What’s
Wrong Today:

Conventional
political wisdom says that the GOP is doomed because of its nihilism, short-sightedness
and obstructionism. They say the party is caught in a death spiral with an ever-shrinking
base of aging white guys.

But,
political pundits say that the GOP
could well win the Senate in 2014, giving them both houses of Congress.
Add in the Supreme Court and they would control two-out-of-three branches of
our government, and all of a sudden, that looks like a mighty healthy death spiral.

Can it be
true?

On NPR
this morning, the call by Mara Liasson was that the GOP needs a net pick up of
6 seats to control the Senate and that it looks quite possible: The Democrats have 3
Senators retiring in red states, leaving open competitions for seats in West
Virginia, South Dakota and Montana that they are likely to lose.

Adding to
that, there are 4 Democratically-controlled seats that are up in 2014 in states
won by Mr. Romney last year. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and North
Carolina. Could 3 go to Republicans? Possibly, although knocking off incumbents
is not an easy task.

So, what
vulnerable seats are up on the other side of the aisle? Just one, Mitch
McConnell in Kentucky, but Yertle doesn’t look all that vulnerable, despite
being the least
popular Senator in DC. However, Romney won Kentucky by 23% just last
November, so a Democratic takeover is probably wishful thinking.

So, starting
next fall, Republicans could control the Senate in addition to the House and the
Supremes.

What to do
now? Work like a madman to prevent losing 6-7 Senate seats. If it happens, we will
get to wait for the long arc of history to bend toward justice.

Pull up a chair;
it looks like it will be a while.

Meanwhile,
Mr. Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, just told Congress that it is holding
up the economic recovery that the average American could really, really use,
because of short-sighted GOP austerity policies, their general lack of
governing ability and their fawning over the 1%.

But hey,
the 2016 electoral map looks favorable. Today we seem likely to elect another
Democrat. To another presidency of gridlock with an implacable congress.

So, let’s
look forward to that…Guess that in the short-term we are doomed, and in the
long run, we are dead.

Now, go
out there and sell democracy to the world!

Oops,
sorry, don’t see any on the shelves. Can we give you a rain check?

What’s
Wrong Today:

From Mike
Allen and Jim Vandehei in Politico:

Republicans are talking
about passing a “border security only” bill as a prelude to doing anything on a
path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in this country. But a
“border security only” bill won’t pass the Senate, so immigration
reform is dead.

Could
it be that the Tea Party members in the House are actually more pro-American
worker than their Senate colleagues? After all, the Senate’s comprehensive
immigration bill (S.744) really betrays workers. How, you ask? The bill is more about globalization
and labor arbitrage for major US corporations than it is about a path to
citizenship.  Lobbyists and the Senate have simply used the plight of
illegal Hispanics as a rubric to pass their underlying agenda, which is to meet
the Corporatists’ demand for cheaper labor.  

In
the Senate bill, the undocumented actually get a raw deal.  It would take
at least 13 years to obtain citizenship and during that period, they would pay
taxes and social security but their status is as guest workers. It is estimated
that 1.6 million additional foreign guest
workers will be added to the labor force in the first year, assuming S.744
became law.  

That
is close to the total number of new
jobs created in the US each year.

More guest workers in
US jobs is driving corporate support for comprehensive immigration reform: Microsoft
and Facebook have demanded more H-1B Visas and other tech visas, even though
there is no
tech worker shortage. The Economic Populist blog analyzed
the National Science Foundation statistics and showed the US has way more
skilled workers now than can be employed. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a
detailed study also proving there is no tech worker
shortage.

From the EPI study:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

EPI also found that in
computer and information science and in engineering, US colleges graduate 50% more students than are hired
into those fields each year.

EPI found after reviewing
studies of wages and employment in the STEM and IT industries, that over the
past decade IT employment has gradually increased, but it had only recovered to
its 2000–2001 peak level by the end of 2010 and that wages have remained flat,
with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels.

Our politicians talk
about STEM jobs (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), as the holy
grail of high wage jobs. In any month since the start of the Great
Recession, there are about 3.6 million jobs available in the US. But our
multinational corporations continually talk about a talent shortage. They claim
the shortage may be as many as 6-7 million STEM jobs. How can there be a talent
shortage that is 2x the jobs available? If there was a STEM jobs shortage, wouldn’t wages rise?

Bloomberg reported that corporations got all of their cheap labor
agenda through the Senate. One interesting trick has already been named the Facebook
Loophole:  

In essence, this
loophole makes it perfectly legal to fire US workers and replace them with
foreign guest workers.  All corporations have to do is file a claim they
intend to sponsor their imported labor for green cards. The Senate bill raises the annual
cap to 115,000 from 65,000. It can rise over time to 180,000 as long as the
jobless rate in management and professional occupations is below 4.5%;
currently it’s 3.7%.

The Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) scored S.744 and the conclusions were that the bill will
lower per capita GNP. The
CBO’s work assumes that the population will rise by 10 million over the same
time period, while most estimates show an increase of 35 million workers over
10 years.

Relative to what
would occur under the current law, S. 744 would lower per capita GNP by 0.7% in
2023. CBO’s best case estimates also show that average wages for the entire
labor force would be 0.1% lower in 2023.

The bill isn’t
helping average wages, or our economy. So who is it helping?

Ironically,
the best hope for American workers now lies with Tea Party Republicans, who do not
have what we would normally call a labor friendly agenda. But, they hate Mr.
Obama and Hispanics enough to produce the unintended
consequence of saving jobs for Americans while meeting their goal of derailing
comprehensive immigration reform.

Strange isn’t it:
more immigrants from Mexico steal jobs from Americans but more immigrants
from India are necessary for our economy.

 

What’s
Wrong Today:

Today,
the Wrongologist departs from his policy of not writing on a hot, trending
issue that everyone else is writing millions of words about,  to comment on the Voting Rights Act (VRA). 

