You know, it would be 100% less frustrating if Dowd hadn't shown that she's capable of writing clean, athletic prose. If she wasn't capable of finding the nugget of truth hiding behind a political smokescreen. If she didn't occassionally show she was capable of dealing with issues on a level that exceeds soundbites. But because she does, now and then, demonstrate some capability, it makes it mouth-foamingly, hair-pullingly, teeth-grindingly painful when she slips into her snarky,
Mean Girls persona and spends the column inches awarded her by the nation's most prestigious paper tossing out lines better suited to notes being passed in the back row of seventh grade social studies.
And this week, for her outstanding achievement in attacking — not a piece of legislation, not a political position, not a politician — but the daughter of a politician who is not running for any office, Dowd has achieved an honor previously reserved for "Never Cry Rape" George Will. She is outta here.
I will not summarize, link to, or even read her column. Naturally, you're free to do so if you feel so inclined. Just leave me out of it.
Of course in this same week, Ross Douthat has spent his precious column inches on making a disjointed ramble through history that ends with a more than slightly dubious argument based on the actions of a single basketball player. Because it's Douthat, a certain level of trite self-important idiocy and points drawn together by logical leaps that would have daunted Evel Knievel is expected. At least the man is consistent.
Let me pause just one moment to make an appeal... Really, New York Times, is this the quality of writing you want from your weekend editorial page? Really?
Now, come inside. Let's see if there's not something out there worth reading...
The New York Times, writing it's own editorial--presumably so there's something worth reading in their paper--looks to the Rio Grande.
There is a reasonable way to confront the influx of Central American children at the southern border, and the White House is getting it mostly right.
It has asked Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to pay for more immigration judges, for legal assistance to children and parents, and to help care for tens of thousands of children in shelters in Texas and elsewhere.
The request seeks more money for the Border Patrol, and for speedier prosecutions and deportations of adults with children, repatriating migrants and addressing causes fueling the exodus in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. And it includes an ad campaign to urge parents there to keep their children at home. ...
But instead of supporting the package, Republicans are throwing up roadblocks. And through dangerous overreaction, some are urging actions that would make the situation worse. They want to make the children’s deportations speedier by amending or repealing the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law signed by President George W. Bush that gave new legal and humanitarian protections to unaccompanied migrant children from countries other than Mexico or Canada.
Republicans
could fix the problem on the border, but they're not about to surrender a talking point just because it stops a metric ton of human misery. On this issue, as with nearly every other, they much prefer "look how bad a job Obama is doing" to "look how good a job we're doing." Government doing a bad job, no matter where the fault lies, is considered a win by this Republican Party.
Nicholas Kristof reminds us that those girls have not been returned
It has been almost three months since Islamic militants in northern Nigeria attacked a school that was giving exams and kidnapped more than 250 girls — some of the brightest and most ambitious teenagers in the region.
Their captors have called them slaves and threatened to “sell them in the market.” The girls were last seen, looking terrified, in a video two months ago.
“We are asking for help,” pleaded Lawan Zanah, father of one missing girl, Ayesha, who is 18 and appeared in that video. “America, France, China, they say they are helping, but on the ground we don’t see anything.”
He told me that he and the other parents don’t even know if their daughters are alive. The parents spend their time praying that God will intervene, since the Nigerian government and others don’t seem to be. “We hope God will feel our pain,” he said.
The principal of the school, Asabe Kwambura, told me that 219 girls are still missing and lamented that the international campaign to help — #BringBackOurGirls — is faltering as the world moves on.
“Continue this campaign,” she urged. “Our students are still living in the woods. We want the international community to talk to the government of Nigeria to do something, because they are doing nothing.”
If we lose focus on this one, we'll deserve every scrap of scorn that conservative talking heads heaped onto the campaign at the outset.
Dana Milbank says that our politics isn't a debate. It's serial monologues.
“This is not theater.”
That was President Obama’s answer in Dallas this week to critics who said he should have gone to the border to see firsthand the mass immigration of unaccompanied minors that has suddenly seized Washington’s attention.
But the president is wrong. The terror, abuse and suffering of children shouldn't be theater, but it is. All the political world today is a stage. Our national dialogue has become a series of one-act plays: Each runs for a week or two, the critics volunteer their reviews of the president’s performance, and then it closes just as quickly — perhaps, like Benghazi, Libya, to be revived for a second run at a later date.
This week, Washington’s thespians are chorusing about the border crisis. Is it Obama’s fault? Has he mishandled it? The border situation will be much the same a couple of weeks from now, but it’s a safe bet that the political world will have moved on to another one-act show. My nomination: whether Obama is to blame for the upsurge of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
So it has been going for months. Two weeks ago, the show was about the IRS and Lois Lerner’s missing e-mails. A week before that, Washington was deep in a seemingly existential debate about the terrorists who had overrun much of Iraq and Syria. Two weeks before that, the play was about the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap with the Taliban. Two weeks earlier, it was about the veterans’ health-care scandal. A week before that, the play was about the kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria.
Let's stop right there, please. Two of these issues are make believe, one of them is none of our business, one is a problem that's plagued presidents since the 1940s and really deserves a solution. One of these issues is an immediate crisis that urgently deserves more attention and concentrated action. If you can't figure out which one that is, please refer to the previous article.
Anne Applebaum on the quiet trickle of journalists out of Russia
They may not be typical, and they may not yet be numerous. They certainly don’t outnumber the thousands of Ukrainians who have been displaced by violence in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, some of whom are now refugees in Russia and others of whom have made their way to western Ukraine.
