The last ten days or so we have seen Republicans, and their religious allies, wage a war against contraception-and bungle it badly. With poll after poll showing that a majority of Americans support contraceptive coverage in health reform, and with the 98 percent figure (of American women who have ever used contraception in the context of heterosexual sex) endlessly repeated in the media, the Republicans nonetheless push ahead with this attack, providing a welcome gift to the Obama reelection campaign and much material to political artists and comics. I have lost count of the number of parodies that have been inspired by that now gone viral picture of five male clerics testifying at the Congressional hearing called by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). A picture that of course immediately brings to mind another image of a similar tone deaf moment on the part of social conservatives,  the nine men surrounding President George W. Bush as he became the first president to sign a ban on a particular technique of performing abortion, in the case of so-called "partial birth abortion."  It's no wonder that the term "patriarchy" has made a comeback in the blogs! [..]

But while the media is momentarily fixated on the second big story this month of a losing fight against family planning (remember the Susan G. Komen Fund fiasco?), less attention has been paid to a related war that is not going well at all.  The assault on abortion that has resulted from the 2010 elections--the Republican takeover of Congress and many statehouses and governorships--has arguably produced the most serious threat to abortion access since the Roe decision in 1973.  What we mainly have heard about this situation are the statistics, the unprecedented number of abortion restrictions introduced and eventually passed in state legislatures at a time when one might assume politicians' focus would be on the economy.

Medea Benjamin: Police Chief Timoney, Meet Bahraini Mothers

John Timoney is the controversial former Miami police chief well known for orchestrating brutal crackdowns on protests in Miami and Philadelphia- instances with rampant police abuse, violence, and blatant disregard for freedom of expression. It should be of great concern that the Kingdom of Bahrain has brought Timoney and John Yates, former assistant commissioner of Britain's Metropolitan Police, to "reform" Bahrain's security forces.

Since assuming his new position, Timoney has claimed that Bahrain has been reforming it brutal police tactics in response to recommendations issued by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry. He says that there is less tear gas being used and that while tear gas might be "distasteful," it's not really harmful.

I have no idea what country Chief Timoney is talking about, because it's certainly not the Bahrain I saw this past week, a week that marked the one-year anniversary since the February 14, 2011 uprising.

Maureen Dowd: Rick's Religious Fanaticism

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.

That's far too grand. He's more like a small-town mullah.

"Satan has his sights on the United States of America," the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008. "Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition."

When, in heaven's name, did sensuality become a vice? Next he'll be banning Barry White. [..]

He told The Washington Post on Friday that, while he doesn't want to fund contraception through Planned Parenthood, he wouldn't ban it: "The idea that I'm coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a statement about my moral beliefs, but I won't impose them on anyone else in this case."

That doesn't comfort me much. I've spent a career watching candidates deny they would do things that they went on to do as president, and watching presidents let their personal beliefs, desires and insecurities shape policy decisions.

Mullah Rick is casting doubt on issues of women's health and safety that were settled a long time ago. We're supposed to believe that if he got more power he'd drop his crusade?

Ellen Brown: How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street

In an article titled "Still No End to 'Too Big to Fail,'" William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end "too big to fail" but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled "systemically important" that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS).  Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt. [..]

The Houses of Morgan, Goldman and the other Big Five are justifiably worried right now, because an "event of default" declared on European sovereign debt could jeopardize their $32 trillion derivatives scheme.  According to Rudy Avizius in an article on The Market Oracle (UK) on February 15th, that explains what happened at MF Global, and why the 50% Greek bond write-down was not declared an event of default.

If you paid only 50% of your mortgage every month, these same banks would quickly declare you in default.  But the rules are quite different when the banks are the insurers underwriting the deal.

Rachel Signer: Occupying the SEC for a Stronger Volcker Rule

On Monday evening, around one hundred people gathered in Liberty Square in downtown Manhattan, preparing to march to the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission buildings nearby. Protesters carried signs reading, "We don't make demands so this is a suggestion: Enforce the Volcker Rule."

Occupy the SEC, a working group of Occupy Wall Street that includes former financial industry professionals, lawyers and concerned citizens, had been up until 5am the night before, editing and formatting a letter they had prepared as a public comment to the SEC. For months, OSEC met twice weekly to review the 298-page proposed Volcker Rule, conducting a diligent, line-by-line analysis of the document. Proposed as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Volcker Rule essentially aims to ban proprietary trading and ownership of hedge funds by banks. Between now and July, the regulating bodies involved-the SEC, the FDIC, the OCC, the CFTC and the Fed-are required to read public comment letters and issue final details on the Volcker Rule.

When members of OSEC viewed their letter on Monday on the SEC's website, they were elated to see that at 325 pages, it was the longest letter by far. In comparison, the longest letter by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a group that represents the interests of securities groups, banks and asset managers, was 173 pages-although SIFMA submitted five letters in total.

Sarah Stillman: Nancy Grace, Policymaker

When the not-guilty verdict came down in the Casey Anthony trial last summer, TV personality Nancy Grace exploded in a cable news paroxysm for the ages: "Somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight." The polarizing former prosecutor had massively expanded her national following with her nightly crusades against the 25-year-old Anthony, an unemployed single mom charged with killing her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. When, soon thereafter, Grace announced she would be joining the cast of Dancing With the Stars, critics had a field day. But her leap into the world of bedazzled spandex was not half as alarming as a less widely discussed foray, into the arena of panic-driven policymaking. [..]

On its face, the law sounds well-reasoned. Don't all parents have certain de facto obligations vis-à-vis their kids-particularly alerting authorities when young lives may be on the line? Michelle Crowder, the 30-year-old Oklahoma mother who authored the Change.org petition, certainly thinks so. "I just decided to jump on there and do it," she told Grace in an interview tag-lined "Breaking News: Outrage." But others are not convinced. There is a long history of passing tough-on-crime legislation in the wake of a brutal crime and the results have been mixed, at best. Caylee's Law is far from unique in transforming the name of an innocent young female victim into a rallying cry for crime-fighting reforms with dubious results. And Grace is only the latest pundit to spin her entertainment empire into a legislative one.

Tom Friedman of the New York Times is at it again, claiming that what America needs to fix our economic and political mess is a radically centrist third party. Radical in this case means conservative when it comes to belt-tightening. Friedman in Sunday's Times urges a third party "to fill the space between the conservative Santorum (or even Mitt Romney) and the left-of-center Barack Obama."

Friedman has written this column before.

This time, he has a coyly undeclared candidate, David Walker, formerly president of the austerity-mongering Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Walker, who served in a previous life as head of the Government Accountability Office, has been barnstorming around the country, denying that he is running for anything, blaming America's woes on Social Security, Medicare, and Federal deficits. [..]

Austerity, as we see in Europe, is absolutely the wrong economic policy. It feeds on itself, driving the economy deeper into a hole. As GDP sags, wages and tax receipts sag with it, making budget balance a vanishing mirage. The more you cut the deficit, the more the economy falters, and the cycle repeats.

The combination of bad economic advice, a ballot slot bought and paid for by secretive private equity and hedge fund players, and a candidate who became a media figure courtesy of Peter G. Peterson, epitomizes everything messed up about our politics. How fitting that Tom Friedman should be its tribune.

George Monbiot: We Need to Know Who Funds These Thinktank Lobbyists

The battle for democracy is becoming a fight against backroom billionaires seeking to shape politics to suit their own interests

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers. [..]

The leading Republican candidates have all but abandoned the idea of mobilising popular support. Instead they use the huge funds they raise from billionaires to attack the credibility of their opponents through television ads. Yet more money is channelled through 501c4 groups - tax-exempt bodies supposedly promoting social welfare - which (unlike the superPACs) don't have to reveal the identity of their donors. TomDispatch notes that "serving as a secret slush fund for billionaires evidently now qualifies as social welfare." [..]

This is plutocracy, pure and simple. The battle for democracy is now a straight fight against the billionaires and corporations reshaping politics to suit their interests. The first task of all democrats must be to demand that any group, of any complexion, seeking to effect political change should reveal its funders.

John Nichols: David Koch Admits to Helping Walker Big-Time

Billionaire campaign donor David Koch, heir to a fortune and a political legacy created by one of the driving forces behind the John Birch Society, makes no secret of his enthusiasm for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

"What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He's an impressive guy and he's very courageous," Koch explained in a recent conversation reported by the Palm Beach Post. "If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power."

That's no surprise. What is surprising is that Koch now appears to be bragging about how he and his brother Charles are using their vast fortune to fund an independent campaign aimed at "helping" Walker. Even in an era when billionaires such as the Kochs are emerging as key financiers of super PACs and other campaign vehicles, Koch's admission will raise eyebrows - and questions about whether inappropriate coordination by a candidate, his campaign and a supposedly independent group might be the stuff of "scandal."

Eugene Robinson: Rick Santorum could take Republicans down with him

Republicans haven't quite thrown away what they see as a winnable presidential election, at least not yet. But they're trying their best.

In GOP circles, there is more than a whiff of panic in the air. Unemployment is still painfully high, Americans remain dissatisfied with the country's direction, even the most favorable polls show President Obama's approval at barely 50 percent - and yet there is a sense that the Republicans' odds of winning back the White House grow longer day by day. [..]

The issue, for Republicans, is not just that Santorum would lose in November. It's that he could be a drag on House and Senate candidates as well. Imagine, say, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) trying to explain to his constituents why someone who doesn't fully understand women's participation in the workforce should be president.

Listen closely and you can hear the anguished cries: "Mitch! Chris! Jeb! Help!"

Ben Adler: Conservatives' War on Women's Sexuality

If you have been surprised to see an uptight prig such as Rick Santorum leading the Republican primary field in national polls, you shouldn't be. Recent events have demonstrated that conservative positions on social issues are as much about repressing women and reversing the gains of the women's movement as they are about saving the lives of the unborn.

The young people I saw at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington the week before last looked to me exactly like what you would expect from a bunch of college Republicans. They were dorks. They wore suits. Maybe some of the women's suit skirts were short, but I was hardly scandalized.

But we learned last week that much of the conservative movement is still living in a different century-and I don't mean the twentieth-with regard to women's sexuality. Conservative bloggers were horrified that some young women at CPAC were dressed provocatively and engaged in loose sexual behavior with the young men in attendance.

Suddenly, manufacturing is back - at least on the election trail. But don't be fooled. The real issue isn't how to get manufacturing back. It's how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren't at all the same thing.

Republicans have become born-again champions of American manufacturing. This may have something to do with crucial primaries occurring next week in Michigan and the following week in Ohio, both of them former arsenals of American manufacturing. [..]

The fundamental problem isn't the decline of American manufacturing, and reviving manufacturing won't solve it. The problem is the declining power of American workers to share in the gains of the American economy.

George Zornick: Obama's Plan to Save the Military From Cuts-at the Expense of Domestic Programs

As budget wonks comb over President Obama's outline for fiscal year 2013, a startling White House plan has become clear: the administration is seeking to undo some mandatory cuts to the Pentagon at the expense of critical domestic programs. It does so by basically undoing the defense sequester that kicked in as a result of the Congressional supercommittee on debt. This wasn't a featured part of the White House budget rollout, and for good reason-it undercuts the administration's carefully crafted message of benevolent government action and economic fairness.

The process for this shift is complicated, and has been flagged by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Essentially, Obama wants to eliminate individual spending caps for both military and non-military spending, and institute one single discretionary spending cap instead. Here's the basic rundown.

Tom Engelhardt: A Real-Life War Novel With No Plot and No End

If all goes as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A.  Only the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will ever filter back to our world.

After all, American war is heading for the "shadows" in a big way.  As news articles have recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration's global spear will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces.  They are so secretive that they don't like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired's Danger Room blog notes, "not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act."  By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.

Although the special ops crew (66,000 people in all) exist on our tax dollars, we're really not supposed to know anything about what they're doing -- unless, of course, they choose the publicity venue themselves, whether in Pakistan knocking off Osama bin Laden or parachuting onto Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard to promote Act of Valor.  In case you somehow missed the ads, that's the new film about "real terrorist threats based on true stories starring actual Navy SEALs." (No names in the credits please!)

John Atcheson: US Running on Myths, Lies, Deceptions and Distractions

Republican Hypocrisy; Democratic Complicity; The Press's Malfeasance; and Why You Don't Have a Job and if You Do, Why it Doesn't Pay Squat

The United States is headed for a plutocratic dystopia where a few gated communities sit like islands amidst a sea of bitterness, misery, and want.

Why?

Because the country is running on lies, myths, deceptions and distractions. Not surprisingly, they aren't working very well for us.

Let's run through a few of the most destructive lies and myths.

Fourteen months ago, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement members and our allies from National People's Action and the New Bottom Line campaign met with Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller in Des Moines to discuss the national foreclosure investigation that he was leading.

Miller vowed to pursue a fundamental transformation of the mortgage servicing industry. He spoke like a people's champion, like someone who would "knock it out of the ballpark" and bring the banks to justice.

But after he announced the details of his settlement with the banks last week, we felt Miller had struck out. [..]

Bold action in the face of grave injustice is not counterproductive - it is required.

If Obama and Schneiderman take these "people first" actions to deliver justice for millions of homeowners and everyday people, then maybe we'll have something to celebrate.

John Nichols: A Politics That Says: The People Shall Rule

After she organized Eugene McCarthy's 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Lyndon Johnson, around the time she joined Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm in forming the National Women's Political Caucus, Midge Miller got herself elected to the Wisconsin Assembly. [..]

The point of progressive public service, argued Midge Miller, was not to be a cog in the machine run by corporate and political elites. It was to make the machine work for the people.

So when Midge Miller's stepson, Wisconsin Senate minority leader Mark Miller, found himself leading a legislative caucus that was being asked to rubber-stamp Governor Scott Walker's attacks on collective-bargaining rights, civil-service protections and local democracy, he thought of Midge. "She believed that it was the first responsibility of legislators to protect the rights of the people," said Miller. "She would never have been a part of anything that rammed changes like these down the throats of the people."

George Zornick: Obama's Plan to Save the Military From Cuts-at the Expense of Domestic Programs

As budget wonks comb over President Obama's outline for fiscal year 2013, a startling White House plan has become clear: the administration is seeking to undo some mandatory cuts to the Pentagon at the expense of critical domestic programs. It does so by basically undoing the defense sequester that kicked in as a result of the Congressional supercommittee on debt. This wasn't a featured part of the White House budget rollout, and for good reason-it undercuts the administration's carefully crafted message of benevolent government action and economic fairness.

The process for this shift is complicated, and has been flagged by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Essentially, Obama wants to eliminate individual spending caps for both military and non-military spending, and institute one single discretionary spending cap instead. Here's the basic rundown.

Ari Berman: Howard Dean Predicts Obama Re-Election, Democrats Retake House

No incumbent president since FDR has been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 8 percent. Despite that daunting precedent, an increasing number of political analysts and prominent Democratic Party figures are now bullish about President Obama's re-election prospects. "Obama's chances have definitely improved," former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean recently told me. "If Mitt Romney's the Republican nominee, I would say it's a one- or two-point win for Obama."

Dean also likes his party's chances at the Congressional level. "I'm predicting flat-out that if Obama wins, Democrats take back the House," he says. Other analysts have recently raised that possibility, even though GOP domination of the redistricting process gives Republicans a major edge in 2012.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Ann Coulter mocked the Obama administration for requiring health insurance to cover birth control by saying "birth control costs $20 a month; an abortion is $400 or $500 at the most, you don't get insurance for that." First of all, Coulter is wrong, or lying. Perhaps she's never been without insurance herself and she doesn't understand the difference between a co-payment and what something costs without birth control. Twenty dollars per month might be what one pays for the pill with insurance. Without it, you can pay over $100. This is, in other words, precisely what you have insurance for.

Lois Utley: Employees Need Birth Control Coverage Mandate

For the women employed by the former Hackley Hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, last week's news couldn't have been better. President Obama's announcement that Catholic hospitals and educational institutions must provide contraceptive coverage to employees should mean those women will finally be getting back the insurance coverage for birth control they lost in 2007, when their hospital merged with a nearby Catholic hospital. That is, unless the Catholic Bishops and their allies in Congress succeed in unraveling the birth control coverage mandate for the hospital's employees and millions of other American women.

Just as the Bishops had demanded, Obama announced that Catholic hospitals, colleges and social services agencies would not have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Instead, under what Obama characterized as an "accommodation," the hospitals' insurance companies would be required to offer the coverage at no extra charge to employees and their dependents. Insurers are expected to be willing to pay the birth control cost, since they save money by avoiding more costly pregnancy care.

Eugene Robinson: Pay Close Attention to China

China, for better or worse, is a serious country. The United States had better start acting like one.

I got a glimpse of the future Wednesday in the vast ballroom of a Washington hotel where hundreds of august dignitaries-and some journalists as well-gathered at a luncheon in honor of Vice President Xi Jinping, who is widely expected to become China's top leader after a year-long transition.

Xi's status is such that he was introduced by no less than Henry Kissinger, who spoke, not for the first time, of the Nixon-to-China breakthrough four decades ago. It is useful to remember that the country we now think of as a trillion-dollar creditor and the manufacturer of iPads was once a Maoist bastion, hermetically sealed against the capitalist influences of the Western world.

