E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Pope Francis’s actions speak louder than his words:
A danger for all of us in the column business is that we’ll look for political meaning in Pope Francis’s big speeches and ignore what he does while he’s here. [...]
Progressives will highlight everything the pope says about climate change, immigration, social justice and capitalism. Conservatives will grab on to every statement he makes against abortion. Both sides will look for how he describes “religious liberty.” Will he talk about the fight over contraception coverage in the Affordable Care Act (as conservatives hope), or will he concentrate on the persecution of religious minorities, including Christians, around the globe?
It’s hard to see how progressives don’t come out ahead, simply because the pope has radically reordered the priorities of the church.
Rebecca Leber at
The New Republic hits a bullseye with her commentary
Choosing Your Mother or Daughter for the $10 Bill Isn't Endearing. It Shows You Can't Name a Historic Woman:
No doubt the candidates love these women very much, but with all due respect to Janet Huckabee, Sonya Carson, and Ivanka Trump, they are not women of great historic import. Indeed, by describing them by their familial relationship—"my wife," "my mother," "my daughter"—the candidates implied that these women are important only because of their association with powerful men.
This is all too familiar terrain for politicians. They fill their stump speeches with stories about the women in their lives, to add a personal touch to their canned talking points, but overlook women's achievements outside of the home. The heroism of women—their importance to these men—is that they are faithful wives, productive mothers, and grateful daughters.
Republicans aren't the only ones guilty of this.
Additional excerpts and links can be found below the fold.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes Don’t Coronate Carly Fiorina Just Yet:
Adele M. Stan on Thursday captured Fiorina perfectly in a blistering assessment in The American Prospect.
“The evil genius of Fiorina,” Stan wrote, “is her uncanny ability to play the gender warrior within the GOP while promoting the party’s misogyny.” Stan continued: “But her feminism seems to begin and end with the fortunes of Fiorina herself, and seeing as she probably doesn’t rely on Planned Parenthood for her health care, she’s happy to deprive millions of women of that care by promoting outright lies about the organization, as in her false description of the video she referenced.”
This distancing herself from the realities of less fortunate women is not new for Fiorina. When she became C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, she made the preposterous claim that “there is not a glass ceiling… My gender is interesting but really not the subject of the story here.”
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
The Rage of the Bankers:
Yet the Fed has faced constant criticism for its low-rate policy. Why?
The answer is that the story keeps changing. In 2010-2011 the Fed’s critics issued dire warnings about looming inflation. You might have expected some change in tune when inflation failed to materialize. Instead, however, those who used to demand higher rates to head off inflation are still demanding higher rates, but for different reasons. The justification du jour is “financial stability,” the claim that low interest rates breed bubbles and crashes. [...]
Well, when you see ever-changing rationales for never-changing policy demands, it’s a good bet that there’s an ulterior motive. And the rate rage of the bankers — combined with the plunge in bank stocks that followed the Fed’s decision not to hike — offers a powerful clue to the nature of that motive. It’s the bank profits, stupid.
Robert Scheer at
Creators Syndicate writes
Fools, Fascists and Cold Warriors: Take Your Pick:
Are they fools or fascists? Probably the former, but there was a disturbing cast to the second GOP debate, a vituperative jingoism reminiscent of the xenophobia that periodically scars Western capitalist societies in moments of disarray. [...]
How odd to hear candidates who generally trumpet a pro-family, pro-Christian sensibility speak so cavalierly about ending the birthright path to citizenship affirmed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Their indifference to the suffering of the stranger in our midst stands in sharp contrast to Jesus’ extolling the virtue of the Good Samaritan. The attack on immigrants comes at an inconvenient time, when Pope Francis is about to visit the United States with his message of compassion for millions of refugees pouring into Europe after being dislocated in Mideast nations the U.S. claimed to be concerned with liberating.
Clara Long at
The Progressive deplores U.S. policy in her commentary
The Other Refugee Crisis, from Central America to the U.S.:
Asylum seekers in Europe frequently face inadequate reception conditions and a fractured system for applying for asylum. And some EU governments – like Hungary – are using fast-track procedures to push those seeking asylum back across their borders before their claims are properly assessed.
