Tag: Opinion

Governor Jerry Brown is aggressively pushing a California state constitutional amendment requiring budget surpluses to be used to pay down municipal debt and create an emergency “rainy day” fund, in anticipation of the next economic crisis.

On the face of it, it is a sensible idea. As long as Wall Street controls America’s finances and our economy, another catastrophic bust is a good bet.

But a rainy day fund takes money off the table, setting aside funds we need now to reverse the damage done by Wall Street’s last collapse. The brutal cuts of 2008 and 2009 shrank the middle class and gave California the highest poverty rate in the country.

The costs of Wall Street gambling are being thrust on its primary victims. We are given the draconian choice of restoring much-needed services or maintaining austerity conditions in order to pay Wall Street the next time it brings down the economy.

Twiggy Garcia: Tony Blair Should Be Prosecuted for War Crimes – Not Just Judged by History

Blair is ‘eel-like’ – but if the Chilcot inquiry is published soon, he might not wriggle off the hook

Boris Johnson’s sympathy isn’t worth much; his sentiments during his LBC interview this week were touching, but he does not have the conviction to back the campaign to see Tony Blair face justice for his crimes. Johnson does, however, offer an insight into Blair’s character which I have experienced first-hand – that Blair is slippery. The London mayor described him as “eel-like” and a “very adept and agile lawyer”. A prosecution for war crimes in Johnson’s words was “not going to happen”.

Currently a prosecution depends on one of two factors: its status before the International Criminal Court (ICC) or its status in domestic law. The ICC calls itself “an independent, permanent court that tries persons accused of the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes”. In all honesty I have no faith in the ICC bringing a conviction against Blair. The ICC has been accused of bias, and as being a tool of western imperialism, only punishing leaders from small states while ignoring crimes committed by richer and more powerful states. This sentiment has been expressed particularly by African leaders due to the disproportionate focus on their nations.

Amy Goodman: Solitary Confinement Is Not the Answer

There has been much attention, and rightly so, on the CIA’s extensive use of torture, which the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is said to have documented in its still-classified 6,000-page report. The use of torture is not limited to the CIA, however. It is all too common across the United States. Solitary confinement is torture, and it is used routinely in jails, prisons and immigration detention facilities here at home. Grass-roots movements that have been pressuring for change are beginning to yield significant results. The coalitions include prisoners, their families, a broad swath of legal and social-justice groups and, increasingly, prison guards and officials themselves. [..]

Most importantly, it’s torture. It’s time to put an end to solitary confinement.

Dan Gillmor: The best way to protest net neutrality’s end is with an Internet-wide slowdown

It’s time to take a page from the SOPA protests and show Americans what a slower Internet would really look like

The head of the Federal Communications Commission, former cable and wireless industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler, may have a battle on his hands over his proposal to create two standards of Internet service and end net neutrality. This is welcome news for anyone who believes in an open Internet.

Now is the time to ratchet up the pressure.

So what’s happened since Wheeler first floated his plan to move toward a two-tiered Internet – where companies would pay Internet service providers for special “fast lanes” to get to you and me? Quite a bit.

In the happy public myth, the United States fights every war to defend freedom. But the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War (among others) deviate from this storyline. These wars were given public support and political cover by being cast as struggles of light against darkness, as struggles to preserve freedom and liberty. In each case, the wars involved massive and premeditated deception of the public and of information presented to it. Toppling leaders or waging wars for more selfishly oriented national reasons, the good will of the American people has been consumed like termites can consume a mansion. We are currently living in an era where there has been a campaign to whitewash the practice of torture by the United States against its enemies (both citizens and non-citizens). We have a lengthy history of assassinating foreign leaders both actively and by indirectly providing cover for action against them by others. We practice rendition and build secret prisons abroad and argue about whether or not we can suspend the Geneva Conventions or kill American citizens without judicial oversight. The American people are occasionally fed up by the nonsense, by the waste of billions upon billions of dollars, and by the loss of standing internationally. But they can’t pay attention for too long, for they are teetering on the edge of their own economic insecurity. So the wars and travesties continue.

The history of the travesties of American warfare and unseemly meddling not merely in the affairs of other nations but of actively subverting international norms and principles and/or of actively deceiving the public both inside and outside of the nation? That’s decently documented in many cases of the past. We gather together and shake our heads knowingly and mention the list: Watergate, Iran-Contra, the coups Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, the secret wars and bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos, and many more examples come to mind. In each case, we look at each other and reassure ourselves and each other that we wouldn’t do THAT again. And yet, here we are. Do you see anyone on trial for torture, for rendition, for egregious abuses of all this nation should stand for?

