Month: January 2011

Tim Pawlenty’s fawning appearance on American Family Association Bryan Fischer’s radio show is an interesting indicator of where the power really is on the right. Here is a Republican from Minnesota who, as a state senator in 1993, actually voted for Minnesota’s pioneering anti-discrimination law. He has held meetings with gay conservatives and has portrayed himself as a moderate. But he has now come out in favor of reinstating DADT, when repeal was supported by over 70 percent of the country, and passed with Republican and Democratic votes in the lame-duck session. We are all familiar with what has happened to public opinion since Pawlenty’s 1993 vote (he has said he regrets it now but only because it included gender identity in its protections). Opinion has moved rapidly in favor of civil rights, with even marriage equality reaching 50 percent public support this year. But Republican leaders have moved as swiftly in the opposite direction – from Romney to Pawlenty. But fawning over Fischer is a new level of mainstream pandering to the Christianist right. His record is appalling and led the Southern Poverty Law Center to label his organization a hate-group. He wants to reinstate Biblical law over US law, and said so as recently as the Tucson shootings. Here’s Fischer’s full, staggering record of extremism, as compiled by Christine Shwen:

Who could forget the time he said the US should “restrict Muslim immigration” and “send them back home”? That was after he’d argued that a devout Muslim can not be a “good American” and that Muslims should be barred from the military. And what about the time he suggested that a plane crash in Montana killing 14 people occured because a doctor who performs abortions was on board, saying that “If you do not hate bloodshed, bloodshed will pursue you”?

And then there was the time Fischer wrote this:

“Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews. Gays in the military is an experiment that has been tried and found disastrously and tragically wanting. Maybe it’s time for Congress to learn a lesson from history.”

Does Tim Pawlenty believe that gay people are responsible for Hitler? That American Muslims and gays should be barred from serving their country?

More to the point: is embracing a man who believes this kind of bile now essential to being viable as a primary candidate for president in the current GOP? If a Democrat had gone on a radio show with anyone as far out on the left as Fischer is on the far right, his or her career would be over.

Andrew Cohen parses it:

If it's any consolation at all to the people now wringing their hands in anger and frustration over the Obama Administration's more-than-tepid legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, the judges of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to whom the Justice Department addressed its latest brief, aren't likely to pay much attention to it anyway. Far more compelling and relevant to their analysis will be the lower court ruling that is the subject of the appeal. It was written by veteran federal judge Joseph L. Tauro, a Nixon appointee and a living legend in Massachusetts law, who set forth in his order a devastating assault on the federal statute that defines marriage as being only between a man and a woman.

His bottom line:

The 1st Circuit's decision, when it comes later this year, will be merely a signpost along the DOMA's road to the Supreme Court. No matter what it says, it will be appealed by the losing side either to the full circuit panel, or to the Justices, or both. Yes, a federal appellate decision affirming Judge Tauro's ruling, in whole or in part, would be good news for same-sex marriage proponents. But such a decision surely won't be binding on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Court's vital swing vote, who almost certainly will decide this issue if and when it comes before him. So my humble advice to DOMA opponents? Don't use up all of your disappointment now. You may need it later.

Andy Crouch (h/t: Alexis) understands the strange confluence of despair and hope in the naughties:

In the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal  technology. In October 2001, with the World Trade Center still smoldering and the  Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the  depths of the Great Recession, the very month where unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment — and technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket…

The genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

This is certainly why my own conversion to Apple, and my deep loyalty to the company and its products, somehow felt comforting in the last decade. Their style elevates me, their power and reliability I have come to take for granted. Their stores have the innovation and beauty that a renewed Christianity would muster in its churches, if it hadn't collapsed in a welter of dogma and politics.

From time to time, my Tory pessimism asserts itself and I have become convinced that our current Tower of Babel will fall to the forces of religious fanaticism or technological destruction or some demonic combination of the two. And then I see an iPhone that can fucking translate, or a Pixar movie that transports, or a Gehry building that takes the breath away.

How can a civilization this astonishing destroy itself? And in that, yes, Steve Jobs has provided some secular hope. May he recover and thrive and be who he is.

(Photo: Customers enter the Apple store to buy iPhone 4 on September 25, 2010 in Beijing, China. By Feng Li/Getty Images.)

Not much, actually.

Hampton Sides acknowledges it:

There are an estimated 24 million cases of PTSD in the United States alone, the majority of the patients likely being veterans. Over the past decade, however, PTSD has gradually become associated with civilian professionals as well: firefighters, police officers, emergency techs, and other first responders whose jobs routinely put them in harm's way and expose them to horrific scenes. A study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 2007 reported that 22 percent of volunteer emergency workers at the World Trade Center disaster site developed a wide range of PTSD symptoms. Traumas suffered by victims and relief workers in recent natural catastrophes such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and last year's earthquake in Haiti have further confirmed that PTSD extends far beyond combat scenarios.

