Month: September 2010

Since September 11, 2001, that's been the justification for every new encroachment on civil liberties, and this time is scarcely different:

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

This logic would be a good basis for a science fiction story about the invention of telepathy, and the government's inevitable insistence that it needs to tap into our brains. Greenwald explains why this news is more extreme than it first appears:

The new law would not expand the Government's legal authority to eavesdrop — that's unnecessary, since post-9/11 legislation has dramatically expanded those authorities — but would require all communications, including ones over the Internet, to be built so as to enable the U.S. Government to intercept and monitor them at any time when the law permits.  In other words, Internet services could legally exist only insofar as there would be no such thing as truly private communications; all must contain a "back door" to enable government officials to eavesdrop …

Former drug czar William Bennett is pining for the good old days:

Back when our country was making a serious assault on drug abuse, a show like "Weeds" would never be aired. Today it is promoted in full page ads in our nation's most popular magazines. This, for a comedy about the life and times of a marijuana-growing and -dealing family. As the head of the network that produces and airs "Weeds" put it, "Our ratings were va-va-va-voom! Who said hedonism is passé?" This, for a show where one is lured to root for a family responsible for the death of a DEA agent, children dropping out of school, gang violence and rape.

Does the formerly compulsive gambler Bennett recognize any distinction between pleasure and medicine and … hedonism?

And, of course, what Bennett doesn't mention is that the drug policy he presided over and implemented led to the deaths of DEA agents, countless innocents victimized by violence associated with the black market for narcotics, and deaths by overdose that are the consequence of prohibition, which incetivizes the production and sale of more potent drugs.

Says Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner:

After the destruction that the drug warriors have caused in this country and others (not to speak of their disastrous contribution to the war in Afghanistan), a little more humility on their part would go a long, long way. We’ve yet to see it…

On a brighter note, we are getting closer to releasing "The Cannabis Closet" as a resource to support Prop 19 in California.

Some feedback on the new Dish feature we've been waiting on for almost two years now:

YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

Oh the joys of the new collapsible post format.  I clicked Read On, went into my normal wait-for-the-screen-to-refresh mode, and viola!  There was the whole post right away.  I love it!

The new "read on/collapse" feature is simply sublime. Great improvement to a seemingly un-improvable blog.

Thanks so much! I will now read more of your posts all the way through. I've got such a pet peeve with opening new pages to continue articles.

Reading The DD on a mobile phone is a lot easier now.

The Daily Dish is now the PERFECT website! I normally load up my browser with my daily reading in the morning, go offline, and return throughout the day. It's always annoying when I want to follow your longer posts because it means I have to plug in the stick again, wait, find the right network … very cumbersome. You probably just saved me 15 minutes of life everyday.

As a hardcore Dish reader of many years, your long-awaited deliverance of the "Read On" feature has led me to reassess my atheism.

Thanks so much for this technical goodie. It keeps me from opening a dozen tabs because there's never a lack of stuff I HAVE TO read/see/hear.  The Dish is so integrated into my thinking process that something so seemingly small really makes a huge difference.

 

Makes me think I might not die of carpal tunnel after all.

Love the new Read On feature. I've been using it and appreciating it on Salon for a while. I admire your publisher for allowing this; as an online ad sales guy, I know you've substantially reduced your inventory by implementing this feature.

About time!!!

I'm a very long-time reader. I'm also a web professional, so I know it's not always easy to do this stuff as fast as your readers want. I first noticed the feature, and most appreciated it, when I was reading on my iPhone.  It was much easier to read without jumping through the multiple page reloads, back-and-forths, or multiple tabs. I love it.

I love you. All of you. Every single one of you. Unconditionally.

Wonderful! Please send enormous thank-yous to whoever is responsible for the "Read On" feature.

You just did.

(Image via Etsy)

Joe Klein is still on the road. His advice to the President on the Afghanistan War:

Less knowledgeable civilians are completely perplexed by the war–and wondering why we're spending so much money over there at a moment when we're struggling back here. When I try to explain that it has to do with stabilizing the region, that it's mostly about our need to make Pakistan–with its 80 nukes and history of Islamist army coups–feel more secure, eyes quickly glaze over.

