Neil Clark at Russia Today analyzes the Conservative Party's resounding victory in British elections last Thursday. His reasoning is mostly sound (Labour party weakness, a dominant right-wing media, big corporate money flowing into Tory coffers, even a "born to rule" attitude among Tory leaders), but complaints about the "first-past-the-post" system sound like sour grapes to me, not just because I advocate the notion that public action should be vigorous enough to render the political party of the representative a meaningless matter -- the British also don't redraw their Parliamentary districts with any regularity, as American states do. I can easily think of reasons why they don't, but that doesn't justify not doing it.
President Obama inexplicably went to Nike headquarters on Saturday to make what USA Today inexplicably calls a "progressive case for trade." You know the script -- "the right kind of agreements," "the past versus the present," the strawman arguing of "trade works" when we criticize "free" trade, not trade. At least the article (paragraph 11) almost wonders out loud why the agreement needs to be fast-tracked. Not to be incorrigible or anything, but I don't even buy the argument that the TPP will improve other countries' labor standards -- the problem in those nations isn't the law, but enforcing the law, and the "investor-state tribunals" will let corporations overwrite those laws anyway.
The Intercept reports that Congressional lawyers argued in court last summer that the SEC shouldn't have been allowed to conduct an insider trading probe, because "lawmakers and their staff are constitutionally-protected from such inquiries given the nature of their work." Now, I'm no lawyer, but I suspect that the moment lawmakers and staff break the law -- and insider trading not only breaks the law, but breaks a law Congress high-fived itself for passing not even three years ago -- you don't automatically get to hide behind the Constitution.
Sen. Rand Paul says Democratic Presidential candidate (and former Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton made Libya a "jihadist wonderland." But though he can talk the talk, he's never walked the walk -- remember how quickly this foreign policy "skeptic" wilted when it was time to support Mr. Obama's bombing raids in Iraq and Syria? Or how quickly he's abandoned even his meek criticisms of aid to Israel? How are we supposed to imagine he's going to be better as President?
Finally, David Corn reminds us, in excruciating detail, why Carly Fiorina's tenure as Hewlett-Packard CEO would make her a bad President. You know the long-story-short -- cut jobs, lost the company money, got pushed out with a $21 million parachute -- but you may not have remembered that she once justified outsourcing by saying "(t)here is no job that is America's God-given right anymore" or that HP's stock price jumped 7% the day they let her go.
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