The Dish

The faculty vote down Gallaudet’s new president, Jane Fernandes. Money quote:

Fernandes, 49, said she is caught in a cultural debate. "There’s a kind of perfect deaf person," said Fernandes, who described that as someone who is born deaf to deaf parents, learns ASL at home, attends deaf schools, marries a deaf person and has deaf children. "People like that will remain the core of the university."
Fernandes is married to a retired Gallaudet professor who can hear. So can the couple’s two children. Some people who were deaf at birth can learn to speak through intensive speech therapy.

First, a student uprising. Then a faculty revolt. Identity politics is clearly far from over.

My essay on the subject is currently the most emailed piece on Time.com. Thanks for your many emails. Keep them coming. I’ll address several critical points in the next few days. 800 words is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

(Photo of Tim and Beverly LaHaye by Thomas Michael Alleman for Time.)

The debate over the relationship between tax cuts and spending increases continues here.

Yes, my corporate overlords have now added them. Most bloggers know what they are; and most experienced blog-readers do as well. For those who don’t: they’re basically a way for you, the reader, to see what other blogs are saying or not saying about various posts on this site. If you click on the "Trackbacks" doohickey beneath each item, you’ll get a fresh page with the item and various responses from various blogs. It’s like a comments section, with the entry-barrier of being a blogger yourself. If you want to follow a controversy or discussion raised in a post, click the trackbacks link (the number attached to it represents the number of links), and follow your nose. If you’re a blogger and want to attract readers to your site, linking helps bring my readers to your site – so link away and join the fun. Win-win. We’re doing it as an experiment. But it’s another little connecting thread between the MSM and the blogosphere. May the conversation blossom.

He says he didn’t approve of the inflammatory, partisan copy on the jacket of his book, "The Party of Death," that completely conflates such a "party" with the Democrats. He "didn’t much like it," he says.

King’s College, London, just out put their latest PDF report on rates of imprisonment in the world. The rates are given as the number of prison inmates per 100,000 people in the population at large. It’s pretty staggering that by far the highest rates of imprisonment occur in the U.S. The U.S. rate is 724 for every 100,000 people – up from 505 in 1992. Of major countries, the only close competitor is Russia with 581, and Cuba at 487. Iran and Israel, to give examples of countries with internal conflict, clock in at 206 and 209 respectively. Most major U.S. allies are in the 130 range or lower. I’m not sure what any of this proves. But this much we can say: the land of the free is also the land of the unfree. Millions of them. Texas, by the way, has an imprisonment rate of well over 1,000. There’s no country on the planet – no dictatorship on earth – as confortable with locking people up as the state of Texas. The detention policies of the current administration may be more understandable in this context.

A rugby-playing reader writes:

Thanks for the Bingham Cup mention in your blog Mr. Sullivan. However, there are some niggling points to, well, point out. First, tournament play is broken down to 20 minute halves (from league-standard 40 minute halves) and, as a veteran of the 2004 Cup, the cumulative amount of playing time for most teams will exceed three hours not 90 minutes.
There will also be lots of beer during the matches, if the UK/Ireland teams have anything to say about hospitality.

Ah, yes. The memories of seven years in high school rugby come flooding back.

More reporting on Africa’s greatest nightmare – from Beliefnet.

"As Weitz’s film, ["American Dreamz] implies, we now live in a country that has a government of incompetence and prevarication. And we know it. No rational person ever completely believes any government, but now we sense, almost like a physical chill, a gap between the administration and the country. We feel that our lives are in the hands of a government that, day by day, speech by speech, is more and more feeble, myopic, and mendacious. The country seems schizoid: on one side, the tremendous power of the government; on the other side, us. This condition seems the base of the cartoon here – the president floundering in the middle of a smarmy television show, trying to bridge the gap – and it gives this modest picture a scary sting," – Stanley Kauffman, The New Republic.

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.