& The Middle East. Drones. The Economy. American Decline? Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? - Magazine. Members of Company E, Fourth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, pictured at Fort Lincoln, in Maryland. The regiment, which was organized in Baltimore after the war broke out, lost nearly 300 men. (Library of Congress) In my seventh-grade year, my school took a bus trip from our native Baltimore to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the sanctified epicenter of American tragedy. Preposterous notions abounded. The attempt was gallant. Given this near-totemic reverence for black history, my trip to Gettysburg—the site of the ultimate battle in a failed war to protect and extend slavery—should cut like a lighthouse beam across the sea of memory.
I remember riding in a beautiful coach bus, as opposed to the hated yellow cheese. We knew, of course, about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Our alienation was neither achieved in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American design. He called this ideology a “great physical, philosophical and moral truth.” Davis later wrote: America's Class War: Billionaires Against the Unions. Barney Frank and Ed Rendell are right.
In seeking to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the public-sector unions and their allies on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party made a big mistake. “My side picked a fight they shouldn’t have picked,” Frank told The Hill. “People need to be more strategic about the fights they pick.” In other places, such as Ohio, Democrats have successfully campaigned in state legislatures to roll back Republican anti-union initiatives. This overreach may well embolden G.O.P. governors in other states to follow the Wisconsin example. In short, it’s a class conflict. Over the years, to be sure, some public-sector unions have adopted restrictive practices and negotiated retirement agreements that can no longer be sustained. Americans are famously reluctant to adopt the language of class warfare, or even to acknowledge its existence. And, of course, the Horatio Alger narrative isn’t completely without foundation.
That didn’t last very long. South L.A., Twenty Years Later. Photograph Courtesy of Dark Servier In 1992, when I was eleven years old, I saw a Korean man on TV for the first time. He resembled the immigrants my family knew from church, the local swap meet, and the Asian grocery store. Stocky, with a buzz cut and large glasses, he wore the many-pocketed utility vest of the working-class entrepreneur. But something was wrong. He was tense, surrounded by smoke, his hand at a trigger.
POP POP POP. A thousand miles from my home in Seattle, Los Angeles was on fire. Korean Americans living on the West Coast at the time remember the first day, 4-29, or sa-i-gu, with time-freezing clarity. The L.A. For many of us, the riots were a schooling in color and class. Photograph Courtesy of AHL “Those Korean Americans who came to South Central were the least affluent Korean-American merchants…” –Raphael J. The corner grocery at 4801 Avalon is a white cinder-block rectangle with “LEE’S MARKET” hand-painted on top in red block caps.
When I visited the author, Mrs. Steve Hahn: If X, Then Why? Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention By Manning Marable (Viking Press, 594 pp., $30) When Malcolm X died in a hail of assassin’s gunfire at the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, the mainstream media in the United States was quick to suggest that he reaped the harvest of bloodshed he had brazenly sown. Calling him an “extremist,” “a demagogue,” a “racist,” and a “spiritual desperado,” commentators often insisted that Malcolm advocated the use of violence, regarded whites as “devils,” and was an embodiment—as a television series on the Nation of Islam had put it in 1959—of the “hate that hate produced.” At best, the press acknowledged Malcolm’s oratorical skills and razor-sharp intelligence, and found him to be personally impressive but politically misguided; at worst, they regarded him as an opportunist and religious zealot intent on stirring the cauldron of racial conflict, the polar opposite of the increasingly admired Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Census: Whites account for less than half of U.S. births for the first time in history. American Indians: Gambling on nation-building. Comment: The Attack on “All-American Muslim” Dearborn, Michigan, is the city in America with the highest proportion of Muslims. That is not a new development.
Immigrants from the Middle East began arriving in the area generations ago, when jobs building cars were still a lure—which should give a sense of the community’s vintage. Some still work in the auto industry, including Angela Jaafar, who is a marketer, and is married to Mike, a deputy chief in the sheriff’s office. The Jaafars and their children form one of five Dearborn families featured on “All-American Muslim,” a reality show, on TLC, created by some of the same team behind “Real Housewives of New York.” The Florida Family Association says that Lowe’s is not the only sponsor it has driven away. That is, at a minimum, weak on Lowe’s part. Not even the Florida Family Association is saying that TLC is letting terrorists use “All-American Muslim” as a megaphone with which to say anything hateful or violent.
Photograph by Adam Rose/©Discovery Communications LLC. Lawrence v Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Lawrence v. Texas, ruling, by a six-to-three margin, that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Even those of us who followed the case had a rather gauzy notion of what had triggered the litigation. On the night of September 17, 1998, someone made a phone call to the police, warning that a black man was “going crazy with a gun” in an apartment just outside Houston. A clutch of sheriff’s deputies stormed the apartment, and found no gun, but they arrested John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner for having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. And, in an unlikely series of legal twists, the arrests of Lawrence and Garner became a vehicle for challenging old anti-sodomy laws that were used solely to shame and stigmatize gay couples. Lawrence and Garner were arrested for simply doing what loving couples do.
