Month: November 2008

"That was our mistake. So many African Americans don’t look at gay marriage as a civil rights issue. They look on it as a religious one. And we, for whatever reason … fear? Arrogance? Complacency? We did not do enough outreach to them. We need to begin a dialogue with them, because we should be putting this back on the ballot every election every year until we win," – David Geffen, to Kevin Sessums. Amen.

Mind the snake.

Hat tip: A Welsh View.

Megan weighs in:

GM can’t be saved.  It needs to go into bankruptcy, which is the only possible way I can see to adjust its legacy labor problems, and possibly provide sufficient shock to the corporate culture to allow the company to make a competent car.  Even that may not work.  And it’s going to involve a whole bunch of pain for everyone.

But unless we’re willing to essentially nationalize three auto companies, that pain is going to come, sooner or later.  And if we want to keep auto workers from feeling pain, then we should just up and give them money.  There’s no reason to waste steel on a lot of crappy cars.

Man, I hope Pelosi doesn’t get her way. Tom Friedman’s column made a valiant effort to make the case for a bailout, but I don’t see one. Haven’t I given up enough of my income to incompetent capitalists?

Larison goes after Joe Klein and Obama for suggesting the US mediate India’s and Pakistan’s long-standing land dispute. He also rounds-up chilly Indian responses.

A new study measured the effectiveness of spam:

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted," says the research paper. Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.

Freddie DeBoer and John Schwenkler have been debating whether pro-choicers or pro-lifers are more to blame for the abortion stalemate. Here’s Freddie: 

To me, the question about abortion (and it is a philosophical and moral question, not a scientific one) is whether or not a fetus is a human, and thus deserving of human rights. If the answer is yes, I could never in good conscience support abortion, outside of specific circumstances when carrying the child to term poses significant risk of killing the mother. Not even in cases of rape or incest.

I remain a staunch supporter of abortion rights, however, because I don’t believe a fetus is human. I can imagine, however, a compromise position from someone who doesn’t believe that a fetus is human; it seems to me much easier for someone who believes that to compromise in the direction of more limitations on abortion, than for someone who believes that a fetus is human to compromise on more permissiveness regarding abortion. I’m just profoundly unmoved by pro-choice arguments that assert the human-ness of the fetus. So it just seems to me that there is greater moral and rhetorical space for the pro-choice side to compromise given our stance on the fundamental question.

Nate Silver examines several readings of the vote, one of which I advanced:

Now, it’s true that if new voters had voted against Prop 8 at the same rates that they voted for Obama, the measure probably would have failed. But that does not mean that the new voters were harmful on balance — they were helpful on balance. If California’s electorate had been the same as it was in 2004, Prop 8 would have passed by a wider margin…

At the end of the day, Prop 8’s passage was more a generational matter than a racial one.

If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two. It appears that the generational splits may be larger within minority communities than among whites, although the data on this is sketchy.

For the record, I’m for protesting, but not for litigating this. We lost. We will win. Our first priority should be defending existing marriages in the law. Then: how about focusing on a new initiative in California getting rid of Prop 8? In 2000, marriage equality was denied by 61 percent; by 2008, that was down to 52. By 2012, we win. Let’s make the arguments, reach our aggressively to minority voters, get out of the HRC-style closet, and win.

A closet NAFTA-fan? Dave Weigel asks Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a question:

Emanuel is good at beating Republicans, but how confident are you that he’s going to bring about the center-left political realignment that organizations like yours were set up to make? The NAFTA fight proved that Emanuel is a free trader, and as Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee reportedly told us (by way of leaked Canadian intel) during the primaries, the president-elect’s interest in rolling back trade deals began and ended with winning Ohio…I know why I’m experiencing alternate bursts of resignation at Democratic power and optimism about Emanuel’s neo-liberal instincts. Why are you so optimistic?

The financial math in this blog-post look grim. And yet the newspaper seems to me to be on a journalistic roll.

A very Obama-era question.