Tag: Punting the Pundits

What’s the economic issue we should focus on – jobs, or inequality? An increasing number of people, including the President and New York’s new mayor, have suggested that inequality of wealth and opportunity is the defining issue of our time.

But some of the folks at the Washington Post’s “WonkBlog” are having none of it. First editor Ezra Klein declared that unemployment, not inequality, should be the left’s defining issue. That drew responses from the likes of Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein (and yours truly, here). [..]

But why are we arguing about hypothetical futures and ignoring the very real present? We’re still in a situation where the “multiplier effect” – the amount of growth which can be achieved through government spending – is very high. The situation cries out for higher taxation on the wealthy and corporations, coupled with investment in jobs and growth. In other words, it calls out for the very same policies which would reduce inequality.

In the end it’s one challenge, not two or three.

Jill Filipovic: The nuns’ Obamacare contraception lawsuit isn’t about religious freedom

Catholic groups claim that filling out a form violates their beliefs. But they really want to mandate that we share the same values

Does religious liberty extend to the right to not have to fill out paperwork? That’s the latest position religious organizations are taking against the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It’s crazy, yes. But, welcome to the future of “religious freedom” litigation.

On New Years Eve, supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction blocking the Obama administration from implementing the aspect of the ACA known as the “contraception mandate”, which requires employee insurance plans to cover a range of preventative women’s health needs. The government has until today to respond. The injunction itself is standard legal procedure, and says little about how Sotomayor or the rest of the court will rule on the merits of the case. But the lawsuit itself, and the related suits challenging the contraception mandate, offer an increasingly troubling look at just how far peddlers of far-right ideology will go not just to claim their own right to live according to their beliefs, but to mandate that you and I do the same.

Dirk van Zyl Smit: Even life prisoners should have hope and a chance to change

Considering someone for release is not the same as releasing them. David Cameron’s proposed 100-year sentence would be much like a death penalty

Why would one consider releasing someone who committed a heinous murder and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment? This is not a question that troubles everyone. The prime minister, for example, was quoted on Thursday as saying: “There are some people who commit such dreadful crimes that they should be sent to prison and life should mean life.” He clearly supports the current system where, in particularly serious cases, a court may add a whole life order to a sentence of life imprisonment and thus prevent release ever being considered.

The question is not so easily dismissed, however. A commitment that we will never consider the release of some offenders serving life sentences, except perhaps when they are at death’s door, means that we write them off permanently. It means that we deny that with the passage of time they may change for the better; or that we may change our assessment of their crimes.

Worse still, we are denying some fellow humans all hope. In that sense we are putting them in the same position as those awaiting execution on death row.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Resurgent Progressives

The re-emergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don’t be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center.

For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted by the existence of an active, uncompromising political right unbalanced by a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged more and more in a conservative direction, meaning that the center is pushed that way too.

Consider what this means in practice. Obamacare is not a left-wing program, no matter how often conservatives might say it is. Its structure is based on conservative ideas. The individual mandate was the conservatives’ alternative to a mandate on employers. The health care exchanges are an alternative to government-provided medicine on the Medicare model.

New Year’s Day, 2014, marks the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Agreement created a common market for goods, services and investment capital with Canada and Mexico. And it opened the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future. [..]

By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today — channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton — the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe.

Richard Klass: The Road to Wars

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has introduced legislation that sets the United States on the road to war with Iran and the road to an internal war within the Democratic Party.

If the first-step deal collapses, there will be no problem in quickly instituting new sanctions. And there will certainly be calls for military action, no matter how short-term the results would be. But if the collapse is triggered by a U.S. unilateral action, the coalition now enforcing those sanctions could well collapse. This undermining of the president’s negotiating authority and international cooperation is as unprecedented as it is dangerous.

The second danger in this bill is that it encourages an Israeli attack on Iran.

Robert Sheer: NSA, Benghazi and the Monsters of Our Own Creation

If we are so smart why are we so dumb? I am referring to the “intelligence” that our spy agencies have gathered at great cost in both massive secret black box budgets and, much more important, the surrender of our personal freedom to the snooping eyes of our modern surveillance state. [..]

Take the revelations in The New York Times’ exhaustive six-part investigation published Saturday demonstrating that the devastating 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was an intelligence disaster. The Times “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault” that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Instead, a local militia leader on the side of the U.S.-supported insurrection in Libya with no known affiliation with al-Qaida is a prime suspect, and he and others allegedly responsible were not on the radar screen of the 20-person CIA station in Benghazi because they were part of the insurgency the U.S. supported. [..]