Richard Reeves: Comes the Revolution

LOS ANGELES-Andrew Breitbart, the publisher of Breitbart.com and a couple of other popular websites, set the tone for a program at the University of Southern California last Wednesday by calling George Stephanopoulus of ABC News a little rat with a runny nose.

He continued by equating mainstream newspapers and television news, National Public Radio, Hollywood and American universities with totalitarians around the world, citing Joseph Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, cultural Marxism and storm troopers.

He was joined by Jon Fleischman, founder of FlashReport.org, a popular website out here that aggregates and reports on California politics, government and cultural life. He offered the opinion that "President Obama represents the abyss. He is taking us over the socialist cliff."

Eight youths, tending their flock of sheep in the snowy fields of Afghanistan, were exterminated last week by a NATO airstrike. They were in the Najrab district of Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan. Most were reportedly between the ages of 6 and 14. They had sought shelter near a large boulder, and had built a fire to stay warm. At first, NATO officials claimed they were armed men. The Afghan government condemned the bombing and released photos of some of the victims. By Wednesday, NATO offered, in a press release, "deep regret to the families and loved ones of several Afghan youths who died during an air engagement in Kapisa province Feb. 8." Those eight killed were not that different in age from Lance Cpl. Osbrany Montes De Oca, 20, of North Arlington, N.J. He was killed two days later, Feb. 10, while on duty in Afghanistan's Helmand province. These nine young, wasted lives will be the latest footnote in the longest war in United States history, a war that is being perpetuated, according to one brave, whistle-blowing U.S. Army officer, through a "pattern of overt and substantive deception" by "many of America's most senior military leaders in Afghanistan."

Those are the words written by Lt. Col. Danny Davis in his 84-page report, "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders' Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort." A draft of that report, dated Jan. 27, 2012, was obtained by Rolling Stone magazine. It has not been approved by the U.S. Army Public Affairs office for release, even though Davis writes that its contents are not classified. He has submitted a classified version to members of Congress. Davis, a 17-year Army veteran with four combat tours behind him, spent a year in Afghanistan with the Army's Rapid Equipping Force, traveling more than 9,000 miles to most operational sectors of the U.S. occupation and learning firsthand what the troops said they needed most.

Eugene Robinson: Drumming up a phony war on religion

At ease, Christian soldiers. There is no "war on religion," no assault on the Catholic Church. A faith that has endured for thousands of years will survive even Nicki Minaj.

It never occurred to me to evaluate the Grammy Awards show on theological rectitude, but apparently we're supposed to be outraged at the over-the-top "exorcism" Minaj performed Sunday night. The hip-hop diva, who writhed and cavorted amid a riot of religious iconography, is accused of anti-Catholic bigotry - and seen as an enemy combatant in an escalating "war on religion" being waged by "secular elites," which seems to be used as a synonym for Democrats.

Seriously? Are we really going to pretend that Christianity is somehow under siege? That the Almighty would have been any more offended Sunday than he was, say, in 2006, when Madonna - who could sue Minaj for theft of intellectual property - performed a song during her touring act while being mock-crucified on a mirrored cross? While wearing a crown of thorns? Even at her show in Rome?

The "war on religion" alarmists are just like Minaj and Madonna in one key respect: Lacking a coherent point to make, they go for shock value.

Robert Sheer: Apple's China Comes Home to Haunt Us

Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple's China operation, beginning to fully comprehend.

At the heart of the deal was a rejection of the basic moral claim of both egalitarian socialism and free market capitalism, the rival ideologies of the Cold War, to empower the individual as the center of decision-making. Instead, the fate of the citizen would come to be determined by an alliance between huge multinational corporations and government elites with scant reference to the needs of ordinary working folk.

Joe Conason: Will Catholic Bishops and the Religious Right Save Obama?

What is most striking about the showdown over contraceptive freedom is not the political victory that President Obama earned by standing up for women's reproductive rights, although his Republican adversaries are certainly helping him to make the most of it. Those adversaries don't seem to realize they have fallen into a trap, whether the White House set them up intentionally or not.

While the Catholic bishops and their allies on the religious right insist that this is an argument over the First Amendment, their true, longstanding purpose now stands revealed to the public. They would begin by imposing their dogma on every woman unlucky enough to work for an employer who shares it-an agenda that is deeply unpopular even among the Catholic faithful, let alone the rest of the American electorate. Then they would impose it on everyone, as the theorists of the religious right suggest every time they deny the separation of church and state.

New York Times Editorial: A Rare Deal

There's nothing like a deadline - and the prospect of acute political embarrassment - to concentrate the mind. With Congress about to go on recess, and with Republicans fearing a voter backlash, negotiators on Wednesday were putting the finishing touches on a deal to extend the payroll tax cut and federal jobless benefits through 2012.

The agreement is imperfect but sound. It will help struggling Americans and the struggling economy. It is also a political win for Democrats and President Obama, who had made extending the payroll tax cut and the jobless benefits a centerpiece of his jobs agenda. We hope that it gives them the courage to stick to that agenda if they face another round of Republican obstructionism.

When it comes to natural gas extraction via "fracking," TV journalism has some serious competition: energy industry commercials.

Like ads for political candidates that run concurrently with broadcast news coverage of the presidential race, ads promoting natural gas (and other fossil fuels) have long been running in concert with news segments about the topic, most recently touting the prospect of a "boom" made possible by the controversial extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing of the shale sprawling beneath more than 30 U.S. states.

During the past three years, Extra! found, there has been exponentially more propaganda for the wonders of natural gas on our screens each night than theoretically objective news segments about natural-gas extraction.

Marian Wright Edelman: Still Hungry in America

"There were some times where, you know, we wouldn't have that much food, and I would tell my mom, 'I'm not hungry, don't worry about it,' and I lost a lot of weight. I remember I used to be a size five, and I went from a size five to a size zero," a New York high school senior said in December.

In 1967, as a young civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, I was asked to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty in Washington about how the anti-poverty program in Mississippi was working. The Head Start program was under attack by the powerful Mississippi segregationist delegation because it was operated by church, civil rights, and Black community groups after the state turned it down. After defending the Head Start program, I told the committee I had become increasingly concerned about the growing hunger in the Mississippi Delta. The convergence of efforts to register Black citizens to vote, Black parents' challenges to segregated schools, the development of chemical weed killers and farm mechanization, and recent passage of a minimum wage law covering agriculture workers on large farms had resulted in many Black sharecroppers being pushed off their near feudal plantations which no longer needed their cheap labor. Many displaced sharecroppers were illiterate and had no skills. Free federal food commodities like cheese, powdered milk, flour, and peanut butter were all that stood between them and starvation. I invited the Senators to come to Mississippi and hear directly from local people about the positive impact the anti-poverty program was making. They did.

Kathy Kelly: Cold, Cold Heart

It's Valentine's Day, and opening the little cartoon on the Google page brings up a sentimental animation with Tony Bennett singing "why can't I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart."

Here in Dubai, where I'm awaiting a visa to visit Afghanistan, the weather is already warm and humid. But my bags are packed with sweaters because Kabul is still reeling from the coldest winter on record. Two weeks ago, eight children under age five froze to death there in one of the sprawling refugee camps inhabited by so many who have fled from the battles in other provinces. Since January 15, at least 23 children under 5 have frozen to death in the camps.And just over a week ago, eight young shepherds, all but one under 14 years of age, lit a fire for warmth on the snowy Afghan mountainside in Kapisa Province where they were helping support their families by grazing sheep. French troops saw the fire, and acted on faulty information, and the boys were all killed in two successive NATO airstrikes. The usual denunciations from local authorities, and Western apologies, followed. (Trend News, February 10, 2012).

So I'm thinking about warmth, and who we share it with and who we don't.

Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez: An Unlikely Environmental Evangelist

I was not raised in any religion, nor do I follow any religious practices now.  I don't believe in God as a benevolent white man in the sky, nor do I believe that one needs to sit in a particular building, listening to a particular preacher, to reach out to the divine.

But I have always felt a deep spiritual connection to the natural world.  When I was 8 or 9, I used to go out into the woods and sit alone in my "spot," which was a circle of mossy stones at the top of a big stone ridge, ringed by maples and centered around a grassy glade.  It was a small circle, no bigger than 10 feet in diameter.  I would just sit there and look and listen to the birds in the trees above me, the small insects on patrol in the grass, feeling the wind ruffling against my face and a kind of inner exultation and delight that I can only describe as religious ecstasy.

No one taught me to do this, and it wasn't until much later, reading personal narratives by indigenous elders, that I was able to put this early spiritual connection with nature into a broader polytheistic cultural framework.

I believe that everything in our world is tinged with spiritual significance.  And I believe that human beings, because we are unique among animals in being able to see the effects of our actions on the larger landscape of the planet, and to both predict and alter the future, have a special moral imperative to do what we can to be the responsible stewards of the natural world of which we are a part.

Watching what's happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a waiting life boat.

We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny -- they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others -- the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control.

The obstacles facing the millennial generation didn't just happen. Take an economy skewed to the top, low wages and missing jobs, predatory interest rates on college loans: these are politically engineered consequences of government of, by, and for the one percent. So, too, is our tax code the product of money and politics, influence and favoritism, lobbyists and the laws they draft for rented politicians to enact.

Bernard-Henri Lévy: What Is Really Happening in Athens

he Greek Parlement's vote, during the night of Sunday to Monday, on the austerity plan the European Union demanded as a prerequisite to the release of a new installment of financial assistance was inevitable. Clearly, the alternative to the austerity plan was, in the short term, exclusion from the eurozone, leading to bankruptcy and the consequent plunge into a state of poverty even more unbearable than what the country faces today. And one finally understands that the negligence of successive governments in Athens for the past 30 years -- their demagoguery, their clientelism, their bad faith, and their short-sighted policies -- have forced their partners to raise their voices.

Nonetheless.

In an affair like this one, which is political as much as economic, and where the highly inflammable matter being toyed with is a people, their pride, their memory, their revolt, their survival, one would like to have seen things handled more deftly.

Mark Weisbot: President Obama's Budget is Disappointing

Good but limited measures on tax reform are sacrificed, once again, to Obama's eagerness to compromise on budget cuts

President Obama's proposed budget has a few interesting proposals for reforms over the next decade. Among the best are the proposals to rescind the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes of more than $250,000, and to tax dividends for stockholders among this group as ordinary income. These and a few other proposals would sum up to a small but significant step in the opposite direction to where this country has been going for the past three decades: that is, a vast upward redistribution of income to the rich and the super-rich.

But those concerned with the immediate future are likely to be disappointed. Most Americans have to work for a living, but there are more than 25 million, or 15%, of the labor force, who are either unemployed, have given up looking for work, or are involuntarily working part time. The main reason for that is quite simple: there is not enough demand for goods and services in the economy in order to employ them.

With private demand still weak from the collapse of the housing bubble, and state and local governments still tightening their budgets and laying off workers, this leaves the federal government as the spender of last resort. But President Obama's budget actually reduces spending, adjusted for inflation, for the coming fiscal year (2013). This means that the government will not contribute to resolving the unemployment crisis under this budget.

Ari Berman: Howard Dean Predicts Obama Re-Election, Democrats Retake House

No incumbent president since FDR has been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 8 percent. Despite that daunting precedent, an increasing number of political analysts and prominent Democratic Party figures are now bullish about President Obama's re-election prospects. "Obama's chances have definitely improved," former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean recently told me. "If Mitt Romney's the Republican nominee, I would say it's a one or two point win for Obama."

Dean also likes his party's chances at the Congressional level. "I'm predicting flat out that if Obama wins, Democrats take back the House," he says. Other analysts have recently raised that possibility, even though GOP domination of the redistricting process gives Republicans a major edge in 2012.

Richard Dreyfuss: United States and Al Qaeda on Same Side in Syria

t's worth noting that the United States and Al Qaeda are on the same side in Syria.

That's not to deny that the government of Syria is conducting a brutal, no-holds-barred attack against a nationwide rebellion that is, increasingly, led by armed paramilitary forces and, well, terrorists.

But the Battle of Syria 2012 pits Saudi Arabia, Turkey, a bloc of Sunni Arab states, the Muslim Brotherhood and even Al Qaeda against Syria and the regime of President Bashar Assad, whose quasi-Shiite minority Alawite sect forms the core of his political power and who is backed by Shiite Iran. It's no surprise that the United States, which swallowed Saudi Arabia's ongoing vicious crackdown on the Shiite rebellion in the island Sunni kingdom of Bahrain, is on board with what increasingly looks like a Saudi- and Turkish-backed effort at forcible regime change in Damascus.

It is no coincidence that so many state legislatures have spent the last year taking the same destructive actions: making it harder for minorities and other groups that support Democrats to vote, obstructing health care reform, weakening environmental regulations and breaking the spines of public- and private-sector unions. All of these efforts are being backed - in some cases, orchestrated - by a little-known conservative organization financed by millions of corporate dollars.

The American Legislative Exchange Council was founded in 1973 by the right-wing activist Paul Weyrich; its big funders include Exxon Mobil, the Olin and Scaife families and foundations tied to Koch Industries. Many of the largest corporations are represented on its board.

ALEC has written model legislation on a host of subjects dear to corporate and conservative interests, and supporting lawmakers have introduced these bills in dozens of states. A recent (pdf) study of the group's impact in Virginia showed that more than 50 of its bills were introduced there, many practically word for word.

Alexander Keyssar: The Strange Career Of Voter Suppression

THE 2012 general election campaign is likely to be a fight for every last vote, which means that it will also be a fight over who gets to cast one.

Partisan skirmishing over election procedures has been going on in state legislatures across the country for several years. Republicans have called for cutbacks in early voting, an end to same-day registration, higher hurdles for ex-felons, the presentation of proof-of-citizenship documents and regulations discouraging registration drives. The centerpiece of this effort has been a national campaign to require voters to present particular photo ID documents at the polls. Characterized as innocuous reforms to preserve election integrity, beefed-up ID requirements have passed in more than a dozen states since 2005 and are still being considered in more than 20 others.

Opponents of the laws, mostly Democrats, claim that they are intended to reduce the participation of the young, of the poor and of minorities, who are most likely to lack government-issued IDs - and also most likely to vote Democratic.

Conflict over exercising the right to vote has been a longstanding theme in our history. The overarching trend, which we celebrate, has been greater inclusion: property requirements were dropped; racial barriers were formally eliminated; women were enfranchised.

Katherine Stewart: The New Anti-Science Assault on US Schools

In a disturbing trend, anti-evolution campaigners are combining with climate change deniers to undermine public education

You might have thought it was all over after the 2005 decision by the US district court of Middle Pennsylvania (pdf), which ruled in the case of the Dover Area schools that teaching intelligent design is unconstitutional. You might have guessed that they wouldn't come back after the 1987 US supreme court decision in Edwards v Aguillard, which deemed the teaching of creationism in Louisiana schools unconstitutional. Or maybe you figured that the opponents of evolution had their Waterloo in the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial in Tennessee.

They are back. There are six bills aimed at undermining the teaching of evolution before state legislatures this year: two each in New Hampshire and Missouri, one each in Indiana and Oklahoma. And it's only February.

John Nichols: Backward Walker: Koch Brothers, ALEC, Puppet Governor Renew the Reagan Delusion

In February, 2011, Scott Walker was just another Republican governor. A favorite of Newt Gingrich, billionaire Tea Partisans Charles and David Koch and wealthy advocates for privatization of education, the Wisconsinite had his national fans on the conservative circuit. But he was not a player, and no one (except perhaps Walker) thought he was headed for the national spotlight. Among the Republican governors ushered into power by the Republican wave of 2010, he was ranked with the "assistant Walmart manager" group of drab mandarins, along with Iowa's Terry Branstad, South Dakota's Dennis Daugaard and Oklahoma's Mary Fallin. He didn't have the national stature of Ohio's John Kasich or Kansan Sam Brownback, nor the wild-eyed "say anything" appeal of Arizona's Jan Brewer or Maine's Paul LePage.

Yet, when the nation's most prominent right-wing operatives and reactionary Republicans gathered for the Friday night keynote speech that is always the centerpiece of a Conservative Political Action Conference, it was not a Republican presidential candidates, nor a Congressional leader who was standing at the podium. It was Scott Walker.

The right has picked a fight on this issue because religiosity is a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats in an election year. Despite that, some Democrats and even some liberals have embraced their logic. The thinking inside the Beltway seems to be that religious voters will turn against Democrats unless the White House drops the basic idea that insurance should cover contraception.

Time will tell on the political impact of this fight, but the relevant political context here is more than just a 2012 measure of Catholic bishops' influence on moral issues. It's also this year's mainstream Republican embrace of an antiabortion movement that no longer just marches on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade to criminalize abortion; it now marches on the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, holding signs that say "The Pill Kills."

William Rivers Pitt: When Clint Eastwood Mocks You, You're Officially Screwed

I ain't happy
I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine
In a bag
I'm useless
But not for long
The future
Is coming on...

- Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood"

You know the wheels have come off the GOP wagon when the Republicans feel compelled to accuse Clint Eastwood of being a shill for the president, but that is precisely what has transpired. Eastwood, who is nobody's Democrat by any stretch of the imagination, starred in a stirring Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler about the resurgence of Detroit's auto industry that was, in essence, a gravel-voiced pep talk for all of America. Speaking personally, the commercial made me want to run full-tilt through a stone wall...and then buy a Chrysler, which is quite a confession, as I pride myself on being utterly immune to advertising.

Reaction from the Republican Right was both swift and hilarious. Apparently, and according to the GOP, Dirty Harry is a dirty liberal hippy socialist communist who hates America and is in the pocket of our birthplace-questionable president...but the GOP found itself struggling to be coherent in its critique.

Paul Krugman: The Whole Truth - and Nothing but

The criterion, according to Politifact, seems to be that a fact isn't a fact if it helps a Democratic narrative. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 24, President Obama said: "In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005."

Which is just true. Period. But Politifact initially rated it as only "half true" because he was "essentially taking credit for job growth." He didn't actually take credit - and even if he had, a fact is still a fact.  I do not think that word means what Politifact thinks it means.

Robert Reich: The Sad Spectacle of Obama's Super PAC

It has been said there is no high ground in American politics since any politician who claims it is likely to be gunned down by those firing from the trenches. That's how the Obama team justifies its decision to endorse a super PAC that can raise and spend unlimited sums for his campaign.

Baloney. Good ends don't justify corrupt means.

I understand the White House's concerns. Obama is a proven fundraiser - he cobbled together an unprecedented $745 million for the 2008 election and has already raised $224 million for this one. But his aides figure Romney can raise almost as much, and they fear an additional $500 million or more will be funneled to Romney by a relative handful of rich individuals and corporations through right-wing super PACS like "American Crossroads."

David Graeber: Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges

In response to "The Cancer in Occupy," by Chris Hedges.

I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York.

I am also an anarchist who has participated in many Black Blocs. While I have never personally engaged in acts of property destruction, I have on more than one occasion taken part in Blocs where property damage has occurred. (I have taken part in even more Blocs that did not engage in such tactics. It is a common fallacy that this is what Black Blocs are all about. It isn't.)

I was hardly the only Black Bloc veteran who took part in planning the initial strategy for Occupy Wall Street. In fact, anarchists like myself were the real core of the group that came up with the idea of occupying Zuccotti Park, the "99%" slogan, the General Assembly process, and, in fact, who collectively decided that we would adopt a strategy of Gandhian non-violence and eschew acts of property damage. Many of us had taken part in Black Blocs. We just didn't feel that was an appropriate tactic for the situation we were in.

Three years ago, when President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, he said:

   "It is fitting that with the very first bill I sign...we are upholding one of this nation's first principles: that we are all created equal and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness. If we stay focused, as Lilly did, and keep standing for what's right, as Lilly did, we will close that pay gap and ensure that our daughters have the same rights, the same chances, and the same freedom to pursue their dreams as our sons."

To which there was much rejoicing. Since then, the picture for women regarding work, jobs, chances and dreams has grown bleaker.

Take those January jobs numbers. That official unemployment fell to 8.3 percent from 9.1 percent a year ago was cause for good cheer amongst the instant expert crowd, but the light at the end of the tunnel was harder to make out if you were female, young, old or a person of color.

Peter Van Buren: Silent State: Washington's Campaign Against Whistle-Blowers

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.

Kiriakou's plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don't go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.

Eugene Robinson: Romney's Overriding Ambition

Criticism of Mitt Romney for lacking a coherent message is grossly unfair. He has been forthright, consistent and even eloquent in pressing home his campaign's central theme: Mitt Romney desperately wants to be president.

Everything else seems mushy or negotiable. Romney is passionate about the need, as he sees it, to defeat President Obama-but vague or self-contradictory as to why. The lyrics of "America the Beautiful," which Romney has recited as part of his standard campaign speech, don't solve the mystery; Obama, too, is on record as supporting spacious skies and fruited plains.

Beyond personal ambition, what does Romney stand for? Obviously, judging by Rick Santorum's clean sweep on Tuesday, I'm not the only one asking the question. I suspect an honest answer would be something like "situational competence"-Romney boasts of having rescued the 2002 Olympics, served as the Republican governor of one of the most Democratic states in the nation and made profitable choices about where to invest his money. But with the economy improving and the stock market soaring, Romney's president-as-CEO argument loses whatever relevance it might have had.

David Sirota: Embracing 'Enough'

Of all the no-no's in contemporary America-and there are many-none has proven more taboo than the ancient doctrine of dayenu. Translated from the original Hebrew, the word roughly means "It would have been enough." The principle is that a certain amount of a finite resource should satisfy even the gluttons among us.

I know, I know-to even mention that notion is jarring in a nation whose consumer, epicurean and economic cultures have been respectively defined by the megastore, the Big Mac and the worship of the billionaire. Considering that, it's amazing the word "enough" still exists in the American vernacular at all. But exist it does, and more than that-the term's morality is actually starting to suffuse the highest-profile debates in the public square.

After the financial meltdown, for example, Congress witnessed an unexpectedly spirited fight over enacting pay caps at bailed-out financial institutions. Beneath the overheated rhetoric, the brawl revolved around determining how much is enough to compensate Wall Street's government-subsidized scam artists.

The list of outrages coming out of the House is long, but the way the Republicans are trying to hijack the $260 billion transportation bill defies belief. This bill is so uniquely terrible that it might not command a majority when it comes to a floor vote, possibly next week, despite Speaker John Boehner's imprimatur. But betting on rationality with this crew is always a long shot. [..]

Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, rightly calls this the "worst transportation bill" he has seen in 35 years of public service. Mr. Boehner is even beginning to hear from budget-conscious conservatives who believe that relying on user fees is the most fiscally responsible way to pay for all transportation programs.

Perhaps the House speaker will listen to these warnings and send the bill back to the relevant committees for the wholesale revision it needs. If he does not, and it passes, then the Senate must stop it.

Amy Goodman: America's Pro-Choice Majority Speaks Out

The leadership of the Catholic Church has launched what amounts to a holy war against President Barack Obama. Archbishop Timothy Dolan appealed to church members, "Let your elected leaders know that you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration's contraceptive mandate rescinded," he said. Obama is now under pressure to reverse a health-care regulation that requires Catholic hospitals and universities, like all employers, to provide contraception to insured women covered by their health plans. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League said, "This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets." In the wake of the successful pushback against the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure's decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Obama administration should listen to the majority of Americans: The United States, including Catholics, is strongly pro-choice.

Cora Currier: Meet the Obscure Federal Regulator Who's Not Helping Homeowners

Last week, ProPublica and NPR raised questions about a risky investment strategy at Freddie Mac that would pay off if homeowners stayed trapped in expensive mortgages. It's just the latest example of how government-owned Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have frustrated many by not putting homeowners first.

Fannie and Freddie are required to help homeowners while earning profits so they can pay back the taxpayers who bailed them out. Here is our guide to the little-known federal regulator, Edward DeMarco, ultimately in charge of the two companies. You may have never heard of him, but as The Washington Post put it, he's "the most powerful man in housing policy."

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Clint, Rick and the Limits of Pessimism

What do Rick Santorum and Clint Eastwood have in common?

Sorry Rick, you haven't made it yet as an Eastwood-style make-my-day cultural icon. But in different ways, Santorum and Eastwood have demonstrated the limits of both an entirely negative slant on politics and a pessimistic take on America's future.

Santorum's Tuesday sweep of Republican presidential contests in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado was a sharp rebuke to Mitt Romney, the on-again, off-again "inevitable" GOP nominee who has built his campaign almost entirely on attacks. His primary target has been President Obama, but Romney has also been relentless in his assaults on former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who admittedly gives him a lot of material to work with. [..]

Amy Wilenz: Impunity in Port-au-Prince

IT has been painful to watch as Jean-Claude Duvalier, who inherited the brutal dictatorship that once ruled Haiti, swanks around the hot spots of Port-au-Prince, flanked by the dregs of his regime - including former members of the dreaded secret police, the Tontons Macoute - as if he were just another member of the capital's thoughtless, partying elite.

Since his return in 2011 from a 25-year exile, Mr. Duvalier - Baby Doc - has managed to insert himself into semi-polite society, even finagling a seat near the new president, Michel Martelly, at the memorial ceremony for the victims of the 2010 earthquake. The president has filled many positions in his government with former Duvalier officials and their relatives. In short, he is rehabilitating Mr. Duvalier - and along with him, the extrajudicial code he and his father, François Duvalier, governed by. Last month, Mr. Martelly proposed a blanket pardon of Baby Doc - who has been accused of corruption and human rights abuses - telling The Associated Press, "I do believe that we need that reconciliation in Haiti."

It's been two years since hell paid Haiti a visit, but for countless women, terror still stalks the ruins. The scars of the January 2010 earthquake are etched on their bodies, in an ever-widening pattern of sexual exploitation.

A crisis of gender-based violence and exploitation is festering--and foreign aid efforts are still failing to protect survivor communities from harm, or to make the criminal justice system more accountable.

Ilyse Hugue: The Evil Brilliance of Komen's Karen Handel

This morning, Karen Handel resigned as the vice president of public policy of the Susan G. Komen foundation. Handel had spent the last week at the epicenter of the controversy around Komen's decision to withdraw support for Planned Parenthood and several progressive groups were circulating petitions to call for her dismissal. Handel's very public resignation letter shows a political acumen and sophisticated grasp of cultural narrative that seems to have eluded Komen generally and their CEO, Nancy Brinker, through this entire debacle. [..]

This morning, Karen Handel resigned as the vice president of public policy of the Susan G. Komen foundation. Handel had spent the last week at the epicenter of the controversy around Komen's decision to withdraw support for Planned Parenthood and several progressive groups were circulating petitions to call for her dismissal. Handel's very public resignation letter shows a political acumen and sophisticated grasp of cultural narrative that seems to have eluded Komen generally and their CEO, Nancy Brinker, through this entire debacle.

Vandana Shiva: The Seed Emergency: The Threat to Food and Democracy

Patenting seeds has led to a farming and food crisis - and huge profits for US biotechnology corporations.

New Delhi, India - The seed is the first link in the food chain - and seed sovereignty is the foundation of food sovereignty. If farmers do not have their own seeds or access to open pollinated varieties that they can save, improve and exchange, they have no seed sovereignty - and consequently no food sovereignty.

The deepening agrarian and food crisis has its roots in changes in the seed supply system, and the erosion of seed diversity and seed sovereignty.

Seed sovereignty includes the farmer's rights to save, breed and exchange seeds, to have access to diverse open source seeds which can be saved - and which are not patented, genetically modified, owned or controlled by emerging seed giants. It is based on reclaiming seeds and biodiversity as commons and public good.

Pat Lamarche: Roseanne Barr Joins Other Green Party Candidates

Comedic innovator, proud grandma and self-proclaimed domestic goddess Roseanne Barr has announced her candidacy for President of the United States as well as for Prime Minister of Israel.  Although some have argued that the former is so dictated to by the latter that holding both offices is unnecessarily redundant.

In less than 48 hours since Barr submitted her paperwork to the Green Party, a quick web search has yielded more than seven hundred links featuring news stories or commentary.

Many of the articles - like the one that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor - question Barr's sincerity as she throws her hat into the ring.

And the wild fire of speculation on whether this was just another of Barr's shenanigans or a true bid for the nomination representing the nation's hundreds of thousands of Green Party members isn't unique to the media outlets across the land, but in the discussion topic of rank and file greens as well.

The violence in Syria shows no signs of abating and the country is quickly sliding into civil war. This week, the battles between government troops and the armed opposition reached the suburbs of Damascus. To date, more than 5,000 people have died in Syria, most of them civilians. The observers' mission of the Arab League has failed to stop the violence, and its members are split over what to do next. In the U.N. Security Council, Russia and China have blocked any Western attempts to internationalize the conflict or even to condemn the Syrian leadership for its violence against protesters.

Russia has been a particularly steadfast supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government. Its opposition to stronger actions against the Syrian regime is founded in a fundamental aversion to revolutionary change and strong economic and geopolitical interests in the country.

Dave Zirin: How a Tragic Soccer Riot May Have Revived the Egyptian Revolution

There are no words for the horror that took place in Port Said, Egypt last week. A soccer match became a killing field, with at least seventy-four spectators dead, and as many as 1,000 injured. The visiting Al-Ahly team lost to Al-Masri, and what followed will stain the sport forever. Al-Masri fans rushed the field, attacking the Al-Ahly cheering section after Al-Masri's 3-1 upset victory. People were stabbed and beaten, but the majority of deaths took place because of asphyxiation, as Al-Ahly fans were crushed against locked stadium doors. It was so unspeakably traumatic that beloved Al-Ahly star Mohamed Aboutreika, who famously revealed a "Sympathize with Gaza" shirt during the 2008 Israel bombardment, immediately announced his retirement after the match. A distraught Aboutreika said, "This is not football. This is a war and people are dying in front of us. There is no movement and no security and no ambulances. I call for the league to be canceled. This is a horrible situation, and today can never be forgotten."

This carnage, however, has produced profoundly unexpected results. The shock of Port Said hasn't produced a political coma but instead acted as a defibrillator, bringing a revolutionary impatience back to life. Instead of starting a wave of concern that "lawlessness" was spreading in post-revolutionary Egypt, the anger and sadness seem to be reviving the revolution. The Western media immediately used the shock of the tragedy to call for a crackdown on the hyper-intense fan clubs, the "ultras". As the New York Times wrote, "The deadliest soccer riot anywhere in more than 15 years, it also illuminated the potential for savagery among the organized groups of die-hard fans known here as ultras who have added a volatile element to the street protests since Mr. Mubarak's exit."

John Nichols: The Post Office Is Not Broke

Republican leaders in Congress are talking about dismembering the US Postal Service by cutting the number of delivery days, shuttering processing centers so that it will take longer for letters to arrive, closing thousands of rural and inner-city post offices and taking additional steps that would dramatically downsize one of the few national programs ordained by the original draft of the US Constitution. At the same time, supposedly "centrist" US Senators Tom Carper (D-DE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Scott Brown (R-MA) are trying to build a "bipartisan consensus" for a death by slower cuts.

Their "21st Century Postal Service Act," a supposed compromise now being weighed by the Senate, would still force the postal service to close hundreds of mail processing centers, shut thousands of post offices, cause massive delays in mail delivery and push consumers toward most expensive private-sector services. It is, says National Association of Letter Carriers President Fredric Rolando, "a classic case of 'killing the Post-Office in order to save it.'"

OK, now it's settled, right? I mean, it must be settled by now. Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee. Eat your peas, Republicans, and then fall in line, because Romney's the guy. Right?

Probably.

Even at this point, after Romney trounced Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, there are some fairly compelling reasons for Republicans to pause before bowing to the party establishment's decision that Mitt must be It.  

Charles M. Blow: It's Halftime in America

Was the Super Bowl ad featuring Clint Eastwood, "It's Halftime In America," a Chrysler ad or an Obama re-election ad?

Confusion abounded.

After all, the spot seemed to tout the success of the auto bailouts, which the four remaining Republican presidential candidates were against. Halftime is also an easy metaphor for a president who's nearing the end of one term but seeking a second.

As soon as the ad ran, my Twitter timeline lit up with people who thought it was a re-election ad. To which I tweeted:

That was a joke of course. But the ad was no laughing matter to Karl Rove, the Bush-era Minister of Machiavellianism. On Monday, Rove told Fox News, "I was, frankly, offended by it."

We have seen the world created by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, and it doesn't work. Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn't happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.

Two years ago, Citizens United tore down a century's worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system. It will go down as one of the most naive decisions ever rendered by the court.

The strongest case against judicial activism-against "legislating from the bench," as former President George W. Bush liked to say-is that judges are not accountable for the new systems they put in place, whether by accident or design.

Ellen Brown: Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of "robo-signing" and the attorneys general of the 50 states is pending for Monday, February 6th; but it is still not clear if all the AGs will sign. California was to get over half of the $25 billion in settlement money, and California AG Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle.

That is good. She and the other AGs should not sign until a thorough investigation has been conducted. The evidence to date suggests that "robo-signing" was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008.  It is not just distressed homeowners but the entire economy that has paid the price, resulting in massive unemployment and a shrunken tax base, throwing state and local governments into insolvency and forcing austerity measures and cutbacks in government services across the nation.

The details of the robo-signing scam were spelled out in my last article, here.  The robo-signing fraud and its implications are expanded on below.

Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists-so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property-is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers' movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Richard Reeves: Romney Hasn't Won Yet

Now that Mitt Romney has about wrapped up the Republican nomination for president. ... What? He hasn't? They changed the rules?

The Republican Party, which did indeed change its nomination rules and has had to try to deal with new campaign finance circumstances, is a classic example of being careful what you ask for-or is it unintended consequences? By the old rules, Romney would be a lock. Now, he will still probably win, but the party may be the focus of weeks or months more of the ugliness many of us have enjoyed watching through these past months. [..]

The party decided to do something about it and did. The most important changes were to slow down delegate selection in important states and move the Republican "Super Tuesday" to March. It worked. Romney has dominated, but there are enough contests and candidates to keep it interesting-to say the least.

