Joseph Stiglitz looks at the business of food in America.
American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.
So it’s almost too absurd to believe that House Republicans are asking for a farm bill that would make all of these problems worse. For the putative purpose of balancing the country’s books, the measures that the House Republican caucus is pushing for in negotiations with the Senate, as Congress attempts to pass a long-stalled extension of the farm bill, would cut back the meager aid to our country’s most vulnerable and use the proceeds to continue fattening up a small number of wealthy American farmers.
Have we not learned by now that the phrase "too absurd" and "Republicans" can't be used in the same sentence? It's wrong to assume that the disastrous effects of GOP policies are due to unintended consequences.
But then, a guy as smart as Stiglitz surely knows this. Read the rest of his essay, then dive below the fold to see what the lesser lights of punditry are up to this morning.
The New York Times editorial board considers the injustice of those locked up forever for nonviolent crimes.
If this were happening in any other country, Americans would be aghast. A sentence of life in prison, without the possibility of parole, for trying to sell $10 of marijuana to an undercover officer? For sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert? For siphoning gas from a truck? The punishment is so extreme, so irrational, so wildly disproportionate to the crime that it defies explanation.
And yet this is happening every day in federal and state courts across the United States. Judges, bound by mandatory sentencing laws that they openly denounce, are sending people away for the rest of their lives for committing nonviolent drug and property crimes. In nearly 20 percent of cases, it was the person’s first offense.
This is what happens when politics is focused on fear. Forty years of getting "tougher on crime" and pretending that things were getting ever worse even as real crime statistics were trending steadily down has brought us to this state of tragic idiocy.
Dana Milbank is convinced it's game over, man.
President Obama’s signature initiative is on the ropes — Down in the count! Fourth and long! — but he remains strangely sportsmanlike.
“We fumbled the rollout on this health-care law,” he admitted at Thursday afternoon’s news conference. “I am very frustrated, but I’m also somebody who, if I fumbled the ball, you know, I’m going to wait until I get the next play, and then I’m going to try to run as hard as I can and do right by the team.”
... on the broader question of whether Obama can rebuild an effective presidency after this debacle, it’s starting to look as if it may be game over.
The record for recent second-term presidents is not good: Reagan had Iran-contra, Clinton had impeachment and Bush had Katrina and Iraq. Once a president suffers a blow such as Obama is now suffering with his health-care law — in which the public not only disapproves of a president’s actions but starts to take a negative view of him personally — it is difficult to recover.
What were we talking about last week? Oh yeah, how the Government shutdown had doomed the Republicans. In a town where the average memory reaches back ten minutes or less, everyone gets a second act. I'm not writing any obituaries.
The Washington Post editorial board complains about the GOP efforts to block Medicaid expansion. Let me say that again: The Washington Post editorial board complains about blocked Medicaid expansion.
“Arizonans are losing the health-care plans they love. The doctors they know. And millions still remain uninsured,” blares a political advertisement in Arizona, part of a multimillion-dollar anti-Obamacare campaign funded by conservative group Americans for Prosperity and running in swing congressional districts.
Despite the ad’s clear intent to deceive, it makes a good point — just not one that should hurt those who favored the law, or those who are trying to help it succeed.
The latest estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reckons that 55 million non-elderly people in the United States lack health insurance; after the law phases in fully, there will be around 31 million. Last year, the CBO figured that the number of non-elderly uninsured after the phase-in would be lower — 27 million. Is the worsening outlook more evidence that the Affordable Care Act is a fundamentally flawed reform? That government is incapable of organizing the insurance system in a more rational way? That the Obama administration is incompetent?
None of the above.
Unfortunately, the health-care law will not quite achieve universal coverage in the United States, for a variety of reasons. The law doesn’t cover illegal immigrants, for example. Most of these reasons were easy to anticipate as lawmakers hammered out the policy, leaving to a later Congress the work of extending coverage to all.
