Dreher (still playing the victim) and Linker go another round. Here's Linker:
It seems to me that Rod's opposition to gay marriage and social acceptance follows less from an argument or an assertion about the world, nature, or God than it does from a disposition or temperament -- from a disposition or temperament inclined toward fear. (In retrospect, I can see how significant and telling it is that one of the first questions I posed to Rod in my original post was "What are you afraid of?", and that Andrew fastened onto that passage in his initial response and returned to it in the title of his longer post in response to Rod. Fear has been at the center of this debate from the beginning.)
I saw the post from the brother of the movie producer. I run a workforce development and education/training NGO that focuses on entertainment and have some knowledge of the business of “the biz.” Here are some additional things to consider about the health of Hollywood right now:
Some new media companies are finally hiring those laid off from print newspapers:
Meanwhile, Dan Gross chronicles how it came to this:
...the newspaper companies that have failed wholesale were essentially set up to fail by inexperienced managers who believed piling huge amounts of debt on businesses whose revenues were shrinking even when the economy was growing was a shrewd means of value creation.
Via Conor Friedersdorf, a detail from Mark Bowden's article on the NYT's management:
[Former C.F.O. Diane Baker's] biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. ... “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”
I had a CT scan today, and the nice people sent me on my way with a CD filled with hundreds of images of my insides. So what else could I do but turn them into an animation.
The frames have been colour corrected so as to only show the bones. Next version will include organs as well.
I've time stretched the clips (otherwise it's all over in 10 seconds) and used After Effects' Pixel Motion frame blending mode to make it smoother, so there's a little bit of morphing visible at various times.
Rebecca Traister test-drives a novel piece of software:
Freedom [is] an application created by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Ph.D. candidate Fred Stutzman, who made it available to the public for free -- though he asks for donations -- a little over a year ago. In an e-mail, Stutzman writes that he came up with the idea after talking with lots of people trying to find places to work without Wi-Fi; he doesn't know how many people have downloaded it, but estimates the number at about 10,000. He has received 50 donations, all of which he's used to pay for software.
Freedom will disable the networking, only on a Mac computer, for periods of anywhere from one minute to eight hours. No Web sites, no e-mail, no instant messaging, no online shopping, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Jezebel, no iTunes store, no streaming anything. Once it is turned on, as it hilariously claims, "Freedom enforces freedom"; you cannot turn it off without rebooting your computer.
A new study suggests that stressful childhoods are responsible for the achievement gap:
Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success.
When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared.
In lab animals, stress hormones and high blood pressure are associated with reduced cell connectivity and smaller volumes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. It's in these brain regions that working memory is centered. Evans and Schamberg didn't scan their human subjects' brains, but the test results suggest that the same basic mechanisms operate in kids.
There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible to imagine, however inaccurately, that gay sex was in and of itself a self-destructive pathology, something no happy, healthy person would willingly engage in. That time is past.
Salon ran a column by Rush Limbaugh's cousin, Julie Limbaugh:
Even though our ideologies do not align, I have always admired Rush for his humor and savvy. I would like to believe that he has created a semi-tongue-in-cheek persona for entertainment's sake, a self-aware self-parody, the original Stephen Colbert. While his haters have always been too busy running in angry frenetic circles to notice the irony, Rush Limbaugh, the caricature, has had the time of his life; and there's something to admire in he who gets the last laugh.
Rush once told me, "The only way to make millions is for half the
nation to hate you." He told me this at his mom's funeral when I was
13, and I think the reason he was talking business was because he was
trying not to look so sad.
I was reading your blog the other day, when I saw a post called "The Young and The Right". It talked about how not only do the young have a high approval rating of Obama, but we have a distinctly low approval rating of the Republican leaders in congress. I'm two months from graduating High School in North Carolina, a 40 year Republican stronghold, and newly minted swing state. I've grown up with my only personal memories of politics being that of the Bush Administration.
Every friend of mine that registered to vote last year registered not as an independent but as a Democrat. Many more too young to vote told me they wanted to do the same. The lasting political effect of the Bush Administration is not only that's created a new generation of (for now) solid up-ticket to down-ticket Democratic voters, but a new generation of leftists.
The lawyer said that as soon as homosexuality receives constitutionally protected status equivalent to race, then "it will be very hard to be a public Christian." By which he meant to voice support, no matter how muted, for traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality and marriage. To do so would be to set yourself up for hostile work environment challenges, including dismissal from your job, and generally all the legal sanctions that now apply to people who openly express racist views.
I realize its often hard to appreciate how your words will come across to those who don't share your beliefs, but good grief, is it possible to be more oblivious? ... eah, it's pretty rough being a Christian in America. Maybe Dreher should try being a "public homosexual" for a while and compare the experience. If I had a Quantum Leap machine, I'd be tempted to zap Dreher into the life of a gay high school student or maybe a gay man in a small Southern town and see how easy he finds it to publicly be himself.
