Month: May 2010

Joyner calls DADT repeal "still a hot button issue in much of the country." Really? A new poll:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday indicates that 78 percent of the public supports allowing openly gay people to serve in the military, with one in five opposed.

"Support is widespread, even among Republicans. Nearly six in ten Republicans favor allowing openly gay individuals to serve in the military," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "There is a gender gap, with 85 percent of women and 71 percent of men favoring the change, but support remains high among both groups."

So why has this remained so radioactive? First, the military is more influenced by Christianist thinking than many other segments of society. Second, the Democrats are still suffering from the post-traumatic stress of 1993, aka homophobia-phobia. Third, the media wants it to be radioactive because that's always a better story.

But this will almost certainly be a total non-event. And Rep. Patrick Murphy, who has spearheaded repeal, says he has the votes.

Julian Glover reviews the Queen's Speech setting out the Coalition's legislative agenda:

Compare this year's speech to Labour's, last autumn. The old speech set the state as the protector of the individual. There were promises to stimulate growth, extend training and strengthen services. The message was that government existed to do good.

Today's speech was the philosophical opposite: the emphasis was on individual rights and duties, paring back regulation and laws. This was a speech written by a government that does not trust its own strength and, as such, it did justice to the promises set out by the coalition.

What stands out most of all is the size of the ambition: 22 bills, most of them big, most of them potential flashpoints – with public service

workers, or unions, or inside the coalition.

Parliament will have to sweat this summer to pass them, even with a House of Lords that is well-disposed to much of this agenda. And this, too, is what the coalition promised.

There was a point, long ago it seems now, when it was hard to take seriously David Cameron's claim to be a liberal progressive. There was a point, just a fortnight ago, when a Tory deal with the Lib Dems was implausible. But this speech is the synthesis of those two things. It will bring a liberal revolution.

A former reporter in Afghanistan writes:

Yes, Mullah Zaeef is a moderate in Taliban world. In the late 1990s he tried to get the Taliban to allow the Internet into the country. And two years ago he bought an iPhone. I met with him a dozen times in Kabul from 2006-2009 and he was always a friendly, humane man.

Then there's this: We invited him over to our house for lunch once. At the table was Zaeef, three men and one women. I pulled out a camera to take a picture, and Zaeef whispered something to our Afghan interpreter, his way of being polite: He couldn't have his picture taken — there was a woman at the table.

That's the face of modernism in the Afghan south.

Aaron Sorkin got there first.

Friedersdorf interviews Kevin Drum about suburbia:

The problems with suburbia are also its greatest attraction: it's bland, safe, quiet, and sprawling. And, generally speaking, cheap. These are all big things that critics mock at their peril. When you hear people lament "cookie cutter stucco houses," for example, there's a condescension there that's really unseemly. The suburban middle class doesn't buy cookie cutter houses because they have no taste, they buy them because that's what they can afford. Hip, creative architecture is a lot of fun, but it's also expensive. A two thousand square foot ranch-style home built on the same plan as fifty other houses in the same neighborhood is pretty affordable.

Could suburbia be changed via policy? Sure. You can change anything via policy eventually. The question is: do suburbanites want change? And the answer, generally speaking, is that they don't: they like safe, quiet, sprawling, cheap, and kid-friendly. They may or may not like bland, but even if they don't they figure it's a small price to pay.

A reader suggests:

One mildly cynical theory: this + this = this. Getting a DADT repeal in place before Kagan's confirmation hearings goes a long way towards taking her ROTC ban off the table as a serious GOP sticking point.

Or maybe we complained loudly enough.

A salutary tale.

Jewish parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall, who is "deeply ambivalent about Israel," describes her difficulty discussing the Matzav with her young daughter:

I stumbled desperately through an explanation of why two peoples feel they have a legitimate claim to the same land. “But having land is like having a seat on a bus,” Josie replied. “You can’t just push someone out of their seat, and you can’t just leave your seat and then come back to it after a long time and just expect the person who is sitting there now to give it to you.” My panicked reaction to her words surprised me. I found myself trying to convince her that Israel did have that right. But that’s not what I believe. But I’m not sure what I believe.

I want my children to love Israel, but I don’t want them to identify with bullies. I was spinning in my own head like the desperate, overwhelmed woman in the Calgon commercial: J Street, take me away!

But Josie’s bus-bully analogy resonated. Baby-boomer Jews seem wedded to a sepia-toned image of Jews as victims—in the shtetl, in the Holocaust, in Israel’s early wars. But in real life, victims can turn into bullies. Perhaps being the parent to girls, rather than boys, helps me see this—in Mean Girl dynamics, the power shifts back and forth almost every day. We want a bright clear line, but heroes and villains in the real world are much fuzzier.

Elsewhere in Tablet, Marc Tracy asks Beinart what prompted his NYRB essay:

Having kids definitely played a role. I think it made me think about not just my Zionist identity, but what kind of Zionism was available to them. And the more I thought about that, the more I began to worry. I also think that we all operate at intellectual levels and emotional levels, and for me I just decided … There was this story in the New York Times about the Gaza War, about the house in Gaza where they found the children whose parents were dead. What you may find, if you do have kids one day, you are affected at an emotional level more strongly by certain things, in a way you may not be entirely prepared for. I think that’s a good thing, it’s primordial. I know people develop all kinds of shrewd and sophisticated and clever ways of explaining anything that happens, but when I read the story I just thought I was not in the mood to try in some clever way to explain it away. And the fact that I felt I was supposed to just sickened me a little bit.

BP's latest strategy to stanch the spill is known as "top kill," which involves pumping a heavy drilling fluid into the well lines before cementing it shut:

[BP executive Doug Suttles] said the biggest risk is the possibility that the drilling mud would be forced from the wellhead into the water instead of forcing the flow of oil and natural gas back down into the wellbore. If that occurs, Suttles said the company could then deploy what it calls the "junk shot," using tire shards, golf balls and other odd-sized debris to force it back. "That is one of the options we would have available," Suttles said. "If we saw the right conditions and felt like that would be the right next step." He said BP decided to use top kill prior to the junk shot for fear that the junk shot might clog the lines and eliminate the top kill option altogether.

If that fails, BP will try placing another containment device over the leak. Andrew Revkin thinks they shouldn't get to that point:

To my mind, if the “top kill” procedure being prepared for [Wednesday] fails, Obama must step forward far more forcefully and publicly engage an oil-well SWAT team drawing on the country’s leading lights in hydraulics, deep-ocean engineering and geology, from the Pentagon outward.