Friday, January 16, 2009

16 Jan 2009 10:12 am

Dissent Of The Day II

A reader writes:

I thought I'd write you concerning the Prop 8 maps you've been discussing over the last couple of days.  I think if you were out here in California instead of on the East Coast you would determine that it is NOT a good idea at this time.  I say this as a progressive who voted against Prop 8 who happens to be Roman-Catholic, so I hear A LOT from both sides of the argument.

Things out here, especially on the Anti-8 side are highly charged.  While the initial flurry of vandalism has died down, the tension has not.  Rhetoric still remains very hot on both sides as if it's Nov 3rd.  The tension which democratic elections are supposed to release has not been resolved in this case. As a matter of fact it has radicalized the gay rights movement out here to a degree that is alienating mainstream people. 

While I have no statistics to back this up, my guess would be that if Prop 8 were to come up on the ballot today in a special election format, I think it would lose again and this time in an even worse fashion than it lost in November.  Things like the Prop 8 map do not help.  Yes the information is publicly available, and legal, and I wouldn't legally prevent anyone from doing it.  The question is, is whether or not this is a good idea?

Continue reading "Dissent Of The Day II" »

16 Jan 2009 09:42 am

The View From Your Window

Tipton, Iowa, 5 pm.

16 Jan 2009 09:05 am

Quote For The Day II

"It’s true, I did break bread with Obama. It was amazing. He was carried into the house by cherubs, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey spread rose pedals on the carpet where he was about to walk and he very considerately asked me what vintage of wine I wanted my water turned into.

It’s also a sign that Obama can talk to and understand Americans at all social levels. For example, that night with us, he had an elegant dinner filled with sophisticated ideas and complex policy conversation with a bunch of right-leaning commentators. Then the next day, he had a meeting with some liberal commentators where, I presume, he was just as fluid while using much simpler sentences, shorter words and serving Froot Loops and Hostess Twinkies. There are pundits at all levels of cognitive distinction, and Obama has to learn to address all of them," - David Brooks, NYT. 

16 Jan 2009 08:47 am

Quote For The Day

"What is interesting is the fact that he would want to do this. And you see that since his election he has kind of reached out to people that may not be ideological allies, to Rick Warren, the pastor who will be at his inaugural, to John McCain, whom he has treated with a lot of dignity and respect, and to a bunch of right wing columnists last night, in part, because I think he is a guy who is intellectually curious and wants to exchange ideas, but also in part he wants to co-opt the vast right wing conspiracy.

And I'm here to tell you that, speaking for myself, he has succeeded. I am brainwashed entirely. I'm in the tank, and I am a believer of hope and change and, above all, audacity," - Charles Krauthammer, on Fox.

16 Jan 2009 08:34 am

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Face it, the word "conservative" has been so thoroughly corrupted that it cannot possibly fit you anymore, even in your attempts to carefully re-redefine it back to what it means to you.  It might be time to call yourself something else rather than have to explain that you're not a Palin-style maniac.

Just remember, Edmund Burke was a Whig.

Will Tory do?

16 Jan 2009 07:59 am

Chavez Caves

David Rothkopf:

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez seems to have lost a little of his bravura recently with reports in the papers today that as his reserves of fuck you money dwindle due to declining oil prices, he is offering the oil companies he once screwed the chance to come back to Venezuela. Bienvenido a Caracas, mis amigos, all is forgiven... er, please forgive me. Now if only we could harness the power of those oil companies to really deliver a lesson.

Imagine for a moment a different world, in which big multinationals committed to a program of not investing in countries that were not dependable democracies or showed disregard for the rule of law.  Think of the countries that would be squeezed, forced to change. Now that would really be the power to change the world. Meantime watch: slowly but surely Chavez's chutzpah-laden outreach will bear fruit...as long as there is a safe profit to be made...and he will more than likely be propped up by some of the same people he once abused.

