& 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) 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. 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. A thousand miles from my home in Seattle, Los Angeles was on fire. 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.” 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. 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. 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. What all of these approaches take for granted is that government policy runs downhill.
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.” "Our Kind of Truth" by Ian Buruma.
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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. Nonhuman Personhood Rights (and Wrongs) "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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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. The Magazine - The Myth of American Productivity. January/ February 2012The Myth of American Productivity. Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class.
We're All the 1 Percent - Charles Kenny. After 30 years of greed being good and rising tides lifting all boats, inequality -- or "class warfare," if you prefer -- is back on the political agenda. The Occupiers who camped out in central squares from Melbourne to Oakland, denouncing the "1 percent" for its supposedly ill-gotten gains, have a point: Inequality is out of control. But these mainly middle-class complainers are an incredibly coddled bunch by any international reckoning. This is good news, because we're going to need to tax them more if we're ever going to solve the world's real inequality problem: the estimated 900 million people who live on less than $1.25 a day.
Pay Attention: The Great American Adderall Drought. My Kasual Kountry Weekend With the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My mom was born in 1950 in the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama about 10 minutes away. The Iceman Leadeth - By David Rothkopf. After British Prime Minister David Cameron, who visits Washington this week for consultations at the White House, and U.S. President Barack Obama ultimately leave office, it is unlikely you'll find the two of them vacationing together. 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. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space. Personalizing Civil Liberties Abuses - The Case of Dr. Al-Arian. On Saturday, I was at the University of Chicago for an event to discuss humanitarian intervention and empire.
One of my fellow speakers was Tariq Ramadan, the highly regarded Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford. George W. Bush and torture: America’s highest officials are responsible for the “enhanced interrogation” of prisoners. Michelle Shepard/AFP/Getty Images. It began with one document. On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., President George W. 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. 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. Barack Obama, Social Darwinism, and Survival of the Fittest Part 3. Barack Obama, Social Darwinism, and Survival of the Fittest, Part 2.