Tag: Opinion

Here’s my question for the Republican Party: How’s that Rick Perry stuff workin’ out for ya?

You’ll recall that Sarah Palin asked a similar question last year about President Obama’s “hopey-changey stuff.” Indeed, hopey-changey has been through a bad patch. But now the GOP is still desperately seeking a candidate it can love. Or even like.

That Perry was crushed by Herman Cain-yes, I said Herman Cain-in the Florida straw poll Saturday confirms that the tough-talking Texas governor’s campaign is in serious trouble. He’s the one who put it there with a performance in last week’s debate that was at times disjointed, at times disastrous.

Allison Kilkenny: Abysmal Occupy Wall Street Coverage: Rubbernecking At The New York Times

Over the weekend, my inbox exploded with angry messages from people who had just read this New York Times article (though it reads more like an op-ed) about the Occupy Wall Street protest. Ginia Bellafante gives a devastating account of the event’s attendees, depicting them as scatterbrained, sometimes borderline psychotic transients.

Bellafante, who is not a reporter but a critic for the Times, offered a representation of the protesters that is as muddled as the amalgam of activists’ motives she presents in the span of the article. She first claims a Joni Mitchell lookalike named Zuni Tikka is a “default ambassador” of the movement. In one of the following paragraphs, she then describes the protest as “leaderless.” Either the people at Zuccotti Park have official leadership or they don’t (they don’t, by the way). So either Tikka is an official spokesperson who warrants first-paragraph favorability, or Bellafante’s own biases persuaded her to put the kooky girl dancing around in her underwear in the spotlight.

The more serious aspect of the protest – the “scores of arrests” that occurred over the weekend including the arrests of more than 80 people, several of whom the police first penned and then maced- is offered as an aside in Bellafante’s article (she doesn’t mention the macing at all).

Stergios Skaperdas: Greece Needs to Default on Its Debt and Exit the Eurozone

If the current Greek government can’t take the necessary steps to do this, it should give way to other political forces than can

The demands of the EU, European Central Bank (ECB), IMF troika and the political climate in the northern parts of the eurozone have sent a clear message to the Greek people and the government of George Papandreou: “Do as we say, regardless of the consequences for you – or even for us.” The demands go well beyond those prescribed by conventional economics. They will deepen the depression and make full debt repayment even less likely than it now is. Therefore, the clear, strong nudge is for Greece to default as soon as practicable.

Michelle Chen What Do Students Learn When Cities Refuse to Fairly Treat Their Teachers?

Schools these days can be dangerous places: a volatile mix of fiscal crisis, ideological tension and impressionable young minds. But our troubled public schools can teach us a lot when they push struggling teachers from the classroom to the picket line.

On Friday, stalled contract talks at Cincinnati State Technical & Community College compelled nearly 200 teachers to go on strike. Basic labor rights are at stake, with the administration “claiming it needs financial flexibility and teachers claiming the right to negotiate critical working conditions,” according to the Enquirer. The standoff appears to be a proxy battle over Ohio Senate Bill 5, which aims to strip away collective bargaining rights. The measure mirrors the infamous anti-union bill that rocked Wisconsin earlier this year, and parallels a national debate over public sector labor in which many educators have taken the helm.

Jeff Biggers; Coalfield Activists Turn Tables at Mountaintop Removal Hearings

In gut-wrenching testimonies on the devastating economic costs and mounting humanitarian crisis related to reckless mountaintop removal operations, two courageous Appalachian coalfield leaders turned the tables on an EPA-bashing Republican-led Natural Resources House Committee hearing in Charleston, West Virginia today.

“The coal industry obviously wants to bury and pollute all of our water and all of who we are, for temporary jobs,” 2009 North American Goldman Prize winner Maria Gunnoe testified. “Jobs in surface mining are dependent on blowing up the next mountain and burying the next stream. When are we going to say enough is enough?

