The program known as “Women, Infants and Children” (WIC) is officially the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.  Their web site can be found here.  The site describes the program this way:

“The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk.”

The program serves approximately nine million people.  As the sequester kicked in a few months ago, this is one of the programs whose funding will be impacted.  It’s solvent through the end of the fiscal year (30 September 2013) but its future after that is not so certain.  There are few examples more clear of how we expect the people who can least afford it to pay for our government’s irresponsibility.

The Center on Budget a Policy Priorities has released this report on the impact the cuts will have on this program.  The cuts to the program’s budget come at a time when increases are needed to maintain it for the 8.9 million people who depend on it.  While it appears, the United States’ economy is recovering, for too many people recovery is a long way off.  WIC is an incredibly successful and effective program.  To do anything but increase its funding will make it turn people who need the services away.

All of this because Congress can’t do its job.  The sequester was supposed to be so bad that no one would let it actually be enacted but it was.  Congress even passed “no budget, no pay” requiring both sides of Capitol Hill pass budget resolutions by 15 April or forfeit their salaries.  Sounds good, right?  Not so fast.  Both chambers passed budgets — a big deal in some ways, the Senate has not passed one since 2009 but at the end of the day, it means almost nothing.  While both chamber met the bar set to keep members getting their salaries, the next step — appoint conferees to work out the differences between the two budget– has not happened.

It’s time for Congress to stop wasting time passing bills to repeal Obamacare and do something to help people who need it.

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If you lie to Congress, it is a crime.  It’s called perjury.  You may remember that when Roger Clemens did it, he barely escaped two counts of it.  And you should remember that the official reason President Bill Clinton was impeached was because of perjury (you know, it had nothing to do with the rabid hatred the GOP had of him, then Congressman Bob Barr, R-GA, asked aloud, If we can’t get rid of him with impeachment what else can we do?  Uh, win an election.)

So if it is illegal for citizens to lie TO Congress, why is is legal for them to lie to us?

First case of lying: Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA)

Issa has made some wild claims about Benghazi.  One that he has repeated is that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally signed a cable about Benghazi.  This has been refuted by all of the whistleblowers and a Washington Post fact checker called that assertion “a whopper” (from Congressman Elijah Cummings’, D-MD testimony at the hearing on the subject on May 8, 2013 — you can watch it online).  All State Department cables have the Secretary’s name.

Yet, Issa repeats this claim over and over and over.  The goal, of course, is to weaken Secretary Clinton because she is the front runner for the Democratic Party and is popular among Republicans.  The only thing they can find to hurt her is this.  Truthfully, that we had people in such a dangerous place left so far away from military support seems really upsetting.  I am torn from thinking this is Libya, this was September 11th, how could we leave our ambassador so unprotected? The Accountability Review Board (ARB) investigated and released this report.   They found that mistakes were made and offered suggestions to prevent this from happening ever again.  They were not wimpy as they have been called by some on the right. They were thorough and pretty scathing.  There is no question that this should not have happened.

What we know is that when the idea of increasing funding for diplomatic security came up, many of these Republicans who are so unhappy with what happened now, said “no.”

(Disclaimer: I worked for the Clinton Administration on and off for most of it.  I also worked for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign and support the idea of her running in 2016.)

Liar number 2: Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

Senator Ayotte has been questioned about her vote against the recent gun control bill.  Her response has been — more than once — that she opposed it because she doesn’t want there to be a national registry of gun owners.  I support gun control and I don’t want that either.  I voted against former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty because, at least partially, he almost went through with a policy to send DC police door-to-door to request residents turn over any guns they didn’t want in their home.  If said guns could be tied to a crime, the people who turned them over could be charged with that crime.  That is ridiculous.

The bill Senator Ayotte voted against had no such provision.  Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) put a provision in the bill making it a felony to keep information on people who had bought a gun past a certain amount of time.  No one wants to see such a registry.

I don’t know what her real reason was and would like to hear it because I feel like every other five minutes I hear someone on the right whining that “No one read the bill!”  Read the damn bill.  And if you have a real reason for going against this common sense bill, please share it.  I might even agree with the real reason, if I knew what it was.

And the liars that love them.

