Month: January 2012

One of 2011's biggest earworms gets a literal remix using Microsoft Paint:

A reader writes:

The Slate article you featured touches on something I've thought for a long time – the fixation on whether gay is "a choice" is interesting but irrelevant. A person's religion is more of a choice than the person's sexuality, and yet we don't allow discrimination based on religion. I'm not allowed to put up a "Catholics need not apply" sign on my business because I don't approve of their choice. "Choice" is a red herring. The question is purely about discrimination.

Scott Long adds:

What if our model for defending LGBT people’s rights were not race, but religion? What if we claimed our identities were not something impossible to change, but a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it?

That's why excluding gays from hate crimes laws is so wack – because religion is protected category. Of course, I don't actually experience my faith as a choice, in the usual sense of the word. It feels as deep a part of me as my orientation. Zack Ford makes an important distinction:

The bottom line is that there is a big difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity, even if it usually goes unnoticed. In other words, the language a person uses to describe how they identify does not have to perfectly align with what their natural attractions actually are. The Williams Institute estimates that about 3.5 percent of the population identify as LGBT, but as many as 11 percent of Americans report having same-sex attractions. 

I think Nixon’s comments make it pretty clear that she did not choose her attractions to women — nor her attractions to men — she merely chose to identify primarily as a lesbian.

E.J. Graff, "about a 5 on the Kinsey scale", joins the discussion.

His taxes:

Just over half of Americans doubt that he pays his fair share in taxes.  After hearing about his actual income and tax rate, these people are less likely to think he “cares about people like me”—an attribute on which Romney is disadvantaged relative to Obama and which is a perennial predictor of how people vote.  Information about his wealth also leads a larger fraction of Americans to believe he cares about the wealthy, and this belief in turn also reinforces the sense that he does not care about “people like me.”  The more Romney’s wealth and taxes are discussed, the more he may seem like someone who cannot relate to ordinary voters.  This may explain why, during a time in which his wealth and taxes were in the news, negative views of Romney jumped 20 points among whites with incomes below $50,000. 

And that's a key demographic for past GOP victories. If Obama can increase support among those voters, things look much bleaker for Romney/Gingrich/Whoever. My view is that this is less damaging and relevant than that Romney's economic proposals want to tilt the balance even further in favor of the super-wealthy. Maybe there's a way for him to neutralize this in some small way. Jed Graham points out that Greg Mankiw, one of Romney's top economic advisors, opposes the carried interest loophole that Romney has (perfectly legally) taken advantage of. Graham's suggestion:

Perhaps there is a route by which Romney can propose to end the tax break as part of a deal that lowers tax rates while broadening the tax base. That would narrow the gap between taxes on regular income and investment gains, thus making favorable treatment of carried interest less meaningful. But Romney has resisted putting forward a comprehensive tax reform plan, presumably because its details would create plenty of more targets for foes to attack.

If Romney were to roll out a serious tax reform plan, Obama would be in trouble.

Brian Earp gets angry about the prosecution of a mother who allowed her 10 year old to get a tatt:

The truly troubling part involves a deep inconsistency in Georgia law regarding parental consent in general. This point can be made by offering a stark point of contrast. It is perfectly OK, under Georgia law, for a parent to consent to the surgical removal of her son’s foreskin, before he is able to form words or express an opinion, in a medically unnecessary, irreversible procedure which I have argued elsewhere is deeply immoral and should be banned. Tattoos? No way. Invasive, medically useless, nonconsensual genital surgery? Go right ahead. 

And there's a Biblical bar on tattoos as well, for good measure:

"Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the Lord."

When you read the fundamentalist defense against tattoos, you also can't help noticing the rationale:

[God] spoke these words in Genesis 1:31,"And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day." When the Lord created the human body, He pronounced that the way He created it was very good.

So why forbid superficial mutilating by tattoo but demand it by permanently altering a key part of a man's body, the genitals? In a manner that, unlike tattoos, permanently scars a part of the body that provides intense physical pleasure. The double-standard is insane.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney addresses a speech to the Hispanic Leadership Network at Doral Golf Resort in Miami, Florida, January 27, 2012. Florida will hold its Republican primary on January 31, 2012. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.

Or, Romney doing his best Jim Carrey claw. Though it's probably closer to Jerry's.

So out there that if Obama and the Dems win this fall, and the temporary Bush tax cuts expire, this is his scenario:

Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.

Today's "conservatives" would use the impeachment provision to oppose an elected president's fiscal policies. If you want to to grasp just how much contempt they really have for the Constitution and the institutions of government – something actual conservatives care about – absorb that fact.

One of the best defenses of marriage equality from a public official I have heard. And a great rebuttal to Chris Christie's deft but cowardly attempt to put civil rights in front of a referendum – even though the legislature is in favor:

A brutal new anti-Romney ad is in the works, according to Jon Karl. Our latest Ad War Update is here if you missed it.

Ed Kilgore takes issue with Romney's promise to not have "an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally Israel":

[I]t’s one thing to suggest that the U.S. will naturally favor its historic ally in intractable disputes. It’s another thing altogether to outsource your policies unconditionally to a foreign government whose positions on matters of war and peace are more than a little controversial to its own people, particularly if your represent the supposedly hard-core U.S. nationalist party that claims it doesn’t trust anybody or anything other than naked self-interest and military power. Perhaps the refusal of contemporary conservatives to see allies anywhere else in the world—certainly not among those debt-ridden socialists of Europe—has made them hold Israel all the closer. But an awful lot of Israelis would tell you that giving this sort of total leverage over the United States to Bibi Netanyahu is not an act to be taken lightly. He will not hesitate to use it.

Xeni Jardin coos over the above video, shot by Surrey Wildlife Trust Mammal Project Officer Dave Williams:

The dormouse, a little rodent species you'll find in Britain, hibernate in the winter in nests they hide on the ground. The dormouse spends up to one-third of its life in hibernation, and typically begin that winter "sleep" when the first frost hits, and their food sources are gone.

More on the project's mission here. My first ever theatrical role was as a dormouse in a kiddie production of Alice in Wonderland. I hope my parents have burned all photographs of me in the costume.