Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—The Supreme Court’s First Major Gun Case in a Decade:
It’s been nearly a decade since the Supreme Court has issued a ruling on the Second Amendment’s scope. But the court may have to resolve a dispute over New York City’s strict restrictions on handgun ownership before its upcoming term begins in October—this, despite the fact that state lawmakers went to great lengths to change the laws and render such a hearing unnecessary.
The case, New York State Rifle and Gun Association v. City of New York, could be a major ruling on how far cities and states can go to restrict handguns in their jurisdictions. But it stands to reveal much more about how the court’s newly-bolstered conservative majority will handle gun-control measures in the age of mass shootings, and how bold they are willing to be after many years of shying away from handing down rulings on the matter.
Earlier this year, the justices agreed to hear a challenge to New York City’s handgun regulations, which imposed strict conditions on licenses and the means by which gun owners could transport their firearms from place to place. Last month, New York officials, fearing that a high court ruling could deal a major blow to gun-control efforts across the country, repealed the restrictions at issue and asked the court to dismiss the case.
The plaintiffs, however, aren’t taking victory for an answer. They asked the court this month to reject the city’s effort to declare the case moot and, instead, hand down a sweeping ruling on the Second Amendment’s scope that legislators in New York had hoped to forestall.
Ross Baker at USA Today writes—I was a proud member of the NRA. These days, I think about the moment they lost me forever:
What led to my final break with the organization was a chance encounter with an NRA event in Northern Virginia, probably in 2004. I had been attracted to a show of Civil War memorabilia near Dulles Airport and discovered that there was an NRA gun show at an adjacent venue.
As I wandered over to check out the NRA event, I was astonished by how many people were openly-brandishing guns even before they entered the hall. While I was taking in all of this, I was lured to an NRA enrollment table with the offer of a discounted ticket to the gun show. By re-joining the NRA after so many years, I would not only get a discount on the ticket but also an NRA ball cap.
Most of what I saw inside the gun show was a lot of trading and selling of guns and ammunition, but what grabbed my attention and appalled me were the number of vendors selling Nazi memorabilia or knock-offs. The best possible interpretation of these vendors was that they were selling the Nazi items to World War II re-enactors, but the more I observed, the more I became convinced that my initial understanding was naive. In some cases at least, these items were being purchased as objects of veneration.
That was the day the NRA lost me forever. Today, the organization has become nothing more than a front for firearms manufacturers and its leadership is corrupted by vanity and self-dealing.
Leading off with the former vice president’s stumble during a speech last Thursday to the Iowa Asian and Latino Coalition where he said to groans, “Poor kids are just as bright and jut as talented as white kids,” Eric Lach at The New Yorker writes—Why Joe Biden’s Gaffes Matter:
But the story was bigger than the single quote Biden misspoke several times during his trip to Iowa—the state where, in 1987, his first run for the Presidency fell apart, after he plagiarized Neil Kinnock, the former British Labour Party leader, in his stump speech. At the Iowa State Fair, on Thursday, he screwed up one of his new slogans, telling a crowd, “We choose truth over facts!” At the Asian and Latino Coalition, he referred to Margaret Thatcher when he meant Theresa May, and spoke of using biofuels to power “steamships.” (On Monday, the group announced that it had decided to endorse Kamala Harris.) On Saturday, after an appearance at a gun-control forum hosted by Moms Demand Action, Biden told reporters that the students who survived the shooting in Parkland, Florida, last year “came up to see me when I was Vice-President,” even though the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School occurred a year after Biden left the White House. The media narrative soon became, simply, What about those gaffes?
A political gaffe, in a definition once offered by the writer and editor Michael Kinsley, is “when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.” In this sense, although Biden has described himself as a “gaffe machine,” his problem isn’t gaffes. When Representative Kevin McCarthy crowed, in 2015, that the Republican Party’s partisan investigations of the Benghazi attack had succeeded in hurting Hillary Clinton’s popularity—that was a gaffe. In contrast, Biden’s misstatements this weekend weren’t “obvious truths.” They were ugly confusions, maybe, or embarrassing flubs—the press, the public, and even Biden’s surrogates spent a few days searching for the right way to describe them. On Friday, Tim Winter, the chairman of the local county Democratic Party, introduced Biden at a fairgrounds event, in a town called Boone. “Let’s talk about Joe Biden’s heart,” Winter said. “The media sometimes calls these gaffes, or slipups. And what they really are is a man with a good heart showing his caring leadership, even when it is politically incorrect to do so.”
