Month: July 2010

What Will The Administration Do About DOMA?

by Patrick Appel

Ambinder reported on Friday that Obama is in no rush. Jim Burroway wants the administration to appeal and for the case to go all the way to the Supreme Court:

There are only three ways to get rid of DOMA nationwide. Barring appeals by Obama’s Department of Justice, the first option is to get another forty-nine sets of similar rulings by federal judges in forty-nine more states. While it’s true that these Massachusetts rulings would serve as a precedent for subsequent rulings by other federal judges, those judges aren’t bound by them in the same way they would be a Supreme Court ruling. So the practical message the Obama administration would be sending if they chose not to appeal this case would be, “Congratulations, now go win 49 more. (And keep going if you want D.C., Puerto Rico and the other territories.)” I just don’t see that happening.

Should it get there, Andrew Koppelman thinks the case "has a good chance to squeak by with five votes."

How Do You Fight the Crazy Right

by David Frum

We had some excitement on the FrumForum blog this weekend. One of your young bloggers, Alex Knepper, got into a controversy with the folks over at the NewsRealBlog. You can read the backstory here.

The NewsRealBlog folks posted ferocious denunciations on their site, accusing our young blogger of sexual perversion among other offenses. For good measure, they posted on his own Facebook page as well.

How do you deal with this kind of thing? Here's perspective from a former leftie, now mainstream liberal, who sometimes blogs under the pseudonym, Eugene Debs:

You’re like some mainstream liberal, circa 1969, having dialogues with the Bill Ayers of that day–in which Ayers is telling you that if you don’t agree with him that “we” should all “off the pigs”, and lead an armed revolution, then it is you who is betraying the “true” left.  Except for one thing–Ayers, Dohrn, etc. were kids then, in their early 20s.  But, in this case, you have mature, middle aged people as the heart of the crazy movement–it’s kids like Alex Knepper who are your only hope.  This is both good and bad–good in that youth has time on its side, bad in that the middle aged Tea Party/love Palin/call-Obama-a-socialist-Nazi lunatics are already in positions of influence throughout the media and, to some extent, political office, too (the Pauls come to mind). … I don’t know how you create a sane movement, but I guess it happens one day at a time.

Losing Nate Henn

by Dave Weigel

The Associated Press reported the death of Nate Henn this way.

Explosions tore through crowds watching the World Cup final at a rugby club and an Ethiopian restaurant, killing at least 74 people, including a Delaware man. Police feared an al-Qaida-linked Somali militant group was behind the attacks, as Uganda's president declared today, "We shall get them wherever they are." Invisible Children, a San Diego, California-based aid group that helps child soldiers, identified the dead American as one of its workers, Nate Henn, 25, who was killed on the rugby field. The group said Henn called Delaware home and had played rugby at the University of Delaware while studying psychology.

Reading that, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I talked to Nate. How long had he been in Uganda? Quite a while, because his Facebook feed was basically all Africa all the time. That wasn't surprising. Growing up in Delaware, Nate was part of a circle of friends who gathered at Bethel Baptist Church more than once a week. (I went to another church but liked to get together with my friends at Bethel.) He was younger than me, three years behind me at a rival high school, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s he was the overeager, energy-to-burn kid who was first to jump in the pool, first to put up his hand in a discussion, first to screw around. The image locked in my mind is him smiling victoriously after making someone exasperated.

Natehenn But it didn't surprise me that he devoted his life to charity work. This was an extraordinary circle of friends, fun as hell, obsessed with pop culture, but absolutely devoted to living for Jesus Christ. Religious work, charity, mission work — this was simply what people did. The walls of the church were decorated with photographs and letters from families doing mission work in Africa or Asia.Many of us went to Bible college, and some of us became pastors.

Obviously I wasn't one of them. I left Delaware for England in 1998, left England for Chicago in 2000, and left Chicago for Washington in 2004. I spent four summers back in the state. During three of those summers one of my other friends directed three full-length action movies, casting Nate as a henchman in one of them. One of them was "premiered" at Bethel; all of them managed to pack in fight scenes, surrealism and pop culture references while driving home clear moral lessons. (I stand by the pop culture references in these films; one of the people Nate's character was henching for was a DVD bootlegger who can't unload his trunk of "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.) This was the most time I spent with Nate since high school, and I was struck by how much more serious he was, how excited he was about sports and school — before, he hadn't really seemed interested in either of those things.

