So many sympathetic straights just don’t know the kind of inequality gays live with all the time. What does that say about the effectiveness of the leading gay rights groups?
Farrakhan, Obama, Chicago
A reader from Chicago writes:
Farrakhan is very much a part of the Chicago political landscape. While the white population has no respect for him, black Chicagoan’s are more ambivalent about the man. Many selectively denounce his worst statements while expressing admiration for his advancement of independence and personal responsibility among blacks.
This admiration is great enough that Chicago politicians, white and black, find it in their political interest to maintain friendly public relations with the Farrakhan, just as they do with Jesse Jackson. In their Chicago bases of operation, neither man carries the local controversy that a Sharpton does in New York. Both have very friendly relationships with the local political establishment powers.
So, while Fox News and the rest of the country rail against Farrakhan, here in Chicago there is relatively little open conflict with the man. To see Chicago Mayor Daley and Farrakhan together at a public event, arms over shoulders, laughing and whispering to each other, you’d never know that this is the same Louis Farrakhan known and despised by the rest of white America. It is within the Chicago political world that Obama’s perspective and approach to Farrakhan was formed. No Chicago politician, white or black, denounces Farrakhan. In exchange, Farrakhan leaves them alone for the most part. So, I don’t think this has anything to do with Obama’s real feelings about Farrakhan. Obama is just continuing with an approach that was part of his political training. His campaign, run by Axelrod (another Chicago veteran), bears all the markings. It may be time for Obama to shed some of the lessons of Chicago, but doing so runs against the grain of everything he learned while cutting his political teeth here.
Children vs Happiness
Ron Bailey goes there. Matt dissents. Jonah Lehrer thinks it depends on what you mean by happy. But children are definitely not green:
Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount. So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all.
Quiet Out There
We’re at that moment in the campaign that reminds me of a horror movie. There’s a kind of relief that the worst cannot happen, that the Clintons are politically dead, that our long national nightmare is over. The screen falls silent. We look at pleasant images: green grass, or a kitchen table scene, or a calm lovers’ embrace. But you know they have something left. They could come suddenly screaming back, like that hand out of the grave in Carrie or Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction. An Edwards endorsement? A March surprise?
Like Freddy or Jason, they still lurk, ready to pounce again. And the credits are yet to roll. Gulp.
McCain and Hagee
Will he reject and denounce?
Face Of The Day
The body of five-month old Mohammad Naser Al-Buri lies in the morgue at the Al-shifa hospital before during his funeral February 28, 2008 in Gaza City, Gaza. Al-Buri, who is the son of the UNRWA of Al-shati primary school doorkeeper Naser Al-Buri, was killed while he was sleeping at his home following an Israeli aircraft strike on the home of his family’s neighbor belonging to the Hamas Government’s Interior Minister, Palestinian medical sources said. By Abid Katib/Getty Images.
Bush vs Obama
It can only help Obama. In fact, it’s campaign gold. You can tell that Bush is really feeling the heat from this guy already. He senses that this movement is a massive indictment of him, his clumsiness in foreign affairs, and his rigidity. He’s right. And the more Bush makes a vote for Obama a vote against Bush the more traction Obama will get.
That Dissent
I know, I know. There are almost no independent sources in the email. And it flies in the face of a lot of other reporting. But the emailer has been corresponding with me for a while and is in Iraq in the military. Yes, he may well be biased, as all soldiers are, in as much as he wants his mission to succeed. Which is a good thing. But we know so little for sure, and the signs and counter-signs are as complex as they are fluid, so I felt it worthwhile to air it. Surely our goal now must be to see things as clearly as we can. And put all perspectives on the table.
Best Of Buckley
Ross thinks it was in his short form:
His artfully recondite style worked best in small, explosive passages.
The smaller the better. I wonder if Buckley would have been a blogger in another era. I know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead – but am I the only person who found Buckley close to unreadable a lot of the time? I never read his fiction, but his nonfiction was packed the endless sentences, ridiculously long words, and meaning that sometimes took several reads to excavate. I don’t know how many times I finished a Buckley column with the thought: what on earth was he trying to say? But then, my gold standard for prose style is Orwell. Never use a long word when a short one will do is not exactly advice Buckley followed.
Buckley A “Neocon”?
The term is now officially meaningless.
