Tag: Punting the Pundits

Aggregate demand is the problem, not ‘Obamacare’

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 288,000 jobs had been added in June, critics cried foul. They said the news was misleading: The details showed a deteriorating job market, which many critics blamed on the Affordable Care Act requirement that employers provide workers with health insurance or risk prosecution or penalties.

But an examination of the data tells an entirely different story about what has hobbled the recovery from the Great Recession, which started in December 2007 and ended in the summer of 2009.

June marked 52 consecutive months of job growth. However, the number of full-time jobs actually fell in June by more than 530,000 compared with May. Total jobs increased only because part-time jobs grew by about 800,000.

At first blush these numbers are alarming. But the details reveal a more nuanced, and in some ways more disturbing, picture. [..]

Most troubling of all, the number of people who want to work full-time but can find only part-time work shot up from 4.6 million in 2007 to 7.5 million last month. This involuntary part-time employment explains, statistically, the entire increase in part-time jobs in the last six-plus years.

Had we maintained the 2007 ratio of full-time to part-time jobs today, we would have 2.5 million more full-time jobs and 2.5 million fewer part-time jobs, according to my calculations from the official data. We would still need another roughly 7 million jobs to fulfill all the demand people have for work.

The shift to part-time work took place before Obama’s policies had any effect and well before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010.

Amanda Marcotte: Why they really hate Neil deGrasse Tyson: Inside the right’s anti-intellectual paranoia

A new National Review cover story demonstrates the seething resentment that fuels much of modern conservative anger

If there’s one belief that binds the disparate factions of the American right together, it’s the belief in American exceptionalism, both for the nation and for individuals. The mythology that conservatism is about promoting excellence and encouraging strivers is found throughout conservative media and literature, from the story of John Galt in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged to Reagan’s description of America as a “shining city on a hill.” While it often manifests as contempt for the poor and the vulnerable, in the abstract this conservative enthusiasm for doing better could, in theory, be channeled productively toward actually pushing people to achieve.

So why are so many conservatives abandoning this enthusiasm for the exceptional in favor of what can only be described as jealous sniping aimed at people who are actually trying to expand the world creatively and scientifically? There’s a lot of highfalutin talk on the right about supporting the strivers, but in practice, the conservative response to someone who tries to stick his head above the crowd is to beat it down with a hammer. Conservatives may think of themselves as lovers of excellence, but in reality, “Who do you think you are?” is swiftly becoming an unofficial right-wing motto.

It’s easy to see why, despite their supposed enthusiasm for excellence, conservative pundits would offer up liberal scientists, journalists, and artists as hate objects for their base. This is a time of economic instability and ordinary people are seeing their fortunes declining. It’s easy to turn that anxiety into rage at people conservative audiences think have easy, charmed lives as coastal elites.

Heather Digby Parton: The GOP’s “war for women” strategy is desperate and clueless and wrong

Republicans have finally realized that (gasp!) women actually vote. But efforts to court them are dead on arrival

In an exciting new development for American politics, the Republican Party ran some spreadsheets and crunched some numbers and – lo and behold – have discovered that women vote. However belated this revelation might be, the GOP is running at this knowledge with everything they have.

Yesterday, high-ranking Republican woman Cathy McMorris Rogers unveiled a bold new campaign to reach out to the half of the population the GOP has been trying to keep broke, barefoot and pregnant. And to prove that they are the party of business and branding, Republicans even came up with a scorching new slogan that’s destined to set the meme-world on fire:

“The War for Women.”

That’s right, they’ve cleverly declared that they are not, as is widely assumed, waging a war on the fairer sex – it’s actually all for them. So now the GOP is fighting against those who are saying it’s a war on women. No wait. It’s a war among women, against the people who say they are fighting for them …?

Well, you get the picture. There’s a war. They’re fighting it. And it has something to do with women.

Joan Walsh: The not-so-secret GOP strategy for everything: Do nothing, and blame Obama

Wrong-way Bill Kristol tells the House GOP to vote against its own leadership just to stick it to the president

You almost have to feel sorry for House Speaker John Boehner. He’s taken on the task of crafting a punitive, stingy, self-contradictory GOP version of a bill to deal with the border crisis that most of his party wants to blame solely on President Obama. There’s no reward for that.

His apparent leadership rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, has been whipping Boehner’s members to oppose Boehner’s bill. As part of an attempted compromise, the speaker is going to let his members vote to end the president’s deferred action on deportations, even though they have no power to do that. But he wants to keep that issue separate from the border-crisis bill, and Cruz, the shadow speaker, is telling members to say no.

In the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol sides with Speaker Cruz. Passing Boehner’s bill, he says, will interfere with the GOP’s top priority – running up big election wins in November. The only reasonable GOP response to the border crisis is to do nothing – and blame Obama.

