This is a very disappointing event. As someone who has been personally targeted in the past, I’m saddened to see the continuing disrespect for free expression by those whose political movement was supposedly born in the “Free Speech Movement” of the 1960s. Since then, we’ve gone through campus speech codes, bans on “hate speech” (defined as any speech the hearer disagrees with), attempts to get people fired for disagreeable political views, and now the use of the courts to get those on the other side arrested.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue.  Anyone who wants the freedom to express their own views online needs to respect the rights of others to do so.  More importantly, they can’t stand mute or make up excuses when someone on the other side is targeted.  The bullies might be filing the court papers against you next.

Davis was a rising star in the Democratic party and a leader in the Blue Dog coalition. He lost the 2010 primary after being attacked as too conservative.

Although I generally find a wide range of views on the site, it seems the “tolerant of dissenting views” gang at the Huffington Post isn’t too pleased.

In the least surprising news of the week, Mitt Romney has officially clinched the Republican Nomination for President.

CNN, Fox and MSNBC have all made their projections.

This of course will not have much impact on the views of hard core Ron Paul supporters, who continue to cling to the theory that Paul will somehow overcome the realities of math (something Mike Huckabee had a problem with in 2008).

To those who insisted that there was no way the GOP could avoid a brokered convention… well you know.

I have not said anything because I have been too busy remembering, honoring and writing about those heroes.

(Mr. Hayes has apologized since.)

But now that Memorial Day is over and we can feel “comfortable” again — at least until the next Veterans Day or Memorial Day — about sending our non-heroes into harm’s way I will say something about that again.

I say again, because I have called all our fighting men and women — not only those who die in battle — “heroes.”

And, just as I expect it to happen again, I received an earful then, but that goes with the territory.

Reacting to a column, “Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service With Heroism,” written by retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. William J. Astore, wherein the colonel discussed all the technical, logical and semantic reasons why our fighting men and women should not be collectively called “heroes,” I wrote:

I am one of those misguided, clueless people who, when writing about our military men and women slugging it out in Iraq and Afghanistan, engaged in combat, just trying not to get killed or maimed by an IED, or just driving a truck with supplies across the desert, instinctively and invariably refers to them as “heroes.”

I went on to give my reasons as to why I call our servicemen and women heroes.

I know that not everyone of our fighting men and women fits the definition of “hero.” I call them collectively heroes out of general, across-the-board respect and admiration for them, and out of deep gratitude for the sacrifices they make for our country.

Those who fit the strict definition of “hero” will still be singled out, recognized, honored and “celebrated” with the appropriate military awards and decorations designed and reserved for just such acts of valor and heroism. I do not believe the “real heroes” would begrudge their brothers and sisters in arms from being referred to as “heroes.” As a matter of fact, real heroes do not feel they are heroes at all.

I categorically reject the opinions of those who say that creating such a class or league of “heroes” would play down the brutalizing effects of war, would justify, even glorify war and would desensitize us to the cruelties and atrocities of war.

The American people overwhelmingly reject the Iraq War and want our nation to end the war in Afghanistan. They overwhelmingly condemn the atrocities committed by a handful of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in all wars.

I do not believe that by supporting our troops, by calling them heroes, Americans approve of every war or attach a connotation of “nobleness” to every military action our leaders take us into. Americans are intelligent enough to make distinctions between the policy decisions that take our nation into war and the troops who are called upon to fight those wars — heroically.

I believe that taking issue with symbolic, laudatory labels for our troops — even though those labels may be overly generous — in order to condemn wars and in order to condemn those who sent our troops to war is wrongheaded.

Moreover, I believe that in taking issue with those who would call our troops “heroes,” to cite the “ennoblement” of German militarism during World War I or the Nazi atrocities during World War II — which included the Holocaust — is an affront to the intelligence and to the moral compass of the American people.

I totally oppose the Iraq war and question our continued involvement in Afghanistan. I have written frequently and strongly about my opposition.

And yet, I still call those men and women who have fought and continue to fight in those wars “heroes” — and I will continue to do so with all due respect to those who disagree with me.

As I concluded my previous piece on this issue:

Astore is correct that “[I]n rejecting blanket ‘hero’ labels today, we would not be insulting our troops.” That is because our troops “collectively” cannot be insulted. Just as calling them heroes does not cheapen true acts of heroism, nor does it justify, humanize or glorify war. Governments and politicians who take us into war might justify and glorify wars, not the troops who fight and die in them.

A Vietnam War era veteran, who did not see combat and who is not a hero, but who will always call our troops collectively, perhaps allegorically, but above all, earnestly heroes.

CODA:

In June 2011, while we were still in Iraq, the Stars and Stripes published this preface to their section called — you guessed it — “Heroes.”

I thought I would be appropriate to quote it here:

After nearly a decade of war, it’s easy to become numb to it.

You read the newspaper, you watch the television and it just keeps coming, one day after another until it all runs together. You mourn the dead and you celebrate the victories, but you can’t allow yourself to feel too deeply or it becomes too much. If you’re one of the 99 percent of Americans not actively fighting this country’s battles, war is difficult to understand.

But we must try. We owe it to the 1 percent.

For them, it’s not complicated. It’s not about surges and drawdowns and Capitol Hill bickering. For the men and women who will lace up their boots in Afghanistan or Iraq today, their only goal is to complete the mission and lie down to sleep at night one day closer to coming home.

It’s not easy. Sometimes completing an ordinary mission requires extraordinary heroism. These are the stories you’ll find in the seventh edition of Stars and Stripes’ Heroes special section.

The servicemembers profiled here never sought glory. Though many later received valor medals, they sought only to succeed and survive and to protect the one standing beside them. Most of them made it home safely, some didn’t. Others are still at war today.

To understand, we must know their stories.

We owe it to the 1 percent.

To read the stories of these heroes, please go here

A cry against judicial activism came from Southern conservatives when the Warren Supreme Court in a 9-0 landmark decision in 1954, Brown v Board of Education, declared state laws unconstitutional that authorized separate public schools for black and white students. The Court decided that these laws violated the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This overturned Plessy v Ferguson which in 1896 had ruled in favor of state supported segregation. Subsequently, in 1973, in Roe v Wade, the Court struck down anti-abortion laws that had been enacted by many states, by a 7-2 margin. Conservatives again saw this as judicial over reaching by the Court.

Since that decision, the Court has ruled a number of times limiting the scope of Roe v Wade with conservative approval. In 1980, it validated the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting federal funds from being used by indigent women for abortions. In Rust v Sullivan in 1991, it upheld regulations that banned abortion counseling and referrals from family planning clinics that received federal funds. In a number of other cases since, it has favored further restrictions on women’s rights to choose abortion. Since these rulings upheld state and federal laws, they could be considered judicial restraint rather than activism.

Other rulings by the Supreme Court have overturned local laws restricting use of guns and upheld laws that expanded gun rights. These decisions affirmed the conservative outlook of the Court, with judicial activism evident in the first instance when legislation developed by elected bodies was ruled invalid. Rulings narrowing the scope of the 1966 Miranda decision about a criminal suspect’s right to remain silent reinforced the Court’s leaning to the right, as did decisions regarding privacy, free speech and immigration.

However, the major manifestation of the Court’s conservative judicial activism came with its Citizen’s United ruling in 2010 that overturned decades of laws and precedents that had attempted to control campaign spending. Statutes had existed limiting corporate contributions in election campaigns since 1906, the most recent of which was the McCain-Feingold Act passed in 2002. This had been upheld by the Court in a 5-4 decision in 2003 in McConnell v Federal Election Commission. Then Citizens United overrode past precedent to strike down the provisions of McCain-Feingold that limited corporate spending in federal election campaigns, saying it went against the First Amendment that protected freedom of speech. Conservatives had previously argued that judicial activism was only credible when protecting rights that were present in the text of the constitution, or if intent of the framers of the constitution had been evident. These criteria were not met in this bald act of judicial activism by the Court, unleashing Super PACs upon the country.

The question now remains how the Supreme Court will rule on the Affordable Care Act. Given the Court’s recent history of conservative judicial activism, it seems likely the justices will either find the entire Act or the individual mandate unconstitutional. When this decision is handed down, one can not expect any cries against judicial activism to come from the right.

