In Focus with Alan Taylor @ TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 17, 2012

41 photos with captions of protests in China in 2011.

....According to research by the Chinese Academy of Governance, the number of protests in China doubled between 2006 and 2010, rising to 180,000 reported "mass incidents." The uprisings are responses to myriad issues, primarily official corruption, government land grabs, Tibetan autonomy, and environmental problems...

By Garry Wills, New York Review of Books Blog, Feb. 15, 2012

Was wondering how long it was going to take the good professor to speak up on this; as Wikipedia says in its first line on him: Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934)[2] is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and prolific author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American politics and political history and the Roman Catholic Church.

TPM Reports that DOJ supports full military benefits for gay couples.

In body of text:

The Obama Justice Department has concluded that legislation banning same-sex couples from receiving military and veterans benefits violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and will no longer defend the statute in court, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in a letter to Congressional leaders on Friday.

Full story at link with access to Holder's letter.

Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2012

Trying to find out how different countries voted Thursday on the United Nations resolution condemning human rights violations in Syria? You can see the complete list of countries and how they voted here.

The resolution passed overwhelmingly, 137 to 12, with 17 abstentions.

The countries that voted against the resolution are Belarus, Bolivia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Ecuador, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The resolution decries human rights abuses in Syria and throws support behind an Arab League plan that calls for President Bashar Assad to step down. You can read the full resolution here. [....]

Also see:

U.N. Assembly Votes Overwhelmingly to Condemn Syria
by Rick Gladstone, New York Times, Feb. 16, 2012

[....] Earlier Thursday, hours before the General Assembly vote, Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary General, sharply criticized Syria while on a visit to Vienna.

“On Syria, I continue to be gravely concerned at the level of violence and mounting loss of life,” he said. Referring to a bleak appraisal of the Syrian conflict made at the General Assembly earlier in the week by his top human rights official, Navi Pillay, Mr. Ban recited the statistics she had compiled: more than 5,400 Syrians killed, thousands missing, 25,000 refugees in other countries and more than 70,000 internally displaced.

“Every day those numbers rise,” Mr. Ban said. “We see neighborhoods shelled indiscriminately. Hospitals used as torture centers. Children as young as 10 years old jailed and abused. We see almost certain crimes against humanity.”[....]

How can the Washington Post run a headline that begins: "Panetta says Iran enriching uranium ..."? How about one stating, "Obama claims sky is blue"? Are Post readers bleeping 3-year-olds? I shake my head in dismay. This is the level of foreign-policy discourse in the United States.

By Angelique Chrisafis in Paris, guardian.co.uk, 16 Feb., 2012

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far right Front National, has been convicted of contesting crimes against humanity for saying the Nazi occupation was not "particularly inhumane". A Paris appeals court upheld the three-month suspended prison sentence and €10,000 (£8,283) fine handed to Le Pen in 2009.

Le Pen had told the far-right magazine Rivarol in 2005: "in France at least the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses – inevitable in a country of 550,000 sq km."

He added [....]

In body of report (Huffington Post):

"What I want to know is, where are the women?" Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) asked Issa before walking out of the hearing after the first panel. "I look at this panel, and I don't see one single individual representing the tens of millions of women across the country who want and need insurance coverage for basic preventative health care services, including family planning. Where are the women?"

Three Dems (women) walked out, full report info worth the read.

The Women's Media Center has released its 2012 annual report, which finds -- surprise -- that women are grossly underrepresented in the news media.

Some key findings, per the press release: In 2011, women represented 21.7 percent of guests on Sunday morning talk shows on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and Fox News, and comprised only 18.1 percent of all radio news directors.

 This is on Politico and you can access the full survey results.

[John Michael Greer] This is where Niall Ferguson enters the picture, ... In several books and a flurry of essays, Ferguson has argued that the United States fills exactly the same role in international affairs today that Britain held a century ago, and since nobody then or now finds it especially problematic to talk about the British empire, open discussion of the American empire ought to be an equally straightforward matter. He makes a very solid case that the United States is an imperial power. What makes this all the more interesting is that while most people who talk about American empire these days mean the label as a criticism, Ferguson does not. Quite the contrary, he thinks America’s empire is a good thing, and has publicly urged American politicians to take their imperial role more seriously—in other words, to get out there and lord it over the world in earnest.

Some of what’s behind this quixotic rhetoric is doubtless the spluttering indignation it evokes from liberal pundits—Ferguson has admitted that one of the motives that got him involved in conservative politics in his student days was the fun to be had by baiting the left—but there’s more to his argument than that. He points out that periods when one imperial power dominates any given system of nations tend to be periods of relative peace and stability, while periods that lack such a centralized power tend to be racked by wars and turmoil. It’s a valid point—imperial Britain’s century of world dominion from 1815 to 1914 featured fewer wars in Europe, at least, than any comparable period up to that time, and American dominion since 1945 has imposed even more rigid a peace on that fractious continent—and Ferguson goes on to claim, on the basis of that undoubted fact, that imperial rule is a good thing for everyone involved, ruled as well as rulers.

The last three polls have Santorum leading Mitt +9, +3 and +15.  It would seem one of the few times that Mitt actually took a stand on an issue in severely conservative way - the auto bail out - may just be the cause for his most humiliating defeat of the season.  The SuperPAC cluster bombs may come in and save the day for Mitt, but he just may learn that in the world of primary politics, all politics is local.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested Friday that her predecessors on the high court mistimed the milestone 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide.

“It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far too fast,” Ginsburg told a symposium at Columbia Law School marking the 40th anniversary of her joining the faculty as its first tenure-track female professor.

At the time of Roe v. Wade, abortion was legal on request in four states, allowed under limited circumstances in about 16 others, and outlawed under nearly all circumstances in the other states, including Texas — where the Roe case originated.

Alluding to the persisting bitter debate over abortion, Ginsburg said the justices of that era could have delayed hearing any case like Roe while the state-by-state process evolved. Alternatively, she said, they could have struck down just the Texas law, which allowed abortions only to save a mother’s life, without declaring a right to privacy that legalized the procedure nationwide.

“The court made a decision that made every abortion law in the country invalid, even the most liberal,” Ginsburg said. “We’ll never know whether I’m right or wrong ... things might have turned out differently if the court had been more restrained.”