Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in giving her response to President Obama’s State of the Union message exemplified everything wrong with today’s Republican Party.

Ms. Rodgers spoke of being the first in her family to go to college. She also said she came to Washington “To grow the working middle class, not the government.”

She doesn’t seem to realize that colleges and universities deeply depend on government. She did an MBA at the University of Washington.

It is a great school. It is also the top-ranking public school for reception of Federal research funding. Without government funding and input, colleges and universities don’t thrive. And they are the chief ladder for working class people like herself and me into the middle class.

Rodgers has repeatedly voted to cut science funding. Deeply.

And while it is true that she was the first in her family to go to college, she chose to go to an unaccredited fundamentalist institution that teaches biblical literalism. She is welcome to her beliefs, but that isn’t an education in critical thinking, and her voting record and behavior show it. She had a great opportunity to open her mind and understand the world. She chose to close it, and now she is trying to close others’.

Her family emigrated to Canada for a while and worked there. They likely benefited from Canada’s health care system. Yet she has repeatedly voted to repeal the US Affordable Care Act.

Rodgers alleged that the Affordable Care Act costs jobs. The opposite is true. When she was challenged as to the basis for her charge, she did not answer.

She argued against any disadvantaging of Down Syndrome children (she has one) but did not note that Obamacare forbids denying treatment for pre-existing conditions.

As Sally Kohn noted, the GOP repeatedly has cut funding for Downs Syndrome research.

She worked on her family’s orchard as a youngster. But today’s farmers face no more pressing issue than climate change. California, you’ll note, just declared a drought, and while droughts are cyclical in the west, aridity is increasing because of human-caused climate change. Torrid El Nino years are likely to double in frequency with climate change.

Rodgers? She serves on the energy committee and has opposed government support for green energy while doing nothing to cut the billions in giveaways to Big Oil.

====

Related video:

Young Turks on Rodgers’ response to the SOTU

First, a Raw Story report, and below is the Gabriel interview with Piers Morgan:

CNN head Jeff Zucker: Fox News is Republican Party ‘masquerading as a news channel’ (via Raw Story )

Jeff Zucker, CNN’s current president, said on Friday that the Republican Party is being run by Fox News and that networks like Fox are just telling people what they want to hear “and missing the story.” According to Mediaite, Zucker was speaking…

——

Related video:

Gabriel Sherman, author of a new biography of Roger Ailes of Fox News, back Zucker up on CNN:

The dilemmas of proliferation with centrifuge technology are laid out clearly in this paper by Houston G. Wood et. al The paper, however, seems to me to underestimate how difficult it is to construct a warhead and delivery system. Moreover, Iran is being actively inspected by the UN and no country under ongoing inspections has ever developed a nuclear weapon.

Regular readers know that in 2009 I put forward a theory of Iranian actions, that the country does not want to blow up an actual bomb but that its security establishment wants what Japan has, nuclear latency or a break-out capacity, i.e. the ability to construct a bomb in short order if the country faces an existential threat (such as an invasion of the sort Iraq faced in 2002-3). Over time Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, as well as former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have agreed that Iran is likely not seeking a bomb but rather a break-out capacity. Nuclear latency has many of the same deterrent properties as actually having a bomb, but does not incur the kind of isolation North Korea is suffering.

A settlement of the conflict between the US and Iran over nuclear enrichment would have to convince the US that Iran has no active weapons production program, and would have to allow Iran to enrich for energy. What would a settlement look like?

1. Iran would have to stop being prickly and nationalistic and would have to give the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors access to everything they want to see. Iran maintains that it is not attempting to construct a bomb, but its protestations of innocence have been undermined by less than 100% cooperation with the inspectors. President Rouhani should pull out all the stops to ensure the inspectors get all the access they want. FM Zarif on Tuesday apparently ruled out snap inspections, but regular extensive inspections would anyway be more to the point.