In holding the hearing in the Appalachian coalfields, Republican members — and their Big Coal bankrolled Democrat allies — had initially brought their thinly veiled political circus of coal industry wags under the banner of “”Jobs at Risk: Community Impacts of the Obama Administration’s Effort to Rewrite the Stream Buffer Zone Rule.” In a parting gift to the coal industry, George W. Bush altered the ineffective but longstanding rule that was supposed to prevent companies from dumping toxic coal waste within 100 feet of a stream. Under the Obama administration, the Interior Department has spent more than two years to study a reversal of the manipulation by the Bush administration.

By now, probably everyone reading this is already sick of America’s quadrennial political spectacle – the one in which politicians and media outlets ask us to believe that there remain vast differences between our two political parties. It’s like cheaply staged pornography on a red and blue set, with words like “polarization,” “socialist,” and “extremist” comprising the breathless dialogue in a wholly unconvincing plot.

Some of this tripe can be momentarily compelling, of course. And as the 2012 election climax draws nearer, many Americans will no doubt submit to the fantasy. But before that happens, it’s worth looking a few levels beneath the orgiastic presidential campaign for a last necessary dose of nonfiction, if only to remind us that the parties are often two heads of the same political monster.

John Nichols: Why Nader, Cornel West, Jonathan Kozol Seek Primary Challenges to Obama

The volume on the ongoing discussion about whether President Obama should face a primary challenge for the 2012 Democratic nomination is constantly being adjusted. When the president compromises on basic premises of progressivism, when he talks of putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts “on the table,” and sometimes when he simply seems unfocused and politically inept, the volume goes up. When the president stands strong, however, when he outlines plans for making the rich pay their fair share, when he promotes infrastructure and investment in he face of Republican intransigence, sometimes when he simply seems to “get” that there is a point where compromise becomes capitulation, the talk dies down.

After the president drew some lines in the sand last Monday, with a speech that laid out the case for genuine shared sacrifice by the wealthy and that seemed to reject the most extreme cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the “Primary Obama” volume dialed downward. As Michael Moore said on MSNBC the other day: “It doesn’t take much” to renew the “hope”-or, at least, the partisan fidelity-that made Obama the most politically potent Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Joan Walsh: Are white liberals abandoning the president?

A Nation writer worries that an “insidious form of racism” explains their criticism of Obama. I don’t see evidence

The Nation’s most-read article this week is by my friend Melissa Harris-Perry, “Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama.” Perry doesn’t mention any white liberals by name, nor cite polls showing a decline in support for President Obama among white liberals (as opposed to white voters generally, where his approval rating has dropped sharply). But her piece touched a nerve because of the widespread perception that white liberals are, in fact, abandoning the president.

I’m not sure how to argue with a perception, which is by definition subjective, but I’m going to try, because this is becoming a prevalent and divisive belief. When I say Melissa Harris-Perry is my friend, I don’t say that rhetorically, or ironically; we are professional friends, we have socialized together; she has included me on political round tables; I like and respect her enormously. That’s why I think it’s important to engage her argument, and I’ve invited her to reply.

E J. Dionne, Jr.: Only Conservatives Can End the Death Penalty

How can we end the death penalty in the United States?

Every so often, one capital case receives wide attention and makes a public spectacle of the American machinery of death. Last week, it was the controversy over Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia after years of impassioned argument, organizing and litigation.

I honor those who worked so hard to save Davis’ life because they forced the nation to deal with all of the uncertainties, imperfections and, in some instances, brutalities of the criminal justice system.

I have been saying this for years upon years, but it bears repeating: the most awesome, fearsome, and effective weapon in the arsenal of the modern Republican Party is their total, utter and complete lack of shame.

That weapon – the ability to say or do anything, literally anything, even as it flies in the face of on-the-record comments made just the day before, or contradicts thousands of votes cast in congresses past – is the equivalent of a battlefield-deployed tactical nuclear weapon. It clears the field, but good, and if everything is ashes in the aftermath, so be it. So long as effective spin makes the news cycle, it’s a victory for them, and screw the people who get hurt.

Rachel Lewis: Wall Street Vampires

Vampires. Thieves of the night. As sunlight is said to be deadly to them, these mythical creatures venture out to drain the blood from their innocent victims only when it is dark outside.  Judging by the reactions of Wall Street to Public Citizen’s attempt to shine a light on their industry, it seems sunlight kills more than vampires though. Lady Liberty can’t help but wonder if the Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan et al crew are trying to audition for the next season of True Blood . . . or, more likely, they have something to hide.

Remember that big gas price spike back in 2008? Well, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, didn’t buy the reasons offered for it then, and he didn’t buy it this spring either when he spoke with then-MSNBC’s Cenk Uygur for a segment properly entitled, “Rigged Game.” Uygur’s first question, “Is it possible that speculators are driving up the gas prices?” Slocum’s reply-“Absolutely.” At the time President Barack Obama, responding to the media frenzy over gas prices, announced the formation of a task force to look into what was driving the increase. Slocum explained to me that this was many months ago and so far, “not a peep” has been heard from this investigative team.

Dave johnston: Conservatives Say It Out Loud: They Hate Democracy

The roots of today’s toxic conservative movement lie in Ayn Rand’s teaching that wealthy “producers” — now called “job creators” — should be left alone by the government, namely the rest of us. The rest of us are “freeloaders,” “moochers,” “leeches” and “parasites” who feed off these producers and who shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions to collect taxes from them or regulate them or interfere in most other ways. The Randians hate democracy, and say so, declaring that “collectivism” sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes.

Maureen Dowd: Fed Up With the Author of ‘Fed Up!’?

IN a flash, Rick Perry has gone from Republican front-runner to cycling domestique, riding in front of the pack and taking all the wind – or in this case, hot air – to allow the team leader to pedal in the slipstream.

In the debate on Thursday night in Florida, as Perry grew more Pinteresque, lapsing into long, paralyzed pauses, Mitt Romney grew less statuesque, breaking his marble mold and showing a new sarcastic streak.

I was speaking in Milwaukee the other night to a great group of peace activists, and in the question and answer period, we started talking about what could be done to change our foreign policy and bring about peace and social justice.

One thing I said we needed to do was to amend the Constitution to overturn the horrible Citizens United decision of 2010 that said corporations are persons, and corporations can spend unlimited funds to influence the outcome of an election.

I said we have no chance of having democracy in America so long as that decision stands, so I urged people to pass a resolution in their city or county to do just that, kind of like what we did during the Nuclear Freeze movement.

Little did I know that there were people in the audience who were already on the job. They’re trying to pass just such an initiative in West Allis, Wisconsin.

George Zornick: The Funding Standoff and the GOP’s Refusal to Learn From Hurricane Katrina

Sometime next week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will officially run out of money if Congress doesn’t act. Unprecedented demands and gamesmanship by Republicans in the House of Representatives are threatening a funding bill for the agency, along with disaster relief for Americans affected by the recent hurricanes. Watching the spectacle unfold, it’s impossible not to marvel at short Republican memories-it wasn’t that long ago that playing politics with FEMA proved disastrous for the GOP.

By many accounts, the federal government’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans was a turning point in George W. Bush’s presidency. His administration was shown to be incapable of even basic functions of government-helping desperate citizens in desperate need following a natural disaster. After they left the White House, several Bush aides acknowledged that this was the moment that the Bush presidency was irredeemably lost

Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick: Bullying as True Drama

THE suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, the 14-year-old boy from western New York who killed himself last Sunday after being tormented by his classmates for being gay, is appalling. His story is a classic case of bullying: he was aggressively and repeatedly victimized. Horrific episodes like this have sparked conversations about cyberbullying and created immense pressure on regulators and educators to do something, anything, to make it stop. Yet in the rush to find a solution, adults are failing to recognize how their conversations about bullying are often misaligned with youth narratives. Adults need to start paying attention to the language of youth if they want antibullying interventions to succeed.

Jamey recognized that he was being bullied and asked explicitly for help, but this is not always the case. Many teenagers who are bullied can’t emotionally afford to identify as victims, and young people who bully others rarely see themselves as perpetrators. For a teenager to recognize herself or himself in the adult language of bullying carries social and psychological costs. It requires acknowledging oneself as either powerless or abusive.

