We start today with Georgetown University professor Thomas Zimmer, writing for the Guardian, on why the right wing is extremely opposed to a Black woman ascending to the nation’s highest court.
This rather alarmed response tells us a lot about how the right views the political conflict, precisely because it is seemingly at odds with the fact that the conservative majority on the court is not in jeopardy. Any assessment of these reactions must start by recognizing their racist and sexist nature. They are revealing precisely because they were so reflexive, so visceral. Misogynoir – anti-Black misogyny - forms the basis of this conservative scorn.
But there is something else on display here too. A Black woman replacing Justice Breyer won’t change the court’s arithmetic. And yet, conservatives still feel threatened by Biden’s announcement because they understand it symbolizes the recognition that having white men dominate the powerful institutions of American life is a problem – and that rectifying this imbalance is an urgent task. They reject the notion that the country’s institutions should reflect the composition of the people; they know representation matters, and that a Black woman ascending to a position like this is also an acknowledgment of past injustice. [...]
The Right is reacting to something real: due to political, cultural, and demographic changes, the country has indeed become less white, less conservative, less Christian. The balance of political power doesn’t (yet) reflect that, as the US system has many undemocratic distortions and is deliberately set up in a way that disconnects these changing demographic and cultural realities from political power. But conservatives realize that their vision for American society has come under pressure.
Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times asks: what makes a Supreme Court Justice “qualified”?
But what does it mean for a Supreme Court justice to be “qualified”? The Constitution is silent on the question, and there’s not much to take from the framers either. To the extent that “qualified” means anything to most people, it’s that the nominee has ample experience on the bench, a standard in keeping with the idea that the court is the final rung on the meritocratic ladder for judges and other legal elites.
If significant experience as a judge is what it means to be qualified for the Supreme Court, however, then most iterations of the court have been patently unqualified. Of the 108 men (and two women) to have served on the court before 2007, according to the legal historian Henry J. Abraham in his history of Supreme Court appointments, 26 had 10 or more years of experience on any court, state or federal. Thirty-eight justices had no judicial experience, and the remaining 46 had only token experience adjudicating disputes from the bench.
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There are many more examples to pull from, but the larger point should be clear: To be “qualified” for the Supreme Court is simply to be the right person for the political needs of the moment. Sometimes, the right person has ample judicial experience. More often, he or she does not. What that person does have, however, is wide experience in public life. For most of the history of the United States, the path to the Supreme Court involved political work, a stint in public office or a prominent position in public affairs, as well as some legal experience.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post has some ideas about responding to right-wing disinformation.
What can a free society that depends on a shared set of facts and multiracial, multireligious democracy do to defend itself?
First, it can counter educational arson by making speech more accessible. School boards
want to ban “Maus”? Buy
a copy of the book for every schoolchild in that district. Right-wing crusaders want to excise the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. from the curriculum? Bring in pop culture icons to lead public discussions and provide a complete picture of America’s struggle for racial equality. And, as President Biden
did with the Tulsa race massacre, he can use his bully pulpit, public celebrations and monuments to share the history the right would rather bury. (It wouldn’t hurt for him to denounce book banning.)
Second, refuse to normalize lies. Don’t give Jan. 6 apologists and vaccine deniers a free pass on mainstream media. Do not treat the right’s campaign of vicious lies as a function of horserace politics. Be clear about who is doing the censoring. (Media reports that cover the spread of book banning without saying who is banning them disguise the responsible players and suggest the phenomenon is not tied to a political agenda.)
Third, private actors (e.g., book publishers, universities, social media platforms) should reiterate their standards. Not every utterance by a professor warrants a firing, but neither should egregious (let alone repeated) bigotry go unnoticed. Suspension from media platforms should precede expulsion. A more nuanced response to vile speech will reduce cries of victimhood.
Anne Kim of Washington Monthly chronicles how and why America stopped caring about the poor.
