The obvious choice is TNR, but I’ve got to think Slate is in the running, unless the wingnuts beat them both to it. (Yes, I’m referring to SCOTUS nom Sotomayor.)
Who will be the first to compare her to J-Lo?Post + Comments (97)
DougJ has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
by DougJ| 97 Comments
This post is in: Politics
The obvious choice is TNR, but I’ve got to think Slate is in the running, unless the wingnuts beat them both to it. (Yes, I’m referring to SCOTUS nom Sotomayor.)
Who will be the first to compare her to J-Lo?Post + Comments (97)
by DougJ| 110 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes
Via Isaac Chotiner, a true work of genius from the Weekly Standard:
Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one’s few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter…A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships.
[….]Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband.
[….]Gay marriage may reside outside the kinship system, but it has all the wedding-planning, nest-building fun of marriage but none of its rules or obligations (except the duties that all lovers have toward one another). Gay spouses have none of our guilt about sex-before-marriage. They have no tedious obligations towards in-laws, need never worry about Oedipus or Electra, won’t have to face a menacing set of brothers or aunts should they betray their spouse.
[….]Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender.
There is no way to improve this piece.
The definitive wingnut take on marriagePost + Comments (110)
by DougJ| 42 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes
Just what the American public wants to hear from Republicans:
“We are very excited about waging an ideological debate,” says Richard Viguerie, the well-heeled conservative fundraiser and direct-mail guru. “We never lose battles. Even if we lose the vote we win, we build the movement.”
“Remember,” adds Princeton law professor Robert George, founder of the National Organization for Marriage, “that the base does not expect to win this. That’s the little secret. [Republicans] don’t have the filibuster, the Democrats have the votes. For [the conservative base], this is about the future of the Republican Party, not who is going to sit on the Supreme Court. . . . . That is why conservatives are going to be interested in it, and what they are going to hold people accountable for.”
Let’s see. Battle you know can’t win? Check. Ideological battle no one but the fundies is interested in? Check. Possible party purges down the road? Check.
Even when conservatives lose, they win. The conservative cause can never fail, it can only be betrayed.
(By the way, I know I’ve asked about this before, but why are there so many crazy wingnut law professors? Instapundit, Dijon guy, she who must not be named, this guy. It’s not like this in other areas.)
“We are very excited about waging an ideological debate”Post + Comments (42)
by DougJ| 37 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
You think they’d knock this shit off after that disastrous fighter jet Air Force One stunt the guy had to resign over, but there’s a two-hour delay on flights into JFK this afternoon because of an air show.
by DougJ| 110 Comments
Jim Hoagland has another excellent column on Obama’s national security policy, which makes the rather complex points that closing Gitmo is an important first step, that the right’s fear-mongering over it is silly, that those on the left who say Obama is Bush-lite on these issues are absurd, but that Obama needs to go further by developing new international rules of conflict. I’m not sure that I agree with or even understand all of this perfectly, but it’s striking to read something so honest and nuanced side-by-side with all the “A Few Good Men” style idiocy that’s floating around (here and here, for example). Not surprisingly, Joe Scar makes the comparison with “A Few Good Men” explicit:
“This scene yesterday…I’m serious here, this comes straight out of ‘A Few Good Men.’ The reason why the closing scene with Jack Nicholson on the stand worked so well, is, of course, we were all rooting for the young attractive Tom Cruise, just like more Americans are probably rooting for President Obama. But at the same time, what was said on that stand by Nicholson…I was struck by that contrast.”
Let’s leave aside the fact that Scar is drawing the wrong conclusion from the movie (a point Steve Benen makes) as well as the fact that the conflict in the movie was about “toughening up” soldiers, not about torture. It seems to me that the real point is that “A Few Good Men” was a fictional movie. We’ve gotten used to wingers using Hollywood ticking bombs and asteroids to argue about reality, but it’s not just wingnuts who do this and it’s rather disconcerting to see this infecting so much of our discourse.
Where does this end? Can we use Harry Lyme’s ferris wheel speech to justify sending fake antibiotics to third world countries?
I understand why movie rhetoric appeals to pundits so much. There’s a whole genre of movie wherein one (usually younger) character’s idealistic view of the world is pitted against the “tougher” view of another (usually older) character. And that’s right in the punditocracy’s wheel-house: naive, hippie democrats versus tough, old Republicans. We see this on more or less every important issue, to some extent.
But doesn’t it seem that the issue of national security, in particular, is just a lot more complicated than that? And if Dick Cheney has such a good case, why won’t anyone other than his daughter defend him? Has anyone seen a single national security professional (Bush political appointees don’t count) argue in favor of torture or in favor of keeping Gitmo open? For God’s sake, even the Bush administration rejected much of the Cheney doctrine after 2005.
But what do I know, I’m just a hack blogger who drinks too much and falls in love with girls.
by DougJ| 41 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
I’ve often been struck by the fact that, although being tall is considered an advantage in most American sports, the greatest (or second greatest, depending on who you ask) player of all time in the most popular sport on earth — Maradona — was well below average in height (he’s 5’5″, while the average Argentinian male is about 5’8″). And that’s always made me wonder about what advantages shorter people might have in various arenas. So this caught my attention:
If a person touches your toe and your nose at the same time, he says, “you will feel those touches as simultaneous. This is surprising because the signal from your nose reaches your brain before the signal from your toe. Why didn’t you feel the nose touch when it first arrived?”
It may be that our sensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest piece of information to arrive, Eagleman says.
[….]Because for the taller person it takes a tenth of a second longer for the toe-touch to travel up the foot, the ankle, the calf, the thigh, the backbone to the brain, the brain waits that extra beat to announce a “NOW!” That tall person will live his sensory life on a teeny delay (at least as regards toe-touching). This, of course, could apply to all kinds of lower-extremity experiences — cold or heat against the skin, tickles, rubs, hitting a soccer ball — the list goes on and on.
by DougJ| 57 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Steve Benen posits the theory that Cheney is on tv, driving down the fortunes of his own party, because he has a book to sell:
Reports indicate Cheney may end up with a deal with Simon & Schuster, because it’s home to an imprint run by Mary Matalin, who is also publishing Karl Rove’s book.
This might offer at least some hints about Cheney’s recent motivations. A book written by a failed former vice president may not compel publishers to pay the big bucks, but a book written by one of the leaders of the modern Republican Party, and the GOP’s leading attack dog of the nation’s elected leadership, might generate a more sizable advance.
I’ve always found Carville/Matalin fascinating. It’s pretty clear neither believes in anything beyond the next pay check, no matter how much they bray about morals and principles and what not.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Matalin is helping Cheney sell the Republican party down the river for a seven figure book advance.
For the past six years, every Bush insider who wrote a book critical of the administration — Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neil, Scott McClellan — has been accused of just trying to make a buck by trashing an unpopular administration. There’s a delicious irony in seeing the ultimate Bush insider do even more political damage by trying to make a buck defending an unpopular administration.