The Dish

He’s lived with HIV for twenty years and he faces a jail-term of six years for using medical marijuana to help him keep his meds down. In a state which has already legalized medical marijuana. I kid you not.

Time magazine digs in. Who’s Kyle Sampson? Has anyone here heard of Karl Rove?

The conversation begins! And yes, I know they snuck a snuke in her snizz. She’s still running.

Alex Ross’s guest-blogger, Justin Davidson, has some fun with Michael Tilson Thomas:

After establishing his street cred by remarking that "by Mozart’s day, music was way more in your face than it had been before," MTT finally gets to the heart of his argument: that the densifying, intensifying and increasingly overwhelming sound of 19th and 20th century symphonic music arose from the need to compete with the rising din of urban life. That, I’ll buy.

If you love classical music and you’re not reading Alex Ross’s blog, you now have no excuse.

"It’s like Pat Benatar wrote Braveheart."

Britain sends asylum-seekers back into hell.

Will they never stop violating his teachings?

They still refuse to be accountable in any serious way. Here’s the editor of the Southern Voice, the major gay paper in Atlanta:

For our article interviewing [Human Rights Campaign president Joe] Solmonese, SoVo asked HRC a simple question about the HRC Atlanta Dinner: How much money did last year’s event raise?

They refused to tell us numbers from the 2006 dinner, although we previously reported that the 2005 event grossed about $200,000.

There are three possible reasons why HRC doesn’t want to tell Atlanta readers how much money we raised for the group at last year’s dinner: the event didn’t raise enough money to make it worth the expense of putting it on, the event raised so much money that HRC fears we’ll decide we should keep some of it here to devote to local causes, or they just don’t take our questions very seriously.

The usual secrecy and lack of accountability. A letter writer in the Washington Blade piles on today:

HRC remains an organization directed and led by a cabal of individuals who continue to use it, and the millions of dollars entrusted to it by its supporters, to promote themselves and their own agendas…

Perhaps it is time that HRC recognize that not everyone is fooled by its glossy, self-promotional branding efforts and that members of the gay community are beginning to seek some accountability.

Until they start answering questions posed by the media, stop giving them your money.

Paul Graham sparked a fascinating debate here on fashion and morals. What are we saying and doing today that one day will seem unfathomably bigoted and immoral? Hal Finney ran with the ball here. Ilya Somin thinks the death penalty will one day look like barbarism. Manifest Destiny takes a different approach and asks what immorality will one day look like. Money quote:

"My money’s on voluntary limb amputation."

Tim Lee figures his libertarianism is biasing him. It’s an interesting topic. My own candidates for what we find morally ok today that we won’t in the future are: abortion-on-demand, factory farming, and discrimination against gays. But my biases may be showing too.

Watching this video should remind us of the kind of people we’re dealing with in Tehran. The British sailor is obviously under duress and forced to tell lies as a hostage. Displaying captive soldiers in this way is repulsive to all decent international norms and it has been approved by the central power-brokers in Tehran. This isn’t a maneuver we can even try and blame on Ahmadinejad.

The salient question, however, is what this means. The hope is that it means that the gradual international coalition against Iran has had an impact. It may be a sign of desperation for the regime to try and use a bargaining chip in this way. The fear is that it reveals that the regime in Tehran cannot be in any way dealt with, and that a confrontation on a wider and larger scale is only a matter of time. Britain doesn’t have the power. The U.S. does. But even then, military action to topple this regime, after the disaster in Iraq, is not a serious option. It would initiate something close to a world war with unforeseeable consequences. Probably the best response, then, is what Blair is doing: insisting on the truth, demanding unconditional return of the hostages, and using the incident to further isolate Iran at the UN. I’m afraid I see no other viable option.