Morning Cram — Week of March 9, 2015

You can read this post, and more, at www.politiclast.com.

Imagine a happy goose on a farm frolicking about, enjoying life, not really sure what his purpose on the farm might be. One day, the farmer shoves a tube down his throat and stuffs him with corn to enlarge his liver to make foie gras.

You’re the goose, we’re the farmer, the corn is the news, and the foie gras is delicious. None of you read the news, so we’re going to do it for you and then tell you what to think — unless, well, you form your own opinion. This is the first edition of Morning Cram, where we’ll throw out a few headlines of the top news stories of the past week minus ones we’ve covered elsewhere.

This feature will be published every Tuesday morning.

For the week of March 9, 2015:

U.S. declares Venezuela a national security threat

Venezuela has been blaming its problems on the United States since the late Hugo Chavez took office in 1999. Chavez has since died and Nicolas Maduro assumed office in 2013. So why are they a National Security Threat? Their economy is crumbling, and ever since Venezuela began its transformation under Chavez an emigration crisis and massive civil unrest due to incredible food and basic supply shortages, like, you need have your fingerprint scanned if you want to buy toilet paper. And, to top it off, they’ve been hosting military exercises with our BFFs, Putin. More on him later.

Obama emailed Clinton on her private address

This could be really bad for Hillary’s political career, not to mention an expected run at the 2016 Democratic Nomination for POTUS. Why does it matter that she used her private email? You know those Nigerians that claim to be in possession of millions of dollars for you and all they need is your bank info? Turns out they’re not the worst people on the internet. Hillary likely handled important classified government information as Sec. of State, and in a post-Wikileaks world, the Madame Secretary should have been a teensy bit more careful in trusting Gmail.

Obama announces changes for student loan repayment

Student loans are America’s biggest crisis at the moment. As much as your grandma will have you believe it’s Sharia Law — it’s not. Student debt has risen to an unmanageable sum (more than credit card debt), and young people all over the country are putting their lives on hold because of it. They’re not buying homes, not starting families, not traveling, and not spending. This is going to create a tremendous problem down the road when the lack of spending starts to hit the US economy hard. Question — if you’re covered in $100k+ and paying $1,500+ per month JUST to manage the interest, how do you pay for anything else when your job is giving you just enough for basic necessities? The answer is you’re fucked. Sadly, this might be the new normal.

Unions challenge Wisconsin’s new ‘right-to-work’ law in court

Scott Walker is the worst person in America. Right to Work laws hurt workers. It hurts blue collar folks that every politician, on both sides, is so adamant about. Right to Work boils down to pulling the teeth out of Unions and shifting the entire balance of power over to the employer. People make less money because of Right to Work.

Separately, Scott Walker, aforementioned worst person in America, commented on Obama’s many ineptitudes because whoever is holding his leash told him to. In the rant, he was asked about ISIS and what he would do to stop them. His response? “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

I don’t care where you land on the Right to Work issue, or how you feel about protestors, or how you feel about the situation in Wisconsin. The man compared lawful, AMERICAN, protestors protected by a First Amendment right to assemble to ruthless terrorists who are filling mass graves and very literally chopping people’s heads off. FOH.

Russia says has right to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea

Alright, this Crimea thing has been going on for a while, so I’m going to trust you to know some of the facts.

Russia is crumbling from the inside. Politically, it is a very weak country because its government relies almost solely on the support of its “oligarchs” to be legitimized. Separately, its government has a very obvious inferiority complex due to its powerful past as a world power and its obvious present as a lagging behemoth no longer able to compete on the world stage. Putin’s only hope of staying in power is to prove to his cronies that Russia is still a player and the only way to do that is to talk the talk even if everyone knows you can no longer walk the walk.

Ferguson police chief resigns after scathing DOJ report

Damn, that took a long time.

Boston bombing jury hears ‘officer down’ police radio call

The trial for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is underway, and there’s little doubt that a guilty verdict will be heard at its conclusion.

I decided to finish the first edition of Morning Cram with this story because there’s not much to say here outside of a larger point that I want to make.

I remember vividly the day of the Boston Marathon bombing and the aftermath. Boston shut down and a heavily militarized police force instilled curfews and martial law over the next several days in order to find and capture the perpetrators. I’m not going to talk about the problem with those events here because they’ve been covered [1] extensively [2] elsewhere [3].

People, from everyday civilians to Senators like Lindsey Graham and John McCain called for Tsarnaev to be named an enemy combatant without really understanding what that entailed:

Enemy combatant sounds bad. It sounds like what anyone would want to call someone like Tsarnaev, who, along with his brother, created so much pain and destruction for so many. However, had Tsarnaev been labeled as such, the day of his trial would have never came, and we’d never have the ability to put him through our judicial process, alongside a jury of his peers, and declare him guilty of the crimes he’s charged with. Instead, he’d be on a barge or in Guantanamo being tortured, but also living through an experience that in his mind, and in the mind of true enemy combatants, would justify his actions.

We should learn from this and be proud that we are sticking to our traditions and trusting our judicial system to go through its motions. After all, Tsarnaev is, and continues to be, an American citizen who allegedly broke the law in America, and should be given his rights as an American to a fair trial to answer for the crimes with which he’s been charged. I guarantee that when he is found guilty and sentenced closure will come easier to victims and their families than if he’d been removed completely from the national conscience and placed elsewhere.