In America today, crime pays -- if you're powerful. Just look at the MF Global and CIA torture cases.
It’s proverbial that, in college football’s Southeastern Conference, “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin.’” (Given that SEC teams have won the last six national championships, it’s fair to speculate that there’s been a whole lot of tryin’ going on.)
Suitably translated into Latin, this might as well be our new national motto. In America today, crime pays, at least if you’re high up enough in the social hierarchy to take advantage of the fact that we’re increasingly willing to accept that laws are for little people.
Before his 14-year stint as governor, before President George W. Bush tapped him to run the Department of Health and Human Services, and before his cushy gig as a wining-and-dining Washington lobbyist, Republican Tommy Thompson began carving out a reputation as powerful state legislator in Wisconsin. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Wisconsin GOP, and went on to become the longest-serving governor in state history. On his way to the top, Thompson found help in an influential policy organization then little known to the public: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.
A militant who fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and is now the leader of a group affiliated with Al-Qaeda in South Yemen has struck a deal with the United States and Saudi Arabia to send 5,000 Al-Qaeda fighters into Syria according to reports out of the Middle East.
Tariq al-Fadhli, jihadist leader of the Southern Yemen insurgency and a man personally trained by Bin Laden, has successfully negotiated with U.S. and Saudi officials to send 5,000 jihadist fighters via Turkey to aid Syrian rebels in the attempted overthrow of President Bashar Al-Assad, reports AlAlam.
“I’m not sure I’m going to state this exactly right,” she said, sitting amidst a sea of convention-related activity and daytime wine drinkers in the Westin hotel lobby in downtown Charlotte. “But I think there are some who believe they are actually protecting women, you know, and that it is better for women to be taken care of. I think women want to take care of themselves, and I think having a voice in how that is done is very important. And frankly, I don’t understand — I mean, I’m obviously a card-carrying Democrat — but I can’t understand why any woman would want to vote for Mitt Romney, except maybe Mrs. Romney.”
The damage wrought by Hurricane Isaac, coming on the seventh anniversary of the flooding that decimated New Orleans and stunned a nation, serves as a not-so-subtle reminder of how much infrastructure matters to our safety and our economy.
This time the levees held, thanks in part to the $14.5 billion a shamed federal government was forced to invest following the 2005 disaster. But for decades, America has scrimped on taking care of the public furniture, endangering people and weakening the economy as bridges rust, roads crumble, dams weaken, and water mains leak. The sudden collapse of an Interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, killing 13, and the cracks that shut down the Sherman Minton Bridge connecting Indiana and Kentucky last year (it reopened in February) are warning signs of widespread, but hidden, dangers lurking all around us.
Paul Ryan’s speech to the Republican convention last week seems to have been some kind of watershed moment, at least for the media. Many of us watching the speech felt it was full of deceptive statements. That wasn't a new development. But this time reporters from the big, mainstream outlets said they agreed. That was a new development. Perhaps the most vivid and important instance was a story in the New York Times, by Michael Cooper, which told readers that several Ryan statements were “incorrect, incomplete or incompatible with his own record in Congress.”
But has the media overreacted? The usual suspects in the right wing press think so. But so do Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist on the Times op-ed page, and Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed. Neither are knee-jerk defenders of Romney, Ryan, and the Republicans. You should take what those two write seriously. I certainly do.
Earlier this summer—several eons ago in campaign time—the political story of the day was that Mitt Romney couldn’t identify a doughnut. Media outlets like BuzzFeed and Daily Kos ran with the story; it was minor and goofy and perpetuated the narrative of Romney as awkward and out of touch. But as a New Englander myself, I knew it was highly unlikely. Dunkin’ Donuts is, without a doubt, the surging, caffeinated lifeblood of Massachusetts. No way the former governor couldn’t recognize a doughnut.
In fact, there was another reason for Romney to be familiar with Dunkin’ Donuts: It’s arguably one of Bain Capital’s success stories (by their reckoning, anyway). And while Romney was gone from Bain Capital by the time it purchased this New England staple in 2005, his campaign has become a target for slighted employees who want higher wages, benefits, and better working conditions.
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