Monday punditry.
Eileen Pollack:
And today, thousands of militia members from around the country, many of them armed, plan to march in the capital and in Virginia to "celebrate" the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and "restore the Constitution."
The problem here in Michigan is knowing which militia members are dangerous and which aren’t. Not long ago, I attended Tax Blast, an annual event put on by the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia. Families chowed down on pulled pork sandwiches; a tiny girl in pink clutched a stuffed dinosaur. The lid on one chafing dish read "Kosher Meals Available"; it stood empty until a man wearing a pistol and a black T-shirt reading "When I Snap You’ll Be the First to Go" filled it with Hebrew National hot dogs.
Paul Krugman:
Most discussion of the role of fraud in the crisis has focused on two forms of deception: predatory lending and misrepresentation of risks. Clearly, some borrowers were lured into taking out complex, expensive loans they didn’t understand — a process facilitated by Bush-era federal regulators, who both failed to curb abusive lending and prevented states from taking action on their own. And for the most part, subprime lenders didn’t hold on to the loans they made. Instead, they sold off the loans to investors, in some cases surely knowing that the potential for future losses was greater than the people buying those loans (or securities backed by the loans) realized.
What we’re now seeing are accusations of a third form of fraud.
We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.
NY Times:
Donald Moore, 75, one of those patients, expressed his uneasiness about the law recently: "The fact is that I don’t understand it, and no one else I talk to understands it. Every day, you read something different in the paper."
Mr. Moore’s latest concern was a "rumor that the new health care procedures are going to be monitored and managed by the I.R.S."
Remember, teabaggers get their news from Fox. Disinformation is rampant. But the truth will out...
EJ Dionne:
The Tea Party is nothing new. It represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics, and it will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections.
Anne Applebaum:
I understand why some want science to explain this volcano, and others see it as the revenge of the gods.
Forget about that. The big threat is that it will wake up the trolls and pixies.
MedPage Today:
The number of babies born with syphilis is sharply on the rise after 14 years of declines, the CDC reported.
Congenital syphilis cases jumped 23% from 2005 to 2008 (8.2 to 10.1 cases per 100,000 live births), found J.R. Su, MD, of the CDC's National Center for HIV, Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention in Atlanta, and colleagues.
The reason appeared to be a 38% increase in the rate of primary and secondary syphilis among women ages 10 and older from 2004 to 2007, they wrote in the April 16 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Health reform can't solve all social problems, but it can be part of the solution.
It was notable that the increase in congenital syphilis from 2005 to 2008 occurred largely in the South (from 9.6 to 15.7 per 100,000 live births) and among infants born to black mothers (from 26.6 to 34.6 per 100,000 live births).
This, again, mirrored the rise in syphilis among black women in the South, which has been linked to crack cocaine use and commercial sex work there, the editorial note said.