Aviva Shen

News Analysis

Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) agitated against food aid for poor Americans included in the Farm Bill during last week’s House Agricultural Committee debate, accusing the government of stealing “other people’s money.” Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already been decimated in both the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill, cutting off nearly 2 million working families, children, and seniors from food assistance. Fincher invoked the Bible in his defense of the devastating cuts, quoting, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”At a Holiday Inn in Memphis over the weekend, Fincher expanded on his version of the Christian social gospel: “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity is to take care of each other, but not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.”

Nincompoopery at Work: Cantor’s Con Would Steal Workers’ Overtime Pay
Jim Hightower
Op-Ed

My state of Texas seems to have an inordinate share of nincompoops in public office. But it's only fair that officeholders from other place be considered before deciding which state is the nincompoopiest of all.Give credit to Pennsylvania, for example, whose GOP governor, Tom Corbett, recently scored big nincompoop points by explaining why his state ranks 49th in job creation."Many employers," the guv grumbled during a radio interview, "say, 'We're looking for people, but we can't find anybody that has passed a drug test.'" Yes, the old my-constituents-are-a-bunch-of-drug-addicts dodge! That's world-class nincompoopery. Did I mention that Tom's voter approval rating is down to 38 percent?But compare Corbett to one of the Lone Star State's congress-critters, Steve Stockman. Steve's re-election campaign has put out a bumper sticker with this uplifting thought: "If babies had guns, they wouldn't be aborted." Wow — that's two nincompoopisms in only eight words!Still, even Steve can't hold a candle to Rep. Louie Gohmert, the mouth that never shuts. Vice chair of a House homeland security subcommittee, Gohmert recently revealed an astonishing piece of intelligence on the terrorist threat to the U.S. of A. Al-Qaida, he informed the whole world, has set up radical Islamist camps on the "other side" of the Texas-Mexico border.Really? No. But the Islamist alarmist proceeded to tell us that Mexican drug gangs are teaching al-Qaida infidels how to cross the border into Texas and to help them fit in. Gohmert says the drug cartels are teaching Islamists how to "act like Hispanics."Hmmm, wondered many Latinos on "this side," how does Louie think one would "act" Hispanic? Sing "La Cucaracha," drive a low-rider, dress up as landscapers? But "think" is not part of Gohmert's shtick — his mouth operates on its own without any connection to a brain or reality.

Bruce Bartlett
Op-Ed

 Ten years ago this month, Congress enacted the third major tax cut of the George W. Bush administration. Its centerpiece was a huge cut in the tax rate on dividends. Historically, they had been taxed as ordinary income, but the Bush plan, enacted by a Republican Congress, cut that rate to 15 percent. The tax rate on ordinary income went as high as 35 percent.This initiative originated with the economist R. Glenn Hubbard, who had been chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers when the proposal was sent to Congress. Mr. Hubbard was a strong believer that the double taxation of corporate profits – first at the corporate level and again when paid out as dividends – was a major economic problem.During the George H. W. Bush administration, Mr. Hubbard had been deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax policy and wrote a Treasury report advocating full integration of the corporate and individual income taxes.Mr. Hubbard had also spearheaded enactment of big tax cuts in 2001 and 2002 that he said would jump-start the American economy. In an op-ed article in The Washington Post on Nov. 16, 2001, he predicted that the soon-to-be-enacted 2002 tax cut, which President Bush signed on March 9, 2002, would “quickly deliver a boost to move the economy back toward its long-run growth path.”Mr. Hubbard predicted that it would create 300,000 additional jobs in 2002 and add half a percentage point to the real gross domestic product growth rate.There is no evidence that the tax cut had any such effect. The unemployment rate remained above 5.7 percent all year, rising to 5.9 percent in November and 6 percent in December. The real GDP growth rate fell each quarter of 2002, and by the fourth quarter growth was at a standstill. Hence the need for yet another big tax cut.

How America Became a Third World Country
Jo Comerford and Mattea Kramer
Op-Ed

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.It’s 2023 -- and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect.  They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.   Traveling back in time to 2013 -- at the moment the sequester cuts began -- no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested -- and won -- special relief.  Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded ...

Ashley Curtin
News Report

Honeybees might soon be on the prowl for land mines. Chemists and entomologists are working together to see if bees can be trained to find TNT residue in leftover land mines—known as the worst form of pollution on Earth—and carry the evidence back on their fuzzy and statically charged bodies to help bring contaminated land back to productive use. A project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Controlled Biological Systems Program division, chemists at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico are working closely with researchers from the University of Montana on whether “foraging bees can detect buried land mines.”   There are between 80 and 120 million land mines located throughout 70 countries, according to the Red Cross. This uncharted land in most developing countries leaves farmers fretful and thousands of acres of fields undeveloped. While land mines around the world are heavily polluting the environment exposing traces of explosives into the soil and water, much research is being conducted to determine what happens to the “mine-leaked” vapors, chemical byproducts and other residues when dissolved into the land and consumed by plants and animals. And that is where honeybees come into play. At Sandia’s test land mine sites in Albuquerque, various plants are being grown in TNT laden soil to determine if these plants will “uptake the residues into their roots, stems and flowers and even incorporate them into their pollens,” Susan Bender from Sandia National Laboratories, said. If accumulated TNT can be identified in these plants, than such plants can then be planted at possible land mines to help bees detect and measure the mines. As this research is currently underway to determine plants’ uptake of TNT, it is known that as bees forage for nectar and pollen, their bodies act as a “dust mop” collecting soil, dust particles and other airborne chemicals, which they in turn take back to their hives. Researchers will then use decades of explosives-detection work and biosystems research to analyze the hive samples for “suspected mines.” This spring, colonies of honeybees will be introduced at Sandia’s test land mine sites and be continuously monitored by a team of researchers and students from UOM. They will “track the bees’ flight activity” and other such behaviors as way to confirm that the bees came into contact with the environmental pollutants from the plants. The soil, dust particles and pollen collected on their bodies and brought into their hives will also be tested for explosives using “highly sensitive chemical analysis tools,” according to Sandia National Laboratories. The goal of the project is to train bees to seek out the odor of such land mine-produced chemicals with food to increase the “odds that they would bring back TNT residues from areas that contain buried mines” in hives established near suspected pollution areas. "If this method works and it's reliable, you could foresee giving people the green light to re-enter or farm large areas based on bee sampling," Bender said in a news release put out by Sandia National Laboratories. While the study is underway, it will soon determine if foraging bees are a reliable and cheap solution to detecting land mines and saving the land.