An entire country defaulting on its debt? After a fight with US hedge-funders? This is the stupidest ‘nuclear option’ yet

Every once in a while you get a crazy financial story that makes you wonder how smart the people in charge really are. Argentina’s recent flirting with economic default is proof that the average consumer, managing a few thousands, could probably do a better job than politicians with billions at their disposal.

If you read the papers, you would believe that the land of tango, gauchos, Malbec and great steaks is on the verge of self-destruction: “Argentina dances with default”, groused a Wall Street Journal headline. “Argentina nears cliff in risky debt game”, chided the Financial Times.

Sounds dire, doesn’t it? [..]

Absolutely nothing is riding on an Argentina’s default. The entire conflict is composed of absurdities.

Jessica Valenti: Feminism makes women ‘victims’? I think you’ve mistaken us for the sexists

Women are victimized in our society. #WomenAgainstFeminism doesn’t change that terrible reality

An old canard about feminists is that, in addition to being hirsute bra-burners, we want to turn all women into “victims” – and thanks to “Women Against Feminism“, this particular accusation has gained some moderately mainstream traction in recent weeks.

But feminism doesn’t make women victims. Sexism does.

That inconvenient truth hasn’t stopped conservatives and anti-feminists from using this supposed victimization to bash a movement that won women the rights to vote, have credit cards, not be legally raped by their husbands, use birth control and generally be considered people instead of property, among other things. [..]

But all the cringing and skepticism in the world hasn’t stopped the idea of “Women Against Feminism” from being taken seriously by at least some in the media.

Andrew Leonard: National Review declares war against the nerds

Why are conservatives so annoyed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Because, you know, science

If you prick a nerd, does he not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? Like fire ants boiling out of their underground lair, overcome with rage at whatever dastard disturbed their slumber, nerds everywhere are taking to the streets, apoplectic at the most foul attack on entitled smarts this nation has seen since Dwight D. Eisenhower called Robert Oppenheimer a pencil-necked geek.

OK, I don’t actually have a link for that Eisenhower thing. Maybe it didn’t happen. But I do have a link for National Review’s cover-story assaulting nerd-dom, “Smarter Than Thou.” A cover story that begins by attacking none other than Neil DeGrasse Tyson – the Holy Roman Nerd-Emperor himself! – as the “the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up ‘nerd’ culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States.”

John Nichols: Governor Cuomo Should Debate Primary Challenger Zephyr Teachout

Election seasons are supposed to provide an opportunity for sitting officials to explain their records, and for challengers to question them. And when a top official is facing intense scrutiny based on recent revelations-as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in the aftermath of reports regarding his administration’s handling of a corruption inquiry-the need for election season accountability is that much greater.

So it only makes sense that Cuomo should accept the debate challenge posed by his Democratic primary foe, Fordham University Law School professor Zephyr Teachout. [..]

Debates are good for democracy. But they are not merely exercises in civil duty. Debates allow for the airing of complex issues of personal and political integrity that can never be adequately addressed in thirty-second attack ads on television.

A debate — preferably, multiple debates — before the Democratic gubernatorial primary in New York would allow capable candidates an opportunity to wrestle not just with questions about the Moreland Commission and money in politics but with a range of pressing issues.

Teachout wants debates on education, immigration and hydrofracking.

“But,” she adds, well aware of the turn New York’s 2014 campaign has taken, “all three would end up in a debate about corruption.”Debates are good for democracy. But they are not merely exercises in civil duty. Debates allow for the airing of complex issues of personal and political integrity that can never be adequately addressed in thirty-second attack ads on television.

A debate — preferably, multiple debates — before the Democratic gubernatorial primary in New York would allow capable candidates an opportunity to wrestle not just with questions about the Moreland Commission and money in politics but with a range of pressing issues.

Teachout wants debates on education, immigration and hydrofracking.

“But,” she adds, well aware of the turn New York’s 2014 campaign has taken, “all three would end up in a debate about corruption.”

There’s no point in relying on men to rescue women

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” a phrase coined by Australian activist Irina Dunn in 1970 and commonly attributed to Gloria Steinem, expressed a primary goal of second-wave feminism: female independence. Liberal feminists of that era, including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, spoke of men as partners and potential allies, not enemies and oppressors. Their kind of feminism wasn’t about rejecting men entirely; it was about freeing women to live without them (or, for those who wanted men in their lives, to enjoy their company on equal terms). Men were nice to have around, if you were straight and found a good one, but come the revolution, no woman would have to stick with a bad one out of economic, social or emotional necessity. [..]

Women who aspire to positions of power are today advised to marry well, not advocate for themselves too forcefully and garner the support of powerful men. This isn’t bad advice: Having a partner does make it easier to devote yourself to work; you are likelier to advance as a woman or minority if you’re not seen as a pushy whiner, and currying favor with men in power probably helps more than it hurts (unless you’re perceived as sleeping your way to the top). 



But relying on a man for money and power, whether he’s your husband or a senior executive at your company, is not a bold feminist act. It may or may not leave individual women stronger, but it leaves women as a group weaker.

Kari Lydersen: Is Rahm Emanuel doomed?

The Chicago mayor’s political capital is drying up, thanks to his autocratic style and unpopular education policies

In some ways, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Karen Lewis, the fiery president of the Chicago Teachers Union, are very much alike – profane, tough, outspoken, unapologetic. Both are Jewish, and both are ardent fans of ballet.

But a face-off between the two in the city’s 2015 mayoral election – should Lewis decide to run – would be a clear referendum on two wildly different versions of politics and views of the city’s future.

That such a contest might be on the horizon shows how Emanuel’s cavalier, steamroller style of governance has alienated Chicago voters, invoked racial and class tensions and made one of the country’s most feared political operatives potentially vulnerable to an unorthodox challenger out of left field.

A poll released by The Chicago Sun-Times on July 14 showed Lewis – an outspoken former chemistry teacher who has led the teachers’ union for four years – beating Emanuel by 9 percentage points in a one-on-one matchup, with 45 percent of voters choosing Lewis and 36 percent choosing Emanuel.

The result came as a shock to many political observers. Lewis, who is African-American, has no previous experience with electoral politics outside the union. Some are repulsed by her brash demeanor. [..]

That an unconventional contender such as Lewis is winning over people across the demographic spectrum shows just how upset Chicagoans are with Emanuel’s autocratic style, his dedication to Big Business and flashy downtown startups at the expense of regular residents and neighborhoods and – perhaps most significant, given Lewis’ standing in the teaching community – his drastic moves to restructure the public school system.

Donna Smith: Churning for Dollars – There Ought to Be a Law

Remember Liz Fowler? She was the Wellpoint executive who took a brief sabbatical from her direct paychecks from the private health insurance industry to write the Affordable Care Act while working for Senator Max Baucus. Once that project was wrapped up, Liz went to work briefly for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as she transitioned her way back to work as a lobbyist for health industry giant Johnson & Johnson. [..]

Now, in Colorado, we’re seeing Patty Fontneau, the CEO of the health insurance exchange, making her departure to return to private industry. Fontneau will take a position as president of health insurance giant CIGNA’s private exchange business. Prior to heading up the exchange, she worked for a law firm and in finance. No doubt her new role at CIGNA will provide her an income that supports the lifestyle to which she became accustomed while earning nearly $200,000 annually (plus bonuses) as the head of the Colorado exchange. It’s a safe bet she never had to apply for or worry about any tax credits or subsidies to cover her own health insurance premiums. [..]

Health care needs to be treated as a public good and a human right. CIGNA certainly is not in the business of providing that. Health insurance is not health care. Health insurance is a financial product sold to us to protect health and wealth which may do neither thing very well at all. So we weren’t duped by Fowler or Fontneau as they worked to help the health industry from the inside or as they left to do similar work more directly from outside the public administration of Obamacare. We patients and private citizens were always the means to an end – higher profits for the health industry and bigger salaries for those who help make it so. As an old adage goes and has ever stayed true, ‘Follow the money.”

Naomi Oreskes: Wishful Thinking About Natural Gas

Why fossil fuels can’t solve the problems created by fossil fuels

Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that one cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that led to it. Yet this is precisely what we are now trying to do with climate change policy.  The Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, many environmental groups, and the oil and gas industry all tell us that the way to solve the problem created by fossil fuels is with more fossils fuels.  We can do this, they claim, by using more natural gas, which is touted as a “clean” fuel — even a “green” fuel.

Like most misleading arguments, this one starts from a kernel of truth.

That truth is basic chemistry: when you burn natural gas, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced is, other things being equal, much less than when you burn an equivalent amount of coal or oil. It can be as much as 50% less compared with coal, and 20% to 30% less compared with diesel fuel, gasoline, or home heating oil. When it comes to a greenhouse gas (GHG) heading for the atmosphere, that’s a substantial difference.  It means that if you replace oil or coal with gas without otherwise increasing your energy usage, you can significantly reduce your short-term carbon footprint.Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that one cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that led to it. Yet this is precisely what we are now trying to do with climate change policy.  The Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, many environmental groups, and the oil and gas industry all tell us that the way to solve the problem created by fossil fuels is with more fossils fuels.  We can do this, they claim, by using more natural gas, which is touted as a “clean” fuel — even a “green” fuel.

Like most misleading arguments, this one starts from a kernel of truth.

That truth is basic chemistry: when you burn natural gas, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced is, other things being equal, much less than when you burn an equivalent amount of coal or oil. It can be as much as 50% less compared with coal, and 20% to 30% less compared with diesel fuel, gasoline, or home heating oil. When it comes to a greenhouse gas (GHG) heading for the atmosphere, that’s a substantial difference.  It means that if you replace oil or coal with gas without otherwise increasing your energy usage, you can significantly reduce your short-term carbon footprint.[..]

So if someone asks: “Is gas better than oil or coal?” the short answer seems to be yes.  And when it comes to complicated issues that have science at their core, often the short answer is the (basically) correct one. [..]

