Gail Collins takes a few pokes at the new Congress:
There was lots of discussion of reform in the Senate, too, and the chamber jumped into a vigorous debate on Democratic proposals to change the rules. The plan would decimate several venerable traditions, like the one that allows one senator to bring all progress on a bill or a nomination to a screeching halt without having to reveal his or her identity.
Everybody is now going home for two weeks to think about it.
This sort of change can only be made on the first day of business, but fortunately, Reid has invoked a special rule that allows him to keep the chamber at opening day until the end of the month. This is something that happens only in the United States Senate and early episodes of “Star Trek.” We are waiting to see if the senators continue to age while time stands still.
R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. actually seems to think the Tea Party-backed Republican freshmen who arrived on Capitol Hill this week are 75 George Washingtons.
The past could provide a visionary approach to solving our real estate predicament if we follow the green-wave ideas of 150-year-old of Frederick Law Olmstead, writes Michael Messner:
We don't have the luxury of vacant land that Olmsted often started with, so we must bulldoze underperforming and underused property, put people to work creating parks on some of the land and "bank" the rest until the economy recovers.
Beginning with Atlanta, Georgia Tech is researching what is needed to accomplish this in 12 major cities. The project is known as Red Fields to Green Fields. Under this plan, some of the abandoned or underutilized property would be acquired by a parks agency or by public-private partnerships, which would then begin demolition, park design and construction, putting people to work immediately. More jobs would come as the improved areas attracted development.
Saroop Ijaz, a lawyer and human rights activist based in Lahore, Pakistan, says reforming her country's blasphemy law, recently given international visibility because of a trumped-up case against a mother of five, is just the first step needed to fix a decades-old effort to inject ethnocentrism and intolerance into Pakistani society.
Robert Scheer takes on Lanny Davis:
The fact that the White House lawyer who most ardently defended Clinton has since put his dissembling talents at the service of ruthless dictators is not the fault of the former president or his wife, but it is a reminder of the shameful opportunism that characterized the Clinton presidency and which some so-called "New Democrats" like Davis insist the Obama presidency should emulate.
Larry Kudlow is so jazzed he thinks so-called tea party free-market populism equals Reaganomics 2.0, and he has high hopes for the second half of Barack Obama's term:
As noted, Obama agreed to freezing top marginal tax rates on all personal incomes and on capital-gains and dividend investment. But now there's major talk that the Obama budget will include a sizable corporate tax cut in return for ending unnecessary loopholes and deductions. Business has been clamoring for this. Hopefully it will include a territorial tax provision to end the double tax on foreign earnings. Equally important, the 100 percent business-expensing provision of the recent tax compromise might be made permanent.
Reagan couldn't have said it any better. …
Of course, as the Gipper also would say, trust but verify: We'll have to see the fine print of any such Obama proposal. Crucially, corporate tax reform must be revenue neutral, not a tax hike. …
And there are plenty of stories coming out of Washington about Obama reading Reagan biographies, which presumably include the pro-growth tax reform of 1986 and surely mention that Reagan himself was a student of the John Kennedy tax reforms that slashed tax rates across-the-board...
Tom Engelhardt says Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military need to enter rehab for their addiction to waging war and empire across the planet:
As 2011 begins, what could be eerier than reading secret Soviet documents from the USSR's Afghan debacle of the 1980s? It gives you chills to run across Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in October 1985, almost six years after Soviet troops first flooded into Afghanistan, reading letters aloud to his colleagues from embittered Soviet citizens (“The Politburo had made a mistake and must correct it as soon as possible -- every day precious lives are lost.”); or, in November 1986, insisting to those same colleagues that the Afghan war must be ended in a year, “at maximum, two.”
Yet, with the gut-wrenching sureness history offers, you can’t help but know that, even two years later, even with a strong desire to leave (which has yet to surface among the Washington elite a decade into our own Afghan adventure), imperial pride and fear of loss of “credibility” would keep the Soviets fighting on to 1989.
Mike Littwin:
The reading of the Constitution is either a way to take us back to the true meaning of America (not to be confused with the true meaning of Christmas, which we don't have to think about until next December) or it's a mindless sop to the Tea Partyers who think it's hip to walk around with their pocket Constitutions in, well, their pockets.
But I'm wondering if, amid all the comity, we'll hear some booing from the House floor during the reading of some of the less sacred parts of the sacred text — say, when someone intones the words from the 14th Amendment about how, according to the Constitution, so-called anchor babies are actually American citizen babies.
Or how about the 16th? Do you want to be the Republican who's stuck reading, "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration"?
OK, the dramatic reading is a gimmick, which would be even better if it were being read — and paid for — by Washington lobbyists.
Leonard Pitts Jr.:
As Maryla Korn, a [Holocaust] survivor from Washington, once told the Washington Jewish Week newspaper, "Maybe by talking and telling our stories, we can restrain another little monster from coming up. How can you not talk?"
Her words stand in stark contrast to the responses I once received from two black women when I asked them to describe a lynching they witnessed in 1930.
"I try and put that behind me," said Sarah E. Weaver-Pate. "I'd just rather forget that."
"Why bring it up?" snapped Clara Jeffries. "It's not helping anything. People don't want to hear it."
Every January we hear Martin Luther King's great speech. Every February, school kids dress up as black inventors or social leaders. But there is in us — meaning the African-American community — a marked tendency to avoid the grit, gristle and grime of our history. The telling of those stories is neither institutionalized nor even particularly encouraged.
It is time for that to change.
Steve Franklin says "Don’t Count on Tomorrow" is the new credo for the unemployed.