Innehållsförteckning för May-26-14 från The Nation

Al Jazeera—Just the News I’ve been a news junkie for decades. Reed Richardson’s “Can Al Jazeera America Save Cable News?” [April 28] is most welcome. By accident I tuned in to AJAM’s first broadcast, and I’ve been watching ever since. I met Ali Velshi and introduced him as a CNN man, but he said, “I’m moving to Al Jazeera.” Other great journalists have moved over as well. My favorite, from PBS, Ray Suarez, holds forth on the new network with his usual grace.
 It was painfully obvious years ago that CNN was losing its way, with more glamor and glitz and less substance, all the lovely young women (sex should not be used to sell facts and truth), and the deification of Anderson Cooper. We must continue to aspire to…

On April 29, a federal judge issued an injunction against Wisconsin’s voter ID law, putting the brakes on the state’s controversial voter-suppression tactic by declaring it a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Under Section 2 of the act, Wisconsin was required to prove that the law would not have a discriminatory impact on people of color. The court ruled that the state failed to prove it. A 2005 study by the Employment and Training Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, found that slightly fewer than half of blacks and Latinos in the city had a valid driver’s license, compared with 85 percent of whites. Among young black men, only 26 percent had valid IDs, compared with 34 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of whites. —Brentin Mock Colorlines.com…

The horrific execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma raises an issue of longstanding concern to this magazine, which in 1925 called for “an organized movement, instead of merely undirected sentiment, to end…this anachronism and barbarism.” It was “tragically true,” the editorial continued, “that the death penalty has come to be a class punishment, practically reserved for the poor and friendless.”
 In July 1992, Michael Kroll, founder of the Death Penalty Information Center, wrote about witnessing “the unquiet death” of a man to whom he had grown close:
 “We were in the middle of something indescribably ugly. Not just the fact of the cold-blooded killing of a human being, and not even the fact that we happened to love him—but the ritual of it, the participation of us, the witnesses, the…

On May 24, 2012, the University of Missouri System announced that it would close the University of Missouri Press so that it might focus more efficiently on “strategic priorities.” Admirers of the press mobilized rapidly to save it. “By abrupt fiat,” the author William Least Heat-Moon wrote in a local newspaper, the university “wants to eradicate a half-century of dedicated work in fostering, developing and publishing more than 2,000 books.” During a concert in Columbia, Missouri, Lucinda Williams lamented the closing of the press and defended its beleaguered staff. The New York Times and NPR covered the controversy, and 5,200 people signed a petition supporting the press. Four months later, the university reversed its decision. “Without question, the best news from the University of Missouri Press,” its editor in chief,…

Some movies have no secrets to keep and are eager to tell you so, very loudly. Especially when summer is near, they come trooping into theaters with sequel numbers trailing their titles, your guarantee of seeing something that will play like an extended cut of its own trailer.
 Better films, of course, prefer to hold something in reserve, and may sometimes even seem reluctant to let their secrets go. That’s the case with Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable Under the Skin, which makes you wait in suspense to seize any scrap of information that might explain the strange comings and goings. More than that, though, you ache for the emotions to stop tantalizing you and slip into your grasp.
 And then, every once in a while, you come across a film like…

On April 30, in a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, the Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation awarded their annual Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and filmmaker Laura Poitras. The bestselling author and journalist James Bamford, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the US intelligence community, presented the award to Snowden and Poitras, who were present by live video link. Here are excerpts from their remarks.
 James Bamford: I’m very honored to be here to introduce two extraordinary people, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden. 
 Many years ago when my first book about the NSA, The Puzzle Palace, was published, the joke was that “NSA” stood for “No Such Agency” or, for those on the inside, “Never Say Anything.” Recently I’ve heard…

The killing of Clayton Lockett by the State of Oklahoma has been widely characterized as a “botched execution.” The truth of this description is, on one level, self-evident. At 6:23 pm on April 29, Lockett was administered the sedative midazolam via a catheter inserted into a vein in his groin, an option of last resort, since a fifty-one-minute inspection of his arms, legs and feet by a phlebotomist failed to locate another “viable point of entry.” At 6:30, the doctor in attendance found Lockett still conscious; by 6:33, he was seemingly not. The paralyzing agent vecuronium bromide was then pumped into his body to stop his breathing, potassium chloride to stop his heart. What happened next registered as an intolerable agony, even in a society as inured to suffering as…

Some inequality of income and wealth is inevitable, if not necessary. If an economy is to function well, people need incentives to work hard and innovate. The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy. 
 We are near or have already reached that tipping point. It is incumbent on us to dedicate ourselves to reversing this diabolical trend. It will not happen automatically, because the dysfunctions of our economy and politics are not self-correcting when it comes to inequality. In order to reform the system, we need a political movement for shared prosperity. Herewith, a short…

Sin valor comercial. no commerical value. Those were the words stamped on the cover of the 1967 first edition, in Spanish, of course, of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I still have in our library in Santiago de Chile—ironic words, for a novel that was to become one of the most sold on the planet and one of the greatest of all time. 
 They had been placed there to ensure that I would not resell the book, though I had no intention of doing so. As the literary critic of Chile’s main magazine, Ercilla, all I wanted to do was read it. I had been waiting for years to devour it, ever since rumors reached me that something special, something beyond special, was coming from the pen of…

It’s hard to say that Maureen Dowd’s column is an embarrassment to political punditry given the state of the profession, but it is rapidly becoming one to the still-great newspaper that carries it, The New York Times.
 To take just one example, on April 30 Dowd penned a juvenile and intellectually incoherent column, obnoxiously headlined Is Barry Whiffing? In it, she eschewed any form of evidence or common sense to give voice to the now-platitudinous Beltway belief that Obama should just fix everything already. This view has come to be known as the “Green Lantern theory” of presidential power, after the comic book superhero; according to this theory, the reason Obama has not been more successful is that he has failed to bring Congress to heel the way superior leaders…

In a federal case that has made it to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, five young Californians from the group Kids vs. Global Warming are suing the EPA and the departments of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Defense under the longstanding legal principle known as the “public trust doctrine” for failing to address climate change.
 Elizabeth Brown of Our Children’s Trust, the group coordinating the effort, explains the doctrine as a duty to protect public resources that future generations will depend on for their survival.
 The National Association of Manufacturers, which is filing an amicus brief in support of the government, argues that “in no case has any court ever invoked the doctrine to compel regulatory action…much less adoption of a sweeping new regulatory agenda.”
 True enough: there is…

My story seems pretty unlikely, even to me. I never expected to run for office—but then again, I never expected to do a lot of things in my life. I never expected to climb a mountain. I never expected to meet the president of the United States. I never expected to be a blonde. But here I am. 
 Whenever I think of the meltdown, I think of Flora. She was probably in her 80s by the time we spoke in 2007. She and her husband had retired and moved to a small town in the South to be near her family. They bought a modest house. Flora’s husband had passed on, and she was on her own now. Until recently she had been doing fine, getting by on her…

“Hungary, An Election in Question” (in five parts, February 28, 2014); “Legal but Not Fair (Hungary)” (April 13, 2014) By Kim Lane Scheppele. Krugman Blog, The New York Times krugman.blogs.nytimes.com Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions Hungary–Parliamentary Elections, April 6, 2014 By the International Election Observation Mission, Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. A New EU Framework to Strengthen the Rule of Law, March 11, 2014 By the European Commission. Opinion on the New Constitution of Hungary, June 20, 2011 By the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission). Opinion on the Fourth Amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary, June 14-15, 2013 By the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission). European Parliament Resolution of 3…