Month: July 2003

“What I once loved about journalism went missing some time ago and seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere: a high-spirited, irreverent, swashbuckling, lances-to-the-ready assault on the status quo. While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicles deciphering management’s latest ‘tidy desk’ memo, bloggers are building bonfires and handing out virtual leaflets along America’s Information Highway.”- Kathleen Parker, Orlando Sentinel.

THE LIE THAT WON’T QUIT: “Visits by Israeli officials usually involve intense security, and none is more controversial than Mr Sharon, who has presided over the reoccupation of Palestinian towns and cities and the Jenin atrocities as Prime Minister.” – The Independent, yesterday. (My italics.)

The strange tale of a white hump-back whale – and its pursuers.

MORE BBC LIES: John Gross reviews their pro-communist mini-series on the Cambridge spies:

Two incidents, for example, are shown playing a crucial role in pushing the quartet towards communism. In one of them, a Jewish girlfriend of Philby’s at Cambridge is subjected to Nazi-style insults. In another, college domestic workers who are on strike are beaten up by right-wing undergraduates. The most notable thing about both episodes, in the context of a supposed docudrama, is that neither of them actually happened: they were both dreamed up by the scriptwriter. And there are many other fabrications, including a KGB attempt to assassinate Franco which fails because Philby, decent and humane fellow that he is, can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
Some of the inaccuracies are trivial in themselves, though they do a good deal to color the atmosphere. Others are of considerable historical significance. The fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross, makes only a brief appearance, for example: he is shown working as a wartime code-breaker, and rejecting Blunt’s suggestion that he start passing on information to the Russians. In reality, as Oleg Gordievsky has pointed out in a trenchant analysis of the series, during the war Cairncross keptthe KGB supplied with a steady flow of decrypts, including the first news they received of work on the atomic bomb. You wonder why the scriptwriter decided to play down his importance.

No need to wonder. These people regard the Soviet Union as a glorious experiment gone awry. Why not celebrate its early, traitorous apostles?

Is anyone else a lttle perturbed that Howell Raines’ first post-resignation interview will be with one of his best friends, a guest at his wedding, and another Southern liberal? Now, I love Charlie Rose; but I’ll be watching tonight for signs that Charlie will disclose his close personal friendship with Raines; and that he asks the tough questions about the immense damage Raines inflicted on the NYT. That’s called ethical, full-disclosure journalism.

This Cliff May piece is an excellent counter-point to the BBC and CBS.

Truly chilling report that plague has broken out in Oran, Algeria. That town was, of course, the subject of Albert Camus’ book, “The Plague,” one of the masterpieces of 20th Century literature. The book ends wondering when the next outbreak would take place.

WMD UPDATE: This one is gooo-ood.

BUSH AND THE JEWS: He’s trying to win over the Gen-Xers. Smart idea.

HOW TO SAVE THE THIRD WORLD: Abolish agricultural subsidies. For once, I agree with the Guardian. President Bush’s massive increases for such subsidies is yet another indicator that, in economic policy, he’s much more of a socialist than he lets on. Big debt, deficit financing, huge new entitlements, and bigger subsidies: Bush’s economic policy is a Democratic dream. So why are Republicans voting for it?

FREE SPEECH ALERT: If this campus nightmare is true, it’s horrifying.

Ramesh Ponnuru claims I misread the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. I don’t think I have. I think the amendment is a very clever device to strip gay couples of any civil protections whatsoever – regardless of courts, legislatures or majority decisions. Let me explain. Say Massachusetts decides by a mixture of court rulings and legislative action to legalize gay marriages. The FMA would bar this from happening – denying the state the right to determine marriage, a right the states have always enjoyed. Ramesh agrees with me on that one. But Ramesh then argues that civil union laws that gave gays some of the benefits of marriage would not be barred by FMA. He’s wrong, I think. In the FMA, states are not just constrained by not being able to construe judicial rulings as mandating equal marriage rights; they cannot even construe a state or federal law as such. No civil unions law could therefore stand up in court, if challenged. Or even a modest domestic partnership package. A reader lays out the case:

Consider Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), the pre-Brown civil rights case that held that a racially discriminatory provision in a deed could not be enforced under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The logic of that case is that a private agreement to discriminate on racial grounds is no longer private if you need the courts to enforce it: a court which enforced such a deed would itself be violating equal protection. The logic of Shelley, applied to the Federal Marriage Amendment, would require that private legal arrangements that gay men and lesbians now make to provide the legal incidents of marriage could not be enforced in court. For example, suppose A gave his partner B a durable power of attorney to make health care decisions for him. If a hospital thereafter chose to ignore B’s directives with respect to A’s health care, B would have no redress, because a court would be barred by the FMA from enforcing the power of attorney. (Likewise if A and B agreed to make reciprocal wills, etc.) I’m sure that the proponents of the FMA say that it would simply maintain the status quo. No one should believe them.

Yep, the amendment is that extreme. Another reader weighs in:

Suppose a state enacts a statute that:
(1) establishes civil unions, which may include same-sex partners;
(2)-makes it incumbent upon employers to extend the same domestic partnership benefits to employees’ “civil union” spouses-that it does to employees’ “marriage” spouses; and
(3) creates a cause of action against any employer that fails to comply with (2).
Suppose then that a gay man enters a civil union with his partner, requests the domestic partnership benefits, and the employer refuses.-Employee sues.
-It seems to me that under the statute, in order for a court to grant relief, it will have to find that the language of the statute conferrs “legal incidents of marriage” on an unmarried couple.- Just because the “plain reading” of the statute provides a legal incident of marriage doesn’t mean that the court is not “construing” the statute when it grants relief.- The FMA would prohibit the court from doing that, making parts (2) and (3) of the statute unenforceable.- At that point, what’s left of the civil union that distinguishes it from a novelty marriage license won at a carnival?-

But that’s precisely the purpose of the amendment. It needs to be exposed for what it is: an unprecedented attack on states’ rights, on minority enfranchisement and the Constitution. Next week, it will be wheeled out as a response to the Massachusetts Court ruling. Don’t believe the mollifying language of its backers. They mean business and they have gay couples in their sights.

