Tag: Punting the Pundits

“I found myself standing in front of railroad tracks in South Florida. I was waiting on the train to come so I could jump in front of it and end my life.” So recounted Desmond Meade, describing his life nine years ago. He was homeless, unemployed, recently released from prison and addicted to drugs and alcohol. The train never came. He crossed the tracks and checked himself into a substance-abuse program. He went on to college, and now is just months away from receiving his law degree.

Meade, however, will not be able to practice law in Florida. As a former felon, he cannot join the bar. That is one of his rights that has been stripped, permanently, by Florida’s draconian laws. In a democracy, if one wants to change a law, you vote for lawmakers who will represent your views. Yet, as an ex-felon in Florida, Meade also has lost the right to vote for the rest of his life.

It’s called “felony disenfranchisement,” and is permanent in 11 states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming. It’s enforced in differing degrees, like a patchwork, across the U.S. In 13 states and the District of Columbia, you get your rights back upon release from prison. In others, you have to get through your probation or parole. In Maine and Vermont, prisoners retain the right to vote, even while incarcerated.

Alec Luhn: Women Break an Olympic Barrier, Keep Reproductive Organs Intact

Women competed in the ski jump for the first time at a Winter Olympics on Tuesday. So far, their uteruses seem to be intact.

The inclusion of women’s ski jumping ninety years after men first competed in the sport at the inaugural Winter Olympics marks the end of a long struggle against those like International Ski Federation (FIS) president and IOC member Gian Franco Kasper, who said in 2005 that ski jumping “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”

He was referring to the pseudo-scientific belief that repeated impacts could dislodge female reproductive organs. “I’ve had people ask me had my uterus fallen out yet,” American ski jumper Lindsey Van, who has been at the forefront of the fight for inclusion, famously said about such claims.

John Nichols: Congressional Republicans Call Obama ‘Lawless’ for Issuing Executive Orders. That’s Just Wrong.

Reasonable people can and should debate the limits of presidential power, particularly when it comes to issues of war and peace, and questions about spying on Americans or politicizing positions of public trust. Any serious discourse on executive overreach would find plenty to criticize in the approaches of all recent presidents-including President Obama.

But “reasonable” and “serious” are not the words that come to mind as the most powerful and prominent Republicans in Congress attack their president’s decision to issue the latest in a long line of executive orders with regard to federal contracts and contractors. [..]

And if by chance, some of the critics might argue that Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson were “lawless,” then how long would those critics have asked the victims of discrimination to wait for reluctant Congresses to act to eliminate Jim Crow laws and barriers to the American promise that outlined in the immortal declaration that “all men [and women] are created equal.”

Robert Parry Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?

Most Democratic power-brokers appear settled on Hillary Clinton as their choice for President in 2016 – and she holds lopsided leads over potential party rivals in early opinion polls – but there are some warning flags flying, paradoxically, hoisted by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his praise for the former First Lady, U.S. senator and Secretary of State.

On the surface, one might think that Gates’s glowing commendations of Clinton would further burnish her standing as the odds-on next President of the United States, but strip away the fawning endorsements and Gates’s portrait of Clinton in his new memoir, Duty, is of a pedestrian foreign policy thinker who is easily duped and leans toward military solutions.

Indeed, for thoughtful and/or progressive Democrats, the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton could represent a step back from some of President Barack Obama’s more innovative foreign policy strategies, particularly his readiness to cooperate with the Russians and Iranians to defuse Middle East crises and his willingness to face down the Israel Lobby when it is pushing for heightened confrontations and war. [..]

One key question for a Clinton presidential candidacy will be whether she would build on the diplomatic foundation that Obama has laid or dismantle it and return to a more traditional foreign policy focused on military might and catering to the views of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Those who truly want to honor the spirit of Black History Month should focus on creating equal opportunity for African Americans

Why do we have a Black History Month in America? As many have said, black history should be part of our national conversation 365 days a year, not just jammed into a single month. While it may not have been intended this way, this annual February event only serves to further separate black people from mainstream America.

Martin Luther King Jr’s dream was to see black people treated as equals in this country, protected by the constitution and given the same opportunities to achieve as their white counterparts, yet black history month runs counter to King’s goals of inclusion. Since 1976, when it was officially recognized, it has become a tool used by black activists to shame businesses, schools and politicians into showing blacks they “care”.

And companies seem only too happy to oblige, even though I doubt if any of them really care about black history at all. As February rolls around, we see corporations from McDonald’s to Northrup Grumman advertizing Black History Month. The ads usually begin with “we salute” or “we celebrate”, but they simply don’t want to be called racist for not acknowledging it.