Americans need to
remember The Edmund Pettus bridge, a symbol of the fight for change in Alabama and the rest of America. It was there that
voting rights marchers were violently confronted by police on March 7, 1965. The next day, Martin Luther King, Jr.
led 3,200 people out of Selma, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
to Montgomery. Less than five
months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

Things went terribly wrong yesterday when SCOTUS
struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by cleverly striking down Section FOUR instead, saying that
the formula that Congress uses to determine which states are under Section 5
pre-clearance is no longer Constitutional. 

 

The vote was 5-4. No one should ever again say that politics
is a fool’s errand, or that it doesn’t matter whether a Democrat or a
Republican takes office. There is a
direct line from 2000, when Nader’s 3% of the vote was enough to throw Florida
into chaos and hand the Presidency to George W. Bush. Consider the following:

• There is a direct line from November
  of 2000 to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. To pretend
  otherwise is to ignore history.

• And there is a direct line from 2010,
  when the 2008 voters stayed home and handed the House and state governments
  across the nation to a radical Republican fringe.

• There is also a direct line from
  November 2010 to yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling.

Will you be energized and organized to take on the challenge in
2014? Will you donate to get out the vote efforts? Will you volunteer
to drive voters to the polls? Will you make calls? Or will you sit at your computer
gnashing your teeth and complaining because the mean nasty Republicans remain mean
and nasty?


Our democracy is only as good as we
make it. Without significant participation, the loudest voices win. We have to
be the loudest voices, voices that make the earth shake.

Anything less, and we deserve what we
get.

Here’s
what the court did yesterday: They invented a standard to
strike down the preclearance map. A law that has been authorized five times
before, with reams of Congressional findings of fact, is invalid because the
Court suddenly prefers its own facts to those provided by Congress. What’s comical
is that the Roberts opinion spends precious little time on the Constitutional issues
and a whole lot of time developing a made-up standard that never existed before,
in order to strike it down.

The
Constitutional issue is simple. Nobody had a problem with the VRA before, and
it’s abundantly clear that the 15th Amendment permits such legislation. When
the Supreme Court looks to strike down a law, it must do so only if
there is no way to uphold it. Clearly that is not the case. What changed is
that the conservative majority seized the opportunity to defang it for no other
reason than the fact that they could.

This is the Roberts
majority creating a judicial line item
veto. They
struck down the coverage formula that had been used by the federal government
to determine which states and counties are subject to continued oversight.
Roberts said that the 1972 formula was outdated and unworkable. The court said
it is now up to congressional lawmakers to revise the law and create a new
formula that will pass constitutional scrutiny. From Chief Justice Roberts:

Chief Justice
Roberts’ opinion is here.  By removing the specific protections of
Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the only protection against massive
predations against minority voters by “states’ rights enthusiasts”
will be a Department of Justice willing to prosecute and defend the general
protections of Section 5. In that context, the political leanings of the
Executive Branch become that much more important. 

You can expect that Republicans
will get right on that new formula thing.  Count out the South from here
on out, folks.  It will be open season on massive gerrymandering because
now, no states, districts, or localities are subject to Section 5 rules. 

From Ginsburg’s dissent:

Assuming Justice
Ginsburg’s research is correct, the jurisdictions covered under Section 5 of
the Voting Rights Act were prevented
from enacting approximately 1600 discriminatory voting laws in the 24 years
between 1982 and the 2006 reauthorization of the Act.

That is 67
discriminatory laws proposed per year, for almost a quarter century.

By Robert’s rule, all
of those laws would have gone into effect and most likely had an impact on
elections before they could be challenged in court, which isn’t good enough.

The only thing that’s history now?  Potentially, the rights of millions of
Americans to vote.

We should mourn for a
few days. Then, we need to fight as if our lives depended on it, because they will.

What ‘s
Wrong Today:

On
Memorial Day the Wrongologist posted this cartoon which demonstrates the arc of
our losses in our many wars:  

We
lost 116,000 in the Wrongologist’s grandfather’s war. We lost 405,000 people in
WWII, the Wrongologist’s father’s war. We lost them in about 3½ years.  If you brought the 1940’s population forward
to today, that would be like losing 1 million Americans.  We lost 58,000 in Vietnam, the Wrongologist’s
war.

These
numbers reflect part of the price Americans paid back then. Leaving aside the
arguments about wars of choice or wars of necessity, we largely accepted those
costs.

The
cartoon also serves to remind us of how
few people have died in the Global War on Terror. In the GOWT, we lost
3000 people on 9/11 and have lost 4,500 Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan in
the past 12 years. This is not to minimize the loss of a single life, but to
bring some perspective to where we are today, 7500 deaths over 12 years equates
to 52 deaths per month, 624 per year on average, compared to 405,000 in 3½
years in the 1940’s. We lost 4,800 on
average for each year of the Vietnam war.

This
loss of human life has been joined with the loss of constitutional freedoms
since 9/11. This came back into focus  this week, as we learned about NSA’s
activities from Edward
Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower. The surveillance state grew exponentially
after 9/11. Many people have said, “I don’t care what the government does, as
long as it keeps me safe.” From Corrente:

So, why have we been so willing to give up
constitutional freedoms to prosecute this “war”? Again, we can’t minimize the
loss of 624 people per year for the past 12 years to fighting terrorism, but have
we lost our sense of proportionality? Are deaths from terror different from
battlefield deaths? Does the possibility that New York, Boston or DC can be
battlefields make a qualitative difference? Enough of a difference to gut the 4th
Amendment, weaken the 1st Amendment or defang Habeas Corpus?

Snowden’s
whistle-blowing has brought important issues back into public view. The NSA receives
Verizon’s call detail records along with those of all other major
telecommunications providers. It stores all information on who talks with whom,
from where to where, by what means, when and for how long. These are the
meta-data of the calls, not the actual spoken content of the calls, although
those can and may well be tapped elsewhere or by other means.

