Tag: Punting the Pundits

The more Republican candidates pitch for social conservative votes, the more we see the misogyny of America’s religious right

Republicans and their Tea Party shock troops say they want to “take America back”. Progressives think they mean back to the 1950s, back to when men were men, women were ladies, and black folks only got into the White House by the back door. But Republicans are thinking big: they actually want to take us back to the Middle Ages, back to the “good old days” of sexual repression, regulation and punishment.

Forget the economy: this election is becoming a referendum on women’s bodies, since it’s women (according to the Republicans’ Book of Holy Misogyny) who like to have sex without wanting to get pregnant, and, if they do get pregnant, might want to have an abortion; women who demand, as former Senator Rick Santorum says, a “license to do things in the sexual realm that is [sic] counter to how things are supposed to be.”

You know, “sluts”.

Maria Tomchick: A Meltdown in Communication: Nuclear Disaster and Corporate Accountability

A new report released by The Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation questions the safety of nuclear power, especially in the hands of private companies.

A team of 30 lawyers, university professors, and journalists interviewed several hundred people involved with last year’s triple nuclear plant meltdown at Fukushima. What they found should serve as a caution to the U.S. government and the U.S. nuclear power industry. [..]

In the wake of the Fukushima meltdowns, several European nations pledged to phase out  nuclear power, but the U.S. is still pursuing an expansion, including the construction of a new generation of plants-to be owned and managed by private companies, of course.

The American people should pay closer attention to the events at Fukushima and question our government’s ability to manage a similar crisis. Could you envision an American president storming into the offices of a major U.S. corporation and demanding that they clean up the mess?

Michelle Chen: Student Labor Scandal Illuminates the Gray Market for Guestworkers

The students came for a summer learning experience with a job at a classic American company. Instead, they got a crash course in the realities of the global economy.

Following months of campaigning, young foreign students who have waged a bitter labor battle against a U.S. candy giant, the Department of Labor has cited two subcontractors that helped import the students into the Hershey plant in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, where they were reportedly subjected to coercive, exploitative conditions. Though Hershey itself wasn’t targeted, subcontractors involved in the work program, Exel Incorporated and SHS Group, were charged with several occupational safety violations, including failure to provide adequate safety-training and a repeated failure to record injuries and illnesses.

Though the citations include various fines, they didn’t really address the core of the shadowy labor supply chain that entangled several hundred students from China, Nigeria, and other countries. According to workers’ testimonies, they came for an “educational” work experience under the J-1 visa program and ended up stuck on an assembly line packing candies for obscenely low wages. The recruits eventually revolted and launched a high-profile campaign with the National Guestworker Alliance and other advocacy groups.

Amanda Marcotte: Why Do Right-Wing Extremists Have the Power to Force Doctors to Humiliate Women?

Of all the words one could have guessed that would completely shift the public discourse, “transvaginal” probably wouldn’t have rated very high before the month of February. Yet that simple word managed to finally draw national attention and outrage to an issue pro-choicers have been trying to highlight for years now — the anti-choice enthusiasm for passing laws requiring women seeking abortion to endure harassment ultrasounds before being allowed to abort unwanted pregnancies.

Anti-choicers claim the laws are necessary for “informed consent,” an argument that bafflingly presumes that women seeking abortions aren’t aware that they’re pregnant. Pro-choicers correctly point out that the laws are both about putting obstacles between women and abortion, and most importantly, forcing unwilling doctors to convey the legislators’ intent to shame and harass women for getting abortions. But this debate about consent and the difference between medically necessary procedures and nuisance ones was hard to get across to the general public. That is, until the word transvaginal came into the picture, after legislators in Virginia tried to join states like Texas in requiring a mandatory ultrasound for abortion.

Americans seem confident in the mythical notion that the United States is a free nation dedicated to reproducing the principles of equality, justice and democracy. What has been ignored in this delusional view is the growing rise of an expanded national security state since 2001 and an attack on individual rights that suggests that the United States has more in common with authoritarian regimes like China and Cuba “than anyone may like to admit.”(1) I want to address this seemingly untenable notion that the United States has become a breeding ground for authoritarianism by focusing on four fundamentalisms: market fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, educational fundamentalism and military fundamentalism. This is far from a exhaustive list, but it does raise serious questions about how the claim to democracy in the United States has been severely damaged, if not made impossible.

