Trevor Timm at The Guardian warns—NSA reform is unavoidable. But it can be undermined if we aren't careful:
Congress now has to reform NSA mass surveillance in the next two weeks—whether they like it or not.
Bolstered by a historic court of appeals opinion from last week that ruled much of NSA’s mass surveillance on Americans illegal, Congress is scrambling to pass a reform bill for the NSA before 1 June, when a key section of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, will expire unless both houses vote to extend it. Now the only question is how far they’ll go.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act is the same law that a three judge panel on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled cannot be used by the NSA to collect every American’s phone records, which is exactly what they had been doing in secret for years before Edward Snowden revealed the program in his very first leak to the Guardian in June 2013.
The court ruling has left Congress reeling, where many thought they might be able to escape without doing much at all; now most members in both parties admit the question is not if the NSA will be constrained but by how much.
Jacob Swenson-Lengyel at
In These Times is singing my song in—
Why Radicals Like Bernie Sanders Should Run as Democrats, Not Independents:
Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, is running for president. Even more ambitiously, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he wants to lead “a political revolution in this country.” And he’s doing it as a Democrat.
In the wake of his announcement, some on the pragmatic left rushed to make the socialist safe for mass consumption. “Bernie Sanders is not Bukharin or Trotsky,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi assured readers, while Thor Benson took to the New Republic to demand the media stop calling Sanders a socialist (he’s a democratic socialist). The Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn went even further. Sanders “isn’t actually that far to the left,” Cohn said, and ultimately, “the label doesn’t mean a whole lot anyway.”
While the pragmatists were busy rounding off Sanders politically sharper edges, some on the radical left dismissed Sanders as a sellout. Ashley Smith wrote in Jacobin that by running for president as a Democrat, Sanders “is acting as the opposite of an ‘alternative.’ ” Smith went on to say that the Democratic Party has “co-opted and changed Sanders,” approvingly quoting David Swanson’s call for leftists to “put our resources into uncorrupted, principled, policy-driven, nonviolent, creative activism” instead of the Sanders campaign.
The debate is about more than Sanders alone. While it’s clear that we live in the midst of a populist moment, many of the pragmatists continue catering to the center—ready to woo independents and endorse whoever sports a “D” behind their name. And many on the radical left, as always, disavow the idea that a political revolution can be waged from within the Democratic Party. Instead, they claim that only a third party candidate could offer a pure, uncorrupted assault on big money politics.
Please check out the excerpts from other pundits below the fold.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Something is stirring in the religious world:
Will we regard poverty as a haunting national problem, or will the focus groups continue to tell politicians of all stripes to talk only about the middle class because mentioning the poor is politically toxic?
Might the condition of low-income Americans galvanize religious people to see alleviating poverty and righting social injustice as moral issues? The habit in political writing when discussing “moral issues” is to refer only to abortion or gay marriage. But what implicates morality more than the way we, as a society and as individuals, treat those who are cut off from the ladders of advancement and the treasures of prosperity?
And can we find a way of thinking constructively about the role of family breakup in setting back the life chances of poor kids while still recognizing that family life itself is being battered by rising economic inequality, the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs, racism and mass incarceration?
Emily Foster at the
Campaign for America's Future writes—
How Banks Did More Damage To Baltimore Than Rioters:
The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore is not just a story of police brutality or the lack of socioeconomic mobility for the urban poor. It’s also a story of how deregulation allowed corporate banks to strip middle-class families of their financial stability and walk away, leaving behind payday lenders and check-cashing stores to plunder low-income and minority communities.
To better understand and communicate that story, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Economic Policy, and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took their Middle Class Prosperity Project to Baltimore on Monday. It was the latest in a series of forums that started in February to focus “congressional and public attention on challenges faced by the middle class.” [...]
On January 8, 2008, former Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon’s administration filed a suit against Wells Fargo in the U.S. District Court. The city claimed that Wells Fargo charged higher fees to black borrowers through their subprime lending program designed for less creditworthy consumers who are more likely to default on loans. The city claimed that the bank’s discriminatory and predatory lending practices led to foreclosures, reduced city tax revenues, and increased city costs due to the crimes surrounding the abandoned properties. The city asked for the bank to cover costs associated with these damages.
In 2010, the bank won the dismissal of the lawsuit brought by Baltimore. However, in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Wells Fargo for failing to report more than 6,000 loans that did not meet insurance requirements under the Federal Housing Administration, and for its failure to properly review early payment defaults. The bank settled, paying $17.5 million to the city of Baltimore and $2.5 million to 1,000 area residents who were affected.
Bill Blum at
Truth Dig writes—
Why the ACLU’s Big Victory Against NSA Surveillance Falls Short:
I don’t like to be a wet blanket, but at the risk of mixing metaphors, I’m going to throw some cold water on the decision last week in American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, which held that the National Security Agency’s vast telephone metadata collection program is illegal.
While the ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals is a clear advance for civil liberties—and the ACLU legal team that engineered it has every right to be proud—the advance, in fact, is modest and incremental.
To understand why I’m less enthused than some others, let’s deconstruct what the decision actually said as well as what it didn’t say.
Jessica Valenti at
The Guardian writes—
Feminism isn't a label Republicans can slap on when it's convenient:
In the lead-up to 2016, Republicans are going to have to perform some serious magic with female voters. They’ll have to make all those pesky rape comments disappear, use sleight-of hand to distract us from their idiotic beliefs about women’s biology and the fact that the core of their platform is about maintaining inequality.
But the GOP’s real abracadabra moment will come if they pull off the trick they’ve been working on for years: convincing Americans that Republicans are not only good for women, but actual feminists.
Last week, presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina was anointed a “real feminist” by The Week, even though “she has no use for laws mandating ‘equal pay’ or paid maternity leave or contraceptive coverage.” In Jeb Bush’s Liberty University commencement speech over the weekend, the likely Republican presidential candidate told his audience that “wherever there is a child waiting to be born, we say choose life,” and in the same breath added, without irony, that he derided the “arrogance” of treating women and girls “as possessions without rights and dignity.”
Shashank Joshi at
The Independent writes—
Recent changes in the Middle East threaten the success of Obama’s Arab summit:
On Wednesday, Mr Obama sat down at the White House with several leaders and representatives of his allies in the Gulf. His dilemma is simple enough. They want aggressive containment of Iran, while he seeks détente. They are happy to risk toppling Mr Assad, while Mr Obama hopes an over-stretched Iran will agree to a peace deal which might save the Syrian state from total collapse and the region from further disorder.
Mr Obama may be gambling that while his Arab interlocutors are flexing their muscles now, their accumulated military dependence on the US—for arms, and the means to deploy them—is simply too great to be cast off in a fit of diplomatic pique. He is probably correct, but that does not mean his disgruntled, emboldened friends won’t seek to prove him wrong first.
Andrew J. Bacevich at the
Los Angeles Times urges—
Go ahead, tick off the Saudis (and the Israelis, too):
In his second term, President Obama has demonstrated a real knack for ticking off putative American friends. First, he annoyed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who registered his complaint by promptly taking it to Capitol Hill. Now (apparently) he has irked Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who signaled his unhappiness by skipping this week's summit with gulf allies at Camp David.
The rocky turn in U.S. relations with two long-standing strategic partners has caused much hand-wringing. But is it really such a bad thing? Or does it hint at a long-overdue policy shift that will align U.S. commitments to these countries with actual American interests? [...]
As others have noted, the nuclear negotiations are not really about nukes. The real aim of the talks is to end Iran's diplomatic isolation, which dates to the Carter-era hostage crisis. Yet bringing Iran in from the cold will alter the strategic landscape in ways that Israel and Saudi Arabia find discomfiting. A completed deal will instantly transform Iran from a pariah into a major regional power. For existing regional powers, the result can mean only one thing: reduced room to maneuver. [...]
Diplomacy is transactional. Successful diplomacy means striking the right balance between give and get. However belatedly, the Obama administration recognizes that when it comes to Israel and Saudi Arabia, the United States has done too much giving and too little getting while paying too high a price. Obama aims to fix that.
Sonja Trom Eayrs at the Minneapolis
Star Tribune writes—
At ground zero of Minnesota's groundwater crisis:
Minnesota needs to do more. Did you know that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) estimates that there are more than 18,000 registered feedlots in operation in the state? Yet Big Ag is pressing for more and bigger feedlots. Given the huge number, the MPCA estimates that the amount of manure generated by livestock in Minnesota is equivalent to a human population of about 50 million people. That’s untreated, liquid animal manure chock full of nitrogen, phosphorus, E. coli bacteria and other contaminants that threaten our surface water and groundwater.
Statewide, the DNR reports that groundwater use has increased 35 percent over the last 25 years — about 3 billion gallons per year on average. A single feedlot, such as the one near my parents’ farm, will draw an estimated 3.5 million gallons of water per year. No wonder we are seeing depletion of our precious groundwater.
Gail Collins at
The New York Times writes—
Wow, Jeb Bush Is Awful:
But today we’re talking about Jeb Bush. As a presidential hopeful, Bush’s most attractive feature was an aura of competence. Extremely boring competence, perhaps. Still, an apparent ability to get through the day without demonstrating truly scary ineptitude.
Then, about a week ago, The Washington Post reported that during a private meeting with rich Manhattan financiers, Bush announced that his most influential adviser on Middle Eastern matters was his brother George.
This was a surprise on many fronts. For one thing, Jeb had apparently missed the memo on how everything you say to potential donors at private meetings can wind up on an endless YouTube loop for all eternity.