Could the right be happier about anything than Benghazi?  Were they this upset with President Bush for letting 9/11 happened? (Didn’t he get a report entitled Bin laden determined to attack the US within the US?  Did he not have intelligence that al Qaeda was looking at using airplanes?  Yes on both.  You may remember how I was jumping up and down begging for hearings?  Oh, you don’t?  This isn’t just because I am not a major TV network but because I am not a truther nor do I see politics in every event on earth).

Second problem I have with the right’s response is their comparison to Watergate.  They say “when Obama lied, people died.”  I have two problems with that statement.  The first issue I have is substantive.  President Obama has not lied.  This is not a cover-up.  This is a tragedy and shows some real holes in the way we do business that need to be fixed.  Secondly, it implies that these lies caused deaths.  Even if this was true, they happened after the event in question so any attempts at finding a causality are just ridiculous.

On the gun control thing, the National Rifle Association and American Future Fund have some to Senator Ayotte’s defense.  The latter has sponsored ads that compound her lie with one of their own.  They claim she has voted for increased background checks when she did the opposite.  Read that here (and see the ad).

One thing that gets under my skin more than many things is when people put up with politicians who lie because that’s just how it’s done.  We get the government we settle for, we need to expect better.

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Few things are more irritating than stupidity.  What makes this even more annoying is knowing you are paying for it.  Congressman Eric Cantor has scheduled a vote this week repealing “Obamacare.”  His proposal’s chances of passing the Senate and/or being signed into law by President Obama are pretty much the same. Talk about exercises in futility.

The House cut its operating budget in 2011 by five percent.  More info on that can be found here.   That amounts to nearly $33 million a year.  Legistorm has information on how much each office spends on salaries for members and staffers.  One sure thing cam be said of all the offices from the big spenders to the most frugal is the source of the funding.  Paying for Eric Cantor to drag te House through this flight of fancy/political posturing at its most absurd.  No one — even Cantor himself, sees this as becoming law — at least not with the current Senate and White House.

This is shameful and not our founding fathers had in mind when they crafted our constitution.

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In all the hoopla about James O’Keefe and Rand Paul‘s filibuster (still support him on that), I completely forgot aout International Women’s Day (IWD), which was yesterday. I was impressed to read the list of countries who now recognize the day.  IWD has been observed since the early 1990s.  It received a boost when women marched through New York city in 1908, demanding better working conditions (better pay and shorter hours) and voting rights.  According to the official page:

“IWD is now an official holiday in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal (for women only), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia. The tradition sees men honouring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc with flowers and small gifts. In some countries IWD has the equivalent status of Mother’s Day where children give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.”

Women’s rights globally have improved but according to that same site (and what we see around us):

“The unfortunate fact is that women are still not paid equally to that of their male counterparts, women still are not present in equal numbers in business or politics, and globally women’s education, health and the violence against them is worse than that of men.”

As inspirational as it may be to read about advancements women have made  globally — women have been elected president and prime minister in multiple countries, head up Fortune 500 companies and are in nearly every profession (a woman is slated to try out for the National Football League this year) — we are an inward looking country.  I am not any better.  When I am overseas as I am just as obsessed with what’s happening in the US as when I am here.

Why should women (and men) care about IWD in the United States, don’t we have equality here?  No.  Hillary may have put thousands of cracks in the glass ceiling but it is still there.

From a 2010 Washington Post piece:

“The distressing statistics don’t stop with violence: Women hold 17 percent of the seats in Congress; abortion is legal, but more than 85 percent of counties in the United States have no provider; women work outside the home, but they make about 76 cents to a man’s dollar and make up the majority of Americans living in poverty.”

Violence against women is a serious problem.  As many as one in four women in the US are raped.  In terms of domestic violence, female murder victims are most often killed by a partner.  Additionally, murder is one of the leading causes of death among pregnant women.

According to the National Organization for Women (NOW):

“In 2005, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner. That’s an average of three women every day. Of all the women murdered in the U.S., about one-third were killed by an intimate partner.”

In cases of domestic violence, the victims are most often women.  The problem of intimate partner violence has even been studied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  They define it as:

“Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious, preventable public health problem that affects millions of Americans. The term “intimate partner violence” describes physical, sexual, or psychological harm by a current or former partner or spouse. This type of violence can occur among heterosexual or same-sex couples and does not require sexual intimacy.”

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) CDC put out a report entitled “The Cost of Domestic Violence Against Women in the United States.”   The full report can be found here. They found:

“Data about nonfatal IPV victimizations and resulting health care service use were collected through the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), funded by the National Institute of Justice and CDC. Based on NVAWS data, an estimated 5.3 million IPV victimizations occur among U.S. women ages 18 and older each year. This violence results in nearly 2.0 million injuries, more than 550,000 of which require medical attention. In addition, IPV victims also lose a total of nearly 8.0 million days of paid work—the equivalent of more than 32,000 full-time jobs—and nearly 5.6 million days of household productivity as a result of the violence.”

This is why passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was so important and the law is still needed.

It is easy to look around and think that we have reached a point where we have full equality (unless you’re gay and then you know too well how different we treat straight couples than gay ones, though same sex marriage will be legal in my lifetime.  Thank you Bill Clinton for your late decision the DOMA you signed into law should be overturned — read his op-ed here.) but we don’t.  Women make less money, are not represented equally in government or in board rooms across the nation.  Moreover, we are subject to more violence — domestic and not.  VAWA did more than allocate resources, it made combatting it a priority.  A friend asked me “Why did we need a federal law, couldn’t the states handle it?”  He recounted stories about how, in Texas, law enforcement did not prosecute women who had killed their husbands (most were victims of domestic abuse, or that was the assumption).  He added they started in the 1980s when more resources were made available to these women.  Personally, I don’t want to leave my safety up to the whims of local sheriffs and prosecutors who may or may not believe domestic violence is an issue.  That’s why we need this law.

Women have had the right to vote for less than 100 years (since 1920).  In that time, a  lot has changed.  Progress has been made but we still have a long way to go.

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This is my donkey tattoo.

Seeing as my post supporting Senator Rand Paul‘s (R-KY) filibuster on Wednesday, received some responses that made me feel like my Democratic bona fides were being questioned, I thoughtI would respond and am am showing them to you.  This photo is a tattoo I have.  It is the Democratic donkey.   And the responses I am talking about are not the comments on the page where the post was published.

I feel like there is an almost knee jerk reaction liberals have to any criticism of President Obama or his administration.  The comments I received here are not the first I have received about this.  Yeah, I have been called a DINO (Democrat in name only).  That is why I am so sensitive about this issue.  There is an old adage: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.  It has seemed recently like we are trying to be more like the Republicans.  I don’t need to fall in love but there’s no way I am ever going to “fall in line.”  Criticizing a president — of either party — is what our First Amendment is all about and it is also the patriotic thing to do.

Teddy Roosevelt said:

““Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

My criticisms of the right don’t have a lot of merit if I am not willing to praise that side when I agree with them or if I am not willing to criticize my side when I see fit.  I have been active in Democratic politics since I was eight years old.  And, truth been told, I have been one who has lamented the fact that we do not have a more parliamentary system where one side gets the ball to run with.  Maybe under that sort of system, we’d have a single payer health care system.  Maybe.  Then I think about administrations that I don’t trust as much as I do the current one.  George W. Bush, I am looking at you.  What other misadventures would the neocons in your administration taken us on?  Would we be at war in Iran? North Korea? France?  And that brings me back to see the value in our system and even the current set up.  Yes, the House seems hell bent on letting nothing constructive happen but it is possible to have a constructive conversation with people whose point of view differs from your own.  Just because we are on the left does not mean our echo chamber is any better than theirs.

For whatever it may be worth, I am not alone in supporting Paul’s right to do a full on, old school, in your face filibuster.  Chris Matthews said, “I may not have the same attitude of a Rand Paul but I worship his right to have it.  I would never put that down simply because there is a little right wing paranoia attached to that guy.”  Ron Reagan, Jr, had this to say, “The Dick Cheneys of the world will get into power and you do not want to set the precedent.” (He was talking about the first letter Eric Holder sent Paul on the subject. Agreeing with Paul on this issue — that the drone program needs more transparency and that we need clarification on when the administration thinks using drones against US citizens is permissible   Wanting a conversation on this subject does not make you a right wing nut job.