The
NSA also sucks
user data from all major Internet services, although Google’s Chief Counsel
denied that yesterday on NPR’s The
News Hour. It also taps into various commercial databases, personal medical
data and into the records of air lines and other transportation services.

It does
all this permanently and on a
global basis. The collecting is not
restricted to “foreigners”.

That is
scary but that is not yet the total observation state. Edward Snowden points
to a different danger of such secret data accumulation: (emphasis by the
Wrongologist)

The
Panopticon is a architectural concept for a prison where the guards can watch,
unseen by the inmates, from a tower in the middle into all cells built in a
circle around the tower. It leaves the inmates in a perceived state of permanent surveillance.

Wikipedia describes the Panopticon: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Bentham devoted
most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is
his prison which is most widely understood by the term. Bentham described the
Panopticon as:

Terrorism
is an authentic danger that can be combated by closer monitoring of Americans’
communication. But do we need, or can we tolerate, a government so powerfully and
deeply embedded in our private lives that they can spot manifestations of such
evils anywhere and everywhere, perhaps even before they occur? Are we willing
to go that far to be “kept safe” from any danger?

From James
B. Rule in the NYT:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

From
today’s NYT editorial:

The
President and members of Congress have said we need to have a debate about the
limits of state surveillance. That debate should define what Mr.
Obama means when he points out we
can’t have 100% privacy and 100% safety.

Politicians: Stop falling over each
other to tell us how much you want to have this debate.  We will only have
it because of Snowden’s leak, not because many of you think the process of data
collection should be made public.

If we are to have a national discussion
(and we should), we need answers to these questions:

• Are the
  calls and texts of ordinary Americans mined for patterns that might put
  innocent people under suspicion?

• Why are data
  from every phone call collected, and not just those made by people whom the
  government suspects of terrorist activity?

• How long are
  the data kept, and can it be used for routine police investigations?

With those
answers, we can begin to decide if they are doing this solely to protect us, or
to try to control us.

We
shouldn’t shrug off our weakened 4th Amendment rights as a side
effect of the digital age. We must fight to preserve as much of our personal
information as possible. So if there is a benefit to learning about the NSA’s
activities, it serves as a reminder that the government is serious about obtaining
information in its war on terrorism and that we must be aware of what’s going on and must have a role in setting
limits on it.

Tyranny
is the existence and use of arbitrary Government power against citizens. The
heart of such arbitrary power is secret laws, secretly interpreted, and
secretly enforced. The Bush and Obama administration’s development of the FISA
and Patriot Acts into a structure in US law is a tyranny and makes a mockery of the US
Constitution.  

We
must place limits on these programs before they get out of control. We need to
start by revisiting the Patriot Act.

What’s
Wrong Today:

From
Michael Klare at Tom
Dispatch:

Is it
possible that we’re witnessing the beginnings of a new Cold War in the Middle
East?

Here
is what we know:

On
Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon threatened the Russian Federation, saying that if Moscow followed through
on its plan to send the S-300 air defense system to Syria, Israel would bomb
the arrays. Since the systems will be accompanied by Russian experts, any
Israeli strike on them could well kill Russian personnel and create a crisis
between nuclear states not seen since India and Pakistan played atomic chicken
in 2002.

Who
is Moshe Yaalon? He is an Israeli Neo-con who was fired as Army Chief of Staff
in 2005 for opposing the Israeli withdrawal of settlements from the Gaza Strip.
He later joined the far right Likud Party. He has called the Palestinians a
“cancer” and said Israel had to consider killing Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.

In
short, he is a hothead, not what you would like to see as the defense minister
of a nuclear-armed state.

From
Reuters
this morning:

Israel
is afraid that the missiles could fall into the hands of opposition forces such
as the Al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, and could be fired at civilian
Israeli jets. They should also be afraid that if the regime was on the verge of
falling, they might be transferred to Hezbollah and so constrain Israeli
freedom of movement in southern Lebanon. Finally, the Wrongologist was an air
defense missile unit commander during the Vietnam era. Air defense missiles can
also be very accurate ground-to-ground weapons and Israel must know that.   

The
S-300 has an operational range of 200km (120 miles), well over the distance
between Daraa in Syria and Israel’s Ben Gurion airport (133km or 80 miles),
meaning that the installation of S-300s at Daraa could potentially shoot down
planes landing at and taking off from Israel’s main airport. That is a threat.

The US Air Force knows the older
export versions of the S-300 that Russia sold to Greece. They know how to
defeat those. But the systems the Russians use today have had several upgrades
in their radars, electronic systems and have new missile engines. With the
S-300s being delivered now, any attempt to enforce a “no-fly zone” is
likely to start with lots of downed “western” (Israeli) jets and a
high casualty count.

So, this looks like a checkmate
move.

As
we reported yesterday,
Russia is determined to shore up the regime of Bashar al-Assad and strengthening
Syria’s air defenses is key to the regime’s survival. That strengthening does
not help against the rebel Free Syrian Army, which has no air force.  

Putin
took a very dim view of what NATO did in Libya and is determined to prevent a
repeat of that intervention against a client state of Russia’s. He is also
concerned that continued Israeli air strikes on Syria could weaken the fragile government
in Damascus.

If
Putin is to be taken seriously, he might call Israel’s bluff. At that point,
Yaalon will have to risk escalation with Russia, or quietly accept that Syria
is in the latter’s sphere of influence, not Tel Aviv’s.

Either
step will represent a big change in the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Given
that both Israel and Russia are nuclear states, and given the complete US
backing for Israel, conflict between those two is extremely dangerous for the US and for the
world.

What
is the US to do? Escalate further and risk widening the war throughout the
Middle East, including substantial Russian involvement? Stand down and stop
supplying additional weapons to the rebels in Syria?

How will the US keep the reins on Israel once S-300s are operational in Syria?

What are
the other alternatives?

Russia
looks like it could be the last man standing in Syria. And rebuilding this
quagmire will be up to them.

Let
‘em have it. It will be their new Afghanistan, or Chechnya.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Pew has released another installment of
data from its massive research into Muslim attitudes, conducted from 2008-2012,
entitled “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society.” Over 38,000
Muslims in 38 countries were surveyed, in interviews in 80-plus languages, thus
constituting a huge survey that is both statistically sound and geographically broad.

 

Pew found that most Muslims are deeply
committed to their faith and want its teachings to shape not only their
personal lives but also their societies and politics.

• Asked “Should Sharia (religious law) be the law of the land?” 57% of
  Muslims across 38 countries answered “yes”, including most problematically for the
  US: 99% of Afghans, 91% of Iraqis, 89% of Palestinians, 84% of Pakistanis and
  74% of Egyptians. 

99% of Afghans…Don’t
you wish we knew THAT before we
started surging, nation-building and paying off Mr. Karzai?

• “Should Sharia apply to non-Muslims as well as Muslims?” Across 21
  countries surveyed on this question, 40% answered affirmatively, with the highest
  positive response coming from Egypt (74%) exceeding even Afghanistan’s 61%.

• In the 20 countries where it was asked, the question of whether Sharia
  punishments (such as whippings and cutting off of thieves’ hands) should be
  enacted, the average of those who answered “yes” was 52%, led by Pakistan (88%), Afghanistan (81%),
  the Palestinian Territories (PT), (76%) and Egypt (70%). The survey showed that
  Muslims tended to be most comfortable with using Sharia in the domestic sphere,
  to settle family or property disputes.

• On
  the specific penalty of stoning for adultery, the
  20-country average was 51% — with Pakistan again leading
  at (89%), Afghanistan (85%), the PT (84%) and Egypt (71%) highest in approval.

• 38% of Muslims across those same 20 nations support the death penalty for those leaving Islam for another
  religion (apostasy).

• Majorities in most countries say that “democracy is better than a powerful
  leader;” however, a powerful leader was preferred by more than 50% in Russia,
  Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as by 42% of Iraqis, 40% of Palestinians and
  36% of Egyptians.

• Most
  Afghans, Egyptians and Tunisians believe that “Islamic political parties” are
  better than other parties.

Data from the global
survey was compared with prior Pew surveys of Muslims in the US. Pew reports that there were 2.6 million Muslims in
the US in 2010 and that their population will grow to 6.2 million by 2030. American
Muslims are much more likely than Muslims in other countries to have close
friends who do not share their faith, and they are much more open to the idea
that many religions – not only Islam – can lead to eternal life in heaven.

On the question
of suicide bombing: Across 20 countries, only 13.5% think it is
ever justified, but support is much higher in the Palestinian Territories
(40%), Afghanistan (39%) and Egypt (29%).

It is the reverse in
the US, where 81% of US Muslims
say suicide bombings or other forms of violence against civilians in the name
of Islam are never justified, while just
1% say violence against civilians is often justified, or is sometimes
justified (7%) to defend Islam.

Dr.
Timothy R. Furnish, who served as an Arabic linguist with
the 101st Airborne and as an Army chaplain, holds a PhD in Islamic history from
Ohio State. He is the author of Holiest
Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden (2005),
and blogs at MahdiWatch,
has these conclusions about Pew Research’s work:

1) The high degree of Muslim support for Sharia is a red flag: Despite assurances
by both the Obama and Bush administrations that most Muslims are “moderate,” empirical
data clearly show that most Muslims support not just Sharia in general, but also
its brutal punishments. Just as
disturbing, almost 40% of Muslims are in favor of killing those who choose to
follow another religion. The countries in which the US is heavily
involved either diplomatically or militarily are where such sentiments run most
high: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Territories.

 

This explains why very few Islamic leaders
have publicly tried to lead the Muslim world towards moderation.

 

Further, it appears that our military, two
presidents and 4 CIA directors owe an explanation to the American people.

 

2) Afghanistan was always a lost cause.
Afghans are at the top of almost every list in support for Sharia, suicide
bombing and honor killing, as well as
dislike for democracy. The data are clear: Our military’s inability
to explain the causes of “green on blue” attacks or the Taliban’s continuing popularity in Afghanistan shows they
never understood the environment.

 

Strategically, the
US decision to stay there after taking out al-Qaida and then attempting to nation-build
in Afghanistan was a huge mistake.

 

2014 can’t come soon enough.

 

3) Islam in Southeastern Europe and Central
Asia is a more tolerant brand of the
faith than
the Middle Eastern variety. For example, the SE European and Central
Asian Muslims are the least likely to support the death penalty for apostasy,
and are the most supportive of letting women decide whether to veil.

 

Muslims in Sub-Saharan Africa are the most
likely to know about Christianity, and to interact with Christians. On the
other hand, African Muslims are among
the most enamored of Sharia, while those in Central Asia are fond of
letting Islamic judges decide family and property disputes. So there does
not seem to be a direct link between Westernization and moderation.

 

4) Malaysia may
be the next breeding ground of Islamic terrorism:
61% of its population (17 million) are Muslims, and they hold harsh views: 86%
want Sharia to be the law of the land; 67% favor the death penalty for
apostasy; 66% like Sharia-compliant corporal punishments; 60% support stoning
for adultery; and 18% think suicide bombing is justified.

 

It looks like we need to hire more Malay
linguists and analysts.

 

In summary, Islam is the world’s
second-largest religion, numbering some 1.6 billion humans (behind Christianity’s
2.2 billion).

 

There is enormous diversity of opinion among Muslims on
many issues of doctrine and religious practice, and we shouldn’t categorize
Islam as either “peaceful” or “violent”. That is the superficial thinking that
has gotten us into big trouble in the last decade.

 

Nonetheless, this latest Pew study provides
empirical evidence that many, many Muslims retain a literalist, supremacist
and often brutal view of managing their world. 