In the case of gas, however, the short answer may not be the correct one.

The people of Detroit have no rights that corporations and their servants in government are bound to respect. Indeed, the emergency manager laws have been used to disenfranchise the residents of every largely Black city and school district in the state, encompassing more than half the Black population of Michigan. (The people of Michigan rejected the legislation in a referendum, but Republican lawmakers simply passed a near-identical measure, as if nothing had happened.)

The 82 percent Black metropolis is under siege, in the Medieval sense of the term. Just as ancient armies deprived towns under siege of food and water, to starve and thirst them into submission, so Kevin Orr has caused the Detroit Water and Sewage Department to cut off tens of thousands of residents, in an escalating trajectory of systematically inflicted mass punishment and pain designed to make life in the city unbearable for a huge proportion of the population.

This is a war against a Black city, and a blueprint for future aggressions aimed at shrinking “chocolate cities” across the nation. What Katrina accomplished through the sudden advent of flood, the corporate strategists in Michigan intend to achieve by emergency dictatorship, privatization and blatantly racist official barbarism.

Dean Baker: Finance in America: Promoting Inequality and Waste

In the crazy years of the housing boom the financial sector was a gigantic cesspool of excess and corruption. There was big money in pushing and packaging fraudulent mortgages. The country paid a huge price for the financial sector’s sleaze.

Unfortunately, because of the Obama administration’s soft-on-crime approach to the bankers who became rich in the process, the industry is still a cesspool of excess and greed. Just to be clear, knowingly issuing and packaging a fraudulent mortgage is a crime, the sort of thing for which people go to jail. But thanks to the political power of the Wall Street, none of them went to jail, and in fact they got to keep the money.

Since the penalties for ripping off people are trivial to non-existent, the financial sector finds this to be a much more profitable line of business than actually providing financial services. The New York Times recently reported on the boom in the subprime market for auto loans featuring many of the same abusive practices we saw in the subprime mortgage market during the bubble years. Lenders are slapping on extra fees, changing the terms after contracts are signed, and doing all the other fun things we have come to expect from leaders in finance. The used car industry was sufficiently powerful that it was able to gain an exemption from being covered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

We could look to contain these abuses with better regulation, but there is an easier route: competition. Senator Elizabeth Warren and others have proposed re-establishing a postal banking system. The Postal Service used to provide many basic banking services and postal banks still exist in many European countries. It should be a simple enough matter to re-establish such a system, run on a profit-making basis, that would provide basic services to low and moderate income households.

Eugene Robinson: Republican Lawmakers on Strike

The Republican Party’s paralysis on immigration is so complete-and so utterly irresponsible-that President Obama has no choice but to act on his own.

Just say the word immigration and most GOP members of Congress either change the subject or scurry away. Rather than tackle a suite of genuine issues whose obvious solutions would clearly benefit the nation, House Republicans prefer to pass yet more useless bills that seek-and fail-to take away people’s health insurance. [..]

House Republicans, meanwhile, have been spinning their wheels. Boehner is reportedly seeking agreement on a bill that provides only about $1 billion in emergency funding, far less than Obama says is needed. And it seems likely that the House bill-if there is one-will seek to change a 2008 law that prevents the Central American children from being summarily deported.

A little background about that law is in order. The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act-named after a 19th-century English abolitionist-was signed by George W. Bush late in his presidency. Designed to combat human trafficking, the law provides that any child from a country other than Canada or Mexico who enters the United States illegally must be given a full immigration hearing before being deported. The goal is to determine whether the child has a valid claim for asylum.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Paul Ryan’s New Clothes

Paul Ryan is counting on this: Because he says he wants to preserve a safety net, speaks with concern about poor people and put out a 73-page report, many will elide over the details of the proposals he made last week in his major anti-poverty speech.

The Wisconsin Republican congressman is certainly aware that one of the biggest political difficulties he and his conservative colleagues face is that many voters suspect them of having far more compassion for a wealthy person paying taxes than for a poor or middle-income person looking for a job.

So Ryan gave a well-crafted address at the American Enterprise Institute in which the centerpiece sounded brand spanking new: the “Opportunity Grant.” The problem is that this “pilot program” amounts to little more than the stale conservative idea of wrapping federal programs into a block grant and shipping them off to the states. The good news is that Ryan only proposes “experiments” involving “a select number of states,” so he would not begin eliminating programs wholesale. Thank God for small favors.

Despite obscene profits from monopoly power, government officials ignore evidence and squash challenges

The profit margins that federal regulators set for utilities should be decreasing, given the long downward drift of interest rates and the shrinking cost of capital.

Bizarrely, the opposite is happening: Utilities are raking in stunning profits at the expense of consumers.

Now the first in a raft of cases asserting that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is letting utilities gouge customers by setting egregiously high rates of return may finally get a hearing.

