Tag: Opinion

Pity poor Shaun McCutcheon.

McCutcheon is the Alabama businessman suing the Federal Election Commission for abridging his First Amendment right to free speech

– that is, if we define free speech as McCutcheon’s right to donate upward of $123,200 in a single election cycle. He claims eliminating federal limits on an individual’s aggregate campaign contributions is “about practicing democracy and being free.” To underscore his love of freedom, McCutcheon wrote checks to 15 Republican candidates in the symbolic sum of $1,776.

The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission any day now. Given the Roberts court’s track record, the biggest campaign-finance decision since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is likely to blow another gigantic hole in the fabric of our democracy.

Diane Ravitch: Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education

A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing. [..]

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation’s most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The “miracle school” usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some “miracle schools” have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn’t stop the claims and boasting.

Martha Rosenberg: “Ask Your Doc” Ads Reach New Inanity with Radiation Ads

Direct to Consumer Drug Advertising Works So Well, They are Now Selling Radiation Treatment Directly to Consumers

Seventeen years after direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising was instituted in the US, 70 percent of adults and 25 percent of children are on at least one prescription drug. Topping the adult pill category for central nervous system drugs is–surprise!–antidepressants which are used by an astounding one in four women between 50 and 64. Topping the pill category for children 12 to 17 is–another surprise!–ADHD meds, though kids increasingly take blood pressure, diabetes and insomnia meds too. (Babies are actually given GERD medicine for spitting up.) Twenty percent of the population is now on five or more prescription medications. Ka-ching.

DTC advertising has done two pernicious things. It has created a nation of hypochondriacs with depression, bipolar disorder, GERD, Restless Legs, insomnia, seasonal allergies and assorted pain, mood and “risk” conditions and it has reduced doctors to order takers and gate keepers. Thanks to TV drug ads, patients tell doctors what is wrong with them and what pill they need, coupon in hand. Drug company-funded web sites even give patients talking points to use when they see the doctor, lest they don’t ring up a sale.

Rebecca Solnit: By the Way, Your Home Is on Fire

The Climate of Change and the Dangers of Stasis

As the San Francisco bureaucrats on the dais murmured about why they weren’t getting anywhere near what we in the audience passionately hoped for, asked for, and worked for, my mind began to wander. I began to think of another sunny day on the other side of the country 13 years earlier, when nothing happened the way anyone expected. I had met a survivor of that day who told me his story.

A high-powered financial executive, he had just arrived on the 66th floor of his office building and entered his office carrying his coffee, when he saw what looked like confetti falling everywhere — not a typical 66th floor spectacle. Moments later, one of his friends ran out of a meeting room shouting, “They’re back.”

Laura Reyes: Paul Ryan and the Politics That Turn Stomachs

It’s hard to imagine conservative political ideology becoming so twisted that one of its standard bearers would step up to a podium and assert poor children are better off going hungry.

Yet when pPaul Ryan addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week http://www.thenation.com/blog/… he did just that, bashing progressives for supporting federally funded school lunch programs. He accused those of us uncomfortable with children going hungry of offering them “a full belly and an empty soul.”

In service of this deeply troubling belief, he told a story about a boy getting a federally funded school lunch who asked for it in a brown paper bag like his classmates, because that — according to Ryan — meant they had parents who cared about them.

Paul Ryan’s politics dictate that it’s better for a child to go hungry than get help. Paul Ryan’s politics dictate that parents who rely on public assistance don’t care about their children. Paul Ryan’s politics dictate that those who are down on their luck — even children — are soulless, not the Wall Street bankers who crashed our nation’s economy and continue to crush the American middle class, necessitating such assistance in the first place.

Bryce Covert: Why Americans Should Take August Off

By now you have definitely seen it: the Cadillac ad for its first hybrid car that has a hard on for America’s work ethic. “Other countries,” actor Neal McDonough says while strutting through his perfectly landscaped yard alongside his in-ground pool, “they work, they stroll home, they stop by the café, they take August off. Off.” Quelle horreur! And he explains that Americans, from Bill Gates to Ali, aren’t like that. “We’re crazy, driven, hard-working believers,” he says. And he implies we do it for the glory, but also for the stuff, like a luxury car: the latter is “the upside of only taking two weeks off in August.”