As Putin and Ahmadinejad and Chavez come back to earth, we can take some small pleasure in observing it. But the smartest response is to get our own fiscal and energy house in order. After the last eight years of fiscal insanity and energy inertia, that's a massive task.

16 Jan 2009 07:16 am

Hamas, The IRA And Washington

Ross tackles the question of double standards. Larison's post is pretty powerful, I'd say. His money quote:

The official opprobrium heaped on Palestinian militants, for example, is primarily a matter of condemning the enemies of an allied state; their use of terrorist tactics is secondary to whether or not they are labeled this.

Ross's quibble:

It's that "entirely" that I don't buy.

I must say that whatever reservations I had about the Walt-Mearsheimer book (and I largely share Ross's assessment), Walt's counter-factual post on Gaza has generated a lot of great blog debate. It has helped out the deeper debate we need to have. As has the entire Gaza bombardment.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

15 Jan 2009 08:46 pm

Give That Pilot A Medal

That's all I have to say about today's extraordinary confluence of goose and man. The pilot and flight attendants and rescue teams all deserve a trip to the White House and some serious props. Maybe a dinner at George Will's - some kind of all-encompassing honor like that.

(Photo: Chris McGrath/Getty.)

15 Jan 2009 08:23 pm

Now Certified

The Dish enters its ninth consecutive year as Best Blog in the Weblog Awards 2008. A record 900,000 votes were cast in all the categories, with the Dish getting 25,000 votes. You did it. I sure didn't. And since you contribute such an enormous amount to the blog, in terms of feedback, emails, and links, it's your award too. Congrats to all the other winners too - from Totten and Yon to Silver and Wonkette and all the others. It's a very impressive roster.

A deep reserve of thanks to the Atlantic, especially James Bennet and David Bradley, who tolerate my enthusiasms with more equanimity than I deserve, to Jessie Roberts who helped evolve the Dish in 2007, to Patrick Appel who keeps the link cupboard fully stocked and gives me the sane and sober pushback I need, to the interns of the past two years, and, casting my mind back to the very beginning, to my old friend Robert Cameron, who created this blog many many years ago and nursed it in the five years of total independence so that it could become what it now is. We don't rest on laurels here, so it's time to go back to work. But once more with feeling:

Thanks!

15 Jan 2009 07:19 pm

Face Of The Day

George W Bush face masks are reduced to make way for new stock of Barack Obama masks at Angels Fancy Dress store on Shaftesbury Avenue on January 15, 2009 in London, England. The Barack Obama masks are some of the first to go on sale in the UK, just days before Mr Obama is inaugurated as the President of the USA on January 20, 2009. By Oli Scarff/Getty.

15 Jan 2009 06:20 pm

A Stimulus Tip

Hugh Hewitt makes a suggestion. Am I hallucinating, or does this actually make sense?:

If President Obama oversees the payout of more than a trillion bucks and cannot point to anything but statistics to show for it in two years, he'll have a political nightmare on his hands, and he'll deserve it.  The enormous size of the stimulus is a never-before-seen-in-American-history splurge, and the Democrats thus far show no sign of treating it as other than a vast payout to their friends.

If President Obama was to demand the funding for and enabling legislation to kick start the construction of the dozens of new nuclear power plants this country needs, as well as the wind turbines envisioned by T. Boone Pickens and the grid expansion everyone knows is necessary, not only would he be creating thousands and thousands of great jobs, he'd be powering the U.S. up for a second American century.

15 Jan 2009 06:07 pm

It Really Is A Post-Gay World

At least among straight, burly and horny 17 year olds. A snapshot of cultural change in a high school principal's office. Pretty funny too:

15 Jan 2009 06:00 pm

Dumped In Alaska

No, not Palin: the Catholic church. The sex abuse crisis - in which the Vatican became the de facto hub of an interational sexual criminal conspiracy in the 1960s and 1970s - had a special brutality in the frozen north:

The new suit contends that pedophile priests unsuited to serve anywhere else were dumped on Alaska and put in remote villages with little or no law enforcement, making it virtually impossible for anyone to report them. There was a calculated effort at the highest levels of the Jesuit order to "'dump' these 'problem priests' in a location in which the priests could avoid detection and continued to sexually abuse countless Native children," the suit says.