Dave Johnson: Shouldn’t Giant Corporations Pay Taxes They Owe?

A huge, huge giveaway of tax money to giant corporations is rolling down the tracks at us. If it happens, this tax giveaway would be second only to the bank bailouts on the list of schemes to give money to private corporations. (Except, with the bailouts we got some of that money back.)

Giant, multinational companies owe us up to $700 billion in taxes they have been avoiding paying. Now they say they’ll let us have some of the tax money they owe us if we let them off from paying it all. For some reason, just telling them to pay their taxes is off the table. [..]

I’d like to propose a simple and fair solution to this deferral problem. Congress should impose a 5-percent-per-year fee on deferred income. Let them keep the money out if they say they need to, and let them defer paying their taxes. But just have them pay a modest 5 percent fee to do it. If a company has a good reason for keeping profits out of the country, a 5 percent fee won’t be a problem.

Jill Lawrence: : Why won’t Obama protect gay workers?

President Barack Obama is following through on his promise to make 2014 a “year of action” even if he has to bypass Congress and do it all by himself. But there’s a glaring gap so far in his unilateral efforts: job protection for gay people, who can still be fired at will in 29 states.

With the military setting an example and same-sex marriage winning acceptance at a rapid pace, it’s amazing that being straight can still be a prerequisite for employment. But the firing last month of a lesbian police chief by a homophobic mayor is a stark reminder that prejudice remains a fact of life.

“I can’t believe that we still have no equal rights,” former Latta, South Carolina, Police Chief Crystal Moore said after Mayor Earl Bullard fired her on April 15. Moore, who was investigating one of Bullard’s hires, had never received a reprimand in her 20-plus years on the force, until Bullard gave her seven in one day. When she asked to talk to her lawyer, he fired her. The town is now set to vote on June 24 on whether to weaken his authority and give the City Council more, including the power to reinstate Moore.

The hyper-selective retelling of events mirrors the popular narrative of Occupy Wall Street – and how one woman may serve seven years while the NYPD goes free

The verdict in the biggest Occupy related criminal case in New York City, that of Cecily McMillan, came down Monday afternoon. As disturbing as it is that she was found guilty of felony assault against Officer Grantley Bovell, the circumstances of her trial reflect an even more disturbing reality – that of normalized police violence, disproportionately punitive sentences (McMillan faces seven years in prison), and a criminal penal system based on anything but justice. While this is nothing new for the over-policed communities of New York City, what happened to McMillan reveals just how powerful and unrestrained a massive police force can be in fighting back against the very people with whom it is charged to protect. [..]

It’s impossible to understand the whole story by just looking at it one picture, even if it’s McMillan’s of her injuries. But that is exactly what the jury in McMillan’s case was asked to do. They were presented a close up of Cecily McMillan’s elbow, but not of Bovell, and asked to determine who was violent. The prosecutors and the judge prohibited them from zooming out.

This is, of course, how police brutality is presented to the public every day, if it is presented it at all: an angry cop here, a controversial protester here, a police commissioner who says the violence of the NYPD is “old news”. It’s why #myNYPD shocked enough people to make the papers – because it wasn’t one bruised or broken civilian body or one cop with a documented history of violence. Instead, it was one after another after another, a collage that presented a more comprehensive picture – one of exceptionally unexceptional violence that most of America has already accepted.

Heather Weaver: Supreme Court Turns Blind Eye to Exclusionary Prayers at Government Meetings

This morning, the Supreme Court issued a disappointing and troubling decision upholding a town board’s practice of opening its meetings with Christian prayers. For more than a decade, the town board of Greece, New York, has started meetings with prayers delivered by local clergy, all of whom, with a few brief exceptions, have been Christian. The Court’s decision today allows the town to continue these official prayers despite the fact that they exclude local citizens of minority faiths and divide the community along religious lines.

The news is not all bad, however. While the outcome in this case was disheartening, the Court did make clear that there are limits on legislative prayers. They may not “denigrate non-believers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion,” and they must remain consistent with the purported purpose of such invocations-to solemnize and lend gravity to the occasion.

Still, as Justice Kagan points out in her powerful dissent, today’s ruling reflects “two kinds of blindness.”

