Month: May 2012

The Guardian's interactive chart on gay rights by type and by state is worth a few minutes of your time. Some background on how and why it was made:

When the idea of doing a gay marriage interactive was mentioned I had two initial thoughts. First, I didn't want to use a map given that a quick Google search would find any number of news sites with just that. Second, I didn't want to focus solely on gay marriage. The political dialogue seems to define the quality of life for gays and lesbians based on their right to marry, but it's much more complicated than that.

A reader writes:

Pranking authority is one thing, but taking advantage of a particular physical weakness of another person, authority figure or not, is quite another. If he'd knocked over a teacher in a wheelchair, would you excuse it in the same way you did the incident with the blind teacher? It's no different than bullying a weaker, presumed-gay, kid. In some ways, it's less excusable, since attitudes towards gays were very different back then.

I'm mostly blind. I take this story as personally as you probably take the story of gay bashing.

Another writes:

Your statement that "[l]eading a blind teacher into a door is cruel, but it's still within the category of prank, in part because it targets authority" made me physically uncomfortable.  How is that not merely bullying someone for the sin of being blind? How is that a stand against authority? It is merely another instance of a prick doing something prickish to someone weaker out of a love for being a prick.

Neither of these episodes is defensible and especially not defensible, as your comment implies, as satire.  Cruelty is cruelty is cruelty and bullying is bullying is bullying. Simply because one might identify more with one victim than another does not make the suffering of the other victim less noteworthy.

Also, you should take note that Mr Romney's alleged apology, "I'm sorry if anyone was offended," is a non-apology and is the standard one offered by pricks around the world.

My readers, on reflection, are right. I apologize for minimizing the cruelty of this. Maybe it would help if I gave two examples of pranks from my high school days that qualify as pranks. We had a history teacher who had a simian-looking face: small beedy eyes a little too close together and a large round jaw. On his first day, whenever he turned his back to the boys, a chorus of monkey noises would come from the back-row. The next morning, he walked into the class to find a bunch of bananas on his desk. (He was white, by the way. This wasn't racist.) This continued and continued and continued. It was brutal. It was cruel. But we were thirteen. And we thought it was funny.

Then there was the teacher with a hearing aide. One morning, the usual suspects in my class organized it so that every student would mime talking and chattering as he walked in, while keeping deadly quiet. I couldn't join in. I just sat there doing nothing. The teacher looked a little perplexed, took out his hearing aide and adjusted it upwards. The mimes became low murmurs. He turned it up some more. And then the signal was given: everybody scream! The teacher looked like he was having a heart attack, but mercifully recovered quickly and put us all in detention.

I don't want to get too squeamish about this. One of my fellow students, Keir Starmer, is now Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions, a version of the US's attorney general. We all grow up. But there remains something raw about the violence of Romney's assault on a gay kid and his humiliation of a blind man that goes beyond pranks against teachers.

One of the key tests for me of anyone's character is their response to cruelty. Cruelty I would describe as the punishment of the weak by the strong. At Cranbrook, Romney had everything: the father who was a former the sitting governor of the state, a sharp intellect, a classic handsome face, charming, and to the manor born. And yet when he saw a younger effeminate kid with a non-conformist look, he felt no compunction in assaulting him with a pair of scissors, cutting off clumps of his hair. He saw a blind man and tormented him. Today, he favors balancing the budget entirely on the backs of the poor, while cutting taxes further for the rich, and as a Bain consultant posed for a photograph with dollar bills stuffed all over his body.

This tells you something about a man's character. And how he would behave as president. It sickens me.

Okay, Biden. Now say something about decriminalizing pot.

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) May 9, 2012

An update:

A good early bet is for the margins of control to narrow in both houses of Congress. Republicans should win the House of Representatives again, but Democrats will pick up some seats, maybe cutting the GOP majority of 25 by a third or (only if Obama wins handily) by as much as half. The Senate appears likely to be very narrowly divided, with Democrats holding on by a seat or, more likely, Republicans gaining technical control by a seat or two.

Previous videos of Maggie Gallagher here, here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Amy Davidson wants to see contrition:

What one does as a teen-ager does not need to mark a person or a politician for life. We can all be stupid. For Senator Rand Paul, it’s Aqua Buddha; for Senator Robert Byrd, it was, more darkly and at a more mature age, his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. It took many more years than it should, but Byrd learned how to talk about that in a way that suggested understanding and repentance. Both of those are necessary.

Drum's judgment:

[D]escribing how he treated both friends and non-friends while he was growing up is fair game. It's partly a window into Romney, and partly a window into the era and culture that he grew up in. But pretending that this makes him an anti-gay bully today isn't. He's got decades of adult experiences that tell us what kind of man he's become. That should be enough.

Dreher, who doesn't let Romney off easy, nevertheless feels that the WaPo is out of line:

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Obama was a horndog in high school, like many American teenage males. Are we supposed to derive a lesson about how he treats women, or his moral integrity, based on how he behaved at 16?

Josh Marshall focuses on Romney's response to the story:

What strikes me most about this story is Romney's intense equivocation. First he didn't remember the incidents. Then he apologized to anyone who was offended but without saying he remembered anything specific. Then he said that he definitely didn't know or think the kid they attacked was gay, even though he apparently didn't remember the attack. None of that really adds up. And I think this is long enough ago that if Romney just came clean and said it was almost 50 years ago and he regrets it that would be sufficient for most people.

Jim Burroway takes issue with Romney's apology:

This apology doesn’t sound like it came from a responsible adult who committed an assault and reflected on it for almost five decades afterward. It sound more like an apology from an eighteen year old kid who was dragged to the headmaster’s office after having just been caught leading a sight-impaired teacher into a closed door. And like most apologies from eighteen-year-old kids caught red-handed, it’s weaselly and pathetic.

Chait, meanwhile, has an alternative theory:

Maybe Romney didn't hate gays — maybe he just hated hair. Or, other peoples' hair, anyway. Perhaps that is the deeper fixation: It is not enough for Romney to have perfect hair. Others must have terrible hair.

My take here, here and here.

If the destruction in The Avengers were real:

Chuck Watson and Sara Jupin, employed computer models used for predicting the destruction of nuclear weapons and concluded that the physical damage of the invasion would be $60 billion-$70 billion, with economic and cleanup costs hitting $90 billion. Add on the loss of thousands of lives, and KAC puts the overall price tag at $160 billion. For context, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks cost $83 billion, Hurricane Katrina cost $90 billion, and the tsunami in Japan last year washed away $122 billion.

(Video: Filming the filming of a scene of the The Avengers in downtown Cleveland )

Sam Harris defended the profiling of Muslims. Bruce Schneier counters:

I too am incensed—but not surprised—when the TSA manhandles four-year old girls, children with cerebral palsy, pretty women, the elderly, and wheelchair users for humiliation, abuse, and sometimes theft. Any bureaucracy that processes 630 million people per year will generate stories like this. When people propose profiling, they are really asking for a security system that can apply judgment. Unfortunately, that’s really hard. 

Rules are easier to explain and train. Zero tolerance is easier to justify and defend. Judgment requires better-educated, more expert, and much-higher-paid screeners. And the personal career risks to a TSA agent of being wrong when exercising judgment far outweigh any benefits from being sensible.

The proper reaction to screening horror stories isn’t to subject only “those people” to it; it’s to subject no one to it. (Can anyone even explain what hypothetical terrorist plot could successfully evade normal security, but would be discovered during secondary screening?) Invasive TSA screening is nothing more than security theater.

Dish reader input here.

"Scour Romney’s record for a single example of real political courage — a single, solitary instance, however small, where Romney placed principle or substance above his own short- term political interests. Let me know if you find one … His campaign has been an exercise in feeble appeasement. The only thing he appears to be dedicated to is abasing himself to the hard-right wing of the Republican Party. Consider the way he allowed a foreign-policy spokesman to be drummed out of the campaign simply for being gay … Romney flunks the character test. He seems incapable of making the hard, sometimes unpopular, choices that are part of the job," – Gerald Rafshoon, former spokesman for president Carter.