It seems real enough now after several impressive weeks from the president, as the Tea Party suffers a big jump in unfavorable ratings to Palin levels. From Obama's tax cut deal to repealing DADT to ratifying START and the South Korea free trade agreement followed by his flawless performance in the wake of the Tucson shootings … Americans are warming to him. Gallup now has him back up at 48 percent with disapproval at a year's low; ABC News has him at 54 percent. The ABC poll also showed a sharp shift in the right/wrong direction numbers, which have been headed in the wrong direction for a long, long time. The right track just jumped from 27 to 38 percent in the past three months and the wrong track dropped from 71 to 60. Obama is more trusted on every major issue than the GOP, including the budget deficit, except healthcare where they're tied. By 44 – 35 percent, the public would prefer the country go in Obama's direction rather than the GOP's.

The deficit is the second highest priority for voters after the economy. Which prods me once again to argue that the State of the Union should focus on ending our long-term debt. Obama has the ears of the country and has gotten a segment of previously skeptical Americans to give him a second look. Those voters want to see signs of real seriousness and leadership on spending and debt. My view is that Obama needs to embrace Bowles-Simpson, or a variation thereof, and challenge both parties to come to a long-term budget deal he can sign. Call their bluff, in other words – stay ahead of the GOP on tax-and-spending candor.

Ezra Klein's healthcare preview:

In the end, repeal will pass the House — likely tomorrow — and quickly die in the Senate. Then comes the more interesting phase of the fight over health-care reform: The GOP's effort at revision.

Republicans, who already know that repeal will fail, are preparing to begin the longer and more complex campaign to replace, rewrite, or simply undermine various parts of the bill. The relevant committees in the House will try to develop alternatives, while the GOP will look for Democrats willing to sign onto targeted attacks on the legislation. That will allow them to focus their energies on the parts of the legislation that are tough for Democrats to defend, rather than letting the Democrats force them to focus on the parts of the legislation that are easy for Democrats to defend. But this strategy has its own dangers: As the least popular bits of the bill are either successfully preserved or somehow changed, more and more of the bill's opponents will lose their reason for fighting the legislation.

It’s an American tradition:

The always provocative Freddie de Boer briefly steps out of bloggy retirement to insist that it does not:

There are many myths within the political blogosphere, but none is so deeply troubling or so highly treasured by mainstream political bloggers than this: that the political blogosphere contains within it the whole range of respectable political opinion, and that once an issue has been thoroughly debated therein, it has had a full and fair hearing. The truth is that almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere, both intentionally and not, while those writing within it congratulate themselves for having answered all left-wing criticism.

That the blogosphere is a flagrantly anti-leftist space should be clear to anyone who has paid a remote amount of attention. Who, exactly, represents the left extreme in the establishment blogosphere? You'd likely hear names like Jane Hamsher or Glenn Greenwald. But these examples are instructive. Is Hamsher a socialist? A revolutionary anti-capitalist? In any historical or international context– in the context of a country that once had a robust socialist left, and in a world where there are straightforwardly socialist parties in almost every other democracy– is Hamsher particularly left-wing? Not at all. It's only because her rhetoric is rather inflamed that she is seen as particularly far to the left. This is what makes this whole discourse/extremism conversation such a failure; there is a meticulous sorting of far right-wing rhetoric from far right-wing politics, but no similar sorting on the left. Hamsher says bad words and is mean in print, so she is a far leftist. That her politics are largely mainstream American liberalism that would have been considered moderate for much of the 20th century is immaterial.

Substantial debate has been generated by his thesis, and while it doesn't yet include Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein, two bloggers he tweaks, his post has already generated enough attention over a long weekend to suggest that he overestimates how difficult it is for the ideas he champions to get a hearing. That's a good thing. Whatever one thinks of his latest, Freddie is as earnest a blogger as you'll find, a quality that more than makes up for occasions when his zeal ends in unfair attacks on other writers.

Here's Will Wilkinson in the comments section:

I think you're right about the full-bore socialist left having almost no place in the public affairs blogosphere. The question is why is that? In particular, why does the institutional left ignore you? I think it's because most bloggy public affairs types want to be politically relevant, but American public opinion tilts so far to the right that any association with real left-wing opinion simply undermines the persuasive authority party-politics-involved liberals. Libertarianism gets a seat because, first, by aligning with the right to fight socialism at home and communism abroad, it made the reactionaries more sympathetic to libertarianism positions than they would have been, and, second, it has a sufficiently authentic claim to some part of the liberal tradition that many liberals compelled to take it seriously. In contrast, conservatives see no reason to treat socialists as anything other than enemies, and liberals mostly just want them to shut up so their team doesn't blow it with the relatively right-wingy American public.

Also, to tenderly bait you, it just might help your cause if socialists ever made compelling arguments about policy.

The Dish has always tried to remain friendly to outsider voices and distance itself from the Inside the Beltway closed conversation. In that sense, the most glaring lack in Freddie's post is a list of who exactly we ought to be reading and engaging but aren't. Isn't that the obvious solution? If we're missing worthy far-left blogospheric voices, who are they?

A timeline of housing optimism in America: