In Santorum’s Sweep, Sign of G.O.P. Unease With Romney

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
NYT

Rick Santorum’s sweep of Mitt Romney in Tuesday’s three Republican presidential contests sets the stage for a new and bitter round of intraparty acrimony as Mr. Romney once again faces a surging conservative challenge to his claim on the party’s nomination.

Mr. Santorum’s defeat of Mr. Romney could scramble the dynamics of the Republican race even as many in the party’s establishment were urging its most committed activists to finally fall in line behind Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor. Voters in three disparate states forcefully refused to do that on Tuesday.

Instead, the most conservative elements of the Republican Party’s base expressed their unease with Mr. Romney by sending a resounding message that they preferred someone else. And they collectively revived the candidacy of Mr. Santorum, who has been languishing in the background since a narrow victory in Iowa’s caucuses at the beginning of the year.

Mr. Santorum’s success on Tuesday night awarded him no delegates from the contests, which were were essentially nonbinding straw polls and drew small turnouts in all three states. And Mr. Santorum’s campaign has few of the organizational advantages of Mr. Romney’s well-financed effort.

(More here.)

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

How military leaders have let us down
By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS
Armed Forces Journal

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

(More here.)

Finally Hearing from the Republican Core

By DAVID FIRESTONE
NYT

Rick Santorum’s three primary victories last night were the first ones in this campaign season that made some sense. At last, conservative voters united behind a candidate who actually resembles the Republican Party that Americans have come to know in the last three years.

The party that so despises government that it repeatedly tried to shut it down last year in Congress – or ruin its credit rating – is not truly represented by Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich might enjoy closing Washington’s doors out of a sense of pique or domination, but both men are far too invested in the city’s power structure to shut it down out of a sense of belief.

Mr. Santorum is the only one of the three who can actually appear heartfelt when asserting, as he did today on Morning Joe, that “the central issue of the day is government oppressing and taking away our economic freedoms.” For him, as for the true believers who now dominate his party, this isn’t just a cynically crowd-pleasing line at a debate; he actually subscribes to the notion that the federal government is stalking its own citizens and mugging them of free choice, and he has for years.

It was all there in his victory speech last night in a suburb of St. Louis, which was structured in the classic paranoid style. Whether it is health care, the bank bailouts, or the environment, he said, an elitist President Obama deliberately ignored the American people and imposed an oppressive mandate that impoverished the country of its liberty.

(More here.)

As Massachusetts governor, Romney had an unremarkable record on jobs

By Jia Lynn Yang,
WashPost
Published: February 7

An overheated industry has gone bust. A tepid economy is not producing enough jobs. And a successful businessman promises he can use his private-sector experience to jump-start the economy.

This is presidential candidate Mitt Romney now, but it was also Romney nearly a decade ago when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, a state that was still reeling from the tech bubble’s burst.

A core argument of Romney’s presidential campaign is that he knows how to create jobs based on his career in finance. As governor, Romney faced his first test in applying his business background to a slow-growing economy — and data show that the results were unremarkable.

Massachusetts was one of just four states that by the time of the financial crisis still had not recovered all the jobs they had lost during the 2001 recession. And, as Romney’s opponents have pointed out, the state ranked 47th in job creation during his term.

(More here.)

Obama’s lucky break

By Dana Milbank,
WashPost
Published: February 7

It’s nine months until Election Day, but President Obama is already bringing out the big guns.

Specifically, he is shouldering the Extreme Marshmallow Cannon.

Obama walked into the State Dining Room at midday Tuesday and encountered 14-year-old Joe Hudy and the compressed-air cannon he invented to launch marshmallows as part of a science fair.

“The Secret Service is going to be mad at me about this,” the president said, but he didn’t care. He asked Hudy to hand over the gun, told onlookers to step aside, pumped up the compressor — and shot a confection across the room Thomas Jefferson used as his office. Under the watchful gaze of an Abraham Lincoln portrait, the projectile narrowly missed a window and smacked into a wall near the entrance to the Red Room.

(More here.)

Capitol Assets: Some legislators send millions to groups connected to their relatives

By Scott Higham, Kimberly Kindy and David S. Fallis,
WashPost
Published: February 7

Some members of Congress send tax dollars to companies, colleges and community groups where their spouses, children and parents work as salaried employees, lobbyists or board members, according to an examination of federal disclosure forms and local public records by The Washington Post.

A U.S. senator from South Dakota helped add millions to a Pentagon program his wife evaluated as a contract employee. A Washington congressman boosted the budget of an environmental group that his son ran as executive director. A Texas congresswoman guided millions to a university where her husband served as a vice president.

Those three members are among 16 who have taken actions that aided entities connected to their immediate families. The findings stem from an examination by The Post of all 535 members of the House and Senate, comparing their financial disclosure forms with thousands of public records. The examination uncovered a broad range of connections between the public and private lives of the nation’s lawmakers.

