Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes without mercy about Gov. Jindal’s Implosion:
Last week on Fox News, [Bobby Jindal] set about defending his statement that America “shouldn’t tolerate those who want to come and try to impose some variant, or some version, of Shariah law.” But he went so far as to say of prospective immigrants:
“In America we want people who want to be Americans. We want people who want to come here. We don’t say, ‘You have to adopt our creed, or any particular creed,’ but we do say, ‘If you come here, you need to believe in American exceptionalism.’ ”
What? Where is that written? I can’t find this “need to believe in American exceptionalism” anywhere in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Isn’t American exceptionalism itself a creed?
The smart-on-paper Jindal increasingly comes across as nuttier than a piece of praline.
More pundit excerpts can be found beneath fold.
Trevor Timm at The Guardian writes The NSA's plan: improve cybersecurity by hacking everyone else:
The National Security Agency want to be able to hack more people, vacuum up even more of your internet records and have the keys to tech companies’ encryption – and, after 18 months of embarrassing inaction from Congress on surveillance reform, the NSA is now lobbying it for more powers, not less.
NSA director Mike Rogers testified in front of a Senate committee this week, lamenting that the poor ol’ NSA just doesn’t have the “cyber-offensive” capabilities (read: the ability to hack people) it needs to adequately defend the US. How cyber-attacking countries will help cyber-defense is anybody’s guess, but the idea that the NSA is somehow hamstrung is absurd.
The NSA runs sophisticated hacking operations all over the world. A Washington Post report showed that the NSA carried out 231 “offensive” operations in 2011 - and that number has surely grown since then. That report also revealed that the NSA runs a $652m project that has infected tens of thousands of computers with malware.
The Editorial Board of the
Los Angeles Times ponders a Down Under approach in
Water restrictions are just a taste of what's to come for California:
Action on Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board to restrict lawn watering and home car-washing made big news outside of California but barely raised eyebrows in-state. That's because most urban agencies had already imposed those kinds of limits more than a year ago. Californians responded initially with big water savings but let the hoses and sprinklers run again toward the end of last year, as the Sierra snow began to fall and it was easier to hope—to pretend—that the dry times were behind us. [...]
Australia responded to the so-called millennium drought by permanently changing the way it produces and delivers water, becoming a global leader in recycling and conserving. California has dabbled in such things for decades, but it's now evident that the state must do Australia-style rethinking and move quickly to Australia-style action. The $1-billion emergency measures announced Thursday by Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders are fine for near-term relief, but fall far short of what's needed to respond to what may well be our own millennium drought.
Melissa Jacobs at
The Guardian laments that
Ashley Judd isn't alone: most women who talk about sport on Twitter face abuse:
I write professionally about American football, and I tweet a lot on a variety of football-related topics. So I get that many male National Football League fans who don’t know that I’ve been covering the league for almost a decade might assume that I have no clue what a Cover 3 defensive scheme is. I don’t get being told “my face looks like a football” after tweeting a joke about the Jacksonville Jaguars possibly moving to London, getting called a “cunt” in response to football analysis or receiving the most untempting sexual invitations imaginable.
Being told to “go put on an apron” when opining on a bad pass interference call is actually kind of comical; being told to suck someone’s dick is flat out abuse.
Thus, when actress, activist and Kentucky Wildcats superfan Ashley Judd announced that she is pressing charges after she received a number of misogyny-laced threats following an innocuous tweet about “Arkansas playing dirty” during last Sunday’s SEC Championship, I was cautiously optimistic. The threats were vile, disappointing and cringe-worthy – but as any woman who exists within the megasphere of sports understands, not surprising.
Robert Fisk at
The Independent writes
If Stephen Harper is serious about criminalising 'barbaric cultural practices', then he should arrest himself for even suggesting it:
Now Harper, the man with the choir-boy good looks whose pro-Israeli policies might win him a seat in the Knesset, is about to push a truly eccentric piece of legislation through parliament in Ottawa. It’s called – and I urge readers to repeat the words lest they think it’s already April Fool’s Day – the “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”. Yup, when I first read the phrase “Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”, I felt sure it was a joke, a line from the “Big Bang Theory” or a Channel 4 mockudrama about Nigel Farage’s first premiership.
Nope. It’s all real. But let me quickly explain that the “Barbaric Cultural Practices” in question are polygamy, “gender-based” family violence, “honour-killing” and forcing children under 16 to leave Canada for marriages abroad. I’ve no problem with legislation against this, of course. Nor have most Canadians.