But McDonough, or this hyper-capitalist alter ego, is dead wrong. Americans should absolutely take August off. It will, in fact, lead to more stuff-among other things.

Republicans say they’ll fight income inequality. That’s good. It’s just a shame they had to make it about race.

The face of poverty doesn’t look the same anymore. And Republicans here in Washington seem to be taking note. They even seem to be caring. What, Paul Ryan, worry about the takers and not the makers? Maybe the war-on-the-war-on-poverty message has less to do with faulty data and midterm chances than something a lot simpler: the GOP’s favorite all-purpose boogeyman – the Welfare Queen – has been replaced with a poor population that looks a lot more, well, white.

According to a recent report from the Census Bureau (pdf), one in three Americans can be expected to fall below the poverty line for at least six months, and more than 50% of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 have experienced at least a year of poverty. What’s different, now, is that two-thirds of those who fall below the poverty line now self-identify as white.

Robert A Ferguso: America’s punishment addiction: how to put our broken jails back together

Eric Holder and Barack Obama can hope for change all they want. But US prisons have become a big-money war zone

In the United States, people can land in prison for life over minor offenses. They can be locked up forever for siphoning gasoline from a truck, shoplifting small items from a department store or attempting to cash a stolen check. Sentences across the United States in the last 30 years have doubled. Roy Lee Clay, for example, received in 2013 a sentence of mandatory punishment of life without parole for refusing to accept a plea bargain of 10 years for trafficking 1kg of heroin. Even the sentencing judge found this “extremely severe and harsh”. The bigger picture: a recent Human Rights Watch report found that the threat of harsh sentences leads 97% of drug defendants to plead guilty rather than exercise their right to a public trial.

Most citizens are shocked when they hear such reports. Federal judge John Gleeson of New York said that the way prosecutors use plea bargaining “coerces guilty pleas and produces sentences so excessively severe they take your breath away”. Federal judge Mark Bennett of Iowa has described the “shocking, jaw-dropping disparity” of prior-conviction enhancements to force a plea bargain in a case.

But these and other shocks mean nothing without a larger shock of recognition: Americans like to punish.

Eugene Robinson: Ukraine’s Test From Within

When the new Ukrainian prime minister visits the White House this week, President Obama should offer continued support-but also ask pointedly why several far-right ultra-nationalists have such prominent roles in Ukraine’s new government.

I don’t know of any reason to doubt Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s commitment to democracy and pluralism. The same cannot be said for some other members of the provisional regime that is trying to reverse Russia’s grab of the Crimean Peninsula. [..]

Obama should anticipate that if far-right figures begin to shape the policies of the new government, tensions between the eastern and western parts of the country will get worse, not better. Public opinion in cities such as Kharkov and Donetsk, where people are nervous but don’t want to become Russians again, may begin to shift Putin’s way.

The upheaval in Ukraine, I’m afraid, is anything but simple-and anything but over.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Right’s New Clothes

Are conservatives interested in new ideas, or are they merely infatuated with the idea of new ideas? Are they really reappraising their approach, or are they trying to adjust their image just enough to win elections?

One way to look at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference is as a face-off between the “No Surrender” cries of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and the “Let’s Try to Win” rhetoric of such politicians as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Seen in this light, Republicans truly are having the internal debate that Ryan called “messy,” “noisy,” and “a little bit uncomfortable.”

But Ryan may have revealed more than he intended when he downplayed conservative divisions. “For the most part,” Ryan insisted, “these disagreements have not been over principles or even policies. They’ve been over tactics.”

In which case, this is not an argument over ideas at all, but a discussion of packaging.

President Obama’s new budget includes a very mild provision to increase tax benefits for low- and moderate-income working people without children. The provision, the Earned Income Tax Credit, is already available to workers with children. Obama proposes to pay for the new tax benefit for workers by raising taxes very slightly on hedge-fund managers and other high-income people.

His budget also retains the existing cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security, backing off a plan to cut retirement benefits as part of a grand budget bargain, and it includes very modest infrastructure spending of about $70 billion a year (compared with what the American Society of Civil Engineers calculates as a shortfall in deferred maintenance of more like $3 trillion). [..]

In all, a pretty moderate, centrist budget, right? [..]

Obama is being branded a populist by the establishment press and irresponsible by Republicans for what is really a very tame program. He should at least earn these adjectives and get the public’s attention.

How about a large infrastructure program that would create a lot of middle class jobs? How about paying for it with a serious crackdown on corporate tax evasion? How about proposing a true living wage instead of having taxpayers subsidize business?

Ralph Nader: California’s Coming Minimum Wage Restoration

If you haven’t yet heard of Ron Unz, you may soon. The conservative, successful software developer, theoretical physicist from Harvard and former publisher of the American Conservative magazine is launching a California initiative that asks voters in November to raise the state minimum wage to $12 per hour (it is now $8 an hour and is going to $9 an hour by July, 2014).

In commencing this effort, Mr. Unz is uniting conservatives and liberals in supporting this initiative and is hopeful that Silicon Valley billionaires or megabillionaires will help fund this citizens’ campaign.

If this sounds quixotic, put that reaction on hold. Mr. Unz’s mind seethes with logic. He believes that a left-right coalition behind a higher minimum wage makes perfect sense. Conservatives, he argues in many an article, would see a decline in taxpayer assistance to low-income people – food stamps, housing aid, Medicaid, etc. – if employers, not taxpayers, paid workers about what labor was paid in 1968, adjusted for inflation. And liberals have always believed in this social safety net on the grounds that workers earned it and that nobody, with or without children, working full time should be living in poverty.

Robert Freeman: Ukraine is About Oil. So Was World War I

Ukraine is a lot more portentous than it appears. It is fundamentally about the play for Persian Gulf oil. So was World War I. The danger lies in the chance of runaway escalation, just like World War I.

Let’s put Ukraine into a global strategic context.

The oil is running out. God isn’t making any more dinosaurs and melting them into the earth’s crust. Instead, as developing world countries aspire to first-world living standards, the draw-down on the world’s finite supply of oil is accelerating. The rate at which known reserves are being depleted is four times that at which new oil is being discovered. That’s why oil cost $26 a barrel in 2001, but $105 today. It’s supply and demand.

Oil recalls that old expression: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In industrial civilization, the nation that controls the oil is king. And 60% of the known oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. That’s why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003: to seize control of the oil. Alan Greenspan told at least one truth in his life: “I hate to have to admit what everybody knows. Iraq is about oil.”

Michael T. Klare: How the US Energy Boom Is Harming Foreign Policy

Rising oil and gas production close to home is enabling a more aggressive stance toward rivals abroad

Opponents of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline have focused largely on its disproportionate role in global warming. President Obama gave a nod to this concern last June, when he said he would deny approval for Keystone if research indicated that its completion would “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” (The president has final say in the matter because the proposed pipeline will cross an international boundary.) But proponents of Keystone-including some in the president’s inner circle-place great emphasis on its geopolitical value, claiming that it will enhance America’s economic prowess and reduce its vulnerability to overseas supply disruptions. Now, with the January 31 release of a State Department-mandated report alleging that construction of Keystone will not significantly increase global emissions because so much tar sands oil is being imported by rail and other means, it appears likely that this argument will prevail. But far from bolstering US security, this approach is bound to produce new risks and dangers

Richard Seymour: Global Military Spending Is Now an Integral Part of Capitalism

China’s surge in military spending gains headlines, partly because of the ominous implications regarding its regional contest with Japan, but it’s the deeper structures of military spending in general that are far more compelling.

