Category: Old Dish

Here’s a classic New Orleans approach to disaster relief (er, yes, Dan Savage emailed me about it). Instead of begging the feds for cash, flash your boobs. The website Boobs4BourbonSt.com is asking women (or, even, men) to email pics of their bare titties. They’ve compiled quite a gallery. To view the gallery, you have to make a donation to one of several relief charities (a minimum of $5). So apposite. Go take your bra off now and get that digital camera out.

So the president spells out his post-Katrina policy: borrowing $200 billion to “clear away the legacy of inequality.” He gives no accounting of how the money will be found. His governing philosophy is: “It’s going to cost whatever it’s going to cost.” So we have the federal government engaging in a massive program of social engineering to reverse racial inequality in one state. But if we can do it in one state, why not all of them? Did we elect Ted Kennedy? I have just one simple question: When do we hold a formal wake for the end of conservatism?

That’s what the annual federal deficit will be by 2015 on the current Bush course. Merely to balance the budget by then, we’d need a 37 percent tax hike. Or we can cut spending. We should cut spending. The test of today’s GOP will be over which path they take in the future. God knows, this president won’t make the hard calls. It’s up to the Congress.

Yes, every now and again, the Sid Blumenthal of the Bush administration and I agree on a thing or two. Avian flu could be the next major disaster to hit the U.S. We have advance warning. We don’t have nearly enough vaccine for a flu with a 50 percent fatality rate. What is the federal plan to ramp up vaccine production and research? Why are we not vaccinating people now? And why do we have vastly insufficient stockpiles of Tamiflu, which is the only known effective agent against it? More here.

“Take heart that there will be a Republican and conservative answer to our bloated government. Democrats (only through implication) will seek to raise taxes as a solution; the Republicans will promise to take an axe to the government and reduce it to what the tax dollars bring in. Guess what position will win? (And why should the public believe the Republicans? Because they will believe a Giuliani or a McCain).
Believe me: a new Reaganism will be borne out of the Bush presidency; and it will be built on the best things that Bush accomplished (he kept us from spiritually becoming a pacifist Canada or a soulless EU, which is what the Left would have produced), and not simply as a reaction to failed presidency.”

I don’t understand the New York Times’ decision to put its op-ed columnists in a web-cage where bloggers and others cannot read them without a hefty annual fee. Newspapers tend to want to increase their influence, not actively restrain it. Maybe there’s a financial rationale that I don’t know about. But the NYT’s ad revenues online are soaring. Why cut off the flow? But here’s an interesting contrast: next Tuesday, this blog is going to be streamed to the Washington Post’s online opinion section. WaPo, unlike the NYT, is trying to reach out to bloggers and increase the interaction between old and new media. They approached me; and I’m always up for an experiment. WaPo will carry my lede item at any given time, and a couple of teaser headlines for the rest. I have no idea what to expect; and neither do they. But it’s one of the first real cooperative ventures between an independent blog and the MSM. The experiment will be over after four days, and the Post is hoping to repeat it with other bloggers – of all political persuasions. Don’t worry. I’m perfectly free to criticize the WaPo and I wouldn’t agree to any editorial limits on my blogging. So check it out next week. And let me and the WaPo know how you think it worked, how it could be improved, or anything else constructive. And I’m sorry, David, John, Tom, MoDo, et al. You deserve a little better, I think.

TORIES AND DRUGS: There’s an interesting development in Britain with regard to drug legalization. A leading contender for the Conservative party leadership favors it – globally.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who decided to skip watching the president live last night. Across the blogosphere, it seems as if many others decided to catch it later, or on the web, or just read the transcript. Why? Because I knew what was coming: an attempt at spiritual uplift, greased by billions and billions that we don’t have, organized by a federal government that, under Bush, cannot seem to organize anything competently. I’m not saying we don’t need to spend money on the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I’m saying I don’t want to hear it from this guy. As a friend of mine commented last night over a drink, I don’t hate this president and never have. I’m just sick of him. Sick of the naked politicization of everything (Karl Rove over-seeing reconstruction?); sick of the utter refusal to acknowledge that there is a limit to what the federal government can borrow from this and the next generation; sick of the hijacking of the conservative tradition for a vast increase in the power and size of government, with only a feigned attempt at making it more effective; sick of the glib arrogance and excuses for failure that dot the landscape from Biloxi to Basra. I’m not the only one. See here, here, here, here, here, and more generally here.

THE DISILLUSION: Maybe the fact that I once truly did buy into this makes me more jaundiced today. I really wanted the man to succeed; believed he could; and, given the stakes, I felt it was almost irresponsible not to support him in the war and defend him from his worst and least principled critics (most of whom still make me retch). If so, filter my current negativism through the prism of my previous enthusiasm. Maybe I’m over-reacting. But please don’t ignore the facts: the biggest increase in federal government spending, debt and power since LBJ. Here’s one tiny example of what we’re seeing: hugely expensive trailer parks to create new federal ghettoes for evacuees. If that’s why you’re a conservative, fine. If you back this because the alternative is so awful, fine. Harry Reid’s call for a Marshall Plan for the South was a healthy reminder that many Democrats are still even worse than this profligate crew. But please don’t ask me to be enthusiastic about this. Buying popularity by spending billions was not why I originally became a conservative. Increasing the welfare state, burdening the future generations with mountainous debt, confusing politics with faith, failing to impose basic law and order as a primary reponsibility for government: these things I thought were characteristics of the left. They now define the Bush administration. I became a conservative because I saw in my native country what a terrible, incompetent, soul-destroying thing big government socialism is. It breaks my heart to see much of it now being implemented in America – by Republicans.

“Your post on the need for the Roman Catholic Church to have openly gay celibate priests reminds me of the title of the Best Rock Video Ever. Its by the Talking Heads and is entitled ‘Stop Making Sense.'”

I’m writing a column on penguins and the culture wars. Here’s a factual nugget that I found interesting. Some on the religious right have hailed the new – and wonderful – movie, “The March of the Penguins” as a socially conservative morality tale. Michael Medved even went so far as to argue that the penguin documentary “passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.” Well, not quite. It turns out that monogamy varies a lot among birds and even among penguin species. The emperor penguins featured in the movie have a very low monogamy habit. From year to year, only 15 percent of the blokes mate with the same, er, chick. Imagine humans with an 85 percent annual divorce rate. That’s the model that some on the religious right are now touting. Maybe they should re-think. When they’re not gay, these birds have as many spouses as Larry King. Even Liz Taylor beats them on the marriage front, I think.

The latest data on American sexual behavior and identity from the CDC has some interesting nuggets. Money quote: “90 percent [of adult males aged 15 – 44] have had oral sex with a female, and 40 percent, anal sex with a female.” If sodomy is defined as non-procreative sexual intercourse (and that is the basic definition), then it is now practiced by 90 percent of heterosexuals. So on what rational moral basis do we discriminate against gays – who, according to the CDC, make up around 3 percent of the population? Meanwhile, mixed news on the safer sex front:

Among men 15-44 years of age who had at least one sexual partner in the last 12 months, 39 percent used a condom at their most recent sex. Among never married males, this figure was 65 percent, compared with 24 percent of married males. Among males who had ever had sexual contact with another male, 91 percent used a condom at their last sex, compared with 36 percent of men who never had sex with another male.

Of course, this requires honesty on the party of survey respondents. But it’s encouraging nonetheless, with gay men understandably far safer than straight men in their sex lives.