I’m also against illegally invading foreign countries, colonising other people’s land, “waterboarding” and bombing wedding parties, or firing drone missiles into Waziristan villages. But these aren’t quite the “barbaric cultural practices” Mr Harper has in mind.
Bill Boyarsky at
TruthDig writes
The GOP Is Promoting War With Iran as a Campaign Strategy:
The Republicans want to frighten the voters into believing that the Democrats will sell out Israel and the United States.
Selling this phony message is tremendously important to them as they get ready for the 2016 election. Domestically, their arguments against the Democrats are vanishing. Obamacare is increasingly popular as signups become more efficient. The deficit—the Holy Grail for Republicans—is shrinking. Unemployment is declining. All they can do is complain that Obama and the Democrats are surrendering to Islam.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post says
This is no way to ease inequality:
It would be wonderful if conservatives really wanted to deal constructively with the predicament they so passionately describe. But thanks to the House and Senate GOP budgets, we now know that conservatives and Republicans (1) aren’t serious about the plight of working-class and lower-income Americans and (2) would actually make their situations much worse.
Their spending plans fail even on conservative terms: They are not fiscally responsible. Instead, they rely on all sorts of magic tricks that shove choices and problems down the road.
One heartening sign is that at least some conservatives find these budgets ridiculous.
Henry A. Giroux at
TruthOut writes
Higher Education and the Politics of Disruption:
The mantras of the new market fundamentalism are now well known: Progress can only be measured through incessant economic growth and "is the only way to handle the challenges and possibly resolve all and any problems." Consuming and discarding are the ultimate engines and measure of happiness. Inequality in wealth and power is the product of individual achievement and benefits everyone. A survival-of-the-fittest ethos drives competition and produces the most qualified individuals to inhabit the commanding economic, political and cultural institutions through which a society governs.
"Individual interests are the only reality that matters [and] those interests are purely monetary." Society is a fabrication and the only viable mode of governance is market-driven. Privatization, deregulation and commodification are the preconditions for freedom and for regulating the social order. Public and higher education is a private right and should serve individual and corporate interests rather than the public good.
Missing from neoliberal market societies are those public spheres—from public and higher education to the mainstream media and digital screen culture—where people can develop what might be called the civic imagination.
Cristian Farias at
The New Republic writes
Was Texas Wrong to Reject a Specialty License Plate Bearing a Confederate Flag:
The only thing the all-male Sons of Confederate Veterans want is to honor their heroes—with historical reenactments, preservation of Confederate soldiers’ gravesites, genealogy services, and publications that highlight their heritage and sacrifice in their fight for freedom. And one way to honor their heroes is with specialty license plates depicting the Confederate flag, in a state with a long history of Confederate pride: Texas.
But Texas denied the group’s request at the behest of concerned citizens who found the flag design offensive. Now both camps will be facing off at the Supreme Court on Monday over whether the Constitution protects imagery and symbols on state-issued plates—even those the concerned citizenry may find unpleasant—as a form of free speech. [...]
But Texas is mostly alone in its battle. In filings with the Supreme Court, a host of heavyweight organizations on the left and the right have thrown their support for the group’s free-speech claims, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the group that represented Hobby Lobby before the Supreme Court last year. Together, these unlikely allies hope to get across that a ruling for Texas might not only trump freedom of speech, but that it might do so at the expense of unpopular minorities or messages—be they religious minorities, pro-life advocates, or those without any beliefs.
Ben Adler at
Grist writes
The Obama admin is finally going to green up its fossil fuel leasing, but how much?
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell promised in a speech on Tuesday that her department, after years of handing out fossil fuel leases at bargain basement prices, would embark on a green reform agenda. Climate activists made encouraging noises after the speech, but it’s not clear how encouraged they actually should be.
The Department of Interior (DOI) has completely ignored the climate impact of its programs like selling leases to mine for coal or drill for oil on federal land. Now, Jewell says, DOI will start considering mitigating climate change in its management of federal lands. [...]
On Thursday, after Obama directed federal agencies to reduce carbon emissions through efficiency and clean energy, Greenpeace took the opportunity to point out the big, obvious way the federal government could slash emissions even more: “his administration needs to get serious about the federal government’s much bigger carbon problem — fueling the climate crisis by giving away our coal, oil, and gas from federal lands and waters,” said Greenpeace climate and energy campaign director Kelly Mitchell. “President Obama and Interior Secretary Jewell can take immediate steps that would have a real impact: rejecting Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic and putting a moratorium on the sale of federal coal.”