 

The
best news in the research is the tolerant and nuanced world view of American
Muslims compared to that of Muslims worldwide, particularly in the Middle East.
Our decade-long military involvement in the Middle East has given many Muslims
a direct, and in many ways, a negative experience with Americans. That
experience may contribute to certain survey results, particularly about the
desire for Sharia in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, or it may contribute to the finding that 39% of Afghans have no issue with suicide bombings.   

 

Our politicians and military must build a
deeper understanding of the global Muslim landscape if we are to have peace and
security in the 21st Century.

 

A deep dive into the Pew data is a great
place to start.

 

What’s
Wrong Today:

On April 27, the Virginia
Pilot Online had this thread that begins as a laugh out loud exchange between
commenters about regulating the use of pressure cookers. Then, like everything
on the web, it turns.

Another blogger
called this exchange, ‘weapons grade stupid”:

Category: Readers’
Opinions Subscribe to this blog

_
27 APRIL 2013 | 5:00 AM

Putting a lid on it

Look at the damage pressure cookers can
do in the wrong hands. The Boston Marathon tragedy and use of pressure cookers by
terrorists for their explosive devices proves that pressure cookers should be controlled.

Even if they’re only used in the kitchen,
pressure cookers can be hazardous. We should limit the public’s ability to obtain or own a
pressure cooker with a capacity of more than six quarts, and we should approve such a purchase only
after the buyer undergoes a complete background check.

Who has a need or right to own a
23-quart-capacity pressure cooker? And, of course, the individual making and exploding the bomb
and enhancing its destructive force with a pressure cooker is not responsible for what
happens with it; it’s the fault of the evil manufacturers and of the stores that sell the pressure
cookers.

Richard King

Virginia Beach

Commenting on this article is open to verified users only | Learn
how to become verified here

Login or register
to post comments

View 18 comments Link
to post

[-] Hide Comments

BED, BATH AND BEYOND….
Submitted by James King, Chesapeake, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at 8:18
am.

…will be lobbying congress about this.
I know this is no joking matter but you never know what the government is going to do next.

PRESSURE COOKERS
Submitted by ML Manning, Virginia Beach, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
8:49 am.

Pressure cookers should also be
registered with both state and federal government. On the other hand, we might should just make
them illegal for everyone except law enforcement and the military.

RIGHT ON!
Submitted by John T Roberts, Norfolk, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
8:41 pm.

Right on, Brother! And any tin-foil
hatted, black helicopter-fearing racist homophobe who thinks reasonable steps to register dangerous
pressure cookers that kill women and children is a plot to deny well-cooked vegetables to
law-abiding citizens is just a freak! We don’t need no stinking pressure cookers! There will still be
well-cooked vegetables! Tyranny ain’t happenin’, Dude!

NOT ENOUGH
Submitted by William Tabor, Chesapeake, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
9:02 am.

Its not enough to require background
checks at household goods retailers, we need to close the flea market loophole as well.

AND…

Submitted by Ryan P Burton, Virginia Beach, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013
at 11:20 am.

The organic farmers market’s… Garage
sale loopholes… and if that does not slow down these thugs, next will be the rationing of
sugar when you borrow it from thy neighbor! We must stop this incessant carnage and
the only way to control it is by central planning!

EXACTLY!

Submitted by John T Roberts, Norfolk, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
8:26 pm.

If ONLY ONE CHILD can be saved from
fleas…

A THOUGHT

Submitted by Frank Papcin, Va.bch., VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at 9:59
am.

–most of you think these posts are
ridiculous,–but the sad truth of the matter is that these posts are no more ridiculous then the words
coming out of you great leader in WASHINGTON.

–what good are new laws if you don’t
enforce the laws we already have.

–why don’t you punish the people that
use guns in crimes the way they should?

–why don’t you help the sick people the
way they need the help?

–why don’t you stop demonizing all the
people that don’t agree with you?

–why don’t a lot of thing that will
never happen. why don’t you stop teaching you children to hate in schools?–why not just teach your
children the basics that they need instead of teaching them what YOU think they should learn about
the many other things YOU think they should know,–in spite of their parents.

–social engineering
is not for the teachers in schools.–It belongs to the parents and

churches,–camps,–social
programs outside of the schools.

–no student should be taught that
blowing up women and children can be justified for any reason.–not in this country.–but it is.

–no professors should be demonizing any
political party in this country,–but it is.–even the president is doing that.–what do you
expect the children to do when it’s in their faces every day?–every where?–don’t they learn by
looking and seeing and hearing?–then doing.

–hatred is taught!–but you don’t want
to hear that–do you?

Submitted by Timothy P Delaney, Virginia Beach, VA on Sat,
04/27/2013 at 7:07 pm.

-no student should be taught that blowing
up women and children can be justified for any reason.–not in this country.–but it
is.” Where exactly is this being taught in our
country? I mean, a discussion of World War II in aclassroom might raise the history of the
bombing of cities like London, Tokyo, Dresden and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki… is that
what you are getting at? Because I cannot imagine a discussion in a history class regarding
WWII that would not mention at least a couple of those instances….

NOT WW II

Submitted by John T Roberts, Norfolk, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
8:24 pm.

Mr. Papcin may have in mind a story that’s
been on Fox News the last few days. The story involves a Tennessee high school textbook
which critics say legitimizes acts of terrorism. I think the critics have a point. You can
read about the controversy here:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/27/textbook-case-bias-parents-say-school-reader-isbiased-vs-israel/

I READ YOUR LINK

Submitted by Timothy P Delaney, Virginia Beach, VA on Sat,
04/27/2013 at 8:53 pm.

I do not believe that that one sentence
within the context of the paragraph could possibly be extrapolated to mean that teachers are
justifying blowing up innocents. First, I do not believe that a fair reading of the piece would
lead one to the conclusion that anyone is justifying the murder of innocents. Second, I do not
believe that an elective class in one particular district can be used to create an impression that
there is some widespread problem of teachers justifying the murder of innocents.

