The New York Times reveals the most popular committee in congress.
The House Financial Services Committee has grown so large that a highly unusual fourth row of seats had to be installed in the committee room. Every term, scores of members, particularly freshmen, demand a seat on the panel — not because they have a burning interest in regulating banks and Wall Street, but because they know that they will be able raise much more money if one of the 61 seats has their name on it.
As Eric Lipton recently explained in The Times, Financial Services has become known as “the cash committee” because interest groups donate more money to its members than to those of any other House committee. More than $10 million has been given to its members just this year, and most of it has come from the big names the committee oversees. Contributors included employees of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, the Credit Union National Association, the Investment Company Institute, Wells Fargo and many of the biggest accounting firms and insurance companies.
Committee members don’t seem particularly ashamed of the favors they do for those providing the cash. Andy Barr, a freshman Republican from Kentucky, promised to protect a tax break worth $500 million to credit unions. (They gave him $15,000.) And he introduced a bill that would allow banks to give mortgages to people who cannot afford them, undoing a federal rule at the request of the big banks’ lobbyists. (Banks have given him at least $47,000.)
See, the banks have learned something from 2008. They've learned that they can get away with anything. That government is their tool and that anyone who stands up against them can be ignored. So don't say nothing's changed.
Come on in. Let's see what else is up.
Frank Bruni reveals just how desperate the search for the last reasonable Republican has become.
Let Rand Paul have his epic filibuster and Ted Cruz his scowling threats to shut down the government. Let Chris Christie thunder to a second term as the governor of New Jersey, his hubris flowering as his ultimate designs on the White House take shape.
Jeb Bush, lying low in the subtropics of Florida, has something they don’t: the unalloyed affection of many of the Republican Party’s most influential moneymen, who are waiting for word on what he’ll do, hoping that he’ll seek the 2016 presidential nomination and noting with amusement how far he has drifted off fickle pundits’ radar, at least for the moment.
Sure. Let's do Bush III. The Tea Partiers can't even claim he's not one of theirs. After all, preservation of power and wealth for the 1% is the central theme of conservatism.
Kathleen Parker takes a while to get moving, but eventually has a much better handle on the event's at the Missouri state fair than all the wingers shouting "first amendment!"
Question: If a black person wears a George W. Bush mask, is he racist? The next logical question answers the first: What if the clown wears a Bush mask at an event attended primarily by blacks and invites the crowd to cheer for the bulls?
This unlikely event would feel offensive for the same reasons the recent clown event did. The Missouri rodeo audience was mostly white and the masked man in the ring was depicting a black man. This changes everything we think about humor, about clowns and about good old-fashioned fun.
Just as N-jokes are no longer funny to almost anyone, placing a black man in the arena like an unarmed gladiator isn’t amusing. As much as we aspire to racial harmony, we have centuries of history to overcome, including the mob-inspired lynching of black men, and this is what so many saw in the clown skit. Memory conquers humor. ...
I am the last person who would suggest that irreverence be censored or punished — or that clowns be sensitized. The excessively reverent are far scarier to me than those who would die laughing. Political satire is, in fact, a public service inasmuch as it channels aggression that otherwise might find bloody expression.
But a civil society should find reprehensible even mock violence against a president, especially one who belongs to a minority that was once targeted for state-sanctioned violence.
That... pretty much nails it.
Andrew Bacevich says it's not the leak, but what comes after that seperates traitor from whistleblower..
Are Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden traitors or patriots? With Manning in jail and Snowden the subject of a global APB, the Obama administration has made its position on the question clear.
Yet for the rest of us, the question presumes a prior one: To whom do Army privates and intelligence contractors owe their loyalty? To state or to country? To the national security apparatus that employs them or to the people that apparatus is said to protect?
... what if the interests of the state do not automatically align with those of the country? In that event, protecting “the homeland” serves as something of a smokescreen. Behind it, the state pursues its own agenda. In doing so, it stealthily but inexorably accumulates power, privilege and prerogatives.
George Lardner wonders why President Obama is so stingy with one of his most important powers.
Since 1789, Obama’s office has had the power to “grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” There are no other limits to that power.
More than 210,000 people are behind bars in the federal system, nearly half of them because of drug-related crimes. As Holder said in a speech to the American Bar Association this month, it appears that the sentences imposed on black male offenders are 20 percent harsher than those imposed on white males. “This isn’t just unacceptable,” he said. “It’s shameful.”
Indeed it is. Obama could do something about it without waiting another day. He could start with the thousands of petitions for clemency that typically clog the Justice Department’s understaffed, underfunded Office of the Pardon Attorney. It takes more than three years before those considered deserving are even processed. And while very few are sent to the White House with a positive recommendation, the fact is that Obama has approved even fewer after sitting on them for almost another year.
Of course, if Obama did pardon a big mass of prisoners, the Republicans would claim he was dividing the country over race, coddling criminals, and destroying the country... just like they do on days he's not using his pardon power.
Leonard Pitts celebrates the power that the president is using.
It’s been a war on justice, an assault on equal protection under the law.
And a war on families, removing millions of fathers from millions of homes.
And a war on money, spilling it like water.
And a war on people of color, targeting them with drone-strike efficiency.
We never call it any of those things, though all of them fit. No, we call it the War on Drugs. It is a 42-year, trillion-dollar disaster that has done nothing — underscore that: absolutely nothing — to stem the inexhaustible supply of, and insatiable demand for, illegal narcotics. In the process, it has rendered this “land of the free” the biggest jailer on Earth.
So any reason to hope sanity might assert itself is cause for celebration. Monday, we got two of them, a coincidental confluence of headlines that left me wondering, albeit, fleetingly: Did the War on Drugs just end?
Well, no. Let’s not get carried away. But it is fair to say two of the biggest guns just went silent.
Peter Aldhouse shows that the outbreak of sense concerning the war on drugs isn't limited to the federal government.
It's been a long time coming. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of drug offenders behind bars in the US swelled from 41,000 to 507,000. In large part, that is due to the lengthy sentences handed down since the war on drugs was ramped up in the 1980s. In a federal court, for instance, being convicted of possessing 5 grams of methamphetamine with intent to supply currently attracts a minimum of five years without parole. ...
Step forward Texas, which in 2007 abandoned plans to spend $523 million building new prisons, and instead invested $241 million in a combination of policies including wider use of probation for drug offenders and expanding substance-abuse treatment programmes.
Since then, not only has Texas avoided building new prisons, it now plans to close two facilities, with a combined capacity for more than 4000 inmates, by the end of this month. And crime rates in the state are down to levels not seen since the 1960s.
If
Texas is starting to show sense, maybe we really are entering the final phase.
Colin Barras has news for anyone who thinks granpa's checkerboard is ancient.
Even in the Bronze Age there was more to life than work. Excavations at a burial site in south-east Turkey have revealed a set of 49 sculpted pieces that may once have been used in board games. They are among the oldest evidence of such games ever found. ...
"We don't know much about board games of the Bronze Age," says Schädler.
Of the few that do survive – including the 5500-year-old Egyptian game of Senet and the 4500-year-old Royal Game of Ur that was played in Mesopotamia – most seem to have been relatively simple, involving racing around the board faster than the opponent.
So... Bronze Age Sorry?