Month: June 2007

A reader writes:

Hey! Will you lay off Tagg Romney? I know you think it is funny to make fun of Romney’s squeaky clean Mormon image, and their sparkling enthusiasm does elicit memories of the Osmond show, and I think Mitt deserves every bit of mocking for his flipflops and his saccharine campaign style.

That said, I was friends with Tagg at the LDS Missionary Training Center. He went on his mission to Bordeaux at the same time I went to Paris. We also had French classes together at BYU and studied together. I’ve hardly spoken to him since graduation, but I still consider him a friend.

Tagg was a genuinely nice guy without a hint of arrogance or snobbery about him.  I never once suspected that his family was worth $500 million or that his grandfather was president of an automobile company, governor of Michigan and a leading candidate for the White House.  He was smart, well spoken, polite. easy to talk to and a genuinely nice guy.  Those qualities are rare enough among people with a little money, but shocking to find from a family that many would consider part of America’s elite.

I’ve no doubt he’s a great guy. But if we can’t have a laugh at the bland, super-nice "Up-With-People" vibe of Romney’s cultural Mormonism, then it’s going to be a long campaign.

If some friends of mine had done this to my apartment without my knowing, I’d make them pay for a hotel room until they undid it.

A lovely op-ed in the NYT today, about a man and his dog. This is classic beagle:

In the rippling heat of a Boston July, we took Edgar to a green suburban meadow. He sat dutifully as we dragged a small canvas cylinder drenched in "rabbit scent" through the tall grass, making an aromatic path, then leaving the toy and a dog biscuit hidden at the trail’s end.

"Ready, boy? Get that rabbit!" I urged the stationary beagle, a small Ferdinand the Bull. "Kill the wabbit!"

I tapped his rear, and, as if I could almost hear him say, "I would prefer not to," he stood up, put his nose to the ground, and walked off, in precisely the opposite direction of the imaginary bunny’s escape.

Edgar sat down again, some 20 feet away, where, I swear, an actual rabbit — aroused to lunacy by the field steaming with eau de lapin — leapt directly over him.

The author credits his beagle with his marriage proposal. I have a similar story. When Aaron discovered Eddy (she was a last-chance shelter-dog displayed in a dog-store), it was love at first sight. It took only a few hours to talk me into it. But it was a few days later that I realized that it hadn’t even occurred to me that Aaron and I wouldn’t be together for at least the lifetime of a dog. So I proposed a short time thereafter. I write this in the car on the way to Provincetown, where we introduced Eddy to the sea last season. When we come back this fall, we’ll be married. And Dusty and Eddy helped make it happen.

Have we spotted a trend? It goes with your mystery flavor soda.

Yes, you read that right. The Church-State divide is apparently a myth, and will be exposed as such on an upcoming religious-right-inspired, PBS-distributed documentary.

"[E]very morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds. [W]e have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open …  We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it," – Colin Powell, standing up for America against this president.

A reader writes:

I just watched This Week with George Stephanopoulos on ABC. Stephanopoulos asked the roundtable whether the next Democratic president should try to abolish DADT right away and risk the same backlash that Bill Clinton experienced in the opening days of his presidency.

Stephanopoulos was a leading advisor to Bill Clinton when a wave of homophobia swept the nation on the issue of gays in the military. Stephanopoulos was clearly reliving that nightmare in his mind in asking this particular question. To my disappointment, almost every member of the roundtable immediately agreed that a Democratic president should wait before tampering with DADT. Most of these journalists were young and should know better that a sea change in attitudes toward gay people has taken place since the early ’90s.

The only person who was aware of this major transformation was George Will, the oldest one sitting at the table. He explained how his 26 year old daughter and all her friends view being gay as no different than being left handed. This accepting attitude is shared by a majority of Americans under 30, the age group that fills the ranks of the military. As he often does on the This Week roundtable, George Will put the other  journalists in their place, this time in support of an immediate lifting of the noxious Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, a policy that actually puts our nation’s security at risk, contrary to what its supporters claim.

Stephanopoulos represents a certain class of Clintonite Democrat: still so spooked by the 1990s that they cannot move forward. He also promoted Clinton’s anti-gay policy initiatives as a wedge against the Republicans. Alas, many tired Democratic pros are encouraged in their cravenness by the conviction-free HRC and big gay donors, many of whom are also old, and have come to believe their own permament defensive crouch is political realism. George Will remains the class of the conservative punditocracy. Over the last few years, he has put the rest of us to shame.

The truth is: anyone who is serious about winning this war will not be throwing good soldiers on the scrap-heap to cater to fear. It seems to me we should cede anti-gay bigotry to our Islamist enemies. We’re better than them. Or aren’t we?

A policeman is seen through a flag during a demonstration against US President George W. Bush planned by pacifist movements, anti-globalisation and far-left parties in Rome, 09 June 2007. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images.

Researcher have found yet another use for the wonder-drug, aka marijuana:

In a study published in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers show exactly how … the body’s own cannabinoids, compounds that are similar to the ones found in marijuana, reduce inflammation.

Mice had a harder time healing from wounds caused by ear tags used to identify them when researchers blocked their internal cannabinoids, said Dr. Meliha Karsak, lead author and scientist in molecular neurobiology at the University of Bonn in Germany. Cannabinoids are involved in many of the body’s daily functions, scientists believe, but they’re still trying to figure out how.

Any treatment would be in the form of a topical ointment. I guess the feds will wait and see if anyone might get some pleasure from such a treatment before deciding whether to ban it or not.

Pretty hilarious snark about Scooter Libby’s elite phalanx of supporters by the Bush-appointed judge.