THE MIDWEST AGAINST FMA

Interesting nugget from a new poll that is similar to many others, and shows a national majority (49 – 42 percent) against the FMA. Has any amendment ever passed without even a narrow majority in its favor? But this poll also breaks things down geographically:

The Annenberg survey found that support for an amendment to the Constitution barring states from legalizing same sex marriages was highest in the South, where 50 percent were in favor and 42 percent opposed. It was lowest in the Midwest where 37 percent were in favor and 56 percent opposed.

No wonder Bush is leery. And when the truth comes out that the amendment doesn’t just bar marriage, but any benefits for gay couples under any name, the opposition will swell. (For some reason, the results are not yet on their website. I was forwarded the press release.)

WHY ACADEMIA IS BIASED

At Duke, one professor, responding to criticism of the overwhelmingly leftist cast of the faculty, proffered this explanation:

“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon said of his philosophy hires. “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

Quod erat demonstrandum. Not all the faculty are this, er, stupid.

BUSH-HATRED PEAKING?

There was a moment during my time on Bill Maher’s Real Time (I had a blast) that, in retrospect, struck me as revealing. At one point, when Maher was going through a list of what he believed were firable offenses at the CIA, in the White House, and so on, during the war on terror, he blurted something out. I paraphrase: “Why was it that the only person who got fired from his job during the war on terror was me?” It was a joke. But it came back to me reading Al Gore’s deranged rant in Tennessee (the state that voted for Bush in 2000). Gore felt humiliated not only by the election result, but also by the soaring popularity of Bush after 9/11. Just like Maher’s anger at being out of it during those months, Gore’s rage and resentment must have been bubbling underneath for a while. So the legitimate WMD issue has finally enabled them to vent more freely, to come out of the shell of restraint that patriotism and unpopularity once imposed upon them. That may also be true for many of us who were alarmed by the fiscal situation during the war but kept mum for similar reasons (although I was on the case for much of last year). We’re venting now. But what that might also mean is that the anger might soon dissipate. Rage at Bush might subside. And the real criticisms of his administration – on spending, debt, WMD intelligence – might be more soberly addressed. Gore is always a very good indicator of where the country isn’t. Bush-hatred, in other words, may have peaked. Bush-skepticism may be rising. Dean didn’t win. Kerry did. And the skepticism may be more deadly.

SELF-PARODY ALERT: “Martha Stewart’s secretary broke down in sobs on the witness stand Monday as she described thanking the homemaking mogul for a gift of plum pudding just before relaying a broker’s prediction that ImClone Systems stock would drop.” – from an AP story on the Stewart drama.

THE BBC IN TATTERS

Lovely, tart little piece by Gerard Baker on the troubles at the Beeb. Money quote:

The Hutton Report was, to read the British media, the Night of the Long Knives, the bonfire of the vanities, and the Cultural Revolution all rolled into one hideous assault on cherished press liberty.
If you live in the fantasy world of self-adulation and preening pomposity of high-powered liberal journalists, I suppose the aftermath of the Hutton Report might seem like that. But for those who have to toil in the less sensational world of reality, the unassuming 72-year-old peer may just have done the world one of the greatest services in the history of journalism and public broadcasting.

Yeah. They may have to get back to objective reporting.

THE VATICAN ON GENOCIDE: Are they talking about Saddam’s record? Nuh-huh. At a Vatican news conference, a Jesuit priest accuses Western drug companies of “genocidal action” because of disparities in treatment between Africa and the West. Memo to Rome: people who create life-saving medicines should not be compared to people who murder millions.

MORE ON SPENDING: Check out Spinsanity’s take on the president’s defense of his massive increase in discretionary spending. It’s not encouraging. Broadly speaking, the records of Bush and Clinton are starkly different. Clinton was the fiscal conservative (thanks, partly to an ornery Republican Congress). Bush is clearly a fiscal liberal (aided and abetted by a pork-loving Republican Congress). This graph tells you a lot. I don’t think it’s disputable that what the president said on “Meet The Press” was therefore untrue both in letter and spirit. He said:

If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.

