Life, Health, Etc.
John Haines - ...once activists turn their attention to grassroots solutions, their imagination, their visions, and their creativity are unleashed. Instead of limiting their thinking to 'achievable reforms', they begin to ask, 'How can the problem actually be solved?' Once that bold question is asked, sensible people can often find answers, even if governments can't.
Frank Rogers, Andrew Dreitcer, and Mark Yaconelli/Washington Post - Hoping to help heal bipartisan rancor, the Faith and Politics Institute invited Frank Rogers, Andrew Dreitcer, and Mark Yaconelli to speak to congressional leaders, staff members, and others who work on Capitol Hill, about a more constructive approach to working with the natural anger, rage, despair, and resentment that emerge in American politics.
Garrett Baer/Killing the Buddha - In his 2007 book, Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero identified a dangerous contradiction. Americans are not only profoundly religious, but also profoundly uneducated about religion--including their own. The enormous role of religion in contemporary politics means that religious literacy is nothing less than a civic responsibility.
Johanna Neuman/LATimes - Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," argues in the June 10 issue of the New York Review that Michelle Obama's "deepening involvement in food issues" could spark a new sensibility about eating in the same way that Lady Bird Johnson's "highway beautification," while sounding benign, sparked a new appreciation of the environment. As he put it, never underestimate a determined first lady.
Naomi Freundlich/Health Beat - Last week I wrote about the President's Cancer Panel Report which highlighted the "grievous harm" caused by environmental carcinogens and urged action that included removing the toxins from our food, water, and air that "devastate American lives." Achieving this is will be no easy task for a nation whose primary tool for regulating chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), was added last year to a list of government programs at "high risk" of failure by the Government Accounting Office.
Lesley Russell and Ellen-Marie Whelan/ Center for American Progress - As the President's Cancer Panel recently noted, exposure to chemicals in the air, food, and water pose a serious risk to Americans' health. The panel notes that dangerous chemicals in the environment are a much larger threat to the nation's health than was previously identified, and calls for a new national strategy to focus on these threats.
Amanda Kimbel-Evans/Rodale Institute - Temra Costa puts the spotlight on the women in her first book Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. She brings together farmers, educators, mothers, chefs, business women and policy wonks, and profiles the work they're doing to cultivate new paths to carry good food from seed to stomach.
Inward Bound -- Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods." Silence can be hard to come by and easy to avoid these days. We all are busy. As a remedy to the rampant noise and distraction, some people practice meditation in activity, in the form of mindfulness, a discipline of being fully present while doing just one thing.
Agatha Glowacki/MarcGopin.com - In one area of research, science is showing how forgiveness can help humans become more healthy and happy, and how holding on to anger leads to emotional and physical deterioration. Another area of research is exploring the possibility that humans are biologically wired for forgiveness, that it is just as normal as our revenge instinct, leaving up to us the choice of which to nurture.
Mark Bittman/NYTimes
|
American and International Politics
E.J. Dionne Jr./Washington Post - The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.
David Leonhardt/NYTimes - In a few cases, such rules really are a free lunch, in that they force people to take steps -- like home insulation -- that save money. But most rules increase costs. They force people away from the energy sources they are now using.
The classic example is the fuel economy rules from the 1970s that required car companies to make fewer gas guzzlers. The newly imposed scarcity of guzzlers, in turn, increased their price. But the relationship wasn't obvious. Americans do not think of fuel economy rules as a tax on large vehicles.
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel.../Think Progress - Cornyn recently told C-SPAN that Bush's "stock has gone up a lot since he left office. ... I think a lot people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush's administration, and I think history will treat him well." They are also clinging to the notion that the government can cut taxes and not offset the spending -- despite all their deficit-cutting rhetoric and criticisms that Obama is "spending trillions of dollars we do not have on things we do not need."
Brian Beutler/TPM - "We need to go back to the exact same agenda that is empowering the free enterprise system rather than diminishing it," said NRCC chairman Pete Sessions on "Meet the Press" Sunday morning..."Look, I think President Bush's stock has gone up a lot since he left office," Cornyn said.
Steven Thomma./Truthout - On the economy, 44 percent approve and 52 percent disapprove. On addressing problems on Wall Street, 42 percent approve and 50 percent disapprove. On health care, 46 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove. On the federal budget deficit, 37 percent approve and 59 percent disapprove. The biggest problem is that unemployment remains high and people are worried about their jobs, their paychecks and their savings.
