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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
I'm sure that President Obama and his wife have done their best to
prepare their daughters for the idea that there are crazy people out
there whose hatred for their father extends to them (although it's not
a job I envy). But it's difficult to prepare for this, posted on the
website (a site so offensive that I didn't link to it) of the Westboro
"Baptist" Church, which has organized an anti-gay protest outside of
Sidwell Friends, the school the Obama girls attend: "Quakers?! Are you
frigging kidding me? You pretend to be all non-violent, and you allow
the most bloody, deceitful, evil, murderous bastard and his shemale
sidekick to place their satanic spawn within your four walls" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
I usually love Charles Pierce's writing, but this recent piece in which he tries to pin some of the blame for the surge in right wing paranoia simply fails to make its point, and veers ever so slightly into the victim-blaming arena. It's tempting to suggest that if Obama made better choices, especially with regard to his appointments, then this whole right-wing freak-out wouldn't be so bad, but it simply isn't true ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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It was reported over the weekend that Obama’s speech at the United Nations describing his dream of a nuclear-free world helped clinch his Nobel Peace prize. Many have observed that while Obama’s words and sentiments are noble, the accomplishments that go along with earning a Nobel are lacking. However, I find his dream itself disturbing ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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With the announcement this morning that Indiana University's Elinor Ostrom had won the Nobel Prize in Economics—the first women to do so in the prize's 40-year-history—the tally of 2009 women laureates rises to five. Since the program began in 1901, only 40 women total have won Nobels. Ostrom doesn't cut quite as striking a figure as DoubleX's new office style icon, Herta Mueller, but this photo fills my Monday-deadened heart with happiness ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from guest blogger Amanda Marcotte:
Hanna, I see what you're saying about how Joe Wilson is in the mainstream of South Carolina white culture,
but that doesn't strike me as a reason to shy away from drawing the
conclusion that he's a racist. If anything, that just seems to be more
evidence that he is a racist. Whether we like
to admit this about our fellow Americans or not, there are large parts
of the country where the mainstream white culture is overtly racist. As
a white person living in a red state, I'm sick of pretending that this
doesn't create plenty of occasions where conservatives will say the
most hair-curling racist things when they think they're out of the
earshot of anyone who will confront them on it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Great job, Obama! You've finally succeeded in getting somebody else
to take some of those Guantanamo detainees off your hands. Your
masterful diplomacy, although strangely ignored by more than 100 of our
petitioned allies, has swayed the tiny island country of Palau to
generously take a small group of the least dangerous detainees. Perhaps
also helpful was the mere fee of $200 million we're paying them,
which—as the Wall Street Journal points out—is
a practical $10,000 for every citizen of Palau. On the heels of that
good news comes yet more: Saudi Arabia is willing to take almost 100 of
the most dangerous detainees. Details of that negotiation still to come.
I can't help but wonder if the protesters who raged over
America's abuse of detainees in Guantanamo will express the same level
of outrage for... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The crazy thing though, Hanna, about the fringe obsession with Obama and Jewish conspiracy
is that it's happening even as the Jews who worried that Obama wouldn't
show enough allegiance to Israel are worrying more. Before the
election, Obama the candidate held the hands of the little old Jewish
ladies with blue hair in Florida who want a president who will put
Israel first no matter what—even when the Israeli government doesn't
necessarily deserve that kind of fealty—and reassured them that he
wouldn't move even the teeniest step away from Bush's Israel stance. (I
won't call it pro-Israel, because I don't think it actually works out
that way all the time.) And in the end... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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What is it with Obama and the Jews? Ever since he chose Rahm Emanuel, the child of an Israeli, as his chief of staff, conspiracy theories have raged about Obama's connection to the Jews... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Without question, this was the first serious foreign policy speech Obama has made as president. In giving it, he broke a number of taboos and slid over several potential minefields, reaffirming America's commitment to Israel as well as to Palestinian statehood in front of an Egyptian audience, and going out of his way to make statements about democracy, womens' rights, and religious freedom. If the speech were the dawn of a new age of public diplomacy then I'm all in favor.
Two things worried me about it, however... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The murder of Dr. George Tiller in his church this Sunday sent a special chill down my spine; not the kind one gets when someone young, or important, or defenseless is gunned down in cold blood, but the kind one gets when domestic terror strikes. I don't mean to be too alarmist about the first killing of an abortion provider since 1998. Of course, any such assassination is illegal and wrong. But the lawlessness and vigilantism of this particular murder—or, as the anti-abortion zealout who allegedly shot him might put it, judgment—is very worrisome. Is total anarchy just around the corner?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
If the Daily Telegraph is right that the unreleased detainee-abuse photos include graphic images of rape, Obama must have been lying when he said
the photos are “not particularly sensational, especially when compared
to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” For all the
pain of those earlier images, what they depicted were not generally
criminal acts in the same way that rape is. They showed violation,
humiliation, the horrific power differential between prisoners and
their jailors—war crimes, to be sure—but they tended to document the
effects and aftermath of violence more than its... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California.
Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist,
but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday
so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be
forced to comment on the gay marriage ban... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action
may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think,
is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential
primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity
politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama)
v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much
racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic
of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or
skin color than with their respective ages... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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This week, Hanna, Meghan, and I inaugurated the Double
X weekly podcast, called the "XX Gabfest" in tribute to some of
our Slate offerings, the "Political Gabfest" and
the "Culture
Gabfest." We hashed out our thoughts about Obama's speech on abortion at
Notre Dame, Nancy Pelosi's troubles, and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Regarding President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, I pretty much agree with Hanna that he said all the right things about abortion. I especially related to his anecdote
about the Christian doctor who wrote Obama to complain that his
campaign Web site referred to all pro-lifers as right-wing idealogues.
I’m about as pragmatic as you can get and still be a pro-lifer, so I’m
right with the president on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the heady afterglow of Obama's inauguration, I accepted a bet from Ann Althouse.
She bet that the president, in the end, would not fulfill his promise
to close Guantanamo within a year, by next January. Testing my hope
that Obama could be counted on, I bet that he'd come through. Now I'd
say Ann is looking more prescient than I am.
How is Obama going to close Guantanamo in eight months when his lawyers just asked... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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While Bristol Palin was enjoying another prime time moment making her ambassadorial debut as the Candie's Foundation's abstinence spokesperson—Meghan, you're right, what dizzy come-hither-hypocrisy is at work there!—you probably missed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The storm of criticism is already brewing, but I for one want to
commend Mary Ann Glendon, a professor at Harvard and a former ambassador to the
Holy See, for refusing to accept the Laetare Medal and speak at Notre Dame's
spring commencement.
I love the eloquence of her open letter to the press explaining why speaking
alongside Obama during the ceremony is against her conscience:
A
commencement, however, is supposed to be a joyous day for the graduates and
their families. It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the
right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre
Dame's decision—in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops—to
honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church's position on issues
involving fundamental principles of justice.
After all the mind-bending
attempts of evangelical leaders like Joel Hunter to try and prove the existence
of some kind of secret Obama pro-life agenda,
it's a relief that Glendon at least personally recognizes the
contradiction. Not only does she personally recognize it, but it also
feels to me that Glendon has a deeper agenda that motivated the release of her
letter to the press: an attempt to force the some of the institutions and
members of the Catholic Church to do a little overdue soul-searching themselves.
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Hanna, I'm glad Obama's grand claim to separate politics and ideology from science bothered you, too. It disturbs me when politicians and pundits talk about science as if it's a separate force all its own, somehow divorced from rational decision-making in which moral forces always come to play. There was a line in last year's movie Flash of Genius in which Greg Kinnear's character points out this political deception to his students. He reminds them that it was engineers who did incredible good when they invented the replacement heart valve and also engineers who were responsible for so much evil when they invented the Auschwitz gas chambers. The examples are extreme, but the point is a good one: Just because science gives us the capability to do something—it doesn't make it the best thing to do. Science allows us to destroy human embryos, but it can't answer whether that's right or not.
So, if anything, Obama's choice to lift the ban and begin to fund morally questionable research when science is giving us such promising, noncontroversial alternatives seems like more like a "Flash of Grandstanding" than anything else, but one that has some seriously scary consequences.
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A few years ago, Education Next ran a terrific article about how the teachers assigned to Manhattans smartest high-schoolers are there because of seniority rather than expertise. According to that piece, half of the teaching vacancies at Stuyvesant are reserved for teachers seeking transfers from other New York City schools, and those must be "filled solely on the basis of seniority."
As someone who had to suffer through a computer science course taught by a fairly batty, near-retirement woman who seemed to be gazing upon Microsoft Word for the first time, I know how painful it is to be taught by someone whose only qualification is having put in some time. I hope Obama strives not just for getting smarter teachers in the classrooms but for creating a system that encourages them to stay there. Teach For America hasn't quite nailed that. TFA puts smart, motivated, overachiever types straight from their elite college campuses to impoverished school districts, and studies show they are effective. But most of my friends who've done it burn out almost immediately—not a huge surprise, given that they're idealists used to succeeding, having to face their failure not only to change the world, but even to get their students to sit down. What we need are smart teachers who can stick around long enough to get that last stint at Stuyvesant.
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