Ps.  I have to think that this week’s dinner President Obama had with 12 Republican Senators had a real impact.  It’s the only reason I can think of that it was Senators Graham (R-SC) and McCain (R-AZ) came out to criticize Senator Paul’s filibuster and defend the president.  In fact, Graham said, on the floor:

“I welcome a reasoned discussion but to my Republican colleagues, I don’t remember any of you coming down here suggesting President Bush was going to kill anybody with a drone.  I don’t even remember the harshest critics of President Bush on the Democratic side, they had a drone program back then. What is it about this drone program that has every Republican spun up?  What are we up to here?”

Oh, and I am also happy that the House passed the Senate’s Violence Against Women reauthorization bill, which included the provisions to protect partners in same sax couples.  Good for you, House.  See?  Not everything they do is crazy.

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He may not be Mr. Smith but Senator Rand Paul did exactly what I like to see Senators do, he executed

an old school filibuster.  Sorry, Bob Cesca but I read the Eric Holder letter and to be honest, I think Paul has a point.  Here’s the actual letter.  The language that started all of this fuss was:

“The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and onewe hope no President will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine anextraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the President could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.”

The emphasis inserted is mine but while I think the administration is not planning any attacks on Americans who are in America, the answer he was looking for was “No.”  What he got was a longer letter explaining that, if I am reading this right, looks like it was “We don’t want to do that but we don’t want to take anything off the table.”  As a liberal Democrat, I am not often in the position of supporting senators like Paul but I 1. love that he did a full on real filibuster and 2. I agree with his position on this — there is no circumstance that would justify using a drone against a US citizen within the US, we have too many other resources.

I am not alone in feeling this way.  Senator Paul received bipartisan support from his Senate colleagues, from the Washington Post: 

“Paul has since been joined in his symbolic effort by Republican Sens. Mike Lee (Utah), Ted Cruz (Tex.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.). He has also gotten some bipartisan support from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.). Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) brought Paul an apple and a thermos of tea — a possible reference to the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which Jimmy Stewart brings out similar provisions.”

Now there were some who said Senator Paul was doing this to play to his base and to people who support his father, Congressman Ron Paul.  That he is laying the groundwork for his 2016 presidential campaign, and there is some truth to that.  To think otherwise would be naive but that doesn’t make his effort meaningless.  Yes, John Brennan will be confirmed to be the head of the CIA.  Yes, this was a losing battle. (Didn’t Mr. Smith say “The only battles worth fighting are the losing ones?” — paraphrase, I am not sure what the exact wording is.)  He won’t win this but he did bring attention to this and that is a good thing.

My proudest moment of my career was when I was the communications director for Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA).  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was up for reauthorization.  The legislative director (LD)  and I disagreed on how he should vote, the LD thought he had to vote for it to look patriotic.  I thought it was (and is) bad for the country and that Joe’s 32 years in the Navy was proof enough of his patriotism.  We weren’t sure how he would vote and I wrote press releases for both. He was on the floor and I texted him “Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither,” Benkamin Franklin.  He said that during his “one minute” (they give representatives these “one minute” speech times on the floor) and I have never felt more part of our government.  He voted “no.” We lost the fight, FISA was reauthorized but when I went home that night, I felt like I fought the good fight and did everything I could.

Thank you Senator Paul, I don’t say that often but I really mean it.

Addition: If you think my opinion on things like the filibuster is new, please read this.

Update:  Bob Cesca posted this. (Thank you.)  Basically, Eric Holder wrote Senator Paul another letter in which he said:

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?  The answer to that question is no.”

That response satisfies me.  (Apparently, Paul is also satisfied with that answer but I suspect he may change his mind.)  I still appreciate the old school filibuster.  Especially when too often Senators use less visible tactics, like the one being used to block judicial nominees such as the “silent filibuster” where one senator can block a nomination anonymously.

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Elections have consequences, Chuck Hagel deserves an up or down vote on his nomination.

