E.J. Dionne Jr. at the Washington Post makes another attempt at unraveling The Obama riddle:
[Obama is] an anti-ideological leader in an ideological age, a middle-of-the-road liberal skeptical of the demands placed on a movement leader, a politician often disdainful of the tasks that politics asks him to perform. He wants to invite the nation to reason together with him when nearly half the country thinks his premises and theirs are utterly at odds. Doing so is unlikely to get any easier. But being Barack Obama, he’ll keep trying.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown at
The Independent writes
Why do Muslims keep having to explain themselves?:
On Saturday the postman delivered readers’ letters—some of them about the recent Oxford sex abuse case, others about the Muslim slaughterers of soldier Lee Rigby. Some of these letters had swastikas, others pictures of [the late racist] Enoch Powell, accompanying words of such odium that it felt as if acid was burning my hands and eyes. Yes, I was distressed, but more than that, filled with fury.
I have written extensively about the Rochdale and Oxford gangs and their sick values, but it’s clearly never enough. And how dare these letter-writers link me to the Woolwich savagery? What’s it got to do with me or the millions of other blameless British Muslims? We hate Islamicist brutes more than any outsiders ever could. They ruin our futures and hopes. And at moments of high tension, the most liberal and democratic of us fantasise about transporting them all to a remote, cold island, their own dismal caliphate where they could preach to each other and die.
Roger Bybee at
In These Times writes
Mississippi Lavishes $1.3 Billion in Subsidies on Nissan as Workers Get the Shaft:
Thirteen years after Japan-based automaker Nissan chose the small, impoverished community of Canton, Miss., as the site of a new auto-assembly plant, a just-released study shows that the company is failing to deliver on its promise of high-wage job creation in Mississippi—while at the same time draining the state of revenue used to pay for a massive package of subsidies.
According to a study released on Friday by the Washington, D.C.-based research group Good Jobs First, the citizens of Mississippi—which ranks dead last among U.S. states in median household income—are bestowing an estimated $1.33 billion in subsidies on Nissan over a 30-year period for the privilege of hosting the factory. [...]
With no monitoring, Nissan’s wages initially started at $13.25 an hour for the first two years of employment as preliminary work at the plant began in 2001, only slightly above the state average of $12.64 or the Madison county average of $12.88.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes about The Obamacare Shock:
The Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare, goes fully into effect at the beginning of next year, and predictions of disaster are being heard far and wide. There will be an administrative “train wreck,” we’re told; consumers will face a terrible shock. Republicans, one hears, are already counting on the law’s troubles to give them a big electoral advantage.
No doubt there will be problems, as there are with any large new government initiative, and in this case, we have the added complication that many Republican governors and legislators are doing all they can to sabotage reform. Yet important new evidence — especially from California, the law’s most important test case — suggests that the real Obamacare shock will be one of unexpected success.
Doyle MacManus at the
Los Angeles Times writes about Obama's
Rebooting the war on terror:
Obama would like to see a clear victory over Al Qaeda — call it "V-Q Day" — before he leaves office in 2017. He's unlikely to enjoy that luxury. But, with luck, the speech he gave last week will help the nation get there — with less collateral damage along the way
The New York Times Editorial Board says the president should stop
Throwing Money at Nukes:
The United States has about 180 B61 gravity nuclear bombs based in Europe. They are the detritus of the cold war, tactical weapons deployed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey to protect NATO allies from the once-feared Soviet advantage in conventional arms. But the cold war is long over, and no American military commander can conceive of their ever being used. Even so, President Obama has put $537 million in his 2014 budget proposal to upgrade these bombs. When all is said and done, experts say, the cost of the rebuilding program is expected to total around $10 billion — $4 billion more than an earlier projection — and yield an estimated 400 weapons, fitted with new guided tail kits so that they are more reliable and accurate than the current ones.
This is a nonsensical decision, not least because it is at odds with Mr. Obama’s own vision.
Jay Janson at
Dissident Voice argues that
Good Americans Should Mourn First the Millions America Has Slaughtered:
This veteran is waiting for the year in which the Veterans For Peace, in its Memorial Day Press Release, states that Veterans mourn first, the lives America took in poor countries, both the civilian men, women and children and the patriots that fought our illegal and criminal invasions since 1945. Only then should come bitterly mourning GIs who were duped by our elected officials and the CIA and Pentagon fed, corporate-controlled war-promoting media cartel fooling them with lies, misinformation, disinformation and psyop techniques that deceived them into proudly following homicidal criminal orders, for which they are obviously liable for prosecution. Orders given, as Martin Luther King Jr. cried out, “for atrocity wars and covert homicide meant to maintain unjust predatory investments overseas.”
Patrick Smith at
Salon declares that
American exceptionalism is a dangerous myth:
Whatever the Tea Party’s unconscious motivations and meanings—and I count these significant to an understanding of the group—we can no longer make light of its political influence; it has shifted the entire national conversation rightward—and to an extent backward, indeed. But more fundamentally than this, the movement reveals the strong grip of myth on many Americans—the grip of myth and the fear of change and history. In this, it seems to me, the Tea Party speaks for something more than itself. It is the culmination of the rise in conservatism we can easily trace to the 1980s. What of this conservatism, then? Ever since Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign slogan in 1984 it has purported to express a new optimism about America. But in the Tea Party we discover the true topic to be the absence of optimism and the conviction that new ideas are impossible. Its object is simply to maintain a belief in belief and an optimism about optimism. These are desperate endeavors. They amount to more expressions of America’s terror in the face of history. To take our country back: Back to its mythological understanding of itself before the birth of its own history is the plainest answer of all.
Chemi Shalev at
Haaretz warns that
Obama’s counter-terrorism speech may alarm Israeli policy makers:
Israeli intelligence experts, defense mavens and foreign policy gurus should be poring over President Barack Obama’s address to the National Defense University by now. Many of them, one can safely posit, won’t like what they’re reading, in the text and between the lines.[...]
But it will come as no surprise to most mavens that Obama, along with his vice president and secretaries of state and defense, is convinced that resolving Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians will go a long a way towards soothing Arab and Muslim resentment of, and enmity towards, the U.S. in particular and the West in general.
Nathaniel Frank at
Slate fumes
The Boy Scouts’ strange new policy on homosexuality is a spineless half-step that is doomed to fail:
Some will view the policy change as progress, which it certainly is for the estimated tens of thousands of gay boy scouts who will finally feel a sense of belonging that was needlessly denied them before. But this modicum of progress virtually dries up when you consider what those same boys will face as they age out of the Boy Scouts: a giant slap-down for anyone wishing to become a Scout leader, with the attendant message that, while being a gay kid is now sort-of OK, being a gay man is still shameful. How is that a place for gay kids to “belong while they learn and grow”?
Gavin Aronsen at
Mother Jones says
Obama's Drug Czar Cites Useless Stat to Dismiss Legalizing Pot:
Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), dismissed calls for pot legalization on Thursday, citing a recent study by his agency to claim that marijuana is the drug most commonly linked to crime. During an Urban Institute panel discussion, while calling for a "21st century approach to drug policy reform," Kerlikowske rejected legalization as a "bumper-sticker approach." But the study (PDF) doesn't actually show a causal relationship between pot and crime: Marijuana is far and away the most commonly used illegal drug, so it stands to reason that it would show up most often in drug tests.
Last Monday in the abbreviated pundit round-up, Jessica Valenti's
column explaining why she would vote for a woman in 2016 was linked and excerpted. Here is a reply from
Amy Shiller at
The Nation—
Feminism is not any single person or outcome, it’s a practice, and a far more active one than Valenti gives credit for:
Consider one of the controversies that has Valenti so fed up, the “legitimate rape” controversy, starting with former representative Todd Akin’s whiplash-inducing remarks that women who are raped are far less likely to get pregnant, as a result of “the body…shutting that whole thing down.” According to Valenti, evidence of feminism’s retreat can be found in the persistence of Akinesque worldviews and gender politics—and the remedy is to “kick the movement…into forward motion…with a bang: the presidency.”
Reframe the question: Didn’t the “legitimate rape” controversy result in exactly the kind of feminist victory that Valenti wants? Once Akin made his remarks, Democrats and Republicans alike condemned his remarks, including President Obama’s “rape is rape” statement. Akin’s loss of a Senate race where he had previously been the front-runner was directly attributed to backlash from women voters. So, women got a high-profile conversation about rape victims deserving credibility and respect, galvanization of women across the political spectrum who stood up for their gender on op-ed pages and at the ballot box, and the election of Claire McCaskill as one of the record number of female senators who emerged victorious in 2012. What about that doesn’t suggest forward motion for the feminist movement?