If Occupy Wall Street had a national plan to flood the IRS with illegal claims for tax-exempt status and some IRS clerks had run a search for “occupy,” they would probably get a bonus and the story would be Occupy’s “criminal conspiracy.” But if the search is for “tea party,” you have a different “scandal,” as William Boardman notes.
The Washington press corps is in hot pursuit of “Obama scandals,” stampeding officials into various rushes to judgment while missing the bigger scandals underlying the excitement du jour, such as the systematic abuse of federal tax-exempt status for secret political donations, as William Boardman notes.
Official Washington has long ignored the genocide and terrorism that Ronald Reagan inflicted on Central America in the 1980s, making it easier to genuflect before the Republican presidential icon. That also helped Reagan’s “death squad” tactics resurface in Iraq last decade, as William Boardman reports.
Though the Voting Rights Act was overwhelming reauthorized by Congress in 2006, the five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court may gut the law in the name of “states’ rights.” Justice Scalia led the way with provocative, offensive and even weird arguments, notes William Boardman.
In recent decades, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward has blundered in fawning books on Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and President George W. Bush – and now finds a threat in a routine exchange with a White House official. But overlooked is his war-mongering, says William Boardman.
An Energy Department plan to allow the recycling of scrap metals emitting very low levels of radiation is drawing opposition because of concerns about potential health hazards. But the upside for U.S. atomic bomb-makers is that waste now requiring costly storage could be sold for a profit, reports William Boardman.
Progress continues on the Keystone XL pipeline as it overcomes creative protests and legal challenges in East Texas. But opposition also is building with big-name environmentalists, like Robert Redford, urging the Obama administration to stand up against global warming, reports William Boardman.
The U.S. government has used Qatar to support “democracy promotion” in the Middle East, including as a logistical base for the invasion of Iraq. But Qatar’s rulers don’t like threats to their own tyrannical powers, even jailing a poet for life for implicitly criticizing the ruling sheikh, William Boardman reports.
The United States and Israel have threatened war against Iran if it crosses some “red line” in nuclear capability, yet these two nuclear-armed states are rarely criticized for their own nuke arsenals. A recent U.S. nuclear weapons test attracted almost no public attention, notes William Boardman.
Aging nuclear power plants present increasing risks to the U.S. environment, because of possible catastrophic events like the one that hit Fukushima, Japan, and storage problems with nuclear waste. A trespassing case in Vermont raised some of these questions, reports William Boardman.
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