Republicans in the Senate have never been thrilled by President Obama’s decision to nominate former Senator Chuck Hagel as his new Secretary of Defense.  Their reasons have varied from his finances, to wanting information on the September 11th attack in Benghazi – when he had no role in the government, to just not liking him.  At least Senator John McCain (R-AZ), a former good friend to Hagel, had the integrity (or should it be called audacity) to admit that he won’t vote for Hagel because he was “disagreeable.”  Since when is being friendly a prerequisite for anything in Washington, DC?  All accounts I have heard make “disagreeable” sound like a compliment compared to what people really think of McCain himself (word around the Hill is that is just pissy and angry but that hasn’t made him step down from him Senate seat).

Senator Lindsay Graham’s (R-SC) insistence that the Administration produce more information on something completely unrelated to the Hagel nomination is curious, especially given statements he has made in the past when it came to other nominations.  During Elena Kagen’s confirmation hearings, he seemed to believe that presidents have the right to have their picks for high offices go through — and I can think of few positions higher than that of Supreme Court Justice, a position held for life and whose influence goes much further than that of a cabinet official.

Here are some excerpts from Senator Graham’s opening statement at this confirmation hearing:

“And as all of our colleagues remember, just a few years ago, we had a real — real conflict in the Senate about filibustering judicial nominees. And it was Senator Byrd and a few other senators who came up with the “extraordinary circumstances” test that would say that filibusters should only be used in extraordinary circumstances because elections have consequences. And Senator Byrd was one of the chief authors of the language defining what an “extraordinary circumstance” was…

“Ken Starr and Ted Olson have suggested to the committee that you are a qualified nominee. There’s no to doubt in my mind that you are a liberal person. That applies to most of the people on the other side, and I respect them and I respect you. I’m a conservative person. And you would expect a conservative president to nominate a conservative person who did not work in the Clinton administration.

“So the fact that you’ve embraced liberal causes and you have grown up in a liberal household is something we need to talk about, but that’s just America. It’s OK to be liberal. It’s OK to be conservative. But when it comes time to be a judge, you’ve got to make sure you understand the limits that that position places on any agenda, liberal or conservative…

“At the end of the day, I think the qualification test will met.  Whether or nor activism can be parked is up to you.  And I look at this confirmation process as a way to recognize that elections have consequences and the Senate has an independent obligation on behalf of  the people of this country to put you under scrutiny, firm and fair, respectful and sometimes contentious.

“Good luck.  Be as candid as possible.  And it’s OK to disagree with us up here.  Thank you.”(bold emphasis was mine)

Now, Senator Graham did vote for her conformation but did not vote either way on Kagen’s nomination to be the US Solicitor General.  His explanation for that was:

“I am not convinced that Solicitor General Kagan will be able to shed her deeply held personal ideological beliefs, political views and experiences, and check those biases at the door of the Supreme Court. Therefore, I must vote against her nomination.”    Source here.   Keep in mind, he felt this way about Kagen when she was up for Solicitor General and still voted to confirm her to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Graham’s position is clearly different now.  Of the Hagel nomination — and other national security posts such as John Brennan’s nomination to be the new CIA Director, he has said, “”I’m gonna hit you and keep hittin’ you. Absolutely,” Graham said when asked by a reporter why he planned to continue his efforts against Hagel and Brennan. “You better believe that I’m not going to let this go.””  

Senator Graham is well within his rights to oppose a nomination and vote against it — his allegations that somehow Hagel is friendly with Iran, whose government supposedly endorsed this nomination, are just absurd and holding up a Defense Secretary nomination while we are at war seems amazingly short sighted and just plan stupid.

PS.  To be fair to Senator Graham, and I do try to be fair, I emailed his press secretary for clarification on the change in his position on using the filibuster in cases like this.  Should I receive a response, I will post it — unedited — here.

Bring Back the Draft

Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) was on Morning Joe this week advocating for a return of the draft.  The official reason we don’t have one has been that a volunteer military works best — we want people who want to be there.  And we do.  If we weren’t sending our troops all over the globe to police the world, as we seem to be doing right now, I would agree but we are.  We expect more from our military and their families than we have ever asked before.  That is not to say the “greatest generation” didn’t sacrifice for the country; they did.  The main difference is the sacrifice was spread out over the entire country.  Currently, despite being in the hopefully end stages of our longest war (Afghanistan) only one percent of the population actively feels the impact of the war.  Multiple deployments combined with extended tours are taking a toll.