There are few surprises about the distribution of military spending: for all the current focus on China’s growing military outlays – and it is significant that they have embarked on a sequence of double-digit increases as a percentage of GDP – the United States still accounts for 40% of such expenditures. However, the distribution is not the only thing that matters; it’s the sheer scale of such investment – $1.756tn in 2012. The “peace dividend” from the end of the cold war has long since bitten the dust. Global military spending has returned to pre-1989 levels, undoubtedly a legacy of the war on terror and the returning salience of military competition in its context. In fact, by 2011 global military spending was higher than at any year since the end of the second world war.

So, what is the explanation for such huge investments? Is it simply the case that states are power-maximising entities, and that as soon as they have access to enough taxable income they start dreaming war?

A Massachusetts court may not understand the 21st century, but who knows how many photo fetish addicts are out there?

Here’s the thing about picture-collecting voyeurism: desire may be amoral, but the act of taking iPhone photos of non-consenting individuals in order to get your rocks off doesn’t happen without consequences. There are personal repercussions. And there should be more legal punishment, too.

No, “creepshots” aren’t protected by the First Amendment, which “does not protect purely private recreational, non-communicative photography”, according to a 2010 ruling. But they’re still running too rampant.

It all depends on what camera angle the creeps are using, which body part they focus on and, until this week, which state they lived in.

Yes, as of Wednesday, it was found to be perfectly legal to take “upskirt” shots of unsuspecting women on public transportation in the state of Massachusetts. Thank god the state legislature has now rushed through a bill to counter such a ridiculous ruling by the courts. (Update: Gov Deval Patrick has made upskirts illegal – officially.)

Joe Conason: Lying Again? Scholars Detect Deception in Ryan’s Poverty Report

For the sake of America’s poor, a sincere conservative effort to improve the programs that serve them is very desirable-especially so long as Republicans control the House of Representatives, where they habitually yearn to cut or defund those same programs. For months, Washington has eagerly awaited the latest version of “compassionate conservatism,” promised by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and his publicists.

Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Ryan denounced government programs that serve the poor, including food stamps and free school lunch: “What the left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that.”

But what the House budget chair and 2012 vice-presidential candidate delivered a few days earlier showed that he is offering not more, but much less. “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later,” produced by Ryan’s House Budget Committee staff is merely more of the same old right-wing propaganda against the safety net, and worse.

David Sirota: Do Companies Have a First Amendment Right to Track You?

Do corporations have a legal right to track your car? If you think that is a purely academic question, think again. Working with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, states are considering laws to prevent private companies from continuing to mass photograph license plates.

This is one of the backlashes to the news about mass surveillance. However, this backlash is now facing legal pushback from the corporations that take the photographs and then sell the data gleaned from the images.

In a lawsuit against the state of Utah, Digital Recognition Network, Inc. and Vigilant Solutions are attempting to appropriate the ACLU’s own pro-free speech arguments for themselves. They argue that a recent Utah law banning them from using automated cameras to collect images, locations and times of license plates is a violation of their own free speech rights. Indeed, in an interview, DRN’s counsel Michael Carvin defends this practice by noting, “Everyone has a First Amendment right to take these photographs and disseminate this information.”

Timothy Karr: Why You Should Fear Big Bad Cable

Comcast’s plan to merge with Time Warner Cable could leave millions of Americans stranded on the digital equivalent of a winding dirt road.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced an open protocol for sharing information that gave everyday Internet users the power over what they created and whom they connected with online.

His concept quickly evolved into the World Wide Web. One British research scientist’s idea for people-to-people communications became a global engine for empowerment, economic growth and free speech.

Berners-Lee’s idea was to create a web of limitless access and choice. And he was largely successful.

We can use YouTube to share and watch videos, or we can switch over to Vimeo, Instagram, or Blip. We can speak directly with friends using Skype, Hangout, FaceTime or other voice and video services. We can connect and communicate anything with anyone at any time.

But all of that could change.

Official Washington and its compliant mainstream news media operate with a convenient situational ethics when it comes to the principles of international law and non-intervention in sovereign states.

