E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—How Kevin McCarthy predicted his own demise:
One group was not surprised by the collapse of Kevin McCarthy’s campaign for speaker: the ultraconservatives inside and outside the House who have made clear since the rise of the tea party that they have no use for politics as usual.
They have always been upfront: Anyone who believes that President Obama poses a grave threat to our constitutional rights — and that Republican leaders have sold out conservative principles for decades — has no choice but to throw sand into the gears of government. For them, governing with Obama means furthering the collapse of the republic. [...]
Republicans have a big choice to make about what kind of party they are. But they’re most likely to keep papering over their divide with psychobabble about “healing.” This won’t work. Just ask John Boehner. Or Kevin McCarthy.
Sabrina Joy Stevens at
The Progressive writes—
Why Columbus Day Should Be A Front In The Progressive Fight For Public Education:
Near the beginning of every school year, one of the creation myths that upholds a White-dominant narrative of the Americas is Columbus Day. Each year, we as educators, parents, and community members face a choice: Will we use this day as an opportunity to empower students by delving into the complexities of our country’s past and present, or will we let Eurocentric nostalgia overshadow the truth?
A growing number of teachers have started to complicate the traditional “In 1492/Columbus sailed the ocean blue” line on Columbus. Some school districts, such as my own in Maryland, no longer take the day off in Columbus’ honor. Some cities and districts, such as Seattle, are taking a step beyond that by opting to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day in honor of those who were already here, instead of the person who helped initiate several centuries of genocide against them.
But for our country as a whole, the day remains on the calendar, though most regard it as a day off to shop and hold parades. Many conservatives, on the other hand, often undermine any attempt to restore the Taínos’ narrative of history. They paint the organizing done by Native Americans and their allies as a “politically correct” assault on Italian-Americans’ heritage and American history as a whole.
For instance, an effort to declare Indigenous People’s Day narrowly failed in Oklahoma City. And the debate over whether the day should be Indigenous Peoples Day or Columbus Day has become a yearly observance on Fox News since at least 2010, when a commentator there declared that it was time to “Take back Columbus Day.” True to form, the folks at Fox believe that America should stop being “guilty” about the accomplishments of European explorers, and bask in our “commitment to the life-serving values of Western civilization: reason and individualism.” The fact that said civilization was built upon the large-scale slaughter and exploitation of others is apparently not worth dampening the celebration.
More pundit excerpts and links can be found below the fold.
David Swanson at Lets Try Democracy writes—Columbus Lives:
Columbus was not a particularly evil person. He was a murderer, a robber, an enslaver, and a torturer, whose crimes led to possibly the most massive conglomeration of crimes and horrific accidents on record. But Columbus was a product of his time, a time that has not exactly ended. If Columbus spoke today's English he'd say he was "just following orders." Those orders, stemming from the Catholic "doctrine of discovery," find parallels through Western history right down to today's "responsibility to protect," decreed by the high priests of the United Nations. [...]
Back in the 1980s I lived in Italy and there was a funny movie called Non resta che piangere (Nothing left to do but cry) about a couple of buffoons who were magically transported back to 1492. They immediately decided to try to stop Columbus in order to save the Native Americans (and avoid U.S. culture). As I recall, they were too slow and failed to stop Columbus' departure. There was nothing left to do but cry. They might, however, have worked on altering the people who would welcome Columbus back with collectively sociopathic ideas. For that matter, they might have returned to the 1980s and worked on the same educational mission.
It's not too late for us to stop celebrating Columbus Day and every other war holiday, and focus instead on including among the human rights we care about, the right not to be bombed or conquered.
Robert Reich at his own website writes—
Hillary, Bernie, and the Banks:
Giant Wall Street banks continue to threaten the wellbeing of millions of Americans, but what to do?
Bernie Sanders says break them up and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated investment from commercial banking.
Hillary Clinton says charge them a bit more and oversee them more carefully.
Most Republicans say don’t worry.
Robert Parry at
Alternet writes—
The Second Amendment’s Fake History:
A key reason why the United States is frozen in political paralysis, unable to protect its citizens from the next deranged gunman and the next massacre, is that many on the American Right (and some on the Left) have sold much of the country on a false history regarding the Second Amendment. Gun-rights advocates insist that the carnage can’t be stopped because it was part of what the Constitution’s Framers designed. [...]
