Daily Kos

David Moberg is senior editor at In These Times, where he has worked covering labor issues since the publication began in 1976. He writes—Central States Pension Fund Prepares To Slash Hundreds of Thousands of Workers’ Pensions:

For several months, many current and retired truck drivers have feared receiving a letter in the mail that could be “devastating,” in the words of Teamsters union vice-president John Murphy. Finally, last Friday, the Central States Pension Fund sent those dreaded letters to 407,000 workers and retirees, mainly Teamsters employed by hundreds of trucking-related companies with roots in the Midwest, South and East.

Each individualized letter told them in detail whether the fund will now cut their promised pension payments—and, if so, by how much.

Four decades after Congress first passed legislation protecting workers against such cuts, these reductions in promised benefits derived from workers’ deferred wages have started again, thanks to legislation passed late in 2014 with support from not only many businesses but also some unions and traditionally pro-union members of Congress.

Pro-worker advocates like the Pension Rights Center warn that this move to cut the benefits at the troubled Central States Pension fund could spread to other, more securely financed multi-employer plans as well as even more widespread single-employer, defined-benefit plans. But it could also spur support for legislation introduced in June by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) that would save the endangered pensions.

The cuts in monthly payments to workers covered by Central States will vary from nothing (for about one-third of the group) to more than 60 percent (the highest losses will be suffered by many in a group of about 28,400 Teamsters whose employers had abandoned their employees, usually via bankruptcy and closure). The average loss for all participants will be 22.6 percent of retirement pay on which they had counted, according to the summary prepared by the fund trustees. [...]

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—Ladies Against Women on their Way to Iraq:

Lynne Cheney, who once presided over the National Endowment for the Humanities and subsequently sought out other duchies in the Culture Wars, isn’t much in the news these days except to kudo her husband on his forensic skills and give an occasional speech.

Behind the scenes, however, the second lady remains active in the halls of rightwingery that do much to set the American agenda. For instance, she sits, emerita, on the board of theIndependent Women’s Forum.

Thanks to bloggers Hannah at Feministing.com and Echidne, we learn that the IWF recently:

…has been awarded a grant to focus on the immediate promotion of women’s full political and economic participation in Iraq. The grant is part of the US Department of State’s $10 million Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative. As Iraqi women prepare to compete in Iraq’s January 2005 elections, IWF, in partnership with the American Islamic Congress and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, will provide leadership training, democracy education and coalition building assistance for 150 pro-democracy, Iraqi women leaders and political activists. […]

IWF was the spin-off of Women for Clarence Thomas. Its first executive director was Barbara Ledeen, wife of Michael Ledeen. Among other notables who have served on its board are Rumsfeld hagiographer Midge Dector, who wrote a 1972 book called The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation, Ted Olson and Larry Kudlow (yes, that Kudlow).

The IWF mission: “to combat the women-as-victim, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism.”

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin joins David Waldman to round up 2016 headlines. Maybe Hillary is likable, after all. You can't pay people to like Fiorina, so she doesn't. Iowa and New Hampshire polls say Biden not much of an issue. Bush, Rubio close as Trump drops. Kevin McCarthy doesn't speak well at all, so he may not get the Speaker position. Mom of Oregon shooter bragged about weapons cache. Colleges on alert over 4chan threads. Sheriffs demand even more military weapons. And, an 11-year-old shoots and kills an 8-year-old because she wouldn't show him her puppy. GOP fights over leadership elections and even when to hold them. Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!

Do you somehow find that 10 hours of Kagro in the Morning is not enough David Waldman for the week? Then you should catch David's interview and discussion of political and policy developments of the past week with Jay Ackroyd and Culture of Truth on this Sunday's broadcast of Virtually Speaking!

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High Impact Posts • Top Comments

Of all the television series and movies I've reviewed in these posts, most of them take a very dim view of human nature. A fundamental aspect of drama is conflict, and most conflict comes from flawed people making questionable choices. Sometimes there are good reasons for those choices, and sometimes there are not so good reasons, but the primacy by which most of these stories revolve is that when one strips away the artifice of civilization and society, human beings are selfish animals that will rip one another apart when things go to shit, whether that be in your standard fictional apocalypse or a full-blown zombie one.

While the news reminds us every day of our cruelty and injustice to one another, the truth about human nature is a bit more muddled. Yes, I'm sure there are people who would probably not think twice about either figuratively or literally slitting your throat for a dollar, but there are many more that would come to your aid if they saw it happening. There are millions of teachers who this very day are volunteering hours of their own time and spending out of their own pockets to give some child under their care a chance. There are millions of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals out there in some shithole, both here or on the far side of the world, trying to make it a better place, some working for little or no pay as you read this sentence. These are just small examples in a grander scheme. But like in all things, some people are horrible, and others rise to their best when things are at their worst.

It's that belief in an enduring human community and its ability to tackle great problems with reason that's at the core of Ridley Scott's The Martian, which won the box office this weekend and has been called a "love letter" to science. Based on the self-published novel of the same name by Andy Weir, and adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods), the film's story is basically Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It follows a botanist turned astronaut named Mark Watney (Matt Damon) who is stranded on Mars, and the struggle to get him back alive.

Continue below the fold for more.

In a predictable response to yet another mass gun murder, we are already hearing the loud cries that more guns are what was needed in the situation. Concealed carry is the solution, and all this death is actually the fault of "gun-free zones." That was Republican Nevada state representative Michele Fiore's argument, who wrote the following on her blog:

“I have said it before and I will say it again: I believe that an armed society is a safe society,” Fiore wrote.

“Labeling a public place a ‘gun-free zone’ will not create a non-violent environment for citizens; in fact, it does the opposite. By creating this illusion, we, as a country, are putting targets on the backs of our children, our families and our selves,” she continued. “While the President has already used this tragedy to feed his anti-gun agenda by saying that these killings have become ‘routine’, what he fails to mention is the truly routine pattern of these terrible crimes is that they happen in gun-free zones. Places where people have been rendered defenseless by the government.”

But the fact is that Oregon does have a concealed-carry law, and that technically it supersedes the "gun free zone" requirement. In fact, there were multiple students on campus at Umpqua Community College who were in fact legally armed and carrying, including veteran John Parker [pictured above] who was on the scene and carrying his weapon. But Mr. Parker had various reasons for not drawing his weapon and charging into the fight. The first among them was that he very well could've have been a target for S.W.A.T. and a distraction from the real shooter.

It's not like the "bad guys" running around with guns have a big sign that says "Shoot Me" pinned on their back.  Police are going to think anyone who's armed is probably the bad guy.

Keep reading.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir Ohio Sen. Rob Portman got a bunch of flak on Thursday, and rightly so, for saying that the public dollars that currently fund Planned Parenthood should instead go to "community health centers" that "provide the women's health needs that are legitimate"—implying, of course, that Planned Parenthood's services are not legitimate. Ridiculous, no doubt, but there's something else worth analyzing here: the fact that a Republican senator facing a difficult re-election in a swing state is nevertheless running hard on defunding Planned Parenthood.

That might seem like a surprising move, given that polls consistently show Planned Parenthood is very popular with Americans. Indeed, no fewer than five polls released in just the last week have found opposition to defunding the group ranging from 52 percent to 65 percent, while support for the idea rests between 29 and 41 percent. Yet Portman, a savvy campaigner who has always been careful to avoid looking crazy, is all for it. What gives?

The one problem with issue-based polling is that it rarely gives you a sense of how intensely people feel about a given topic. An excellent example is guns: Background checks for gun buyers are enormously popular in poll after poll, but ardent firearms enthusiasts are so hostile to any and all regulations that their zealotry has blocked congressional action on the issue, despite the fact that they represent just a small minority.

Abortion rights often play out the same way: There are many single-issue voters out there who identify as "pro-life" and for whom nothing else matters; there are few on the pro-choice side who match that level of intensity. And that, in all likelihood, is the calculus Portman is relying on—after all, he's seen all the polls that show voters preferring not to defund Planned Parenthood, and Ohio's probably not too different than the nation as a whole on this score.

But the anti-Planned Parenthood brigades are fired up with terrifying passion and will do anything they can to destroy the organization, as the mendacious video jihad by the so-called "Center for Medical Progress" has shown. Portman is hoping to stoke this rage, and at the same time, he's counting on those who like Planned Parenthood to simply not be motivated to the same degree. There's a good chance he's making the smart move politically.

This does not mean that Planned Parenthood is a loser of an issue for Democrats. Far from it. They should be completely unafraid to support and defend the group—again, it is still very well-liked and does enormously important work. But unless Portman has a very inaccurate read on his electorate, it does mean that, despite Planned Parenthood's popularity, attacking the organization is not necessarily a loser for Republicans, and it may in fact motivate the conservative base more than it turns off those in the middle.

Evidence continues to mount that the St. Louis Police Department is covering up what truly happened when they shot and killed VonDerrit Myers in October 2014.

His family just released the autopsy results, which show that Myers appears to have been shot from behind.

Myers’ family hired pathologist Dr. Cyril H. Wecht to conduct a study of the gun wounds from October 8, when Myers was shot and killed by an off-duty St. Louis Metropolitan Police officer.

Six bullets struck Myers on the rear part of his body and the other two were “not directly frontal,” Wecht said. One shot hit him on the right side of the face, between the eyebrow and the ear. Another shot struck him on the side of his left thigh.

Wecht said he did not know the order in which the wounds were inflicted. However, he said the head wound would have rendered him unconscious immediately. Wecht also investigated the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley and JonBenet Ramsey.

One of the family’s lawyers, Jermaine Wooten, said the report’s findings – showing almost all shots from behind – contradict the story of the police officer, who has not been identified. Police representatives have said that Myers was facing the officer the entire time.

In addition to these troubling autopsy results, several other factors continue to point to something extremely peculiar in this case. They include the fact that Myers' DNA was not on the gun police claimed to find; eyewitnesses and other geo-locating evidence contradict the entire police narrative of chasing Myers; and an earlier video taken minutes before he was killed appears to show Myers completely unarmed.

Finally, the partner of the man who shot and killed Myers appears to be caught in a scandal himself. A jury believes he also planted a gun on a young black man in St. Louis, and attempted to frame him for something he didn't do.

Meet the Libertarian Party of Florida's candidate for U.S. Senate, because Florida.

Two years ago, Augustus Sol Invictus walked from central Florida to the Mojave Desert and spent a week fasting and praying, at times thinking he wouldn't survive. In a pagan ritual to give thanks when he returned home, he killed a goat and drank its blood. [...]

"I did sacrifice a goat. I know that's probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans," he said. "I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness ... Yes, I drank the goat's blood."

Mr. Sol Invictus, and yes he did legally change his name to that, was chosen by the Libertarian Party not because his strong record on ritual animal sacrifice but, presumably, because of his very loud opinions on possibly mounting an armed revolution against the American government. You know: Libertarianism.

"The only question is when are the citizens going to start fighting back?" he said in a phone interview Friday. "I don't think I'm the only person who sees a cataclysm coming, but I think I'm the only person saying it, and I think that scares people."

He also has renounced his U.S. citizenship, which would seem to pose certain problems for his U.S. Senate candidacy, but no matter. Thank you, Libertarian Party of Florida. No reason—just, thank you.

Fully one-half of our list this time is made up of people accidentally shooting themselves or family members. Most of the rest is your regular assortment of kids getting shot (9), people cleaning or clearing their guns (3), hunting accidents (3), and neighbors firing into other people's properties (2).

Yeah, there was the guy in Brooklyn who accidentally shot himself in the junk when the cops caught him taking a leak on the street. There's a lot of junkshot GunFAIL going around these days.

And sure, there was the executive for a chain of gun stores who accidentally shot himself in the hand in his company's Knoxville store.

There was even yet another 2 year old, this time in Lake Placid, NY, who got hold of a family gun and accidentally shot his mother.

But the title for the week goes to the possibly not-all-that-good guy with a gun in Houston who witnessing a carjacking, decided to draw his gun and intervene, only to end up shooting the victim of the carjacking in the head, while the carjackers got away. So proud of his heroism was he, that he cleaned up his own shell casings and took off before the police arrived.

No one could have predicted that.

But most of the rest of what follow, beneath the fold, has become pretty routine, if not exactly predictable.

The above would be a tweet this morning from Fox News analyst Monica Crowley.

At the Berlin Wall last week. Walls work.

Discuss.

Welcome to America: Where in 2015, even our textbooks are racist.

Disgusted at what she saw in her ninth-grade son's high school geography textbook, Roni Dean-Burren took to Facebook to express how outraged she was to see the horrors of American slavery glossed over and rewritten. Her video, seen below, has received nearly 2 million views, sparked a serious nationwide dialogue, and finally garnered a response from McGraw-Hill, the maker of the textbook itself.

American officials said Monday that repeated U.S. airstrikes on Oct. 3 that killed 22 staff and patients and wounded dozens of others at a hospital in the northern Afghanistan city of Kunduz were called for by Afghan military authorities. Officials originally said the strikes were sought by U.S. troops, who, along with elements of the Afghan army were fighting Taliban fighters who had taken over large parts of the city.

The hospital was run by the France-based organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). That group, known for its pro bono medical work in 20 countries worldwide and as the winner of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, announced on Sunday that it was leaving Kunduz, saying the hospital was no longer functional. None of the international volunteer medical workers were hurt in the airstrikes, but several Afghans on the MSF staff were killed or wounded.

A U.S. official said Saturday that the attack was carried out by an AC-130 gunship at the request of U.S. ground troops coming under fire. That would mean it wasn't pre-planned. Under U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, pre-planned attacks require a collateral damage estimation but ad hoc airstrikes to assist troops on the ground do not. A U.S. general, John Campbell, said at a Monday press conference that "several civilians were accidentally struck." The Pentagon version of "stuff happens."

The Pentagon is now saying that it was not American troops who called for the strike but rather the Afghan military:

"Their description of the attack keeps changing—from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government," Christopher Stokes, General Director of MSF, said in a statement.

