Abbreviated pundit round-up: Marriage equality gets backed and shellacked

_{Visual source: Newseum}

Colbert I. King says the marriage equality isn't about what Obama said last week even though much of the media and almost everybody else has made it about him:

Think about it this way: If school desegregation amendments had been placed on state ballots in the 1950s, 'separate but equal' might still be the law of the land in the South. Fortunately, state-sponsored segregation was not put to a popular vote. That question went before the U.S. Supreme Court. The nine justices unanimously, and rightly, decided in 1954 that state laws creating separate schools for white children and black children were unconstitutional.

The case for same-sex unions also belongs in the courts, not the polling place.

Steve Chapman:

President Barack Obama's critics have a point in criticizing his handling of the gay marriage issue as evasive, politically devious and lacking in principle. I hate to say it, but it's bad enough to qualify as Lincolnesque.

Abraham Lincoln is remembered today for freeing the slaves. But he didn't start out with that policy, and he didn't get there quickly. He reached his ultimate position only by slowly and painfully "evolving" ' while blacks waited and suffered in bondage.

Michael Gerson:

It is a group in which Obama still has broad support, but no longer inspires as he once did. "The Obama generation," says Brookings scholar William Galston, "lasted about five years." Those ages 18 to 24 are less enthusiastic about Obama than those ages 25 to 29. Since 2008, political engagement among millennials has weakened, cynicism toward government officials has increased and skepticism about the value of political involvement has gone up.

Obama's gay-marriage shift is not likely to change this dramatically. In a recent survey by Harvard's Institute on Politics, 58 percent of millennials cited jobs and the economy as their issue of top concern. No other topic broke single digits, and cultural issues appeared hardly at all.

But looking beyond a single election, it is undeniable that America is in the midst of a large, consequential shift in the attitudes of the rising generation.

Surveying the wreckage from JPMorgan's announced losses of $2 billion, Paul Krugman thanks CEO Jamie Dimon for a reminder:

Just to be clear, businessmen are human ' although the lords of finance have a tendency to forget that ' and they make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved. But banks are special, because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole. And what JPMorgan has just demonstrated is that even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they're allowed to take on.

Why, exactly, are banks special? Because history tells us that banking is and always has been subject to occasional destructive 'panics,' which can wreak havoc with the economy as a whole. Current right-wing mythology has it that bad banking is always the result of government intervention, whether from the Federal Reserve or meddling liberals in Congress. In fact, however, Gilded Age America ' a land with minimal government and no Fed ' was subject to panics roughly once every six years. And some of these panics inflicted major economic losses. [...]

Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything's under control.

Apparently not.

The New York Times editorial board weighs in on the city's policy that has cops stopping and frisking" young black and Latino men at rates far in excess of their numbers in the population:

The data also show that the police are significantly more likely to use force when they stop blacks and Hispanics than when they stop whites. This means minority targets are more likely to be slammed against walls or spread-eagled while officers go through their belongings. Even when victims are unhurt, they are likely to develop a deep and abiding distrust of law enforcement.

For all this, only about 6 percent of stops lead to arrests.

Richard M. Daley and Bruce Katz:

Perhaps the only silver lining to the Great Recession is that it triggered a new focus on manufacturing in the United States. After 25 years of being sold a shiny vision of a service-dominated post-industrial economy, the U.S. is rediscovering how important it is to actually make things in order to spur innovation, raise wages, drive exports and lower the trade deficit.

Eli Hager:

In our national conversation about race and other forms of inequality, presidential candidates and the media have fostered a consensus that the civil rights movement is finished. [...]

I teach eighth grade in the Mississippi Delta ' 20 minutes from the town where Emmett Till was murdered and an hour from where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered a decade later ' and I disagree. In fact, my students attend schools that are still fundamentally separate and unequal. The Delta is half black and half white, yet the public schools here that are 'failing' and 'at risk of failing' are 95 percent black, according to data compiled by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Its white academies are just that: purposely all-white, prestigious and successful.

Rebecca Traister:

The image of the feminist as a mirthless, hirsute, sex-averse succubus is a friendly-fire casualty of the Republican 'war on women.' It's a grave loss to conservatives, who have used this faithful foot soldier as a comfortably grotesque stand-in for the real people whose liberties they have sought to conscribe: women.

Doyle McManus takes on campaign advertising from independent committees who don't have to disclose the names of their donors:

... when a candidate's campaign makes a spurious charge, voters can call him on it. When an independent committee makes a spurious charge, who you gonna call?

Ken Blackwell really streeeeeeeetches when he stretches:

Benjamin Netanyahu is not half American, as Churchill was. But he did graduate from an American high school. And he does speak English, they say, "with a Philadelphia accent." Americans understand that freedom is not free. We have always been willing to fight for our liberty. That's what the Liberty Bell stands for. If he strikes Iran's nuclear program, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will strike a blow for our liberty, too.

Robert Fisk has lost his patience with politicians' "codswallop" about "not standing idly by."