Since utilities are legal monopolies with no market to discipline their pricing, only the vigilance of regulators stops them from causing irreparable economic harm by stifling growth, draining wealth from customers and distorting investment. Court rulings say FERC commissioners must “guard the consumer against excessive rates.”

The legal standard for setting utility rates is known as “just and reasonable.” Profits and prices are supposed to be balanced so both investors and customers get fair treatment.

FERC commissioners, however, disregard the just and reasonable standard, routinely ignore evidence and act more as agents of utilities than fair-minded regulators.

Robert Reich: The Increasing Irrelevance of Corporate Nationality

“You shouldn’t get to call yourself an American company only when you want a handout from the American taxpayers,” President Obama said Thursday.

He was referring to American corporations now busily acquiring foreign companies in order to become non-American, thereby reducing their U.S. tax bill.

But the president might as well have been talking about all large American multinationals.

Only about a fifth of IBM’s worldwide employees are American, for example, and only 40 percent of GE’s. Most of Caterpillar’s recent hires and investments have been made outside the U.S.

In fact, since 2000, almost every big American multinational corporation has created more jobs outside the United States than inside. If you add in their foreign sub-contractors, the foreign total is even higher.

Philip Pilkington: Fed’s targeting of asset bubbles leads to contradictions

Yellen’s comments on overvalued markets welcome, but finding the right solution is tricky

On July 15 the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, announced during a Senate hearing about the current economic outlook that certain asset markets were overvalued. The charges mark a potential revolution in how central banks across the world will conduct their affairs. In her testimony, Yellen noted that valuations for low-rated “junk bonds” or corporate debt “appear stretched,” while “issuance has been brisk.” Similarly, in its full monetary policy report released the same day, the Fed said stocks for some social media and biotech industries appear significantly overvalued.

Much of this was not surprising. For months, commentators had said these trends of high valuation in risky and overvalued markets are unsustainable. But such confirmation from the most powerful banker in the world dramatically alters how central banks see themselves. Following the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks turned their focus to managing the financial market in a far more concerted manner than they did previously. For example, the banks intervened in the market to prop up asset prices by increasing the monetary base in the banking system and thus lowering interest rates, but it seems that they will now try to stop these prices from rising to levels they consider dangerous.

Peter Shrag: Unscrambling the California omelet

Why breaking the state into six is a terrible idea

There are many arguments in support of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper’s view that California is too big, too diverse and too unwieldy to work efficiently as a state. With 38 million residents and growing; 13 TV markets; some 7,000 government entities, including cities, counties, water and mosquito abatement districts, school districts; and an ethnically and economically polyglot population, most residents feel closer to their local governments than to the distant politicians in Sacramento.

Draper’s remedy: an initiative for the 2016 ballot to divide California into six states to bring government closer to the people. One, the proposed new coastal state of Silicon Valley, which would include San Francisco and the high-tech suburbs to the south (where Draper lives), would have the highest per capita income in the nation, above Connecticut. Its neighbor to the east, the state of Central California (a region sometimes called California’s Appalachia), would be the poorest, poorer than Mississippi. That might be welcome to the rich taxpayers along the coast, but it would create monstrous problems for the have-nots. [..]

But this is a nutty idea, nuttier even than Draper’s costly school voucher initiative in 2000, which got trounced by a vote of 70-30. So perhaps this move is a very costly provocation to bring out some great new wave of disaffected rednecks with pitchforks, or to generate yet another great anti-establishment political upheaval like the tax revolt of 1978 or the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in 2003.

The good news in Paul Ryan’s newly released anti-poverty proposal is that, for the first time in as long as anyone can remember, Ryan is not advocating the wholesale destruction of the social safety net. His past budgets – including the most recent – have envisioned catastrophic cuts to social programs all in the service of boosting military spending and alleviating the tax burden on the wealthy. At least for now, he’s transitioned from “destroy the safety net” to “grudgingly accept its continued existence.” So hooray for progress!

The bad news is that Paul Ryan’s view of that safety net is still largely detached from reality. Also, his approach to curing poverty seems to be to treat the poor in as paternalistic and insulting a way as possible by proposing that they sign “contracts” to remain eligible for public assistance.

For real. “Contracts.” Under Ryan’s proposal, all the funding for a dozen or so federal poverty programs, like SNAP and housing assistance, would be consolidated into a single grant for the states – an “opportunity grant,” as Ryan calls it, in a fairly obvious message-tested attempt to move away from the term “block grant.” The organizations within the states tasked with dispensing benefits would “work with families to design a customized life plan to provide a structured roadmap out of poverty.” One of the requirements under this scenario is “a contract outlining specific and measurable benchmarks for success,” complete with “sanctions for breaking the terms of the contract.”

Sanctions! Under the Paul Ryan poverty plan, the poor = Iran.

Heather Digby Parton: Texas gun nuts’ scary ritual: How hatred of a president turned profane

Three weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a concerned citizen from Dallas named Mrs. Nelle M. Doyle wrote a letter to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger. She was worried about the president’s visit. [..]

