What can you say about a story like this?
(“This way to the libertarian recruitment center” comes to mind, actually.)
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Ted
We took a quick spin around the Internet looking at religious-conservative sites to see what their reaction was to Bush’s proposal of a constitutional amendment about marriage. What did they have to say at 8:30 PM EST? (on Tuesday, the day the of Bush’s announcement of support for the FMA- Ted)
* Coral Ridge Ministries: no mention
* Christian Broadcasting Network: no mention
* The 700 Club (subset of CBN): no mention
* Focus on the Family: a tiny link to a short statement
* Concerned Women for America: no mention (but an old link to a page defending the term “marriage”)
* Family Research Council: Yes, a featured summary on the front page, and a link to a short statementThat’s a pretty tepid response. Where was the coordination by the White House?
It could very well be that socially conservative organizations just don’t have their act together when it comes to the web. I was struck at the failure of the American Family Association to drum up more support for their poll on gay marriage. Sure, a lot of liberal (and socially liberal) organizations and pages linked to the survey, but so did social conservative organizations and pages. They’ve got their mailing lists, and the support of a network of online socially conservative activist groups. Still, the most conservative option, opposing civil unions and gay marriage, lost 2-1.
Still, interesting.
For the record:
Wesley Clark didn’t spread the rumor about John Kerry.
We also spoke to a couple other reporters and pieced together what happened: at a press conference at a Nashville restaurant, Clark made a passing reference to an upcoming National Enquirer story about Kerry’s past. The story wasn’t about an intern at all, and Clark brought it up in the context of his own campaign plans. He was staying in, he said, in part because the expected story might damage the Kerry campaign. According to one reporter, it appeared Clark didn’t have any idea what the allegations might be.
There’s a commercial on Bush’s campaign website that claims that Kerry took “more special interest money than any other senator.” That’s a very difficult statement to defend. (The commercial is still there.)
When you combine money from paid lobbyists and PACs–which makes sense, since they’re both conduits for “special interests”–Kerry actually ranks ninety-second out of 100 U.S. senators. That doesn’t make him pure, but it makes him purer than most serious candidates for the White House. And it puts him on a different planet from President Bush, who accepted more money from lobbyists last year alone than Kerry has in the last 15.
There was a commonly circulated story that Saddam Hussein used to murder people by lowering them into industrial plastic shredders. It should not add any luster to the terrible dictator’s reputation to point out that this story was thinly sourced at best. (via No More Mister Nice Blog)
I’m reading a lot of blogs, both liberal and conservative, and seeing copious abuse rained on Bush for his support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. (See especially John Scalzi for a remarkably eloquent defense of equal rights for gays here, here, and here. Also, see the Declaration of Independence*, where it says something about how all men are created equal.)
This is right and good. I agree with Andrew and Michael that this could be a major disaster for Bush. Even DeLay is slowly distancing himself from the FMA.
But it’s entirely appropriate to ask for more from the Democratic candidates. It seems to me that they’re missing a huge opportunity. I think that these points would be fairly uncontroversial:
1. There’s a significant trend in the United States is toward legal recognition of same-sex marriage. We may very well be all-but-there by election day. Here’s Nick Confessore:
The one thing that most polling shows on the issue of gay marriage is that the prejudice against it is rapidly dying off. According to that same Gallup poll I mentioned earlier, 39 percent of those respondents aged 18-29 support full marriage rights for gays, versus 24 percent of those aged 30-49 and just 15 percent of those 50 and older. Add up those in the younger bracket who support either gay marriage or civil unions, and you’ve got 59 percent. In a decade or so, full marriage rights for gays may well command a strong majority of Americans.
Many conservatives acknowledge this, although not all.
2. Democrats have enjoyed tremendous goodwill as a result of the stance that the national leadership took in the 1960s regarding civil rights.
If I’m right, then the national Democratic leadership has an unusually clear opportunity to get on the right side of history with a clear statement about fairness and equality.
In a few years, I’ll be able to say that the left led the way on the question of gay marriage. But as of today, I won’t be able to say the same thing about the national Democratic party.
Make me proud, John. Or, if you won’t, John.
* Not the Constitution. How embarassing.
On the other wing…
Matt Welch once wrote a pretty good column about liberal pieties at alternative weeklies. I think I’ve found Exhibit A. I’d like to distance myself from this article before Lileks or somebody finds it.
The cover story of Houston’s alt-weekly, the Houston Press, is about a talented young boxer named Benjamin Flores. Flores was born in Mexico and came to the United States when he was eleven. Although he came here illegally, he has a work permit (but not permanent residency or citizenship.) The work permit doesn’t give him to the right to re-enter the country.
He’s beaten the No. 1 amateur featherweight fighter in the United States and the No. 1 from Mexico. But that means nothing, because Benjamin Flores belongs neither here nor there. He can’t fight for the United States because he’s not a citizen. He could fight for Mexico, but there’s no guarantee the U.S. would let him back in this country once he crossed the border.
He is a fighter without a country — a pugilist caught in the gears of globalization.
Tonight, as he takes his first step into the professional ranks at the International Ballroom, he will also take home a modest cash prize. The money will seal him off from ever competing on an Olympic stage.
I guess that this is where the infinite flood of compassion is supposed to kick in, but it’s not happening. Flores isn’t doing too badly; he’s got a work permit and a promising career ahead of him. It’s entirely reasonable to restrict a country’s Olympic athletes to its citizens- it prevents rich countries from athlete-shopping all over the world. It’s isn’t Flores’ fault that his birthplace disqualifies him from boxing for the U.S. But it isn’t my fault that I hit like a ten-year old, either. If he had been one or two years younger, he probably wouldn’t have waited until 2008 to start his pro career. Plenty of successful boxers have gone to the Olympics, but plenty haven’t, including Buster Douglas, Mike Tyson, and Matthew Saad Muhammad.
