The Dish

An almost perfect example of why so many have come to find the GOP anathema:
                       

Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch "family values" pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.

He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said.

His double life is now exposed with the news he has a 3-year-old love child with a divorced Air Force colonel, and critics are calling him a hypocrite.

Touchy, touchy.

A reader writes:

Kinsley is fundamentally wrong about genetics and genetic discrimination. He throws in a few points about the unfairness of inherited wealth and other topics, but saying X is bad therefore there no reason Y shouldn’t also be bad is a weak argument. Kinsley doesn’t even bother to explain how his talent example relates to gene-testing based discrimination. He doesn’t because he can’t. Here’s the continued logic of his example:

Let’s say there is a combination of genes for being a cello master. 

Does everyone who has that combination have an urge to play cello from the age of 5 and grow up to play like Yo-Yo Ma? No. Are there people without those genes that can become well-respected professional cellists? Yes. Could there be another, unknown combination of genes that also results in great cello playing? Yes.  Let’s say  we can identify the cello genes of Yo-Yo Ma. Would it be reasonable for a high school orchestra to select a cellist with those genes over a cellist without those genes who works harder and plays better merely on the assumption that the genetically superior cellist has the innate ability to be better even if she doesn’t show the ability? Would it be reasonable for a professional orchestra to hire based on a genetic test rather than current abilities and potential based on those observed abilities and work ethic?

As for insurance, the issues are more complex than Kinsley writes. What if a genetic test shows someone has a 20% increased risk of developing a disease that will cost millions of dollars to treat? The population incidence of this disease is 1/10000 so the chance this person will get the disease is 1/8333. Based on pure capitalism, the insurers choice is easy. Don’t insure this person or charge exorbitant rates. Even though the chance of getting the disease is still small, there is no amount you can charge this person for insurance that would balance out even the small chance of millions of dollars of expenses. Even if getting a genetic test could help improve preventative care, there is no way anyone would get that test without being assured that it wouldn’t affect their ability to get insurance. This is more than a hypothetical situation. I do medical research and we sometimes see incidental findings that really don’t affect people’s daily lives, but might minutely increase risks for future problems. Right now, if we tell a patient about these findings and they do report it to their insurance, they risk losing coverage or having their rates go up. If they don’t report it, they can get their insurance pulled when they try to make a claim since it might be lying about one’s health even if the claim has nothing to do with the finding. If insurers and employers started to make decisions based purely on genetic information, medical research involving genetics would grind to a halt. This is why this bill passed the Congress and Senate and why Dr. Ron Paul should be ashamed of his vote.

Ominous:

[A]mong the 78% of voters who said they believe the economy has slid into a recession, 52% would vote for Obama, compared with 32% for McCain.

Breakin’ and Poppin’ – Alfonso Ribeira from 1985:

Even more of a non-starter, according to Ross. Agreed. McCain has real problems with his partisan base. Having Lieberman tout his climate change credentials wouldn’t help bring home the uber-cons.

Is it a non-starter?

A reader writes:

I think the patriotism issue is related to the conflation of the Head of State with the Head of Government.  The American president is both of those things, formally and culturally — going all the way back to the first President, who remains, more than any other historical figure, the avatar of America.  Contrast the prime minister in a constitutional monarchy, who is a policymaker only.  The degree to which a particular president’s perceived embodying of the nation requires patriotic reaffirmation — and bars him from calling us to national self-criticism — varies with the historical conditions of the moment.  When, as now, we’re feeling embattled, unsure of our country’s primacy (and its righteousness), more of us neurotically demand that the president be the face-painted superfan.

The current administration has calculatingly stoked this need for its own political gain, and happily gratified it, too.  But in more confident times (and when presidents have truly led), Americans have embraced a president who adheres to Teddy Roosevelt’s view that "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."  (TR would no doubt have agreed with the converse, which is what we’re discussing here, i.e., that it is equally unpatriotic and servile to demand that the president uncritically "stand by" the country.)  What an irony if our rejection of monarchy has led to a state of affairs where our elected executive’s duty to provide an honest diagnosis of the nation’s condition is hamstrung by the demand that he function — like the Queen — as a patriotic symbol.  For most of my lifetime, we’ve been a better, more (small "r") republican people than that.  I audaciously hope that our next President will bring us back to that place.

A reader writes:

"He is reported in evangelical circles to promote the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency."

Heh. If this scenario holds true, Obama likely will preside over a catastrophic terrorist strike on the US, lead us into a bloody war with no clear exit strategy, invite the wrath of God on a major city in the form of a hurricane, and destroy America’s moral standing in the world by authorizing inhuman acts against our enemies.

Nah, that could never happen.

When my conservative friends ask me how I came to like Obama, despite his liberal policies, I really only have one response. On spending, war, debt, torture, executive power, federalism, individual liberty and the size of government: how much worse could it get? Would any far left liberal have done the damage that the Bush Republicans have? And with so little conservative resistance?