Saturday, February 18th, 2012
, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: Here is what the nonsense of teaching to the test, and No Child Left Behind (a singularly inapposite name for a law) have bequeathed to us. In an age when technological skills are the path to a successful society, the U.S.is becoming the junior varsity. All of this arises because we have been making policy on the basis of ideology and theology instead of facts.
The proof of this can be seen in the fact that, as with healthcare, we spend more than any other country yet get stunningly mediocre social outcomes.
Western schoolchildren are up to three years behind those in China’s Shanghai and success in Asian education is not just the product of pushy ‘tiger
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Friday, February 17th, 2012
Stephan: My daughters are grown, so baby formula has not been a high priority on my radar in recent years, but my eldest daughter, Katherine, is now pregnant so I have begun looking at the world of 'littles' again with high personal interest. What I have found amazes and alarms me. Consider this report on baby formula.
This problem arises because we have largely gutted those pesky regulatory agencies that are supposed to keep our foods and drugs safe. You may find it hard to believe but as this report points out, there is currently no regulatory upper limit for arsenic in food.
If you have a baby, or know someone who has an infant, you might want to pass this along.
No surprise here: arsenic is not good for you. In high doses, of course, it’s a deadly poison, but even at lower levels, exposure to arsenic can raise the risks of cancer and heart disease. It’s especially dangerous for young children in whom chronic arsenic exposure has been linked to lower IQ and poor intellectual function. And because arsenic can occur naturally in groundwater - where it can poison people via drinking water or through food grown in arsenic-contaminated soil - it can be difficult to avoid.
That’s why a new study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives indicating that organic brown-rice syrup - a sweetener used in many organic and gluten-free foods, including baby formula - can be a source of arsenic is so worrying. Researchers from Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School looked at foods that use organic brown-rice syrup and found evidence that some baby formulas, cereal bars and energy shots all contained levels of arsenic that were significantly higher than the 10 parts per billion (ppb) federal limit for drinking or bottled water.
Worst of all, despite the results, there are currently no U.S. regulatory limits for arsenic in food - which means there’s little to prevent consumers, […]
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Friday, February 17th, 2012
JESSICA GOAD, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund - Think Progress
Stephan: Almost no one except a few of the conservation organizations seem to be paying much attention, but there is a growing trend in the Theocratic Right to sell off public lands. Not only Santorum but Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney have made similar proposals.
Just to be clear these public lands are the national parks and forests. There has been pressure from the corporatists for years to open up the forests to mining and timbering. It made a lot of progress in the administration of Bush the Younger. But now it is morphing into a argument that there ought not to be public lands.
Having been a hiker, backpacker, rock climber, canoeist throughout America's extraordinary public lands for virtually my entire life I take particular exception to these plans. This is the parallel universe of the Right and, if a Rightist were to win the Presidency, we might see the end of the extraordinary vision of John Muir that became a reality thanks to Republican Theodore Roosevelt.
Speaking at a campaign stop in Idaho Tuesday night, Rick Santorum continued the Republican presidential contenders’ recent pattern of calling for the selling off of public lands. According to the Idaho Statesmen, Santorum told Idahoans that:
But there’s a lot of land out there that is land that can and should be managed by stewards who care about that land. I believe the land is there to serve man, not man there to serve the land. If we turn that, obviously, BLM, they just don’t – look, we’re not going to have the resources to manage this land correctly. The federal government doesn’t care about it, they don’t care about this land. They don’t live here, they don’t care about it, we don’t care about it in Washington. It’s just flyover country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
We need to get it back into the hands of the states and even to the private sector. And we can make money doing it, we can make money doing it by selling it. So I believe that this is critically important.
Santorum failed to note that public lands-even those that aren’t national parks-are […]
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Friday, February 17th, 2012
STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist - Explore
Stephan:
By any one of several dozen measures – here are three:
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Friday, February 17th, 2012
Stephan: Citizens United was not the beginning of legalized bribery allowing large donors to buy the government, it was the culmination. Think about what this report is saying, '... 196 individual donors... have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.' I think it is time to ask the five Supreme Court Justices who voted for Citizens United: What in the world were you thinking?' Or, far more probably, they knew exactly what they were thinking and what effect their decision would have. Talk about activist judges legislating from the bench.
Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation, and the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.
At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation — drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% — electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.
These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.
If 2008 was the year of the small donor, when many political pundits (myself included) predicted that the fusion of grassroots organizing and cyber-activism would transform how campaigns were run, then 2012 is ‘the year […]
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