Also, it’s really Daniel’s gig, but I call “globollocks” on “a pugilist caught in the gears of globalization,” for reasons that should be obvious.
Flores comes across as a decent guy; my perception is that the wheedling tone comes from the reporter. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Ann Coulter is not really a pundit; she’s a political insult comic. When she lied about Max Cleland’s Vietnam injuries in her column last week, I heard about it, but didn’t comment. Life’s too short. (Besides, Tbogg, Arthur Silber, and Senator Jack Reed did a good job with it.)
Mark Steyn has repeated the story, using Ann Coulter as a source.
As Ann Coulter pointed out in a merciless but entirely accurate column, it wasn’t on the “battlefield.” It wasn’t in combat. He was working on a radio relay station. He saw a grenade dropped by one of his colleagues and bent down to pick it up. It’s impossible for most of us to imagine what that must be like — to be flown home, with your body shattered, not because of some firefight, but because of a stupid mistake.
(UPDATE: Glenn has taken down the link to the post in question. We all make mistakes. Original post below the fold, edited somewhat.)
Below is my review for Yesterday Rules, the new album by blogger and MTX frontman Doctor Frank. It’s really very good. (The album, not the review.)
Just a few links and announcements:
The second-funniest thing I’ll see today, after the Guardian article from Brian’s post below, is TMFTML’s secret memo about the dirty director’s cut of “Hey Ya!”
However, it contains swear words, so please keep it away from Michael Powell.
The New York Times Magazine had an excellent story this weekend on the fraud that brought the cable company Adelphia to bankruptcy. Most of the blame has to lie with the Rigas family, who managed to borrow three billion dollars, obligated the shareholders in their public company to cover it, and contrived to hide it from investors. They built a company with comically poor corporate governance- over half of the board were family members, and the audit committee may never have met.
Along the way, they had plenty of accomplices among the institutions that were supposed to be independent circuit breakers. Banks had no business lending other people’s money to the Rigases. Deloitte and Touche failed badly in their role as independent auditors. Despite the refusal of Adelphia management to disclose the loans, Deloitte still signed off on their 10-K. Adelphia attorneys did nothing to stop the loans, and most analysts did only a cursory job of inspecting the company’s structure.
In my mind, most of these problems don’t seem to be appropriate targets for public policy. No law can prevent incurious analysts, cowardly auditors, or shortsighted corporate management. (Conflicted auditors are another story, but that doesn’t appear to be a problem here.) I’d imagine that most laws that attempted to address these issues would do more harm than could.
But regarding banks, I’m not so sure. Specifically, I’m not sure about whether it was a good idea to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law prevented commercial banks from getting in the investment banking business until it was overturned in 1999 by the Financial Modernization Act. One of the concerns for the original lawmakers was that full-service banks would lower their standards for commercial loans in order to win lucrative underwriting contracts. According to the author, that’s exactly what happened in this case.
I just noticed that John Quiggin’s post below was the thousandth post on Crooked Timber.
At this rate, we’ll catch up with Instapundit thirty years after he quits blogging. Go us.
The National Review, one of America’s premiere journals of conservative opinion, has started publishing letters from anonymous readers who claim to have had unpleasant experiences with leading Democratic candidates. (Here’s one on Kerry and one on Clark.) If you possess an email address and an eye-opening story, you’ve passed the rigorous fact-checking that has made National Review and the Penthouse Forum world-famous.
In honor of this editorial decision, I would like to propose my first contest ever:
Punk the National Review
The rules are simple:
– Send the National Review an email with an imaginary story of your first-hand experience with a Democratic presidential candidate or elected official.
– Send it to me at the same time– I don’t want anyone to claim retrospective credit. (ted at crookedtimber.org) (UPDATE: Be sure to blind carbon copy, or send it separately- it’ll give the game away if it’s a regular CC.)
– Up to three readers who get a letter published in the National Review (either in the Corner or in a story) will get a $10 gift certificate for Amazon.com from me.
– The contest runs from right now until March 31. If more than one letter is published, I will let readers judge the most outrageous letter that hit the virtual pages of the National Review. The winner of this contest will receive a $20 Amazon gift certificate. If more than three letters are run, all published letters will be eligible for this prize.
Good luck to all of you.
Lifted from Jack O’Toole:
Here’s Andrew Sullivan on Josh Marshall’s New Yorker article:
Josh Marshall has written an engaging and artful essay about the notion of an American empire for the liberal New Yorker magazine. I read it yesterday and then re-read it. Josh manages to write about the Clinton era “soft-imperialism” and the Bush era “hard imperialism” with nary a mention of a certain even that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Emphasis added. Here’s the Josh Marshall article in question, fifth paragraph:
After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.
If this is the kind of attention to detail we get when Sullivan reads something and re-reads it, what happens when he reads something only once?
UPDATE: I emailed Andrew about this, and he emailed back:
he has a one sentence aside in a 4000 word piece.
my point entirely
andrew
I honestly don’t know how to respond to that.
I’ve been heavily involved in work production related activities, but I should point to Daniel Drezner, who is blogging about a potentially huge story.
The Bush administration, deeply concerned about recent assassination attempts against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and a resurgence of Taliban forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, military sources said.
U.S. Central Command is assembling a team of military intelligence officers that would be posted in Pakistan ahead of the operation, according to sources familiar with details of the plan and internal military communications. The sources spoke on the condition they not be identified.