E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The conservative evasion on guns:
President Obama spoke some of the most important words of his tenure last week in response to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. “This is something we should politicize,” the president said. “It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.” [...]
Politicians who go on about American greatness should be ashamed of saying that the United States is the one and only nation that can’t act effectively to solve a problem every other free and democratic country has contained.
Rebecca Leber at
The New Republic explains why she thinks New Hampshire Sen.
Kelly Ayotte Should Be Worried About Losing Her Seat Over Gun Control:
Gun violence “is something we should politicize,” President Barack Obama insisted in emotional, frustrated remarks on Thursday after a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon left ten people dead.
Obama’s speech charged politicians to lead with gun control legislation, but he left out the more obvious point: Congress’s makeup needs to change if there’s any hope of ever passing the most basic of gun control legislation, universal background checks. This starts with targeting vulnerable pro-gun politicians and replacing them with Democrats or Republicans who better represent public opinion.
And no one is more vulnerable than Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who faces reelection in a presidential swing state in 2016.
More pundit excerpts and links can be read below the orange calligraphy.
George Zornick at The Nation writes—The Oregon Sheriff’s Position on Gun Control Is More Radical Than We Think:
In the wake of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin has already gained some unpleasant notoriety for having sent a letter to Vice President Joe Biden in early 2013 that decried any gun control measures in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. Hanlin also pledged not to implement any such laws.
The letter has been widely reported in the media, but, in fairness to Hanlin, we don’t yet know if his apparent reluctance to enforce gun-control laws—including some recently passed Oregon measures—might have made it easier for the shooter, Chris Mercer, to carry out his plan. Given that Mercer only recently moved to the area, perhaps not.
But Hanlin’s letter deserves close scrutiny nonetheless, because Hanlin is not alone. Hundreds of sheriffs across the country have sent similar letters, and if their actions match their words, already weak American gun control laws are being subtly loosened and disregarded by law-enforcement professionals nationwide.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes—
On Guns, Fear Is Winning:
Do we want a society in which some 33,000 people in America lose their lives to gun violence each year and more than twice as many are injured by guns? Do we want a society in which mass shootings are routine?
If we do, well, we have it. But if we don’t, and I believe that most of us don’t, then we have to start thinking about ways to not only keep guns out of the wrong hands, but also about how we slow or reverse the proliferation of guns.
If there is one thing that my brother’s collection has taught me, it is that guns outlive their owners. These hundreds of millions of guns will most likely be part of our society for decades, and some even for centuries, regardless of what laws we pass now. That is something of which we should truly be afraid.
Jessica Valenti at
The Guardian says the forced-birthers are fighting a losing battle in
Right-wing hate can't kill widespread love for Planned Parenthood:
But here’s the thing: all of this time spent hating Planned Parenthood, the political power used to try to shut it down and activist energy trying to catch them a lie...it’s all for nothing. Planned Parenthood will continue to prevail as it always has. In fact, a recent poll shows that the organization is more popular than any presidential candidate or political party. Confounding as those numbers may be to Republicans, I suspect many women get it.
People don’t just like and support Planned Parenthood because one in three women have abortions and 95% don’t regret them, though that’s certainly part of it. People love Planned Parenthood because women (and men) across the country have gone there when they couldn’t go anywhere else. They’ve gotten STI tests, breast exams, pap smears, birth control – and yes, abortions. Planned Parenthood has helped them – saved them, even – and that’s something people don’t soon forget.
That’s why whenever Republicans make moves to defund the beloved organization, women have protested en masse. It’s why when breast cancer organization Susan G Komen for the Cure tried to take away $600,000 in grants from Planned Parenthood in 2012, they had to backtrack within days. Women were so furious – cutting up pictures of Komen’s pink ribbons, leaving thousands of posts on its Facebook wall and sending well over a million tweets – that Planned Parenthood raised over $3m in enraged donations.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times addresses campaign spending reform in
Senator Bernie Sanders’s Impressively Modest Donors:
Mr. Sanders has made a campaign theme of skewering the big-dollar, “super PAC” machinery of modern politics, and his donors clearly are responding. He reported 1.3 million online contributions from 650,000 different donors, running ahead of the Obama campaign’s 2008 record for small-dollar gifts. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign reported 250,000 donors three months ago but no new total for the latest quarter.
Her campaign insisted it was on target to raise $100 million this year, while the Sanders campaign said it had already reached its $40 million goal for competing in the Iowa caucus in February. In the Republican primary, Ben Carson, campaigning as a nonpolitician, reported an impressive $20 million for the quarter from more than 350,000 donors. [...]
Whatever his fate before the voters, Mr. Sanders has shown that it’s possible to amass a war chest from ordinary people who are sick and tired of big money politics.