Several of the cases have received previous media attention, raised by local newspapers or campaign opponents, but the practice has continued unabated, The Post found.

(More here.)

Freedom at 4 Below

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

Moscow

To observe the democratic awakenings happening in places like Egypt, Syria and Russia is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach.

The glow comes from watching people lose their fear and be willing to take enormous risks to assert, not a particular ideology, but the most human of emotions: the quest for dignity, justice and the right to shape one’s own future. I was in Moscow on Saturday morning — just as the demonstrations against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were gathering. It was minus-4 Fahrenheit. A simple rule: Whenever 120,000 people gather to rally for democracy — and you can see your breath and can’t feel your fingers — take it seriously.

Putin’s allies were predicting that only a small crowd would brave the weather. They were wrong, and it underscores something that a lot of cynics regarding these awakening movements just don’t get. They’re like earthquakes or volcanoes. They are totally natural phenomena, and they emerge from a very deep place in people’s souls. Those mounting them are not sitting around calculating the odds of success before they start. They just happen. Anyone who thinks that President Obama could have saved former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is as delusional as anyone who thinks Obama is behind the protests against Putin. We’re all spectators, watching an authentic human wave.

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.

(More here.)

What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You

By CARY H. SHERMAN
NYT

Washington

THE digital tsunami that swept over the Capitol last month, forcing Congress to set aside legislation to combat the online piracy of American music, movies, books and other creative works, raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age.

Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft, to shield consumers from counterfeit products and fraud, and to combat foreign criminals who exploit technology to steal American ingenuity and jobs. They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged, and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000. They studied the problem in all its dimensions, through multiple hearings.

While no legislation is perfect, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (or PIPA) was carefully devised, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support in the Senate, and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA), was based on existing statutes and Supreme Court precedents. But at the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works. Consider, for example, the claim that SOPA and PIPA were “censorship,” a loaded and inflammatory term designed to evoke images of crackdowns on pro-democracy Web sites by China or Iran. Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal? When the police close down a store fencing stolen goods, it isn’t censorship, but when those stolen goods are fenced online, it is? Wikipedia, Google and others manufactured controversy by unfairly equating SOPA with censorship. They also argued misleadingly that the bills would have required Web sites to “monitor” what their users upload, conveniently ignoring provisions like the “No Duty to Monitor” section.

(More here.)

Iran’s Achilles’ Heel

By EFRAIM HALEVY
NYT

Jerusalem

THE public debate in America and Israel these days is focused obsessively on whether to attack Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons ambitions; hardly any attention is being paid to how events in Syria could result in a strategic debacle for the Iranian government. Iran’s foothold in Syria enables the mullahs in Tehran to pursue their reckless and violent regional policies — and its presence there must be ended.

Ensuring that Iran is evicted from its regional hub in Damascus would cut off Iran’s access to its proxies (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza) and visibly dent its domestic and international prestige, possibly forcing a hemorrhaging regime in Tehran to suspend its nuclear policies. This would be a safer and more rewarding option than the military one.

As President Bashar al-Assad’s government falters, Syria is becoming Iran’s Achilles’ heel. Iran has poured a vast array of resources into the country. There are Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps encampments and Iranian weapons and advisers throughout Syria. And Iranian-controlled Hezbollah forces from Lebanon have joined in butchering the Syrians who have risen up against Mr. Assad. Iran is intent on assuring its hold over the country regardless of what happens to Mr. Assad — and Israel and the West must prevent this at all costs.

Sadly, the opportunities presented by Syria’s meltdown seem to be eluding Israeli leaders. Last week, Israel’s military intelligence chief spoke of the 200,000 missiles and rockets in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria that could reach all of Israel’s population centers. And there is a growing risk that advanced Syrian weapons might fall into the hands of terrorist groups. Iran’s presence in Damascus is vital to maintaining these threats.

(More here.)

Romney didn't build companies, he made money for investors

February 7, 2012

By Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press

Recent opinion polls show that less than one-third of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mitt Romney, and almost half, 49 percent, have an unfavorable opinion — a number that skyrocketed 15 percentage points in one month, according to a January ABC News/Washington Post poll.

The cause of this problem is Mitt’s connection to Bain Capital, a private equity firm that he ran for 15 years, and which still pays him the equivalent of $60,000 per day — $22 million per year. Romney claims his firm created jobs and he cites this business experience as his principal qualification to be president, citing companies that survived Bain’s corporate looting such as Staples, as evidence of jobs created.

Private equity firms are not in business to create jobs, however. They buy weak corporations and then pick them clean for a quick profit, after which they walk away rich as the firms and their employees frequently sink into bankruptcy. Their goal is to make money which, in fact, they do by redistributing wealth, not creating it.

