Tag: Punting the Pundits

The lines on Wednesday were huge, like the ribbon of humanity at Navy Pier in Chicago that snaked through halls and stairwells and along the pier and then stretched, amazingly, out to and under Lake Shore Drive. Young illegal immigrants by the tens of thousands formed similar lines in other cities across the country. They lined up outside churches and nonprofit agencies, holding paperwork and folders, to learn more about a new Obama administration policy that would protect them from deportation and give them permission to work.

It was the first day of applications for the administration’s “deferred action” program, which does not give legal status to unauthorized immigrants, just a two-year reprieve from expulsion. It’s simply a step away from indiscriminate deportations, a reordering of enforcement priorities to shield law-abiding young people who were brought here illegally as children.

It’s also an application of common sense. But to Mr. Obama’s more strident critics, Wednesday was no less than the beginning of the end of the Constitution. One of them called it “A-Day,” for amnesty, and invoked the fall of the Roman Empire.

Donna Smith: Dead Woman Working: American Dream Died Long Ago

It was a slow and torturous death, my American dream.  And for millions of others, I am guessing it is the same.  Nothing this current round of politicos is planning to do can restore it.  Just like there is nothing to being a little bit pregnant, there is nothing anyone can do to breathe life back into what once seemed possible.  Now I just hang on waiting to die.

This piece is not about who will or will not be our president or vice president, as after voting in every election since the 1970s, I am pretty sure what I need and want isn’t coming from any of them.

When I launched into my adult life as a rather average American woman, I held dear all the illusions that I could work my way out of any financial or societal calamity if only I had the spirit and drive to do so.  I was so wrong.  I was born into a working class family where my parents struggled and worked hard to make sure I was positioned with an education and life experiences to live a better life than they had and perhaps struggle a little less.  It was all for naught.

David Suzuki: How Environmental Destruction Causes Illnesses and Diseases

Preventing illness is the best way to get health-care costs down. So why aren’t governments doing more to protect the environment? We’ve long known that environmental factors contribute to disease, especially contamination of air, water, and soil. Scientists are now learning the connection is stronger than we realized.

New research shows that 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans-those that rapidly increase in incidence or geographic range-start with animals, two-thirds from wild animals. Lyme disease, West Nile virus, Ebola, SARS, AIDS… these are just a few of the hundreds of epidemics that have spread from animals to people. A study by the International Livestock Research Institute concludes that more than two-million people a year are killed by diseases that originated with wild and domestic animals. Many more become ill.

Tom Englehardt: Baseless Deconstruction: How Your Dollars Became Ghost Towns in Iraq

A war and occupation thousands of miles away that lasted seven years and involved more than 1.5 million Americans, military and civilian, has passed into the history books and yet we still know remarkably little about so much of it.  Take American military bases in Iraq.  There were, of course, none in March 2003 when the Bush administration launched its regime-change invasion with dreams of garrisoning that particular stretch of the planet’s oil heartlands for generations to come.

At the height of the American occupation, in the face of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies and a bloody civil war, the Pentagon built 505 bases there, ranging from micro-outposts to mega-bases the size of small American towns — in one case, with an airport that was at least as busy as Chicago’s O’Hare International.  As it happened, during all but the last days of those long, disastrous years of war, Americans could have had no idea how many bases had been built, using taxpayer dollars, in Iraq.  Estimates in the press ranged, on rare occasions, up to about 300.  Only as U.S. troops prepared to leave was that 505 figure released by the military, without any fanfare whatsoever.  Startlingly large, it was simply accepted by reporters who evidently found it too unimpressive to highlight.

A Guide to Disaster at Home and Abroad

Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country, were horses living semi-wild among the muck and garbage of Baghdad. Those horses had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and seven years after their “liberation” by the American invasion of 2003, they were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for food.

I flew home that same day, a too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not afford to pay teachers a decent wage. Once great cities were rotting away as certainly as if they were in Iraq, where those horses were scrabbling to get by. To this day I’m left pondering these questions: Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as “policy”?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: On Social Security, Say It IS So, Joe!