Problem priests from seven Jesuit provinces in the United States as well as four other countries ended up in the rural villages, mostly in Western Alaska, Wall said. "They were specifically targeting the Athabascan and the Yup'ik cultures, because they wouldn't talk," he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Nothing that new, but a reminder of how much evil the Vatican perpetrated for so long.

15 Jan 2009 04:46 pm

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

I have to take exception to your equation of what's happening in Gaza right now to neoconservatism.  Of course today's bombing of the UN facility was a terrible and tragic mistake, and will do nothing to help move the peace process forward.  Of course the entire situation, the deaths of Palestinian civilians, the international outrage, in essence all of the negative results of the Gaza offensive, are sad and unfortunate.  Ultimately, what this comes back to, though, is the bottom-line question of what you would have Israel do?  Hamas will simply never be a reasonable player in the move toward a two-state solution.  Its charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and its stated attitude is that there is no need for a long-term truce, because it won't be terribly long before Israel is in fact destroyed.

 

No other country on earth would be asked to stand still while its neighbor, bent on its destruction, continuously fires rockets at populated areas.  Removing Hamas from power is going to be ugly and cause tremendous collateral damage, but it's an absolute pre-requisite for any hope of a lasting peace. 

15 Jan 2009 04:36 pm

Fact-Checking Kristol Again

He's bragging on Fox. Two things: I'm not sure that Gerry Seib or I would think of ourselves as "liberal columnists." Gerry is a center-right columnist for the Wall Street Journal and ... well, let's just say that I would not have written "The Conservative Soul" if I thought of myself as a liberal (if a very different kind of conservative than the statist, interventionist, big-spending, torture-backing Christianism Kristol favors). Secondly:

They got some coffee in some styrofoam cups.

Actually, we didn't actually get that. There was some water in a glass jug in the corner. I know Kristol is a fact-free zone, as the New York Times has discovered to its chagrin. But he could make his status-obsessed, narcissistic comments without making shit up.

15 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

Dolly Parton and a dancing Swedish corgi. My husband will love this one:

15 Jan 2009 04:14 pm

I Hope Sick-Bags Are Available

Mark Penn and Karen Hughes invite guests to an Inaugural Brunch.

15 Jan 2009 04:10 pm

The McCain-Palin Split

Obama coopts the old McCain by severing him from the wack-job from Wasilla. More shrewd moves. If the GOP decides to be the pajama party of Palin and Wurzelbacher in response, Obama's move will look shrewder still.

15 Jan 2009 04:01 pm

Tripping With Coffee

From a new study:

'High caffeine users' - those who consumed more than the equivalent of seven cups of instant coffee a day - were three times more likely to have heard a person's voice when there was no one there compared with 'low caffeine users' who consumed less than the equivalent of one cup of instant coffee a day.

15 Jan 2009 03:34 pm

The Qahtani Case

A reader writes:

One note that has been missed in the analysis of all of this: Crawford's report talked about how Qahtani's torture took place over a nearly two month period. Presumably the intelligence officials were not able to get whatever information they thought he had in a short time frame. Doesn't this seriously undermine the "ticking time bomb" defence of torture?

If it took two months to break this man, how urgent was the information that he had? Also, isn't it at least conceivable that in that two month period the intelligence officials could have gotten the information from him by methodically developing a relationship, a level of rapport, that would have ultimately lead Qahtani to realize that at America's core is a decent society full of decent individuals, committed to treating the rest of the world with some core level of decency?

The ticking time bomb scenario has not happened in the US or anywhere else in human history. It was a rhetorical device to cover for Bush and Cheney's desire to use torture as a routine weapon in the war on terror. It's a talking point in a propaganda campaign, not a good faith argument for any actual current situations.