To put this in perspective, in 2012, more soldiers died at their own hands than in combat.   Read more here.  Yes, more soldiers killed themselves.  Having witnessed the impact suicide has on the person’s family and friends up close, I can tell you it is one of the most horrible things to go through (not that I really need to say that, I just feel the need to).

First we ask our military to go above and beyond the call of duty — and their families and loved ones go through the same thing.  As an aside, Bank of America was fined for illegally foreclosing on the homes of soldiers fighting in wars (one service member told me, the foreclosure process was more stressful than his time in war — not kidding).

When talking about things like Medicare, Republicans (I am looking at you Paul Ryan) will say “we need people to feel they have skin in the game.”  If that is true for Medicare, why is not true of war?  I agree with Rangel.  If more of us knew that starting new wars would mean people we love would be sent to fight for us, maybe we would think a little bit more about doing it.

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In what was ostensibly the launch of ‘Republicanism 2.0′ young guns Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio both gave ‘vision’ speeches at the Jack Kemp Foundation dinner last week, spelling out their revamped conservatism they hope to sell the American public. Michael Tomasky was not impressed, noting neither man made any meaningful shift on policy – a necessity if Republicans want to get elected any time in the next 10 years:

Republicans aren’t anywhere near to exposing themselves to the kind of self-examination and intra-party debate the Democrats undertook after Reagan’s second win. Despite upholstering their speeches with ample liberal rhetoric, and in Rubio’s case those aforementioned quasi-proposals, Rubio and Ryan both stuck hard to current-day GOP gospel. Raising tax rates isn’t an option. Relying on government isn’t the answer, and all the rest. When I read the Ryan remarks I quoted above, as I first started reading those words, I thought to myself, “Ah, might I encounter here an actual nugget of self-criticism?” It came. But it was only about messaging. The substance of their positions, to them, is fine and dandy….

If Ryan or Rubio had been ready to spoon out some bitter medicine, they’d have been catcalled off the stage. Republicans, based on what we’re seeing on Capitol Hill right now, aren’t close to being ready for that. A few conservative intellectuals talk this talk, but never in the history of the relationship between intellectuals and politicians has an intellectual class been so removed from and powerless to influence its political class.

The platform given to Rubio and Ryan in the wake of their defeat is similar to the attention the GOP shone on Bobby Jindal and Michael Steele back in 2008 after McCain and Palin took a beating at the polls. Jindal, probably the least charismatic politician in America was given the weighty task of responding to Obama’s State of the Union speech, and gave perhaps the most uncomfortable rebuttal in US history.  Richard Steele was inexplicably given the position of Republican Chairman of the National Committee despite having nothing in his track record to suggest he would be up to the role (and he most definitely wasn’t). The GOP obviously calculated that running minorities for office was the cool thing to do, so they found a couple they believed wouldn’t say anything too risky and thrust them into the limelight. They hadn’t of course realized that Barack Obama had won the election despite the fact he was a minority, and discounted his enormous talent and ability to articulate the frustrations of a generation sick of Republican policies.

As Tomasky points out, “Neither they nor the people they’re talking to are ready to accept that they’ve been wrong about anything except messaging, and until they are, this [Ryan and Rubios speech] is just gaseous rhetoric.”

So we’ve seen the new Republican vision, and it’s no vision at all. Just new messengers delivering the same garbage the public has rejected in two national election, and will reject a third time if it doesn’t change.

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English: NASA artist’s conception of a human mission to Mars (1989 painting by Les Bossinas of NASA Lewis Research Center). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m not sure the market is particularly big for this, but if I had a spare $1.5 billion, I’d definitely be up for this:

A team of former Nasa executives is launching a private venture to send people to the moon.

For $1.5bn (£940m), the newly formed Golden Spike is offering countries a two-person trip either for research or national prestige.

Nasa’s last trip to the moon was 40 years ago, and since the space race ended there has been only sporadic interest in another visit. Barack Obama cancelled Nasa’s planned return, saying America had already been there.

But Golden Spike’s president, Alan Stern, said the firm had talked to other countries that had shown interest in going. He said he was looking at countries such as South Africa, South Korea and Japan.

“It’s not about being first. It’s about joining the club,” said Stern, a former Nasa associate administrator. “We’re kind of cleaning up what Nasa did in the 1960s. We’re going to make a commodity of it in the 2020s.”