What Vice President Joe Biden said today was, to use his now-famous phrase, “a big effin’ deal.” No, we’re not talking about his “chains” comment which, as usual, has fascinated a press corps obsessed with taking statements out of context and playing “gotcha” games. We’re referring to the comments he made about Social Security in a Virginia coffee shop.

From a press corps pool report, as relayed by NBC News:

   “Hey, by the way, let’s talk about Social Security,” Biden said after a diner at The Coffee Break Cafe in Stuart, Va., expressed his relief that the Obama campaign wasn’t talking about changing the popular entitlement program. “Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security,” Biden said, per a pool report.

As if that weren’t enough, Biden said it one more time:

“I flat guarantee you.”

What does it mean when those words come from the Vice President of an Administration that’s been talking for years about a deal to cut Social Security? A lot.

Joe Sestak and Marc Gilmore: Principal Reductions Can Save the Economy… By Saving Homes

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s recent announcement that it would bar Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from reducing principal for borrowers at risk of foreclosure has brought attention to an almost certain means to fix an economy that over the past few years has taken halting, unsteady steps towards recovery. Distinct signs of progress have been observed in several areas. Manufacturing productivity has increased, hiring has picked up, and the unemployment rate has fallen from more than 10 percent to roughly 8 percent. Despite these signs of progress, though, there is one prominent segment that continues to undermine the economic recovery: the housing market. The problems in the housing market will continue to impose a serious drag on the economic recovery until that market is stabilized.

The failure to prevent the millions of troubled mortgages from becoming delinquent and being foreclosed causes damage not only to individual borrowers who lose their homes, but also to their communities and to the economy as a whole. When borrowers default on their mortgages and are not provided effective modifications, their homes are eventually sold through short sales or foreclosure sales at substantial losses to the lenders and investors who funded the purchase of the home. For the past two years, those distressed property sales have comprised 30 percent of all home sales, on average, and have sold at an average discount of 30 percent less than the contemporary market value of non-distressed properties. Because they sell for so much less than other properties, those distressed properties drive down the values of the other homes in their neighborhoods, across their community, and throughout their metropolitan areas. These are the headwinds that continue to hold the housing market back.

Leslie Savan: How Paul Ryan Makes It Easier for Republicans to Steal the Election

Everybody, even the Republicans, is talking about how choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate has made winning the election just that much harder for Mitt Romney. But maybe the choice makes it just a little bit easier to steal.

Sure, some down-ballot Republican candidates are scrambling to distance themselves from Ryan’s plan to strangle Medicare; and behind the scenes, many Beltway GOP operatives worry that with Ryan on the ticket, “Romney has practically ceded the election,” as Politico writes. But these scaredy-cats are forgetting that even issues like Medicare may ultimately prove irrelevant as long as their vast system of voter suppression is up and running. As if to remind them, a Pennsylvania judge yesterday upheld that state’s draconian voter ID law, which could keep hundreds of thousands of registered minority, urban and elderly voters from the ballot box-enough to hand this Obama-leaning state to Romney.

And Paul Ryan is the GOP’s best bet that such a theft would be greeted with a nationwide shrug.

Here’s why: [..]

Abject and unwavering support of President Barack Obama on the part of blacks and what used to be called “the left” has made them pretty much irrelevant since Obama emerged as a viable presidential candidate back in mid-2007. After five years of the Age of Obama, four of them as president, one would imagine there are lots of new reasons to endorse him. But even his abject supporters can’t find any.

For more than four years now, we at Black Agenda Report have chronicled the self-silencing and growing irrelevance of black America and what calls itself “the left” in the age of Obama. Black America has arrayed itself as a veritable wall around the First Black President. But it’s not a wall that protects him from racists or Wall Street predators or Pentagon warmongers. The truth has always been that when we stifle our own tongues and circle the wagons trying to silence critics of the White House we only protect the president and his party from accountability to their supposed base: us.

Charlotte Silver: A revolution against ‘the culture of leaks’?

