Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "Congress Followed Massachusett's Lead" - Tim Murphy

The Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act by a 5 to 4 vote. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, responding to the ruling in front of the US Capitol, reiterated his pledge to spend his hypothetical first day in office working to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

Romney, the only other elected official in American history to mandate that citizens buy health insurance, probably won't like this passage from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion:

By requiring most residents to obtain insurance, see Mass. Gen. Laws, ch. 111M, §2 (West 2011), the Commonwealth ensured that insurers would not be left with only the sick as customers. As a result, federal lawmakers observed, Massachusetts succeeded where other States had failed.  See Brief for Commonwealth of Massachusetts as Amicus Curiae in No. 11–398, p. 3 (not­ing that the Commonwealth’s reforms reduced the number of uninsured residents to less than 2%, the lowest rate in the Nation, and cut the amount of uncompensated care by a third); 42 U. S. C. §18091(2)(D) (2006 ed., Supp. IV) (noting the success of Massachusetts’ reforms). In cou­pling the minimum coverage provision with guaranteed­ issue and community-rating prescriptions, Congress followed Massachusetts' lead.

In a sane political climate, Mitt Romney would happily take credit for this. As it stands, he's in the uncomfortable position of once more distancing himself from his biggest political accomplishment.

The full article is available here

How Many Americans Are Killed by Terrorism? - Micah Zenko

The number of U.S. citizens who died in terrorist attacks increased by two between 2010 and 2011; overall, a comparable number of Americans are crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year. This is not to diminish the real—albeit shrinking—threat of terrorism, or to minimize the loss and suffering of the 13,000 killed and over 45,000 injured around the world. For Americans, however, it should emphasize that an irrational fear of terrorism is both unwarranted and a poor basis for public policy decisions.

This data was included the National Counter Terrorism Center's just-released 2011 Report on Terrorism. The report offers the U.S. government’s best statistical analysis of terrorism trends through its Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS), which compiles and vets open-source information about terrorism

Here are a few points worth highlighting that notably contrast with the conventional narrative of the terrorist threat:

“In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years.”

Of 978 terrorism-related kidnapping last year, only three hostages were private U.S. citizens, or .3 percent. A private citizen is defined as ‘any U.S. citizen not acting in an official capacity on behalf of the U.S. government.’

Of the 13,288 people killed by terrorist attacks last year, seventeen were private U.S. citizens, or .1 percent.

The full article is available here

stART Turns Worcester's Green Street Into A Cultural Landscape - Steven H. Foskett Jr.

stART on the Street is central Massachusetts largest, art, music and performance festival.   

The past few years the spring stART festival has been held in the north Main Street area, but this year the Canal District people invited the group to set up in their neighborhood. A rain out last weekend didn't seem to have an impact on attendance on a warm Sunday under perfect skies.

With Green Street blocked off for the day, thousands of people roamed up and down. Families and couples tried on jewelry and munched on food from local restaurants, while various bands played. A belly dancer stopped festival-goers in their tracks, while an acoustic guitarist gently soothed the crowd above a lot on Gold Street. Puppeteers entertained little ones as they walked by, and a car show, new for this year, offered a small but eclectic display of everything from old Dodges and Pontiacs to a quirky old 1960s Saab 96. The venue was dog-friendly, stroller friendly, and even iguana friendly, as a man walked by holding the large lizard.

Stacy Lord, one of the festival's co-directors, said it seemed to be a good fit early in the afternoon.

“It has a whole flair to itself,” Ms. Lord said.

The full article is available here

Florida: You Cannot Take Our Vote - Lisa Sharon Harper

June 4 marked the 93rd anniversary of the congressional passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. On August 18, 1920 Tennessee became the 36th state to pass the Amendment and on that day women’s suffrage became the law of the land. 

Florida missed that boat. The sunshine state had never voted on the 19th Amendment before it was ratified. Florida’s legislature didn’t actually ratify the 19th Amendment until it took a symbolic vote in 1969.

The current news about Florida’s voter purge has me wondering what happened in the 43 years between Florida’s symbolic thumbs up for suffrage and today’s current voter suppression?

The answer: The year 2000 happened.

Katherine Harris was elected Florida’s Secretary of State in 1998. Soon after, she initiated a voter purge in Florida that had been unseen since the days of Jim Crow. More than 57,700 eligible voters were wrongfully purged from Florida’s voter rolls. Harris claimed the purge was an attempt to block convicted felons from voting, but the purge was conducted in such a way that the state gave itself wide latitude to strike names that were not confirmed felons.

Recently Florida launched a new voter suppression campaign that claims to target non-citizens, but disproportionately affects Latinos and relies on an unreliable list of 2700 potential citizens. 

In a democracy, the ability to vote is one of the most basic ways each citizen is given to exercise agency in her world.  No matter how poor you are, no matter how rich you are, no matter marginalized you are, no matter how much power you wield, no matter obscure your life, and no matter how famous your name - all have the right to exercise a most basic form of agency in our world—the cast of a vote.

So, as we celebrate the anniversary of the congressional passage of the 19th Amendment, I celebrate the Justice Department’s decision to block implementation of Florida’s latest ode to Jim Crow. And I thank the 67 county elections supervisors, 30 of whom are Republican, who have defied Gov. Rick Scott and refused to implement the Florida purge.

The full article is available here

Will Americans Speak Out Against Obama's Drone Warfare? - Medea Benjamin

On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die.

The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.

An article in the Washington Post today, entitled “Drone strikes spur backlash in Yemen,” shows that the damage is not just long term but immediate. After interviewing more than 20 tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from southern Yemen, journalist Sudarsan Raghavan concluded that the escalating U.S. strikes are radicalizing the local population and stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants. “The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders,” said legal coordinator of a local human rights group Mohammed al-Ahmadi, “but they are also turning them into heroes.”

Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer suing the CIA on behalf of drone victims, thinks its time for the American people to speak out. “Can you trust a program that has existed for eight years, picks its targets in secret, faces zero accountability and has killed almost 3,000 people in Pakistan alone whose identities are not known to their killers?,” he asks. “When women and children in Waziristan are killed with Hellfire missiles, Pakistanis believe this is what the American people want. I would like to ask Americans, ‘Do you?’”

The full article is available here

Paul Krugman: We Could End This Depression Right Now - Josh Holland

The central message of Noble Laureate Economist Paul Krugman's new book, End This Depression Now! is simple: It doesn't have to be like this. No external dynamic is keeping unemployment at more than 8 percent and consigning a generation of young workers to an economy in which risk is plentiful and opportunities scarce. It is only a failure of political will -- and an almost universal embrace of conservative voodoo economics – that is keeping us mired in this dark economic moment.