It wasn't a surprise that Nate continued doing this, growing more and more serious about what he wanted to spend his life doing. I'm devastated by what happened. A lot of people loved Nate and depended on him, and it hurts to watch them post on his Facebook wall promises to "see you soon." It shouldn't hurt. They'll donate to the charity he worked for. They know he spent his last years on earth liberating children from war and terror, and that he is at peace and at rest with his Lord.

The Summer The Markets Lost Hope?

by David Frum

Investors and workers have endured a lot of pain over the past two years. But something seems to have snapped in recent days. Bad jobs numbers in the past month, miserable private sector job creation over the whole second quarter, the continuing (accelerating?) unwillingness of consumers to borrow and spend - all that has hit home since May.  From Monday's WSJ:

Many individual investors were tiptoeing back into stocks in the spring. Now, they're running for cover again. … U.S.-stock funds saw inflows in January, March and April, but net withdrawals resumed in May.

You want the chart? Here's the chart:

[FLEE_p1] 

Can The Democrats Recover?

by Patrick Appel

Not in the short-term:

I doubt that anything that will happen between now and election day (or anything Democrats can say) will substantially alter these views; history suggests that by now, they’re too entrenched. And Obama’s ratings, though higher than those of congressional Democrats, are hardly robust. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that in this year’s contested races, Democrats who can’t win based on local issues or opposition research will probably lose.

Palin Gets Factor’d Again

by Chris Bodenner

First on BP, now immigration reform. But despite the heat O'Reilly puts on Palin, he essentially walks her through interview, providing talking points in the form of leading questions. For instance:

BO: Alright, so no amnesty. But what do you do with these folks? Do you make them register with the federal government? Do you tell them they have 60 days to get out of here before we put you in jail? What do you do with them?

SP: Do … do we make them register with the federal government?

BO: Yeah, so we know who they are, where they are.

SP: Yes! We do!

By the end of the interview, her solution basically boils down to "secure the border, deport everyone." Even the two Fox commentators and O'Reilly rolled their eyes afterward.

Anchorage after Palin

by Dave Weigel

ANCHORAGE – In the words of one of the great mid-1990s indie movie characters: I wasn't even supposed to be here today. Alaska Airlines gave me what I thought was an obscenely good deal to visit the Aleutian Islands — a plane left Washington, D.C. at 8 a.m. Sunday, and a third plane would get me to Dutch Harbor, AK by 10:30 p.m. eastern time. Important information was not known to me when I booked this. Dutch Harbor flights are canceled all the time. The landing strip down there is described by locals as some cross between the Isle of Sirens and Endor, and it's so dangerous that low fog, like the kind they had yesterday, spurs airlines to consider the mortality of its passengers and cancel its flights.

So I accidentally wound up in Alaska's metropolis; happily, some local journalists decided to show me around and dull the disappointment. The ringleader was Shannyn Moore, a left-leaning radio host (Sorry, Republicans. You should have tweeted me.) who regaled me with stories of her car being splattered with red paint and damaged around the windows after Sarah Palin stopped being an easy-to-approach local politician and started being a global celebrity whose supporters responded… proactively to criticism.

I see why local pundits and reporters reacted the way they did to Palin's turn. In a very short amount of time, jet-lagged, I visited one local restaurant — the Bear Tooth Grill — and ran into State Sen. Hollis French, reporters for local TV and the Anchorage Daily News, and the main blogger behind Mudflats. This was a left-leaning crowd, and I didn't talk politics on the record with French, but there was plenty of confusion and amusement about how the media in the lower 48 covers Palin. (One documentary filmmaker at the restaurant downloaded Ken Vogel's scoop about Palin's new PAC and wondered what to make of the $2500 and $5000 donations to candidates versus the money spent on other promotion of Palin.) This was Anchorage, not her home base in the Wasilla, but there's no Palin merchandise on sale on gift shops, and little discussion of Palin's role in Alaska politics. As far as the left-leaning Alaska media's concerned, the political press corps is being snowed by someone who disappointed the state. But that is the view of the left, and if I can make it back here — or get stuck here — I want to see what the other half thinks.