Month: March 2010

As is quite obvious, if you want fiscal recklessness back in power, you need to vote Republican. Their record since George H W Bush's admirable, patriotic decision to raise taxes – followed by Clinton's responsible, Eisenhower-style first budget – gave us the surplus in 2000. Since then the GOP, led by Dick "Deficits Don't Matter" Cheney and Karl "Voters Don't Care About Deficits" Rove, has been a fiscal nightmare. Paul Ryan's budget proposals, however debatable, are the first sign that a measure of fiscal  sanity can be found somewhere in the GOP).

So where are his Republican allies? Ambers explains:

Here's what Ryan would do:

Massive, across the board tax cuts. (Cue the familiar arguments about the tax code's progressivity and significant tax process simplification.)  To balance out the revenue streams, Ryan would impose an 8.5% business consumption tax, which would, in theory, place more of a burden on middle class families than the rich, as the taxes would get passed along to consumers. …

Because deficit reduction is so intimately linked to health reform, Ryan would focus on reducing long-term burden of Medicare and Medicaid; the programs would be significantly revamped, and eventually significantly reduced, and while the level of benefits could remain the same, the way the benefits are delivered would change — vouchers would be used to incentivize private insurance plan purchasing…

Ryan endorses a version of President Bush's partial privitization of Social Security, giving younger Americans the option of investing as much as a third of their money, and filling the multi-trillion dollar transition gap that would result by using general revenue. In other words, the rest of the government budget might have to be significantly cut in order to allow Social Security to be saved…

This isn't a non-serious plan. But Republicans don't seem to be ready to risk the accusation that they want to end Medicare (a very popular program), privatize Social Security (a non-starter), raise taxes on the middle class (by proxy) — by affixing their name to a specific plan that does just that.

So the question for Republicans is: yes, Paul Ryan has a plan. But if you don't support it, then what, specifically, would you do to reduce the deficit over the long term?

My answer: because the GOP has no interest in fiscal balance, as they proved under Bush and Cheney and to a lesser extent under Reagan. They're fiscal frauds. If they weren't the Tea Party movement wouldn't need to exist.

Thiessen claims that the John Adams comparison is bogus because the Boston Massacre soldiers "were Adams’ fellow countrymen – not foreign enemies of the state at war with his country." Were Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh not fellow-countrymen? Was Padilla not seized on American soil at O'Hare airport?

Matt Corley goes in for the kill:

Yesterday, Perino and Burck published an article on National Review Online detailing how Holder contributed to, but neglected to tell the Senate about, an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was held as an enemy combatant. Another one of the lawyers smeared by the ad, Joseph Guerra, now Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, worked on a brief urging that the Supreme Court hear Padilla’s case. Another DoJ lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Tony West, worked on the case of “American Taliban” Johh Walker Lindh, an American citizen.

"Owe your banker £1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed," – Keynes.

Bruce Bartlett explains how that relates to the debt the US owes the Chinese here.

"The president is a person, not a product. We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand,” – David Axelrod to Desiree Rogers.

Just as Jewish settlers enjoying their new homes in East Jerusalem are repellent for singing songs in praising mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein, so it seems to me is it utterly unnecessary for the PA to take this moment for

the inauguration of a square named after Dalal Mughrabi, the Fatah woman who led the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 37 Israeli civilians and an American photographer were killed and 71 people were wounded.

Mercifully, this ceremony was postponed yesterday.

A reader writes:

In 1984 my daughter was in the second grade and outed us. How? It was Valentine's Day and she drew a big heart with an arrow through it that said, "Dad loves Ted".

I still have it.

P.S. Her teacher was *horrified* and told the school principle. Another teacher who had a gay son told me that my family was the subject of ridicule in the teacher's lounge. I try to forget that.

Another writes:

In response to your video posting today, I just want to reiterate that yes, kids do get it.  A friend of mine has a 7-year-old son whom she asked if he wanted to attend the Pride parade with her and some friends.  He said yes and got very excited about being in a parade, but the morning of the parade, he was quiet and seemed confused at breakfast.  When my friend asked him what was wrong, he asked her what "gay" meant.  She explained it to him, in an age-appropriate way, and he pondered this for a moment before saying, "Yeah, that makes sense," and went on eating his breakfast.  And, incidentally, had a great time at the parade.

The Christianist Right in this country knows this.  Why do you think they're so terrified of the normalizing effect of gay marriage, and gay marriage being "taught" in schools?

