Month: November 2008

I didn’t know you had it in you:

Surely you’ve heard the one about the moyle who has a side business selling wallets he would make out of his clients’ foreskins.  When asked by a potential buyer why his wallets were so expensive, the moyle explained: "Because if you rub it, it turns into a suitcase."

Badaboom. Another writes:

Yes, they are especially good for eyelid replacement. Unfortunately, the recipients turn out a bit cockeyed.

Tip your waitress. Goldberg is due to chime in any minute now, I suspect.

Both supporters and opponents have asked for a judicial ruling on whether the initiative can stand. My own view is that it should stand, and the court should decline to reverse it. We lost. They won in a fair fight. No whining. With one caveat. Those civil marriage licenses already issued should not be revoked. I find the retroactive voiding of marriage licenses at once legally suspect and humanly cruel.

If my own marriage license were suddenly deemed void, it would feel like a very nasty attack on my own family. It is one thing to decide that gay couples are barred from civil equality from now on, but to reach back and strip couples who married in good faith under the law is excessive.

My own view is that we can protest and have; we are also within our rights to boycott businesses who bankrolled the initiative, and to confront the Mormon church. But we lost a fair fight because of complacency, and dreadful leadership. Now: start the battle to reverse the initiative through the ballot box. This time: a different model of grassroots organizing, web-based fund-raising, and social networking advocacy. But first: a revolution at HRC and its clones.

A new service:

"This is the first time in history that the ‘on-demand’ generation will be able to fully experience couch commerce by ordering pizza directly through their television set. You’ll see a television ad for Domino’s and you’ll click ‘I want it’ through your remote. In about 30 minutes, your pizza will show up at your door.”

This is not good for those bloggers gaining weight in Adams Morgan.

Juan Cole examines the latest Bond:

With this film, Daniel Craig’s Bond, who is from a considerably lower social class than Flemings’, has chosen to defy the white-tie set, and the Bush administration’s greed and lawlessness, and to stand up for the little people (including Camille, who symbolizes Morales’s Indios). At one point the smarmy CIA man Beame rejects any criticism from Bond of US imperialism, given Britain’s own long and sordid imperial history. But a country, and a people, always has a choice in each generation, of whether to do the right thing. They are not prisoners of their ancestors.

Craig’s Bond is an intimation of the sort of Britain that could have been, if Tony Blair had stood up to Bush and refused to be dragged into an illegal war of choice, and into other actions and policies that profoundly contradicted the principles on which the Labour Party had been founded (and you could imagine Craig’s Bond voting for Old Labour, while Flemings’s was obviously a Tory).

Saletan believes US drones are doing a better job in Pakistan:

Pakistan tolerates the drones not just because it fears the terrorists but because the drones are earning its confidence. They’re not inflicting the sort of massacres that trigger domestic unrest and destabilize allies. In fact, the drones are doing such a good job that Pakistan now wants drones of its own. "Give them to us," Pakistan’s president tells the Post. "We are your allies." Some day, Pakistan will have its drones. So will India, China, and Iran. The proliferation of drones is well underway. Maybe it will solve the problem of terrorist insurgency. Maybe it will create something worse.

The Prop 8 success – planned for over a decade – is not the only example of the Mormon church targeting the gay minority. A reader writes:

It pains me to see an organization like the Boy Scouts, which has for nearly a century produced young men of character, leadership and good citizenship, painted as a bigoted, Christianist group.

But the reputation the Boy Scouts have rightly earned for calling gay boys and leaders "unclean" and "incapable of being the best kind of citizen" (both official statements regarding their policy to ban "avowed homosexuals") is driven mainly by the Mormon Church.

The LDS are the largest religious grouping in the Scouts and were able to pressure the BSA’s membership with an ultimatum: come out with a policy banning gay leaders, or we’ll pull all of our members.

Today Scouting’s membership is on the decline, marginalized as a religious organization of the right wing. Younger parents with kids entering the Scouting age are repelled by the prejudicial message of politics that surround Scouting.  That’s a real shame, because the program at the local level is still among the finest ways that a child can spend their formative years. But the grip that the Mormon Church holds over Scouting forced the organization all the way to the Supreme Court, and now further toward irrelevancy in a nation the needs Scouting.

Most troubling because of the Mormon Church, Scouting sends a message to 14-year-olds secretly coming to grips with their sexuality that they are the ONE kind of citizen not worthy of being a Scout. I was that young Scout once, and I also witnessed the near devastating impact that message had on another teenage Scout. Scouting professes to be "absolutely non-sectarian", requiring only that a Scout do his duty to God (in whatever religion or manner the Scout deems fit)… with only this one exception: don’t be gay.  And while there are several churches that sponsor Scouting and supported the BSA’s battle to ban gays, only the Mormon Church stood up and demanded the action.

The LDS church has every right to lobby for the public law to reflect their religious truths, and if the majority of others agree, there is not much a minority of gay people can do about it. But the LDS church cannot then expect to be above criticism and exposure and some harsh words.

Patrick Barry argues that the very act of putting the offer of talks on the table helps clarify the different factions that presently compose the Taliban.

A reader writes:

I believe the Republicans made the subject of Palin’s labor with Trig fair game when Linda Lingle included it in her speech at the RNC. About five minutes in, Lingle says:

The same day she delivered that speech, Sarah went into labor with her fifth child … made the trip back to Alaska … and delivered her son Trig the next day. Did I mention that she is tough?"

From that point on, we are all within our rights to consider it "tough", "reckless", "stupid", "dangerous", or "preposterous". I’d go with "reckless".

Me? Preposterous, if I had to guess. But that’s the choice. Here’s the full background again. Palin could easily resolve all this in an instant. But won’t, and pretends she has. Why is the Anchorage Daily News unable to end this speculation once and for all? Are they scared? They usually aren’t. And this is not about a private person, or, even, in the end, about Palin. It’s about the system and how the McCain campaign was utterly, unbelievably reckless in their vetting. We can’t have accountability and closure till we know what’s at issue. And only the blogosphere, it seems, is interested in finding out.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

Packer is disgusted by new regulations banning Iraqi interpreters from wearing face masks to conceal their identities.