Month: January 2011

Victor Davis Hanson explains the kind of praise of America he wants to hear from illegal immigrants and their spokespeople.

"Make no mistake, the GOP's boundless animosity toward Democrats' recent legislative achievements and its upcoming caress of endless committee investigations will doubtlessly arouse its base to orgiastic heights of political ecstasy. But that base is in caught in a thrasher of demographic decline; and what's more, the larger electorate will soon sicken to the House GOP's nauseating monotony of attack, attack, attack, while twiddling, twiddling, twiddling away any responsible behavior of actual co-governance," – PM Carpenter. He's great on the health insurance unseriousness.

Maybe my new year began more mellowly than others' but I was struck by the rather harsh tone coming immediately from the partisan right this week. It felt off to me, politically tone-deaf … leaving Obama to play the adult conciliator and deal-maker.

A reader writes:

Only Ross Douthat could warmly remember those wonderful years where white, single women faced with unplanned pregnancies were forced through stigma and the law to carry their pregnancies to term and give their babies up for adoption. It was so much nicer for those good, respectable married women struggling with infertility when 14-year-old girls were providing a constant supply of babies for them! Adoption may be a wonderful solution for some people, but it seems to also be incredibly traumatic for others – and not just for the nine months of pregnancy but throughout their entire lives. It's not the magical band aid you can put over the complex moral issue of unwanted pregnancies.

Another writes:

I’m flabbergasted by your quote of Ross stating that “would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.” They do not. I’ve adopted two children, and the waiting list is not long.  It doesn’t even exist: there are 500,000 children in foster care in the US, and 100,000 of those are available for adoption today.

Well, ok, but you want an infant?  No problem:

less than a month after we adopted our first child, our agency called us asking if we knew anyone at all with a completed home study.  They had a healthy baby boy in a hospital and nobody willing to adopt him.  (Agency rules didn’t allow us to take him before our first was completed)  For our second, the agency tried for days to contact us around Christmas since we were the only people on the list who were willing to take him. 

Why was it so hard to place them?  Simple: the adoption market is built around healthy white infants.   If you’re willing to remove even *one* of those conditions, the waiting list is short to non-existent.

There’s no shortage of children to adopt; the waiting list exists solely because adoptive parents want to wait for the “right” kind of child.  Please don’t perpetuate the myth.

(Photo: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty. Details of the process here.)

Paul Gottfried takes aim at that same Rich Lowry column – specifically its rose-tinted treatment of Great Britain's colonial and military history:

England previewed our “liberal democracy,” practiced “benign colonialism,” and was in many ways a “jumping off” point to our “exceptional nation.” “It was a bulwark against the dictatorships of the Continent, from Napoleon, to the Kaiser, to Hitler.” Let me point out some of what is wrong with such hyperbole. The English bear many of the same “black marks” that Lowry ascribes to continental countries, and as the descendant of Irish peasants, Lowry might recall at least some of England’s many misdeeds. English rule abroad was not always “benign colonialism,” and in the Boer War, which the Salisbury government launched against the Afrikaners to grab their land, the English practiced naked aggression and engaged in atrocities against their fellow Northern European Protestants, as opposed to such customary English victims as Highland Scots, Irish Catholics, and the inhabitants of Chinese coastal cities.

It is also ridiculous to see all English entanglement in wars against continental powers as driven by a democratic struggle against dictatorship. As an insular empire protected by a large navy, the English had an interest in keeping hegemonic powers from emerging on the continent and pursued this interest with whatever allies they could find.

Fair enough – although I think England's global legacy holds up relatively well against, say, Russia's or Germany's. What's striking to me is that Lowry picked 1648 as a starting point. Ancient Greece? Rome? Egypt? And what of China and India and their endlessly silted inheritance of history, culture and philosophy? Now think of the last 350 years compared with humankind's hundreds of thousands of years on the planet. It is not that the US doesn't have a huge amount to be proud of; as someone hoping to become a citizen, I believe that deeply in my bones and want to be a full part of it. But it's the insularity, ahistoricism, and magical thinking of what should be called jingoism, not patriotism, that pierces the consciousness.

Where is the humility? Where is the dissatisfaction, even disgust at times, that leads to improvement?

Aaron Carroll greets the coming healthcare vote with snark:

Evidently, there is going to be a big vote on health care reform in the House.  It’s going to be on January 12, which is 8 days away. There will be no hearings on the bill.  No markups out of committee.  No extended period for everyone to read it.  No bipartisan meeting to discuss it.  There will be no CBO scoring of the bill.

It will be – and when you read this, please add lots of sarcasm in your head – “shoved down our throats”.

Austin Frakt is more somber:

The only thing I oppose is debate without substance. If anyone wants to be taken seriously on health care (or anything) they’ve got to do the work, all of it. Democrats did so and they got a law passed and enacted. It’s not perfect, but it is an improvement over the status quo. Can Republicans make it better? It takes more than repeal.

Above is the latest anti-HIV scare tactic from New York's Department of Health. Sean Strub's comments here. His factual points matter:

The horrible conditions noted are typically found only in some older people with HIV, or those who are not diagnosed until later stages of the disease; anal cancer is caused by an entirely different virus, osteoporosis is likely as much a function of anti-retroviral treatment as it is HIV itself, etc.

The ad reads like emails I get – and constant streams of comments on conservative blogs – regularly accusing me of dementia and other strange alleged side-effects of long-term HIV. You'd think that safer sex ads would have found a way by 2011 to promote condom use without ratcheting up fear to even more implausible levels, and without reinforcing the bleakest messages about young gay male life:

The message it gives–not factually, but with all the visceral power of that 5-frame shot of a ruined ass–is that if you're out on the scene, death and decay are stalking you and serves you right if they get you."

There's a better way, as Sean notes:

We can and should tell young people that HIV is very bad and they don't want to get it, but we can do that without condemning or stigmatizing people who already have HIV.  And we can and should tell people with HIV that a diagnosis is not the end of their lives, that they still pursue their dreams and seek everything anyone else can extract from life without sending a message to young people that HIV is no big deal.

We need to convey both of these messages, at the same time, and not let one negate or diminish the other.

Doing eleven points better in the Gallup poll at this point in his first term than the Gipper was. More data here. Skepticism warranted on the recent bump up – but Obama has now been trending above Reagan's numbers for months now.

Elevated my morning a touch:

Noah Kristula-Green documents it:

O’Donnell had a consistently negative effect on the close down-ticket races in Delaware.

Republican Party officials in the state who spoke to FrumForum on and off the record expressed great frustration with the damage she caused. O’Donnell did this in several different ways. She cost the GOP several candidates in the Delaware State House, giving the Democrats a super-majority. She hurt the campaign for the Republican nominee for State Treasurer. She boosted a Democratic party which has been growing stronger in the state, and solidified in the minds of many voters the view that the Republican party was an atavistic and unserious party, which the mainstream had rejected. In a year when Republicans had a wave to take advantage of and the opportunity to grow across the entire country, O’Donnell failed her party and brought it down.

Now imagine the down-ticket disaster Palin would be.

What do Marty Peretz and Christianist nepotist Jordan Sekulow have in common?