Month: December 2008

The posters I noted here are proliferating. Oui, nous pouvons!

One of those Not-In-The-Onion-I-Swear stories:

A lawmaker says the state’s Homeland Security office should be crediting God with keeping the state safe.

State Rep. Tom Riner, a Southern Baptist minister who was instrumental in establishing that requirement in 2006, disapproves of the fact that Homeland Security doesn’t currently mention God in its mission statement or on its Web site. The law passed under former Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who prominently credited God in annual reports to state leaders. But Gov. Steve Beshear’s administration didn’t credit God in its 2008 Homeland Security report issued last month.

"We certainly expect it to be there, of course," Riner, D-Louisville, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

From Modesto, California:

A Roman Catholic priest has told parishioners they should confess if they voted for Barack Obama because the president-elect supports abortion.

The Rev. Joseph Illo says his parishioners at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Modesto shouldn’t risk losing their "state of grace" by receiving communion sacrilegiously. He delivered the message in a Nov. 21 letter and during mass.

In an interview this week with the Modesto Bee, Illo says he sent the letter because Catholic teaching requires that people go to confession when they commit a mortal sin.

I’m as struck as Mark McKinnon by the sudden, if tempered, swooning of the center-right for Obama. even Fred Barnes has had an epiphany of sorts. They are responding to his obviously sensible and accomplished picks for the economy and foreign affairs as if they have realized for the first time who "that one" actually is. He is not now and never has been a leftist ideologue. That was a paranoid fantasy that helped kill the GOP this year. He is a pragmatic, sane, reasoned centrist liberal. He doesn’t want to surrender to terror or abolish capitalism – he wants to hone our fight against the Islamists to better effect and to save capitalism from itself. And the core meaning of his candidacy – an end to the polarizing culture war battles of the post-Vietnam era – is not just hype. It’s real:

It appears the political classes have briefly sobered up and decided to act responsibly, selflessly and — dare we say it — in the best interest of the country. The times are simply so serious, so dangerous, so calamitous that we can’t afford politics as usual. And for once, politicians seem to get it. We all wish President-elect Obama success. Because there’s a good chance that if he fails, we all go down together. Way down.

And let’s give credit where it’s due. The spirit of good will is being significantly leveraged by Obama, who has had made a series of very smart, practical, pragmatic and non-ideological picks for his cabinet.

Eight years ago, George W. Bush said he wanted to change the tone in Washington. Well, a recount crippled that idea before it got out of the crib. It simply wasn’t the right time for the message or the messenger.

And Bush was never that serious about it. Obama is.

While many Dish readers were enjoying their Thanksgiving break, I reviewed the new Gus van Sant movie. Here it is, if you missed it and are interested.

The tabloid headlines – and who can blame them? – are reporting "the oldest stash ever." And it does indeed seem like the cannabis found in a Chinese tomb going back 2,700 years is legit. But this is what struck me:

The substance has been found in two of the 500 Gushi tombs excavated so far in northwestern China, indicating that cannabis was either restricted for use by a few individuals or was administered as a medicine to others through shamans, Russo said. "It certainly does indicate that cannabis has been used by man for a variety of purposes for thousands of years." Russo, who had a neurology practice for 20 years, has previously published studies examining the history of cannabis. "I hope we can avoid some of the political liabilities of the issue," he said, referring to his latest paper. The region of China where the tomb is located, Xinjiang, is considered an original source of many cannabis strains worldwide.

My italics. America has two major responses to cannabis. The first is still Puritanical disdain. The second is stoner giggling and humor. Between those two poles, we may find that exploring marijuana’s medical potential and its spiritual dimension are more fruitful ways forward.

Nir Rosen reports from Kabul:

“I’m not optimistic,” a longtime NGO official with more than a dozen years’ experience in the country told me. He said the confidence of the Taliban today is beginning to resemble the swagger of the mujahideen he knew during the war against the Soviets. “You can’t help getting this increased uncomfortable feeling that you are waiting for something terrible to happen.” Another senior NGO staffer with decades of experience in Afghanistan told me there was “a loss of hope.” “Afghans with money,” he said, “want to move their families to Dubai or India; they’re looking at an exit strategy.” Perhaps, he suggested, America and its allies should start doing the same: “We’re not up to the task of success in Afghanistan.”

Maniratuba, Brazil, 6.30 pm.

The Bush-backing blogosphere took the discrediting of one Newsweek story to proclaim that religious freedom was meticulously respected at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, and elsewhere in the black sites world of the CIA. But the more testimony from former Gitmo inmates emerges, the more the stories and anecdotes of abusing and violating the religious tenets of the prisoners proliferate. It is impossible to verify these things, of course. And al Qaeda operatives are trained to lie. But there is a consistency and pattern to the reports, along with detailed testimony from many FBI agents, that make me believe that using faith to torture prisoners was far from rare.

Here’s a disturbing summary of the mounting evidence from the Catholic magazine, Commonweal:

When I first read about the incident reported in the infamous May 1, 2005 Newsweek exposé-a Qur’an in the toilet!- I assumed it was a one-time offense, and I was not surprised when Newsweek later retracted the report. But according to the detainees’ own accounts, before 2005 almost everyone from Kandahar, Bagram, or Guantánamo had witnessed desecration of the Qur’an. The U.S. inspector general’s own May 2008 report on FBI involvement in detainee interrogations found that abuse of the Qur’an was one of the most frequently reported offenses. Thirty-one FBI agents claimed to be aware of it.

One of the worst offenders was General Geoffrey Miller, Rumsfeld’s Gitmoizing apparatchik. But read the whole thing.

Dale Carpenter thinks Prop 8’s passage is stalling the momentum of marriage equality in New York and DC. There will, almost certainly, be a pause. But I don’t see this as fatal or even that troubling. We have marriage rights in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and thousands of married couples in California. The backlash against those couples has prompted its own backlash-lash in defense of them. The impact of seeing thousands of married men and women split up in the law and the dignity of their marriages invalidated by a large majority is real. Watching a tiny minority get trashed by a majority is always a critical element in civil rights struggles. And if the gay movement is a moral movement at its core, if our goal is to speak to the truth of our lives regardless of the consequences, losing is not the worst thing that can happen. Winning illegitimately or prematurely could be worse.

As the dust of Prop 8 recedes, I find myself more committed than ever to making the case for marriage equality as often as I can and to try and live the change I want to see in the world. I think many many more gay people feel the same way. This is what matters, in the end. And as we win the argument, and as the next generation comes of age, we will win democratic victories. We have already won in two states. We have proven the principle. Allowing the polity to digest this, and using every defeat as an educational tool, is not going backwards. It is the fitful, messy process of moving forward in a democracy where everybody gets a say. I’d rather lose and live in such a democracy than win by violating it.