Month: August 2010

Jamelle Bouie counters this chart – and Yglesias' contention that "among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis" – with the chart above. Bouie adds:

A college degree certainly helps black workers, but not by much, at least compared to the national average. What's more, well-off blacks tend to have more social proximity to blacks lower on the income scale, so while white college grads are mostly isolated from the recession's effects, I'm not sure if you can say the same for their black counterparts.

Heather Horn summarizes Adam Weinstein's lengthy challenge to Matt:

[Weinstein] points out some other problems with talking about college graduates as a single group. Aside from issues of race, there are issues of age and class: recent graduates are much more likely than older graduates to be underemployed, while Weinstein doesn't take kindly to Yglesias, a Harvard man, grouping "all of us Florida State, Navy, and Iona College grads in with [him]self, John Boehner, and Ben Bernanke."

Fallows responds to the notion that the Atlantic as a whole is now a de facto party to the neoconservative and Israeli campaign to initiate a global war with Iran here and here. I hope to post a long and impassioned response to Jeffrey's cover-essay making the Israeli case for war next week. But a small word about the meta-issue. The point of this magazine, as I understand it, is airing real and honest debate about the great issues of our time. I think Jeffrey's piece is a classic example of what should be published under such a philosophy, and am proud that this magazine is pioneering the debate we need to have. We do not, moreover, believe in a collective line. We believe in open discourse. And there is no subject as grave as the one Jeffrey has grappled with or that this country will have to confront in the months and years ahead.

And that is why I intend to rebut his arguments and evidence and worldview as powerfully and effectively as I can soon. And why I am not going to rush in prematurely.

A truly unhinged Congressman Gohmert touts his "terror babies" canard to Anderson. There are few better examples of the politics of fear than the ranting of Gohmert. His "argument" is that because the 14th Amendment could possibly prompt Jihadists to give birth to "terror babies" who would grow up as Americans and then commit terror, we should accept it as established fact and reverse a core part of the Constitution to prevent it. You tear up the Constitution to protect us from a threat that exists only in the paranoid mind of the far right. And by the way, Gohmert also says something about Republican amnesia. He says that dismissing this threat as bogus is equivalent to the FBI and CIA dismissing the 9/11 plot as inconceivable before it happened. But we know for a fact that president George W. Bush was told a month in advance of the coming threat. These people remember nothing, know nothing and fear everything:

I have nothing to add to Steve Benen. Money quote:

Also note the lesson Krauthammer believes Pope John Paul II was offering: "This is not your place; it belongs to others." In this case, who are we to believe "others" are? On Sept. 11, 2001, the victims included innocents of every race, ethnicity, and religion. Krauthammer seems to suggest Muslim Americans are the "others" who should stay away. That is as absurd as it is offensive.

It is worse than offensive. It is a conflation of American Muslims with al Qaeda – a conflation Bin Laden has been eager to establish for years. That Krauthammer and so many other conservatives simply assume this conflation is a real eye-opener for me. I thought they made a distinction between foreign Jihadists and American Muslims, were in fact proud of the way in which American Muslims have overwhelmingly rejected both the nihilism of Islamist violence but also the segregation of many Muslims in Europe.

It appears I was mistaken. The war, as they understand it, is one between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam as a whole. They have forgone Bush and Rice for Cheney and Falwell. And religious freedom? One more expendable principle in the pursuit of power through demagoguery.

A reader writes:

Your reader's comments unintentionally capture McWhorter's point exactly. They blame cities, teachers, and anybody else except the culprit. A sample of their silly tropes: Urban schools are "underfunded?" Bull. They actually spend more per pupil than most (check out D.C.'s history on that).  Kids in cities can't graduate because the teaching staff is awful? Garbage. Urban districts certainly have a larger percentage of time servers and patronage hires, but the fact remains that the good ones just get burned out because they can't get any traction against the social problems. "Poor access to contraceptives" is the cause of teen pregnancy? In 2010?

This reads like a primal scream from 21-year-old college student who has never been outside the suburbs but is certain that his Intro To Radical Politics professor just can't be wrong.  The fact is, lack of interest from students and totally non-existent parental involvement are the biggest reasons for the drop-out rate, which everyone acknowledges when race is not the topic.