Unfortunately, her prediction wasn’t alarmist enough as it turned out. [..]

So why bring this up today? That was a long time ago and we’ve moved on from those days, right?  The John Birch Society is a relic of another time.  Anti-communism is still a rallying cry on the right, but without the Soviet threat, it’s lost much of its power.

Unfortunately, the venom, the incoherent conspiracy-mongering, the visceral loathing still exist.  In fact, in one of the most obliviously obtuse acts of sacrilege imaginable, Dealey Plaza is now the regular site of open-carry demonstrations.  That’s right, a group of looney gun proliferation activists meet regularly on the site of one of the most notorious acts of gun violence in the nation’s history to spout right-wing conspiracy theories about the president while ostentatiously waving around deadly weapons.

Micheal Winship: Deep in the Tell-Tale Heart of the Texas GOP

Imagine the official presentation of a worldview concocted by conspiracy theorists and an assortment of cranks and grumpy people. Conjure a document written by scribes possessed of poison pens soaked in the inkpots of Ayn Rand and the Brothers Grimm, caught in the grip of a dark dystopian fantasy of dragons and specters, in which everyone’s wrong but thee and me and we’re not sure of thee.

No, this is not some Game of Thrones spinoff. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the official 2014 platform of the Republican Party of Texas, 40 pages of unrestrained, right-wing bluster against you name it — women, minorities, immigrants, Muslims, gays, Obamacare, the Internal Revenue Service, red light cameras, the EPA, the World Bank, vaccinations — well, you get the picture. In the spirit of the Alamo, this is a work straight out of the 19th century with no option for surrender.

David Sirota: Comcast’s worst nightmare: How Tennessee could save America’s Internet

Chattanooga’s public electric utility offers residents lightning-quick connections — much to big telecoms’ dismay

The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services. Whether and how federal officials act may ultimately shape the future of America’s information economy.

The front line in this fight is Chattanooga, Tennessee, where officials at the city’s public electric utility, EPB, realized that smart-grid energy infrastructure could also provide consumers super-fast Internet speeds at competitive prices. [..]

For EPB, the good news is that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly pledged that in the name of competition and broadband access, he will support preempting state laws like Tennessee’s. However, in a capital run by money, EPB may still be politically overpowered. After all, as a community-owned utility in a midsized city, EPB does not have the lobbyists and campaign cash to match those of behemoths like Comcast and AT&T. What the utility does have is a solid track record and a pro-consumer, pro-competition argument.

The question is: Will that be enough to prevent Wheeler from backing down or being blocked by Congress? The future of the Internet may be at stake in the answer.

The deeper the US slips into economic decline, the higher it ratchets up the pace and stakes of armed conflict.

The United States has set the world on fire. It is nonsense to talk of a “new” Cold War, when what the world is witnessing is multiple conflagrations as intense and horrifically destructive as at any period since World War Two. Virtually every one of these armed conflicts has been methodically set in motion by the only power capable of perpetrating such massive, simultaneous mayhem: the United States, along with its underlings in London, Paris and Tel Aviv – the true Axis of Evil.

Washington is embarked on a mad, scorched earth policy to terrorize the planet into submission through relentless escalation into a global state of war. Unable to maintain its dominance through trade and competition, the U.S. goes beyond the brink to plunge the whole planet into a cauldron of death. As Russia is learning, it is extremely difficult to avoid war when a great power insists on imposing it. That was a lesson inflicted on the world 75 years ago, by Nazi Germany.

Whoever coined the phrase “No Drama Obama” should be sentenced to a lifetime of silence. The First Black U.S. President systematically brought swastika-wearing fascists to power in Ukraine to start a war on Russia’s borders. The passengers of the Malaysian airliner are victims of Obama’s carefully crafted apocalypse, a pre-fabricated conflict that could consume us all. Obama methodically and without provocation laid waste to Libya and Syria, and now the jihadists unleashed by the United States and its allies are destroying Iraq all over again and threatening to erase Lebanon and Jordan and even the oil kingdoms of the Gulf. Obama has signed yet another blank check for Israel’s ghastly war of ethnic annihilation in Gaza – a crime against humanity for which the U.S. is fully as culpable as the apartheid Jewish State, which could not exist if it were not part of the U.S. superpower’s global war machine.

Robert Parry: Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment

Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that as a former prosecutor he knows he has a strong case against the eastern Ukrainian rebels and their backers in Russia in pinning last Thursday’s shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on them, even without the benefit of a formal investigation.

During his five rounds of appearances on Sunday talk shows, Kerry did what a judge might condemn as “prejudicing the case” or “poisoning the jury pool.” In effect, Kerry made a fair “trial” almost impossible, what a bar association might cite in beginning debarment proceedings against prosecutor Kerry.

