Current affairs

There's a simple way to save thousands upon thousands of lives needlessly snuffed out by gun violence in the United States: reduce the availability of guns.  This is so obvious, it's difficult to understand why so many people say, 'the problem is complicated." No, it isn't. That's a lie, mostly spread by people who aren't interested in saving the lives of innocents -- including the twenty children and six adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month.  So says, Fareed Zakaria, one of this country's clearest-sighted fact-based commentators in The Solution to Gun Violence is Clear. Read the whole…

I'm glad that President Obama is vowing to stand firm on not negotiating over an upcoming increase in the federal debt limit.  “I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed,” the president said Tuesday night after he successfully pushed Republicans to allow tax increases on wealthy Americans. This is the Obama that progressives hoped we'd see after his re-election victory. He's a lot more realistic about how you negotiate, or don't negotiate, with unreasonable fanatics who care much more…

To me, and lots of others, it's obvious that guns kill people. My first blog post on this subject contains inarguable facts to that effect. The United States has 35-50% of the world's civilian owned guns, but only about 5% of the world's population. We rank #1 in firearms per capita. Our intentional homicide rate is three times that of Canada. Our firearm-related death rate is five times that of Canada.  State comparisons lead to the same conclusion: guns kill people; people don't kill people. States with strong gun laws and low rates of gun ownership have the lowest firearm…

I gave myself Antifragile for Christmas. My wife wrapped it up after I handed her the Amazon box. I've been happily reading the book for the past few days.  The subtitle of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's lastest work (he wrote The Black Swan) drew me in: "things that gain from disorder." What a marvelous notion. Fragile things break when stressed. Robust things stay the same when stressed. And antifragile things benefit when stressed -- like Hydra, which grows two heads whenever one is cut off, or bones, which get stronger when they support heavy weight. Several chapters in, Taleb is well…

I just finished watching Lawrence O'Donnell's spot-on commentary about the NRA's shameful commitment to arming mass murderers with the most powerful available weapons.  Watch it. Especially if you're a NRA member. This is what you're supporting with your NRA dues: mass murder. If you don't want to be an accomplice to the next killing of innocent children, cancel your NRA membership. Truth is powerful. O'Donnell speaks the truth. Truth-telling can change the world. I sure hope it brings about changes in our gun laws. Other countries have the same video games we do. Other countries watch the same Hollywood movies we…

I'm happy John Boehner's "Plan B" approach on the fiscal cliff was shot down by his fellow House Republicans. Now we're back to zero, pretty much, which is a good place for Obama to be. Progressives have been increasingly irritated at Obama for doing what he said he wouldn't: negotiate with himself. Like Obama said, he's come more than halfway in his talks with Boehner.  Republicans like to forget that Obama campaigned for re-election on letting taxes go up on the richest 2% of Americans, those couples making more than $250,000 a year. The remaining 98%, which includes 97% of…

Here's the most disturbing image that sticks in my mind after all the media coverage about the killing of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school: Television footage of people right here in Oregon buying record numbers of military-style assault weapons similar to, if not exactly the same as, the Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle used in the killings. A gun store owner said that he had amazing sales after two people were killed at the Clackamas Town Center attack in my state. But the day after the Connecticut massacre, he said sales were even higher, record-breaking. That's…

When Americans talk about gun control, as, thankfully, we're back to doing after the horrific murders of twenty children and six adults at an elementary school in Connecticut, plus the killer's mother at her home, two irritating features of political discourse in this country bug me. First, too many people approach social problems with a religious sort of attitude. Meaning, they cling to supposed transcendent principles without grounding them in here-and-now reality. Example: talking about the Second Amendment and gun rights as if these were unalterable sacred truths, rather than choices made by fallible humans. Second, too many people refuse…

Today its being reported that 26 people, including 18 children -- eighteen children, NRA! -- have been killed at an elementary school by a gunman. This follows two people, plus the shooter, being killed at a mall here in Oregon a few days ago. But, hey, we keep hearing, "It's too soon to talk about policy implications, about ways to reduce gun violence, about stronger gun laws." Including from the White House. Like I've said before, and will keep saying, because it's an unarguable fact: Guns kill people. People don't kill people. This is a lie: "guns don't kill people;…

