In the new issue of Time magazine, a debate on Afghanistan is listed in the table of contents this way:

What Should We Do Now? Two Views
Is it time for the U.S. military to turn Afghanistan over, or is time for our troops to stay the course?

The "stay the course" view is presented by Peter Bergen, who argues that critics of the war are all wrong about Afghan history and the Afghan public's view of foreign troops (they don't mind them much): "The objections to an increased U.S. military commitment in South Asia rest on a number of flawed assumptions."  Sending  as many as 40,000 more troops--as the White House seems to favor--is "sound policy."

The opposing view comes from Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He thinks that the hawks have twisted the argument--- as he puts it:

Hawks on Afghan policy--those who favor defeating Al-Qaeda through a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy involving up to 40,000 more U.S. troops--have divined a politically clever line of argument: Win or get out.

It's a phony choice. The hawks know there's no chance of our simply pulling out of Afghanistan. That option isn't even on the White House table, despite growing public desire to end the war. The true aim of the hawks, or all-outers, in this maneuver is to discredit the real policy alternative--the middle ground.

So he's for the "middle ground," which includes this:

Third, surge about 10,000 new combat forces on top of the 68,000 already authorized and create an additional 5,000 dedicated trainers. Such a surge should be sufficient to handle immediate troubles.

Fourth, start doing what the U.S. does well--deterrence and containment. To deter, we must maintain a small, residual capability in Afghanistan for a few years, as well as offshore air and missile capabilities to inflict harsh punishment when necessary.

So to simplify: The debate is between sending 40,000 more troops, or 10,000--with a "residual capability" in Afghanistan for "a few years." There's "no chance" for any other policy--even though public opinion is clearly against sending more troops. And we're hoping to create democracy in Afghanistan?

In his Time column this week, Klein writes:

So what should Obama do about Afghanistan? His dilemma isn't as stark as has been posed in recent press accounts, with screamers on the right demanding slavish devotion to the military's wish list and screamers on the left demanding a withdrawal. The U.S. military has become far more ... nuanced when it comes to making requests of presidents. The negotiations about what [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal can officially request will not take place anywhere near the public eye. It is very likely that more troops will be sent--to build and train the Afghan security forces, it will be said. Obama's problems on the left will be mitigated by the fact that most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves. They don't want to hurt the President, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time.

OK, "screamers on the left" are demanding withdrawal. That would make "the left" the majority of the public, right? Klein counsels that left opposition will have little effect, since "most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves."  It's hard to figure out why this is true, or frankly why it would matter--the general public has reversed its opinion quite dramatically, hasn't it?

Apparently that doesn't much matter;  the real issue here are the Democratic politicians, who "don't want to hurt the president, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time." Funny, then, that the public doesn't seem to mind being seen as "weak on defense," if that's really how one would describe opposition to escalating the war in Afghanistan.

Time has a big piece by Nina Burleigh on Israeli settlements in this week's issue. It's a familiar framing: The Katzes, very normal, gentle people readers can identify with (they're even from New York!), "consider themselves law-abiding citizens" and do painfully earnest and upstanding things like "publish a small community magazine and take part in civic projects. Sharon raises money for charity by putting on tap-dancing and theater shows." There's a smiling family portrait, and a picture of settlers playing in a swimming pool with their kids. They "don't think their town is an obstacle to peace."

These settlers from the large settlement of Efrat are contrasted somewhat with the more militant settlers who live in the small outposts--the "legal" versus "illegal" settlements, according to the Israeli government. The two are "profoundly unlike each other," writes Burleigh, "but Palestinians revile them equally."

In fact, that's just about all Palestinians do in this article: "revile," "hate," "despise" and generally just be "unwelcoming." A single Palestinian is quoted (and one Israeli human rights group that opposes the settlements). The "Two Views of the Land" the print headline promises--online the headline is "Israeli Settlers vs. the Palestinians"--may be given equal billing, but it's far from an even match.

The piece wraps up by talking about Obama's and Netanyahu's strategies and options: "Challenging...law-abiding citizens like Sharon Katz" will be politically difficult, Burleigh observes--note that law-abiding has no qualifier here as it did in the beginning. The closing paragraph reinforces the normalcy of the Katz family: "Sitting around their kitchen table, with grandchildren's plastic toys scattered on a deck beyond sliding-glass doors, the Katz family doesn't look or sound militant. Indeed, to American ears, their version of the national narrative sounds rather familiar. " Sharon Katz is given the last word: "Israel shouldn't leave any hilltop! How did communities start out in the American West? With one log cabin. When we bought this land, it was a rocky hillside. Look what it looks like today."