Carl Bloice: And Now, the Catfood Party

Like most establishment pundits, Thomas Friedman (and apparently most of the rest of the nation) came away from the awful reality show called the Republican Presidential debates quite discouraged. While some prominent conservatives in the party are openly casting about for a way to inject some sanity into the race and perhaps another candidate the New York Times columnist is talking up another party. “Eventually the `circular firing squad’ that is the Republican primary will be over and the last man standing will be the party’s nominee for president,” wrote the scribe of flat earth fame. “If that candidate is Rick Santorum, I think there is a good chance a Third Party will try to fill the space between the really `severely conservative’ Santorum (or even Mitt Romney) and the left-of-center Barack Obama.” (Notice how he puts the unnamed party in capital letters, probably to set it off from the already existing alternatives, like the Green Party, or Socialist Party.)

New York Times Editorial: A Weakened Miranda Rule

The Supreme Court recently did significant damage to the Miranda rule, which requires that suspects in custody be told of their right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present, and that any statements they make could be used against them in criminal proceedings.

Without these warnings, statements made are inadmissible as evidence, the court said in the 1966 case Miranda v. Arizona, because “the very fact of custodial interrogation exacts a heavy toll on individual liberty, and trades on the weaknesses of individuals.”

That is exactly the principle violated by the court’s new ruling in Howes v. Fields. The case involved Randall Lee Fields, who was in jail in Michigan for disorderly conduct, was interrogated by sheriffs there and, based on what he said, was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for a sex crime.

George Monbiot: How Ayn Rand Became the New Right’s Version of Marx

Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats

It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as “refuse” and “parasites”, and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.

Danny Schechter: Sweet Home Chicago: G8 Summit Moved but Protests Will Continue

Did the Obama alumni Association in Chicago—David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and Bill Daley—get nervous and call the White House, or was it Barack himself, having disposed/co-opted one threat by the name of Netanyahu who recognized he had a more serious problem on the horizon.

The president has been playing Ronald Reagan these days, talking tough while feinting towards the center. What he most decidedly does not want to do is play Hubert Humphrey and relive the summer of 1968 in Chicago. That’s why the G8 meeting was shifted from contested ground there to safe space in the ultra secure well-guarded environment of Maryland’s Camp David.

The last thing the president needs in the middle of his campaign is another police riot in the second city.

The Leona Helmsley theory of international law

Asked whether Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was a war criminal, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Appropriations Committee that “Based on definitions of war criminal and crimes against humanity, there would be an argument to be made that he would fit into that category,” although she downplayed the idea of charging him as such, in the interest of persuading him “perhaps to step down from power.”  And with maybe 7,000 Syrian civilian deaths in the past year, probably few outside of al-Assad’s power apparatus would argue strenuously with her characterization.  There was a rather large elephant in that committee room, though.  The Senate and the Administration are accustomed to thinking that they define and enforce justice on a global basis, but doesn’t justice, like charity, begin at home?

Like perhaps with George W. Bush?  Prosecuting the former U.S. President  for the crime of invading Iraq would, of course, be considered absurd on Capitol Hill and is virtually ignored in the mainstream American media, yet the matter is not taken so lightly everywhere.  Last November, for instance, a War Crimes Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia convicted both Bush and former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair of “crimes against peace.”  The verdict concluded that “Weapons investigators had established that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was also not posing any threat to any nation at the relevant time that was immediate that would have justified any form of pre-emptive strike.”

David Swanson: Un-Cheating Justice: Two Years Left to Prosecute Bush

Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government.  She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that “state secrets” claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals.  She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice.  And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush.

Holtzman’s new book, coauthored with Cynthia Cooper, is called “Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution — and What We Can Do About It.”  Holtzman begins by recalling how widespread and mainstream was the speculation at the end of the Bush nightmare that Bush would pardon himself and his underlings.  The debate was over exactly how he would do it.  And then he didn’t do it at all.