The US government has been intolerant of whistle blowers under the Obama administration.

California Senator Dianne Feinstein is not happy about the leaks. “The torrent of leaks,” as she calls them, inked onto the pages of the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun; leaks of information that once exposed to the light of day can’t be swept back into hiding. Feinstein, as chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, is set to lead the revolution against what she calls “the culture of leaks” sustained by a security-threatening status quo that’s all too tolerant of whistleblowers and whiners.  

Her solution lies in a measure amended to the Intelligence Authorisation Act for the fiscal year 2013.

The proposal, which has been confirmed as “casting a distinct chill over press coverage of national security issues” by New York Times reporter, Scott Shane, cites the proliferation of leaks as evidence that intelligence agencies must institute an “insider threat programme” that will route out potential leakers.

Furthermore, the proposed bill would threaten harsh punishments to all employees of government intelligence agencies, including being stripped of security clearance and loss of pension if found to have “wrongfully” disclosed information. Finally, the provision would place a gag order on former government officials from publically discussing matters for up to one year after leaving the government employment.

Nick Turse: Washington puts its money on proxy war

The US has been training, advising and conducting joint exercises all over the world with “proxy war on its mind”.

In the 1980s, the US government began funnelling aid to Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan as part of an American proxy war against the Soviet Union. It was, in the minds of America’s Cold War leaders, a rare chance to bloody the Soviets, to give them a taste of the sort of defeat the Vietnamese, with Soviet help, had inflicted on Washington the decade before. In 1989, after years of bloody combat, the Red Army did indeed limp out of Afghanistan in defeat. Since late 2001, the United States has been fighting its former Afghan proxies and their progeny. Now, after years of bloody combat, it’s the US that’s looking to withdraw the bulk of its forces and once again employ proxies to secure its interests there.

From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing a multi-faceted, light-footprint brand of warfare. Gone, for the moment at least, are the days of full-scale invasions of the Eurasian mainland. Instead, Washington is now planning to rely ever more heavily on drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world.

Alfred W. McCoy: Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad

After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.

President Obama has closed the CIA’s “black sites,” its secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. But via rendition-the sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that torture-and related policies, his administration has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.  In this way, he has avoided the political stigma of torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them.

This “resolution” of the torture issue may meet the needs of this country’s deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy an international community determined to prosecute human rights abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term risk of another sordid torture scandal that will further damage U.S. standing with allies worldwide.

I had the opportunity to interview author and broadcaster Bill Moyers last year, just before his latest TV show launched. Then, we were a full year ahead of the presidential election. Now, as we head into the cable-news crush called convention season, I watched our conversation again. It’s even more pointed now. Says Moyers: “The scandal (one part of the scandal), is local television stations make enormous sums of money from all of the campaigning that goes on every two or fours years… and they give back nothing for that… Nothing. They should be giving “free time” to the candidates that have real debate with citizens and answer questions. Instead they write carefully manufactured commercials that are exploitive and misleading and demeaning.”

Read Moyers, and then read this speech from Newton Minnow, then chair of the Federal Communication Commission. Minnow said it best, when he said it 1961: “In a time of peril and opportunity, the old complacent, unbalanced fare of action-adventure and situation comedies is simply not good enough.”

Today, cable news has turned our elections themselves into unbalanced action adventures or worse, situation comedies. And public television, barring shows like Moyers’ own, is barely keeping afloat – or keeping anyone awake.  Given our situation as a nation, maybe the last word should be tragedies.

Terry Tempest Williams: A Generational Stance on Behalf of the Arctic Ocean

In less than a week, the Obama administration may well approve Shell Oil’s plans to do exploratory drilling in America’s Arctic Ocean. It would be an unmitigated disaster because there is no proven way to clean up an oil spill in the harshness of Arctic conditions. It should be stopped.