Resurrecting Democracy

A VietNam vet and a Columbia history major who became a medical doctor, Bob Levine has watched the evolution of American politics over the past 40 years with increasing alarm. He knows he’s not alone. Partisan grid-lock, massive cash contributions and even more massive expenditures on lobbyists have undermined real democracy, and there is more than just a whiff of corruption emanating from Washington. If the nation is to overcome lockstep partisanship, restore growth to the economy and bring its debt under control, Levine argues that it will require a strong centrist third party to bring about the necessary reforms. Levine’s previous book, Shock Therapy For the American Health Care System took a realist approach to health care from a physician’s informed point of view; Resurrecting Democracy takes a similar pragmatic approach, putting aside ideology and taking a hard look at facts on the ground. In his latest book, Levine shines a light that cuts through the miasma of party propaganda and reactionary thinking, and reveals a new path for American politics. This post is cross posted from his blog.

Image via Shutterstock.com

The problem is that there are few buyers. The facilities for sale are elaborate to the point of esoteric. I mean, who really needs a piggery?  Maybe we can use it as a home for retired politicians, if we can get them to retire.

In honor of our fallen troops, CNN.com has created an amazing interactive “Home & Away map” which includes information about all of the men and women who have died in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars since 2001.

It is a stunning, interactive map where you can learn where our heroes lived and how and where they died on the battlefields, in the deserts, in the mountains and in the streets of towns and cities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also, the distribution according to age (note how young most of them were), home states and when they died.

For example, point and click to Monroe, MI, and the names of the two service members from that town who died in Iraq will pop up. Click on one of the names, and you’ll see where and how he died. You can also leave a message or memory about them for their families.

Amazing and sad.

Please take a moment during the final hours on this Memorial Day to visit the site and honor our fallen soldiers here and here.

President Obama Commemorates Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery

In an unusual “op-ed” published today in Military.com, Military Times and Stars and Stripes, President Barack Obama paid tribute to all “our men and women in uniform who gave their lives so that we could live free” in all our wars, but singled out the Vietnam War (This Memorial Day marks the beginning of the 50th anniversary of that War), those who died in that war and its veterans.

Indicating that he would join Vietnam veterans and their families for a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., the President writes:

I’ll join Vietnam veterans and their families for a ceremony to begin this 50th anniversary. It will be an occasion to honor the 58,282 names on The Wall—men and women who gave their lives in that war. We’ll stand with their families, who have borne that loss ever since. And we’ll reaffirm our commitment to never stop searching for the 1,666 service members who are still missing from that war.

The President expresses sorrow — and shame — that the Vietnam War veterans “didn’t always receive the respect and thanks they deserved, [that][a]t times they were neglected and even shunned,” and makes it clear that this 50th anniversary is America’s “opportunity to do it right,” to give our Vietnam veterans the respect and honor they deserve.

He concludes:

This Memorial Day, let’s remember all those who’ve put on the uniform, served far from home, and laid down their lives so we can live ours in security and freedom. And let’s take this opportunity to truly honor and support all those who served and sacrificed in Vietnam. That’s what we’ll be doing when we gather today at The Wall, and that’s what we can all do together in the months and years ahead.

Please read the entire op-ed here.

Image: White House.gov

Those who served in that conflict often questioned the wisdom and merits of our involvement but they still served with distinction and honor. While they might not have supported the war they did support their brothers and sisters in arms.

Many came home with grevious wounds, both physical and mental. Many of those wounds endure to this day.

At the time, the men and women who served in that conflict were at best ignored, at worst spat upon by the people of the nation they had served.

Today the President of the United States, The Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff presided over ceremonies at the Vietnam War Memorial to honor those who served in that conflict.

We can spend years debating the merits of that conflict, the wisdom of our entry, the legacy of that involvement.

But may we NEVER again fail to honor those who served their nation.

So in memory and honor of all who have fallen in defense of our nation.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Happy Memorial Day Everyone

It’s pretty clear to me, however, that money isn’t the only Big M explanation for Walker’s apparent current lead in the polls. Perhaps not even the most important one. The more important M Factor at work here is Mean-spiritedness.

Why have so many people in Wisconsin bought into the Walker way of political thinking? Why have public service unions proven such a popular target? Are members of the public service unions Walker has been bashing so successfully wallowing in luxury at the public’s expense?

Of course not. These union members have simply enjoyed, through the process of collective bargaining, a traditional American standard of living no longer accessible to so many others.

A growing number of these others in Wisconsin have lost many of the rights and perks that make up our traditional standard of living. The job security. Wages that grow faster than inflation every year. Benefits like health insurance paid for by employers.

