Comedy Central has the video Charleston Church Shooting.

Jon addresses a racially motivated shooting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., which took the lives of nine parishioners.

Talking Points Memo has the article Why Conservatives Still Won’t Admit That Charleston Was A Racist Crime.

At this point, Roof’s bigotry has become clear in myriad ways. Yet as late as this afternoon, when cornered by a reporter and asked if the shooting was racially motivated, presidential candidate Jeb Bush said “I don’t know.” This means Bush is either incapable of basic logic, or he has willfully decided to blind and deafen himself to one of the nation’s biggest problems.

Further in the article the author, Aurin Squire, mentioned something that pokes me in the eye when I see it.

It is no secret that one of the baubles of the conservative movement is the Confederate flag, which appeared on Roof’s license plate. It is a symbol of white supremacy and slavery, and it is also a symbol that is a part of South Carolina’s official government as the flag flies in the capital. When questioned about her state’s continued support for it, Governor Haley shrugged it off.

Southerners can give a wink and a nod, or maybe a shrug, when they tell you what the flag means to them. I don’t care if they believe in their own bs or not. I know what it means to me. To Sharon, it means rescind your offer on a house in Florida when the neighborhood has too many of these flags. The Southern reaction to our decision on the house would probably be, “Good. I guess the flag served its purpose.” It is hard enough to live amongst a bunch of central Massachusetts conservatives. In the south, many of these people would be thought of as flaming liberal Yankees, but some of them would be thought of as kindred spirits.

The Ready For Warren organization sent me an email about a big announcement. The gist of the email is embodied in their CNN opinion piece.

Talking about members of the Ready For Warren campaign, the article said the following:

They are also ready to back “Warren Wing” candidates who embody Warren’s fearless brand of progressive populism. And although it isn’t just about the presidency, 58% of supporters have urged us to back Bernie Sanders as the candidate currently running for president who best embodies the values that Warren champions.

I am firmly in that 58% who urged the support of Bernie Sanders. The article explained why the creation of a new organization to back Sanders.

Why?

Because while Warren is the champion who inspired this movement, the draft effort was never just about her — it’s about her message and the values she represents.

This is pretty darn close to the exact words I used in many an email and opinion survey answers that I directed to Ready For Warren. What is left unsaid in the article is that of the 42% who did not suggest backing Bernie Sanders, how many of those just did not mention the topic of supporting another candidate. I don’t think that those who do not want to back Bernie Sanders is anywhere near that 42%

Naked Capitalism has the article Andrew Bacevich: Washington in Wonderland, Down the Iraq Rabbit Hole (Again).

You really have to read the article to see how the putting together of seemingly logical and small steps can lead to an illogical non-strategy. However, I know many of you can’t take the time to read the article, so I’ll give you some pieces that probably will mislead you from the gist of the article.

But first, I’ll give you my conclusion. If you can’t figure out what to do to fix a problem, and everything you can think to do will make the problem worse, then the only logical action is to do nothing. When people urge you to “don’t just stand there, do something” keep reminding them that anything you can think to do rather than just standing there will only make matters worse. Why do people insist that we make matters worse? What is the logic to that?

In describing one small step in the chain of illogic that he was describing, Bacevich said the following:

AT-4s blowing up those Humvees — with fingers crossed that the anti-tank weapons don’t also fall into the hands of ISIS militants — illustrates in microcosm the larger madness of Washington’s policies concealed by the superficial logic of each immediate situation.

In discussing a conversation that was on a PBS News Hour, Bacevich made the following points:

So what the former secretary of defense, think tank CEO, and retired general chose not to say in fretting about ISIS is as revealing as what they did say. Here are some of the things they chose to overlook:

* ISIS would not exist were it not for the folly of the United States in invading — and breaking — Iraq in the first place; we created the vacuum that ISIS is now attempting to fill.

* U.S. military efforts to pacify occupied Iraq from 2003 to 2011 succeeded only in creating a decent interval for the United States to withdraw without having to admit to outright defeat; in no sense did “our” Iraq War end in anything remotely approximating victory, despite the already forgotten loss of thousands of American lives and the expenditure of trillions of dollars.

* For more than a decade and at very considerable expense, the United States has been attempting to create an Iraqi government that governs and an Iraqi army that fights; the results of those efforts speak for themselves: they have failed abysmally.

Now, these are facts. Acknowledging them might suggest a further conclusion: that anyone proposing ways for Washington to put things right in Iraq ought to display a certain sense of humility. The implications of those facts — behind which lies a policy failure of epic proportions — might even provide the basis for an interesting discussion on national television. But that would assume a willingness to engage in serious self-reflection. This, the culture of Washington does not encourage, especially on matters related to basic national security policy.

Just to boost my ratings, I’ll embed the panel discussion below. Bacevich, in his article, admits that his contribution to this discussion was too weak and ineffective, and failed to make the points he made in the article.

Here is the blurb that went along with the above video.

The White House has announced it will send more troops to fight the Islamic State group in Iraq. To discuss the multi-front war with the militants, Judy Woodruff talks to Michèle Flournoy of the Center for a New American Security, retired Col. Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command.

Naked Capitalism has the article Unresolved Allegations of Criminal Insider Trading Leaks from the Fed.

A segment on yesterday’s Boom/Bust program, starting a 22:30, discusses the still-open inspector general criminal investigation into leaks from the Fed. As Ed Harrison recounts, the Fed had set up limits on meetings with officials in 2011 because former Fed staffers were profiting from these relationships.

If the Fed is not answering Congress’s questions, I don’t know why the Congress can’t just initiate its own investigation. If the Fed failed to make a referral to the Department of Justice, why can’t the Department of Justice initiate its own investigation based on what is already publicly known.

The Naked Capitalism article pointed to the Pro Publica article Leak at Federal Reserve Revealed Confidential Bond-Buying Details.

Leaks from inside the Fed are considered a serious matter. In the past, they have prompted Congressional concern and triggered the involvement of federal law enforcement. In this instance, then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke instructed the central bank’s general counsel to look into the matter.

Why is Congress being so reticent in investigating this matter? Do they already know who is the powerful person that they all need to protect? The SEC probably has the capability of finding out who were the big money makers from the leaked information. They certainly know who published the information. Was that a criminal act itself?

Patheos has the article Jeb Bush Says Catholic Dogma Trumps US Government.

Theocracy Alert: In an ominous speech announcing his 2016 presidential campaign, Jeb Bush promised if elected president he would favor Catholic dogma over the courts, the law, and the U.S. government.

John Ellis Bush (aka Jeb) is free to choose his own religion, but he is not free to choose mine.

The Salon article Here’s how Bernie Sanders could win: The one issue where Hillary’s vulnerable, and where the Tea Party might be right has the perfect one line description to start you off.

If progressives want to retake government, a full-throated war on public corruption is the key to everything

I liked the fact that the article notes that corruption of the political system was running rife long before the Citizen’s United decision where the Supreme Court explicitly accepted corruption as part of the system.

In Citizens United, Justice Kennedy “found” that government has no stake in “soft corruption”–the billions spent on lobbying and elections–because, he says, it does no harm and people don’t seem to mind it.

This is nowhere near what the founding ancestors thought about corruption. If Supreme Court justices actually wanted to be strict constructionists, they would not be so cavalier about even a hint of corruption.

I bet some politicians are going to say that the Supreme Court will knock down any efforts at fixing the system. So first we have to change the Supreme Court. Under the current corrupt system, that would take too long before we could even get started.

If we have a flood of laws making even the hint of corruption punishable, as the founding ancestors did, it could take years for the Supreme Court to knock them down. While the reformers are at it, they could also make clear that impeachment will rapidly follow any Supreme Court justices who take money, or even vague promises of favors, for their decisions. There are at least a couple of current justices who would be gone in seconds if this rule were enforced.

To set the stage, let’s take a little detour into the preposterous article by Reuters, Greek PM tears into lenders, euro zone prepares for ‘Grexit’

“In the event a solid reform package is not presented, then a ‘Grexit’ would have to be accepted if necessary,” said Michael Grosse-Broemer, a senior lawmaker in Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “I’m not so sure anymore if the Greek government is really interested in averting damage for the people of Greece.”

How much worse can it get than what Germany has already forced on Greece? We know who isn’t really interested in averting damage for the people of Greece. This is a ploy often used by our Republicans. They know perfectly well what a damaging policy is when they choose it. In fact they think it is so damaging that the accuse the other side of doing it. The gall of it is almost beyond belief had we not seen it with our own eyes.

OK, let’s return from the detour to the article on New Economic Perspectives, The IMF “Defense” of it Actions against the Greeks is an Unintended Confession.

The IMF, the heedless horseman of the troika that announced it would stop negotiating with the Greeks and go home, has attempted to justify its position through Olivier Blanchard, its “Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department.” Blanchard entitled his defense “Greece: A Credible Deal Will Require Difficult Decisions By All Sides.” That is a “serious person” title, but it is also economically illiterate – and no one knows that better than Blanchard. After all, it is the IMF’s deeply neo-liberal economists whose research has confirmed that the IMF’s austerity policies are self-destructive responses to the Great Recession and that fiscal stimulus programs are even more effective than economists had predicted.

The reason why this ought to be of so much interest in the USA, is that if we let the oligarchs get away with this behavior in Greece, it only strengthens the arguments for doing it here. If we get the chance to prove them wrong in a definitive way, then we can more easily defeat them here. Who was it said that we’d rather defeat them over there than have to fight them over here?

I received an email from Bernie Sanders where he promised not to make the same mistake that President Obama did when he got into office. I have previously identified this exact mistake. My most recent post on this was House Rejects Trade Measure, Rebuffing Obama’s Dramatic Appeal. The fact that Bernie Sanders nailed the issue so well just thrills me.

Campaign For America’s Future has the article Hillary’s Relaunch. It is an excellent analysis. I would take their comments a step further than they did.

The call for an infrastructure bank and issuing bonds shows that she knows nothing about modern money theory. We are trying to pump money into the economy through fiscal policy. We don’t need to take money out of the economy by selling bonds. Although, I must admit, if the bonds are bought by the wealthy, and we take their money out of one investment into another, that could work out well. Even better would be to tax the money away from the wealthy. We don’t need to be paying them interest for lending us back our own money. I don’t think her economic advisers are sharp enough to get the difference. Also, if they do know the difference, they need to be educating the public on this nuance. They need to dispel the myth that we need taxes or bonds to borrow back the money the government freely creates with a few keystrokes on a computer.

Her call for tax incentives for corporations that do the right thing sounds like more giving away taxes to the wealthy. We ought to tax penalize the companies that do the wrong thing, and charge normal taxes on companies that do the right thing.

What she said on foreign policy was enough to indicate that she was overly hawkish. Did she have to poke Russia and Iran? Did she fail to mention what we have done to those to countries to make them our adversaries? Does she feel that “standing up to them” is part of our problem? Did she own up to our provocation in the Ukraine that made this situation the mess that it is?