Tag: Punting the Pundits

Mairead Maguire was awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her actions to help end the deep ethnic/political conflict in her native Northern Ireland.

On Thursday 13th December, 2012, I visited Julian Assange, Editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, in the Ecuadorian embassy, Knightsbridge, London.    It is six months now since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy and was given political asylum.  He entered the embassy  after the British Courts shamefully refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning accused of sexual molestation (no criminal charges have been made against him).  [..]

I believe the UK/Swedish/USA governments are all complicit in this mental torture of Julian Assange,  and I appeal to the  Australian government, Human rights defenders, brave media,  and  people who love freedom and truth to break the ‘silence ‘ and  stand up for the rights of Julian Assange to assurance he will get the change to answer all accusations against him in uk or Sweden and the assurance he will not be extradited to USA where he could meet the same ‘cruel and inhuman’ treatment as pt. Bradley Manning.  The least we can do is raise our voices to  protect JulianAssange (and Bradley Manning) who made such brave attempts, at the cost of their own freedom,  to try to protect all our freedoms and democracy.

Muna Mire: Idle No More: Women Rising to Lead When it’s Needed Most

Chief Theresa Spence is now on Day 13 of her hunger strike. Too weak to leave the teepee she is living in on Victoria Island, a mere stone’s throw from Parliament, she called for a round dance yesterday at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, Prime Minister Harper’s residence.

Throughout the duration of her hunger strike, Harper has maintained a chilly silence around the grassroots Indigenous movement now widely known as Idle No More, taking to Twitter instead to share his jokes about bacon with the Canadian electorate. What started as a string of emails between four Saskatchewan women back in November in protest of Bill C-45 eventually became a hashtag on social media, snowballing over time into a global movement for Indigenous rights.

Chief Spence is starving herself for her home community of Attawapiskat where there is a dire housing crisis, but more broadly for all Indigenous peoples in Canada, many of whom have rallied around her. Spence is asking for a meeting with the Prime Minister, Governor General and other leaders, and will fast until she gets it.

Rebecca Solnit: 2013 as Year Zero: For Earth and For Us

This last year put the crisis in perspective, this coming year our battle begins

As this wild year comes to an end, we return to the season of gifts. Here’s the gift you’re not going to get soon: any conventional version of Paradise. You know, the place where nothing much happens and nothing is demanded of you. The gifts you’ve already been given in 2012 include a struggle over the fate of the Earth. This is probably not exactly what you asked for, and I wish it were otherwise — but to do good work, to be necessary, to have something to give: these are the true gifts. And at least there’s still a struggle ahead of us, not just doom and despair.

Think of 2013 as the Year Zero in the battle over climate change, one in which we are going to have to win big, or lose bigger.  This is a terrible thing to say, but not as terrible as the reality that you can see in footage of glaciers vanishing, images of the entire surface of the Greenland Ice Shield melting this summer, maps of Europe’s future in which just being in southern Europe when the heat hits will be catastrophic, let alone in more equatorial realms.

Michelle Chen: Despite Exemptions, Police and Firefighters Show Labor Solidarity in Michigan Right-to-Work Battle

Michigan’s new right-to-work law has has struck a savage blow to America’s labor movement in its heartland. Unions across the state have thronged to Lansing to oppose the attack, which makes union membership optional and thus reduces labor’s bargaining clout. But tucked into the legislation are subtle exemptions for particular workers-police and firefighters, who have historically played by a different set of rules, creating political divides in the labor movement.

But in this case, it seems that many members of Michigan’s police and firefighters unions-about 1,700 bargaining units altogether-are standing in solidarity with other public-sector unions to oppose the law.

Of the four Gospels, this story of the “slaughter of the innocents” is told only in Matthew, and there isn’t much historical evidence for it other than Herod’s established record of murders and atrocities committed against those whom he saw as threats to his throne. Scholars say that if it did occur, it was not a major event: Bethlehem was a little town, as the carol says, and the number of children killed would have been accordingly small – about 20 or so. By Matthew’s account, after it was done, “what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’ ” [..]

The people in Newtown, Conn. , are in one of those times when the true meaning of the Christmas holiday is felt and expressed by all people of the community, regardless of faith, wealth or social standing. It is a time for coming together and for understanding and consideration, for seeking whatever solace can be had. It is a time not only for joy to the world but also for hope that there is truth in the words found further on in the Book of Matthew: “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

John Nochols: ‘A Christmas Carol’ (The Unemployed Are Not Boehner’s Business Remix)

Charles Dickens would find these times rather too familiar for comfort. In seeking to awaken a spirit of charity in his countrymen, the author called attention to those who callously dismissed the poor as a burden and the unemployed as a lazy lot best forced by hunger to grab at bootstraps and pull themselves upward.

Dickens was, to be sure, more articulate than House Speaker John Boehner and the members of Congress who on the cusp of this Christmas season left Washington without extending jobless benefits for 2 million long-unemployed Americans. But surely he captured the essence of their sentiments with his imagining of a certain conservative businessman’s response to a visit by two gentlemen-“liberals,” we will call them-on Christmas Eve.

Paul Buchheit: The 12 Days of a Capitalist

On the first day of Christmas my employer gave to me ONE penny for every $3 the richest 130,000 Americans make. It’s been a national tradition since 1980.

On the second day my doctor showed me TWO Americans needing mental health care, but only one of the two could afford treatment. The doctor informed me that the fifty states have cut $1.8 billion from their mental health budgets during the recession, and that the 2013 Republican budget proposes further cuts. “It’s crazy,” I protested. “Some states are allowing guns in schools and daycare centers and churches and bars and hospitals, but they’re cutting mental health care?” The doctor just nodded in frustration.

Michael I. Niman: If You’re Reading This, the World Hasn’t Ended – Yet

But give us another 100 years of climate change and we’ll get there.

During the previous month, we’ve all heard about the supposed end of the Mayan calendar, which isn’t actually ending. Except for a handful of cranks, we also knew the world wasn’t going to end on December 21. But the media still covered the story. And they covered it well. The Nexis/Lexis database shows that during the past 30 days the US newspapers and “news wires,” which are the sources for much of what is broadcast and distributed online, ran twice as many stories mentioning the Mayan calendar as they did mentioning the UN Climate Change Conference. This fact alone is terrifying on many levels.

Climate doom isn’t a certainty-that is, we still have a very small window of opportunity to take some very drastic and radical action to avert the worst effects of global warming, and prepare for what’s already heading our way. This is a tale of two doomsdays. One is nonsense, but it entertains us. The other is real, and unless we change the way we live, it will destroy us-or, more accurately, it will allow us to destroy ourselves. And that’s why we’d rather talk about the end of the 13th baktun.

Our country and our media have too much reverence for the U.S. military and the CIA, which are not making us safer but rather helping to create new threats. As the Washington Post reports, some of our generals have an “array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards.” Even worse, many officers later join the boards and executive suites of military contractors, where they rake in millions making corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman richer at taxpayer expense, and sometimes promoting war itself on the network news. Our military-industrial complex is as corrupt and rotten as any institution of America’s broken democracy, and more deadly than most in its consequences.

We need to end this war in Afghanistan and the other operations that are making Americans less secure and recruiting new enemies daily. Then we can focus on fixing our broken economy at home.

Robert Kuttner: The Zombie Party

Public opinion is steadily moving away from the Republican Party, as is America’s demographic future. President Obama’s three-point re-election win understated that reality, while events since Election Day have underscored it.

Public opinion dramatically favors restoring higher tax rates on the top 2 percent. Large majorities oppose cutting Social Security or Medicare. Acceptance of same-sex marriage is increasing, and is already the overwhelming majority view of those under 40 — the future electorate. Most Americans don’t support the absence of any regulation of combat weapons. [..]

And yet a Republican Party, as personified by the House Majority, is the zombie that has been overtaken by public opinion but will neither change nor get out-of-the-way.

So reforms desired by most American voters will be a long time coming.