"There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the US and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical." [...]

The medical charity said that despite frantic calls to military officials in Kabul and Washington, the hospital was "repeatedly, very precisely" hit for more than an hour.

Gen. Campbell said the Pentagon is investigating the incident. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for an impartial investigation.

More about this below the fold.

I know there's going to be steep competition for the dumbest column about guns in the wake of [insert latest horrific mass murder here], but since The Fix keeps flogging this rather silly effort we're going to at least give it an honorable mention. After noting Obama's repeated point that gun deaths in America dwarf deaths by terrorism and musing that it might be "hard to know what point Obama was hoping to make," and after indeed crunching the numbers and agreeing that all the terrorism America has faced is mosquito spit in a bucket compared to the flood of gun deaths in America every single day:

Gun violence is real and pervasive, of course, but you could make the same point about fatalities that result from car crashes or from heart disease. The number of people who die from those things dwarfs the number of deaths from terrorism, too.

Yes. Yes, that is right. Those things also kill large numbers of Americans. And, for the benefit of the slow among us, we will again repeat that the difference between those things and gun violence is that Congress has not repeatedly passed multiple laws demanding that government be barred from doing anything to prevent car crashes or heart disease. Because, of course, that would be stupid. There is no pro-cancer lobbyist group demanding doctors not screen their patients for cancer because Freedom, and the few voices among us who huff that they should be able to launch their un-seat-belted protocorpses out of their car windshields if they damn well want to are, rightfully, ignored in favor of all the firefighters and police officers and paramedics who got tired of having to carry snow shovels in their trunks in order to laboriously peel those freedom-lovers back off the pavement.

Only gun violence is subjected to federal laws, passed by cheap crooks and supported by the paranoid, requiring government to not even examine why these things are happening. If private planes were crashing into American public classrooms at the rate of one a week. you can damn well bet that the cable news networks would pee their tailored pants in alarm, and presidential contenders would be beside themselves with public fury demanding that something be done, and there would be select committees and all of the usual pomp that important men surround themselves with when they want to be seen as giving a damn. We would shut down the airports. We would demand inspections of each and every plane. We would, in short, do something.

If elementary, middle, high school, or college students in America were constantly being killed on a classroom-by-classroom scale by crashing private planes, or monthly gas explosions, or a steady stream of ricin bombs, or packs of rabid wolves, or toxic pencil shavings, or ordinary crayons, or, yes, car accidents, heart attacks, or cancer, we would do something. We would do a lot of somethings; new laws, new safety requirements, new commissions, new investigations; we would keep doing them until we had made such incidents, at the very least, more rare than they used to be.

The right to simply walk into any classroom in America and start murdering people, however, is specifically and conspicuously Protected. It may not be infringed in the slightest, says the NRA, which has predicated all their recent lobbying and promotional fearmongering on the explicit premise that what with the "knockout game," and immigrants, and ISIS, and the government itself, their members may themselves find themselves in a position where they, too, need to murder large numbers of people at once and government shall not interfere with those preparations. This radical—well, objectively insane—premise is cited even by sitting congressmen as the reason why the rest of America shall be prohibited from doing anything to prevent those mass murders.

Head below the fold for more on this sad story.

Last week, news broke that Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner were meeting with President Obama on negotiating a two-year budget. Turns out, that information came from McConnell and was another move to screw over Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, even if just a little, and to make the process of negotiating a budget that much harder.

Reid and House Minority Nancy Pelosi thought they had an agreement with Republicans that a private conversation between GOP leaders and President Barack Obama about the budget would not be publicly disclosed—an effort to protect the early talks from political attacks.

But on Tuesday, with a little prompting from a reporter, Senate Majority Leader McConnell divulged that he’d been talking to the president along with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The Kentucky Republican conveniently didn't mention Senate Minority Leader Reid or Pelosi, who will both ultimately be integral to the talks despite McConnell's attempt to publicly freeze them out.

Just like that, the fall's high-stakes budget talks are off to a rough start. […]

After McConnell's comments, which Congress's Democratic minority viewed as an attempt to cut Democrats out of the talks, top aides rushed to emphasize the obvious: No deal can be made without Reid and Pelosi's assent, given that Republicans don't hold enough Senate seats to muscle a budget deal through, and House GOP leaders haven't been able to pass major spending deals without Democratic help. And, they added, Reid and Pelosi were fully aware of the GOP's talks with the president.

As if there wasn't enough uncertainty about the process now with the House in total disarray with Boehner's pending departure and one of his would-be replacements, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) promising that he'll both shutdown government and default on the debt. You might think with all that uncertainty, McConnell would step up and be at least a little bit responsible. That he would be working to limit the chaos to the House side. But that would be giving McConnell far too much credit. Clearly, governing is still not at the top of his agenda.