Month: March 2013

Whitewashing Rape, Ctd

A reader writes:

I do not understand the outrage at CNN’s reporting. Can we not discuss how this will impact the guilty? Can we not have any compassion for the guilty? Full disclosure: I served 4 1/2 years in prison for a violent felony when I was 19 years old. Fast-forward 19 years and I am in a Master’s Marriage and Family Therapy program specifically to help people like those two teenagers. Believe it or not, they are people and they will be entering society in one or two years and it’s in society’s interest to rehabilitate them. I believe the first step is having compassion for people who commit crimes. This does not mean we cannot abhor the crime. We must. But we must also get them to take responsibility and understand the impact of their crime. That powerful video showed me that at least Ma’Lik Richmond seemed to understand the severity of his actions. And to everyone who detests these guilty teenagers, never fear; they will be dealing with the repercussions for the rest of their lives, for there is no label worse than “rapist”.

Another writes:

Honestly, I don’t see how this story is the least bit sympathetic to the rapists. If I were one of those boys, the best thing, the most sympathetic thing CNN could have done would be never to have turned this local crime into a national story in the first place.  Now, not only does everyone in their hometown know about it, but millions of people across the country.

Another:

Isn’t the young men’s narrative a useful one alongside the victim’s?  I mean, wouldn’t young men who think they have a bright future or want to create one, take the crushed dreams of the guilty young men as a cautionary tale? The victim’s story alone might not be enough of a compelling story to keep young men out of trouble.

Congressmen Lag Their Constituents On Gay Rights

DADT Comparison

Erik Voeten flags a paper (pdf) on the conservative bias of Congress. One finding:

[O]n average public support in a district for a liberal policy towards gays needs to be well over 50% for a Congressman to vote in favor of that policy. Moreover, when opinion in a District changes, Democrats are much more likely to change their votes than Republican Congressmen. The figure [above] illustrates their findings for the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell issue. There were only small pockets in the country where majorities opposed changing the policy. Votes against it in Congress were much more numerous than we would expect from public opinion.

“Unmitigated Codswallop”

Now that’s some writing I can relate to. It’s Charles Pierce’s high-spirited rant against Ezra Klein’s hymn to Kenneth Pollack. Money quote:

Let Pollack go to Walter Reed and avoid those pesky moralistic arguments.

“‘We’ll never know,’ Pollack replied. ‘History doesn’t reveal its alternatives. But I think the evidence out there is that we could have handled this much better than we did, and that it didn’t have to be this bad. The best evidence for that is the surge. In 18 months, we shut down the civil war and reversed the direction of Iraqi politics.'”

In brief, fuck you. History “revealed its alternatives” at the time. You did your damndest to make a buck while shutting them down, and 65 people died in car bombings this week as a demonstration of how the surge reversed the direction of Iraqi politics. As for Ezra, well, he should go and sin no more. It is encouraging that he no longer believes in fairy tales.

Cannabis Lite

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Emma Maris, whose brother assesses the potency of marijuana sold in dispensaries in Washington, finds that the most common question she gets about him is, “Can he score me some weak weed?”:

Clearly, there’s a market segment out there that isn’t being catered to by the dope industry. And these relatively affluent customers want something more like a glass of wine at the end of the day than the effect summarized by one recent review of the guava dawg strain in Northwest Leaf magazine: “lung expansion, flavor worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize, and the ability to instantly make my face feel like it’s been shrink-wrapped.”

Peace Process Polling

It doesn’t look promising:

The ugly truth is that the Palestinians and Israelis are arguably further apart on peace now than they have been at any point in the past 20 years. Both sides want a settlement, but they can’t see how to achieve it and they don’t trust each other. The only aspect they really agree upon at all is that President Obama will not be helpful in establishing peace.

Francis Emerges, Ctd

The Inauguration Mass For Pope Francis

Where Benedict was a withdrawn absolutist, Francis is an engaged pragmatist. Here are two illuminating examples. The first is that he backed – as a last resort – civil unions for gay couples in Argentina as an alternative to full marriage equality. It’s extremely hard to imagine the mind of Ratzinger being capable of such a nuanced and practical stance in a specific situation:

Faced with the near certain passage of the gay marriage bill, Cardinal Bergoglio offered the civil union compromise as the “lesser of two evils,” said Sergio Rubin, his authorized biographer. “He wagered on a position of greater dialogue with society.”

In the end, though, a majority of the bishops voted to overrule him, his only such loss in his six-year tenure as head of Argentina’s bishops’ conference. But throughout the contentious political debate, he acted as both the public face of the opposition to the law and as a bridge-builder, sometimes reaching out to his critics.

