Visual source: Newseum
Republican lawmakers are skipping the tedious part of their jobs -- the lawmaking. The New York Times points out how the GOP is outsourcing the job of making laws to lobbyists, freeing them up for things that are more important.
In many cases, those hiring lobbyists were Tea Party candidates who vowed to end business as usual in Washington. As The Washington Post reported, when Ron Johnson ran against Wisconsin’s Senator Russ Feingold, he accused Mr. Feingold of being "on the side of special interests and lobbyists." Now that he is a senator, Mr. Johnson has hired as his chief of staff Donald Kent, whose firms have lobbied for casinos, defense industries and homeland security companies.
Hey, they did end business as usual! Come on, who didn't know that what they really meant was "we'll make it worse"?
Bringing together people of every region on a planet to form the most diverse culture on Earth? Good. Bringing together plants and animals from every region to form a crazy-quilt of invasive species? Anthropologist Hugh Raffles says we're too quick to believe that's automatically bad.
Non-native plants and animals have transformed the American landscape in unmistakably positive ways. Honeybees were introduced from Europe in the 1600s, and new stocks from elsewhere in the world have landed at least eight times since. They succeeded in making themselves indispensable, economically and symbolically. In the process, they made us grateful that they arrived, stayed and found their place.
But the honeybee is a lucky exception. Today, a species’s immigration status often makes it a target for eradication, no matter its effect on the environment.
Personally, I'd give up honey if it meant I could have back American Elms or see a forest of mature American Chestnuts. Raffles may be right that non-native species are hard to dislodge, but that doesn't mean I have to celebrate their displacement of species that evolved on this continent any more than I would celebrate the vanishing of many human cultures that grew up in America.
At the Washington Post, former Foreign Policy editor William Dobson says that the right of assembly is the right authoritarian regimes are least likely to respect -- and with good reason.
Leonard Pitts remembers one of those incidents that won the rights now in danger.
Once upon a long time ago, a tired man faced an audience of public workers. They were on a wildcat strike, demanding the right to bargain collectively and to have the city for which they worked automatically deduct union dues from their paychecks. The city's conservative mayor had flatly refused these demands.
...
On Monday, it will be 43 years since that man was shot from ambush and killed in Memphis, Tenn. Martin Luther King's last public actions were in defense of labor and union rights.
One wonders, then, what he would say of Wisconsin.
Tim Rutten shows just how far into crazyland GOP anti-immigrant proposals have drifted.
More than 10 House Republicans are sponsoring the Secure Border Act of 2011, a draconian piece of legislative fantasy that directs the Department of Homeland Security to submit to Congress a five-year plan to eliminate all undocumented immigration and smuggling. This legislation follows a request by all seven GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Homeland Security calculate for them the cost of deporting all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
But even though immigration has been a wedge issue since at least the middle of the 19th century, and Republicans have ramped their rhetoric up to reality warping factor 9, there's a growing realization that on this issue, they're going to lose every time.
The Los Angeles Times defends one of the good laws in Arizona -- the public funding of candidates -- against a Supreme Court that seems set to overturn the law.
The conservative justices who were skeptical of the law and its rationale at Monday's oral arguments should think again. Upholding the law would not violate their convictions about campaign finance.
Think again? Who says they thought the first time?
At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, O. Ricardo Pimentel notes that, despite the names on the ballot, the name not on the ballot may determine the votes.
Scott Walker's name is not on any Wisconsin ballot this Tuesday. He was on a particular November ballot that a lot of people are trying their best to forget, especially if they are public employees who voted for him. ... No matter. Wisconsin should never shy from holding elected officials and their policies accountable - even through surrogacy when that makes sense. And it does here. After all, every midterm congressional election features U.S. senators and representatives running with or against another guy not on the ballot - the president.
It's awfully hard in any case to be sympathetic to Walker or to those who are feeling a weighty millstone around their necks. Walker picked this fight - and needn't have. A war of choice, so to speak.
I like wars that are fought with campaigns and ballots. Gov. Walker, get ready to retreat.
Ha! Not only will you not go blind, or develop hairy palms, but New Scientist says you will be cured of a disease that... I always kind of assumed drug manufacturers made up in the first place.
for some, masturbation might have a real clinical benefit: it can ease restless leg syndrome (RLS). The insight could provide sweet relief for the 7 to 10 per cent of people in the US and Europe who suffer from the condition.
Stock tip: sell GlaxoSmithKline, buy Kleenex.