I understand that it would be fodder for
those who are the core Fox audience, but really, could not the same argument be made for the
bombing of cities and civilians in WWII?

JOHN

Submitted by Timothy P Delaney, Virginia Beach, VA on Sat,
04/27/2013 at 10:20 pm.

I purposely noted the bombing of London
in WWII, because both sides engaged in what can only be described as terror bombing.
Sure, there were notional military /industrial targets around, but lets not try to obscure what
it was – an attempt to terrorize and beat down the population’s will. And both sides would
find a way to justify….As for the sentence in question, I
thought that while it was probably meant to spur thought/conversation, I myself could not begin
to equate the two. In war, innocents sometimes get killed and it is an accident -in terrorism,
innocents get killed and it is the objective. Obviously, one is far worse.

NOTHING FITS

Submitted by Bruce D Price, Va. Beach, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
2:13 pm.

23 quarts? Would something that big fit
in a backpack? I’ve read that it would not. There would be a big bulge and everyone would think,
uh-oh, a bomb! I’m just been looking at videos which
claim to show that the Boston Marathon event was a fake.

Perhaps the most profound commentary was
from a Nevada politician who read the journalistic Code of Ethics. That’s the one where
reporters swear to tell the truth and report the facts, in order to protect their communities from
tyranny, etc.

Another commentator made the point, as he
examined pictures of a victim without a leg who was not bleeding a drop, that he should
be able to call his local paper and say look at this picture, it proves fraud. But he knows
it’s useless because the local paper belongs to the White House. On a more optimistic note, another
commentator claims that the public is getting smarter, and the hoaxes will be harder to pull off.

I SEE

Submitted by Al Markowitz, Norfolk, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at 3:57
pm.

your foil hat is working. . .

YOUR SARCASM DETECTOR

Submitted by William Tabor, Chesapeake, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
8:08 pm.

needs realignment.

ONE HAS TO WONDER JUST HOW CLEVER THIS LETTER WRITER

Submitted by Lillian Jane Massey, Norfolk, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013
at 6:58 pm.

One has to wonder just how clever this
letter writer would be, as well as most the posters here, had they lost a loved one, lost a leg, a
foot an arm, a child, a mother or father in that Boston bombing. If you were friends, relatives,
even just acquaintances of any of those people personally assaulted by the bombs, would
you all really be this insensitive?

I understand tongue-in-cheek,
facetiousness and snarkiness, but considering the people who lost an awful lot at that site two
Mondays ago, I personally feel the only thing I really don’t understand is poor taste. Being so glib about such a sad, painful,
hurtful event for so many Bostonians personally, not to mention our entire country, the
letter-writer and most of you who responded to that letter give poor taste a new, much more pathetic
meaning.

DOES IT HAVE TO BE…

Submitted by John T Roberts, Norfolk, VA on Sat, 04/27/2013 at
9:02 pm.

Does it have to be “that Boston
bombing”?

I would imagine the letter writer, and
most of the commenters here, have “lost a loved one, lost a leg, a foot an arm, a child, a mother
or father” in some manner that is analogous to the Boston tragedy.

In my own case, I once knew someone who
was murdered, members of my family have died of horrific diseases, friends of family have
committed suicide, and someone I loved burned to death in an auto accident. Most people
can make similar claims.

So maybe it’s not so glib or in poor
taste to exploit the Boston bombing to make a point about gun control advocacy.

In any case, I’ve seen enough in life to
be truly opposed to gun control and the philosophies that support it.

Login to your account to post comments

report violation

hide all
comments from this user

What’s
Wrong Today:

You
say our Congress can’t act in a bi-partisan way and quickly pass something that
the President will sign?

Consider
the bill that modifies the transparency requirements under the STOCK Act. It was introduced
on April 11, 2013 and was signed by the President on April 15, 2013.

What
is the STOCK Act? Back in 2012, amid pressure from Mr. Obama including an
appeal for its passage in his 2012 State of the Union address, Congress passed
the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a bill
prohibiting the use of non-public information for private profit, including
insider trading by members of Congress and other government employees. The Act
was passed by a 96-3 vote in the Senate, and by 417-2 in the House.

It is unclear why,
prior to 2012, it was perfectly legal for congress to trade on inside
information, but apparently, it was.

Yet
even before the law became effective, the United States House and Senate voted
unanimously to repeal one of its provisions. The repealed provision
required that all financial
disclosure forms be accessible online.

The
provision would have required 28,000 senior government officials to post their
financial information on a publicly available online database. It had come
under harsh criticism from federal government employee unions.

Under
the new law, the elements of the STOCK Act that were removed include:

• Creation of searchable, sortable
  disclosure of the information contained in financial disclosure reports even for Congress, the
  President, Vice President, the President’s cabinet and congressional
  candidates.

• Electronic filing for
  Congress, the President, Vice President, the President’s cabinet and
  congressional candidates, as well as high-level executive and
  congressional branch employees. Even images of the staffers’ filings will
  not be available for viewing on the web.

So, more hurdles that concerned Americans will have to jump to get the information.

Congress
twice had passed legislation to delay its implementation. As part of a previous
delay, Congress asked the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), to
study the implications of the requirement. Their report,
released in March, found the provision should be repealed, because it could threatened national security, the safety of government employees abroad, as well as make
it difficult to attract and retain talent in the public sector:

In other
words, according to the “nonpartisan and independent” NAPA, having
Congressional financial documents online represents a national security risk,
since terrorists will terrorize the US even more when they know on what days
Nancy Pelosi bought and sold the S&P 500.

Surely
this explains why the bill was rushed and voted in the matter of days: We can’t
have a debate over matters of “national security” especially if the
financial well-being of Congress is at risk. As the Washington Times recapped:

In other
words, while the STOCK Act passed nearly unanimously in 2012, showing how
“honest” congress was, this follow up legislation, which effectively undoes a
key reporting requirement of said anti-inside trading law, passed just as
unanimously.

