The Nation November 4, 2013

Horror in Afghanistan 
 Your October 7 cover pulled me in like a magnet. Finally, someone is writing about our victims in Afghanistan. The picture of the young wounded person is not overwrought with emotion; it is totally sad, caring, framed in black. The research is so awful, so horrible, I couldn’t wade through all of it. This is what Chelsea Manning is in prison for—telling the truth. ANN STOKES West Chesterfield, N.H.
 _________________________ I would like to hug Bob Dreyfuss and Nick Turse like my sons for their courage in writing their powerful article “America’s Afghan Victims” [Oct. 7]. I have been against war since I was 5: during World War II in Macedonia, I was bombed twice, first by Germans, then by Americans chasing out the Germans and…

@LilianaSegura
Prison mail. MI inmate on Nobel Prize for Malala Yousafzai. “That young lady knows more about peace than all the US
presidents.”
 @chrislhayes
GOP behavior a reminder that the vast majority of powerful elites who run the country are bumbling in the dark.
 @KatrinaNation
Tea Partiers fail to understand that the very govt programs they denounce are part of humane infrastructure of a civilized country.
 @lhfang
Kind of perfect that
@tedcruz’s twitter icon is a pic of him
at Tea Party Express, a PAC known for
scamming donors & enriching consultants.…

The Nobel Committee announced on October 11 that this year’s Peace Prize will be awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an institution critical to averting the escalation of war and ridding the world of its most dangerous weapons.
 The Nation has published the writings of over a dozen Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mikhail Gorbachev and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In 1946, when former Nation staff editor Emily Greene Balch won the Peace Prize for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (sharing it with YMCA leader John Mott), the philosopher John Herman Randall Jr. wrote in these pages that the selection showed the Nobel Committee had “recognized how much private citizens can contribute to the conditions for…

A common talking point on left and right is that the Republican-engineered shutdown realizes a long-sought conservative goal: the wholesale shrinking of the federal government. But even during a shutdown, $250 billion—about four-fifths of what is normally spent—is automatically allocated every month. Social Security, Medicare, the military and national security are essentially insulated from shutdown shenanigans. For fiscal conservatives, at best the shutdown will nibble at the margins. So if this “crisis” isn’t really about reducing spending on big-ticket items, what is it about? It seems, increasingly, like subterfuge for curtailing safety net programs the GOP has long loathed.
 In fact, it’s precisely because so many government functions do continue that the impact on programs that are not “entitlements” or otherwise seen as politically untouchable is particularly acute. Despite the…

Republicans entered the fight over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling with a list of demands. Among the “modest” concessions they sought: approving the Keystone XL pipeline, eroding contraception coverage under Obamacare and privatizing Medicaid. Democrats, for their part, have mostly just tried to pass “clean” bills, and in the case of a continuing resolution to keep the government funded, have even accepted sequestration-level spending.
 Shutting down the government—or, worse, failing to raise the debt limit and forcing the United States to default on its obligations—is the height of irresponsibility. Democrats should play offense with their own demands. Contrary to popular belief, more Democrats are in safe seats—seats they won with more than 67 percent of the vote—than Republicans, which should spur them to bold action. Even better,…

From 1992 to 2006, the average cost of bail for people who were arrested more than doubled, from $39,800 to $89,900. Bail in the United States has become so expensive that eight in ten Americans would have to pay over a year’s wages just to make the average amount.
 This is where the commercial bail industry steps in. Loans from bondsmen allow pretrial defendants to stay out of jail, but with a catch: the bondsmen keep a fee of around 10 percent—potentially a crippling amount.
 The United States is almost alone in the world in its use of commercial bail. Changing this would mean fighting the American Bail Coalition, a powerful lobby that spends millions fortifying the bail industry. To learn more about how to fight this and other similarly…