Dana Goldstein: The Future of No Child Left Behind

This morning President Obama will announce that due to the intransigence of Congress, the administration is moving forward unilaterally to reform No Child Left Behind. In what is being referred to as the “waiver process,” the Department of Education will offer states the opportunity to ignore some of the law’s most absurd dictates-for example, that every single student be “proficient” in math and reading by 2014, regardless of whether a child is disabled or fluent in English-in exchange for embracing a narrower reform agenda.

The administration’s preferred reform strategies are no surprise, since they were also part of the earlier Race to the Top and School Improvement Grant programs. They include asking states to embrace the new Common Core curriculum standards in high school math and English; using student performance data-often standardized test scores-to evaluate teachers and principals; and overhauling underperforming schools by replacing the principal or significant portions of the teaching force. States will also have the option of closing schools down entirely and “restarting” them under different management, sometimes a charter school operator.

I don’t know if Troy Davis was innocent, but I do know that the evidence for demanding a re-examination of his conviction, including the recanted testimony of most of the witnesses against him, was overwhelming. But of course that is now beside the point, which is exactly what is so wrong about the use of the death penalty. No matter what evidence of innocence might be produced in the future, it is of consequence no longer.

That is a compelling argument against the death penalty-no room for correction-but there are others. The most egregious argument for capital punishment is the claim that the finality of officially condoned killing is a necessary guarantor of civilized order. Egregious because it is not possible to make that case without explaining why most of the democratic societies that we admire shun the death penalty as contrary to their most deeply held values.

David Sirota: Two Heads of One Political Monster

By now, probably everyone reading this is already sick of America’s quadrennial political spectacle-the one in which politicians and media outlets ask us to believe that there remain vast differences between our two political parties. It’s like cheaply staged pornography on a red and blue set, with words like “polarization,” “socialist,” and “extremist” comprising the breathless dialogue in a wholly unconvincing plot.

Some of this tripe can be momentarily compelling, of course. And as the 2012 election climax draws nearer, many Americans will no doubt submit to the fantasy. But before that happens, it’s worth looking a few levels beneath the orgiastic presidential campaign for a last necessary dose of nonfiction, if only to remind us that the parties are often two heads of the same political monster.

John Nichols: GOP Debaters Needn’t Worry: Obama’s No Socialist

Asked whether Barack Obama was a socialist — as Texas Governor Rick Perry, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have all agreed is most certainly — former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to talk his way around the most predictable question of Thursday night’s Fox News/Google debate.

But he more or less “went there.”

“What President Obama is, is a big-spending liberal,” Romney replied. “He takes his political inspiration from Europe and from the socialist democrats in Europe. Guess what? Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here.”

A few minutes later, Gingrich went all in, decrying “Obama’s socialist policies.”

So there you have it. Obama’s a socialist, right? Wrong.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: When Socialism Saves Capitalism

Washington – Have you noticed that one of the Obama administration’s most successful programs is also its most “socialist” initiative?

OK, the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler was not socialist in the classic sense: the government was not looking to hold onto the companies over the long run. Their turnaround was accomplished in significant part by tough, capitalist management steps.

But, yes, this was socialism — or, perhaps, “state capitalism” — because the government temporarily took substantial ownership in the companies when no one in the private sector was willing to put up enough capital to prevent them from going under. Today, the companies are thriving.

More than that: the auto industry exemplifies how unions can do their best to protect the interests of their members while also ensuring the prosperity of the companies that employ them.

Let us not mince words: The state of Georgia just murdered Troy Davis. The state coroner will list homicide as his cause of death. But he wasn’t the first and, sadly, he won’t be the last person slaughtered in the name of U.S. law and order. There are today dozens more people scheduled to be killed by states, according to Amnesty International. Their likely deaths represent the ultimate act of perversity in a system that destroys untold thousands of primarily black and brown lives every day.