Despite abundant empirical evidence of poverty’s structural causes and the failures of welfare reform, current public opinion still reflects the ascendancy of conservative social policy. While it’s an article of faith among liberals that poverty’s primary causes are structural—that is, the result of racial segregation, substandard schools and transit, low wages, labor market dislocations, and other factors—many Americans still hew to a naive, Horatio Alger view that poverty and wealth are determined largely by individual behavior. (Of course, both culture and choices matter. “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”)
Seventy percent of Americans, for instance, believe they can achieve the “American Dream” if they “work hard and play by the rules,” according to Gallup. Likewise, 61 percent of Americans say “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard,” according to the Pew Research Center, while just 36 percent say “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success.”
Many Americans are also resistant to the idea of systemic racism as a root cause of poverty, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. In a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, just 31 percent of Americans—including only 6 percent of Republicans—said that white people “benefit from advantages in society that Black people do not have.” Likewise, a 2020 Gallup poll found that 67 percent of whites believe “blacks have as good a chance as whites to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.” (Only 30 percent of Black respondents feel the same.)
Nancy Kaffer of the Detroit Free Press says that for herself and especially for her young son, “normal” is right now.
We'd persisted through the long spring of 2020, through the excruciating summer that followed, and the ill-conceived pivot to virtual that fall. We'd enjoyed the near normal summer of 2021 and endured the weeks of close-contact quarantines and building shutdowns that punctuated the off-again, on-again return to in-class instruction. We'd weathered the delta surge, the winter of omicron, and our school's month-long post holiday shutdown — all with "normal" firmly in our sights.
Or so I thought.
But now, 23 months into this pandemic, I realize that there is no normal. Not for my son, and not for me.
Maybe it's just a function of time. He's 11, and by the numbers, the pandemic has been happening for 20% of his life, compared to 4% of mine. Longer, if you consider that he has only hazy memories of his baby-to-toddler years.
I have decades of pre-pandemic life to remember; he has a scant few years.
Normal? What normal? This is normal now.
Mark Kriedler of Kaiser Health News writes that the nation’s college and universities are struggling to recruit and maintain mental health professionals for students that need those services.
Across the country, college students are seeking mental health therapy on campus in droves, part of a 15-year upswing that has spiked during the pandemic. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in December issued a rare public health advisory noting the increasing number of suicide attempts by young people.
Colleges and universities are struggling to keep up with the demand for mental health services. Amid a nationwide shortage of mental health professionals, they are competing with hospital systems, private practices, and the burgeoning telehealth industry to recruit and retain counselors. Too often, campus officials say, they lose.
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According to data compiled by KFF, more than 129 million Americans live in areas with a documented shortage of mental health care professionals. Roughly 25,000 psychiatrists were working in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The KFF data indicates that more than 6,500 additional psychiatrists are needed to eliminate the shortfall.
On campuses, years of public awareness campaigns have led to more students examining their mental health and trying to access school services. “That’s a very good thing,” said Jamie Davidson, associate vice president for student wellness at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The problem is “we don’t have enough staff to deal with everyone who needs help.”
Dave Zirin of The Nation writes about the lawsuit filed by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores alleging discriminatory practices by the National Football League.
Flores has recently been on the losing end of the lie that the NFL cares about diversity. He just completed his second consecutive winning season in Miami. It marked the first time that the hapless Dolphins have had consecutive winning seasons in almost 20 years. Flores even brought the team back from a 1-7 start to a winning record, the first NFL coach to accomplish that feat. And yet, he was fired. On his way out, “unnamed sources” trashed Flores’s reputation—characterizations that many meek reporters, ever dutiful to the NFL, thought nothing of publishing. That ham-handed slandering brought Flores to the brink.
What, based upon his lawsuit and the chronology of events, may have finally pushed him over was a bogus Rooney Rule interview with the New York Giants, an organization that, like 7 of the 32 NFL teams, has never hired a Black head coach. Flores found out when his former mentor Bill Belichick contacted him by accident. Belichick apparently tried to congratulate Brian Daboll for landing the Giants job but texted the wrong Brian. The Giants had seemingly decided to hire a white coach with a thin résumé before Flores was even interviewed. Flores has also had enough of a league that has only one Black head coach when 70 percent of players are Black. He also knows that by issuing his lawsuit, his time in the league has almost certainly come to an end. The owners don’t take kindly to whistleblowers or people pointing out how grotesque they can look when the lights are on bright.
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You might think the NFL would respond to this lawsuit with some humility. Perhaps they would announce their own internal investigation to see if Black coaches are being unfairly excluded from the top jobs. But this is the NFL we’re talking about: plutocratic and right-wing to its core, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to be told by the help whom they can or cannot hire. Their response, before any serious examination of Flores’s charges, is that the case is “without merit.” If you feel a spray on your cheeks, that’s 31 billionaires spitting in your face and telling you it’s raining.
Hibai Arbide Aza and Miguel González obtained copies of the written U.S. responses to Russian security concerns about Ukraine in an exclusive for the Spanish daily El País. (This excerpt is from the El País in English online edition.)
The Russian authorities demanded a written response to their proposal to sign a deal that gave security guarantees to Moscow regarding the expansion of NATO to the east. Moscow even included a draft version of the hypothetical deal. The response was two texts: one titled “Confidential/Rel Russia” (consisting of an introduction, seven points and some brief conclusions) on the part of Washington; and another, under the heading “NATO-Russia Restricted” (with 12 sections), from the Atlantic Alliance. The texts capture to a large extent – albeit in a much more detailed form – the messages that the Western leaders have conveyed in public to the Kremlin. The US and NATO have coordinated their responses, which are complementary but do contain some differences.
The main difference between both texts is that Washington is prepared to discuss the concept of “indivisibility of security,” which the OSCE approved at its summit in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan in 2010. Moscow has included this in the first article in its draft deal, using this principle to allege that the eventual entry of Ukraine into NATO would affect its security. The text from the US warns that it does not share the Russian point of view and notes that the concept of indivisibility of security “cannot be viewed in isolation.” Even so, it expresses willingness to deal with the “respective interpretations” of the same. And it points out that “the United States and Russia also reaffirmed the inherent right of each and every participating state to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance.”
The documents obtained by El País are here.
Marianne Lavelle of Inside Climate News has an interesting report on climate change as it relates to national security concerns pertaining to the Russia/Ukraine conflict. This excerpt focuses on some of the reasons that now might not be an optimal time for Putin to invade Ukraine.
For now, though, Ukraine is caught in the squeeze between Putin and Europe. Putin has repeatedly denied that he is planning an invasion of the former Soviet state, characterizing the troop build-up on the border as a defensive response against the threat of NATO expansion. The United States delivered a written response last week that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said “sets out a serious diplomatic path forward should Russia choose it,” but Russia’s immediate response was cool.
Among the factors working against Putin, though, were several related to climate and energy. Nord Stream 2 appeared to be losing its power as a wedge to divide NATO, as new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made clear for the first time that his government was open to sanctions against the project if Russia invades Ukraine. The foreign minister in his coalition government is Annalena Baerbock, co-leader of Germany’s Green party, who has long opposed Nord Stream 2 as not only destabilizing to Europe, but contrary to European Union climate targets. The pipeline, though complete, has not yet received regulatory approval, and environmentalists argue it will lock in hundreds of millions of tons of new carbon emissions annually.
Putin’s own drive to cut Ukraine out as a natural gas conduit between Siberia and Europe also may have weakened his hand. Nord Stream 2 is the fourth pipeline he has built to cut Ukraine out of the mix and avoid paying the transit fees that made up as much as 4 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. The amount of Russian gas that flows to Europe through Ukraine has fallen from 80 percent at the time of the 2006 Russian cutoff to just 25 percent today.
“The multi-decade effort by Russia to diversify how the gas gets to Europe means that even before Nord Stream 2, the impact of a Ukrainian disruption on Europe would be much more limited,” said Tsafos.
Novelist Simon Edge, writing for Al Jazeera, says that the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS or “the Met”), Dame Cressida Dick, should be relieved of her duties and not simply because of the possible cover-up involving the #10 Downing Street lockdown parties.
Dame Cressida has different standards when it comes to the powers-that-be. When stories of rule-breaking at Downing Street emerged, the Met made the preposterous claim that it did not investigate crimes committed in the past, then said there was no evidence of law-breaking. When confronted with suitcase-loads of that evidence, it ordered the suppression of a key report that would reveal the truth beyond doubt.
As I write this, a damning new report has emerged of Met officers joking about hitting and raping women amid a culture of appalling racism, misogyny and homophobia at a police station in the heart of London. The news has fuelled calls for Dick’s resignation: she must have known how prevalent these attitudes were, even as she gave high-minded speeches about the high standards of conduct within her force.
To anyone who remembers the events of July 2005, poor judgement and terrible behaviour from an institution run by Cressida Dick are sickening but no surprise. This incompetent wrecker of havoc, rewarded at every turn, is a symbol of all that is rotten in our country.
Vanda Felbab-Brown writes for the Brookings Institution’s “Order From Chaos” blog about about the resurgence of armed non-state actors in the international arena.
2021’s fundamental development in the nonstate actor space was the Taliban’s dramatic defeat of the Afghan government. Long gaining battlefield momentum as Afghan security forces remained ridden with problems and Afghan politicians remained caught up in parochial struggles, the Taliban took Kabul and the rest of the country amidst the departure of U.S. and international forces.
Around the world, jihadis touted the Taliban’s defeat of the U.S. superpower and its Afghanistan project. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an anti-Pakistan group operating in both Pakistan and Afghanistan with close connections to the Haqqani network (one of the Taliban’s power poles) extolled the Taliban’s success. So did Somalia’s al-Shabab, whose websites closely followed and hailed the Taliban’s battlefield progress and victory for weeks. Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent congratulatory notes. Even Yemen’s Houthis declared that the Taliban, with its history of brutality toward Shia, showed that foreign “occupations” are bound to fail.
But the effects of the morale boost on actual battlefield performance of these and other jihadi groups should not be overestimated. The TTP may be enjoying a more comfortable safe haven in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but it was there for years before the Taliban takeover of Kabul, and re-escalated its attacks against targets in Pakistan a year and a half earlier. The Houthis in Yemen have essentially won. But they ground down the combined forces of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, supported by the United States, already by early 2020. And Iran’s support for them has been far more fundamental to their success than Taliban victory.
Finally today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian, writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer about the West Philadelphia-born creator and star of ABC’s Abbott Elementary, Quinta Brunson, and her use of Philly speak and slang.
In the opening scene of the series’ fourth episode, Brunson’s character — Janine Teagues, who teaches at a fictional Philadelphia elementary school — is working through some standard Philly slang on her classroom whiteboard. As she calls out words at both the introductory level (hoagie, jawn) and advanced (ard [”all right”], boul [“boy”], oldhead [”those of you who need these bracketed explanations”]), the class repeats the words back in unison. Cheesesteak is up there too, but it’s inexplicably written as two words, which — since every Philadelphian spells it cheesesteak, and the show otherwise labors for local authenticity — can only be a nod to the many imperfections of struggling public schools.
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Teaching what’s now known as African American Vernacular English has a checkered history. It was exactly 25 years ago that a national controversy forced the Oakland Unified School District in California to abandon its plans to incorporate “Ebonics” into its language curriculum. Critics from President Bill Clinton on down decried the district’s plan to use Black English to teach “standard” English.
But in the years since, research has shown that Oakland might have been on the right track. Academics debate endlessly whether Black English is a language or a dialect — and about the racist assumptions that come with each argument — but most agree that a student raised speaking African American Vernacular English has to work harder to translate something in “standard” English in order to understand it. Just as foreign-language learners have to translate a sentence to their native language before processing it, so do people for whom white English deviates from how they learned to speak. That translation takes time, and it presents endless opportunities for the translators to fall behind.
Everyone have a great day!