Month: June 2007

Do we need smarter soldiers? A debate. Petraeus comes off the clear winner.

A request for lots and lots of homeland security moolah. Is Billy Joel’s yacht in danger?

The state Supreme Court just asked the two parties in the marriage equality case some new and intriguing questions.

Mexican-Americans are far more likely to refrain from sex before marriage, never have sex, or to eschew contraception. In this, they are the American exception that proves the American rule.

The Boston Globe investigates:

The deferments for Mormon missionaries became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s, especially in Utah, leading the Mormon Church and the government to limit the number of church missionaries who could put off their military service. That agreement called for each church ward, or church district, to designate one male every six months to be exempted from potential duty for the duration of his missionary work.

Romney’s home state was Michigan, making his 4-D exemption as a missionary all but automatic because of the relatively small number of Mormon missionaries from that state.

A reader writes:

Reading the second installment from Gellman last night through me into a tremendous depression. Cheney probably can’t be effectively checked.  He has an intellectual midget as his president, who trusts him to deal with all those questions which are simply too difficult. Anyway, he’d rather be out riding his mountain bike. Cheney is undermining all the key institutions of the country, and he’s made a mockery of the rule of law tradition. He has shown that there is only one branch of government that matters – the executive – that it has the power. And he has shown that secret government – secret postures even within the government – work; that it can be used to silence opposition and impose a firmly shaped political will. The legislative branch is spineless and ineffectual, and the judiciary can be filled with enough straw men to eliminate any serious threat. And when it raises up its head, well, just ignore it.

The public reaction here should be outrage, but that’s not happening. Outrage, apparently, is reserved for Paris Hilton. My faith in our country and its system have been shaken. Dick Cheney did it.

In the end, the American people have done it to themselves.

A round-up of the GOP hopeful Fred Thompson’s past girlfriends. Money quote:

Morgan remembers encouraging Thompson to run for president when they were together. "I think he has a great chance of capturing the women’s vote. He’s majestic. He’s a soft, safe place to be and that could be Fred’s ticket. Women love a soft place to lay and a strong pair of hands to hold us," she said.

Has anyone asked Dr Dobson?

"Bush was really not much of a Republican at all – more like a retarded Christian AA version of Woodrow Wilson. He spent like crazy and he got America involved in these crazy "let’s export the wonderfulness of us" adventures. Because America these days has a cultural memory of about four seconds no one remembers that this is not the way Republicans used to act, but once Bush finally blew up, the door opened for some canny people in the party to remind everyone of that fact, " – Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone. Actually, some of us pointed this out before Bush blew up. The basic thesis of "The Conservative Soul" is holding up well.

A rave review from the religious right:

Besides Obama, how many times have you seen a presidential candidate get up in front of a large crowd and talk in depth about his salvation? I’ll give you the answer: Zero. For Obama to stand up and talk about how Jesus changed his life, my friends that takes guts. You may disagree with everything he’s about, you may disagree with his policy goals but as Christians, shouldn’t we like it when someone talks about Christ being the missing ingredient in his life? …

Barack Obama seems to want to bring the country together as best he can on this issue of faith and politics. His heart appears as though it’s in the right place. To “call out” leaders of the Christian Right like that seemed a little too broad for my taste. (watch those comments here )He blanketed a lot of people with one broad brush. If you really look closely at those leaders of the Christian Right, it doesn’t seem fair to pigeonhole all of them in the same category and to say all they care about are abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design. These leaders have spoken out and taken action on issues like the genocide in Darfur, poverty in America, torture techniques, helping people after devastating natural disasters, etc. Do they focus on abortion and gay marriage more than progressives? Yes but is that such a crime to believe that God would be against it?

To me though, the criticism of the religious right was a small part of the speech. I saw it more as an uplifting speech that can bring people of faith together. For example, Obama talked about how God SHOULD NOT be removed from the public square.

Yes, Obama is aggressively staking his candidacy in part on an explicitly religious appeal. In this, he is Bush’s natural successor, and threatens to make secular politics even more elusive in a fundamentalist age. He also threatens, if he pulls it off, to be a transformational candidate, turning American politics into a battleground primarily between those who believe the Gospels mandate an expansive welfare state and those who believe they mandate government’s moral regulation of human birth, death and sex. For my part, I believe Jesus had no politics, let alone the big government politics of our time. And the attempt of both right and left to coopt his truth corrupts faith and politics simultaneously.

A reader writes:

It’s good that Jeff Weintraub notices Condi’s pulling out the "no one saw it coming" canard. Again.

Back to her record in the her job as National Security Advisor, people seem to conveniently forget that the United States was attacked on Condi/Bush’s watch, not 8 days or 8 weeks but 8 months into Bush’s administration.  And Condi and her team had been forewarned that terrorists were plotting to use civilian airliners as weapons. Several documents in the public domain, one read aloud during those 9/11 Commission hearings, prove it. In fact, in the two years preceding the attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command held exercises simulating hijacked airlines used as weapons to cause mass civilian casualties. Chillingly, one of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. So when Condi said that the national security apparatus – which she headed – was as surprised as anyone, she was….lying.

As to her legendary steadfastness in the face of criticism, that steadfastness continues in the face of decisions that have been proven disastrous or whose asserted rationale has been proven untrue. Here, one recalls Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Interestingly, Rice has been "flexible" when her position made consistency, er, difficult and uncomfortable. As George Will also pointed out in 2004, in 2000 Rice questioned the use of U.S. military forces in peacekeeping operations, saying "Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do…we don’t need the 82d Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." Yet the vast majority of what our military is doing in Iraq is "nation-building" and "civil administration." This is but one example of her striking about-faces…such as her sea change since 1999 when called upon to tutor then-Governor Bush in foreign affairs, and she said "I would expect the United State to probably intervene less. I think there has been a somewhat promiscuous use of power in the Cold War era."

Now I remember why I preferred Bush to Gore on foreign policy in 2000. Less interventionist. More humble. Ha ha ha ha ha sniffle.