To those who oppose marriage for any two persons who wish to be married, I ask simply:
Is marriage important, yes or no?
Do you think marriage helps children who are being raised, yes or no?
Do you think it hurts people (legally, socially, emotionally or financially) not to be married if they want to be married, yes or no?
How specifically could gay and lesbian marriage damage your marriage?
Isn’t America about equality?
David Boies describes why opposing witnesses in the Prop 8 trial failed.
4:45 after the brief ad.
Via Andrew Sullivan.
“[Elena Kagan] seems fully comfortable standing before this committee and suggesting something which no recent nominee has ever dared suggest: Supreme Court justices should be among the nine smartest people in the land, and guess what? I’m one of ’em!”
This month has been the deadliest month yet for foreign troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. Department of Defense now reports that one hundred coalition troops were killed this month. The death toll for 2010 to date now stands at 320. With soldiers and equipment still arriving in the country, peak troop strength is anticipated to reach 150,000 by August. And, with the removal of General Stanley McChrystal from command of Afghanistan following an embarrassing article in Rolling Stone magazine, a shift in leadership is underway with General David Petraeus attending confirmation hearings now. Efforts are now being made ot both weaken the Taliban and pressure them to reconcile with the Afghan government, but progress is slow, and many earlier gains are becoming unstable once more. Collected here are images of the country and conflict over the past month, part of an ongoing monthly series on Afghanistan. … (42 photos total)
Impressive array. Many emotions.
From Ask the Pilot, Patrick Smith’s review of “Please Remove Your Shoes.”
Still, though, my favorite line in the film is this one from FAA security agent Steve Elson: “They [TSA] focus on all kinds of minutiae and crap, rather than the items they need to.” Elson tells the story of the time a simulated bomb was run through an X-ray machine with a bottle of water placed on top of it. Guards caught the water, of course, but missed the bomb.
From David J. Morris at The Virginia Quarterly Review Blog, as good a summary as you’ll find about what they were thinking and why. A key excerpt:
It is still a little difficult to believe that an accomplished fifty-five-year-old officer would say and allow his staff to say the outrageous things in the Rolling Stone article. You can just hear the chorus in Washington: “What was he thinking?” But then, I think McChrystal and his buddies didn’t expect that Hastings would actually write down everything they said and put it into print. It’s an unfortunate staple of Beltway journalism that has bled over into war reporting that most reporters are loathe to burn their sources by writing derogatory things about them. To be blunt, most reporters are as career-obsessed as the officers they’re interviewing and they don’t want to poison the well. This is doubly true if the officer being interviewed is a four-star general. There is a simple reciprocity involved: if you want to be invited back to ride on The Boss’s helicopter, if you want continued access, you’d better not write about his soft spot for strippers and gin. That said, it’s a naturally antagonistic relationship and most officers hate reporters because they represent a threat to their reputations. There are no medals awarded for conspicuous gallantry in a press conference. . . .
Enter into this mix Michael Hastings, a reporter who apparently had made a decision at some point to not play by the normal rules; who can be friendly, interested, and reasonably non-threatening in-person; whose brother is an army officer; and who was writing for what is primarily a pop culture magazine. McChrystal and his staff, jangled and beat-down after literally years of being in and out of various combat zones, probably thought they were coming across as hip and irreverent in front of the Rolling Stone guy, knowing that there was a far better chance their teenage daughters were going to read about them there than in the back pages of the National Review. Of course, many of those staff officers are now dealing with what amounts to the final mistake of their careers within an organization that doesn’t forgive much in the way of media fiascos.
Link via Andrew Sullivan.
Around midnight last Friday the shoeless prisoner was roused from a nap and strapped into a chair. The guards put a patch over his heart, the firing squad’s target from 25 feet. Any last words?
“I do not. No.”
With that, a black hood was placed over the bald head of the condemned man, and the countdown began . . .
So begins Timothy Egan’s story of The Last Firing Squad. It merits your click.
The fact, revealed in Rolling Stone, that Gen. Stanley McChrystal voted for President Obama may well have been a planted nugget designed to show how receptive McChrystal was to Obama’s worldview. But several people who worked for, and continue to work for, Gen. McChrystal say that it’s true. McChrystal told his subordinates about his ballot choice in November of 2008. More surprisingly, this choice did not surprise them. McChrystal was a hard core operator, aggressive as hell, a JSOC ninja — but he was also a social liberal who tolerated, nay, welcomed gay people into his inner circle, who disdained Fox News, and who grew increasingly frustrated with his reputation as Dick Cheney’s hired assassin.
