Month: March 2011

Eve Conant updates us:

The military-wide training ([JD Smith, co-director of OutServe, an underground network of some 2,700 active-duty gay and lesbian service members] posted examples of his training on the OutServe site ) signals the final death throes of DADT, and has commenced in all branches.

On a less happy note:

For some, the training serves as both a morale boost and reminder of how far they have yet to go. Jennifer, who just returned home from a tour in Iraq and serves in the Air Force, completed her training last Saturday. “I’m glad to see they are talking about zero tolerance for discrimination. But they made it clear that because of the Defense of Marriage Act, we don’t have benefit rights and won’t be getting any.” A source at West Point, who also has not come out, says that, “When DADT is repealed it will be awesome, it will be life-changing. But the part of the training that’s so hard to swallow is how a same-sex partner of many years can be treated the same as a girlfriend or boyfriend of a few weeks. It just boils down to the fact that little will change until DOMA changes.”

Steve Cheney insists that implementing Facebook commenting on outside sites (like TechCrunch) requires people to have one identity on the web:

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence.

…[F]orcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I'm not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us.

(Image: Process of Elimination Map by Ben Greenman)

Graeme Wood reads Wikileaks cables on Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. He concludes that "U.S. diplomats cared about all the right things, but apparently had no power to make them happen because their perceived clout wasn't enough to persuade anyone to reform":

Perhaps there are cables that show the United States to be a regional puppet master, or even a regional player capable of exerting a teeny bit of influence, among the 245,000 cables still undisclosed by WikiLeaks. But for an American to read the cables so far made public is an exercise in humility. The take-away lesson of the leaks and the revolutions may be that once a foreign government becomes so out of touch that the United States can't induce it even to do something that is clearly in its own interest, the point of no return has been reached and the government is doomed.

Wait there's more:

An earlier edition from McLovin and James Franco's little bro here.

The cost of borrowing may increase soon, say market watchers who flagged this news:

Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., eliminated government-related debt from his flagship fund last month as the U.S. projected record budget deficits.

Pimco’s $237 billion Total Return Fund last held zero government-related debt in January 2009. Gross had cut the holdings to 12 percent of assets in January, according to the Newport Beach, California-based company’s website. The fund’s net cash-and-equivalent position surged from 5 percent to 23 percent in February, the highest since May 2008. Yields on Treasuries may be too low to sustain demand for U.S. government debt as the Federal Reserve approaches the end of its second round of quantitative easing, Gross wrote in a monthly investment outlook posted on Pimco’s website on March 2. Gross mentioned that Pimco may be a buyer of Treasuries if yields rise to attractive levels.

Kevin D. Williamson:

What this means, of course, is pressure on the U.S. government to offer higher interest rates on its bonds. Gross says that the rates need to go up about 1.5 percent to reflect market realities. And market realities, ignored for the past few years, are going to start reasserting themselves as “quantitative easing” ends and the Fed stops buying U.S. debt that the markets don’t want. As things stand, interest on the debt (at about 6 percent of all federal spending) is equal to about one-third of all discretionary spending combined (about 19 percent of the budget). Current forecasts have debt-service costs alone amounting to nearly $1 trillion by 2020, consuming 20 percent of all federal tax revenues. That’s a vicious circle: Bigger deficits add to the total debt, which drives up the cost of debt service, which creates bigger deficits, shampoo, rinse, repeat, and wake up in Argentina circa 1999–2002…

Meaning that major reform of the entitlement programs is not optional. It is do or die.

Bagehot responds to to the £50 fine imposed on a Muslim extremist, Emdadur Choudhury, after he burned Remembrance Day poppies and chanted anti-military slogans during a two-minute silence on Armistice Day last November 11th:

I am pretty uncomfortable with the idea that non-violent political protests can lead to criminal convictions in today's Britain. Judging by his actions and public declarations, Mr Choudhury is a nasty provocateur and possibly a religious maniac, emerging from court to brag that he could not care less about the death of British soldiers, that others would pay his fine for him, that he did not accept the authority of British law and acted for the "sake of Allah".

But I would still rather he had not been charged at all.

Me too. The same goes with charges (ultimately dropped) against a preacher in Cumbria inveighing against homosexuality on the sidewalk. Ditto Britain's banning of Fred Phelps compared with last week's First Amendment decision. Free speech is being chipped away in Britain and Europe. Thank the Founders – one more time – for the First Amendment.

(Photo: Emdadur Choudhury, Mohammad Haque and others take part in a protest as they leave Belmarsh Magistrates Court for lunch in south-east London on February 23, 2011. By Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images)

Palin's unfavorables are off-the-charts bad. But not among the base. Among Iowa Republicans she has a 65-30 fav/unfav split (an almost exact inverse of her fav/unfav split among all voters). Rasmussen's national poll of the GOP base has Palin's favorables at 79 percent, even though many consider her unelectable in the general election. Hence my reluctance to join the CW that she cannot win the nomination. Alex Massie acknowledges Romney's various weak spots, but still thinks he's the frontrunner:

Romney's problem, I think, is that he lacks both empathy and imagination. These are under-appreciated, but vital, qualities. A politician need not possess both (Thatcher, for instance, lacked imagination but possessed empathy – at least for the people she thought she was talking to or cared about) but successful politicians have some measure of both. Deficient in these qualities, Romney comes across as stiff and awkward and somewhat robotic. His politicial intelligence seems artificial; he has a grasp of the grammar but lacks true fluency in the idiom of day-to-day  retail politics and the Vision Thing. Consequently it sometimes seems as though he is trying too hard and, in the process, he risks making himself appear ridiculous. 

Bernstein, who likewise believes that Romney has a shot at the nomination, discounts the damage Romneycare will to to Mitt's campaign.

A reader writes:

You cite Alex Knapp, who wrote, "Now, in the 21st century, we send robot planes to bomb civilians in a country that’s ostensibly an ally." That is such unadulterated bullshit that it deserves a Moore Award nomination.  First, the planes (drones) are not "robots"; they're remotely controlled. 

In fact, the very first true military "robot" plane just made its first flight last month.  And just what do you think a pilot in a traditional manned aircraft can see when he's bombing from 30,000 feet?  He sees the exact same thing that the guy on the ground controlling the unmanned plane sees: video and infrared images of a target.

And then the whole sending robot planes "TO bomb civilians"?  Only an anti-military jackass would make such an uninformed and inflammatory remark.  Those instances are clearly very unintentional and tragic mishaps.  Suggesting there is intent to kill civilians on the part of the people who planned those missions is the modern equivalent of calling a soldier a baby killer.  Knapp was right on everything else he wrote in that piece, but had to "go there" in painting the military as a bunch of monsters.

Point taken.

A reader writes:

A brilliant and beautiful animation of Gareth Bale's play for Tottenham versus AC Milan in their two-leg Champions League matchup. Basically hand-drawn, and took the artist about 35 hours to complete.

Update: One of several readers corrects:

The MHB of Gareth Bale was a beautiful rendition of his hat trick against Inter Milan, not their cross-town rivals, AC Milan. Confusion probably arose because Tottenham played AC Milan as recently as yesterday, but their last game against Inter Milan was months ago.

Yay! Finally something to contribute to the Dish!

A reader writes:

Actually, there are decent scientific studies of the question of paternity confidence that would make one think twice about comparing blackbird and human paternity.  Monogamy seems to be a pretty good explanation of paternity in most human populations. Razib Khan provides an overview of the research.

But there is an obvious distinction between non-monogamy and paternity – especially with widespread access to contraception. Adultery doesn't mean, as it might have in the past, children with non-biological parents they think are their own. But yes, Maury is not measuring a representative sample.