Not coincidently, Romney’s proposed tax plan would also redistribute wealth upward by cutting estate taxes along with capital gains and corporate taxes — the way the wealthy get their money — at a cost of $2 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Lawrence Summers and Andrei Shleifer found back in 1988 that much of the gains for buyout specialists like Bain come from breaking contracts with workers, suppliers and other corporate stakeholders. When they flip companies via leveraged buyouts, they basically take out all the money, throw the workers’ pensions onto a federal agency (the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation) and “stiff” the creditors. Their specialty is deal-breaking, not job creation.

As James Surowiecki recounted in the New Yorker recently: Private equity firms pile the target companies high with debt in order to buy them, then use those companies’ equity to borrow even more money, which they use to pay themselves huge management fees and “special dividends.”

The new owner then engages in asset stripping, selling off profitable portions and cutting costs, as Bain did with GS Technologies. Among the cost cutting measures Bain imposed was to cut the hourly rate of employees’ profit-sharing plan from $5.60 an hour to $1.25 per hour. Eventually, they eliminated profit-sharing completely.

These practices allow them to recoup their initial investment while keeping ownership control. Between 2003 and 2007 private-equity funds took more than $70 billion out of their companies. These dividends create no economic value — they just redistribute money from the company to the private-equity investors, while placing the companies, which have been looted and loaded down with debt, in jeopardy of failing.

The Charleston Gazette explained the process: “Bain bought control of Worldwide Grinding Systems, changed its name to GS Technologies, caused the firm to borrow $125 million — then used the borrowed money to give $36 million in dividends to Bain’s owners. The debt helped force GS into bankruptcy and 750 workers lost their jobs. Bain reneged on their medical and pension costs, and the federal government suffered a $44 million loss to cover their pensions.”

As usual when companies are facing bankruptcy, top managers continued to pay themselves bonuses while workers were losing jobs, pensions and medical benefits. The “profit-sharing” all went to the corporate looters.

The Charleston Gazette cited another case: “Bain and Goldman Sachs bought control of a Baxter International medical testing division that was renamed Dade Behring. The new owners slashed research spending and had the firm borrow $421 million — then used $365 million of the borrowed money to buy back Dade shares from Bain owners, quadrupling their investment in them. Bain put a mere $30 million into Dade but got $100 million in ‘management fees.’ Dade was saddled with $1.5 billion debt, went bankrupt, and wiped out 1,500 jobs.”

Bain did even better when it bought American Pad & Paper (AmPad) and Stage Stores. In each case, Bain invested $5 million and collected $100 million in dividends.

The New York Post reported that Bain made $578 million from just five deals: GS; Baxter; Details, Inc.; Stage Stores; and AmPad; all five companies subsequently went bankrupt.

As Warren Buffett has pointed out, there is a real difference between investing and building a company that makes something or provides a service that adds value to the economy, and predatory capitalism that loots and strips to make millions for its executives.

Bain’s approach under Romney was the latter, hardly a recommendation for making Romney president.

Senate Democrats Rally to Save Seats

By David M. Drucker
Roll Call Staff
Feb. 7, 2012, Midnight

Nearly everyone in Washington is familiar with EMILY’s List. But what about Al’s list?

Through his large email list of political supporters, Sen. Al Franken has quietly but steadily become one of the most sought-after and prodigious fundraisers among Democratic Senators outside of leadership. The Minnesotan — along with a handful of his rank-and-file colleagues — has been active this cycle in raising money for the almost two dozen Democrats and Democratic-held seats that are being contested on the November ballot.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), Majority Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), Conference Vice Chairman Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (Wash.) remain the four heavyweights among caucus fundraisers. But others are stepping up to help the Democrats protect their thin, four-seat majority, including Franken, Finance Chairman Max Baucus (Mont.), Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (Mass.) and Sens. Michael Bennet (Colo.), Kay Hagan (N.C.) and, to a lesser degree, Mark Warner (Va.).

“Everybody is really helping us. Members understand what is at stake,” Murray told Roll Call last week. Washington’s senior Senator also serves as Conference secretary, the fourth-ranking leadership position.

(More here.)

Romney’s Returns Revive Scrutiny of Offshore Tax Shelters

By JONATHAN WEISMAN
NYT

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney’s tax returns have drawn political scrutiny on multiple fronts, like his relatively low tax rates and the money parked in a Swiss bank account. But on Capitol Hill, his returns have caught the eyes of members of both parties for what appears to be his use of a type of complex shelter that has been debated for years in battles over evasion and fairness in the tax code.

The technique in question allows nonprofit institutions and large retirement funds to exploit the advantages of shell companies set up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands by investing money with private equity firms like Bain Capital, which Mr. Romney ran. Ordinarily, such private-equity investments are frequently subject to something called the unrelated business income tax. But by going offshore, pension funds, universities, foundations and even large Individual Retirement Accounts can structure those investments to avoid that heavy tax.

The technique has drawn bipartisan scrutiny in recent years from the Senate Finance Committee, complicating the confirmation of one of President Obama’s nominees, drawing negative attention to a Republican Treasury official and eliciting scathing criticism of a well-known charity, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. The committee’s chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and its former ranking Republican, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, have moved to make it illegal.