David Paul: The Absolutist Politics of Norquist and LaPierre Will Destroy the Republican Party

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre really out-did himself this week. Speaking in response to the Newtown, Connecticut shooting, LaPierre concluded that armed guards in the schools were the answer. Like those old time liberals he so disdains, LaPierre’s solution to mass murder in schools was to throw money at the problem, demanding that Congress “appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.” [..]

Better that he had kept his mouth shut.

In one week, the two major planks of the Republican Party have demonstrated later stages of rot. Even more than its anti-abortion stance, the Republican Party is bound to its anti-tax pledge and pro-gun commitments. And those two political shibboleths are enforced by the organizational and political skills of the two men who are their public personae: Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist and LaPierre.

Robert Parry: The Real Rationale for the 2nd Amendment, That Right-Wingers Are Totally Ignorant About

A big obstacle to commonsense gun control is the Right’s false historical narrative that the Founders wanted an armed American public that could fight its own government.

Right-wing resistance to meaningful gun control is driven, in part, by a false notion that America’s Founders adopted the Second Amendment because they wanted an armed population that could battle the U.S. government. The opposite is the truth, but many Americans seem to have embraced this absurd, anti-historical narrative.

The reality was that the Framers wrote the Constitution and added the Second Amendment with the goal of creating a strong central government with a citizens-based military force capable of putting down insurrections, not to enable or encourage uprisings. The key Framers, after all, were mostly men of means with a huge stake in an orderly society, the likes of George Washington and James Madison. [..]

The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 weren’t precursors to France’s Robespierre or Russia’s Leon Trotsky, believers in perpetual revolutions. In fact, their work on the Constitution was influenced by the experience of Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786, a populist uprising that the weak federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, lacked an army to defeat.

The Republicans have put themselves in a holy mess with this Plan B debacle. They now have less than zero leverage. They are a national laughingstock. A majority of the country now thinks they are “too extreme.” They just got walloped in the election. And with the tax cuts set to expire the laws are rigged against them as well.

There is only one person who can rescue the Republican Party now — Barack Obama. And he will. I have been saying for over two years now that President Obama is dying to do the Grand Bargain. He will do it at any cost. In fact, he actively wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. He can’t wait for that pat on the back from the establishment when they finally call him post-partisan, above party politics, and a statesman for screwing over his own voters. This is by far his greatest wish.

I couldn’t believe that people couldn’t believe that President Obama offered to cut Social Security again in this round of negotiations. What are you still surprised at? The man has offered to cut these so-called entitlements every time. When are you going to get it through your head — he wants to cut them!

Gail Collins: Wish You a Gun-Free Christmas

Well, the Mayans were sort of right.

The world didn’t implode when their calendar stopped on Dec. 21. But the National Rifle Association did call for putting guns in every American school in a press conference that had a sort of civilization-hits-a-dead-end feel to it.

And we learned that negotiations on averting a major economic crisis had come to a screeching halt because Speaker John Boehner lost the support of the far-right contingent of his already-pretty-damned-conservative caucus. We have seen the future, and everything involves negotiating with loony people.

Robert Reich: Boehner’s Failure and the GOP’s Disgrace

Remarkably, John Boehner couldn’t get enough House Republicans to vote in favor of his proposal to keep the Bush tax cuts in place on the first million dollars of everyone’s income and apply the old Clinton rates only to dollars over and above a million.

What? Even Grover Norquist blessed Boehner’s proposal, saying it wasn’t really a tax increase. Even Paul Ryan supported it.

What does Boehner’s failure tell us about the modern Republican party?

That it has become a party of hypocrisy masquerading as principled ideology. The GOP talks endlessly about the importance of reducing the budget deficit. But it isn’t even willing to raise revenues from the richest three-tenths of one percent of Americans to help with the task. We’re talking about 400,000 people, for crying out loud.

Rep. Brad Miller: Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Honest Bankers

There was a hit song in the forties (made popular more recently by the Muppets) called “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens.” [..]

