

One of the many enduring and endearing memories of Scooter is his universal love of families.

Except for the Plame/Wilson family of course. And those of our soldiers stuck in Iraq...

• • • • •

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