Tag New York Times

Daily digest 1

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Some news of the day, in easy to swallow bites

A Supreme take on tolerance

One cool thing about retired justices of the Supreme Court is they tell us what they really think about things, like John Paul Stevens dropping his impartiality to talk about the community-center-with-a-mosque-near-ground-zero affair that we discussed back in August.

He said that a nation built by people who fled religious persecution “should understand why American Muslims should enjoy the freedom to build their places of worship wherever permitted by local zoning laws.”

(snip)

He called the [National Japanese American Memorial] “a powerful reminder of the fact that ignorance — that is to say, fear of the unknown — is the source of most invidious prejudice.”

Princess Leia inspires boy—to build hologram

Another cool thing—real holograms!

Worst thing about being president was name-calling?

Former President George W. Bush says the lowest point of his presidency was when Kanye West called him a racist over the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.  Really?  It wasn’t September 11, or not catching bin Laden, or the economic crash with the bankruptcies, foreclosures, debt, and job losses?  It wasn’t lying to start a war that’s cost thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, or Abu Ghraib?  Not even the fact you couldn’t help ease the very real suffering of those victims of Katrina?  (And why do you care what Kanye West thinks?  Are you really so self-absorbed that you think that’s the worst thing that happened during those eight years?  Really?)

A lot of that daily 200 mil is for Michelle’s hairdressers

You can say almost anything and be believed, if you’re careful who you speak to.  Citing only a report in one Indian newspaper, which cites only one unnamed source, the geniuses of the political right have been trumpeting their disgust about the “fact” that our government is going to spend $200 million a day on President Obama’s diplomatic trip to India, including sending 34 warships to sit security off the coast of Mumbai.  Yeah, more than the daily cost of the war in Afghanistan, or the full purchase price of the New Jersey Nets.  Talk about your willing suspension of disbelief…

We’ve also just learned that water is wet

No, really: they sequenced Ozzy Osbourne’s DNA and confirmed what had long been suspected: he’s a mutant.

The more things change, the more they stay eerily the same

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First of all, don’t believe most of what’s coming out of the mouths of the political pros today, either the candidates or the party officials and consultants, including the ones disguised as Fox News commentators.  The winners of yesterday’s elections are saying every result is due to people rejecting President Obama and big government, while the losers are trying to convince us that they’re not to blame; nothing is that simple.  But make no mistake: the Democrats were beaten up yesterday.  Why?

For starters, the party in power always loses seats in the midterm elections.  Plus, Americans are (generally) not ideological, they’re practical—they want the economy strong and unemployment down, and they are impatient so they voted for someone new.  They didn’t, by and large, vote for mouthy extremists with no realistic plan for solving problems.  It was the independent voters, who supported Democrats in 2008, who drove the results of this election.  And if this election showed the biggest party swing in some 70 years, maybe it was because we’re trying to recover from the worst economic crisis in some 70 years.

The irony?  Unemployment is unacceptably high, but the naysayers aren’t giving the administration any credit for what it did do that, arguably, saved the economy.  But those things didn’t bring back jobs fast enough, and that was all the excuse many needed.

Don’t put too much stock in this big change being permanent.  Just two years ago there was supreme confidence that the Republican Party had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and that was less than a decade after the Democrats were routed and ostracized following the Clinton presidency, which came after a generation of Republican ascendancy while Democrats wandered in the desert.

Republicans now control the House and should be expected to make an effort to lead, rather than just get in the way as they’ve done the past two years.  Some wise Republicans have said as much today, that the people have given them a “second” chance (this presumes the world began with the election of Ronald Reagan).  Well, the thing Speaker of the House-presumptive John Boehner has touted is the Pledge to America, and I’ve read estimates that achieving that vague set of goals will add $700 billion to the debt.

So don’t be surprised if there’s not much change in Washington.  Promises to lower taxes are vacuous: government can’t afford to take a pay cut any more than you or me, not if it plans to keep programs people want, like Social Security, Medicare, and national defense.  Cutting anything else won’t have the kind of impact on long-term debt that will make a serious difference.  Besides, when it comes to a plan to help the economy recover and generate jobs, what’s your level of confidence that the party largely responsible for the circumstances that led to the economic crisis is the party that can make it all better?

Look for real changes at the state or local level, where enough small changes can add up to real power for Republicans.

