Molly Redden at Mother Jones writes Want an Abortion This Year? Get Ready to Wait:
For women seeking an abortion, 2015 is shaping up to be the year of the long wait.
Since the beginning of the year, six states have proposed or passed laws that would require a woman to wait days before she has an abortion—laws that critics say place an especially harsh burden on poor and rural women.
Conservative lawmakers in Arkansas and Tennessee have passed bills forcing women seeking abortions to attend an initial appointment and then wait 48 hours before the actual procedure. The Florida Legislature has passed a measure, which GOP Gov. Rick Scott promises to sign, creating a 24-hour waiting period between two appointments. A bill that died in Kentucky, which already requires women to receive counseling 24 hours before an abortion, would have forced women to receive that counseling in person.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
A senator’s faith -- and humility:
There are few moments of grace in our politics these days, especially where conflicts over religion are concerned. Last week, I witnessed one. Perhaps it was a mere drop in an ocean of suspicion and mistrust, but it was instructive and even encouraging.
The venue, in a small meeting room at a Holiday Inn not far from the U.S. Capitol, was a gathering of members of the Secular Coalition for America whose mission is “to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States.” One cause of the contentiousness of our politics is that both secular and very religious Americans feel misunderstood and under assault.
Enter Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.).
The secular coalition invited Coons to speak because, as he said of himself last Thursday night, he is “dedicated to the separation of church and state and to the equal protection under the Constitution, which I swore to uphold, whether you are religious or secular.”
More pundits can be found below the fold.
Farai Chideya at The Guardian writes There are no quick fixes for the problems in Baltimore. But its people give me hope:
To really understand my hometown, you can’t just look at the rioters, the police or the politicians. The city is filled with neighborhoods and generations of people holding together a city that has shrunk from a population of nearly 1m in 1950 to 630,000 today. That population decline is due, in part, to white flight – the movement of white residents to the suburbs in response to desegregation – and largely to the disappearance of industrial jobs. The city’s shrinkage explains the swathes of vacant homes (estimates suggest there are 16,000), the economic pressures on the schools (which are largely funded by property taxes), and the fact that real estate speculators, priced out of New York and Washington DC, are now looking to Baltimore to invest.
The riots are just a setback for those types – a pause in the march towards a city with more cute cafés and a vibrant art scene, but not necessarily better infrastructure or schools for those who can’t afford to choose their neighborhoods. My family and other long-time residents have been fighting for the city for decades; they don’t want to see it fall to the rioters or become comfortable and affordable only for the gentrifiers.
Patrick Cockburn at
The Independent writes
Isis on the run? The US portrayal is very far from the truth:
A graphic illustration of Western wishful thinking about the decline of Islamic State (IS) is a well-publicised map issued by the Pentagon to prove that the self-declared caliphate has lost 25 per cent of its territory since its big advances last year.
Unfortunately for the Pentagon, sharp-eyed American journalists soon noticed something strange about its map identifying areas of IS strength. While it shows towns and villages where IS fighters have lost control around Baghdad, it simply omits western Syria where they have been advancing in and around Damascus.
The Pentagon displayed some embarrassment about its dodgy map, but it largely succeeded in its purpose of convincing people that IS is in retreat.
The Editorial Board at the
Los Angeles Times urges that
In hiking the minimum wage, don't leave tipped workers behind:
The restaurant industry has been lobbying hard both at the state Capitol and at L.A.'s City Hall to convince lawmakers that proposals to raise the minimum wage should exempt waiters, bartenders, valet parking attendants and other tipped employees who generally supplement their base pay with gratuities. Instead, restaurateurs are pushing for a “total compensation model,” in which they would be allowed to pay a lower wage with the expectation that employees would earn enough in tips to reach or exceed the minimum wage. If an employee did not reach the minimum wage, the employer would make up the difference. [...]
Restaurant owners also argue that an across-the-board wage hike would give tipped employees, who can earn $30 an hour or more in some high-end restaurants, an unnecessary pay hike, using money that could otherwise be used to boost the incomes of lower-paid, untipped kitchen staff.
But the reality is that most tipped workers are not making $30 an hour. Advocates for the minimum-wage hike estimate that more than 60% of tipped workers in all industries earn less than $25,000 per year. The average hourly pay of a waiter or waitress in the L.A. area is $11.81 including tips, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The California Restaurant Assn. disputes that figure and commissioned a study that found the average hourly wage among servers to be $21. But even if the average wage is that high, there would still be a significant number of tipped restaurant employees who earn less than $13 or $15.
