Charity Is Not A Substitute For Justice

The Article: Charity is not a substitute for justice by Sarah Kendzior in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: On November 15, thousands of people in San Francisco worked together to make an ailing child’s wish come true. Miles Scott, a five-year-old boy recovering from leukaemia, dreamed of becoming “Batkid”. At the behest of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, a charity which grants the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses, San Franciscans staged an elaborate series of events for Scott and his family. He rode in the Batmobile, rescued a damsel in distress, and received national press coverage and a personal message from President Barack Obama.

The public effort for Scott shows what a difference kindness and compassion can make for a family in need. But one of the reasons the Batkid outreach was so moving is that it is such a rare occurrence.

In an era where bad luck is mistaken for bad character, the plight of those worse off tends to be ignored or portrayed as a perverse form of retribution. Poverty becomes both a crime and its own punishment, even for children. In many US schools, a child who cannot come up with lunch money is expected to go hungry. In Texas, a 12-year-old’s lunch was thrown in the trash because he could not come up with 30 cents.

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The New Republicans

Gays, Latin-o’s, and black people: all part of the 2014 Republican re-branding effort. Global warming? Might be real. Facts? Might be true. This is the face of the new GOP!

The Difference Between The Rich And Poor

Succinct and honest.

How George W. Bush Failed The GOP

The Article: How George W. Bush failed the GOP by Rachel Maddow in The Washington Post.

The Text: After a presidency, what comes next? Not just for the president but also for the members of the administration, the president’s allies in Congress, his or her political party?

In the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, no hearty saplings were ever able to take root in the shade of that big tree. No one expected Vice President Dick Cheney to ever be a contender for the presidency — part of his effectiveness was his willingness to say and do very unpopular things. When he snapped at ABC’s Martha Raddatz, “So?” as she questioned him about public disapproval of the Iraq war, he wrote the perfect epitaph for his vice presidency.

But by the time the Bush era was winding down, the whole administration, including the president, was stewed in terrible, Cheney-level disapproval ratings. And now, almost no one who played a significant role in that administration is anywhere to be found in electoral politics, beyond the tertiary orbits of Punch-and-Judy cable news and the remains of what used to be the conservative “think tank” circuit.

That’s true even for former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who had no formal role in his brother’s administration but will probably always find the familial association an insurmountable obstacle to his own presidential hopes.

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Barack Obama Drops It Like It’s Hot

Even if you hate the Affordable Care Act and think that Obama is the Antichrist, you can at least admit that this impression is dead-on.