2. The US would have to acknowledge Iran’s right to enrich uranium to 5% for fuel for its reactors. The US itself, France, Japan, Britain, Russia, China, India and some others either already do this or have the proven capacity to do so.

3. Iran would likely have to give up enriching uranium to 19.5% for its medical reactor, as a good faith measure.

4. The US would have to agree in return to allow at least some Iranian banks to return to the major international banking exchanges. At the least, the president would have to give assurances that he would not order third party sanctions on international banks that dealt with Iran.

5. Iran might have to accept online real-time monitoring of its uranium, both raw and low-enriched, by the IAEA

6. The US would have to agree not to veto steps by the UN Security Council to loosen or remove multilateral sanctions.

7. Iran’s uranium would have to be stored as uranium oxide, which is not as easy quickly to convert into high-enriched uranium.

8. President Obama should enunciate a doctrine that the US would not invade Iran or attempt to overthrow the Iranian regime in the absence of overt Iranian military aggression toward the US or a close US ally. The senate likely would not pass a non-aggression treaty, but a presidential doctrine would have some legal and moral force. This step is important because the Iranian quest for nuclear latency is driven by regime insecurity, given the 1953 US coup against the then elected Iranian government.

9. Iran might have to agree to limit the number of centrifuges it maintains, so as to make the rapid construction of a bomb much more difficult. There is no way for an enrichment program to be prevented completely from being used for bomb-making, but the break-out can be made difficult and time-consuming.

10. The US would have to learn to live with the vague potential of Iranian breakout. But US intelligence, satellite surveillance and the threat of restored severe sanctions could work to forestall any such development. Of course, the Supreme Leader of Iran has forbidden constructing, stockpiling or using nuclear weapons, so that attempting to break out in the absence of a clear and immediate threat to Iran’s survival would not be legitimate in the eyes even of regime loyalists. Ultimately, as well, the US and Israeli nuclear arsenals and sophisticated delivery systems are the real bar to Iran using a nuclear weapon, the likelihood of which is virtually in imaginary numbers territory.

Can a breakthrough be had? I believe so. The sticking points will be the extremists on both sides. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards and Leader Ali Khamenei think the negotiations are another imperialist US trick, and getting them to sign on the dotted line of an agreement won’t be easy. On the US side, the Israel lobbies and Israel itself will accept nothing less than the mothballing of the whole Iranian enrichment program, which is highly unlikely to happen.

A settlement would therefore have to be one that could be accomplished by Presidents Rouhani and Obama despite the carping of the right wings of their countries.

A lot is at stake. The severity of US unilateral sanctions now reaches the level of a financial blockade on Iran, and blockades are acts of war. An attempt to sanction Iran at these levels over the long term would incur a constant risk of tensions spiraling into war. The US economy was deeply wounded by Iraq; Iran is three times bigger, and another major such quagmire could finish the US off as a superpower.

President Obama followed the crisis from its first moments and came out promptly to caution against fruitless speculation as to the perpetrators as well as solemnly to vow that they will be held accountable. (He has a certain track record in that regard.)

The idea of three dead, several more critically wounded, and over a 100 injured, merely for running in a marathon (often running for charities or victims of other tragedies) is terrible to contemplate. Our hearts are broken for the victims and their family and friends, for the runners who will not run again.

There is negative energy implicit in such a violent event, and there is potential positive energy to be had from the way that we respond to it. To fight our contemporary pathologies, the tragedy has to be turned to empathy and universal compassion rather than to anger and racial profiling. Whatever sick mind dreamed up this act did not manifest the essence of any large group of people. Terrorists and supremacists represent only themselves, and always harm their own ethnic or religious group along with everyone else.