Diane Ravitch: What Powerful and Greedy Elites Are Hiding When They Scapegoat the Schools

Our economy is changing in ways that are alarming. Income inequality and wealth inequality are at their highest point in many decades; some say we are back to the age of the robber barons. Most of the gains in the economy since the great recession of 2008 have benefited the 1 percent, or even the 1 percent of the 1 percent. The middle class is shrinking, and we no longer have the richest middle class in the world. The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate of any of the advanced nations of the world (and, no, I don’t count Romania as an advanced nation, having visited that nation, which suffered decades of economic plunder and stagnation under the Communist Ceausescu regime).

Forbes reports that there were 442 billionaires in the U.S. in 2013. Nice for them. Taxes have dropped dramatically for the top 1 percent since the 1970s. But don’t call them plutocrats. Call them our “job creators,” even though they should be called our “job out-sourcers.” [..]

We need to spend more to reduce poverty. We need to spend more to make sure that all children get a good start in life. We need to reduce class sizes for our neediest children. We need to assure free medical care for those who have none. We have many needs, but we won’t begin to address them until we change our tax codes to reduce inequality.

Ellen Brown: In California, Robbing Main Street to Prop Up Wall Street

Why Gov. Jerry Brown’s rainy day fund is a bad idea

Governor Jerry Brown is aggressively pushing a California state constitutional amendment requiring budget surpluses to be used to pay down municipal debt and create an emergency “rainy day” fund, in anticipation of the next economic crisis.

On the face of it, it is a sensible idea. As long as Wall Street controls America’s finances and our economy, another catastrophic bust is a good bet.

But a rainy day fund takes money off the table, setting aside funds we need now to reverse the damage done by Wall Street’s last collapse. The brutal cuts of 2008 and 2009 shrank the middle class and gave California the highest poverty rate in the country. [..]

There is another alternative – one that California got very close to implementing in 2011, before Jerry Brown vetoed the bill. AB750, a bill for a feasibility study for a state-owned bank, passed both houses of the state legislature but the governor refused to sign it. He said the study could be done by the Assembly and Senate Banking Committees in-house; but 2-1/2 years later, no further action has been taken on it.

On Friday we learned that a lot of Republican U.S. senators and a smattering of Democrats are once again trying to make an end run around a legitimate process to assess the impacts of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, in favor of moving legislation authorizing its immediate construction.

While the political process in Washington, D.C., has come to give a lot of us pause, the good news is, it only furthers the resolve of tens of thousands of Americans to work harder to make their voices heard.  [..]

So it is particularly painful to see some members of Congress once again trying to circumvent a legitimate process to push approval of Keystone XL — a pipeline that would take some of the world’s dirtiest oil from Canada, through the heart of America, to the Gulf Coast and then off to overseas markets.

Brian Krebs: What Target and Co aren’t telling you: your credit card data is still out there

Hackers have an open window that no fallen CEO has bothered to close, because the retail industry is looking for security in all the wrong places

Target wants you to know that you can trust it again. Nearly seven months after the second biggest retailer in America ignored multiple alarm bells, allowing thieves to virtually hijack the cash registers at some 1,800 stores and siphon at least 40m credit and debit card records plus contact info for more than 70m customers, CEO Gregg Steinhafel is out, and the company has pledged to spend $100m upgrading the security of its checkout system.

But Monday’s mea culpa papers over problems still endemic throughout the American retail industry: an over-reliance on in-store technology rather than cybersecurity experts in the boardroom, and a tendency to underestimate the lengths to which bad guys will go to steal anything that isn’t properly nailed down.

Robert Reich: The Four Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Inequality

Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven’t stopped lying about what’s happening and what to do about it.

Herewith, the four biggest right-wing lies about inequality, followed by the truth. [..]

The truth is, America’s lurch toward widening inequality can be reversed. But doing so will require bold political steps.

At the least, the rich must pay higher taxes in order to pay for better-quality education for kids from poor and middle-class families. Labor unions must be strengthened, especially in lower-wage occupations, in order to give workers the bargaining power they need to get better pay. And the minimum wage must be raised.

Don’t listen to the right-wing lies about inequality. Know the truth, and act on it.

Ban Ki-moon: Climate change affects us all. So what’s stopping us joining forces to act on it?

I have seen that effective, affordable climate solutions exist. The push-back against sceptics must start in earnest at the UN’s 2014 summit in New York

Three decades from now the world is going to be a very different place. How it looks will depend on actions we take today. We have big decisions to make and little time to make them if we are to provide stability and greater prosperity to the world’s growing population. Top of the priority list is climate change.