We must resist and insist that President Obama and Secretary Salazar deny this drilling permit to Shell Oil on two points: The Department of Interior has refused to issue an environmental impact statement to access the risks, impacts, and potential damages that Shell Oil’s drilling plan might have on the fragile and complex ocean environment and its inhabitants. Instead, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement has issued what is called a “Finding of No Significant Impact. This is a lie. 2) Shell Oil has not been able to produce a comprehensive strategy or plan of action, by their own admission, outlining their what they would do should an oil spill occur in Arctic waters.

Katha Politt: Gun Control? Dream On.

Why am I even bothering to write about gun control? That was going to be my opening sentence when this column was to be focused on the Aurora, Colorado, movie-theater massacre: twelve people murdered and fifty-eight wounded, some very severely, by James Holmes, demented neuroscience graduate student. Then came the massacre at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin: six killed and three wounded by Wade Michael Page, 40-year-old white supremacist and leader of a racist hardcore band called End Apathy. And even after this horrific crime, which the FBI is calling “domestic terrorism,” my opening is the same: Why am I even bothering to write about gun control? End apathy? Fat chance. If even the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, one of Congress’s own, by Jared Loughner, another hyperarmed madman, didn’t move her pro-gun colleagues or their constituents, nothing will.

Remember the Million Mom March? In May 2000, 750,000 women gathered on the National Mall to call for what are often referred to as “reasonable” controls on guns, like background checks at gun shows and handgun registration (as opposed to “unreasonable” curbs like making it illegal to buy weapons intended to kill people-for example, handguns or AK-47s, let alone 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet). Today you might as well stand on the Mall and sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Ellen Brown: Saving the Post Office: Letter Carriers Consider Bringing Back Banking Services

On July 27, 2012, the National Association of Letter Carriers adopted a resolution at their National Convention in Minneapolis to investigate establishing a postal banking system.  The resolution noted that expanding postal services and developing new sources of revenue are important to the effort to save the public Post Office and preserve living-wage jobs; that many countries have a successful history of postal banking, including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States itself; and that postal banks could serve the 9 million people who don’t have bank accounts and the 21 million who use usurious check cashers, giving low-income people access to a safe banking system.  “A USPS bank would offer a ‘public option’ for banking,” concluded the resolution, “providing basic checking and savings – and no complex financial wheeling and dealing.”

The USPS has been declared insolvent, but it is not because it is inefficient (it has been self-funded throughout its history).  It is because in 2006, Congress required it to prefund postal retiree health benefits for 75 years into the future, an onerous burden no other public or private company is required to carry.  The USPS has evidently been targeted by a plutocratic Congress bent on destroying the most powerful unions and privatizing all public services, including education.  Britain’s 150-year-old postal service is also on the privatization chopping block, and its postal workers have also vowed to fight.  Adding banking services is an internationally proven way to maintain post office solvency and profitability.

Medea Benjamin: At Drone Convention, Zero Tolerance for Peace

When are we, as a nation, going to have a frank discussion about drones and remote-controlled killing? One might think that such a dialogue could take place when thousands of people come together, once a year, at the gathering of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). Wrong.

But AUVSI, the lobby group for the drone industry, brooked no dissent at its August 6-9 Las Vegas Convention. When I, as author of a new book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, tried to rent a room at the Convention Center to give a presentation on my book, AUVSI vetoed my request. When I tried to register as a journalist, I was told that I did not meet their criteria, but they refused to say what that criteria was. And after registering online as a normal participant and paying the $200 fee, when I appeared to get my badge I was yanked off the line, surrounded by police, and told I would be arrested if I set foot in the Convention Center during the duration of the gathering.

Standard Chartered, the London-based bank, may soon reach a settlement with bank regulators to resolve charges that it violated American banking rules that restrict transactions with Iranian clients. The rules are intended to impede money flows that might finance terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The bank has said it “strongly rejects” allegations that it improperly processed $250 billion of transactions for Iranians. The claims were leveled last week by New York’s Department of Financial Services, a regulatory agency recently formed by merging the state’s banking and insurance departments. But if the bank does not settle the charges, its officials will have to rebut them this week at a meeting called by Benjamin Lawsky, the former federal prosecutor who leads the department. It seems a safe bet that the officials would rather settle than have to defend the bank’s actions, with specificity, before the authorities. [..]