Ana Marie Cox: The real problem with US Common Core: it further outsources education

New York is the latest to revolt against Common Core. What’s especially scary is more business intrusion into the classroom

There’s a pretty good chance that up until last week, you’d never heard of the Common Core national standards and curriculum. That changed recently when New York State became the largest state thus far to see a sharp reversal in the adoption of the standards. A bipartisan group of legislators proposed suspending the use of the Common Core assessment tests, based largely on the rebellion of the state’s largest teacher’s union. After endorsing a plan three years ago that would link teacher evaluations to student test scores, the union has now seen the actual testing results – available for the first time last fall – and isn’t so sure. [..]

What’s the harm?, you might ask. The money has to come from somewhere, right? Marketing is designed to discourage critical thinking. Its purpose is to insinuate itself into your subconscious and keep you from making your own decisions. It invalidates the workings of the mind and the heart. You can know Shakespeare’s sonnets backwards and forwards, but if you spend your spare time chasing the next Shiny New Thing, what good will poetry do you?

Suzanne Goldberg: Why Global Water Shortages Pose Threat of Terror and War

From California to the Middle East, huge areas of the world are drying up and a billion people have no access to safe drinking water. US intelligence is warning of the dangers of shrinking resources and experts say the world is ‘standing on a precipice’

On 17 January, scientists downloaded fresh data from a pair of NASA satellites and distributed the findings among the small group of researchers who track the world’s water reserves. At the University of California, Irvine, hydrologist James Famiglietti looked over the data from the gravity-sensing Grace satellites with a rising sense of dread. [..]

How governments manage those water problems – and protect their groundwater reserves – will be critical. When California emerged from its last prolonged dry spell, in 2010, the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins were badly depleted. The two river basins lost 10km3 of freshwater each year in 2012 and 2013, dropping the total volume of snow, surface water, soil moisture and groundwater to the lowest levels in nearly a decade.

Without rain, those reservoirs are projected to drop even further during this drought. State officials are already preparing to drill additional wells to draw on groundwater. Famiglietti said that would be a mistake.

“We are standing on a cliff looking over the edge and we have to decide what we are going to do,” he said.

“Are we just going to plunge into this next epic drought and tremendous, never-before-seen rates of groundwater depletion, or are we going to buckle down and start thinking of managing critical reserve for the long term? We are standing on a precipice here.”

Leslie Savan: Chris Christie Bullies Again

Governor Chris Christie says he’s been humbled, that he’s been doing some “soul-searching” after his staff got caught arranging traffic jams to punish political enemies.

But bullies bully out of weakness, and Christie is now weaker than he’s ever been. He can’t possibly give up his only real political asset-a talent for intimidation that makes victims want to be on his side to win his protection-when he needs it most.[..]

The attempt to put the squeeze on New Jersey mayors does double duty by also intimidating other potential witnesses and officials receiving subpoenas (the New Jersey legislators investigating the bridge scandal issued eighteen new subpoenas yesterday).

It’s all part of the web of fear that Christie has established throughout New Jersey. It’s aimed as much, if not more, at Democrats than at Republicans, and until the GWB scandal broke, that fear was passed off as the Christie miracle of “bipartisanship.”

Even though the former front-runner in the GOP presidential race now looks like he’ll never make it to the primaries, even though Christie boosters like Joe Scarborough say he should resign as the head of the Republican Governors Association, anyone who the governor’s office can conceivably touch still lives in fear of his wrath.

The bully can still steal their lunch.

When focus shifts from inequality to opportunity, progressives lose

Inequality is out, opportunity is in. Or so read the tea leaves from President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. As late as December the president described “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility … this is the defining challenge of our time.” However, by the time of his Jan. 28 speech, the framing of his agenda had morphed to “opportunity is who we are. And the defining project of our generation must be to restore that promise,” with barely any mention of inequality.

Some commentators welcome this shift in focus. Political analyst Ruy Teixeira, for example, argued that discussing opportunity is the “most effective way to sell the progressive vision for the economy” and “challenge inequality.” This may be the case, and so far the substantive policy agenda the president has forwarded hasn’t changed with the language.

With this change in focus, however, there’s a real chance that important pieces of progressive agenda could disappear and ideological blind spots be introduced. It’s crucial, then, to identify these, in order to better combat them in advance.

Paul Buchheit: How Entitlements for the Rich Cheat the Rest of Us

The word ‘entitlement’ is ambiguous. For working people it means “earned benefits.” For the rich, the concept of entitlement is compatible with the Merriam-Webster definition: “The feeling or belief that you deserve to be given something (such as special privileges).” Recent studies agree, concluding that higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.