When Secretary of State John Kerry denounces Russia’s intervention in Crimea by declaring “It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not Twenty-first Century, G-8, major-nation behavior,” you might expect that the next line in a serious newspaper would note Kerry’s breathtaking hypocrisy.

But not if you were reading the New York Times on Wednesday, or for that matter the Washington Post or virtually any mainstream U.S. newspaper or watching a broadcast outlet.

Yet, look what happens when Russia’s President Vladimir Putin does what the U.S. news media should do, i.e. point out that “It’s necessary to recall the actions of the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, where they acted either without any sanction from the U.N. Security Council or distorted the content of these resolutions, as it happened in Libya. There, as you know, only the right to create a no-fly zone for government aircraft was authorized, and it all ended in the bombing and participation of special forces in group operations.”

Karen Hansen-Kuhn: Obama Administration Told to Stop Expanding ‘Corporate Rghts’ in Trade Agreements

One of the most controversial provisions in free trade agreements is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which gives corporations the right to sue governments over public measures that undermine their expected profits. It’s a pretty outrageous assault on democratic structures. In fact, when I tell people new to the trade debate about it, at first they often don’t believe me.

But it is a fact. ISDS is included in bilateral and regional trade and investment pacts around the world. The supposed justification is that legal systems in many countries don’t adequately protect foreign investments, so it creates a special tribunal just for them. For example, under NAFTA, three U.S. agribusiness firms sued the Mexican government over restrictions on high-fructose corn syrup, and won $169 million in compensation. Tobacco giant Phillip Morris, operating through its Hong Kong subsidiary, has sued the Australian government over new rules on cigarette labels that highlight fthe health dangers. If that one seems a bit convoluted, it’s because when the Australian government signed a free trade agreement with the United States, it refused to include ISDS, saying its legal system was perfectly able to handle any disputes. But Australia was already bound by an investment pact with Hong Kong.

This expansion of corporate rights has become a big issue in the public debate on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, also known as TAFTA). The EU announced in January that it would pause the negotiations on that mechanism in TTIP so it could hold a public consultation on the issue. But the Obama Administration has not followed suit, so a group of 43 U.S. organizations (including IATP, along with labor, environmental, faith and farm groups), led by the AFL-CIO, sent a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman demanding a similar pause in the U.S., to get more public input.

Harry Belafonte: Let’s Fix a Justice System That Isn’t Working

There is a crisis that demands our urgent attention. For the last four decades, this country has been obsessed with expanding the number of people we throw behind bars and the length of time we hold them there. Crime rates have been falling for the last 20 years, but still we have a massive and unsustainable prison population, particularly targeting the poor and powerless. We’re not strengthening communities, we’re using our criminal justice system to throw away certain people’s lives – disproportionately the lives of Black and brown men, women, and children. This has decimated communities around the nation and it’s gone on for far too long.

But we’re not stuck with a criminal justice system that is hurting us. Solutions exist, and the ACLU’s Smart Justice Fair Justice Campaign is already working to put them into practice. Bad laws and policies are created by the politicians who are supposed to represent us. Police departments choose how to enforce these bad laws. Bad policies are made, and bad policies can be changed.

It is time to reduce tensions and create possibility with Russia, not flex rhetorical muscles and fan the flames of folly.

The escalating crisis in Ukraine has set off reckless missile-rattling and muscle-flexing in this country. My Post colleague Charles Krauthammer sees this as a Cold War faceoff, calling for the United States to ante up $15 billion for Ukraine and send a flotilla to the Black Sea. A front-page headline in The Post on Sunday said that the crisis “tests Obama’s focus on diplomacy over force,” quoting Andrew C. Kuchins of the Center for Strategic and International Studies decrying President Obama for “taking the stick option off the table.” Right-wing and Republican posturing fills the airwaves.

