Finger Pointing Trumps Rationality In Big Fight

The Fiscal Cliff Drama, in WSJ Graphics

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Congress, Obama set to resume 'fiscal cliff' talks

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Is Government Driving U.S. Over Fiscal Cliff?

Radley Balko: Five-Star Fridays: Fontella Bass, RIP.

Fontella Bass died this week. Here's the song she wrote and made famous, although like too many 1960s soul and R&B artists, the song made money for everybody but her. (At least until she finally won in court, nearly 30 years later.)

The experience apparently soured her to the music business. She made one more album--Free in 1972. It was a commercial flop, but it's one of my favorite soul albums of the 1970s. After that, she largely retired, at least from mainstream R&B.

Our loss, then and now. Rest in peace.

And here's a personal favorite:

Follow Radley Balko on Twitter: www.twitter.com/radleybalko

Wade Henderson, Esq.: Time to Put the National Interest Ahead of Ideology, Branding

In a televised interview last week, Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas said that nothing the president offered in spending cuts could convince him to vote to raise income taxes, not even on the wealthiest Americans. Nothing, nada, zip.

In the same week, Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida explained why he opposed Speaker Boehner's "Plan B" to allow tax rates to increase on incomes above $1 million. "If you don't draw a contrast with the other side, who are you?" West asked.

Somewhere along the way, some House Republicans seemed to have confused ideology for common sense and branding for governing. And soon -- perhaps as early as next week -- we may all pay the price for their confusion.

According to the polls, the public has already decided that Republicans will bear the brunt of the blame if Congress and President Obama fail to reach an agreement to keep our economy from falling off the so-called "fiscal cliff" or defaulting on our debt.

Personally, I don't care which political party gets the blame. What I am concerned about -- and what every member of Congress should be concerned about -- is how we can avoid this completely unnecessary train wreck from happening in the first place.

Without a deal before year's end, our economy will run smack into an austerity headwind created by the combination of tax increases and deep spending cuts that will stifle the recovery and potentially ignite a global recession.

The pain will be especially hard for people living paycheck to paycheck in the higher taxes they would pay and the access they would lose to vital safety-net programs, and for the long-term unemployed, who would lose the unemployment insurance they need to make ends meet. In addition, nearly 300,000 children would be cut from the school lunch program and millions of Americans would lose access to food stamps.

This is an emergency for tens of millions of Americans, and fortunately, some Republicans have signaled that they're willing to accept a fair deal that balances spending cuts and tax increases. But too many House Republicans seem more concerned about their branding and maintaining an ideological purity against raising taxes.

President Obama has been clear that he wants to head off this disaster-in-the-making, but it requires bipartisan support to do so. Throughout the negotiations, the president has shown flexibility in ways that many of us who advocate for the poor and middle class are not happy about, like putting benefit cuts for Social Security recipients on the table.

But so far, even that extraordinary offer and the president's willingness to accept smaller tax increases hasn't been enough to entice House Republicans to reconsider their stubborn allegiance to tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Time is running out, but it's not too late for Republicans to choose to put common sense and governing ahead of branding and ideology. That's the only way we'll be able to move past the cliff and move forward as a nation, together.

Follow Wade Henderson, Esq. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/civilrightsorg

Support For Stricter Gun Laws Soars In Poll

Support for tighter gun control laws continues to rise in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, and another new poll finds that support for stricter gun laws is at its highest point in years.

In the new HuffPost/YouGov survey of 1,000 adults conducted Dec. 21-22, 55 percent of Americans said that gun control laws should be made more strict, 13 percent said they should be made less strict, and 27 percent said there should be no change. Support for stricter laws in the new poll is even higher than it was in another HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted immediately after the shooting took place, when 50 percent of respondents said that that gun control laws should be made stricter.

Jeffrey Sachs: Retreating from Violence in 2013

I propose a New Years Resolution for America: the retreat from violence in 2013. We ended 2012 witnessing a mentally unstable, 20-year-old slaughter school children using assault weapons owned by his gun-enthusiast mother, who also became his first victim. We watched in shock as an unapologetic NRA urged more guns, not less, on our wounded society.

Yet even the deranged NRA performance had one thing right: Our problems are not just guns, but a society drenched in violence. I'm not speaking about Hollywood and video games. I'm speaking about our nation's approach to the world.

Our foreign policy is the NRA's strategy applied globally: shoot first and aim later, believe that the only instruments in our foreign policy toolkit are threats and drone missiles, and sell advanced weaponry far and wide.

Americans were all too easily whipped into a war fury to topple Saddam Hussein on phony pretenses and lies. Perhaps 100,000 Iraqi civilians died, if not many more. Thousands of young American men and women died and tens of thousands are maimed for life.