Jim Hightower: Treating Sick Rich Folks

In these trying times of health care austerity, it reaffirms one’s faith in humanity to learn that many hospitals are now going the extra mile to provide top quality care for all.

For all super-rich people that is. These folks are so rich they can buy their way into “amenities units” built into secluded sections of many hospitals. It’s not medical care that they’re peddling to an elite clientele, but the personal pampering that the superrich expect in all aspects of their lives.

Chris Hedges: AIPAC Works for the 1 Percent

The battle for justice in the Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is about living rather than dying. It is about communicating rather than killing. It is about love rather than hate. It is part of the great battle against the corporate forces of death that reign over us-the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the speculators on Wall Street, the oligarchic elites who assault our poor, our working men and women, our children, one in four of whom depend on food stamps to eat, the elites who are destroying our ecosystem with its trees, its air and its water and throwing into doubt our survival as a species.

What is being done in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is a pale reflection of what is slowly happening to the rest of us. It is a window into the rise of the global security state, our new governing system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is a reflection of a world where the powerful are not bound by law, either on Wall Street or in the shattered remains of the countries we invade and occupy, including Iraq with its hundreds of thousands of dead. And one of the greatest purveyors of this demented ideology of violence for the sake of violence, this flagrant disregard for the rule of domestic and international law, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Super Tuesday: Missing the Primary Issue

politics never stays in Ohio, and there are two story lines here on the eve of Super Tuesday.

There is, first, the Republican presidential primary fight. Rick Santorum has to win Ohio to keep his candidacy alive. A Mitt Romney triumph would, at last, turn him into the “inevitable” Republican nominee. The second narrative involves the struggle for a state that Republicans must take in November to have any chance of defeating President Obama.

The problem for Republicans is that the two story lines are not coming together.

Dave johnson: Labor’s Fight Is Our Fight

Unions have been fighting the 1% vs 99% fight for more than 100 years. Now the rest of us are learning that this fight is also OUR fight.

The story of organized labor has been a story of working people banding together to confront concentrated wealth and power. Unions have been fighting to get decent wages, benefits, better working conditions, on-the-job safety and respect. Now, as the Reagan Revolution comes home to roost, taking apart the middle class, the rest of us are learning that this is our fight, too.

The story of America is a similar story to that of organized labor. The story of America is a story of We, the People banding together to fight the concentrated wealth and power of the British aristocracy. Our Declaration of Independence laid it out: we were fighting for a government that derives its powers from the consent of us, the people governed, not government by a wealthy aristocracy telling us what to do and making us work for their profit instead of for the betterment of all of us. It was the 99% vs the 1% then, and it is the 99% vs the 1% now.

THERE’S an old saying, attributed to the British Foreign Office in colonial days: “Keep the Persians hungry, and the Arabs fat.” For the British – then the stewards of Persian destiny – that was the formula for maintaining calm; it still is for Saudi Arabian leaders, who simply distribute large amounts of cash to their citizens at the first sign of unrest at their doorstep.

But in the case of Iran, neither America nor Britain seems to be observing the old dictum. Keeping the Persians hungry was a guarantee that they wouldn’t rise up against their masters. Today, the fervent wish of the West appears to be that they do exactly that. Except that the West is doing everything in its power to keep the Iranians hungry – even hungrier than they might ordinarily be under the corrupt and incompetent administration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mark Engler: Obama’s Broken Resolutions

In June 2007, on a warm Sunday in San Antonio, Texas, presidential candidate Barack Obama rolled up his white shirtsleeves and addressed a crowd of 1,000: ‘We’re going to close Guantánamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus,’ he said. The assembly cheered.

The senator repeated his vow the next month, and in subsequent campaign stops: ‘As President, I will close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions.’

In November 2008, after being elected, Obama went on the news show 60 Minutes. ‘I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo,’ he stated, ‘and I will follow through on that.’

It is now 2012. The US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba – which has held hundreds of prisoners without trial and has been the site of torture and abuse – remains open. In December, President Obama signed into law a National Defense Authorization Act that, according to the New York Times, will ‘make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law.

Subhankar Banerjee: How “Drill, Baby, Drill” and “Yes We Can” Got Married

American military prefers to make preemptive strikes. We know this. In America, corporations have enormous influence over the government-these days they essentially run the government. We know this too. And now a giant corporation has made a preemptive strike against nonprofit organizations. “Arctic Ocean drilling: Shell launches preemptive legal strike” is the title of a recent Los Angeles Times article. Shell’s legal attack is against REDOIL-a small indigenous human rights organization in Alaska and 12 environmental organizations fighting to stop dangerous drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in Arctic Alaska-Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Greenpeace, National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Ocean Conservancy, Oceana, Pacific Environment, Sierra Club, and The Wilderness Society. This is historic.

On Thursday, I requested Cindy Shogan, Executive Director of Alaska Wilderness League in Washington, D.C. about how she would respond. Following is the email statement I received from her:

   “In a true-life David vs. Goliath parable, Royal Dutch Shell, a foreign company that makes millions of dollars in profits per hour, is forcing Alaska Wilderness League, a grassroots-based nonprofit with the sole purpose of advocating for Alaska’s lands, waters and native people, into court-and seeking fees and costs against us. I suppose if you’re like Shell, and you have billions of dollars to throw around, you can engage in this desperate ploy, instead of proving on the ground that you can actually clean up an oil spill in Arctic conditions.

   My response to Shell is this: Alaska Wilderness League will not be bullied. We will take the time we need to evaluate whether Shell’s oil spill response plan, for the most aggressive course of Arctic Ocean drilling ever proposed in history, meets the letter of the law. We owe that much to the Iñupiat people who have thrived on Alaska’s Arctic coast for thousands of years, and the extraordinary Arctic ecosystem that is among the most vital in the world.”

How did we get here? I’d suggest through a cruel marriage of two phrases. You perhaps never thought that two phrases could marry, right? And, that they can even produce babies, right? In America, anything is possible.

Charles M. Blow: Santorum and the Sexual Revolution

Rick Santorum wants to bring sexy back … to the 1950s, when he was born.

That is because Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed.

To fully understand Santorum’s strident rejection of the 1960s, it’s instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in 2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in Washington.

The speech was interesting, but the answers he gave to the questions that followed were truly illuminating.

WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website, has again published a massive trove of documents, this time from a private intelligence firm known as Stratfor. The source of the leak was the hacker group “Anonymous,” which took credit for obtaining more than 5 million emails from Stratfor’s servers. Anonymous obtained the material on Dec. 24, 2011, and provided it to WikiLeaks, which in turn partnered with 25 media organizations globally to analyze the emails and publish them.

Among the emails was a short one-liner that suggested the U.S. government has produced, through a secret grand jury, a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In addition to painting a picture of Stratfor as a runaway, rogue private intelligence firm with close ties to government-intelligence agencies serving both corporate and U.S. military clients, the emails support the growing awareness that the Obama administration, far from diverging from the secrecy of the Bush/Cheney era, is obsessed with secrecy, and is aggressively opposed to transparency.

Robert Sheer: [The Ayatollah Is Right About One Thing: Nuclear Weapons Are Sinful ]

Given my own deep prejudice toward religious zealotry, it has not been difficult for me to accept the conventional American view that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme theocratic ruler of Iran, is a dangerous madman never to be trusted with a nuclear weapon. How then to explain his recent seemingly logical and humane religious proclamations on the immorality of nuclear weapons? His statement challenges the acceptance of nuclear war-fighting as an option by every U.S. president since Harry Truman, who, in 1945, ordered the deaths of 185,000 mostly innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We do not see any glory, pride or power in the nuclear weapons-quite the opposite,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Tuesday in summarizing the ayatollah’s views. Salehi added, “The production, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons are illegitimate, futile, harmful, dangerous and prohibited as a great sin. Given my own deep prejudice toward religious zealotry, it has not been difficult for me to accept the conventional American view that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme theocratic ruler of Iran, is a dangerous madman never to be trusted with a nuclear weapon. How then to explain his recent seemingly logical and humane religious proclamations on the immorality of nuclear weapons? His statement challenges the acceptance of nuclear war-fighting as an option by every U.S. president since Harry Truman, who, in 1945, ordered the deaths of 185,000 mostly innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We do not see any glory, pride or power in the nuclear weapons-quite the opposite,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Tuesday in summarizing the ayatollah’s views. Salehi added, “The production, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons are illegitimate, futile, harmful, dangerous and prohibited as a great sin.

