Clowns and street performers dance in the Hamra shopping district of Beirut on December 9, 2008. Thirty performers from Germany, Italy, Morocco and Lebanon donned rainbow-coloured wigs and round red plastic noses put on a show in the streets as frustrated drivers blasted their horns and tried to make their way around them. Ramzi Haidar/Getty.
By Patrick Appel
Walid Phares predicts that the Guantanamo trials will be used against the US:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his comrades will use the so-called confessions deal to build a psychological environment for a martyrdom case: “istishaad.” They aren’t interested in saving their lives (at first, although they think they could) but in providing a maximum damage to their enemy through the tribunal proceedings.
They will claim the court is not legitimate, the entire Guantanamo process as illegal and that they are ready to die as Jihadis in the path to Allah. Their first target is to grant themselves, in the eyes of millions of militants around the world the status of “Shuhada,” martyrs, even though they could survive it.
The “confessions” turned declaration of victory will be picked up by Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups and transformed into vital material for propaganda: videos, audio and texts. The “show” inside court will be used for indoctrination purpose around the world. A myth will be set in motion and emotional reactions to the “story” will be mutated into future revenge operations.
by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:
As a classmate of Mr. Foote’s, I would like to present a different view of the ROTC debate here at Columbia. First of all, the vote that you refer to in The Daily Dish was not actually a referendum; it was a survey used to gauge student opinion. The actual decision will be made by the University Senators, who are not bound to vote in accordance with the results of the opinion poll.
Moving on to Mr. Foote’s op-ed — it, like all of the pro-ROTC arguments, seems to rely on two main points. One, that ROTC provides a way for low-income students to pay for a college education they couldn’t otherwise afford. This may be a valid point at some institutions, but not at one with such a large endowment as Columbia.
The second argument is that it will be easier to change the military’s discriminatory policies ‘from the inside,’ whatever that means. This argument seems to overlook the fact that ROTC already exists on myriad campuses that undoubtedly have gay students; what makes Mr. Foote and those who agree with him so sure that Columbia can succeed where so many other colleges have failed? On the other hand, I imagine if all universities said that they were banning ROTC until the military repealed DADT, that change would be effected rather quickly.
by Chris Bodenner
Keep them away from the baby swingers.
By Patrick Appel
Letting go can be tough:
After getting rejected by sixteen publishers, Bay Area author Mary Patrick Kavanaugh held a funeral for her rejected novel. At the open coffin event, attendees viewed the failed manuscript, rejection letters, refinance papers, a useless MFA in creative writing, and the author’s much watched DVD of The Secret.
by Chris Bodenner
(Kicks in at :45 mark)
By Patrick Appel
I got side-tracked and haven’t been posting up on the Balgojevich story. Some reaction from around the web. Josh Marshall:
Even setting aside the primordial level of corruption of trying to sell the senate seat of the President-elect of the United States, I never fail to be amazed at the brazenness and stupidity of some political crooks. I mean, I think everyone involved in politics or interested in political corruption in the country had to know that Blagojevich’s phones were tapped and probably his offices were bugged, and that Pat Fitzgerald had him under the craziest level of scrutiny. And he tries to sell the senate seat with that hanging over his head? That’s simply amazing. I guess you could say he’s just a traditionalist, trying to keep up heritage of Chicago machine politics. But with some of these characters, it must just be pathological.
K-Lo:
This Illinois Senate-seat news is outrageous and shameful. That said, it warms my heart. Finally, a political scandal you can talk to your children about. No room at the Mayflower. No myspace page. No Gay-American announcement. Just good and evil and money and power corrupting.
Incredible. Blagojevich was already under investigation. And then he tries to sell Obama’s Senate seat? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this. This dude tried to auction the Senate seat of the President-Elect of the United States. Wow. They haven’t even invented a machine that can calculate the Fail Factor here. I do believe we have gone to Interstellar Fail. Intergalactic, perhaps.
oMoe Lane’s response is predicatable:
I think that not only should the President-elect fully endorse Senator Durbin’s call for a special election for the replacement seat; I think that Barack Obama should come back to his home state, mingle with his and Blagojevich’s fellow-Democrats, and heavily associate his name with whatever candidate that the Democratic wing of the Illinois Combine comes up with. It’ll fit in nicely with Blagojevich’s trial on corruption charges.
