NewsTrust - Congressional Oversight - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

DNC chair blames Tea Party ‘tyrants’ for S&P credit rating downgrade

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Hill - By Alicia M. Cohn - Aug. 08 (Opinion) - Alicia M. Cohn / The Hill: DNC chair blames Tea Party ‘tyrants’ for S&P credit rating downgrade — The head of the Democratic National Committee joined Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Monday in casting blame for the U.S. credit downgrade on the Tea Party movement. — Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) …

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For lesson in shared sacrifice, send Congress to boot camp

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Russel L Honore - Aug. 02 (Editorial) - Like most veterans, the men and women who have worn our nation's uniform to defend this country, I am furious with and disappointed in the state of indecision that plagued Washington these past few weeks. Whether or not to raise the debt ceiling so our country can continue to pay our bills and maintain our global credit rating didn't seem like such a difficult decision.

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Which Darrell Issa would run House oversight panel?

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Ruth Marcus - Oct. 27 (Opinion) - The election is less than a week away. Democratic control of the House is in jeopardy. So it's not too soon to start worrying about Darrell Issa.

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Why Obamanomics Has Failed

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Allan Meltzer - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics. First, administration economists and their outside supporters neglected the longer-term costs and consequences of their actions. Second, the administration and Congress have through their deeds and words heightened uncertainty about the economic future. High uncertainty is the enemy of investment and growth. Most of the earlier spending was a very short-term response to long-term problems. One piece financed temporary tax cuts. This was a mistake, and ignores the role of expectations in the economy. Economic theory predicts that temporary tax cuts have little effect on spending. Unless tax cuts are expected to last, consumers save the proceeds and pay down debt.

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Meet the Real Villain of the Financial Crisis.

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By BETHANY McLEAN - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - ... in the end, it comes down to this: Goldman Sachs, ACA Capital, IKB Deutsche Industriebank and even the rating agencies never had any duty to protect us from their greed. There was one entity that did — our government.

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What do we need health insurers for anyway?

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Michael Hiltzik - Feb. 28 (Opinion) - The only way insurers can remain profitable at all is by selling healthy people on policies that don't offer much coverage at all, while squeezing older, less healthy people remorselessly so they either pay for most of their care out of pocket or get priced out of the insurance market completely (thus becoming a burden for taxpayers).

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The Thread: Assassinating Americans, Killing the Constitution?

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Tobin Harshaw - Feb. 06 (Opinion) - Should we kill U.S. citizens abroad who aid terrorists?

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Those who caused the economic meltdown are still in denial

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Paul Krugman - Dec. 15 (Opinion) - Given recent economic history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation. But you would have been wrong.

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Obama's Big Sellout

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Dec. 12 (Opinion) - Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

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-- Yes Men Say No to Corporate Greed

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Jacques Servin, Igor Vamos - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - We are the Yes Men, two guys who dress up as powerful businessmen, propose horrible things to audiences of actual powerful businesspeople and film them cheerfully applauding our most outrageous -- and often illegal -- ideas.

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The Age of Irresponsibility

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Matthew Continetti - Feb. 22 (Opinion) - Decades from now, historians are going to fill e-tome after e-tome debating when the crisis in American authority began. A good place to start would be the Clinton era. The president of the United States had a tawdry affair, lied about it, and refused to accept any responsibility for his actions. The Republicans correctly pointed out that the president had acted beneath his office. The problem was that many of them were acting beneath their offices, too. In Washington, where the spirit of public service is supposed to reign, both Democrats and Republicans were using positions of power for private indulgence. Many things sprang from the Clinton impeachment. Confidence in authority was not one of them. We correct for the mistakes of past presidents. George W. Bush (barely) won the White House in part because he promised to restore integrity to the office. And the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did briefly increase the public's trust in government and its elites. In the tense months following the attacks, the public rallied behind strong leaders like Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Rumsfeld. These men, who had many private failings, nonetheless were seen to be acting in the interests of the nation as a whole. We seemed to be on the verge of a new era of patriotism and civic renewal.

