Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Sequesters, aspirations, drones

Headlines vis Newseum Joseph Stiglitz looks at the myth of social mobility.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity.

The New York Times looks at the effects of the sequester. And the cause.

These cuts, which will cost the economy more than one million jobs over the next two years, are the direct result of the Republican demand in 2011 to shrink the government at any cost, under threat of a default on the nation's debt. Many Republicans say they would still prefer the sequester to replacing half the cuts with tax revenue increases. But the government spending they disdain is not an abstract concept. In a few days, the cuts will begin affecting American life and security in significant ways.

Carl Hiassen thinks it's more than water that Rubio desires.

Dear Marco,

One simple word sums up your unorthodox rebuttal to the President's State of the Union Address: Genius.

Pausing in the midst of a speech that nobody would otherwise remember, lunging off-camera for a bottle of water and then slurping it like a demented hummingbird'.'.'.

Time magazine was right. You are the savior of the Republican Party.

Was the whole country laughing at you? Possibly. OK, yeah. ...

In retrospect, it was the best thing that could have happened... Thanks to you, Marco, nobody's talking about that moldy little speech. They're talking about you jonesing for that water bottle.

Leonard Pitts weighs in on the drone controversy. Read this one to warmup for the next installment of Hunter's examination of the legal issues around drone strikes.  

To those acts of violence against clarity, we can add a new one. A Justice Department memo recently obtained by NBC News authorizes drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens who join al-Qaeda, saying this is legal when three conditions are met. The third is that the operation be conducted 'consistent with applicable law of war principles.' The second is that capture is infeasible. But it is the first that puts ice down your back. It requires that 'an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.'

If you don't see why that should shiver your spine, perhaps you use a different dictionary than the government. Merriam-Webster for instance, defines 'imminent' as an adjective meaning, 'ready to take place; especially: hanging threateningly over one's head.'

But in its memo, which surfaces as the Senate ponders confirming John Brennan as director of the CIA, the Justice Department says its definition of 'imminent threat' doesn't require 'clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.'

In other words, 'imminent' doesn't mean 'imminent.' And if U.S. intelligence ' which we all know is infallible, right? ' determines you to be a member of al Qaida, that determination, absent any evidence of a planned attack, gives the government the legal pretext to vaporize you. Worse, the government contends this may be done without oversight, judicial or otherwise. The president becomes, quite literally, your judge, jury and executioner.

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