Author: Lenny
Arab Spring and Gaddafi’s Fall
With the death of Libya’s brutal dictator Muammar Gaddafi as the latest result of this year’s “Arab Spring,” which has already toppled dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, we’ve been hearing a lot about regime change in the Middle East. We liberals so far have had very little trouble drawing a distinction between, on one hand, revolutions brought about by the will of Middle Eastern people, and on the other hand, by the Bush-Cheney neoconservative “regime change” doctrine in Iraq. But is that line really so easily … Read More
Alabama Immigration Law
Causes Chaos
If more states are considering enacting sweeping new immigration laws like Arizona’s and want a recipe for chaos and panic, they can use Alabama as their model. The problems caused by Alabama’s new immigration law show exactly why the Constitution takes certain matters that affect the country as a whole – like national defense, foreign policy, and, in this case, setting a “uniform rule of naturalization” – out of the hands of individual states. Earlier this year, citing a desire to … Read More
“Ground Zero Mosque”
Proves Everyone Wrong
On September 21, the Park51 Islamic Center – derided by Tea Partiers as the “Ground Zero Mosque” despite being neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero – opened its doors to popular acclaim and surprisingly little controversy. In the end, all of the inflammatory rhetoric about this religious center turns out to have been a tempest in a teapot. Why? Because Park51 was fundamentally misunderstood as a symbol of intolerance and insensitivity, rather than one of tolerance and healing.
Universal Appeal:
Health Care Reform and the High Court
Last Friday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta struck down as unconstitutional the important “individual mandate” provision of the health care reform law. (The Eleventh Circuit left other aspects of the law intact, unlike the lower court, which had invalidated the whole thing.) The individual mandate is the part of the law that, beginning in 2014, would require Americans to carry health insurance, as a way of trying to stop the shifting of health care costs from the … Read More