All around the world it is plain that climate change is happening and that human activities are the principal cause. Last month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that the effects of climate change are already widespread, costly and consequential – from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the poorest countries to the wealthiest. The world’s top scientists are clear. Climate change is affecting agriculture, water resources, human health, and ecosystems on land and in the oceans. It poses sweeping risks for economic stability and the security of nations.

Inner-city poverty and segregation lie behind the US firearms problem. And the National Rifle Association knows how to exploit it

So long as the debate about gun violence limits itself to gun ownership alone it risks being suspended in this morbid circular logic with broad appeal and limited plausibility. Chicago, gun lobbyists point out, has some of the strictest gun legislation in the country. What they don’t say is that between 2008 and 2012 almost one in five guns recovered in crimes within a year of purchase were bought at one gun shop just out of the city limits. Polls consistently show that Americans favour universal background checks for gun sales. Research shows that states with stricter gun controls have fewer gun-related deaths.

So gun control laws are important and have an effect. That’s why the NRA is so viciously opposed to them. Just last week it managed to delay a White House plan to close a loophole allowing people to buy weapons like machine guns, grenades and sawn-off shotguns without undergoing background checks. But by themselves they provide a significant but entirely insufficient frame through which to understand and remedy gun violence. In a nation with rampant inequality, endemic segregation and massive poverty guns are the spark on a huge pile of dry tinder.[

Charles M. Blow: Eye-for-an-Eye Incivility

The botched Oklahoma execution of Clayton Lockett has called our continued use of the death penalty in this country back into question. In many ways, the death penalty is an abhorrent attempt to sate an irrational cultural bloodlust, rooted in vengeance and barbarism and detached from data. [..]

Those sentenced to death have often, like Lockett, been convicted of heinous, nearly unspeakable crimes. But is state-sponsored eye-for-an-eye justice truly a mark of a civilized society? How do we not, as a culture, descend to the same depravity of the person who takes a life – or multiple lives – when, as citizens of a state or country, we, in turn, take the murderer’s life? Do our haphazard attempts to rid the world of evil imbue us with it?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: ‘Who Makes the Game?’ Donald Sterling Certainly Asked the Right Question

His racism got all the headlines, but there was something to be learned from Donald Sterling’s other words. So, before the spotlight turns elsewhere and Sterling crawls back into well-deserved obscurity, it’s worth considering his usefulness as a representative sample of the oligarchical class.

We’ll say one thing for Donald Sterling: He certainly asked the right question. [..]

Racism is a powerful ongoing force in our country’s social dynamic, but race is also closely connected with class as a tool for economic warfare. The “plantation” isn’t the only analogy for Sterling’s mindset. His attitude toward the players also resembles that of baronial landlords toward tenant farmers, or mine owners toward miners who were paid in “credits” for the company store.  Like plantation owners, the landed aristocracy and the mining bosses saw their employees and tenants as less than fully human. They kept them in a form of peonage, both financial and cultural, while clinging to a worldview which justified their own domination.

Noah Greenwald: How Many More Fiery Rail Explosions Do We Need?

Wednesday’s fiery train derailment in Lynchburg, Va., is yet another disturbing reminder of the dangers of increasing shipments of particularly explosive Bakken crude oil from North Dakota and western Canada.

Shipments of the oil have ramped up dramatically in recent years and a series of derailments, including one in Quebec that killed 47, have raised serious safety concerns.

We’ve got to do something. The best first step is a moratorium on these shipments until we know for sure that people and the environment can be protected.

The Labor Department released two job surveys Friday morning, and one of them has unambiguously good news: the monthly survey of businesses said the economy added 288,000 jobs in April, beating expectations by a considerable margin and representing one of the highest monthly totals since the 2008 crash. Steve Benen has the chart: [..]

And disturbing fundamentals still abound. The employment rate’s substantial drop from 6.7 percent in March to 6.3 percent in April was due entirely to people leaving the work force, according to the household survey. The overall labor force participation rate fell to its lowest point of the recovery.

While quite a bit of these “missing workers” are baby boomers who retired, about half are of prime working age. In other words, these are people who simply stopped looking for work.

Zoë Carpenter: More Local Law Enforcement Officials Are Refusing to Comply With Obama’s Deportation Policies

At least ten counties in Colorado announced this week that they will stop complying with requests from immigration officials to detain people solely for the purpose of investigating their immigration status.

The announcements follow similar moves made in late April by more than two-dozen counties in Oregon and Washington State, as well as the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore. The trend illustrates the fraying relationship between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement in several states, after recent court rulings challenged the legal foundations of their cooperation. The break presents yet another challenge to the Obama administration, whose immigration enforcement mechanisms lean heavily on the partnership between federal and local agents.

Leslie Savan: Why Is the Right Obsessed With Castration?

Right-wing pols and militia men seen to be thinking about castration an awful lot lately. In speeches and in campaign ads, they’re threatening to cut off their enemies’ balls, and it’s getting weird.

We can only speculate over why some on the right have castration on their minds. Conservative white males, now a minority in a country led by a black president, are losing their demographic cojones. Maybe they’re threatening their foes with what they fear most-or maybe talking like a mohel allows them to sound violent and still be considered vaguely humorous.

Over at Cliven Bundy’s ranch, the folks fighting federal tyranny (that is, refusing to pay for grazing rights on federal land) are still gathering and making speeches.

Dave Zirin: Whitewash: How The NY Times Just Rewrote The History Of Sports

Timothy Egan has an op-ed in the New York Times calling sports “the most progressive force in America.” He points to the ways that Jackie Robinson integrated baseball a decade before the Civil Rights Movement and is honored today as “players throughout the country wear his number, prompting millions of kids to ask their parents what that is all about.” Egan also praises Muhammad Ali, as someone “with a mouth as quick as his jab, [who] forced a conversation about pride and prejudice that went far beyond the boxing ring”. He lauds present-day figures like Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, for calling out racist code words in the media and delivers his most effusive praise to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, writing, “In issuing the sports equivalent of the death penalty – lifetime ban, probable forced sale of his franchise – to the basketball owner Donald Sterling, the N.B.A. showed every other institution that courage is more commendable than dithering.”

Egan could certainly have also mentioned women like Billie Jean King, Donna de Varona, and “Racey” Lacey O’Neil and their efforts to advance women’s rights and Title IX, as well as everyone from Tom Waddell to Martina Navratilova to Kye Allums to Jason Collins for using sports as a way to break open the closet and provide visibility to the very existence of LGBT athletes.

Oh, my Lord, where to begin?

You already know what this column is about. You know even though we are barely three sentences in. You knew before you saw the headline.

There are days in the opinion business when one story makes itself inevitable and unavoidable, one story sucks up all the air in the room. This is one of those times. One story.

Well … two, actually: the misadventures of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling. [..]

It is only possible to think that so long as you don’t look too closely, so long as you are willing to ignore dirty deeds done largely out of sight and back of mind by collective hands – everyone guilty, so no one is. Then some guys who didn’t get the memo speak a little too stupidly a little too loudly and people condemn them and feel good about themselves for doing so.

But many of us don’t really understand what they purport to condemn. Otherwise, how could there be all this noise about that which doesn’t matter – and silence about that which does?

Clayton Lockett’s agonizing final minutes were the results of a failed experiment, proving states can no longer be trusted to run their laboratories. Let’s stop tinkering with the machinery of death

Now is the time for the supreme court to step in, once again, and impose a nationwide moratorium on executions. These justices may never end capital punishment themselves, but America has more than enough reasons for pause. When the majority of death sentences are reversed, the efficacy of the entire capital punishment system gets called into question. A majority of justices agree that the death penalty does not deter would-be killers. In economic terms, death penalty cases are far more expensive than cases which result in life without parole sentences.

The exercise by a state of its most awesome power – the power to deprive a citizen of his life – must be accompanied by due process and complete transparency. A government which seeks to kill its citizens by way of a process veiled in secret – that is a government which does not deliver justice.

Arvina Martin: Welcome to the beginning of the end of the GOP’s voter-imposter performance

Wisconsin’s voter ID ruling affirms what some Republicans won’t acknowledge: racist laws have no place in our political system

After Tuesday’s court ruling that the Republican-sponsored voter ID law in Wisconsin was going to prevent more real votes than fraudulent votes from being cast, Republicans who insist on pushing more states to adopt these overreaching laws are going to have to do some serious mental gymnastics to convince anyone that voter impersonation is a real issue, let alone a big enough problem to affect any election. [..]

In a country where corporations are now considered people, and where money is now considered speech, there thankfully remains hope that the actual people of this country will be able to access the vote – and have a say in how their governments are run. This week’s Wisconsin ruling, which mirrors some of the same arguments that led to a Pennsylvania court putting the kibosh on their own voter ID laws, is at least a start.

Craig Aaron: The FCC’s Flimsy Defense of Fake Net Neutrality

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wants you to calm down.