The Obama administration has responded to the crisis by flexing its own rhetorical muscle. When Vladi­mir Putin ignored Obama’s warning that “there will be costs” if he sent troops into Crimea, Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the “brazen act of aggression,”vowing that “Russia is going to lose (and) the Russian people are going to lose,” suggesting “asset freezes (and) isolation with respect to trade (and) investment” while promising economic assistance of a “major sort” for whatever government emerges in Kiev. Cooler heads such as Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock described Obama’s warnings to Putin as “ill-advised” and argued that “whatever slim hope that Moscow might avoid overt military intervention in Ukraine disappeared when Obama in effect threw down a gauntlet and challenged him. This was not just a mistake of political judgment – it was a failure to understand human psychology – unless, of course, he actually wanted a Russian intervention, which is hard for me to believe.”

Ari Berman: Willie Horton Politics: Senate Votes Against Civil Rights

Today, the US Senate voted 47-52 not to confirm Debo Adegbile to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Every Republican senator and seven Democrats voted against Adegbile’s nomination.

Adegbile, the former director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was superbly qualified for the position. He was endorsed by the American Bar Association and high-profile lawyers on both sides of the aisle, and presciently defended the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court last year. He would’ve made an excellent head of the Civil Rights Division.

But Adegbile was the victim of a vicious right-wing smear campaign, attacking him because LDF defended Mumia Abu Jamal’s right to a fair trial. All across the right-wing media echo chamber, on Fox News and conservative blogs, the words Adegbile and “cop-killer” were plastered in the headlines. The Fraternal Order of Police came out against his nomination, even though a court agreed with LDF that Abu Jamal had not been granted a fair trial-a basic right in American society regardless of whether he did or did not commit the crime.

Hina Shamsi: Death without Due Process

Obama violating the ideals he pledged to uphold

The White House is once again weighing whether to kill an American citizen overseas as part of its “targeted killing” program.

This extrajudicial killing program should make every American queasy. Based on largely secret legal standards and entirely secret evidence, our government has killed thousands of people. At least several hundred were killed far from any battlefield. Four of the dead are Americans. Astonishingly, President Obama’s Justice Department has said the courts have no role in deciding whether the killing of U.S. citizens far from any battlefield is lawful.

The president, it seems, can be judge, jury, and executioner.

This is not the law. Our Constitution and international law strictly limit extrajudicial killing, for good reason. In areas of actual armed conflict, killing can be lawful because of battlefield requirements. Outside that context, an extrajudicial killing is legal only as a last resort, and only in response to a truly imminent threat. This makes sense: If a threat is imminent, there is no time for judicial review. In every other context, the Constitution requires the government to prove its case to a court before it kills. After all, allegations aren’t evidence – the difference between the two is due process.

Here’s one solution to the league’s fumbling of race and free speech: replace incognito on-field secrets with a giant hot mic

Lately, I’ve been following an NFL rules-change proposal to dock a team 15 yards – the league’s harshest yardage penalty – should officials hear its player use the word “nigger” or other racial slurs. This proposal, like so many attempts to curb “hate speech”, comes from a place of genuine concern and legitimate grievance. It originates with the Fritz Pollard Alliance, named for the league’s first black coach, and John Wooten, who heads the group, has argued passionately for it as a way to peel back some of the more gruesome attitudes that characterize the modern industrial-sports complex.

But backlash against the idea has been swift, fiery and disproportionate. ESPN devoted an hour-long special to the issue. It’s spawned countless op-eds and been weighed in on by pretty much every player or sportswriter with a Twitter account and an opinion. Those responses run a spectrum from compassionate doubtfulness and raised-eyebrow irony (the league will consider punishing “nigger” but not “Redskins”?) to angry dismissal. Media critic, cornerback and Super Bowl champion Richard Sherman turned the intent of the rule on its head, reasonably concluding that actual enforcement of the rule would penalize black players and itself be “almost racist”.