While authorities usually act together in such cases, the feds have been on the Standard Chartered case for years without bringing charges or reaching a conclusion.  [..]

Mr. Lawsky’s challenge is to work cooperatively with federal regulators, while standing his ground.

Robert Dreyfuss: Obama’s Regime-Change Policy in Syria

The Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA are making war plans for Syria. And they’re pretty much announcing them.

Over the weekend, on a visit to Turkey, a NATO member, to meet with Syrian opposition leaders and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explicitly declared that Washington’s policy toward Syria is now in what she called the “operational” phase. “We have been closely coordinating over the course of this conflict, but now we need to get into the real details of such operational planning,” she said adding: “Our intelligence services, our military have very important responsibilities and roles to play, so we are going to be setting up a working group to do exactly that.”

Make no mistake: this is regime change by force. It’s not exactly like Iraq, and it’s not exactly like Libya (yet)-but it’s regime change by force anyway.

Ari Berman: Romney-Ryan Economic Plans Would Increase Unemployment, Deepen Recession

Much has been written in recent days about Paul Ryan’s plans to privatize Medicare, dismantle Social Security, massively cut taxes for the wealthy and drastically redistribute income from the bottom to the top.

Yet perhaps the most disturbing feature of Ryan’s budget is that, in the midst of a prolonged recession, it would cost the US economy millions of jobs. Ryan’s 2011 budget plan proposes what the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities calls “the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in US history-two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes” (Medicaid, Pell grants, food stamps and low-income housing). According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the shock to aggregate demand from near-term spending cuts would result in roughly 1.3 million jobs lost in 2013 and 2.8 million jobs lost in 2014, or 4.1 million jobs through 2014.”

Robert Kuttner: Food and the Fed

The record drought and crop failures will create shortages, especially of corn, and will increase the prices of many foods that either contain the stuff or use it to feed livestock. That, in turn, will cause an uptick in the rate of inflation. And higher prices will give the inflation hawks in the Federal Reserve more ammunition in their insane campaign for higher interest rates.

At the most recent meeting of its policy-setting Open Market Committee, Aug. 7, the Fed declined to lower interest rates further, under pressure from inflation hawks. The vote to keep rates at their present level was only 7-3, with the dissenters favoring tighter money. [..]

It’s also clear that the insane weather is a clarion call to get far more serious about global climate change. Readers of my stuff will note that, like columnist Gail Collins on the subject of Mitt Romney’s dog-on-the-roof, I never pass up an opportunity to point out that World War II cured the Great Depression; and that today we need massive social investment to cure slumping demand.

Paul Ryan’s looks are often compared to an actor’s, and that’s no accident: He’s being groomed for the role of a lifetime. When Mitt Romney accidentally introduced Ryan as “the next President” he may have been displaying the same predilection for accidental honesty – for truth-telling as political gaffe – that he showed when he praised Israel’s socialized health system.

And Romney may be right. The most likeable and electable extremist in the country just became the GOP’s 2016 front-runner. That’s no accident either.

All the signs suggest that the economy will struggle for years unless progressive steps are taken. Worse, another steep decline into recession or depression could occur at any time. If Obama’s re-elected and we’re still suffering in 2016, as now seems likely, our “electable extremist” will be in the perfect position to become the next President.

Heads we win, says Corporate America, and tails you lose.

Raymond J. Learsy: France’s 75% Millionaires Tax and America’s Insidiously Crafted Two Tiered Law Enforcement

France’s newly elected Socialist President Francois Hollande has vowed to impose a 75% tax on anyone’s income above a million Euros equivalent to $1.24 million. Clearly there is growing concern among the upper echelons of the France’s business class as Hollande presses forward his ‘manifesto of patriotism’ to ‘pay extra tax to get the country back on its feet again’ (“Indigestion for ‘les Riches,” New York Times, August 8, 2012).

