Month: May 2009

A reader writes:

K-Lo frames her entire column around the idea of protecting young people in the public square from personal attacks, something few people would disagree with. But then she casually drops this line:

"Mercifully, [Prejean] seems to have faith, but when you’re dating Michael Phelps on again and off again, you probably don’t have the best support system walking into a vicious national debate."

Does K-Lo know something about their two-week relationship that we don't?

My guess is no. The only discernible reason to invoke Phelps is to remind us that he – gasp! – smoked pot. (In fact, wouldn't Phelps, someone also pilloried for a scandalous photo, be just the kind of person to offer "the best support system" to Prejean right now?)  Thus, in the eyes of K-Lo — the aspiring Mom-In-Chief to all those poor, defenseless Christian girls out there — Phelps is nothing but an inconsiderate stoner. "No offense," she should have said.

Dale Carpenter has a long, smart post on same sex marriage and religious liberty. This is worth pointing out:

The really interesting question is why there have been so few conflicts. The main reason, I suspect, is common sense and forbearance on the part of both gay couples and those who object on religious grounds to gay marriage. Unless they have no other choices, few gay couples want to pay for marital goods or services from people who don’t want to provide them. Few service providers object to gay marriage on religious grounds and, as Laycock suggests, fewer still believe their faith requires them to refuse goods or services (or housing) to gay couples. Plus, they want the business.

Another reason we’ve had few conflicts is that this unusually religious and pluralistic country already respects and protects religious beliefs and practices to an extent unseen anywhere else in the world. There are the federal and state constitutions protecting religious freedom. Just about every antidiscrimination law protecting gays has been the result of legislative compromise in which the scope of the law was limited, or exemptions were added, to minimize conflicts with religious objectors in the most likely contexts (like religious groups, and small businesses and landlords). Additionally, half of the states require by statute or judicial decision a compelling state interest, enforced by means narrowly drawn, for any state policy that burdens religion.

Obviously, religious individuals, businesses, and organizations sometimes lose religious-freedom claims. But they also win a lot of the time, most recently and prominently when the California Supreme Court left undisturbed a lower court decision allowing a religious school to exclude two students having a suspected lesbian relationship. The religious school was not a business, said the state courts, and thus not even subject to the state’s civil-rights law.

Richard Just proposes:

The obvious, first-glance answer is that it would be a political minefield. But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it would be eminently doable. And not only doable: It's even plausible to envision a scenario where it ends up helping Democrats by damaging conservatives.

I find the idea of focusing on the identity of these potential Justices to be depressing. That applies to pro-gay and anti-gay arguments equally. Can we please focus on ability, judgment, and temperament? You know: those things actually relevant to the job?

"The current days of the internet will soon be over," – Rupert Murdoch. He's allegedly going to make you pay to read my column. James Joyner points out the difficulty of shoving the horse backwards into an empty stable:

Pretty much everyone who has tried to charge for online news has failed.  WSJ has been something of an exception but only because they’re selling specialized content to a niche audience with a strong incentive to pay for information.   Even WSJ hasn’t tried to charge for its editorials, for example.

Chris Bertram passes along news of a recent survey showing that “Some 80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers are at least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy.”  Not only does that call into question whether they’re worth paying for but, more importantly, it demonstrates that most of the information is ubiquitous.  Unless all the news producers band together into a cartel, shuttering it off from the non-paying public, any per-per-view scheme is doomed to fail.

Adrian Monck doesn't buy the PR/newswire stat.

Or is that a fish-stick in your mouth?

My argument on why the focus on waterboarding in the torture debate is actually a distraction.

Charles Johnson's revulsion at some of his far-right-drifting fellows is backed up by Bruce Bawer in a must-read post. Money quote:

Charles is, alas, not whistling Dixie: I can testify that in the last couple of years some significant, and lamentable, shifts have taken place on the anti-jihad front.  Writers and bloggers whom, not very long ago, I would unhesitatingly have described as staunch defenders of liberal values against Islamofascist intolerance have more recently said and done things that have dismayed me, and that, in many cases, have compelled me to re-examine my view of them.

Once upon a time, these people made a point of distancing themselves from far-right European parties such as Belgium’s Vlaams Belang – whose most prominent Internet voice, Paul Belien, has declared himself to be fighting for “Judeo-Christian morality” not only against jihadist Islam but also against “secular humanism.”  Belien has made no secret of his contempt for gay people and for the idea that they deserve human rights as much as anyone else.  Now, however, many of the anti-jihadist writers who once firmly rejected Vlaams Belang have come to embrace it wholeheartedly.  In fact, for reasons unknown to me, this regional party in one of Europe’s smallest countries appears to have become, for a number of anti-jihadist writers on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing short of a litmus test: in their eyes, it seems, if you’re not willing to genuflect to VB, you’re not a real anti-jihadist.

If you wondered how long it would take for a movement that included Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer to destabilize, wonder no longer. But it is nonetheless a worrying sign. The struggle to fight against Islamist intolerance without ending up as its ideological mirror image is as hard as fighting actual Islamist terrorists without succumbing to their morality. And conservatives, broadly speaking, have failed on both counts. We need a new center on this – anti-torture, anti-Jihadist, anti-terror and religiously and ethnically tolerant. It won't be easy. It never is.

Or: why I love the Internet. Make your own Keyboard Cat Video. We at the Dish just did. It involves a certain governor.

What sane adult would be after watching this ad from the GOP Senators? Hilzoy righteously pwns them.

Drum responds to my quibble and to Michael O'Hare. The most cogent piece of Kevin's argument to my mind is the following:

The carbon exchange itself, of course, does need to be set up and kept in operation by a government agency.  That's extra work compared to a tax, and it has to be done right.  Still, this is hardly untrod territory.  There are hundreds of electronic commodity exchanges around the world and we know how to set one up.  In fact, we've done it before for other cap-and-trade programs, and the operation of the exchange itself has never been that big a deal …

O'Hare's right that cap-and-trade is no cheaper than a tax (and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise), but I think he's wrong to believe that setting the proper tax level is easier and more efficient than setting the cap level directly.  From the point of view of both politics and public support, I think it's exactly the opposite.