The Commentariat -- February 17

Wisconsin teachers, other state employees, protest in Madison, Wisconsin's capitol building. AP photo.Here's the above photo, in motion:

Everybody's got to make some adjustments to new fiscal realities. But some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions.
-- Barack Obama, today ...

... Jennifer Epstein of Politico: "Teachers unions, historically one of the most powerful interest groups in American politics, are being besieged like never before – under attack from conservative GOP governors with a zeal for budget-cutting even while taking fire from some Democrats, including President Barack Obama, who has suggested he agrees that unions can be an impediment to better schools.... The backlash threatens to undercut one of the Democratic Party’s most stalwart backers — and upset a mutually beneficial relationship where the unions provided financial support and foot soldiers for Democratic campaigns, in return for political cover to protect their prerogatives in the U.S. Congress and state capitals across the nation."

Illustration for Rolling Stone by Victor Juhasz.** Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: "... the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.... Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted.... When it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals." Read the whole article. ...

... Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post: "The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees lenders like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America..., is pushing for a quick and modest settlement to the months-long federal and state probes into abusive mortgage practices, frustrating other federal agencies and state egulators and raising questions over President Barack Obama's delay in naming a pro-consumer chief to head the agency.... The agency is negotiating an agreement that would cost the industry less than $5 billion in fines and mortgage modifications." By contrast, "in 2008, state attorneys general reached an $8.4 billion agreement with just one company -- Countrywide Financial -- to settle predatory lending accusations. The money was used to aid distressed homeowners." ...

Simon Johnson in Bloomberg News: the too-big-to-fail banks are the biggest government-sponsored entities today. And "top bankers are ... pressing hard for the right to increase dividend payments. That’s effectively a transfer from creditors and taxpayers tomorrow (because of the guarantee) to shareholders today."

Michael Grunwald of Time: the Obama Administration is using the stimulus bill to reform the Washington bureaucracy by diverting "funds into competition-based, peer-reviewed, results-oriented grant programs that reward only the worthiest applications."

Mark Landler of the New York Times: "President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.... The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo." ...

... Fareed Zakaria in Time: "The central, underlying feature of the Middle East's crisis is a massive youth bulge. About 60% of the region's population is under 30. These millions of young people have aspirations that need to be fulfilled, and the regimes in place right now show little ability to do so." ...

... Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times profiles Gene Sharp, an 83-year-old American intellectual whose "practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably 'From Dictatorship to Democracy,' a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt."

Ed Pilkington, et al., of the Guardian: "Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons capability. Responding to the Guardian's revelation that the source, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi or "Curveball" as his US and German handlers called him, admitted fabricating evidence of Iraq's secret biological weapons programme, Powell said that questions should be put to the US agencies involved in compiling the case for war." CW: see yesterday's Commentariat for video & a link to the original Guardian story.

Steven Mufson of the Washington Post: "Interest payments on the national debt will quadruple in the next decade and every man, woman and child in the United States will be paying more than $2,500 a year to cover for the nation's past profligacy, according to figures in President Obama's new budget plan." ...

... E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post: "I hope [President] Obama has the spine to keep calling the bluff of the deficit hawks until they get serious about changing the politics of deficit reduction. We can't afford another 30 years of fiscal evasion."

Mark Arsenault & Christopher Rowland of the Boston Globe: "Senator Scott Brown reveals in his soon-to-be-released autobiography that he was sexually abused by a male camp counselor and suffered repeated beatings at the hands of a stepfather. His book, to be released on Monday ..., vividly details a childhood in Wakefield and other Massachusetts towns that was punctuated by violence, family strife, and petty crime":

Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold founded "Progressives United" yesterday:

... You can join up by going to his site, which is at least partially down because it got so many hits.

Local News

Gail Collins: Former First Lady Barbara Bush pleads against spending cuts to education in Texas, which has fallen to "47th in the nation in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores," but Gov. Rick Perry & Republicans in the state legislature have no intention of heeding Bush's warnings. "Besides reducing services to children, Texas is doing as little as possible to help women — especially young women — avoid unwanted pregnancy."

Right Wing World

Forget Motherhood & Apple Pie. Jay Newton-Small of Time: "This morning, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) told George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America that the tax code needs to be changed – citing the example that the Internal Revenue Service recently deemed breast pumps a valid medical deduction. (This is related to Bachmann's assertion that First Lady Michelle Obama's encouragement of mothers to breast-feed in order to prevent childhood obesity is the latest example of the “nanny state,” though the IRS and Obama acted independently of one another.)" With video.

A. G. Sulzberger of the New York Times: "A state bill to expand the definition of justifiable homicide in South Dakota to include killing someone in the defense of an unborn child was postponed indefinitely Wednesday after an uproar over whether the legislation would put abortion providers at greater risk."

Dave Leach, an Iowa anti-abortion activist, praised the bill, saying it could end abortions in South Dakota by scaring away doctors or by establishing grounds for someone to kill those who stay. 'There may be something I'm overlooking, but from all appearances, this bill would certainly justify an individual taking the life of an abortionist in order to save human lives,' he said. ...

... As Amy Sullivan of Time points out, "... whether or not the bill actually would permit such acts hardly matters if anti-abortion activists think that it does. "

News Ledes

Undisclosed Locations. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "... law enforcement officers are searching for Democratic senators boycotting a Senate vote on Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair plan Thursday in an attempt to bring the lawmakers to the floor to allow Republicans to act on the bill. One Democratic senator said that he believed most of the members of his caucus have gone to another state...."...

... AP: "Wisconsin lawmakers are prepared to pass a momentous bill that would strip government workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights over the loud objections of thousands of teachers, students and prison guards who packed the Capitol for two days of protests. The nation's most aggressive anti-union proposal has been speeding through the Legislature since Republican Gov. Scott Walker introduced it a week ago." CW: also, see yesterday's ledes.

Al Jazeera: "Troops and tanks have locked down the Bahraini capital of Manama on Thursday after riot police swinging clubs and firing tear gas smashed into demonstrators in a pre-dawn assault, killing at least four people. Hours after the attack on Manama's main Pearl Roundabout, the military announced a ban on gatherings, saying on state TV that it had 'key parts' of the capital under its control." ...

... AP: "The Obama administration is expressing alarm over a violent crackdown on anti-government protesters in key U.S. ally Bahrain and urging authorities there to use restraint. The State Department said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Bahrain's foreign minister on Thursday to register Washington's 'deep concern' about overnight developments." ...

... New York Times: "Without warning, hundreds of heavily armed riot police officers rushed into Pearl Square [in Manama, Bahrain] early Thursday, firing shotguns, tear gas and concussion grenades at the thousands of demonstrators who were sleeping there as part of a widening protest against the nation’s absolute monarchy. At least five people died, some of them reportedly killed in their sleep with scores of shotgun pellets to the face and chest, according to a witness and three doctors who received the dead and at least 200 wounded at a hospital here."

AP: "Libyan protesters seeking to oust longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi defied a crackdown and took to the streets in four cities Thursday on what activists have dubbed a 'day of rage,' amid reports that at least 14 demonstrators have been killed in clashes with pro-government forces."

New York Times: "A provincial court gave the Pakistani government three weeks on Thursday to decide whether the American official in custody for killing two Pakistanis has diplomatic immunity, a decision that amounts to a slap to the United States.... The decision came a day after a whirlwind visit by Senator John Kerry who tried to find a quick resolution to the case which has severely damaged relations between the two countries and exposed the weakness of the pro-American government headed by President Asif Ali Zardari."

Washington Post: "CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress on Wednesday that if Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is captured they will be held by the military and probably will be sent to Guantanamo Bay, the first time any senior administration official has outlined a detention plan for al-Qaeda's top leadership."