The political rationalization for Hollande’s initiative is to provide political cover for the deep cuts that the government may need to make to France’s extensive social and welfare programs.

Yet the motivating force can be ascribed to a far more destructive impulse imbued with the class animosity dating back to the Revolution. Significantly, Hollande has been quoted, “I don’t like the rich.” Voila!

Matthew Rothschild: Victory for Anti-Nuclear Power Movement in the US

Wendell K. Potter: “Path to Prosperity?” For Many Senior Citizens, VP Pick Ryan’s Plan Would Be Path to the Poorhouse

Score two for the movement against nuclear power in this country.

In June, the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was in violation of the law for failing to adequately assess the environmental hazards involved in the storage of nuclear waste, a point that anti-nuke activists have been making for years and years.

In response to that court ruling, the NRC this week issued a statement that it was stopping the issuing of permits for new nuclear power construction, as well as for life extensions on old existing plants, until it satisfies the court’s concerns.

If Americans who are embracing Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” — and that now includes Mitt Romney — spent a few minutes reviewing a few recent research reports, they just might conclude that the Wisconsin Republican’s plan to reduce the deficit might better be renamed the “Path to the Poorhouse” because of what it would mean to the Medicare program and many senior citizens.

Ryan’s proposal, which will get new scrutiny now that Romney has made him his running mate, would end the current Medicare program for everyone born after 1956. It would replace Medicare with a system in which beneficiaries would receive a set amount of money from the government every year to buy coverage from private insurers. That money would go straight into insurance companies’ bank accounts, which would make them far richer and even more in control of our health care system than they already are.

Mitt Romney will announce his running-mate Saturday morning on the USS Wisconsin.

Wisconsin, it will be noted, is the home state of Congressman Paul Ryan.

And the campaign bling factories are gearing up to print “Romney-Ryan” pins.

That’s a significant shift.

Until just a few days ago, Ryan was considered an unlikely prospect for the No. 2 spot on the Republican ticket: too rigid in his budgetary obsessions, too whacky in his enthusiasm for Ayn Rand’s novels and Austrian economics, too enthusiastic about taking apart Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But Romney has always liked Ryan.

And so has the Republican right.

Eugene Robinson; Heating up debate on climate change

Excuse me, folks, but the weather is trying to tell us something. Listen carefully, and you can almost hear a parched, raspy voice whispering: “What part of ‘hottest month ever’ do you people not understand?”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July was indeed the hottest month in the contiguous United States since record-keeping began more than a century ago. That distinction was previously held by July 1936, which came at the height of the Dust Bowl calamity that devastated the American heartland. [..]

We can’t do anything about the greenhouse gases we’ve already spewed into the atmosphere, but we can minimize the damage we do in the future. We can launch a serious initiative to develop and deploy alternative sources of energy. We can decide what kind of environment we leave to our grandchildren.

I’d like to hear President Obama and Mitt Romney talk about the future of the planet. What about you?

Dan Moran: NRA prevents funding for studies on gun violence

There was nothing unusual about the University of Colorado’s grant to its once-promising student, James E. Holmes.

If Holmes weren’t accused of killing a dozen people and wounding 58, we’d never know that he received $21,600 for living costs while he pursued his doctorate in neuroscience. Nor was there anything odd about how the university paid for the stipend. The money came from an annual grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health.

But if the National Institutes of Health had granted money to a researcher delving into the reasons for mass shootings, there might have been trouble. In an Orwellian use of power politics, the gun lobby led by the National Rifle Association has in many instances muzzled federal agencies’ ability to fund basic research into gun violence.

Robert Reich: Back From Three Weeks Vacation With a Bold Proposal

When I left the U.S. economy was in a stall, Greece was on the brink of defaulting, the euro-zone couldn’t get its act together, the Fed couldn’t decide on another round of quantitative easing, congressional Democrats and Republicans were in gridlock, much of the nation was broiling, and neither Obama nor Romney had put forward a bold proposal for boosting the economy, slowing climate change, or much of anything else.

