Obama

Twenty-three percent of non-voting Latinos who responded to the poll said that Obama’s decision to delay executive action made them more enthusiastic about the president and the Democratic Party, while 60 percent of non-voting Latinos said the delay made them less enthusiastic. This is notable because Latinos have historically backed Democrats by wide margins.

As the losses for Democrats mounted during the course of election night, any number of pundits questioned the Democratic Party’s Obama Avoidance Syndrome. That philosophy failed to aid Democrats in Kentucky and Georgia hoping for upset victories. The party’s reluctance to embrace the Obama administration’s successes in providing health care, lowering unemployment and saving the nation from a great recession proved to be their undoing.

Immigration reform advocates will need to overcome their frustration and work hard to get pro-immigrant voters to the polls in November for what will, essentially, be a vote of confidence in Obama’s commitment to (very soon) take practical steps toward (substantially) better immigration policy. Of course, the challenge in getting demoralized pro-immigrant voters to turn out is, indeed, formidable. 

Unfortunately for Hollander, his reputation precedes him. A self-proclaimed “serial anti-feminist” who has advocated against the Violence Against Women Act, sued Columbia over having a women’s studies program (without a men’s studies program) and a New York City nightclub for having a “Ladies’ Night,” which he says is discriminatory toward men. His aim in this case isn’t for equal opportunity for women and men, it’s for Hollander alone to feel Schadenfreude.

We who experience these events through the media are infinitely better off than people for whom they are life-or-death reality.  But even at our remove, it’s hard not to feel beaten up and helpless.  This feeling is amplified by the media’s economic self-interest in keeping us anxious and riveted, and by our addiction to our ubiquitous screens.  Steven Pinker’s argument – that this is actually the least violent time in human history – may be factually accurate, and there are plenty of genocides within living memory to put today’s torrent of rotten news in perspective.

Obama might talk tough and promise to be “relentless, but the cold hard truth is the US does not care that much about freelance journalists anywhere in the world. It didn’t ask for them to be there, unlike the US ambassador killed in Benghazi, Libya. Forget the government, freelancers don’t even have news organizations that truly have their back. Even a major news organization cannot save you from fanatics hell-bent on making an example out of you as Daniel Pearl discovered in Pakistan. 

The beheading of Foley, a dreadful and tragic event, sparked a surge of gloom, doom, and hype among senior US officials and within the media at large. Of late, estimates of total ISIS fighters and foreign recruits have soared, but are based on what could only be iffy information. This is precisely what ISIS’s leaders intended. ISIS perceives, as do other ruthless entities, that the US (and its allies) are traumatized far more by the death of one citizen than vastly broader atrocities in the Middle East. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipino American journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is arguably the most visible undocumented immigrant in America right now, has joined 10 other fellow undocumented immigrants in applying for temporary relief from deportation proceedings under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The 11 people applied for DACA as part of the “1 of 11 Million” campaign launched on Wednesday, August 20, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.