Hank Kalet

Mike Lukovich’s latest, from the Truthdig Web site. Lukovich is one of the top cartoonists out there. For more, click here.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Another voice heard on the civil war over whether to call the chaos in Iraq a civil war: Colin Powell, the secretary of state that helped lead us into this mess.

From Rueters:

DUBAI –Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday Iraq had descended into civil war and urged world leaders to accept that “reality”.

Powell’s remarks came ahead of a meeting between Bush and Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in the Jordanian capital to discuss the security developments in Iraq.

“I would call it a civil war,” Powell told a business forum in the United Arab Emirates. “I have been using it (civil war) because I like to face the reality,” added Powell.

He said world leaders should acknowledge Iraq was in civil war.

So, suddenly Mr. Powell is willing to speak up publicly. He did, according to Bob Woodward, warn the president that taking down Saddam Hussein might plunge Iraq into chaos — remember the “Pottery Barn” rule? — but that was behind the scenes. Publicly, though, he played the role of the good little soldier, making the administration’s anti-Iraq case before the United Nations, and he deserves whatever opprobrium has been and will continue to be heaped upon him.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today regarding whether the federal government should be required to apply the Clean Air Act to emmissions of greenhouse gases.

The Bush administration, as expected given its harsh antienvironmental bias, opposes the move — the product of a lawsuit filed by 12 states and 13 environmental groups.

This case is a prime example of the destructiveness of the Bush years — and not only because it is shows the effect that Bush’s antiregulatory and environmental attitude has on the agencies assigned to protect the public.

It also will be one of the first chances that we will have to see the Bush court in action. It is this more conservative court — shifted significantly to the right with the confirmation of Samuel Alito — that will decide this case and too many cases well into the future.

Already, according to the AP report I linked to above, Chief Justice John Roberts (Bush’s other appointee) and Justice Alito are indicating they have a dim view of the case. Added to Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, that’s a pretty strong conservative block. The swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, has a relatively conservative voting record, though he has been moving more toward the center in recent years and maybe taking over the position held by Sandra Day O’Connor — essentially, the pragmatic conservative who respects precedent and the political process — before she retired.

Here’s hoping the recent change in party composition in Congress puts an end to Bush’s court packing.

By the way, buried in this story is an example of the kind of bad reporting that passes for balance:

Many scientists believe that greenhouse gases, flowing into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, are leading to a warming of the Earth, rising sea levels and other marked ecological changes.

“Many” makes it seem as if global warming remains an open question (many feel one way, therefore there is a constituency that believes otherwise) when in reality there is consensus in the scientific community and the only objections these days are coming from corporate sponsored scientists and ideological hacks.

I would have written it this way:

A consensus has formed in the scientific community over the issue, with the vast majority of scientists believing that greenhouse gases, flowing into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, are leading to a warming of the Earth, rising sea levels and other marked ecological changes.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Hard to imagine an editorial that more directly dismantles the bogus legislation that state Sen. Gerald Cardinale (R-Bergen) is offering as a sop to offset his attempt to amend the state Constitution to prevent same-sex marriage than the one that ran in The Record today.

There is nothing equal about this proposed legislation. As an example, two seniors living together to curb expenses is not the same as a same-sex couple living and sharing a life together in a committed relationship. The Equal Benefits Act mocks the commitment same-sex couples want to legally make, and it underscores the problems of implementing the state’s high court ruling.

The court gave the Legislature the discretion to decide whether to call same-sex unions marriage or something else. The court, though, was clear that same-sex couples were entitled to all the benefits of marriage.

The court went beyond the dollars and cents of marriage; it addressed the heart and soul of marriage. It recognized that same-sex couples are raising families and want the same legal and societal recognition for their unions, for their families.

The court, of course, punted, dumping this in the lap of the Legislature and making the civil rights of gay couples a matter of negotiation and political expediency.

Couples like Sarah and Suyin Lael of Dayton (pictured) deserve a lot better.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

A dozen years of Republican Congressional rule and all we have is a deteriorating middle class — but I guess that wasn’t too much of a price to pay for the return of “values” to the public sphere.

The key to understanding the damage wrought by the GOP’s not-so-benign neglect is the federal minimum wage. As Derrick Z. Jackson writes today in a column in The Boston Globe, the “minimum wage has become one of the most appalling symbols of the exploding gap between rich and working poor in this nation.”

Workers earning the federal minimum of $5.15 an hour gross just $026 a week and $10,712 a year — not enough to cover housing around these parts, let alone food, clothing, transportation, child care, health care, or anything else. Here is what I wrote about the issue in 2005, after the show “30 Days” aired a segment on living on the minimum wage. (The show’s creator, Morgan Spurlock, and his fiance, Alexandra Jamieson, spent a month working minimum wage jobs and trying to survive in Columbus, Ohio.)

Several scenes stand out: There was the embarrassment of having to put groceries back because the food budget just won’t allow for the purchase of an extra bottle of water. And there was the difficulty in finding an apartment while clearing a little more than $350 a week between them. The best they could do was an apartment in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Columbus — a situation in which far too many at the bottom of the income ladder find themselves.

New Jersey attempted to rectify this problem with a phased-in hike to $7.15 that will fully kick in in 2007. And the new Democratic majority is promising a federal hike — phased in over two years — to $7.25.

It is a start — the least we could do, really — but not nearly enough to address growing inequalities we have come to view as all too normal.

Consider: A wage hike to $7.25 will boost weekly income to just $290, or about $1,200 a month — not much when you consider that housing in Middlesex County (according to a 2005 report) costs between $1,100 and $1,500 month.

The argument against raising the minimum — that it would destroy small businesses — has always had a hollow ring, as a new study shows. From Derrick Jackson’s column:

A new briefing paper released this week by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, studied the 17 states and the District of Columbia that had raised the minimum wage between 1997 and 2005. It found that the states that increased the minimum wage actually experienced — for the most part — higher wages “without reducing employment or discouraging labor supply.” The median minimum wage of those states is $1.40 over the federal wage.

“Overall,” the report said, “it is safe to conclude that statistically reliable evidence for any employment losses in the data is nonexistent.” This included restaurants and bars, where owners and lobbyists have long cried they would be devastated if they were forced to pay higher wages. The report quoted a study of New Jersey’s fast-food industry that concluded, “The increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage probably had no effect on total employment . . . and possibly had a small positive effect.”

A study earlier this year by the Fiscal Policy Institute of New York found better economic performance in the 10 states with higher minimum wages than the others.

So the Democrats deserve some credit for promising a wage hike, but the reality is that it is — as Jackson says — a day late and more than a dollar short:

The current value of the minimum wage is the lowest since the $4.74 of 1955, when adjusted for inflation. The proposed raise to $7.25 still does not equal the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage in 1968, $7.71. The minimum wage is currently only 31 percent of the average hourly wage for nonsupervisory workers. That equals the widest gap since 1949. For the 1950s and ’60s, the wage floated between 44 percent and 56 percent of the average hourly wage.

According to other liberal think tanks, such as the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the minimum wage would now be $23 if it had risen at the same pace as CEO pay since 1990.

Another thing to consider is this (also noted by Jackson): It would take a wage of $8 an hour just to get a worker to the federal poverty line for a single-parent family of three — and this does not take into account that many who study the issue believe that the poverty line is actually a lot higher than the figure set by the government.

Increasing the minimum to $7.25 is perhaps the least we could do. But it is more than has been done in years.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick