The New York Times on how the minimum wage is going up, even as the Republicans continue to fight it.
Stagnating wages and widening inequality are the central economic challenges of our day. Without wage growth, the gains from economic expansion — as measured by income and wealth — become increasingly concentrated at the top of the economic ladder in a self-reinforcing process that makes broad prosperity impossible.
With Congress unwilling to address those challenges, the states have picked up some of the slack. Currently, for example, 26 states and the District of Columbia have, or soon will have, raised their minimum wage above the paltry federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. ...
In November, ballot measures in San Francisco and Oakland will let voters decide on raising their cities’ minimum wages. In San Francisco, the push is for $15 an hour by 2018, up from $10.74 and equal to the nation’s highest citywide minimum, which was enacted recently in Seattle. In Oakland, which does not have its own minimum wage now, the goal is $12.25 an hour by 2015.
Really, this is the one issue on which every Democratic candidate should be pounding the living crap out of every Republican candidate. Why this isn't in every Democratic ad is beyond me.
Sorry I'm running late this morning. But hey, there's more below the fold...
Leonard Pitts on the erosion of all those other rights.
Last week, a federal judge told us what we already knew.
Namely, that police in Ferguson, Mo. violated the rights of protesters demonstrating against the shooting death of Michael Brown. U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry struck down an ad hoc rule under which cops had said people could not stand still while peacefully protesting. Some were told they couldn't stop walking for more than five seconds; others, that they had to walk faster.
Again: These were not rioters. These were citizens seeking “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment gives them the right to do. So Perry’s ruling is welcome, but not particularly surprising. The no-stop dictate was so flagrantly wrong as to make any other decision unthinkable.
Still, one’s sense of righteous vindication is tempered by the fact that police felt free to try this absurd stratagem in the first place — and by the fact that this was hardly the only recent example of police using the Constitution for Kleenex. ...
It seems our constitutional rights are being nibbled out from under us, compromise by compromise, expediency by expediency, while we watch with dull complacence. In our unthinking mania for laws to “get tough on crime,” we actually made it tougher on ourselves, altering the balance of power between people and police to the point where a cop can now take your legally-earned money off your sovereign person and there’s little you can do about it.
Protests are far from the only place this is happening. We've made the give-up-freedom-for-the-illusion-of-safety bad bargain so many ways in the last decade and a half that cataloging them all would take... a catalog.
Alicia Parlapiano, Derek Willis, and Jennifer Daniel look at the effects of the Supreme Court throwing open the gates to oligarchy.
In the run-up to the passage in 2002 of the McCain-Feingold Act, which tightened the nation’s campaign contribution restrictions, Senator John McCain predicted, "There will be a period of time of relatively clean elections — I emphasize relative — and then we will find some smart people who find smart ways around it."
Mr. McCain proved prescient. Twelve years later, a series of workarounds and court rulings have allowed more cash than ever to flood the political system. In that period, the top dozen individual donors spent at least $396 million in federal elections — about 1.5 percent of the entire $28 billion spent across the country — and an additional $271 million in state elections. And those amounts understate the donors’ total contributions: They don’t, for example, include money given to political nonprofit groups, which are not required to disclose their donors. This is why the billionaire Koch brothers don’t appear on the list.
The list, as generated, is built to serve the "both sides do it" narrative that is the #1 sin of the media over the last decade.
Dana Milbank on the FEC.
If you were to seek out a poster child for all that is broken in Washington, you could find no better candidate than the Federal Election Commission.
The agency that oversees our campaign-finance system, by law led by three Democratic and three Republican appointees, has come to a complete halt because of partisan deadlock. For five years, it has written virtually no significant regulations and done virtually no significant enforcement of election law.
If you’ve been thinking of breaking federal election law, this would be an excellent time to do it, because the chance of being caught is close to nil. There is no cop on the beat.
But this week, a Democratic commissioner took a bold gamble to change all this. She did it with a method that has become arcane in Washington: She offered a concession.
She sided with the commission’s three Republican members to break a logjam that has persisted for nearly five years — allowing the agency finally to draft rules consistent with the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. In return, the Democratic commissioner, Vice Chairman Ann Ravel, is expecting reciprocal concessions from her Republican colleagues.
Wow. A Democrat offers a concession and all it takes is for Republicans to also give a little. That'll happen any second now. Any second. Any..
Ross Douthat on the right to a dignified death.
ON Nov. 1, barring the medically unexpected or a change of heart, a young woman named Brittany Maynard will ingest a lethal prescription and die by suicide.
Maynard is 29, recently married and is suffering from terminal brain cancer. After deciding against hospice care — fearing, she wrote in a CNN op-ed, a combination of pain, personality changes, and the loss of basic mental and physical functions — she and her husband moved from California to Oregon, one of five states that permit physician-assisted suicide. In the time remaining to her, she has become a public advocate for that practice’s expansion, recording testimonials on behalf of the right of the terminally ill to make their quietus.
The tragedy here is almost deep enough to drown the political debate. But that debate’s continued existence is still a striking fact. Why, in a society where individualism seems to be carrying the day, is the right that Maynard intends to exercise still confined to just a handful of states? Why has assisted suicide’s advance been slow, when on other social issues the landscape has shifted dramatically in a libertarian direction?
In case you're wondering, it's liberal's fault.
Frank Bruni and America's continued love for Bill Clinton.
...Even when he’s not running, he’s running — exuberantly, indefatigably, for just causes, for lost causes, because he hopes to move the needle, because he loves the sound of his own voice and because he doesn't know any other way to be. Politics is his calling. The arena is his home.
And that’s the real reason that he’s so popular in his post-presidency, so beloved in both retrospect and the moment. In bold contrast to the easily embittered, frequently disappointing occupant of the Oval Office right now, Bill Clinton was — and is — game.
Nothing stops him or slows him or sours him, at least not for long. Nothing is beneath him, because he’s as unabashedly messy and slick as the operators all around him. He doesn't recoil at the rough and tumble, or feel belittled and diminished by it. He relishes it. Throw a punch at him and he throws one at you. Impeach him and he bounces back.
The New York Times sounding a just note... to which no one ever seems to listen.
For the first time in more than 50 years, shifting politics in the United States and changing policies in Cuba make it politically feasible to re-establish formal diplomatic relations and dismantle the senseless embargo. The Castro regime has long blamed the embargo for its shortcomings, and has kept ordinary Cubans largely cut off from the world. Mr. Obama should seize this opportunity to end a long era of enmity and help a population that has suffered enormously since Washington ended diplomatic relations in 1961, two years after Fidel Castro assumed power. ...
As a first step, the Obama administration should remove Cuba from the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorist organizations, which includes Iran, Sudan and Syria. Cuba was put on the list in 1982 for backing terrorist groups in Latin America, which it no longer does. American officials recognize that Havana is playing a constructive role in the conflict in Colombia by hosting peace talks between the government and guerrilla leaders.
Yes, it should be done. No, it's not on anyone's agenda.
Ruth Marcus on Hillary.
The 2008 campaign was the first with a woman as a serious presidential contender, so it was not surprising that gender was an uncomfortable, tiptoe-y subject. The male candidates weren’t sure-footed in dealing with it — recall Barack Obama’s “you’re likable enough, Hillary” and the debate discussion about the color of her jacket.
Neither, actually, was Clinton herself. Her campaign was never certain how, or even whether, to talk about gender. Often, it put the issue at arm’s length. “I am very proud to be making history running as a woman for president of the United States,” Clinton would say on the campaign trail, “but I’m not running because I am a woman.” ...
If the pre-campaign season is any indication — and, yes, I do think we are in pre-campaign season — this time could be interestingly different.
Clinton, like her party, is prepared to put issues of gender equality front and center; the preponderance of female voters and the Democrats’ edge with them make that focus a no-brainer for candidates of both genders. “We talk about a glass ceiling,” Clinton said at a forum on women’s economic security at the Center for American Progress last month. “These women don’t even have a secure floor under them.”
Please. Let's have that fight.
Hal Hodson dons the latest in virtual reality wear.
An old man sits across the fire from me, telling a story. An inky dome of star-flecked sky arcs overhead as his words mingle with the crackling of the flames. I am entranced.
This isn't really happening, but it feels as if it is. This is a program called Storyteller – Fireside Tales that runs on the latest version of the Oculus Rift headset, unveiled last month. The audiobook software harnesses the headset's virtual reality capabilities to deepen immersion in the story. ...
Movie company 8i, based in Wellington, New Zealand, plans to make films specifically for Oculus Rift. These will be more immersive than just mimicking a real screen in virtual reality because viewers will be able to step inside and explore the movie while they are watching it.
As a genuine VR nerd (and owner of the development version of the Occulus), I'm aching for all these things to arrive. I have my bags packed. I'm ready for a different reality.