“Give Pete Carroll about one year before he starts realizing the mistake he just made. By that time, he’ll be wondering why he resigned from USC to become head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. That fat deal he recently accepted — one reportedly worth $35 million over five years — won’t be nearly as capable of insulating his pride from all the abuse he’ll be taking publicly. The players also won’t be embracing him like they have in college. Before you know it, that constant smile that has become Carroll’s trademark will be harder and harder to find.
Regardless of how optimistic some Carroll supporters may be about this news, the man is going to fail in the NFL. He’s already been fired by the New York Jets (whom he coached in 1994) and the New England Patriots (he was there from 1997 to ’99), which is all you really need to know,” – Jeffri Chadiha, ESPN.com, January 12, 2010, on the coach of one of this year’s Superbowl teams.
Can I nominate your review of “Looking” for a Poseur Alert? That show is a serious case of the emperor’s new clothes. As a 31-year-old gay man (who has only seen the first episode), I was hoping to see a gay version of “Girls” or at least a show that had something smart/interesting/funny to say. You act as if the fact it is boring is an achievement in itself. Just because gay people are “normal” does not mean they have to be boring. Straight girls may be normal but “Girls” is still innovative.
I feel like every time a new show comes out featuring gay people, they always say, “This isn’t a show about being gay, it’s just a show about people that happen to be gay.” Puhhlease. I have never seen a show more “about being gay” than “Looking,” which would be fine if it were at least fresh. “Six Feet Under” was doing gay relationships in a way more interesting way years ago, and that was really not a show “about being gay.”
“Will and Grace” was also not really a show about being gay, it was a sitcom featuring gay characters. I think your comments about it featuring “the eunuch” and “the sassy queen” say more about your own unresolved issues that seem really antiquated to someone like myself. (And how was Will a “eunuch” when the show regularly featured his dating and sex life? For god’s sake it was a network sitcom, not a bareback porno.)
The show took a long time to deal with Will as a sexual being, and, when it did, applied different standards than it did to Grace’s romantic life. Maybe I should have explained that more fully than resorted to a quip. But it may – again – be a generational as well as a personal response. In retrospect, the early nervousness about Will as a sexual being slowly dissipated. My reader was 15 when the show began. I was 35. Another:
Oh please, Andrew. I’m betting your “confession” is not news to most of your regular readership. (I’m a proud Founding Member – at the ridiculously low $1.99/month rate. I’m retired and on a fixed income, so I’m grateful for the subsidy.) Anyway, I think you’ve made your feelings abundantly clear over the years about your aversion to gay-themed entertainment.
While you obviously have the right to your opinions – that’s why I read you! – I think you’re being not quite honest about what seems like an almost Pavlovian reaction to “Angels In America” and “Will and Grace”.
(We can agree to leave Jeffrey’s critique to folks who care.) I’m betting you’re still nursing wounds suffered during the initial AIDS epidemic. I know you were attacked – sometimes viciously – for daring to veer from ’80s/’90s gay orthodoxy, but I don’t need to remind you of how brutal those years were and how some of the gay community’s self-righteous anger actually transformed government policy. Yes, you got caught in the cross-fire, but our loved ones were dying horrible deaths and any conservative approach was just not going to cut it. I was in ACT-UP/L.A. in the ’80s, and the movers and shakers in that group were by and large leftist. (I remember being somewhat aghast during an demonstration/arrest when one of my “fellow travelers” confessed to actually being a “red.” I quickly got over my own aversion to this self-proclaimed Bolshevik. Like I said, people were dying.)
With regards to Angels, I saw the play in L.A. before its starring turn in New York. (Tony Kushner – still an unknown writer – was in the back row that night doing rewrites.) To see that play on stage – while the AIDS epidemic was still raging – was electrifying, not to mention funny and shocking and, in the end, moving. Yes, Kushner’s politics were unapologetically leftist, but what he wrote was a powerful indictment of the powers-that-be. So what if Ethel Rosenberg wasn’t portrayed as treasonous?? She was sharp – and she was hilarious. As far as “Will and Grace” goes, the case has been made many times that, by bringing gay men (whether they were kissing or not) into America’s living rooms, the highly successful sitcom did more for gay rights than anything outside a Supreme Court ruling. The fact that Will and Grace (and Jack and Karen) were part of the entertainment zeitgeist of the (gay) nineties was more kismet than you give it credit for. Let it go.
I have. The post was full of the sense that all of the emotional turmoil was completely understandable, if very painful. One more:
While I generally found your take on Looking accurate, I found myself in complete disagreement with one sentence: “this is not yet what I’d like to be able to watch: a convincing drama about gay men in, say, Houston or Atlanta.” This statement is based on the assumption that no such life exists in Houston or Atlanta, or at least not in the “just living” context that Looking seeks to illuminate about gay life in 2014. This statement assumes that if gay life exists at all in either of those places, it is still in the closet and shame driven Boys in the Band style. It also wreaks of East Coast elitism.
As a gay resident of Atlanta who has also lived in enough other places to have perspective from which to compare it, I can say your statements could not be further off base. First, I’ve lived as an out gay man in DC, Chicago, and Boston and I can say that Atlanta’s gay community is just as visible and vibrant as all three of those cities. Second, while the state’s politics are not as progressive, I can assure you that gay people in Atlanta live just as normal, baggage-free lives as the characters portrayed in Looking. The city’s and state’s politics are not all that different from the DC you lived in less than 5 years ago. Before the recent passage of same-sex marriage, was DC’s gay community cloaked in shame and secret codes? Did the gay residents of DC not live the same normal lifestyles you see on Looking today?
My reader misunderstands me. My point was precisely his. You could have portrayed this dimension of gay life without centering it in San Francisco. In some ways, I think the cutting edge is precisely in those cities, and it would have been a little fresher in perspective. But the reader response to all this reminds me again of how fraught the portrayal of minorities in the mainstream media can still be.
“Just another retaliation by this administration. And some folks think its a good idea that he gets the nuclear codes,” – Chris Bollwage, mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who claims governor Chris Christie shut down his town’s DMV office in another act of political retribution.
David Kenner points out that the US knew all about Syria’s torture prisons back when we used to send people there:
The only mystery for [Maher] Arar is why Americans are shocked at reports of torture in Syrian prisons. “What surprises me is the reaction of some people in the West, as if it’s news to them,” he told Foreign Policy. “As far back as the early 1990s … the State Department reports on Syria have been very blunt — the fact is, Syria tortures people.”
It’s a history that the U.S. government knows all too well — because, at times, it has exploited the Assad regime’s brutality for its own ends. Arar was sent to Assad’s prisons by the United States: In September 2002, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detained him during a layover at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. U.S. officials believed, partially on the basis of inaccurate information provided by Canada, that Arar was a member of al Qaeda. After his detention in New York, Arar was flown to Amman, Jordan, where he was driven across the border into Syria.
(Image from a recent report (pdf) on torture within Syria. Earlier CNN coverage of the report here.)
Kavitha A. Davidson questions whether the seats will be filled in Sochi:
Because of security concerns, Russia can’t expect a boost from foreign fans. And it will probably have a tough time selling domestic fans on the cost, despite organizing committing Chairman Dmitry Chernyshenko’s optimistic estimate that 75 percent of spectators will be Russian citizens. Putin has boasted the affordability of the tickets — the cheapest tickets cost $15 and more than half the tickets sell for less than $150 — but the problem most Russians face is accessibility. Transportation to the remote city of Sochi is largely out of reach, with flights costing more than half the average monthly salary of $860.
Bershidsky notes that “the security measures have been obvious and oppressive — and the athletes and guests have yet to arrive”:
Residents of Sochi have endured emergency evacuations of the new railway station in Adler. Rail commuters must get special permission to transport liquids, laser and high-frequency devices, bicycles, tools and winter sports equipment. Since Jan. 7, out-of-town cars have been banned from entering the Sochi area and required to park in special lots at least 60 miles from the city center. Nikolai Yarst, a reporter for the Ura.ru site in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, visited checkpoints at the city limits and found long lines of cars with Sochi plates awaiting a painstaking examination by police.
Jonathan Mahler claims that the threats are unprecedented:
We’ve had terrorist attacks at the Olympics before. But this is the first time we’ve heard so many credible threats before the Games. It’s also the first time the Games have been held in a region featuring two wars between the host country and native Islamic separatists.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised that Sochi won’t be another Munich, and he is turning the city into a police state to make good on that promise. But how much faith does anyone have in the integrity of the 1,500-square-mile security zone that Russia claims to have built around the Games? The U.S. will have two warships in the nearby Black Sea — a couple more high-value targets? — in case Americans need to be evacuated en masse. It has also volunteered military support to help keep the Games safe, though there seems little chance that Putin will accept the offer.
Meanwhile, Amelia Urrey shines a light on Sochi’s environmental toll:
Not only is this shaping up to be the most expensive Olympics in the history of the games, with $51 billion of new development, it is also arguably one of the most destructive. Five thousand acres of pristine forests have been felled, while wetlands that served as important stopovers for migrating birds have been filled in. Landslides and waste dumping threaten the watershed, which feeds into the Black Sea. … The construction projects have also left local Sochi-ers in the lurch, facing frequent power shortages, land subsidence, flooding, and widespread pollution. While the mayor of Sochi pointed to a new Louis Vuitton store as a symbol of progress, nearby communities are living without running water, and some have been cut off from the city by a new $635 million highway.