But the Constitution’s Framers in 1787 and the authors of the Bill of Rights in the First Congress in 1789 never intended the Second Amendment to be construed as the right for individuals to take up arms against the Republic. In fact, their intent was the opposite.
The actual goal of the Second Amendment was to promote state militias for the maintenance of order in a time of political uprisings, potential slave revolts and simmering hostilities with both European powers and Native Americans on the frontiers. Indeed, its defined purpose was to achieve “security” against disruptions to the country’s republican form of government. The Second Amendment read:
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times writes—
The hijacking of the House of Representatives:
After his decision to retire, Boehner denounced the GOP radicals as “false prophets” who misled their own voters. They “whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know — they know! — are never going to happen,” he said last week.
But don't feel too bad for him: Boehner stood by while that whipping took place.
“Now he's saying the House has been hijacked by radicals, but the pilots of this airline gave the hijackers first-class seats,” Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a longtime Congress-watcher, told me. “They encouraged them, incited them, promised them things. And now the hijackers want what they were promised.”
As radical as the insurgents are, it would be wrong to dismiss them as a fringe group. Even as they antagonized Boehner, they built a national constituency that may be a majority among grass-roots Republicans.
David Moberg at
In These Times writes—
The Fight for $15 Is Raising Wages. Now It’s Time for Step 2: Unions:
Low-wage Americans—the 42 percent of workers making less than $15 an hour—know all too well that they don’t just want more; they need more simply to survive at the lowliest version of the American standard of living. Increasingly, they are pressing their demands more forcefully, possibly inventing a new form of unionism as they persevere, organizers suggest.
This week, as the White House entertains a discussion of “worker voice,” there is new evidence from public opinion polls, legislative proposals, public testimony and activity from Congress to city halls that the fight to empower and properly pay the workers in low-wage service jobs continues to grow.
And increasingly, these workers say, they want and need a union. They also want—and say they are willing to register and to vote for—political candidates who will fight for their needs.
David Dayen at
The New Republic writes—
Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Reform Plan Is to the Right of Bernie Sanders':
The rise of Bernie Sanders as a policy force among liberals has forced Hillary Clinton to lurch left this presidential primary season, from opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone XL pipeline to calling for a repeal of the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health care plans. Now she’s cobbled together a plan to protect and advance reforms of the financial industry.
Clinton’s plan does not go as far as Sanders’ or her other rivals’—there’s no proposal to reconstitute the firewall between investment and commercial banking, for example. What Clinton does endorse addresses some glaring problems in the financial system: opaque algorithmic trading, risky bets with depositor funds, and bank executives who evade justice when they break the law. Whether you think they will work depends on how you game out the likely responses to such changes.
For example, Clinton wants to strengthen the Volcker rule, the kludgy step-sister to Glass-Steagall, the investment/commercial bank firewall. The Volcker rule, named for the former Federal Reserve chair, is designed to prevent deposit-taking banks from making proprietary trades with their own funds. But it included several loopholes, including one allowing banks to invest up to three percent of their capital in hedge funds, who then make those trades.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes—
Million Man March, 20 Years On:
Saturday morning, with the crispness of fall in the air and wispy clouds overhead, an impressive throng of black bodies — and a smattering of other colored ones — gathered on the Mall, facing the steps of the Capitol.
They had gathered for the “Justice or Else” rally convened by the Nation of Islam’s controversial leader, Louis Farrakhan, to mark the 20th anniversary of the group’s historic Million Man March. And that’s the rub.
The question is, as it was in 1995: Can you separate the march from the messenger, the lightning rod 82-year-old Farrakhan? The answer: Not exactly.
The New York Times Editorial Board urges the deployment of the Next Generation Science Standards for
Teaching the Truth About Climate Change:
Misinformation about climate change is distressingly common in the United States — a 2014 Yale study found that 35 percent of Americans believe that global warming is caused mostly by natural phenomena rather than human activity, and 34 percent think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is even happening. (In fact, an overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is here and that it is caused by humans.) One way to stop the spread of this misinformation is to teach children about climate change.
The Next Generation Science Standards offer one guide for doing so. Developed by a committee of scientists and education experts and honed by teams in 26 states before their release in 2013, the standards set forth a variety of scientific practices and concepts for students from kindergarten through 12th grade to master.