Here is the truth. The rates of growth of all discretionary spending are as follows: 2000: 7.5 percent; 2001: 5.6 percent; 2002 (Bush’s first real year): 13.1 percent; 2003: 12.4 percent. Now I think the president meant discretionary spending apart from defense and homeland security. There, the administration deserves credit for what appears to be a slow decline in the rate of growth, from its 2002 height. So where does the 15 percent of Clinton’s last year come from? There you can see that Bush is repeating the Josh Bolten spin about what the administration intended to spend, but not what it actually spent. Lie is too strong a word for this. But no honest person could describe those figures as Bush’s or Clinton’s actual record. Spinsanity calls it: “misleading.” I’d simply call it “culpable negligence.” Bush is also ignoring the looming social security crisis, his own Medicare bill, and the Alternative Minimum Tax chimera. Tim Noah is right to point out that this level of deception is aimed primarily at fiscal conservatives. When an administration starts spinning untruths to its own supporters, it’s in trouble.

MORE DECEPTION

There’s a similar shell-game going on with the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. The line from social conservatives is that this is a “moderate” measure designed only to prevent courts from imposing equal marriage rights on unwilling populations. It is nothing of the kind. There are two pieces worth reading on this – so you can make up your own mind. One is Ramesh Ponnuru’s attempt to parse the language of the amendment to make it seem as if barring “the incidents of marriage” from civil unions would not gut civil unions. Why? Because such “incidents” – like the right to inherit a spouse’s property or visit him in hospital – somehow cease to be “incidents” of marriage as soon as they are included in civil unions. Huh? Eugene Volokh, who has no dog in this hunt, demolishes that case.

THE REAL DEAL: And you have to ask yourself: if Ramesh were right about the amendment, why would the religious right support it? If the FMA merely bars the name “marriage” from substantively identical cvil unions, why wouldn’t the first simple sentence restricting the word ‘marriage’ to heterosexuals, be enough? The FMA, to recap, stipulates that courts may not construe either a state constitution or any state law to confer marital “incidents”. Notice the state “law.” So take California’s civil unions – passed as a law. As soon as this FMA is passed, say there’s a fight somewhere over whether a spouse has a right to visit his husband in hospital. Anti-gay or simply hostile parents sue to bar access for the spouse. A court adjudicates. Under the FMA, the court is bound not to construe the civil union law as giving any “incidents of marriage” to the civil union spouse, as it would to a married spouse. Game over. Civil union gutted. Ramesh, who seems like a decent fellow, may simply be unable to credit the motives of his anti-gay allies. But they are very clear. They want to ban gay marriage and any civil recognition of gay couples under any name. These “Christian” activists are lying about their amendment. And the press, so far, is swallowing their lie. (Meanwhile, the British Tory leader, Michael Howard, adopts John Kerry’s position and embraces “civil partnerships” for gays.)

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“I’m reading through your fisk of Bush on MTP. Good job. About the president’s use of the word ‘Sure:’ I think he was using it not as a placeholder, but rather as an acknowledgement that he was expecting to hear this question and was ready to answer it (misleading as that answer might have been). I think that maybe, in the president’s head, the words “Can you explain…” were grafted onto the question. I don’t know if you saw the interview or just read it, but I got the impression from body language that the president had been prepped to some degree on all of these questions, and when TR asked them a little box in his head opened: ‘Sure, I know the answer to that.’
Or maybe not.” That might be true. But then it’s another Bush family tick – going meta on us. It’s like the classic: “Message: I care.” They keep thinking about the process rather than answering the question. It’s the nittiest of picks. But it’s still weird.

BUSH’S MBA

A fellow student and subsequent professor analyzes George W. Bush from the Harvard Business School perspective. It’s interesting reading. Money quote:

By reputation, the President was a very avid and skillful poker player when he was an MBA student. One of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W. Bush’s political career. He is not one to loudly proclaim his strengths at the beginning of a campaign. Instead, he bides his time, does not respond forcefully, a least at first, to critiques from his enemies, no matter how loud and annoying they get. If anything, this apparent passivity only goads them into making their case more emphatically.
Only time will tell, whether Saddam ever had any WMDs. Their non-existence has not been proven. Only time will tell whether or not Osama bin Laden (or his corpse) will be taken into custody by American Troops. Only time will tell whether or not Iraq will continue to make progress toward a transition toward a peaceful democratic government. George W. Bush knows much more information about these topics than his domestic political opponents do. At the moment, they are betting a lot of their chips on one side of these questions.
We will see by November who has the winning hand.

I guess we will.