The execution came following a harrowing and wrenching night for Davis’s family and supporters all over the world. Hundreds had gathered for a vigil outside of the Jackson, Ga., prison where Davis was put to death. Literally minutes before Davis’s scheduled 7 p.m. execution, the U.S. Supreme Court delayed the killing in order to review a final appeal. A little over three hours later, news broke that the court had refused to block the execution. He was slain at 11:08 p.m. eastern.

Amy Goodman; 99 Percenters Occupy Wall Street

If 2,000 tea party activists descended on Wall Street, you would probably have an equal number of reporters there covering them. Yet 2,000 people did occupy Wall Street on Saturday. They weren’t carrying the banner of the tea party, the Gadsden flag with its coiled snake and the threat “Don’t Tread on Me.” Yet their message was clear: “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” They were there, mostly young, protesting the virtually unregulated speculation of Wall Street that caused the global financial meltdown.

One of New York’s better-known billionaires, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, commented on the protests: “You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.” Riots? Is that really what the Arab Spring and the European protests are about?

Jesse Jackson: We Ignore Poverty, But It Is On the Rise

Poor people are invisible in our nation’s capital. Republicans defend the affluent, calling them “job creators,” Democrats champion the middle class and those boldest stand with “working families.” The poor go without mention.

Yet the most recent census reveals that a stunning one in six Americans lives in poverty, more than 46 million, the highest number since the government began keeping track. Poverty is rising across all races and all regions.

Gail Collins: What Would Willow the Cat Do?

Right now you’re probably asking yourself: What has Congress been up to since it raised the debt ceiling?

A lot! The House, for instance, recently passed an important resolution repudiating the raising of the debt ceiling.

These are the moments when it becomes clear why nobody wants to talk about politics anymore. In fact, as a public service, I would like to change the subject and point out that Willow, a cat who disappeared from its home in Colorado five years ago, has been found in New York City. How do you think she got here? By car? By foot? Let’s all talk about that for the next hour or two.

Richard Reeves: America the Passive

BERKELEY, Calif.-Democrats should be building statues of former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, or at least giving away copies of her new book, “A Governor’s Story.”

It’s not that her eight years in Lansing were a roaring success. After all, the state was falling apart in the center of a national disaster, manufacturing jobs disappearing or moving overseas. But now that she is a “former,” teaching at her alma mater, the University of California, she has the freedom to talk about what she learned and say a number of things that need to be heard by Americans who can’t seem to get in their heads the idea that the world has changed. And that America has to change too.

As she told Monica Davey of The New York Times last week, after years of cutting taxes and spending, alienating many of her Democratic supporters, especially union members:

“Everything that is hitting the country hit Michigan first.

The hot new book in Washington, Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, shines a bit of new light on the Obama administration’s lack of support for financial transactions taxes.

According to the book, based on 700 hours of interviews with high-level staff, President Obama supported the idea of placing a small tax on trades of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments. But, as with many other progressive policy proposals, it was blocked by Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who was serving as Obama’s Director of the National Economic Council.

A major theme of the just-released book is how Summers dominated daily morning economic policy meetings with Obama. Former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag reportedly told Suskind that Summers would often tell the President “I’ll make my argument first; you can go after me.”

Robert Reich: A Good Fight

So the really big fight – perhaps the defining battle of 2012 – won’t be over Medicare. It won’t even be over Obama’s jobs program.

It will be over whether the rich should pay more taxes.

The President has vowed to veto any plan to tame the debt that doesn’t increase taxes on the rich. The Republicans have vowed to oppose any tax increases on the rich.

It’s a good fight to have.

In a Rose Garden ceremony yesterday, Obama proposed new taxes on the wealthy – including a special new tax for millionaires, the closing of loopholes and deductions for people making more than $250,000 a year, and an end to the portion of the Bush tax cut going to higher incomes.

Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz: America’s Costly War Machine

Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.

Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.

Richard Wolff: The Truth about ‘Class War’ in America

Republicans claim, in Orwellian fashion, that Obama’s millionaire tax is ‘class war’. The reality is that the super-rich won the war

Republicans and conservatives always fight back against proposals to raise taxes on corporations and rich individuals by making two basic claims. First, such proposals amount to un-American “class warfare”, pitting the working class against corporations and the rich. Second, such proposals would take money for the government that would otherwise have been invested in production and thus created jobs.