This week we had a huge political fight about breast cancer. Clearly, we have now hit the point where there's nothing that can't be divided into red-state-blue-state.

Nothing. The other day I saw a blog called "I Dig My Garden" that had a forum on whether Republicans could truly love gardening. And there was a little dust-up in Albany over politicization of a local pet blog, which had featured a discussion on Mitt Romney's driving to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

But breast cancer would seem like the last thing to go. Everybody hates cancer and everybody likes breasts - infants, adults, women, men. Really, it's America's most popular body part.

Russ Baker: Close Reading: The Saudis, a Twitter Investment, and the End of Arab Spring?

Is Twitter (a) a leading vehicle for freedom movements, or (b) primed to control and shut down open discourse throughout the world?

This question emerged recently when we learned that the global messaging service was planning to abide by the rules of each country in terms of content it carries. Here's New York Times:

   This week, in a sort of coming-of-age moment, Twitter announced that upon request, it would block certain messages in countries where they were deemed illegal. The move immediately prompted outcry, argument and even calls for a boycott from some users.

Twitter said it would also "give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world.""

Now, you may be one of those people who very proudly have not incorporated Twitter into your life, but this development is still of enormous relevance to you and your world. Why? Simply because Twitter, with its declared 175 million registered users (many of whom, it must be said, are inactive) has become one of the most powerful forces in communication today, arguably more relevant to more people than even traditional heavyweights like The New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.

Laura Flanders: The Deal That Saved Detroit (and Banned Strikes)

President Obama is, as AP puts it, "wearing his decision to rescue General Motors and Chrysler three years ago as a badge of honor" on his re-election campaign. It saved jobs and working communities, brought the US auto industry back from the brink. In January, US auto sales were up 11 percent over a year ago, and a proud president was cooing to the college students of Ann Arbor, Michigan:

"The American auto industry was on the verge of collapse and some politicians were willing to let it just die. We said no.... We believe in the workers of this state."

You're going to be hearing a lot about the deal that saved Detroit in the next few months, not least because likely opponent Mitt Romney was against it. Then Governor Romney wrote in the fall of 2008 that if the big three auto companies received a bailout, "we can kiss the American auto industry goodbye." Romney bad; Obama good; Big Three back. The Deal with Detroit is gold dust for Democrats. Reality is a bit more complicated.

For one thing, it was Republican President Bush, not the Democrats' Barack Obama, who originally decided not to stand by as the auto makers died. The deal saved an industry-US cars are still being made in the US-but it came at such a high price that in many ways it's a whole new industry. The American auto industry that built middle-class lives as well as cars-that one we kissed good-bye, and it may be a while before we see it back again.

Jeff Biggers: If We Can Stop the Keystone Pipeline, We Can Stop Mountaintop Removal. Right?

One of the most heartening moments of solidarity in the Tar Sands Action movement took place last summer: A contingent of Appalachian coalfield residents, whose homes are literally under siege from daily blasting and stripmining fallout, took their place at a White House sit-in and went to jail in an appeal to President Obama to deny the TransCanada Keystone pipeline permit.

For the Appalachian residents, like many citizens on the dirty energy frontlines, the pipeline decision served as a litmus test for the Obama administration's commitment to dealing with climate change and a clean energy future.

Eastern Kentucky activist Teri Blanton, who lost her brother to a coal mining accident and has witnessed the destruction of her native Harlan County from stripmining over the past decades, invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

President Obama's plan for homeowner relief, announced yesterday, would allow homeowners who are current on their mortgages refinance at today's low rates-even if they're underwater. It could provide thousands of dollars of relief to millions of homeowners, which would also provide a boost to the economy.

However, as I mentioned yesterday, the plan falls short when it comes to principal write-downs by GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The plan provides all kinds of incentives for these principal write-downs to occur, when it's clearly in the authority of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to simply force Fannie and Freddie to write them down immediately.

The FHFA director, Edward DeMarco, has so far refused to do so, and has frequently been a target of some House Democrats for that reason. Yesterday, Representative John Conyers Jr., a powerful voice in the House Democratic caucus, praised Obama's plan but called for immediate action on GSE write-downs

Bill Boyarsky: The Thinking Person's Guide to Campaign 2012

Pity the poor mainstream news media, confronted with many debates, demands for instantaneous coverage, competition for website traffic and the specter of ever-multiplying Super PACs.

All these factors have changed the dynamics of the presidential campaign, putting election coverage beyond the capabilities of the news media, which has been hit hard by heavy newsroom budget cutbacks.

The loss has been severe for the nation, resulting in harried coverage too often divorced from our national struggles, including the effort to recover from the Great Recession.

David Sirota: When It Comes to Education Technology, Trust-but Verify

The release of Apple's computer-based textbooks last month had the usual technology triumphalists buzzing. "Apple and the Coming Education Revolution," blared the headline at Fast Company magazine. "Apple puts iPad at head of the class," screamed MacWorld. And Time magazine declared the announcement the "debut [of] the holy grail of textbooks." It sounds exciting-a rise of the machines that promises educational utopia rather than "Terminator"-style cataclysm.

Or does it?

Though it may be too soon to definitively answer that question, it's not too soon to ask it. Because despite the celebratory hype, there's no guarantee that a hyper-technologized education system is synonymous with genuine progress.

Eugen Robinson: Romney's Indifference to the Poor

I wish Mitt Romney's cavalier dismissal of poverty in America could be chalked up as just another gaffe, but it's much worse than that. The Republican front-runner seems dangerously clueless about the nation he seeks to lead.

When I first heard the now-famous quote-"I'm not concerned about the very poor"-I thought it might be fodder for a snarky column about the wee little Mr. Monopoly who lives inside Romney's head and blurts out things like "Corporations are people, my friend," or "I like being able to fire people." But I realized that being "very poor" is no laughing matter to millions of Americans.

Putting Romney's words in their full context makes them worse. Here is what he said on CNN:

"I'm in this race because I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling."

For my part, I'm concerned about what sounds like shocking ignorance about the extent of poverty in this country and an utter lack of urgency about finding solutions.

Ben Adler: Sheldon Adelson Against Disenfranchisement in Nevada Caucus

Caucuses are offensively anti-democratic affairs. They require participation in a specific time and place, preventing anyone who may be unavailable from exercising their rights as a citizen. (Typically there is no absentee voting in caucuses.) People with disabilities, college students, single parents and people who work unusual shifts are among the most common victims. In Nevada's caucus, we've discovered another: observant Jews. The Nevada caucus is on Saturday.

Nevada's Republican Party, to its credit, has created an absentee voting mechanism in the caucuses for members of the military. As I've previously reported, there is a movement within the Republican Party to encourage or require state parties to allow absentee voting in caucuses for military personnel who are stationed out of state. Iowa chose not to do so, but Nevada did.

This raises the question of why anyone else who cannot be at a caucus site at 9 am on Saturday is not simply allowed to vote absentee the way military service members can. Apparently, Nevada Republicans think democracy is only a necessity for the military. Call it another Republican military exception, like the notion that government-provided health insurance is a moral obligation for veterans and an unpleasant burden for anyone else.

John Nichols: How Scott Walker and ALEC Plotted the Attack on Arizona's Unions

Two days after Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Governor John Kasich's anti-labor agenda by a sixty-one to thirty-nine margin in a statewide referendum, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker jetted to Arizona to launch the next front in the national campaign to attack union rights. [..]

"We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It's why we did what we did in Wisconsin," declared Walker, who at the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute said that compromising with unions was "bogus. [..]

This week, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer-fresh from pointing her finger in the face of President Obama-and her allies in the Republican-controlled state legislature announced that they would try to outdo the anti-labor initiatives of Walker and Wisconsin's Republican legislators.

And they did so in conjunction with the very people Walker has consulted with, spoken to and urged on in November: The Goldwater Institute.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few days ago, said the "critical risks" facing the American economy this year were a worsening of Europe's chronic sovereign debt crisis and a rise in tensions with Iran that could stoke global oil prices.

What about jobs and wages here at home?

As the Commerce Department reported Friday, the U.S. economy grew 2.8 percent between October and December - the fastest pace in 18 months and the first time growth exceeded 2 percent all year. Many bigger American companies have been reporting strong profits in recent months. GE and Lockheed Martin closed the year with record order backlogs.

Yet the percent of working-age Americans in jobs isn't much different than what it was three years ago. Yes, America now produces more than it did when the recession began. But it does so with 6 million fewer workers.

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in a fawning cover story in the current edition of Esquire magazine, as "Someone we can all agree on. ... Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days." In a softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as a job creator without noting the subsequent loss of jobs resulting from the collapse of the housing derivatives bubble that his financial deregulatory policies promoted.

Amy Goodman: Romney's 1 Percent Nation Under God

Although Mitt Romney has yet to win a majority in a Republican primary, he won big in Florida. After he and the pro-Romney super PACs flooded the airwaves with millions of dollars' worth of ads in a state where nearly half the homeowners are underwater, he talked about whom he wants to represent. "We will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor, and there's no question, it's not good being poor," he told CNN's Soledad O'Brien. "You could choose where to focus, you could focus on the rich, that's not my focus. You could focus on the very poor, that's not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans." Of the very rich, Romney assures us, "They're doing just fine." With an estimated personal wealth of $250 million, Romney should know.

Jin Hightower: Newt Gingrich: The Spawn of Citizens United

Wow, January's gone already -- time really flies when you're having Republican presidential primaries! And what better time than Groundhog Day to poke into that warren of feral Republican ideologues and see what the heck is going on.

Already, four of the GOP contenders have had to drop out -- Michele Bachmann because she was just too wacky, Jon Huntsman because he was too sane, Herman Cain because he was too exposed and Rick Perry because he was too dimwitted.

But the greatest surprise is the sudden surge of the Adelson campaign. Little-known until now, Adelson was the big winner in South Carolina, came from nowhere to a second-place finish in the Florida primary, and looks to have the political kick needed to go the distance.

Never heard of Adelson? It consists of the married duo of Sheldon and Miriam, neither of whom are actually on any ballot. Rather, they are running on the Money Ticket.

Joe Conason: What Happened in Florida Won't Stay in Florida

Mitt Romney's convincing victory in the Florida primary erased his earlier defeats and perhaps any serious obstacle to his nomination. The question that still troubles party leaders, however, is the damage he will sustain before returning to Tampa in September for their convention.

Triumph could cost Romney much more than the million dollars or so that bought each point of his 46-32 margin over Newt Gingrich. Already the former speaker has shaped the plutocratic image of Romney now visible in national polls. A furious, wounded Gingrich could go still further-demanding, for instance, that Romney release many more years of tax returns.

But the electorate can also learn much about Romney from Ron Paul, if the Texan ever summons the courage to articulate their profound differences on war, national security and defense spending.

"Nein! Nein! Nein!" roars today's headline on Ta Nea, Greece's largest circulation daily, over a caricature of Angela Merkel controlling a map of Greece with puppet strings. This is not just the usual Greek rage against the EU's austerity measures: Last Friday the Financial Times made public a German proposal to take over Greece's finances so extreme as to look like parody. In order to receive the next tranche of its bailout, the document explains, Greece would have to agree a "transfer of national budgetary sovereignty" to a European commissar, "preferably through constitutional amendment," making an absolute commitment to service its debt before spending public funds on anything else

Merkel has since backed off from the document, but whoever leaked it obviously wasn't aiming at a warm, candle-lit atmostphere between Greece and Germany at the ongoing negotiations for a write-down of Greece's private sector debt, or at today's European summit in Brussels (where there's also a general strike in progress against austerity measures). Once again, the Greek crisis is at the heart of the talks, though it's not on the published agenda. The official business on the table includes the new European fiscal compact, due to be signed in March, which would punish states that exceed fixed deficit and debt levels and has been described by one official as a plan to outlaw Keynesianism; and measures to promote growth and create jobs, especially for the young, who are now being tagged as a "lost generation."

Amanda Marcotte: In Bad Faith: New Study Further Underscores Lack of Truth in Anti-Choice Claims

One of the most frustrating parts of dealing with the modern conservative movement is their incredibly practiced disingenuousness. From a bunch of white people denying racism while pushing racist policies to a bunch of straight people claiming that they want to ban gay marriage not because they hate gays, but because they love "traditional marriage," the constant pose of the modern right winger is one of bad faith.

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the anti-choice movement. Despite arsons, vandalism and occasional assassinations, anti-choice activists demand the right to label their movement "non-violent." And despite the fact that the movement is organized by religious people whose religion teaches that women should be constrained to traditional gender roles and that sex outside of marriage (or for pleasure instead of procreation) is wrong, anti-choicers cry foul if you suggest that their activism against women's liberation or sexual freedom somehow is rooted in opposition to women's liberation or hostility to sex.

Renee Parsons: What Happened to the War Powers Act?

On Sunday night's 60 Minutes program, Scott Pelley opened an interview with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta with the question, "How many countries are we currently engaged in a shooting war?" Surprised by the question, Panetta, who laughed heartily as if Pelley had just told him a really humorous knock-knock joke that tickled his funny bone, responded 'that's a good question. I have to stop and think about that." Panetta proceeded to answer "we're going after al Qaeda wherever they're at.... Clearly, we're confronting al Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa...." In case you're wondering, yes, Panetta confirmed that US troops are in Pakistan.

Pelley's question could not have been more clear just as Panetta's answer was unequivocal. What neither Pelley nor Panetta, who received a law degree from Santa Clara University Law School, mentioned was that for the US to be 'engaged in a shooting war,' not to mention more shooting wars than he could recount, without congressional approval is not only unconstitutional but is a clear violation of the War Powers Act of 1973.

Michelle Chen: Amid 'Turnaround Agenda,' Teachers, Communities Overshadowed by Corporate Reforms

The conversation about school reform in Washington is replete with big ideas--glossy proposals for "accountability," putting the "students first," fixing "broken" schools, all in hopes of making America "competitive" again.

Yet our schools are poorer than ever, and in many communities, the child poverty has deepened while test scores have stagnated. The experts leading the education reform debate have failed to draw a simple equation: a system with adequate resources does better than one without.

The gap in the logic has widened as state governments press school districts to conform to new standards--or else. States are gunning for a competitive grant fund known as "Race to the Top," which the White House dangles as an incentive to restructure school systems. This hyped-up free-market reform rhetoric seeped into President Obama's suggestion to "offer schools a deal" in his State of the Union address.

In his State of the Union Address last week, President Obama announced a renewed commitment to manufacturing in the United States. While the commitment to rebuilding the country's manufacturing base is welcome - manufacturing has historically been a source of good-paying jobs for workers without college degrees - he unfortunately left the most important item on the list off the agenda.

President Obama failed to commit himself to restoring the competitiveness of the dollar as part of his agenda for bringing back manufacturing jobs. The value of the dollar really has to be front and central in any effort to restore US competitiveness since it is by far the most important factor determining the relative cost of US goods compared with goods produced elsewhere.

Gary Younge: US Elections: No Matter Who You Vote For, Money Always Wins

Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions

Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".

Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: The Party People of Wall Street

A week or so ago, we read in The New York Times about what in the Gilded Age of the Roman Empire was known as a bacchanal - a big blowout at which the imperial swells got together and whooped it up. [..]

This year, the butt of many a joke were the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. In one of the sketches, the bond specialist James Lebenthal scolded a demonstrator with a face tattoo, "Go home, wash that off your face and get back to work." And in another, a member -- dressed like a protester - was told, "You're pathetic, you liberal. You need a bath!"

Pretty hilarious stuff. The whole affair's reminiscent of the wingdings the robber barons used to throw during America's own Gilded Age a century and a half ago, when great wealth amassed at the top, far from the squalor and misery of working stiffs. Guests would arrive in the glittering mansions for costume balls that rivaled Versailles, reinforcing the sense of superiority and the virtue of a ruling class that depended on the toil and sweat of working people.

Eugene Robinson: The GOP's Anti-Gingrich Campaign

MIAMI-When the empire strikes back, it hits hard. The Republican establishment is deploying every weapon and every soldier-even Bob Dole-in an increasingly desperate attempt to pulverize the Newt Gingrich rebellion. Eventually, the shock-and-awe campaign may work.

But then what? In the establishment's best-case scenario, the party is left with Mitt Romney, a candidate whose core message, as far as I can tell, seems to be: "Yes, I made a ton of money. You got a problem with that?" really believe in him.

The World Economic Forum opened in Davos amid choruses of central bankers and economists calling for governments to cut spending.

This message of austerity is like the call of the ancient Sirens, whose music lured sailors to shipwreck.

We should take a lesson from Odysseus, who poured wax into the ears of his crew and had himself lashed to the mast of his ship to resist the Siren call.

Austerity supporters are selling the idea that governments, like families, must cut back when income shrinks. But economically, governments are not like families.

Firing teachers, cops and government clerks will, for sure, reduce public spending. But budgets, like the song of the Sirens, are only part of the story. Listen only to the alluring lyrics and, like the many voyagers before Odysseus, we will suffer disastrous consequences - in our case falling incomes and worsening economies.

