Month: November 2009

The suspect has been caught; the motive seems a workplace grudge. One person dead. Second Amendment still in force.

Catherine Rampell tries to explain the difference between two conflicting workforce estimates:

What explains a spike in unemployment in October alongside a relatively modest decline in employment during the same month?

It might be the self-employed, said Joseph Brusuelas, director at Moody’s Economy.com. Self-employed workers are not included in payroll (establishment) numbers, and the household survey data show that this group was hit particularly hard in the last month. Entrepreneurs may be doing especially badly because they are still having trouble getting financing for their businesses, Mr. Brusuelas said.

“Small businesses, start-ups and mid-size businesses — the places more likely to be captured by the household survey, but not the establishment survey — are not getting relief in the credit market,” he said. “This is perfectly illustrative of a recession caused by a financial crisis. Credit markets are healing but most of the companies benefiting are the larger companies.”

A reader writes:

I'm a straight, married man, 32 years old. My dad is an out Gay man. Mom and dad divorced when I was six, and he came out shortly thereafter. My adolescence was fraught with tense cover ups of my dad's lifestyle; draping a sheet over the bookcase of gay interest books when friends came over; drumming up odd (and, in retrospect, clearly see-through) lies to explain this or that "family friend", and why my divorced parents were still civil and could eat together at holidays. I was full of confusion and self-loathing while playing games of "Smear The Queer" on the playground and listening to homophobic rock and rap music with my friends. I'm embarrassed about my behavior to this day. I frequently feel the need to apologize for attempting to shove my own father back into the closet, even though he was already out, proud, and comfortable.

My best friend from that time also had a gay parent, and even we didn't discuss it until we were both grown men. Fake aunts, uncles, friends, and roommates were as close as we could get back then. And I grew up in San Francisco! I can only imagine what this might be like for children in less liberal parts of the country.

I want this discussion to happen earlier in life. I hope kids growing up in the future won't have the same issues. I desperately want this to be normalized, for the children. Because even though I have no problem talking about my dad's sexuality today, back then, I was deathly afraid to address it because of what it might have said about me and him both. What my friends might say, the insults they'd be able to add to their repertoire.

To focus the debate around kids' understanding of their own sexuality is missing the point; kids will always do what they do when it comes time to experiment. This is really about kids' understanding of the world around them; I pray that by the time I have a couple of my own, that there won't be any stigma attached if one of their friends has two dads.

A reader writes:

I agree with your post. The question I have been wrestling with over the past 6 to 8 months is how best to push back. I have written 'letters to the editor', I have started my own blog, I have tried to engage people who accept lies as fact, but to little avail. Ultimately, it seems that the far right wing is not interested in facts, attempting to find out what is happening around them, or even engage someone like me in civil conversation. The people I have spoken with just get pissed off, and move away. They are ”know nothings“ in a very real sense.

Knowledge is the work of the devil, it seems. It goes far beyond anti-intellectualism. It teeters on the brink of some sort of mutated religious fanaticism: it is an act of faith, a bizarre and dangerous belief that the country is being run by fascists, communists, atheists, Jews, Blacks, all distilled into one person, President Obama. Anything and everything they believe is a “right” guaranteed by the constitution and god. So what to do?

My guess is that someone or some group will fall into the abyss and turn on one of their own who has strayed from some imagined orthodoxy. They must purge their group before than can proceed with their ambiguous mission. It will play out in a tragic way. Only then will people stop and reflect upon our degenerating state of affairs. What happens after that reflection, I cannot guess. Perhaps the violence and destruction that occurred in Europe and Asia during the last century will visit our relatively tranquil shores, and the American psyche will change for the better. I have been an unredeemed optimist my whole life, but for the first time dark clouds are all I see.

I think I will drink more over the next years.

One response is also simply to challenge the Palinites to tell us specifics: what programs do you want to cut? Which war do you want to end? Which taxes do you want to raise, if necessary? How do you insure the uninsured? Instead of flailing at the dumb extremism of them all, it's important to keep demanding they contribute to the substantive debate.

But, boy, it really struck me after this email. What a perfect epitome of know-nothings than a candidate who literally knows nothing. Which is why Palin remains their candidate, and a Peronist threat to democratic life and discourse. Which is why the Dish will continue to follow her closely, even as others move on.

Megan ponders the job numbers.

From Calculated Risk. James Pethokoukis:

Remember in the early 1980s 7 straight quarters of avg. GDP growth of roughly 7% (!) lowered jobless rate by only 2.5 percentage points. Hard to see economy booming like that between now and Election Day 2010.

Reading Malkin, Dreher and Bawer and listening to Mark Steyn almost gloating on Rush today about how the Fort Hood shooting unmasks a Jihadist threat from within, one has to ask: what, even if this is true, do they expect the US government to do about it?

More vigilance toward troubled cases like Hasan – not unlike the greater vigilance that could have avoided the Virginia Tech massacre – is certainly and rather obviously a good idea. If political correctness is preventing this vigilance, it needs to be pushed back, and hard. But it is equally important not to do this crudely, to avoid impugning the overwhelming majority of Muslim-Americans who disdain violence, to sustain the civil, non-sectarian bonds that keep this country together. Because a failure to do so would surely only give Jihadism more strength, not less.

The one thing we can say about Muslim Americans this past decade is that they have not responded the way many European Muslims have.

Their more successful integration and their economic success have led to a remarkably puny number of instances in which actual Jihadists have tried actual terror attacks (and I don't mean the countless false leads pursued by Bush and Cheney and innocent people they rounded up and abused). 

So to foment the notion that every Muslim-American is now suspect, or that the military, already disproportionately controlled by Christianist forces, should monitor Muslim servcemembers as rigorously as they do, say, gay ones, would surely hurt, not help.

What troubles me about the right at the moment is that they are becoming a pure protest movement. They know what they are against, and they keep describing one issue after another as a Manichean contest – freedom or slavery, good or evil, Muslim or American, libruls and "real Americans" – in ways that do nothing practically to move the country forward. It is pure rhetoric, talk-radio politics, and dangerously contemptuous of its social consequences. When they offer us plans to balance the budget, plans to insure the uninsured, strategies to defeat Islamism, we should listen with all ears. Until then …  it's painfully immature.

Marc Lynch's take:

[If Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, is serious about not seeking re-election], then it isn't necessarily a disaster. It could shake up a failing process on autopilot, it could offer the chance to finally renew Palestinian leadership, and it could offer a way for the Gaza-West Bank, Fatah-Hamas standoff to be defused.  Nothing has changed in the last week to make me change my mind on those basic points. 

 Most of the Palestinian and Arab commentary I've seen since his announcement falls into three basic trends:  the first thinks he's bluffing, attempting to leverage his weakness into pressure on the U.S. and Israel; the second thinks it's irrelevant, because the elections will not actually be held in January; and the third is cheering his  departure, and hoping that it will lead to a collective admission that the PA's strategy has failed.  The three perspectives are obviously not mutually exclusive.  When I asked leading Palestinian academic Salim Tamari yesterday about the impact it would have on the peace process, he just looked at me quizically and said "what peace process?"

At least eight people were shot and four others wounded in another shooting spree in Orlando, Florida. This mass murderer is still at large.

Someone found some out-takes of an early photo-shoot rehearsal.