Thomas B. Edsall/The New Republic - What these findings suggest is that the center-left coalition pieced together by the Obama campaign is not yet a stable alliance that the Democrats can depend upon.
Tim Fernholz/American Prospect - Today's passage of financial reform in the Senate by a vote of 60-39, and the news that the president will sign the bill by the end of the day, caps a remarkable run; In the past two years, the sheer magnitude of legislation that the president and his congressional allies have passed marks one of the most productive legislating periods in recent history.
Peter Beinart/Time - Back then, progressives did not define the left end of the political spectrum. In the 1930s and 1960s, America featured honest-to-goodness alternatives to capitalism, home-grown radical movements that scared the crap out of the American establishment and sent some of its denizens scurrying into arms of reformers like FDR and LBJ.
Reed Abelson/NYTimes - As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country's biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals.
Chris Nelder/Seeking Alpha - On March 25, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) joined the officially worried, with a report in French newspaper Le Monde titled "Washington considers a decline of world oil production as of 2011."
|
American and Global Economy
Jared Allen and Russell Berman/The Hill - Under the banner of the Spending Cuts and Deficit Reduction Working Group, the four Democrats are proposing budget cuts that would total $72 billion over 10 years -- a modest proposal for a budget that clocks in at over $3 trillion per year. The budget items offered for elimination include select defense programs, agricultural subsidies and tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. The group touted the measures as "concrete, actionable ideas" that could be implemented immediately.
Arthur Delaney/Huffington Post - "Unemployment Insurance in the real world is 'paid for' by federal and state payroll taxes over a business cycle," wrote Rick McHugh, a staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project. "In the federal budget world, this does not count as 'paid for,' even if in the real world those benefits are going to actually get paid for by UI payroll taxes."
Ezra Klein/Washington Post - This is a litmus test. It's not Democrats who are trying to pass the largest tax hike of all time, but Republicans who are calling for the largest increase in the deficit in memory.
John F. Harris and Jim Vandehei/Politico - But on the issues voters care most about -- the economy, jobs and spending -- Obama has shown himself to be a Big Government liberal. This reality is killing him with independent-minded voters -- a trend that started one year ago and has gotten much worse of late. On the eve of his inaugural address, nearly six in 10 independents approved of his job performance. By late July 2009 -- right around the time Obama was talking up health care and pressuring Democrats to vote on cap-and-trade legislation -- independents started to take flight.
Mike Dorning/Bloomberg - Greenspan has warned for months that the rising federal debt and deficits projected in future years together risk driving up long-term interest rates and choking off capital investment. In a March 26 Bloomberg TV interview, he said an increase in long-term interest rates was a "canary in the mine."
Elisabeth Williamson/Wall Street Journal - The White House has asked business leaders to identify specific regulations that they believe are obstacles to job-creating private investment. As part of a broad policy review, administration officials asked business leaders to identify specific rules that could be streamlined, although the administration hasn't yet proposed revisions for any of the rules at issue.
Ryan Grim/Huffington Post - Viewing Kyl's argument through the prism of the deficit makes for a confusing philosophical landscape. But it's not about the deficit, it's about the size of government: Kyl and the GOP in general want to slash government spending -- on the domestic front, at least. Borrowing to pay for unemployment insurance cuts against that goal; borrowing to pay for tax cuts reduces revenues available to government and moves the nation closer to a crisis point at which cuts to social programs may become palatable. That strategy has long been known as "starve the beast."
Fernando Suarez/Political Hotsheet - The focus of the conference is expected to be on health care, but it is clear the underlying concern is how these governors can work together to grow their local economies. "We all recognize that we are not going to be able to tax our way to a prosperous future," said Democratic Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware. "We're not going to be able to cut our way to a prosperous future. In the end, that means that we need to grow our way.
Tammi Luhby/CNN - While the Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus program has become a popular target for GOP attacks, the subsidized jobs initiative has been adopted by Republican and Democratic governors and policy analysts alike.
Arthur Delaney/Huffington Post - David Walker, president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, joined Mishel earlier this year to argue in an op-ed that a "focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead." (The Peterson Foundation funds all manner of deficit reduction efforts, including the Concord Coalition.)
|
