The Wash­ing­ton Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the ori­gins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

I should start by saying that Allen is some­thing of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doc­tor­ates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Human­i­ties Divi­sion at the U. of C. she was the uni­ver­sity offi­cer most directly respon­si­ble for Chicago Review.

Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s val­i­da­tion of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been cov­ered by him and others:

There’s some inter­est­ing stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doc­tor­ates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a mar­ginal Illi­nois char­ac­ter named Andy Martin—without even resort­ing to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsess­ing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.

This kind of turf-​guarding is fairly pre­dictable, espe­cially when it’s jour­nal­ists and aca­d­e­mics who are stand­ing on oppo­site sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)

But Smith’s self-​confessed super­cil­ious­ness seems mis­placed.

And on a more depress­ing note, the Times also has an arti­cle today on a new report (PDF) that describes how the U.S. gov­ern­ment blocked the dis­burse­ment of loans intended to fund clean-​water and san­i­ta­tion projects in Haiti for polit­i­cal reasons.

The rev­e­la­tion of the role the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment played in keep­ing the loan money from reach­ing Haiti is the most dis­turb­ing part of the report–though given our his­tory in that coun­try it would be dif­fi­cult to describe the news as shock­ing–and I’ll get to it in a moment.

But the report’s real effort–and arguably its most impor­tant–is to con­strue this med­dling as a human rights vio­la­tion. Specif­i­cally, the report con­cludes that “it is clear that actions taken by the United States in block­ing IDB devel­op­ment loans ear­marked for water projects in Haiti were a direct vio­la­tion of the U.S. government’s human rights obligations.”

The key con­cep­tual hinge for this argu­ment, which seems fairly novel to me as a legal argu­ment (but what do I know?) is that

the human rights of indi­vid­u­als in many parts of the world—including the right to water—are directly affected by the actions that some States take at the inter­na­tional level through inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, devel­op­ment pro­grams and, most impor­tantly for this report, IFIs [inter­na­tional finan­cial institutions]” (p. 50).

This opens the path to the report’s con­clu­sion that

the United States actively impeded the Hait­ian State’s abil­ity to ful­fill the Hait­ian people’s human right to water through its actions, thus breach­ing its duty to respect human rights. Such bla­tant frus­tra­tion of the object and pur­pose of the human rights treaties to which the United States is a sig­na­tory or a State party is a clear vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law.

In any case, here are the para­graphs that describe the U.S. government’s inter­fer­ence with the Hait­ian loans, from pages 11 and 12 of the report, which was jointly authored by the Center for Human Rights and Global Jus­tice (CHRGJ), Part­ners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memo­r­ial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Lasante:

I couldn’t help but cringe a bit when news of my native county crept up in sev­eral news sto­ries about gay mar­riage in Cal­i­for­nia, for exam­ple in this Wall Street Jour­nal article:

June 17 marks the date that gay and les­bian cou­ples can marry legally in Cal­i­for­nia, fol­low­ing a land­mark ruling by the state’s Supreme Court in May that struck down the ban on same-​sex mar­riage. The day will be marked by joyous cel­e­bra­tions and eager cou­ples earn­ing a right they have waited years to obtain.

Yet, the occa­sion will also be punc­tu­ated by the divi­sion it cre­ates through­out the state. On the one hand, San Fran­cisco County has added addi­tional staff and expanded hours so the clerk’s office can accom­mo­date the surge in demand from same-​sex cou­ples seek­ing mar­riage licenses and wed­ding ceremonies….

In con­trast, the Butte County clerk-​recorder issued a June 11 news release saying her office will stop per­form­ing wed­ding cer­e­monies alto­gether–for gay and het­ero­sex­ual couples.

For Rick Perl­stein and others, actions like this last amount to noth­ing less than a twenty-first-century ver­sion of the mas­sive resis­tance cam­paigns that fol­lowed Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion. Until I looked into it, I was inclined to agree.

But it turns out that what’s going on in Butte County is much less sin­is­ter than the WSJ and others would have us believe.