“He listened to my views with a great deal of respect,” said Marcelo Márquez, a gay rights leader and theologian who wrote a tough letter to Cardinal Bergoglio and, to his surprise, received a call from him less than an hour after it was delivered. “He told me that homosexuals need to have recognized rights and that he supported civil unions, but not same-sex marriage.”

Here’s what impresses me: the call back to a gay rights activist. Dialogue. Empathy. I do not expect the Magisterium to change switly on homosexuality – but if we could only have a dialgoe, a discussion, some kind of glasnost on the subject, what an amazing change that would be! If Berguglio had succeeded in persuading the Argentine church to back civil unions, can you imagine how he would have been seen at the Conclave? Can you imagine Benedict’s conniption? Sometimes you need a straight Pope to deal honestly with gay issues.

Then this striking flexibility on priestly celibacy, in an interview last year, after retelling a story of falling head over heels in love as a young man:

Bergoglio admits he was able to choose his path as a priest over the girl but realizes that not all priests can do this. Bergoglio added, “When something like this happens to a seminarian, I help him go in peace to be a good Christian and not a bad priest.

“In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those Churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests. In Western Catholicism, some organizations are pushing for more discussion about the issue. For now, the discipline of celibacy stands firm. Some say, with a certain pragmatism, that we are losing manpower. If, hypothetically, Western Catholicism were to review the issue of celibacy, I think it would do so for cultural reasons (as in the East), not so much as a universal option.”

He continued, “If a priest tells me he got excited and that he had a fall, I help him to get on track again. There are priests who get on track again and others who do not…The double life is no good for us. I don’t like it because it means building on falsehood. Sometimes I say: ‘If you can not overcome it, make your decision’.”

Yes, yes, yes: confirmation bias, wishful thinking, you name it. But there is nothing unchangeable about the celibacy requirement. Half of Catholic Christendom has married priests. My old parish in England, where I first received Holy Communion, now has a married priest – a former Anglican. These are management, not doctrinal decisions. Francis understands that, it seems. These procedures can change. For the sake of the survival of the church in the West, they must.

(Photo: Franciscan friars ariive in St. Peter’s Square attend the Inauguration Mass of Pope Francis on March 19, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)

Ask Me Anything

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[Re-posted from last week with many questions added by readers, primarily about the new Dish model. But feel free to submit additional questions related to the new Pope, the Iraq War or anything else you are curious about. ]

A year has passed since I last answered questions for the Ask Anything feature, and now that we are settled into the new Dish and assembling our own video equipment, it’s a good time to revive the series. To submit a question, simply enter it into the field at the top of the Urtak poll (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). We primed the poll with questions you can vote on right away – click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. We will air the videos soon.

Facts On Fracking, Ctd

[youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phCibwj396I]

Readers revive a recent thread:

As a professional on the land side of the domestic oil and gas industry, I just want to point out one thing: Fracking is used in the production of both oil and natural gas. The conversation is usually framed as one about natural gas production alone, which is incorrect. When talking about producing our domestic oil reserves, fracking is a key component of doing so, particularly in the Rocky Mountain states and up into North Dakota, where fracking has proven to be the “key” to finally unlocking the enormous potential of the Bakken formation, which everyone has known about since the 50s, but only figured out how to tap into successfully in the last decade (with few exceptions).

Another:

Kevin Bullis claims that “some environmentalists are comparing fracking not to coal but to solar and wind power, on the assumption that we could easily abandon fossil fuels for renewables. That’s a mistake.” This may be true, but the bigger mistake is what Bullis and others like him are doing: assuming that natural gas is somehow replacing coal.  It is not.  Even if the United States is replacing some of its energy from coal with natural gas, that coal is not going to stay in the ground.  There are coal export terminals planned on the West coast.  That coal is still going to be mined and shipped overseas, where it will be burned.  So burning more natural gas is not reducing carbon in the atmosphere but is increasing carbon in the atmosphere.  The global amount of carbon in the atmosphere is what matters.

And as far as the reduction in air pollution, that is certainly a good thing.  But again, that pollution is just being exported somewhere else.  I don’t think we should be proud that we’re exporting our dirtiest energy to inflict damage on people in other countries.  Continued reliance on natural gas is only going to stall our need to transition to cleaner alternatives now.  More importantly, it deincentivizes our country from addressing the cold reality that we simply consume way too much energy for our population.  Our main concern should be addressing how to reduce our gluttonous consumption of energy, not transitioning from a really dirty carbon source to a somewhat less dirty carbon source.

And before anyone supports coal or natural gas, they should visit the blown up mountains in West Virginia or the industrialized forests and farmlands of northern and southwestern Pennsylvania.  It’s easy to be for these things that provide our energy when you don’t have to live with the localized consequences.  It’s quite another when you live at the base of a valley that’s been filled in with the rubble of a blown up mountain where your family has lived for generations.  Or to see the forested hills and valleys of Pennsylvania be transformed into industrial wastelands by the natural gas industry.  Switching to natural gas is not smart in the long run – it’s simply another short term fix for an addict.