Another:

My partner and I have been together for over 20 years now. My partner's sister has a now 21-year-old son who has never known anything other than my partner and me being at all family functions.  We were visiting his family and he wanted to take us to a free wine tasting. At the wine tasting a woman started a conversation with the nephew and it soon became apparent that my partner and I were with him.  She asked, "Who are these guys?"  Without any hesitation he answered, "These are my uncles."

It almost brought a tear to my eye.

Another:

Three of my nephews live in southern West Virginia in a town with a lot of bigotry, much of it tacitly accepted. I've made a project of taking them out-of-state on my visits and eventually succeeded in bringing the eldest out to San Francisco, where I live, after overcoming the amorphous fears of his parents.

At about age 13 or 14, on his first visit, John told me that he hated gay people and thought they should be put in jail because they are "against the Bible." No amount of discussion between us or even fussing on my part could change his mind.

I live in an apartment building with a shared courtyard and we're a pretty friendly group of tenants who enjoy spending time together. One rare sunny day, John and I went out to the courtyard to play chess in the garden's 'chess corner.' Two couples were already there, Will and Darren, Jade and Janice. I realized my nephew was thrilled to be hanging out with the grown-ups without knowing that most of the grown-ups were gay. I went inside.

About two hours later, he stomped into the apartment and without preamble announced, "Aunt Michelle, I don't hate gay people any more. And did you know that the clitoris is just for pleasure?"

For maximum funny, my story should probably end there but I have to add that John, now 23, is recently back from 13 months in Iraq serving in the U.S. Army. Of course he has gay friends in the Army. Hate in the abstract is easy. Thanks to some caring and generous adults, my nephew got that monkey off his back pretty early and I hope the experience continues to serve him well. I am so proud of him.

(Photo: my and Aaron's nieces as ring-bearers at our wedding in 2007.)

A reader writes:

I am a capital habeas lawyer.  I spend my days looking at crime scene videos and autopsy photos, and learning about the details of my clients' trauma-filled lives.  I have experienced some of what the secondary trauma literature refers to as "numbing"–a dampened ability to react to photos/videos/facts that would horrify most people.  But when I happened upon the photo of the dead and buried Palestinian girl, I was shocked and disturbed.

When someone in our office sends a disturbing photograph to be printed at a communal photocopier, he/she sends an email to the office warning others, who may happen upon the copy machine, that disturbing images are being printed.  I wish you would do the same for your readers.  Why not put the photo of the dead girl below the jump, and include a warning above the jump?

I appreciate the need to inform people about important events, and sometimes that information comes in the form of photographs.  But some readers, for whatever reason, may feel they cannot handle such a photo, and those people deserve a warning. I do not think I am being unreasonably alarmist when I say that you may be subjecting readers to trauma from which some will have a very difficult time recovering.

The Dish has shown deeply disturbing photos from all parts of the world – refugee children, victims of torture, victims of terrorism, bodies lined in a row from ethnic warfare in Iraq, gay boys hanging in Iran, recently a dead cattle in Mongolia. We have published Muhammed cartoons and the beheading of Nick Berg. It is my belief that readers should look at the reality of the world and face it squarely. I think too much of the MSM is too sensitive to print the news that is necessary to print.

I appreciate that some readers do not want to see these images and I am sorry if they suffer trauma from it. But it is nothing like the trauma that the parents of that child felt, whose death was partly funded by US military aid. If you do not want to see these graphic images, please stop reading the Dish.

Alma Guillermoprieto reflects on Mexico City's embrace of marriage equality:

Does this mean that Mexico, long considered a bastion of machismo, is in fact less sexist than, say, California? Quite possibly, although, as elsewhere in Latin America, matters are more complicated than that. It was not so long ago that gay men were murdered by the dozens in Yucatán, and in the capital itself there have been a number of murders of gay men that could be either the work of a single psychopath or part of a campaign. Homophobic jokes and all forms of physical and psychological harassment are common.

During the years of its absolute hold on power, the Institutional Revolution Party (P.R.I.) was the very embodiment of machismo, ruling through arbitrariness, authoritarianism, and the permanent threat of violence against the weak. Yet it had three chairpersons who were women. All three were single, and rumors about their sexual orientations were common, but none of this posed an obstacle to their stunning rise in politics. Elsewhere in Latin America there have been presidents more or less known to be gay, though none have openly declared this. On the other hand, as I wrote on newyorker.com recently, ultra-macho presidents like Álvaro Uribe and Hugo Chávez enjoy great popularity.

Austin Bramwellargues that urban sprawl is centrally planned. Yglesias reads through a Phoenix zoning ordinance:

[W]alkable urbanism is illegal in most of the county. Not just giant skyscrapers, but anything even remotely non-sprawling.