The Dish

One way to resolve the thorny question of whether marijuana should be legal is to adopt an indirect approach. Instead of trying to get it legalized, which in this puritanical culture would meet stiff resistance from the usual busybodies, you can simply lower the penalties for use and possession. Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich has taken a brave stand on the least controversial measure – allowing people with serious illnesses, like AIDS and cancer, to alleviate their nausea by using weed. The fine for such usage is now $100 – in the range of a parking ticket. Good for Ehrlich for demonstrating compassionate conservatism.

THE CHURCH DIGS IN:The insurance companies aren’t exactly demanding compassion and contrition.

MORE SHOES DROPPING? Is Blair merely the first of NYT future scandals? The New York Post, hardly a disinterested party, seems to think so:

“There’s a big search going on inside the Times and outside the Times to find out if there are other Blair-like problems,” says our source. “Howard Kurtz [of the Washington Post] is rumored to be working on something. The Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times are supposed to be doing something. The Times wants to come out with something first. If somebody else goes down, then people think [top editor Howell Raines] is out. That’s the prevailing wisdom around here.”

Tick, tock.

THE MYTH OF GAY MALE PROMISCUITY: Actually, that’s pushing it. But Eugene Volokh, a pretty disinterested party, has done some digging and come up with some interesting data. Gay men are not as promiscuous as some would argue.

Ramesh Ponnuru responds today to Family Research Council head Kenneth Connor’s apoplexy that the head of the RNC, Marc Racicot, actually met with the largest gay group, the Human Rights Campaign. At first, the religious right complained that the meeting had occurred at all; Connor then finessed this by saying that his complaint was that the RNC head met with HRC in secret. I’m not sure it was “secret.” I heard about it the day it happened. With 300 people in the audience, it’s unlikely such an event would remain under wraps. Then Ponnuru takes on Connor’s threat that social conservatives will walk if Bush reaches out in any measure to gay voters and their families, or indeed to the huge majority of Americans who believe gay peole should be protected from discrimination in the workplace:

Connor notes that there was a drop-off in evangelical voting in the 2000 election, and suggests that there will be another one if Republicans do not take up the social-conservative cause on gay rights more vigorously. He provides no evidence that the drop-off was caused by evangelical unhappiness with the Republican party on gay issues, rather than by, say, the decay of certain Christian-conservative groups that used to turn out voters. He cites no polls on the degree of evangelical satisfaction with the president or the Republican party today. And he provides no argument that social-conservative voters would be wise to abandon Bush next year over his gay-rights record. If social conservatives really were inclined to do anything so foolish, which I very much doubt, I hope that their leaders would try to wise them up.

All good points. There’s more than a little bluff here. The religious right has been in sharp decline for a while now. They are swiftly losing public support in their continued resistance to any recognition of gay citizens’ civil rights. The younger conservative generation is nowhere near as uncomfortable around gay people as their predecessors, and see modest outreach tp gays as a no-brainer. At some point, the president will have to choose between appeasing a small but angry cadre of religious activists, and becoming a truly inclusive president.

The sanctions end. The French surrender.

The Daily Telegraph reports on what might have been another attempted terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia:

The men, believed to be Moroccans, were held in Jeddah as they queued to board a flight to Sudan. They were apparently behaving suspiciously at passport clearance. When asked if they were travelling together, one said no and one said yes. Under interrogation, one of them said they had planned to crash the airliner into the National Commercial Bank, the only skyscraper in Jeddah, Saudi’s commercial capital.

The Telegraph cites “security sources” for its story. What might be happening is the reverse of what happened in the 1990s. In that decade, crackdowns on Islamist militants in the Middle East led them to export their terror abroad to the West. Now that the U.S. and its allies have fought back hard, these murderers may by default be turning their attention back to the Arab autocracies that helped spawn the terrorism in the first place. Could this finally force the Saudis to take the threat seriously? Could the murder of fellow Muslims and Arabs undermine al Qaeda’s appeal among disaffected young men in the region? Here’s hoping on both counts.

GREENSPAN’S WARNING: While the president and his party put another huge hole in this country’s future fiscal solvency, Alan Greenspan, that notorious leftist, testified in Congress yesterday. Here’s how the Financial Times put it:

Mr Greenspan also expressed concern about the effect of plans for further tax cuts and increases in government spending. He warned “deficits do matter” and expressed dismay at what he characterised as a breakdown in budget discipline in Washington. He reminded lawmakers the US government was facing a “significant” budget problem as the “baby boom” population ages and draws on more healthcare and retirement benefits. “I’d like to see that addressed more seriously than it is,” he said. “I must say the silence is deafening.”