Danny Schechter: Remember Rousseau: Property Rights and Human Rights Are Still At War

The conflict between property rights and human rights has entered a new chapter. It is a debate that goes back to the challenge by landowners and merchants behind the American Revolution's war on British control over the colonial economy.

Only today, as those speaking in the name of the 99% challenge the super wealthy of the 1% (actually the .001 %) there is a new battleground in what's known as the housing market with as many as 14 million Americans in or facing foreclosure. [..]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau who postulated the "social contract" that gives property rights a moral claim would be turning in his grave if he knew of the many abuses that homeowners in the US face daily.

Chris Hedges: Corporations Have No Use for Borders

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010's G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

L. Alan Sroufe: Ritalin Gone Wrong

Three million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children's functioning.

But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?

In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.

As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.

Bill Boyarsky: Winning Our Future, Gambling With Democracy

With financial and political interests ranging from Las Vegas to Israel to China, Sheldon Adelson, who is bankrolling the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, is a powerful illustration of the dangers of unlimited campaign contributions.

Casino magnate Adelson donated $5 million to the super PAC Winning Our Future, which helped Gingrich defeat Mitt Romney in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Then Adelson's wife, Miriam, gave the pro-Gingrich PAC $5 million more for the Florida primary. These gifts provide sweet revenge for Gingrich, beaten in Iowa and New Hampshire with the help of ad campaigns funded by the pro-Romney super PAC, which is now operating in Florida.

January 18, 2012 could prove to be an incredibly important day, and not just for copyright policy or the Internet. On that day, two critically important things happened: First, with its 6-2 decision in Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court shut the door, finally and firmly, on any opportunity to meaningfully challenge a copyright statute constitutionally. Second, millions from the Internet opened the door, powerfully if briefly, on the powers that dominatepolicymaking in Washington, and effectively stopped Hollywood's latest outrage to address "piracy"-aka, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

The constitutional battle began over a decade ago. Conservatives on the Supreme Court had long rumbled about the need to respect the "original intent" of the "framers" of our Constitution by enforcing the affirmative limits of the Constitution. In 1995, a 5-4 Court decision shocked conventional wisdom by striking a law regulating commerce because, as the Court found, it exceeded those original limits. Three years later, the Court did the same, this time with a law regulating violence against women. The Court seemed eager to read the Constitution the way the framers wrote it, regardless of how the current Congress read it.

Laura Flanders: Not A Peep About President's Praise for War

The grades for the president's State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it's chilling to see just how few hits the president takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.

Speaking of the troops, President Obama began: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations."

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president's comfort with his commander-in-chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news -- of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Accompanying Obama's next phrase, "Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example," no one thus far has played vile viral video. The critics have been kind.

Brian Moench: Physicians in Congress Committing Malpractice on Millions

What would you think if your physician told you, "Keep smoking because quitting would kill tobacco and health care jobs." Or, "Don't take your high blood pressure medicine, you can't afford it." And, "Don't lose weight, no one has proven obesity is bad for you."

That's exactly the quality of medical advice we are getting from the 18 Republican physicians currently serving in Congress. Some of the most well known are the father and son team of Rep. Ron and Sen. Rand Paul and Sen.Tom Coburn. Almost all of these physician/Congressmen have been key soldiers in the Republican war on the EPA; calling it a "job killer," pronouncing relevant health science "unproven," claiming we "can't afford" their regulations.

George Lakey: How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the '1 Percent'

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it's worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They "fired" the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn't find oil, but that didn't stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls "an enviable standard of living."

The deal to block outside ads in the Senate race is admirable, but futile: Citizens United has embedded big bucks in politics

Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren, are attempting some creative political jujitsu to end massive outside spending on advertising in their 2012 US Senate race. I applaud them and you should, too. But, their experiment, however laudable, is unlikely to work. [..]

Unfortunately, the candidates do not control this outside spending. The candidates would like the media to turn down such outside advertising. But the dirty secret every campaign year is that commercial broadcasters love - and, in fact, have come to depend upon - the money thrown at them in election years.

New York Times Editorial: So Who's a Lobbyist?

Under the federal lobbying law, Newt Gingrich can legitimately claim that he is not a lobbyist. That alone demonstrates how much the law needs to be changed. [..]

The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 has three tests: 1) Do you make more than $3,000 over three months from lobbying? 2) Have you had more than one lobbying contact? 3) Have you spent more than 20 percent of your time lobbying for a single client over three months?

Only a person who has met all three tests must register as a lobbyist. So a former lawmaker who has many lobbying contacts and makes $1 million a year lobbying but has no single client who takes up more than 20 percent of his time would not be considered a lobbyist.

Congress has shown little interest in tightening these requirements, in part because lawmakers don't want to close off a lucrative career in lobbying after they leave office. More than 400 former lawmakers have become lobbyists or consultants in the last decade.

George Zornick: Enforce Dodd-Frank: Break Up Bank of America

Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill provides a pretty clear mandate: if the federal government determines that a financial institution poses a "grave" risk to the financial system, the government is entitled to take action to mitigate that risk.

Specifically, if the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System makes that assessment, it can take action with the approval of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is part of the Treasury Department. The potential actions can range from limiting mergers and acquisitions, imposing conditions on how the institution does business or ordering it to liquidate. [..]

To that end, Public Citizen filed a petition (pdf) this week to the Federal Reserve and FSOC to break up Bank of America-a bank that's clearly too big to fail, since it holds assets equal to one-seventh of the United States' gross domestic product. It's got the second-biggest holdings of any US bank and is interconnected with so many other institutions that few people-if any, even inside the bank-truly understand the complexity of those arrangements and dependencies.

Jennifer Abel: The bigger picture of Rand Paul's brush with the TSA

Go Rand Paul, for refusing a patdown! But ordinary Americans will still be daily deprived of their constitutional rights by the TSA

The brouhaha over Senator Rand Paul's refusal to submit to a full-body groping by blue-gloved minions of the Transportation Security Administration shows, again, how the more things change, the more they stay the same. [..]

For all that Rand Paul was right in refusing the TSA patdown, though, his proposed solution is little better than the status quo. Paul supports the creation of a "trusted traveler" program for frequent flyers who would be exempt from TSA procedures. That would surely be an improvement for frequent flyers like Senator Paul, but it still does not address the odious idea that the TSA's routine treatment of passengers is acceptable.

Fourth amendment rights should not be special privileges, doled out only to those the government deems "trustworthy". Or did 9/11 really change all that?

Ari Berman: Mitt's Money Problem

"Romney, sinking in polls, says 'banks aren't bad people.' " That headline from the LA Times encapsulates, in a nutshell, why Mitt Romney is in trouble, both in the Republican primary against Newt Gingrich and in a possible general election campaign against President Obama. [..]

The key problem for Romney is that at a time when Americans are increasingly concerned about income inequality and the political voicelessness of the 99 percent, Romney is an unabashed proponent of Wall Street and the 1 percent. The fact that he paid only 13.9 percent in taxes on $21.6 million in income in 2010, that he had investments in offshore tax havens, that he profited at Bain Capital from bankrupt companies and shuttered steel mills, and that he believes corporations are people all reinforce this central weakness of his candidacy.

In the State of the Union address, President Obama promised a fresh investigation into mortgage abuses that led to the financial meltdown. The goal, he said, is to "hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans." Could this be it, finally? An investigation that results in clarity, big fines and maybe even jail time?

There is good reason to be skeptical. To date, federal civil suits over mortgage wrongdoing have been narrowly focused and, at best, ended with settlements and fines that are a fraction of the profits made during the bubble. There have been no criminal prosecutions against major players. Justice Department officials say that it reflects the difficulty of proving fraud - and not a lack of prosecutorial zeal. That is hard to swallow, given the scale of the crisis and the evidence of wrongdoing from private litigation, academic research and other sources.

Robert Sheer: Obama's Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

I'll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton's faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the "good guys" for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday's State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Joe Conason; Mitch Daniels: Bombast From the Past

Why the Republicans chose Mitch Daniels-the Indiana governor who once thrilled right-wing pundits as a 2012 hopeful-to deliver a rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address is puzzling. His uninspiring remarks surely killed the Daniels fad, revived lately as Republicans fret over the unappetizing choices available in their primaries.

By shining the spotlight on Daniels, the Republicans risked losing much more than a political rescue fantasy. He isn't merely a politician who looks like an accountant; he actually was an accountant-or at least he played one during the Bush years, when he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Listening to him drone on about fiscal rectitude just might have reminded voters of the true source of our national problems.

William Rivers Pitt: Staring at Empty Pages

The Occupy Wall Street movement should spend today doing a nice little victory lap, because it seemed for all the world like its members were ghost-writers on President Obama's State of the Union speechwriting staff. Though he never directly mentioned the movement itself, Mr. Obama spent a great deal of time on Tuesday night underscoring many of Occupy's most central themes: income inequality, tax fairness, and the need to rein in the illegal and immoral behavior of the nation's largest financial institutions.

Talk is cheap, of course; despite all of Mr. Obama's high-flown rhetoric, his administration is reportedly prepared to cut a disgracefully easy deal with the five banks most directly responsible for the financial meltdown, giving his so-pretty words a hollow ring [..]

Dan Kaufman: A Judge in the Dock

IN October 1998, British police officers arrested the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet while he was recuperating from back surgery at a London hospital. They were acting on an international warrant issued by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón seeking General Pinochet's extradition to stand trial in Spain on charges of torture and murder. After a 17-month legal battle, General Pinochet was released on medical grounds, but Judge Garzón's warrant paved the way for stripping the former dictator of immunity and prosecuting him in Chile. [..]

Yet Judge Garzón is now himself under legal attack for confronting Spain's own dark history. He is on trial this week before the Spanish Supreme Court for daring to investigate crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War and the nearly four-decade dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. The case against him is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes.

Newt Gingrich clearly missed the rabid South Carolina crowds at Monday night's debate. NBC asked the Tampa, Fla. audience not to cheer, and mostly they didn't, leaving Gingrich listless without angry mob energy. He didn't bash the media the way he did in last week's Fox and CNN debates, and he tried to act presidential when Mitt Romney jabbed him about his work for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

But he failed. Presidents don't pout. A sulky Gingrich complained the GOP campaign had become "unnecessarily personal and nasty, and that's sad." Gingrich objecting to "personal and nasty" is as believable as Romney pretending he does his own laundry. That's really sad. But Romney had the better night, hitting Gingrich early and often for having to resign the House speakership "in disgrace" due to ethics charges. And when Gingrich tried to claim he left his leadership post voluntarily, Ron Paul double-teamed him with Romney. "He didn't have the votes, that was what the problem was," Gingrich's former House colleague told the crowd.

Dana Goldstein: Scratching the Surface of Obama's Education Rhetoric

In general, I was underwhelmed by the education sections of President Obama's State of the Union address, which were long on platitudes and short on honest talk about the difficulties of implementing school reform.

Most notably, the president made an odd and surprising proposal to make dropping out of high school illegal before the age of 18:

   We also know that when students aren't allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.

Obama has, thankfully, done more than his predecessor to focus attention on underperforming high schools. George W. Bush's signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, put most of its emphasis on fourth and eighth grade test scores in just two subjects, reading and math, while Obama's school turnaround programs include support for so-called "dropout factories," high schools with a graduation rate of less than 60 percent. The administration has focused, however, on fostering management reform in those schools, by turning them over to charter-school chains or replacing their principals and teaching staffs. It seems to me, however-and to many innovative high school educators-that one can't really address the drop-out crisis without making school much more engaging for low-income teenagers, whether or not they show an inclination toward making it to and through a four-year college. This means dealing head-on with curriculum, not just tinkering with how teachers are hired and fired, and by whom.

Valerie Tarico: Righteous Abortion: How Conservative Christianity Promotes What It Claims to Hate

One of the great ironies of American society is that most abortions in the U.S. are caused by conservative Christians. Read the statistics: Forty nine percent of pregnancies in this country are unintended, a rate that has been painfully stable for almost 30 years. Almost half of those pregnancies end in abortion. Or, to turn it around, over 90% of U.S. abortions are the result of accidental pregnancy. U.S. rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion far exceed any other country with similar economic development.  So does our rate of religiosity.  The fact that we are outliers on both is not a coincidence.

Three aspects of conservative Christianity promote abortion:  pro-natalism, an obsession with sexual sin, and an emphasis on righteousness over compassion.

Mary Bottari: Scott Walker's Plutonomy: An Economy for the One Percent

While volunteer after volunteer from each of Wisconsin's 72 counties marched into the state's election board to deposit over one million signatures for the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Walker was no where to be found.

At the hour petitions were being deposited on January 17, Mother Jones revealed that Walker was scheduled to attend a high-dollar fundraiser in the heart of the New York's financial district at 339 Park Avenue -- the towering headquarters for global financial giant CitiGroup. The $5,000 per couple fundraiser was hosted by none other than Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, former CEO of AIG.

Walker's choice to be on Wall Street the day of the recall filing is so astounding, for many it goes far beyond the notion of a tin ear. "Walker could not have sent a clearer signal to Wall Street, that he is on the side of the 1 percent ready to do their bidding and take the heat," said Scot Ross of the Wisconsin group, One Wisconsin Now. Ross points to the data his group compiled to support his claim that Walker is constructing an economy that only the 1 percent could love.

For months, a massive federal settlement with big Wall Street banks over their role in the mortgage crisis has been in the offing. The rumored details have always given progressives heartburn: civil immunity, no investigations, inadequate help for homeowners and a small penalty for the banks. Now, on the eve President Obama's State of the Union address-in which he plans to further advance a populist message against big money and income inequality-the deal may be here, and it's every bit as ugly as progressives feared.[..]

As we noted last week, many progressive groups have begun a massive petition drive to push back against the settlement and demand fair investigations. Moreover, attorneys general in California, New York, Delaware, Nevada and Massachusetts have previously said they won't be a part of any deal that offers civil immunity.

So the deal is far from done-but it's certainly moving towards an undesirable conclusion. We'll have plenty more in this space all week.

John Nichols: GOP Slates Antilabor Zealot Daniels for SOTU Response

The Republican Party is so determined to advance the extreme antilabor agenda of its Wall Street funders and front groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council that it shoved aside John Boehner (might have teared up), Paul Ryan (last year's man) and vaguely interesting governors such as New Jersey's Chris Christie and South Carolina's Nikki Haley (both backing a loser for president) in order to make way for Indiana Governor Daniels to deliver the response to Tuesday's State of the Union address by President Obama.

The choice of Daniels, who is currently leading the fight to enact an antilabor "Right-to-Work (For Less)" law in Indiana,  sends a powerful signal at a time when the Republicans who would be president are stumbling over one another to proclaim their enthusiasm for "Right-to-Work" legislation, their disdain for public employees and their unions, and (in Newt Gingrich's case) their determination to turn the clock back a century in order to eliminate child labor laws. Only Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich are more closely linked in the public's mind with the union-bashing frenzy that has so energized Republican governors and legislators. And Daniels is, arguably, the most aggressive union basher of all. Having already stripped Indiana public employees of collective bargaining rights, he is now aiding and abetting the efforts of Indiana Republican legislators to undermine the rights of private sector workers.

Roger Cohen: The Sarkozy Effect

LONDON - In the other election of 2012, the one more imminent, there are only two words worth remembering. The first is leadership. The second is change. The rest, as the French say, is du blah-blah.

If the French decide leadership is more important in a time of crisis they will grit their teeth and re-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. If they want change from a president never close to their hearts, they will - as Samuel Johnson said of second marriages - embrace hope over experience and elect the Socialist candidate, François Hollande.

Rumor has it that on Monday, after months of negotiation with big banks, the White House may announce a settlement that would let the banks off the hook for their role in the foreclosure crisis-paying a tiny fraction of what's needed in exchange for blanket immunity from future lawsuits.

We hope these rumors are untrue.

President Obama has the ability to stop and change the direction of this sweetheart deal. He should reject any deal that benefits the one percent and lets the big banks get away with their crimes. Instead, the president should stand with the 99 percent and push for real accountability and a solution that will help millions of people in this country.

Here are the hard facts about the housing crisis we face:

    3.5 million Americans are homeless.
    18.5 million homes sit vacant.
    Since 2007, more than 7.5 million homes have been foreclosed.

Default and foreclosure rates are now several times higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

Dean Baker: The Surefire Way to End Online Piracy: End Copyright

The popular rebellion against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was an impressive display of democracy in action. The opponents of the bill were able to use the web and various social media venues to educate the public about the specifics of the bill. The resulting flood of emails, phone calls and letters caused the bill's Congressional sponsors to cut and run.

While this revolt against the entertainment industry's effort to rein in the web was inspiring, there is a real issue at stake. It is getting ever harder for creative workers to get paid for their work.

This is seen most clearly in the music industry. Sales of recorded music in the United States dropped from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $7.7 billion last year. If sales had kept pace with inflation and the growth of the economy they would be over $23 billion today.

Ellen Cantarow: Shale-Shocked: Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement

This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a "water state." Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen's lore.

Far below this rippling wealth there's a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it's been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing -- "fracking" for short.

Jim Hightower: America's Class Divide

What planet does presidential wannabe Rick Santorum live on? When it comes to grasping the situation of America's hard-hit workaday majority, this sweater-vested ultra-right-winger is further out than Pluto.

In a recent debate, Santorum assailed a tax plan proposed by front-runner Mitt Romney. It wasn't the plan's details that caused Rick to stamp his tiny feet, but Romney's expressed intent to help the "middle class."

Tut-tut, chided the ideologically-pure Santorum, Republicans mustn't use such language, for it creates an impression of class warfare. After all, he lectured: "There are no classes in America. We don't put people in classes."

Sure, Rick -- today's jobless economy, a national epidemic of union busting and wage knockdowns, absurd tax giveaways to the super-rich, the ongoing Wall Street bailout, inexcusable corporate subsides, rising poverty, the slashing of anti-poverty programs and a decade of falling incomes for the vast majority, while the elite 1 percent makes off with triple-digit increases in its wealth -- there's no class war happening. Just close your eyes, hum a happy tune ... and live on Pluto.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: What Newt Learned From Nixon

Conservatives may denounce class warfare, yet by shrewdly combining the politics of class with the politics of culture, Newt Gingrich won his first election in 14 years, humbled Mitt Romney and upended the Republican Party.

He also exposed profound frailties in Romney as a candidate, throwing him badly off-balance on questions related to his personal wealth, business career and income taxes. Unless Romney finds a comfortable and genuine way of talking about his money, he will present President Obama's team a weakness that they'll exploit mercilessly. The country is thinking more skeptically about wealth and privilege in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Romney has not adjusted.

Gingrich skillfully set up his opponent to step on the landmine of class by transforming Romney from his self-cast role as a successful businessman into a heartless financier more interested in profits than in job creation.

After a long, dark period of stagnant progressive momentum and pay-to-play politics, this week saw a flurry of progressive victories that could upset the conventional wisdom about a post-Citizens United world.

This morning's announcement by Harry Reid that the Senate is postponing the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) vote would have been almost unimaginable as recently as a week ago, when PIPA and its House counterpart, SOPA (the Stop On-line Piracy Act), were considered done deals. Only a handful of disgruntled geeks stood in the way of an industry power grab that would have blessed online censorship and stifled innovation. But the bills' promoters failed to anticipate the power of "Blackout Wednesday" to popularize the outrage. Suddenly, it wasn't just geeks. Congress started fielding calls from people unable to sell couches on Craigslist and harried parents of students desperate to consult Wikipedia for school papers. Thus sounded the death knell for the bills.

While the tactical decision to pull down popular sites in protest of these bills were tailored to the Internet blackout bills, the other two major victories this week-the rejection of the massive Keystone oil pipeline and the submission of 1.9 million signatures to recall union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker-were also made possible by fusing old-school community organizing with innovative netroots strategies.

New York Time Editorial: Egypt's Economic Crisis

In the year since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted, Egypt has faced many challenges: the military-led government's brutality against protesters and pro-democracy groups, its resistance to handing power to civilian leaders and the rise of Islamists in the country's first free elections. Now worsening economic conditions are further sabotaging hopes for a democratic future.

The country's foreign currency reserves have fallen from a peak of $36 billion to about $10 billion and could run out entirely by March. The currency is under severe pressure, and a steep drop in the exchange rate could bring painful inflation and more social unrest. Youth unemployment is about 25 percent, a dangerous situation where 60 percent of the citizens are 30 and under.

Egyptians want jobs, education and a say in governance. Many are justifiably angry about the military's autocratic control - and will be angrier still if economic conditions deteriorate further. They aren't the only ones with a stake in the outcome. Egypt is the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East. Its success, or failure, will have a huge impact on the region and beyond.

John Nichols Forget Romney, Gingrich Is Running Against 'Liberal Media'-and It Might Work

Fifteen years ago, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich was arguing that President Clinton's personal foibles were fair game for political debate, and ultimately justification for impeachment.

Now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination as a "moral values" candidate, Gingrich is suddenly facing charges, raised by an ex-wife, about his own personal foibles. Those questions arose on the eve of the final debate before the critical South Carolina primary, in which Gingrich has surged to a top-tier position. The former Speaker needed one more opportunity to distinguish himself as the meanest dog in the GOP junkyard-a socialist-ripping pit bull as compared with the French poodle that is Mitt Romney.

And he got it in Thursday night's last pre-primary debate. [..]

The man who raised tough questions about Bill Clinton's shaky claim to moral authority blamed a media personality for asking tough questions about his shaky claim to moral authority. Then Gingrich announced that he was "tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans."

Reasonable people can debate whether Obama has been "protected" by the media.

On Thursday night, however, that wasnt what Newt Gingrich was really complaining about.

What he was really complaining about was John King's refusal to protect Newt Gingrich.

Maureen Dowd: Opening Newt's Marriage

Right now, you are probably asking yourself whether two divorces, a history of adultery and an ex-wife who says you asked for an open marriage would be enough to disqualify a person from becoming president of the United States.

O.K., pretend that was what you were asking yourself.

Sex was one of the topics very much on the minds of voters as South Carolina prepared to go to the polls on Saturday. Also, there was the big debate, in which Newt Gingrich said that asking about the open marriage thing was "despicable." That was also when Mitt Romney slipped and referred to health reform in Massachusetts as "Romneycare," which I enjoyed very much.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the campaign, Herman Cain announced that he was endorsing "the people" for president. On behalf of the people, I would like to say that, if elected, we promise to balance the budget, release Mitt Romney's tax returns and pass a law against driving to Canada with an Irish setter tied to the roof of the car.

Multiple marriages and even adultery are not automatic disqualifications for the presidency. If they were, the country would have a very different roster of former presidents and candidates. But when a political party decides that moralizing about personal conduct is as important as public policy, it inevitably makes some of its leaders vulnerable to the worst charges of hypocrisy.[..]

For too many Republicans, it's not enough that Americans are free to pray in the house of worship of their choice; they want all children to be required to pray in school. They want to impose their own ideas about sexuality and abortion on everyone. And they love to accuse Democrats of being insufficiently pious. (Rick Perry's exit from the race on Thursday may mean no more ads accusing President Obama of a "war on religion" and liberals of believing faith is a sign of weakness. Or, it may not, depending on how desperate the other candidates get.)

When Republican officials then get caught violating one of the Ten Commandments, they make an enormous show of contrition and repentance and ask for the public's forgiveness. But as the hypocrisy level continues to rise, that forgiveness may become much harder to provide.

Eugene Robinson: Change They Don't Believe In

You know-it-alls who think unemployment is the most urgent crisis facing the nation are wrong, I've learned from watching a zillion Republican campaign ads on television this week. All you deficit hawks, rise-of-China worrywarts and alarmed observers of the Iranian nuclear program are wrong, too, and should stop bothering yourselves with trifles.

One of Mitt Romney's spots ends by laying out the nation's top priority in no uncertain terms. Voters should support Romney, the narrator says, because "beating Obama is the most important issue."

Am I the only one to find that weird? I understand why trying to engineer President Obama's defeat would be an urgent priority for Romney, who wants to move his family into the White House, but why should it be more important to voters than, say, boosting the economy or reducing the debt? Why shouldn't the focus be on policies and results?

David Sirota: Ron Paul and Our Selective Definition of Bigotry

If they have any value at all anymore, presidential election campaigns at least remain larger-than-life mirrors reflecting back painful truths about our society. As evidence, ponder the two-sided debate over Republican candidate Ron Paul and bigotry.

One camp cites Paul's hate-filled newsletters and his libertarian opposition to civil rights regulations as evidence that he aligns with racists. As the esteemed scholar Tim Wise puts it, this part of Paul's record proves that he represents "the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe ... the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man's property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings."

The other camp tends to acknowledge those ugly truths about Paul but then points out that the Texas congressman has been one of the only politicians 1) fighting surveillance, indefinite detention and due-process-free assassination policies almost exclusively aimed at minorities; 2) opposing wars that often seem motivated by rank Islamophobia; and 3) railing against the bigotry of a drug war that disproportionately targets people of color.

Joe Conanson: Tax Day: Will Romney Make April Fools of Republicans

Mitt Romney's latest flip-flop is almost complete. Having vowed a month ago not to release his federal income tax returns, the Republican presidential front-runner conceded during Saturday night's debate that he would "probably" release his returns, and then on Tuesday afternoon finally said he will do so-in April, long after he is likely to have secured his party's nomination. With characteristic arrogance, he excused the delay by suggesting that April 15 is the traditional date when public officials supply this information, which is certainly true if you're already president.

Even more galling was Romney's suggestion that he will reveal only his 2011 return, which would allow him to control the narrative, of course, by paying a higher rate this year than in years past. Having admitted that he pays as little as 15 percent-or around the same effective rate as a family earning $60,000 a year.

On December 30, the Montana Supreme Court delivered a New Year's gift to the nation, upholding a century-old ban on corporate political expenditures in state elections. The decision has gone underreported amidst the hoopla of the Republican primaries-even as super PAC spending skyrockets and there is an emerging understanding of its corrosive impact-but the Montana case sets up the first direct challenge to the disastrous Citizens United decision as we approach its second anniversary.

Free Speech For People - a national non-partisan campaign challenging the fabrication of corporate rights under the US Constitution-filed a friend- of-the-court brief in the Montana case. It led a coalition that included the American Sustainable Business Council, a network of more than 70,000 businesses across the country; the American Independent Business Alliance; and a local supermarket business and non-profit corporation.

George Zornich: Keystone XL Is Dead-Again

For the second time in as many months, the Obama administration has rejected the Keystone XL pipeline - a hugely controversial project that would traverse the length of the country from Nebraska to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying heavy and dirty tar sands oil from deep in Canada. [..]

But Republicans successfully revived the project during the end-of-year negotiations on the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance. Democrats desperately wanted these measures, and the final bill included a provision that would force the State Department to issue a decision on Keystone within two months.

Today - less than even one month since the payroll tax cut bill was passed - the State Department announced they were denying the permit. In a statement, President Obama endorsed that decision: "As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline's impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment."

Leslie Savan: Colbert Raises Cain

Stephen Colbert, the all-but-declared candidate for the president of the United States of South Carolina, and Jon Stewart, the man in charge of the Colbert Super PAC, are not technically, legally, or otherwise coordinating campaign plans-as they stated at one point in perfect unison last night. But in a frenzy of non-coordinatism, these two citizens united to get Stephen on the SC ballot, even though the ballots have already been printed and write-ins aren't permitted. How? By running an ad equating a vote for Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race in last month but is still on the ballot, as a vote for Stephen Colbert. [..]

It's only fitting that Cain, whom Rachael Maddow earlier revealed as not a candidate but a brilliant performance artist, play host to performance artist Colbert's frankly parasitic campaign. After all, the comedic Republican primary, with its clown car full of jokesters (from Romney saying that the $374,000 he made in speakers fees last year is "not very much" to Gingrich's blowing audible racist dog whistles during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day debate) is as funny as anything out of Comedy Central.

John Nichols: Scott Walker Admits His Defeat Would Stall the GOP's Antilabor Push

Even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was acknowledging Tuesday that the one million signatures that had been gathered on petitions seeking his recall and removal from office were all but certain to force him to face a new election.

Walker still thinks he will win that election.

But if he loses, and polling suggests that is a very real prospect, Walker has admitted that the anti-GOP agenda of Republican governors and presidential candidates will be dealt a blow.

Indeed, Walker suggests, Republican governors will be less inclined to attack public-sector unions. And he suggests that Democratic governors will also recognize that assaults on the rights, the benefits and the pensions of state, county and municipal employees and teachers are politically unwise.

E. J. Dionne, JR.: So Much for a Populist GOP

Members of the tea party insisted they were turning the GOP into a populist, anti-establishment bastion. Social conservatives have long argued that values and morals matter more than money. Yet in the end, the corporate and economically conservative wing of the Republican Party always seems to win.

Thus was Mitt Romney so confident of victory in Saturday's South Carolina primary that he left the state briefly on Tuesday for a fundraiser in New York City. And why not? The power of big money has been amplified in this campaign by the super PACs let loose by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and lax regulation.

You cannot watch the morning news shows in this state without confronting an intricately confusing blitz of ads, some paid for by candidates, others by the supposedly independent PACs. One kind is indistinguishable from the other.

From all evidence, the issue of economic justice isn't going away. Break the news gently to Mitt Romney, who seems apoplectic that the whole "rich get richer, poor get poorer" thing is being discussed out loud. In front of the children, for goodness' sake.

"You know I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms," he told the "Today" show's Matt Lauer last week. "But the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It's a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach."

Actually, those blasts weren't comimg from President Obama. That was Romney's competition for the Republican nomination, sounding like a speakers' lineup at an Occupy Wall Street rally.

Charles M. Blow: Newt Gingrich and the Art of Racial Politics

I'll spare you the video. TMC

That's the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him if his condescending remarks about the work ethic of poor black people are indeed condescending:

   Juan Williams:  Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also say poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can't you see that this is viewed as at a minimum as insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?

   Newt Gingrich: No, I don't see that (applause).

Gingrich went on to say that the children would be "getting money, which is a good thing if you're poor. Only the elites despise earning money."

The first implication here is that elites are liberals, not men like Gingrich - whose net worth The Los Angeles Times has estimated to be $6.7 million, who was a history professor, who was paid $1.6 million dollars by Freddie Mac for "advice," and who had a half million dollar line of credit at Tiffany's.

If Gingrich isn't among America's elite, the word no longer has meaning.

New York Times Editorial: Taxes and Transparency

Barack Obama released his tax records when he ran for president in 2008. So did Richard Nixon in 1968. In fact, so did George Romney in that same campaign.

But, in 2012, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and onetime chief executive of a private equity firm, is still hedging about whether he will do so.

Candidates for the presidency are not legally required to release their tax records, but they generally have for many years now - because American voters have a right to know how the men and women who want to be president make their money.

Barry Lando: Iran, the U.S. and Israel: Blind Man's Bluff

In a perilous spiral of assassinations, threats and counterthreats, leaders in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran keep ratcheting up the tension. What is most alarming about the situation is that the principal players and their advisers are engaged in an incredibly dangerous three-way game of blind man's bluff.

None of them expresses a real understanding of the others-their motives, their concerns or their likely reactions. That's true even for Israel and the United States: Though the U.S. risks being sucked into any conflict between Israel and Iran, the Obama administration is currently forced to guess what its supposed allies in Israel are planning.

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F. Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake.

In that brief moment when the rising tide was indeed rising, millions of people believed that they might have a fair chance of realizing the "American Dream." Now those dreams, too, are receding. By 2011, the savings of those who had lost their jobs in 2008 or 2009 had been spent. Unemployment checks had run out. Headlines announcing new hiring - still not enough to keep pace with the number of those who would normally have entered the labor force - meant little to the 50 year olds with little hope of ever holding a job again.

New York Times Editorial: On the Trail of Mortgage Fraud

President Obama should form a task force to investigate and pursue potential civil and criminal wrongdoing by institutions and people whose conduct had the greatest economic impact.

Queens has been harder hit by foreclosures than any other New York borough, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation believes it has found a culprit. Last July, the F.B.I. accused Edul Ahmad, a local broker, of a $50 million mortgage fraud, saying he lured fellow immigrants into subprime mortgages, inflated the values of their properties and concealed his involvement in deals that were ruinous for scores, if not hundreds, of borrowers. Mr. Ahmad pleaded not guilty, and posted $2.5 million bail. Now, according to court papers, as reported in The Times, he is plea-bargaining with federal prosecutors.

Whatever Mr. Ahmad did or did not do, one thing is sure: he did not act alone. The attention Mr. Ahmad has drawn highlights the relative lack of scrutiny of the big banks and their senior executives. Big banks created demand and provided credit for dubious mortgage loans, which they bundled into securities and sold to investors. If not for reckless lending and heedless securitizing, there would have been no mortgage bubble and no mortgage bust - and, in all probability, no Edul Ahmad.

Eugene Robinson: The Dream That Came True

He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he'd likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, and to pray-and to dream.

For the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming was not optional. It was a requirement of citizenship to envision a fairer, more prosperous nation no longer shackled by racism and poverty. It was a duty to imagine a world no longer ravaged by senseless wars. His most famous speech was less an invitation to share his epic dream than a commandment.

In these sour, pessimistic times, it is important to remember the great lesson of King's remarkable life: Impossible dreams can come true.

John Nichols: 'Right-to-Work' and the Jim Crow Legacy That Affronts King's Memory

When the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched "Operation Dixie" in the aftermath of World War II, with the goal not just of organizing unions in the states of the old Confederacy but of ending Jim Crow discrimination, Southern segregationists moved immediately to establish deceptively named "right-to-work" laws.

These measures were designed to make it dramatically harder for workers to organize unions and for labor organizations to advocate for workers on the job site or for social change in their communities and states.

In short order, all the states that had seceded from the Union in order to maintain slavery had laws designed to prevent unions from fighting against segregation. The strategy worked. Southern states have far weaker unions than Northern states, and labor struggles have been far more bitter and violent in the South than in other parts of the country. It was in a right-to-work state, Tennessee, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting the struggle of African-American sanitation workers to organize a union and have it recognized by the city of Memphis.