People who have been involved in pervasive felonious conduct cannot be trusted to report themselves voluntarily, and even when asked directly they have a motive to lie. And regulators should not rely on the institutions to act against their own interests, even when there is less at stake than a possible prison sentence. Regulators rely on financial institutions to grade their own “stress tests,” to propose their own “living wills,” and to conduct “independent foreclosure reviews” with consultants and law firms of their own choosing. A dose of skepticism by regulators is in order where financial institutions have an interest in what they report.

Get it?

Let me get right to the point. I’m against the proposed “chained CPI” cut in Social Security because it substantially undermines the protection against inflation that Social Security recipients enjoy under current law. The existing cost of living adjustment (“COLA”) already understates actual increases in the “cost of living;” the chained CPI would exacerbate the problem. [..]

Where we are now in the fiscal cliff negotiations is that Speaker Boehner is talking about reducing the federal deficit in the exact same way that Governor Romney did — Boehner says that he wants to, but he won’t tell us how. President Obama, boxed in by the poll-driven sense that he must-must-must propose something “balanced,” is “balancing” the reduction of tax breaks for the rich against the reduction of the protection that seniors have against inflation. On the merits, however, reducing that protection is undeserved, unwise and unfair.

Robert Reich: Cliffhanger: Obama’s Unnecessary and Unwise Concessions

Why is the President back to making premature and unnecessary concessions to Republicans? [..]

But apparently the President is now offering to continue to Bush tax cuts for people earning between $250,000 and $400,000, and to cut Social Security by reducing annual cost-of-living adjustments. [..]

Hands off Social Security. If the Republicans are willing to raise tax rates on high earners but demand more spending cuts in return, the President should offer larger cuts in defense spending and corporate welfare.

Joe Brewer: What If All the World’s Debt Just Went Away

Just for fun, imagine if all debt were wiped away when the Mayan Calendar ends this Friday…

How would the world be different?  What would become possible for you personally in your life?  How would nations and corporations invest our newfound wealth differently if we all started from a clean slate?  Problems like global warming and extreme poverty would instantly become financial drops in the bucket-easily tackled with fair contracts and forward-looking investments.  The structural debts of entrenched subsidies, invested capital, tax havens, and trade agreements that keep them from being addressed would simply no longer exist.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Well just such a fantasy used to be standard practice in the Hebrew Tradition throughout the early days of their civilization.  They held a great Jubilee every seven years to erase all debt and end economic slavery.  Accounts kept on stone tablets were broken.  Those stored on papyrus were burned to ash.  Slaves were returned to their families.  Everyone was given a fresh start.  (This tradition is being revived today through the Occupy-inspired project, Rolling Jubilee, that has already abolished more than $9,000,000 in US debt for everyday citizens.)

Jim Hightower: Welcome to ‘Michiganistan’

Michigan is no longer a state. It is now “Michiganistan,” an autocratic czardom in the hands of Emperor Rick Snyder.

Formerly the Republican governor, Snyder has been enthroned by the GOP’s lame-duck, legislative supermajority to rule with an iron fist – democracy, rule-of-law, fairness, and the people be damned.

Who’s behind this madness? Say hello to two infamous, anti-union, billionaire plutocrats: the Koch brothers. They had funneled as much as a million dollars into Snyder’s 2010 gubernatorial election, and three Michigan front groups funded by the billionaire brothers aggressively pushed the exact same anti-worker proposal that the Republican thugs just bullied into law.

President Obama on Wednesday gave Vice President Joe Biden Jr. a month to complete a job that he could have finished that afternoon. It is time to come up with, as Mr. Obama put it, “a set of concrete proposals” to make the nation safer from guns. The ways to do this are well-known because the nation has grappled with gun massacres many times before. It is Congress that hasn’t. [..]

Many of the good ideas, some expressed on this page this week, involve sensible limits on who can buy guns and how they can be sold. Mr. Obama should also focus on the weaponry itself, starting with restoring – after toughening – the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004. Assault weapons are versions of military rifles that are meant to kill people, not paper targets, clay pigeons or deer. They account for only a fraction of the guns sold and used in the United States, but they play a hugely outsize role in the national slaughter; rampage killers love them.

