Visual source: Newseum
The Republicans have cut all funding for the U.S. Institute of Peace, and noted pacifist and peace activist Colman McCarthy is cheering.
The institute was established in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan took time out from arming his favorite juntas to reluctantly sign the legislation that created it. He then lectured its directors at their first meeting that "in the real world, peace through strength must be our motto."
The institute has obediently followed those orders and avoided examination of the military policies of the U.S. government.
Why continue to throw a pitiful few dollars at an agency designed to make it look as if the government is interested in peace, when that's so obviously a lie? A "peace" agency that made not one speech against the invasion of Iraq, and whose budget is not just less than that of the Defense Department but less than that of individual weapon systems isn't just a laughingstock, it's an impediment.
Nicholas Kristof tips his hat to the Japanese for the dignity and strength they are showing in a situation that's unfathomably awful. And when they get around to putting up a few new statues...
I hope that some day Japan will erect another symbol of loyalty and dedication to duty: a statue of those nuclear plant workers.
Dana Milbank explains what the GOP considers an emergency.
Had the new majority finally come up with a job-creation bill? A compromise with Democrats to rein in the deficit?
Not quite. This particular emergency involved the lower end of the FM-radio dial. Republicans, in an urgent budget-cutting maneuver, were voting to cut off funding for National Public Radio. All $5 million of it — or one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the federal budget.
But maybe the Republicans are only wanting to kill the competition. Maybe their secret jobs plan is actually to turn the Senate chamber into the phone bank for a
Nationwide Job Creation Pledge Drive! It's going to be brilliant. Of course, all the money raised will be given to billionaires and oil companies.
Is it possible for markets to price in the possibility of immense catastrophe? Jeff Somers shows that even those doing the calculations on Wall Street doubt that they can plan for the economic impact of disasters. Nuclear power is cheap... most of the time, but do the emergencies, rare as they are, turn it into a source too expensive for investors to touch? How do you calculate for things that are very rare, possibly unique, but which have unmatched impact?
Martin Weitzman, another Harvard economist, wonders, for example, how Wall Street or anyone else could place an accurate price on the risk that an asteroid would crash into a major population center. In a controversial mathematical proof called, perhaps appropriately, the Dismal Theorem, he found that "it's very hard to make reliable inferences about rare events on the tails of probability distributions."
George Will frets about the Chinese Navy. Complete with a Gilbert and Sullivan reference, a name drop of Teddy Roosevelt, and quote from Blanche DuBois, it's quite possible George unearthed this article from a 1960 time capsule.
The New York Times has a gallery of images created by Japanese graphic artists.
You spend around a third of your life doing it. Other animals do it more, or less, but everything -- from ants to blue whales -- sleeps. But why? Despite the literal everyday nature of this phenomenon, we really don't know. However, researcher Bryson Voirin is trying to find out by studying animals with a reputation for being sluggish on their best days: sloths. As it turns out, wild sloths sleep 9 hours a day, but captive sloths sleep 16. Are we really that boring?
Sarah Palin wins the Worst Week in Washington award for her slipping popularity. It seems that Democrats originally believed Palin was an "unprepared ideologue unfit for national office." Oddly, Republicans believed exactly the same thing! Naturally, this made Republicans want nothing more than to elect her to the highest office available. But now they're just tired of her. Maybe they're afraid she's become too experienced for the GOP.
When Wisconsin's rights-erasing non-budget bill gets to the state Supreme Court, it's nice to know that it'll be in good hands with conservative justice David Prosser.
"In the context of this, I said, 'You are a total bitch,' " Prosser said.
That's Prosser addressing the chief justice of the court, and sure, he know it sounds a little raw, but just listen to this classy non-apology.
"I probably overreacted, but I think it was entirely warranted."
Meanwhile, Milwaukee Sentinel Journal columnist O. Ricardo Pimentel says that recalls aren't only justified, they're necessary.
An intelligent electorate will reserve recall elections for only those times and offenses that warrant them. They are warranted now.
Not because legislators' votes showed up in an "aye" or "no" column but for the duplicity with which these votes were conducted.
What the Republican majority perpetrated in Madison was a flimflam, tantamount to malfeasance. What the absconding Senate Democrats did was their job - yes, by not doing it.
What the Republicans did - in both the Senate and the Assembly - was to subvert democracy, even if every court before which legal challenges come rule otherwise.