Tag: Open Thread

Within the American polity there is a cyclical requiem in the wake of each mass shooting – a predictable collective lament for a calamity that ostensibly everyone regrets and nobody can resolve. Profiles of the victims emerge as reporters opine in front of police tape, wringing every last detail from tear-stained survivors. Gradually facts about the shooter emerge, followed by endless speculation about his (they are almost always men) motives before the president calls for prayer and healing.

Everybody knows their lines. With 45 mass shootings already this year they have rehearsed them often enough. Indeed, the tragedy lies not only in the trauma of the victims but in the apparent helplessness of the political class and the hopelessness that the deathly cycle might be broken. [..]

To the outside world the solution seems straightforward: less guns, more gun control. With roughly 90 guns for every 100 inhabitants, America has far more guns per capita than any other nation and fewer controls on how many guns you can buy, how you buy them, who can own them. Nowhere else in the world has this kind of problem on this kind of scale. This is one example of American exceptionalism few are keen to emulate.

Sen. Barbara Boxer: A GOP Pattern of Vicious Attacks on Planned Parenthood

Almost 100 years after the founder of Planned Parenthood was arrested for distributing birth control information, Republicans are attacking the group in an unprecedented fashion.

This week, the GOP members of a congressional committee subjected Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood, to more than five hours of outrageous accusations — repeatedly interrupting her, grilling her on her salary, disrespecting her and making very clear that their true intent is to turn back the clock on women’s rights and women’s health.

Those Republicans did prove one thing: they are clueless about women’s health.

Republican after Republican badgered Richards about the lack of mammography equipment at Planned Parenthood clinics, even though that is the norm.

Antony Loewenstein: Disaster capitalism is everywhere

A plethora of private companies are profiting from natural or man-made crises – abroad and at home

When an earthquake struck Nepal in April, thousands of locals died in the carnage. But many foreigners had far more luck as members of Global Rescue, a company committed to rescuing its clients from dangerous environments. “Why shouldn’t we be able to hire private armies to ensure our safe return home from vacation?” posed a recent article in Wired, headlined “The tricky ethics of the lucrative disaster rescue business.”

Global Rescue is booming, opening offices in Pakistan, Thailand and beyond. There’s nothing illegal about its operations, and its mandate makes a certain amount of sense: Anybody in the middle of a natural disaster would want to be helped immediately. But the corporation’s interests aren’t humanitarian – they’re profit-driven, with an annual membership costing approximately $700. In Nepal, limited numbers of helicopters were fought over to transport injured foreigners, while the vast majority of Nepalese had no choice but to wait for help from overwhelmed relief services. “It’s beyond our scope” to assist those locals trapped on snowy mountains, said Drew Pache, a Global Rescue employee and former U.S. special forces operative.

Ari Berman: Alabama, Birthplace of the Voting Rights Act, Is Once Again Gutting Voting Rights

It was Alabama that brought the country the Voting Rights Act (VRA) because of its brutality against black citizens in places like Selma. “The Voting Rights Act is Alabama’s gift to our country,” the civil-rights lawyer Debo Adegbile once said.

And it was a county in Alabama-Shelby County-that brought the 2013 challenge that gutted the VRA. As a result of that ruling, those states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, including Alabama, no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government.

After the Shelby County decision, Alabama’s strict voter ID law, passed by the GOP legislature in 2011, was allowed to go into effect without federal approval. And now Alabama is making it much tougher to obtain the government-issued ID required to vote by closing 31 DMV locations in the state, many in majority-black counties.

Such obvious deceptions and bogus thinking would get him fired on ‘The Apprentice’

If you believe that the $18.1 trillion federal debt should be much bigger, that the rich don’t have nearly enough, and that corporations need a tax-rate cut of 57 percent, then Donald Trump has just what you are looking for.

The real estate mogul and reality TV star who wants to be president put out a document he called a tax plan. Like many of his business deals, it is long on boastfulness and short on money to pay the inevitable bills.

Trump told “60 Minutes” that his plan will work because “overall, it’s going to be a tremendous incentive to grow the economy and we’re going to take in the same or more money … We’re gonna grow the economy so much.”

He would cut the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, cut the corporate rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and eliminate the estate tax so the children of billionaires inherit tax-free. (Most of the estate tax falls on economic gains that have never been taxed, as I showed in my book “Perfectly Legal”.) That sounds like more of the tried and failed Republican tax policies of the past 35 years.