Eric S. Singer at
The Nation writes
Why Baltimore Burns:
In 1950, Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country, with a population of roughly 1 million. At the time, the Sparrows Point Steel Mill was one of the largest employers in the city, with 30,000 employees. It produced over 10,000 tons of steel per day. At the mill’s height of production during World War II, blacks comprised a third of its workforce, a higher percentage than most other mills in the nation. These were relatively stable jobs, particularly after 1941, when African-American votes swung the balance in favor of unionization. [...]
Then, in the early 1970s, foreign competition for steel resulted in huge job cuts. Three thousand workers lost their jobs in 1971; 7,000 more in 1975. By the late 1980s, the mill employed only 8,000 people. Those astonishing job losses devastated West Baltimore. Overall, Baltimore lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs by 1995, and the city’s population shrunk by 35 percent. Today, the city is the 26th largest by population in the United States.
As the devastation took hold, many Baltimoreans with means migrated across the jurisdictional boundary between Baltimore City and Baltimore County into newly built suburban neighborhoods. Some of those neighborhoods specifically forbade African-Americans, Jews and sometimes Catholics from moving in. Simultaneously in the city, banks used federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation–produced maps to determine whom they would and would not lend to. Those maps marked red most of what became known as the “inner city.”
Patricia J. Williams at
The Nation laments
The American Ritual of Racial Killings:
What strikes me most about the recent videos of black men dying and dying and dying is the repetition. They all seem familiar—as in: We’ve heard it before, and before, and then well before even that. The scenes splashed across the news have become almost ritualistic, prayerful; they have a narrative potency that seems to move of its own accord, an agency exceeding that of the humans involved, whether police or suspects, victims or bystanders. We all know the words, we all sing along. In North Charleston, South Carolina, the death of Walter Scott began with a litany like so many before it: He reached for my weapon, a struggle ensued, I feared for my life, the weapon discharged. Amen.
The counternarrative, the recall and response, was provided by a passerby who captured the now-viral video of the killing on his cellphone. That, too, was a memory remembered, a chorus we knew before we knew: He was running away. He was shot in the back. He was unarmed. The weapon was planted. Repeat con affetto.
Sue Sturgis at
Facing South writes
Energy lobbyists behind governors' crusade for Atlantic oil:
The oil and gas industry's success in getting Atlantic drilling back on the agenda can be traced in large part to the full-throttle lobbying efforts of the Outer Continental Shelf Governors Coalition—a secretive group founded in 2011 to revive and expand offshore drilling in the wake of the BP disaster.
Based in the offices of its chairman, Republican Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina, the Governors Coalition now includes member governors from nine coastal states. The group describes itself as the voice of these state leaders in their efforts to "foster a productive dialogue" with the federal government over the future of offshore oil policy. [...]
From the beginning, the Governors Coalition has been open about its agenda: to expand offshore oil and gas drilling, both in areas where it is currently allowed in the Gulf Coast and Arctic Ocean, as well as opening up the untapped waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The position of governors is especially critical in deciding the fate of Atlantic drilling, since the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that guides the federal offshore leasing process gives significant weight to governors' recommendations.
The Governors Coalition has been less open, however, about its close relationship to the oil and gas industry, which stands to reap immense profits if the elected officials are successful in promoting their pro-drilling agenda.
The Editorial Board of
The New York Times concludes
Stumbling Into a Wider War:
It should come as no surprise that the United States and its coalition partners are discussing widening the war against the Islamic State beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria. Wider wars have become almost habitual in recent years, as military conflicts have expanded with little public awareness or debate. President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” began in Afghanistan, then moved to Iraq and elsewhere. Fourteen years after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Obama is still deploying American troops and weapons to fight Al Qaeda and other extremists in far-flung parts of the world, including Pakistan. [...]
It is essential that further expansion of the campaign against ISIS and other militant groups be debated rigorously and openly by Washington and its coalition partners. For one thing, it is dangerous and unwise to assume that “affiliates” pledging support for ISIS are controlled by ISIS, share its resources or can duplicate its ruthless skills. Many cannot do so, and the coalition would make a serious mistake if it treated all splinter groups as the same kind of threat.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes :
Mosby seemed to recognize in that moment that this case and others like it are now about more than individual deaths and individual incidents, but about restoration — or a formation — of faith for all of America’s citizens in the American justice system itself. [...]
After last month N.P.R. reported that Mayor Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago was supporting a $5.5 million reparations package for victims of a former police commander and his officers in that city. As MSNBC’s Trymaine Lee put it, they “for decades ran a torture ring that used electrical shock, burning and beatings on more than 100 black men.”
All of this and more eats away at public confidence in equal justice under the law and reaffirms people’s worst fears: that the eyes of justice aren’t blind but jaundiced. As Langston Hughes once wrote:
“That Justice is a blind goddess / Is a thing to which we black are wise: / Her bandage hides two festering sores / That once perhaps were eyes.”