The story told in Lawrence v. Start with the two men charged with sodomy. The two were accidental plaintiffs in more ways than one. Against Law, For Order. It’s taken decades and millions of lives, but elite opinion is starting to move against mass incarceration. The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books ran detailed exposés on the scale and violence of the penal state. Conservative leaders like Grover Norquist have said that mass incarceration violates the principles of “fiscal responsibility, accountability, and limited government,” while GOP darlings like Mitch Daniels have tried to take the lead in state reform. Soon the common wisdom will shift from “we need to get tough on crime” to “we jail too many people for too long for the wrong reasons.” The next question is what to do about it, and here the answers are harder. There are those that think that it’ll be fairly easy – follow European examples and decriminalize drugs, for instance.
Some, like public policy professor Mark Kleiman, believe we can change punishment techniques to have both less crime and less incarceration. Neoconservative Neoliberalism A New Form of Governance. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's War. For a couple of centuries now, we have had to make due with Samuel Johnson’s famous phrase: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Thanks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we can now revise this phrase for the twenty-first century. Tthe last last refuge of a scoundrel, it appears, lies in taking up the battle against something called “Christophobia.” Hirsi Ali coins this term as part of her alarmist and deeply hateful cover story for Newsweek. “The War on Christians” is splashed across the cover, but the actual target of Hirsi Ali’s piece becomes more clear in the title provided for the online version of the piece: “The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World.”
The terms of Hirsi Ali’s argument, such as it is, are all set out in her opening paragraph: "We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. "Our Kind of Truth" by Ian Buruma. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – Rick Santorum, a former United States senator seeking the Republican Party’s nomination to challenge President Barack Obama this year, has been saying some very strange things about the Netherlands. Ten percent of all deaths in that country, he recently claimed, are from euthanasia, half of which are forced upon helpless patients.
Old people are so frightened of being killed by homicidal doctors that they wear bracelets that read: “Do not euthanize me.” In a way, Santorum’s canards must come as a relief to a country that has increasingly been in the news for outrageous statements by right-wing populists about Muslims and Greeks. The Dutch were nonetheless disturbed. In fact, Santorum’s fantasies were swiftly refuted in the US itself. As the Post pointed out, there is no such thing as involuntary euthanasia in the Netherlands. But does any of this matter to Santorum’s followers? That has changed.
Nonhuman Personhood Rights (and Wrongs) | The Primate Diaries. "American Chimp" by Nathaniel Gold Americans take their rights seriously. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what actually constitutes a ‘right.’ Religious believers are correct that they have a right to freely express their beliefs. This right is protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution that prohibits Congress from making any “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
However, as a result, devout believers feel it is a violation of their rights when intelligent design creationism is forbidden in the classroom or when prayer during school sporting events is banned. The answer is no and represents an important distinction when understanding what a right actually is. “The evidence for cognitive and affective sophistication—currently most strongly documented in dolphins—supports the claim that these cetaceans are ‘non-human persons,’” said White. This is not as radical an idea as it may sound. The True Costs of Humanitarian Intervention. As forces fighting Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi consolidated control of Tripoli in the last days of August 2011, many pundits began speaking of a victory not just for the rebels but also for the idea of humanitarian intervention.
In Libya, advocates of intervention argued, U.S. President Barack Obama had found the formula for success: broad regional and international support, genuine burden sharing with allies, and a capable local fighting force to wage the war on the ground. Some even heralded the intervention as a sign of an emerging Obama doctrine. It is clearly too soon for this kind of triumphalism, since the final balance of the Libyan intervention has yet to be tallied. Yet even if the intervention does ultimately give birth to a stable and prosperous democracy, this outcome will not prove that intervention was the right choice in Libya or that similar interventions should be attempted elsewhere. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register. Why foreign assistance is still important. Secretary Clinton will testify tomorrow before the House Foreign Relations Committee, "Assessing U.S.
Foreign Policy Priorities Amidst Economic Challenges: The Foreign Relations Budget for Fiscal Year 2013. " Each year there are myriad advocacy groups lobbying for a robust foreign assistance budget and just as many saying enough with tax-payers' money going to corrupt governments, congressional earmarks, dubious special interest programs and long-standing civil servant pet projects that do nothing to address the challenges of the developing world or compliment U.S. foreign policy priorities. This year, we can add to this annual procession of Republican candidates vying for the 2012 presidential nomination who still repeatedly call for a foreign assistance budget that starts at "zero. " A position that still baffles me. She should recognize the critical role that the U.S. plays promoting the ideals of freedom, democracy and human rights that we enjoy in the United States.
Atheism in America. Godlessness is the last big taboo in the US, where non-believers face discrimination and isolation Point, Texas (pop. 792) is not the easiest place for a single lesbian to raise her child. But neither her sexuality nor her unwed parenthood are enough to make Renee Johnson an American conservative’s worst nightmare. As she explained to me when I met her at Rains County Library, “I’d rather have a big ‘L’ or ‘lesbian’ written across my shirt than a big ‘A’ or ‘atheist’, because people are going to handle it better.”
We had met in a private room because Johnson worried that anywhere else in the town, people might overhear us and be offended by her godlessness. No wonder she often feels alone in her non-belief. But Johnson is far from unique. America is the well-known exception to the rule that the wealthier and better-educated a country is, the less religious its population. Renee Johnson, an atheist from Point, Texas: she often feels alone in her non-belief Friends have rejected him. Mormon Church and racism: a new controversy about old teachings. GEORGE FREY/AFP/Getty Images. “God has always been discriminatory.” So says Randy Bott, a professor of religion at Brigham Young University, in a Washington Post piece by Jason Horowitz. Bott’s statements have kicked up the most significant dust storm concerning Mormonism and race in 30 years. Bott was quoted at length in Horowitz’s piece, which was published on Tuesday.
(Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.) By Tuesday night, BYU students were planning protests concerning Bott’s comments, ABC4’s 10 o’clock news in Salt Lake City had cut off coverage of Mitt Romney’s primary sweep to report on those comments, and BYU administrators—not to mention members of the LDS Church’s hierarchy—had huddled together, trying to come up with an appropriate response.
Bott’s comments—about which more below—were incendiary. Why did the church withhold the priesthood from blacks for over a century? Such past beliefs have never officially been repudiated. Adam Curtis Blog: WHO WOULD GOD VOTE FOR? Making It in America - Magazine. In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third.
Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It’s a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America’s economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so difficult to solve. Dean Kaufman I first met Madelyn “Maddie” Parlier in the “clean room” of Standard Motor Products’ fuel-injector assembly line in Greenville, South Carolina. Tony Scalzitti, the plant manager, was giving me the grand tour, explaining how bits of metal move through a series of machines to become precision fuel injectors. Also see: Live Chat With Adam Davidson The author will be answering questions about his article and American jobs on January 31 at 4 p.m. Later, I sat down with Maddie in a quiet factory office where nobody needs to wear protective gear.
The Magazine - The Myth of American Productivity. Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class. We're All the 1 Percent - Charles Kenny. Pay Attention: The Great American Adderall Drought. My Kasual Kountry Weekend With the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The Iceman Leadeth - By David Rothkopf. George Edwards and the Powerless Presidential Bully Pulpit. We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy. Foreign Affairs Focus On: Threat Inflation with Micah Zenko. "America’s Islamic Blind Spots" by Naomi Wolf. Personalizing Civil Liberties Abuses - The Case of Dr. Al-Arian. George W. Bush and torture: America’s highest officials are responsible for the “enhanced interrogation” of prisoners. How One Georgia Town Gambled Its Future on Immigration Detention. Will the Supreme Court Uphold Arizona's Immigration Law? - Andrew Cohen - National. Supreme Court Takes Up Controversial Arizona Immigration Law. Todd Miller: Bringing the Battlefield to the Border.
The American Dream is dying. Here’s how we can fix it. U.S.-Europe-Asia: The new strategic triangle. American Foreign Policy is Already Post-Partisan. How Obama Lost Canada. America, India, Pakistan, China: the next game. America’s Threat to Trans-Pacific Trade - Jagdish Bhagwati. Tomorrow’s Pax Pacifica - Kevin Rudd. The Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations. The US, China, Iran Oil Showdown. "Reinventing the Sino-American Relationship" by Michael Spence. "America's Renminbi Fixation" by Stephen S. Roach. Obama's decision to get re-elected and avoid trade war with China. The China Bluff. Why America Must Save Chen Guangcheng - By Frank Wolf. Friends Like These - By Dan Blumenthal and Lara Crouch. "Hillary Clinton’s Asian Adventure" by Jaswant Singh. "A Pivot to the People" by Anne-Marie Slaughter.
Clinton Embraces the Navy - By Robert Farley. Trustbusters - By Greg Rushford. I Sold My Soul to the Department of Homeland Security. The Trouble with Profiling : A guest post by Bruce Schneier. Did a Blogger Really Expose a Fatal Flaw in Airport Security? Why Are So Many Americans Single? The Invisible Borders That Define American Culture - Arts & Lifestyle. The China Conundrum. The secret life of J Edgar Hoover | Film | The Observer. Reconsiderations: The Cold War Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point? Why Are American Kids So Spoiled?
E.J. Dionne Jr. for Democracy Journal: Why History Matters to Liberalism. JFK's Overshadowed Crisis. Think Again: Intelligence - By Paul R. Pillar. "Exit the Political Wife" by Naomi Wolf. What if realists were in charge of U.S. foreign policy. What were the causes of 9/11? Barack Obama, Social Darwinism, and Survival of the Fittest, Part 1 | George H. Smith. Barack Obama, Social Darwinism, and Survival of the Fittest Part 3 | George H. Smith. Barack Obama, Social Darwinism, and Survival of the Fittest, Part 2 | George H. Smith.