Christopher Brauchli: The Senate's Holiday

Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
- Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

The Republicans' newest way of countering criticism that Congress spends more time on recess than it does working occurred when it went home for the Christmas holidays. The criticism occurs because in 2011 Senate and House Members were in session for 112 days, according to the Library of Congress, leaving them 253 days of free time. (These numbers are imprecise. They may have inadvertently worked a few more days than shown.) To counter the impression that they do not work very hard the Republican Senators agreed to pretend they were working when most of them were spending the holidays away from Washington. They agreed that when they were gone they would not be gone.

Last evening, Tavis Smiley hosted a program that was broadcast live on C-SPAN live and that focused for two-and-a-half hours on the issue of poverty in America.  It was terrific.  The energy and commitment of the experts assembled to investigate and help alleviate poverty made the conversation rich beyond anything I've seen in ages.  Each panelist came at the topic from a different perspective.  That added to the richness of the discussion about being poor in America. [..]

Even though I've been through the slide from middle-income to poor and now am fighting the unwinnable fight to climb back out, I still need the affirmation these sorts of discussions can give to remember that it still isn't my fault.  The system crushed me, and the system will crush me again unless I stay intensely vigilant -- and maybe it will crush me again even if I do.  But I do not want to stay vigilant about the wrong things.

John Nichols: Mitt Romney Abandons His Father's Civil Rights Legacy

The Republican Party, founded by militant abolitionists and once the political home of civil rights champions such as George Romney, has since the late 1960s been degenerating toward the crude politics of "Southern strategies" and what former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater referred to as the "coded" language of complaints about "forced busing," legal-services programs, welfare and food stamps. But the 2012 campaign has seen this degeneration accelerate, as the candidates have repeatedly played on stereotypes about race, class and "entitlements." [..]

If ever there was a time when the man who is likely to be party's 2012 presidential nominee should be joining the NAACP in objecting to the racialized language being heard on this year's GOP campaign trail, it is now.

But that's not happening.

Instead of objecting to the excesses of the other contenders, the "adult" in the race, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, picked up on the themes developed by Santorum and Gingrich to gripe about "the ever-expanding payments of an entitlement society" as "a fundamental corruption of the American spirit."

Romney is arguably the most disappointing of the current candidates, as he surely knows better.

Charles M Blow: Bitter Politics of Envy?

You're just jealous. At least that's how Mitt Romney sees it. The millionaire who posed for a picture with the boys at Bain Capital with the long green clinched between their teeth and poking out of their collars and jackets now says that people who question what he did there, and what rich people do now, are just green with envy.

In his New Hampshire victory speech on Tuesday, Romney lambasted his Republican opponents (who have raised real issues about his role at the private equity firm Bain Capital) for following the lead of President Obama, whom he described as a leader who divides us "with the bitter politics of envy."

Gail Collins: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Back in the late-1950s there was a TV show called "The Millionaire" about a mysterious rich man, named John Beresford Tipton, who would anonymously give checks for $1 million to total strangers.

Usually, the recipient was a poor schlub who was over the top with joy until it turned out that the money didn't buy happiness. Clearly, we were all better off in our humble homes, clustered around our 14-inch TVs.

I am bringing this up because the current presidential race has demonstrated that a million dollars is nothing - nothing - these days. Nothing! A million dollars is what they give you for designing the best pantsuit on a reality TV show.

For Mitt Romney, Tuesday night's triumph in the New Hampshire primary offered a tempting opportunity to gloat. Such unattractive conduct is no longer surprising from the Republican front-runner, who is enduring the gradual disclosure of his personality.

The hot Romney video of the moment displays him telling the Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me," and went viral not because of its specific context, which wasn't particularly damning, but because the public perceives the remark as a distillation of elite heartlessness. Every decent person who has had to fire someone knows that doing so-under almost any circumstances-is unpleasant, difficult and frequently wrenching. To boast that you "like to fire people" after observing years of economic pain among the jobless suggests a deep defect that, to most Americans, may disqualify Romney from the presidency.

Of course, that quote could have been a peculiar gaffe or a meaningless slip, but it wasn't. There is no shortage of evidence, emanating mostly from his own mouth, that privilege, arrogance and entitlement are major features of Romney's character.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Is This Land Made for You and Me - or for the Super-Rich?

The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina.  Well, not exactly all.  At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year.

Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times.  And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep.  He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich.  What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. "So long, it's been good to know you," he sang, and off he would go.

John Nichols: Walker, Texas (Money) Ranger: Can Lone-Star Cash Save Anti-Labor Governor?

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is scared, so scared that he is calling in a posse of Texas billionaires to try and save his political skin.

Facing the threat of a recall election, Walker poured money into a television advertising campaign to convince Wisconsinites that his attacks on collective bargaining rights, his budget cuts for education and local services, and his pay-to-play approach to politics are good things.

Wisconsinites weren't buying what Walker was selling. On Tuesday, the recall campaign mounted by United Wisconsin will submit not just the 540,000 signatures needed to recall Governor Walker but hundreds of thousands more.

This fight is going to happen. Walker knows he faces an accountability moment that threatens to end his long political career.

But he is not giving up easily. The governor is arming himself with all the money he can get his hands on. Big money. Texas money.

Mark Weisbrot: The Economic Idiocy of Economists

The American Economic Association's Annual Meeting is Red-letter Day for 'the Dismal Science'. And Dismal it Proved

The American Economic Association's annual meetings are a scary sight, with thousands of economists all gathered in the same place - a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Chicago was the lucky city for 2012 this past weekend, and I had just finished participating in an interesting panel on "the economics of regime change", when I stumbled over to see what the big budget experts had to say about "the political economy of the US debt and deficits".

The session was introduced by UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach, who put up a graph of the United States' rising debt-to-GDP ratio, and warned of dire consequences if Congress didn't do something about it. Yawn.

But the panelists got off to a good start, with Alan Blinder of Princeton, former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, describing the public discussion of the US national debt as generally ranging from "ludicrous to horrific". True, that. He asked and answered four questions.

Isabeau Doucet: Haiti's Hard Road to Recovery

Two years after the earthquake life is improving, but the nation still faces a cholera epidemic and a huge rebuilding challenge

In Haiti, you'll see a young man sitting on a crumbled wall blasting a song out of a bashed-up radio and singing along - apparently without irony - lyrics that just repeat "I love my life". You'll see a woman trying to peddle half-rotten papayas from a basket on her head, dancing to kompa on a pile of sewage-soaked rubble and trash. You'll see a barefoot six-year-old boy flying a homemade kite wearing a T-shirt that says "Save Darfur". You can be sure that if your motorcycle, car or SUV breaks down in the potholes of Port-au-Prince, any one of these folks will bend over backwards to help, rather than pose any threat to your safety.

What's remarkable about Haiti is that despite the devastating earthquake, tent camps, cholera, political instability and chronically corrupt and neglected judicial institutions, it couldn't be further from the orgy of violence people around the world associate with it. The United Nation's latest homicide statistics show that Haiti is one of the least dangerous places in the Caribbean region with a murder rate on a par with the US.

Pakistan's civilian governments are typically short-lived and cast aside by military coups. This disastrous pattern could be repeating itself as the current civilian government comes under increasing pressure from the army and the Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, the standoff hardened when Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani fired his defense secretary, Naeem Khalid Lodhi - a retired general and confidante of the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani - and replaced him with a civilian, Nargis Sethi. Infuriated military officials said they might refuse to work with the new secretary and warned vaguely of "serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences" after Mr. Gilani publicly criticized them in an interview.

Eugene Robinson: Two-For-Two and Game On

MANCHESTER, N.H.-It's going to be mean and dispiriting, this campaign. We'll be assailed with talk of "European socialism" and "vulture capitalism"-not "hope" and "change"-and the months between now and November will seem an eternity.

There's no use trying to gainsay or belittle Mitt Romney's victory here Tuesday. Yes, he might have hoped for a bigger turnout. Yes, he would have been happier to win with at least 40 percent of the vote, rather than 39-point-whatever. And yes, given that he's a part-time resident of New Hampshire, he was always expected to dominate the contest.

None of this is likely to matter. Romney is the first non-incumbent Republican to open two-for-two, winning both Iowa and New Hampshire. Exit polls show him with decent support among all the GOP's diverse constituencies-and no glaring weaknesses. It's true that most Republicans would prefer someone else, but there's no agreement on who that someone else might be. By the time the anti-Romney forces get organized, he'll be giving his acceptance speech.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: What Kind of Capitalist Was Romney?

Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008. The focus will be on whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole.

As a political matter, the discussion will be a classic test of an old Karl Rove theory that the best way to undercut an opponent is to attack him in his area of perceived strength. Romney's central claim is that his business experience prepares him to be the nation's great job creator. That message runs into some difficulty if he is seen instead as a job destroyer.

Ralph Nader: Iran: The Neocons Are At It Again

he same neocons who persuaded George W. Bush and crew to, in Ron Paul's inimitable words, "lie their way into invading Iraq" in 2003, are beating the drums of war more loudly these days to attack Iran. It is remarkable how many of these war-mongers are former draft dodgers who wanted other Americans to fight the war in Vietnam.

With the exception of Ron Paul, who actually knows the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, the Republican presidential contenders have declared their belligerency toward Iranian officials who they accuse of moving toward nuclear weapons.

The Iranian regime disputes that charge, claiming they are developing the technology for nuclear power and nuclear medicine.

Dave Zweifel: High Court Opened Door to Legalized Bribery

Remember the 2010 State of the Union address when President Obama spoke directly at the Supreme Court justices sitting in the front row and "lectured" them about their Citizens United decision?

"Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections," Obama told the justices, as the glare of the cameras focused on them. "Well, I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests."

The court, by a 5-4 vote, had just declared that corporations are, in effect, people when it comes to First Amendment rights and, therefore, their "free speech" can't be limited by campaign spending laws.

After wincing a bit from the free flu shot, my young patient turned to me and said, "What you're doing here is awesome - it's so hard get health care!"

"Here" happened to be New York City's Zuccotti Park in mid-November, the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street, just days before the encampment was broken up by hundreds of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's armor-clad police in the dead of night. But it could have been anywhere in the United States.

Health care is in fact increasingly unaffordable for the 99 percent. More than 50 million Americans lack health insurance and thus reasonable access to treatment. A recent Harvard study showed about 45,000 excess deaths annually can be linked to lack of insurance.

Even people with insurance face formidable barriers to care like rising co-pays and deductibles. As a result, they are putting off care, getting sicker and ending up in our emergency rooms with serious complications - often facing crushing medical bills later.

Miriam Pemberton

We're Not Stepping Down From Being the Planet's Top Cop

President Barack Obama ordered up yet another strategic review last year. This one explicitly aimed at bringing the nation's military posture into line with something we can afford.

In response to that review, his administration forged a plan, unveiled during the first week of the year, which takes a few modest steps in the right direction. The job description for our self-appointed role as world policeman will be trimmed a bit. We won't be patrolling everywhere all the time, but we'll be doing something more like check-ins in places like Latin America and Africa. Some of those U.S. troops that have been guarding Europe since World War II will probably come home. The Army and Marine Corps will shrink modestly. There's a verbal commitment, at least, to share more responsibilities with allies. And we'll cut a few more Cold War weapon systems. That's probably a safe move, now two decades since the Cold War ended.

Stephanie Penn Spear: Fracking, Keystone XL, Mountaintop Removal and More

On Jan. 10 at 1 p.m. on the west lawn of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, concerned citizens from all over the state will gather to ask Gov. Kasich to impose an indefinite moratorium on Ohio's oil and gas wastewater injection well sites and the natural gas extraction process that has become well-known as fracking, until further research and proper regulations are put in place to protect human health and the environment.

This protest is in response to the 11 earthquakes that have hit the Youngstown, Ohio area since March 2011. The most recent earthquake, with a 4.0 magnitude that was felt nearly 200 miles away, shook the community on New Year's Eve. Won-Young Kim, a research professor of seismology geology at Columbia University who is advising the state of Ohio on the Dec. 31 earthquake, said that circumstantial evidence suggests a link between the earthquake and high-pressure well activity. Kim believes that the recent earthquake did not occur naturally and may have been caused by high-pressure liquid injection related to oil and gas exploration and production.

Maureen Dowd: A Perfect Doll

As chief executive of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney was all about cold analysis and hot profits.

He took a rare personal interest in one of his investments: the Lifelike Company, which produced My Twinn dolls, fashioned to look like the little girls who owned them.

As Mark Maremont reported in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, Romney invested $2.1 million in 1996 for a stake in the company; the idea was brought to him by a Lifelike partner who was a friend from Brigham Young University and Harvard Business School.

Romney, who accuses President Obama of "crony capitalism" on the Solyndra deal, introduced his brother-in-law to Lifelike officials, who dutifully hired the relative and promoted him to vice president with an annual salary of $100,000.

Mitt Romney seems ready to wield his version of birtherism as a major weapon in the fall campaign against President Obama. In his standard stump speech he tells audiences that President Obama wants "to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society." According to Romney, this means a European-style welfare state that redistributes wealth and creates equal outcomes regardless of individual effort and success.

That's pretty strong stuff, but of course this doesn't sound anything like the President Obama who many of us have come to know and criticize. After all, this is the guy who got the top Wall Street bankers and told them that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. And, according to Ron Suskind, he assured them that he would hold his ground.

John Nichols: No Longer a Party of Lincoln: The Racial Politics of the New GOP

The Republican Party, founded by militant abolitionists and the political home through much of its history for committed foes of segregation and discrimination, has since the late 1960s been degenerating toward the crude politics of Southern strategies and what former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater referred to as the "coded" language of complaints about "forced busing," legal-services programs, welfare and food stamps. But the 2012 campaign has seen this degeneration accelerate, as the candidates have repeatedly played on stereotypes about race, class and "entitlements."

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum told a crowd of supporters: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."

Richard Dreyfuss: Hawks Hysterical Over Pentagon Cuts

To no one's surprise, the military-industrial complex and its allies are pushing back against the Obama administration's plans to trim some fat at the Pentagon.

The big boys-namely, the Aerospace Industries Association, the National Defense Industrial Association and the Professional Services Council-co-wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warning that even Panetta's modest efforts to slow defense spending could lead to catastrophe. Panetta's proposed $480 billion reduction might fatally undermine the defense industrial base, the letter warned, and it added that they expect further cuts in years to come.

Noting that the Congressional supercommittee's failure to reach an accord might trigger another $600 billion in defense cuts, the three industry heavyweights said, "Even if the trillion-dollar 'doomsday' scenario is avoided, respondents were operating under the assumption that, based on past history, more cuts would be added on top of the $480 billion over the next decade."

Dan Savage: Rick Santorum's homophobic frothing

The Republican candidates now vying to be most anti-gay will find they're on the wrong side of American voters in November

Alfred Kinsey famously - and, as later studies seemed to prove, erroneously - reported that 10% of the American population was gay. For decades, the American gay rights movement celebrated and pointed to the Kinsey Report; "1 in 10" and "10%" were popular gay rights slogans when I came out in the 1980s. But later research would show that our numbers were smaller. A recent study conducted by the Williams Institute at the University of California found that 3.8% of adults in the United States were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

Just as gay America once celebrated Kinsey's 10% figure, America's religious conservatives/extremists celebrate these newer, lower estimates. They argue that the LGBT community is so tiny - just 9 million Americans, according to the Williams Institute - that our calls for civil rights protections and full civil equality shouldn't be taken seriously. Rights, they implicitly assert, should be awarded only to minority communities that have attained some sort of critical mass. (The Williams Institute's estimates, for the record, are believed to underestimate the size the LGBT community, just as Kinsey once overestimated it - people lie about their sexual orientations; how do you control for the closet; what about LGBT children, etc.)

THE beginning of a new year is a time for resolutions, and Hillary Clinton's admirers are already busily, lovingly resolving on her behalf. On one sideline, her friends tell me that after a few years of hyperactive globetrotting what she really needs is to put her feet up and dictate another volume of her memoirs while nagging Chelsea to deliver grandchildren. ("She's tired; she needs some time off," her husband told ABC.) At the other extreme, a couple of Democratic consultants, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, propose to draft her right now as the 2012 Democratic presidential candidate, whether she likes it or not. ("Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does," they wrote in The Wall Street Journal.) Other helpful devotees have noticed that Brown University is looking for a new president, or have imagined her creating a clone of the Clinton Global Initiative focused on empowering women. Or maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg will decide to put her feet up, opening a seat on the Supreme Court.

The right choice is none of the above. [..]

The proposal to draft her in place of President Obama this year is preposterous. It exaggerates his vulnerability and discounts Hillary's loyalty. But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama's running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

It's time to take it seriously.

Robert Naiman: Judy Miller Alert! The New York Times is Lying About Iran's Nuclear Program

It's deja vu all over again. AIPAC is trying to trick America into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party's colonial ambitions, and the New York Times is lying about allegations that said country is developing "weapons of mass destruction."

In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 ("Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil "), this paragraph appeared:

   The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined withe a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objectiv, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign. [my emphasis]

The claim that there is "a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective" is a lie.

Eugene Robinson: Hawk in a Clown-Car Field

Before there was the tea party to define the phrase "far-right fringe," there was Rick Santorum. He's a nice-guy zealot who should never be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.

