Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity, Outrage
And Duncan Black’s bottom-dwelling continues in earnest:
As I said before, I have know idea if the Roberts adoption story is newsworthy. That’s why, you know, reporters might ask questions and stuff to find out. But, there’s certainly something weird, and by weird I don’t necessarily mean “unethical” or “illegal,” about Irish-born kids being adopted in Latin America by an American couple.
What a heel.
Jeff Goldstein pens a well-deserved rant.
by John Cole| 6 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture
This is terrible news for a family that has already gone through a lot:
Dana Reeve, who spent nine years caring for her paralyzed husband, Christopher Reeve, until his death last year, announced Tuesday that she has lung cancer.
Reeve, 44, said she decided to disclose her illness following rumors about her health in the media.
“I have recently been diagnosed with lung cancer, and am currently undergoing treatment,” Reeve said in a statement. “I have an excellent team of physicians, and we are optimistic about my prognosis.”
I still agree with Gary Farber. I am really angry with death, and I hope Dana pullsthrough ok.
by John Cole| 5 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
No one wants to be the next Judy Miller:
Bolstered by public support for the ability to guard anonymous sources after a high-profile case sent one reporter to a federal jail, journalists and their advocates say they are hoping Congress will successfully step in on their behalf.
“The momentum has been building and is continuing to build, with the jailing of [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller being the latest push,” said Irwin Gratz, an editor with the Maine Public Broadcasting Network and president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
The “push” is upon legislation recently proposed in the House and Senate that would provide a shield for journalists who do not want to disclose their anonymous sources at the request of federal prosecutors.
Have at each other.
by John Cole| 37 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I had to read this several times before I believed it:
The Grateful Dead ceased to exist on Aug. 9, 1995, when the band’s lead guitarist and most recognizable figure, Jerry Garcia, died at age 53 of a heart attack at a drug treatment center. Yet 10 years later, the man and the band remain alive for millions of fans, and the once notoriously ad hoc Grateful Dead business operation has become a model for a music industry struggling with the Internet and digital democracy.
I simply have a hard time believing Jerry Garcia has been dead for ten years, and even though I am still pretty young, this just made me feel old. Indeed, all those old shows feel like a different lifetime. I still remember sitting on top of my M1A1 Abrams at Gun II in Grafenwohr when I found out that Brent Mydland had died, just a few days before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Weird how it all goes by so fast. At any rate, check out the NY Times piece on the legacy of Jerry Garcia’s music.
I should probably add that the last time I saw the Dead was on June 30th, 1995, at Three Rivers Stadium in Pitsburgh. I remember the rain starting as they played a ‘rain’ set of Box of Rain, Samba in the Rain, and Looks Like Rain. Garcia was dead a little over a month later.
One of my favorite shows was in 1992 at Buckeye Lake, when the Dead and the Steve Miller Band got together for an excellent show, including an encore where they played the Baba O’Riley.
*** Update ***
Ed Cone has more. Deadheads everywhere. I wonder how many of you are aware that John Kasich was a huge Dead fan.
by John Cole| 13 Comments
This post is in: Military
Via Dan, guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan, this story:
As a frontline artilleryman during two tours of duty in Iraq, Army Specialist Jeff Howe faced many dangers that could have ended his military career, if not his life. Instead he got tripped up by his online personal ad, which identified him as gay.
Howe set up the ad last year on Connexion.org as a social outlet during a break between his deployments. Though he did not use the ad or discuss it while on active duty, it led to his discharge on Wednesday under the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy against openly gay and lesbian service members…
Howe’s case started this spring in Iraq with a Web log, or blog, the Army asked him to create so that his unit could easily update friends and family back home. One of the photos he posted to the blog depicted a vehicle that was blown up by a rocket. A commander who was senior to Howe’s direct supervisor objected to the photo and quietly started a background investigation on Howe, which led to the discovery of his Connexion.org profile from 2004.
Howe, 32, enlisted in the Army after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, taking a leave of absence from his job in corporate marketing. He was already open with family and friends about his sexuality, but his desire to help his country exceeded his concern about the military’s gay ban.
“Going back in the closet was a trade-off I could make briefly,” Howe said in an interview with the PlanetOut Network.
“With my understanding of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ I thought I was fine,” the Chicago resident said. “I didn’t realize my personal ad was a violation of the policy. You don’t receive any training about it during your military orientation.”
Sharra Greer, SLDN’s director of law and policy, said the military interprets “don’t ask, don’t tell” more broadly than many people realize, and it can include seemingly innocuous statements or actions outside a professional context.