Of the 2009 stimulus, Krugman writes, “Those who had more or less the right ideas about what the economy needed, including President Obama, were timid, never willing either to acknowledge just how much action was required or to admit later on that what they did in the first round was inadequate.” Instead of treating the dismal jobs picture as a crisis requiring their full attention, Washington “pivoted” to talking about the deficit – a phantom menace -- at precisely the wrong time. “People with the wrong ideas,” Krugman writes, “were vehement and untroubled by self-doubt.”

The moral of the book is: this doesn’t have to be happening. This is essentially a technical process; it’s a small thing. It’s like having a dead battery in a car, and while there may be a lot wrong with the car, you can get the car going remarkably easily, if you’re willing to accept that’s what the problem really is.

First and foremost, what we have is an economy that just doesn’t have enough spending. Consumers are hobbled by debt, corporations don’t want to spend if they don’t see consumer demand. Somebody has to step in and spend, and that somebody is the government. The government could – and by all means let’s talk about forward-looking, big projects -- right away get a big boost in the economy just by reversing the big cutbacks that have taken place in state and local governments these past three years. Get the schoolteachers rehired and get the policemen and firefighters back on the beat. Fill those potholes that have been developing in New Jersey and I believe all over America. We’d then be most of the way back to a decent economy again.

The full article is available here

Paul Simon's Graceland, Apartheid and the 'Deep Truth that Artists Speak' - Cathleen Falsani

For many of us, Graceland — rightly or wrongly — planted seeds of the beauty and joyful strength of Africa in our imaginations for the first time.

25 years after the release of Paul Simon's Graceland album, the singer-songwriter returned to South Africa to visit the musicians who worked with him on what many believe is his musical masterpiece. A new documentary film, Under African Skies, chronicles Simon's journey and the role that music — and artists — may have played in bringing about the end of apartheid.

This was 1985. Nelson Mandela still was in prison (on year 22 of his sentence and more than five years away from his eventual release.) Apartheid struggles and extreme racial tensions in South Africa had reached a vicious zenith. And there also was a cultural boycott in place. Artists — no matter how famous or big-hearted they might be — were supposed to stay away from the country.

Joseph Shabalala, founder and leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the South African acapella group featured on the album that Simon introduced to the American audience via a now famous performance on Saturday Night Live well before Graceland ever hit record shops, calls Simon “brother.”

“He just come to me like a baby, like, ‘Father, can you teach me something?’ And we hug. That was my first time to hug … a white man,” Shabalala recalls in the film. “When we started working together, we didn’t see black or white… He’s my brother.”

Graceland won numerous awards, including a Grammy for record of the year, and has gone on to become one of the most enduring albums in American music. Musically it did things that hadn’t been done before in popular genres, mixing traditional African tunes, sounds and rhythms, sampling bits from disparate cultures.

But the celebrated album is much more than the sum of its parts. For many of us, Graceland — rightly or wrongly — planted seeds of the beauty and joyful strength of Africa in our imaginations for the first time, which led more than a few of us to dig deeper into issues of injustice there and raise our voices on behalf of our African brothers and sisters.

The full article is available here

Tenacious D: Rize Of The Fenix (B+) - AV Club

If 2006’s Tenacious D In 'The Pick Of Destiny' hadn’t bombed at the box office, Jack Black and Kyle Gass would’ve had to invent some other setback to rise (or rize) from on the new Rize Of The Fenix. Black acknowledges the failure of Destiny right in the album’s opening line, as well as the not-all-that-exaggerated assumption that the movie finished off Tenacious D for good.

But rather than dwell on Jack and Rage Kage’s bad fortune, Rize posits The Pick Of The Destiny as motivation for Tenacious D to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is still a good best rock ’n’ roll band. This puts Tenacious D on a furious quest that brings out its best on Rize.

Whereas Tenacious D was an arena-metal record, Rize Of The Fenix touches on a number of styles, including the Spanish guitar finger-picking of “Senorita,” the English folk of “The Ballad Of Hollywood Jack And The Rage Kage,” and the ’80s soundtrack pastiche “To Be The Best.” Rize still has plenty of heft—much of it courtesy of Dave Grohl, who plays drums on nearly every track—but Black and Gass have made an album that is surprisingly varied and even epic at times, particularly the title track, which moves through Iron Maiden dynamics to a gooey, power-pop chorus.

The full article is available here

Clean Energy As Culture War - David Roberts

On clean energy, the material/financial aspects of the conflict are the easiest to understand. Wind, solar, and the rest threaten the financial dominance and political influence of dirty energy. However, there also the cultural and psychological aspects of the conflict.

Conservative leaders are telling their flock that there are endless deposits of fossil fuels all around them, if only those pesky Democrats and their regulations would get out of the way. The message is that the American way of life can continue forever, indeed that it is our patriotic birthright, but that Democrats want to take it from them. That goes deeper than energy. It’s about home and hearth.

In terms of broad cultural associations and identities, the issue of energy is wrapped up in a way of life that they claim is under threat from multiple directions.  They’re saying that Democrats want to make America, the land of plenty, into Europe, the (imagined) land of tiny cars, cramped apartments, and high prices. Again, that’s about more than prices or watts. It’s about cultural identity.

This is in spite of the fact that the per-unit price of energy goes up, consumer bills can go down, through efficiency. It’s possible to use less energy while still enjoying the same high quality of life. There’s no other choice. Cheap, abundant fossil fuels are a thing of the past.

Reducing emissions enough to substantially slow climate change will inevitably involve being more judicious and intelligent in our energy use. Profligate, heedless consumption of disposable crap is going to have to be reined in. That will mean changing habits and land-use patterns. Insofar as those habits and land-use patterns are viewed as constitutive of a “way of life,” many will view that as a threat.

The full article is available here

Exonerees Served More than 10,000 Years in Prison for Crimes They Didn't Commit - Maurice Possley

Nearly a quarter of a century after DNA testing was used to prove that a defendant had been falsely convicted of a crime, the American public has become familiar with the phenomenon and how the script plays out in our courtrooms.

The exonerated defendant stands before a judge and is informed that the conviction is vacated and the charges are dismissed. And then the former inmate —more than 100 have come from Death Row — is joined by family members and lawyers in a celebration on the courthouse steps.