One more thing: enough with all the balloon juice about “taking back” the government, unless you’re talking about taking it back from the deep-pocketed interests who’ve been controlling the people in office for years and years now.  On paper, the government is still and always has been in the hands of the people we citizens chose to look out for our interests, just as the Constitution envisioned.  On the ground…well, we all have to understand that the longer those people stay in government—like Boehner, just elected to his 11th two-year term?—the more they depend on the money that greases Washington’s wheels; it’s true for Democrats and Republicans, and they know it, too.

The older I’ve gotten the easier it’s become to keep these things in perspective: if you don’t like the results of this election, remember that there’ll be another one along soon enough.

Equal justice for all: the gay rights tide has turned

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The fight to keep homosexual Americans from enjoying the full rights of citizenship is over; the opposition is giving up.  A federal judge has enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy anywhere in the world, and the expected reaction to that news was…nowhere to be heard.

Sure, hard-core haters had their say, but I’m struck by just how quiet it has been.  At the risk of fanning the flames, I’d say it looks like the usual suspects in the anti-gay effort have finally run out of steam, perhaps because it’s so clear that courts are going to enforce the Constitutional protections that have been denied to homosexuals.

First, the DADT (ugh!) policy is a crock and it should be repealed; it should never have been imposed.  Was anyone really in favor of a regulation that permitted gays to remain in the service unless they were discovered?  How in any important way is that any different than the old system, where gays were discharged when they were discovered?

The law’s days are clearly numbered.  Although the Justice Department asked the judge not to halt enforcement of the law while it prepares an appeal, the president has promised to get rid of the law—and Congress almost did so earlier this year!

The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs favor repeal of DADT, but they want to go slow.   Excuse me, gents—why?  Because it would force an immediate change to benefits or buildings, or protocols for social events?  That’s why you want to wait until an internal review is completed, in a month a half?  Really?

I never understood the argument that allowing gay people in the service to be open about their sexuality would hurt morale (and hurt it even worse in time of war, or wars).  I don’t believe that most men and women in the armed forces are so closed-minded and prejudiced on this topic, because I don’t think most Americans outside the military are, either.

Think about the reality of the situation: if DADT has legally cleared the way for gays to serve since 1993, then people in the military have had at least since then to get used to the idea that gays are there: to get used to the idea that they don’t leer at you in the shower or rape you in your bed, at least not in any greater numbers than heterosexuals do those things; to get used to fighting next to them in a shooting war, and to know that they can be brave and trustworthy comrades, at least to the same extent that heterosexuals can be.

We can proclaim not to understand why people are homosexual, or embrace a religious belief that homosexual activity is a sin, but none of that matters in a tolerant, secular, civil society.  The experts can’t say why a person is sexually attracted to one gender or the other.  And it violates the rights of due process and free speech guaranteed to each American in the Constitution to treat someone differently because of their sexual orientation just as it would to treat them differently because of their gender or their ancestry. 

The tide has turned.  Homosexual activity is no longer illegal.  If you read or watch Ted Olson’s argument as presented on Fox News in August, the same argument he made in the California court case, you can see that the case for gay marriage will prevail.  States are giving up trying to stop homosexuals from adopting children.  Republican political strategists recognize that opposing gay rights is a long-term losing proposition.  One officer discharged under DADT has successfully sued to be reinstated in the Air Force.

You don’t have to “understand” gay people any more than you have to “understand” people of a different race or a different religion.  You only have to understand that these people are Americans like you, who believe in American rights like you do, who want to enjoy American freedoms like you do, who support our country with their work and their taxes like you do, and who want the opportunity to serve to protect this way of life, just like you do.

Just the facts, ma’am

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

Wishing a thing to be true doesn’t make it true.  Despite what you hear about the president’s birthplace and religion.

We’ve talked about this before (here and here) but we need to keep pointing it out because it won’t go away all by itself: too many people today are willfully ignorant of verifiable truths that conflict with what they wish to be true (but isn’t).  I came across a wonderful column by Timothy Egan on this last week, important less for blaming perpetrators than for identifying why this hurts us:

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy.

(snip)

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war.  And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy.  At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes.  But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

They waste a lot of time and karmic energy, for starters.

Last week I received a chain e-mail in which the original author complains that Christians and Jews are discriminated against in the new health care insurance law, which itself marks the establishment of a system, called dhimmitude, by which the Muslims who have conquered this country through jihad will collect a tax from non-Muslims and permit us to continue to live here.

Seriously.  That’s what it says.