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Why Foreign Ownership of US Assets is a Big Deal

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Post - By John Crudele - Sep. 18 (Opinion) - A few weeks back President Bush used his trip to the Olympics to chide his hosts, the Chinese, about human rights violations. Even if the president was truly passionate about the issue that probably wasn't the best move. Last week the Chinese - along with our friends the Japanese - are said to have insisted that Washington take action to protect their investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is exactly what happened. A lot of stuff has happened in the past week - AIG's bailout by the government, Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch's shotgun marriage to Bank of America, to name a few. But the fact that the Chinese, or anyone for that matter, had any influence as to how our country conducts its financial affairs is by far the most important and long-ranging event.

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Stark Revelation

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Aug. 23 (Editorial) - So government auditors have uncovered evidence of fraud in Medicare. Or rather, more fraud. The politicos lingering around Washington can barely keep a straight face as they claim to be shocked.

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Stonewalled by the C.I.A.

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Thomas H. Kean, Lee H. Hamilton - Jan. 02 (Opinion) - There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. -- or the White House -- of the commission's interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations.

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Democrats Find Their Voice

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:22:27 -0800

New York Times - Nov. 17 (Editorial) - It has been two long months since Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, cowed Congressional Democrats into silence, championing President Bush's misguided course on the war. We're pleased to see that the effects of his briefing are finally wearing off. The bad news, as ever, is that Mr. Bush and his Republican allies continue to resist reason. House Democrats distinguished themselves this week when they stood up to the White House's latest military funding steamroller: approving only $50 million of the additional $196 million the president requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also set conditions on the funding, including demands that troops start coming home from Iraq within 30 days and that the withdrawal be completed by mid-December 2008.

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Lawmakers Question Mukasey on Ideas

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 09:42:06 -0700

NPR - By Liane Hansen, Ari Shapiro - Oct. 21 (Review) - Congress questioned judge Michael Mukasey this week to determine whether he should succeed Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. Mukasey was asked about his beliefs on waterboarding and torture policy in general. [6:06]

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Suicide is not painless

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 09:31:31 -0700

International Herald Tribune - By Frank Rich - Oct. 21 (Opinion) - It was one of those stories lost in the newspaper's inside pages. Last week a man you've never heard of - Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the U.S. Air Force - killed himself by running his car's engine in his suburban Virginia garage. Riechers' suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance in a front-page expose in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Riechers, a decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: "I really didn't do anything for CRI. I got a paycheck from them." The question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.

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No To Mukasey

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:32:09 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Oct. 19 (Opinion) - An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney-general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator, (heh, indeed) I'd vote no. This is the faultline of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent.

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Blackwater's rich contracts

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:21:33 -0700

International Herald Tribune - Oct. 03 (Opinion) - It should come as no surprise that the Bush administration would take any opportunity to reward its political friends with lavish no-bid contracts. Still, there is something particularly unseemly about the munificent payments to Blackwater, the State Department's principal private security contractor in Iraq. With many Iraqis still seething after Blackwater guards killed at least eight Iraqis two weeks ago, it is evident that Blackwater and other security contractors are undermining the military's efforts to win over Iraqis.

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Blackwater Hearings Ain't no Superbad

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:10:04 -0700

Wired - By Noah Shachtman - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - Today, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing on private security contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given recent events in Iraq (the shooting involving Blackwater contractors that left as many as 20 dead) and the hearings' star witness (Erik Prince, chairman of the controversial firm) it was expected to be an important and even heated event. Indeed, the line of people waiting to attend the session this morning wrapped down the entire hallway corridor, like it was the premiere of a hit movie. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend, and even scored a seat on the front row. I should have gone to see Superbad instead. Writing now a few minutes after the first panel of the hearing has ended (some 4 hours later!), below are a few of my quick-hit observations. The best encapsulation of the entire hearings on this important matter of national security was that offered by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). He led his remarks by saying, "Hopefully, we will get to serious discussion." Then he proceeded to talk about everything from diabetes drugs to Moveon.org -- as opposed to the issues at hand.

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Lindsey Graham's Realism

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 10:05:16 -0700

Washington Post - By David S. Broder - Sep. 16 (Opinion) - Now that the president has endorsed the Petraeus-Crocker plan for Iraq, it is worth noting one exchange from their Senate hearings. Some senators, such as Barbara Boxer of California, were so self-absorbed they could not manage to ask a single question in their allotted time, even when they had Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker ready to provide answers. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is not like that. An Air Force Reserve officer, Graham is an incisive questioner whose unexpected and provocative inquiries often produce revealing answers, whether the subject is Iraq, immigration or a Supreme Court nomination.

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