The Walker mean-spirited pitch? These union people are getting something you don’t have. I won’t make your own lives better, but you’ll at least feel better if state employers can be brought down, that the unions protecting rights and perks you no longer have protected can be undermined.

Similar billionaire underwritten mean-spirited politics is at work in other realms like with food stamps and Medicaid. Why should others get free food when you work so hard to buy food for your your own family, just because these others are so poor? Why should others get free health care with Medicaid when your own health care costs are so high, just because these others are so poor?

You can govern in difficult times by bringing people together, by appealing to their better angels. Or you can take the 50-percent-plus-1 approach to governance, turn a tad more than half the voters into a nasty-minded mini-majority conned into identifying their own interests with those of their financial betters, while also turning them hostile towards anyone less well-off than themselves.

A line from a famous poem by W.H. Auden runs: “We must love one another or die.” The State of Wisconsin has died a little since Scott Walker took office. The cruel mean-spiritedness of many Republic Party nostrums these days is driving the whole country further and further away from communion with our better angels.

This is the result, an amazing performance that raises the bar for future grooms to hopeless levels.

But wow…

Just one quick shot of the Iowa heading out under the Golden Gate Bridge, with a more detailed posting to follow

Frank Bruni writes in this morning’s New York Times, that race is still at the center of the American presidential contest:

Although race represents a less central dynamic for Obama now than it did in 2008, it’s a factor in his political fortunes nonetheless. It poisons some of his opponents, pumping them full of a toxic zeal beyond the partisan norm. How else to explain their obsession with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or the lunatic persistence of the “birthers,” including the Arizona secretary of state, who didn’t drop his threat to keep Obama off the state ballot until Wednesday? Even as he quieted down, Donald Trump piped up, raising questions yet again about where Obama was born, though Trump’s motivations are surely less racist than narcissistic, even entrepreneurial. For him attention is attention and ratings are ratings, no matter how repulsively drummed up.

Life would be so much easier for Americans if the race question would disappear. But it is part of America’s DNA. Perhaps it will always be so. On the other hand, it is part of the theme of hope and change which Obama ran on in 2008:

He still personifies the hope, to borrow a noun that he has used, that we really might evolve into the colorblind, fair-minded country that many of us want. His own saga taps into the larger story of this country’s fitful, unfinished progress toward its stated ideal of equal opportunity.

And that is the essential problem Mitt Romney faces. He personifies success. But he has not established an emotional connection with voters. Nobody questions Romney’s success as a businessman, as a father or a husband. But Obama speaks to America’s aspirations. Romney speaks to its bottom line.

This is a moment of history folks, never again will a battleship sail under the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Iowa has been a part of US history, from taking FDR to Yalta all the way to Ronald Reagan and the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty.

The fact that this voyage occurs on both Memorial Day weekend and during the 75th anniversary celebrations for the bridge seems quite fitting.

I would hope that CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc will be covering the transit, so keep an eye out on the news.

You can also track things at The Pacific Battleship Center.

They also have a Facebook page, just look for Pacific Battleship Center.

In 1940, FDR won reelection against a likable corporate lawyer, Wendell Willkie, who was dubbed the Barefoot Boy from Wall Street and easily defeated.

Four years later, Thomas E. Dewey, a buttoned-down former prosecutor with a campaign strategy of not being “prematurely specific” on issues, was described as an opportunist who “changes his views from hour to hour.” Pictured by his own aide as “cold as a February iceberg,” Dewey was dispatched as the Little Man on the Wedding Cake.

Now, Obama is running for reelection against a changeable Wall Street insider with current views that make Willkie and Dewey look like flaming radicals, one who claims that his experience as a venture capitalist qualifies him to be President.

Democrats have floated Vulture Capitalist, but the label has not stuck. Now Obama is working on another, Clueless Capitalist.

On the stump, the President tells of Romney’s answer to a question about financial struggles, “right out of an economic textbook. He said, ‘Our productivity equals our income.’ And the notion was that somehow the reason people can’t pay their bills is because they’re not working hard enough.

“If they got more productive, suddenly their incomes would go up. Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world (laughter) know that the problem isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough…”

MORE.

Is there finally going to be closure? Or, rather, a semblance of closure — because how could there really ever be closure in the case of an innocent 6 year old child who vanished in 1972, was declared legally dead in 2001, helped spark the missing children’s movement, and was the first lost child displayed on a milk cartoon — developments which underscored the tragedy of young children with their lives in front of them vanishing, seemingly being whisked mysteriously away, never to be seen or heard from again. As in the case of Etan Patz .

But finall, it seems, the case of Etan Patz is a lingering a mystery no more.

The reasons: a family’s sense of civic responsibility and the apparent killer’s case of terminal cancer coupled with end-of-life pangs of guilt. Police think they finally have their killer — who reportedly lured the child with soda, then strangled him, and disposed of him. And walked around, alive, living, seeing his friends and relatives, all of these years. ABC News:

Police today arrested a former grocery worker in the 1979 murder of Etan Patz, apparently ending a mystery of what happened to the 6-year-old boy that has haunted New York City for three decades.

Pedro Hernandez, 51, confessed to police that he lured Patz to his death with the promise of a soda. He took police back to the basement of a Manhattan boedga and showed them where he claimed he strangled Patz.

He said he stuffed the boy’s body into a plastic garbage bag, carried it to another location in the Soho neighborhood and dumped it in the trash.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Hernandez provided no motive for the killing.

Patz, a handsome blond boy, vanished on the first day he was allowed to walk to the school bus stop alone on May 25, 1979. Friday will be the 33rd anniversary of his disappearance.

Kelly said detectives were drawn to Hernandez in recent days because Hernandez had told family members and friends as early as 1981 that he had “done a bad thing and killed a child in New York.”

It was one of those family members or friends who alerted police following renewed interest in the case when police excavated the basement apartment of a building on the same block last month where Patz lived and Hernandez worked.

Kelly said police had informed Patz’s parents, who have for years wondered what happened to their 6-year-old son.

“We only hope these developments bring some measure of peace to the family,” Kelly said.

Patz’s father, Stan Patz, was “a little surprised, but after all the things he has gone through he handled it very well,” said Lt. Chris Zimmerman, head of the NYPD Missing Persons Unit.

Modern media with its info-asault and a society that features watching fictional murders on TV and the movie as big-bucks-making fun entertainment have largely deadened us to the human impact of this story, even though most of us go through the motions of supposedly being able to understand. Perhaps our minds blot it out: the horror, shock and pain that the little boy faced in his final moments….the sheering pain of the parents when the days dragged on and their child didn’t return…then the months…then the years…their missing child’s belongings in their apartment, constant reminders, triggers of uncertainty and sinking-feeling-grief. Their lives went on; but they were never the same lives and the grief would never, ever leave them.

But for the boy’s father, at least this (if there is no final twist in the confession being deemed invalid) erases a questionmark that has been hovering for years. Here’s a video of Stan Patz recalling that awful day.

CBS News: Etan Patz then and Hernandez today

CBS News:

Pedro Hernandez was 18 years old then. Today, he is 51, and police say he confessed to the crime.

It was exactly 33 years ago, May 25, 1979, also a Friday, when a boy walking to the school bus stop alone for the first time, no more than a single block, seemed to vanish into thin air.

Police began their investigation at the Patz family’s Manhattan loft. They followed up on leads in Israel, Columbus, Ohio, even the Pennsylvania woods.

But on the eve of the 33rd anniversary, it was learned that the answer to the mystery may have been no farther than the corner store…

…Hernandez, 51, worked at a neighborhood grocery store. The Patz family knew it well.

But it was another clue, a dead-end lead, that forced the truth out of hiding.

Last month, when investigators dug up the basement of a building down the street, stories of the mystery of Etan Patz were back in the news and triggered the conscience of someone who had been carrying a dark secret for too long.

It was a relative of Hernandez who called police.

“In the years following Etan’s disappearance, Hernandez had told a family member and others that he had ‘done a bad thing’ and killed a child in New York,” Kelly said.

On Wednesday, New York City police detectives came to a small New Jersey house. Within hours, they say, Hernandez had confessed, and then allowed police to follow as he retraced his steps at the scene of the crime.

Lisa Cohen has written the most authoritative book on the Etan Patz case, “After Etan: The Missing Child Case that Held America Captive.”

Was the anniversary of his disappearance significant?

“I don’t think it’s unusual that things happen on this case on the anniversary or near the anniversary. I think it’s a time when people remember,” Cohen said.