If you were, say, a U.S. intelligence analyst sifting through the evidence and finding that some leads went off in a different direction, toward the Ukrainian army, for instance, you might hold back on your conclusions knowing that crossing senior officials who had already pronounced the verdict could be devastating to your career. It would make a lot more sense to just deep-six any contrary evidence.

Indeed, one of the lessons from the disastrous Iraq War was the danger of enforced “group think” inside Official Washington. Once senior officials have made clear how they want an assessment to come out, mid-level officials scramble to make the bosses happy.

Daniel Denvir: How to dismantle a school system

Racked by budget cuts, Pennsylvania’s schools are coming apart at the seams

Graduating seniors last month celebrated the end of a difficult year at Philadelphia’s Bartram High School, one prominent example of Pennsylvania’s deepening public education crisis.

Michael Miller, the father of one college-bound graduate, complained that the state keeps “taking money and taking money, and it’s a scary thought where we’ll be in five years.” He returned from military service in Afghanistan just as Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s education budget cuts began to hit the state’s poorest districts.

For years Pennsylvania has served as a testing ground for the conservative theory of small government – more specifically, since 2010, when Corbett signed a no-new-taxes pledge crafted by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and rode a Tea Party wave into office. The effects have proved deleterious. Corbett’s cuts to public education have been particularly painful, with poor districts like Philadelphia bearing the brunt.

On July 10, 2014, in New York State, Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores to a year in prison and fined her $1,000 for photographing a peaceful demonstration at the U.S. Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field  (near Syracuse) where weaponized Reaper drones are remotely piloted in lethal flights over Afghanistan.  Dozens have been sentenced, previously, for peaceful protest there. But uniquely, the court convicted her under laws meant to punish stalkers, deciding that by taking pictures outside the heavily guarded base she violated a previous order of protection not to stalk or harass the commanding officer.

Mary Anne is a 58 year-old grandmother of three, from Ithaca, New York, where she is part of the Upstate Drone Action. [..]

The problem is not that Mary Anne lacks appreciation for the law of the land. She’s exercising her First Amendment right to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance. The problem is that Judge Gideon refuses to challenge military elites, some of whom never, ever want people of compassion and conscience to interfere with their use of threat, force, and even assassination to control people in other lands.

Mary Anne has appealed her case, and a NY judge has released her from prison until the appeal is resolved.  Another activist, Jack Gilroy, awaits sentencing, and in coming days and weeks, more activists will be tried on similar charges in the De Witt Town court. Judge Gideon and his fellow DeWitt Court Judge Robert Jokl have many more opportunities to think about these critical issues.  I hope they’ll be influenced by having encountered some of the finest people in the world as they hear the cases of peace activists in upstate New York.

Donna Smith: With New Obamacare Rulings, One Thing Is Certain: We Need Medicare for All for Life

It makes me crazy to see the latest news about a Federal Court striking down the tax credits (subsidies) offered on the Federal Affordable Care Act health exchanges because I know the media commentators will go crazy analyzing the politics of it all. The Republicans are celebrating; the Democrats are scrambling. And the people who hate the ACA/Obamacare as well as those who are pushing to achieve a longer term solution through single-payer reform will claim victory. The camp that will once again be completely ignored in this whirl of political analyzing will be the patients and the caregivers whose lives and security are threatened once again.

We won’t hear the patient and caregiver stories unless and until some of the politicians decide it would benefit them to prop us up in front of a camera in support of their particular position on health reform. While there are some very limited efforts going on to record stories, it has been since before the ACA/Obamacare was passed since anyone really cared to hear what happens to average people about their struggles with the profit-driven, dysfunctional US health system. No, Michael Moore will not be making another updated version of SiCKO and gathering stories for it as some have suggested to me — the original version still holds up well, sadly. [..]

What I really first thought when I saw the latest hit to people who need and want those tax credits/subsidies was too colorful to write here, but it wasn’t because I would lose anything as a result. I was so angry that more months and years of political manipulation would damage so many people when the solution that could heal us is so readily available and has been for almost half a century now. Medicare turns 49 on July 30th. We would do well to celebrate the program’s successes, acknowledge improvements we need to make, and share with our neighbors and friends how badly this nation needs to extend Medicare to all for life.

Laila Atawa: Muslims aren’t shocked to discover we are watched. But we won’t be scared

Can revelations about ‘sting’ operations move the government beyond 9/11-era discrimination? Because you can’t stop terrorism by alienating a generation of people

We know that we’re often discriminated against by our government and our fellow Americans, but studies still show that Muslim Americans feel more loyalty to the US than ever. Every year, more and more individuals from my faith commit themselves to civic engagement, seeking to educate themselves and their neighbors, and better the country in which they live – often because of the conviction that nobody else should have to face what they went through growing up after 9/11.

Though many Muslims Americans like me kept quiet in the years after 9/11 for fear of arousing illegitimate government suspicion, we’ve since learned that it is not silence that will keep the government from overstepping its bounds. We need to be visible, to be active, and to speak up when the government uses our religion as the basis for persecution. Revelations like even those in this latest, extensive report won’t scare us any more – they’ll only serve to push more Muslim Americans into public service.