Joe Conason: Mitt Romney: An Extremist for the Privileged

Seeking applause from a right-wing audience in Michigan, Mitt Romney vowed on Saturday: “I will cut spending, I will cap spending and I will finally balance the budget,” saying that he will end federal funding for all the usual Republican budgetary scapegoats-the Public Broadcasting System, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has said much the same thing many times in recent mhttps://thestarshollowgazette.com/editDiaryAction.doonths, hoping to woo the tea party extremists who keep rejecting his candidacy.

But Romney must think these “conservatives” very stupid if he’s promising to balance the federal budget by eliminating nominal amounts spent on the nation’s cultural programs. And he must think they’re even dumber if they believe he can do that while delivering the massive tax cuts and defense increases he has also promised. As a former corporate investor and state governor, he certainly knows that his numbers simply don’t work.

E. J. Dionne: Mitt Romney: An Extremist for the Privileged

Maybe Rick Santorum is helping Mitt Romney after all: Santorum’s wacky statements about college and snobbery, along with his upset stomach over a 52-year-old John F. Kennedy speech, are distracting attention from Romney’s extremist economic ideas.

Yes, Romney needs Santorum to keep doing his exotic fan dance on social issues because the stage act diverts everyone (especially journalists) from examining the reactionary and regressive ideas Romney is cooking up on substantive questions. If Romneyism is what now passes for “moderation” in the Republican Party, no wonder the authentically moderate Olympia Snowe decided to end her distinguished career in the Senate. There is no room anymore for proposals remotely worthy of the moderate label.

FROM the 1940s to the 1970s, organized labor helped build a middle-class democracy in the United States. The postwar period was as successful as it was because of unions, which helped enact progressive social legislation from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare. Since then, union representation of American workers has fallen, in tandem with the percentage of income going to the middle class. Broadly shared prosperity has been replaced by winner-take-all plutocracy.

Corporations will tell you that the American labor movement has declined so significantly – to around 7 percent of the private-sector work force today, from 35 percent of the private sector in the mid-1950s – because unions are obsolete in a global economy, where American workers have to compete against low-wage nonunion workers in other countries. But many vibrant industrial democracies, including Germany, have strong unions despite facing the same pressures from globalization. [..]

In fact, the greatest impediment to unions is weak and anachronistic labor laws.  It’s time to add the right to organize a labor union, without employer discrimination, to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, because that right is as fundamental as freedom from discrimination in employment and education. This would enshrine what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1961 at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention: “The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement.  Together, we can be architects of democracy.”

Jim Hightower: The Keystone XL Flim-Flam

For Rep. Allen West, the skyrocketing price of gasoline is not just a policy matter, it’s a personal pocketbook issue. The Florida tea-party Republican (who, of course, blames President Obama for the increase) recently posted a message on Facebook wailing that it’s now costing him $70 to fill his Hummer H3.

It’s hard to feel the pain of a whining, $174,000-a-year congress-critter, but millions of regular Americans really are feeling pain at the pump – especially truck drivers, cabbies, farmer, commuters and others whose livelihoods are tethered to the whims of Big Oil. It’s an especially cynical political stunt, then, for congressional Republicans, GOP presidential wannabes and a chorus of right-wing mouthpieces to use gas price pain as a whip for lashing out at Obama’s January decision to reject the infamous Keystone XL pipeline.

Matthew Rothschild: Don’t Lower the Corporate Tax Rate

Republicans love to talk about how high the U.S. corporate tax rate is, and how bad that is.

But when you examine their arguments, their case falls apart.

