The Washington Post: Hillary Clinton’s Christian faith, once a political weapon, all but absent from 2016 campaign

Church attendance also has been all but absent from Mrs. Clinton’s schedule, except when she’s turned up behind a pulpit to stump for votes, particularly in predominantly black churches, where her appearances focus largely on how she intends to work with religious leaders to accomplish shared political objectives. [...]

The reason for the shift, analysts say, is twofold. Mrs. Clinton is taking on an opponent, Republican Donald Trump, who is seen as one of the most nonreligious presidential candidates in modern history. Pew polling from earlier this year found that just 30 percent of American voters say they consider Mr. Trump religious, while 48 percent said the same about Mrs. Clinton.

Perhaps more importantly, she now leads a party that, among its white base, if not its core black and Hispanic members, has become an increasingly secular institution. Recent polling shows the Democratic Party includes in its ranks nearly four times as many atheists and agnostics as the GOP.

read the article 

Channel Criswell: David Lynch - The Elusive Subconscious

Vox: Why race and identity will remain the dividing line in American politics for a while to come

For the past half-century, the party system has moved from one organized around economics to one organized around social/identity issues. This transition has happened quite slowly, and for the past three decades these two issues have essentially fused along a single cross-cutting dimension for an unusually long time, which is probably the reason politics became so deeply polarized. [...]

For Democratic Party leaders, there are three benefits to maintaining race and identity as the primary dimension of conflict in American politics.

The first reason Democrats want to make politics about race and identity is that they probably hold the majority position, at least if the 2016 election cleavages hold. And going forward, the electorate is only going to grow more diverse and more highly educated, which means that if Democrats get to be the party of tolerance and cosmopolitan social values in a politics organized around these issues, they will be in a strong electoral position. [...]

If the Republican Party were just a party of strategic politicians who wanted to win elections, and had no constraints from activists, donors, or its own principles, its strategy would be very simple: Tone down the racism and identity politics, focus on the economic populism that Trump has at times channeled, and became a truly populist party. If Trump had run a strong populist, anti–Wall Street, anti-TPP, "end the crony corruption of Washington" campaign, he might be winning now. [...]

But perhaps the bigger obstacle keeping Republicans from moving into the potentially winning populist position is that the business and wealthy elites who have long controlled the Republican Party from the top would be horrified to see Republicans take a populist turn. [...]

A more decentralized Congress will likely produce more cross-partisan coalitions, and probably more legislation, but also more uncertainty and possibly chaos.

read the article 

Vox: Donald Trump is doing worse with Latinos than the previous 6 Republican presidential candidates

The survey, by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions, found that if the election were held today, 70 percent of registered Latino voters would vote for Hillary Clinton. Only 19 percent would vote for Trump. About 2 percent said they won’t vote for president, 4 percent said they’d vote for someone else, and 4 percent said they’re undecided or don’t know. [...]

In 2000 and 2004, Bush got 35 and 40 percent of the Latino vote. That was up from the share of the vote that Ronald Reagan (35 and 37 percent), George H.W. Bush (30 and 25 percent), Bob Dole (21 percent) got. It was also higher than what John McCain (31 percent) and Mitt Romney (27 percent) got in subsequent elections.

Trump’s numbers, then, are below the previous six Republicans to run for president. And they’re especially low at a time when the Latino population has grown — from 14.8 million people in 1980 to 55.2 million in 2014.

read the article 

The New Yorker: Obama the Conservationist

Last month, Obama designated eighty-seven thousand acres in central Maine as a new national monument. He bypassed Congress to make the designation, invoking the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by Roosevelt in 1906. (The act allows the President to create national monuments “by public proclamation.”) And, on August 24th, he added almost three hundred million acres to the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, northwest of Hawaii; the additional acres made Papahānaumokuākea (pronounced “Papa-ha-now-moh-koo-ah-kay-ah”) the largest ecological preserve on the planet. Obama has now put more acreage under protection than any other President, though the bulk of it is underwater. The historian Douglas Brinkley recently dubbed him “a 21st-century Theodore Roosevelt.” [...]

For many in Congress, underfunding isn’t enough. Last summer, Representative Cresent Hardy, a Nevada Republican, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have sabotaged the Antiquities Act, curtailing a President’s ability to create national monuments. (National monuments are a lot like national parks; most are managed by the Park Service, and many—including the Grand Canyon, first designated by Teddy Roosevelt—have gone on to become parks themselves.) The Hardy amendment was approved by the House but then dropped in the bill’s final version.