Worth repeating that: deficits do matter. Then you read pieces like Bruce Bartlett’s at National Review Online. Money quote:

Voinovich and Snowe are responsible for the $350 billion cap. For some reason, they decided that this was the biggest tax cut we can afford – even though it represents a trivial sum over 10 years in an economy that will generate well more than $100 trillion over this period. Chafee is simply a Democrat in all but party registration. McCain, however, is a conservative from a conservative state. He said there should not be any tax cut as long as the nation was at war. Yet he continues to oppose even a $350 billion tax cut despite the end of war.

So the war is now over? Surprising to hear that from National Review. But look at the assumption in Bartlett’s piece: that it’s absurd for a conservative in a conservative state to actually worry about the government balancing its books! The bottom line is that the U.S. government is going to go seriously broke in a few years because of demographic pressure and entitlement growth. Yet the current administration is merrily adding to the national debt by not one but two big tax cuts, while pushing spending to heights unseen since LBJ opened the spigots. I’m sorry but we saw the consequences of that kind of combination in the 1980s and it took a decade to bring the budget back to balance. The fact that the Democrats are no better is not an argument. It makes Bush’s negligence even worse.

THE BOMB AT YALE: No clue yet who planted it. Here’s the Yale Daily News’ story.

THE SCANDAL OF ROBERT SCHEER: How does he get away with it? Stefan Sharkansky has the goods on the far-left Los Angeles Times columnist. Scheer makes Paul Krugman look honest. And Scheer’s latest recycling of the BBC’s smear about the rescue of Jessica Lynch merely adds to the picture of journalistic irresponsibility.

HOW THE WORLD CHANGES: A conservative deputy in Australia gives a moving speech about why he is bucking his party’s formal position and supports legal equality for gay citizens. He has a gay son. He sees him as a human being:

Mr Turner said many young men he had spoken to in recent years had explained that they were forced to leave their families and live in Sydney because their small towns did not offer the support or acceptance they so desperately sought. “My son has a partner, a business and a home in Orange. He is accepted by friends of my wife and I, and he is accepted by the vast majority of people in Orange who have a reasonable understanding of the issue,” he said.

One person at a time; one family at a time. That’s what it will take to change minds and hearts.

THE CLINTON WARS: “So yes, I hate the man. I admit it. I’m not proud of it. But whenever I admit my hatred for the guy, I’m reminded of a scene in the movie about Ted Bundy called “The Deliberate Stranger.” These two cops are being interviewed by a reporter after years of trying to catch Bundy. The reporter notes that it sounds like “you guys hate Ted.” One cop says, “I don’t hate him.” The other cop says, “I hate him.” The first says, “I lied. I hate him, too.”” – more honesty on the Letters Page.

From, yes, the Onion.

“Yes, yes, yes! Enough already with the infantile bullshit that passes for leadership in modern management. I was at Sprint for three years. There it was a goose! Ironically, I stole the damned thing for a souvenir when I left and it may be worth some money. My wife says it’s a genuine “Beenie Baby.” Who’d a thunk it? One time we spent two whole days discussing the childhood classic, “Who Moved My Cheese,” the story of two rats. We managers referred to the book as “Who Cut The Cheese.” It’s a rip-off that could easily be condensed into less than one page, single-spaced, but then nobody would pay $20 for it. The gist of it is never be comfortable, your cheese is moving (i.e., the world is changing) and you have to keep moving or starve (i.e., become obsolete, laid off, etc.). To cap the seriousness of the sessions, they gave out “cheeseheads” (a la Green Bay Packer’s fame) to the participants.
After it was over most of us felt the main thing we learned was never to be comfortable (at Sprint), the world is changing (i.e., telecom was starting to slide into the toilet) and you have to keep moving or starve (i.e., maybe we should be looking for a job in another industry). With such brilliant leadership – surprise! – Sprint’s in trouble.”

The latest piece of anti-Bush spin from the BBC contains the following topic sentence: “President George Bush must now regret declaring on 1 May, that the tide had turned in the war on terror.” Yeah, right. The piece goes on to concede that “al-Qaeda seems to have adapted to the fact that, for the moment at least, it is no longer able to hit high-profile Western targets.” And that is not progress? The piece concludes: “If [al Qaeda] is no longer waging a jihad, or holy war, against the symbols of American power, and is simply engaged in indiscriminate slaughter, it risks alienating many of those who have so far provided its wider base of support.” So the tide might have turned after all?