We continue fighting a war in Afghanistan on a cynical political cycle. If the U.S. had real war aims in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration would not have announced years ago that the war would end in 2014. The date was set for Obama's reelection campaign, to avoid an appearance of weakness in the run-up to reelection. We will leave Afghanistan accomplishing nothing that we couldn't have accomplished at a tenth the cost and without a war.

We continue the U.S. foreign policy of regime change, despite its absurd failures and blowbacks time and again. It's a hallowed tradition, stretching back to Mossadegh, Arbenz, Diem, Allende, and others.

In 2011 we decided that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi had to go, so NATO provided the air cover and the heavy arms to topple him. Yes, Gaddafi was crazed, but no, NATO cannot now run Libya nor even handle the blowback as armed troops once in Libya now overrun Mali. Be sure that more violence will follow in Mali and other parts of West Africa.

Now we are told that Syria's Bashar al-Assad has to go. We will arm and try to manipulate the rebels. Syria's ancient cities will be turned to rubble and thousands more civilians will die in the name of saving them. And then Syria will be ungovernable, but now on our watch. The rebels we armed will soon be our enemies. As in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Syria -- the list goes on. This we call a foreign policy.

Of course the numbers of dead in these recent wars pale in comparison with the deaths in another unnecessary American war, the Vietnam War, which took the lives of more than one million Vietnamese civilians and more than 50,000 Americans. And what was the point of that war? It resulted from a grotesquely exaggerated U.S. fear of Vietnam being reunited under nationalist-communist leaders, the ones we signed a trade pact a few years after the war ended.

Why do we engage in so many useless wars? Almost for the same reason that we have no gun control. A significant number of Americans, perhaps a quarter or a third, harbor the belief that force is the only answer to disagreements. Yet more consequentially, the larger part of America, and the political class in general, is afraid of this group.

Consider why we were in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson knew the war was both pointless and hopeless, but he sent more than 500,000 troops because he was afraid that the U.S. right wing would attack him for being soft on communism if South Vietnam were to fall on his watch. This is the same reason why we will leave Afghanistan in 2014 rather than 2012 or earlier.

It's a deeper question why a minority preaching violence so often gets its way. Why are the politicians so paralyzed by the fear of being called weak? Why are peaceful approaches to solving problems at home and abroad not even pursued? My guess is that the powerful emotion of fear dominates reason. Extremists can whip up pervasive and infectious fear that turns peaceable people into proponents of violence.

The constant resort to violence is draining America's spirit and finances. The $700 billion we spent on the Pentagon this past year is not only more than the combined spending of the next 15 countries, and more than five times China's military spending, but also overshadows by far our other approaches to solving world problems and building national security.

The Republicans rail against foreign aid, but all foreign aid combined, around $30 billion a year, is not even a one-twentieth of what we spend annually on the Pentagon.

There is a much smarter way. The NRA wants us to have a gun in every classroom. How about realizing that free trade in assault weapons in a violence-prone society is a bad idea, and one incidentally that doesn't have a scintilla of constitutional protection (even Scalia believes that the Second Amendment does not protect assault weapons). It's time to remove assault weapons from the marketplace, not with fig-leaf legislation that is easily ignored, but through real and consequential measures as they have in Australia, the UK, and many other countries.

Similarly, a world awash in weapons and wars can never be a safe world. We need to find other inducements to peace. The key step would be to take a moment to understand the places we are bombing -- in doing so, we'd actually discover a better way to national security.

These violent places, from Mali to Afghanistan, are poor, famine-prone, water scarce, and reeling under climate change (which is causing longer and more intense droughts). Their extreme poverty and vulnerability to famine leads to the violence of desperate and frustrated people. These societies need help to grow food, improve livestock, harness solar power, mobilize information technology, and thereby address the problems that are crippling their societies and turning hope to despair and to arms. In 2009, Obama gave a speech in Cairo calling for the mobilization of science for development in Africa and the Middle East. Good idea, but barely implemented. It's high time to turn that speech into action.

In 2013 let's take just one-seventh of the Pentagon budget, $100 billion, and devote it to solving global problems like food, water, energy, and education. We will see a renaissance of peace that would change minds as well as hearts, in the U.S. and around the world.

