Visual source: Newseum
NY Times Room for Debate:
What kind of help does Japan need, and what aid would be counterproductive? What can the United States and the rest of the world do to help the country recover?
Harold Meyerson:
Today, the quake, tsunami and, most particularly, the potential of a nuclear catastrophe in Japan should weaken at least one of our own deeply rooted faiths — in our own infallibility. Consider, for a moment, all the systems that the experts said had been rendered safe, foolproof and immune to disaster, and that nonetheless crashed during the past three years. There was the financial system, an assemblage of immense wagers on all manner of things, which an array of mathematicians and economists assured us could not possibly come tumbling down. There was deep-water oil drilling, which the oil companies’ geologists, among others, insisted could not possibly result in a cataclysmic spill. And today, there are nuclear power plants, safeguarded, their engineers have told us, against the oh-so-remote possibilities of meltdowns.
hese assurances — at least, most of them — were not given in bad faith. Wall Street’s quants genuinely believed that they had erected a stable system, as did the geologists and the nuclear engineers. The equations were elegant; things penciled out. At long last, humankind had triumphed over risk.
Except when it hadn’t.
Markos Moulitsas:
For weeks, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) claimed his push to cripple his state’s public unions was motivated solely by a need to balance the budget. Last week, he tacitly admitted his lies by passing his ban on collective bargaining using a legislative procedure specifically applicable only to non-budgetary items.
While Walker won the battle, he’s about to lose the war.
Tom Jensen/PPP:
At this point GOP field just not strong enough to make Maine competitive despite weakened Obama: http://tinyurl.com/...
and
Jensen again:
Of course the reality is that Democratic leaning voters did this to themselves to some extent. It's a small sample but among those who admit they didn't vote last fall, Strickland has a 57-13 advantage over Kasich. It was a similar story in Wisconsin the other week where Tom Barrett led Scott Walker 59-22 among those who had stayed at home in 2010. Democratic voters simply did not understand the consequences- or didn't care- of their not voting last fall and they're paying the price right now. But the winners of that realization in the long run may be Barack Obama, Sherrod Brown, and Herb Kohl- these states are already looking politically a whole lot more like 2008 than 2010.
Mark Bittman:
It’s time to take a look at the line between “pet” and “animal.” When the ASPCA sends an agent to the home of a Brooklyn family to arrest one of its members for allegedly killing a hamster, something is wrong.
That “something” is this: we protect “companion animals” like hamsters while largely ignoring what amounts to the torture of chickens and cows and pigs. In short, if I keep a pig as a pet, I can’t kick it. If I keep a pig I intend to sell for food, I can pretty much torture it. State laws known as “Common Farming Exemptions” allow industry — rather than lawmakers — to make any practice legal as long as it’s common. “In other words,” as Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of “Eating Animals,” wrote me via e-mail, “the industry has the power to define cruelty. It’s every bit as crazy as giving burglars the power to define trespassing.”
Dana Milbank:
Here in Washington, the immigration debate is in stalemate. But in Kansas, there has been a breakthrough.
This striking achievement came about this week during a meeting of the state House Appropriations Committee on efforts in Kansas to shoot feral swine from helicopters. Republican state Rep. Virgil Peck suddenly had an idea. “Looks like shooting these immigrating feral hogs works,” he commented, according to a recording posted by the Lawrence Journal-World. “Maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal immigration problem.”
Brilliant! Shooting immigrants from helicopter gunships! Why didn’t they think of that in Congress?
There are a few logistical problems with Peck’s idea, including the fact that Kansas isn’t a border state. But maybe Oklahoma and Texas will grant overflight rights for immigrant-hunting sorties.