Holly Baxter: It’s time to kick the high-protein diet habit – before it kills you

Veggies, tuck into your hummus with glee – it’s now almost impossible to deny that eating too much meat, dairy and eggs is unhealthy

According to the latest study into protein consumption, it turns out that this theory may well have something to it. The National Health and Nutrition Survey has been collating data on 6,381 people across the US, and found that diets rich in animal protein (as opposed to protein routinely taken from plant sources) could be as harmful to health as other vices such as smoking. Those under the age of 65 who regularly consume a lot of meat, eggs and dairy are four times more likely to die of cancer or diabetes – although it’s worth noting that, if you make it to 66, beginning to eat a high-protein diet for your remaining years is a better shout than sticking with the steamed kale. [..]

Ultimately, it makes no difference whether you did it for the love of fluffy lambs in spring or deep-seated narcissism combined with a fierce survival instinct: the fact is you should probably eat less meat. You may well have to face a couple of awkward questions over a bowl of hummus, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear. And so, for the love of the NHS, please consign your well-thumbed paleo book to the dustbin. Because it turns out that you may be taking its simpering promises to make you thinner literally at your own peril.

Leslie Savan: MSNBC and Its Discontents

Lately, MSNBC seems to be waking up every few mornings to find a celebrity rattlesnake in its boot. First, Bill Maher said MSNBC was obsessed with Chris Christie and that Bridgegate had become its Benghazi. Then Alec Baldwin took to the cover of New York magazine to denounce his former network for running “the same shit all day long.” “The only difference” between shows, Baldwin wrote, “was who was actually pulling off whatever act they had come up with.”

MSNBC killed Baldwin’s Friday night talk show after only five weeks when the actor made a homophobic remark, which he contends in New York wasn’t homophobic at all. He also calls Rachel Maddow, whom he suspects was behind his ouster, a “phony.” But such Hollywood hairballs, coming on the heels of a series of apologies, anchor defenestrations and schedule rejiggering, could make a casual viewer wonder, Could there be buried in Baldwin’s bruised ego a critique of the network worth listening to? And is Maher right that MSNBC is in danger of becoming the Fox News of the left?

With at least one house of Congress almost certain to be under the control of intransigent Republicans through the rest of his presidency, there is little prospect for any major legislative action over the next three years. However, President Obama has said that he intends to use his presidential power to do what he can to improve the economy and lay the groundwork for future change.

While there are limits as to what Obama can based on executive authority alone, there are many areas where he can have an impact. He already identified one area in his State of the Union Address, when he announced that new federal contracts would require that workers be paid a higher minimum wage. This sort of action can be carried much further.

Eugene Robinson: Before Crimea There Was Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada and So On

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Closing the D.C. Reality Gap

To understand the country’s frustration with politics, we shouldn’t focus primarily on “gridlock” and “polarization.” The larger problem is a disconnect between what the nation’s capital is talking about and what most citizens are worried about.

The issues discussed at kitchen tables and over back fences relate to getting and keeping good jobs, better educating our children, improving living standards (or, these days, keeping them from falling), and holding families together. The issues that fixate Washington are abstractions such as tax reform, deficit reduction, and whether small government is better than big government. Call the distance between the two sets of priorities the Reality Gap.

Mike Konczal: Mike Konczal

We already have one, it’s a major success, and we can use the post office to expand it rapidly

Trying to get basic banking services to cash Social Security and disability checks was a persistent source of anxiety for Patricia Geary, A 65-year-old Philadelphia resident. She receives her payments in paper form, but since she didn’t have a checking account, she had trouble figuring out how to convert them into usable form.

“It was so stressful,” she told me. “It put me in such a fragile and depressive state that I had to seek out professional help at times.”

Commercial banks have too many hidden fees and minimum balances that are too high to help her. The check-cashing places she relied on require large fees for her to get cash and even more fees to convert some of that cash into money orders to pay bills. Keeping her money entirely in cash made it hard to budget well and left her vulnerable to theft.

Luckily, a public option became available. Geary received a Direct Express debit card that loads her government pension and disability payments. The card has low fees and none of her old financial hassles. “It was so much more flexible and allowed me to be much better at budgeting,” she said. “It’s like I have a bank in my pocket.”