A simple question: now that the chief Gitmo prosecutor has said that Qahtani was tortured, will the New York Times, the AP, Newsweek and the Washington Post stop using words and euphemisms that are not true? Or do we have to endure more linguistic cowardice from the MSM?

15 Jan 2009 03:19 pm

The 2008 Feltron Annual Report

An artist catalogs his year. Creative Review describes the project:

For three years now we’ve studied how many miles he has run, how many emails and texts he has sent, which books he has read. In 2007 we found out when he met Sarah and when he turned thirty (but were they linked?). We know how much money gathered in his coin bucket, how many photos he has uploaded to Flickr, when he was attacked on the train, and so on.

15 Jan 2009 03:02 pm

They're Coming To Get You!

Dreher responds to my defense of 8 maps:

Here's the thing: how would you feel if your wife or your kids were at home alone when some outraged creep from the Queer Avengers or somesuch organization showed up pounding on the door demanding to talk to somebody about your Prop 8 donation? Eightmaps makes that a lot more likely. In Texas, thank goodness, we have a castle law, which gives homeowners the right to shoot anybody who invades their property. It's a good law, and though I certainly hope never to have to invoke it, after last summer's experience I wouldn't hesitate to make use of the liberty it grants me to protect my family and my property. Activists who wish to use Eightmaps or any of its successors to harrass Texans, gay or straight, conservative or liberal, in their houses risk getting their asses shot off.

Rod needs some help. This stuff is just deranged sexual panic - mixed up with fantasies of anti-gay violence.

15 Jan 2009 02:38 pm

The View From Your Window

New York, New York, 7.35 am

15 Jan 2009 02:25 pm

The Right And Hillary

Daniel McCarthy notices that the chumminess from the period when she might have prevented the first black president has not dissipated:

[Clinton is] a monster of the conservative movement’s creation. Throughout the ’90s, the movement’s mouthpieces put about the idea that Hillary was the power behind the throne — she was, after all, less popular and further to the Left than her husband. This backfired spectacularly: after all, if Hillary could be co-president, doesn’t that make her eminently qualified for the senate, to be president again, or to be the nation’s top diplomat?

And having done at least as much as her feminist fans on the Left to build up the myth of omnicompetent Hillary, what is the Right doing now? Lying down for her: “even firebrand South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint,” Time’s Massimo Calabresi writes, “said he was ‘optimistic and hopeful about [Sen. Clinton's] role as secretary of State.’” If there is a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, it’s evidently the best friend Hillary Clinton could hope to have.

Until, of course, they discover her real views about the Middle East.

15 Jan 2009 01:52 pm

Yes, Nazi-Lovers Still Exist

Johann Hari has - yet again - a priceless story. It's an interview and profile of David Irving. Money quote of many:

We settle in the living room looking out over the grounds, and our   photographer begins to snap him. He mentions that the white coffee-cup   Irving is holding works well against the green, and Irving says: “Well, it   is an Aryan cup.”

15 Jan 2009 01:44 pm

Science Under Bush

A revealing and interesting interview with the outgoing Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Marburger. Money quote:

Seed: Did you see President Bush ever change his mind based on the scientific evidence that you presented him?

JM: As far as I can tell, the president, as a matter of principle, doesn't think it's wise to defy nature. By the time I've arranged a presentation about something for the president, all science questions have been resolved. And he expects it. He would probably fire me if I permitted a science question to leak into his briefings. I'm there to make sure that his advisors and his agencies have consulted with the science community, and that all the science issues have been taken care of before anything gets to him.

15 Jan 2009 01:38 pm

Obama And The Middle East

Ta-Nehisi speculates.

15 Jan 2009 01:33 pm

Photo Cliches

A new blog. Jason Kottke explains:

Photo Cliches is a blog dedicated to collecting, uh, cliched photos. Current categories include people groping statues, people pretending to have fake penises, and my personal favorite: people doing the thumbs-up Lynndie England pose.