Trump’s supporters made similar arguments in 2016. We take him seriously, they said, not literally. Obviously, Trump and Biden are not comparable, politically or personally, but it is becoming easier to imagine that, if Biden does become the Democratic nominee, the Party and its supporters will be in for months of apologizing and explaining things away. [...]
Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic writes—Why Democrats May Not Want Steve King to Resign:
Steve King staying in office could ultimately help Democrats.
Earlier today, the Iowa Republican drew their condemnation when he questioned whether there would be “any population of the world left” if not for instances of rape and incest throughout human history. “Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can't say that I was not a part of a product of that,” he said at an event in Urbandale, Iowa, as he discussed his support for legislation that would restrict abortion without exceptions for rape or incest.
In response, a handful of Democratic presidential candidates are calling (or, in some cases, calling again) for him to resign. But there’s an irony to their exhortations: As I reported last week, if King exits before the 2020 general election, it’ll be much more difficult for Democrats to win his seat—and turn the entirety of Iowa’s House delegation blue. [...]
If Democrats want to win the seat, they should want King in the general-election race. If he resigns, or loses the Republican primary, it’ll make the party’s chances of flipping the district that much harder.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—America Made Lady Liberty a Hypocrite:
I’m really glad we’re having a discussion about what the Statue of Liberty means to America, even if it is precipitated by nefarious thinking. This week, the Trump administration moved forward with a change in legal immigration policy that will limit people allowed to enter the country to those who are well enough off not to need public assistance. It is called the “public charge” rule.
This is yet another way for the administration to restrict people coming from poorer countries, many of them countries with black and brown people. What we are witnessing is an all-out, every-avenue strategy to maintain America as a white majority country — and, by extension, to extend white power and white supremacy — for as long as possible.
This is the game. This has always been the game. This is why President Trump’s base loves him. He is fighting for their primacy, their privileges and their power. But media, politicians and liberals in general make a huge mistake when they respond by invoking the Statue of Liberty and the poem inscribed on it pedestal.
The poem says of the statue:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
But, the statue was not conceived as a beacon of liberty and immigration. The idea was conceived by French abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye in 1865, just two months after the Civil War ended, a monument to the emancipation of this country’s slaves.
Nick Martin at The New Republic writes—Native American Imposters Keep Corrupting the “Redskins” Debate:
I would be an obscenely wealthy individual if I was compensated every time this exact interaction has played out in my short life’s worth of conversations. I shouldn’t have been surprised when, the following morning, I read the opening words of Washington Post writer Theresa Vargas’s Friday column:
The majority of Native Americans still aren’t offended by the name of the Washington Redskins.
In the following paragraphs, Vargas unpacked the responses to the team name—one she called “a dictionary-defined slur, whether or not 10 percent of Native Americans or 50 percent of your co-workers or your favorite aunt acknowledge it.” What she didn’t do was question the poll itself. [...]
The latest poll was conducted by the polling firm Wolvereye, whose CEO, Ryan Baum, reportedly reached out to Vargas to share their findings. Wolvereye appears to be a relatively new company—its Facebook page was created in 2017, and, as of Monday evening, the sole post on its website was a brief summation of the R-word poll, with a link to the Post article that so quickly deemed its work passable. The company hangs its hat on its ability to “Identify the emotional DNA structure of...” things like “brands” and “categories” and “experiences.”
Given the criticism the Post faced following its 2016 poll, non-Native readers may have been unsurprised to peruse this update apparently ratifying the paper’s initial findings. For those familiar with Indigenous issues, however, there’s a glaring problem with the latest study—the same problem the Post’s own poll had. The respondents in both polls were drawn from the vast pool of Americans who “self-identify” as Native Americans, like my new drinking buddy. Additionally, and just as problematically, Wolvereye did not make its full methodology available to the Post or its readers—unlike the original Post poll, which acknowledged, albeit not very prominently, that only 36 percent of interviewees said they were actually enrolled in a tribe.