“Any statement of your sexual orientation at any time, to anyone, is a violation,” she said. “But many service members don’t understand that.”
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” just seems to get harder and harder to defend.
*** Update ***
Here is a post written by a member of the same fraternity (a gay fraternity- something I did not know existed) as Jeff Howe.
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Politics
This seems to be a pretty unfair portrayal of events:
A prominent abortion rights group launched a television ad yesterday that accuses Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. of siding with violent extremists and a convicted clinic bomber while serving in the solicitor general’s office, an accusation that Roberts’s supporters immediately condemned as a flagrant distortion.
The ad, sponsored by NARAL Pro-Choice America, focuses on Roberts’s role in a case involving whether a 19th-century anti-Ku Klux Klan statute could be used to shut down blockades of health clinics by abortion protesters. The solicitor general’s office filed a friend-of-the-court brief siding with the clinic protesters, including Operation Rescue. The high court ruled 6 to 3 against the health clinics in January 1993.
The NARAL ad, set to begin airing tomorrow on local channels in Maine and Rhode Island and nationally on the CNN and Fox News cable networks, features Emily Lyons, a clinic director who was badly injured when a bomb exploded at her clinic in Birmingham in 1998. The ad ends by urging viewers to call their senators to tell them to oppose the federal appellate judge’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
“Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber,” the ad states. The ad concludes by saying, “America can’t afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans.”
It is just going to go downhill from here.
*** Update ***
Sebastian Holsclaw writes:
We can put aside the question of whether or not Operation Rescue really supports clinic bombings (I always thought it was a splinter called something like “The Lambs of God”). The ‘unlawful behavior’ in question for the court case was not clinic bombings, but rather political expression. And it was found by the Supreme Court not to in fact be unlawful under the Ku Klux Klan act–the question in the case. Now Terry and Bray were indeed among the defendants in the case, but so were every other pro-life demonstrator. Spinning that into excusing violence against other Americans is exactly like saying that the ACLU was pro-terrorist because it protected the free speech rights of Muslims. It will be interesting to see if Democratic leaders take up this line of attack when the confirmation comes around.
by John Cole| 50 Comments
This post is in: The War on Your Neighbor, aka the War on Drugs
John Tierney picks up where Jack Shafer left off in his attempts to debunk the hysteria about meth use and abuse, and he pens a great editorial in the NY Times:
Amphetamines can certainly do harm and are a fad in some places. But there’s little evidence of a new national epidemic from patterns of drug arrests or drug use. The percentage of high school seniors using amphetamines has remained fairly constant in the past decade, and actually declined slightly the past two years.
Nor is meth diabolically addictive. If an addict is someone who has used a drug in the previous month (a commonly used, if overly broad, definition), then only 5 percent of Americans who have sampled meth would be called addicts, according to the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
That figure is slightly higher than the addiction rate for people who have sampled heroin (3 percent), but it’s lower than for crack (8 percent), painkillers (10 percent), marijuana (15 percent) or cigarettes (37 percent). Among people who have sampled alcohol, 60 percent had a drink the previous month, and 27 percent went on a binge (defined as five drinks on one occasion) during the month…
In Georgia they’re prosecuting dozens of Indian convenience-store clerks and managers for selling cold medicine and other legal products. As Kate Zernike reported in The Times, some of them spoke little English and seemed to have no idea the medicine was being used to make meth.
The prosecutors seem afflicted by the confused moral thinking that Mr. Bennett blames on narcotics. “Drugs,” he wrote, “undermine the necessary virtues of a free society – autonomy, self-reliance and individual responsibility.”
If you value individual responsibility, why send a hard-working clerk to jail for not divining that someone else might manufacture a drug? And why spend three decades repeating the errors of Prohibition for a drug that was never as dangerous as alcohol in the first place?
Are the authorities simply creating a new bogeyman in the never-ending war on your neighbor? Mark Kleiman says the concern over methamphetamines is appropriate.
*** Update ***
Any discussion of drug policy in the NY Times and other prominent publications gets the description of ‘great’ from me. Even if you hate John Tierney. This is an issue we need to discuss, so even if John Tierney is wrong (as Mark Kleiman asserts and I linked, because I trust Mark on these issues to honestly present facts), this is a great piece. Of course, I am sure there are some of you who would rather read a Maureen Dowd piece explaining that the plot lines in Desperate Housewives show that Bush sucks.
*** Update ***
Another piece here in the Chicago Tribune.