As is Lowrey’s:
Blagojevich and Rangel are obviously first steps toward Democrats taking over the mantle of corruption from the Republicans.
Volokh on the legal issues at stake:
…my sense is that political deals of the "I appoint your political ally to X and you appoint me to Y" variety are pretty commonplace, though perhaps done with more subtlety than seemed to be contemplated here. Should these deals indeed be treated as criminal bribery? Have they generally been so treated?…the government’s theory, I take it, would apparently treat such a deal as a federal crime — assuming the federal jurisdictional requirements are met — even if it were a standalone deal by an otherwise uncorrupt official. So that, I think, makes it worth considering how the law should treat these sorts of deals involving political appointments.
Nate Silver thinks it may put some IL seats in play:
The Republicans are extremely disorganized in Illinois, but both the governor’s seat and Obama’s senate seat now need to be considered viable pickup opportunities for them in 2010. The Republican with the strongest statewide brand name is former senator Peter Fitzgerald, who retired from the Senate in 2004. With that said, the Democrats have several rising stars of their own, such as Alexi Giannoulias, Jan Schakowsky, Lisa Madigan, and Luis Guiterrez, all of whom have pretty clean reputations.
Kevin Drum sums up the blogospheres reaction as a whole:
Thanks partly to this being a slow news day and partly to the sheer juiciness of the whole thing, the blogosphere is ablaze with chatter about the arrest of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges. Main theme: the guy has been under investigation for three years by the same prosecutor who convicted both Scooter Libby and the previous governor of Illinois, but he was merrily blathering away to friends anyway about selling off Barack Obama’s senate seat to the highest bidder? What kind of fucking moron is this guy?
By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
It’s always a bad idea for government to decide what journalists should cover, but that has little to do with the Federal Writers Project. In its original incarnation, the FWP was mostly about documentation. From state travel guides to slave narratives, the FWP was at its best recording local knowledge for posterity. The government has continued to make such grants – through the NEH, for example – without seriously endangering our democracy.
The real flaw in Pinsky’s proposal is that it has nothing to do with the present crisis.
When the FWP was created in 1935, unemployment stood above 20%. Writers and editors who had lost their jobs had little chance of gaining alternative employment; using them as manual laborers in other federal programs would have egregiously wasted their skills and training. The FWP was intended to tide them over until the economy recovered, and, as Pinsky himself points out, many participants went on to achieve notable success in the postwar years.
The present economic crisis, however, shows every sign of simply deepening a secular trend. There’s no reason to believe that jobs being lost in journalism are ever coming back. Moreover, in an information-centric economy, former journalists possess skills that can be deployed in other sectors. I don’t want to downplay the pain of that dislocation, or its destructive consequences to the health of our democracy. But putting displaced journalists on to the federal payroll simply postpones the necessary readjustment.
By Patrick Appel
Razib points to this graph showing that more partisan people tend to pray more. I have no idea what conclusions to draw:
by Chris Bodenner
Evangelical leaders are up in arms over Newsweek‘s cover story examining "the religious case for gay marriage":
In addition to contesting Newsweek’s specific scriptural arguments, some social conservatives took issue with the basic premise of the magazine’s story: that conservative opposition to same-sex marriage is based on specific biblical instructions. "I see it as an attempt to caricature and reduce to a cartoon the social conservative belief in the efficacy of traditional marriage, and try to reduce it to some formulaic, scriptural literalism," said Ralph Reed…. "There’s more of a practical, sociological foundation for why we seek to affirm marriage…."
Richard Land takes the same tack:
“The arguments that are used are often not biblical arguments. They are secular arguments, arguing about marriage as being a civic and a social institution, and that societies have a right to define marriage,” Land said. Broadening the definition of marriage could “shatter” the social role married couples have traditionally played, he said.
I’m with editor Jon Meacham:
"Let the letters and emails come. History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion."
The Dish 