Month: October 2010

Kyle Berlin tours America's "first official cannabis factory, a 60,000 sq. ft. facility in Oakland that would house 30,000 plants and could produce $50 million of cannabis per year":

Security will be an issue for any pot factory; cannabis sells at about the same price per ounce as gold, making this facility something of a horticultural Fort Knox.

"We're in talks with serious security contractors — ex-military, ex-Navy SEALs, people with extensive experience guarding high-value properties," [Derek Peterson, co-founder of Gropech] said. "We've got one shot. If something happens — if there's a break-in, or a worker is hurt, or something happens to the plants — then every naysayer is going to come out of the woodwork and say, 'I told you it couldn't be done.'"

Astoria, New York, 6 pm

That's what American captives did, exploiting the cultural ignorance of the Hermit Kingdom.

Senator Jim DeMint is often cited as its key Congressional leader. Here he is in South Carolina:

“People are beginning to see that there's no way we can pay the interest on our debt and every week, we're borrowing money to pay the debt we have and are creating new programs that are costing more money,” he said. “Hopefully in 2012, we'll make headway to repeal some of the things we've done, because politics only works when we're realigned with our Savior.”

DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn't be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn't be in the classroom. “(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense,” he said. “But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.”

"Freedom to religion" [sic] means firing gay high school teachers. Fiscal conservatism is to "realign with our Savior." On gay high school teachers, it's worth remembering that Ronald Reagan as long ago as 1978 aligned with Harvey Milk in opposing discrimination in the Brigg's Initiative. His op-ed before the initiative was regarded as a turning point against the anti-gay teacher crusade:

The timing is significant because he was then preparing to run for president, a race in which he would need the support of conservatives and moderates very uncomfortable with homosexual teachers. As Cannon puts it, Reagan was "well aware that there were those who wanted him to duck the issue" but nevertheless "chose to state his convictions."

Reagan penned an op-ed against the so-called Briggs Initiative in which he wrote, "Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this." This was a remarkably progressive thing for a politician, especially a conservative one about to run for president, to say in 1978. The Briggs Initiative was overwhelmingly defeated. Its sponsors blamed Reagan for the defeat.

Please don't tell me these people have moved past Christianism.

Ken Silverstein is quitting DC:

I just no longer have the energy to cover Washington. I’ve loved working for Harper’s, but, as I told Mediabistro, “Washington and Washington politics has worn me down. Every time I write a story I feel like I wrote it a year ago and five years ago and 10 years ago. Nothing ever changes here.” …  When you can read an entire column by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and never once feel the urge to cut out your own heart with a dull knife, you know that you no longer have the sense of outrage that is essential to reporting from our nation’s capital.

Amen. If I didn't escape to the Cape for four months a year, it would be a struggle. The daily, hourly exposure to this is draining, unless you give in to partisanship, schtick or phoning it in. I try not to.

But so much of this city's official culture repels me, nauseates me, sickens me. What keeps me here are the many wonderful people who also flock here, the hope of the young, the friends outside of politics, the neighborhoods that are still full of life and diversity and humor. And, of course, the Dish tries to think about much much more than Washington. And I simply could not do it without Chris, Patrick, Zoe and Conor.

Jon Chait skewers the book recently written by Arthur Brooks:

The premise of The Battle is that America is fighting a “culture war,” but this culture war is not over social issues—it is over economic ones. A culture war, of course, is a zero-sum fight between two antithetical values in which compromise is impossible. That is how Brooks portrays the conflict between statism and free enterprise that has been unleashed by Obama’s radical attack on American values. “These competing visions,” warns Brooks, “are not reconcilable: We must choose.”

It is a curious premise. After all, economics is very different from social issues precisely because it is rife with positive-sum outcomes (i.e., prosperity) and because it pertains to technical questions amenable to data and difference-splitting.

What’s more, Democrats do not advocate communism and Republicans do not advocate anarchy. Both parties favor some mix of market and state. Even Paul Ryan, whose purist small-government vision has enthralled the conservative movement (and who forms a mutual admiration society with Brooks), advocates a federal government that consumes 19 percent of the economy. Democrats advocate a government that consumes, in the long run, around one-quarter of the economy. Is it really not possible to imagine a compromise between these two visions?

As told by aerial photographs from southwest Florida.

