The Plain Dealer had a story on the front page yesterday that summed up perfectly the attitude of the Republican party.

The concrete sound barriers erected along the highways to shield nearby residents from noise were crumbling long before the advertised 20-year life expectancy was reached, presumably because inferior concrete had been used. Repairing them will cost the Ohio transportation department more than $1 million per mile, money that is hard to come by these days when governments are being squeezed by the demand for tax cuts.

What struck me was the comment of one resident who said, “It looks terrible. I know they don’t have the money, and I don’t want my taxes to go up to fix it. But they need to do something.”

Really? No doubt she expects magic elves to do the repair work for free once they have finished helping out the shoemaker.

Glenn Greenwald points out that the popular claim by politicians and media figures that the public is willing to sacrifice civil liberties in return for security is in fact not supported by opinion polls.

The dream world of Villager punditry is truly something to behold. Take William Cohan who has a suggestion in the Washington Post for Elizabeth Warren, who has just declared her candidacy to run for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts currently held by Republican Scott Brown.

Seven weeks removed from the political reality that cost her a job as one of the nation’s best-known — and controversial — advocates for consumers and the middle class, Elizabeth Warren now officially wants to return to Washington as the junior senator from Massachusetts. But if she is really serious about wanting to help working Americans and reform Wall Street, Warren should consider a different line of work: She should get a job as a partner at Goldman Sachs.

The idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

No, it is as crazy as it sounds, if not crazier. The idea that Elizabeth Warren, after railing for years at how banks like Goldman Sachs have been profiting while impoverishing the middle classes by taking advantage of deregulation and lax oversight by the government, could simply pick up the phone and ask Goldman Sachs to hire her to reform it, and that Goldman Sachs would offer her a partnership in order to reform itself is doubly bizarre.

The only way that this could happen is if there is cynical collusion between Warren and Goldman Sachs in which Warren is just another cynical academic on the make and agrees to uses her reputation for integrity to get a high-paying job providing cover for Goldman Sachs for the pretense that it is serious about reforming itself. But if that is the case, then this demolishes Cohan’s argument that this move would help in reforming Goldman Sachs and Wall Street.

What amazes me is that these Villager pundits actually get paid to churn out this drivel.

The occasion of the unveiling of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial causes Cornel West to decry the oligarchic control of the US.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

Michele Bachmann is continuing to take a well-deserved pounding on her irresponsible publicizing of a claim by some person she said she met who said that her daughter had become mentally retarded as a result of taking the HPV vaccine.

What started out as an effective attack on Rick Perry, suggesting during Monday’s debate that he had issued an executive order mandating that the vaccinations be given to all young girls in Texas in return from contributions from the vaccine manufacturer Merck, has now become an albatross around her own neck. In doing so, she has deflected attention not only from Rick Perry but from the important question of how drug companies are unduly influencing decisions about health policy.

NPR interviewed Steven Miles, the bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who offered a $1,000 reward if Bachmann could provide “a properly signed medical release form so that these documents can be reviewed by highly qualified neurologists to see if this claim is true.” Bachmann has not responded to NPR’s queries about this challenge to produce the document. Miles further said that, “If we had a vaccine that would prevent a nonsexually caused cancer that affected 10,000 women a year, this would be a no-brainer. This controversy over the HPV vaccine is about the sexual politics in the United States. It is not about the medicine.”

Miles is absolutely right. The thought that somewhere some people might be having sex outside of marriage totally freaks out the religious right.

In a further sign of the steady deterioration of the US infrastructure, the US postal service may become the next victim of the oligarchy’s drive to eliminate anything that does not benefit themselves. The US postal service is an institution that is committed to serving people all over the nation and it delivers mail to even the remotest parts of the country at the same cost to anyone anywhere. So those of us in the cities where the volume of mail is large essentially subsidize the mail services of the more remote areas. It is a socialized system (i.e., one that spreads the cost over the entire population and thus makes it affordable to everyone) and thus targeted by those who oppose any measure that promotes the general welfare. Chuck Zlatkin describes the campaign to destroy the postal service. If it succeeds, the US will be the rare (only?) country that does not have a national mail system.

Phil Rubio explains to Stephen Colbert how the postal service has been shackled and the efforts being made to save it.

She made the announcement yesterday that she will be running for the US senate in Massachusetts. Her website is ElizabethWarren.com.

The oligarchy will pull out all the stops and pour money into this race to try to prevent her winning. People are going to troll through her past and drag her through the mud. This election will be a good indication of whether an earnest, centrist, political amateur can defeat the oligarchic machine and its professional cadres. I sincerely hope so.

My daughter moved to Massachusetts last month to go to graduate school and will likely work on this campaign. Although I live in Ohio, I gave the Warren campaign a contribution yesterday because improbable candidacies need money early.

Two bioethicists are offering up to $11,000 for the identification and release of the medical records of the person whom Michele Bachmann claimed became mentally retarded after getting the HPV vaccine. These kinds of irresponsible statements can cause great harm if not quickly challenged, as we saw with the claim that the MMR vaccination causes autism, and the media’s idiotic ‘balanced’ approach that treats even empirical questions as matters of opinon (“Some say this but others say that”) does nothing to dispel them.

I am glad that in this vacuum, private citizens are stepping up to clear the record.

“These types of messages in this climate have the capacity to do enormous public health harm,” [Steven Miles, a U of M bioethics professor] said of why he made the offer. “The woman, assuming she exists, put this claim into the public domain and it’s an extremely serious claim and it deserves to be analyzed.

Bachmann is sensing trouble and trying to wriggle out.

Bachmann somewhat walked back her comments Tuesday on Sean Hannity’s radio show, where she said she had “no idea” if the HPV vaccine was linked to mental illness. “I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a physician,” Bachmann said. “All I was doing is reporting what this woman told me last night at the debate.”

No, you are none of those things. But you are a high profile elected official running for the presidency, which means that your words get hugely amplified and so should know not to pass along stories that have the potential to cause panic and harm until you have had time to substantiate them. Why is that so hard to understand?

During Monday night’s Republican debate, in response to a hypothetical question from the awful Wolf Blitzer, the audience and Ron Paul seemed comfortable with the idea that a young person who is uninsured but suffers a life-threatening condition should be allowed to die because he chose not to buy health insurance. The alternative of a socialized single payer medical system where everyone is covered without exception, the norm in almost all developed countries, is of course too ghastly to contemplate for these lovers of personal freedom.

It turns out that the question was, at least as far as Paul was concerned, not that hypothetical after all. Kent Snyder, Ron Paul’s campaign manager in his run for the presidency in 2008, died at the age of 49 of complications from pneumonia, penniless and uninsured, because the premiums he would have had to pay to buy insurance were too high because of pre-existing conditions. The death of someone who was so close to him, purely because he could not afford health insurance, does not seem to have influenced Paul in the least. Instead, being the true believer he is, he eulogized Snyder as a martyr to the libertarian cause, which I am sure Snyder’s bereaved mother, who was also stuck with her son’s medical bills, deeply appreciated.

A self-described libertarian posted this comment on the above article about Snyder’s death: “My personal belief is that it is not society’s responsibility to deal with the uninsured. In extreme circumstances (national disasters for example), perhaps. My tax dollars need to go to basic government services, nothing else. I don’t need to fund the NEA, someone’s family planning mistake or alternative energy companies, etc, etc. I’m sorry to appear callous but its not my responsibility to take care of a total stranger. We are all adults here, presumably, lets deal with our own issues ourselves.”

I am always amused by libertarians’ careful inclusion of the ‘basic government services’ and ‘national disasters’ exemptions to their general ‘keep the government out of everything’ policy. It usually means that they want the government to intervene only to help when they themselves are in need. These libertarians tend to be well off owners of property and are self-centered hypocrites, wanting the government to provide only the services that they want and benefit from. So they want things like police and a military and a fire department and good roads because those things benefits and protect their property, and they can afford to pay for everything else. They also want a national disaster exemption because earthquakes and hurricanes do not distinguish between the rich and poor and could hit them too. If you are a consistent libertarian, surely you should support the idea that those services too should also be the product of the free markets? Why shouldn’t people organize and pay for their own police and fire departments and pave the roads they drive upon?

Fortunately, not everyone embraces the cold-hearted libertarian philosophy that the wellbeing of total strangers is not our concern. Watch this video in which a motley group of strangers from all walks of life spontaneously come together, risking serious injury, to rescue a motorcyclist who was trapped under a burning car. They are hesitant and frightened, not sure what to do, but something about the plight of a fellow human being drives them to feel they must help and they come together to lift the car and drag him out.

Of course, there is a difference between the way one responds to an immediate need that one sees in front of one’s eyes and how one reacts to people who are suffering out of sight. But the difference is not as great as one might think. The impulse to help others in need is universal. News reports afterwards said that the motorcyclist survived. The rescuers did not know what drove them to help but as soon as the woman who looked under the car said that he seemed to be alive, it galvanized everyone to take collective action.

This is why I think that the libertarian philosophy of having the government not take responsibility for the general welfare of the people will never take root beyond the ranks of a small, smug, affluent, minority. There is something deep within most people that causes them to be stirred and respond to the plight of others in need. I believe that it is biological and primeval and cannot be extinguished by the oligarchy and the manipulative politicians who are its servants, who seek to stoke the selfish instincts of people in order to benefit themselves.

I will trust my life in the hands of ordinary people over doctrinaire libertarians any day.

In his weekly radio address just prior to the orgy of memorializing on September 11, 2011, president Obama boasted that “They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.”

How long are we going to deceive ourselves that that is true? You may have read about the panic aboard an airplane on September 11 when some passengers were reported by their fellow passengers to have acted suspiciously. Now read the account of one of those people who was deemed to have been acting strangely.

Home of the brave, indeed.