Yes, it is a joyous occasion to step from behind prison bars after years — as many as 30 years in one case —of being locked up for a crime that was not committed.

But, as a report issued Monday by the National Registry of Exonerations makes clear, behind every one of these jubilant moments are tragedies, some of them of enormous proportion.

The full article is available here

The Mecca of Metal - Worcester Palladium Proves Its Worth In Niche Market - Matt Robert

“If you’re into metal music anywhere in the world, you know about the Palladium,” says Chris Besaw of Break-Thru Music, a joint business venture of MassConcerts, which exclusively books the Palladium as well as a few dozen other venues throughout southern New England. “It’s definitely known internationally within that world of the metal and hardcore scene.”

Justin Thomas, 27, agrees. He, along with friend, Jason Gill, 32, drove 500 miles from southern Maryland to attend the event, renting a hotel room in Westboro for the weekend.

“We met people from Australia,” raves Scott McLennan, freelance journalist and former music editor with the Worcester Telegram.  “I remember one time I was hanging out [at the festival] and there was this band,” recalls McLennan, laughing. “I want to say it was [Polish blackened death metal band] Behemoth [who played NEMF in 2007] – and the guitar player walks into the Palladium and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe I’m here; I can’t believe I’m in the Palladium!’ And Mike Hsu [of WAAF] and I were like, ‘This shit hole?’ So, it was like hallowed ground, like ‘Metal Land.’”

“There’s definitely a huge economic runoff,” assures Besaw. “We’re bringing in probably, over the course of the weekend, in and out of the building, about 7,000 people. A lot of those people stayed in local hotels. I know some of those hotels were sold out. We allow re-entry during the day. So, these kids were all out in the streets, going to local restaurants, going to local stores across the street. Everybody who’s in the area is benefitting from us bringing these people to the city.”

The full article is available here

Tea Partiers Who Opposed Bank Bailout Take Campaign Donations From Bailed-Out Banks - Travis Waldron

Tea Party-backed candidates swept into Washington in 2010 on a wave of opposition to bank bailouts. Now that they’re in Washington, however, their campaigns are drowning in campaign cash provided by the very banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The 10 freshmen Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee who have Tea Party backing have taken more than $100,000 from the political action committees affiliated with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs — the nation’s five largest banks.

The Tea Party hasn’t succeeded in ending “too big too fail” because they haven’t tried. Though the five biggest banks are now bigger than they were before the financial crisis, the Tea Party members haven’t proposed a single piece of legislation to limit their size. Instead, they’ve focused on repealing financial reform and blocking efforts to protect consumers from Wall Street’s predatory practices.

The full article is available here

Corporations Spending The Most On Lobbying See Their Tax Rates Drop - Rebecca Leber

Two-thirds of the largest 200 U.S. corporations lobbied on at least one tax bill between 2007 and 2010, and here’s why: the majority of them ended up paying lower taxes in 2010.

The eight major corporations that spent the most on lobbying, for a total $540 million, all saw their tax rates decrease. According to a Sunlight Foundation report, the odds that those companies saw lower rates merely by chance is less than 1 in 100. The odds that six of those corporations paid seven percentage points less is even lower, at only 1 in 100,000.

Instead, the reduction was likely a result of their presence in Washington, lobbying for tax giveaways.

The full article is available here

The "Voter Fraud" Fraud - Ari Berman

Between 2000 and 2007, there were 32,299 UFO sightings in the United States, 352 deaths caused by lightning, but only nine cases of voter impersonation, according to a great new infographic by Craiglist founder Craig Newmark.

Yet conservatives continue to hype the extremely rare occurrence of election fraud as if it were a widespread problem and is somehow responsible for the election of Obama. And there is evidence that they’ve been successful in pushing this fact-free narrative among the broader public.

In 2009, Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin of Occidental College studied the media coverage of ACORN during the 2008 election and concluded:

• 82.8% of the stories failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare
• 80.3% of the stories failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law
• 85.1% of the stories about ACORN failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems
• 95.8% of the stories failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of "voter fraud" to dampen voting by low‐income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with the politicization of voter-fraud accusations—firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

The real story in 2012 is how the myth of voter fraud has been advanced by Republicans to justify new voting restrictions in more than a dozen states, which could disenfranchise up to 5 million voters on Election Day, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That’s a whole lot of casualties in response to a few bad actors.

The full article is available here

When Politicians Hit Wrong Notes - Dave Whitaker

The GOP isn’t unique in the art of foot-in-mouth disease, but 2012 is proving a banner year for the party with the pachyderm mascot to wade knee-deep in elephant dung. The Republicans just can’t stop picking campaign songs without first securing the rights.

Candidates are supposed to get permission from ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) to use copyrighted music in any kind of public performance. However, the Grand Old Party seems to have developed a Grand Old Tradition of failing to do so – or at least, failing make sure the act they’re playing is actually on board with the politician.

This classic stumble can be traced back to 1984. When President Ronald Reagan was running for re-election, he cited Bruce Springsteen as representative of the American dream. What he failed to realize is that “Born in the U.S.A.”, Springsteen’s hit at the time, was not a flag-waving anthem but a seething attack on the poor treatment received by Vietnam veterans when they came home. Oops.

I don’t deny there are ample bone-headed errors from both sides of the political fence. When it comes to politicians associating themselves with music, though, the Republican party has a runaway lead on hitting sour notes.

The full article is available here

A New Green Agenda for Commuters - The Nation

The huge difference between the thinking of Republicans and Democrats disappears when it comes to gas prices. Both subscribe to the same dubious premise: we can lower prices by increasing supply. But over the past decade, such policies have had little effect on the global oil market.

It’s time to change our approach: rather than trying to increase supply in a vain attempt to cut prices, progressives should be embracing policies that will reduce the amount of gasoline we use, thus reducing the impact of prices on household budgets and the national economy.

Progressives should establish a new green agenda that takes the dialogue away from the empty promises of Republicans, who persist in the fantasy that more drilling will bring lower prices. We have much to gain if we make energy (and by extension the environment) a tangible pocketbook issue for the middle class. Instead of talking about abstractions like green jobs and green energy, candidates have to focus on greener rides—and greener wallets.

Three big policy initiatives could put families back in control of their money and their lives: a loan guarantee program for efficient cars, a set of incentives that involve employers in worker transit, and a reorientation of highway and transit funding to encourage innovation and choice in transit. As I’ll discuss below, these strategies—while markedly different from most of the green proposals under discussion—deliver large environmental, economic and political benefits quickly, while building a platform for deeper cuts in carbon emissions and larger markets for green services in the future.