It's understandable that progressives would be tempted to cheer Santorum's sudden rise as a viable candidate for the Republican nomination. The likely nominee, Mitt Romney, would love to be able to modulate his rhetoric and begin running a more centrist campaign that could appeal to independents in November. But if Santorum continues to pose a threat, Romney will likely have to move even further right-ceding valuable political ground to President Obama.

And if Santorum somehow manages to win the nomination, he will be easier for Obama to beat than Romney. I mean, Obama beats him easily. Doesn't he?

But I know there's no such thing as an airtight guarantee, and that's why those welcoming the Santorum surge for Machiavellian reasons should be careful what they wish for.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Stuck in the Bloody Primaries

WINDHAM, N.H.-It isn't every day that political candidates are asked whether the 10th Amendment allows states to nullify federal laws, but that was precisely the question Rick Santorum faced at a forum here a few days ago organized by a libertarian-leaning group.

To his credit, Santorum did not pander to the nullifier. "We had a Civil War about nullification," Santorum said with a smile. "I'm not sure I want to go there."

But Santorum's experience raises a larger question about this year's Republican primary contest: Rather than strengthening the party for the coming battle against President Obama, will it instead leave it more marginalized from the views of swing voters? Have the party's candidates, particularly Mitt Romney, had to spend too much time and energy wooing voters far to the right of the mainstream?

I know that this week you have been kicking yourself for not having paid more attention to Rick Santorum.

Me, too! How can we call ourselves informed citizens without a thorough grounding in the heart and mind of the man who almost won the Iowa caucuses? So, as a public service, I am concluding my job of reading books by all the Republican presidential hopefuls with the work of Rick Santorum.

So you won't have to. Not that you were planning to anyway.

Dana Goldstein: A Decade of No Child Left Behind

As the No Child Left Behind Act turns 10 on Sunday, the bill's future remains uncertain, with Congress and the Obama administration divided over how to update the controversial law. Meanwhile, NCLB has been largely irrelevant to two of the major trends in national education policy-making over the past three years: the push to tie teacher evaluation and pay to student achievement data, and the move toward a Common Core curriculum in math and English. (The main lever pushing those changes is the Obama administration's deployment of billions of federal grant dollars to states that agree to adhere to those priorities.) Nevertheless, NCLB has had a profound effect on what students experience in the classroom and on the way the American public talks about its schools. Here is my assessment of how NCLB has changed American education over the past decade, both for the better and for the worse.

Ben Adler: Huntsman: The Better Foreign Policy Alternative to Paul

It's been a popular conceit on the left that Ron Paul is the GOP's "peace candidate," with a superior foreign policy to not only his GOP opponents but President Obama. But there's actually a Republican presidential candidate with a more sensible foreign policy than Paul's: former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman.

Paul's foreign policy has enormous flaws: namely a completely illiberal lack of interest in promoting democracy or human rights, opposition to all foreign aid and crazy conspiracy theories about the United Nations. Huntsman doesn't harbor such batty ideas.

Danny Schechter: US Political News Is a Fool's Game

"Game On" was Rick Santorum's first comment after his "surge" was considered successful with a mere 30,000 votes in Ioway. He inadvertently gave the game away by calling it a game - which is what it is.

Only this game is not just about politics but about the media. Pseudo-events like this are what the media lives for: it provides something for them to do, and to feel important while doing it. It creates airtime for endless punditry, and a spectacle to liven up a dull Iowa winter.

For Iowans, it's a chance to "participate" in something that sounds important; for media heads, it's a routine of the news, a ritual. The media, in effect, provides an infomercial posing as real news.

10 current words and phrases that my kid may never know because they might end up as relics of a lost vernacular, starting with "civil liberties."

By far, the laziest, most vapid articles annually published during this post-holiday season are lists of the past year's top 10 words and aphorisms. Admittedly, the sloth of such an endeavor tempts me. But as a new dad obsessed with my 1-year-old son's future, I think I've got a more worthy list to add to the pile-one of current words and phrases that my kid may never know because they might end up as relics of a lost vernacular.

Here are those harrowing 10. I hope I'm wrong but fear I'm not.

New York Times Editorial: A Leaner Pentagon

With his new defense strategy, President Obama has put forward a generally pragmatic vision of how this country will organize and deploy its military in the 21st century, while also addressing its deep fiscal problems.

It is based on the idea that the country must be smarter and more restrained in its use of force - a relief after President George W. Bush's disastrous war in Iraq. It will mean a significant reduction in the size of the Army and Marine Corps. But it doesn't minimize the fact that the world is a very dangerous place and says the country must still be ready to fight a major land war - although one lasting for years would require another buildup.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Sweet Victories: Lessons for 2012

As we head into 2012, there are a lot of questions about where the Occupy energy will go from here. I'm confident it will move in powerful directions-fighting unjust foreclosures and evictions, exploring alternative banking, taking on outrageous student debt, countering the corrosive role of corporate money in politics, and allying in new ways with the growing ranks of poor Americans.

But there are also tangible-maybe not sexy or systemic-reforms that make a real difference in people's lives and speak to OWS principles, and would benefit from its energy and activism. In 2011, two victories on paid sick leave offer something to build on as we work towards an economy that is more just and fair. Connecticut became the first state to guarantee this common sense protection for working people; and Seattle joined San Francisco and Washington, DC as the only cities with paid sick leave on the books.

Richard Reeve: America's 5 Political Parties

It would seem that the United States has a five-party system right now. What was done in Iowa last Tuesday could unravel in New Hampshire, but whatever happens next, the United States is more politically fractured than it has been in decades.

Iowa is the beginning but has never been the bellwether of presidential campaigns. Too white, too rural, only 5.7 percent unemployment, and all that. But hard ideological lines shone through the Iowa results, even if the state had caucuses rather than an all-out primary, which means most of the folks who showed up were not only ordinary American citizens but also activists to some degree.

On January 11 it will have been a decade since the first of the men we once called "the worst of the worst" were brought to Guantánamo Bay, a location handpicked by the Bush administration so that it could detain and interrogate terror suspects far from the prying eyes of the law. In the intervening years much has improved at this remote US-controlled enclave in Cuba. Allegations of ongoing torture have ceased; the detainees have access to lawyers and court review; and more than 600 of the 779 men once held there have been released.

But in another way, Guantánamo is a deeper problem today than it ever was. No longer a temporary exception, it has become a permanent fixture in our national firmament. And although at one time we could blame President George W. Bush's unilateral assertions of unchecked executive power for the abuses there, the continuing problem that is Guantánamo today is shared by all three government branches, and ultimately by all Americans. With President Obama's signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year's Eve, the prison is sure to be with us-and its prisoners sure to continue in their legal limbo-for the indefinite future.

Amy Goodman: Republicans Divided, Citizens United

The Republican caucuses in Iowa, with their cliffhanger ending, confirmed two key political points and left a third virtually ignored. First, the Republicans are not enthusiastic about any of their candidates. Second, we have entered a new era in political campaigning in the United States post-Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that unleashed a torrent of unreported corporate money into our electoral process. And third, because President Barack Obama is running in this primary season unchallenged, scant attention has been paid to the growing discontent among the very people who put him in office in 2008. As a result, the 2012 presidential election promises to be long, contentious, extremely expensive and perhaps more negative than any in history.

Mitt Romney technically prevailed in the Iowa caucuses, squeaking out an eight-vote margin over late-surging Rick Santorum. Libertarian Ron Paul garnered an impressive 21 percent of the vote in the crowded field. Note that the Republican Party does not allow a recount of the handwritten, hand-counted ballots, and that the final Romney edge was first reported on right-wing Fox News Channel by none other than its paid commentator Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush's two controversial presidential election wins.

Joe Conason: Did Reagan Raise Taxes? Let GOP Candidates Answer

Politicians and their flacks lie every day, but it is unusual for someone prominent to utter a totally indefensible falsehood like the whopper that just sprang from the mouth of Eric Cantor's press secretary on national television.

While interviewing the House majority leader, "60 Minutes" correspondent Leslie Stahl suggested that he might consider compromise because even Ronald Reagan had raised taxes several times. Cantor's flack then burst out in protest, saying he couldn't allow her remark to stand.

The premise of Stahl's perceptive question was perfectly accurate, of course. But the rude Hill staffer is scarcely alone in promoting this super-sized lie about Reagan's tax purity. And it would be worth discovering which of the Republican candidates likewise reject a fundamental truth about their party and its idol.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Santorum, Huntsman and the Future of Conservatism

MERRIMACK, N.H.-I love watching Republicans engage in class warfare. They condemn it as a sin when Democrats come within 100 miles of even mentioning the sharp and growing class inequalities in the United States. But when conservatives play the class card, they see doing so as a high ethical calling involving the defense of good and moral folk against the depredations of a liberal elite.

Blatant hypocrisy is instructive.

Rick Santorum gave by far the best speech Tuesday night after his boffo performance in the Iowa caucuses. Among the Republicans, he along with Jon Huntsman-and, yes, Ron Paul who is really a libertarian-knows who he is and why he's running. Santorum has a philosophy (and a theology) that holds his views together. It's a retro philosophy but no less interesting for that. So comparatively speaking, he comes by his class warfare honestly, even if he panders shamelessly on guns and gays and talks about the straight-laced President Obama as if he embodied the moral sensibilities of Woodstock and Gomorrah.

Eugene Robinson; Search and Destroy Mission

DES MOINES-Mitt Romney and his backers decided that to win in Iowa they had to destroy Newt Gingrich's campaign. Now Gingrich looks eager-and able-to return the favor.

Romney got his victory, but it doesn't feel much like one. It's embarrassing that the supposed Republican front-runner could only manage to beat Rick Santorum by eight votes out of about 120,000 cast in Tuesday's caucuses. It's troubling that Romney has spent the past five years campaigning in Iowa and still could draw just one-quarter of the vote.

And it's downright ominous that Gingrich is threatening to do whatever he can to block Romney's path to the nomination. If the sneering description of Romney in Gingrich's post-caucus speech Tuesday is a preview-he called him a "Massachusetts moderate" who is "pretty good at managing the decay"-this could get ugly.

Gail Collins: The March of the Non-Mitts

"This is the New Hampshire primary! This is a big deal! I can't even believe I'm standing here!" cried Jon Huntsman, who yearns to be the Rick Santorum of New Hampshire.

That's what it's come to. Do you think this is what Huntsman told himself when he quit his distinguished post as ambassador to China? ("Diplomacy is all well and good, but I believe I was meant for greater things. Like being the Rick Santorum of New Hampshire.")

Santorum, of course, was the man of the hour when he sort-of-almost-nearly came in first in the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday. Actually, Mitt Romney won. (Eight Republicans can't be wrong!) But Santorum has the momentum. His strategy of spending his entire life going from one Iowa Pizza Ranch to another paid off.

"Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society," Mitt Romney wrote in USA Today last month. The coming election, Romney told Wall Street Journal editors last month, will be "a very simple choice" between Obama's "European social democratic" vision and "a merit-based opportunity society - an American-style society - where people earn their rewards based on their education, their work, their willingness to take risks and their dreams."

Romney's assertions are the centerpiece of his, and his party's, critique not just of Obama but of American liberalism generally. But they fail to explain how and why the American economy has declined the past few decades - in good part because they betray no awareness that Europe's social democracies now fit the description of "merit-based opportunity societies" much more than ours does.

Matt Taibbi: Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins

The 2012 presidential race officially begins today with the caucuses in Iowa, and we all know what that means ...

Nothing.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. Just as even the non-British were at least temporarily engaged by last year's royal wedding, people all over the world are normally fascinated by the presidential race: both dramas arouse the popular imagination as real-life versions of universal children's fairy tales.

Instead of a tale about which maiden gets to marry the handsome prince, the campaign is an epic story, complete with a gleaming white castle at the end, about the battle to succeed to the king's throne. Since the presidency is the most powerful office in the world, the tale has appeal for people all over the planet, from jungles to Siberian villages.

Paul Krugman: When Economics Gets Political

David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics [..]

These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between the economists John Maynard Keynes and Mr. Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Mr. Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

Ari Berman: Romney Narrowly Wins First GOP Contest, But Obama Has Advantage in Iowa

In the end, Mitt Romney won Iowa by a staggeringly close eight votes and will likely be the GOP presidential nominee. But we already knew that heading into last night. How Romney gets the nomination, and what shape he's in when he faces off against Barack Obama, will be the real story of the GOP race. Based on his performance last night, Romney's showing in Iowa doesn't exactly inspire confidence in his campaign.

Fawaz Gerges: Debunking the Terrorism Narrative

The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda

The popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain have not only shaken the foundation of the authoritarian order in the Middle East, but they have also hammered a deadly nail in the coffin of a terrorism narrative which has painted Al-Qaeda as the West's greatest threat. At least, they should have.

Yet despite Osama bin Laden's killing in May, the dwindling of his group to the palest shadow of its former self and the protest of millions across the Arab world for whom the group never represented, Al-Qaeda holds a grasp on the Western imagination. Few Americans and Westerners realize the degree to which their fear of terrorism is misplaced, making closure over to the costly War on Terror difficult, if not impossible. Shrouded in myth and inflated by a self-sustaining industry of so-called terrorism "experts" and a well-funded national security industrial complex whose numbers swelled to nearly one million, the power of Al-Qaeda can only be eradicated when the fantasies around the group are laid to rest.

Maureen Dowd: Oedipus Rex Complex

American politics bristles with Oedipal drama.

Sons struggling to live up to fathers. Sons striving to outdo fathers. Sons scheming to avenge fathers. Sons burning to one-up fathers. Sons yearning to impress fathers who vanished early on. Sons leaning on fathers. Sons using fathers as reverse-play books.

John McCain was the raffish and rebellious Navy flier son of a stern four-star admiral who commanded the Vietnam theater where McCain was a P.O.W. Al Gore was the wooden good son of a Tennessee senator who was a fiery orator.

The Republicans handed President Obama a nice tactical victory when they caved in just before Christmas and agreed to extend the payroll tax cut on Obama's terms (with no offsetting program cuts.) But the extension deal is only for two months, which means the battle will be fought all over again in February.

You could say this is double-stupidity on the Republicans' part, since the public will be treated yet again to a debate in which the Democrats want to tax millionaires in order to spare working people a tax hike, while Republicans defend the very rich and demand further cuts in valued programs as the price of avoiding a tax increase on ordinary Americans.

But maybe it's Democrats who have set themselves a trap. Some Social Security advocates contend that Obama's nice partisan victory is hollow if not Pyrrhic.

The New York Times Editorial: The Slush Funds of Iowa

Turning on the television in Iowa recently has meant getting hit by an unrelenting arctic blast of campaign ads stunning in volume and ferocity. Residents here say they have never seen anything like the constant negativity in decades of witnessing the quadrennial combat of the state presidential caucuses. The ads have transformed the Republican race for a simple reason: a new landscape of unlimited contributions to "independent" groups that was created by the Supreme Court.

To influence the small fraction of Iowa voters who will participate in Tuesday's caucuses, the candidates and their supporters will have spent $12.5 million, an unprecedented amount. Only a third of that was spent by the candidates themselves; the rest comes from the "super PACs" that most of the candidates have allowed to be established. These political action committees are essentially septic tanks into which wealthy individuals and corporations can drop unlimited amounts of money, which is then processed into ads that are theoretically made independently of the candidates.

Simon Johnson: Austerity and the Modern Banker

Washington, DC - Santa Claus came early this year for four former executives of Washington Mutual (WaMu), a large US bank that failed in fall 2008. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had brought a lawsuit against the four, actions that included taking huge financial risks while "knowing that the real estate market was in a 'bubble.'" The FDIC sought to recover $900 million, but the executives have just settled for $64 million, almost all of which will be paid by their insurers; their out-of-pockets costs are estimated at just $400,000.

To be sure, the executives lost their jobs and now must drop claims for additional compensation. But, according to the FDIC, the four still earned more than $95 million from January 2005 through September 2008. So they are walking away with a great deal of cash. This is what happens when financial executives are compensated for "return on equity" unadjusted for risk. The executives get the upside when things go well; when the downside risks materialize, they lose nothing (or close to it).

John Nichols: Six Ways Iowa Progressives Will Caucus

But what is the point of progressives caucusing on Tuesday?

Actually, there are a lot of points to be made, even if most of the media is missing them.

The Republicans who are competing to be the candidate of the 1 Percent will get 99 Percent of the media attention that is devoted to the Iowa caucuses. But some of the most exciting activity with regard to the caucuses is not on the right, it's on the left.

Iowa progressives are organizing on a variety of fronts to raise issues, upset expectations and challenge the Republican and Democratic game plans for Tuesday night.



Both the Republican and the Democratic parties will begin their delegate-selection processes in Iowa, although the two party caucuses do not operate according to the same rules. The Republicans hold a straw poll that will get most of the attention once the results are in Tuesday night, especially if a surging Rick Santorum elbows his way into a first- or second-place finish. The Democrats hold more traditional "town-meeting" style caucuses, and in many cases they may be little more than groundwork-laying events for President Obama's reelection campaigns. But that will not be the case at every Democratic caucus, just as there will be surprises at GOP gatherings.