Katrina vanden Huevel: The Downing of Flight 17 Should Trigger Talks, Not More Violence

The violence in eastern Ukraine has now claimed more innocent victims, with 298 dead in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Children, scientists headed to an AIDS conference, families on vacation-their deaths add to the hundreds of civilian casualties and tens of thousands of refugees victimized by the spreading conflict, which the Kiev government is now escalating.

The shooting of a civilian airliner is clearly a tragic mistake that no one wants to own, but that comes all too often in war zones. Currently, the Dutch government – 193 of its citizens perished in the crash – said it “would hold off assigning blame as it pursues its top priorities of recovering the victims’ bodies and conducting an independent investigation of the crash site in eastern Ukraine.”

However, in the United States, the tragedy has triggered a ferocious chorus of media and political condemnation of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Putin is called the “puppet master” or worse, with commentators asserting that he can end the war at will. The separatist militias in the east are scorned as Moscow’s pawns. The Kiev government’s bombing of its own cities and people is treated as a necessary response to Russian provocation.

All this ignores the context of this crisis and worse seems designed to fan the flames of the conflict. Already the United States has pimposed new sanctions http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/16/… on Russia and is pushing its reluctant European allies to join. The Russians have responded with sanctions of their own. The Ukrainian government’s attacks in the eastern regions continue, with US aid and involvement certain to increase.

Court decision is likely to undermine faith in the integrity of US judicial and financial system

In the flurry of rulings ending the Supreme Court’s latest term, an item that got relatively little notice was its decision not to review a case on Argentina’s government debt. This refusal let stand a lower court decision that makes the United States an extreme outlier in dealing with Argentina and potentially other troubled debtor nations.

The dispute has its origins in the decision of the Argentine government to default on its debt in December 2001. At the time, the government was struggling under an International Monetary Fund austerity program. Argentina’s economy had already shrunk 10 percent from its 1998 level – a much sharper falloff than the United States experienced after the 2008 financial crisis. Argentina’s unemployment rate was at 20 percent and rising. Still, the IMF was demanding further budget cuts as a condition for lending the money needed to keep paying its debt. [..]

In a world where the United States’ economy is no longer the largest or even close to it, we are not going to be able to write the rules for our own convenience. If countries like Argentina cannot count on being treated fairly in U.S. courts, they will simply take their business elsewhere. The loss will be ours, not theirs. The U.S. will again pay a high price for allowing well-connected people in the financial sector to set policy.

Robert Parry: Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment

Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that as a former prosecutor he knows he has a strong case against the eastern Ukrainian rebels and their backers in Russia in pinning last Thursday’s shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on them, even without the benefit of a formal investigation. [..]

If you were, say, a U.S. intelligence analyst sifting through the evidence and finding that some leads went off in a different direction, toward the Ukrainian army, for instance, you might hold back on your conclusions knowing that crossing senior officials who had already pronounced the verdict could be devastating to your career. It would make a lot more sense to just deep-six any contrary evidence.

Indeed, one of the lessons from the disastrous Iraq War was the danger of enforced “group think” inside Official Washington. Once senior officials have made clear how they want an assessment to come out, mid-level officials scramble to make the bosses happy.

If Kerry had cared about finding the truth about this tragedy that claimed the lives of 298 people, he would have simply noted that the investigation was just beginning and that it would be wrong to speculate based on the few scraps of information available. Instead he couldn’t resist establishing a narrative that has – in the eyes of the world – made Russian President Vladimir Putin the guilty party.

Eugene RobinsonL The Downside of Giving Weapons

The bodies and debris that rained from the Ukrainian sky offer a cautionary lesson about the danger of giving heavy weapons to non-state actors. I hope the hawks who wanted President Obama to ship anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian rebels are paying attention.

By now there is little doubt that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, with 298 people on board, was blasted out of the sky Thursday by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from eastern Ukraine. U.S. officials say they have solid evidence that Russia supplied such arms to the separatist rebels who control that part of the country.

It is unclear whether the missile was fired by rebels who had been trained to operate the complex SA-11 system or by Russian military advisers. This seems to me a distinction without a difference. Whoever pulled the trigger, Russia must bear responsibility-and be held accountable.The bodies and debris that rained from the Ukrainian sky offer a cautionary lesson about the danger of giving heavy weapons to non-state actors. I hope the hawks who wanted President Obama to ship anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian rebels are paying attention.

By now there is little doubt that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, with 298 people on board, was blasted out of the sky Thursday by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from eastern Ukraine. U.S. officials say they have solid evidence that Russia supplied such arms to the separatist rebels who control that part of the country.

It is unclear whether the missile was fired by rebels who had been trained to operate the complex SA-11 system or by Russian military advisers. This seems to me a distinction without a difference. Whoever pulled the trigger, Russia must bear responsibility-and be held accountable.