The Dish

That’s the term used by American Christianist Scott Lively to advocate for the new law in Uganda. He now claims to be shocked at any idea that he could endorse the execution of people for homosexuality and appalled by the violence threatened against gays in Uganda during the evangelicals’ anti-gay crusade in Africa. Well, here’s a video of Lively’s talk in Uganda that reveals what he says when he doesn’t think he’s being watched by Americans. He likens gays to mass killers, as the kind of people who would create a holocaust, as terrible dangers to civilization. This is the core of the Christianist message and the Christianist message is now the core of the GOP. At some point, you have to take these people’s words seriously.

In Britain, there's a small flap over David Cameron's commitment to recognizing married couples in the tax system, something the UK currently, and bizarrely, doesn't do. The trouble is its cost in a period of terrible public finances after years of Labour over-spending. Cameron is going to have to find a more affordable way to fulfill his promise. But note that Cameron, by backing civil partnerships for gays, but not marriage, would not extend these benefits to gay couples, as if the state does not have just as big an interest in supporting gay families as straight ones.

Even when a separate system for gay couples is deemed equal, it almost never is. Only marriage works. Only marriage is equality.

Bear Grylls shows us how to survive on a life raft with nothing but fetid water. You're welcome.

The wry leftie has a new blog. And one of his opening shots is at Jim Manzi's essay. The premise of Jim's essay is that there is a balance to be struck between economic growth and social stability. Like the conservative he is, Jim appreciates that a conservative will want a balance between these two goods and will hope that statesmen, using prudential judgment in periods of unknowable flux, will do their best to make the right adjustments to keep a society both prosperous and stable. And in this contrast, he compares Europe with America over the last thirty years. But his comparisons are not exactly apples to apples. And the contrast in growth is underwhelming when viewed from a distance:

How did the United States perform in comparison with European social democracies? Well, since 1980, the original 15 members of the European Union saw their real per capita income grow by 58%. Real per capita GDP in the United States grew by… 63%. And that measure actually overstates the

difference. 

The European Union does not include Switzerland, Norway or Iceland — three countries that clearly qualify as European social democracies. Those three countries had 71% growth in per capita GDP since 1980 — thanks to Isha Vij of the Center for American Progress for pointing this out to me — which, if added to the EU 15, would bring the growth record of the United States and the social democracies even closer to parity.

Interestingly, Manzi concedes in his essay that social democracy provides superior social cohesion. His essay simply assumes that it inherently produces dramatically lower growth. But now that we can see his assumption doesn't hold up, he's actually making the case for social democracy. To be sure, I'm not a social democrat, but Manzi has inadvertently softened my skepticism. If instituting a social democracy in the United States would dampen growth only very slightly, and create greater social cohesion and economic equality (meaning, for people who aren't very rich, higher living standards), why not give it a try?

My only solid take-away from this is that there really is intelligent and civil discourse on the web between the right and left. You just have to make an effort to find and appreciate it.

The Leveretts continue their campaign to diminish the significance of the Iranian uprising:

Antigovernment Iranian Web sites claim there were “tens of thousands” of Ashura protesters; others in Iran say there were 2,000 to 4,000. Whichever estimate is more accurate, one thing we do know is that much of Iranian society was upset by the protesters using a sacred day to make a political statement.

Vastly more Iranians took to the streets on Dec. 30, in demonstrations organized by the government to show support for the Islamic Republic (one Web site that opposed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election in June estimated the crowds at one million people). Photographs and video clips lend considerable plausibility to this estimate — meaning this was possibly the largest crowd in the streets of Tehran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s funeral in 1989. In its wake, even President Ahmadinejad’s principal challenger in last June’s presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, felt compelled to acknowledge the “unacceptable radicalism” of some Ashura protesters.

But Iranians were not upset with the brutal violence used by the regime on "a sacred day." Scott Lucas calls the entire op-ed a "confetti of unsupported assertions":

The Leveretts do put a series of challenges, discussed also at EA, about the opposition’s leadership, its strategy, and its objectives, but this is all to prop up the “default” option that the regime (whose political, religious, economic, and ideological position is not examined beyond that claim of a million protesters on its behalf on 30 December) must not only be accepted but embraced in talks. Just as the US Government set aside the inconvenience of Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, so it should put in the closet the trifling annoyance of those Iranians who demonstrate against rather than for the Government.

I might add that there is a clear distinction between government workers told to march and bussed in to demonstrate, at no risk to themselves, and hundred of thousands risking their lives and bodies to demonstrate against a wicked and fraudulently elected regime.

Check out this full-throated defense – “Uganda Is Right; Rick Warren Is Wrong” – of executing homosexuals under the civil law – which uses Martin Luther King Jr as support for a law that would round up, spy on, jail and execute members of a minority. The speaker argues that because gay people ahve a choice to leave the country if they want to avoid being rounded up and killed or imprisoned, this is not equivalent to those leftist regimes (of course Nazi Germany is leftist for much of today’s Republican right) that have persecuted minorities in the past. I have to say this honesty is refreshing. It’s a full-throated follow-through of Christianist doctrine. The Bible, after all, mandates the execution of homosexuals. The GOP believes that the Bible is the most important basis for social policy. What else, after all, can compete with the divine word? Others on the evangelical right have actually denounced the Uganda bill as un-Christian. So let me take this chance to praise unreservedly John Mark Reynolds’ brilliant evisceration of the proposed law in First Things from both a Christian and secular perspective. But that led me to search for other statements in the conservative press in the US. Guess what?

I’ve googled National Review and come up empty (maybe my search engines aren’t good enough). Ditto The Weekly Standard and The American Conservative and Commentary. If readers find any clear denunciations of this fascist attack on a minority in the right-wing media, let me know, and I will publish them. And then ask yourselves: if a bill of this sort were prepared against, say, evangelicals in a Muslim country or Jews in a Christian one, do you think there would be such a non-response?

What the Jews were to the right in the 1920s, the gays are in the 2010s. Unpleasant, dispensable, and if possible, wiped out.

Greenwald builds on this post:

When confronted with their conduct, Politico's Editor-in-Chief blithely claims that this misleading, subservient behavior is his understanding of what "journalists" are supposed to.  And it undoubtedly is.

It's true that, two days before printing its latest Cheney article, Politico ran a good article by one of its few real reporters, Josh Gerstein, documenting that Bush waited longer to comment on Richard Reid than Obama waited to comment on the Northwest Airlines incident, but that's only one of Cheney's lies, and debunking it in an entirely separate article doesn't justify printing Cheney's comments without challenge two days later.

I still wanna know: did Allen call Cheney up after the undie-bomber in order to goad a comment out of him, or did Cheney contact him since he is the usual outlet for the Cheneyites.

Frum calls Rubin's suggestion of Palin having working-class roots "flat-out wrong by almost any definition":

Palin’s father was a high school teacher, her mother a public school administrator. Her mother’s brother was a lawyer, an official of the Texas state bar, and later a judge. In a state where many workers had to fear seasonal unemployment, her family enjoyed the security of a public-sector white-collar salary, benefits, and pension. The Heaths were not rich, but they were comfortable and respectable – much more so than, say, the family of young Bill Clinton, who if I remember right, did quite OK among Jews.

To itemize Palin’s summer jobs as proof of her blue-collar authenticity reminds me of that Saturday Night Live sketch in which Al Franken’s Pat Robertson insists he is much more than a TV preacher. “I worked as a caddy, I’ve watched people’s houses ….”

Yes, Todd belonged to a union. So did Ronald Reagan. However: Even before Sarah Palin’s book deal, the Palins ranked among the richest people in their hometown of Wasilla – and were capable of expressing intense disdain toward their perceived social inferiors, like the Johnston clan. If anything, the Palin family’s status grievances look less like Richard Nixon style resentment of poverty and humiliation – and much more like John Adams’ fury on encountering in London those English snobs who didn’t realize what big deals the Adamses were, back home in Braintree.

Frum's critique of Rubin is quite extensive and worth the read. What it tells me is simply how Commentary is now a shadow of its former self. It's an agit-prop digest edited by a foam-flecked ideologue because daddy gave it to him.

Kathy Griffin is banned from CNN. Wonder why?

His website, that is.