“With Petraeus now running the Afghan ‘surge’, we are back to square one: an impossible and contradictory war that requires permanent occupation to work and twelve months to succeed.”
Wondering what the General McChrystal flap is about? Amy Davidson tells us.
First posted here two years ago today.
“The recent haggling over Guantanamo Bay is such classic Democratic Party politics, it almost makes you want to laugh. Almost, except that it’s, you know, revolting. Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.”
Matt Taibbi, first posted here one year ago today. It’s only gotten worse.
“It’s unfortunate that walruses were included.”
Exxon Mobil’s CEO as quoted in Gail Collins column today. The CEO was referring to the bogus Gulf oil drilling emergency plans.
Collins’s column is good.
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As good as anything I’ve seen on the damage and the Gulf Coast, first hand from someone who works there.
If you’re reading this blog post on a computer, mobile phone or e-reader, please stop what you’re doing immediately. You could be making yourself stupid. And whatever you do, don’t click on the links in this post. They could distract you from the flow of my beautiful prose and narrative.
Bilton goes on to discredit that theory and survey some recent thinking on the topic. Among other things, his discussion led me to this:
And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.
Both are worth reading if you’re not too distracted.
Based on recently revised estimates, BP’s ruptured oil well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico continues to leak 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day. The new figures suggest that an amount of oil equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could still be flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days. Despite apparent efforts to restrict journalists from accessing affected areas, stories, video and photographs continue to emerge. Collected here are recent photographs of oil-affected wildlife, people and shorelines around the Gulf of Mexico on this, the 51st day after the initial explosion. (41 photos total)
A contributor to the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston said yesterday he regretted a portion of a column that has infuriated gay Catholics in the region.
In the column, published last week, the writer argued that one reason the children of gay parents should not be admitted to Catholic schools is the “real danger’’ that they would bring pornography to school.
That allegation, plus several others in the column, has drawn a torrent of criticism from gay rights advocates.
And yesterday, the editor of the paper, The Pilot, said in a statement, “The tone of the piece was strong, and we apologize if anyone felt offended by it.’’
. . .
Hard to understand why anyone would take offense at that.
Another outstanding essay from Roger Ebert. I’d go to church if pastors spoke and thought like Ebert writes.
That brings me back around to the story of the school mural. I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life? Were you raised as a racist, or become one on your own?
That’s the current state of the oil spill superimposed on Albuquerque. Click to enlarge.
Go to IfItWasMyHome.com to move the spill to your area.
“Yes, if you are on the terrorist watch list, the authorities can keep you from getting on a plane but not from purchasing an AK-47. This makes sense to Congress because, as [Senator Lindsey] Graham accurately pointed out, ‘when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.’ ”
Also from Collins:
And almost everyone [at the senate hearing] had a good word for the T-shirt vendor who first noticed the suspicious car and raised an alert. Really, if someone had introduced a bill calling for additional T-shirt vendors, it would have sailed through in a heartbeat.
Gun legislation, not so popular.
“Probably the only time i will say ‘GO Suns’ ”
Ms. Longoria is married to San Antonio player Tony Parker. She was, of course, showing her support for the Sun’s wearing their “Los Suns” jerseys Wednesday. (Los Suns won.)
Wish it weren’t so, but I fear my lasting memory of many trips to Prince William Sound will be of hunched-over workers with toothbrushes, trying to scrub black tar from shivering birds and sea-worn rocks in the Alaska spring of 1989.
All the images were staggering: The birds looked lost and stunned, their coats of warmth matted black, their wings greased by hydrocarbons that would eventually kill most of them. The inlets of that most Edenic of sheltered seas had a sickening sheen, with a smell that made you nauseated and stayed with you through sleepless nights. Harder still was the sight of fishermen — tough, independent, weather-callused men — weeping for their loss.
And so, Timothy Egan begins another fine essay, this on how we didn’t learn anything from the 1989 Alaska oil spill and we won’t learn anything this time either.
Sigh.
“The [Tucson] City Council voted 5-1 today to sue the state to overturn SB 1070, the controversial immigration law that requires local police to verify the status of those they ‘reasonably suspect’ are here illegally.”
Way to go, Old Pueblo!
Thanks to John for the pointer.