The writer (not the forwarder) laments that he, a Christian, will face “crippling IRS liens” on his assets and jail time when—not if—he refuses to buy health insurance or pay the penalty for not buying it, while Louis Farrakhan (a random example, surely) not only won’t face penalties, he’ll have “100% of his health needs paid for” by government insurance.  And to prove it all, he directs you to page 107 of the new health care insurance law where the word “dhimmitude” appears.

Except that it doesn’t, of course; it doesn’t appear in any of the pages of the new health care insurance law.  Nor does any jail time penalty for violators of the law.  Because this chain e-mail is a product of the south end of a northbound bull.

I checked what Snopes.com had to say and found that religious groups with an IRS exemption from paying Social Security and Medicare taxes on First Amendment grounds (and which, as a result, don’t receive benefits from either of those programs) could be exempt from the requirements of the new health care insurance law.  The entry at FactCheck.org agrees, and provides the link to the government data which makes clear that no Muslims are among the groups now exempt from Social Security and Medicare, and thus would not be exempt from the new health care insurance law.

So, in four minutes I learned that (1) Muslims are not exempt from the requirement to buy health insurance, but Amish and Mennonites and others could be (I did not know that), and (2) dhimmitude isn’t really a tenet of Islam, but an “academic concept” proposed by a writer with anti-Islam ties (fourth paragraph under Full Answer).  What I couldn’t find an answer to is, did anyone really believe that the word “dhimmitude” was right there on page 107 of the new health care insurance law, so anyone who read it would know what the conquering jihadists were doing?

Almost nothing in the chain e-mail was accurate, yet thousands of people are all worked up.  Over nothing.  At least, nothing factual from the chain e-mail, except perhaps that the Amish can opt out of Social Security.  Dang ol’ Amish get all the breaks.

Political opportunists exploit Ground Zero, and not in a good way

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

September 11 is right around the corner, and this year it is likely to spike the hysteria over the planned construction of a community center two and a half blocks from the World Trade Center site.

Doesn’t that sound a lot less creepy and threatening than “a mosque at ground zero”?  That’s the gist of the problem.

A Muslim group in New York City wants to build a community center, including space for religious observance, at 45-51 Park Place in lower Manhattan, a site near the hole in the ground where the Twin Towers stood.  Google the address to see the distance between it and the pit.  There have been complaints from people who find the idea of a mosque at ground zero appalling and insensitive, and in some cases a symbolic victory for the people who carried out the September 11 attacks (and who are, it is true, still at war with the United States and plotting our destruction).  It’s not been made clear (to me) if there are objections to the swimming pool and meeting rooms in the plan, or just that there would be areas for Muslim religious activity.

I don’t follow how building a community center shows insensitivity to the victims of a terrorist or criminal act, unless you blame the builders of the center for the attack.  The man behind the Cordoba House has some questionable beliefs, but no associations with Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda.  If the people behind this proposal aren’t directly connected to the 9/11 hijackers, is the objection some sort of guilt by association?  I’d like to believe that association with Islam is not the cause of the opposition, since Islam didn’t attack us—that was done by some people with a perverted interpretation of Islam.  They’re no more representative of Islam than the (insert name of your favorite religious fringe group here) are of Christianity.

People who commandeer passenger jets and use them as missiles deserve our attention.  The last president let his administration turn that attention into fear, and enough of the fear became irrational enough to be exploited as a wedge to grab power and start a war that had nothing to do with finding the people who attacked us, merrily ignoring civil liberties along the way.  It’s not too big a leap to say that irrational fear, and political opportunism, are pumping up the volume in this case.

Charles Krauthammer makes a compelling point about preserving sacred ground, although he doesn’t say how far away would be far enough, and Ross Douthat has an interesting column about how the constitutional America and the cultural America are in conflict on this issue, and I see his point.  But I’m no culture warrior: no one’s made an argument that the proposed construction is illegal, the necessary governmental authorities have approved the plan, neighborhood and business groups approve, we’re not religious bigots…and it’s two blocks down and around the corner, for crying out loud.  Let’s move on.

Want more?  William Saletan does a skillful job taking down the anti-mosque arguments on their face, and their proponents with them.

How about a joke?  This is ridiculously close to a real news item:

The Statue of Liberty was briefly evacuated today after a faulty sensor in an elevator shaft falsely indicated smoke. While there were no immediate reports of injuries, the very idea that someone might build a Muslim community center just across the water from the site of that undamaged sacred ground was compared to a stab in the heart by a bunch of racist yahoos.