The full article is available here

Ryan Budget is Robin Hood in Reverse, On Steroids - Bob Greenstein

House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan's budget is a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past  half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature. In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids.  It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).

Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured. It would also impose severe cuts in non-defense discretionary programs—much deeper than the across-the-board cuts ("sequestration") that are scheduled to take place starting in January — thereby putting core government functions at still greater risk.

Yet alongside these extraordinary budget cuts, with their dismantling of key parts of the safety net, the budget features stunning new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

The full article is available here

Gas Price Rhetoric Pumps Up The Hype - Bob King

The debate about rising gasoline prices is generating a lot of fuzzy math. Hence the cloud of murky, misleading or downright inaccurate rhetoric flying around.  Here’s POLITICO’s guide to some of the season’s most bewildering rhetoric:

1) Oil and gasoline prices are the highest they’ve been since 1918. Or the past 150 years:
The reality: Gasoline prices are still below the peaks they reached under Bush in June 2008, when the inflation-adjusted monthly average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.26, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And even at $107 a barrel, crude oil is still well below that summer’s high price of $145 a barrel.

2) Gasoline prices have doubled under Obama:
This statement is true, though it’s incomplete — which hasn’t stopped it from becoming part of the standard GOP stump speech on energy policy.  The pre-Obama era was no low-gas-price utopia either, and prices more than doubled under Bush before the financial crash. The summer 2008 peak was 127 percent higher than the inflation-adjusted price of $1.88 a gallon when Bush was inaugurated.

3) U.S. oil and gas production is way down under Obama. Or way up:
Here, the two parties sound like they live in separate universes.  On federal lands and federal offshore waters, oil production fell sharply last year, partly because of the after-effects of the BP spill — but was still 12 percent higher than before Obama became president.

Natural gas production, meanwhile has soared to the highest levels ever, mainly because of the industry’s success in extracting previously unimagined quantities from shale reserves on private and state-owned lands.

The production numbers, drops in fuel demand and improvements in energy efficiency have caused U.S. reliance on petroleum imports to shrink to their lowest levels since the late 1990s

4) Watergate-gate:
D.C.-area residents are familiar with the insanely high prices of the Exxon station at the Watergate complex, which routinely charges as much as $1 a gallon more than other stations less than a mile away — including a Sunoco across the street. So that makes it a magnet for news organizations or other groups shopping for a shocking price, especially one within walking distance of the White House.

The full article is available here

Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents - Religion Dispatches

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American evangelicalism, reaching into the classrooms of popular schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University. Millions of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a real debate when it comes to human origins, that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice, and that secular historians are suppressing the vision of the Founding Fathers that America was supposed to be a Christian nation.

Controversies that should have died decades and even centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers, say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral, family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that the present age is not.

Many evangelicals, skeptical that a PhD after a name gives any reasonable authority, have come to sympathize with and even celebrate Fox News’ and its most well-known anti-intellectual, Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly, who pits his understanding against that of experts in their fields of study, is fond of scoffing, “sorry, professor, not buying it,” suggesting that expertise is really just opinion.

There are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists, and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields. Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they do not speak the language of biblical inerrancy, anti-evolution, and conservative politics embraced by other Christians.  The intellectual trajectory of American evangelicalism is not encouraging.

The full article is available here

Lessons To Be Learned From Greece - Nicholas Kristof

In the United States, Republicans lambaste President Obama's stimulus package as a failure and insist on bone-crunching budget-cutting. If you want to know how well that works, come visit Europe — especially Greece.

Yes, Greece needed a wake-up whack and economic reform, but Republican-style austerity knocked the patient unconscious. Contrast the still-shrinking economies of Europe with the stirrings of recovery in the United States, and you feel lucky to be an American and a beneficiary of President Obama's stimulus.

No doubt Greece had been living recklessly and needed structural reforms. While much of Europe was fundamentally healthy until the crisis hit, Greece truly was a mess. But the problem was not a welfare state — Greece has much less of a safety net than northern Europe. Rather, it was corruption, inefficiency and a system in which laws are optional.

Yet instead of structural reforms or improved tax collection, what has changed in Greece, so far, has mostly been slashed budgets. And austerity in the middle of recession has made matters worse — just as John Maynard Keynes predicted.

One of the earliest recorded economic crises in the Western world came in Athens in the fifth century B.C. Fortunately, Athens was then led by the great Pericles, an early Keynesian who did not respond by slashing budgets.

Instead, he ordered a public-works initiative and built the Parthenon.

The full article is available here

Walmart is no savior: More small businesses = healthier people - Tom Laskway

Reforming our food system is a Herculean task; one that might intimidate Hercules himself.  Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations.  And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

A new report from Food and Water Watch argues that, not only is Walmart’s dominance problematic in general, but the company’s recent projection of itself as a food system savior is misleading.

Walmart’s model is based on practices that drive consolidation; take money away from farmers, workers, and processors; and drive agriculture to get more industrialized. Walmart’s model is part of the problem, which means the company is not going to be a meaningful part of the solution to shortcomings in the modern-day food supply.

A recent study published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society suggests that communities that invite Walmart in may be making a devil’s bargain. The study found strong evidence that communities that rely on big box retailers — and large corporate employers in general — are less healthy and have higher rates of obesity and diabetes than those that don’t.

The researchers found that, despite the advantages that employees of large companies have in income and benefits, communities as a whole who relied on small businesses were more healthy otherwise. As they put it, “The concentration of small businesses is associated with lower rates of mortality, obesity and diabetes.”

The full article is available here

Challenging the Self-Made Myth - Katrina vanden Heuvel

Over the last thirty years, anti-government arguments by conservative pundits and politicians have gained prominence, and the rhetoric this 2012 campaign season seems more toxic than ever.  Republicans are relentlessly pushing the notion that lower taxes, less regulation and small government (except for Defense) will magically end the recession, create a better country, and “job creators” will lift all boats.

It’s BS. As Congressman Barney Frank recently said, “I’ve never seen a tax cut put out a fire. I’ve never seen a tax cut build a bridge.”  Americans benefit every day from government—from consumer protection to roads and bridges to food and safety regulation.

A central myth that underlies today’s anti-government rhetoric: that an individual’s success is the result of gumption and hard work alone.  In reality, personal success is closely tied to the supports society provides.  In fact, the greater an individual’s success, the greater his or her dependence on public infrastructure, public investment in research and innovation, and regulations and fair rules.

No one has honed in on the need to reset the narrative on government more effectively than Elizabeth Warren who laid out her cogent argument simply and powerfully in a gritty video clip that went viral: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The full article is available here

As Santorum and Romney Battle for Loony Right, The Rest of Us Shouldn't Gloat - Robert Reich

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat.  What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.  But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.  Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years.  They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as “tea partiers” and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years.

The full article is available here

Wall Street Oil Speculation Driving Surge in Gas Prices - CommonDreams.org

Despite rising prices at US gas pumps, demand in the US was so low it has become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it generates. This fact contradicts the familiar refrain from GOP politicians and operatives who claim that a 'Drill Everywhere' agenda would solve US energy woes or lead to lower prices for consumers.

That speculators have a huge impact on oil and gasoline prices is not news to anyone paying attention to the subject over the years, but it is an aspect that most media outlets rarely mention -- even when spiking gasoline prices dominate the news cycle. And legislatively, efforts to bring damaging speculative practices under control have continually stalled in Congress.

The full article is available here

What Bible is Santorum Reading? -- Mike Lux

When you claim to fervently believe in the holy words of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and your political philosophy is diametrically opposed to most of what is actually in that Bible, I have to call you out on that.

Rick Santorum's recently commented that President Obama's agenda is "Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology." I am now beginning to wonder if Santorum and other conservatives are just reading a different Bible entirely than the one I read.

While you can -- if you really work hard to do it -- find verses here and there supporting a more conservative political point of view on certain specific issues, there is simply no way to read the Bible I read and not come to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly supportive of helping the poor, showing mercy to the weak, refraining from judging, treating others as you would treat yourself, calling on the wealthy to give their money to the poor.

Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses.

If you want to believe in a God who doesn't care about the poor, loves the wealthy more than anyone else, and wants you to be selfish, feel free. But when you claim to fervently believe in the holy words of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and your political philosophy is diametrically opposed to most of what is actually in that Bible, I have to call you out on that. When Rick Santorum says that Obama follows a theology not based on the Bible, I have to say this: either he is not reading the same Bible I do, or he is not reading the Bible at all, because Rick Santorum's political views are in direct, fundamental opposition to the Bible he claims to follow.

Modern conservatives argue that everyone should take what they want and devil take the hindmost, that we are all on our own, and that if you are rich it means that a Darwinian selection process allowed you to succeed, and that you owe nothing to anyone else. Modern conservatives are far more faithful to Ayn Rand, who openly rejected Christianity because of its values of helping the poor and caring for others. Give her credit for one thing: at least she was honest.

The full article is available here

2 Years After Haiti's Quake, Women Still Shattered by Sexual Exploitation -- Michelle Chen

It’s been two years since hell paid Haiti a visit, but for countless women, terror still stalks the ruins. The scars of the January 2010 earthquake are etched on their bodies, in an ever-widening pattern of sexual exploitation. 

A crisis of gender-based violence and exploitation is festering--and foreign aid efforts are still failing to protect survivor communities from harm, or to make the criminal justice system more accountable.

“Survival sex” (referring to the trading of sex for basic resources) has become a common way to get by in an economy that traffics in desperation. Last November and December a research team found that many women and girls had “exchanged sex for food, education or other necessities for themselves and their families.”

Unable to secure decent work or housing, women and girls often turn to selling sex for precious resources like “coupons for aid distributions, access to direct aid distributions, cash for work programs, money, or even a single meal,” according to the study. Though many women surveyed said they used survival sex to meet individual needs, some women bartered sex to support their children or pay for schooling.

The full article is available here

Larry Summers & Bill Clinton: Democrats Who, Acting Like Republicans, Unleashed Wall St. - Robert Scheer

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason. 

Summers, like Clinton, still defends the reversal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a 1999 repeal that destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banking put into place by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.  He tries to obscure the obvious truth—that the too-big-to-fail banks, made legal by Clinton-era deregulation, required taxpayer bailouts.  Citigroup—where Robert Rubin, who preceded Summers as Clinton’s treasury secretary, played leading roles during a critical time—specialized in precisely the mortgage and other debt packages and insurance scams that were the source of America’s economic crisis.

In the current edition of Esquire magazine, Clinton, in a rare moment of honest appraisal of his record, conceded that his signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), legalizing those credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, was based on bad advice. That advice would have had to come from Summers, his point man pushing the CFMA legislation, which Clinton signed into law during his lame-duck days.

That new law exempted derivatives trading from all existing regulations and regulatory agencies. Summers argued in his congressional testimony that there was no reason for any government regulation of what turned out to be tens of trillions of dollars in toxic assets.

The full article is available here

Adding to the deficit: Bush vs. Obama - Ezra Klein

Since President Obama became chief executive, the national debt has risen almost $5 trillion. But how much of that was because of policies passed by Obama, and how much was caused by the financial crisis, the continuation of past policies and other effects? For this analysis, we worked with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to attach a price tag to the legislation passed by Obama and his predecessor.

George W. Bush’s major policies increased the debt by more than $5 trillion during his presidency. Obama has increased the debt by less than $1 trillion.

Read the related article here

Apple Makes Good Products, Flawed Arguments -- Reagen-era Trade Negotiator Clyde Prestowitz

Several points in the recent New York Times story on Apple and why the iPhone jobs are mostly not in America caught my attention, but none more so than the statement by a top Apple executive that " We [Apple] don't have an obligation to solve America's problems."

In the 1981-86 period I was one of the U.S. government's top trade negotiators, especially with Japan. At that time, Apple was trying to crack the Japanese market for personal computers and getting nowhere. Steve Jobs and other Apple executives had the funny notion that the U.S. government had an obligation to help them and asked me and other negotiators at the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to help them get on the shelf in Japan.

Apple's products still have a large U.S. government R&D content and I'll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple's intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries such as China and Japan between which there are long standing and bitter animosities.

And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment's notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies and of most Asian economies? It's the latter, of course. Apple is not the pinnacle of capitalism. It's the pinnacle of the marriage of Silicon Valley innovation with strategic Asian mercantilism.

I'm amazed at the one way thinking of many U.S. corporate types as revealed in the article.  In several places, it states that America no longer produces the kind of workers with the kind of skills necessary to run the kinds of factories and supply chains that operate now in Asia.  But the truth is more nearly the opposite. It's because the companies are moving the jobs overseas that no Americans are learning the necessary skills. This is true for two reasons. One is that Americans are generally not stupid and recognize that because of off-shoring there won't be any those kinds of jobs and thus there is no sense in learning the skills necessary to do them. The second is that most of this kind of job or skill training occurs on the job, and if there are no jobs then there will be no skills.

The full article is available here

The Human Cost Of An iPhone - Charles Duhigg and David Barboza

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk.

Underage workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

The full article is available here

Catholic Leaders Call On Gingrich And Santorum To ‘Stop Perpetuating Ugly Racial Stereotypes’ About Poverty - Marie Diamond

Faith in Public Life reports that more than 40 Catholic leaders and theologians across the country are calling on two of their “fellow Catholics,” GOP contenders Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, to stop using divisive rhetoric about race and poverty on the campaign trail.

Noting that Catholics consider racism an “intrinsic evil,” the open letter confronts the two candidates about their comments singling out minorities who receive welfare.

Despite the fact that 39 percent of Americans on welfare are white, Gingrich and Santorum have directed their vitriol toward minorities in speeches before mostly-white audiences. Instead of acknowledging that millions of American families are looking for help in difficult times, the candidates have played up stereotypes of “lazy blacks” who prefer a government handout to hard work.

The full article is available here

Movie Review: Contraband - The AV Club

No one will confuse it with Maria, Full Of Grace, but like that more accomplished film about moving illegal material across borders, the little-hyped Mark Wahlberg smuggling drama Contraband benefits from elegant simplicity. (Even its brown-paper-bag of a title gets right to the point).

Wahlberg is always better as a character actor than an action star, but Contraband plays to his strengths by casting him as a fundamentally decent working-class man forced by circumstances into a desperate situation. Contraband’s modest goals keep it from ever soaring too high: It’s pretty much exactly as good as it needs to be. It’s little more than an effective genre film, but in this era of bloated, convoluted epics, that’s cause for minor celebration.

The full article is available here

Fact-Checking Newt Gingrich's "Food Stamps " Southern Strategy

Gingrich Rides Racially Coded Rhetoric to Surge in South Carolina - Ben Adler
Gingrich’s rhetoric -- calling President Obama “the best food stamp president in history” and so forth -- is a dog whistle designed to appeal to South Carolina’s white Republican voters. Gingrich boldly promised to "continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job," as if the majority of poor people were not, in fact, employed and as if the unemployed lack knowledge rather than opportunity.

Gingrich knows the secret to his success among Republicans is his penchant for mocking and excoriating liberals. In South Carolina that approach has taken on a racially inflammatory element, and it seems to be working.  This was the first state to secede from the Union. Surrounding the state capitol building there is a street named for slavery defender John Calhoun, a statue of segregation defender Strom Thurmond and a Confederate flag flying.  When he says black parents will take him up on his offer of jobs instead of food stamps some listeners might hear “get blacks off of food stamps,” particularly when it comes after his boast of having passed welfare reform.

Cynically, the rhetoric was a brilliant piece of jiu jitsu: Gingrich plays to racial animosity while claiming credit for trying to empower poor minorities.


Myths about Food Stamps - The Cost of Hunger Blog
MYTH 1: Most food stamp recipients wouldn’t need this benefit if they would just get a job.
50 percent of food stamp participants are children and 8 percent are elderly citizens. In fiscal year 2005, of all food stamp households, 84% contained either an elderly or disabled person or a child, and these households received 89% of all food stamp benefits. Commonly referred to as the “working poor,” many food stamp users who are employed full-time still earn poverty level wages, making it difficult to afford food.

MYTH 2: The Food Stamp Program uses tax dollars that never benefit my community.
every dollar in food stamp benefits generates two dollars in household spending. Food stamp benefits not only support grocery purchases, but also free up cash for other necessities, such as medical care, children’s clothing, house repairs, and child care. As more money is spent, more jobs are created, ultimately promoting a more robust local economy.

MYTH 3: Only people who are on welfare get food stamps.
As of 2005 less than 15 percent were receiving welfare and over 29 percent were gainfully employed. Participants need not be receiving welfare to receive food stamps.

MYTH 4: Food stamp recipients are all the same
Currently, food stamp beneficiaries are a diverse group. USDA statistics show that:

59 percent of food stamp recipients are female,
43 percent are Caucasian,
33 percent are African American,
19 percent are Hispanic,
2 percent are Asian, and
2 percent are Native American.


Fact-Checking Newt Gingrich's Food Stamps Claims - Huma Khan
It is true that the number of Americans who rely on food stamps is at a record high. Nearly 46 million Americans received benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — better known as food stamps — this year, the highest number in recorded history. But experts attribute that mainly to the weak economy and high unemployment. Additionally, George W. Bush’s administration expanded eligibility for food stamps to get more Americans to apply, which also contributed to an increase in recipients.

The idea that administrators are not working to cut fraud can also be challenged.  The Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, contracts with a computer firm to analyze food stamp purchases to root out fraud, for which it has received kudos from the Government Accountability Office.

While fraud remains a problem, it is not just a federal government issue. The problem also lies within states, each of which has a different requirement for who receives such benefits. In 35 states, people can get food stamps even if they don’t partake in any other assistance programs.  States are also responsible for targeting fraud by recipients, while the federal government monitors such misdemeanors on the retail side.

Walmart Trims Its Local Taxes - Worcester Telegram

A tax break for Walmart means higher taxes for residents, according to assessors in several area communities.

Wal-Mart Associates Inc. is headquartered in Bentonville, Ark., but stores incorporated in Massachusetts become domestic corporations — eligible for tax breaks — and it appears that many of the state’s Walmarts have recently taken advantage of those breaks.

Bob Bliss, spokesman for the state Department of Revenue, said, “One effect is that they are exempt from most personal property taxes. On the flip side, this may result in more state excise taxes paid. This is an individual decision each entity can make.”

Bob Ellia, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Assessing Officers, said the practice of incorporation for tax savings is common.

“I don’t know if this is a trend, but I do know it is not at all uncommon. Major companies do an analysis and compare what they pay in taxes under what status and do what they can to save money.”

Wal-Mart reported $419 billion in sales last year, to earn first place in the 2011 Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies by revenue.

The full article is available here

Christmas Post-Mortem: Market Culture’s Attack on US Families - John Brueggemann

As I join many in my community in the annual post-feast January slim-down, it occurred to me that this is a fitting moment to reflect on how expansive market culture is damaging the health of our families.  The symbolism of the religious spirit and the commercial frenzy of the holiday season are now thoroughly intertwined.

