Month: November 2010

Today on the Dish, Goldberg rejected the claim that he wants war with Iran, and incensed Andrew with his conflation of Israel with all Jews, while Andrew remained adamant that Iran remains as dangerous as ever. WaPo leaked the DADT report, and Andrew breathed a sigh of relief at how sane, fair and extensive the report was. Obama stepped up his support, military families were against DADT, and we rounded up the full web reax. A Dish reader chalked it up to McCain being old and out of touch but Andrew wasn't buying it. Kim Kardashian was going to die on Twitter to stop AIDS, civil unions still don't sound as good as marriages,and Orin Kerr had his doubts about Judge Stephen Reinhardt's place on the Prop 8 panel.

We kept on top of the Wikileaks story with Andrew's take on the Forbes cover story, Will Wilkinson's defense of the substance of the leaks here, and a rebuke to Assange here. Simon Jenkins opened the floodgates on what's wrong with American foreign policy, and George Packer and Greenwald debated whether governments have a right to secrecy. Bill Keller tried to justify Wikileaks to a former British diplomat, Fred Kaplan showed us the bright side of Obama's diplomacy from the leaks, and Sarkozy chased a dog chasing a rabbit.

Andrew weighed in on the federal pay freeze and his longview on Obama and the debt, and joined the Douthat/ Fallows debate on our ability to hold principles to account, no matter the president. Adam Serwer shut down Marc Thiessen on torture, Iraq got scammed, and Stan Collender argued fiscal hawks should praise TSA's body scanners. Fox News amped up its GOP presidential candidate production with the Fox Five, Mason Herron threw cold water on Christie in 2012, and we tallied probabilities on Palin. McCain's former advisor begged Palin not to run, as did Pravda and four "educated Jews." David Sessions honored Alex Pareene with the hackiest religious pundits, a Harvard illegal immigrant mourned the DREAM Act, and Anderson Cooper was on fire.

Dan Ariely wrote your Christmas shopping lists, Reihan predicted Microsoft will rise again, and alcoholic whipped cream comforted us. Some readers don't like to take dates on bikes, while other readers were happy to bike their kids and spouses around. Readers photographed their own pictures of America, and Alexis Madrigal summed up Nick Denton's vision for the future of the internet. "Imagine" made the Shut Up And Sing contest, and readers added their two cents on Disney's cartoon omissions.

Voyeurs' doornob here, Yglesias award here, Hewitt award here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here, poseur alert here, chart of the day here, and VFYW contest winner #26 here.

–Z.P.

After directing our attention to David Frum's arguments against The Dream Act, Will Wilkinson dismembers them.

George Packer says yes:

There is an undeniable public interest in knowing, for example, that U.S. intelligence believes the Iranians are buying advanced missiles from North Korea, and that Gulf Arab rulers have been privately urging American military action against Iran. The question is, does that interest outweigh the right of U.S. officials to carry out their work with a degree of confidentiality?

Yes—the right. Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators, and—not least—journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn’t the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials? If WikiLeaks and its super-secretive, thin-skinned, megalomaniacal leader, Julian Assange (is he also accompanied everywhere by a Ukrainian senior nurse?), were uncovering crimes, or scandals, or systemic abuses, there would be no question about the overwhelming public interest in these latest revelations. But the WikiLeaks dump contains no My Lais, no black sites, no Abu Ghraibs. The documents simply show State Department officials going about their work over a period of several years.

Greenwald turns the point on its head:

John Cole notes an added irony of the furor over this latest disclosure:  "I have a hard time getting worked up about it – a government that views none of my personal correspondence as confidential really can’t bitch when this sort of thing happens."  Note how quickly the "if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-then-you-have-nothing-to-hide" mentality disappears when it's their privacy and communications being invaded rather than yours.

Joel Wing's head hits the desk as he recounts the story of Iraq's fake bomb detectors:

According to ATSC [the British company that sold the wands], the devices could find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies, and contraband ivory through walls, water, the earth, and even in planes flying overhead. The wands had no batteries, and were supposed to be powered by static electricity generated by the operator walking in place for a short period of time. Once a person had moved around enough, they were to point the ADE-651 at a vehicle or package and it would point at any contraband. It would seem that any legitimate government agency would be skeptical of such lavish claims, but the Interior Ministry went ahead and bought several hundred from 2007-2009 for an average price of around $40,000-$60,000 a piece. 

