Month: May 2006

A reader nails it:

Of course "Party of Death" is a hit-piece on the Democratic Party. Ponnuru has chosen his issues (abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research) as his ‘death’ issues to achieve (in my view anyway) a predetermined outcome i.e. the Democrats are the Party of Death. He’s gaming the conversation. One could easily (and perhaps should) write a book focussing on US infant mortality rates, universal health care, Just War Doctrine, inhumane treatment of prisoners, capital punishment, and sex education. Guess who’s in the Party of Death now?

I’d rather avoid equating any political party with something as profound and as universal as "death." But Ponnuru is a Republican; and his book is part of a partisan project.

I wonder if the Washington Post got their graphic wrong. This release from the Census suggests a robust African-American population in the future. Did WaPo screw up? (Yup. It appears they did.)

Putting Stephen Cambone in charge of the Army Field Manual is like appointing Simon Cowell head of the diplomatic corps. But Cheney and Rumsfeld want to continue the torture policy; and heaven knows the Congress, the law, the U.N., our treaty obligations, and the president cannot stop them. So torture they will.

From the invaluable Robert Samuelson:

In 1954 defense accounted for 69.5 percent of federal spending and "human resources" (programs such as Social Security, Medicare, job training and food stamps) only 18.5 percent. In 2005 defense was 20 percent and human resources 64.2 percent.

Forget the military-industrial complex. Our new threat is the senior-entitlement complex.

The most interesting piece of data in the new study of the under-fives is not, it seems to me, that fact that almost half are now non-white. What’s interesting is that only 4 percent of the under-fives are African-American. That compares with 15 percent Asians, 22 percent Hispanics, and 55 percent non-Hispanic whites. Compared with the general population, that’s a potentially huge future drop in the black presence in American life. Perhaps I’m more aware of this because of where I live: Washington D.C. In the decade and half since I’ve lived here, D.C. has only gotten whiter and browner. Its black heritage is just about hanging on. But I doubt it will survive my lifetime with much demographic strength.

Finally. The Onion has the details.

A reader writes:

I now forgive you of every bad thing you have written because you use the word pop instead of soda.

For a geographical analysis of who says what, here’s a great resource.

Two leading Christianists have just fought back against my recent essay in Time magazine. Ramesh Ponnuru and Hugh Hewitt are two of the most articulate advocates for fusing Republicanism with religious fundamentalism. I can see why they would dissent. But Hewitt surely goes overboard in describing my essay as "hate-speech."

Ponnuru’s argument is that the Christian/Muslim vs Christianist/Islamist parallels don’t work very well. He has a point. Islam begins with far lesser appreciation for individual liberty than Christianity. But history shows that Christianity, when pressed, will murder and burn and torture countless people to enforce orthodoxy. We live in kinder, gentler times, and Christianity experienced a Reformation, a Counter-Reformation and even the Second Vatican Council in ways that Islam sadly has not. And so regular Muslims are far closer to Islamists than many Christians are to Christianists.

Moreover, the Christianists keep moving the goalposts so far to the right that the distinction between Christians and Christianists is far more persuasive now than in even the recent past. Leading theocon Robert P. George, for example, believes not just that all abortion, including that caused by rape and incest, should be illegal; he believes that a microscopic zygote is morally indistinguishable from a fully-grown adult. Many Christianists therefore now believe that many forms of contraception are the moral equivalent of abortion; and many leading Christianists are moving fast toward banning contraception altogether. (For an important glimpse into the growing radicalism of Christianism on the question of contraception, check out this essay in the New York Times Magazine). Rick Santorum supports laws that would allow the cops to enter a gay couple’s bedroom and arrest them for private, adult, consensual sex; Robert George has no problem in theory with making non-procreative sex illegal (his sole problem is that it would be hard to police such a law). Other Christianists are opposing an HPV vaccine that could prevent 90 percent of cervical cancer in women, because it might lower the risks of extra-marital sex. They seek not merely to oppose marriage rights for gay couples – but to strip gay couples of all rights in the federal constitution. In Virginia, Christianists have made even private legal contracts between two members of the same gender illegal. They support keeping people in persistent vegetative states alive indefinitely through feeding tubes – for decades, if necessary – even if the individual herself has a living will begging to be allowed to die in peace. They have contempt for federalism, believing that the federal government should over-ride state laws and even families in enforcing religious dogma. Remember Terri Schiavo?

In all of this, the Christianists do not represent most Christians, although they have made great strides in the Vatican and in the fundamentalist leadership. I should stress: these people have every right to their views. They certainly have developed an arsenal of arguments and a body of thought to back them up. But this agenda, whatever else it is, cannot be described as mainstream Christianity. Its extremism, its enmeshment with partisan political power, its contempt for individual liberty, its certainty and arrogance and intolerance, demand that some other name be given to it. They have gotten away with too much for too long. It’s time for mainstream Christians, in both parties, to fight back. And we are.

(Photo of David Barton, leading Christianist, by Lee Blankenship Emmert, for Time.)

They have this great new machine thingy that makes all your senses so much more acute:

Super Power uses machines, apparatus and specially designed rooms to exercise and enhance a person’s so-called perceptics. Those machines include an antigravity simulator and a gyroscope-like apparatus that spins a person around while blindfolded to improve perception of compass direction, said the former Scientologists.

I wonder if it controls box offices as well. I’m totally serial.

The case against Bill Clinton’s nannying initiative to prevent school kids from drinking pop.