Without much consideration of this conflation, some Christians condemn “the attack on Christmas.” They blame secularists or other faith traditions. The irony of the imperative to defend Christmas and “put Christ back in Christmas” is that this problem is mainly a struggle between the Christian Jesus and the “Christian” Santa.

It is not Jews (or atheists) hassling Christians to spend weeks scurrying around worrying about stuff (which used to jumpstart on the hideous day of shopping after Thanksgiving known as Black Friday but now seems to begin after Halloween). If anything, the cultural imperialism of Christmas seems to have enabled a sort of Christianization or really Santafication of Chanukah.

One theme that helps define modern Christmas is the rapidly changing role of media technology.  As we come to terms with the cultural transformation of the information revolution, we have not yet figured out who is going to determine the ideals, laws, and manners around technology use and media exposure. I know many families in my community who feel outgunned in this regard. This is especially important as we shift from optional use of digital technology to basic dependence.

In Longing and Belong: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Allison J. Pugh observes that what really concerns parents in this regard is the “economy of dignity.” They know their children’s desire is not just about having stuff. It is about fitting in, about literately participating in discussions of popular culture on the playground.

Pugh finds that those families who effectively negotiate the question of spoiling versus their children being left behind raise kids who are socially successful. Because this is a very difficult time to fit in without competing and shopping like everyone else, resisting market culture is a relentless struggle. At no time during the year is this struggle more intense than the holidays.

Most people want to be comfortable, informed, active and connected. And we all need to come to terms with the culture in which we live. But that does not mean we have to passively accept all the craziness that comes our way.

The full article is available here

FDA Gives Up On Antibiotic Restrictions In Livestock - Tom Laskawy

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled a Scrooge move just before Christmas. The agency published an entry in the Federal Register declaring that it will end its attempt at mandatory restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

According to the vast majority of microbiologists and public health experts, restrictions on agricultural uses are key to preserving the effectiveness of antibiotics as well as to preventing the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA and salmonella Heidelberg (cause of last summer's record-breaking ground turkey recall).

Consumer groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Pew Charitable Trusts have been calling for an end to the practice for years. But it's not just outsiders who are fed up with the agency's work on this issue; the administration's own watchdog group, the Government Accountability Office, recently gave the agency a failing grade in the subject.

It seems that as long as the industry opposes it, the agency can't keep antibiotics out of our meat and dairy products (nor, for that matter, can it ensure that antibiotics will remain effective). If the agency continues to favor industry's concerns over the public health, it begs the question: Who exactly is looking out for us?

On the brighter side, several organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Public Citizen have actually filed a lawsuit against the FDA demanding the agency restrict antibiotics in animals. So it may just fall to a federal judge to determine what's truly good for the public interest. Of course, it would be nice if the agency actually tasked with that responsibility would step up to the plate.

The full article is available here

2011: The Year of Resistance to Conservatism's "War of the Words" - Richard Eskow

Words are the weapons of choice in economic and political wars. Corporatists own the Republican Party, and large swathes of the Democratic Party too. Most Americans disagree with their ambitions, but they've been so good at designing and using these linguistic weapons that the public hasn't had a chance. 

From "death tax" to "job creators," the public has been saturated with prefabricated words and phrases that reshapes the thinking of millions of people in an Orwellian way.  Teachers, police, bus drivers and firefighters became "special interests" while mega-corporations became "people" who were being "deprived of their rights."

But something was different this year. This was the year that the people came up with some words of their own, outside the corporate- and billionaire-funded think tanks of conservatism. For the first time in many years, the right-wing warriors of language ran into heavy resistance. That's an important development that should be celebrated - and repeated.

The full article is available here

Obama Has Adopted Many Core Republican Beliefs. Is That Why Their 2012 Candidates Are A Disaster? - Glenn Greenwald

Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff.

The Republican presidential primaries have been a particularly base spectacle. Republicans have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny.

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger.

Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.  They render themselves inherently absurd.

The full article is available here

If It Ain't Broke, Break It - Keith Ellison

When your entire philosophy is that government is the problem, you make government the problem. 

Last week, Speaker Boehner described the Senate deal for extending middle-class tax cuts and unemployment benefits as acceptable.  No sooner did the Tea Party House Republicans begin to fear that this good faith compromise just might succeed than they stepped forward and smashed the deal.  What happened? The anti-government ideologues happened.

The Tea Partiers rejected the deal their leader blessed—knowing full well the Senate would not capitulate to their demand—and thereby risking the livelihood of 160 million Americans who depend on the extension of unemployment benefits and payroll tax cuts. These are the Grover Norquist disciples who want to “drown government in the bathtub."

When your entire philosophy is that government is the problem, you make government the problem. Even conservative economists agree that unemployment benefits create jobs by allowing consumers to spend more money. Yet this conflicts with the Republicans’ predetermined ideology that no government action can help.

The Republican philosophy goes something like this: if you take your car to the mechanic and instead of fixing it, they take out the engine and charge you an arm and a leg, you should conclude that mechanics can’t fix cars and you should probably just take yours to the junkyard and sell it for scrap metal.

But the truth is—you probably just hired a bad mechanic.

The full article is available here

“War on Christmas”: Anti-Semitic, White Supremacist Roots of Right's Annual Culture War - Max Blumenthal

The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media. 

What would Christmas be without warnings of the secular crusade to destroy it? Thanks to the fulminations of cable news cranks and evangelical moralists, the War on Christmas has become an annual outrage.

The story typically goes as follows: secular elements have intimidated stores into replacing the phrase “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays;” nativity scenes have been removed from public spaces under threat of ACLU lawsuits; a decadent culture is moving ever closer to eradicating Christian morality; and America slouches towards Gomorrah.

The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media.  So who was the genius that created it? To find the answer, a visit with the ghost of conservatism’s past is in order.

In his 1995 book, Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow argued that the influx of “weird aliens with dubious habits” from developing nations was eroding America’s white Christian “ethnic core,” and in turn, sullying its cultural underpinnings. The War on Christmas was, in his view, a particularly pernicious iteration of the multicultural “struggle to abolish America.”

In 1999, Brimelow founded what would become the internet’s leading anti-immigration web journal, VDare.com, named for the first British child born in the Americas. Brimelow’s new venture provided a forum to allies like Jared Taylor, a white supremacist publisher, and Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychology professor who has argued that Jews are genetically equipped to out-compete Gentiles for resources and power.