Amending the STOCK Act was not a victimless
crime:
Those who truly would benefit from the lost transparency are the American
people and the media, or at least those few in the media who have not yet been
bought by Congress and who are willing to uncover which members of Congress might
be violating the STOCK law.

This is known as “security through obscurity.” Rather than
fixing the system’s flaws, you just make the system opaque or unusable enough that
those flaws never surface. If someone wants the public information badly
enough, they will jump through whatever hurdles were created to get it.

Congress
could have carved out exceptions for individuals in sensitive jobs. That would
actually be smarter than hoping that no one would bother to look for the
information on paper instead of online.

Security
through obscurity as a justification to repeal important transparency
provisions of the STOCK Act starts us down a slippery path where any government
action or information could be taken offline in the name of safety.

Why
is it that the public can use the Internet to research everything except what
their government is doing? We know that Congress is not tech savvy, but
how can its twisted wisdom be that information is sufficiently transparent if journalists,
academics, advocates and citizens are forced to dig through file cabinets in
basements in Washington, DC to find it?

And
does anyone think that makes us safer?

We
must note that both houses of Congress acted quickly and in a bipartisan manner
in order to hide their shady dealings, their insider trading and, oh yea, “identity
theft.”

Stealth
elimination of government transparency = bilateral shame.

The
entire Congress chose to act against the public interest in favor of their self-interest.

What’s Wrong Today:

Recent economic news brings three more depressing facts about the jobs market.

First, the Economic
Populist reports that The
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) February (it is lagged by a month) JOLTS report, or Job
Openings and Labor Turnover Survey shows there are 3.1 unemployed per job opening, compared with 1.8 per opening at the start of the
recession in December, 2007. Job openings increased 8.7% from January to a
total of 3,925,000.  

While job
openings have increased 80% from July 2009, they still remain 15% below
pre-recession levels of 4.7 million: 

Actual
hires increased 2.8% to 4,418 million and hiring has only increased 22%
since June 2009. Below is the graph of the official unemployed per job opening.
 There were 12.03 million unemployed in February 2013.

And people could be unemployed for a long time. It could take 10-15 years to bring
the available workforce and the demand for workers back to an equilibrium
similar to what it was prior to 2007.

Second, according
to the Wall Street Journal, 284,000
Americans with college degrees were working minimum wage jobs last year, which
is 70% more college grads
working for the minimum wage than there were 10 years ago.


Nearly half of the college graduates in the class of 2010 are working in jobs
that don’t require a bachelor’s degree and 38% have jobs that don’t even require
a high school diploma, according to a January report from the Center for
College Affordability and Productivity.


The New York Fed reports that student loan debt has tripled over
the last eight years to $966 billion.  That is a 70% increase in borrowers
and a 70% increase in debt held by each.  Student loan debt is now the
second largest consumer debt, trailing only residential mortgages and student debt is not discharged
through bankruptcy.

It used to
be college was affordable as well as the ticket to a stable career.  That
dream has been replaced by profit centers making money by selling dreams to
unemployable teenagers.  Worse, for many, despite having fresh skills
straight out of school, they still cannot get a job.

Third, the March employment reports show that the
Employment Ratio (EMratio) and the Labor Force Participation rate (LFrate) again
haven’t improved. If fact, the EMratio is where it was in January 1984
while the LFrate is where it was in January 1979.

But let’s
start with a few definitions from
the BLS:

The labor force participation
rate is the percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population
that is in the labor force. Who is in the civilian non-institutional population? Persons 16 years and older residing in the
50 States and the District of Columbia who are not inmates of institutions and
who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.

The employment-population ratio represents the percentage
of the civilian non-institutional population that is employed. The civilian
labor force consists of all persons classified as employed or
unemployed.

Here is a graph of both through
February 2013:

Bill
McBride  of Calculated Risk unpacks some of the detail behind
the overall rates:

• There
  is a big decline in the LFrate for those in the 16 to 19 age group, due mostly to
  higher enrollment rates by these groups in school. This could be encouraging news
  for the future, but these kids are building more student loan debt as described
  above and their jobs could still be low wage.

• We
  are experiencing a slow decline in participation for those in their key working
  years (25 to 54). They are back to where they were in January 1984. As these
  are our most productive citizens, that is very disturbing. See the graph below:

• The
  55 and overs have increased their participation. This is probably a combination
  of financial need (not good news) and more workers staying healthy.

We have come to the end of excuses
for the last half decade of bad employment news. Congress and the White House
have no answers and apparently, no will to try to find any answers.

This
economy has been called the knowledge
economy. Maybe so. It is an economy organized to benefit a coalition of politicians and financial elites. In
the new economy, the only members of the working classes with good jobs are the
knowledge worker technocrats that serve both.

However,
the majority of workers are skilled and low-skilled service workers.

Robert Reich
divides service workers into “routine producers” and “in-person
servers.” Since service workers own and leverage less capital (or less knowledge),
their ability to create surplus value and thereby demand high wages is
intrinsically less than that of knowledge workers.

This has created a massive structural
tension, as society tries to establish a way to maintain the wages (or standard
of living) of the service workers in an economy where the value they produce and
income they can generate by their labor is capped.

This
is the economy every student and every worker must understand if they are to
navigate it to their benefit.

There are many
companies, big and small, that repeatedly post the same exact jobs. They interview
for those jobs, choose not to fill them, and re post them. This goes along with
the STEM and H-1 visa gaming of the “no qualified Americans,”
“we need a tax break to hire,” game.

We
grew up in a society where merit was rewarded and performance was measured by
getting ahead in a corporation, where expanding the middle class was preferable
to steepening the climb up the ladder.  