Jared Bernstein: Rep. Ryan’s New Poverty Report: A Fat Thumb on the Evidentiary Scale

Paul Ryan and the majority Republican staff of the House Budget Committee are out with a big document that purports to provide a balanced evaluation of the full spate of federal anti-poverty programs. It’s a detailed, serious look at the issue but is beset with misleading evidence and conclusions. While much of the commentary suggests that federal antipoverty efforts have failed and are fraught by wasteful duplication, the evidence — some of which is in here and much of which is conspicuously missing) — belies that facile claim.

Of course we could improve the efficiency of many of these programs. But a close look at their totality shows considerable and even lasting anti-poverty effectiveness.

There’s also something that I found fundamentally odd about the report. In 200 pages of detailed and carefully researched analysis (excepting omissions, as you’ll see), it’s all windup, no delivery. Rep. Ryan never suggests what he wants to do differently in terms of antipoverty policy. Is this a mystery serial where we have to wait for the next installment (i.e., the House budget)? I think I know why he left out the punch line as I’ll reveal below (I too can create a wonky mystery!).

International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.” Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is “in direct, overt violation of international law.”

Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the antithesis of international law.

Leo W. Gerard: Rights Only for the Right People

All those rights Americans cherish, those fundamental human and political freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution, Republicans contend those aren’t really inalienable rights or anything solid or permanent like that.

See, according to the GOP, some Americans are sub-citizens who don’t deserve rights equal to those enjoyed by, well, the right-wing. Republicans think they’re right, and anyone who disagrees doesn’t deserve rights.

Republicans managed to highlight that perverse plank in their political platform over the past several weeks as they proposed – and sometimes actually passed – legislation limiting the fundamental rights of specific groups of American citizens. That includes gay Americans, African-Americans, and Americans who are members of labor unions. Right-wingers sought to seize from these Americans their rights to vote, protest and live free from discrimination.

Joe Glenton: Rape and sexual assaults in the military need more than ‘kangaroo court’ justice

Informal and unaccountable ‘in-house’ procedures mean hundreds of allegations go unquestioned

The foreign secretary, William Hague, has called for an end to the use of sexual violence in war as part of the fine and timely crusade he has taken up alongside movie star Angelina Jolie. An inquest into the death of corporal Anne-Marie Ellement, a military policewoman who killed herself in 2011 after claiming she was raped by army colleagues, has fixed a spotlight on the issue of sexual violence within the British military. Today the coroner found Ellement killed herself in part due to bullying in the army and the effects of alleged rape. It has also emerged that of 200 allegations of rape and sexual assault between 2011 and 2013 in the military, there have only been 27 convictions.

To begin to understand the British military on any level it is best to start with a round of myth busting. Let us dispense with the idea that the British military is in a meaningful sense a slightly quaint but essentially harmonious family. Healthy families do not regularly inflict acts of sexual violence upon each other, and in the British forces rapes and sexual assaults seem to have become something of a banality. No comparable professional group in the UK appears to rival the military for rates of colleague-on-colleague sexual violence. I would argue this stems from a poisonous mix of unchallenged sexism, unaccountable power and an archaic military justice system.

Dan Gillmor: Snowden made cyber-geek nightmares true. Can ‘private’ be normal again?

The NSA leaks created everyday interest in products built to protect. At a security pow-wow turned sour, that’s a good thing

In the nearly nine months since the Edward Snowden revelations began on this website, some of the most jaw-dropping surveillance news has involved a company called RSA, which for years has been one of the top computer security firms in the world. Boiled down, RSA is alleged to have weakened a core element of a widely used encryption product at the behest of the National Security Agency, receiving $10 million in the process of providing a “back door” for government snooping. [..]

It’s too early to tell whether this incompetence – or betrayal, take your pick – will hit RSA and its $51bn parent company, EMC, where it should: on the bottom line. And despite a boycott by some scheduled speakers here, the RSA conference was well-attended. As one security expert who’s expressed contempt for the company’s behavior told me, it’s still his best chance to catch up, face-to-face, with other top people in this still burgeoning field.