From Mother Jones
By Stephanie Mencimer

Thursday’s Supreme Court decision striking down limits on corporate spending in elections marks the latest in a remarkable string of victories for a Republican lawyer in Terre Haute, Indiana. James Bopp Jr. did not argue Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission before the high court, but the case was entirely his brainchild.

Bopp, the longtime counsel to the anti-abortion group National Right to Life, has now almost singlehandedly obliterated many of the nation’s relatively modest restrictions on corporate election spending, including the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation. And he’s done it all in the name of the First Amendment. In 2007, Bopp persuaded the Supreme Court to eliminate limits on corporate funding of television ads in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, arguing that the rules were an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. A few months later, he represented Citizens United in its battle with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over its efforts to air a critical documentary about Hillary Clinton on television during the election season—the case that led to Thursday’s major Supreme Court decision.

As with so many of Bopp’s cases, few people took the Citizens United challenge seriously in the beginning. During one hearing in early 2008, US District Court Judge Royce Lamberth actually laughed at Bopp for comparing the Citizens United film—which portrayed Hillary Clinton as a European Socialist—to investigative news shows like 60 Minutes. Since then, judges, good government groups and various other political actors have learned that Bopp is not to be laughed at. After the Supreme Court decided to take the case, Citizens United hired renowned high court litigator Ted Olson to handle the oral arguments, but the case bears all the trademarks of Bopp’s handiwork.

Read more Campaign Finance

From Raw Story
By Sahil Kapur

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday said the Massachusetts election was a “wake up call” for Democrats and that his party had better change course or it could suffer devastating losses come November.

“People elected Democrats in 2008 to change the direction,” he told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview.

“And the same entrenched interests that George Bush could not shake, this current White House is having great difficulty in shaking. One could suggest they might be more entrenched than ever.”

Kucinich staunchly defended liberalism but alleged that Democrats are not behaving like liberals.

“There’s nothing liberal about the bailouts. There’s nothing liberal about standing by and watching banks use public money to get their executive bonuses. There’s nothing liberal about giving insurance companies carte blanche to charge anything they want for health care… Since when did that become liberal?”

“There’s nothing liberal about letting coal and oil write climate change legislation,” he added. “Are you kidding me?”

The 13-year congressman lamented the lack of change in economic policies, tying it to the major problems Democrats are facing.

Read more Kucinich

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I’ll post the link to it once it’s up. But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human “Left” for the Democrats’ woes — one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, often overlap).

Last night, Evan Bayh blamed the Democrats’ problems on “the furthest left elements,” which he claims dominates the Democratic Party — seriously. And in one of the dumbest and most dishonest Op-Eds ever written, Lanny Davis echoes that claim in The Wall St. Journal: “Blame the Left for Massachusetts” (Davis attributes the unpopularity of health care reform to the “liberal” public option and mandate; he apparently doesn’t know that the health care bill has no public option [someone should tell him], that the public option was one of the most popular provisions in the various proposals, and the “mandate” is there to please the insurance industry, not “the Left,” which, in the absence of a public option, hates the mandate; Davis’ claim that “candidate Obama’s health-care proposal did not include a public option” is nothing short of an outright lie)

In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by “the Left,” let alone “the furthest left elements” of the Party? As Ezra Klein says, the Left “ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months.” The Left wanted a single-payer system, then settled for a public option, then an opt-out public option, then Medicare expansion — only to get none of it, instead being handed a bill that forces every American to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry.

Read more Powerful Left

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

Barack Obama should fire Rahm Emanuel today.

He has not served the President well as chief of staff.

One year ago, Obama took the oath of office riding a wave of goodwill. In the next six weeks, his popularity continued to soar. But now it’s hit bottom, and so have the Democratic prospects, after the debacle in Massachusetts.

Rahm Emanuel is responsible for a lot of this free fall.

Emanuel is a DLC Democrat, and he’s advised Obama to go in a DLC direction time and time again—and to disregard the progressive base.

