Month: July 2008

HIV Travel Ban Update

By Patrick Appel

From the Immigration Equality blog:

When the President signs the Pepfar bill (which could be as early as this Wednesday) the statutory HIV ban will be removed. That is, the HIV ban will no longer be written into the Immigration and Nationality Act which is extraordinarily good news. This is just the first step though, in a two step process. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has the authority to decide which illnesses constitute “communicable diseases of public health significance.” Currently, HIV is on this list, meaning that the HIV ban will not immediately be lifted with the passage of Pepfar. So, what happens next?

We must now set our sights on HHS. and urge them to strike HIV from its list. Immigration Equality is working in coalition with other organizations now to determine the best way to approach HHS. In order for the ban to be fully repealed, HHS will have to issue proposed regulations, allow for public comments, and then issue final regulations. This could be a lengthy (and contentious) process.

The Nationalistic Torch II

By Patrick Appel
Matt Steinglass counters Fallows:

There will be 22,000 journalists in Beijing next week. There is no way to shut up a journalistic mob of that size, each clambering over the next to get the story. China decided to invite the world in, to host the Olympics, in the expectation that it would receive a big boost in global respect and affection. It is about to find out what happens when you invite the world in. If Chinese don’t want foreigners viewing their country with a critical eye, they should kick the foreigners out. But you can’t throw an event to win the world’s respect and affection, screw up the event, and then complain that the world is biased against you.

Correction Of The Day II

By Patrick Appel

More on that moccasin guy and his rival Barrack Abeam:

Gore told the AP he hoped the speech would contribute to "a new political environment in this country that will allow the next president to do what I think the next president is going to think is the right thing to do." He said both fellow Democrat Barrack Abeam and Republican rival John moccasin are "way ahead" of most politicians in the fight against global climate change.

moccasin, who supports building more nuclear power plants as one solution to global warming, said Thursday he admires Gore as an early and outspoken advocate of addressing the global warming problem even though "there may be some aspects of climate change that he and I are in disagreement (on)."

Who says there are only two choices?

Face Of The Day

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A British soldier with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) asks questions from an Afghan man at his house during a patrol on the outskirts of Kabul on July 27, 2008. Britain has approximately 7,800 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of whom are in Helmand, where the Islamist Taliban militia have been fighting a bloody insurgency since losing power in 2001. 111 British troops have been killed during operations in Afghanistan since 2001.  Photo by Shah Marai/Getty.

Orwell Watch

by Chris Bodenner
Peter Kirsanow notes:

Voters are far more favorably disposed to policies described as "affirmative action" than they are to policies described as "racial preferences." When a policy is described as "affirmative action," polls show an almost even split in support and opposition. In contrast, a Newsweek poll last summer showed that Americans oppose "racial preferences" by a margin of 82%—14%. The opposition to "racial preferences" also includes a plurality of blacks. … Thus, supporters of preferences employ the term "affirmative action"— a benign policy designed to "level the playing field." Who could be opposed to that?

A Surge Of Distortions

By Daniel Larison

Speaking of the "surge," I heartily recommend my TAC colleague Kelley Vlahos’ post on the "surge"-as-Republican loyalty test, but I would just add that there is nothing terribly new about this test.  From the moment that the plan was announced, it became an article of faith among the tiresome enforcers of movement and party purity that any elected Republican who expressed any doubts or qualifications of support, no matter what they were, were to be denounced and targeted for primary challenges.  Hugh Hewitt was only the most vocal and obnoxious of the movement conservatives who insisted on applying this strangest of litmus tests in the wake of the ’06 electoral debacle in an effort to make the GOP more or less unequivocally a party identified with the Iraq war and with nothing else. 

Back then, even such reliable pro-war Senators as John Warner and Sam Brownback were chastised for advocating surrender, and it was during this phase when Chuck Hagel (who had voted to authorize the war and had kept his complaints about the war muted until the midterms) was declared to be persona non grata at the White House.  Even Romney’s modest wait-and-see approach for most of 2007 was turned into a liability for him on the eve of the Florida primary, when McCain shamelessly lied about what Romney’s position had been.  Something that I think most analysts of the recent debate over the "surge" have missed is why McCain is sticking so doggedly to arguing over who was right a year and a half ago: it was his use of the "surge" to break Romney in the primaries that paved the way for his nomination, and I expect that he believes that he can ride this issue all the way through the general election by using it just as unscrupulously against Obama as he did against his main primary rival.  The press will allow this to happen, because it is now commonly accepted wisdom that "McCain was right about the surge," which somehow gives him license to distort his opponents’ views while officially retaining credibility on matters of national security. 

Cross-posted at Eunomia 

Blogs Killed Satire

by Chris Bodenner
Apparently the "right-wing" blogger I criticized in my earlier post was being ironic:

Satire’s getting harder and harder to pull off–and we’re just beginners. Though we strongly disagree with Mr. [Bodenner] about affirmative action, Mr. Public was satirizing the sort of far right blogger who finds a justification for his wrong opinions even in very rationally expressed views that coincide only slightly with his own, such as Mr. [Bodenner]’s. Everything Mr. [Bodenner] says in his post is correct as a response to this sort of thinking. Maybe satire is really dead because there is no wrong opinion, no matter how extreme or looney, that doesn’t appear somewhere on the internet.  I’m not sure it’s possible to be sufficiently over the top anymore for people to recognize satire.

He makes a great point; his exaggerated post still falls short of the extreme rhetoric I regularly find in the blogosphere.  So regardless of its true intent, the spoof was a good foil.