The lesson he draws:

The whole episode smacks of the institutionalized corruption and incompetence that is found throughout the Iraqi government. No one should have believed that the ADE-651s worked. The claims about the device’s abilities were too good to be true. More to the point, after the Americans repeatedly told the Iraqis about their ineffectiveness, and various studies had come out that proved they did not work, the Interior Ministry should’ve stopped their use. Instead officials again and again said they believed in them. The Ministry even made a bogus report to absolve itself, and then the Interior Minister blocked his own Inspector General from investigating the purchase of the wands. The Inspector General noted that the cost of this fiasco was the deaths of hundreds of people, and yet they were still deployed across Iraq. It seems to protect themselves the leadership of the Interior Ministry are willing to allow their own people to be killed rather than admit their mistake, and recall the wands.

Since we posted that link, it seems to have disappeared entirely. But the site itself is unavailable too. Maybe we crashed it.

[Update: a new link. Seriously, it's rip-roaring stuff – the kid of thing you don't actually see in the US media, even though Palin thinks she does.]

A reader writes:

Watching clips of John McCain move the goal posts again on DADT repeal, and listening to my teen age kids react to what he is saying, has made it clear to me why DADT repeal is held up by the Senate. It is a perfect illustration of the generational shift that has taken place regarding acceptance of gays and lesbians in general.

My kids are 16 and 18. While my wife and I are progressive, we sent our kids to a Catholic High School in Dallas, Texas so they get plenty of exposure to conservative thinkers. Nevertheless, they and all of their friends simply cannot understand why anyone would be “freaked out” by letting gays and lesbians serve in the military. It seems as ridiculous to them as forcing “coloreds” to drink from separate water fountains.

My kids aren’t gay, and they don’t really understand being sexually attracted to a member of the same sex. But they think it is private, and the result of the way god made people, so let them be because they aren’t hurting anyone. They all know gay kids because, thankfully, they are no longer afraid to “come out”. Teenagers all understand that no one would “choose” to be gay and face the hysterical ranting of the far right. They laugh at older people who say that soldiers would be afraid of being “targeted” by a “homo” as complete nonsense.

On the other hand, John McCain is 74 years old. People who are his age and served in the military have a very different perspective. When they were in the military, being gay would have been viewed as shameful and perverted. Many people that age still think that. Senators, given the bubbles they live in, don’t realize how much things have changed. When McCain was saying that he wanted to “hear what the soldiers had to say” he was certain they would be against repeal – because he would have been uncomfortable serving with gay soldiers.

You can tell by watching McCain that it is simply inconceivable to that 74 year old military man that gays and lesbians would be accepted by soldiers. It just doesn’t compute. He can’t process that information because it is so different from his world view. When he gets a survey that tells him that such acceptance has occurred, he can’t believe it; it must be wrong. Most of the men in the Senate are much closer to McCain’s age than to the age of the average soldier serving today. What we are seeing is what happens when cultural norms change and “the old folks don’t like it.”

Alas, I don't actually believe that in McCain's case. McCain knows and has worked with and relied upon openly gay people in his own staff. His disgusting posturing on this question now is not, in my view, out of conviction but out of calculation. He got re-elected by veering to the far right and junking much of what he once believed in. He is also clearly consumed with bitterness and hatred of the president who so humiliated him in his disastrous campaign. He is lashing out. And he is contemptible for it.

Station Warrant Officer Nick Dale (L) from No. 1 Air Mobility Wing based at RAF Lyneham in WWII era RAF dress, sporting his Movember moustache, shares a joke on November 30, 2010 in Lyneham, England. The airmen at the RAF base, which is home to the RAF's Hercules force and handles repatriation flights from Afghanistan, have grown their moustaches as part of the global sponsored charity event Movember to raise money for prostate cancer. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.

World AIDS day is tomorrow. Just when you think the red ribbon bullshit could not get any thicker, we get this:

On Wednesday, Kim Kardashian is going to die a little. So is her sister, Khloé, not to mention Lady Gaga, David LaChapelle, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Serena Williams and Elijah Wood. That day is World AIDS Day, and each of these people (as well as a host of others — the list keeps growing) will sacrifice his or her own digital life. By which these celebrities mean they will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.

Texas In Africa files this under "badvocacy."

Stan Collender makes his case:

From virtually every federal budget perspective — keeping taxes lower, reducing domestic spending, making government more efficient, keeping the deficit and borrowing as low as possible — scanners are the kind of initiative that should be rewarded and encouraged rather than condemned. The United States is better protected at a lower cost because the TSA is getting better information faster without having to hire additional people. 

Reihan thinks so:

[I]t's important to remember that Microsoft has not been standing still, and that it has taken in the lessons of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, which Tim Lee has summarized very lucidly. The success of the Xbox prompted Microsoft to give a great deal of autonomy to the teams that created the Zune media player and Kinect. And innovators like Ray Ozzie, who is about to end his tenure as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, have helped the firm navigate the rise of cloud computing. A recent essay gives us a glimpse of Ozzie's thinking about the longer-term future.