Month: May 2009

I lived through eight years of the Clintons and then eight years of Bush. Through it all, gay people were treated at the federal level like embarrassments or impediments. With Clinton, we were the means to raise money. With Bush, we were the means to leverage votes by exploiting bigotry. Obama seemed in the campaign to promise something else. I listened to him in the early days and found him sincere about ending discrimination by the government; and I came to respect, while vehemently disagreeing with, his position on federal civil unions. He seemed genuinely distressed that gay servicemembers should be treated with contempt and persecution by their commander-in-chief, that gay couples should have to fight for basic human treatment – like entry to hospital rooms, or being able to stay in the same apartment as their late spouse, or forced into cruel separation by immigration laws that treat gay couples as threats, rather than assets, or if you had the temerity to survive HIV, being treated at the US border the way Jesse Helms always wanted people with HIV to be treated – like perverts and pariahs and threats.

It is quite something to have a government stamp in your passport, as I do, that will tell any immigration or police officer with a connection to a government database that I have HIV, that I am therefore a threat and can be arrested and detained and deported at the border if necessary. I’m a big boy with money and a robust self-esteem as an HIV-positive survivor, but I think of thousands of others far less powerful and wealthy than I am who are afraid to enter or leave the US because their HIV status renders them criminals. I think of how the US is the only developed country – and one of only a handful of undeveloped countries – that still tells the world that people with HIV are dangerous pariahs, who need policing at borders and deporting if discovered. And yet this is the current policy of the Obama administration on global HIV and AIDS.

And it’s tedious to whine and jump up and down and complain when a wand isn’t waved and everything is made right by the first candidate who really seemed to get it, who was even able to address black church congregations about homophobia. And obviously patience is necessary; and legislative work takes time; and there are real challenges on so many fronts, especially the economy and the legacy of war crimes and the permanently restive Iraqi and Afghan regions we are constantly in the process of liberating from themselves. No one expects a president to be grappling with all this early on, or, God help us, actually leading on civil rights. That’s our job, not his.

But I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on these issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away.

Here we are, in the summer of 2009, with gay servicemembers still being fired for the fact of their orientation. Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options (unlike most non-Americans with HIV who have no options at all).

And what is Obama doing about any of these things? What is he even intending at some point to do about these things? So far as I can read the administration, the answer is: nada. We’re firing Arab linguists? So sorry. We won’t recognize in any way a tiny minority of legally married couples in several states because they’re, ugh, gay? We had no idea. There’s a ban on HIV-positive tourists and immigrants? Really? Thanks for letting us know. Would you like to join Joe Solmonese and John Berry for cocktails? The inside of the White House is fabulous these days.

Yesterday, Robert Gibbs gave non-answer after non-answer on civil unions and Obama’s clear campaign pledge to grant equal federal rights for gay couples; non-answer after non-answer on the military’s remaining ban on honest servicemembers. What was once a categorical pledge is now – well let’s call it the toilet paper that it is. I spent yesterday trying to get a better idea of what’s intended on all fronts, and the overwhelming sense – apart from a terror of saying anything about gay people on the record – is that we are in the same spot as in every Democratic administration: the well-paid leaders of the established groups get jobs and invites, and that’s about it. Worse: we will get a purely symbolic, practically useless hate crimes bill that they will then wave in our faces to prove they need do nothing more.

As for the HIV ban, legislatively lifted by overwhelming numbers of Republicans and Democrats almost a year ago, this is the state of play from an Obama HHS spokesman:

The Department of Health and Human Services has submitted for OMB review a notice of proposed rule-making to implement this change.

Translation: we’re doing the bare minimum to make us look no worse than Bush, but we have no real interest in this and are letting the bureaucracy handle it, and we guarantee nothing. On gay servicemembers, the president is writing personal notes to those he has fired and intends to continue firing. Will he write some personal notes to the people with HIV he deports? Will he write personal notes to the gay spouses suddenly without a home or their late spouse’s savings or forced by his administration to relocate abroad because he has no intention of actually fulfilling his promises?

I recall my old, now dead, friend Bob Hattoy, who toiled in the Clinton administration. He was going to write a memoir of working with people who thought of homosexual rights as wonderful things to say you support (especially if you’re fundraising or at a Hollywood dinner party) but far, far too controversial to ever do anything about, let alone risk anything for. In the end, of course, the Clintons enacted a slew of brutally anti-gay measures – passing DOMA, doubling the rate of gay discharges from the military, signing the ban on HIV-positive tourists and immigrants – and expected standing ovations as pioneers of civil rights. The pathetic gay rights leaders gave it to them, so delighted were they to have their checks cashed. The proposed title of Bob’s book was a summary of the priorities of the Clinton years:

It’s The Economy, Faggot.

I have a feeling he died laughing. What else are you gonna do?

CalculatedRisk runs the numbers:

The new retail numbers are far from encouraging.

A reader writes:

Drum and Yglesias go into round five. Drum's core argument:

On a related note, Felix Salmon posts on what parts of cap and trade are economically feasible.

The photographer seems to have gotten the focus wrong a little. From the Daily Beast's gallery.

A reader writes:

You write:

"an energy policy without nuclear power cannot do anything to stop global warming"

This is simply not true.

