Category: The Dish

Ad revenue for the NYT plunged 6 percent in Feburary – but online ad revenue is up.

Things are rough when I’m gentler on POTUS than NRO:

While delivering his remarks lost his place at least once, and sounded like an exhausted lame duck lamely reading his unconvincing statement. There are two years left in this administration and the president had better exude some confidence. And be confident about his people. And get rid of them if he’s not. Anything else strikes me as lame.

Gonzales is too close to the president to be sacrificed, it appears. The risk is that this will only prolong the investigation, and expose more of the seamy underside of the politicization of the justice system. The benefit is that Bush seems less a victim of events and more – temporarily at least – in control of them. Besides, losing Gonzales would have been a big personal blow, and my guess is that Rove and Cheney both wanted to dig in. I should add that the actual, substantive position of the president is not that unreasonable. Gonzales will testify under oath; they’re releasing mounds of evidence; others on Bush’s staff will willingly cooperate. The attempt to protect executive privilege is a defensible one. But the attempt by Bush to portray himself as somehow above partisanship on this is a little rich. It was the triumph of partisanship over good government that brought this scandal to the surface in the first place. And partisan politics is surely playing a key role in the push-back. The specter of Karl Rove under the "klieglights" would have been political poison to Bush – and to the GOP. So he’s digging in. And the hole could get a lot deeper.

(Favorite line: ‘The serve at our pleasure." He really is getting monarchical, isn’t he?)

A reader writes:

The very simple solution to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is this: On April 1st, every GLB Serviceperson stands up and tells their superior, "I’m gay and I want to serve my country."  Either the military loses tens of thousands of qualified soldiers and is forced to draw down in Iraq, or they eliminate this stupid rule.  Bush would have to choose between his beloved base and the War on Terror. Interesting to watch, eh?

We really do have the power.

I missed this, as did Headline Junky, but Senators Carl Levin and Lindsay Graham were watching the "confession" of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in a nearby room by remote TV as it happened. I put the word "confession" in quotes because any confession procured through torture is inherently suspect. Levin and Graham have been impressive for a while, and their presence is a welcome sign that they take what has happened to the reputation of America seriously. Even more impressive is their response:

Two senators who watched Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confess to planning the Sept. 11 attacks and other plots said Friday that his allegations of mistreatment by U.S. captors should be taken seriously and investigated. "To do otherwise would reflect poorly on our nation," Sens. Carl Levin, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said in a joint statement. …

Levin and Graham said they were impressed with the tribunal’s professionalism, but did not rule out further changes to the system. "The true test of the (tribunal) process is not a case in which the detainee admits the allegations against him, it is a case in which the detainee disputes those allegations," the senators wrote.

Thanks. In the Kafka-esque nightmare into which this president has thrown us with respect to detainee interrogations, the obvious sometimes needs to be stated.

Watch director David O. Russell go completely bonkers at Lily Tomlin on the set of "I Heart Huckabees." I’d embed but the language is so NSFW I daren’t. Tomlin’s composure is remarkable. She’s one cool dude. Money quote: "We better get some insurance against the director."

A profile in courage. More here.

Sam Harris’s latest response in our blogalogue on faith and reason can be read here. Money quote:

Is it really so difficult to imagine one’s own nonexistence? I think it might be easier than advertised. Presumably, you don’t find it hard to accept that you didn’t exist before you were born, so why is it so difficult to believe that you will cease to exist after you die? Think of all the times and places where you now aren’t: The 14th century got along fine without you (well, not so fine). If you are in D.C. at this moment, you are utterly absent from every other city on earth. There are people walking the streets of Rome right now, carrying on without the benefit of your company. Is your absence from just one more point in time and space really so difficult to imagine? (This time and space argument doesn’t originate with me. I believe I’ve borrowed it from Douglas Hofstadter.)

Or imagine dying in parts: what if you had a stroke that damaged your visual cortex-where would your faculty of sight be thereafter? If a priest said that your visual self had gone on to heaven before you, would you believe him? What if another stroke caused you to lose your ability to speak and to understand language-do you think that your eloquence must survive in some immaterial form? There is simply no question that brain damage can cause any of us to lose the specific faculties that constitute our conscious selves. Why is it so hard to imagine that we can lose all these faculties at once?

He’s on a roll. The rest is here. I’ll respond within a week.

A reader writes:

I have no idea how to contact Larry Kramer and he’d probably hate it anyway, some feeble drip in the raging ocean of homophobia trying to be heard.  But after reading that heartbreaking editorial of his, I sit here in tears and wish I could tell him that I do not hate gay people, that I have spent my whole life fighting against homophobia to the point that I’m often viewed with suspicion.  What am I hiding, everyone eventually asks? Nothing.  How can anyone do anything else? Why am I so alone in this?  What the hell is wrong with everyone? There simply aren’t enough angry het people Andrew, Larry is right. There are plenty of nice people who don’t hate gay people, probably the majority, but not enough who find the hate intolerable and won’t take another minute.

"We are conservative scholars, activists and writers. We do not favor a crippled executive or enfeebled government. In a time of danger, checks and balances make for stronger government because the people will more readily accept a muscular authority if barriers against abuses are strong. If at some future time Congress, in turn, aggrandizes power and invades the executive or judicial domains, we will be equally alert to sound the alarm. But today, the clear and present danger to conservative philosophy is the White House," – Barr, Keene, Viguerie, Fein – all a bunch of flaming liberals, right?