Bryce Covert at The Nation writes—The American Workplace Still Won’t Accommodate Pregnant Workers:
Pregnancy discrimination rears its head in every sector of the economy, from law firms, tech companies, and banks to fast-food chains and retailers. Studies show that pregnant women are perceived as unreliableand mothers are seen as less competent; unsurprisingly, then, women file claims of pregnancy discrimination in every industry. Some are simply fired after telling their employers they’re pregnant. That’s illegal but common. According to a review of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data done by the National Partnership for Women & Families, being fired is the reason cited most frequently by workers filing charges of pregnancy discrimination. Others were refused jobs or promotions.
But in service-sector jobs, the discrimination that pregnant workers face is not just about asking whether someone is getting on the so-called mommy track at work. It’s wrapped up with the overall disempowerment most employees face. “Low-wage workers are often seen as expendable and interchangeable in a way that highly compensated professionals are not,” said Liz Morris, the deputy director of the Center for WorkLife Law. So a pregnant woman’s request for a small change in her schedule or working conditions may be met with a no—or worse, retaliation. “You have less power in the workplace and less bargaining authority,” she added, “because there is a perception that if you’re not willing to do it without complaining, somebody else will be.”
Josh Hoxie at Other Words writes—5 Ways the Economy Is Stacked Against Young People:
The mechanics of wealth building are fairly simple. Save more than you spend, invest those savings to generate more money. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There’s one big problem for younger people trying to do this: The rules are rigged against them. Here are five facts showing the unfair burden millennials carry.
1. Wages are stagnant [...] 2. Student debt is out of control.[...] 3. Everything else costs more too. [...] 4. 4. Buying a house is out of reach. [...]
5. Traditional money advice is laughably out of touch.
The standard personal finance advice doled out these days is to save at least three months of expenses, save for retirement, and spend less than a third of your income on housing.
But when you don’t have enough to cover rent, student loans, and insurance, not to mention groceries, where’s all this saving going to come from? What’s the advice for the 40 million of us earning under $15 an hour, whose jobs don’t cover the cost of living? [...]
Bold solutions to un-rig the economy are on the table, like Medicare for All, college for all, student debt forgiveness, first time home buyer programs, and a Green New Deal. Millennials are in a position to benefit the most from these programs — and to contribute the most to ensuring they become law.
Without bold solutions, the steady rise of inequality will continue unabated for generations to come.
Kayla Blado at In These Times writes—The Answer To Burn Out At Work Isn’t “Self-Care”—It’s Unionizing:
It’s Monday morning and your alarm goes off. As you wake up, the dread of going to work creeps in. You’re feeling exhausted, stressed out, underpaid and underappreciated. It's a mindset you can’t shake, and no amount of coffee will fix: You have workplace burnout.
The World Health Organization recently included burnout as a legitimate diagnosis in their handbook that guides medical professionals in diagnosing diseases. It is characterized by three indicators: “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy.”
So, what can be done about burnout? “Self-care” has been touted by social media influencers as the best solution to restoring your mental health, no matter the cause. Sure, healthy food, exercise and sleep are important ways to deal with stress, and we could all use more of each. But eating a salad isn’t going to fix the systemic problems at your workplace, nor will getting a massage give you a voice on the job, or increase your paycheck.
If you work at a nonprofit, you might be all-too-familiar with workplace burnout. Nonprofits are notorious for being understaffed and under-resourced. Workers at nonprofits often have to wear multiple hats for the sake of supporting the mission of the organization, and the resulting stress can take a toll on their mental and physical health.
It is important to address these workplace issues comprehensively, but there is one clear and immediate solution: join a union.
Tyler Belstrom at The Guardian writes—Do you know which 2020 Democratic frontrunners are hawks, and which doves?
In a world where the United States is fighting forever wars, engaging with rising powers, and belatedly realizing the existential threat of climate change, the American people need to hear a coherent foreign policy. That explains why four out of the five major contenders for the Democratic nomination have recently given speeches focused on foreign policy. This is especially important given the fact that foreign policy is one of the areas where the modern president has relative autonomy to act.
Unfortunately, though, the policy substance of the first two Democraticdebates in Miami last month was shallow – whip rounds of hand-raising and arguments between also-rans. As the field winnows, Democrats need to have a foreign policy-focused debate to show what would differentiate the major contenders; all we have to guess from right now are the candidates’ voting records, speeches and campaign hires.
I would split the five frontrunners into three camps: liberal internationalist hawks (former vice-president Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris), Obama-redux (Mayor Pete Buttigieg), and progressives (Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren). [...]
The debate should answer many questions. What should be America’s role? Have we moved out of a unipolar moment? Does China’s rise doom us to another cold war? With the war on terror a failure, how should we change our policies? How do we responsibly end these endless wars? How do we build cooperation to deal not only with climate change but the migration that will come because of it? How do we prevent the US from supporting anything like the Saudi/UAE-led war in Yemen again?
Jean Willoughby at Yes! magazine writes—For a Greener New Deal and Cooler Climate, Focus on Food and Agriculture:
The global food system is responsible for more emissions than previously thought, according to a new United Nations report. It may also hold a key to reversing climate change.
Agriculture as usual is putting the climate at risk as “unprecedented rates” of land and freshwater resources are used to fuel a global food system that wastes one-third of everything it produces, the new reportfinds.
What we need now are policies, many of which could be packaged in a revised Green New Deal, to direct our resources into climate-smart practices and technologies for agriculture and land management. When it was first released, the Green New Deal resolution presented a sweeping vision for decarbonizing our economy and getting to net-zero emissions within a decade. Since then, Democratic presidential hopefuls have been releasing plans that riff on its framework, translating its vision into policy.
As the UN report makes clear, we need a plan that fuses climate policy with farm policy. We can’t get to net-zero without preserving farmland, restoring degraded lands, and supporting rural economies in a just transition. Every hour, we lose 175 acres of farmland to real estate development. Fertile soil is a national treasure and an endangered resource as much in need of protection as Yosemite or the Great Smoky Mountains.
A successful Green New Deal must integrate what we know about carbon, emissions, and pollution into policies related to agriculture and land use. In short, maintaining a livable climate depends on transforming the food system.
James Downie at The Washington Post writes—Why we need single-payer health care — and ‘health justice’
During the first two rounds of Democratic presidential debates, no topic received more attention than health care. In the two-night face-off in June, discussions of health care and immigration occupied the most airtime; in the July debates, the attention to health care expanded, when it was the only subject that all 20 candidatesreceived time to discuss. The focus was almost entirely on whether Medicare-for-all is sustainable. That has led to some grousing online that health care, while important, was getting too much attention. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In “Health Justice Now,” author and activist Timothy Faust has written the best concise explanation of why the United States needs single-payer health care — and needs to widen the definition of health care itself. Faust has experience in the health-insurance industry as a data scientist and in government by helping to sign people up for Obamacare. In other words, he has lived in the two bellies of America’s health-care beast: in an industry “in which the question of ‘Who gets to receive healthcare, and when?’… is determined by private profitability,” and in government programs that, while improved by Obamacare, remain woefully inadequate.
Faust’s summary of the problems with the U.S. health-care system will be familiar to all. Americans pay more than peers in other developed countries for worse health-care outcomes. Thousands of people die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Mental health is covered essentially in name only. And the current multi-payer system has had decades to solve these problems, without success.
Nancy Altman is president of Social Security Works and chairwoman of the Strengthen Social Security coalition. At the Los Angeles Times, she writes—Social Security isn’t in crisis. It just needs a tune-up:
Recognizing Social Security’s importance to the economic security of working families, policymakers followed FDR’s direction and expanded it regularly — until 1972. In the years since, politicians have increasingly seen government, to quote Ronald Reagan, not as “the solution to our problem” but as “the problem.” Not coincidentally, Congress has not passed legislation to expand Social Security in more than four decades.
Nor has any action been taken to increase Social Security’s dedicated revenue, despite the fact that a modest shortfall — projected to begin in 2035 — was first reported to Congress in 1989.
When a shortfall was reported to Congress in 1975, legislation was enacted in 1977. When a new projected shortfall was reported in 1979, Congress again reacted relatively quickly, passing legislation in 1983. In contrast, three decades have passed without action to address a shortfall first identified in 1989.
Notwithstanding that failure to act, Social Security’s current projected shortfall, modest in size and still years away, is not a “crisis,” as too many politicians assert, but a call for simple maintenance. If your car needs an oil change, it’s not a crisis. But if you do nothing, and wait until your engine is blown, it can become a crisis.