The sense of entitlement among the very rich is understandable, for it helps them to justify the massive redistribution of wealth that has occurred over the past 65 years, especially in the past 30 years. National investment in infrastructure, technology, and security has made America a rich country. The financial industry has used our publicly-developed communications technology to generate trillions of dollars in new earnings, while national security protects their interests. The major beneficiaries have convinced themselves they did it on their own. They believe they’re entitled to it all.

Their entitlements can be summarized into four categories, each of which reveals clear advantages that the very rich take for granted. [..]

Entitlements for the rich mean cuts in safety net programs for children, women, retirees, and low-income families. They threaten Social Security. They redirect money from infrastructure repair, education, and job creation.

And the more the super-rich take from us, the greater their belief that they’re entitled to the wealth we all helped to create.

Michael P. Jeffries: Reaction to Michael Sam coming out is as much about race as homophobia

Michael Sam doesn’t conform to what the white dominated media and entertainment corporations are used to. It scares them

But when Sam came out as gay to the rest of the public yesterday, National Football League executives and coaches surveyed by Sports Illustrated were clear in their response: risky move. They said Sam’s announcement would mark him as a man on “a lonely path”, hurt his stock in the upcoming NFL Draft, and damage his chance to have a prosperous career. One executive said, “It’d chemically imbalance an NFL locker and meeting room.”

Sam’s star is rising, and NFL executives’ skies are falling. How can the league’s gatekeepers be so deaf and blind to the evidence that Sam’s sexual orientation does not inhibit his play or damage his team? Why can’t they see Sam for what he is or read the situation correctly?

Part of the answer is, of course, the immense power of homophobia, which continues to sew injustice and insult across all sorts of workplaces and social situations. But the reaction to the NFL’s would-be first out gay player is about way more than that – it’s about the ways gender combines with race and class, the roles and stereotypes cast upon black men in America, and the peculiar position Michael Sam now occupies.

Jeffrey Bachman: Time to Take a Stand to End US Impunity

Why is it that when the United States is responsible for violations of international law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, discussions of the violations center almost exclusively on whether such violations are necessary and effective? It’s almost as if international law only exists for others, and even then the ‘others’ to which international law applies is limited to those the U.S. views as ‘rogue’ states.

The United States has disregarded international law time and again, making a mockery of its very existence. Such behavior makes clear to the rest of the world that the U.S. lacks the moral authority necessary to make serious and substantiate its proclamations. I cannot help but conclude that U.S. hypocrisy, along with the clarity with which the populations of other states view U.S. policy, contributed to the U.S. being ranked as the greatest threat to world peace.

More significantly, the term ‘hypocrisy’ is incapable of contextualizing exactly what it is being used to describe. In just the past twelve-plus years, the United States has illegally invaded one country and systematically tortured individuals it has rendered and detained. Currently, the U.S. maintains oversight over facilities in Afghanistan at which detainees are still systematically tortured, force-feeds individuals protesting their indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, and operates a “targeted” killing program that continues to kill innocent people. As per usual, the U.S. has succeeded in egregiously violating some of the most significant international legal standards with complete impunity.

The political posturing over raising the minimum wage sometimes obscures the huge and growing number of low-wage workers it would affect. An estimated 27.8 million people would earn more money under the Democratic proposal to lift the hourly minimum from $7.25 today to $10.10 by 2016. And most of them do not fit the low-wage stereotype of a teenager with a summer job. Their average age is 35; most work full time; more than one-fourth are parents; and, on average, they earn half of their families’ total income.

None of that, however, has softened the hearts of opponents, including congressional Republicans and low-wage employers, notably restaurant owners and executives.  [..]

Evidence, however, does not stop conservatives from making the argument that by raising the cost of labor, a higher minimum wage will hurt businesses, leading them to cut jobs and harming the low-wage workers it is intended to help. Alternatively, they argue it will hurt consumers by pushing up prices precipitously. Those arguments are simplistic. Research and experience show that employers do not automatically cope with a higher minimum wage by laying off workers or not hiring new ones. Instead, they pay up out of savings from reduced labor turnover, by slower wage increases higher up the scale, modest price increases or other adjustments.

Which brings the debate over raising the minimum wage full circle. The real argument against it is political, not economic. Republican opposition will likely keep any future increase in the minimum wage below a level that would constitute a firm wage floor, though an increase to $10.10 an hour would help tens of millions of workers. It also would help the economy by supporting consumer spending that in turn supports job growth. It is not a cure-all; it is not bold or innovative. But it is on the legislative agenda, and it deserves to pass.