Two terrific and fresh pieces out on equal marriage rights. James D. Miller looks at the issue as how to deal with a “brand”. He argues:

Brand name analysis proves that civil unions for gay couples can’t fully substitute for marriage. If you started a fast-food restaurant, it would be easier to call your place McDonald’s than to use some new unknown brand name. Sure, in time you could build up this new brand to become as locally well-respected as McDonald’s name, but for the near future at least, you’re better off going with the existing brand.

Miller says the critical question is whether expanding marriage to include gays will “dilute” the brand. I think it will strengthen it by making it universal. Meanwhile, recently married John O’Sullivan thinks imaginatively about the future when gay marriage is a part of the social landscape:

People thinking of living together would then have three choices: civil marriage, religious marriage, and household partnerships. In effect there would be a competition between these three institutions for their custom. Which would be likely to prove most popular and durable? One can only guess at the result of such choices. Here’s my guess … Traditional marriage might well emerge strengthened from this evolutionary test.

I’m truncating his argument here, so please be sure to read the original. I don’t want to Dowdify him.

WHAT THE FMA WOULD DO: Meanwhile, I keep getting emails from people who think the Federal Marriage Amendment is not such a big deal. Here it is:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

Note how the states are effectively barred from providing anything that resembles marriage or any of the “legal incidents thereof.” It’s an attempt not only to reverse any state that wants to have same-sex marriage but to invalidate all domestic partnership laws, any state-provided benefits, or any support for same-sex couples anywhere anyhow. It’s a massive power-grab from the states, in an area where states have always had constitutional authority. If you merely want to stop one state’s marriages being nationalized, you have the power already. It’s called the Defense of Marriage Act, alongside the long established precedent of states being able not to recognize out of state marriages for public policy reasons. The FMA, in contrast, is an attempt to use the federal constitution to rob gay citizens of any rights in their relationships whatsoever, regardless of where they live or what their states want. It’s not conservative. It’s a radical attempt to impose one religious view of marriage upon the whole citizenry for ever. It’s about the constitutional disenfranchisement of an entire class of citizens.

Here are some pictures of dorm rooms in Tehran university after the government thugs have “disciplined” various freedom-seeking students. Here are some more – of what was done to the students themselves. Yesterday, three student leaders were seized by the regime’s goons and are now in capitivity. It’s useful to see the true face of tyranny – a face so familiar and comforting to the anti-American ideologues running the BBC. Yesterday, the Beeb’s leftists described the 1999 massacre of students as a “police raid.” Yeah, and Tiananmen Square was a street fight. How do these BBC apologists for theocratic terror live with themselves? (More on Iran on the Letters Page.)

Predictions of a huge public backlash against Lawrence vs Texas do not seem to me to have been borne out. That may change if Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court rules in favor of marriage equality next week. But meantime, the far right seems a little divided and a little disoriented. It seemed an odd time for the head of the Family Research Council, Kenneth Connor, to resign – but last week, resign he did. Was it because he was lukewarm about the far right’s new gambit – writing an anti-gay marriage plank into the federal Constitution? Who knows? Blogger, “The Right Christians,” has some thoughts and theories. Here’s why I think the Federal Marriage Amendment won’t work for the anti-gay right. Constitutional amendments are extremely hard to pass. They normally need overwhelming public support – like the 90 percent plus support for a ban on flag-burning – but even then they tend to fail. Polls show Americans divided by 39 percent to 55 percent on equal marriage rights – hardly an overwhelming consensus that should be enshrined for ever in the Constitution itself. Moreover, those numbers have moved considerably in a few years, again suggesting that it would be foolish to mess with the Constitution to resolve a volatile and fast-changing issue. Lastly, conservatives rightly view the Constitution as a sacred document to be messed with only very carefully. Many conservatives will oppose such an amendment on those grounds alone. They should. One unconservative consequence could also be that such an amendment serves to retroactively invalidate what could be thousands of marriages by the time such an amendment would even have a chance of passing. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful use of conservative resources: going around the country actually trying to break up committed couples. And all under the pro-family banner! You can see the slogan now: Support the family – break up marriages and take kids away from parents. I wish it were merely funny. But it’s tragic.

His compilation of Communist sympathizers – provided to the British government in 1949 – will now see the light of day later this summer. Timothy Garton Ash comments.

PATRIOTIC RAP: Here’s a lyric even arch-conservatives could support:

Draft me, pass me the M-16
Give me a buzz cut, ask me if I give a f**k
I’m comin’ out blastin’
Military four fashion
Twelve close castin’, for weapons of mass-distraction
Outlastin’ all the privates in my company
Fightin’ for my family, and the cats that grew up with me
My band of brothers, rarely just smother the enemy
Razor blades cut ya face and leave a scar so you remember me
Lurkin’ to leave y’all with bloody red turbans
Screamin’ “Jihad!” while y’all pray to a false god

A little crude, I guess. But it’s hip-hop. And it’s not a pose. Rapper Canibus joined up, finished his military training at Fort Knox, and is now a cavalry scout/reconnaissance specialist.