Neither logic nor evidence supports either claim. The charge of class war is particularly obtuse. Consider simply these two facts. First, at the end of the second world war, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. Today, that ratio is very different: for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes on business. In short, the last half century has seen a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation off business and onto individuals.

Maureen Dowd; The Re-election Tango

Whether Bill Clinton is being mischievous or helpful is never entirely clear. But the former president often manages to show the current president just how the game should be played.

When Barack Obama was languishing by the phone in July, yearning to hear from John Boehner on the elusive Grand Bargain, the Big Dog advised blowing off the obstructionists in Congress and invoking the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling.

Clinton will often forcefully – and feelingly – frame the argument for Obama policies that would help the working class in a way that Obama himself, once hailed as a master communicator, can’t seem to muster.

“Class warfare!” scream the Republicans, in a voice usually reserved for phrases such as “Run for your lives!”

Spare us the histrionics. The GOP and its upper-crust patrons have been waging an undeclared but devastating war against middle-class, working-class and poor Americans for decades. Now they scream bloody murder at the notion that long-suffering victims might finally hit back.

President Barack Obama’s proposal to boost taxes for the wealthy by $1.5 trillion over the next decade is a good first step toward reforming a system in which billionaire hedge-fund executives are taxed at a lower rate than their chauffeurs and private chefs.

Paul Krugman: The Bleeding Cure

Austerity is inflicting vast pain now, and killing our future, too.

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb.

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.

Joe Nocera: No Extra Credit

What if everything that is happening in Washington right now is just meaningless noise?

What if the Obama jobs plan, the coming deliberations of the supercommittee, the debate over taxing millionaires – what if none of it is likely to make a whit of positive difference for the economy? What if the only thing that matters is something Congress and the president rarely mention, and can do nothing about?

I’ve come to believe this is the case. What is killing the economy is lack of credit. In the aftermath of an asset bubble, invariably the result of too-loose credit, banks don’t just tighten their standards; they practically shut down.

Nick Turse: Obama’s Arc of Instability

Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time

It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.”  It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet.  A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them — from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia — Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.

Garrisoning the planet is just part of it.  The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities right up to full-scale war.  But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind: the odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in which the United States is in no way militarily involved.

President Obama will propose a millionaires’ tax as part of the deficit-reduction package to be unveiled Monday. This is a great idea, which has already been branded “class warfare” by the Republicans.

The problem is the rest of the expected speech, which entirely mixes Obama’s message to voters. Obama is widely expected to propose cutting $300 billion from Medicare over a decade, including a widely-leaked increase in the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.

That really is a kind of class warfare, directed against the vast majority of older Americans who cannot afford to buy decent health insurance in the private marketplace.

By contrast, the proposed tax on people who make over a million dollars a year is sensible, and smokes out Republicans as defenders of wrongheaded economics and the very rich.

John Nichols: Thousands Cheer Bernie Sanders’ Appeal to Obama, Super Committee: Make the Rich Pay for Deficits

Declaring that “Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history,” and decrying threats to Medicare and Medicaid that would punish Americans who did not cause the current economic crisis,  Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders brought thousands of progressives from across the Midwest to the feet Saturday, as they cheered his message to President Obama and the congressional “Super Committee”:”We can deal with deficit reduction in a way that is fair and responsible.”

“Instead of balancing the budget on the backs of working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the most vulnerable,” Sanders said, “it is time to ask the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in this country to pay their fair share.”

Joshua Spivak: The Old Electoral College Switcheroo: The Devastating Consequences of Pennsylvania’s Proposal to Game the Electoral College

With a close 2012 presidential race approaching, Republican-dominated legislature is now looking to deliver a big blow to President Obama’s electoral strategy. The state is debating whether to switch its allocation of its Electoral College votes from the winner-take-all system used by nearly every other state to the congressional district-based system of dividing votes.