Robert Kuttner: The New American Hustle

The Oscar favorite (10 nominations), American Hustle, begins with the words “Some of this actually happened.” And it did. [..]

Fast forward nearly half a century. The biggest American Hustle of all, the financial frauds engaged in by America’s largest banks and their top officials, has resulted in no criminal prosecutions of senior executives. Only a few relative small fry have been convicted of the relatively minor crime of insider trading. Oh, they did convict Bernie Madoff, whose scam was evident for a decade to a whistle blower whom the SEC didn’t want to take seriously.

But there has been no FBI sting of senior bankers. In a sense, none is really necessary because the feds have an email trail demonstrating conclusively that bankers conspired to inflate the value of nearly worthless mortgage-backed bonds, to manipulate markets and to misrepresent the value of securities that they were simultaneously peddling to customers and betting against for their own profits.

Robert Reich: Why the Lousy Jobs Report Boosted Wall Street

The stock market surged Friday after the lousy jobs report. The Dow soared 160 points, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq also rose.

How can bad news on Main Street (only 113,000 jobs were created in January, on top of a meager 74,000 in December) cause good news on Wall Street? [..]

But what’s bad for Main Street and good for Wall Street in the short term is bad for both in the long term. The American economy is at a crawl. Median household incomes are dropping. The American middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. And as companies focus ever more on short-term share prices at the expense of long-term growth, we’re in for years of sluggish performance.

When, if ever, will Wall Street learn?

Ralph Nader: The Law Must Be Free and Accessible to All — Not Secret and Profitable

Imagine this metaphorical scenario. You are cruising along a highway and you are pulled over by a police officer. You’re not sure why you were stopped. The patrol officer approaches and gives the signal to roll down the window. You oblige. “How fast were you going?” the officer might ask after examining your license and registration. You answer honestly. “Do you know the speed limit on this highway?” might be the next question. Thinking it over, you realize that you do not know. For as long as you can recall driving along that stretch of highway, there were no signs anywhere indicating the speed limit. You don’t know if you were speeding or not! You explain this to the officer, and he confirms your suspicion — there are no speed limit signs on the road. In order to know the speed limit, he explains, you must purchase a highway law codebook. It costs $1000.

The officer proceeds to write you a speeding ticket.

Obviously, this scenario doesn’t make much sense. If the law is to be understood and obeyed, it must be public information. How can we follow the law if we don’t know what it is?

This is the astonishingly unfortunate reality for a large number of our nation’s laws — fire codes, building codes, electrical codes, food safety regulations, state and municipal codes and more. Obviously, there is a significant difference between highway laws and technical safety codes, but the root of the issue is the same — the public must have ready access to the law. The “signs” must be in plain sight for all to see.

“The U.S. worked hard to create the American dream of opportunity. But today, that dream is a myth.” -Economist Joseph Stiglitz, Financial Times

If you follow the financial news, you already know that the American people are on an epic downer. [..]

Pessimism, pessimism, and more pessimism. It’s like the whole country is on the brink of despair. Maybe Phil Graham was right, after all. Maybe we are just a nation of whiners. But I kind of doubt it. What’s really going on can be summed up in one word: Frustration. People are frustrated with the government, frustrated with their jobs, frustrated with their shitty, stagnant wages, frustrated with their droopy incomes, frustrated with their ripoff health care, frustrated with living paycheck to paycheck, frustrated with their measly cat-food retirement plan, frustrated with their dissembling, flannel-mouth president, frustrated with the fact that their kids can’t find jobs, and frustrated with the prevaricating US media that keeps palavering about that delusional chimera called the American Dream.

What dream? The dream that America is the land of “land of opportunity”?

David Sirota: Congress Suffers From Selective Deficit Disorder

“Cognitive dissonance” is the clinical term used to describe stress that arises from holding contradictory beliefs. In politics, this term is a misnomer, because while many lawmakers, operatives and activists present oxymoronic views, many of them don’t appear to feel any stress about that. When it comes to budgetary matters, such a lack of remorse translates into something even worse than cognitive dissonance-something more akin to pathology. It is what I’ve previously called Selective Deficit Disorder-and it was hard to miss in the last few weeks.

In Washington, for instance, the disorder was on prominent display in Congress’s new farm bill. Citing deficit concerns, House Republicans crafted the bill to include an $8 billion cut to the federal food stamp program. Yet, the same bill increased massive subsidies that disproportionately benefit wealthy farmers and agribusinesses. In all, the conservative American Enterprise Institute reports that under the bill, annual subsidies could increase by up to $15 billion.

In this textbook episode of Selective Deficit Disorder, deficits were cited as a reason to slash a program that serves low-income Americans. However, those same deficits were suddenly ignored when it came to handing over billions to a corporate special interest.

Joe Conason: What Republicans Hope You Don’t Know and Never Find Out

Listening to Republicans in Congress wailing incessantly about our spendthrift culture raises a nagging question: What would they do, besides talking, if they actually wanted to reduce federal deficits and, eventually, the national debt?

First, they would admit that President Barack Obama’s policies, including health care reform, have already reduced deficits sharply, as promised. Second, they would desist from their hostage-taking tactics over the debt ceiling, which have only damaged America’s economy and international prestige. And then they would finally admit that basic investment and job creation, rather than cutting food stamps, represent the best way to reduce both deficits and debt-indeed, the only way-through economic growth. [..]

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it is Republican voters, misinformed by Fox News, who most fervently and consistently insist on these mistaken ideas, with 85 percent telling pollsters that the deficit has increased. Less than a third of Democrats gave that answer. But nearly 60 percent of independent voters agree with the Republicans on that question, and only 30 percent of Democrats understand the truth-an implicit repudiation, as The Huffington Post noted, of the president’s political decision to prioritize deficit reduction rather than job creation.

Eugene Robinson: Sibling Rivalry Not Fit For a King

Nothing will ever tarnish the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who transformed a nation. But his squabbling heirs seem to be trying their best.

I realize these are harsh words for a family that has suffered more than most. But King’s sons and daughter need to be reminded-yet again-that their father’s words and deeds belong not just to his descendants but to history as well. The King siblings have a responsibility not to treat this precious inheritance like some shiny knickknack someone found in the attic.

In the latest round of internecine warfare, Martin Luther King III and Dexter King have filed a lawsuit seeking to compel their sister, Bernice King, to hand over their father’s Nobel Peace Prize medal, which he received in 1964, and the Bible he carried with him whenever he traveled.

America has grown a vast and complex regulatory and financial support system for cheap, dirty energy. This isn’t over

Authorities in West Virginia declared the water of 300,000 residents affected by last month’s chemical spill safe to drink on 14 January, just five days after the incident. Since then, a few things have happened. Stop me if you’ve heard them before (but I doubt you have). [..]

To anyone that follows environmental news, this arc is familiar: A human-interest story with an environmental pollution angle breaks through the media chatter. Cable news outlets roll clips of distraught residents. Footage the damage unspools (with or without stomach-turning images of dead or injured wildlife). There is a news conference of dubious utility. Investigative reporters find evidence of previous infractions of safety and environmental regulations. Politicians declare the need for hearings and more strict enforcement. Volunteers show up to help. Sometimes there’s a concert.

Then we move on. We move on despite the fact that the chemical leak was, in some ways, an improvement on the status quo for West Virginians: at least the residents knew there were questions about the water piped into their homes. Most of the time, most West Virginians simply live in the toxic aftermath of the daily release of not-quite-as-verifiably deadly chemicals. The mix of air, water, and soil pollution that is a matter of course in coal mining counties means that children born in those areas have a 26% higher risk of developing birth defects than those born in non-coal-mining counties. That’s not from drinking water that’s been declared contaminated, that’s from drinking water, breathing air, and playing on ground they’ve been told is safe.

Russell Brand: Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws

In Hoffman’s domestic or sex life there is no undiscovered riddle – the man was a drug addict and, thanks to our drug laws, his death inevitable

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death was not on the bill.

If it’d been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily, we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell.

But Philip Seymour Hoffman? A middle-aged man, a credible and decorated actor, the industrious and unglamorous artisan of Broadway and serious cinema? The disease of addiction recognises none of these distinctions. Whilst routinely described as tragic, Hoffman’s death is insufficiently sad to be left un-supplemented in the mandatory posthumous scramble for salacious garnish; we will now be subjected to mourn-ography posing as analysis. I can assure you that there is no as yet undiscovered riddle in his domestic life or sex life, the man was a drug addict and his death inevitable.

Chris Kluwe: Athletes in Sochi must speak up about Russia’s intolerance. I did it in the NFL

Olympians shouldn’t be silent about abuse against LGBTQ people in Russia. Doing what’s right is better than winning

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), chief benefactor of these big money sponsors, has determined that any athlete speaking out in “accredited areas” against the human rights violations occurring in Russia right now will be found in violation of the Olympic Charter, banned from the games, and stripped of any medals. Corporate sponsorships, the pot of gold at the end of the Olympic rainbow, will disappear. A lifetime spent preparing, training, hour after agonizing hour, will have been for naught if an athlete dares to make a political statement at the wrong time about political events happening in a politicized Olympics; politicized in no small part by the IOC refusing to uphold their own charter when it applies to themselves.