They predicate it on the fact that the current tax rate is 35 percent. But because of creative accounting and loophole sneaking, the actual rate that corporations paid last year was just 12.1 percent.

Many of our biggest companies paid nothing in corporate taxes, or even got rebates.

Take GE, for example. In the last decade, it made $81 billion in profits but paid only 2.3 percent in corporate income taxes. And over the last five years, it got $2.7 billion in rebates.

So for all the crying over how high the corporate tax rate is, it’s pretty much a myth. As Robert Reich points out, corporate taxes used to account for one out of every three dollars of federal tax revenue back in Eisenhower’s day. Now they account for only one out of every ten dollars.

New York Times Editorial: Romney Wins, the Middle Class Loses

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum fought each other to nearly a draw in the Michigan primary and may actually have to split its delegates, but together they may have lost Michigan for their party by running campaigns that were completely disconnected from the lives of middle-class voters and pushed ever farther to the right margins of American politics.

A month ago, the state was rated a tossup in this November’s general election. But after voters got a taste of the Republican field, Michigan seems to be on President Obama’s side of the ledger, along with Wisconsin. Both elected Republican governors in 2010, but large numbers of blue-collar voters have turned away from the party after realizing how little regard it has for their interests.

Aspirins and short skirts and contraception, oh my! The last few weeks have seen a slew of Republican gaffes concerning women’s sexuality. From Rick Santorum’s billionaire supporter Foster Friess’s waxing nostalgic about the good old days when women put aspirin “between their knees” in lieu of contraception to an online furor over whether the young conservative women at CPAC dressed too provocatively-the GOP has a major woman problem on their hands.

Their fear of sex-of women’s sexuality in particular-has become a major media talking point, and a source of outrage among American women. But what I don’t understand is why anyone is surprised. Republicans have long based their agenda for women in a deep-rooted disdain for all things female. We’ve been down this road many, many times before.

When a picture of Congressman Darrell Issa’s all-male panel on birth control (the make-up of which prompted several Democratic women to walk out of the hearing) hit the Internet and mainstream media-I couldn’t help but be reminded of a similar picture of George W. Bush signing the “partial birth” abortion ban, surrounded by a group of smiling clapping men. All men. (Santorum was one of them.)

Maureen Dowd: G.O.P. Greek Tragedy

Rick should scat.

Mitt Romney needs to be left alone to limp across the finish line, so he can devote his full time and attention to losing to President Obama.

With Sanctorum and Robo-Romney in a race to the bottom, the once ruthless Republican Party seems to have pretty much decided to cave on 2012 and start planning for a post-Obama world.

Not even because Obama is so strong; simply because their field is so ridiculously weak and wacky.

John McCain has Aeschylated it to “a Greek tragedy.” And he should know from Greek tragedy.

Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto: What’s the Matter With Arizona?

Nothing. My home state does not suffer from a fundamental political or societal flaw. There are a number of things that I do not like about Arizona, namely S.B. 1070, tent city Joe Arpaio and finger-wagging Jan Brewer. But to understand Arizona and that nothing’s the matter with it, you have to understand its Western personality, one that is volatile and quirky. It is a personality that is forged by an inheritance of populist politics and idiosyncratic political leaders.

One hundred years ago this month, Arizona was the last state in the continental United States to gain statehood. While the political machines in New York, Baltimore and Chicago were grinding out back-room deals, Arizona was only beginning to think about statehood. As Tom Schaller points out in his book, Whistling Past Dixie, the later incorporation of the Mountain West states meant a later start to political development in this region. As a result, states west of the Mississippi do not have deep partisan roots that anchor their political systems.

Politics in the West has been and continues to be candidate-centered. The same state that elected Barry Goldwater to the Senate is the same state that in 1974 elected Raúl Castro, Arizona’s first Latino governor. Arizona is also a state where in 2002 and 2006 voters simultaneously elected Democrat Janet Napolitano as governor and Republican Jan Brewer as secretary of state.

