Month: May 2010

DADT legislative repeal passed a huge hurdle. Now for the full Senate vote, where many Republicans are pledging to vote against funding the military if it stops persecuting gay service-members. The Republicans, John McCain disgustingly in the lead, will apparently filibuster to prevent passage. I must say that the following notion from Congressman Franks is bizarre:

“We’re going to say, ‘No. We don’t care what you say. You can die for us on the battlefield, but you have no input into this process.’ That’s a disgrace to this institution and it’s an insult to the men and women who pour out their blood on foreign battlefields for the country that we all love so much.”

The military will have a great deal of input into this process, and will have all the time they need to implement it smoothly. That's what the year-long review is about. But the policy question is not up to the service-members. It is up to the Congress and the civilians who control the military in a free country.

A large majority of the country favors this move. And yet the current GOP is prepared to filibuster to prevent it. That means that if they gain seats this fall, they will keep gay service-members in the brutal vice of discrimination for a long time to come. That's how deep the fear goes.

(Map from Esquire which has several more on those lines.)

Scott Adams has an unusual view of the world:

I bought some BP stock recently because I liked the odds that the top engineers and scientists in the solar system, with unlimited funding, presumably somewhat freed from management meddling, could plug a hole…I also assumed that the liberal media's coverage of the oil damage would depress the stock more than necessary. It's a catastrophe, no doubt, but even catastrophes have levels. I'm betting the financial damage will be very, very, very bad and not very, very, very, very bad.

This is also a test of my theory that you should buy stocks in the companies that you hate the most. In general, you hate the companies that have the most power. And BP is the frickin' Death Star of companies. They're in the process of destroying an entire region of the world and there's still no talk of cutting their next dividend. I admire them in the same way I admire the work ethic of serial killers. There's an undeniable awesomeness about BP. I hate BP, but I still want to have their baby.

The Museum of the Moving Image puts the show in a historical context:

Four more installments here.  EW interviewed Kiefer Sutherland on the eve of the final episode. Money quote:

In the second season, we worked with the Muslim community, and I know we did a PSA. But, if you want to just take a look at 9/11, they were Muslims. Deal with it. It’s a fact, and Muslim extremists exist, and we have also done Christian right extremists, and we have also done political, Eastern block terrorists, and those who had financial and religious motives — all kinds. We weren’t going to pretend that the 22 hijackers in 9/11 weren’t Muslim. By the same token, I do believe you have a responsibility to say that this is a show about extremes. And I think you have to do whatever you can to make sure that people understand that this is not a commentary on what you believe people of the Muslim faith are doing.

The poet was a contributor back in the day. Though they got off to a rocky start:

Sometime in 1912, before Robert Frost made his famous leap to "live under thatch" in England, where he would become known as a poet, he sent some of his poems to Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and in due course received a personal reply that read, "We are sorry that we have no place in The Atlantic Monthly for your vigorous verse." Frost's submission included some of his finest early poems — "Reluctance," for example.

Sedgwick's ambiguous snub rankled in Frost's memory. During the two and a half years he lived in England his first two books of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914),  were published there, though not yet in the United States. Thanks partly to Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, Frost's poems were hailed in advance of U.S. publication as representing a new American voice. In February, 1915, North of Boston was published in New York, just as the Frost family set foot back in the United States.

Response to this new book of poems about New England was nearly immediate, and Frost was quickly in demand for public appearances. On May 5, 1915, he came to Boston from his new home in Franconia, New Hampshire, to be heard at Tufts University, where he read three of his as yet unpublished poems: "Birches," "The Road Not Taken," and "The Sound of Trees." The day after his Tufts appearance, he called on Ellery Sedgwick at the Atlantic offices, which the magazine shared with Houghton Mifflin Company at 4 Park Street. Sedgwick had just received a letter from the noted English editor and critic Edward Garnett (also the discoverer of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence), in which Garnett wrote that "since Whitman's death, no American poet has appeared, of so unique a quality, as Mr. Frost." It's not surprising that Sedgwick received Frost with a warm welcome and began by asking if Frost had any new poems for The Atlantic.

Listen to three of his published poems here (and a rejected one here). Read Edward Garnett's 1915 essay "A New American Poet" here. Check out Mark Van Doren's 1951 cover story here.

Charneé Ball, a Navy veteran discharged under DADT, is on a mission to get her GI Bill benefits reinstated and ultimately return to service:

Friedersdorf smacks down Andy McCarthy's new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America:

It is perfectly fine for Mr. McCarthy to forcefully disagree with the rhetoric President Obama uses when discussing national security. Unfortunately, this first excerpt of Mr. McCarthy’s book isn’t an argument against President Obama’s rhetoric, it is a wildly, serially misleading, factually inaccurate account of the rhetoric he uses that better resembles an alternative universe.

It is so easily shown to be false that it ought to exist only in the author’s mind. Unfortunately, this misinformation is being touted by Rush Limbaugh as piercing, Michelle Malkin is recommending it to her readers, and Mark Levin is calling it “thorough” and “cutting edge," and few of their listeners will question the facts the book presents because they foolishly if understandably underestimate the capacity for intellectual negligence perpetrated by these hosts everyday.

Election season approaches. The essentials:

(Hat tip: Balko)

Joshua Tucker dissects the latest Family Research Council "report" on "homosexual assaults in the military." And Alvin McEwen examines the "reports'" authors. They're just desperate at this point. And casting some servicemembers as infected molesters and rapists does not seem like supporting the troops to me.

Rob Tisinai proposes replacing it with "romantic orientation." I prefer "affectional orientation" myself.