Gail Collins: Revolt of the Cliff Dwellers

Attempts to avert the infamous “fiscal cliff” are like a super-high-stakes card game. But you have to imagine a game in which one player needs to go into a back room before he makes his bet and get the approval of a herd of rabid ferrets.

That would be Speaker John Boehner. Across from him at the card table sits the president. When Barack Obama won his big Senate race in 2004, his pals in the Illinois Legislature celebrated with one last evening of poker, in which they took the senator-elect for every dollar in his wallet.

So perhaps it was not surprising that in the negotiations, the president gave up quite a bit. You will remember that Obama had campaigned on keeping the Bush-era tax cuts only for the American middle class: families making $250,000 a year or less. O.K., possibly not all truly middle-class. Still, that was his line in the sand. There were long stretches this fall when tax-hike-for-over-$250,000 seemed to be his only specific plan for the next four years. But, this week, he let Boehner move the line. Pushed it up to $400,000. Plus, Obama gave way on entitlements by agreeing to change the cost-of-living adjustments on Social Security. Then, all eyes turned to the House speaker. And the rabid ferrets.

Peter van Buren: Torture: An All-American Nightmare

Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Won’t Settle the Torture Question or Purge Torture From the American System

If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.

There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of the twenty-first century we tortured people as national policy. One day, we’re going to have to confront the reality of what that meant, of what effect it had on its victims and on us, too, we who condoned, supported, or at least allowed it to happen, either passively or with guilty (or guiltless) gusto. If not, torture won’t go away. It can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us — that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.

John Atcheson: Wanted: A President With Bush’s Balls, Obama’s Brains and Biden’s Heart

Uhmm.  Don’t look now, Mr. President, but you’re taking a mandate and turning it into mush.

Ordinarily that might not matter much.  The importance of the goings on inside the Beltway are notoriously overestimated.

But as you yourself said, this election was an unusually clear and important choice between two fundamentally different views of government.  And as you noted, the stakes were high.

You pointed out that that the prescriptions Republicans were pushing to fix the economy were those that caused the economic collapse.

And guess what? Being the only sane candidate on the issue became a political asset.

And you won.

Yet one week after the election, you warned progressives to be prepared for “bitter pills.”   Really?  Why not just tell McConnell, Bohner and the tea crazies we’re ready to fold?

In June 1944, around 150,000 brave men were asked to storm the beaches of Normandy. At risk to themselves, they accepted the challenge on behalf of their nation and the world. They were heroes. They were leaders.

Imagine if we had leaders today with as much courage as each of those soldiers had in just one of their fingers.

This gun debate, the fiscal cliff, and frankly all important and difficult issues demand leaders willing to be uncomfortable. Willing to lean into an oncoming storm rather than be blown along with it. The men at Normandy risked their lives for what was right. Our politicians could at least risk their campaign donations.

Deborah Burger: Time to Act Now To Restore Our Ravaged Mental Healthcare System

Registered nurses across the country mourn the loss of life marked by the shooting of innocents in Connecticut. This should be a clear wake up call for the White House, Congress, and state and local legislators to take action to address causes of the violence, including restoring the devastating cuts that have occurred to mental health services across the U.S.

Every day a massive tragedy is being played out on a smaller scale everyday in emergency rooms, in mental health facilities, and on the streets across our country, where, with sometimes devastating consequences, mental health is underfunded to a shocking, and sometimes deadly degree.

Members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest organization of nurses, say it is time to act with both short term and long term responses.

Amanda Marcotte: Time to Stop Restricting Abortion and Start Restricting Assault Weapons

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, calls for restrictions on the manufacture and sale of a variety of guns, especially assault rifles such as the Bushmaster .223 used by the shooter in his rampage against women and children, have grown stronger. Of course, this creates a strange situation for pro-choicers, who are usually on the end of arguing that restrictions on abortion don’t do much to reduce abortion rates, allowing gun nut anti-choicers (the two tend to go together because gun nuttery, like anti-choice nuttery, is based in a weird mix of misogyny and psychosexual issues) to squee “gotchas” at us. So, I figured I’d go ahead and shoot that nonsense down and explain here why restrictions on the sales of guns and restrictions on access to abortion are very, very different things. [..]

When crafting legislation, it’s important to avoid being simple-minded and assume that a ban is a ban is a ban. The evidence is clear that abortion restrictions and gun restrictions couldn’t be more different in how they play out in the real world. It’s time to stop restricting abortion and turn our attention to guns.

Michelle Chen: Toxic Train Wreck Exposes Weakness in Federal Chemical Policy

In late November, while other parts of New Jersey were recovering from the superstorm, the quiet town of Paulsboro was blindsided by a very unnatural disaster. A train derailed while crossing a local bridge, sending freight cars tumbling into the water below and releasing a toxic swirl of the flammable gas known as vinyl chloride, used to make PVC plastics. In the following days, chaos ensued as residents hurriedly evacuated. Authorities struggled to manage the emergency response, leaving people confused and frustrated by a lack of official communication about hazards.

Though the derailment came as a shock to residents, this was an accident waiting to happen, environmental advocates say. Paulsboro is just one of the latest in a spate of recent disasters (including others involving vinyl chloride) in industries that handle massive amounts of toxins with minimal oversight.

DISCUSSING the federal budget negotiations should come with a warning label: “Caution – talk of the ‘fiscal cliff’ may induce hyperventilation, blurry policy vision and confusion.”

Take the last of these. According to a recent poll, Americans believe that, if there’s no negotiated settlement between President Obama and Republicans in Congress, the budgetary changes set to take effect on Jan. 1 will enlarge the federal deficit. In truth, going over the cliff – that is, accepting the “last ditch” spending cuts agreed to in August 2011 as well as the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts – would have the opposite effect: it would reduce the deficit. That, after all, has been the aim all along.

But even those who understand this often misjudge the likely impact of these automatic program cuts, known as the sequester, and the tax changes. Indeed, a closer look at this much-feared budget buzz saw reveals it’s better for the country than any likely deal would be.

Darryl Li: Khaled el-Masri and empire’s oblivion

By allowing surrogate countries to take the blame, America can conveniently forget about being responsible for torture.

Two of last Thursday’s headlines together provide a good example of the work of imperial forgetting. On the front page of the New York Times, a story about the depiction of torture in the forthcoming national revenge flick Zero Dark Thirty shows how little debates have advanced over the past decade. “Reasonable” interlocutors in the Beltway remain stuck in the inane exercise of sparring over whether some utterance extracted by waterboarding in 2003 somehow contributed to the chain of events that led to Navy SEALs shooting an unarmed man in the face at point-blank range in 2011. Torture was bad, but perhaps it was a good thing after all, so no need to investigate the whole truth and hold people accountable. Moving on…

This is where we run into the second headline. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France issued its long-awaited and unanimous decision (summary here (pdf)) in a suit filed by Khaled el-Masri against Macedonia. El-Masri’s ordeal is one of the best-known horror stories of the war on terror: A German citizen of Lebanese origin, el-Masri was arrested in Macedonia on New Year’s eve in 2003, held incommunicado and interrogated in a hotel for several weeks at the behest of the United States, and then handed over to CIA personnel at Skopje airport. [..]

In the American empire, officially sanctioned torture and meager justice for it are both quarantined to unfold in distant lands, headaches primarily for other sovereigns. Meanwhile, in the homeland, the process of national forgetting can move ahead. All that’s left is for a few stale debates and some popcorn propaganda to relegate tales like Khaled el-Masri’s to the footnotes of history.

Benjamin Jealous: The voter suppression fight underscores how fragile are our democratic rights

This electoral cycle saw more effort to disenfranchise voters than at any time since the Jim Crow era. We must be ever-vigilant

This is a crucial moment for the progressive movement in America. But if we want to make real, lasting changes in the American way of life, we need to make some fundamental changes in how our democracy works. That means much-needed election reform; fighting the corrosive power of corporate money; and fixing the United States Senate.

2012 was a banner year for progressives. We brought racial profiling and the death penalty back into the national conversation. Marriage equality made great strides, with four states legalizing same-sex marriage or failing to make it unconstitutional. Despite attempts at voter suppression and an ailing voting infrastructure, a diverse electorate loudly rejected the anti-worker, anti-immigrant, anti-equality agenda offered by an increasingly radical right wing.

But last week’s sneak attack on organized labor in Michigan reminded us that the enemies of democracy are still very much empowered and in power. The same groups that funded voter suppression again flexed their financial muscle to cripple worker’s rights at their core. If we become complacent now, we risk losing all we have gained this year and more.

Robert Reich: Remember the Children

America’s children seem to be shortchanged on almost every issue we face as a society.

Not only are we failing to protect our children from deranged people wielding semi-automatic guns.

We’re not protecting them from poverty. The rate of child poverty keeps rising – even faster than the rate of adult poverty. We now have the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world.

And we’re not protecting their health. Rates of child diabetes and asthma continue to climb. America has the third-worst rate of infant mortality among 30 industrialized nations and the second-highest rate of teenage pregnancy, after Mexico.

From a tragic weekend, a return to the daily grind of politics. Our hearts may not be in it, but the challenge is undying and the struggle is one: to protect each other and preserve our humanity in the face of relentless forces. [..]

Last year in Africa I heard the story of a nine-year-old girl who took her own life rather than face the horrors in her village. Her voice has spoken to me ever since, informing the work of my days with the graphic immediacy of her experience. Now the children of Newtown speak to millions of us. For me the voice of Newtown will alway be the voice of that friend of a friend’s daughter. From now on she will always be a still, small voice in my life.

As mournful as they are, we need those voices. Without them we become soulless purveyors of numbers and facts, debating-team members with no stake in the outcome other than the desire to win an argument.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Now is the time for meaningful gun control

We should mourn, but we should be angry.

The horror in Newtown, Conn., should shake us out of the cowardice, the fear, the evasion and the opportunism that prevents our political system from acting to curb gun violence.

How often must we note that no other developed country has such massacres on a regular basis because no other comparable nation allows such easy access to guns? And on no subject other than ungodly episodes involving guns are those who respond logically by demanding solutions accused of “politicizing tragedy.”

It is time to insist that such craven propaganda will no longer be taken seriously. If Congress does not act this time, we can deem it as totally bought and paid for by the representatives of gun manufacturers, gun dealers and their very well-compensated apologists. A former high Obama administration official once made this comment to me: “If progressives are so worked up about how Washington is controlled by the banks and Wall Street, why aren’t they just as worked up by the power of the gun lobby?” It is a good question.

Eugene Robinson: Ready to jump from the ‘fiscal cliff’

Are you as sick of the “fiscal cliff” as I am? Actually, that’s a trick question. You couldn’t possibly be.

Having to read and hear the constant blather about this self-inflicted “crisis” is an onerous burden, I’ll admit. But just imagine having to produce that blather. Imagine trying to come up with something original and interesting to say about a “showdown” that has all the drama and excitement of, well, a budget dispute.

As if this weren’t bad enough, it happens that both of the protagonists – President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner – have reasons to wait until the last possible moment to agree on a deal. Obama believes time is on his side, and Boehner (R-Ohio) needs to show the troops that he will fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets. This could go on past Christmas, at which point many of us will be looking for a real cliff to jump from.

Juan Cole: Questions I Ask Myself About the Connecticut School Shooting

I ask myself, “Why?”

Why do U.S. cable news networks intensively cover these mass shootings, making it the only story for a day or two and prying into every detail of them, when they aren’t interested in preventing them from happening again through banning semiautomatic weapons?  Is it just, like, a natural disaster to them?

Why don’t the news anchors or discussants ever bring up the simple fact that between 1994 and 2004, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994: The Federal Assault Weapons Ban prohibited assault weapons?  The prohibition was not unconstitutional.  Congress foolishly put in a 10-year sunset provision, and of course Bush and his Republican Congress allowed it to expire.

Why doesn’t anyone blame George W. Bush for these mass shootings?  He’s the one who led the charge to let the assault weapons ban expire.  Why aren’t the politicians in Congress who take campaign money from assault weapons manufacturers ever held accountable by the public?