A firestorm of public outrage flared up after his latest plans to permit a pay-to-play Internet leaked. The Federal Communications Commission lit up with angry phone calls, irate emails, and a lot (I mean a lot) of bad press.

In a speech on Wednesday at the big “Cable Show” in Los Angeles, Wheeler had this to say to his former industry colleagues: “Reports that we are gutting the open Internet rules are incorrect. I am here to say wait a minute. Put away the party hats.”

And in a blog post on the FCC website, Wheeler claimed that the many critics of his plan are “misinformed.”

Does that mean that it’s time for Net Neutrality fans to put down their pitchforks?

Hell, no. It’s time to get even louder.

Tom Engelhardt: In a Land Where the Dollar Can Speak Its Mind, But We Can’t

The old words are on the rebound, the ones that went out in the last century when the very idea of a Gilded Age, and the plutocrats and oligarchy of wealth that went with it, left the scene in the Great Depression. Now, those three classic terms that were never to return (or so it once seemed) are back in our vocabularies. They’ve been green-lighted by society. (If they’re not on SAT tests in the coming years, I’ll eat my top hat.)

Of course, an inequality gap has been widening into an abyss for decades now, but when it comes to the present boom in old-fashioned words that once went with being really, really, obscenely wealthy and powerful, give the Occupy movement of 2011 credit. After all, they were the ones who took what should already have been on everyone’s lips — the raging inequality in American society — out of the closet and made it part of the national conversation. 1%! 99%!

Obama and Biden have taken a sudden feminist turn on sexual assault. Shouldn’t someone still make some rules for punishing school rapists?

American colleges are not known for taking rape very seriously: activists at Brown University are currently protesting the measly one-semester suspension of a man who sexually assaulted and choked another student; 23 students currently allege that Columbia University violated federal law by discouraging victims of sexual assault from reporting and allowing rapists to stay on campus; the University of Chicago is facing a federal investigation over its handling of sexual assault; and Tufts University revoked its agreement with the US Department of Education to remedy a poor track record of dealing with sexual assault on campus in violation of Title IX. And that’s just this week.

But thanks to the work of grassroots and student-led organizations, a new initiative from the White House to curb sexual assault on campus is using explicitly feminist ideas to frame their recommendations. Color this feminist pleasantly surprised, if not entirely satisfied.

Emma Brockes: The truth about Airbnb: not a racket, nor brothel, just sparing a dime on rent

Questions we should be asking about the startup: isn’t it just a course correction for a real-estate system stacked against us? Also: is someone having sex in my bed?

Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, has lots of questions for the residents of the “digital Wild West” who rent out their apartments on Airbnb. Roughly: who are you, where do live and you’re making how much from your spare room, five flights up and with an unrestricted view of your neighbor’s air vent?

All of which misses the exact point of the ingenius pad-crashing service, and the more pressing issue facing users, not lawyers. As those of us with friends who hand over their keys for the weekend know well, there is only one question for occasional landlords on Airbnb, to be asked in a squealy voice and with a face like you just sucked an extra large lemon: how can you let strangers have sex in your bed?!

Ana Marie Cox: The NRA has declared war on America

Wayne LaPierre and Co are not out merely to defend the Second Amendment or Newtown or gun laws anymore. They want you to pay the price for freedom and they want their money now

As the annual meeting of National Rifle Association members started here this weekend, the gentleman seated next to me said to settle in: “It’s mostly administrative stuff. We vote on things.” He paused for emphasis: “It’s the law.”

He’s somewhat mistaken, of course. The NRA doesn’t have any state-mandated obligation to hold an annual meeting. What’s more, the NRA has very little respect for the law. A half an hour later, at that very meeting, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre exhorted the crowd to a morally obligated vigilantism. He drew a vivid picture of a United States in utter decay and fragmented beyond repair, Mad Max-meets-Hunger Games, divided by Soylent Green:

Katrina vanden Heuvel: What Cliven Bundy Learned From the Koch Brothers

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s fifteen minutes of fame are up. He was a Fox News poster boy when he refused to pay fees for grazing his cows on federal land and greeted federal rangers with the threat of armed resistance. But when he voiced his views on the joys of slavery for “the Negro,” his conservative champions fled from his side.

What is interesting about Bundy, however, is not his tired racism but rather his remarkable sense of entitlement. His cattle have fed off public lands for two decades while he refused to pay grazing fees that are much lower than those he would have to pay for private land (and lower even than the government’s costs). “I’ll be damned if this is the property of the United States,” he says, claiming he won’t do business with the federal government because the Constitution doesn’t prohibit Americans from using federal lands.