Another:

In response to this reader’s comment, I live in Colorado, I’m in the water business, and I take issue nearly everything that was stated. I’m a die-hard liberal, but the misinformation out there on fracking just boggles the mind. No, fracking does not use “significant” amounts of water. The industry’s water needs are very small compared to other industrial and agricultural uses. The oil and gas industry has not outbid farmers for water (can the reader cite even one example?). And the water permanently “lost” as part of the fracking process is really no different than the water that is permanently “lost” (evapotranspired) when you raise corn or brew beer. The same farmers who are leasing their water to the oil and gas industry are mostly the same farmers who are reaping hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in oil and gas royalties.

I’ll agree that the land use issues are difficult. Drilling activity has intensified in recent years and it does encroach on towns and urban sprawl. That’s really what this issue is all about: NIMBY, etc.

Update from another:

I’m a long time Dish reader, first time writer, and Boulderite. The Colorado water guy who wrote in claiming that oil and gas companies don’t outbid farmers clearly hasn’t been reading the newspaper. Here’s the source, from April 2012 right after the water auction. And here’s the key part:

At the recent auction, Fort Lupton-based A & W Water Service Inc. bid successfully for 1,500 acre-feet of water, paying about $35 per acre-foot. That’s slightly higher than the market price that irrigators pay for leasing water along the Front Range. The average price paid for water at NWCD’s auctions has increased from around $22 an acre-foot in 2010 to $28 this year.

A & W also leases water from Longmont, Loveland, Greeley and other cities—and hauls it to drilling sites.

The GOP’s Looming Gay Crisis

“There is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays — and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be. If our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out,” – the Growth and Opportunity Project report on the problems facing the GOP.

In the latest polling, 81 percent of those under 30 favored marriage equality. I was shocked by the number, but TO GO WITH AFP STORY By Otto Bakano -- Tshouldn’t have been. What we can all forget is that this is the first generation who went through their childhood and teens knowing that civil marriage was an option for gay couples. That generation included gay kids and teens who, for the first time, could see an integrated future for themselves in their own families and society. I have no doubt this has made that generation the least fucked-up, sanest gay generation in history – seeing from the get-go a real and equal and dignified future for themsleves. And their greater self-confidence and self-esteem has been infectious. Their straight peers know them and their orientation and simply find it baffling that they would be denied what every heterosexual has always accepted as a given in their own lives.

That can only mean that, for the young generation, and all those who follow it in the future, the GOP’s aggressive stance and brutal rhetoric against marriage equality simply identifies them as bigots. Some may not be. But that is what they will be seen to be. The report does not advocate changing policy on marriage equality. But I think the premise that it can win the next generation simply by ignoring the question is untenable.

Which is to say, I would go a little further than the always insightful Tom Edsall, who wrote:

There is at least one crucial problem that the authors, all members of the establishment wing of the party, address only peripherally and with kid gloves: the extreme conservatism of the party’s primary and caucus voters — the people who actually pick nominees.

The over-60, predominantly white, Fox News watching, fundamentalist base cannot budge an inch on gays. Because it’s a religious and not a political position. And so it may soon be a truly fateful day for the GOP: drop the anti-gay policies or become the even angrier old white man party.

How amazing that marriage equality, once wielded by Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove as their key weapon in winning Ohio and the presidency in 2004, now threatens to kill the GOP as a national brand. With every year that passes, every attack on gays is now felt by growing numbers of their own family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors. There’s a multiplier effect here. And gerry-mandering has enabled the GOP to control the House without ever having to grapple with those voters.

If I were Karl Rove, I’d be praying for Anthony Kennedy to write the gay Loving vs Virginia. It would take the issue off the political table for good, and leave them a nice juicy judicial tyranny argument instead. But a mixed verdict – say one that allows for federal recognition of civil marriages in the nine states and DC that has them, and that mandates that civil unions with all the substantive benefits of civil marriage must be called marriage – would keep the issue alive, violate no federalist principles, and leave the GOP’s fundamentalist intransigence in place – as a dead weight around their necks as they try to stay afloat.

Watching ideologues confront reality is always entertaining for a real conservative. But it’s going to be excruciating for today’s Republicans.

(Photo: Getty images.)

Dissents Of The Day

A reader quotes me:

This feels like an academic debate. But it isn’t. I have blood on my hands. However many times I try to wash them, the blood will not come off.

Can you and all your fellow pundits spare us the self-flagellation about Iraq? I say this as a former Army officer who served in west Baghdad just after the civil war there cooled off. We get it. We know what a charlie-foxtrot it was. We also know we need to constructively talk about the lessons learned and strategic and policy failures. Folks like Tom Ricks and Rajiv Chandresekaran are doing that quite well right now. I would much rather have Paul Wolfowitz (see Bacevich) come to terms with Iraq than you give us your very own “hathos alert”.

Another piles on:

Let your self-importance go already! Blame the blamable, not the lemmings. You are a blog writer. You comment. You don’t wage wars. You fell for their BS. Nothing more.

Another takes issue with the visual part of the post:

Once again with the pictures of dead children. Was it absolutely necessary to post one of a child with his scalp tearing forward and a pacifier in his grandfather’s hand?  I paid up my $20 to get my regular dose of the Dish, but I cannot stand it when you post these pictures of dead children.  What is the purpose?  Sensationalism?  Trying to make the point that the war in Iraq was wrong?  You can do that with the many essays you have written, without including the broken bodies of dead children. Please. The next time you think you will … don’t.

Another doesn’t go quite that far:

I’ve emailed about this on a number of occasions and I know you have a very “if you don’t like it, stop reading my blog” attitude sometimes but, as you are a clearly a very empathetic person, I would like you to try to put yourself in the shoes of parents with young children.  As a father of two young kids, unexpectedly seeing something as horrifying as what you have posted today can be more traumatic that you realize.  And I don’t expect anyone who isn’t a parent to truly understand what I’m talking about because having children literally changes your brain.  And no, having dogs doesn’t fucking count.

Before having kids (I have a six and two year-old) I could see a photo like that and feel an appropriate amount of pain/empathy without it fucking up my brain for an extended period of time.  Not so anymore.  For example, just hearing Rachel Maddow talk about Sandy Hook again the other day almost had me in tears and made me depressed/distracted for most of the day.  Am I hyper-sensitive relative to many others about this stuff?  YES… because I have little kids.  But I’m also a big jock of a guy and can tell you that my reaction is not half as severe as what most mothers would experience if they saw what you posted today.

I very much understand why you show these pictures.  I actually applaud you for putting them out there because most Americans don’t see the horror of war, and we need to.  In fact, I’ve threatened to send pictures of dead children to my father because he can be very callous about the murders we’re committing overseas in the name of “The War on Terror.”  I’ve threatened to do this because I want him to see pictures and think about those dead kids as if they were HIS grandchildren.  But ultimately I don’t send them because I’m not an asshole who will traumatize someone just to make a point.

So, PLEASE put photos like that below Read On with a warning of graphic images.  This will at least allow your readers to choose what they are seeing and give them the opportunity to prepare themselves.  That can make a huge difference.

Another differs:

I think that the photo you posted is the most disturbing and graphic photo you’ve ever posted on your blog.  I wasn’t sure that I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing until I made the photo larger.  I imagine you will get some complaints about it.  But I’m glad you posted it.  We can’t be reminded often enough of the real consequences of any war.

I feel no satisfaction that I was 100% opposed to the war from the very beginning.  The very idea of it was devastating to me.  It made no sense to me at all, and I was appalled that the America I loved was going to start a war under circumstances that I considered unjustified.  It felt like a betrayal of the principles I strongly believed in and thought were absolutely sacrosanct.  I hated that people around the world hated us and saw us as bullies.

Shortly before the war started, I went with my husband and baby son to Spain for a vacation.  I was saddened by the hatred I felt from many people simply because I was American.  We had an encounter with an airline employee at the airport in Madrid that left me shaken for days.  Despite being an employee in a service position dealing with international travelers, she did not even attempt to hide her contempt for my little family, simply because we were American.  She took pleasure in saying “Americans are terrible people.”  I wanted to report her to her boss. I wanted to explain to her that I didn’t support the war, that a lot of Americans didn’t support the war, that I didn’t vote for Bush, that the America that would do this was not my America.  But I love my country, and I respect the office of the President, even if I didn’t respect the President, and I suffered mostly in silence.  She’d made her mind up, anyway.

I’m glad I didn’t read you then.  I don’t think I would have stuck with you.  But I don’t think you have blood on your hands.  In my America, you are always allowed to say what you feel, to give your opinion, which is all you did, even if you were wrong.

George Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones with blood on their hands.

I do not mean to exaggerate my infinitesimal influence on decisions made by others. I was trying to express as clearly as possible how sorry I am. As for the graphic photos: this is the blood on my hands. I posted it not for shock value, but as a reality check against precisely the kind of solipsism one can fall into in this kind of thing. I also see one of the defining qualities of the Dish is that we will publish photos other mainstream outlets will not, for the reasons articulated by readers.

Someone, in my view, needs to get some of the brilliant but sometimes disturbing photography of some of the world’s best photo-journalists out there. If you can’t put them on your own blog, who will ever see them? And who will see them in their minds the next time we entertain something like invading a Middle East country.