Raising the federal debt ceiling should be automatic. That's how things worked before the Tea Party crazies got into Congress. Consider the facts, from Wikipedia: Every President since Harry Truman has added to the national debt expressed in absolute dollars. The debt ceiling has been raised 74 times since March 1962, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan, eight times under Bill Clinton, seven times under George W. Bush and three times (to August 2011) under Barack Obama.  ...The process of setting the debt ceiling is separate and distinct from the regular process of financing government operations, and raising the debt ceiling neither directly…

I loved this column by Maureen Dowd.  A Lost CivilizationThe Republican tribe is being wiped out, and not by plague, drought or Conquistadors. I'll miss them. Sort of. Well, not very much. OK, actually not at all. But hopefully there will be a few specimens kept around in a political zoo so we can remember what they looked like, way back when.  Some excerpts: Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first civilization in modern history to spiral the…

Tax wisdom from Jill Lapore in her November 26, 2012 piece, "Tax Time", The New Yorker. Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.  During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for…

Just when I thought the Republican Party couldn't get any crazier, their political insanity ratchets up another notch.  I can almost understand why the not-so Grand Old Party disdains minorities, the poor, homosexuals, abortion rights advocates, secular humanists, and other people who don't fit in the small confines of who modern day Republicans consider to be morally acceptable. But disabled people? That's a new low. Which was reached yesterday when the Senate failed to ratify a United Nations treaty that protected the rights of disabled people -- including disabled American veterans who, along with Sen. John McCain, strongly favored the…

Wow. I've come to expect an amazing amount of Republican two-facedness after watching Mitt Romney, the GOP's annointed presidential nominee, change his position on just about everything (abortion, global warming, Iran, etc. etc.) to wild acclaim from the right-wing faithful. But I have to give the Republicans credit. They've surpassed my expectations for GOP amnesiac hypocrisy by embracing a position on Medicare that, a mere month after the election, is exactly opposite to what Romney and Ryan campaigned on. Remember all those Republican ads castigating Obama for his supposed $716 billion in Medicare cuts that Romney promised to restore to…

I've got a great plan for handling the fiscal cliff crisis that is causing massive headaches for both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. I'm calling it "Chill" in honor of the Sirius satellite music channel I was listening to as the plan came to mind while I was driving home from downtown Salem tonight. Appropriate, because if there's anything our country needs right now, it's a chilling of the feverish right-left political arguing. Today Obama presented a fiscal cliff proposal to GOP leaders. They freaked out over it. Apparently Republicans haven't gotten the news that President Obama was resoundingly re-elected after…

It's been eight days since I posted "Susan Rice vindicated about her Benghazi comments." Now, reports have surfaced that make her even more vindicated, and her ridiculous Republican attackers even more wrong. I'm following this issue because it provides a fascinating look into the reality-denying right-wing brain. It's been obvious for quite a while that Ambassador Rice was simply conveying talking points prepared by United States intelligence agencies. Driving around today, I heard GOP Senator Lindsey Graham interviewed by George Stephanopoulus. Graham was asked exactly that: isn't it true that Rice was conveying talking points approved by intelligence officials? He…

It pains me to think about the 2016 presidential election, since we're just a few weeks past the 2012 election -- which felt like it went on for years (because it did).  But pundits who got the Obama-Romney victor wrong are now turning their attention to getting likely nominees for 2016 wrong. Which includes Florida Senator Marco Rubio on the Republican side.  This makes Rubio's recent comments about the age of the Earth even more disturbing. In my ever-optimistic mind, I've been hoping that after the G.O.P.'s solid defeat in the 2012 election, Republicans would realize that they need to…

Consider this, members of the longshore workers and other unions at the Port of Portland who are engaged in what can only be described as "antics" which threaten the viability of shipping in this area and even the entire Pacific Northwest: When a proud progressive like me, who supports unions, who was strongly against Republican efforts in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere to cripple unions, who dislikes corporate domination of our nation's economy, reads about what is happening at the Port of Portland and thinks "Those unions are acting absurdly," maybe it's time to calm down and stop auditioning for parts…