Political realities and options are shaped to no small degree by public perception of situations, which is in turn shaped by media coverage. Perhaps if Native Americans had been portrayed in media accounts as sympathetic individuals instead of a generally undifferentiated mass (a mass often portrayed as unwelcoming and hateful), the political realities of the American West would have turned out differently. U.S. media accounts of the Israeli settler issue that portray the settlers as highly sympathetic and "law-abiding" individuals against a backdrop of largely invisible but clearly hateful Palestinians obscure the illegality of the settlements and contribute to the intractable political situation the Time piece wrings its hands over.

In Katha Pollitt's latest Nation column (7/15/09), she finds it "not hard to poke holes in" the July 2 Time magazine cover story by "Caitlin Flanagan--professional antifeminist, author of a whole book of essays attacking working mothers, herself excepted"--being full of "Flanagan's predictions of universal doom for the children of divorced or never-married parents":

After all, President Clinton and President Obama turned out all right. Most children of divorce do. There are plenty of countries where divorce and unmarried parenthood are common, but children do fine--Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands. Some of the measured bad effects on kids are more about the way we divorce than the divorce itself--unstable living arrangements, disappearance of the father into a new family, moves and changes of school, new parental partners who don't stick around, loss of income, less attention from a mother who is now working all the time. It may be ideal for kids to grow up in a loving, sane, happy, stable, two-parent home, but that is not the alternative for couples contemplating divorce, still less for most never-married single mothers....

If the concern is really with children, especially poor children, we could improve their lives tremendously by concentrating on the things we actually can achieve. Healthcare. Excellent schools with music and drama and art and gym and after-school programs. Neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outdoors and air clean enough so they don't get asthma. Libraries. Summer camp. Counseling for kids in trouble--and their parents. Economic support for families, married or not. Housing for all. Free college. A public works job for anyone who wants one. All those necessities that, in America, are seen as the responsibility of individual families.

On such subjects, Pollitt has "noticed that conservatives express concern for low-income and especially black people--'the underclass'--only when they want to attack liberals." She writes that this actually is "a specialty of Flanagan's--the only time she writes about cleaning women is when she is blaming feminists for paying them too little."

Listen to the new edition of the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Katha Pollitt on Caitlin Flanagan in Time" (7/17/09).

Guest blogging at Double X (7/2/09), Linda Hirshman takes on a Time magazine "cover story by working mother-scourge Caitlin Flanagan" that uses "the occasion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that 'Marriage Matters.'" Specifically, Hirshman writes of Flanagan's contention that

Marriage matters, because single-parent families are bad for children, the only people who count. "Drastically" bad: "On every single significant outcome ... children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households.... If you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others."

OK, maybe poor people, more often single than their critics from the elite Flanagan class, have worse outcomes, but aren't those problems more about, say, poverty than single-parent families? And, in fact, sociologists have been looking for reliable data that sorts that out since the invention of sociology in the 19th century and as recently as 2005.

But instead of looking at the recent work, Flanagan gives us her usual brew of autobiography (my parents' 50-year marriage, my husband’s caretaking), outmoded studies and interviews with experts from right-wing foundations such as David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values (and a loud spokesman against marriage for same-sex people), and Heritage's Robert Rector.

Hirshman points to a 2005 report from "the centrist Brookings Institution" that apparently is "unbeknownst to Flanagan": "Looking at a decade's work, [Penn State Professor of Family Sociology and Demography Paul R.] Amato reported 'the results of individual studies vary considerably: Some suggest serious negative effects of divorce, others suggest modest effects, and yet others suggest no effects.'"

One of Amato's conclusions is that "if the share of adolescents living in two-parent families returned to its 1970 level, it would have ... a relatively small effect on the share of children experiencing these problems." His educated guess that "in general, these findings... are likely to disappoint some readers" appears true enough, except when corporate media pundits like Flanagan choose not to read them at all. See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Career Women, Go Home: Media Return to a Favorite Obsession" (11–12/06) by Keely Savoie.