On health care, Emanuel kept insisting that the public option was not very important. He helped engineer the under-the-table deal with the drug companies. He let Max Baucus dillydally, rather than push hard for a vote before last summer. And then he and Obama bent over backwards to placate Senators Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman rather than force a vote, via the reconciliation process, on a decent progressive health care bill.

“The only non-negotiable principle is success,” Emanuel likes to say. But that’s the very definition of being unprincipled. And by being unprincipled, he’s delivered defeat.

Read more Emanuel

From Global Research
By Tom Burghardt

In the wake of the Flight 253 provocation, over-hyped terrorism panics, and last year’s Big Pharma and media-engineered hysteria over the H1N1 flu pandemic, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13528 on January 11.

Among other things, the Executive Order (EO) established a Council of Governors, an “advisory panel” chosen by the President that will rubber-stamp long-sought-after Pentagon contingency plans to seize control of state National Guard forces in the event of a “national emergency.”

According to the White House press release, the ten member, bipartisan Council was created “to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State Governments to protect our Nation against all types of hazards.”

“When appointed” the announcement continues, “the Council will be reviewing such matters as involving the National Guard of the various States; homeland defense; civil support; synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States; and other matters of mutual interest pertaining to National Guard, homeland defense, and civil support activities.”

Clearly designed to weaken the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which bars the use of the military for civilian law enforcement, EO 13528 is the latest in a series of maneuvers by previous administrations to wrest control of armed forces historically under the democratic control of elected state officials, and a modicum of public accountability.

One consequence of moves to “synchronize and integrate” state National Guard units with those of the Armed Forces would be to place them under the effective control of United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), created in 2002 by Bushist legislators in both capitalist parties under the pretext of imperialism’s endless “War on Terror.” At the time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called USNORTHCOM’s launch “the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1946.”

Read more Big Brother

From AlterNet
By Amy Goodman

The following is a transcript of an interview with Robert Johnson by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now! about Move Your Money, a project to help people transfer their money from bigger banks into smaller, community-oriented financial institutions that generally avoided the reckless investments and schemes that helped cause the financial crisis. Robert Johnson is former economist at the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Budget Committee. He’s now the director of the Economic Policy Initiative at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

Amy Goodman: So, Move Your Money, how did it come about?

Robert Johnson: Came about at a dinner. Eugene Jarecki, my wife Alexis and Arianna and I were talking about how frustrated people were that there was no legislative reform and there was no — well, you might call “remorse” from the big bankers. So we started to just, how we say, bat the fat about what could be done. And we talked about how in past episodes people had sold stock, and in this episode, you could get people to move their money.

Why would they move their money when they’re happy with their services? Because they can get comparable services locally. Everything is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, up to $250,000. And they could stop this toxic side effect of derivatives lobbying and “too big to fail” lobbying that’s going on by the top five or six banks that –

Goodman: So, name names. Who are you saying people should — which banks should they pull their money out of? And what banks should they put them into? Tell us what community banks are, but name the ones they should pull out.

Read more Interview

From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

The official Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — the group that aims to hold a modern version of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, whose investigations set the stage for New Deal bank regulation — began taking testimony on Wednesday. In its first panel, the commission grilled four major financial-industry honchos. What did we learn?

Well, if you were hoping for a Perry Mason moment — a scene in which the witness blurts out: “Yes! I admit it! I did it! And I’m glad!” — the hearing was disappointing. What you got, instead, was witnesses blurting out: “Yes! I admit it! I’m clueless!”

O.K., not in so many words. But the bankers’ testimony showed a stunning failure, even now, to grasp the nature and extent of the current crisis. And that’s important: It tells us that as Congress and the administration try to reform the financial system, they should ignore advice coming from the supposed wise men of Wall Street, who have no wisdom to offer.

