| Driven to Kill |
[04 Sep 2015|08:48am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html In April a BMW racing through a fruit market in Foshan in China’s Guangdong province knocked down a 2-year-old girl and rolled over her head. As the girl’s grandmother shouted, “Stop! You’ve hit a child!” the BMW’s driver paused, then switched into reverse and backed up over the girl. The woman at the wheel drove forward once more, crushing the girl for a third time. When she finally got out from the BMW, the unlicensed driver immediately offered the horrified family a deal: “Don’t say that I was driving the car,” she said. “Say it was my husband. We can give you money.”
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| The Trump Test |
[04 Sep 2015|03:12pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/09/donald_trump_is_a_test_for_all_republican_presidential_candidates_how_they.html Jeb Bush has decided to stoop to conquer. The onetime GOP front-runner didn't think Donald Trump was worth his time. By simply being the adult in the race, he hoped, voters would stick with him and turn away from Trump. Or, at the very least, voters would ignore Trump’s trolling of Bush. But the decent opinions of mankind did not kick in. Bush's poll numbers dropped, while Trump’s rose. Now Bush is confronting Trump head-on. “Donald Trump is trying to insult his way to the presidency,” Bush said Thursday. Bush is also picking up the frequency of his assaults, taking on Trump in ads, with an online quiz about his liberal past, on Instagram, and in television appearances. “Trump is wrong for the party and the country,” said a Bush aide. “We are going to fight for it. Ducking and hoping he goes away is not a path to success.”
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| The Pardon Process Is Broken |
[04 Sep 2015|05:05pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/09/presidential_pardons_presidents_are_using_their_clemency_power_far_less.html Attorney Margaret Colgate Love has dedicated her career to securing mercy for people who have been convicted of crimes. When she worked for the Justice Department as the U.S. pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, this meant reading and vetting clemency applications and identifying individuals whose cases merited the attention of the Oval Office. In the years since, she has been running her own law practice, where she has specialized in clemency petitions, and has been one of the most prominent advocates in Washington for the executive branch acting less stingy in its approach to clemency.
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| Into the Quagmire |
[04 Sep 2015|05:06pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/09/hiroshima_nagasaki_hanoi_how_the_manhattan_project_generation_of_scientists.html This year marks two somber anniversaries: Seventy years ago, the United States became the first and only country ever to use atomic weapons in war, incinerating the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the last days of World War II. Two decades later, the massive bombing campaign of Operation Rolling Thunder and the introduction of ground troops in Vietnam ushered in an era of napalm-fueled destruction, Agent Orange defoliation, and brutal “search-and-destroy” missions. The prolonged war cost tens of thousands of American lives and displaced, maimed, and killed millions of Vietnamese.
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| The Best Intentions |
[04 Sep 2015|05:06pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/09/hiroshima_nagasaki_hanoi_how_the_manhattan_project_generation_of_scientists.html This year marks two somber anniversaries: Seventy years ago, the United States became the first and only country ever to use atomic weapons in war, incinerating the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the last days of World War II. Two decades later, the massive bombing campaign of Operation Rolling Thunder and the introduction of ground troops in Vietnam ushered in an era of napalm-fueled destruction, Agent Orange defoliation, and brutal “search-and-destroy” missions. The prolonged war cost tens of thousands of American lives and displaced, maimed, and killed millions of Vietnamese.
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| Europe’s Deadly Denial |
[04 Sep 2015|08:45pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/europe_refugee_crisis_the_eu_has_failed_to_confront_the_wars_in_syria_and.html LONDON—Picking apart the layers of irony and hypocrisy that surround the European refugee crisis is like peeling an onion without a knife. At a train station in southern Moravia, Czech Republic, police pulled 200 refugees off a train and marked numbers on their arms. On its eastern border, Hungary is building a barbed-wire fence to keep out refugees, remarkably like the barbed-wire “iron curtain” that once marked its western border. Choose whatever image you want—ships full of Jews being sent back to Nazi Europe, refugees furtively negotiating with smugglers at a bar in Casablanca—and it now has a modern twist.
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| White Fright |
[04 Sep 2015|09:20pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/09/donald_trump_and_white_nationalism_does_the_candidate_s_rise_represent_the.html Fear of “white nationalism” is very much in vogue. To Thomas Edsall, writing in the New York Times, the rise of Donald Trump is a predictable consequence of the fact that the Republican Party is “the home of an often angry and resentful white constituency,” which fears that discrimination against whites is a growing problem. Evan Osnos of the New Yorker, in a similar vein, seeks to explain the Trump phenomenon by viewing it through the lens of radical white nationalists, who warn that white Americans face cultural genocide as their numerical majority shrinks. Ben Domenech, publisher of the Federalist, argues that Republicans face a choice: They can build their coalition around a more inclusive libertarian vision, the path that he prefers, or they can follow Trump and redefine themselves as the defenders of white interests in a bitterly divided multiracial society.
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