VDare became the staging ground for the War on the War on Christmas. Unlike their more respectable counterparts, Brimelow’s writers dared to name the true anti-Christian Grinch: Jews.

VDare’s 2005 War on Christmas winner, Steve Sailer, a Eugenics enthusiast, wrote, “those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.”

By 2005, Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson were dedicating entire shows to the War on Christmas. While their rants were directed at “secular progressives,” they echoed the arguments of Brimelow’s allies. “It’s all part of the secular progressive agenda,” O’Reilly grumbled. “If you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs, like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage.” National Review’s website jumped back on the bandwagon, beginning with editor Kathryn Jean Lopez’s promotion of Gibson’s bestselling 2005 polemic, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

The full article is available here

The Nastiness of Newt Gingrich - The Nation

Early in this years Presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich emerge as the cruelest and most unusual contender.

It figured that a Republican presidential primary race defined by nothing so much as a taste for cruel and unusual politics would eventually see Newt Gingrich emerge as the cruelest and most unusual contender.  And so he has, emerging as the default choice of a new breed of Republican so extreme it would scare the bejeezus out of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan.

Last week, he stepped up with a proposal to fire school janitors and replace them with child laborers. Blaming “the core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization” for “crippling” children, Gingrich told a Harvard audience, “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid.”

Even in a party where shamelessness is now considered a virtue, it’s unsettling that a man who collected $30,000 a month for an hour of counsel to Freddie Mac administrators would attack school janitors, who according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 a year.

In response to Gingrich, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said, “The people you want to fire and replace with kids? A lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids’ heads, food on the table, and provides them with healthcare and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty.” But Gingrich has never been bothered by the human costs of right-wing social experimentation.

Should GOP disdain for Romney be so overarching that Gingrich prevails, he will then be the beneficiary of the largesse that Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and others are accumulating to pay for an anyone-but-Obama campaign in the fall.

The full article is available here

Dead Afghan Kids Still Not Newsworthy - Peter Hart

We've been conditioned simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

The full article is available here

Fox News Spins Pepper Spraying Cops: ‘It’s a Food Product, Essentially’ - Gawker

Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly got to talking about a UC Davis police officer's appalling use of pepper spray on nonviolent protesters. Guess what direction the conversation took!

If you guessed "needlessly deferential to authority and dismissive to the suffering of protesters," you guessed correctly!  (What pepper spray does to your body)

"I don't think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police," O'Reilly says, "particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus."

God forbid! We'd never want to question Lt. John Pike's decision to generously and indifferently dust peacefully sitting protesters with pepper spray from only a few feet away. Especially given that Davis is, you know, a liberal campus!

And, gosh, even if we were going to Monday-morning quarterback the police, shouldn't we remember, as Megyn Kelly tells O'Reilly, that pepper spray is "a food product, essentially"?

The full article is available here

Memo Reveals How Seriously Powerful Interests Take Occupy Wall Street - George Zornick

Television show Up With Chris Hayes unveiled a major scoop: the show obtained a written pitch to the American Bankers Association from a prominent Washington lobbying firm, proposing a $850,000 smear campaign against Occupy Wall Street.

The memo, issued by Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, described the danger presented by the burgeoning movement, saying that if Democrats embraced Occupy, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street.… It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Furthermore, it notes that “the bigger concern…should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

We’ve seen similar efforts already. Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS has blanketed Massachusetts airwaves with commercials depicting Occupy protestors as crazed radicals, and hitting Elizabeth Warren for embracing them.

These episodes belie any conservative claims that Occupy Wall Street (1) doesn’t have a clear purpose, or (2) won’t be effective. Rove has wondered in the past “what are these people for? To the degree that they’re for anything it’s left wing nuttiness.” Grover Norquist tweeted the other day that he hopes Occupy DC “keep(s) this up” because “Hippies elected Nixon. OWS will beat Obama.” Fox News is full of similar dismissals of Occupiers as dangerous, confused folks.

But if Rove thinks Occupy doesn’t present a clear message, why is he spending millions of dollars to attack them? Similarly, CLGC staffers are political professionals with many Wall Street clients, and the memo shows how seriously they consider the threat presented to powerful financial firms by the Occupy protests.

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Fox Falsely Dubs Alleged White House Attacker As "'Occupy' Shooter" - Media Matters

An official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said the motive for the gunfire might have been simple anger. 

During the November 17 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson asked Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin: "It looks like this White House shooting suspect may have tried to blend in with the Occupy protesters in D.C. when he came from out West. So I pose this question to you this morning: What would have happened if a tea party person had tried to do that?"

Malkin responded that "there is now conflicting testimony or evidence of whether he was in the Occupy D.C. camp, but apparently, reportedly, allegedly there is somebody within that movement who has confirmed that he was there at the camps."

Malkin later noted that "the guy was just completely off his rocker and had nothing to do with any coherent sense of political ideology." But during the segment, onscreen text continued to tie Ortega-Hernandez to the Occupy D.C. movement.

In trying to determine why he recently traveled to the nation's capital from the western part of the country, investigators searched the Occupy D.C. campground near the White House but have found no connection between him and the Occupy protesters, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case.

One of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said the motive for the gunfire might have been simple anger: Ortega-Hernandez "hates the president, he hates Washington, he hates society," the official said.

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Surprise! Right Wing Anti-Solyndra/Anti-Obama Ad Is ‘Mostly False’ - Chris Mims

An anti-Solyndra ad put out by Americans For Prosperity has been viewed 1 million times on YouTube alone, not to mention millions more on television.  Which just goes to show you that if you give the people what they want, they will eat it up like delicious candied bacon, because who doesn't like having their completely ridiculous prejudices reinforced at the expense of truth and our country's future economic prosperity?

One problem though; it is wrong.  Here are just a few of its by-now-canonical-on-Fox-News lies:

• The ad says that "friends of Obama" benefited from the loan, but it references a Daily Caller article about George Kaiser, who, according to Politifact, "is neither a shareholder nor an executive of Solyndra."
  
• Accusations that internal administration emails point to a special relationship with Solyndra are also false -- it’s sort of the opposite. An email from Steve Mitchell, who did get a meeting at the White House and who was connected to Solyndra, said, "I think the company is hoping that we have some unnatural relationship [with administration officials] that can open bigger doors -- I've cautioned them that no one really has those relationships anymore."
  
• Solyndra's loan guarantee was commenced under Bush Jr., not Obama. In the words of Politifact, " … the money wasn't Obama's to give. Solyndra's request predated his administration, and career Energy Department officials handled the deal."

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