Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Friday, July 10th, 2009 Monday, June 8th, 2009He is known to follow a vegan diet, eating no meat or food containing animal products. In the past, he has worked as a computer network specialist and with the operating system LINUX. [He] wears eyeglasses, is skilled at sailing, and has traveled internationally.
“He” is FBI most-wanted criminal Daniel Andreas San Diego. My thought on reading that was, “sounds like half of the Bard kids I know. Crazy how people with similar interests to people you like can be totally nuts.”
In this way I am different from Erik Marcus, who runs Vegan.com, as he seems to have had a related but much less reasonable reaction: he sounds like people I like, so surely he’s not that bad, right?
Light fisking after the jump.
(more…)
I get into a fair number of … heated discussions … with religious people. Like caffeine addiction, this is probably something I should be concerned about and address, but which I prefer to nurse. Today something popped up in the ol’ Google Reader that brought me back to three specific old fights.
The spark is this Politico piece about how, “The National Organization for Marriage, a prominent backer of the successful campaign against same-sex marriage in California, is launching a $1.5 million ad campaign this morning aimed at forestalling same-sex marriage support in other key states.”
Before I get started, let’s go to the tape:
Now dig this:
“The biggest argument — and the biggest lie — put forward by those who want to redefine marriage is that it’s not going to have any affect on you. ‘Why should you care? It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” said NOM executive director Brian Brown. “In state after state we’ve seen same-sex marriage directly conflict with people’s religious beliefs.”
What a fun bait and switch. He sets you up by claiming that he’s going to show that it’s a lie that, “It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” but then actually argues that it, “conflict[s] with people’s religious beliefs.”
So this is for the friend whose retort, when I said that religion is the problem at the root of this issue, was “Some of the most famous homophobes were godless and closeted: Roy Cohn, J Edgar Hoover.” Seriously, that’s great and all, but J Edgar Hoover didn’t put up $1.5m to manipulate public opinion.
Last November I had a long argument with a colleague who listed as one reason to support Proposition 8 the fact that she didn’t want her preacher sued for refusing to marry some gay dudes. At the time, I thought that made sense, and I was happy to tell her that exceptions exist for that kind of thing. I thought this made so much sense that I later defended the right of the Catholic church to excommunicate bishops who ordained women, saying:
[I]t may be somewhat important to protect these stupid rules. For instance, one of the things the pro-Prop-8 crowd says is, “What if some gay couple sues my priest to make him marry them, which is against his religion?” It’s important for them, and it’s important for us to be able to say, “Look, your [...] religion is safe, there’s an explicit judicial precedent which says those types of lawsuits are not valid.”
But then I read something like:
Brown cited the decision of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts to stop handling adoptions in response to a law banning discriminating against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt children.[...]
Proponents of same-sex marriage argue that the legal changes will, if anything, strengthen marriage. There have also been moves to protect groups like Catholic Charities from conflicts, and the Vermont same-sex marriage bill that became law yesterday, for instance, contains religious exemptions.
And the kowtowing drives me crazy. There is absolutely no reason to allow anyone to discriminate against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt, so that sort of “exemption” should be out of the question. But it’s clearly something they would want. So now I don’t know how I feel about this.
Anyway, I’ll give the last word to Tony, because he’s smarter than I am:
So, the evidence of the real impact it will have on your lives is, religious bigots will stop doing charitable work if they can’t discriminate? I really fail to see how this is something for which gay marriage is responsible. It’s a but-for cause, to be sure, but we don’t get to blame everything on but-for causes: If a guy kills someone who mouths off at him in a bar, he doesn’t get to say “What? I wouldn’t have done it but for his crack about my mom.”
Apparently Americans United for Change is now running an ad pressing Arlen Specter to vote for the bailout in Pennsylvania (via TPM, as usual). Its worth a listen – the ad plays the Limbaugh “I hope he fails” soundbite and frames the party-line House vote as Republicans voting against job creation. That’s obviously an over-simplification, but the House Republican response also strikes me as disingenuous (to the extent that response is “No more tax cuts? What happened to bipartisanship?”).