I'm a huge proponent of nuclear power — it's carbon free energy and a complete no brainer — but saying that tackling global warming (well, CO2 emissions) requires nuclear power implies that it's remotely feasible to generate a large fraction of the United States' energy (let alone the rest of the world) using nuclear power.  Not only is this physically impossible, but even if you imagine that there's enough fissionable material out there (there isn't), it would be impossible to build and commission enough reactors fast enough to prevent an irreversible increase (on the centuries timescale, anyway) in atmospheric CO2 – here's an open-access article at PNAS that gets this point across.

During the campaign, John McCain proposed building 50 nuclear reactors by 2013.  Good idea!  It's nearly impossible to do so, but I'm all for trying.  However, those would generate less than 5% of current electricity demand, let alone the future increased electricity demand, or the very much increased demand you'll see if we ever get this promised hydrogen economy going and quit oil and coal.

The fact is that it's simply not an effective expenditure of resources to spend money decreasing CO2 emissions with nuclear power.  I'm for modernizing nuclear regulations and hope that cap-and-trade will make nuclear more profitable, but the government's money will go much, much further towards lowering emissions if it's put towards increased efficiency.  Check out this 2007 report (pdf) from McKinsey – look at the chart in Exhibit B.  In the best feasible case nuclear power offsets less than 100 megatons of CO2 emissions by 2030. That's less than 2% of our emissions today, and it'd take a decade for new reactors to come online.  The report also notes that most nuclear plants currently in operation are going to have to be retired soon; so you've got to rebuild plants on existing sites in addition to finding new ones.

If you're going to demand honesty from politicians you shouldn't help spread McCain's canard that we'll be just fine if we cut the red tape around nuclear power.  Folks on the left and the right are equally responsible for downplaying the potential consequences of global warming and the real sacrifices required to limit its effects.

Consumption is far and away the number one target, and essentially no one's talking about it.

Matt Taibbi is tired of being called a traitor for opposing torture:

I don't think my own anti-Jihadist credentials are in doubt. Just browse through the archives. As a proud gay man, I'd be one of the first to have my head sliced off by these murderous medieval morons. I want every last one of them fought with every legitimate weapon we have and brought to justice.

But you know what? They haven't been brought to justice, have they?

Bin Laden remains uncaptured, his legend alive, his minions helping to destabilize Afghanistan and now Pakistan. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed has not been tried. Almost no one has. Because Bush's torture program has made it impossible to put any of them on trial, to demonstrate, as we did at Nuremberg, how callous and deluded and vile they are. Because it would reveal our own descent into barbarism and show how Cheney's version of "truth" wouldn't survive an instant of scrutiny in a real court of law.

Instead, we sold our soul, tortured them by the hundreds and thousands in the cold cell intelligence factories Cheney set up across the world – and somehow managed to make America, seven years after 9/11, the object of moral scorn around the world. The image of a man shackled by the wrists on a wall, frozen to near-death and doused with cold water for hours and sleepless hours on end has come, these last few years, to stand for something American in the global psyche. You think that has made us safer? You know how difficult that was? 

And you know what other victims of torture in hellish despotisms across the world now know?

They know America does it too.

And a little hope is snuffed for a little while longer.

John Schwenkler argues against hate crime laws:

True, attacking someone as a means to coerce or intimidate or – perhaps – harass or provoke is reasonably regarded as a more serious crime than “mere” random assault, and it doesn’t seem inappropriate to include within the law a category that defines it as such; we do just this sort of thing, after all, in differentiating murder from manslaughter. But obviously it shouldn’t matter at all whether such a behavior was gone in for as a consequence of hatred for some vulnerable group rather than, say, some other sociopathic tendency or perhaps the desire to draw attention to some political cause.

Hate crime laws have got, in other words, everything to do with “motivation” rather than “intent”…

Exactly. The real reason for hate crime laws is not the defense of human beings from crime. There are already laws against that – and Matthew Shepard's murderers were successfully prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in a state with no hate crimes law at the time. The real reason for the invention of hate crimes was a hard-left critique of conventional liberal justice and the emergence of special interest groups which need boutique legislation to raise funds for their large staffs and luxurious buildings. Just imagine how many direct mail pieces have gone out explaining that without more money for HRC, more gay human beings will be crucified on fences. It's very, very powerful as a money-making tool – which may explain why the largely symbolic federal bill still hasn't passed (if it passes, however, I'll keep a close eye on whether it is ever used).  Will at Ordinary Gentlemen demurs:

I tend to think that crimes committed with the intent to harass or intimidate any group are bad, but crimes committed with the intent to harass or intimidate a historically marginalized group are worse. I also think there’s a fair case to be made that certain groups should receive additional protection in the form of more severe criminal punishment for offenders. If a particular crime is more likely to take place or more abhorrent than your run-of-the-mill offense, I’m in favor of prosecuting it more severely. Granted, a lot of this is context-dependent, and I don’t think federal legislation is really necessary, but under the right circumstances I can see how hate crimes enforcement could be justified.

When even defenders of hate crimes laws believe the federal boondoggle is superfluous – given the vast number of states with such laws on the books – you know it's meaningless. My fear is that the Democrats and the Obama administration will tout this as an excuse for doing nothing actually substantive to help gay citizens. How easy to pass a symbolic law that will prevent no crimes rather than, say, remove the disgusting ban on gay servicemembers. And HRC will use it as a reason to keep sending them checks. Please don't.

The Social Security and Medicare trustees reports came out yesterday. Megan suggests that the entitlements can be funded but that there are "political risk" problems.  Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Ezra Klein tackles the report, and Tyler Cowen crushes health care costs budget fallacy:

Arnold Kling responds to Biggs: