Category: Issues of the Day

But Initiative 26, which would change the definition of “person” in the Mississippi state Constitution to “include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof,” is more than just an absolute ban on abortion and a barely veiled shot at Roe v. Wade — although it is both. By its own logic, the initiative would almost certainly ban common forms of birth control like the IUD and the morning-after pill, call into question the legality of the common birth-control pill, and even open the door to investigating women who have suffered miscarriages.

The next front in the abortion wars

Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the “war on terror,” although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an “accelerant” to the essential dynamic.

Pierce has more.

“If the itches here are: taxes are too simple, rich people don’t have enough money, seniors have too much retirement security, and multinationals are not creating enough jobs abroad, Gov Perry just scratched them all.”

Jared Bernstein

“Republican state legislators would rather not see voting at all. These include black people, poor people, and people who know who Feist is. And, apparently, their civics teachers — thousands of dollars in fines being the state of Florida’s penalty these days for helping the kids in student government register to vote.”

Charles P. Pierce

Read it and weep.

“Overall, what struck me was how non-threatening the thing is: a modest-sized, good-natured crowd, mostly young (it was a cold and windy evening) but with plenty of middle-aged people there, not all that scruffy. Hardly the sort of thing that one would expect to shake up the whole national debate. Yet it has — which can only mean one thing: the emperor was naked, and all it took was one honest voice to point it out.”

Paul Krugman

“Remember how I told you that the Hyatt Hotel stood up to hate and pandering to violent rhetoric?

“I lied like a dog.

“The Hyatt Hotel apologized to Pamela Geller and the lunatic fringe.”

Juanita Jean

Pierce writes a letter to the President. You’ll want to read it.

He begins:

Dear Mr. President:

You’ve been waiting for your moment?

This may be it.

I know you’re sick of people always running that FDR clip all up in your grill, the one from 1936 in which the offspring of New York patroon society gets up in Madison Square Garden and says, 

“They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

Continue reading.

“While the OWS folks in New York will remain where they are, at least for the moment, the temptation to send in the cops was too great for the people running several other cities, most notably Chicago and Denver. (Tearing down the tents and using the pepper spray. Well done, Denver. A two-fer!)”

Charles P. Pierce

Three factoids underscore that inequality:

¶The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.

¶The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

¶In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.

As my Times colleague Catherine Rampell noted a few days ago, in 1981, the average salary in the securities industry in New York City was twice the average in other private sector jobs. At last count, in 2010, it was 5.5 times as much. (In case you want to gnash your teeth, the average is now $361,330.)

Nicholas D. Kristof

With the increasingly blockheaded Eric Cantor worrying about the “mobs” on Wall Street that he says are “pitting Americans against Americans,” it’s helpful to remember that his party spends a great deal of time pitting the Americans in the public sector against the Americans in the private sector for the purposes of protecting the people in the wealthiest sector. Increasingly, public-sector jobs are framed as being less legitimate, even though the effect on the general economy of someone who works in the Department of Environmental Affairs is exactly the same as someone who works at, say, Wal-Mart. Both of them spend money. Both of them buy goods. Both of them become better and more productive citizens because they draw paychecks. If you cut tens of thousands of government jobs, you are still cutting, you know, jobs. You are acting in a way that depresses the economy, just as if the plant in town closes and all the jobs go to China, while everybody who used to work the assembly line waits outside the unemployment office for hours because the staff in there has been cut to the bone because the Republican governor of the state has decided that the way to deal with unemployment is to throw the people who work for him out of their jobs. The political utility of dividing government work from “actual work” is belied by the facts on the ground, which are that the economy is still not producing enough private-sector jobs to keep up with unemployment, and that “not as bad as we thought it was going to be” apparently is the new normal.

Charles P. Pierce

“In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.”

Paul Krugman in today’s column

I am not running for president either.

Are any of you running?

… read this.

Occupy Wall Street Demands – What They’ve Come to Find at Occupy Wall Street Is America.

No, seriously. Don’t bother with my blog if you don’t stop and read this. You don’t have to agree with it; I wouldn’t tell you what to agree with.

I just want you to think about it.

Charles P. Pierce on the Brennan Report on new laws restricting voting. An excerpt:

How hard is it really? Our election laws should be such that as many people as absolutely possible are allowed to vote, and as conveniently as possible, and every damn vote should be counted fairly. Period. Full stop. How is there not a national consensus behind that?

People fought and bled and died for this right, and not just overseas, either. Lyndon Johnson gave the greatest speech I ever heard from an American president and did so in support of the Voting Rights Act….

How did we get so far from that, with phony accusations of “voter fraud” being enough for people to erect paper barriers and bureaucratic dirty tricks that would have embarrassed the East Germans.

Good specific economic analysis from Nobel-winner Paul Krugman:

Even with this restricted vision of costs, they find that the costs of air pollution are big, and heavily concentrated in a few industries. In fact, there are a number of industries that inflict more damage in the form of air pollution than the value-added by these industries at market prices.

It’s important to be clear about what this means. It does not necessarily say that we should end the use of coal-generated electricity. What it says, instead, is that consumers are paying much too low a price for coal-generated electricity, because the price they pay does not take account of the very large external costs associated with generation. If consumers did have to pay the full cost, they would use much less electricity from coal — maybe none, but that would depend on the alternatives.

Turn back the clock to June 1934. Millions of Americans are out of work, losing their homes and facing more of the same. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responds by creating the Committee on Economic Security. To Congress, he stresses that he places “the security of the men, women and children of the nation first.” All Americans, he emphasizes, “want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where they can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this man-made world of ours.”

…

Fast forward to February 2010. With millions of Americans out of work, home foreclosures at historic highs and little prospect of relief for those in need, President Obama acts, establishing a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The commission’s task is to “improve the fiscal situation,” to “achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run” and to address “the growth of entitlement spending.” The commission recommends, true to its charge, cuts in entitlement spending — that is, the programs established in 1935 and later years to aid the unemployed, aged, disabled and sick.

From a piece by Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw in The New York Times

“In case we’re not sure exactly what happened here, Pinker explains that Harrison was ‘partly strangled, disemboweled, castrated and shown his organs being burned before being decapitated.'”

Now that’s what I call capital punishment. And I’m guessing Harrison wasn’t sedated during this. (The event took place at Charing Cross, London, in 1660.)

From the Scientific American blog Cross-Check reviewing Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

“It’s the health care, stupid!”

Go look as these charts.

We have one overriding domestic issue. Period.

The last hanging in Britain occurred in 1964. Across the channel in France, the peine de mort was done away with by the Mitterrand administration in the early 1980s. So the two great historic homelands of theatrical capital punishment—conservative Britain with its “bloody code” and exemplary gibbetings described by Dickens and Thackeray, and Jacobin France with its humanely utilitarian instrument of swift justice for feudalism promoted by the good Doctor Guillotin—have both dispensed with the ultimate penalty. The reasoning was somewhat different in each case. In Britain there had been considerable queasiness as a consequence of a number of miscarriages of justice that had led to the hanging of the innocent. In France, in the memorable words of Mitterrand’s Minister of Justice, M. Robert Badinter, the scaffold had come to symbolize “a totalitarian concept of the relationship between the citizen and the state.”

Since then no country has been allowed to apply for membership or association with the European Union without, as a precondition, dismantling its apparatus of execution. This has led states like Turkey to forego what was once a sort of national staple. The United Nations condemns capital punishment—especially for those who have not yet reached adulthood—and the Vatican has come close to forbidding if not actually anathematizing the business. This leaves the United States of America as the only nation in what one might call the West, that does not just continue with the infliction of the death penalty but has in the recent past expanded its reach.

From “Staking a Life,” by Christopher Hitchens