Consider what has happened so far: The U.S. economy is still grappling with the consequences of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; trillions of dollars of potential income have been lost; the lives of millions have been damaged, in some cases irreparably, by mass unemployment; millions more have seen their savings wiped out; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, will lose essential health care because of the combination of job losses and draconian cutbacks by cash-strapped state governments.

Read more Clueless

From TruthDig
By Amy Goodman

The media have been swamped with reports about the attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now dubbed the “underwear bomber,” failed in his alleged attack, close to 300 people were spared what would have been, most likely, a horrible, violent end. Since that airborne incident, the debates about terrorism and how best to protect the American people have been reignited.

Meanwhile, a killer that has stalked the U.S. public, claiming, by recent estimates, 45,000 lives annually—one dead American about every 10 minutes—goes unchecked. That’s 3,750 people dead—more than the 9/11 attacks—every month who could be saved with the stroke of a pen.

This killer is the lack of adequate health care in the United States. Researchers from Harvard Medical School found in late 2009 that 45,000 people die unnecessarily every year due to lack of health insurance. Researchers also uncovered another stunning fact: In 2008, four times as many U.S. Army veterans died because they lacked health insurance than the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period. That’s right: 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 died because they were uninsured.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama was fiery when he made his public statement after meeting with his national security team about the airline breach: In seeking to thwart plans to kill Americans “we face a challenge of the utmost urgency,” he said. He talked about reviewing systemic failures and declared we must “save innocent lives, not just most of the time, but all of the time.”

This is all very admirable. Imagine if this same urgency was applied to a broken system that causes 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year. Since stimulus funds will now be directed to supply more scanning equipment at airports, what about spending money to ensure mammograms and prostate exams at community health centers?

Read more Terror

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Every debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed as one of “security v. privacy and civil liberties” — as though it’s a given that increasing the Government’s surveillance authorities will “make us safer.” But it has long been clear that the opposite is true. As numerous experts (such as Rep. Rush Holt) have attempted, with futility, to explain, expanding the scope of raw intelligence data collected by our national security agencies invariably impedes rather than bolsters efforts to detect terrorist plots. This is true for two reasons: (1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots. As Rep. Holt put it when arguing against the obliteration of FISA safeguards and massive expansion of warrantless eavesdropping power which a bipartisan Congress effectuated last year:

It has been demonstrated that when officials must establish before a court that they have reason to intercept communications — that is, that they know what they are doing — we get better intelligence than through indiscriminate collection and fishing expeditions.

The failure of the U.S. Government to detect the fairly glaring Northwest Airlines Christmas plot — despite years and years of constant expansions of Surveillance State powers — illustrates this dynamic perfectly. As President Obama said yesterday, the Government — just as was true for 9/11 — had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country. Yet our intelligence agencies — just as was true for 9/11 — failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is that?

Read more Surveillance State

From The Consortium News
By Ivan Eland

The botched attempt by a Nigerian, apparently trained in Yemen by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to conduct a suicide bombing on a plane as it neared Detroit has highlighted the U.S. government’s overzealous, ineffective and even counterproductive efforts to overcome terrorism.

Although Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s stance that “the system” worked buckled under withering ridicule, she was right — but only if the non-governmental aspects of that system are included. The government’s performance and after-incident measures are ridiculous and even ill-advised.

Even if the government had done nothing in the realm of anti-terrorism after 9/11, the skies would have been much safer. The reason is that aircrews and passengers changed their response to attempted aircraft hijackings.

Prior to 9/11, pilots, flight attendants and the flying public were of the mindset to cooperate with any hijackers. The image in their minds was of being flown to Cuba and eventually being released once the hijackers had publicized their cause.

After 9/11, a vision of being slaughtered en masse and used to massacre even more non-passengers has been seared into the minds of the traveling public.

As seen in the Richard Reid shoe-bomber incident and the most recent suicide-bombing attempt, surly aircrews and passengers are alert, will not remain passive in the face of imminent death, and are ready to beat to a pulp any would-be hijackers before they can carry out their nefarious deed.

That’s the good news.

Read more Terror