(Photo: Security personnel talk in the Olympic Park in the Coastal Cluster in Alder, Russia on January 9, 2014. The region will host the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, which start on February 6. By Michael Heiman/Getty Images)
Maya Rhodan runs down the advice of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, appointed last year to suggest ways to improve voting procedures:
The recommendations focus partly on the impact improved technology can have on the voting process, such as using electronic poll books, improving access to voter information on states’ websites for voters overseas and in the military, and easing the process of updating and replacing old voting equipment. One key recommendation was that schools continue to serve as polling places. Some districts have expressed security concerns about that role in the wake of high profile school shootings, but the commission said schools remain ideal places to cast a ballot because they are accessible to people with disabilities and often located near voters’ homes.
Christopher Flavelle highlights the report’s revelation that gun violence, especially after Newtown, has discouraged voting in schools. Toobin wonders whether the Republicans care about fixing such problems:
Democrats are likely to greet the recommendations with some enthusiasm, though many will regret the absence of proposals on photo identification and the Voting Rights Act. A person familiar with the commission’s deliberations noted that these topics were not within the group’s charter and, besides, may not be as important as their high profile suggests. “There is a lot of sound and fury about photo I.D., but it pales in comparison to long lines, registration systems, and absentee ballots in terms of the number of people affected,” this person said. “We are talking about tens of millions of voters affected by these issues.”
The recommendations will test Republicans.
If, as many Democrats believe, they simply want to reduce turnout because they have a tendency to win low-turnout elections and lose high-turnout contests, Republicans can ignore or nitpick the recommendations, despite Ginsberg’s impeccable partisan credentials. (I first met both Ginsberg and Bauer when they were on opposite sides of the Florida recount, in 2000.) Or the commission’s work could serve as a model of bipartisan coöperation, with the two sides putting aside their differences in the interest of setting up fairer fights in the future. That, in any event, is today’s fond hope.
Bernstein doesn’t think any of the report will be adopted:
To the extent that the problem is mainly one of information not previously available to well-intentioned, non-partisan election administrators, then Bauer-Ginsburg could certainly make a big difference. But to the extent the problem is one of partisan state governments who want to maintain high hurdles between (at least some) people and the franchise — or to the extent that money is needed to implement change and election administration remains a low priority — then change will be minimal.
Although the lead up to the 2012 election saw widespread efforts to restrict voting rights, 2013 ushered in a countertrend of improving voter access. It’s true that the movement to cut back on voting rights did not end. But many states pushed forward with positive voting reforms as well, with 10 states passing laws making it easier to vote, many along the lines recommended by the Commission. Voter-registration reform has been especially popular. Interestingly, while voting restrictions passed almost exclusively in Republican-controlled states, voting improvements passed in Republican, Democratic, and mixed-control states. The appetite to improve the voting system can transcend partisanship.
The legal pot business is already spurring the growth of supporting industries:
[I]n the world of legalized marijuana, pot shops and grow facilities aren’t the only business opportunities; there are also all the ancillary businesses that service those pot shops, grow facilities, and the pot-smokers themselves. “You can relate it back to the gold rush,” says Ean Seeb, co-founder of the Denver Relief marijuana consulting company. “For every chunk of gold, you needed picks and shovels, a pan and a sifter, and the same thing applies to cannabis. For every gram of marijuana, you need a bag, labels, receipts, exit packaging, point-of-sale, a way to pay for it, staff, uniforms, a payroll company, insurance, and so on.” …
Ancillary businesses are particularly attractive to out-of-state investors. That’s because to have an equity interest in a Colorado marijuana business, state law requires at least two years of Colorado residency. So if you’re an out-of-state entrepreneur who wants to bet on the new industry today, the only choice you have is to invest in the picks and shovels—buying interest in megasized garden product stores, consolidating real estate portfolios to lease to Colorado-based pot-store owners, funding research and development for thumbprint-based security systems for grow facilities. Plus, while buying recreational marijuana is starting to feel downright ho-hum here in Colorado, let’s not forget that selling, cultivating, and manufacturing marijuana remains prohibited by federal law. Thus, risk-averse businesspeople might prefer to invest in companies that are not directly involved in violating federal law.
Casey B. Mulliganargues that we should pay jurors better:
Many people summoned for jury duty search desperately for excuses. Their efforts increase the burden on the court system, which has to summon and process a large number of people in order to empanel its juries. The court system might alleviate these problems by following the example of the modern military: recruit people for service by paying them far more than minimum wage. Jurors could still be selected randomly, but with a nice paycheck waiting for them, they would not try as hard (or at all) to be excused by the court.
