The Dish

Thanks for all your emails. It really is more common than I thought. I’ve now been up since 5.45 am, and feeling fine. Actually great. That was simply unimaginable with my usual sleep patterns. And that’s after only half a night with the treatment. Maybe I’m being “excitable,” but, hey, it’s wonderful. here’s another typical email:

I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about 9 months ago. I can’t describe the improvement in my life that has resulted from sleeping with the breathing machine, right from day 1. I have been working with a personal trainer for several months. She had a good idea of where my physical limits were. After three days (!) of sleeping with the CPAP machine I was blowing past all of them. She was amazed. My energy level is way up, my memory is better, and I don’t doze off in meeting now. And I’m told I don’t snore anymore either. I hope that your results are as good as mine. The breathing mask can be uncomfortable sometimes but the benefits are huge.
I wonder how many other men suffer from sleep apnea and don’t know it? Snoring and dozing off in midday have become cliches for middle-aged men, but now it seems to be a curable disease. You should encourage all of your readers to be tested if they have any of the symptoms.

Absolutely. Ask your spouse if you’re snoring or having difficulty breathing when you’re asleep. It might be affecting you more profoundly than you think.

PICASSO DOES THE PISTONS: A little blasphemous given the context. But clever.

A WEDDING TOAST: The newly elected president of Massachusett’s senate, Robert Travaligni, gave a moving wedding toast to state senator, Jarrett Barrios and his husband, Doug Hattaway last weekend. Travaligni will be responsible for presiding over the next constitutional convention to decide if a constitutional amendment to ban such marriages will go to the voters in 2006. My guess is that civil marriage for all citizens is here to stay in Massachusetts.

Here’s an MSM classic:

The veteran anchor has been under fire in recent months for his role in a “60 Minutes Wednesday” story that questioned President Bush’s service in the National Guard, which turned out to based on allegedly forged documents.

Allegedly?

Why on earth is Rather staying on full-time at Sixty Minutes, the show whose reputation he besmirched by rashness and partisanship? Notice the ABC News story barely mentions the memo-gate fiasco. Rather’s tenure as CBS anchor was bound to end some time soon. Big deal. A simple question: How can you rehire a man for Sixty Minutes when you haven’t even published your own investigation into the journalistic meltdown that he presided over? Shouldn’t you wait until you know what actually happened before you declare that someone will stay on full-time? And how long does such an investigation take, for Pete’s sake? My bullshit detector just went through the roof on this one.

My defense of Prince Charles – at TNR online (subscription required).

They just get worse and worse.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I read your colum on ‘The Un-Credibles.’ You wrote:

A large part of the pro-Bush vote – especially among blue state residents – was a vote against the left elite and the cultural attitudes it represents in the public imagination. It was a vote not so much for Bush or his often religious policies (or even the war on terror), but against the post 9/11 left, against Michael Moore and political correctness and Susan Sontag and CBS News, among a host of others.

You nailed it, dude. You just fucking nailed it. I grew up in redneck America – John Ashcroft’s hometown, no less – but I’ve been a chai latte-drinking, Times-reading, wine-scrutinizing-metro-scum pig living in the northeast ever since I got my law degree ten years ago. So I think I know “both sides” of this country pretty darned well. The Democrats didn’t lose this election because of the GOP’s gay bashing – the polls bear that out. And they didn’t lose because 51% of Americans are cross-wielding bigots who want to roll back our civilization to the fourteenth century. Follow the principle of Occam’s Razor – all things equal, the simplest explanation is the best. As applied here, that means the Democrats were not entrusted with the keys to the White House because there were just too many Americans who don’t like and don’t trust the Democratic Party. That’s why they lost this election. That’s why GOP voter id equaled – for the first time ever – Democratic voter id. That’s why Daschle lost his Senate race. That’s why the GOP has six more Senate seats than it did 25 months ago.
Let me say it again – the Democrats lost because they are not liked and they are not trusted. That, and really nothing else, was the verdict of this election. And for what it’s worth, shitting all over the 61 million pitchfork-wielding imbeciles who didn’t vote for them probably isn’t their path back out of the wilderness, emotionally gratifying though it may be.”

This is what early morning is like? The sleep study was fascinating. They basically stick electrodes all over your head and body, connect them to a little forest of wires, put you in a strange room, fix a remote camera directly on you and then tell you … to go to sleep. Thank God for Ambien. And then half-way through the night, the nurse comes in and puts this big mask over your nose and mouth. The mask blows a steady stream of air into your nasal passages and throat, and they can regulate the pressure remotely, depending on how your readings are. It really wasn’t that uncomfortable. And I have no idea what my readings were or what my diagnosis is. The nurse isn’t allowed to say. But he did hint that if I didn’t have sleep apnea, he wouldn’t be putting a mask on me at 1 am. And then there’s how I felt waking up. Usually, I need about nine hours sleep to feel vaguely fresh. And it takes about an hour for me to caffeinate, rouse myself and generally emerge from slumber. Not this time. I went to sleep around 10.30 pm and woke up around 5.45, feeling fresh as a daisy. I could feel the change instantly. Psycho-somatic? Maybe. I’ll get data soon. But I’m really excited at the possibility of having to sleep less, and being more energetic in the day. Yes, I know it seems as if I never sleep sometimes. But that’s the deceptive nature of a blog. More importantly: I really recommend this for people who seem to stop breathing intermittently in the night, or have really bad snoring, or feel listless and tired in the day. Sleep is so important to health. I may be finding that out all over again.

“Dates are not sacred. what is sacred is the process.” – Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki, on the Iraq elections. Mulki was appointed by an unelected monarch.

Kudos to the Family Research Council for intellectual honesty. Here’s a frank argument by one Allan Carson, conceding what is now obvious: it is very hard to hold the line against civil marriage for gay couples on the grounds that they cannot procreate. The reason is that civil marriage is available to any straight couple, regardless of their willingness or ability to have chidren. And this national consensus is now decades old:

It is now clear that the “right of privacy,” conceived by the Supreme Court nearly four decades ago, is the enemy of both marriage and procreation separately, and is especially hostile when they are united. It is also clear that we lost the key battles in defense of this union decades ago, long before anyone even imagined same-sex marriage. And we lost these battles over questions that–to be honest–relatively few of us are really prepared to reopen. How many are ready to argue for the recriminalization of contraception?

Well, yes. The basic problem for the anti-gay marriage forces is that they are upholding a marital standard for gays that no one any longer upholds for straights. And this obvious inequality – recognized even by Scalia, for example – cannot withstand judicial scrutiny under any reasonable standard of equal treatment under the law. Thats why I think it’s hyperbole to describe the Massachusetts court of judicial “activism.” The argument of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was that gays couldn’t marry because they couldn’t procreate. Once it was obvious that this standard did not apply to heterosexuals, the court had no choice but to strike down the inequality. It was not a radical decision at all. It was an inescapable one. And that’s why even a conservative court like Alaska’s upheld it. And that’s why you really do have to amend a state constitution to prevent its guarantees of equality from being applied to gay citizens.

SO PROCREATE: The social right’s intellectually honest option, then, is obvious. And Carlson deserves praise for airing it. In order to prevent gays from marrying, the state must deny non-procreative straight couples from having the full rights of civil marriage. Maybe these non-reproducers can have civil unions until they reproduce. Maybe they can get married, but have their licenses revoked after five years if no babies are forthcoming. Carlson has another suggestion:

Perhaps we should restrict some of the legal and welfare benefits of civil marriage solely to those married during their time of natural, procreative potential: for women, below the age of 45 or so (for men, in the Age of Viagra, the line would admittedly be harder to draw).

That works too. And when you see the issue this way, you can see why the current effort to focus only on excluding gay citizens is so unfair. If non-procreative, companionate marriage is the civil norm, then you simply don’t have a case against gay couples having marriage licenses. And if you keep this standard for straights, while forcing gays alone to bear the burden of your battle against four decades of marital evolution, then you are being deeply, deeply unfair. So which is it? A new standard? Or equality now?

Not for anything serious, mind you. I’m a terrible snorer and my boyfriend, who has the misfortune of falling asleep after me sometimes, also thinks I have sleep apnea. That’s what happens when, for some reason, you don’t breathe right when you’re asleep, appear to be dead for a while, and then rouse back with some sort of splutter to get enough oxygen to your lungs. Of course, I’d never noticed it myself. So I’m going in overnight for tests. I guess I’m a little unnerved. I’ve never spent a night in a hospital, mercifully. But my main worry is that you check in at 8.30 pm. At that hour, I usually have half a workday in front of me. And then they kick me out by 7 am. Seven o’clock only happens once a day in Sullivan-land. Well, maybe all these nocturnal hours contribute to my sleep disorder. Or maybe I have no such thing. But my doc tells me that he had it, and, after treatment (it varies according to the case), he slept much better and had far more energy. So maybe I’ll become more productive. Is that Glenn Reynolds’ secret? See you in the morning. Wish me luck.

A marine gives his own account of what happened. Extraordinary.