Follow Jeffrey Sachs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JeffDSachs

Brian Levin: The Cancer of Gun Violence Requires the Policy Equivalent of Chemotherapy

When people are diagnosed with cancer, doctors do not simply advise them to take ibuprofen to alleviate the pain. Rather, doctors typically act systemically, using chemotherapy and radiation in attempt to obliterate the cancer. Of course, these treatments are often difficult and there is always the chance that the cancer may come out of remission. But ultimately, they attack the root of the problem and offer the best hope for recovery. Gun violence is a cancer plaguing our American body politic. In the past two weeks alone, the over 200 victims have ranged from six- and seven-year-old kids and their teachers in suburban Connecticut to firefighters in upstate New York. We must treat this menace with potent legislation that amounts to the policy equivalent of chemotherapy to address the underlying causes of gun violence.

In his remarks to the press after the Sandy Hook shooting, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre elaborated on the "meaningful contributions" to the national conversation on gun violence the organization had promised in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. His solution, more guns in more hands in more places, was anything but meaningful. Like the doctor who opts to treat cancer with painkillers, this proposal relies on treating violence as it erupts and fails to get at the root of the problem making it untenable and, frankly, dangerous.

Mr. LaPierre asked, "Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away ... or a minute away?" But an assailant carrying a semi-automatic weapon or a gun with a high capacity magazine could kill hundreds before an armed guard could respond -- even if a guard were stationed inside of a school. As a case in point, during the massacre at Columbine High School, an armed sheriff's deputy was stationed on the premises. Amid the chaos, he "didn't know who the 'bad guy' was" and could not halt the perpetrators.

Even if we were to place armed guards in every classroom, as we know all too well, gun violence and mass shootings are not confined to schools. Would Mr. LaPierre buy the logical extension of his argument that the only way we can be safe is if armed guards and "good guys" are on every single street corner and every nook and cranny across the 50 states? This is a frightening proposition.

True meaningful action to reduce violence in our society requires a holistic approach. Yes, improving the security of our public places and the effectiveness of law enforcement is an important component. As is enacting policies at the federal, state and local levels to bolster mental health services, improve education and opportunities for young people, and reduce the exposure of our youth to violent images and messages. Addressing these issues is crucial, as many of the perpetrators of gun violence are mentally ill and many others are trapped in a destructive culture of nihilism and hopelessness. Our young people have grown up bombarded by blood and gore in movies and video games. But we would be remiss if our plan to address gun violence neglected to touch on the very weapons that are used to carry out these massacres plaguing our streets and our schools, our shopping centers and our theaters, our temples and our office buildings.

On Sunday morning, Mr. LaPierre stated on Meet the Press, "You know, look. I know there's a media machine in this country that wants to blame guns every time something happens. I know there's an anti-Second Amendment industry in this country." Is it unreasonable to acknowledge that guns play a role in gun violence and that this is not some kind of fabrication by a vast conspiracy? The canard that "guns don't kill people, people do" is flawed because a rock, a kitchen knife or a jump rope or, nearly any object, can be used to kill someone. What sets apart guns, especially automatic and semi-automatic weapons, as well as guns with high capacity magazines, is their lethal potential. Attackers can use them to mow down untold numbers of people in seconds.

No one is trying to confiscate everyone's guns. Not President Obama, not Senator Feinstein, not Mayor Bloomberg, not the Brady Coalition -- not anyone. While this is how LaPierre and his contemporaries have framed the calls for sensible gun laws in our country, this mischaracterization is deceptive and presents a false dichotomy: people who want all guns confiscated and banned, leaving hunters to resort to spears on one side, and those who want to protect the Second Amendment on the other. I think most reasonable people would agree that policies such as banning assault weapons -- that have no legitimate use outside of the military -- and ending loopholes that allow people to purchase guns at gun shows and on the internet will help keep us safe without threatening the Second Amendment.

While LaPierre and others say that the majority of Americans support the Second Amendment, this is not incompatible with the gun control supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans. A recent CNN/ORC International poll conducted after the Sandy Hook shooting shows that 85 percent of Americans favor some kind of gun control laws. More specifically, nearly everyone polled favors background checks, over 90 percent support barring high-risk populations (e.g. convicted felons) from owning firearms and 62 percent support banning semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines. Even the late President Ronald Reagan, himself a member of the NRA and a victim of gun violence said, "I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home."

No one policy or set of policies can end all gun violence. However, laws have the power to reduce gun violence and mitigate the carnage. The more comprehensive the legislation we pass, the more likely it is that we will be successful, and it is clear that gun control must play a role. Let us support our leaders seeking to make our society safer through multidimensional policies aimed at the root causes of gun violence. By enacting these measures, the policy equivalent of chemotherapy, we can begin to eradicate the cancer of gun violence ravaging our body politic.

Follow Brian Levin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/brianlevin

Dem Senator's Departure Leaves 'Unsettling' Void

It is a name that has echoed prominently through the Senate for years, even though most Americans know very little about the person himself.

'Mr. Akaka. ... '

Read the whole story at New York Times