Month: October 2009

Kevin Drum urges patience on DADT. DiA takes a different stance:

Unlike gay marriage, it doesn’t present a natural opportunity for action on the state level. Individual states or cities could pass resolutions in support of ending the policy, but this would only be a symbolic gesture. So we could wait for action from Congress. But that will involve a long wait. And those service members are especially important these days. Mr Obama has already expressed an intention to end the policy, which means that he is already politically exposed (though the political risk is small). He is facing charges that he hasn’t fulfilled the campaign promises made to his gay supporters. We have already seen that this administration has an eye for the low-hanging fruit—the closing of the Hutto detention centre, for example. If the president issued an executive order calling for an immediate halt to the implementation of the policy, that would help the military and advance the cause of gay rights.

Nancy Scola argues:

The White House is showing a quiet eagerness to engage with online newsies, just not necessarily the very political and advocacy-minded folks of the political blogosphere. The new news ecosystem isn't foreign to them, they just see it — and its utility — differently. The Obama White House would much rather, it seems, route around those hard-core political bloggers and engage with the people who have positioned themselves online as community managers, folks who can be said to bring a constituency to the table (beyond the army of commenters and diarists some blogs and bloggers have). Case in point, the White House is right now, with no great fanfare, inviting the Consumerist and the Motley Fool to pull together questions for the White House on Obama's plan for reforming the "rules of the road" that the financial world has to follow, pegged of off a web video starring White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee.

(Hat tip: Ben Smith)

The White House is now offering DADT repeal details:

A spokesperson for Senator Joe Lieberman confirmed that the senator had been speaking to the White House about the bill (to repeal DADT). “Senator Lieberman has had discussions with representatives of the Administration and others on the best way to reverse this policy which he has opposed since it was first proposed in 1993,” said Marshall Wittmann, Lieberman’s press secretary…

“SLDN is working with key senators on Senate Armed Services Committee and believes the White House is actively engaged to help facilitate a timely, bi-partisan bill introduction and is also having critically needed repeal discussions within the Pentagon. SLDN is counting on getting repeal done in 2010.”

We'll see. And we'll be watching.

George Packer looks at what Obama and the generals are reading:

Richard Perle once told me that no one in Washington reads books. Not true, apparently, and it’s good to know that important ones are being read around the Obama Administration. But this competition between reading lists worries me. Back in 1993, Bill Clinton, having campaigned on the need for America to intervene in the Bosnian war, got hold of Robert Kaplan’s book “Balkan Ghosts” shortly after taking office and concluded that this was an ancient ethnic blood-feud and no one could do anything about it. That was bad history, and it led to bad policy: Clinton allowed the genocide to go on for over two more years. Books in the hands of Presidents are not necessarily helpful. (According to Karl Rove, George W. Bush read ninety-five books in 2006, the year the Iraq war was nearly lost.)

Can help you win at card games.

I'm excited to be hosting a book signing for my old friend, Tad Friend, in DC tomorrow evening. You may know Tad's writing from the New Yorker, and if you do, you know you'll love the book, which is a wry look at the decline and fall of Waspdom:

Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden–to Sylvia Plath. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Tad noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics. Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family's age-old traditions and expectations. Part memoir, part family history, and part cultural study of the long swoon of the American Wasp, Cheerful Money is a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.

The details of the reception are here.

Loinel Tiger reflects on the early human fossil research unveiled a few weeks ago:

[T]here has long been the view that Natural Man–aboriginal folks of virtually everywhere–lived in perfect harmony with their environments, moved in ecological whispers, and killed only on what they ate. But we have long known about the massacres of the fauna of North America that occurred before those over-civilized Europeans came along. Did bison herds dwindle from millions to a few thousands by committing suicide? We also recently learned that on the coasts, too, there was irrationally exuberant overexploitation of marine resources. Sentiment is for Hallmark, not the analysis of the universe.

Probably a healthy development:

The praise for Obama inside HRC’s fancy dinner and the denunciations of Obama in the streets of D.C. seemed to unequivocally confirm the split that’s emerged in the gay community in the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 8 in California. On one side, the grassroots, the netroots, many younger GLBT people and the Stonewall 2.0 folks, who are pissed off, mad as hell and aren’t gonna take it anymore. On the other side, the gay activist establishment, which seems to believe that business-as-usual “slow and steady” is still the way to go.

About halfway through the National Equality March, when it became clear that the turnout was big enough for the march to be deemed a huge success, a reporter said to Cleve Jones, “You realize you just split the gay movement in two.”

Jones nodded and grinned.

This is a very old fault-line in most civil rights movements. I do want to say again that the words Obama spoke on Saturday were meaningful and welcome and hopeful. I do not doubt his good intentions. I believe in his presidency and its transformative potential. I also understand the need for ruthless pragmatism at times. And ruthless is something Obama has actually been on many hard issues – ruthlessly putting pragmatism before purism, while not conceding principle.

But it seems to me to disrespect the president if we do not demand the change he represented. Trusting a leader to deliver was not, despite the cat-calls from the right, the point of the Obama campaign. It became bigger than him. It must remain bigger than him.

The president wasn’t vilified on the streets on Sunday as he has been recently. We are not attacking the president; we are simply demanding he do what he promised to do and supporting the troops who do not have the luxury of deciding to wait before they risk their lives for us.

We know it isn’t easy; but the Democrats need to know we weren’t kidding. You cannot summon these forces and then ask them to leave the stage. We won’t.

Remember: we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Not him, us.

Razib Khan asks if there is a anti-evolution litmus test for GOP presidential candidates:

I’m on the record as saying that predictions for 2012 are very premature. But, it looks like 3 of the front-runners for the G.O.P. nomination are rather frank Creationists (Palin, Huckabee and Pawlenty). I’m skeptical about any of these as likely candidates (i.e., if you had to make a bet you’re going to be surprised), but if you keep adding individuals to the list it seems likely that we’re looking at a serious probability that the G.O.P. nominee in 2012 will be a Creationist. Creationism doesn’t really have the same valence as abortion as a “culture war” issue, but, it useful in being a distinctive marker for social conservative candidates. Mitt Romney is now notionally as pro-life as the social conservatives, but it seems unlikely that he’ll flip his position on evolution since he expressed himself so explicitly in the 2008 debates.

Learn To Fly from Christian Letruria on Vimeo.