The AP on the arrest:

Now it is 33 years to the day, and so much has changed because of Etan Patz, the boy from Prince St. in SoHo who changed the world by never making it to his bus stop one day, never making it to school. And never coming home.

We put the faces of missing children on milk cartons now because of Etan Patz. Parents of this city now look at everything, including their own neighborhoods, differently. All because of this one 6-year-old boy who went missing.

The abduction of Patz is not more tragic than any other because of all the pictures of him we have seen over all the years, because he was white and beautiful and it happened in Manhattan. Maybe it just seemed endlessly tragic because the case never officially closed, and was opened again this week in New York.

This time there is a full confession, oral and written and on video at the D.A.’s office from a former SoHo bodega worker named Pedro Hernandez. So Etan Patz is in the news again, all this time after it happened, after a morning in May 1979 when he begged his parents to let him go to the bus stop alone, just one time.

He remains the little boy who stayed 6 forever.

And his parents have stayed right where they were 33 years ago, the same apartment on Prince St. where they were living the day the boy disappeared. Of course, you know why, especially if you are a parent. They kept hoping Etan Patz, 6, would somehow make it home. Kept waiting for him to come through the door.

They kept hoping for the best, even when they had to know, after the first day became a week, and then a month, and then a year, that the worst thing that could happen to their middle child had happened.

Much later, Stan and Julie Patz had to have watched the story of Elizabeth Smart play out in Utah the way it did. She was a girl older than Etan, 14 years old, abducted from her bedroom in Salt Lake City. She was found nine months later, alive, just 18 miles away, in a place called Sandy, Utah, spotted by an alert biker who had just seen a story about Smart on America’s Most Wanted.”

It’s always wrenching to think about the lives of children and teenagers ending in senseless violence inflicted by adults or themselves. But little Etan’s disappearance, legally proclaimed death, and the apparent confession make this one most notable.

So there might be some closure in the case of Etan Patz.

But not in what happens to some innocent children.

And their parents.

Foreign nationals now comprise the majority of scientists and engineers being trained in the U.S. for advanced degrees. For example, they account for 50% of master’s degrees and 70% of Ph.d degrees in electrical engineering. On an undergraduate level, foreign born residents earn 33% of all degrees in engineering, 27% of those in computer science, math and statistics, and 24% of those in the physical sciences. Each year vast numbers of students from abroad come to study in our universities, because the education they receive is superior to what they can get at home. Last year, 160,000 Chinese men and women were enrolled in American universities, about 60% of them pursuing engineering or science degrees. Yet our poorly conceived laws limit thousands of these scientists and engineers from obtaining jobs in our country after they graduate, even though they would prefer to stay and our high-tech firms would love to have them. We should be trying to lure these foreign graduates to work in America, rather than making it difficult for them to gain employment.

A Harvard Business School study found that almost half of the scientists and engineers with doctorates currently working in the U.S. were immigrants, and they accounted for 67% of the increase in American scientists and engineers between 1995 and 2006. The need for these educated foreign born workers will only grow as the Baby Boomers age and retire in the years ahead.

At the same time that immigration laws block many foreign-born scientists and engineers from working in America, China and India are actively recruiting those that are here, providing outsized bonuses and other inducements. As a case in point, according to the New York Times, China has been offering experienced professors and researchers bonuses of approximately $158, 000 to come back home.

The flow of these university graduates to their native countries from the U.S. can be considered a reverse brain drain, inverting the expected pattern of immigration. Federal funds subsidize the education of these scientists and engineers with grants to the universities they attend, aiding the economies of other nations and helping them to compete against us. America also loses the tens of thousands of patents and new technology these foreign scientists and engineers would have developed in our country, which would have created more jobs. These go instead to the nations to which they’ve returned.

Opposition to allowing more foreign scientists and engineers to work in America has come from some unions who claim that they drive down wages for American workers. Since there are jobs going unfilled in the high-tech fields because there are not enough scientists and engineers, the charge appears ludicrous. And foreign workers in these firms receive salaries that for the most part are comparable to American workers. In addition, immigration agency bureaucrats have complicated the processes that foreign-born scientists and engineers must go through to work in the United States, making it more difficult for them to obtain jobs. But the real problem lies with the politicians hostile to immigration who have been against increasing the visas for educated workers.

