Month: February 2013

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Suzy Khimm compares immigration wait times:

There’s no one line. There are many lines with wait times that vary wildly depending on the type of green card that a prospective immigrant is applying for, the number of visas available and his or her country of origin: For those applying for work visas because of their “extraordinary ability,” including high-ranking professors and international business executives, there is virtually no wait time. By contrast, a brother or sister of a U.S. citizen from the Philippines applying for a family-sponsored visas may have been waiting 24 years, as those visas have been oversubscribed, according to the State Department’s latest figures.

For me, it was eighteen years. Because, despite Jesse Helms’ best-laid plans, I survived HIV and him. As for the general issue, I favor much more legal immigration, especially for those foreigners educated in America, especially Indians and Chinese – who will become and already are our core competitors. I fell in love with my new country within weeks of living here. Almost three decades later, I just wish that love were not now entwined with memories of the kind of anxiety and stress and trauma that no non-immigrant and no one without a stigmatized illness would ever quite understand. It should be easier and fairer. Basically: what David wrote today.

“The revolution is like a baby. You can’t say if this baby is going to be a doctor or a lawyer, smart or dumb. Even if this baby throws his mother’s purse, I can’t complain — he’s a baby,” – Rami, a Syrian activist, on the unfolding saga of the Arab Spring.

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If you didn’t hear the testimony above from Wednesday’s hearings on gun control, try to get through it. Hearing a father speak about the murder of his own child is not easy. Compared with the attitude of Wayne LaPierre, it was, as Susan Mulligan noted, also politically savvy:

House Republicans held a hearing on [birth control], and invited no women to testify. The glaring omission not only detracted from the credibility of the hearings, but ended up buttressing the other side’s case. … Democrats made no such mistake when they held hearings on gun violence Wednesday. They invited the very vocal, unapologetically anti-any-kind-of-gun-restriction executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, to testify. …

LaPierre’s absolutist stance on any kind of restrictions or background checks ended up helping the progun control side. He may well have ginned up his base and fundraising (which may well have been the point), but he did not appear to the general public as someone interested in pursuing a reasonable accord.

He is one of the more effective spokesmen for gun control I know. Resisting even universal background checks? C’mon.

Beinart was as disappointed as I was by Hagel’s performance yesterday:

When Hagel talks about the difference between war’s ghastly reality and the antiseptic way in which it is discussed in Washington, and when he describes how the dishonest selling of the Iraq War awakened in him a fury he had been suppressing since his days as a grunt in Vietnam, he’s not only authentic, he’s eloquent. I suspect that’s what made him compelling to Obama, who after being pressured into supporting an Afghan surge he never really believed in, wants to surround himself with people willing to stand up to the mainstream assumptions that have served America so poorly over the last decade.

But that Chuck Hagel didn’t come through yesterday because instead of speaking from the gut, he said what he thought other politicians wanted to hear. That strategy failed because right-wingers like McCain, Graham, and Cruz saw Hagel’s ideological incoherence and smelled his political fear. And it failed because Hagel shouldn’t have been speaking to the armed services committee. He should have been speaking over them, to the majority of Americans who voted for Obama, twice, in part because they want a leader who will break with the foreign policy thinking that has brought us a decade of endless war.

Agreed. But the fact that the defense secretary for the US was required to spend almost all his time on the question of Israel was even more remarkable for being unremarkable:

“I’ve said that I’m a strong supporter of Israel… I’ve said that we
have a special relationship with Israel… Ive never voted against Israel
in my career… I’ve been to Israel many times,” he told Jack Reed of
Rhode Island.

While Kirsten Gillibrand of New York made no bones about “the most
urgent issues– Israel and Israel’s security issues… We are
fundamentally tied to [Israel].” Then Gillibrand demanded that if there
has to be a continuing resolution in the event of a budget crunch,
Hagel’s Pentagon will take pains to keep money going to Israel for its
Iron Dome missile defense.

So in the sequester, Israel comes before the US, if push comes to shove. Hagel will almost certainly survive this process, but it has served its purpose: to reveal how no president and no defense secretary can speak honestly and openly about their views on the Middle East, and that US defense, so far as the Congress is concerned, is basically fused with that of another country – a country that isn’t even in NATO or the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and is illegally occupying and ethnically engineering conquered territory to its West.

And, of course, the unspoken assumption is that Obama is trying to return to a more balanced approach in the region, in the tradition of George H W Bush. But you can only do that as a president if you have publicly insisted you won’t – and every official is required by the Congresss to reiterate blind, unequivocal, permanent support for anything any far-right Israeli government may do.

(Photo: Former U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) pauses as he testifies before the
Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing to
become the next secretary of defense on Capitol Hill January 31, 2013 in
Washington, DC. By by Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Update from a reader:

Sorry, but as a geographer I have to correct you. While the majority of the Palestinian territory is called the West Bank, it is actually to the east of Israel proper. If they were occupying conquered territory to Israel’s West the Israelis would be occupying the seabed under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea! Sorry to be nit-picky. But in the Middle East, quite often, the geographic specifics really matter.

Forrest Wickman sticks up for the actress:

It’s worth contrasting the coverage Hathaway and Jackman have received for their performances in Les Misérables. Both made headlines by shedding pounds for their roles, a practice common to all sorts of Oscar-baiting performances. But only Hathaway’s weight loss has attracted scrutiny and shaming. Hathaway’s character starves, sells her hair, and sells her body, while Jackman belts out a song in close-up while crawling through a river of sewage. The movie’s vision demanded over-the-top performances, and they both knocked it out of the park, but only Hathaway gets shit for it.

Linda Holmes defends popular culture:

The problem with popularity is not that only awful things are popular or that “the masses” can’t tell the difference; it’s the wrongheaded philosophy that only popular things are perceived to be good, or the practical problem that arises when only popular things can survive. A statement that something is “fine for the masses” or “made for the masses” could simply mean it’s of high quality and accessible, which should be a good thing, or could mean it’s facile and uncreative, in which case what’s wrong with it is that it’s facile and uncreative, not that there exists somewhere a teeming zombie horde of undifferentiated pasty-faced morons waiting to snap it up.

Barry Strauss reviews Rome’s Last Citizen, a study of Cato, the ancient statesman who resisted the political designs of Julius Caesar – and thus centuries later became a hero to the American founders, especially George Washington:

[Cato] drove Caesar into
civil war by refusing any compromise. Caesar prevailed, and Cato took
his own life rather than admit defeat. His death capped a career of
standing up for the republic as he saw it. If there was something blind
and wrongheaded about him, there was also something magnificent … Soldiers can take courage from Cato’s example. Politicians should ponder
it with care. His life offers a lesson in particular for conservatives
about the need for tactical compromise to save what’s best of an old
order. For how long should one stand on principle when tectonic shifts
rumble below? If only Cato could have read Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958
novel, The Leopard, with its cynical but effective lesson: “If we want things to stay as they are, everything has to change.”

(Image: “Suicide of Cato the Younger” by Charles Le Brun, 1646 from Wikimedia Commons)

Ivory Toldson disputes the idea that “black students purposefully underachieve because they attribute being smart to ‘acting white'”:

[T]he Acting White Theory for black education is more fodder for cultural critics than it is a construct that will advance any meaningful solutions for academic achievement gaps. In many ways, white males are the most forthright about being apathetic toward educational values, which is likely attributed to having less of a need for impression management because of having no stereotype threat. For black people, the context of “acting white” could be primarily a function of satire and sarcasm, and have more to do with styles of dress, communication nuances, music preferences and a particular swagger that is independent of intellectual aptitude.

The problem with the Acting White Theory is that it promotes the misconception that black students underachieve because of their corrupted attitudes. Meanwhile, many black students are relegated to under-resourced schools, and they lack motivation because of low expectations from teachers and school leaders, unfair discipline and fewer opportunities for academic enrichment.

Lisa Wade dissects the racial implications of for-profit prisons:

This is a deeply unethical system and new research shows that, in addition to being disproportionately incarcerated, racial minorities and immigrants are disproportionately housed in private prisons.  Looking at three states with some of the largest prison populations — California, Texas, and Arizona – graduate student Christopher Petrella reports that racial minorities are over-represented in private prisons by an additional 12%; his colleague, Josh Begley, put together [the above] infographic.

This means that, insofar as U.S. state governments are making an effort to rehabilitate the prison population, those efforts are disproportionately aimed at white inmates. Petrella argues that this translates into a public disinvestment in the lives of minorities and their communities.

Michaela Pommells, meanwhile, implicates the lack of transparency in privatized prisons:

On the political scale, any community backlash becomes irrelevant because public officials can play dumb considering that private prisons are not required to adhere to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). … Petrella points out that, “People of color are already over-represented in [public prisons] relative to their population share. Therefore, bringing transparency to the private prison industry would disproportionately benefit communities of color.”

(Image by Christopher Petrella and Josh Begley)