Category: The Dish

A reader dissents from my welcome to Mary Cheney in the battle for marriage rights:

I wish I had the time to write a calm and reasoned response to your entries about Condi Rice and Mary Cheney, but since I don’t, this is going to be from the heart:

It’s irrelevant that Rice or any of the other members of this administration are "tolerant" of GLBT people or that they have gay/lesbian family members or friends, when they win elections by stirring up anti-gay prejudice in this country. Why don’t you see this?

Of course, Condi and the Bushes and the Cheneys are tolerant of gays and lesbians. They are sophisticated people who have known gay people as neighbors, colleagues, family members, and friends all their lives. If anything, that makes their cynical exploitation of gays as a campaign issue all the more contemptible.

As for Mary Cheney, yeah, I’m glad she’s FINALLY spoken up. But she has it pretty cushy, no? No matter what happens to the rest of us — when "marriage protection" laws go into effect in state after state, potentially depriving us of existing domestic partner benefits, wills, powers of attorney, guardianship, or any other rights that "approximate" marriage — she and Heather will still be sheltered by the wealth and privilege they enjoy by being members of the Cheney family.

Until all gay people have equal rights and protection under the law, I don’t give a good god damn that Condi Rice was sweet to some transgendered person or that the Cheney’s love their lesbian daughter. Did you read Mary Cheney’s coming-out story? She said that her mother wept out of sadness and fear that her daughter would face a life of "pain and prejudice" as a lesbian. From whom I wonder? Oh yeah, right, the people who put her father in office.

Point taken. Hence my hope that Mary actually walks the walk – and fights for the rights her party would take away.

They’re our best hope, according to Bernard Lewis. (Hat tip: Ron.)

Hugh Hewitt explains it all for you.

Many of you have challenged me to explain and defend my use of the term "Christianist" to define those who want to conflate religion and politics. Well, you asked for it. My Time essay on the question is now posted. My Times of London column on the closet tolerants, Bush and Cheney, is also posted.

(Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP.)

Now, that’s a counter-intuitive idea. What we now know is that there is no relationship between cutting taxes and reducing spending – at least according to Bill Niskanen. Niskanen worked in the Reagan White House and now chairs the Cato Institute. Sebastian Mallaby explains:

Niskanen has crunched the numbers between 1981 and 2005, testing for a relationship between tax cuts and government spending, and controlling for levels of unemployment, since these affect spending and taxes independently. Niskanen’s result punctures his own party’s dogma. Tax cuts are associated with increases in government spending. The best strategy for forcing cuts in government is actually to raise taxes.

How can this be? Mallaby suggests an answer:

Maybe cutting taxes before cutting spending makes government feel cheap: People are still getting all the services they want, but they are paying less for them. Maybe this illusory cheapening has a perverse effect: Now that government feels like a bargain, people want more of it.

And conservatives then provide rationales for giving it to them. Welcome to Big Insolvent Government Conservatism, the nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue.

How low can Bush fall in the polls? Will he sink as far as Nixon? And without even an impeachment?

The next CIA resignation is forthcoming.

Mary Cheney’s new book makes it clear where she stands on the attempt to write anti-gay discrimination into the federal constitution. Money quotes from the GMA interview:

"My father has made it very clear … That freedom means freedom for everyone. He’s stated … his opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment, which I think is a very big deal … Today, same-sex couples can get married in Massachusetts and Canada and Great Britain. Can anyone honestly say 10 years ago they thought we’d be having this debate today?"

Well, over ten years ago, some of us helped kick-start the debate and I’m delighted to have had Mary as an ally in the past and present. I agree with Elizabeth Birch and Hillary Rosen in the WaPo this morning. Mary’s relationship with her spouse, Heather, is testimony to the endurance and dignity of gay relationships – and their presence in Republican families as well as Democratic ones. Here’s a thought: maybe Mary can build on her opposition to the "Marriage Protection Amendment" by agreeing to testify against it when the Senate holds hearings next month. We need you, Mary. Help reclaim the Republican party as the party of freedom, not intolerance. You could make a real difference in humanizing this issue for your own party.

In the past, legal immigration to the United States was not exactly a tough process. In fact, almost anyone who showed up across the border or on a boat were welcome. Money quote:

Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, wrote about her Irish forebears in a Wall Street Journal column: "They waited in line. They passed the tests. They had to get permission to come … They had to get through Ellis Island … get questioned and eyeballed by a bureaucrat with a badge."
But these accounts are flawed, historians say. Until 1918, the United States did not require passports; the term "illegal immigrant" had no meaning. New arrivals were required only to prove their identity and find a relative or friend who could vouch for them.
Customs agents kept an eye out for lunatics and the infirm (and after 1905, for anarchists). Ninety-eight percent of the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were admitted to the United States, and 78 percent spent less than eight hours on the island. (The Mexico-United States border then was unguarded and freely crossed in either direction.)

I think Lou Dobbs needs to read a little history, don’t you?

A new study suggests that the hotter and easier professors are, the better their student ratings. You don’t say. (Hat tip: Tax Prof.)