Jodi Peterson at
High Country News laments the right-wing attack on the the Land and Conservation in
The nation's most successful conservation program is in jeopardy:
In July, Montanans celebrated the addition of 8,200 acres, known as Tenderfoot Creek, to the Lewis and Clark National Forest. Most of the $10.7 million cost was paid for by the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses oil and gas royalties for conservation and recreation projects.
But yesterday, the 50-year-old fund, widely viewed as one of the nation’s most popular and most successful land conservation programs, was allowed to expire completely. Despite broad bipartisan support, and despite a deadline that was no surprise to anyone, Congress failed to take action to reauthorize it. That means that offshore oil and gas producers will no longer be paying into the chest that funds the program — and now that the funding connection has been broken, reinstating it will be very difficult, especially given the tone of this Congress. Instead, lawmakers will be dickering over how to divvy up former LWCF appropriations, which will now be going into the general treasury. [...]
So what’s likely to happen next? “This is a sad day for everyone who cares about our national parks and outdoor conservation, recreation and wildlife. Congress has broken an enduring promise to the American people,” said Alan Rowsome, senior director at the Wilderness Society and co-chair of the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition, in a statement. But the coalition, the outdoor recreation industry, other conservation groups, and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers aren’t just mourning the program’s loss—they’ll be kicking efforts into high gear to get the LWCF reauthorized as quickly as possible.
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Adam Hersh at
Project Syndicate writes—
The Trans-Pacific Free-Trade Charade:
As negotiators and ministers from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries meet in Atlanta in an effort to finalize the details of the sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), some sober analysis is warranted. The biggest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems.
You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for “free trade.” The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about “free” trade. [...]
It should surprise no one that America’s international agreements produce managed rather than free trade. That is what happens when the policymaking process is closed to non-business stakeholders – not to mention the people’s elected representatives in Congress.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Enemies of the Sun:
We used to say that the G.O.P. was the party of Big Energy, but these days it would be more accurate to say that it’s the party of Old Energy. In the 2014 election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 87 percent of its political contributions to Republicans; for coal mining the figure was 96, that’s right, 96 percent. Meanwhile, alternative energy went 56 percent for Democrats.
And Old Energy is engaged in a systematic effort to blacken the image of renewable energy, one that closely resembles the way it has supported “experts” willing to help create a cloud of doubt about climate science. An example: Earlier this year Newsweek published an op-ed article purporting to show that the true cost of wind power was much higher than it seems. But it turned out that the article contained major factual errors, and its author had failed to disclose that he was the Charles W. Koch professor at Utah State, and a fellow of a Koch- and ExxonMobil-backed think tank.
Ben Adler at
Grist writes
Obama squanders opportunity to clean up smog and fight climate change:
Like liberals who are struggling to accept that Pope Francis met with America’s most anti-gay county clerk last week, environmentalists are feeling betrayed by President Obama. On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released a new regulation for ground-level ozone, a primary ingredient in smog — and it’s much weaker than green groups wanted.
The Obama administration has a long and tortured history with the smog rule; the EPA moved to strengthen it in 2011 but was overruled by the White House. Now the administration has finally imposed a new rule, only it’s too lax and four years too late. EPA is lowering the definition of a safe level for ozone from below 75 parts per billion to 70 ppb. [...] The EPA presents the rule as a victory for clean air. [...]
The American Lung Association argues that lives will be lost to EPA’s political timidity, noting that EPA’s own analysis last year found that a 60 ppb standard would have prevented up to 7,900 premature deaths, 1.8 million childhood asthma attacks, and 1.9 million missed school days. “The EPA’s independent scientific advisors reviewed the evidence and concluded that a level of 60 ppb would provide more public health protection than a standard of 70 ppb,” said American Lung Association President Harold Wimmer in a statement.
Robert Scheer at
TruthDig writes—
Amid the Crowing of the GOP and Clinton, Sanders Is on the Rise:
Clinton, in rhetoric and action, will never allow a Republican opponent to appear more hawkish than herself. In the general election, she will burnish her record of support for every bit of military folly from George W.’s invasion of Iraq to her own engineering of the campaign to overthrow all secular dictators in the Middle East who have proved to be an inconvenience to the Saudi theocracy.
During her tenure in the Obama administration, Clinton, by her own frequent boastful admission, was the hawk in the Cabinet pressuring the president to be even more aggressive in his drone assassinations and murderous air wars, which have destabilized the region and created what the pope recently termed the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.
But it is the still troubled economy that will dominate the election, and it is the failure of the Democratic Party establishment—now represented singularly by Clinton—to deal with the lingering recession that explains the startling rise of Bernie Sanders as a viable candidate.