Reading Caitlin Flanagan's Time magazine cover story (7/2/09) on the "increasingly fragile construct" of marriage--which claims that "the divorce culture became a fact of life" over "the past 2½ decades"--one would never guess that U.S. divorce rates have actually dropped by almost a third since 1992, from 4.8 per thousand people to 3.5.

There's almost too much to say about this recent column Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine. But let's start by parsing this:

In the good old days of the last century, the years before the collapse of the economy and the World Trade Center towers, political discourse in the U.S. was, too often, rutted in issues that didn't affect the lives of most people. They were important moral and symbolic issues, to be sure. And they were difficult issues, although their subtleties were obscured by extremists, who tended to dominate the debate. Still, the people directly affected by the so-called social issues--abortion, gay marriage, racial preferences--pale in comparison with the tens of millions who have lost their jobs and fortunes in the past year and with the global, life-and-death impact of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Didn't affect the lives of most people"? The people who are "directly affected" by abortion, gay marriage and "racial preferences" are women (roughly half of whom experience an unintended pregnancy at least once in their life), people of color and gay people--i.e., just about everyone except straight white males like Klein.

(I'm still trying to figure out what an "extremist" pro-gay position on gay marriage would be. Is that the one where gay rights advocates "want to change the way *I* live"?)

Then Klein writes this:

Late-term abortions--no more than a few percent of the total performed in the U.S.--were Tiller's specialty. These are usually hard cases, sometimes the result of rape or incest or the discovery of severe birth defects. But they are, without question, the taking of a life. At the same time, the pro-life community should concede that sex education and the widespread availability of morning-after pills and condoms are necessary if we're going to prevent these tragedies.

First of all, abortions performed after 19 weeks actually account for only 1.1 percent of all abortions. Viability usually starts around 24 weeks, so what are usually termed "late-term" abortions surely account for well under 1 percent. More importantly, that they are "without question, the taking of a life" is just kinder, gentler baby-killer language. And how are "sex education and the widespread availability of morning-after pills and condoms" going to prevent "the discovery of severe birth defects"?

Finally, Klein launches into an attack on affirmative action:

The Sotomayor debate has been polluted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who claim, ridiculously, that the judge is a racist. That sort of rant is so-o-o 20th century. Beneath the pollution, however, is a serious policy question that needs to be resolved: With an African-American president and a polychromatic society moving toward racial (if not economic) equity, why do we still need preferences enshrined in law?

Klein's assertion that we're "moving toward racial...equity" is a little hard to figure; the fact that a biracial man was elected president doesn't change the reality for people of color that racial disparities in the United States are still very much with us.

Klein went on to say that Judge Sonia Sotomayor crossed a line

when she agreed in 2008 to toss the results of a promotion exam for the New Haven, Conn., fire department because an insufficient number of minorities passed it. That seems inherently unfair to those who succeeded--including the dyslexic firefighter Frank Ricci, who hired tutors to help him pass and whose name adorns the case. The lack of minority success does not necessarily signify the presence of racial prejudice. The best way to rectify such a situation is to make sure the next test is truer. An appropriate 21st century standard should be proof of actual discrimination against specific individuals.

What, exactly, does he mean by "make sure the next test is truer"? If the test was flawed, the logical thing to do would be to throw out the results. But then, logic doesn't seem to be Klein's strong suit.

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (2/8/09) quotes from yet another "Time magazine article about Larry Summers and how incredibly brilliant he is":

Perhaps as early as March, they'll launch their biggest lift with the beginnings of a plan to reform Social Security and Medicare, the two entitlement programs that, even before the economy collapsed, were threatening the Treasury with bankruptcy.... When Obama unveils his annual budget in late February or March, Summers promises that the president "is going to describe the kinds of approaches he wants to take to the entitlement problems that have been ignored for a long time." Some options might include delaying retirement, stretching benefits and lifting the cap on taxable earnings....

On that front, Republicans could come to Obama's rescue. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has told Obama in person that his party favors entitlement reform and would work for passage if both parties shared the risk.

That's right, one of the geniuses largely responsible for the formation of our current economic crisis is being lauded by Time--and so many other corporate outlets--for alarmist Social Security misinformation thoroughly debunked for years now. Or, as Schwarz notes in his usual pithy way: "It really required a Democratic president full of hope and change to cut Social Security."

Time magazine tells us about Obama's chief economic adviser:

His controversial comments about women's aptitude for math and science were a reminder that he operates best when he is working behind the scenes.