The excuse is that this sacrifice of our freedom will make us more secure, as in the misnamed “National Security Agency,” by knowing more about our “enemies.” But the record is unmistakably the opposite, that this relinquishing of privacy and transparency has stifled genuine public debate about the goals of our policy and left us both stupid and weak.

Few of the politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue how it actually works (and doesn’t)

The US and British militaries insist that this is such an expert program, but it’s curious that they feel the need to deliver faulty information, few or no statistics about civilian deaths and twisted technology reports on the capabilities of our UAVs. These specific incidents are not isolated, and the civilian casualty rate has not changed, despite what our defense representatives might like to tell us.

What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is a far cry from clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited clouds and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: “The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?” I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.

Madeline Ostrander: Can the Stuck-in-Place Economy Help Us Face Climate Change?

New studies show that people with deep roots in the place where they live are better equipped to handle upheavals of the type that come with climate change.

After I finished high school in the flat, square corn country of central Illinois, I fled-along with many of my fellow classmates. We chased jobs or graduate school in places like San Francisco, New York, or Washington, D.C. I settled in Seattle. It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I became aware of the social costs of this mobility. [..]

According to recent environmental research, this could also mean that I am less equipped to cope-if, say, an emergency strikes-than someone who’s better connected to Seattle. Sense of place, community, and rootedness aren’t just poetic ideas. They are survival mechanisms. [..]

The most foreboding trends now and in the decades ahead may stem from climate change-disasters like drought and flooding that devastate some places and force people to move. As we face this kind of world, some communities might endure precisely because people have dug in, rooted themselves, and developed the kinds of generosity, adaptiveness, and foresight that come from knowing where they are.

Joyde Walker: The Choice is Ours: Austerity or Shared Bounty

For all I have gained as the result of my financial struggles, I consider myself blessed. You might wonder how I can say that, when, at the end of December, I’m still working with my winterizing kit, consisting of staple gun, duct tape, and cardboard, trying to insulate against the air leaks that drive my heating bill up. But because of my hardships, I have become more sensitive to the hard times many around me are facing, and feel compelled to share what little I have.

Because of incessant increases in the cost of living, I sometimes have a hard time meeting my expenses. Still, I am more fortunate than some lacking adequate food or shelter because the people setting standards don’t consider them deserving or needy enough to receive help. But thanks partly to the fidelity of family and friends, I am able to keep food enough to share with a few others also struggling to make ends meet.

Nell Minow: Before Academics Complain About Conflicts of Interest, They Should Disclose Their Own

Academics who study business love to talk about the power of incentives and the importance of full information to enable the most effective and efficient decisions. Unless it applies to them.

As David Kocieniewski reported in the New York Times on December 27, 2013, “academic experts” who testify and make filings in favor of business-friendly regulations and rulings often fail to disclose the corporate sources of funding for their research. While they appear to represent the ivory tower virtues of scholarly integrity, with fidelity to nothing but the truth, they are in fact advocates who are paid to take the positions they promote. [..]

Inside Job, the superb documentary about the financial meltdown, has a devastating scene with Glenn Hubbard, the Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Business, refusing to discuss the payments he receives from the financial services industry. As one commenter on the Times article noted, “Nothing is funnier than watching people who study economics declare that money can’t possibly have any influence on their work.”

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law-ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful-to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.

We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.

The establishment of city, regional and state banks, such as the state public bank in North Dakota, permits localities to invest money in community projects rather than hand it to speculators. It keeps property and sales taxes, along with payrolls for public employees and pension funds, from lining the pockets of speculators such as Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. Money, instead of engorging the bank accounts of the few, is leveraged to fund schools, restore infrastructure, sustain systems of mass transit and develop energy self-reliance.

Jeff Jarvis: The primary NSA issue isn’t privacy, it’s authority

At heart, the NSA debate is about what the government is allowed to do with what it knows and who is overseeing it

I celebrate Judge Richard J Leon’s opinion that the government’s mass collection of communications metadata is “almost Orwellian”, and I decry Judge William H Pauley III’s decision that the NSA’s collection is both effective and legally perfectly peachy.

But I worry that the judges, as well as many commentators and Edward Snowden himself, may be debating on the wrong plane. I see some danger in arguing the case as a matter of privacy because I fear that could have serious impact on our concept of knowledge, of what is allowed to be known and thus of freedom of speech. Instead, I think this is an argument about authority – not so much what government (or anyone else) is allowed to know but what government, holding unique powers, is allowed to do with what it knows. [..]