The negative energies were palpable. Fox News contributor Erik Rush tweeted, “Everybody do the National Security Ankle Grab! Let’s bring more Saudis in without screening them! C’mon!” When asked if he was already scapegoating Muslims, he replied, ““Yes, they’re evil. Let’s kill them all.” Challenged on that, he replied, “Sarcasm, idiot!” What would happen, I wonder, if someone sarcastically asked on Twitter why, whenever there is a bombing in the US, one of the suspects everyone has to consider is white people? I did, mischievously and with Mr. Rush in mind, and was told repeatedly that it wasn’t right to tar all members of a group with the brush of a few. They were so unselfconscious that they didn’t seem to realize that this was what was being done to Muslims!

It was easy for jingoists to find Chinese or Arabs on twitter gloating. But I saw much more of this kind of message:

#إنفجار_بوسطن Our religion doesn’t teach us to be happy on people’s’ miseries.

— Zaynab AlAlawi (@ZaynabDAlAlawi) April 16, 2013

or there was this:

#إنفجار_بوسطنTerrorism has no religion whether it is in Boston or in Syria

— Osama Alharthi (@osamahr) April 16, 2013

But there were positive energies as well. The Egyptian woman activist Asma’ Mahfouz, who was important in calling for the Tahrir demonstrations that kicked off the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, said that she admired the American sense of deep concern for the welfare of citizens, and the way authorities came out promptly to speak to the incident. She contrasted this situation to that in Egypt, where, she alleged, the authorities have less respect for the value of citizens’ lives. For a young Egyptian revolutionary, America is still an exemplary nation in some regards, and many in the world admire it even in the way it deals with adversity.

Similar sentiments were voiced by the journalist Fatima Naout, who said that when dozens of Egyptians died in a train accident, it took President Morsi 12 hours to come on television, and then he made only a brief statement of less than a minute. She also complained of innocents being arrested for sabotage and ultimately released, while what she called Muslim Brotherhood gangs attacked demonstrators with impunity. She said that the US is a nation of laws and upright judicial procedure, and Egypt still is not.

On the other side of the aisle in Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood members of the Senate (Majlis al-Shura) unhesitatingly condemned the bombings. MP Izz al-Din al-Kumi condemned all violence that harmed individuals of any nationality. He discounted a return to the ‘war on terror’ atmosphere of 9/11, saying that al-Qaeda had suffered too many blows any longer to be a viable organization. Dr. Farid al-Bayyad, another parliamentarian said, “Regardless of our differences with American policy, we roundly condemn these attacks.”

Some Syrians and Iraqis pointed out that many more people died from bombings and other violence in their countries on Monday than did Americans, and that they felt slighted because the major news networks in the West (which are actually global media) more or less ignored their carnage but gave wall to wall coverage of Boston.

Aljazeera English reported on the Iraq bombings, which killed some 46 in several cities, and were likely intended to disrupt next week’s provincial election.

Over the weekend, Syrian regime fighter jets bombed Syrian cities, killing two dozen people, including non-combatants:

What happened in Boston is undeniably important and newsworthy. But so is what happened in Iraq and Syria. It is not the American people’s fault that they have a capitalist news model, where news is often carried on television to sell advertising. The corporations have decided that for the most part, Iraq and Syria aren’t what will attract Nielsen viewers and therefore advertising dollars. Given the global dominance by US news corporations, this decision has an impact on coverage in much of the world.

Here is a video by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) on the dilemma of the over one million displaced Syrians, half of them children:

So I’d like to turn the complaint on its head. Having experienced the shock and grief of the Boston bombings, cannot we in the US empathize more with Iraqi victims and Syrian victims? Compassion for all is the only way to turn such tragedies toward positive energy.

Perhaps some Americans, in this moment of distress, will be willing to be also distressed over the dreadful conditions in which Syrian refugees are living, and will be willing to go to the aid of Oxfam’s Syria appeal. Some of those Syrians living in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey were also hit by shrapnel or lost limbs. Perhaps some of us will donate to them in the name of our own Boston Marathon victims of senseless violence.

Terrorism has no nation or religion. But likewise its victims are human beings, precious human beings, who must be the objects of compassion for us all.