Stern said he was aiming for a first launch before the end of the decade, and then up to 15 or 20 launches in total.

Dozens of private space companies have started up recently. The Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks launches worldwide, said few if any would make it.

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McDonalds: Your kids might be working here (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: If you are reading this website, you’re most likely to be educated, white and economically middle to upper middle class (at least that’s what our demographics tracking software tells us). The opportunities for you in the workplace are probably pretty varied – you might be a doctor, a lawyer, a mid level manager, a financial analyst or work in the non-profit sector. To you, the world is an interesting and international place where you could, if you tried hard enough, become whatever you wanted to be.

But if you look at economic trends in America, people like you are dwindling and most people have far fewer pathways to interesting and well paying careers. There are many reasons for this, the major one being the shift away from industry and the wholesale financialization of the economy – a transformation that has seen speculation and deregulation as the major engines for economic growth. This has led to spurts of massive growth for the wealthiest Americans, followed by huge contractions  in the economy (ie. the Wall St crash) that have disproportionately affected the middle class and poor.

This shift has also seen a huge erosion of labor rights given the overemphasis on capital. Labor markets need to be flexible (ie. it should be easy to hire and fire people) in order for companies to maneuver in the increasingly volatile global economy, meaning job security is fast becoming a thing of the past.

And as education costs soar, so does debt, and in an economy where there are no certainties this means only the rich can ensure a pathway for their children to succeed. For everyone else, going to school becomes a riskier and riskier prospect where going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt may not be worth it in the long term.

As Eduardo Porter writes in The New York Times, the future of work in America is looking pretty bleak for most people, as they will increasingly be confined to jobs in the service sector – the most immune part of the economy to the effects of financialization and globalization:

The American labor market has been hollowing out for decades – losing many of the middle-skilled, relatively well-paid jobs in manufacturing that can be performed more cheaply by machines or workers overseas. It has split between a high end of well-educated workers, and a low end of less-educated workers performing jobs, mostly in the service sector, that cannot be outsourced or mechanized.

This process is not expected to reverse any time soon. According to government statistics, personal care aides will make up the fastest-growing occupation this decade. The Economic Policy Institute study found that some 57 percent of them live in poverty.

In an interesting article in Gawker, Hamilton Nolan notes that recent union battles in America represent the past and future of the US economy. On the one hand, there were the high skill union strikes in Long Beach California where blue collar workers making upwards of $100,000 a year demanded their jobs not be outsourced, while there was a move to unionize minimum wage fast food workers in New York. Nolan points out that given the shift towards service sector jobs, old fashioned high skilled union strikes will be a thing of the past:

The reality is that high-paying blue collar jobs that are able to be outsourced are not going to play a big role in the future of the average American worker. With a few exceptions, it’s not possible for organized labor to hold those sweet jobs hostage from the forces of free trade and the international economy. A glance at America’s decimated industrial sector will tell you that.

Income inequality in America is huge, and growing. The middle class, which was for generations full of those relatively well-paid blue collar workers, is shrinking. In the foreseeable future, the “average American worker” will not be a longshoreman, or an auto worker. He will be the guy taking orders at McDonald’s.

There’s a general theme within Leftist circles that unions are demonized in America – this isn’t technically true – Americans don’t hate unions per se, they hate poor people’s unions. You rarely hear anyone criticize lawyer or doctor unions – there may be the odd complaint about unions in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, but more commonly, it’s automobile workers, public employees, hotel workers and teachers who are the victims of much of the nation’s scorn. They are held responsible for the collapse of their respective industries, the appalling results from the nation’s high schools, and the budget problems in state governments.

Given most people will not be working in high skilled jobs in the future, it’s probably time for a bit of attitude adjustment when it comes to unions. As Nolan points out:

For the average American, employee protests at Wal-Mart and McDonald’s are far more significant than shutting down a huge port. McJobs may be the future. Let’s at least try to make that future livable.

So if you find yourself waiting in long lines to pick up your Big Mac because most of the workers are on strike and demanding higher wages, don’t get angry – it could be your kids working there. And remember – they’ll be looking after you in your old age, so Mc Ds had better start paying more.

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