30 Questions The White House Doesn’t Want To Answer

The Article: Here are the 30 questions the White House doesn’t seem to want to answer by Andrea Peterson in The Washington Post.

The Text: The White House launched the We The People petition site in 2011 as a way for Americans to get their government to respond to their calls for action. On the digital platform, people can create and sign petitions seeking specific action on an issue from the federal government. In theory, once a petition has garnered a certain number of signatures within a certain time frame, it is reviewed by White House staff and receives an official response.
But that’s not always what happens.

Now a new site, www.whpetitions.info, takes its own tally and highlights petitions that have received enough signatures but have not received responses. By its count, the White House has responded to 87 percent of petitions that have met their signature thresholds with an average response time of 61 days. But the average waiting time so far for the 30 unanswered petitions is 240 days. And six of them have been waiting for over a year.

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The Church’s Quiet Gay Rights Movement

The Article: The Quiet Gay-Rights Revolution in America’s Churches by Molly Ball in The Atlantic.

The Text: For most gay Americans in the 20th century, the church was a place of pain. It cast them out and called them evil. It cleaved them from their families. It condemned their love and denied their souls. In 2004, a president was elected when religious voters surged from their pews to vote against the legal recognition of gay relationships. When it came to gay rights, religion was the enemy.

A decade later, the story is very different. Congregations across the country increasingly accept, nurture, and even marry their gay brethren. Polls show majorities of major Christian denominations — including American Catholics, despite their church’s staunch opposition — support legal gay marriage. Leaders of some of the most conservative sects, like the Southern Baptists, have moved away from the vitriolic rhetoric of yesteryear and toward a more compassionate tone. Mormons march in gay-pride parades. A sitting Republican senator, a Methodist from the heartland state of Ohio, says the question was settled for him by “the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God.” A new pope says, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

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Corporate Welfare, Alive And Well

The Article: Corporate welfare, alive and well by Michael Hiltzik in The Los Angeles Times.

The Text: As a developer of shopping malls, including 22 in California, Westfield Group clearly takes its responsibilities to the consumer economy seriously.

The Australian company’s malls are typically well-designed and anchored by the finest department stores, such as Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom. The firm spends gobs of money to refurbish its older malls.

As a California taxpayer, you should be proud of Westfield’s efforts. That’s because you’re paying through the nose for them.

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Oprah’s Big Lie At Harvard

The Article: Oprah Lied at Harvard by Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic.

The Text: There is something special about the optimism of the very privileged. At Harvard not long ago, Oprah Winfrey spoke to the graduating class and, “address[ing] my remarks to anybody who has ever felt inferior or felt disadvantaged, felt screwed by life,” uttered this memorable sentence: “There is no such thing as failure.” She immediately explained her strange assertion: “Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.” The experience of defeat, in other words, is an error of interpretation. Nothing is bad that is followed by something else. Nothing is bad unless you call it bad. Only death, on this account, is a defeat, since it is followed by nothing, though I suppose that in her quackery Winfrey believes in an afterlife in which she dwells for eternity between Tom Cruise and Maya Angelou at God’s Oscar party. As an example of the unreality of failure, Winfrey told a tale of personal adversity. When she launched her television network, it did not do well. “I was stressed and I was frustrated and quite frankly I was embarrassed.” But somehow she rose from the ashes. “I’m here today to tell I have turned that network around!” The audience in Harvard Yard must have fought back tears.

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Everything You Know About Immigration Is Wrong

The Article: Everything you know about immigration is wrong by Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.

The Text: Everything you know about immigration, particularly unauthorized immigration, is wrong.

So says Princeton University’s Doug Massey, anyway. Massey is one of the nation’s preeminent immigration scholars. And he thinks we’ve wasted a whole lot of money on immigration policy and are about to waste a whole lot more.

Massey slices the history of Mexico-to-U.S. migration in five periods. Early in the 20th century, there was the era of “the hook,” when Japan stopped sending workers to the U.S. and the mining, agriculture and railroad industries begged Mexican laborers to replace them. It’s called “the hook” because laborers were recruited with promises of high wages, signing bonuses, transportation and lodging, most of which either never materialized or were deducted from their paychecks.

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