The Good: The Egyptian people vote for constitutional changes.
The Bad: Israel and Hamas exchange fire. (Is this even news?)
The Ugly: The United States military has just attacked a third Middle Eastern nation.
Andrew Sullivan, over at The Daily Dish, is covering the ongoing events excellently.
Job growth? Jobs growth?
On the same day that he incorrectly claimed President Obama was raised in Kenya, FOX News personality and sometime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee also committed a Freudian slip that garnered much less public attention but showcased the same befuddling absence of logic. Referencing Natalie Portman’s allusion to impending motherhood at the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday night, Huckabee lamented, “People see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.'”
But it was his next comments that made the least sense: “There aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image…Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.”
For someone occupying the more extreme fringe of the conservative movement, it seems a bit ideologically blasphemous for Huckabee to concede that, without government, disadvantaged children would not only be malnourished but would also not receive health care. Even excluding the very poor families that are eligible for Medicaid, this leaves plenty of financially struggling families, often unemployed due to the recession, who would have no health care at all under the (Republican-approved) old system.
Perhaps Huckabee should really think twice before campaigning for a job that requires a functioning brain, and stick to his day job with his far more lenient employer, where no such requirements are made of its employees.
But this is nearly always because he’s hit the nail directly on the head. Today, in a piece titled “The military/media attacks on the Hastings article,” Greenwald dissects the curious antipathy of mainstream journalists towards a reporter, Michael Hastings, who actually does his job. The job in question is, of course, to hold those in power accountable for their actions and to question their often vague and opaque descriptions of what are often very disturbing actions taken in the name of “national security” or some other (similarly Orwellian) newspeak.
One of my favorite parts of Greenwald’s piece is this passage he borrowed from The Atlantic, which quoted Hastings as follows:
Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on…K Street. That’s what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.
Strange, isn’t it, that this type of journalism is considered suspect by many prominent reporters? And by strange, I mean very scary.
For the last year or two, several of my friends and I have fashioned a mini-tradition out of emailing political articles to each other. As often as not, these email chains die on the vine, with nary a reply in sight. But the occasional subject will touch a nerve, prompting a barrage of reply emails with all the requisite jousts and parries.
The most recent
addition to the series was sent by Ben* with the subject line, “Sometimes, I just hate politics…” The email linked to a YouTube video posted by the Wisconsin GOP in which Democratic politicians denouncing hateful rhetoric from the right were juxtaposed against footage of liberal protesters engaging in identical behavior. To Ben, the hypocrisy was nauseating: even the specter of a recent assassination attempt, far from halting the partisan bickering, instead served as a catalyst for more of it.
Unable to resist the bait — and I use the word “bait” loosely here, as that was not Ben’s intention — I responded, arguing that “equating Hosni Mubarak signs [used by public-sector employees in Wisconsin]…with, say, bringing guns en masse to town hall meetings is a bit of a dubious analogy.” I concluded with the estimate that “realistically, at least 75% of [the hyperbolic rhetoric] is coming from the (very far) right.” Continue reading But they started it: a few thoughts on partisanship and when it’s OK to point a finger
If nothing else, the Great Recession has worked wonders for the publishing industry. One can find virtually any perspective on the crisis — the big banks caused it, Bush’s policies facilitated it, Obama’s aggravated it, and so on — and, accompanying each viewpoint, a plethora of books devoted to its promulgation.
Amer Chaudri, a longtime employee of Citibank, falls into the big-bad-banks camp. His book, Diatribe: A Scathing Journey into the Heart of the Financial Corporate Culture (and Related Digressions), represents a Main Street stab at understanding Wall Street profligacy.
I’ve read several books and countless articles, over the past year or two, on the financial meltdown of 2007-2008. Some do a better job than others of navigating the complex world of derivatives trading, regulatory negligence, and underlying psychological factors. In Chaudri’s case, storytelling emerges as his vehicle of choice for the castigation of an industry. Continue reading Book review: Diatribe, by Amer Chaudri
Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, begins with the immortal phrase, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And so it remains today. Nothing in the intervening century and a half, from the publication of Dickens’ Tale to the 2011 wave of protests rocking the Arab world, has changed the immutable veracity of that simple paradox.
Instead of two cities, however, I’m thinking of two countries. Let’s start with a simple thought experiment. One month ago, imagine if someone had predicted that, in Tunisia and Egypt, massive protest movements would emerge ex nihilo to shatter the status quo; that these movements would, furthermore, contain no traceable elements of radicalism or Islamism in any form; that, in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which the West has feared for so long, would at least initially linger in the shadows and allow the secular and leaderless crowds to lead the way; and that, finally, the demands of the protesters would remain eminently reasonable and, most significantly, democratic. Such a prognosticator would have been mocked relentlessly.
As it turns out, this has all taken place over the course of the last several weeks. And the American response? To hesitate, to triangulate, to hedge its bets according to the ever-shifting political winds, and — finally and most heartlessly — to work furiously behind the scenes to orchestrate a return to the pre-January 25 status quo while halfheartedly trumpeting the Egyptian revolution in the public sphere. Continue reading A tale of two countries: Egypt, America, and the strangling of democracy