More recently, Representative Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican, who is the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, tried to prevent Obama from creating the preserve in central Maine. Bishop, too, has introduced legislation to undermine the Antiquities Act, which he has called “the most evil act ever invented.” (Last year, he was recorded suggesting that anyone who supports it ought to die.) The Republican National Committee’s 2016 platform—a hair-raising document if ever there was one—seems to subscribe to this sentiment. It calls on “national and state leaders and representatives to exert their utmost power and influence” to wrest land away from federal protection.

read the article 

The New Yorker: Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang Want to Get Married

Like so many young people today in China, the two men met online. According to Sun Wenlin, a tech consultant and, at age twenty-six, the younger of the pair, it had been “love at first sight.” Hu Mingliang, who is thirty-seven years old and the more reticent of the two, works as a security guard. In June, 2015, on the first anniversary of the day they met, they walked to the local civil-affairs bureau to apply for a marriage license. They were turned away, but, unlike the tens of millions of Chinese who have resigned themselves to sexual identities unrecognized by the state, Sun decided to file a lawsuit. It was the first of its kind in China, and asked for the legalization of same-sex marriage. The case was rejected by the court, but not before garnering attention and support from around the world. Sun and Hu’s open appeal to the legal system was indisputably a step forward for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and a testament to their commitment to each other. And yet the two men—one from the country, one from the city—had taken somewhat different journeys, shaped not only by the contradictions of the country today but by the long history of homosexuality in China. [...]

“Chinese society has always prioritized the collective over the individual,” Yu Haiqing, a professor of Chinese culture and media at the University of New South Wales, told me. “People did what they did in private, but there wasn’t public protection for it, because it seemed irrelevant to the practical goal of perpetuating the family line.” One reason it has been difficult to discuss the codification of L.G.B.T.Q. rights is that the very notion of individual rights has been contested in recent years, and not just in the political realm. As Yu put it, “When you are living with multiple generations of your family and your life is enmeshed with theirs, it’s hard to imagine rebelling against the norm.” [...]

In some ways, Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang are the embodiment of this evolving China. Sun, the more urbane of the couple, was the one to insist on lodging the petition. His city-dwelling parents have been fully supportive of his legal battle, and he has rarely shied away from media attention. Sun has declared more than once that he does not want to be a spokesman for all gay people in China but is fighting for himself as an individual. By contrast, his partner, Hu, whose parents still live in the Hunan countryside, felt somewhat differently. Months before the two men filed their suit, Hu had brought Sun home to meet his family, and the experience left a deep impression. Prior to going home, Hu had felt trepidation about coming out to people he had known all his life. But his family and childhood friends did not reject him. “If you know someone who is gay, that changes your perspective,” Hu said, voicing his hope that the recognition of gay marriage might affect not only him but the country at large. “It just takes exposure.”

read the article 

Slate: Mommie Dearest (from 2003)

I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism. [...]

During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.* Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one …

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

read the article 

Salon: Dead in the water: Why the TPP and TTIP trade deals probably won’t go anywhere

EU officials were quick to downplay Sigmar’s statement, saying they hoped to “close this deal by the end of the year.” But Gabriel isn’t the first to cry foul on the TTIP, which, if enacted, would establish the world’s largest free trade zone between the United States and the EU’s 28 member states. In May, French negotiators threatened to block the agreement. U.S. negotiators have also reportedly been angry over the passage of a similar agreement between Canada and the EU, which included protections U.S. negotiators don’t want included in the TTIP. [...]

“The fact that TTIP has failed is testament to the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest against it, the three million people who signed a petition calling for it to be scrapped, and the huge coalition of civil society groups, trade unions, progressive politicians and activists who came together to stop it,” writes Kevin Smith of Global Justice Now, an organization that has worked to fight TTIP in the United Kingdom.

While the TPP has become a lightning rod for labor and other progressive organizations in the United States, the TTIP has slipped mostly under the radar stateside. That’s partially because talks over it, which began in 2013, have taken place almost entirely behind closed doors. Among the proposals unearthed are provisions to open European public services to U.S. businesses and to scale back online privacy protections. European groups have also raised the concern that the deal could send jobs from their continent to the United States, where trade unions and labor protections are weaker than in the EU.

read the article 

Al Jazeera: Will Israel be put on trial for war crimes?

Under the terms of its founding statute, the ICC could take over jurisdiction of such probes if it is persuaded that Israel is unable or unwilling to conduct credible investigations itself.

So far, only three Israeli soldiers have been indicted on a relatively minor charge - of looting - even though Israel's 51-day offensive, named Protective Edge, in July and August 2014 resulted in some 2,250 Palestinian deaths. The vast majority were civilians, including 551 children. [...]

In response, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon criticised Israel for the "low rate of investigations opened into these serious allegations".

Since Protective Edge, two of Israel's largest human rights groups, B'Tselem and Yesh Din, have refused to cooperate with Israeli investigations in Gaza, accusing the Israeli military of using them to "whitewash" its actions.

In June, the New York-based monitoring group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), added to the pressure on the ICC, calling for it to open a formal investigation into the Gaza offensive.

The credibility of Israel's probes has been further undermined by a report issued last week by two local human rights groups. Adalah and Al Mezan, based in Israel and Gaza, respectively. The report accused Israel of failing to examine properly the evidence they had collected relating to 27 suspected war crimes during the 2014 offensive. Five cases referred to the Israeli attacks on UN schools sheltering civilians.Two years on, the groups noted, Israel had issued no indictments. Investigations, where they occurred, were "clearly flawed". [...]

This is the first time Israel has agreed to cooperate with an international body over allegations that could ultimately lead to war crimes trials. Israel denied entry to UN commissions of inquiry in 2009 and 2014, following major offensives in Gaza.

read the article