How can the IOC get away with this blatant disregard of their own rules? Easy. The IOC has what Olympic athletes want. Money. Power. Fame. [..]

What is the true price of fame?

The price of fame is being a role model, whether you like it or not, and people are always watching.

The world is watching. The platform is yours.

Nicholas Freudenberg CVS stores will no longer sell cigarettes. It’s the health over profit revolution

The decision to cut tobacco shows that advocates and public opinion can swing the profit-loss calculus in favour of health

The CVS decision announced today to stop selling tobacco products at its 7,600 pharmacies around the United States by 1 October is an important step forward for public health – and for tobacco control activists.  [..]

From a public health perspective, the CVS decision is good news because research shows that the ubiquity of unhealthy products contributes to their overuse. The more places people can purchase and consume alcohol, tobacco, sugary beverages, salty snacks and fast food, the more they ingest. Alcohol, tobacco and processed food corporations know that easy access triggers the cravings or addictions their products are designed to elicit. Normally, they vociferously oppose any limits on their right to put their wares within arm’s reach. The decision by the nation’s second largest pharmacy chain to choose a different path shows that public mobilization, changing social norms and regulation can combine to persuade at least some companies to choose the high road.

A lot of political analysts think it is entirely possible that the Republicans will take the senate next November. This development won’t change much, in all likelihood, if it does occur. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives can already block most legislation, and in 2013 it dedicated itself the the proposition that the country must be punished for re-electing Barack Obama, by being denied virtually any new needed legislation at all. The Republicans won’t have a two-thirds majority in the Senate, and so won’t be able to over-rule an Obama veto.

What is odd, and damning of the current American political system, is that the Republican Party’s major platform positions are roundly rejected by the American people. That is, they are ideologically a minority party. And yet they manage to win elections. [..]

The system is obviously broken. Cutting down the role of big money in our politics, and reforming our districting processes, is key to fixing it. Until then, our politics will continue to lurch to the right even as the public is left of center, and that is a recipe for trouble down the road.

John Nichols: Harry Reid Knows Opposing Fast Track Is Smart Policy and Smart Politics

There are a lot of reasons Senate majority leader Harry Reid shot down President Obama’s State of the Union request for a congressional grant of fast-track trade promotion authority to negotiate new free-trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Reid has a history of skepticism when it comes to trade deals, having opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, permanent normalization of trade relations with China and a host of other arrangements that were favored by Wall Street interests.

Reid has a skeptical caucus. Only one Senate Democrat is on record in favor of granting fast-track authority, which would allow the administration to negotiate the TPP deal without meaningful congressional oversight or amendments. And that senator, Montana’s Max Baucus, is preparing to exit the chamber to become US ambassador to China. Senators who are sticking around, like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, are ardently opposed.

Yet Reid’s rejection of Obama’s request was not a show of skepticism. It was an expression of outspoken oppositio

Robert Reich: Why Widening Inequality Is Hobbling Equal Opportunity

Under a headline “Obama Moves to the Right in a Partisan War of Words,” The New York Times‘ Jackie Calmes notes Democratic operatives have been hitting back hard against the President or any other Democratic politician talking about income inequality, preferring that the Democrats talk about equality of opportunity instead.

“However salient reducing inequality may be,” writes Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, “it is demonstrably less important to voters than any other number of priorities, incudlng reducing poverty.”

The President may be listening. Wags noticed that in his State of the Union, Obama spoke ten times of increasing “opportunity” and only twice of income inequality, while in a December speech he spoke of income inequality two dozen times.

But the President and other Democrats — and even Republicans, for that matter — should focus on the facts, not the polls, and not try to dress up what’s been happening with more soothing words and phrases.

Howard Dean: Containing Health Costs Is Good But Not at the Expense of the Mentally Ill

Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) put forth a proposed rule that would make unprecedented changes to the six classes of medication that are specifically protected under Part D. Historically, these protected classes have existed to ensure patients have access to critical prescription drugs. These proposed changes endanger that safeguard.

Patients suffering from mental illness are likely to suffer the consequences of this rule more than any other populations. The proposed rule would make significant changes to the availability of antidepressants and antipsychotics. Implementing these changes will bring additional risk to an already vulnerable population.

Mental health is an increasingly significant issue in the United States and resources, both private and public, should be targeted at fostering understanding, improving the lives of patients, and reducing the toll mental illness takes on our society. By limiting the number of drugs available to this population, regulators will create another barrier to treatment for patients suffering from mental illness.

In 1798, the Federalist Party leveraged fear of French spies and domestic traitors to pass theSedition Act, making it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” that would bring Congress and the president into “contempt or disrepute.” Punishment ranged from six months to five years in prison and $5,000, a small fortune at the time. Several editors and publishers were prosecuted. Some newspapers folded, others were cowed into silence and at least one editor fled and continued to write in hiding. [..]

More than two centuries later Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican in charge of the House Intelligence Committee, has come up with a new way to silence reporters responsible for stories he considers threatening to national security. In a lengthy exchange in a hearing on Tuesday with FBI director James Comey about the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Rogers suggested that because reporters are profiting from stories based on these stolen documents, they have committed crimes. The discussion is worth reading in full, but here’s the key bit:

   ROGERS: So if I’m a newspaper reporter for-fill in the blank-and I sell stolen material, is that legal because I’m a newspaper reporter?

   COMEY: Right, if you’re a newspaper reporter and you’re hocking stolen jewelry, it’s still a crime.

   ROGERS: And if I’m hocking stolen classified material that I’m not legally in possession of for personal gain and profit, is that not a crime?

Comey demurred, saying the question “could have First Amendment implications.”

No kidding: While the government has gone after reporters for refusing to reveal their sources for stories based on unauthorized leaks, no journalist has ever been prosecuted simply for reporting a story based on classified information. Doing so would tip the balance between the government and the Fourth Estate dramatically.

Barbara Garson: All the President’s Middlemen: The Public-Private Profiteers

If You Want to Play Doctor, Don’t Hire an Insurance Company as Your Receptionist

Health care isn’t the first boon that President Obama tried to give us through a public-private partnership.  When he took office, more than 25% of U.S. home mortgages were underwater — meaning that people owed more on their houses than they could get if they tried to sell them.  The president offered those homeowners debt relief through banks.  Now he’s offering health care through insurance companies

In both cases, the administration shied away from direct government aid.  Instead, it subsidized private companies to serve the people.  To get your government-subsidized mortgage modification, you applied at your bank; to get your government-mandated health coverage, you buy private insurance. [..]

Private health insurance companies can only survive if people throw their hands up in horror at the thought of an incompetent and intrusive government.  Expect, then, that the untimely requests for death certificates, the delayed payments to doctors, the arbitrary denials of coverage, and all the other slings and arrows that the insured already endure will be baroquely embellished and cynically blamed on “government.”

If it was hard for underwater homeowners to distinguish between bankers and bureaucrats while they were losing their homes, it will be even harder for frustrated sick people to untangle the public and private strands so tightly braided into the Affordable Care Act. That, however, is what has to happen if Americans are to move toward a simpler, go-to-the-doctor-when-you’re-sick healthcare system.

Lisa Guisbond: NCLB Crashed and Burned. When Will We Ever Learn?

It’s 2014, the year all U.S. public schools were  supposed to reach 100% student proficiency, so said No Child Left Behind (NCLB),

No, you didn’t miss the fanfare.  One hundred percent proficiency didn’t happen. Not even close.  In fact, our classrooms are making even less progress toward improving overall educational performance and narrowing racial test score gaps than before NCLB became law.

The problem is policy makers are still following NCLB’s test-and-punish path. The names of the tests may have changed, but the strategy remains the same. As the late, great Pete Seeger sang, “When will we ever learn?”

It’s not that the law’s proponents haven’t acknowledged – repeatedly – the law’s vast unpopularity and negative consequences, including the way it made schools all about testing. Back in 2007, Congressman George Miller, an [NCLB v] co-author, said, “No Child Left Behind may be the most negative brand in America.” The retiring congressman said recently that the results from the federally mandated tests were intended to measure school progress and drive improvements. Instead, he said, “the mission became about the test.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Tom Perkins and the guilt of the gilded

When Tom Perkins, the billionaire co-founder of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, warned in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that the “demonization of the rich” in America was comparable to the anti-Semitism that led to Kristallnacht, the coordinated attacks on Jews in 1938 Nazi Germany, the ensuing uproar led even his old firm to disavow his views. [..]