Tax experts and former Senate Finance Committee staff members say that Mr. Romney’s I.R.A. appears to have used the technique, and that he may have benefited personally.

(More here.)

Ten Years Later: Torture, Indefinite Detention, Military Tribunals

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
NYT

An absorbing article by Andrew Cohen on the Atlantic’s website has reminded me that today marks a very special 10th anniversary. Ten years ago policies were established that led to Abu Ghraib, the secret C.I.A. prisons, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and torture; that led, in other words, to a period that ranks among the worst in American history for the abuse of executive power, the shredding of civil liberties and the undermining of the judicial system. At the time, we didn’t know it was happening, because it was done in secret.

Mr. Cohen’s article concerns an executive memorandum with the ironic title “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees.” It was written by several Bush administration officials, including John Yoo (who went on to author the infamous torture memos), and was approved by Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s mob lawyer – I mean White House counsel.

This memo advanced the notion that the President could honor the Geneva Conventions only when he felt like doing so, and that in any case, they did not apply to prisoners associated with al Qaeda or the Taliban.

It was the underpinning of everything that came later:

• The authorization to torture prisoners.
• The idea that Mr. Bush could arrest any foreign citizens he wanted anywhere in the world and hold them indefinitely without charge (or even evidence sometimes).
• The institution of military tribunals where the rules of evidence and American justice do not apply.
• The idea that terrorist suspects should be considered military prisoners even though the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had a long track record of arresting, charging and convicting them.

(More here.)

Why French Parents Are Superior

While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety. Pamela Druckerman on the Gallic secrets for avoiding tantrums, teaching patience and saying 'non' with authority.

By PAMELA DRUCKERMAN
WSJ

When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that's a few hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I'm American, he's British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her, was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?

We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler deserved to be its own circle of hell.

Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.

(More here.)

Komen vice president Karen Handel resigns

By Sarah Kliff and N.C. Aizenman,
WashPost
Updated: Tuesday, February 7, 10:00 AM

A top official of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation who was involved in the controversy over the group’s funding of Planned Parenthood resigned Tuesday.

Karen Handel, vice president for public policy, acknowledged that she had supported Komen’s decision to pull funding for Planned Parenthood in a resignation letter obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution. However, she said the decision-making process began before she joined the organization last year, and the policy change was thoroughly vetted at every level within the organization and unanimously agreed to by the board at a November meeting.

“The Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges,” Handel wrote to Komen’s CEO and founder Nancy Brinker.

In an interview, Handel acknowledged she played a role in Komen’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, but also pushed back against allegations that she was the sole actor in the decision.

(More here.)

Fallout From Fatigue Syndrome Retraction Is Wide

By DAVID TULLER
NYT

When scientists reported in 2009 that a little-known mouse retrovirus was present in a large number of people with chronic fatigue syndrome, suggesting a possible cause of the condition, the news made international headlines. For patients desperate for answers, many of them severely disabled for years, the finding from an obscure research center, the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nev., seemed a godsend.

“I remember reading it and going, ‘Bingo, this is it!’ ” said Heidi Bauer, 42, a mother of triplets in Huntington, Md., who has had chronic fatigue syndrome since her 20s. “I thought it was going to mean treatment, that I was going to be able to play with my kids and be the kind of mom I wanted to be.”

Patients showered praise on the lead researcher, Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute. They sent donations large and small to the institute, founded by Harvey and Annette Whittemore, a wealthy and politically well-connected Nevada couple seeking to help their daughter, who had the illness.

In hopes of treating their condition, some patients even began taking antiretroviral drugs used to treat H.I.V., a retrovirus related to the murine leukemia viruses suddenly suspected of involvement in chronic fatigue syndrome.

(More here.)

Right-to-Work Laws Won’t Bring Back Manufacturing: Ron Klain

By Ron Klain
Bloomberg
Feb 6, 2012

For most policy problems, there is usually a simple answer and a correct answer; they are rarely the same thing. That dilemma is evident in the debate about what the U.S. can do to boost its manufacturing sector.

One side was staked out by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address. Building on the success of his rescue of the auto industry, the president set forth a multipronged approach toward a broader reinvigoration of manufacturing.

His proposal includes closing tax loopholes that subsidize companies that ship manufacturing jobs overseas and investing the savings in incentives to bring plants back home. Obama also called for doubling the tax deductions that high-tech manufacturers get for making products in the U.S., additional incentives for putting factories in hard-hit areas, and further tax disincentives for foreign operations.

The president also outlined an agenda for expanding trade in U.S. manufactured goods, cracking down on foreign manufacturers that don’t compete fairly, and implementing country-specific trade measures. In addition, he called for expanded programs to train workers in the skills they need to be qualified for new jobs in advanced manufacturing.

