Sunday, January 26th, 2014
ADAM PECK, - Think Progress
Stephan: I woke up this morning to CNN talking about another mass shooting -- three people dead -- this time in the Columbia Mall, a shopping center I knew well from my time in Washington. When I thought about it I realized there has been a publicized shooting every day this week. Not unusual actually, since 246 people a day get shot in America.
Then I came across this report, and realized how bad it has gotten in schools. It is amazing that we allow a small group of Americans to not only put us at risk, but also to demand we pay for the human wreckage their psychosis creates.
Last year was supposed to be a year of action to curb gun violence in our schools. But three weeks into the new year, statistics suggest that the problem could actually be worsening.
Though the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, 2014 is off to a deadly start: in the first 14 school days of the year, there have been at least 7 school shootings. For sake of comparison, there were 28 school shootings in all of 2013, according to gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action.
Purdue University is the most recent, when a 23 year old teaching assistant fired four shots inside a campus building on Tuesday, killing a 21 year old senior. One day earlier, a student was hospitalized after being shot near the athletic center on the campus of Widener University in Pennsylvania. And last week, there were at least three other school shootings, resulting in the hospitalization of five students between the ages of 12 and 18.
That number could have been even higher were it not for several near-misses. An eighth grader was arrested in Georgia last week after he brought a gun to school on consecutive days and robbed a classmate. […]
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Saturday, January 25th, 2014
BRENDAN SMITH, KRISTEN SHEERAN and MAY BOEVE, - Grist
Stephan: Here is a viable alternative to the Keystone Pipeline that offers all its supposedly benefits and more and, has none of its downside.
In the coming months, President Obama will decide whether to approve the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport crude tar-sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. We know that the pipeline would greatly aggravate climate change, allowing massive amounts of the world’s dirtiest oil to be extracted and later burned.
The payoff, say supporters such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is a job boom in construction industries, which are currently suffering from high unemployment. Earlier this month, Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue called on the president ‘to put American jobs before special interest politics.”
If you believe headline-grabbing challenges such as Donohue’s, the president is painted into a corner on the KXL pipeline – trapped by a stagnant economy and an ailing environment.
The president knows KXL’s jobs promises are way overblown. In July, he explained it this way to The New York Times: ‘Republicans have said this would be a big jobs generator. There is no evidence that is true.” The most realistic estimates, said the president, show that KXL ‘might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline, which might take a year or two.” And after that, ‘we’re talking about somewhere […]
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Saturday, January 25th, 2014
NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute - The New York Times
Stephan: This story is getting almost no coverage but represents a potentially historic change in our democracy, and not a good one.
WASHINGTON – AMID the coverage of the Christie controversy and the latest budget deal, it was easy to miss the news about last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning. And yet the Canning case represents the biggest threat to presidential power in decades, and the stakes in the decision are extremely high.
The case grew from a challenge by the Noel Canning Corporation to President Obama’s recess appointment of several nominees to the N.L.R.B., along with the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Recess appointments are not unusual, but in this case, the Senate was away but still convening pro forma sessions – just five minutes or so at a time – because the House had not given permission to adjourn.
The challenge began narrowly, centered on the question of whether a president or the Senate gets to decide when the legislative body is in recess. But it was broadened dramatically last year by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled that virtually all recess appointments violated the direct language of the Constitution: Only those vacancies occurring during the recess between […]
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Saturday, January 25th, 2014
KELLY RIDDELL, - The Washington Times
Stephan: The American gulag by its nature is corrupting. The warehousing of great numbers of human beings is both extraordinarily costly, and inevitably corrupting because just like slavery the power relationship is so distorted it is dysfunctional.
A decade after President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act, sexual abuse is still rampant in America’s corrections facilities, with a growing number of accusations lodged against the very officers charged with protecting their inmates.
Nearly half of all sexual assault accusations reported in U.S. correctional facilities in 2011 were aimed at prison guards or staff, according to a report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. That was up 18 percent since 2006.
But the challenge for officials is sorting through cases in which evidence indicates the commission of a crime and those in which prisoners may have been motivated solely by a desire to harm guards they don’t like – a concern corrections unions have raised for years. The report found that only about 10 percent of reported sexual assaults in prison could be substantiated.
Among the accused perpetrators, less than half were prosecuted and 22 percent remained in their jobs, the report said.
‘An inmate is just as threatened by staff as … by other inmates – this wasn’t the prevalent thought just a few years ago,” said Jamie Fellner, who served on the National Rape Elimination Commission that was created by Congress […]
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Saturday, January 25th, 2014
, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: The uncontrolled surveillance state inevitably over-reaches because its nature is to gather all the data that exists. It represents a form of mental illness expressed at the social level contrived by a small group of people, who live and thrive off the energy of people's fears. And like its first cousin, the military, it is proving to be incredibly profitable for the companies and individuals that build and run the system, either privately or under contract to the government.
But like the wars in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, that top a longer list, its major product is a tremendous amount of anti-Americanism. This piece gives a sense of the German version.
Germany and the US appear to be edging closer to political confrontation. The Federal Prosecutor says there is sufficient evidence to open a politically explosive investigation into NSA spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
Last Tuesday, on the sidelines of an Social Democrat party caucus in Berlin, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas ran into Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Maas pulled his fellow SPD member aside and warned him about what could become a difficult matter. “Something may be coming our way,” Maas whispered, and noted that the foreign minister could be affected as well. Germany’s federal prosecutor, Maas intimated, is currently considering opening an investigation into the scandal surrounding the surveillance of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone by US intelligence. It’s a step that would undoubtedly be considered an affront by the Americans.
Steinmeier listened attentively and nodded several times, but he didn’t say much. At the start of his second posting as foreign minister (he previously served for four years from 2005-2009), Steinmeier is facing the extremely tricky problem of new discord in German-American relations.
The current difficulties got their start in October, when SPIEGEL reported that US intelligence services were interested in Merkel’s mobile phone. When the magazine published its […]
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