Month: November 2008

Every now and again, someone gets the fame they deserve. Rachel Maddow is photographed by Roger Erickson for the Out 100 this year, the magazine’s tally of the 100 gay people who made the biggest impact in America in 2008. From Julia Baird’s profile in Newsweek:

The greatest media-created cliché about Maddow has been that her "meteoric rise" has been almost accidental, that the truck-driving, yard-clearing, erstwhile activist became an "unlikely" star once the MSNBC heads recognized her potential. That’s clearly a fiction.

Her résumé is impressive: she studied public policy at Stanford before winning a Rhodes scholarship to undertake a Ph.D. in political science. While completing her thesis, Maddow worked odd jobs—unloading trucks, landscaping, stamping coffee packets—before entering a competition on local radio. She was offered a job that day. In 2004, she got her own show on Air America, which still airs nightly. Before long, the cable-TV networks anointed her as one of their favorite leftist pundits, and not long after that, MSNBC star Keith Olbermann pressured his bosses to give Maddow her own show. Maddow’s partner, artist Susan Mikula, believes the "unlikely" label is just code for lesbian: "She goes from Stanford to Oxford to activism to radio, then TV? What’s so unusual about that? Is it because she is a gay lady?"

Here’s her Conan interview:

Portfolio tallies up the Super Adventure Club’s earnings:

Total estimated annual revenue: $500 million to $550 million.

Not bad for a cult.

Kottke discusses the Netflix prize, a $1 million check for "the first team to improve upon Netflix’s default recommendation algorithm by 10%."

The press corps gets neurotic about Obama.

From their piece on John Brennan’s withdrawal from contending for the top CIA post under Obama:

Obama’s advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over online blogs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects, including waterboarding, which critics consider torture."

There is some debate about some of the techniques used on prisoners by Bush and Cheney, but no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?

Salon recently interviewed Richard Rodriguez. He’s one of the most brilliant and soulful gay writers around and this is a typically shrewd insight into the forces behind Prop 8:

American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn’t declining, it’s increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence.

The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.

Monotheistic religions feel threatened by the rise of feminism and the insistence, in many communities, that women take a bigger role in the church. At the same time that women are claiming more responsibility for their religious life, they are also moving out of traditional roles as wife and mother. This is why abortion is so threatening to many religious people — it represents some rejection of the traditional role of mother.

In such a world, we need to identify the relationship between feminism and homosexuality. These movements began, in some sense, to achieve visibility alongside one another. I know a lot of black churches take offense when gay activists say that the gay movement is somehow analogous to the black civil rights movement. And while there is some relationship between the persecution of gays and the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, I think the true analogy is to the women’s movement. What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves sexually — even form our sense of what a sex is — sets us apart from the traditional roles we were given by our fathers.

Keith Gessen has a dispatch from Moscow:

What would it take for this regime to stumble? People have been saying for a long time that Putin will not be tested until oil prices fall. Now oil prices are falling, and Putin-Medvedev are mostly blaming the United States and stoking up anger at Ukraine’s president. If oil prices keep falling, their magnificent cash reserves – $500 billion before the current crisis – could, in a country of 140 million people, turn out to be less handy than they’d thought. There is right now no movement and certainly no political party that could challenge the Kremlin – the Kremlin has spared no money or effort in making sure of that.

…If things are going to fall apart, Moscow could well be the place they fall apart most quickly. What happened in the years of extremely high energy prices was something more familiar than a yearning for the ‘strong hand’. The Russian people were offered a bribe and they took it. Why not? But now the bribe is running out, and anything could happen. What you realise under the giant vaulted ceilings of Garage, or simply on the streets, in the alleyways, where an ancient metropolis was once rearranged to serve the people, is that it’s happened here before.

From the Blade:

A member of Barack Obama’s transition team is denying media reports that the president-elect has decided to delay efforts to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” until 2010.

An Obama transition team spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the decision on how to approach repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which prohibits gays from serving openly in the military, would be made after more experts have joined the Obama administration. “These decisions will not be made before the full national security team is in place,” the spokesperson said.

… and the Louisiana purchase. A historical perspective on the mind-blowing use of your and my tax dollars in this bailout.