Specter is getting a fair bit of attention as the bill moves to the Senate, although this seems in part to be motivated by speculations that Senate Republicans may filibuster the bailout. This seems fairly unlikely to me, for the simple reason that a “no” vote against a bill that is certain to pass anyway comes at little present cost to a Congressperson, with the potential for substantial gain if the recession continues to the midterm elections. It’s a gamble, but one where it’s cheap to buy in. A filibuster would attract considerably more media attention than even the vote yesterday, and any of the 40 Senate Republicans who feels even a little vulnerable probably wouldn’t have the temerity. But more than that, I doubt that a Senator like John McCain, who isn’t fearing for his Senate seat, would care to create the spectacle of a filibuster when a simple “no” vote would get the point across.
Obviously there have been a lot of changes during the first week of the Obama presidency, but here’s one that you might have noticed. WhiteHouse.gov has started to turn into a user-friendly website with some interesting content. Blog posts instead of press releases! It’s mad, I tell you.
Here’s my favorite bit so far:
For incoming White House staff, the past few days have been a singularly thrilling — and learning — experience. Wide-eyed staffers roam the halls of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with thick stacks of HR paperwork in hand, new phone numbers are being memorized — and the line for coffee and club sandwiches is starting to grow as word spreads about the White House Mess. It’s safe to say that working at the White House isn’t something anyone can prepare for, but the career staff continue to work tirelessly to make the first few days as smooth as possible.
How adorable is the mental image of a staffer scuttling about with an arm full of poorly-sorted paper, oggling the hallways? I’m sure I’m being played a little bit here, and the incoming staff are more savvy than awestruck. But I like the idea that the office, indeed the very building, might mean something to these people. Even if they aren’t really agog.
President Barack Obama will direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday evening.
Apparently Russ Feingold (D-WI) plans to introduce a constitutional amendment to end Senate appointments, in light of the gubernatorial bungling of the past three weeks. This has me considerably excited because I really like constitutional amendments. This is partly for the stock “living document” enduring values reasons, but also partly because the particular history of the amendments we have (and haven’t) made is ridiculous.
Less than 24 hours in office and already I think it’s safe to say Obama is a better president than his predecessor. Via TPM I learn that Obama ordered Guantanamo prosecutors to seek a 120-day halt in pending war crimes trials. Now that’s not rescuing the American dream (or for that matter, even as good as ordering a more permanent cessation), but it’s a good start for day one. It also got me thinking, what did Bush do on his first day of office?
Apparently, Chief of Staff Andrew Card wrote a memo to the heads of various agencies ordering them to “put on hold dozens of regulations passed by the Clinton administration.” These included “lowering arsenic levels in drinking water; reducing the release of raw sewage into rivers and streams; setting limits on logging, drilling, and mining on public lands; increasing energy efficiency standards; and banning snowmobiles from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.” This fuller account of the arsenic regulations explains that public outcry led the EPA to form new expert panels that “reached conclusions supporting an even more stringent standard” than the one Clinton had proposed (and the Bush administration sought to roll back). So less than a day in office and a Bush appointee was already trying to undermine regulations that administrative procedures proved to be justified. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that suspending prosecutions at Guantanamo won’t look as bad in retrospect.
Consider the following transcript from a recent television broadcast:
FIRST PERSON: If the American people are not convinced that we should overturn the definition of marriage, then I would say that those who support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of us [...].
SECOND PERSON: I think it’s an absolute — it’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights.
Question: Which of these two people received more than 20% of the popular vote during a major party’s presidential primary?
Extra credit: Explain how anyone could say the following sentence with a straight face. No credit will be given for “Maybe if he was a robot or something?”
The basic purpose of a marriage is not just to create the next generation, but to train the replacements.