Another writes:

I have to disagree with your readers who took umbrage to John McWhorter.  I spent five years as a teacher in Compton. (Yeah. That Compton.) I can't tell you how sick I am of people who have never been in a classroom talk about the failures of the “system.” The system works reasonably well in Compton.

Sure, they could use better teachers and more administrators, but the students have all the learning tools they need. In my English classes I gave each student a brand new book each year and let them keep another one at school so they wouldn't have to shlep so much luggage around daily. The classroom were clean, bright and well lit. The back wall was full of nice Macs hooked up to high speed internet. The schools in Scarsdale might be better equipped, but I don't see how.

The schools I worked in were never "underfunded."  I'm as tired of that myth as I am hearing the GOP put “job killing” in front of every mention of taxes. Funding is not even close to the problem in Compton. McWhorter is right. It's a cultural issue.

I'm not talking about single parent families, although that's an issue. (You've also got a lot of kids in group homes – that's worse than the single parent issue.) The real problem is that the “system” doesn't run the schools. Gangs do. I can't tell you the number of bright, upwardly mobile freshman who were determined to break the mold and get out of Compton but were waylaid by gangs. By junior year most of them are gone, afraid of being killed if they return to school, usually for some ridiculous breach of gang etiquette like looking the wrong way at a banger. I can see their faces now, lost in the miasma of the inner city. That's the real tragedy.

Until our justice system spends as much effort on suppressing the gang plague as it does on jailing Lindsey Lohan no amount of educational reform is going to fix anything.

Petraeus is pushing for a slower withdrawal. Joe Klein saw this coming:

It is the nature of David Petraeus to move mountains to achieve his mission–and the immediate mountain sitting in front of him is the Obama Administration's December policy review, which will determine how quickly we start to leave Afghanistan in July 2011.

Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal came away from the last policy review, in the fall of 2009, with the distinct impression that the 2011 date would not signal the beginnings of a precipitate bugout. I was told by Administration officials at the time that there might be NATO withdrawals in 7/11–the Germans from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, for example–and some cosmetic American reductions, but the main fighting force in the Taliban-infested south and east would continue its work until the mission was accomplished.

Allahpundit:

I’m actually surprised that he’s starting to push this now; it makes more political sense for Obama to have him do it after the midterms, when there are no electoral consequences in asking to extend a war that’s increasingly identified with Democrats. Presumably he nixed that idea because the long-awaited Kandahar campaign is set to begin later this year and the optics of demanding more time in the middle of a tough battle might be awkward. Better to float the idea this summer, before the shooting starts, so that the public doesn’t read it as a desperation move taken in response to a hard fight later.

The NYT is losing faith:

[W]e are increasingly confused and anxious about the strategy in Afghanistan and wonder whether, at this late date, there is a chance of even minimal success.

A reader writes:

Living in Arkansas, my husband and I have a perspective on the “marriage equality should be driven solely by state legislatures” argument that is surely shared by many gay couples in the Bible Belt and elsewhere.  Our state is a good 20 years away from majority approval of same sex marriage, and we know that as long as we live in Arkansas, we do so as two single, cohabiting men in the eyes of the state.  Therefore, we are faced with an impossible choice: (a) live alone, with no support system, in a state that recognizes our marriage, or (b) live in Arkansas, where we are offered zero protections as a couple, but we enjoy the love and support of our family and friends.  For heterosexual couples in all 50 states, Home = Security.  For same sex couples in 45 states, it is more like Home vs. Security.

On a daily basis, we are asked the same question by friends and foes alike: “What the hell are y’all doing in Arkansas?”  And our answer is plain and simple: Because this is our home.  This is where we belong.  And when we start a family, we want our children to enjoy the richness of a childhood filled with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews.  But unless those darned “activist judges” on the federal bench step in, planning for our future will continue to be an endless game of absurd tradeoffs and unsatisfying options. 

A reader writes:

I'm not an expert, but to my untrained eye, those "color photos" look more like photochroms. Photochroms are a combination of photography and lithography, but aren't real color photos. Essentially, they are artificially colored black and white photos. For some awesome early color photography, check out the collection of photos by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii at Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's sister site for media. Each of these images was itself originally three monochromatic images taken in close succession, that were projected on top of each other. These were digitally combined by the Library of Congress, to wonderful effect.

(Photo: "A picture of Alim Khan (1880-1944), Emir of Bukhara, taken in 1911.")