But the U.S. has employed a version of such fast-track procedures at its border for a decade. Many asylum seekers who cross our southern border are quickly returned to the places they fled with no chance to tell their story and request protection. That puts people fleeing for their lives at serious risk. [...]
On top of these flawed processes at the border, since last summer the U.S. government has contracted with private prison companies to detain nearly 3,000 children and parents to deport them through these expedited procedures. The Border Patrol generates countersigned, sworn, official government records for the "results" of their border interviews about fear, including with these children.
In one case Human Rights Watch has examined, a baby as young as 11 days old purportedly told an officer he entered the United States "with the intention of going to Dodge City, Kansas to reside and seek employment."
Gail Collins at
The New York Times points out the lies of woman-hating activists she describes in
The Fight for Unplanned Parenthood:
When Planned Parenthood leaves town, bad things follow. Ask the county in Indiana that drove out its clinic, which happened to be the only place in the area that offered H.I.V. testing. That was in 2013; in March the governor announced a “public health emergency” due to the spike in H.I.V. cases.
Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University, studied what happened when Texas blocked Planned Parenthood grants and tried to move the money to other providers. Even when there were other clinics in an area, she said, “they were overbooked with their own patients. What happened in Texas was the amount of family planning services dropped. And the next thing that happened, of course, was that unplanned pregnancies began to rise.”
If an elected official wants to try to drive Planned Parenthood out of business, there are two honest options: Announce that first you’re going to invest a ton of new taxpayer money in creating real substitutes, or shrug your shoulders and tell the world that you’re fine with cutting off health services to some of your neediest constituents.
Lawrence Goldstone at
The New Republic writes
Constitutionally, Slavery Is Indeed a National Institution:
Sean Wilentz’s latest op-ed in The New York Times, “Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution,” argues that it is a “myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery.” Instead, the Princeton professor demonstrates a woeful misreading of the debates over the drafting of the Constitution. That the document does not contain the words “slave” or “slavery” in no way indicates that it was written to reject the institution. In the debates, the delegates almost always employed euphemisms such as “this unique species of property,” “this unhappy class,” or “such other persons,” as stand-ins for the more repugnant “slaves.” They simply carried that practice over to the final document.
But whether or not the words appear in the text of the Constitution, they dominate its spirit
Syreeta McFadden at
The Guardian writes
Government policies based on racist myths help dissolve black families:
Black families are and have always been imperiled by aggressive criminal justice policies and demonized for their effects; the disintegration of black families then blocks the formerly incarcerated from accessing basic necessities for survival. That hardship only perpetuates systemic income inequality, and this hardship is shouldered disproportionately by black women.
In the latest cover story by Ta-Nehisi Coates, out in the October issue of the Atlantic, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Coates makes a case that a dystopian fairy tale about African-American family structures has accompanied the rapid rate of incarceration of African Americans as far back as 1965. At the height of the civil rights movement, then Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan released The Negro Family, a report intended to address black urban poverty yet intentionally omitted tangible policy recommendations. Instead, it built the base of the family-centered magic fix rhetoric ubiquitous in our ongoing discussions and implementation of vast urban public policy from housing, schools and finally, the unprecedented rise of mass incarceration that disproportionately affects poor black families.
The Moynihan narrative is one of the reasons why the government created racist, classist policies that incentivized the dissolution (or non-formation) of black families, then problematized black people for not having them.
William Kaufman at
In These Times laments in
Why Radical Leftists Need To Stop Worrying and Back Bernie Sanders that leftists are fantasizing that they are doing a great service to humanity by scoffing at Bernie, but they’re merely isolating themselves from the rest of the country:
In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities, it seems, but against… Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without an ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders exposés seem to have become a thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point any further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jerry Corbyn, or even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other leftish types and the jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent essentially the same political impulse?
The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left, in fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse, or even smile at a Democrat.