Ilyse Hogue: In Defense Of ‘The Help’

Standing at the center of a circle of women, a housekeeper tells of finally fixing herself a meal after working seven straight hours, only to have the mistress of the house storm into the kitchen and throw the pan of food into the sink, banning “that ethnic food” from her home. Next up, a nanny recounts the most recent day when after working eleven hours straight, her employers requested that she stay late into the night to care for the children. Unable to jeopardize her job, she stayed, going one more night without seeing her own children. The other women in the circle nod in weary recognition and, in turn, tell their own stories.

These are not scenes from the popular and controversial movie, The Help. These are twenty-first-century experiences being shared at the Los Angeles gathering of the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance (NDWA) this past weekend. The women present call themselves “the real-life help,” and the meeting was held in conjunction with the Oscars to remind Americans enamored with the Hollywood vision of civil rights era maids asserting their dignity that things have not changed as much as we might think.

There’s been a lot of bad news coming from Afghanistan in recent weeks-deep anti-American sentiment finally overflowed into violence when it was revealed American soldiers burned copies of the Koran at Bagram airbase on February 20. More than 30 people have been killed in revenge attacks, and 11,000 Afghans took to the streets in protest this weekend.

Two American troops were killed inside the Afghan Interior Ministry last week, also in response to the Koran burning, leading to the unprecedented removal of all military personnel from the government ministries. Given that this is the government the United States is trying to build up, it’s a troubling development to say the least, as is the fact that 10 of the last 58 coalition deaths have come at the hands of America’s Afghan partners.

Much to its credit, the White House press corps put press secretary Jay Carney through the ringer on the war yesterday-he was peppered through most of his daily briefing with smart, tough questions about the recent violence and the overall viability of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

Eugene Robinson: Santorum in the Extreme

For all his supposed authenticity, Rick Santorum is not what he seems. Beneath that sweater vest beats the heart of a calculating and increasingly desperate politician who has gone beyond pandering all the way to shameless demagoguery.

That’s the charitable view. The uncharitable take on Santorum’s incendiary rhetoric is that he actually believes this stuff. Either way, it’s time for Republican voters to end his little electoral adventure and send him back to the cosseted life of a Washington influence-peddler.

The image of aw-shucks earnestness that improbably landed Santorum in the Republican Party’s Final Four was beginning to fade. Mitt Romney, who is nothing if not relentless, was beginning to climb back up in the polls, and Santorum risked becoming nothing more than the latest of a series of anti-Romneys to bite the dust. Something had to change-so, in recent days, Santorum’s avuncular smile has become a nasty sneer.

John Nichols: GOP Candidates Embrace Anti-Labor, Free-Market Fundamentalism

Much is being made, and appropriately so, about the extremism of the Republican presidential field when it comes to reproductive rights and ripping down Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state.

It is not just Rick Santorum. Three of the four Republican contenders for the presidency-the sometimes exception is Ron Paul-are running campaigns that position them as theocratic extremists of a far more radical bent than religious-right contenders such as Pat Robertson in 1988 or Gary Bauer in 2000.

But there was an ever more arch fundamentalism on display among the Republican contenders as they battled across Arizona and Michigan in anticipation of today’s critical primaries in those states.

Like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich and Maine Governor Paul LePage, they are anti-labor extremists whose opposition to free trade unions goes to extremes not seen since southern segregationists sought to bar unions because of their fear that white workers and people of color were being organized into labor organizations that would threaten “Jim Crow.”

Ari Berman: Who Will ‘Reagan Democrats’ Support in 2012?

In 2008, the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner described Macomb County, Michigan-home to the bellwether suburbs north of Detroit-as “90 percent white, half Catholic, 40 percent union families, one third over 60.” Macomb was once the most Democratic suburb in the country, giving LBJ 75 percent of the vote in 1964, but it swung sharply to Republicans in the 1980s and has been a pivotal swing county in the state ever since. Gore won it by two, Kerry lost it by one and Obama won it by eight.

The archetypal “Reagan Democrats” make up a fifth of Macomb’s electorate. These blue-collar, non-college-educated white voters abandoned the Democratic Party in the ’70s and ’80s, out of anger at Democratic support for policies like welfare and affirmative action, and leapt into the outstretched arms of Ronald Reagan, who won Macomb County by thirty-three points in 1984. They’ve been an important part of the GOP coalition ever since. “In the 2008 Michigan primary,” wrote National Journal’s Ron Brownstein, “57 percent of GOP voters lacked a college education and 75 percent earned less than $100,000 annually.”