In the search for a legally protected right to privacy in the United States, begun with Brandeis and Warren in 1890, the Fourth Amendment has been interpreted as affording privacy protection as have the First Amendment (freedom of belief) and the Fifth (freedom against self-incrimination). In each case, though, the right is not so much for something – privacy – as against something – namely, government abuse.

Paul Buchheit: The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn’t seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family’s net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main – perhaps only – beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years. [..]

President Obama recently proclaimed that inequality “drives everything I do in this office.” Indeed it may, but in the wrong direction.

William Cohen: As NSA Spy Debate Heats Up in 2014 Don’t Believe the Security Hype

A new year of media noise begins, and with it an avalanche of propaganda. With the public growing wary of privacy intrusions, the NSA debate is heating up and the message from power centers will focus on the effectiveness of the spy program in stopping terror attacks, the effective controls in place to prevent abuse, and the danger to the public posed by traitorous leakers of secret operations. These claims are all false.

Yet these are the claims endorsed in the December 27 ruling upholding the legality of the NSA spy program by U.S. federal judge William Pauley III in ACLU v. Clapper. Judge Pauley’s ruling is full of deference to government and its need for secrecy. However, a December 16 ruling by federal judge Richard Leon in Klayman v. Obama exposes that the claims made by the government are wrong. Judge Leon characterizes the NSA spy program as Orwellian and violating fundamental constitutional safeguards. [..]

With a conflict between federal judges, the legality of the NSA spy program will likely be resolved by the Supreme Court in 2014, after the appeals courts in Pauley and Leon’s districts have their say. It is an open question how the Court will rule. Consider that Judge Leon was appointed by Bush 43, and Judge Pauley by Clinton. Politics and ideology are not at all predictable when it comes to views on the NSA spy program.

The Court is a powerful and conservative institution. Yet the Court is swayed by public sentiment. The best way for people to influence the law is to raise their voices against the clear violations by the national security state and the bogus arguments now being used to defend itself from further scrutiny.

What a difference a year makes. Last year at this time, a president and a party who had just won an election with progressive rhetoric were quickly pivoting toward a “Grand Bargain” which would cut Social Security and Medicare. Leaders in both parties were obsessed with deficits, and there was “bipartisan” consensus that these “entitlements” needed to be cut. The only questions left to debate were when they would be cut, and by how much. To resist these moves was to be dismissed as “unserious” and “extreme” — in Washington, in newsprint, and on the airwaves.

Today the forces of corporate consensus are on the defensive. It’s considered politically reckless to get too far out front on the subject of benefit cuts. Some of the think tanks who advocated Austerity Lite one year ago are focused now on inequality. And, as the leaders of Third Way learned recently, the same rhetoric which earned nods of approval all across Washington this time last year can get you slapped down today.

Social Security is a vital program, but the implications of this shifting debate run even deeper, to the future of the social contract itself.

Andy Fitzgerald: Why won’t the west call out Saudi Arabia for persecution of democratic activists?

A Saudi activist was sentenced to four years and 300 lashes. He is the fourth to be imprisoned from one organization this year

At the memorial for Nelson Mandela, President Barack Obama eulogized the fallen leader:

   Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement – a movement that at its start held little prospect of success. Like [Martin Luther] King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed.

Listening in the crowd sat Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s second deputy prime minister. Apparently the words were lost on the government His Royal Highness was representing (though it’s questionable he even relayed the message), because within the next week, a Saudi judge sentenced democratic activist Omar al-Saeed to 4 years in prison and 300 lashes. His crime: calling for a constitutional monarchy (a government that would likely outlaw such cruel and unusual punishment). [..]

Supporters of democracy should not be afraid to name, shame, and directly confront tyranny wherever it is seen. Whether it is in Russia or China, or perpetrated under the guise of “national security” by the United States or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Those that deem oppression a strategic necessity or its elimination an impossibility almost always end up on the “wrong side of history”.

David Dennis: Politico’s 2014 ‘journalists to watch’ list doesn’t have a single person of color

American media is still struggling to find diverse voices. Part of the problem goes back to unpaid internships

A few months ago, I wrote a commentary for the Guardian about how unpaid internships create an unfair funnel system to media outlets. They create a homogenous voice that excludes those who don’t have the money or privilege to work for free. This, to me, is the biggest challenge facing the media. Cities like New Orleans, Chicago’s South Side or Gary, Indiana are underrepresented or misrepresented in the media because there aren’t enough journalists who come from those or similar areas to tell the stories.

The proof of the “blacking out” of the media has shown its face again in a Politico list of US journalists to watch in 2014. The list doesn’t have a single person of color on it. Politico’s list spans almost every major publication or media outlet in the country from ESPN to CNN and beyond. The Politico article mentions these reporters’ great work in the areas of politics, sports, and more, but where is the diversity? Do we honestly not have any journalists of color in the upper tier?

John Nichols: Holiday in Austerity Land: 1.3 Million Americans Lose Jobless Benefits

When it was initially discussed as a rude repercussion of a bungled budget deal, the prospect that 1.3 million Americans would lose long-term unemployment benefits just days after Christmas was bad enough.

Now, that the day has come, however, it stands as a stark reminder of the extent to which the United States has regressed from the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt greeted the Holiday Season with a celebration of the fact that: “Today neighborliness no longer can be confined to one’s little neighborhood. Life has become too complex for that. In our country neighborliness has gradually spread its boundaries-from town, to county, to State and now at last to the whole Nation.”

Imagine a country that, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, abandons those hit hardest by economic turbulence, and you have a sense of what the United States has become under the cruel hand not just of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan – who refused to agree to any budget deal that included an extension of benefits – and those members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, who compromised with the failed Republican vice presidential candidate’s austerity agenda.

This is the season of lists: roundups and recaps, forecasts and resolutions.

What was the biggest story of the year? Snowden.

The best movie? “12 Years a Slave.”

The splashiest pop culture moment? Twerk, Miley!

Will the health care rollout roll over the president’s second-term agenda? Who’ll win in 2016? Who are the people to watch? Can Pope Francis top his 2013 cool points?

We resolve to go back to the gym and lose a few pounds, to pay off that credit card debt and up our savings, and to tell that overbearing boss to “chill out!”

I must say that as corny as it all is, I’m always entertained by it. In fact, “entertained” may be too mild a word. I’m enthralled by it, mostly because I connect with the more profound undercurrent of the moment: the idea of marking endings and beginnings, the ideas of commemoration and anticipation.

For that reason, the new year has always been my favorite time of the year.

Conor F. McGovern: The Graying of Our Incarceration Nation

The incarceration of vast swaths of the American public is now an aging issue. Our prisons have increasingly become homes for the aging, as there are now some 125,000 prisoners age 55 or older, nearly quadruple the number there were in 1995. Many of these prisoners are serving life sentences, but others soon will be released into society facing special hardships because of their age. They will join a massive and steadily increasing population of aging ex-offenders who always will bear the scars to their mental, physical and financial well-being that come with having been a prisoner in America. [..]

America is aging, and with it ages the largest population of prisoners and former prisoners in the industrialized world. This is no longer just an issue of criminal justice. It has become an issue of elder justice and retirement security, and it is time the aging community supports this large and growing group of older Americans.

David Sirota: Celebrating the End of the Fake ‘War on Christmas’

Another winter solstice has come and gone, and yes, the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus has once again survived the alleged “War on Christmas.” In fact, as of this year, this pretend war may finally be ending-and not because those “defending” Christmas won some big battle, but because more and more Americans are realizing there is no such war at all. [..]

All of this is good news-especially because these welcome public opinion trends are coinciding with a renewed effort by the divide-and-conquer crowd to continue manufacturing division. Indeed, as just one example, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly tried to make the “War on Christmas” meme into a full-on race war by insisting that both Santa Claus and Jesus must be depicted as white. Apparently, Rupert Murdoch’s cable television empire is still trying to turn the holiday into another excuse to promote conflict. Thankfully, polls show that the ruse isn’t working.

As we gather for the holidays, we remember the empty chairs at far too many holiday tables: for servicemembers killed overseas, children slain by gun violence, and loved ones lost to AIDS, cancer and other diseases due to stigma and poverty — and we recommit ourselves to the work we must do to advocate for policies in diplomacy, safety, healthcare, and opportunity that reflect our highest American values of peace and equality.  [..]

That is why all I want for Christmas are my voting rights from which all other rights flow. Without voting rights, our struggle for women’s rights, civil rights, LGBT rights, immigrants’ rights and workers’ rights is just a conversation. We know that a handful of voter fraud cases have been used to silence millions of voices and we must change that.

Robert Naiman: Could We Make Opposition to Iran War Obligatory for Blue State Democrats?

On August 8, 2006, something world-historical happened in Connecticut: Joe Lieberman was kicked out of the Democratic Party as punishment for the crime of supporting the Iraq war. The retribution delivered to Lieberman established a “red line” for “blue state” Democrats: support the Iraq war, and something like this could happen to you. [..]

What if we could make examples of some blue state Democrats who are vulnerable to pressure from the pro-war forces – not punishment examples, but deterrence examples? What if we could show by example that engagement by Democrats can keep these blue state Democrats from going over to the pro-war side? [..]

What if Ohio Democrats decided that they weren’t going to allow Sherrod Brown to go over to the pro-war side this time? Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Democratic friends don’t let Democratic friends support wars of choice. What if, for example, some brothers and sisters in the Ohio labor movement would sidle up quietly next to Senator Brown and say, “hey, Sherrod, you’re not thinking of screwing the President on this, are you?”

William Pfaff: We Need Your Prayers This Season, Pope Francis

Christmas this year seems more the occasion of religious war than of the peace to which the greeting cards routinely allude. Peace talks, such as the “5 plus 1” talks seeking reconciliation with Iran to eliminate the threat of war from or against that country, are the subject of sectarian and political attack inside the U.S. Congress and in Israel. Who wants peace if you can have the rewarding destruction of a rival? [..]

The United States, according to President Obama, is the “greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known.” He doesn’t mention peace, since the United States during the last two decades has chosen to be constantly at war.

The only man of peace for whom there currently seems universal admiration and deference is Pope Francis. For most West European and American admirers, that seems less to be because they want the peace the Pope calls for in his Christmas declaration, but because they want women and married priests-and because the Pope has asked who is he to pass judgment on homosexuals who are believing Christians.

No doubt he nonetheless is praying for all of us this Christmas. We need the prayers.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The De Blasio-Bloomberg Paradox

he standard line on New York City’s Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who takes office next Wednesday, is that he’s the antithesis of outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That’s not quite true, and New York’s voters probably hope it isn’t. In electing de Blasio, they were looking for a course correction from the Bloomberg years, not a repudiation.

Change they’ll certainly get. Bloomberg is a billionaire who lives in Manhattan’s upscale precincts. De Blasio is a progressive populist who hails from middle-class Brooklyn. He campaigned on his “tale of two cities” divided between the very rich and everyone else. [..]

But the larger point is that the most heralded progressive politicians have been those who married their quest for social justice with reform-minded efficiency. It would be good for the country if the leader of the town that includes Wall Street became a powerful national voice against inequality. The paradox is that a touch of Bloombergism could make de Blasio a more effective populist mayor.

The hard-sell campaign by drug companies to drive up diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., and sales of drugs to treat it is disturbing. The campaign focused initially on children but is now turning toward adults, who provide a potentially larger market. [..]

Curbing the upsurge in diagnoses and unwarranted drug treatments will require more aggressive action by the F.D.A. and the Federal Trade Commission, which share duties in this area. It will also require that doctors and patients recognize that the pills have downsides and should not be prescribed or used routinely to alleviate every case of carelessness, poor grades in school or impulsive behavior.

Michael Winship: Campaign Cash Rules Drown in the Bathtub

I’m speculating here, but as we approach year’s end, I assume that Grover Norquist hasn’t been visited by Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future and found spiritual redemption. Nonetheless, I’m betting that Grover Norquist feels pretty good. Just not in a Santa Claus kind of way; more like one of those evil geniuses in bad movies who rubs his hands together and cackles, “At last, my plan is working!”

Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, is infamous for his expressed desire to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” And even though the new budget deal takes a feeble swipe at sequestration and the indiscriminate slashing of government funds, his wish may be coming true.

This thought springs from recent indications that what little power the government still has to regulate campaign finance donations – already whittled to a minimum by Citizens United and other court decisions – is being steadily eroded by funding cutbacks, intimidation, bureaucracy and an inability or refusal to enforce the few rules we have left.

Stanley Kutler: Why Are We in Afghanistan?

Fifty years not-so-long ago, under the umbrella of the Cold War, we were embroiled in the quicksand-“quagmire” was the term of choice-of Vietnam. By 1965, with upward of half a million troops “in-country,” skeptics and critics began to seriously question the war. The U.S. government, however, countered with the “domino theory,” contending that unless stopped in Vietnam, hordes of Chinese-led communists would overrun Southeast Asia, leapfrog to Japan, the Philippines, and eventually Hawaii and the beaches of La Jolla. But no dominoes fell. [..]