But it is inequality, not populism, that continues to spiral out of control. Billionaires attending the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering in Davos, Switzerland were greeted with an Oxfam report revealing that the 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest, or one half of humanity, and detailing the “pernicious impact” of the yawning disparities. Academics, including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, argue convincingly that the extreme inequality contributes directly to global stagnation. And even the WEF’s own poll of movers and shakers this year named the growing wealth divide as the leading geopolitical risk. President Obama has chimed in as well, terming inequality the “defining challenge of our time.”

Michelle Goldberg: Why Do We Have Unsafe Abortion in the United States?

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Eyal Press, a Nation contributor and the son of an OB/GYN who provided abortions, has a harrowing and important story about the rogue abortionist Steven Brigham, who has owned substandard clinics all around the country. Brigham has been involved in horrifically botched surgical abortions as well as a number of medical abortions that failed because he used methotrexate, a cheaper, less effective and more dangerous drug than the commonly prescribed mifepristone. In some cases, he began a procedure in New Jersey and then had patients driven to Maryland where he would complete it, so as to circumvent New Jersey law governing late-term abortion. One of his patients, an 18-year-old African-American girl who was twenty-one weeks pregnant, had to be airlifted to Johns Hopkins Hospital after her uterus was perforated and bowel damaged.

There have been complaints and investigations about Brigham going back to the 1990s, but somehow he continues to operate, moving from one state to another and opening new clinics when old ones are shut down. On the surface, his case, like that of gruesome Kermit Gosnell, seems like evidence for the anti-abortion movement’s contention that abortion clinics are under-regulated. “The argument about abortion often centers around the morality of killing the unborn,” writes Jillian Kay Melchior in National Review. “But Press’s story really hammers home the impact on the vulnerable women who often find themselves exploited at sketchy abortion clinics.”

Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman is yet another victim of the war on drugs. Prohibition is not working. It is time to try something new. [..]

Why would a man held in such high esteem, a man with so much going for him and so much to live for, risk it all by buying illegal drugs from a criminal on the street and then injecting them into his veins? For the same reason any addict uses drugs: to get high.

Perhaps this desire was a moral failing on Hoffman’s part. Perhaps its origin lies buried in his personal history, with some trauma having triggered it. Perhaps it is written in his genetic code. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.

What we do know is that this need to get high is beyond some people’s control. Our drug policy of prohibition and interdiction makes it difficult and dangerous for people like Hoffman to get high, but not impossible-and makes these tragic overdose deaths more common than they have to be.

Dean Baker: The Attack of the Robots: Economists’ Silly Fantasies

Economists are not very good at economics. We know this because we had a huge housing bubble that collapsed, which almost none of them saw. The pre-crash projections from the Congressional Budget Office imply that this downturn has already cost us more than $7.6 trillion, or $25,000 per person. This could have been prevented if we had economists in policy positions who understood how the economy worked.

But even if economists aren’t very good at dealing with the economy, they still can provide value to society. In particular they can be a great source of entertainment. That’s how we should view the story that robots will take all of our jobs and leave most of the population unemployed.

This story has become a popular theme lately among Washington policy types. There are important people from across the political spectrum running around town wringing their hands over the prospect that the economy may not provide jobs for large segments of the labor force.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Populist Moment

Of all the myths that circulate in Washington, perhaps none is more prevalent or intractable than the one that says that the United States is a “moderate” nation — and that the “center” of public opinion lies somewhere between the views of conservative Democrats and those of less extreme Republicans (a relative term at best).

The polling data shows conclusively that this is wrong, but the mythology refuses to die.

According to the myth, the rise of populism is to be condemned as “polarization,” a situation that the capital’s insider subculture routinely laments — even when it involves something that in other historical moments would be described as “a debate.”

In this worldview, “populists” are as extreme as Tea Party radicals and are to be treated with equal disdain. At best they’re useful naïfs who can be trotted out to stir up the base at election time, then to be conveniently sidelined again for the next four years. And that worst they’re childlike ideologues, to be condescended to and dismissed.

Cenk Uygur: The Sniveling Apologizers at MSNBC Don’t Represent Progressives

First, let me be clear that this is not intended for the hosts on MSNBC. It’s management that’s the issue. The way Phil Griffin has his hosts trot out for one apology after another is revolting. At least, he included himself in the genuflecting to the right-wing last time around. The whole display is pathetic.

Let’s also be clear about another thing. Phil Griffin, who happens to be the head of MSNBC, is not a liberal or progressive. I worked at MSNBC, I talked to Phil Griffin many times, I know Phil Griffin. He is not remotely progressive. All he cares about is success in his own career. He even basically admitted in this recent interview that he would head a conservative network if it made more money. The idea that he represents progressives as he keeps groveling to conservatives is absurd and sickening.