Month: November 2008

Ponnuru And The Gays

He writes:

Some Republicans believe that their reputation for intolerance is costing the party the votes of the next generation of Americans. But that argument got harder to make when California, one of the most liberal states in the country, passed a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage.

But the next generation of Californians, even after the dreadful No on 8 campaign, still favored marriage equality by huge margins. Ramesh may be right that gay-bashing can still produce some small gains for the GOP (although in most states, it cannot be banned any more than it has been), but California sure didn’t disprove the generational argument.

And assume also that banning marriage rights is popular for a while. Does the GOP not realize that it needs openly gay people in its ranks to show that it is not completely anachronistic or regional?

Where are the openly gay conservative writers and congressmen and women? Where are the openly gay governors or state reps? The trouble is: it’s almost impossible to find any gay writers or thinkers or pols on the right who oppose marriage rights. Take someone like Jamie Kirchick, a trouble-shooting neocon trouble-maker and rising star among conservative writers. But Jamie, like almost every other gay conservative, supports gay marriage. How could a gay conservative oppose it? Yes, we can have disagreements about how and why to support it. But it tells you something important that the only gay people that the right can now attract are closet-cases, harking back to a previous era. Oh, and Larry Craig and Ted Haggard.

The sad truth is: the GOP is not just opposed to marriage equality, it is deeply hostile to and uncomfortable among openly gay people in general. This isn’t true of many conservatives and Republicans in private, may of whom are completely at ease with gays. But even those who see us a equal human beings are required in public to pretend otherwise, a state of affairs that makes it impossible for an adjusted homosexual under the age of forty to feel at home there. Until the GOP enters the 21st century, as the Tories have done in Britain, they won’t look normal enough to appeal in any broad way to the next generation. And that includes the straights.

Spineless?

Brian Doherty isn’t happy that Obama is moving slowly on DADT:

I imagine if Obama makes this change cleanly at any time in his term, he’ll be fondly remembered. Still, his apparent unwillingness to be bold on something he considers a matter of both justice and wise policy–and that he has clear political support on–should be disconcerting to his fans.

It is. Because it is a caution based on caution – not reality.

No Way. No How. No Brennan: Ctd.

A reader writes:

  While I agree with you that Brennan would be an awful choice at CIA, for both substantive and symbolic ("branding") reasons, I do see one significant ray of light appearing from this "Dark Side" guy:  He wants to have a real debate on these issues:

"It’s a tough ethical question, and it’s a question that really needs to be aired more publicly. The issue of the reported domestic spying — these are very healthy debates that need to take place. They can’t be stifled, because I think that we as a country and a society have to determine what is it we want to do, whether it be eavesdropping, whether it be taking actions against individuals who are either known or suspected to be terrorists. What length do we want to go to? What measures do we want to use? What tactics do we want to use? "

He wants the American people to be forced to make explicit moral choices, instead of acquiescing implicitly to the soft dictatorship of a secretive and dishonest "unitary executive".  This is closer to Democracy, at least.  Where there is openness and truth, there is hope.

Agreed. But it disturbs me that this man, while urging debate, never tells us which side of the debate he’d be on. I fear he’d be on Tenet’s side. As he has been.

Paul On Obama

Ron Paul on what he expects from the new administration:

I don’t expect many good things. I do expect a lot of spending and even more debt. To really cut spending and balance our budget, we need to change foreign policy. Obama’s rhetoric on foreign policy is better than what we have gotten recently, but don’t expect any real change.

He may be more likely to wind things down in Iraq, but he’s still planning on keeping troops there for a least 16 more months. He wants money for Georgia and more troops in Afghanistan. He isn’t going to bring home our 30,000 troops from Korea or our 50,000 soldiers in Germany, and he won’t close any of our 700 foreign bases. At the same time, he is planning even bigger spending here at home. I hope I’m wrong, but if this spending and debt continue, the dollar is going to crash and we will see the middle class in this country take a grave hit.

Medved: Full Civil Equality For Gay Couples

But not the M-word. A key member of the religious right backs civil unions containing all the rights – federal and state – that apply to civil marriages. So if the far right now favors comprehensive civil unions at the state and federal level, why won’t Obama propose a federal civil unions bill? Or will the Human Rights Campaign try to dissuade him?

Learning To Love The Trillion Dollar Deficit

Matt Miller, a former "deficit fetishist," claims that the current economic situation demands a large deficit:

The key (and here you’ll see I haven’t really changed my stripes) is to enact a long-term framework for fiscal sanity even as we test the limits of how much debt the Treasury can peddle.

Bob Litan of the Brookings Institution suggests building such triggers into Obama’s blueprint from the start. Once unemployment gets back beneath 6%, for example, we could require a supermajority vote in Congress to run deficits higher than, say, 2% or 3% of GDP (by comparison, the trillion dollar figure will push us toward 7%, an all-time high).

Yes, promises like this can be broken. But given the extraordinary circumstances, writing this kind of future restraint into law would tell world markets that we know the debt spree has to end. Obama could also set up a bipartisan commission on Social Security and Medicare with a view to building consensus for action in a second term, by which time the current crisis will, with luck, be a fading memory.

The Cameron Model?

Here’s a very helpful and insightful piece by Tim Montgomerie. I’m drawn to two elements in particular. The Conservatives returned to a concern for civil liberties:

Once the party of authoritarianism the Conservatives have about-turned and become a vigorous opponent of Labour’s plans for a national ID card and for an extended period of detention without charge.  A more respectful view of same-sex relationships has also bought David Cameron greater opportunity to make the case for traditional marriage.

And if I were part of the degenerate "conservative" think-tank-magazine establishment, I would also note this:

The two think tanks that have had most influence on Project Cameron didn’t exist when the Conservatives were last in power: Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Justice.  Policy Exchange (or PX as it is known) was founded by Nicholas Boles and Michael Gove. Boles now runs the Conservative Party’s preparation-for-government unit and Michael Gove MP is the party’s education minister-in-waiting with an ambitious programme for schools reform in his briefcase.

And Nick Boles is openly gay. Imagine that in today’s Dixified GOP.

Adam Smith Meets Charles Darwin

Via Catherine Rampell, a study on division of labor among ants:

My results indicate that at least in this species, a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually.

Mark Thoma thinks through why Smith’s theory doesn’t apply in this case.