(More here.)

Romney Support Falls Back in States He Won

By Erin McPike
RealClearPolitics
February 7, 2012

Under the original election calendar, the Romney campaign foresaw victories in New Hampshire and Nevada as a firewall protecting the candidate's path to the GOP nomination: Post big wins in both states, use the momentum to get a major win in Florida, and then lock up the whole thing. Nevada ended up moving its nominating contest back to follow the Sunshine State’s, but Romney still posted double-digit victories in all three contests.

And so everything's gone according to plan.

There’s just one problem: After waging warfare on his GOP competitors in each of those elections -- all in swing states that could be critical in a November matchup against President Obama -- Romney has left those contests less popular than when he started campaigning in earnest.

The news Monday in a national Washington Post/ABC News poll made waves: Obama’s approval rating shot up to 50 percent; the president bested Romney in a general election matchup; and he led his likely GOP rival among crucial independent voters.

And so the Romney campaign issued two memos to effectively distract from those findings. The first one, authored by campaign pollster Neil Newhouse, addressed the new survey.

(More here.)

Poisoned Politics of Keystone XL

By JOE NOCERA
NYT

On Monday, Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, traveled to China for a week of high-level meetings. He brought with him a handful of his cabinet ministers, including Joe Oliver, his tough-talking minister of natural resources who, until recently, had been withering in his scorn for the opponents of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which President Obama rejected a few weeks ago. The pipeline, of course, was intended to transport vast oil reserves in Alberta to the American refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Oliver no longer talks so freely about the environmental critics of the Keystone pipeline; all of Harper’s ministers have been instructed to stop making comments that might be construed as interfering in the American presidential election. But there are other, more diplomatic, ways to send messages. Like going to China with your cabinet members and cutting energy deals with a country that has, as The Globe and Mail in Toronto put it recently, a “thirst for Canadian oil.” Oil, I might add, that may be a little dirtier than the crude that pours forth from the Saudi Arabian desert — that is one of the main reasons environmentalists say they oppose Keystone — but is hardly the environmental disaster many suppose.

I realize that President Obama rejected Keystone because, politically, he had no choice. My guess is that, in his centrist heart of hearts, the president wanted to approve it. But to give the go-ahead before the election was to risk losing the support of the environmentalists who make up an important part of his base.

I also understand that the Republican decision to force Obama’s hand was a political stunt, allowing them to denounce his decision during the campaign. As Jennifer Steinhauer put it in The Times recently, “Republicans are framing Keystone as an urgent jobs and energy project at a time of high unemployment and creeping gasoline prices.”

(More here.)

Congressional earmarks sometimes used to fund projects near lawmakers' properties

By David S. Fallis, Scott Higham and Kimberly Kindy,
Washpost
Published: February 6

A U.S. senator from Alabama directed more than $100 million in federal earmarks to renovate downtown Tuscaloosa near his own commercial office building. A congressman from Georgia secured $6.3 million in taxpayer funds to replenish the beach about 900 feet from his island vacation cottage. A representative from Michigan earmarked $486,000 to add a bike lane to a bridge within walking distance of her home.

Thirty-three members of Congress have directed more than $300 million in earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or within about two miles of the lawmakers’ own property, according to a Washington Post investigation.

Under the ethics rules Congress has written for itself, this is both legal and undisclosed.

The Post analyzed public records on the holdings of all 535 members and compared them with earmarks members had sought for pet projects, most of them since 2008. The process uncovered appropriations for work in close proximity to commercial and residential real estate owned by the lawmakers or their family members. The review also found 16 lawmakers who sent tax dollars to companies, colleges or community programs where their spouses, children or parents work as salaried employees or serve on boards.

In recent weeks, lawmakers have acknowledged the public’s growing concern that they appeared to be using their positions to enrich themselves. In response, the Senate last week passed legislation that would require lawmakers to disclose mortgages for their residences. The bill, known as the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (Stock) Act, would also require lawmakers and executive branch officials to disclose securities trades of more than $1,000 every 30 days. At the same time, the Senate defeated an amendment, 59-40, that would have permanently outlawed earmarks.

(More here.)

Wolfram, a Search Engine, Finds Answers Within Itself

By STEVE LOHR
NYT

Stephen Wolfram, a 52-year-old scientist, software designer and entrepreneur, tends to go his own way — often with noteworthy results. He published his first physics paper at 15, earned his Ph.D. from Caltech at 20 and two years later won a MacArthur prize.

Less than three years ago, Dr. Wolfram created a new kind of search engine, called Wolfram Alpha. Unlike Google or Microsoft’s Bing, Wolfram Alpha does not forage the Web. It culls its own painstakingly curated database to find answers.

There was skepticism in 2009, when Wolfram Alpha arrived, with critics saying the approach was very limited, useful mainly for math and science facts. But the technology has come a long way, including delivering many answers for Siri, the question-answering personal assistant in the Apple iPhone 4S.

