James Warren at the New York Daily News writes The NRA’s privacy fever dreams :
Credit agencies know about your credit lines, any bankruptcies and liens you have and how well you’ve honored mortgages and credit cards. Companies compile your prescription drug history and sell reports to insurers. [...]
And hackers, including an apparent army of them in China, try to steal it all.
But now we have the National Rifle Association, supposedly concerned about privacy, drawing a line in the sand over, of all things, background checks for the purchase of guns, including via the Internet.
George Zornick at
The Nation writes
Wayne LaPierre Is Winning:
The problem here extends beyond the NRA’s lobbying muscle—it’s the structure of Congress itself. The exploitation of the filibuster in the Senate creates an unreasonably high bar to passing legislation that a majority of Americans support. Meanwhile, the extreme gerrymandering of House districts has produced a class of Republican lawmakers who can afford to utterly disregard national consensus so long as they cater to their reactionary base. In recent months, states like New York and Colorado have stepped up with strong gun control legislation, and mayors like New York’s Michael Bloomberg are rallying public opinion around a comprehensive federal bill. In Washington, though, inertia reigns.
Since Sandy Hook, almost 3,000 people have died of gun violence in America. President Obama was right to say that these victims deserve a vote on gun control legislation. But they deserve much more than that. They deserve a Congress that works.
Tom Rogan at
The Guardian writes
The protection of President Obama's family shouldn't be political football:
On Monday, Breitbart's Matthew Boyle wrote a piece which publicized where Malia and Sasha Obama's spring break vacation was taking place (greatly complicating the duties of their secret service detail). Last year, another conservative group published the government costs for Malia Obama's trip to Mexico. The same organization previously reported on the costs of a 2010 Spanish vacation by Michelle Obama and her daughters. In producing these reports, the messaging was clear: protection for the first family is too expensive and should be restrained.
Ignorant to their double standards, these conservatives seem to be issuing an ultimatum: the president's wife and daughters should not be allowed to vacation and until they stop, we will harass them for their acquiescence. This is ridiculous.
Eric Lorenzsonn at The Progressive writes in Five Things You Should Know About DNA Exonerations that two decades after the U.S. began exonerating convicted persons because DNA analysis showed they couldn't have done the crime, 76 percent of cases point to faulty eyewitness accounts, but a fourth of cases (with some overlap) found that :
2. People are being wrongly convicted because of fraud and abuse.
A quarter of all exonerees were inculpated because of abuse or misconduct by police officers, resulting in a false confession.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Lessons From a Comeback:
Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.
And if this agenda is successful, it will have national implications. After all, California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too.
So is California still the place where the future happens first? Stay tuned.
Leo Gerard at
In These Times writes
Can You Trust Big Banks With Your Money?:
A worker hands his hard-earned dollars to a teller and trusts the money will be deposited and available for withdrawal when needed. Despite the crash on Wall Street, workers still trust bankers to safeguard deposits from robbers and reckless investments.
Granting banks a little less credulity might be wise. Just consider what happened in the past two weeks. A U.S. Senate investigation revealed that the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking reforms utterly failed in the case of the $6.2 billion “London Whale” gambling loss at JPMorgan Chase. Then a U.S. House committee passed seven measures to weaken Dodd-Frank. And there was the European Union’s demand that Cyprus expropriate money from depositors to prevent that nation’s big banks from failing. That means no depositor can trust that a government won’t dip its hands into savers’ accounts to bail too-big-to-fail banks. The trust is gone, baby.d
Rupert Cornwall at
The Independent writes
Brinkmanship in Pyongyang baffles and alarms the US:
What really worries the North's neighbours and the US is that, with tensions so high in the region, even a small incident could quickly escalate. For while confrontations with North Korea over its nuclear programme have been occurring regularly since the early 1990s, rarely have there been so many ingredients for trouble as now. Kim's regime appears genuinely angry over the sanctions imposed by the United Nations after its 12 February underground test, the latest and most effective of the three it has carried out since 2006. The reason is not so much the sanctions themselves. These will have little practical impact, given the regime's isolation already. In the past, however, provocations by the North have drawn a carrot-and-stick response from the West. This time it has been all stick, in the shape of sanctions backed even by China, normally North Korea's most reliable backer, and no carrot. There has been no suggestion of a revival of the six-nation negotiations last held five years ago, let alone of what Pyongyang most covets, direct talks with Washington.
David Dayen at
Salon writes
How the industry uses the high court to allow bribery and evade the FDA.:
So, imagine you’re a big-time drug company. You want to keep competitors off the market as long as possible. Your move is to basically sue the pants off the generic drugmaker for copyright infringement, setting in motion a long and tortuous legal process. And these usually end with “pay-for-delay” deals. The brand-name drug company pays the generic manufacturer a cash settlement, and the generic manufacturer agrees to delay entry into the market for a number of years. In the case before the Supreme Court, the drug company paid $30 million a year to protect its $125 million annual profit in AndroGel, a testosterone supplement.
It’s hard to see this as anything but bribery, designed to preserve a lucrative monopoly for the brand-name drug maker. In fact, this is what the Federal Trade Commission has argued for over a decade. They consider it a violation of antitrust law, arguing that the exchange of cash gives the generic manufacturer a share of future profits in the drug, specifically to prolong the monopoly.
Jeff Gerritt, deputy editorial page editor at the
Toledo Blade laments in
The Blade buys assault rifle within minutes:
Though public support for such [an assault weapons] ban has softened in the last two weeks, most Americans still back it. But the National Rifle Association, spending nearly $3 million a year on federal lobbying, wants to make sure we continue to live in a country where buying assault-style rifles is almost as easy as buying a carton of eggs.
David Campbell at
The Age writes
To prolong life at all costs can be an act of cruelty:
Supreme Court judge Betty King recently sentenced Heinz Karl Klinkermann, 73, to an 18-month community corrections order for trying to kill himself and his terminally ill wife, who was suffering dementia and Parkinson's disease and was no longer able to communicate. Justice King's decision was, given the possible penalty, lenient, but the case highlights the failure of our laws to deal properly with an issue that is going to loom ever larger in our ageing population.
As Justice King said in her judgment: ''To keep an animal alive in the precarious health circumstances of some of those in palliative care may well lead to charges of cruelty, but the law protects human life and places it into a special category. It is protected at all cost.''
The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board says something must be done about
The veterans benefits backlog:
The backlog has been repeatedly and publicly bemoaned in recent weeks, and officials of the VA have been appropriately contrite. Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki vowed publicly this month that by 2015, no one would have to wait more than 125 days. [...]
But 2015 is two years from now, and 125 days is still an unacceptably long time.