One imagines how the early Christians might have responded to this threat: by embracing their marginalization and seeing discrimination against them as a sign of their righteousness. Today's Christianists, in contrast, need the government to enforce their religious doctrines, for fear that without government, these convictions could falter. It says a lot about the comparative strength of their faith and their paranoia.
Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room
visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3
million to taxpayers and others, according to a report.
I work for the state child welfare agency for Missouri. We have been routinely asked if the economy has affected the amount of child abuse and child neglect hotline calls that are made or the number of kids coming into foster care. So far, it has not. We assume that because most of our clients are already soaking in poverty that the economic downturns don't affect them because they currently survive in that same circumstance.
This is no longer the case. Today, we had our first child enter foster care because the parent's unemployment ran out and the parent could no longer care for them. The economy is now affecting us.
There is growing belief on the right that President Obama will use him for political cover to slash weapons programs and the defense budget...My bet is that Gates will stay on until about this time next year, and leave when the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review) is done. By then, I predict, Republicans will be crying, "Bobby, we hardly knew ye."
Scott McLemee George Scialabba reviewsAgainst the Grain, a collection of forty-five essays from The New Criterion:
In its crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture, The New Criterion is -- on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it -- right. Notwithstanding the importance of legal and social equality for women, homosexuals, and members of racial minorities, most of the cultural strategies employed in the service of these ends have been -- again, on the whole; and with many exceptions, not always duly acknowledged by conservative critics -- misguided and counterproductive.
Nate Silver crunches the numbers of increasing support for marriage equality in various states. Here's his conclusion:
The state has roughly average levels of religiosity, including a fair number of white evangelicals, and the model predicts that if Iowans voted on a marriage ban today, it would pass with 56.0 percent of the vote. By 2012, however, the model projects a toss-up: 50.4 percent of Iowans voting to approve the ban, and 49.6 percent opposed. In 2013 and all subsequent years, the model thinks the marriage ban would fail.
One of your readers wrote, "Even though it's not physically addicting, it can be very psychologically addicting, causing people to lose motivation and desire to do anything else."
Oh please. Wouldn't that apply to everything that is enjoyable? I'd much rather have sex with my wife, watch my son play hockey, play golf, ride a bike, read a book, play with my dog, eat ice cream, or read your blog than go to work, clean the house, or any of the other less desirable activities that daily life requires; yet I, and the vast majority of those around me seem to somehow be able to get on with our daily lives and responsibilities.
I unfortunately work for a company that drug tests, so I definitely do not partake. I did in high school, and to some extent in college. If it wasn't illegal, and I wouldn't get fired for it, I'd have a bong the size of a bazooka.
Jeffrey Goldberg provides a long list of the Islamist's statements on Israel. It's a good complement to this. Reading them all, it becomes quite clear to me that Ahmadinejad does indeed want Israel to cease to exist, but equally clear that he is not speaking of dropping a nuke on it. This one I hadn't read before:
December, 2006: "I want to tell [Western counties] that just as the
Soviet Union was wiped out and does not exist anymore, so will the
Zionist regime soon be wiped out and humanity will be free."
As we know, Russia now exists and the Soviet Union was not destroyed by nuclear arms. And if this is the process by which he hopes Israel will disappear, I see no reason to fear an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel (and on one of the most sacred sites in Islam). And since that is Netanyahu's rationale for launching a war, it seems weaker to me now than it did before. It is also worth noting that one foreign minister in the Middle East has actually explicitly and unequivocally proposed bombing another country - Israel's.
"Holy hell has broken loose over this," is how one of Mike Isikoff's sources has described John Brennan's attempt to prevent release of three damning OLC memos drafted by the Bush administration in its systematic program for torturing terror suspects. One begins to realize how deeply important it was that Brennan didn't get the top CIA job. You see now his attachment to the torture regime he pretended to oppose and his fierce loyalty to CIA officers who may have committed war crimes and now seek to prevent the American people from finding out what was done in secret, against the law, in their name.
Only the president can resolve this. And when he does, we will see more clearly than at any previous point how committed he really is to change we can believe in.
In that state the far right cannot claim some kind of judicial tyranny in granting civil equality to all its citizens in civil marriage - and are trying to thwart the will of the legislature by the governor's veto. The Senate has more than enough votes for an over-ride. The House is on a knife edge, with a mere five votes in the balance. You can email state legislators on this page. Please do. They are very close to getting the votes needed for an over-ride. Your email could make the difference.
