Category: The Dish

He’s leaning toward her:

It’s funny. I was talking to a friend over the weekend and asked if he’d decided who to support. Hillary, he said. We talked about that for a while, and he went through several possible problems with her candidacy and why he’d decided they weren’t really big things to be concerned about. But I didn’t really find myself convinced. In fact, the conversation mostly just reminded me of a bunch of reasons to be concerned about her candidacy.

When you get down to it, I guess I’m sympathetic toward Hillary but really, really wishing that Obama would give me a good reason to change my mind and support him instead. But he just never does. Domestic policywise he’s been fairly cautious and mainstream. On the foreign policy front he’s better than HRC, but only by a couple of notches. And his Kumbaya campaigning schtick leaves me cold. Worse than that, in fact: it leaves me terrified that he just doesn’t know what he’s up against with the modern Republican Party and won’t have the instinct to go for the jugular when the inevitable Swift Boating commences. (Needless to say, I have no such doubts about Hillary.)

Kevin, I’d guess, is not alone. Tonight’s debate will be interesting.

Now you know the Brits are serious about climate change.

Heh:

Q: When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?

A: Why would they put [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?

Staten Island, New York, noon.

No Halloween parade in San Francisco? The NYT notices the post-gay reality in many, but not all, parts of America:

There has been a notable shift of gravity from the Castro, with young gay men and lesbians fanning out into less-expensive neighborhoods like Mission Dolores and the Outer Sunset, and farther away to Marin and Alameda Counties, “mirroring national trends where you are seeing same-sex couples becoming less urban, even as the population become slightly more urban,” said Gary J. Gates, a demographer and senior research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At the same time, cities not widely considered gay meccas have seen a sharp increase in same-sex couples. Among them: Fort Worth; El Paso; Albuquerque; Louisville, Ky.; and Virginia Beach, according to census figures and extrapolations by Dr. Gates for The New York Times. “Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York,” he said. “Now you can just go to Kansas City.”

"If you look at the way in which the mullahs have run Iran, by and large they have been incredibly savvy. They’re building up bank accounts in Dubai and in Switzerland. This does not strike me as the kind of ravings of, you know, an end of days millenarian.

The Iranians are trying to capture the core political high ground of the Middle East, and they’re trying to become the dominant power in the region. We should be working against them; we should building an alliance against them.

But the idea that they are not going to be deterred by Israel’s 200 nuclear weapons, including a second strike capacity on submarines, is just fantasy. It’s based on plucking a few quotes here and there from a president who is not constitutionally or operationally in charge of the nuclear program," – Fareed Zakaria, in a debate with Norman Podhoretz on the PBS Newshour last night.

It’s worth reading the entire transcript. Here’s the audio. I find the specter of religious fanaticism behind nuclear weaponry extremely troubling. I don’t think we can dismiss the theological rantings of the Tehran leadership. And it’s very refreshing to hear one of today’s neo-conservatives speaking of the danger of religious fanaticism. But we also have to be empirical about this: is their fundamentalism worse than Mao’s fundamentalism? Or Stalin’s? Are they less susceptible to the logic of mutually assured destruction than the Soviets were?

This is not an easy call. But the transcript shows that Zakaria has far more empirical reasoning behind his position than Podhoretz does behind his. And bringing Hitler up in your first response is not a sign of a deep or complicated analysis.

Max Blumenthal shoots several fish in several barrels at the recent Family Research Council conference. But what fish! What barrels! The sheer passion of the hatred for gay people as a fundamental plank of contemporary conservatism is unmistakable.

They’re a nation of gamblers – and the British bookies have just drastically cut the odds of Ron Paul actually winning the presidency. Yes, it’s 12/1. Very recently, it was 66/1. The Brits think he has more of a chance than John Edwards.

The usual triangulating, you-have-to-parse very-closely Clinton crapola. Let me go out on a limb: of course she’ll vote for him without demanding a statement on whether waterboarding is torture – as long as, and no longer than, she decides that it is in her political interest to vote as such. She is very consistent in this: there is no other principle that Clinton has ever operated by or ever will.

Here it is. I just watched it. I was under the impression he would be singing. Allowing this guy to preach strikes me as a step far too far. No, he doesn’t say anything homophobic as such. He uses the usual formula of loving those he wants to be other than they are – which is a very funny kind of love. But in saying that God "delivered" him from homosexuality, McClurkin describes sexual orientation as something that God wants to save me and other gay people from. If one were being generous, one would say this isn’t meant as an attack; but it is certainly experienced as an attack. McClurkin, in short, should never have been allowed to speak at this event, because his words are inherently divisive, his record of comments on gay people offensive, and the point of the event was allegedly unifying. It wasn’t. To my mind, this isn’t ultimately about the difficulty of forging any kind of alliance between gays and African-Americans. It is the inherent danger of mixing religion with politics. That’s called Christianism. Some of us have not spent the last few years trying to rescue conservatism from the toxin of theocracy only to support a candidate who wants to do the same thing on the left. I don’t think Obama wants to go that far; I still believe that broadly speaking, his is the only major candidacy right now that offers the kind of change we need. But what happened on that stage was inexcusable, stupid, and damaging. I don’t blame any gay American for jumping the Obama ship over it.