What a difference three weeks makes.

Here’s a bold proposal I offer free of charge to Obama or Romney: Every American should get a mandatory minimum of three weeks paid vacation a year.

Most Americans only get two weeks off right now. But many don’t even take the full two weeks out of fear of losing their jobs. One in four gets no paid vacation at all, not even holidays. Overall, Americans have less vacation time than workers in any other advanced economy.

This is absurd. A mandatory three weeks off would be good for everyone — including employers.

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Another mass murder, another shooting spree, leaving bodies bullet-riddled by a legally obtained weapon. This time, it was Oak Creek, Wis., at a Sikh temple, as people gathered for their weekly worship. President Barack Obama said Monday, “I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching.” Amidst the carnage, platitudes. With an average of 32 people killed by guns in this country every day-the equivalent of five Wisconsin massacres per day-both major parties refuse to deal with gun control. It’s the consensus, not the gridlock, that’s the problem.

The president’s press secretary, Jay Carney, said, “We need to take common-sense measures that protect Second Amendment rights and make it harder for those who should not have weapons under existing law from obtaining weapons.” It’s important to note where Jay Carney made that point, reiterating the phrase “common sense” five times in relation to the President’s intransigence against strengthening gun laws, and invoking “Second Amendment” a stunning eight times. He spoke from the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the White House, named after one of Mr. Carney’s predecessors, shot in the head by John Hinckley during the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Brady survived and co-founded with his wife the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. After each of these massacres, the Brady Campaign has called for strengthened gun control.

Mike Lofgren: Religion Destroyed the Republican Party

The following is excerpted from “The Party Is Over,” a new book by former Republican staffer and Truthdigger of the Week Mike Lofgren, published by Viking Press.

Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes-at least in the minds of its followers-all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.

Joe Conason: The ‘Missing Evidence’ in Romney’s Tax Records

Harry Reid has provoked outrage among liberals as well as conservatives, who seem to believe he has violated propriety by repeating gossip about Mitt Romney’s taxes. The Senate leader says someone connected with Romney told him that the Republican candidate paid no income taxes for a period of 10 years. Offended by Reid’s audacity, commentators on the right have indicted him for “McCarthyism,” while others on the left have accused him of inventing the whole story.

Evidently the chief complaint against Reid-aside from aggressiveness unbecoming a Democrat-is that he cited “an extremely credible source” who he has so far declined to name. Some journalists have gone so far as to suggest that Reid must be lying because he won’t identify the source. [..]

Many of Reid’s critics work for news outlets that rely on unnamed sources every day, of course, publishing assertions that range from the mundane to the outlandish. It is hard to see why an unnamed source quoted by a daily newspaper or a monthly magazine-or hidden behind a screen in a TV studio-is more credible than a person whispering in the ear of a United States Senator.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Will Conservatives Reject Obamacare’s Rebates?

Here’s a chance for all who think Obamacare is a socialist Big Government scheme to put their money where their ideology is: If you truly hate the Affordable Care Act, you must send back any of those rebate checks you receive from your insurance companies thanks to the new law.

This is just common sense. If you think free enterprise should be liberated from Washington’s interference, what right does Uncle Sam have to tell the insurers they owe you a better deal? Keeping those refunds will make you complicit with Leviathan.

And here’s a challenge to Mitt Romney. You are running a deceitful ad about waivers the Obama administration has yet to issue based on rules allowing governors to operate their welfare-to-work programs more effectively. Will you please stop talking about your devotion to states’ rights?

Under the direction of the United States, the UN Security Council recently extended sanctions for another year against the northeast African nation of Eritrea. The country of 6 million people, nestled against the Red Sea, is on America’s hit list. In the imperial double-speak of Washington, Eritrea is described as a “destabilizing” force in the region – which simply means the government in Asmara has refused to buckle under to U.S. military domination of the Horn of Africa. [..]