Given the paucity of American students seeking advanced degrees in science and engineering, we should be handing out green cards and welcoming any potential workers or entrepreneurs in the high tech sector. We should also provide them with easier paths to citizenship so they will be more likely to remain. It will only benefit our economy in the long run.

Resurrecting Democracy

em>A VietNam vet and a Columbia history major who became a medical doctor, Bob Levine has watched the evolution of American politics over the past 40 years with increasing alarm. He knows he’s not alone. Partisan grid-lock, massive cash contributions and even more massive expenditures on lobbyists have undermined real democracy, and there is more than just a whiff of corruption emanating from Washington. If the nation is to overcome lockstep partisanship, restore growth to the economy and bring its debt under control, Levine argues that it will require a strong centrist third party to bring about the necessary reforms. Levine’s previous book, Shock Therapy For the American Health Care System took a realist approach to health care from a physician’s informed point of view; Resurrecting Democracy takes a similar pragmatic approach, putting aside ideology and taking a hard look at facts on the ground. In his latest book, Levine shines a light that cuts through the miasma of party propaganda and reactionary thinking, and reveals a new path for American politics. This post is cross posted from his blog.

Image via Shutterstock.com

Listen to what Newt Gingrich said in January: “The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave. I’ll let you decide if that’s really good capitalism. I think that’s exploitation.”

Or what Rick Perry said that same month: “There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business. I happen to think that that is indefensible.”

When Democrats say things like that, they’re accused of being Bolsheviks who want to destroy capitalism. But even in the context of the GOP primary battle, where “moderate” was the ultimate epithet, Romney’s actions at Bain were seen as raising a legitimate and important question: Shouldn’t free markets serve the American people, rather than the other way around?

President Obama is right to raise this issue now. I wish he had done so during the debate on financial regulatory reform — only now is he posing the kind of fundamental questions that needed to be asked — but better late than never. In his defense, a tough re-election campaign does tend to concentrate the mind.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with private equity, which plays an important role in the economy. And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with wealth; those who risk their capital in private-equity ventures should be rewarded when those deals pay off. No one begrudges Romney his offshore investment accounts, his mansions or his wife’s Cadillacs.

But as Romney himself acknowledges, free markets need rules and regulations in order to function. Some kinds of dealings are prohibited or even criminalized — insider trading, for example, because of the way it benefits a select few at the expense of other investors.

It is reasonable to ask whether some highly leveraged buyout deals, of the kind that Bain and other private-equity firms often conduct, should fall into the same thumb-on-the-scale category as insider trading.

Suppose a company is failing and appears beyond rescue. Suppose a private-equity firm buys the company with borrowed money, burdens it with more debt, and then spends the next few years firing workers, selling assets, eliminating pension plans — all the while collecting handsome “management fees.” Then the company fails anyway, as it was fated to do.

What higher economic purpose has been served? Why is this not what Perry memorably called “vulture capitalism”?

The discussion we should be having goes far beyond the relatively small world of private equity. Look at the mounting losses as the nation’s largest and supposedly best-run bank, JPMorgan Chase — at least $2 billion and perhaps much more.

The transactions that produced the losses are numbingly complex, but essentially they involved betting both ways on the direction of various economic and business indicators. The idea was to balance the bets so that if the bank’s predictions were right it would make a lot of money; and if the predictions were wrong it would lose money, but not so much.

The bank got on a winning streak, and so it made bigger and bigger bets. Then the bank’s luck turned south, and Chairman Jamie Dimon discovered that the betting positions were unbalanced; instead of losing a little money, the bank was set up to lose a lot.

Sharp-eyed traders at hedge funds noticed what was happening and jumped in to take advantage of a big spender on the skids.

That’s a classic Las Vegas story, but why should it be a Wall Street story? Should a bank whose deposits are federally insured — a bank big enough to crash the financial system — be standing at a craps table in the middle of the night yelling, “Baby needs a new pair of shoes”?

This is what Rick Santorum said in March: “I heard Governor Romney here called me an economic lightweight because I wasn’t a Wall Street financier like he was. Do you really believe this country wants to elect a Wall Street financier as the president of the United States? Do you think that’s the kind of experience we need? Someone who’s going to take and look after, as he did, his friends on Wall Street and bail them out at the expense of Main Street America?”

Good question. I’d like to hear Romney’s answer.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. (c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group