15 Jan 2009 01:17 pm

Balm In Gilead

Peter Staley on the latest AIDS and HIV blockbuster drug. Brought to you by the much-maligned American healthcare system.

15 Jan 2009 01:10 pm

Making Fun Of Europe

One genuflects before the genius of David Cerny. Here's the best slide-show of the exhibit.

15 Jan 2009 01:08 pm

No Pants Subway Ride

A New York tradition - with extra goose-pimples:

15 Jan 2009 12:56 pm

Pixelated Ladies

A reader writes:

I am one of your heterosexual male readers, and I really found those pixelated images to be oddly inviting and incredibly disturbing. But I can understand your confusion as to how to feel about those images.

I'm putting one after the jump. The website is here.

Continue reading "Pixelated Ladies" »

15 Jan 2009 12:55 pm

From Inside Gaza, Ctd.

An update on that CARE worker:

After surviving the neighborhood’s fiercest bombardment to date, CARE local staffer and primary blogger in Gaza, Jawad Harb, sounded much better this morning. Following last night’s air strikes, the UN established a temporary camp a few hundred meters from his neighborhood, where residents can run during an air strike. Jawad and his family, including his six children and paralyzed 86-year-old grandfather, had been unable to find space in overflowing UN shelters, which received some 7,000 new displaced people last night alone.

The coordinates of this new temporary camp have been given to the Israeli army, so it is a "safe" location. And Jawad and his family have packed "go" bags of necessary items, ready to bolt to the camp if needed.

15 Jan 2009 12:50 pm

Nearly Over

Know hope:

At 9:00 p.m. Friday, the highest-level staffers will turn in their gear; and the West Wing will become a ghost town. Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Counselor Ed Gillespie, and Press Secy Dana Perino are the senior staffers who will remain here, on standby. Monday is a federal holiday so the White House would be closed anyway. On Tuesday, Special Agent Donald White of the U.S. Secret Service will shadow President Bush, sit in the customary front 'shotgun' seat of the limousine, and guard the President until noon. At 12:01, Agent White steps over to a position behind Barack Obama.

15 Jan 2009 12:31 pm

Dual Loyalties?

Hitch asks:

Here is a thought experiment that does not take very much thought. Picture, if you will, Hillary Clinton facing a foreign-policy conundrum. With whom will she discuss it first and most intently: with her president or her husband? (I did tell you that this wouldn't be difficult.) Here's another one: Will she be swayed in her foreign-policy decisions by electoral considerations focusing on the year 2012, and, if so, will she be swayed by President Barack Obama's interests or her own?

I think Clinton should be given a chance to prove herself as secretary-of-state and deserves a break from this kind of criticism for the time being. Unless she gives reason to infer that she is actually doing as Hitch predicts, she deserves the benefit of the doubt. The world is really in too grave a crisis right now to do otherwise.

15 Jan 2009 12:30 pm

The End Of Waterboarding

America may have an attorney-general soon who actually believes in the rule of law. Imagine.

15 Jan 2009 12:15 pm

Conservative Degeneracy Watch

Ah, yes, the Corner resurrects ... the Vince Foster affair.

15 Jan 2009 11:59 am

Marriage, Democracy And California

George Will's column this morning is, yet again, a must-read. Money quote:

Just eight years ago, Proposition 22 was passed, 61.4 to 38.6 percent. The much narrower victory of Proposition 8 suggests that minds are moving toward toleration of same-sex marriage. If advocates of that have the patience required by democratic persuasion, California's ongoing conversation may end as they hope. If, however, the conversation is truncated, as Brown urges, by judicial fiat, the argument will become as embittered as the argument about abortion has been by judicial highhandedness.

I'm emotionally conflicted on this. As someone who has spent much of my adult life making the case for gay equality and for civil marriage as the sine qua non of such equality, I'd love marriage to be real in California for all Californians. But intellectually, I'm not conflicted. I'm with George.

