Visual source: Newseum
Nicholas D. Kristof:
When President Obama decides soon whether to approve a $53 million arms sale to our close but despotic ally Bahrain, he must weigh the fact that America has a major naval base here and that Bahrain is a moderate, modernizing bulwark against Iran.
Yet he should also understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.
There's another deal in the works that is a thousand times worse, the sale of $60 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, which was happy to send 1200 troops into Bahrain to assist in crushing the peaceful uprising there.
Gary Younge:
While the departure of American troops should be greeted with guarded relief (guarded because the US will maintain its largest embassy in the world there along with thousands of armed private contractors), every effort must be made to thwart those who seek to embellish and distort their lamentable legacy. You'd think that would be easy. The case against this war has been prosecuted extensively both in this column and elsewhere. (The argument that the removal of Saddam Hussein somehow compensates for the lies, torture, displacement, carnage, instability and humans rights abuses is perverse. They used a daisy cutter to crack a walnut.)
This war started out with many parents but has ended its days an orphan, tarnishing the reputations of those who launched it and the useful idiots who gave them intellectual cover. Nobody has been held accountable; few accept responsibility.
Robert J. Samuelson says the prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes are obsolete in a world brimful of government debt. He offers no alternate antidote, which, given his views, is a blessing.
Dale Bosworth, a career U.S. Forest Service employee and its chief from 2001 to 2007, says it will be financially tough on local governments if the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act is not renewed next year.
Larry Kudlow, an avid backer of "right to work" laws suddenly loves unions because their leadership favors the Keystone XL pipeline. In what is certain to be a surprise to environmental advocates, he says President Obama needs to get over his "obsession with clean energy at the expense of fossil fuels" and "his attachment to radical environmentalism."
USAToday:
Mining is a uniquely dangerous job—so dangerous that it has its own federal safety agency. While many companies have good safety records, at the center of most tragedies is a rogue company that flouts the laws. ...
For rogue operators, nothing focuses the mind quite like a criminal indictment. Seeing a CEO or others from the executive suite take a perp walk could well be the best deterrence to cutting corners.
Say to huzzah! to that.
Laurie Penny:
The idea that "the protester" can be "the face of the year" may be a comfortable one for many of the readers of Time. It implies that the angry crowds that have populated their flatscreen televisions for the past 12 months are engaged in only polite protest. The best summary of the distinction between protest and resistance still comes from Ulrike Meinhof, who wrote: "Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too." Protest, to put it another way, says "not in my name". Resistance says "over my dead body". What is happening now in the streets of Moscow, in the city squares of Egypt, in foreclosed homes in Oakland and east New York and Barcelona, and in Wukan in China, is resistance, and it is happening because people around the world are sick of being told to wait while their lives and futures are mortgaged to the notional interests of a rabid financial elite intent on cannibalising its own future.
Eric Berkowitz, a guest columnist who presumably would never assume to speak for the Cleveland Plain Dealer but assumes the words of a Daily Kos diarist somehow speak for the site, is glad the Afghan rape victim Gulnaz has gained her freedom from the prison she was sentenced to for immoral behavior, but abhors the price she paid to do so—agreeing to marry her rapist:
But before we get too smug, we should recognize that our legal tradition has roots that are not all that different from those we condemn, and you don't have to look too far back in history for outrageous examples. For example, it was only in 1980 that the California Legislature made it illegal for a husband to rape his wife. As late as the 1950s, the right of a husband to take his wife by force was enshrined in the laws of every state. As legal authority Rollin Perkins put it in 1957: "A man does not commit rape by having sexual intercourse with his lawful wife, even if he does so by force and against her will."
Ben Adler:
Amid all the concern over Republican efforts to impose onerous requirements on voting such as photo identification laws, it’s worth remembering that the biggest impediment to voting in primaries has existed for decades, without any signs of correction: caucuses. Caucuses are anti-democratic and one of the worst infringement of voting rights in our current electoral system.
Unlike in a normal election or primary, where you can stop by any time during the day and vote by absentee ballot, caucuses require that you arrive within a very narrow window of time, typically in the early evening, and stay for the duration, which can last several hours. Anyone unable to do so is disenfranchised.
Mike Littwin:
We went into the war as the world's lone superpower. We ended the war worried about our economy, worried about China, worried about Iran. And if we're still the world's lone superpower, we've learned a hard lesson in the limits of what that means.
Despite having the most powerful military in history, we've been bogged down for nearly a decade in two wars in places where the opposition doesn't even have an organized army.