Historical analogies are treacherous, yet the past can inform subsequent events. In Vietnam, we had Nguyen Ngo Diem-“the George Washington of Southeast Asia”-and his family as our allies, but more often than not resistant to our will. Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, for peculiar reasons of his own, likes to appear as an ingrate, adept at ignoring our advice, and undoubtedly corrupt. Most of all, both interventions have had little to do with our national interests.

There has been yet another violent attack with mass casualties. This was not the act of a lone gunman, or of an armed student rampaging through a school. It was a group of families en route to a wedding that was killed. The town was called Radda-not in Colorado, not in Connecticut, but in Yemen. The weapon was not an easy-to-obtain semiautomatic weapon, but missiles fired from U.S. drones. On Thursday, Dec. 12, 17 people were killed, mostly civilians. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has consistently tracked U.S. drone attacks, recently releasing a report on the six months following President Barack Obama’s major address on drone warfare before the National Defense University (NDU) last May. In that speech, Obama promised that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured-the highest standard we can set.” The BIJ summarized, “Six months after President Obama laid out U.S. rules for using armed drones, a Bureau analysis shows that covert drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more people than in the six months before the speech.” In a nation that abhors the all-too-routine mass killing in our communities, why does our government consistently kill so many innocents abroad?

Becky Garrison: Conservatives’ Quagmire: The War on Christmas

Right wingers preach the Gospel according to Fox News. Their cries of holiday persecution just make them look more foolish

The annual “war on Christmas” took an unexpected twist this holiday season, when the UK-based website the Freethinker published the ironic headline “First known casualty in America’s 2013 ‘War on Xmas’ turns out to be a Salvation Army member”. A woman attacked a bell ringer in Phoenix, Arizona because she was angry at being wished a “Happy Holidays” instead of honoring Jesus’ birth by saying “Merry Christmas”. In another act of Christmas violence, unidentified arsonists tried to torch one of the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s billboards that proclaimed “Keep Saturn in Saturnalia” – a reference to an ancient celebration of the Roman god of agriculture.

The Gospel According to Fox News preaches a tale of Christian persecution running rampant through America. While others around the world face imprisonment or even execution for their religious beliefs, Christians in the states suffer the indignity of facing a holiday season sans baby Jesus Christ’s omnipresence in the public square. Instead of sharing parables of the Beatitudes in practice, Fox’s Meghan Kelly’s chose to push forth the blatantly racist proposition that Jesus and Santa are white; the line between Fox News and the Daily Show’s parodies have now become almost indistinguishable.

Jill Filipovic: Sorry marriage traditionalists, young people shouldn’t rush to the altar

Old views prioritise finding a spouse. But couples who focus on educational and professional development first are happiest

Do conservatives think young men are wayward children, needing women to manipulate and direct them into decent behavior? That’s New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s opinion, at least, and he chalks it up to traditional values. On that point, he’s not wrong: traditional values do situate young men simultaneously as future patriarchs and foolish chumps needing the allegedly more moral, family-centric female to civilize them. Douthat’s argument is about as offensive to women as his usual writing – which is to say, very – but men, you should take note also: a retreat to strict gender roles insults you, too. [..]

Douthat and conservatives like him don’t seem to believe men to be complex at all. They seem to think that men fundamentally dislike women, and need to be sexually and socially coerced into pairing with one in any way that’s more committed than intercourse.

Perhaps that says more about them than it does about men, 30-something single Brooklynites, or even our Republican-voting parents.

Natalia Antonova: Now Pussy Riot are free, Russia’s culture wars must end

The radical Orthodox backlash sparked by Pussy Riot has been disturbing. Now the band is free I hope we can all move on

As the result of a general amnesty, Pussy Riot rockers Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have been set free. In case you’re just joining us from outer space, these women had been serving a two-year sentence for hooliganism and incitement to religious hatred after performing an anti-Putin song at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in downtown Moscow.

Although they were originally due for release in March, just a few months from now, it’s good that Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina came out early, for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. [..]

As an Orthodox Christian, I don’t want some glassy-eyed guy screaming at me to “repent” when I go to the theatre. I don’t want to be lectured about the “forces of darkness” that will surely consume Russia for holding an Olympic torch relay. At the end of the day, I want there to be at least a measure of healing – for everyone involved. An amnesty is the perfect excuse to move on.