Well, this may be a little generous, but he is genuinely, I think, trying to back up his feelings with real ideas. This is not thinking, of course. Thinking is challenging your feelings with ideas. But I think Mark Oppenheimer is onto something when he describes Beck's refusal to treat his audience as people who could not possibly be interested in history, or philosophy, or a somewhat half-baked congeries of ideologies, philosophies and conspiracy theories. He's not stupid – he got into Yale. He's kind of a smarter but less insecure Jonah Goldberg who made it on his own merits. Mark Leibovich's brilliant NYT profile of him yesterday captured a little of the malign innocence of those green blackboards, the kind of atmosphere that made me laugh ("We hate Woodrow Wilson!") but also almost admire. Here's Beck mocking himself as a young intellectual:

He embarked on a period of “searching” and self-education. The process was largely haphazard. He tells of walking into a bookstore and loading up on books by a hodgepodge that included Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Carl Sagan, Nietzsche, Billy Graham and Adolf Hitler. “The library of a serial killer,” he called it.

His formula was not cooked up by Ailes as condescending Hannityism:

“If you were in an imaginary meeting for a TV show,” Bill Shine, Fox News’s programming director, says, “and someone said: ‘I have an idea. Let’s spend a month talking about the founding fathers and get a bunch of pictures of Benjamin Franklin and hang them up,’ you’d be like, ‘What?’ But it works.”

When he tries to talk of a distinction between Jesus' admonition to help the poor and socialism, he is not nuts; but his excitability and emotional vulnerability get the better of him and his arguments. He is utterly, inexcusably irresponsible a great deal of the time (on Obama and race, for example), but what distinguishes him from O'Reilly or Hannity is his obvious occasional self-doubt, captured hilariously in this 2 am letter to Sarah Palin:

I said: ‘Sarah, I don’t know if I’m doing more harm or more good. I don’t know anymore.’

This is not, I think it's fair to say, a question that has ever occurred to Sarah Palin. Back to Oppenheimer's point:

Glenn Beck actually appeals to listeners by offering them intellectual sustenance (or something pretending to be). My dad was in a Dunkin’ Donuts recently — we are from Massachusetts, after all — and a woman he met there said, “You know, Beck discovered that FDR knew the Japanese were going to invade. Beck has a whole staff of researchers learning things for him.”

And as Leibovich notes, Beck can hold people spellbound by talking about the founding fathers and whatnot. Here is the point: the theologian Stanley Hauerwas was once talking to me about premillennial dispensationalists — you can Google it, if you care, but it is a kind of fundamentalist Christian, basically — and he said, “You know, their theories about the end times are not for stupid people. You have to be smart to follow that stuff.” His point was that people want ideas to chew over, they appreciate complex ideas, and they will gravitate toward people or institutions who seem to offer them red meat of that particular kind. Beck with his incredibly convoluted theories, the gold-standard stuff, the hatred for Woodrow Wilson: he really is offering a pretty deep, if internally inconsistent, worldview for people who do not have another worldview, like progressivism or Marxism or monetarism or even Christianity, in place. And he is offering books and thoughts and ideas, without condescension, to people who may not be comfortable getting such ideas from the Times or National Review.

(Photo: Fox News personality Glenn Beck speaks during the 'Restoring Honor' rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the National Mall on August 28, 2010 in Washington, DC. Beck held the rally on the 47th anniversary of the 'I Have a Dream' speech of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to 'restore America.' By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Glibertarian Glenn Reynolds proclaims that the Tea Party “is now the single most powerful political force in the nation.” It’s certainly an influential force in the 2010 midterms. As yet, however, it hasn’t actually accomplished anything. And few of its candidates have offered specific proposals for cutting spending, while most of them backing extremist Christianism to the hilt.

One exception worth noting is Rand Paul, who said this, to his credit, in a recent debate:

Mr. Paul said he would raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare — he did not say to what age — and the deductibles for Medicare, casting these steps as the responsible approach.

Not exactly up to the standards of the British Tories, but much better than most. And if there is no specific mandate for actual cuts – especially the brutal kind necessary tobalance the budget without any tax increases – what hope on earth is there for these people to actually do what they abstractly say they want to do?

It’s probably wise to postpone the victory parade for small government, just as it was wise not to celebrate “victory” in Iraq as that country now descends toward another dictatorship – this one, closely allied with Iran.

The Washington Post has a moving multimedia package on the 180,000 plus American soldiers who've sustained brain damage while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.