This is a factor that should guide the President in the December policy review: if he decides to dial back in Afghanistan–to Joe Biden's less ambitious model, perhaps–he will be noisily criticized by the neoconservatives (who seem a far more significant presence in Washington than they do out in the country), but most civilians will either not care or not mind.

As Dan Savage writes, "it's not just students who live in fear":

Dan talks to the NYT about his project:

Q: Aren’t celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Adam Lambert already showing teenagers that it’s O.K. to be gay?

A: They see Ellen and Adam Lambert and Neil Patrick Harris. They’re good folks and important public figures, but those are gay celebrities. What are the odds of becoming a celebrity? What kids have a hard time picturing is a rewarding, good, average life for themselves. Becoming Ellen is like winning the lottery. But there are a lot of happy and content lesbians who we don’t see or hear from ever.

Those are the people teens need to hear from right now. When a 15-year-old kills himself, he’s saying he can’t picture a future that is decent enough and happy enough to stick around for. Gay adults can show our present lives and help them picture a future.

Q: The video advice you offer kids is to just hang in there. Why aren’t you telling them that you can help them now?

A. We can’t help them.

That’s what makes gay adults despair and feel so helpless when we hear these stories. We can’t barge into these schools. I get to go to colleges and speak, but high schools don’t bring me in, and those are the ages that young gay people are committing suicide. I’ve read these stories for years. Because of technology, we don’t need to wait for an invitation anymore to speak to these kids. We can speak to them directly.

The Chicago Sun-Times lauds the project. Dan highlights more videos here, here, and here.

Larison makes the case for Romney:

The latest version of Romney is the one who fiercely denounces health care legislation and urges its repeal. A substantial percentage of Republican primary voters in 2008 overlooked his complete lack of credibility on a range of issues on which he pretended to be the true conservative candidate, and without McCain in the race sucking up the support of all the moderate primary voters Romney will probably gain their support as well. The voters who regard Romney as too fake and too unprincipled will probably be split several ways by a large field of candidates, and the new Republican rules for awarding delegates will benefit the candidate who is best able to compete in many different kinds of states and who has the resources and organization to have a campaign presence across the country. All of that leaves Romney with a decent chance at the nomination. His nomination will be a debacle for the GOP of a different sort, but it seems the most likely outcome whether or not the public mood changes.

New York, New York, 11 am

That's how Marty Beckerman describes the dynamic between Ann Coulter and gay attendees of Homocon 2010:

In her speech on Saturday, Coulter says that "not only can gays be conservative, you pretty much have to be," because they are the "highest income demographic," because "gays are too stylish to work for the federal government," because radical Muslims want to execute them, and because "once [scientists] find the gay gene, guess who's getting aborted?"

This is the same Coulter, of course, who is comfortable with the word "faggot," wrote that Rick Santorum's comparison of gay sex to bestiality is an "indisputably true point," told an interviewer that sexually active gay men should "feel guilty about it," and mocked the "irritating lesbian" teenager in Tennessee who wanted to bring her girlfriend to senior prom.

When The Politics Blog asks her why gay conservatives still gravitate toward her, Coulter dips back to the humor well: "Gays are the least politically correct people in the world — they like my jokes." And then there's this, which is apparently not a joke because she repeats the sentiment a half-dozen times throughout the night: "Gays are against gay marriage."

It's important to note that this bigot was not invited by Log Cabin Republicans (GOProud is a splinter group) and that her words received what Politico called a "mixed response."

Many of us fought for years to construct a conservatism that treated gay people as individuals and as equal citizens. We fought, as GOProud does, to rebut the notion that being gay means being a socialist or a leftist. But we also fought to have core civil equality recognized – in military service and marriage, and we fought against an agenda that placed gay victimology at its center. What GOProud has done, in inviting this woman, is much more than that: it is to invite someone who actively opposes our civil equality – equal rights, not special rights – and whose record of anti-gay bigotry is as plain as the collar bones on her shoulders.

Matt Yglesias argues that we shouldn't always focus on the best arguments. Rebutting the worst arguments is easier and more efficient in raising the level of public discourse. One question: how do you rebut a Senatorial candidate who believes that the earth was made 6,000 years ago?