From today’s Le Monde, thanks to my intrepid French correspondent:

“The difficulty for French policy makers is to deliver, in the presence of George Bush, an intelligible message without seeming to go back on everything.- France is now ready to vote at the UN in favor of the American Iraq resolution.- ‘It’s not the role that we would have hoped for the UN, but there has been real progress in the American text, and maybe there can be even more progress,’ said the Elysee Palace.- This vote, which could happen Thursday morning, would liberate the Evian summit from a weighty subject full of conflict. . . . And then, you have to look at the facts:- ‘There is no alternative,’ they say in Paris.- A majority of the Security Council is in favor of the American text.- Germany and Russia hope to avoid relaunching another battle at the UN and France, said one diplomat, ‘does not have an interest, for the future, of disassociating itself from them because it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Americans could again look to implement their policies by force of arms.- The advantages and inconveniences of an abstention [at the UN] should be weighed against all that.”

Reculer pour mieux sauter. (Translation: we still need to watch our backs.)

The administration’s decision to start knocking heads and confiscating weapons in Iraq is an overdue sign that the White House now gets what has to be done. Without credible order, nothing political can be achieved. Without the recognition of unquestioned allied authority, no new authority can emerge. Bringing in the Brits to help train the Iraqi police is also a smart move. They have, er, experience with this kind of thing.

THE END OF SHAME: Jayson Blair is right about one thing. Even Stephen Glass can’t match his chutzpah. The seven figure Hollywood treatment; the laughter; the casual invocation of racism at the New York Times; the book deal. The contempt for the profession he pretended to care about:

The discovery of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair’s deception in his coverage of the Lynch family in West Virginia, especially his description of a house from which he wrote that tobacco fields and cattle were visible (they are not), provoked laughter from the disgraced journalist during his first extensive sit-down interview with the New York Observer’s media columnist Sridhar Pappu.
“That’s my favorite, just because the description was so far off from the reality. And the way they described it in The Times story – someone read a portion of it to me – I couldn’t stop laughing.”

The guy is beyond gross. And the culture that will pay him handsomely for this callow tripe is even grosser.

INSIDIOUS SID: If you have any lingering belief that Sidney Blumenthal can be trusted to portray even a smidgen of the full truth about the Clinton years, then read Mike Isikoff. Right now.

HEDGES AGAIN: Yes, the NYT hack who gave the offensive commencement speech was the same Chris Hedges who wrote the now-infamous piece of factually-challenged anti-Israel propaganda, published by the old leftist bore, Lewis Lapham. Here’s a righteous fisking of the piece. Hedges is a political extremist masquerading as a reporter. That’s why he has found such a comfortable niche at Howell Raines’ New York Times.

MY BLIND SPOT: “I alternate between applauding your tireless efforts at educating the public about homosexuality and thundering against the likes of Rick Santorum to feeling complete exasperation at your equally tireless efforts to see a gay-friendly and “inclusive” G.W. Bush. Incredulously, you ask this President to endorse ENDA. I hate to be the one to tell you, Andrew, but that will never happen. When the votes were counted (or not counted) in 2000, George W. was not exactly a slam dunk. Similarly, the 2002 Congressional elections were much closer than the subsequent media spin would have us believe. Now we have the bible bangers threatening to walk in 2004 because the GOP defense of Santorum was deemed too tepid. Do you think Rove will dare to risk alienating a major part of the GOP base by allowing this President to do anything perceived to be favorable to homosexuals?” – more feedback, including a defense of Danny Glover, on the Letters Page.

A classic:

Grown-ups do not behave this way. Unless they are running a day care. It’s a cute anecdote for a retreat, but applied to the real world, to the newsroom, is a sign of how infantile management theory has become. The introduction of the moose splits the staff into two groups: the brown-nosers who put the moose on top of their computer monitor and give it seasonal decorations, and the cynics who stuff the damn thing in their bottom drawer next to the employee manual, the healthcare benefits package, and the rest of the crap the company expects you to read. They look at that moose, and think: if I get fired tomorrow, they’ll ask for the moose back. It’s their moose. It ain’t mine. I put this moose up on eBay, I’m going to be covering Trenton zoning meetings for the next ten years. Screw the moose.
There’s probably a secret Times subculture of Moose Abuse. No doubt the Moose has been photographed in a stripper’s cleavage, face down on a bar in a puddle of New Amsterdam lager, sitting in Thompkins Square with an anarchist’s A photoshopped on his chest, standing outside the building with a cigarette in his mouth.

Yes, that cigarette. The scarlet letter of our time.