Visual source: Newseum
Kate Allen remembers what too many Americans have forgotten:
Ten years is a long time. That a former British resident has spent every single one of the intervening days between February 2002 and today in a cell in Guantánamo, without answering a single charge or having had one day in court, is an affront to the concept of justice.
Shaker Aamer has lived the last decade of his life in limbo. He has gone from a young father in his mid-30s to a grey-haired man in his mid-40s in a cell in the detention camp in Cuba. During that time, he has been involved in protests against conditions at the camp, including hunger strikes, and has been subjected to periods of solitary confinement. He alleges that he has been subject to torture, both before his arrival and while there. He talks of days of sleep deprivation and beatings. [...]
That this is the example set by the foremost power in the Western world is a matter of shame for America. It is responsible for a degradation of the collective moral authority of the US government and those who are its partners.
Paul Krugman:
You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.
Fred Hiatt's premise fails because his so-called "accountability liberals" aren't either.
Michael Kinsley in lament:
[Felix Salmon, financial blogger for Reuters, blogged last week] about the quality of writing on the Internet. It's bad, he says, much of it, but that's good. Well, maybe not actually good, but not bad. How so? Well, it's a bit hard to follow the thread of his argument (thus, some might say quite unfairly, demonstrating his thesis even as he lays it out). But his basic point is that on the Web, sheer quantity trumps quality. He praises the editor of the New York Observer for dispensing with editors: She "doesn't have either the time or the money to have a layer of experienced journalists reworking her bloggers' prose before it's published." He continues:
"And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. … But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn't matter, not any more.… When you're working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you'll be rewarded for it.… The less you worry about quality control … the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson think Romney's the man for America, George Romney, that is.
The New York Times:
ALEC’s influence in the Virginia statehouse is pervasive, the study showed. The House of Delegates speaker, William Howell, has been on the board since 2003 and was national chairman in 2009. He has sponsored or pushed many of the group’s bills, including several benefiting specific companies that support ALEC financially, like one that would reduce a single company’s asbestos liability. At least 115 other state legislators have ties to the group, including paying membership dues, attending meetings and sponsoring bills. The state has spent more than $230,000 sending lawmakers to ALEC conferences since 2001.
The
Times says there is "nothing illegal about this," quite true, "or unethical," which is an amazing leap.
Cetan Wanbli Williams, a member of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, won the Native American Music Award – Album of the Year in 2007. In 2011, the Grammys terminated the Native American Music Award category:
Based on the available evidence, over the 11 years of its existence the Native American Music Album winner was actually produced by a Skin just 21 percent of the time. That’s NOT EVEN enough Indian to be enrolled in most Tribes.
Rather than have another foreign institution judge us, and dictate what constitutes Native American identity; we must view the termination of the Grammy award as a victory for sovereignty.
The thing about Skins is that we have always governed our identity through the production of our art.
In case you're not familiar with "Skins," short for the epithet "Redskins," it's a term many Indians have embraced as a means of sneering at racists.
Doyle MacManus on the Obama team's reelection strategy:
"There's a misapprehension that people in the middle, independents, are somehow less concerned about the economy and the yawning gaps in the economy than Democrats," [David] Axelrod said. "They're not."
Kenneth Rapoza writes that as
The New York Times "right-sizes" its editorial staff, the death of print media approaches:
What’s happening? It’s not the economy. It’s us. We are no longer reading newspapers. In September 1998, the Times had around 1.06 million papers in distribution daily on a six-month average, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. By September 2010, it had about 876,000 papers in circulation. At The Boston Globe, also owned by the Times, circulation went from 470,000 in 1998 to 220,000 in 2010. The newspaper union accepted a 6-percent wage cut (original proposed cut was 23 percent) in 2009 to keep jobs. Despite this, the Globe remains a money-losing enterprise.
Ed Quillen was a bit embarrassed to hear Colorado referred to during national coverage of the GOP presidential caucus as "Focus on the Family Country":
Diversity in the definition of marriage is an American tradition. Beyond that, neither [Rick] Santorum nor any other right-thinker has ever explained just how I'd be worse off if same-sex marriage were legal. Santorum ought to find another issue, like complaining about secular public schools that corrupt children by teaching that the earth is more than 6,000 years old.