Month: June 2011

Rev. Emily C. Heath, who is live-blogging Albany, captures the reaction to Skelos's announcement:

Devastating news via the NYT's Thomas Kaplan:

Lanza statement: "After exhaustive consideration of the issue of same-sex marriage … I have decided to vote no."

Andrew Lanza has been the Republican senator presumed most likely to vote yes and break the tie.

This is huge:

Follow developments here. Update: A statement from the majority leader:

After many hours of deliberation and discussion over the past several weeks among the members, it has been decided that same-sex marriage legislation will be brought to the full Senate for an up or down vote.

The entire Senate Republican Conference was insistent that amendments be made to the Governor’s original bill in order to protect the rights of religious institutions and not-for-profits with religious affiliations. I appreciate the Governor’s cooperation in working with us to address these important issues and concerns.”

As I have said many times, this is a very difficult issue and it will be a vote of conscience for every member of the Senate.

If you need a primer for the events in Albany, check out recent Dish coverage here, here, here, here and here. Ryan J. Davis tweets a pic of "Some guys at Stonewall watching the empty NY Senate chamber waiting for a vote":

The link to the live-feed of the Senate chamber is here (but, as of now, "The Senate is Temporarily at Ease").

Khamenei's cronies arrested one of the Iranian president's top allies yesterday:

Mr. Ahmadinejad has been challenged on each of his cabinet appointments, including those of oil minister, sports minister and foreign minister. … Some of the president’s allies, including Mr. Malekzadeh, have been accused of being part of a “deviant current” of disloyalty. As a result, many former allies have abandoned the president and proclaimed their allegiance to Ayatollah Khamenei.

Enduring America keeps tabs on today's developments.  Abbas Milani has a must read on the rivalry:

It has been two months of bizarre allegations of voodoo and venal sins taking place in the offices and homes of the president’s closest aides and confidants—not to mention the far more run-of-the-mill charges of their financial corruption and sweetheart deals in places like Belarus. It has been a time of repeated open threats of the president’s impeachment, the same president who was not too long ago the darling of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, close as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to the supreme leader’s own ideas and ideals. It has been a time when more than a hundred members of Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, have requested an investigation into the last presidential election and the allegation that 9 million votes were purchased through cash payments from government coffers.

Amazing how the tables can turn.

Gregg Gillis is the guy to ask.

Like Dickerson, Douthat suspects a debt ceiling deal will get hammered out:

[I]f they do work out a deal — and this is the crucial part — it doesn’t have to include nearly as much in the way of revenue increases as a liberal president would normally prefer, because taxes are already scheduled to go up. Republicans are being intransigent on taxes in these negotiations for ideological reasons, but also because they know that if Obama is re-elected (which is more likely than not), they won’t be able to block tax increases: With a non-stroke of the pen, he can just let the Bush tax cuts expire — for the rich, or even for the middle class as well.

Alexis Madrigal remembers the first time he realized the Internet would dramatically change our lives. As an eager middle-schooler, he emailed a biology professor, who responded and later became a friend:  

There were no "social networks" as we think of them now, but the power to connect to  people — anyone! including Kansas biology professors! — was like a neon arrow pointing from my dark bedroom at the end of a gravel road in a tiny town to the future, when we'd all sort of be everywhere in the world at once.

Maggie Koerth-Baker's revelation came later:

[I] remember one of my professors talking about how to track down sources using
phone books, calling newspapers in other towns, digging into old back issues of magazines and journals at the library. He was describing a days-long process, just to get started. Just to find the people you wanted to interview. And I realized that his experience didn't describe my experience. Finding sources still took time, but I found them online in hours, not days, and I went to the right people directly, rather than through intermediaries making recommendations. This technology was changing the way journalism was done. That was when I realized that the Internet was powerful.

Derek Powazek is collecting other testimonials for his new project, On the Network.

(Image of "Memory" by Joe Dragt who paints over old circuitboards)

Mark Oppenheimer concentrates on the difference between a religion and a nation-state:

[D]o not confuse Zionism with Judaism. Raise your children to see them as analytically separate. That does not mean raise them to be against Israel, anti-Zionist, whatever you want to call it. If Zionism is deeply important and true to you, give it to your children. But while contemporary, post-1948 Zionism may be as important as Judaism (or not), and may be theologically interwoven with Judaism (or not), it is not necessary to Judaism.

Because, to begin, nation-states are all imperfect, flawed, and often brutal, while a true religion should not be. (That previous sentence may be too hard on nation-states and too easy on religion, but I hope you will take the point: countries are of this world, while religion can be an aspiration to something better.) And, what's more, the worship of a nation-state is idolatrous. It is bad Judaism to make Judaism and Zionism—in terms of support for a particular contemporary nation-state—coequal in one's loyalties.

Earlier discussions here and here.

Another quiet victory against terrorists, this time in Seattle. Now that the threat is neutralized, Goldy strikes the right tone: