Author: Andrew Sullivan

Lindsey Graham's opposition to repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell is not very surprising. Not asking and not telling about sexual orientation is, after all, as central pillar of his own public identity as it is for Elena Kagan. But his smug dismissiveness toward a profound social and civil rights issue is illuminating:

"This is a political promise made by Senator Obama when he was running for president. There is no groundswell of opposition to Don't Ask, Don't Tell coming from our military. This is all politics. I don't believe there is anywhere near the votes to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. On the Republican side, I think we will be united in the lame duck [session] and the study I would be looking for is asking military members: Should it be repealed, not how to implement it once you as a politician decide to repeal it. So I think in a lame duck setting Don't Ask, Don't Tell is not going anywhere."

We should wait for the study, which asked open-ended questions of servicemembers about their views on the matter. But notice that he was echoed almost verbatim by McCain this morning:

“There was no uprising in the military. There were no problems in the military with ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ … It’s called ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ OK? If you don’t ask them, you don’t ask somebody, and they don’t tell.”

(This, of course, is untrue, as blatant violations of this have been documented.) Notice too that Butters reduces this question to a campaign promise – as if a clear promise by a president who won a landlside victory is of no consequence whatever to Senate poobahs like him. Notice also that his criterion for such a change is a "groundswell" in the military. But the civilian branch controls the military and decides its policies – not the other way around. The House of Representatives, the commander-in-chief, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the defense secretary and a hefty majority of Americans in most polls all want the change. Who does Graham think he is to dismiss all of this with a "not going anywhere" back of the hand?

Recall that Graham, not so very long ago, was regarded as one of the more centrist and reasonable Republicans. The degeneracy of that party is well illustrated by his and his buddy McCain's evolution.

"The most famous Christians of the early church were martyred. The most famous Christians of today get book deals," – tweeter Steve K McCoy.

A man who uses manipulative ploys and bluffs? Say it ain't so.

A reader writes:

The single tear at 1:16 seals it.

The original version is genuinely moving though, and a song that simply explores the pain of others is not what makes a Shut Up And Sing nomination. It's a performance that is really about the singer's moral preening that qualifies. And so Lisa Marie gets it, while her father doesn't. The best rendition, of course, is Cartman's (and Dina's).

I note this simply because it is important to resist the facile narrative that somehow Obama proved he was a radical leftist because he supported a stimulus package (after Bush's) in the face of the worst recession since the 1930s:

In an updated report [PDF] on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the CBO said that the legislation will increase the budget deficit by $814 billion from 2009-2019, compared with an original estimate of $787 billion. “By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and about 70% of ARRA’s budgetary impact was realized by the close of that fiscal year,” the report said.

The CBO estimates that the expenditures had a big impact on the economy, though the benefits have likely peaked. For the third quarter it says the stimulus added between 1.4 and 4.1 percentage points to growth and reduced the unemployment rate by between 0.8 and two percentage points. The benefits from the stimulus are expected to wane for the rest of this year and through 2011 and 2012.

Unemployment, sans stimulus, would therefore now be between 10.4 or 11.6 percent without the stimulus. Now you can argue that the economy should have been allowed to collapse entirely and rise from the eventually settled ashes. But you cannot argue that and criticize the president for high rates of unemployment today. He did about as much as he could within the bounds of fiscal responsibility.

He acted not as a liberal or as a conservative, but as a responsible, pragmatic human being. Precisely as he promised to be. And precisely why the ideological cynics in the GOP gave him no support whatever.

Eric Spitznagel interviews Isabella Rossellini about her upcoming show, "Green Porno: Seduce Me", a series of online shorts about kinkiness in the animal kingdom: 

Last August, her strangely erotic take on bedbug fucking went viral, thanks to a perfectly timed bedbug epidemic in New York City. There was something revelatory about watching Rossellini get stabbed in the gut with a penis knife while muttering with orgasmic enthusiasm, “He ejaculates into my wound!” It was a moment when many of us realized that Blue Velvet might not have been entirely a product of David Lynch’s twisted imagination.

The entertaining interview eventually sours.

J.J. Abrams's old TED talk focuses on his love of mystery in movies and TV. Sean Carroll isn't satisfied:

Yes, indeed, the concept of “mystery” is absolutely crucial to what makes a story compelling. But I think Abrams takes the idea too far, valorizing mystery for its own sake, rather than as motivation for the characters and the audience to try to solve the mystery. The reason why mysteries are interesting is because we want to figure them out! If they are simply irreducibly mysterious — if there is no sensible explanation that ultimately makes sense of all the clues — then it’s simply frustrating, not magical. …

The end of Inception is quite famously amenable to more than one interpretation. … This drives people crazy, trying to figure out which one is “right,” an impulse I think is misguided. It’s okay to accept that we don’t know all the answers! But in theses cases we understand quite well the space of all possible answers. There is no black box whose operation is simply mysterious. We don’t need to know all the final answers once and for all; but it’s better storytelling if we understand what the answers could be, and that they make sense to us.

A case for theology?

Ron Sider opposes marriage equality for the same exhausted "procreation-as-marriage" reasons that have been tossed around for years. What's striking about his essay in First Things is his  acknowledgment that the religious right has ruined its own credibility on the issue:

We have tolerated genuine hatred of gays; we should have taken the lead in condemning gay bashing but were largely silent; we have neglected to act in gentle love with people among us struggling with their sexual identity; and we have used the gay community as a foil to raise funds for political campaigns. We have made it easy for the media to suggest that the fanatics who carry signs announcing “God hates fags” actually speak for large numbers of evangelicals.

Worst of all, we have failed to deal honestly with the major threat to marriage and the family: heterosexual adultery and divorce. Evangelicals divorce at the same rate as the rest of the population. Many evangelical leaders have failed to speak against cheap divorce because they and their people were getting divorced just like everyone else. And yet we have had the gall to use the tiny (5 percent or less) gay community as a whipping boy that we labeled as the great threat to marriage.

What a farce. It is hardly surprising that young non-Christians’ most common perception (held by 91 percent) of contemporary Christianity is that we are “antihomosexual.” Even more disturbing is that 80 percent of young churchgoers agree.

We did not need to do this. We could have preached against hatred of gays, taken the lead in combating gay bashing, and been the most active community lovingly caring for people with AIDS. We could have taken marriage more seriously. We could have shown the world that Christians could defend marriage while loving those who wanted to live a different way.

The evolution of Disney, as seen through all 50 of its animated feature films: