America’s not a force for good: The truth about our most enduring — and harmful — national myth - Salon.com
"... the Vietnam War compelled millions of citizens to question the once widely held faith that their country is the greatest force for good in the world, that it always acts to advance democracy and human rights, that it is superior in both its power and its virtue. "
"More than half a century of empirical research has documented a range of psychological factors underpinning ideological differences, including correlations between conservatism and authoritarianism, dogmatism, prejudice, and justification of inequality, among other things."
"Those who run around screaming about “American exceptionalism” often condemn countries like France, Norway and Switzerland to justify their jingoism. Sadly, the U.S.’ economic deterioration means that many Americans simply cannot afford a trip abroad to see how those countries function for themselves. And often, lack of foreign travel means accepting clichés about the rest of the world over the reality."
"We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn't happen during his prime ministership, and so that's why we've got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don't see a chaotic situation in the region," the president said in an interview with The Huffington Post on Friday."
Trillion Dollar Fraudsters - NYTimes.com
"Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.
And there’s more: The budgets also claim large reductions in spending on other programs. How would these be achieved? You know the answer."
"The Senate’s treatment of Loretta Lynch, Obama’s nominee for Attorney General, suggests, though, that Ginsburg may have actually underestimated the pathology at work. On November 8, 2014, the President sent her name to the Senate as a replacement for Eric Holder, and she has yet to be confirmed—the Republican leadership has simply failed to put her nomination up for a vote by the full Senate. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, made vague, wiggly gestures about getting it done this week, but he didn’t, and unless something remarkable happens over the weekend his next opportunity will be three weeks from now. The Senate is talking about the budget next week, and will take all its time to pretend that it is making a serious effort to do something about the nation’s finances; after that comes one of those mysterious two-week congressional recesses."
"If the polls are to be even remotely believed, the coalition to emerge in a few weeks time will be as – if not more – unwieldy than the one we happily said goodbye to a few months ago. We’ll most likely be going back to the polls in another two to three years.
Each time, Israel goes to elections hoping that this time it will wake up the next morning to a headline that reads, “Israel has conclusively decided.” But we never do, because we never have conclusively decided.
Instead of that fantasy headline, our reality was best summed up in a sign someone saw fluttering from a balcony a week ago: “I am disappointed in the results of the coming elections.”
The results, much more than the election campaign, will reflect who we are. The message will be muddled because we are a variegated, divided and factious people who can’t agree on what policy should be.
And, yes, we are also one that comes together in times of pain and trauma."
"Conservatives believe that if blacks and Latinos simply work hard, get a good education and earn a good income, historical racial wealth gaps will disappear. The problem is that this sentiment ignores the ways that race continues to affect Americans today. A new report from Demos and Brandeis University, “The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters,” makes this point strongly. The report shows that focusing on education alone will do little to reduce racial wealth gaps for households at the median, and that the Supreme Court, through upcoming decisions, could soon make the wealth gap explode.
Wealth is the whole of an individual’s accumulated assets, not the amount of money they make each year. As such, in his recent book, “The Son Also Rises,” Gregory Clark finds that the residual benefits of wealth remain for 10 to 15 generations."
"Last weekend was the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama, commemorating a day where police brutally beat a group of civil rights marchers demonstrating for voting rights."
By way of illustration, take a look at the new profile of Warren published this week in Politico Magazine, which is hardly a hotbed of doctrinaire liberalism. Written by Glenn Thrush and Manu Raju, the piece bears most of the hallmarks of the Politico style, for better and worse. At no point during its thousands of words do Warren’s policy views get any more than the most cursory attention, and the only new information it provides is essentially gossip. (Former President Bill Clinton refused to campaign for Warren during her 2012 Senate bid because she has been mean to his banker buddies, for example.) But what’s most interesting about the piece is that even here, in the unofficial flagship magazine of elite Washington, the fundamentally non-radical approach Warren takes to politics is crystal clear.
Indeed, what we see Warren doing in the piece more than anything else is playing politics by the traditional means. Before her star-making performance as an overseer of the Wall Street bailouts, she spends years quietly but consistently building contacts in Washington and making powerful friends. When the White House decides it won’t go to bat for her to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she largely created, she doesn’t rail against them in the press or demand it appoint a radical in her stead. When Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid offers her a spot on the leadership team, she happily takes it, hoping to prove to anybody watching that she’s a “team player.” Hell, according to Politico, she’s even trying to find ways to compromise with Republicans in the Senate!"
"In fact, one of O'Reilly's favorite tricks is the editing of videotape to create a half-truth that amounts to a big lie. After O'Reilly had interviewed President Obama in February of 2014, he played a clip of the interview on his show, saying that it revealed a president refusing to call the Benghazi attack an act of terror. Malignantly, the clip ended immediately before the President said this: “Understand, by definition, Bill, when somebody is attacking our compound, that's an act of terror, which is how I characterized it the day after it happened.”
"About an hour north of where the president spoke was Shelby County, whose suit against the Department of Justice the Supreme Court had used togut the same Voting Rights Act that Bloody Sunday helped to pass.
His speech also came after several shootings of unarmed black men, whose deaths caused national protests and racial soul-searching.
It came on the heels of the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, Mo., which found pervasive racial bias and an oppressive use of fines primarily against African-Americans.
It came as a CNN/ORC poll found that four out of 10 Americans thought race relations during the Obama presidency had gotten worse, while only 15 percent thought they had gotten better."
"Had the shooting occurred three and a half miles to the north, the world’s attention might have turned to the city of Florissant, where in 2013, the police stopped black motorists at a rate nearly three times their share of the population. Less than four miles to the northwest, in Calverton Park, court fines and fees accounted for over 40 percent of the city’s general operating revenue last year.
But it was Ferguson and its government that came under federal scrutiny almost unprecedented for a city of its size, culminating ina Justice Department report last week that described explicit racism among city officials, abusive policing and a system that seemed to view people “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” And it is Ferguson that will almost certainly be forced to make wholesale changes."
