Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post writes about the fight against the Islamic State:
President Obama should call Congress back to Washington for a special session to vote on authorizing war against the Islamic State. If he does not, Congress should return on its own to conduct this vital debate.
Do your jobs, everybody.
As legal justification for the war, Obama relies on two measures, passed more than a decade ago, that authorized U.S. military action against al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. To state the blindingly obvious, things have changed.
Walter Pincus, meanwhile, looks at the Islamic State PR machine:
The Islamic State may practice medieval barbarism in Syria and Iraq, but its worldwide media operations are 21st century. [...] U.S. attempts to counter this type of messaging faces the same difficulty that Washington has had in trying to create democratic governmental partners in the region. The new Baghdad government somehow must overcome the anti-Sunni, anti-Kurd actions of the former Nouri al-Maliki government to regain the Iraqi people’s support — U.S. tweets can’t do it. The task in Syria is even more difficult.
President Obama has repeatedly said that it is up to Iraqis and Syrians to win the military war on the ground. The propaganda war is no different.
For more on the day's top stories, head below the fold.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post breaks down the president's 60 Minutes interview and the media reaction:
You can argue that it happened because ISIS grew rapidly, which would have been hard to predict, or you can argue that the Iraqi Army’s instantaneous collapse in places like Mosul was an unlikely outcome, but at this point no one is going to say that we had perfect information and understood exactly what ISIS’s capability would become. So why is this such big news?
The answer lies in the problematic pattern of so much political reporting, where appearances are more important than facts and politicians are held to standards that reporters themselves would claim to find frustrating, even abhorrent. The result is that while this kind of coverage looks on the surface like it encourages accountability, in fact it does exactly the opposite.
Joe Nocera at the NYT examines Eric Holder's legacy as it relates to accountability for the financial crisis:
As for the prosecution of individuals involved in the financial crisis, he claimed that the Justice Department had “taken aggressive action, nearly doubling the number of mortgage fraud indictments and criminal convictions between 2009 and 2010, then increasing them even further the following year.”
Actually, Holder’s Justice Department has been notoriously laggard in prosecuting crimes that stemmed from the financial crisis, and much of what it has done amounts to an exercise in public relations.
The Week's
Ryan Cooper:
The first black attorney general, by all accounts a committed liberal with a special concern for civil rights, was also the guy who rubber-stamped the NSA's dragnet surveillance program and the CIA's assassination of American citizens. He prosecuted neither Bush-era torturers nor any of the thousands of high-level Wall Street fraudsters from the financial crisis (save one).
So, despite his genuinely admirable action on sentencing reform, police discrimination, and other racial justice issues, he will ultimately be remembered as complicit in turning the American state away from the rule of law when it comes to the rich and powerful.
Dean Baker adds his take:
Undoubtedly there are positives to Holder's tenure as attorney general, but one really big minus is his decision not to prosecute any of the Wall Street crew whose actions helped to prop up the housing bubble. As a result of this failure, the main culprits walked away incredibly wealthy even as most of the country has yet to recover from the damage they caused.
Just to be clear, it is not against the law to be foolish and undoubtedly many of the Wall Streeters were foolish. They likely believed that house prices would just keep rising forever. But the fact that they were foolish doesn't mean that they didn't also break the law. It's likely that most of the Enron felons believed in Enron's business model. After all, they held millions of dollars of Enron stock. But they still did break the law to make the company appear profitable when it wasn't.
In the case of the banks, there are specific actions that were committed that violated the law.
Turning to party politics,
Craig Shirley at Reuters explains why folks may be overstating the Republican advantage this election season:
Establishment Republicans should keep the champagne on ice until after the midterm elections. Too many are already popping corks, pronouncing their strategy of “crushing” the Tea Party during the primaries as a crucial step in their successful takeover of the U.S. Senate. [...] National polls show the GOP to be about as popular as the heartbreak of psoriasis. The Democrats, for all their faults (and they are many) remain more popular. Republicans are not for anything. They are defined as simply being against President Barack Obama and certainly not for any form of federalism.
Since the 1950s, beginning with the rise of Senator Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley’s National Review, there has been a war for the soul of the GOP. But this time is different. The establishment Republicans loath the conservative-Reaganite-Tea Party-reformer-populists, viewing them as a serious threat. They stand as an indictment against the entire GOP insider culture.
Over at The Nation,
John Nichols looks at yet another disappointing Supreme Court ruling:
In case there was any remaining confusion with regard to the precise political intentions of the US Supreme Court’s activist majority, things were clarified Monday. The same majority that has made it easier for corporations to buy elections (with the Citizens United v. FEC decision) and for billionaires to become the dominant players in elections across the country (with the McCutcheon v. FEC decision) decided to make it harder for people in Ohio to vote.
Yes, this Court has messed with voting rights before, frequently and in damaging ways. It has barely been a year since the majority struck down key elements of the Voting Rights Act.
But Monday’s decision by the majority was especially blatant—and immediate. One day before early voting was set to begin in Ohio on Tuesday, the Supreme Court delayed the start of the process with a decision that will reduce the early voting period from thirty-five days to twenty-eight days.
On a final note, take a minute and go read
Dana Milbank's profile of an American hero:
In the first days of the Iraq war 11 years ago, Army reservist Jay Briseno was shot in the back of the head at a Baghdad market. The bullet left him blind, brain-damaged, paralyzed from the neck down and unable to communicate, eat or breathe on his own.
He is perhaps the most grievously wounded soldier to survive the war, or any war. On any number of occasions, his parents have been told to prepare themselves for his death. But on Monday morning, Jay Briseno smiled — broadly and unmistakably.