The new version of Wolfram Alpha arrives Wednesday afternoon. Its formal name is Wolfram Alpha Pro, and Dr. Wolfram calls “Step 2, the next step of what can be done with this approach,” which he describes as a “computational knowledge engine.”

(More here.)

Company Faces Forgery Charges in Mo. Foreclosures

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
NYT

One of the largest companies that provided home foreclosure services to lenders across the nation, DocX, has been indicted on forgery charges by a Missouri grand jury — one of the few criminal actions to follow reports of widespread improprieties against homeowners.

A grand jury in Boone County, Mo., handed up an indictment Friday accusing DocX of 136 counts of forgery in the preparation of documents used to evict financially strained borrowers from their homes. Lorraine O. Brown, the company’s founder and former president, was indicted on the same charges.

Employees of DocX, a unit of Lender Processing Services of Jacksonville, Fla., executed and notarized millions of mortgage documents for big banks and loan servicers over the years. Lender Processing closed the company in April 2010, after evidence emerged of apparent forgeries in these documents, a practice now called robo-signing.

Chris Koster, the Missouri attorney general, will prosecute the case. “The grand jury indictment alleges that mass-produced fraudulent signatures on notarized real estate documents constitutes forgery,” Mr. Koster said in a statement. “Today’s indictment reflects our firm conviction that when you sign your name to a legal document, it matters.”

(More here.)

‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World

By ADAM LIPTAK
NYT

WASHINGTON — The Constitution has seen better days.

Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning.

In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”

A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

The study, to be published in June in The New York University Law Review, bristles with data. Its authors coded and analyzed the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them.

(More here.)

Charges Against U.S.-Aided Groups Come With History of Distrust in Egypt

By SCOTT SHANE and RON NIXON
NYT

WASHINGTON — Authoritarian rulers from Caracas to Moscow and beyond have long viewed pro-democracy groups financed by the United States with deep suspicion, regularly denouncing them as meddlers or spies and sometimes harassing their workers.

But never has a government gone as far as Egypt’s, which on Monday confirmed that it intended to try 19 Americans and more than two dozen other people on charges stemming from a criminal investigation that has shocked Obama administration officials and endangered military aid.

In the wake of the charges and response on Monday, Egypt abruptly recalled from Washington a delegation of generals that had been planning to meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Egyptian state media announced charges against four such nonprofit organizations that are based in Washington and that receive some United States government support. The charges include operating without licenses, “conducting research to send to the United States” and supporting Egyptian candidates and parties “to serve foreign interests.”

(More here.)

U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

(updated below – Update II – Update III)

On December 30 of last year, ABC News reported on a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Khan, who was killed with his 12-year-old cousin when a car in which he was riding was hit with a missile fired by a U.S. drone. As I noted at the time, the report contained this extraordinary passage buried in the middle:

Asked for documentation of Tariq and Waheed’s deaths, Akbar did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene of an attack.

What made that sentence so amazing was that it basically amounts to a report that the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.

In a just-released, richly documented report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, on behalf of the Sunday Times, documents that this is exactly what the U.S. is doing — and worse:

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

(More here.)

Top official: drone critics are Al Qaeda enablers

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

The New York Times‘ Scott Shane reported this morning on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism study I wrote about yesterday, detailing that the U.S. drone program, as the NYT put it, “repeatedly targeted rescuers who responded to the scene of a strike, as well as mourners at subsequent funerals.” Shane’s article contains this paragraph:

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

Note that the “senior counterrorism official” did not deny the findings, at least not in the quotes provided, but there are two lessons to take from this paragraph. First, at least according to some “senior” Obama official, those who report critically on the civilian-killing, rescuer-and-funeral-targeting American drone attacks (i.e., those who “malign these efforts”) are either supporters of or useful idiots for Al Qaeda; it sure is a good thing the Bush era is over when those who questioned the President’s national security policies were accused of helping the Terrorists. Second, if you’re a cowardly senior government official who wants to smear critics as Al Qaeda enablers or supporters, The New York Times will grant you anonymity to do it, all while violating multiple provisions of its own policy on anonymity adopted after its historically shameful performance in the run-up to the Iraq War:

The use of unidentified sources is reserved for situations in which the newspaper could not otherwise print information it considers reliable and newsworthy.

(More here.)

A Postwar Picture of Resilience

By ANTHONY D. MANCINI
NYT

WHEN the United States announced last week that its combat troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn by mid-2013, there was obvious relief. But it was followed by familiar concerns.

One of the biggest of those concerns is the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among the tens of thousands of returning veterans, which according to some media reports runs as high as 35 percent. These reports have incited fears that we will soon face a PTSD epidemic. But are such fears justified?

According to mounting scientific evidence, they are not. In fact, the prevalence of PTSD among veterans of recent wars is about 10 percent — substantially lower than is commonly believed. Indeed, the picture emerging is one of remarkable psychological resilience among the military.

