Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times writes that Republicans haven't quite worked out a foreign policy beyond 'not Obama':
Republicans haven't quite worked out what their foreign policy ought to be, beyond "not Obama."
That's partly because it's still early in the campaign and the GOP boasts a bumper crop of potential candidates, some of them governors who never needed a foreign policy until now.
It's also because one probable GOP candidate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), has already broken from the pack and argued for a minimalist foreign policy with lower defense spending and fewer military commitments. Some of Paul's opponents have charged that his views add up to isolationism; the senator prefers "conservative realism."
But the debate isn't only about Paul. Ever since President George W. Bush's long misadventure in Iraq, his Republican successors have been struggling to refashion conservative foreign policy in a way most voters would embrace.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post contrasts J.Edgar Hoover's personal and official attitude toward the civil rights movement with the words of his latest successor at the FBI in
James Comey’s candor on race:
Last Thursday’s speech by FBI Director James Comey at Georgetown University was remarkable on its own terms, but revolutionary in the context of his agency’s history. You wonder if Hoover would have accused Comey of subversive intent.
“All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty,” Comey said. “At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.”
He explained why a copy of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s approval of Hoover’s request to wiretap Dr. King sits on his desk: “The entire application is five sentences long, it is without fact or substance, and is predicated on the naked assertion that there is ‘Communist influence in the racial situation.’” He calls agents’ attention to the document, he said, “to ensure that we remember our mistakes and that we learn from them.”
There are more pundit excerpts below the fold.
David Moberg, who has written on labor matters for nearly years at In These Times, writes about how Sixty-four unions and community groups are demanding a banking public option—at the post office.:
American Postal Workers Union (APWU) president Mark Dimondstein has an offer that should be hard to refuse, especially for the 10 million American households, mostly low-income, that do not have a checking account or other basic banking services.
Through its network of 30,000 post offices and other outlets, the United States Postal Service (USPS) could readily and cheaply provide many banking services (just as it now provides money orders), no matter where you live or what you earn. This could save people without bank access from paying the exorbitant interest and fees at currency exchanges, payday lenders, rent-to-own dealers, pawn shops and other subprime financial institutions. […]
When talks for a new APWU contract start in February, Dimondstein intends to make establishing postal banking a major demand, even though it falls outside the bread-and-butter issues unions typically bring up in bargaining. He plans to argue that creation of the bank would profoundly affect the mandatory bargaining issues of wages, hours and working conditions.
The negotiations come on the heels of a new campaign, launched this week by the postal unions—in partnership with community groups such as National People’s Action, Public Citizen, USAction and Interfaith Worker Justice—to mobilize the public in favor of a postal bank.
David M. Perry at
The Guardian laments that
Conservatives want to rewrite the history of the Crusades for modern political ends:
At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama made a statement that you wouldn’t expect to be controversial: violence in the name of religion is a global problem and it’s bad. […]
The response was furious. Right-wing radio and TV talking heads aired long rants about Obama’s “attacks on Christianity”. Jonah Goldberg claimed the Crusades were a justified action against Muslim aggression and the Inquisition was a well-intentioned anti-lynching measure. Ross Douhat spent his morning on Twitter defending conservative Catholicism more generally. Redstate.com’s Erick Erickson declared that Barack Obama was not a Christian in “any meaningful way”. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal argued that since the medieval Christian threat was over a long time ago, we should just focus on combating radical Islam.
Jindal is wrong. While relatively few contemporary Christians are calling for the crusades these days (although crusader iconography is not uncommon in the US military), it’s a mistake to believe in Christian exceptionalism—the idea that Christianity alone has solved its problems—while other religions are still “medieval”. One of history’s lessons is that any ideology, sacred or secular, that divides the world into ‘us versus them’ can and will be used to justify violence. […]
Reminding the public about ugly moments in the history of Christianity does not make one anti-Christian. To compare the Jordanian pilot who was burned to death by Isis militants to the public burning of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas does not make one un-American. To acknowledge such comparisons instead gives one the moral authority to call out other acts of violence and atrocity, including those that are justified via religion.
Rebecca Kemble at
The Progressive writes
Walker Has "The Right Stuff" For GOP Presidential Bid:
As of this writing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has yet to formally declare his bid for President in 2016, but that hasn’t stopped him from campaigning for it. Arguably, he’s been campaigning for President ever since winning his first election for Governor in 2010.
Seen in this light, all of the extreme, unconstitutional, and potentially illegal actions Walker’s administration has undertaken make a twisted kind of sense. His slash-and-burn policies of the past four years have nothing to do with responsible state governance. But they do signal to billionaire GOP campaign donors that he is willing to ride roughshod over the needs of the people in Wisconsin to prove that he can do the two things required of any contender for top office: Concentrate power in the executive office and redistribute wealth upwards. […]
The audience for Walker’s rare public addresses is clearly not the people of Wisconsin but rather potential donors. The ideologically charged statements in last week’s budget address—“Our plan is based on growth and opportunity—which leads to freedom and prosperity for all,” and “Our plan will use common sense reforms to create a government that is limited in scope and—ultimately—more effective, more efficient, and more accountable to the public,”—are little more than verbal reassurances to his political backers that he is still on their side.