Hamas and Fatah have announced that their talks in Cairo on a government of national unity have ended without agreement, to be resumed (perhaps) in three weeks. While some Egyptian sources are trying to spin this as a simple pause, with no deeper implications, few Arab commentators are buying it. Combined with the failure of the Doha summit and the formation of an extreme right-wing Israeli government, the suspension of Palestinian unity talks signals a rather depressing end to months of feverish diplomacy.
I've read all the other state supreme court opinions on gay marriage and I think this one stands up pretty well in terms of legal quality, regardless of what side one is on. The author, Justice Mark Cady, is also not considered a left wing judge by any means which may further enhance the ruling's influence especially since it comes from a "heartland" state.
It's been a crazy day for me and I've been unable to sit down and read the opinion in full and in quiet. Will do this weekend. From the abstracts and summaries, it's clear that the actual arguments for limiting marriage to 97 percent of the population, while denying it to 3 percent, no longer hold in reasonable minds. Once you have accepted sexual orientation as a fixed and profound part of someone's identity, and once civil marriage is not restricted to those with children, it is simply very, very hard to find a secular argument for denying critical civil rights under constitutions that guarantee formal equality. You can reach for Biblical injunctions, or try the logic of unintended consequences, or in the end invoke pure prejudice in a Burkean fashion. But even Burke understood that societies change and grow, social beliefs shift, our understanding of humanity deepens, and an intelligent conservatism adjusts.
That's why, I think, so many conservative jurists have been forced by logic to adopt this position - from the early decisions in Hawaii and Alaska, through the numerous Republican-appointed judges who find it hard to reflect pure prejudice in rational legal judgment. Yes, fear can overwhelm logic and justice. But remove fear - and the case is overwhelming.
Another relative arrested. And an internal spat between the Palins and the Johnstons makes it onto the talk show circuit:
"We're disappointed that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of their relationship," [Palin spokesperson] Stapleton said in a statement Friday.
A policeman stands guard in front of a house with a poster of US President Barack Obama just before his visit in Baden-Baden, southern Germany, on April 3, 2009. Obama is to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the sidelines of a NATO summit taking place from April 3 to 4 in Baden-Baden, Kehl and the eastern French city of Strasbourg. By Sascha Schuerman/AFP/Getty Images.
...it’s very difficult to skeptically review the scientific literature and conclude that the consensus is wrong. That’s why folks like Jim Manzi (and Ronald Bailey, who has revised his views somewhat since writing the book Taylor cites) are reluctant to confidently endorse the views in that Cato ad. But rather than accept, as an institution, that the science is probably correct and go about its business arguing that no state action is required (or whatever policy it might decide upon) Cato chose to betray the principles of honest skepticism that no doubt attracted many of libertarianism’s better minds. They’re sure to notice this choice. Hence, crisis.
This is the third pro-SSM state supreme court decision in the past year. In addition to the important marriage result, the decision is notable because it continues a growing trend among state courts to treat sexual-orientation classifications as suspect. If it continues, that trend will have consequences on gay-rights questions well beyond the marriage context. State judiciaries are beginning to follow a familiar pattern of hastening civil-rights progress for a group once that group's cause has achieved a measure of legislative success and cultural acceptance.
"I have been watching an interesting phenomenon on the Right, which is beginning to cause me concern. I am referring to the over-the-top hysteria in response to the first months in office of our new president, which distinctly reminds me of the “Bush Is Hitler” crowd on the Left," - David Horowitz.
In contrast to reports circulating on the Internet, Leahy said he is continuing to explore the proposal.
“I am not interested in a panel comprised of partisans intent on advancing partisan conclusions,” Leahy said. “I regret that Senate Republicans have approached this matter to date as partisans. That was not my intent or focus. Indeed, it will take bipartisan support in order to move this forward. I continue to talk about this prospect with others in Congress, and with outside groups and experts. I continue to call on Republicans to recognize that this is not about partisan politics. It is about being honest with ourselves as a country. We need to move forward together.”
My name is Will Wilkinson. I smoke marijuana, and I like it.
And one more:
I am a self made multi-millionaire with three houses in three states including a ski house in Colorado and a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. I'm happily married and keep fit by running 15 miles a week and working out regularly. I support the arts and other charities heavily. I oftentimes work long hours and manage a crew of about 70 people. I have been a weed smoker for as long as I can remember. Recently I received a glass bong as a present. Tonight my friends and I are going to rip huge tubes of sweet OG kush and get high as shit. Then I will take my responsible millionaire ass and plant it in front of the TV for a long night of xbox and candy eating. I will laugh uncontrollably and have a fantastic time. These nights of Xbox and reefer is one of the best things in my life... And I got a pretty damn good life."