Paul Volcker deserves better. In the hands of Tim Geithner’s Treasury, the Rule named for Volcker supposedly limiting speculative mischief by government-guaranteed banks is fast becoming a cumbersome parody of itself.

Financial regulatory officials, at the behest of Wall Street, have turned a simple bright line into a convoluted monstrosity. The questionnaire alone, inviting comments, runs 530 pages.

The bankers and their allies in government have succeeded once again in making their financial engineering too complex to regulate. The Volcker Rule, in the spirit of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, was supposed to simplify matters. But the regulators are helping Wall Street by adding to the complexity. See Jesse Eisenger’s analysis from Propublica.

The capacity of Wall Street to create new mutations of derivatives that are not quite explicitly covered by this or that sub-sub-sub rule is of course endless. In the absence of a clear line, Wall Street can always field more lawyers than the government can spare regulators, and what an awful waste of taxpayer money.

Robert Fisk: The New Cold War has Already Started – in Syria

If Iran obtains nuclear weapons capability, “I think other nations across the Middle East will want to develop nuclear weapons”.

Thus thundered our beloved Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in one of the silliest pronouncements he has ever made. Hague seems to spend much of his time impersonating himself, so I’m not really certain which of Mr Hague-Hague’s personas made this statement.

Flaw number one, of course, is Hague-Hague’s failure to point out that there already is another Middle East “nation” that has, in fact, several hundred nuclear weapons along with the missiles to fire them. It’s called Israel. But blow me down, Hague-Hague didn’t mention the fact. Didn’t he know? Of course, he did. What he was trying to say, you see, was that if Iran persisted in producing a nuclear weapon, Arab states – Muslim states – would want to acquire one. And that would never do. The idea, of course, that Iran might be pursuing nuclear weapons because Israel already possesses them, did not occur to him.

Max Blumenthal: Progressive Democratic Hero Elizabeth Warren Enlists to Serve AIPAC’s Pro-War Agenda

Few congressional candidates have excited the progressive base of the Democratic party as much as consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren has. With her tenacious advocacy for a consumer protection agency to fight unfair lending practices and her consistent framing of economic issues in terms of structural inequality has earned her enthusiastic promotion from major progressive figures from Markos Moulitsas to Rachel Maddow to Michael Moore. [..]

While progressives celebrate Warren for her fight against the big banks and the financial industry’s lobbying arm, they have kept silent over the fact that she has enlisted with another powerful lobby that is willing to sabotage America’s economic recovery in order to advance its narrow interests. It is AIPAC, the key arm of the Israel lobby; a group that is openly pushing for a US war on Iran that would likely trigger a global recession, as the renowned economist Nouriel Roubini recently warned. The national security/foreign policy position page on Warren’s campaign website reads as though it was cobbled together from AIPAC memos and the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry by the Democratic Party hacks who are advising her. It is pure boilerplate that suggests she knows about as much about the Middle East as Herman “Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan” Cain, and that she doesn’t care.

Gary Younge: The Itinerant US Left Has Found Its Home in the Occupy Movement

Far from alienating middle America, the progressive movement has captured the public and political imagination

At the auction of foreclosed homes at Queens supreme court in New York, the official carefully explained the process for one person to make an offer on another person’s misery. As the bidding was about to begin on what was once the home of Valencia Williams, around 20 people stood up and started to sing: “Mr Auctioneer / And all the people here / We’re asking you to call off the sale right now / We’re going to survive but we don’t know how.” [..]

The legacy of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is still in the making. Those who believe it came from nowhere and has disappeared just as quickly are wrong on both counts. Most occupiers were already politically active in a range of campaigns. What the occupations did was bring them together in one place and refract their disparate messages through the broader lens of inequality. The occupations were less an isolated outpouring of discontent than a decisive, dynamic moment in an evolving process.