What Others Are Saying

Another hot day is warming up in South Louisiana, and we have a guest arriving this evening, providing he can get a flight on student standby, so this morning, I'm just linking to some posts and articles that caught my attention:

• Margaret Talbot opines about the Catholic Church's suing the Obama Administration over insurance coverage for birth control, in "Why is the Catholic Church Going to Court?," on The New Yorker website.  Bottom line:

  No one is challenging the rights of those Catholics who object to birth control to eschew it themselves, and to denounce it in public. But the lawsuit proposes something different: namely, that religious freedom means they can deny access to birth control to people who don’t share their faith or that article of it. It doesn’t.

• Heather Digby Parton, guest blogging for Kevin Drum, reflects my own cynicism about the lack of political will of our politicians in reigning in the power of Wall Street. (And now that the Supreme Court has added to the problem with its decision of Citizen's United, what little spine was left in our politicians has been, perhaps, permanently removed.) Adding to my depression about how Wall Street's trade in toxic derivatives screwed millions of Americans while the perpetrators of that financial disaster seem to have become even more politically powerful are these posts to which Parton links: Thomas Edsall's May 26th opinion piece in The New York Times and Mark Taibbi's article "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform," in Rolling Stone. Here's a lovely quote from Taibbi's article:

  The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.

• A recent study suggests that exercise may actually hurt some folks with heart risks, as Gina Kolata reports in her New York Time's article, "For Some, Exercise May Increase Heart Risk," 30 May 2012. Oh, well. We know we all are going to die, anyway, right? No sweat.
  
  
  
• I'll end with this great Pig at the Trough homage to a Ronald Reagan ad (and a poke at Wall Street) that James Fallows shares this morning on his blog: "The Bear vs. the Pig: A Great Reagan Ad Updated."
  
  ....things to do.....
 

oh, and "oink, oink": "Honeywell CEO Says the Corporate Tax Rate Should be Zero"