But a factor that the law’s authors couldn’t foresee was Republican intransigence combined with last year’s Supreme Court ruling. The justices proclaimed that states could opt out of an expansion of Medicaid, a partnership between states and the federal government that provides health care to poor people. The law aimed to cover a larger percentage of low-income people by raising Medicaid’s eligibility limits across the country, with the federal government paying for nearly all of the cost. It was a bargain that no state leader should have passed up. Yet Republican politicians have blocked Medicaid expansion in half the states.
Why? Well... don't look for reasons that show, you know,
reason. Just like the punishing food policy, and the senseless policy of lifetime sentencing for petty crime, the purpose of limiting Medicaid expansion is simply to hurt people. That's not a side effect, it's the goal.
Leonard Pitts looks back 150 years to the greatest speech in American history, and to words that were intended to heal, not harm.
When it was his turn, Abraham Lincoln stood in that cemetery in Gettysburg, a town whose walls were still pitted with bullet holes from the great battle four months before and whose heart was still scarred with the memory of bodies lying twisted, bloated and mangled in the rain.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he said in that high, piping twang, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
In a speech lasting just two minutes, he grappled with the challenge of defining America.
It is noteworthy that the second greatest thing any American ever said echoed the first. Standing at Lincoln’s shrine a century later, Martin Luther King noted his “symbolic shadow” and his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation “five score years ago.” And when he said, “I have a dream,” the first dream King articulated was that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
It you're already feeling a little bored with the history lesson... suck it up and read those words again. Lincoln came closer to the heart of what America
can be than anyone before or since. And go read the rest of Pitts' column, which is one of his best.
Rebecca Solnit Shows how the language of hate only compounds disaster.
A lie repeated often and confidently enough can become widely mistaken for the truth, becoming a belief that obscures the facts. False beliefs about disaster follow this model; their poison is concentrated in a few oft-deployed words, notably "mobs," "panic" and "looting."
This poison is being poured out over the disaster zones of the Philippines right now as misleading coverage threatens to become its own disaster, augmenting the existing one.
Attempts at survival are not criminal acts, yet that is how they are often portrayed in news reports suggesting the problem is out-of-control mobs or looting rather than that the largest typhoon ever to make landfall has left thousands dead and tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, without food, water or medical care.
We have headlines like these: "Video Shows Looting in Tacloban Store" (from Euronews); "Looting, Gunfire Erupts in Typhoon-Hit Philippines" (the New York Post); and "Desperate Philippine Survivors Turn to Looting" (the Chicago Tribune). ...
Why does this misrepresentation matter? Thanks to bad journalism, many readers come to believe that the storm victims are criminals or thugs or mobs and that the situation is savage rather than tragic.
That can affect relief aid, and it can also provide cover for a government to take the chaos of the storm as a chance to shift priorities — maybe suspend the constitution, impose long-term martial law, prevent aid from reaching the victims or bring violence rather than help. Governments may do this partly because they believe the media stories.
Thanks in part to rumor-mongering and demonizing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many people in power were willing to believe the worst of New Orleans' residents. Stories suggested that survivors were shooting at helicopters and killing refugees in the Superdome, and the retractions that eventually came were too late to matter. The media can whip up another layer of suffering and destruction on top of an already dire situation, and they often have. Right now, they appear to be doing so again.
This is another strong piece that deserves to be read in full.
Graham Lawton presents seven animals made extinct by humans.
Until recently, the great auk was thought to be the only extinct species whose final moments were recorded for posterity. On 2 June 1844, three men clambered onto Eldey, a rocky island off the coast of Iceland. The next day, they captured and strangled a breeding pair of great auks and smashed the egg they were incubating. The carcasses were sold to a collector – the last of this magnificent bird, mercilessly hunted to extinction for its meat, eggs and pelts.
However, it now seems that this large flightless seabird – the "penguin of the north" – survived a bit longer. A sighting off the Canadian island of Newfoundland in 1852 is accepted as genuine.
Just one of seven in today's gallery.