The result of such a switch could seriously damage Obama’s chances of reelection. He won 21 electoral votes in Pennsylvania in 2008. Under the district-based system, he would have only won 11. But the effect on 2012 is not the real problem with such a switch — instead it could cause a quadrennial havoc and serve as another body blow to any public confidence in the electoral system.

Eugene Robinson: Where Are All of the Compassionate Conservatives?

Washington – We heard plenty of contradictions, distortions and untruths at the Republican candidates’ tea party debate, but we heard shockingly little compassion — and almost no acknowledgement that political and economic policy choices have a moral dimension.

The lowest point of the evening — and perhaps of the political season — came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked.

“That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. “This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody … ”

Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

As the economy faces the risk of another recession, and the 2012 campaign looms, President Obama has been groping for a response to the biggest crisis of his career. All he has to do is listen to the voters.

The Times and CBS News released a new poll on Friday, and once again we were impressed that Americans are a lot smarter than Republican leaders think, more willing to sacrifice for the national good than Democratic leaders give them credit for, and more eager to see the president get tough than Mr. Obama and his conflict-averse team realize.

So long as the politicians keep reinforcing their misconceptions – and listening only to themselves – the country has little chance of getting what the voters want most: jobs and a growing economy.

Gail Collins: Rick Perry, Uber Texan

YOU think of Rick Perry, you think of Texas. And more Texas. Perry the cowboy coyote-killer, the lord of the Texas job-creation machine, the g-dropping glad-hander with a “howdy” for every stranger in the room. He barely exists in the national mind outside of the Texas connection.

A continuation of the TV series “Dallas” is due in 2012. How long will it take before we fixate on the fact that James Richard Perry is another J. R.?

Some of this is natural – the man is the governor, after all. But we didn’t obsess about the state this way when Governor Bush was the presidential candidate. (We obsessed about the Bushes.) We didn’t talk endlessly about Arkansas when we were evaluating Governor Clinton. (We obsessed about the Clintons.)

The difference is that Perry obsesses about Texas, too. On the campaign trail, he’s the ambassador from the Lone Star State, promoter of the Texas Miracle, filtering almost everything through a Texas prism. On his maiden voyage through the Iowa State Fair, some hecklers were giving him a hard time, the typical hazing for a new face on the national scene, and Perry’s response was instinctive.

Michelle Chen: [In Anti-Government Politics, “Time-Out” on Regulation versus Shortened Lives ]

Seizing upon a reliable “job creation” talking point, conservatives have stoked their war against “big government” by trying to freeze federal actions to protect the public.

The proposed “Regulatory Time-Out Act,” which would impose a one-year moratorium on “significant” new regulations, takes aim at regulations that keep industry from dumping poison in rivers or accidentally blowing up factory workers-in other words, policies that capitalists call “job killers.”

According to the champion of the bill, Sen. Susan Collins, “significant” rules are those “costing more than $100 million per year,” and those projected to “have an adverse impact on jobs, the economy, or our international competitiveness.” The guiding principle of this proposed regulatory kill-switch is a cold cost-benefit analysis that weighs profitability against people’s health and safety.

Jim Hightower: DuPont’s Herbicide Goes Rogue

The company’s landscaping weed-killer turned out to be a tree-killer.

In the corporate world’s tortured language, workers are no longer fired. They just experience an “employment adjustment.” But the most twisted euphemism I’ve heard in a long time comes from DuPont: “We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms,” the pesticide maker recently stated.

How unfavorable? Finito, flat-lined, the tree is dead. Not just one tree, but hundreds of thousands all across the country are suffering the final “symptom.”

The culprit turns out to be Imprelis, a DuPont weed-killer widely applied to lawns, golf courses, and – ironically – cemeteries.

Rather than just poisoning dandelions and other weeds, the herbicide also seems to be causing spruces, pines, willows, poplars, and other unintended victims to croak.

“It’s been devastating,” says a Michigan landscaper who applied Imprelis to about a thousand properties this spring and has already had more than a third of them suffer outbreaks of tree deaths. “It looks like someone took a flamethrower to them,” he says.