There's a chance the legislature can over-ride the governor's veto of civil equality. From Marty Rouse, National Field Director of the Human Rights Campaign:
The bill heads into final technical passage in the House tomorrow and
then returns to the state Senate for concurrence (remember last week's
overwhelming 26-4 vote there). The bill should land on Governor
Douglas' desk next Tuesday; he'll likely immediately veto and then the
House will likely try to override on Tues, Wed, or Thurs of next week.
Since some Democrats who voted against the bill last night, may vote with
their party to override (and some Rs who voted for the bill may not
want to vote to override their Governor), it is not completely clear
how close the votes are to override.
Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry–handsomely–to use more fossil fuel. “Which is,” as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the “opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established.”
I watched the original interview. Powell is one of the toughest guys out there. He's smart, smooth, and he can intimidate with a single minute shift in body language. Watching Rachel work him was revealing. He was somewhat shocked to be pushed so hard (although obviously he was there for a reason); he was not on strong moral ground, and he knew it, and he knew we knew it; he looked very tired at times; and he was trying to tell her -- in fact he DID tell her, that it was all going to come out in time:
POWELL: "And so it is a legal issue and I think we have to be very careful and I have to be very careful because I don't want to be seen as implicating anybody or accusing anybody because I don't have the complete record on this. And that complete record I think in due course will come out."
The "complete record I think in due course will come out"--if you were Cheney, Yoo, et al., how would you be reading that?
I began working in the mortgage business in 2002. I started in an entry level position at a medium-large mortgage company not long after I dropped out of high school.
Back then I was a drifter who needed a job to help pay the rent for the new apartment my girlfriend and I just moved into. I was lucky enough to find an ad offering $15 per hour plus commissions with no experience necessary (I’m sure for many this speaks volumes about the current state of the mortgage market). It was a telemarketing job that I excelled at and soon worked my way out of and into a management role where I was to hire and train new recruits. After a couple years of that I was recruited by another company to be a mortgage broker and by 2005 I was making $90,000 per year at the age of 23.
Soon after came ‘the crash,’ where the lenders who mortgage brokers relied on began dropping like flies. By the end of 2007, business at our company was down by about 50%.
William Galston thinks cap and trade may be doomed:
Support for environmental legislation is strongest on the coasts, weakest in the interior areas that depend more heavily on coal-fired power plants. The Midwest, which has already been hit hard by the collapse of manufacturing, would take a second blow. This matters because the Democratic Party is an uneasy coalition between the coasts and the interior, symbolized by bitter fight between Henry Waxman and John Dingell for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It is hard to imagine Midwestern Democrats voting for cap-and-trade in current economic circumstances, and perhaps not in any economic circumstances--that is, unless they receive credible assurances of dollar-for-dollar offsets against the higher costs their constituents would have to bear.
A cap and trade system would introduce a new market fabricated by government to regulate the entire economy of mundane markets. Cap and trade is based on the political invention of scarcity. But the problem of determining the ideal supply of emission permits is much like the Federal Reserve's problem of determining the ideal quantity of government money. In both cases, bureaucrats must appeal to dubious mathematical models and pronounce on questions that remain the subject of raging scientific controversy. When the Fed produced the wrong answers, it helped inflate the housing bubble, which led to the ruin of our economy. Do we trust the government climate bureaucrats to do better?
Evan Wolfson emails to note how so many judges who have backed simple civil equality for all citizens have appointed by Republicans:
Massachusetts (Goodridge, 2003)
Margaret Marshall, appointed by Chief Justice
Gov. Weld (R) in 1996, elevated to Chief by Gov. Cellucci (R);
in 1999
California (In re Marriage Cases, 2008)
Ronald George, Chief Justice appointed by
Gov. Wilson (R) in 1991, elevated to Chief by Gov. Wilson (R);
in 1996
Connecticut (Kerrigan, 2008)
Richard Palmer, Associate Justice appointed by
Gov. Weicker (Ind.); in 1993 -- Note that Weicker was a Republican during his time in the House and Senate. He won the governorship as an independent.
And today, in Iowa (Varnum, 2009)
Mark Cady, Associate Justice, appointed by
Gov. Branstad (R) in 1998.
Singer is one of several conservatives I’ve spent time with recently who’s thinking through the implications of the financial crash, and trying to figure out--not to put it too grandiloquently--the way forward for democratic capitalism. Many of those with the most practical and creative ideas, I’ve found, are practitioners, with experience on the Street (and in some cases in government); some are business school professors. They’re at once free-market-friendly and free-society-committed, while understanding that we need to devise and implement a reasonable structure of law and regulations that will prevent system-threatening leverage, opacity, and irresponsibility. Singer and others can point us to a path very different from Obama-like nanny-state liberalism, but also different from head-in-the-sand-everything-was-fine-except-for-the-Community-Reinvestment-Act conservatism.
March 29, 2009 - April 4, 2009
Site Meter 