We lost the Prop 8 battle because we ran a dreadful campaign run by the usual craven Human Rights Campaign cowards and incompetents. We deserved to lose. We do not deserve to get a do-over via court power. There are some interesting legal and constitutional arguments here that are not as easily dismissed as George might like. But as a political matter - and this is a political struggle - I hope the court decides to allow Prop 8 to stand. I do not want civil equality imposed by judicial fiat in the most populous state in America - in the face of a close initiative vote. It would be a horribly pyrrhic victory. It would taint this movement's power and message and moral standing.

I don't think George fully grasps what the denial of marriage equality does to the souls of gay folk, and does not appreciate how we are in fact deeply wounded by the heterosexual majority in denying us core equality. But he's right that California already provides substantive state protections for gay couples. He's right too that recent history suggests we can easily win this in the democratic sphere and have been making amazing gains in persuading people of the justice of the cause. To impose a victory by fiat when in a few years, if we do the work we should, we can gain a victory with deep democratic legitimacy, would be to snatch pseudo-victory from the jaws of real victory.

The court did its duty and its 2008 ruling is part of civil rights history. It need not force this now, and shouldn't. Let's put this to a referendum again. And let's do the hard work to win.

15 Jan 2009 11:35 am

The Democrats' Laffer Curve

Some spending delusions:

The tendency to attribute outright magical powers to government spending has gotten slightly out of control.  It's appropriate to ask the same question that should have been asked of Republicans in 1980:  if all this is so marvelous, why don't we just do it indefinitely--slash tax rates to zero, borrow and spend forever?

The answer is that there are declining returns to all of this.  At some point, the Laffer Curve maximizes, and any further cuts cost the government money. Similarly, the trillionth stimulus dollar probably isn't nearly as effective as the first.

My own impression is that Obama's econ peeps are well aware of this. We may well be surprised by their fiscal conservatism. In fact, I think we may be. There are many aspects of this administration that are shaping up to be more authentically conservative than the Bush administration. That's one reason Paul Krugman remains so pissed off. And one reason Obama may succeed.

15 Jan 2009 11:23 am

John Bolton's Fantasy Comes True

The Israelis shell the UN headquarters in Gaza. In yet another brilliant move to win over global opinion and dispel any notion that this invasion has been morally suspect, they also destroy large amounts of food and humanitarian supplies. Meanwhile, the only entity capable of running any kind of viable Palestinian state - Fatah - is being murdered by Hamas in Gaza and undermined on the West Bank by Israel's Gaza campaign. So the result of this campaign might well be the permanent collapse of any hope for a viable Palestinian state, deeper alienation of Israel's own Arab population, propaganda gains for Jihadism across the world, and a crippling legacy for the new administration to try to tackle.

Just a day's work for neoconservatism.

15 Jan 2009 10:44 am

"A Heterosexual But With Issues"

Ted Haggard relaunches himself. You can figure it all out.

15 Jan 2009 10:18 am

Accidents Waiting To Happen

Fresh Pics features the photographic art of Jean-Yves Lemoigne. God knows how he pulls these off, but my heterosexual male and lesbian readers might like the pixelated ladies. Here's my favorite metaphor for Obama as he arrives in Washington:

15 Jan 2009 09:47 am

Polling Gaza

Pew has a new report. Money quote:

By nearly three-to-one (55% to 20%), Republicans approve of the military action Israel has taken in the Gaza Strip. Independents, by a smaller margin (44% to 29%), also approve of Israel’s actions. However, a plurality of Democrats (45%) disapproves of Israel’s military campaign, while just 29% express a positive opinion...

Those who are younger than 30 are less likely to sympathize with Israel than are older Americans. By 42% to 17%, more young people say they sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians. Roughly half or more of those in older age groups sympathize more with Israel, while only about one-in-ten or fewer sympathize more with the Palestinians.

White evangelicals are the strongest non-Jewish supporters of Israel.

15 Jan 2009 09:25 am

Pardon Libby!

I wouldn't be surprised, I have to say.