VOICES FOR CHANGE

Nincompoopery at Work: Cantor’s Con Would Steal Workers’ Overtime Pay
Jim Hightower
"

My state of Texas seems to have an inordinate share of nincompoops in public office. But it's only fair that officeholders from other place be considered before deciding which state is the nincompoopiest of all.

" ::
Tea Party Rage: Nothing Fails Like Excess
Froma Harrop
"

 Back in their day, the tea party folks were riding high, fueling indignation over alleged government-run death panels, a treasonous Federal Reserve and the like. They commandeered sparsely attended Republican primaries, managing to nominate for Senate seats a dabbler in witchcraft in Delaware, holders of strange views on rape ...

" ::
Revenge of the Bear: Russia Strikes Back in Syria
Juan Cole
"

President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation has drawn a line in the sand over Syria, the government of which he is determined to protect from overthrow. Not since the end of the Cold War in 1991 has the Russian Bear asserted itself so forcefully beyond its borders in support of claims on great power status. In essence, Russia is attempting to play the role in Syria that ...

" ::
Global Capital and the Nation State
Robert Reich
"

 As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — ...

" ::
Rise Up or Die
Chris Hedges
"

 Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book 

" ::
The Newsmaker Memo: An Interview With Ron Wyden, the Senate’s Powerful Policy Wonk
Joe Conason
"

Having served in Congress for more than three decades — and in the upper chamber since 1996 — Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden has established a reputation as one of the Senate's more serious and diligent members. Over the years on Capitol Hill, he has watched the Republican Party veer constantly further rightward, and yet he continues to believe against all ...

" ::
Consumers Not the Best Drivers in Health Care
Froma Harrop
"

 For years, conservatives have pushed for a health-insurance model emphasizing catastrophic coverage. It works as follows:Consumers pay the cost of ordinary care, such as ...

" ::
The IRS and the Real Scandal
Robert Reich
"

 “This systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” said David Camp, the Republican chairman of the House tax-writing committee, at an oversight hearing Friday morning dealing with the IRS. “This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive.”David ...

" ::
Texas Blast Exposes the New Normal
David Sirota
"

 If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11's worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?

" ::
Pyromaniacs on the Potomac: The Problem With Obama’s Second Term
Robert Reich
"

 Six months into a second term and the Obama White House is on the defensive and floundering: Benghazi, the IRS’s investigations of right-wing groups, the Justice Department’s snooping into journalists’ phone records, Obamacare behind schedule, the Administration’s push for gun control ending in failure. Should the blame fall mainly on congressional Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media, whose vitriolic attacks on Obama ...

" ::

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FROM AROUND THE WEB

Education

Upon graduation, one student realizes that the life she has been living during college, with money that added up in terms of loans, is now a reality.

Gay Marriage

“Bill passes to House of Lords despite opposition in lower house from majority of ruling Conservative party members.”

Workers’ Rights

“The walkouts in federally owned buildings by non-union workers have been ‘unprecedented.’”

Abortion Rights

A judge struck down a law in Arizona that would ban abortions at 20 week.

Wall Street

Why the FBI and other investigators are taking a closer look at the Minnesota rep’s ill-fated 2012 presidential run.

Monsanto Greed

Following outcry, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., announced that he would put forward an amendment to Senate farm bill.

U.S. Justice

A Senate panel will try on Tuesday to pry more details out of current and former officials of the Internal Revenue Service about the agency’s targeting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they sought tax-exempt status.

Disaster Relief

U.S. president declares major disaster with at least 91 people feared dead and scores injured and missing.

Gay Marriage

If Downing Street joins forces with the Labor Party, the bill to legalize gay marriage will “run grave trouble.”

Media

“Probing leaks over North Korea, the government surveilled James Rosen’s every contact with State Department.”

U.S. Natural Disasters

A massive storm including a twister, pouring rain and tornadoes hit the region hard on Sunday.

Benghazi controversy

Eight months later, it is the decisions made back in Washington that remain murky and in perpetual dispute.

U.S. Military

Under pressure to fight sexual assault, the U.S. armed forces in recent years rolled out education programs about proper sexual conduct through methods like role playing and video games.

Oil Crisis

Texas, alleges the companies and others “engaged in willful and wanton misconduct” in the 2010 Deep Horizon oil spill.

Tax Evasion

The outgoing chief of the IRS angered Republicans during a hearing on Friday when he wouldn’t identify any other parties involved in the tax-collection agency’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups.

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