This story of resilience has been ignored, partly because many assume that humans are inherently vulnerable to trauma. That belief makes us receptive to messages, most delivered by the media, that reinforce this perspective.

(More here.)

Steal This Column

By BILL KELLER
NYT

AMONG the wonders of the Internet, Wikipedia occupies a special place. From its birth 11 years ago it has professed, and has tried reasonably hard to practice, a kind of idealism that stands out in the vaguely, artificially countercultural ambience of Silicon Valley. Google’s informal corporate mantra — “Don’t Be Evil” — has become ever more cringe-making as the company pursues its world conquest. Though Bill Gates has applied his personal wealth to noble causes, nobody thinks of Microsoft as anything but a business. I marvel at Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his acolytes; but I marvel at their imagination and industry, not what the new multibillionaire described last week as their “social mission.” But Wikipedia, while it has grown something of a bureaucratic exoskeleton, remains at heart the most successful example of the public-service spirit of the wide-open Web: nonprofit, communitarian, comparatively transparent, free to use and copy, privacy-minded, neutral and civil.

Like many people, I was an early doubter that a volunteer-sourced encyclopedia could be trusted, but I’m a convert. Although I find errors (a spot check of the entries for myself and my father the other day found minor inaccuracies in both, which I easily corrected), I use it more than any other Web tool except my search engines, and because I value it, I donate to its NPR-style fund-raising campaign.

So as I followed the latest battle in the great sectarian war over the governing of the Internet — the attempt to curtail online piracy — I was startled to see that Wikipedia’s founder and philosopher, Jimmy Wales, who generally stays out of the political limelight, had assumed a higher profile as a combatant for the tech industry. He supplied an aura of credibility to a libertarian alliance that ranged from the money-farming Megatrons of Google to the hacker anarchists of Anonymous.

Et tu, Jimmy?

(More here.)

Things Are Not O.K.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT

In a better world — specifically, a world with a better policy elite — a good jobs report would be cause for unalloyed celebration. In the world we actually inhabit, however, every silver lining comes with a cloud. Friday’s report was, in fact, much better than expected, and has made many people, myself included, more optimistic. But there’s a real danger that this optimism will be self-defeating, because it will encourage and empower the purge-and-liquidate crowd.

So, about that jobs report: it was genuinely good, certainly compared with the dreariness that has become the norm. Notably, for once falling unemployment was the real thing, reflecting growing availability of jobs rather than workers dropping out of the labor force, and hence out of the unemployment measure.

Furthermore, it’s not hard to see how this recovery could become self-sustaining. In particular, at this point America is seriously under-housed by historical standards, because we’ve built very few houses in the six years since the housing bubble popped. The main thing standing in the way of a housing bounce-back is a sharp fall in household formation — econospeak for lots of young adults living with their parents because they can’t afford to move out. Let enough Americans find jobs and get homes of their own, and housing, which got us into this slump, could start to power us out.

That said, our economy remains deeply depressed. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, we started 2012 with fewer workers employed than in January 2001 — zero growth after 11 years, even as the population, and therefore the number of jobs we needed, grew steadily. The institute estimates that even at January’s pace of job creation it would take us until 2019 to return to full employment.

(More here.)

Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook

By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
NYT

BERLIN — As Wall Street prepares for a record, multibillion-dollar initial stock sale from Facebook, the social networking site, a meeting with the potential to shape the economics of the deal was set to take place Monday in Vienna.

Richard Allan, a former member of Parliament in Britain who is the European director of policy for Facebook, and another executive from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, will meet with Max Schrems, a 24-year-old college student.

Mr. Schrems, a law student at the University of Vienna and a user of Facebook since 2008, has led a vocal campaign in Europe against what he maintains are Facebook’s illegal practices of collecting and marketing users’ personal data, often without consent.

In less than a year, Mr. Schrems’s one-person operation has morphed into a Web site, Europe Versus Facebook, and a grass-roots movement that has persuaded 40,000 people to contact Facebook in Ireland, where its European headquarters are located, to demand a summary of all the personal data the U.S. company is holding on them.

(More here.)

The Flub Watch Never Stops for Obama’s Team

By HELENE COOPER
NYT

WASHINGTON — For Brad Woodhouse, the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, it was when he came across a Twitter post about a CNN interview in which Mitt Romney seemed to shrug off concern for the very poor.

And Bill Burton’s moment came a week and a half ago while he was in his family room watching Mr. Romney take Newt Gingrich to task for talking about putting a colony on the moon. If someone made such a proposal to him, Mr. Romney said, “I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’ ”

Both moments were perceived by the Obama re-election campaign as another gift from Mr. Romney — now dubbed “the gift that keeps on giving” by some on the Obama team. “Just when you thought we had enough videotape about him firing people, he gives you one more,” Mr. Burton, who leads a political action committee backing the president, said before laughing.