Oh, so that was the lesson. I had been under the misapprehension that the lesson had something to do with Larry Summers' sexism.

Time also writes that of Obama's incoming economic team,

Summers is the one to watch. He is expected to do for the economy what strong-minded and ambitious National Security Advisers like Henry Kissinger have done for foreign policy: plan it, set it and control it.

To be clear, it would seem that Time magazine means this as a compliment--to Summers' apparent talents, and to Kissinger's legacy.

As well as being infused with a modern-day "white man's burden" mythology not exactly unheard of in media reporting on Somalia, Time magazine's article "The Suffering of Somalia" (11/13/08) follows the well-documented pattern of misreporting on recent U.S. intervention on Somalia (see Extra!,  3-4/08)--downplaying the disastrous role of recent U.S. policy in that country:

Somalia is not so much a failed-state as a didn't-even-try one. It hasn't had a government since 1991, when warlords took over and embarked on a series of intractable clan wars that have produced one of the world's worst humanitarian crises: hundreds of thousands dead and 3 million people desperately in need of aid.

In the following paragraph, Time notes that "those who try to help too often come to grief."

Yet the record shows that the humanitarian situation in Somalia has gotten far worse in the wake of a U.S./Ethiopian military invasion in '06. According to

Foreign Policy in Focus, the U.S./Ethiopian intervention ended what had been a brief six-month period of relative peace and security under the rule of the Islamic Courts. By the end of 2007, the situation had escalated into a full-scale humanitarian crisis, and today, "Nearly half of Somalia's population is starving and the stage is set for a famine on par with the horrific hunger that ravaged the Horn of Africa in the early 1990s."

Time concludes by identifying "the emergence of Iraq-style Awakening militias made up of moderate Somalis, who have taken on al-Shabaab in street battles in recent weeks" as an an "encouraging development":

The chances are that this will grow into a full-scale conflict. Still, an Awakening would also offer Somalia's best hope of keeping its extremists in check. Perhaps only in Somalia could the prospect of more war be a sign of hope.

Actually, the use of U.S.-backed militias to fight official U.S. enemies in Somalia is not a new development. As Extra! pointed out:

In early 2006, the CIA provided big payments to brutal and widely despised warlords who formed the "Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism," a group that clashed with the courts and snatched up "terror suspects" to feed to the CIA, actions that managed to backfire and dramatically increase public support for the Islamic Courts; experts argue that without that U.S. involvement, the Courts wouldn't have been able to build up the public support they needed to bring Mogadishu under their control (Agence France Presse, 6/15/06; Chatham House, 4/07).

As for the prospect of war being "a sign of hope" in Somalia, that's something that Extra! observed the mainstream press was saying back in 2006 too, during the U.S./Ethiopian intervention:

-"In a country with such a troubled recent history, including famine, anarchy, isolation and war, a potentially viable government has suddenly emerged"  (New York Times, 12/29/06)

-"Somalia now has the best chance in 15 years to end anarchy and establish an effective government"(Associated Press, 1/2/07)

One interesting post-election story has been the treatment of Rahm Emanuel, a center-right Clinton Democrat who will serve as Obama's chief of staff. While some Republicans claim Emanuel is too "partisan," some media defenders argue that he's not, since his politics are not all that liberal. Time magazine's Karen Tumulty explains:

The strongest signal of how that White House will operate has been Obama's pick of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel to be its chief of staff. Emanuel is a win-at-any-cost partisan but not an ideologue; in his earlier White House stint as a top aide to Clinton, he was a key figure in shepherding through the North American Free Trade Agreement, a crime bill and welfare reform--none of them popular with the Democratic Party's liberal base.

Apparently pushing for a corporate "free trade" pact and gutting public assistance for the poor are not "ideological"--they're just the sort of common sense the media like to cheer. As for the idea that pushing policies unpopular with the party base is evidence of a "win-at-any-cost" outlook--well, that depends on your definition of "win." When FAIR founder Jeff Cohen examined the Democratic Party's electoral performance in the Clinton years (L.A. Times, 4/9/00), here's what he found:

Let's do the numbers. When Clinton entered the White House, his party dominated the U.S. Senate, 57-43; the U.S. House, 258-176; the country's governorships, 30-18, and a large majority of state legislatures. Today, Republicans control the Senate, 55-45; the House, 222-211; governorships, 30-18, and almost half of state legislatures.