Chandra Bozelko: A criminal justice reform bill that doesn’t end mandatory minimums isn’t enough

Too often we forget that our judicial branch is supposed to be a criminal justice system, not a criminal sentencing system: sometimes convictions do not have to be made and sometimes punishments do not have to be severe (depending on the particular facts of the case) in order to achieve justice. But, though we might be moving away from the War on Drugs, it seems that we will continue our war on justice.

On Thursday, the US Senate announced the results of its agreement on a comprehensive reform bill called the Criminal Justice Reform and Corrections Act of 2015. Despite its name, and the growing consensus that such provisions impede rather than improve justice, the bill allows many mandatory minimum sentences to remain in effect – and even adds mandatory minimums for other crimes. But the backstory of a crime can contain complexities, and mandatory minimums don’t allow sentences to be tailored to the circumstances of the situation.

Terry O’Neill: Why the Attacks on Planned Parenthood Keep Failing

When Republican leaders in Washington don’t feel like governing, they attack women’s health care and abortion rights. That’s what happened this week, as a focus on defunding Planned Parenthood jumped to the head of the line in legislative priorities for the House of Representatives. That, and launching vicious personal attacks on Cecile Richards, the organization’s CEO.

But Planned Parenthood is not going down, far from it. In fact, I predict the organization will be both better understood and more admired over the coming months. It’s already starting: a new poll shows not only Planned Parenthood enjoying widespread and deep support, but also politicians who support the organization. [..]

In 1969, during the debate over the law that became Title X, which expanded federal government funding for family-planning services for low-income women, President Nixon said,

   It is clear that the domestic family planning services supported by the Federal Government should be expanded and better integrated. It is my view that no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

In his historic visit to the United States, Pope Francis spoke frequently about the importance of peace and of negotiation and cooperation. His words clashed with a U.S. presidential debate marked by the bellicose postures of candidates in both parties. Francis speaks from a religious, not a political, frame, but ironically, he may have a greater grasp on American public opinion than many of those seeking to lead this country.

Francis opened his visit by praising President Obama for “efforts which were recently made to mend broken relationships and to open new doors to cooperation,” clearly a reference to the opening to Cuba and the nuclear weapons deal with Iran. In his address to Congress, he emphasized the importance of “dialogue and peace,” of being “truly determined to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world.” He called for an end to the arms trade, driven, he argued, simply by “money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood.” At the United Nations, Francis decried war as “the negation of all rights,” calling on leaders to “work tirelessly to avoid war between nations and between peoples.”

Zoë Carpenter: [John Boehner’s Downfall Had Nothing to Do With His Position on Abortion]

Let’s get one thing clear about John Boehner: His problem was not that his position on abortion was too liberal.

Boehner’s resignation as Speaker of the House and from his congressional seat, which he announced to his Republican colleagues on Friday morning, is intimately tangled up in the squabble over federal funding for Planned Parenthood-though Boehner has clashed with the conservative wing of his caucus repeatedly since the Tea Party takeover that brought him to power in 2010. Buoyed by a series of undercover videos taken by anti-abortion activists, conservative members of the GOP have been pressing Boehner to tie a measure stripping funds from the healthcare organization into a must-pass budget bill. […]

 By resigning, Boehner appears to have succeeded in kicking the shutdown can down the road. The Washington Post reports that the Freedom Caucus, which is made up by the most conservative members of the GOP in the House, has agreed to support a short-term funding bill that does not affect funding for Planned Parenthood. But the issue will probably come up in a few months when Congress is again tasked with passing a spending bill. By that time the GOP will have installed a new Speaker, one that hard-liners hope will be more sympathetic to their tactical choices. Practically, it’s hard to imagine how the next leader could surpass Boehner’s legacy in seeking to restrict choice, though surely they’ll try.

Michelle Chen: In America, the Poorer You Are, the Poorer Your Children Will Be

When people talk about “balancing work and family,” they’re usually talking more about the workplace than what’s going on at home. Now we’re starting to get data on what the workaday life looks like from a kid’s eye view, and it doesn’t look good.

When debating the issue of work-life balance, arguments over unlimited vacation and employment discrimination center around women’s barriers to opportunity-the perennial glass ceiling that Anne Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg rage at when lamenting not “having it all.” For working-class folks crushed by on-call schedules or poverty wages, it’s often hard to find any life outside work, let alone to balance work and family lives. But centering the conversation not on career ambition but the life course of a family helps put the false dichotomy of work vs. life in perspective.

Katha Politt: Illegal Abortion Is Dangerous, Birth Control Works, and Other Inconvenient Truths for Pro-Lifers

Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist and anti-choice conservative Catholic, has responded at some length on his blog (parts one and two) to my postelection column, in which I posed some pointed questions for pro-lifers. My format gives me much less space, but I’m going to try to take up his major points here. Then we can move on, which most of you have probably already done. [..]

 I myself do not believe that poverty is the only reason most low-income women who have abortions choose to do so. Middle-class and wealthy women have abortions, too. Having a child affects every aspect of a woman’s life, not just her pocketbook: her prospects, her relationships, her family, her dreams and ambitions, her physical and psychological well-being. We should get rid of poverty to make people’s lives better, not to justify more forced births. We should ban job discrimination against pregnant women and mothers, too-something abortion opponents rarely discuss. Low-income women are much more likely to have unplanned pregnancies, though, and that is something we can fix. We should provide birth control to all-not as a grudging trade-off against abortion rights, but to give girls and women more freedom to shape their lives.

I wish I felt Douthat cared about that freedom.

On the web, I’ll reply to Douthat’s other arguments, including that legal abortion and birth control aren’t prerequisites for women’s equality. Irish feminists beg to differ.

Jeb Bush may not be very good at running for president. But he has a remarkable talent for wedging his foot in his mouth.

The former front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination-who struggles to get above single digits in the polls-has frequently played the fool on the 2016 campaign trail.

But he will have a hard time topping his argument against accepting Pope Francis’ counsel on the need to fight climate change. After the pontiff urged members of Congress to engage with the rest of the world in “courageous actions and strategies” to combat global warming, Bush declared that the pope’s call should be disregarded.

Why? Because, Bush announced, “He’s not a scientist, he’s a religious leader.”

Bush, who is Catholic and who has attended mass with Pope Francis, needs to study up on the pontiff’s background in science. And on the rigorous research that underpins the pope’s advocacy on climate-change issues.

David Swanson: Bernie Sanders Gets a Foreign Policy

After 25,000 people asked, Senator Bernie Sanders added a few words to his presidential campaign website about the 96% of humanity he’d been ignoring.

He did not, as his spoken comments heretofore might have suggested, make this statement entirely or at all about fraud and waste in the military. He did not even mention Saudi Arabia, much less declare that it should “take the lead” or “get its hands dirty” as he had been doing in interviews, even as Saudi Arabia bombs Yemeni families with U.S. cluster bombs. While he mentioned veterans and called them brave, he also did not turn the focus of his statement toward glorification of troops, as he very well might have.

All that to the good, the statement does lack some key ingredients. Should the United States be spending a trillion dollars a year and over half of discretionary spending on militarism? Should it cut that by 50%, increase it by 30%, trim it by 3%?  [..]

And which of today’s battles would Sanders like to end? Drones are not mentioned. Special forces are not mentioned. Foreign bases are not mentioned. The only hint he gives about future action in Iraq or Syria suggests that he would continue to use the military to make things worse while simultaneously trying other approaches to make things better:

E. J. Dionne: John Boehner’s Impossible Task

John Boehner was a deal-maker who took over the House speakership at a moment when making deals had, for many Republicans, become a mortal sin.

He was thoroughly conservative in a Republican Party that had moved the goal posts on what constituted conservatism. He could never be conservative enough for his critics on the right.

His tea party antagonists call themselves “constitutionalists,” but they seem to ignore the part of the Constitution that provides the president-in this case, a president from the other party-with veto power.

The GOP’s most ardent conservatives thought they had won the right to run the country when they took control of the House in 2010. They felt this even more strongly after gaining a Senate majority in 2014. Democrats who controlled one or both houses of Congress when Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were in the Oval Office never presumed they had such power. But the standards Boehner was held to were more exacting.

Eugene Robinson: Carly Fiorina Is Too Mad to See Straight

How angry is Carly Fiorina? So angry she can’t see straight. That’s the only explanation for the yawning gulf between what she says and the plainly visible facts.

Fiorina stands out among the Republican presidential candidates not just because she is a woman but also because she has adopted a strategy of breathing fire. She presents herself as mad about everything, and she never gives an inch on anything she says, no matter how demonstrably untrue. Unhappily for our democracy, this approach has vaulted her into the upper tier of the multitudinous GOP field. [..]

Is she really, truly so filled with rage? Probably not. When she ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in 2010, she was a moderate, pro-business Republican. That erstwhile profile would get her nowhere in this year’s presidential race, however, when everyone is scrambling to get to the right of everyone else and “moderate” is a dirty word.

One has to wonder if the showy posture of ultraconservative anger isn’t the biggest lie of all.