The Nation Apr-28-14

This Is Your Brain on Poison Susan Freinkel’s “Warning Signs: Pesticides and the Young Brain” [March 31] should be required reading for everyone who cares about the well-being of children (and thus, about our future), especially for those who believe that childhood vaccines cause autism. A mountain of solid evidence from all over the world indicates no connection between immunization and autism; this article presents some of the compelling evidence that the tsunami of toxic compounds is responsible for neurodevelopmental and endocrine-disruptor damage in children. How much better for us all if the movement blaming vaccinations for autism came to appreciate this evidence and turned its sights away from life-saving vaccines and onto industrial toxins as the likelier source of this heartbreaking epidemic. Alan Meyers, MD, MPH Professor of pediatrics,…

@SenSanders
Our job is to say to these billionaires, “Sorry, you’re not going to buy elections.” #McCutcheon
 @KatrinaNation
I admire Nancy Pelosi: She’s led for those who need a voice inside/“I never expected anything but a double standard.”
 @billmckibben
Exxon’s new statement: we plan on overheating the planet, we don’t
think any government will stop us, we dare you to try. 
 @EdgeofSports
“In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” should be required for all students in the United States. Rest in Power to Peter Matthiessen.
 @LilianaSegura
Grossed out by media promoting Bush’s paintings as journalists keep dying covering the wars he launched.
 @Ali_Gharib
Some home news: Pleased to announce I’ve joined @theIFUND as a reporting fellow.
 @JessicaValenti
Hobby Lobby’s hypocrisy: its retirement plan invests in contraception manufacturers.
…

In 1971, before becoming an associate justice of the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell penned a memo to the director of the US Chamber of Commerce advocating a comprehensive strategy to strengthen corporate power in America. Powell wrote, “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” In its recent McCutcheon v. FEC ruling, which overturned forty years of campaign finance law by repealing federal limits on overall individual campaign contributions, the Court was not so much an instrument as a blowtorch, searing a hole in the fabric of our democracy. 
 It completed a trifecta of bad Court rulings that started in 1976 with Buckley v. Valeo, which reversed the Midas touch by turning money…

In early April, Brendan Eich resigned his new position as CEO of Mozilla following an uproar over the $1,000 donation he made in 2008 to California’s anti–gay
marriage Proposition 8 campaign. Ever since,
conservatives—obsessed as they are with their putative culture war victimization—have been screaming about a new age of political oppression. “It is one of history’s little ironies that some of our current batch of prim-faced, puritanical, intolerant, and miserable thought police call themselves, of all things, ‘gay,’ something they manifestly are not,” huffed a National Review editorial. “The treatment handed out to Mr. Eich by them and their non-gay supporters is contemptible.” Rush Limbaugh ranted against “fascists on the left,” while Newt Gingrich lamented the “new fascism, which says if you don’t agree with us 100 percent, we have the…

Arguments about Israel/Palestine often turn, I’ve noticed, on when one chooses to start the clock. The most recent flare-up began, in this view, at 7 am on Tuesday, April 1, when Housing Minister Uri Ariel of the far-right Jewish Home Party issued tenders for 708 new homes in the illegal East Jerusalem settlement of Gilo. In doing so, he set off a sequence of events that saw the Palestinians deciding to apply for membership in fifteen international organizations, which led Israel to reject the deal that Secretary of State John Kerry had painstakingly assembled (in which Israel would release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners and extend the peace negotiations for four months, while receiving the gift of freedom for superspy-traitor Jonathan Pollard in return). The day ended with chief Israeli negotiator…

Illustrator Steve Brodner’s covers for The Nation will be included in the American Illustration 33 annual award book. Brodner’s caricatures capture politics at their most outrageous: preening billionaires and venal politicos strut right off the page. In 1998, Brodner designed the iconic poster for Warren Beatty’s film Bulworth, and he has reported on national politics extensively for Esquire. He is part of a distinguished line of Nation illustrators that includes Ben Shahn, Edward Sorel and David Levine.…