We now
inhabit a different world. Not simply one where the historical warnings of
Jefferson and Eisenhower (banks, corporate hegemony) have come to pass, but one
with automated toll booths, self-checkout in the retail store, faux job
postings.

In our world,
one in six Americans live in poverty.  The number of Americans living in
poverty is now at a level not seen since the 1960s.


In our world, 20% of all children are living in poverty.  Incredibly, a
higher percentage of children are living in poverty in America today than was
the case back in 1975.

We inhabit
a world where dis-empowerment of the individual and dis-empowerment (or
co-option) of the lower and middle economic classes are the rule of the day.

If we taxed politicians
based on stupidity, we might solve the deficit problem.

 

 

The Wrongologist spent 4 days in Dubai last
week. He was invited to speak at the American University in Dubai. Mission Accomplished.
The student body is mostly from Arab countries. Their demeanor is similar to that
of students everywhere. The 8th Dubai Corporate Games, a large amateur athletic
competition between corporate teams was underway on campus. Students attended,
cheered and ate fast food, just like anywhere in the US. Hip-hop music was
playing from boom boxes. We saw this sign in the University cafeteria:

One of the trip objectives was to see if either
Turkey (see the Wrongologist’s Turkey column here)
or Dubai could be a model for the countries struggling for answers after the
early optimism surrounding the Arab Spring.

Four days does not create expertise, but here
are a few impressions: Dubai is a global
city. It is a business and cultural hub of the Middle East and the Arabian Gulf
region. Above all, the city is very modern and very clean, with no visible
signs of trash. It is the most centrally located city of the jet age and is
whitewashed of things like religious extremism, tough immigration laws, pesky
taxes or real-estate restrictions that might impede the flow of money into the
city.

Daniel
Brook, in his book, A
History of Future Cities, (Norton, 2013) writes a history of four cities;
St. Petersburg, Mumbai, Shanghai and Dubai. These cities were intended to be
venues for the world’s most ambitious organizations and people. They grew and
prospered, in most cases beyond what their country accomplished. Brook says
they are object lessons for the world we live in now:  

Brook
tells us that the growing class of the rich and their associated service
providers now jet from Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Geneva, London and New York, barely noticing the difference. Dubai
is an example of that: It has the look and feel of Las Vegas, another desert
city of high rise glass-walled buildings and neon. Dubai today is home to many
innovative, large high-rise buildings, including the world’s tallest building du jour, the Burj Khalifa.

The
nightly fountain show in the Burj Khalifa’s artificial lake is similar to the water
and light show outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas, although the fountains in
Dubai perform the Arabic Hair Dance or the Swinging Cane Dance, as opposed to “Fly
Me to the Moon” or “Viva Las Vegas”.

In some
ways Dubai is architecture school gone wild. All sorts of building concepts have
been executed, along with man-made islands, indoor ski hills and skating rinks
inside large shopping malls that include all of the global franchise stores.

Dubai has 2.1
million people, including a large expatriate community, with much of its
residential real estate market driven by wealthy expat buyers from China and
elsewhere in the Middle East, or by the not-as-wealthy European and American
expats, who are renters of large, western-style apartments. A 2012 study found that Emiratis
comprised a tiny 2% of the labor force. So expats come in many forms:
Indians and Filipinos predominate in taxis and domestic jobs, while an Italian restaurant
where we had dinner was staffed predominantly by Italians who were on one-year
contracts to work both the front of the room and the kitchen. We saw many
Russians shopping in the malls. Construction jobs are held by Africans,
Pakistanis and south Asians.

A famous
expat is Pervez Musharraf, deposed former president of Pakistan, who announced
that he is returning to Pakistan after 4 years self-imposed exile in Dubai.
That was tough duty.

Brook
points out that Dubai seized its moment in the 1970’s under the leadership of
Sheikh Mohammed, by building extraordinary hotels and office buildings long
before there were enough businesses or people to fill them. It then took off in
the post-9/11 environment by being the most important safe haven for people and
money in the Middle East.

Its infrastructure
is new and spectacular, with a stunning metro that is reasonably inexpensive, although
not available on a 24×7 basis. It is the longest driverless metro system in the
world, covering 46 miles of track. The station names could be from a sci-fi
novel: Media City, Internet City, Knowledge City and Health Care City. You can
even buy a ticket to Energy. These sectors of Dubai are established to create a
nexus of similar businesses in a given area.

The principal
thoroughfare, the Sheikh Zayed Road, is a 12 lane highway without potholes, (America
take notice) but not without traffic jams at rush hour. The airport departure
terminal is sleek and modern:

The Arrivals
Terminal is not so modern or different from elsewhere.

In
closing, in the past 10 days the Wrongologist visited two secular-leaning Muslim
countries, Turkey and Dubai. Both are thriving economically, making them quite
different from the Arab countries currently slogging through the Arab Spring.

Turkey is an
old democracy which, along with Indonesia, represent the only true democracies
among Muslim countries. Both have growing economies. Dubai is ruled by a Sheikh
and his family. Its economy is growing, but its people largely live on a
government stipend, since so few of them are employed.

Are either
of these countries models for the rest of the Arab world? Turkey at least in Ankara
and Istanbul, is an amalgam of Europe and Asia, of Islam and Christianity. It
was always a part of both worlds, and it is hard to see it as a repeatable
model for any other Middle Eastern country.

Dubai is 99%
Muslim, excluding the expats. It is multicultural and capitalist. Can Dubai be
the model for the rest of the Middle East? No. It succeeds by being secular on
the surface and ruled primarily by the laws of commerce. It is much like
Singapore: A city-state with inflexible social rules, but flexible business
rules.

It represents
the worst of wealth-based modernity, compelling, clean and soulless. If there truly
is a pivot toward Asia in the coming 50 years, Dubai along with Shanghai may be
the New York and London of the 21st century.

The
British glam-rock group, ABC said it best: “I’ve seen the future, I can’t
afford it”.

(ABC-“How to be a Millionaire”-1985)