Today's Republicans: The Party Of Strivers - Conservative Columnist David Brooks

There is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyper-individualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

Today's Republicans strongly believe that individuals determine their own fates. In a Pew Research Center poll, for example, 57% of Republicans believe people are poor because they don't work hard. Only 28% believe people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control. These Republicans believe that if only government gets out of the way, then people's innate qualities will enable them to flourish.

The fact is our destinies are shaped by social forces much more than the current GOP is willing to admit. The skills that enable people to flourish are not innate but constructed by circumstances.   Government does not always undermine initiative. Some government programs, like the GI Bill, inflame ambition.  Today's Republicans, who see every government program as a step on the road to serfdom, are often blind to that. They celebrate the race to success but don't know how to give everyone access to that race.

Today's Republican Party won't be a worthy governing party until it treads the course Lincoln trod: starting with individual ambition but ascending to a larger vision and creating a national environment that arouses ambition and nurtures success.

The full article is available here

Paul Ryan's Proposed Cuts To Food Stamps Would Hit Red States Hardest - Tom Laskawy

While cutting food stamps remains atop the Republican agenda, a new Gallup poll reminds us that hunger continues to run rampant in America.   According to a recent Gallup poll, over 18 percent of Americans “say there have been times when they could not afford the food they needed” during the last year. In 15 states, that figure jumps to one in five Americans.

There’s an odd political angle to this poll. The top-10 list for states with the highest hunger rates includes the GOP strongholds of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Louisiana. More than half of those states are as red as they come, i.e. even in a landslide these states wouldn’t back Obama.

A cynic would thus observe the deep irony that Republicans have dubbed Obama the “Food Stamp President,” while the Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, the party’s acknowledged deep-thinking wonk, wants to cut food stamps by $133 billion over the next decade.

The fact that Republicans have utterly abandoned the economic interests of vast swaths of their supporters in favor of policies that tilt toward the rich doesn’t represent irony as far as I’m concerned. Rather, it’s tragedy.

The full article is available here

The Backwards, Inside-out Politics Of Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, and Coal - Philip Bump

“That plant kills people,” Mitt Romney said in 2003, pointing at the Salem Harbor power plant. He was right — one estimate suggests that 20 people die each year due to pollution from the plant, now managed by Dominion Energy. “They have thumbed their nose at the people of Massachusetts and Salem Harbor by not cleaning it up on time. So we’re saying, clean it up on time, do the job in the community, invest in cleaning technology.”

Romney’s language is far stronger than any President Obama has ever used on coal. In fact, the president’s campaign is using that line to attack Romney in radio ads in coal-producing states.

How the hell did this happen? How is it that the Democratic presidential candidate is embracing the most noxious form of energy production in America, while his opponent is on record saying that it should be cleaned up?

With one key, prominent exception: the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has inched forward like a soldier on its belly, pushing ahead with slightly stronger guidelines on particulates, mercury, carbon emissions. Attempts to make a difference on ozone were rebuffed by the president, but the EPA has continued to do its job, despite taking an enormous amount of heat for doing so. The EPA is the stated reason that, despite the president’s inaction and Romney’s past rhetoric, coal companies are fuming at Barack Obama. A broad array of coal and mining company executives have pledged financial support for the Romney campaign, arguing that their industry is at risk from the EPA’s action.

The full article is available here

The Idea of America and Governmentphobe's Distortion Of It - Valerie Elverton-Dixon

When Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, Ryan said that America was an idea. He spoke of the idea that human rights derive from God and from nature and not from government. It's an interesting opposition Ryan asserts between God and nature on one hand and government on the other.

His remarks intimate that government is some tyrannical bogey man out to debilitate righteous free enterprise, binding it with red tape and stealing our liberties and our hard-earned money through taxes. He seems to think that big government equals a reduction of our human rights. This is a distortion of the idea of America.

If we look to the Declaration of Independence as the founding document that articulates the idea of America, an often neglected passage says, "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” According to the Declaration, while government is not the origin of human rights, it exists to secure human rights. So to posit an opposition between rights and government is incorrect.

What does the idea of America mean when the rich, for the most part, do not fight in our nation’s wars, pay as little taxes as they can, and then dishonorably distort the truth in our national political conversation in order to gain and to maintain power?

The full article is available here

The Ryan Choice - Robert Reich

Paul Ryan exemplifies the social Darwinism at the core of today’s Republican Party: Reward the rich, penalize the poor, let everyone else fend for themselves. Dog eat dog.

Ryan’s views are crystallized in the budget he produced for House Republicans last March as chairman of the House Budget committee. It would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation’s poor – forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Ryan’s budget would also reduce food stamps for poor families by 17% ($135 billion) over the decade, leading to a significant increase in hunger – particularly among children. It would also reduce housing assistance, job training, and Pell grants for college tuition.  In all, 62% of the budget cuts proposed by Ryan would come from low-income programs.

At the same time, Ryan would provide a substantial tax cut to the very rich – who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s total income.

Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest… the working out of a law of nature and of God.”

Not until the 20th century did America reject social Darwinism. We created a large middle class that became the engine of our economy and our democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward, often through no fault of their own.

We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods – public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health – that made us all better off.  In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on our own in a competitive contest for survival.

The full article is available here

Dark Days with the Dark Knight - David Sterritt

The recent mass shootings bears out the need to get beyond simplistic attacks on popular culture. When social chaos grabs the headlines, it’s easier to blame movies than to examine root causes like the disintegrating safety net for families and maxed-out mental-health facilities.

What’s really going on with violent entertainment has deep roots in the American psyche. In some respects the present-day United States is a nasty place: look at the amount of gun violence, the grotesque influence of the National Rifle Association, the amount of violence by other means, the astounding number of people in jails and prisons, the number of people executed each year, the proliferation of domestic poverty, the ability of wealth to shape public policy, the accelerating decline of the middle and working classes, the horrifically large number of innocent people killed as a result of the Iraq invasion, the use of torture as an interrogation and punishment device, the embrace of indefinite detention for people not convicted (or even accused) of crimes, the acceptance of a permanent state of war against anyone declared to be The Enemy, and on and on.

I find it hard to imagine how anyone can place those factors on one side of the scale, and put violent films on the other, and then say the Columbine or Virginia Tech or Batman shooters did what they did because movies got them all excited.

What’s needed now is not just a less violent cinema but a more intelligent cinema that dares to think about issues and to encourage thinking in its audience. We are the beneficiaries of the most advanced audiovisual systems ever known, capable of moving our emotions, challenging our ideas, and opening our imaginations. Is it right that the most technologically sophisticated and financially expensive products of this system are entertainments like the Batman movies, designed to deliver their gratifications not to the mind but to the gut? Surely our entertainment industry can aspire to greater things.

The full article is available here

Yes, More Solyndras for Clean Energy - Michael Grunwald from Time Business

The solar company failed, but the decision to invest in it was the right one.

The Solyndra “scandal” is trotted out every few months as part of the big-vs.-small-government debate in this country, but it is not and never was a scandal. The federal clean-energy loan program that the infamous solar-panel maker was a part of was designed to finance risky ventures, and Solyndra was a reasonable risk.

The Bush and Obama Administrations both selected Solyndra from 143 applicants for the program’s first loan, and investigators found no evidence that political interference made that happen.

But no matter how often independent fact checkers debunk charges of crony capitalism, Washington Republicans won’t be deterred from pushing a No More Solyndras Act, vowing to kill the loan program. Government aid isn’t supposed to guarantee success; subsidized farms and entrepreneurs with Small Business Administration loans fail all the time. Some students who receive Pell Grants probably end up drunks on the street.

There’s a legitimate debate to have about Solyndra and green industrial policy, but it’s not the debate over imaginary corruption we’ve been having. Solar power has increased over 600% since 2009, partly because of the low prices that doomed Solyndra. The $90 billion for clean energy in the stimulus actually crowded in private investment, luring an additional $100 billion in matching funds from the sidelines.

Yet Republicans haven’t argued against subsidies for manufacturing. In fact, they’ve argued that the stimulus shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, which is ludicrous. It has increased the domestic content of U.S. wind turbines from 20% to 60%. Politics aside, that’s a good thing. It would be a shame to trade our dependence on foreign oil for dependence on foreign turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, all products that were invented in the U.S.

The full article is available here

Republicans’ Anti-Government Rhetoric Comes Back to Bite Republican Governments - Ed Kilgore

Anyone who’s lived in metropolitan Atlanta knows its infamously snarled highway traffic. But any Georgian also knows that it would be impossible to raise taxes to do something about it—at least since 2004, when Republicans achieved control of both the legislative and executive branches of state government for the first time since Reconstruction.

Last week’s calamitous defeat of a sales-tax-for-transportation referendum in metro Atlanta and most of the state showed that when push comes to shove, Republican governing can’t survive the Republicans’ anti-governing message. Having spent years demonizing higher taxes and government spending, Georgia Republicans were in a poor position to ask for more of both for any purpose under the sun.

The Georgia experience matters nationally for a simple reason: Since 2008, the GOP and its business allies have energized its movement-conservative base (rechristened as the Tea Party Movement) to savagely fight for radically reduced public spending. Now, when increased public investments and the revenues necessary to pay for them are obviously essential to keep a state economy growing, Republicans can no longer dial back the rhetoric.

If Republicans conquer Washington in November and Republican-controlled state governments derive the bitter harvest of radically reduced federal support for public services, it will be interesting to see if a “governing wing” of the GOP survives at all in state capitals around the country. And it will be equally interesting to see whether business interests are happy with obtaining better tax rates and less regulation in exchange for dysfunctional government from sea to shining sea.

The full article is available here

High-Capacity Semiautomatic Handguns: Weapon of Choice for Mass Shootings - Greg McCune

The semiautomatic handgun used in the deadly attack on a Wisconsin Sikh temple is the same type used in other recent U.S. mass shootings, including one at a theater in Colorado, and the attack on a congresswoman in Arizona, gun experts said.

Wisconsin shooter Wade Michael Page used a Springfield 9mm semiautomatic handgun to carry out the attack at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, officials said. As in several other recent mass shootings, the gun had been purchased legally, at a Milwaukee-area gun store called the Shooter Shop.

James Holmes, the man accused of killing 12 people in a shooting spree last month at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, used one .40-caliber Glock handgun and had another one in his car.  Jared Loughner, who is accused of killing six people and critically wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a January 2011 attack in Tucson, Arizona, used a Glock 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with a magazine that held more than 30 bullets.

Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia Tech University student who killed 32 people and then committed suicide in 2007, also used a Glock semiautomatic handgun.  The common thread binding the mass attacks together is that they all used semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines.

Semiautomatic handguns are the weapon of choice for mass murderers because they are light and easy to conceal, and adaptable to using high-capacity magazines, experts say. This allows the shooter to fire the maximum number of bullets in a short period of time.

The full article is available here

Crazy Weather: 'Virtually No Other Explanation Than Climate Change' - Common Dreams

A statistical climate change analysis led by NASA's James Hansen, which will be presented in a report released Monday on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that recent extreme weather events are not anomalies, but rather the result of a systemic climate change patterns fueled by man-made global warming.

The new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

In an op-ed published on Saturday, Hansen explained that the new analysis, which looked at the past six decades:

revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The full article is available here

The Book of Jobs - Joseph E. Stiglitz

It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.

We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover.

Even if we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the housing bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support.

The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems.

The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced.

The full article is available here

Is Algebra Necessary - Andrew Hacker in The New York Times

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. Why do we subject students to this ordeal?

Of course, people should learn basic numerical skills: decimals, ratios and estimating, sharpened by a good grounding in arithmetic. But a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.

It's not clear that the math we learn in the classroom has any relation to the quantitative reasoning we need on the job. John P. Smith III, an educational psychologist at Michigan State University who has studied math education, has found that “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” 

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. Why do we subject students to this ordeal?  Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives.

There is no reason to force everyone to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves.

So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.

The full article is available here