15 Jan 2009 09:05 am

The Best Of The Blogs

Thanks so much for the votes. Best Blog is a real honor - and, heading into the ninth year of daily blogging, a mark of survival in a way. But the great advantage of the poll is to be reminded how many great blogs there are out there that you haven't yet heard of. Here's the winner of the Best Blog Design: Our World 2.0, for example. Neil Gaiman won the best lit blog. I'd never heard of the Strobist photo blog before now. If you don't know of Ars Technica, and are interested in technology updates, you should check it out. In the Best New Blog department, I found Shafeen Charania. I'd never heard of him and can't really place him easily in the political universe - but was drawn in immediately. This, I thought to myself, is the spirit of the blogosphere I remember from its earliest days (and I was there). Props to those we already know and appreciate: Nate Silver and Andy Towle are longtime Dish faves (and from Andy, I found this tennis-porn blog). And then we have the quintessential blogger photograph - jammies and all:

15 Jan 2009 08:59 am

Information Wants To Be Free, Ctd.

Another reader:

The value of this map, at least for me, would be the same even without the names attached.  This map has finally cracked the story I'd been able to tell myself about Prop 8. It wasn't my community that was the problem, the story went, it was all the money coming in from out of state, especially Utah.  Well, the map speaks for itself.  Scan down the San Francisco peninsula, between San Francisco and San Jose.  I live in the middle of that swath of red dots, in what is conventionally assumed to be one of the most liberal parts of the country.  I've probably waited in line with some of the people in those red dots at the grocery store or post office, passed them on the street, or seen them at the library.  There were no Yes on 8 signs in yards or stickers on cars during the campaign around here, and they would probably have been quickly ripped out had anyone tried to put them up.  Well, the Yes on 8 folks aren't invisible to me anymore.  I can't keep telling myself that my community isn't part of the problem with such clear evidence staring me in the face.

And so you have a clearer idea of the work we have to do: persuading, arguing, telling our stories.

15 Jan 2009 08:31 am

Terrorist Hunting

Jeffrey Rosen reviews a new show:

...it's not exactly surprising--even though it's surely unintentional--that ABC's new primetime show, "Homeland Security USA," confirms the false promise of DHS. Billed as "the new hit series about the heroes who keep us safe at home," the show, which airs [Tuesdays], promises that "no job is more important--or more dangerous" than the one performed by the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security. But the first episode last week turned out to be a glorified version of "COPS" at the border, and every segment inadvertently reminded us why DHS officers spend so little time protecting the homeland against violent threats: Investigations that begin by looking for terrorists come up short, so officers have no alternative but to snag people for non-violent crimes.

15 Jan 2009 08:27 am

Government Ruins Everything

Rickrolling jumps the shark.

15 Jan 2009 08:26 am

Digital Warfare

The IDF on YouTube vs. PalTube.

15 Jan 2009 07:52 am

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

I can only conclude that the practical intent of this map is to publicly shame and intimidate those who supported the amendment.

If my 26 employees, some of which are in civil unions (which were marriages), saw my name on this, how would they feel?  What would they think of me? How would this impact our relationship?  The really crappy thing is that I may not even know that I was listed or they looked.  It would just begin one day with glares, stares, and tension.  It would begin to create a hostile environment.  Perhaps some folks may quit working for or with me.  Perhaps someone may say something or perhaps not.  What if I just opposed SSM but, in every other way, was progressive and supportive of gay rights in my public and personal life.  Viewers of this map won't know that.  All they know is that I gave $50.00 bucks and if I was foolish enough to list my business then all the better to make me a target.  There is no call for conversation, dialogue, discussion, debate.  Just an implied threat: support stuff like this and have your name posted in the town square for all to see.

This is all about publicly shaming, through the posting of names, folks who supported objectionable public policy.

Cry me a river. You can only shame people if they feel ashamed. And, frankly, if you have chosen to strip civil rights from some of your employees, why should you be able to protect yourself from the consequences? Your employees weren't protected from the consequences of your decision. You helped force them into legal divorce - and you're the victim here?