Month: May 2010

Ambinder explains the mechanics of the DADT compromise:

It is a REPEAL with a TRIGGER mechanism. The repeal will be on the books, but policy won't change until certain thresholds are crossed. Those thresholds happen to be the same conditions that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen (C/CJS) had already set — no impact on readiness, recruitment, effectiveness, retention, and unit cohesiveness. However, repeal will become official policy; not if, but when becomes set in stone. Gates, initially hesitant to upend his timetable, which saw his work being finished in December and repeal early next year, agreed to compromise language. That's because Gates gets to make the final call as to when. There appears to be enough votes in the Senate to add this provision to the defense appropriations markup. The House might add language THIS WEEK. A victory for gay rights groups who had been pushing Congress and the White House to act more quickly; key players include Sens. Lieberman, Levin, Rep. Murphy, Speaker Pelosi and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, in whose hands the president delegated the task.

Dale Carpenter adds:

The repeal is limited in one sense. It does not ban discrimination against gays in the military. It returns the status quo ante DADT in 1993 when the president had sole authority to set military personnel policies on gays. The difference is that now the president has promised to reverse the old policy after a study is issued in December on how to implement the change. 

In theory, the next president could reassert the ban. But that’s very unlikely to happen once gays are serving openly. Liberalization of anti-gay public policy tends to be governed by one-way ratchet. Plus, the experience in other countries has been that allowing service by openly gay personnel presents no real problems for recruitment, retention, or discipline, and controversy about it quickly subsides.

And Drum zooms out:

So if things go the way I think they'll go, by later this year Obama, Pelosi, and Reid will have passed a historic stimulus bill, the Lily Ledbetter Act, healthcare reform, college loan reform, financial reform, repeal of DADT, and Obama will have withdrawn from Iraq.¹ Not bad for 18 months of work. And who knows? There's even a chance that Obama's Afghanistan escalation will work. If it does, what president since LBJ will have accomplished more in his first term?

¹Except for the pesky "residual force," of course. Still, once the combat forces are gone, it's hard to see a scenario in which they're ever sent back in.

My major fear up to now has been that the repeal could get lost legislatively if the GOP made big gains in the House and Senate this fall, as is historically almost certain. This compromise removes the basis for that fear, while allowing the military and the defense secretary to manage the transition to ensure a smooth ride. I hope it works. If it does, it really will be a feather in the cap of Jim Messina, the good folks at SLDN and Servicemembers United, and the Obama administration. It will also redound to the credit of those who did not give up on this, who refused to concede that this was not a civil rights question of the first order, and to the countless servicemembers, past and future, who put their lives and careers on the line for this change.

It's been a long two decades. So long one almost feels numb at exactly the moment one should feel exhilarated. But that's probably how all such breakthroughs feel, when they eventually happen. For the first time in American history, gay people will be deemed fully worthy of the highest call of patriotism – to risk one's life for the defense of one's country.

In that sense, for the first time, the Congress and president will treat them as fully citizens.

(Photo: Former Coast Guard Academy Cadet Bronwen Tomb (L), who was removed after telling another cadet she was gay, former Air Force Staff Sgt. David Hall (C), who was removed from the Air Force Academy after being accused of but not admitting to being gay, and Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, who served as a lesbian, listen during a news conference on Capitol Hill March 3, 2010 in Washington, DC. U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) has introduced legislation to repeal the U.S. military's don't ask don't tell policy for gays and lesbians serving in the military. By Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images.)

Homer, Alaska, 8.10 pm

Bainbridge tackles Bartlett on tax hikes or national security cuts.

Jonah Lehrer lobs grains of salt at a UCLA study finding that children don't increase happiness:

The fact of the matter is that it's much easier to quantify pleasure on a moment-by-moment basis, or document the swing of cortisol levels in saliva, that it is to quantify something as intangible as "unconditional love". Changing a diaper isn't enjoyable, and teenagers can be such a pain in the ass, but having kids can also provide a profound source of meaning. (I like the amateur marathoner metaphor: survey a marathoner in the midst of the race and they'll complain about their legs and that nipple rash and how the endless route. But when the running is over they are always incredibly proud of their accomplishment. Having kids, then, is like a marathon that lasts 18 years.)

I am in awe of you.

Sarah Palin meets her new neighbor, journalist Joe McGinniss. Classy:

Wonder what kind of material he’ll gather while overlooking Piper’s bedroom, my little garden, and the family’s swimming hole? Welcome, Joe! It’ll be a great summer – come borrow a cup of sugar if ever you need some sweetener. And you know what they say about “fences make for good neighbors”? Well, we’ll get started on that tall fence tomorrow …

Footage from ABC News of what the spill looks like from beneath the waves. The money shots begin at 1.30.

Andrew Sprung tries to wrestle some kind of rationality from Sarah Palin's latest magical realism … and fails:

We are literally in fantasyland, where it's natural to body forth the possibility that Obama has been influenced by oil money and then conjure a Republican president who's received "even less" than Obama but whom the media will assume (as it would have with Bush, who received proportionately more of the industry's dollars, but never mind…) is more influenced than Obama is (was).  And just as the slip about "support by the oil companies to the administration" suggests the opposite of what she purportedly means, so the "even" in "even as much," taken literally, would seem to suggest that Obama hasn't received much from the oil industry. 

It all makes sense in her own head. She has a priori conclusions and reasons through bad grammar and total fantasy to the alleged premises. And this is not a bug for Palin Inc. It's a feature.

Bernstein wants to take judges off the ballot:

It's not remotely realistic to expect that voters make careful decisions about judges. Not really because of the technical expertise needed to do so, but because of the numbers game. Voters don't sit down and carefully consider the case for and against handfuls of state judges, on top of federal, state, and local legislative and executive branch candidates, not to mention in many places both state and local ballot measures. Instead, voters use shortcuts, with the big one being party affiliation. O'Connor's preference is for a yes/no vote on incumbent judges (something already used in some states), but in reality voters have no idea who their states' judges are, much less whether they're doing a good job or not. What this translates into is incumbent judges who are safe unless they annoy a well-funded interest group, a coalition of groups, or a political party. Is that really what we want? Judges who know that their jobs are safe as long as they don't rattle any cages — at least not any cages that can do full-scale opposition research and produce TV ads?

Elizabeth Kolbert puts the BP spill in context:

While the point of “peak oil” may or may not have been reached, what Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College, has dubbed the Age of Tough Oil has clearly begun. This year, the United States’ largest single source of imported oil is expected to be the Canadian tar sands. Oil from the tar sands comes in what is essentially a solid form: it has to be either strip-mined, a process that leaves behind a devastated landscape, or melted out of the earth using vast quantities of natural gas.

(Image: Oily water is seen at sunset at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill May 11, 2010 off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. By Gerald Herbert/Getty Images.)

TNC guest-blogger, Darius Tahir, rates a series of movie adaptations:

Great books are great books; that is, they're great books because they're great at being books. And many of the qualities that make a book great as a book aren't portable to movies. Any kind of inner voice; psychologizing; stream of consciousness; many kinds of allusion; many kinds of wordplay, and I'm sure there are more examples that I didn't think of. 

That's why it's a pretty bad idea to try your hand at the great books, though people keep on trying (The Great Gatsby, say, or All the King's Men). No, were I a director, I would only choose to adapt mediocre books with promise.