Visual source: Newseum
The New York Times looks at the Justice Department's rejection of an extremely restrictive
The department said the law clearly disadvantages Hispanic voters, who lack photo ID’s at a much higher rate than the state’s overall population. The Voting Rights Act requires that states and counties with a history of racial discrimination prove that new voting laws don’t discriminate in purpose or effect, and Texas was unable to meet that test.[...]
In a letter to Texas elections officials, the Justice Department said the state submitted no evidence that it is suffering from a voter-impersonation problem that would be solved with an ID requirement. But, at the department’s request, Texas did submit data showing how the requirement would affect Hispanic voters, and the numbers were disturbing. Nearly 11 percent of Hispanic registered voters lack a driver’s license or government-issued card, compared with nearly 5 percent of non-Hispanic voters. (Hispanics were the only minority group analyzed because it was easier to identify their last names)
Frank Bruni also takes on discrimination in
The New York Times:
Hussy. Harlot. Hooker.
Floozy. Strumpet. Slut.
When attacking a woman by questioning her sexual mores, there’s a smorgasbord of slurs, and you can take your rancid pick. Help me out here: where are the comparable nouns for men? What’s a male slut?
A role model, in some cases. In others, a presidential candidate. [...]
Decades after the dawn of feminism, despite the best efforts of everyone from Erica Jong to Kim Cattrall, women are still seen through an erotically censorious prism, and promiscuity is still the ultimate putdown.
It’s antediluvian, and it’s astonishing. You’d think our imaginations would have evolved, even if our humanity hasn’t.
Eugene Robinson at
The Washington Post echoes what many are saying in the wake of this week's massacre of civilians by a lone U.S. soldier:
What are we accomplishing, aside from enraging the Afghan population we’re allegedly trying to protect? How are we supposed to convince them that a civilian massacre carried out by a U.S. soldier is somehow preferable to a civilian massacre carried out by the Taliban? How does it make any of us safer to have the United States military known for burning Korans and killing innocent Muslim children in their beds? [...]This is supposed to be a period of transition from U.S. occupation to Afghan government control. But what do we expect to accomplish between now and 2014, when our troops are supposed to come home? We can be confident that the Afghan government will still be feckless and corrupt. We can anticipate that the Afghan military will still lack personnel, equipment and training. We can be absolutely certain that the Taliban insurgents will still constitute a threat, because — and this is what gung-ho advocates of the war fail to grasp — they live there. To them, Afghanistan is not a battlefield but a home.
The Atlantic's
Robert Wright writes about the lessons learned from the massacre in Afghanistan:
The overarching lesson is that once you launch even the best intentioned and most justified of wars, you become a hostage to fortune. Stuff happens--political stuff, geopolitical stuff--and suddenly events have spun out of control. The downsides of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars turned out to be many, many times worse than their proponents said they'd be. (Though there was so little debate about the Afghanistan war that "proponents" is a misleadingly distinct category.) And if you look at the people now saying we should bomb Iran, they tend to be the people who were the most full-throated in their reassurances that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars would work out really nicely.
Robert Kurzban pens a thought-provoking piece on hypocrisy:
Arguments from the right fare little better. Framing the debate in terms of threat rings hollow. The institution of marriage is not the sort of thing that needs defending; more marriages, albeit in novel configurations, don’t threaten the institution. People eating beef Wellington for breakfast would not require defending the institution of breakfast by defining the meal as two eggs, toast, coffee, with orange juice optional. Opponents of same-sex marriage want to use the coercive power of the state to prohibit a particular contract between two citizens, an agenda at odds with the typical philosophical leanings of those on the right.
Finally,
Michael Gerson takes on Republican Rick Santorum's attacks on teleprompters and speechwriters:
The idea that a leader should carefully craft his public words, sometimes with the advice and help of others, is not particularly new. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were known to polish George Washington’s prose. William Seward contributed to Lincoln’s first inaugural, though it was Lincoln’s edits that gave the speech its music. Sam Rosenman captured FDR’s distinctive voice, as Ted Sorensen did for JFK. Richard Goodwin helped Lyndon Johnson rise to the rhetorical demands of the civil rights struggle. “At times, history and fate,” said Johnson, “meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”
Such collaboration is not a species of fraud. It is a process in which a leader refines his own thoughts, invites suggestions by trusted advisers and welcomes the contributions of literary craft to political communication. A very few presidents — Lincoln may exhaust the category — have no need of consultation on policy or style. But political mortals generally benefit from it.