But the new wave of Russians settling in Kiev does reflect a momentous change. Not long ago, a quite senior, quite well-known Russian journalist came to see me. He was looking for a job — any job. Or rather, any job outside Russia. Nothing bad had happened to him, but he was worried about the worsening climate for journalism, the shrill tone of government propaganda and the general hostility toward people like himself — people with foreign friends and connections.
He was also worried about the possible reinstatement of the “exit visas” for which the Soviet Union was once notorious. Since the invasion and occupation of Crimea, several million Russians have been forbidden to leave the country. These include employees of the Interior Ministry, Defense Ministry, Federal Prison Service, Prosecutor General’s Office and Federal Migration Service, among others. In total, about 4 million government employees are now unable to travel abroad. Few if any of them — secretaries, clerks, drivers, lawyers — possess anything resembling a state secret. The purpose of the ban is rather to prevent Russians from seeing that the outside world is attractive in any way and to keep them loyal to the regime at home.
Just think of it as an iron curtain of red tape.
Jonathan Capehart on Boehner's laughable lawsuit.
When I called the impending lawsuit against President Obama by House Speaker John Boehner “frivolous” last week and questioned whether the House even had standing to bring such litigation, renowned Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe cautioned me.
“The House as an institution may well have standing to challenge at least some of the president’s unilateral suspensions and revisions of statutory deadlines and specific mandates in the Affordable Care Act and other congressional legislation, including legislation governing deportations,” Tribe told me. “It’s not an open-and-shut case, but the House would have at least a plausible basis for claiming standing.”
What a difference a week makes. Tribe told me yesterday that he is “now convinced that there’s no ‘THERE there.” And that was BEFORE the speaker released language of a bill seeking authorization to sue the president “over the way President Obama unilaterally changed the employer mandate” in the Affordable Care Act. Boehner’s announced action solidified Tribe’s view.
“The very fact that Boehner is willing to say the House of Representatives is injured by the President’s decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate is bizarre in itself, given how often the House has voted not just to delay it but to scuttle it,” Tribe told me via e-mail last night. “And it’s hard to imagine what conceivable remedy a federal court could possibly issue: an order directing the President to reverse course and implement the employer mandate sooner? Hardly!”
I don't know. Seeing the Roberts Court issue a ruling that forbids the president from doing anything while being black (or Democratic, and especially both) seems perfectly in line with recent decisions.
Rick Perry has a Washington Post editorial this week taking up the John McCain argument that American must be involved in every war, everywhere, every time. But hey, it's not entirely an Obama is a wuss editorial. Mostly it's a "hey, remember that I'm running for president in 2016 despite being nearly laughed off the stage last time around, and Rand Paul is a wuss" editorial.
As a veteran, and as a governor who has supported Texas National Guard deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, I can understand the emotions behind isolationism. Many people are tired of war, and the urge to pull back is a natural, human reaction. Unfortunately, we live in a world where isolationist policies would only endanger our national security even further.
That’s why it’s disheartening to hear fellow Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), suggest that our nation should ignore what’s happening in Iraq. The main problem with this argument is that it means ignoring the profound threat that the group now calling itself the Islamic State poses to the United States and the world.
Most of the remainder of the article is an paean to the great Reagan for his vaunted, "lead from the front" policies. Presumably those of illegally trading arms, illegally funding fascist insurgents, staging invasions of a country roughly the size of a Sucrets box, and strategic distribution of birthday cakes to enemies.
Leonard Pitts shows how Hobby Lobby is a massive application o grease to an already slippery slope.
It is a case of Supreme hypocrisy.
The adjective refers to that nine-person tribunal at the top of the American legal system, the noun to its latest act of judicial malpractice. Meaning not the notorious Hobby Lobby decision handed down at the end of June but a less-noticed ruling a few days later.
We have to revisit the former to provide context for the latter. On June 30, the court ruled that a “closely held” corporation may deny employees health insurance covering any contraceptive method that conflicts with the company’s religious beliefs. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito faulted the government for failing, under the Affordable Care Act, to choose the “least restrictive” means of ensuring women access to all FDA-approved methods of birth control. He pointed out that the ACA already makes an exemption for nonprofit groups with religious objections; simply fill out a form certifying those objections and they are relieved from having to provide the disputed contraceptives.
Alito saw this as a win-win. Employees get the birth control they want — they pay directly to the insurance company — but the government does not “impinge” the organization’s religious beliefs.
Three days later, the court issued an injunction freeing a Christian school — Wheaton College in Illinois — from having to fill out the certification form. The school had argued that simply doing the paperwork — the form asks only for name, contact information, signature and date — infringed upon its religious liberty because it would trigger the employee’s ability to get the disputed contraception. So the same form that the court held to be a reasonable compromise on Monday was judged an unreasonable burden on Thursday. Or as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in a withering dissent, “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.”
Indeed, the malleability of the court’s logic suggests these rulings are based less in law than in the personal beliefs of the men on the tribunal. One gets the sense they chose the desired result first, then backfilled whatever “reasoning” would get them there.
It's too bad that Joseph Heller is unavailable to take up a seat on the Supreme Court (for a lot of reasons, actually). Because, to coin a phrase, that's some catch.
Forget the National Day of Prayer. I'd like to propose the National Day of Screaming Your Lungs Out in Frustration. Starting... now.