In the rarefied world that is dedicated to getting Mr. Obama re-elected, the battle has never been viewed through the prism of how to beat Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum or Ron Paul. It has always been about Mitt Romney.

(More here.)

Deal Is Closer for a U.S. Plan on Mortgage Relief

By SHAILA DEWAN and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
NYT

With a deadline looming on Monday for state officials to sign onto a landmark multibillion-dollar settlement to address foreclosure abuses, the Obama administration is close to winning support from a crucial state that would significantly expand the breadth of the deal.

The biggest remaining holdout, California, has returned to the negotiating table after a four-month absence, a change of heart that could increase the pot for mortgage relief nationwide to $25 billion from $19 billion.

Another important potential backer, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman of New York, has also signaled that he sees progress on provisions that prevented him from supporting it in the past.

The potential support from California and New York comes in exchange for tightening provisions of the settlement to preserve the right to investigate past misdeeds by banks, and stepping up oversight to ensure that the financial institutions live up to the deal and distribute the money to the hardest-hit homeowners.

(More here.)

Egypt Defies U.S. by Setting Trial for 19 Americans on Criminal Charges

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT

CAIRO — Egypt’s military-led government said Sunday that it would put 19 Americans and two dozen others on trial in a politically charged criminal investigation into the foreign financing of nonprofit groups that has shaken the 30-year alliance between the United States and Egypt.

The decision raises tensions between the two allies to a new peak at a decisive moment in Egypt’s political transition after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak a year ago. Angry protesters are battling security forces in the streets of the capital and other major cities. The economy is in urgent need of billions of dollars in foreign aid. And the military rulers are in the final stages of negotiations with the Islamists who dominate the new Parliament over the terms of a transfer of power that could set the country’s course for decades.

The criminal prosecution is a rebuke to Washington in the face of increasingly stern warnings to Egypt’s ruling generals from President Obama, cabinet officials and senior Congressional leaders that it could jeopardize $1.55 billion in expected American aid this year, including $1.3 billion for the military. But for Washington, revoking the aid would risk severing the tie that for three decades has bound the United States, Egypt and Israel in an uneasy alliance that is the cornerstone of the American-backed regional order.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she had personally warned the Egyptian foreign minister, Mohammed Amr, at a security conference in Munich on Saturday that the continuing investigation of the nonprofit groups cast new doubt on the aid. “We are very clear that there are problems that arise from this situation that can impact all the rest of our relationship with Egypt,” she told reporters there.

(More here.)

Obama holds edge over Romney in general election matchup, poll finds

By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen,
WashPost
Published: February 5

Boosted by improved public confidence in his economic stewardship, President Obama for the first time holds a clear edge over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a hypothetical general-election matchup, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Romney, who notched his second consecutive victory Saturday by easily winning the Nevada caucuses, continues to solidify his position as the front-runner in the race for the GOP nomination. But as the contest has grown more negative, public impressions of the top Republican contenders have soured, as has the former Massachusetts governor’s standing as a general-election candidate.

Obama remains a polarizing figure, with Americans closely divided on whether he deserves reelection as well as on many aspects of his performance in office. Although better than they were a few months ago, his ratings on handling the economy and job creation remain negative, with intensity continuing to run against him.

The poll results underscore how important framing the contest could be to the outcome. If the fall campaign becomes largely a referendum on Obama’s tenure in office, as Republicans hope it will, he could struggle to win a second term — barring an economic recovery that vastly outperforms expectations. If, however, it becomes a choice between the incumbent and the challenger, as Obama advisers predict it will, the president’s prospects would be brighter.

(More here.)

Bill Moyers on fighting corporate personhood

Ask Bill: How can ordinary people help to overturn or nullify the Citizen United Decision? from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Related links:

• Move to Amend
• Free Speech for People
• ReclaimDemocracy.org
• The latest on Google News

India on the brink of being Walmart-ized

"Walmart's entry into the market would destroy that entire system."

Once a Food Chain, Now a Corporate Supply Chain

Friday 3 February 2012
by: Kanya D'Almeida, Inter Press Service | Report

While Indian retailers are losing sleep over the possible entrance of multinationals like Walmart into the dense South Asian consumer market, very little thought has been given to the Indian small farmer, who stands to lose even more at the hands of the world's biggest commercial food retailer.

The commercial food market topped seven trillion dollars at the end of 2009, overtaking even the mammoth energy sector, according to a new report by the ETC prepared ahead of the June 2012 Rio+20 conference on sustainable development.

The top 10 retail food firms raked in combined annual sales worth 753 billion dollars, 25 percent of which went to the world's largest corporation: Walmart.

In 2009, 51 percent of Walmart's total revenue came directly from its food sales, making it the U.S.'s largest grocer.

However, with consumer markets in the U.S. and Western Europe shriveling fast, Walmart has been forced to look elsewhere for customers.

(More here. This is the second of a two-part series. The first part is here.)