Eritrea’s real sin is to be one of the very few nations in Africa that do not have military relations with AFRICOM, the U.S. war machine. That puts a bulls-eye on her back, along with Zimbabwe and Sudan, which U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice demanded be blockaded and bombed back in the George Bush administration. Barack Obama’s Africa policy is an extension and expansion of Bush’s aim to militarize the continent, and the much older U.S. policy to create chaos and horrific human suffering in those regions it cannot directly control. In practice, Obama’s doctrine is the same as Bush: “You are either with us or against us.”

Gail Collins: The Wacky Primary Voters

Missouri Republicans have just nominated a Senate candidate who appears to believe that the government’s college student loan program is the equivalent of Stage 3 cancer. Actually, he said “the Stage 3 cancer of socialism,” which is perhaps not the exact same thing. But I believe you get the idea.

This was a week after Texas Republicans nominated a Senate candidate who is worried about protecting the world’s golf courses from the United Nations. Republicans, I think you need to get a grip. [..]

Next week we have Wisconsin, where former Gov. Tommy Thompson, the guy everyone expected the Republicans to nominate for the Senate, is in trouble thanks to a challenge from – yes! – the Tea Party. And will Connecticut Republicans nominate a former congressman with a reputation for bipartisanship or a businesswoman whose claim to fame is building a professional wrestling empire? Duh.

Paul Krugman: US Conservatives Pile on the Excuses

The commentators Mike Konczal and Jonathan Chait both had good blog posts recently on “You didn’t build that,” the statement President Obama made during a speech in July that, deliberately misinterpreted, has dominated right-wing discourse these past few days. But I think both of them missed a couple of tricks.

The first is that both in effect shrugged their shoulders over the fact that for several days running the central theme of the Romney campaign has rested on a complete lie.

I understand; going on about the dishonesty can get boring. But we should step back often to look at this remarkable spectacle. I really don’t think there’s been anything like this in American political history: a presidential campaign with a pretty good chance of winning that is based entirely on cynical lies about what the sitting president has said. No, Mr. Obama hasn’t apologized for America; no, he hasn’t denigrated achievement. Yet take away those claims, and there’s nothing left in Mitt Romney’s rhetoric.

Michael Wolff: Never Forget Who Profits Most in $2 Billion Presidential Campaign

Campaign fundraising’s reality is that donors large and small end up disappointed. So cui bono? The media and media buyers

What does all this money, in the most well-funded presidential race ever, buy?

There’s the $750m for the president; $800m for Mitt Romney; and then there’s a couple of hundred more in Super Pac funds.

What do the people putting up all this dough in politics actually get? Or maybe a better question: how do people keep falling for this? [..]

Sheldon Adelson has been one of the big spenders during this campaign (by some estimates, his spend may go to $100m), first for Newt Gingrich, and now for Romney, accompanying the Republican candidate and his entourage on their recent trip to Israel. This might be what Adelson wants: some big-man travel, some personal press, a sense of bully-boy insinuation into Israel-US relations, some faith-based pride. But does he get real influence?

Jim Hightower: The People’s Choice! Only, Not Really

If you thought right-wing politicos couldn’t get any goofier, take a peek at Texas on “Cruz Control.”

Ted Cruz is America’s latest tea party darling, having just pulled off a political contortion in Texas that few would’ve thought humanly possible: He got to the right of Gov. Rick Perry! The “Oops” governor is himself a former tea party darling who’s such a far-out know-nothing that he’s renowned for putting the goober in gubernatorial. By the time of last week’s Republican runoff election in Texas, however, Cruz had squinched himself Houdini-like into even farther-out political positions than Perry has taken, thus wowing the tealeaf crowd and defeating the guy whom Perry was backing to be the Party’s nominee for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

How far out is he? One of the white-hot talking points Cruz used to fire-up the narrow extremists who now control the Texas GOP is that he will, by God, defend America’s golf courses! You might not have realized that golf course defense is a burning national issue crying out for the attention of U.S. senators, but such keen vigilance on even the most unimaginable threats to our nation is the kind of stuff that makes Cruz a tea party fave.