David Palumbo-Liu, at TruthOut writes
The Challenges of Liberalism:
One of liberalism's great strengths—its commitment to entertaining a diversity of opinions - is also its greatest point of weakness. For inevitably, even the most liberal of liberals draws a line in the sand, someplace.
Take that champion in the war against political correctness, Jonathan Chait, and his defense of blasphemy, issued shortly after the killings in Paris. He takes issue with western liberals, who on the one hand support the right of free speech and yet point to the Hebdo staff's role in provoking their antagonists. Chait says that, ironically, "Muslim radicals" and "Western liberals" end up occupying the same position […]
What Chait misses is the fundamental issue of power. It is those in power who get to determine the elasticity or rigidity of liberalism. It is they who draw the lines around "civility." They channel "blasphemy" in the directions they prefer, that is, away from their gods and churches. When those in positions of weakness or subordination cry out against such duplicity and the harms it brings, Chait then chastises them for being "PC."
Alice Robb at
The New Republic writes
Jon Stewart Made America More Cynical:
Jon Stewart’s announcement that he’ll retire from “The Daily Show” later this year has inspired countless homages. [...]
But at least one ode rang false. At The Atlantic, David Sims wrote that Stewart’s “willingness to swipe at every hagiography or exaggeration presented by politicians and media alike made him the most trusted man on television in an era of profound cynicism.” But Stewart shouldn’t get a free pass, just because he’s funny: He did his part to foster that atmosphere of distrust and scorn. Hardly anyone—right or left, public figure or ordinary citizen—could assume they were exempt from his mockery. I’ve often found that watching Stewart attack everyone for half an hour can leave you feeling kind of hopeless.
Empirical research supports this idea. In 2004, Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris, political scientists at East Carolina University, designed an experiment to look at how watching “The Daily Show” affected viewers’ feelings toward politicians of both parties. [...]
Baumgartner and Morris have also studied how watching “The Colbert Report” affects viewers’ political attitudes: They found, counterintuitively, that college students actually had more “warm” feelings toward George W. Bush after watching “Colbert” than “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Weimar on the Aegean:
Try to talk about the policies we need in a depressed world economy, and someone is sure to counter with the specter of Weimar Germany, supposedly an object lesson in the dangers of budget deficits and monetary expansion. But the history of Germany after World War I is almost always cited in a curiously selective way. We hear endlessly about the hyperinflation of 1923, when people carted around wheelbarrows full of cash, but we never hear about the much more relevant deflation of the early 1930s, as the government of Chancellor Brüning — having learned the wrong lessons — tried to defend Germany’s peg to gold with tight money and harsh austerity.
And what about what happened before the hyperinflation, when the victorious Allies tried to force Germany to pay huge reparations? That’s also a tale with a lot of modern relevance, because it has a direct bearing on the crisis now brewing over Greece.
Gareth Porter at Middle East Eye writes
The real problem of 'getting to yes' with Iran:
Talking to reporters Monday, President Obama asked rhetorically, “[D]oes Iran have the political will and desire to get a deal done?” Iran “should be able to get to yes,” Obama said. “But we don’t know if that is going to happen. They have their hard-liners, they have their politics….”
The idea that Iranian agreement to US negotiating demands is being held back by “politics” is a familiar theme in US public pronouncements on these negotiations. The only reason Iran has not accepted the deal offered by the United States, according to the standard official view, is that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is a hardliner who is constraining the more reasonable Iranian negotiating team from making the necessary compromises.
But that is a self-serving understanding of the problem, and it reflects a much more profoundly distorted view of US - Iran relations on the nuclear issue. The premise of Obama’s remark was that US demands are purely rational and technical in nature, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Holly Jacobs at
The Independent writes
This is what it is like to be the victim of revenge porn, and why we need to criminalise it:
In 2012, before I started the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) and its campaign, End Revenge Porn, victims of nonconsensual pornography had few options. When someone turned their most intimate moments into public entertainment, no one could help them. Not lawyers. Not the police. Not victim advocates. Not family or friends.
Police would tell them it wasn’t a crime. Nothing could be done about it. The only advice victims were given: hire a lawyer. […]
Often, perpetrators post personal information alongside the images: a victim’s name, social media profiles, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, and any other information they could get their hands on. Victims tell stories of being approached in the aisles of their local grocery store by strangers asking if they are porn stars, or of strangers showing up at their doorstep, saying they were responding to an invitation they found online. […]
Filing dozens of individual takedown notices with numerous websites might eventually pay off. Victims’ photos might come down – for a while. Within a few days, though, they’d be up again on hundreds of different websites. With no recourse, victims often gave up, left their jobs, transferred schools, moved, or even changed their names, like I did. Some considered suicide. Others followed through with it.