The Notion

Obama, Human Rights & the Chutzpah of Conservatives

By Eyal Press

"Does Obama Believe in Human Rights?" asks Bret Stephens in today's Wall Street Journal. According to Stephens, the answer is a resounding "no." Citing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's statement on a visit to China earlier this year that human rights should not interfere with other pressing issues, Stephens writes indignantly, "It… takes a remarkable degree of cynicism – or perhaps cowardice – to treat human rights as something that ‘interferes' with America's purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them."

It takes a remarkable degree of cynicism – and chutzpah – for Bret Stephens to have written that sentence. This is the same Bret Stephens who, two years ago, in this tendentious column, defended the Bush administration against "inflated, imprecise and tendentious allegations of torture." Waterboarding, Stephens allowed, was unpleasant business, but did not "properly" qualify as torture.

Stephens is nauseated that the Obama administration is engaging regimes such as Burma. He does not bother to mention that the great Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi supports the administration's policy of engaging the junta running her country, or that human rights activists have long been divided over whether sanctions against Burma help or hinder the expansion of freedom. There is no inherent conflict between engagement and the promotion of human rights, just as isolating a country (see Cuba) doesn't necessarily hamper an authoritarian ruler's ability to stay in power and suppress political freedom.

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October 20, 2009

Backing Obama, MoveOn Urges Congressional Dems to Join Fox Fight

By Ari Melber

MoveOn.org jumped into the battle between Fox News and the Obama White House on Tuesday, urging its 5 million members to call on Congressional Democrats to stay off the network for the rest of the year -- the same timetable announced by the White House.

"To draw attention to its biased coverage, President Obama will not appear on FOX for the rest of this year," notes a MoveOn email, citing recent reporting by The Times. "It's about time Democrats stood up to FOX," continues the missive, which calls on MoveOn members to sign a petition "asking Democrats to support President Obama's stance by staying off FOX as long as he does."

While Obama aides have forcefully singled out Fox for two weeks running, Congressional Democrats have been oddly subdued, as The Hill recently reported:

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October 20, 2009

Health Care Hoax Worse Than Balloon Boy

By Laura Flanders

An attention grab that held millions of Americans transfixed. A story that seemed to be about life in the balance. It dominated the airwaves, the social networks, held Americans in its clutch. And then it turned out to have been nothing but a hoax. A play for attention that distracted the entire country.

Now that the Balloon Boy's story is blown, can we call out the health care hoax?

The anti-health care lobby is taking all our attention hostage and a nation's hopes (and votes) for quality health care are floating away.

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October 20, 2009

The Parable of Balloon Boy

By Richard Kim

It was all a hoax, a fraud, a cynical and none too well concocted publicity stunt to bolster the Heene family's reality TV cachet. But there was something beautiful about the lie too, for like all lies the balloon boy story provided us with a release from reality, an escape. I don't mean to make light of viewers' fears that six-year-old Falcon Heene's life was in danger as his UFO-shaped vessel floated into the sky. But who can deny the element of wonder and envy evoked by that spectacle?

It seemed a myth from the beginning: the innocent child, guilty only of being too curious, transcending earth to join the heavens. He was too pure, too good for this world. Literature is full of such ascendant figures: Remedios the Beauty from Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude who is too lovely for this world and so one day levitates away while folding laundry; Pascal, the French boy from The Red Balloon (1956), whose devotion to protecting his new friend from a gang of balloon-popping bullies is rewarded when all the balloons in Paris take him for a magical ride; and Jesus who, after his persecution and resurrection, ascends into heaven in front of his eleven disciples to sit at the right hand of God. Then there is the wife of Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, who wrote a book about how her soul took a ride "on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus." According to Miyuki Hatoyama, "It was a very beautiful place, and it was really green."

Frankly, from where I'm standing, Venus sounds like a great place now. Here on Earth, it is increasingly looking like world leaders are going to blow the Copenhagen summit, a moment that Gordon Brown has called the last chance to save our planetary home. In the territorial United States, unemployment is at 10 percent, and while Wall Street makes record bonuses off taxpayer-funded bailouts, jobs are nowhere in sight. Obama may have won a Nobel Peace Prize in part for his talk on eliminating nuclear weapons, but the US Senate hasn't even approved the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Ninety-nine red balloons go by. Afghanistan and Iraq--every day brings news of the horrors of occupation, and the only choices the US can make are hard ones.

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October 19, 2009

Caught On Tape: Obama Adviser Explains How To Control Media

By Ari Melber

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn made headlines last week for calling out Fox News, now she's drawing attention for comments she made about how the Obama campaign managed to control and route around the traditional press. You can bet this video is going viral. (Embedded below).

In footage from a January conference, Dunn candidly explains the campaign's disciplined emphasis on disintermediation:

The reality is that whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech ... a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying -- as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was.... One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. We just put that out there and make them write what Plouffe had said -- as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it, as opposed to the press controlled it. And it did not always make us popular with the press... increasingly by the General Election, very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control.

