Month: February 2011

West Warwick, Rhode Island, 9.14am

Jason Kottke lists them:

The On Language column originated by William Safire has been cancelled.

Christoph Niemann's excellent Abstract City blog is closing down and the feature will move to the New York Times Magazine.

This is the last The Medium column by Virginia Heffernan.

After 12 years, Randy Cohen will no longer write The Ethicist column.

Deborah Solomon won't be doing those irritating interviews anymore.

Update: A couple I missed: Rob Walker's Consumed and Mark Bittman's The Minimalist are both ending.

Change happens. I kinda liked Solomon's interviews.

The Onion reports:

"It was just awful—they smashed through our living room window, one of them said 'I've had my eye on you, Roger,' and then they dragged my husband off kicking and screaming," said Cleveland-area homemaker Rita Ellington, one of the latest victims whose defenseless marriage was overrun by the hordes of battle-ready gays that had been clambering at the gates of matrimony since the DOMA went into effect in 1996.

The latest crackdown on opposition leaders and their family members is only energizing the Greens:

Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, the progressive cleric and supporter of the Green Movement has issued a statement and condemned the arrest of Mousavi, Karroubi and their wives.

In his class yesterday, Grand Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat Zanjani condemned the verbal assault on Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He said, "Did we suffer before the revolution [in the struggle against the Shah] in order to create the current conditions? What has happened to morality and justice in an Islamic nation that a Muslim woman is attacked in public in a religious place?"

The Coordination Committee for the Civil Struggle and Human Rights in the province of Azerbaijan has issued a statement and asked the people to take part in the marches on Tuesday March 1.

The Coordination Committee of Green in the city of Kermanshah has also issued a statement in support of the marches, and has declared that its supporters would take part in the marches. Student organizations in 18 campuses of the Islamic Azad University around the nation have declared their support for the Tuesday, March 1 marches. In addition, the Muslim Student Associations of the University of Tehran, and University of Medical Sciences of Tehran have also announced their intention to take part in the marches.

Tehran Bureau captions the above scene:

Video of recent verbal assault on Faizeh Hasehmi, daughter of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, apparently by plainclothes security agents. She is repeatedly addressed as "garbage" and several times as "whore." The agents tell her, "We will get rid of you and your father," and shout "Death to the hypocrite" and "Death to Hashemi."

James Franco's, of course.

Lisa Miller passes along a Pew report that finds, "more than other Americans, evangelicals are prepared to cut deeply and forcefully when chopping the deficit." I'm impressed with their grasp that, in many ways, debt is profoundly immoral when it is taken to the extremes of Americans these days, both publicly and privately:

On conservative Christian blogs and on right-wing Christian radio, preachers and pundits reinforce the Biblical sinfulness of debt. A publicist from Coral Ridge Ministries, the conservative megachurch in Coral Gables, Florida, quotes his church's founder, D. James Kennedy, in a recent blog post.  "The bible says that inheritences should go from the fathers unto the sons, but we have reversed that concept. We are taking from our sons and our grandsons and are wasting it on our own immediate wants. We have lost the biblical concept of self-discipline."

There is no Biblical reason that a government shouldn't run a deficit from time to time, counters P.J. Hill, an economist at Wheaton College, a Christian school. Governments run deficits and surpluses and God has nothing to say about it, he adds. But how much one generation shifts its financial obligations to another is a moral issue–and about that he is very concerned. "As the debt becomes bigger and bigger, it becomes of more pressing concern, and that I can see becoming a social issue." Hill doesn't believe evangelicals' priorities have changed–they're still concerned about abortion and the breakdown of the American family, and they still give more to the poor through private charity than most other groups. He thinks the shift relates, appropriately, to a shift in the national conversation. "Evangelicals, like all Americans, are very concered about the debt."

A veteran dog-owner and trainer asks the question in more, er, colloquial fashion, and comes to terms with the fact that her puppy just isn't that smart. Money quote:

Over the past two months, she's made some progress, but it's been painfully slow and is easily forgotten.  Still, I was living under the assumption that maybe my dog just had a hidden capacity for intelligence – that all I had to do was work hard enough and maybe she'd wake up one day and be smart and capable like a normal dog.  Until last night.

The account is hilarious and poignant and brilliantly illustrated. Check it out. The whole blog is inspired. By the way, instructions for the canine IQ test can be found here.

If your name is Koch, it's pronounced cock. And if your name is Boehner, it's pronounced boner. They can always change their names if they want. Until then … I'm calling it like it is.

Wouldn't it be a fanastic development if the uprisings throughout the Arab world rekindled the spirit of June 2009? Khamenei is obviously concerned it might:

Iran has arrested opposition leaders Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, the opposition website Kaleme said on Monday. "Sources say that they have been arrested and transferred to Heshmatiyeh jail in Tehran," Mousavi's website Kaleme reported. Judiciary officials were not immediately available for comment.

Doug Mataconis sees them as huge steps forward – and wonders why a faction on the right still disagrees:

I must admit that I’ve never quite understood why social conservatives are so vehement in their opposition to contraceptive use, or even the very idea of sex education, while at the same time being stridently pro-life. After all, it seems quite logical that more widespread use of contraceptives would make abortion far less likely, which is something I think that both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” people would say is a good thing. Nonetheless, the opposition continues, as personified by Kathryn Jean Lopez’s column at Townhall today.

Now, frankly, I’m not entirely unsympathic to those who want to defund Planned Parenthood, not because I disagree with its mission but because I don’t believe that providing taxpayer dollars to such organizations is a proper function of government. Nonetheless, Lopez’s column makes clear that this battle isn’t really about Planned Parenthood at all but about the very idea that we live in a society where men and women have the option of using methods to prevent pregnancy and thus don’t have to live with the fear that every sexual encounter will lead to an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy.

Perhaps the fastest way to significantly reduce the number of abortions in the world would be for the Catholic Church to encourage its members to use contraception. It nearly happened in 1968. We have lived with the consequences of papal diktat ever since.