Critics of a market-oriented recruitment system might say the pool of jurors would not fully represent the population because, among other things, people getting high pay in their normal jobs would be less willing to serve on a jury because of the loss of pay. But let’s not pretend that the conscripted jurors we have today are a random sample of the population.
I need to challenge Joe Mathews’ assertion that the design of the average Council Chamber defeats the goal of public engagement in decision making. As a government employee, I have sat through many public hearings and forums specifically designed to solicit public comment on policy issues, and one of the observations I’ve made is that almost all speakers at these events aren’t bothering to speak to the council members or hearing officers – they’re speaking to the audience. Their attention is directed at the crowd, and their words are intended to enflame the crowd to support whatever their message is … which in turn is generally targeted towards the media covering the event rather than the government officials. Unless Mr. Mathews believes that we all live in a Norman Rockwell painting of small-town America, we should be prepared to accept the reality that those who speak at government meetings are those with the courage and the drive to do so, regardless of how the deck chairs behind the dais are arranged.
Another quotes Mathews:
“To unleash the untapped power of council and school board meetings – to make them about creating conversations – we must flip our priorities and redesign the spaces, so that council chambers and boardrooms are foremost places for people to gather and talk.” And the rest of the quoted text is just about the stupidest idea for city council and school board meeting spaces I can imagine. Cross-talk? Coffee and snacks? Booze? Holy crap, nothing would ever get accomplished (as opposed to almost nothing, as it often seems now).
I agree that raising the seating of the board above the floor level of the public is a problem because it makes them look like priests or something, but it’s a fairly inexpensive way to keep them visible. Rather than turn the whole thing into some sort of third space (per Oldenberg or Putnam), why not raise the public seating into a more auditorium-like configuration? We already (metaphorically) look down on our politicians, so why not in reality?
Joe Mathews seems mainly to be concerned that public decision making is petty, boring, and legalistic. No kidding. We’re talking about local politics, and decisions about roads, bus routes, and zoning (and so on, and on, and on, and on) – the important, daily, mundane work of developing and maintaining the (ideally) invisible frameworks through which we live our real, exciting lives getting along with our friends, neighbors, and strangers.
We already have third places where community members can talk about the issues of the day, and the week or month between public meetings is when people can chat up their neighbors and express their opinions to their officials directly: face-to-face, or e-mails, letters, social media, or even the public comment periods of the meetings. Making the meeting space look like a coffee shop isn’t going to eliminate closed sessions, or make it possible for the school board to do anything different about the problem teacher just because some parents are talking about it during the public meeting.
In my job as a planner in a small Midwestern city, I’ve seen well-run meetings, where citizens get engaged when someone does something to make people mad, and I’ve seen them invited to comment during board discussion of the current agenda topic to air the matter. Indeed, in one board, it’s done for every single agenda item. So citizen engagement is possible and desirable in the current, ordinary configuration. However, it’s up to the community to find the way to get that engagement. The configuration of the meeting space can surely make a difference in the feeling of a meeting, but the legal requirements of public notice and equal treatment mean meetings of public officials will never be as chatty as Mathews seems to want.
Another reader:
Although I’ve found the Quakers can be as full of crap and deluded as anybody else, their meeting houses can be a democratic delight – see photos here and here. There is neither dais, nor (in theory) any authority figure.
Another:
If Joe Mathews thinks that American city councils are bad, he should try British ones! Most British councils have rows of chairs for the councillors, facing towards a central dais where the mayor or council chairman sits, with the public seating up in balconies, facing the backs of the councillors. Not only are we not looking at our fellow citizens – we’re not even looking at the politicians themselves, but at their backs.
One more:
I have to call BS on the comparison between City Council and Church, or that City Councils will be more appealing if they looked like Starbucks. City Council officials are facing the crowd because they’re “elected”; they’re not equal to Joe Citizen in the crowd. They hold the responsibility and authority to actually make a decision. That’s why you address them. After all, this is not just a democracy, it’s a representative democracy. Average people in City Council meetings don’t get to talk much, not because it’s laid out like a Church, but simply because there’s only so much time and too many people who all want to ramble on and on about their stupid idea of how to fix everything.
So, how do we let everyone talk without wasting time and still letting good idea rise to the top and reach the council?
We do it online. Set up a web site where good ideas can rise to the top and enforce strict rules to keep the discussion civil. Then bring in those with the best ideas and argument to have a live discussion in the City Council meeting. People don’t go to Starbucks (or other coffee shops) because it has a comfortable layout. They go because there they don’t have to discuss mind-numbing issues and eventually have their voice drowned by the loser who has nothing better to do than be there at 6am to stand at the start of the line and shout at the council for their totalitarian regime.
I’d like to thank the Council and I yield the rest of my time.
The Dish 
