It's a good thing we're fighting for women's rights in Afghanistan

One of the justifications for the continued war in Afghanistan is that women are likely to lose whatever freedom they've obtained now that the Taliban is not in charge. Remember this Time Magazine cover? Although I don't think it's a good enough reason to keep the war going—we'd have to fight forever in every woman-oppressing country on the planet, ultimately—it is enough to give one pause.

But ... this is the regime that we're actually fighting to preserve:

KABUL, Afghanistan — When the Afghan government announced Thursday that it would pardon a woman who had been imprisoned for adultery after she reported that she had been raped, the decision seemed a clear victory for the many women here whose lives have been ground down by the Afghan justice system. 

But when the announcement also made it clear that there was an expectation that the woman, Gulnaz, would agree to marry the man who raped her, the moment instead revealed the ways in which even efforts guided by the best intentions to redress violence against women here run up against the limits of change in a society where cultural practices are so powerful that few can resist them, not even the president. 

The solution holds grave risks for Gulnaz, who uses one name, since the man could be so humiliated that he might kill his accuser, despite the risk of prosecution, or abuse her again. 

The decision from the government of President Hamid Karzai is all the more poignant coming as Western forces prepare to leave Afghanistan, underscoring the unfinished business of advancing women’s rights here, and raising questions of what will happen in the future to other women like Gulnaz.

Read further into the story, and you'll discover that European Union officials have silenced a documentary about the plight of Gulnaz and women like her—supposedly for their protection, but also for cravenly political purposes. It's all very depressing. And it leaves me with a question I don't actually know how to answer: How do we actually help these women? Fighting an un-ending war doesn't seem to be the answer, but an alternative solution seems really necessary.

Advice to landowners about to sign a lease with an energy company

Get a lawyer first. The New York Times story about big companies taking advantage of small property owners isn't all that surprising, but the seeming willingness of landowners to sign a lease without understanding the details ... well, no, that's not surprising either, but it should be.

“If you’ve never seen a good lease, or any lease, how are you supposed to know what terms to try to get in yours?” said Ron Stamets, a drilling proponent and a Web site developer in Lakewood, Pa., who started a consumer protection Web site, PAGasLeases.com, in 2008 so that he could swap advice with his neighbors as he prepared to sign a gas lease. Others have also taken steps to better inform landowners about the details in leases. In the past several years, the attorneys general in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania have published advisories about the pitfalls of leasing land for drilling.

And thank heavens for Stamets's website. But property owners stand to make a pretty decent chunk of change out of leasing their land to drillers: It should be a no-brainer that they hire a lawyer to examine the terms of the lease—never just accept the standard form!—and to get advice about what protections they want or need. The energy companies are looking out for their own interests, not yours. If you don't know enough to protect your interests, hire somebody who does.

Forgiveness for Newt

I remember in the late 1990s when a conservative friend of mine made a strenuously felt case that Bill Clinton didn't deserve to be president because of Clinton's well-known philandering. "How can I trust him to keep his oath to the country when he can't even keep his vow to his wife?" my friend said, and indeed that seemed to be the rationale for a lot of evangelical Christians who weren't content to simply oppose the president, but expressed a great deal of contempt for him.

I was reminded of my friend tonight by Dave Weigel's Slate story about how Iowa evangelicals are trying, very delicately but unmistakably, to give their flock permission to vote for thrice-married (and multiple philanderer) Newt Gingrich. To be fair, those leaders acknowledge the problem. Says one pastor: “Do you vote for a Mormon who's had one wife, a Catholic who's had three wives, or an Evangelical who may have had an entire harem?”

There's a lot of talk about "forgiveness" in Weigel's piece—talk that, to my memory, was pretty well absent when it came to Clinton's transgressions a decade ago. What to make of this? A couple of options:

• That evangelicals were sincere in the late 1990s about their contempt for Clinton, but have been so beaten down by GOP sex scandals since then that they're bending and bowing to the larger culture's sexual mores—or at least, deciding those strict rules don't matter so much in the political realm anymore. I'd actually kind of hate to see that, bizarrely enough: I don't really share evangelicals' sexual morality, but I'd hate for holders of that morality to shrug and give into the culture out of weariness rather than conversion.

• Or maybe it's straight hypocrisy.

The truth, I suspect, is a little bit of both: A mixture of defeat and cynicism when it comes to our sexed-up culture. In any case, I'd love to hear some of these guys talk more about forgiving Clinton. They kind of have to, right?

Even holiday work has disappeared

Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of workers who are unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 18.1% in November, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment. That is up from 17.8% a month ago and 17.2% a year ago. Many employers appear to have chosen to hire part-time rather than full-time employees for this holiday season.

via gallup.com

Once I was the King of Spain...

...now I eat humble pie: Tobias's current favorite song:

Should Congress extend the payroll tax break?

Maybe not. It might feel good now, but have long-term consequences. Or, at least, that's what I say in this week's Scripps column:

Whether he means to or not, President Obama is threatening the future of Social Security and the cause of good governance with his campaign to extend the payroll tax cut.

Sure, the tax break is meant to be temporary. But lots of tax breaks have a sunset clause. Yet somehow we're still stuck (for example) with the tax cuts that were passed under George W. Bush, which helped create our current deficit mess. Why? Because Obama didn't have the political will to let those tax cuts expire and let America's wealthiest citizens start contributing to deficit reduction.

Now the president is traveling around the country, saying the end of the payroll tax break is an attack on the middle class, one that will further undermine an ailing economy, and proves that Republicans only care about keeping taxes low for the rich.

On that last part, he's right: GOP tax-cutting zeal has been mysteriously absent on this issue.

But if the end of the temporary tax break amounts to an unconscionable tax hike on the middle class, it will probably be an unconscionable tax hike on the middle class next year and the year after that, and so forth, for as many times as is needed to renew the "temporary" exemption. If the economy suddenly, finally starts to grow, there will surely be politicians who suggest that letting the break expire at that point will bring the pain back.

Americans will want to keep their tax break. (It amounts to about $1,000 a year for many families.) But they'll also eventually want their Social Security check. It may not be possible to keep both. In the end, we really do have to pay for the government we get, or we'll stop getting that government. We'll end up paying, one way or another.

Ben manages to be down on both the payroll tax cut extension and Social Security. You'll have to click the link to read his take.

The economy must be fixed, then!

Banks show highest profits since ’07 | NAFCU: " Federally insured banks reported third-quarter profits of $35.3 billion, which is up $6.5 billion from the previous quarter and the highest level since 2007, according to the FDIC’s latest Quarterly Banking Profile.

The FDIC report, released last week, noted improved earnings for 63 percent of insured banks from with the same time last year. This is the ninth quarter that earnings improved, the FDIC said."

'via Blog this'