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Paul Ryan: Denounce Federal Funding Only To Ask For It Later

Posted on October 10, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash by Lee Fang in The Investigative Fund.

The Text: Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is barnstorming the country, promising to repeal every provision of health care reform if the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected this November. But a letter he wrote to the Obama administration may undermine this message.

On December 10, 2010, Ryan penned a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services to recommend a grant application for the Kenosha Community Health Center, Inc to develop a new facility in Racine, Wisconsin, an area within Ryan’s district. “The proposed new facility, the Belle City Neighborhood Health Center, will serve both preventative and comprehensive primary health care needs of thousands of new patients of all ages who are currently without health care,” Ryan wrote.

The grant Ryan requested was funded directly by the Affordable Care Act, better known simply as health care reform or Obamacare.

Starve The Poor, Engorge Yourself

Posted on October 9, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food by Mehul Srivastava and Andrew MacAskill in Bloomberg News.

The Text: Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India’s biggest food heist.

Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes’ drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice. By law, those 57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They’re meant for some of the 350 million families living below India’s poverty line of 50 cents a day.

Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen’s home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation — a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest.

How To Get The Shaft By The Navy

Posted on October 8, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Why was a Navy adviser stripped of her career by Jeff Stein in the Washington Post.

The Text: Gwenyth Todd had worked in a lot of places in Washington where powerful men didn’t hesitate to use sharp elbows. She had been a Middle East expert for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. She had worked in the office of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, where neoconservative hawks first began planning to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

But she was not prepared a few years later in Bahrain when she encountered plans by high-ranking admirals to confront Iran, any one of which, she reckoned, could set the region on fire. It was 2007, and Todd, then 42, was a top political adviser to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.

Previous 5th Fleet commanders had resisted various ploys by Bush administration hawks to threaten the Tehran regime. But in spring 2007, a new commander arrived with an ambitious program to show the Iranians who was boss in the Persian Gulf.

Crazy Repubs, Useless Dems And A Missing Middle Class

Posted on October 7, 2012 in Articles

The Article: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted by Bill Moyers in TruthOut.

The Text: After a tremendous response to his commentary on Truthout, Mike Lofgren has released a new book, “The Party Is Over.” In it he explores what he calls the “company town” of Washington DC, where “the company’s products are politics and military hardware.” Receive a copy from Truthout with a minimum donation of $35 – or a monthly donation of $15.

Bill talks with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who describes the modern dysfunction of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In Lofgren’s view, Republicans have become overly obsessed with obstructing President Obama, and the Democrats suffer from political complacency. Lofgren’s new book is The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
Transcript

Bill Moyers: The growing power of the religious right is one reason my guest left the Republican Party and became an Independent. “The mixture of politics and religion,” he says, “debases both, and has turned the GOP into an apocalyptic sect.” He has his problems with Democrats, too. For one thing, he says, both parties “are captives to corporate loot.”

Race-Based Reactions To Terrorism

Posted on October 6, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Why The Reaction is Different When the Terrorist is White by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

The Text: Observing that the Sunday attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin hasn’t attracted nearly as much attention as other shooting sprees, including last week’s rampage at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, Robert Wright wonders if the disparity is due to the fact that most people who shape discourse in America “can imagine their friends and relatives — and themselves — being at a theater watching a Batman movie,” but can’t imagine themselves or their acquaintances in a Sikh temple. “This isn’t meant as a scathing indictment; it’s only natural to get freaked out by threats in proportion to how threatening they seem to you personally,” Wright says, adding that the press ought to give much more coverage to the incident.

In a provocative essay in The Awl, Jay Caspian Kang goes different places with the same core insight. “Who, when first hearing of the news, didn’t assume the killings were an act of racial hatred? Who didn’t start to piece together the turbans, the brown skin, the epidemic of post-9/11 violence that is under-reported, or at least never has all its incidents connected?” he asked. That narrative “only implicates a small percentage of Americans,” he continued, “the story of the massacre at Oak Creek will be, by definition, exclusionary. It will be ‘tragic’ and ‘unthinkable’ and ‘horrific,’ but it will not force millions of Americans to ask potentially unanswerable questions. It will not animate an angry public.” It will seem different, he adds, to members of the several minority groups “who cannot limit themselves out of the victims of Oak Creek.”

These observations ring largely true to me.