Month: October 2007

Heh:

Q: When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?

A: Why would they put [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?

Staten Island, New York, noon.

No Halloween parade in San Francisco? The NYT notices the post-gay reality in many, but not all, parts of America:

There has been a notable shift of gravity from the Castro, with young gay men and lesbians fanning out into less-expensive neighborhoods like Mission Dolores and the Outer Sunset, and farther away to Marin and Alameda Counties, “mirroring national trends where you are seeing same-sex couples becoming less urban, even as the population become slightly more urban,” said Gary J. Gates, a demographer and senior research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At the same time, cities not widely considered gay meccas have seen a sharp increase in same-sex couples. Among them: Fort Worth; El Paso; Albuquerque; Louisville, Ky.; and Virginia Beach, according to census figures and extrapolations by Dr. Gates for The New York Times. “Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York,” he said. “Now you can just go to Kansas City.”

"If you look at the way in which the mullahs have run Iran, by and large they have been incredibly savvy. They’re building up bank accounts in Dubai and in Switzerland. This does not strike me as the kind of ravings of, you know, an end of days millenarian.

The Iranians are trying to capture the core political high ground of the Middle East, and they’re trying to become the dominant power in the region. We should be working against them; we should building an alliance against them.

But the idea that they are not going to be deterred by Israel’s 200 nuclear weapons, including a second strike capacity on submarines, is just fantasy. It’s based on plucking a few quotes here and there from a president who is not constitutionally or operationally in charge of the nuclear program," – Fareed Zakaria, in a debate with Norman Podhoretz on the PBS Newshour last night.

It’s worth reading the entire transcript. Here’s the audio. I find the specter of religious fanaticism behind nuclear weaponry extremely troubling. I don’t think we can dismiss the theological rantings of the Tehran leadership. And it’s very refreshing to hear one of today’s neo-conservatives speaking of the danger of religious fanaticism. But we also have to be empirical about this: is their fundamentalism worse than Mao’s fundamentalism? Or Stalin’s? Are they less susceptible to the logic of mutually assured destruction than the Soviets were?

This is not an easy call. But the transcript shows that Zakaria has far more empirical reasoning behind his position than Podhoretz does behind his. And bringing Hitler up in your first response is not a sign of a deep or complicated analysis.

Max Blumenthal shoots several fish in several barrels at the recent Family Research Council conference. But what fish! What barrels! The sheer passion of the hatred for gay people as a fundamental plank of contemporary conservatism is unmistakable.

They’re a nation of gamblers – and the British bookies have just drastically cut the odds of Ron Paul actually winning the presidency. Yes, it’s 12/1. Very recently, it was 66/1. The Brits think he has more of a chance than John Edwards.

The usual triangulating, you-have-to-parse very-closely Clinton crapola. Let me go out on a limb: of course she’ll vote for him without demanding a statement on whether waterboarding is torture – as long as, and no longer than, she decides that it is in her political interest to vote as such. She is very consistent in this: there is no other principle that Clinton has ever operated by or ever will.

Here it is. I just watched it. I was under the impression he would be singing. Allowing this guy to preach strikes me as a step far too far. No, he doesn’t say anything homophobic as such. He uses the usual formula of loving those he wants to be other than they are – which is a very funny kind of love. But in saying that God "delivered" him from homosexuality, McClurkin describes sexual orientation as something that God wants to save me and other gay people from. If one were being generous, one would say this isn’t meant as an attack; but it is certainly experienced as an attack. McClurkin, in short, should never have been allowed to speak at this event, because his words are inherently divisive, his record of comments on gay people offensive, and the point of the event was allegedly unifying. It wasn’t. To my mind, this isn’t ultimately about the difficulty of forging any kind of alliance between gays and African-Americans. It is the inherent danger of mixing religion with politics. That’s called Christianism. Some of us have not spent the last few years trying to rescue conservatism from the toxin of theocracy only to support a candidate who wants to do the same thing on the left. I don’t think Obama wants to go that far; I still believe that broadly speaking, his is the only major candidacy right now that offers the kind of change we need. But what happened on that stage was inexcusable, stupid, and damaging. I don’t blame any gay American for jumping the Obama ship over it.

They’re now suing a school board because a school mandates "a moment of silence"? Money quote:

A 14-year-old suburban girl and her dad, atheist activist Rob Sherman, filed a lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court that challenges the constitutionality of a law requiring Illinois public schools to observe a moment of silence.

Sherman and his daughter Dawn, a freshman at Buffalo Grove High School, contend that the law providing for "silent prayer or for silent reflection on the anticipated activities of the day" runs afoul of the constitutional separation of church and state.

It makes you want to sympathize with the Christianists. Can we exercise a little mutual respect on these matters?

Here’s a really helpful exchange, I’d say, on whether Michael Mukasey really does have a responsibility to say whether waterboarding is torture before he is confirmed as attorney-general. Ben Wittes wrote in defense of Mukasey’s reticence in TNR. Marty Ledermam responds – to my mind persuasively – here. Money quote from Marty:

Which brings me to the final and most important reason why Judge Mukasey can answer the question — even if DOJ does not provide him with the classified OLC memos. There may well be some ambiguities at the margins about whether and under what circumstances certain interrogation techniques amount to torture, to cruel treatment under Common Article 3, to or conduct that shocks the conscience under the McCain Amendment. After all, as Henry Hart stressed, even legal rules that appear straightforward contain seeds of ambiguity, and raise difficult questions of application. Does a "No Vehicles in the Park" law prohibit a baby stroller? A statute of a tank? Roller skates? Bicycles? A wheelchair? An ambulance? (See H.L.A. Hart, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals, 71 Harv. L. Rev. 593, 607 (1958); Lon Fuller, Positivism and Fidelity to Law–A Reply to Professor Hart, 71 Harv. L. Rev. 630, 663 (1958); Jeremy Waldron, Vagueness in Law and Language: Some Philosophical Issues, 82 Cal. L. Rev. 509, 537 (1994); Pierre Schlag, No Vehicles in the Park, 23 Seattle U. L. Rev. 381 (1999).)

Therefore, some interpretive principles are invariably necessary, and there will be close cases. That’s true even of the Torture Act and Common Article 3’s ban on "cruel treatment and torture."

But if, in parsing the "no vehicles" rule, one arrives at the conclusion that a souped-up Corvette may be driven through the center of the park, then that’s a pretty good clue that you need to find yourself some new interpretive principles.

If a Corvette isn’t a car, nothing is a car. And if waterboarding isn’t torture, nothing is. Mukasey knows that waterboarding is torture and that the Bush administration has authorized it. If we are to expect the attorney-general to defend the rule of law and plain English, he needs to answer the question now.