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October 19, 2009

Reflections on Marriage

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Feminist author Jessica Valenti's marriage to Andrew Golis of Talking Points Memo was the lead wedding story in the New York Times style section this Sunday. It was odd to see this Full Frontal Feminist not only marry, but also submit to a romantic short story about her union. Indeed the Times seemed intent on portraying Valenti's marriage as a morality tale: tough feminists may talk about social equality, but all girls really want is a good man and note-worthy bustle. For some, Valenti's wedding became a lens for assessing her feminist credentials.

Valenti's story, as written by the Times, is an interesting companion to last week's National Equality March in Washington, DC. The National Equality March was clearly defined by organizers and participants as a demand for equal protection in all matters governed by civil law. It was a demonstration for justice in housing, employment, property, citizenship, and family law, but media nearly exclusively reported the event as a march for same-sex marriage equality.

For Valenti and for the National Equality March participants, as for many in America, marriage is the terrain where the personal is indeed political.

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October 18, 2009

Maddow Responds to Bush Sr. - And 9 of 10 Republicans Fear Her

By Ari Melber

Rachel Maddow invites Republican officials to appear on her show "every day," the popular MSNBC anchor said Saturday, but only about one out of ten take up her offer.

Those numbers suggest Congressional Republicans are especially wary of a Maddow interrogation, since most politicians jump at the chance to appear on prime time news shows with good ratings. The "incentives" to appear differ for elected officials and operatives, she said, and the show draws more conservative "lobbyists and P.R. guys," who are paid to push their clients anywhere they can. (See Phillips, Tim.)

Maddow's comments came during an appearance at The New Yorker Festival on Saturday, in a sold-out session moderated by staff writer Ariel Levy.

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October 17, 2009

British Censorship Chills US Reporting

By Maria Margaronis

They say that when Wall Street sneezes, London catches a cold. But it seems that when London puts a freeze on facts, the chill can spread just as well the other way.

What I'm about to tell you was censored in Britain until yesterday night because of a "super-injunction" won for the oil-trading company Trafigura by the famously aggressive media law firm Carter-Ruck. Super-injunctions, for those unfamiliar with Britain's baroque libel and media law, are gagging orders which cannot themselves be mentioned, thus allowing corporations and oligarchs to carry on their business untainted by public suspicion. They have become increasingly popular with both British and foreign litigants who have something to hide--and with lawyers who make fortunes squeezing foreign libel cases into the British courts. Such is the chilling effect of these dubious legal instruments that even The Nation, First Amendment champion par excellence, felt obliged to hold an earlier version of this post for two and a half days while its lawyers considered the risks of publication. It's only because Trafigura has lifted the injunction in Britain after an outcry on the internet, in the press and in the House of Commons that you are reading this now.

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October 17, 2009

Franken's Anti-Rape Amendment

By Emily Douglas

In April of 2008, KBR employee Dawn Leamon went public. A few months earlier, she had been raped and sexually assaulted by co-workers while deployed at Camp Harper, in Iraq, and after weeks of being pressured not to report the incident, forced to work alongside her attackers, and medically neglected, Leamon brought the story to a Houston attorney and to The Nation. Leamon joined a slowly building chorus of female defense contractor employees who'd been raped or sexually assaulted by co-workers while in Iraq, to utter impunity on the part of their assailants. In response, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called a hearing to investigate why the Justice Department had not prosecuted any sexual assault allegations in Iraq since the going to war in the country.

When it turned out that defense contractors often required employees, as a condition of employment, to submit to binding private arbitration in disputes with the contractors (including allegations of sexual assault), instead of bringing complaints to public courts, and that the Department of Defense claimed they couldn't prosecute for this very reason (even though these clauses only prevented civil suits), Senator Ben Nelson, who called the hearing, offered a simple solution: "This might be something you want to require and include in your contracts--before you award them," Karen Houppert reported in The Nation.

Freshman Sen. Al Franken took Nelson's suggestion seriously, and has pushed through an amendment to a Defense Appropriations bill that would prevent the Pentagon from doing business with contractors who force employees into binding arbitration over rape and sexual assault charges. (As Jon Stewart put it, "How is that a loophole that needs closing?")

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October 16, 2009

AP Asks If Obama Is 'Obnoxiously Articulate'

By Ari Melber

Political reporters have now toggled from worrying that Obama gets "too much" media coverage to asking whether he is "too" good at communicating through the media. Maybe even obnoxiously good. Maybe even -- here comes that loaded word from the primaries -- too articulate.

The A.P.'s Liz Sidoti is on the case. And this is from a news article:

Obama has been a constant presence in the mass media as he expands the bureaucracy's reach into the private sector.... In doing so, he has created a quandary. Put aside for a moment the question of whether government is actually intruding into people's lives more than before. The point is that many people feel like it is -- in part because Obama doesn't stop talking about his goals. If President George W. Bush got slapped around for being inarticulate, is Obama obnoxiously articulate?

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October 15, 2009