Musing's musings

What he said

As far as I'm concerned, Dan Savage has said all that needs to be said about President Obama's shameful record on gay rights since winning election--and also about the "wait your turn, faggot" crowd that inevitably pops up every time anyone has the temerity to point out that the Dear Leader is naked. The Dear Leader really hasn't been all that dear as far as the gay community is concerned, and he sure as hell hasn't been a leader. Or even that good of a follower.

But then Obama was sworn in under Rick Warren’s porcine gaze and the "fierce urgency of now" quickly morphed, in Andrew Sullivan’s damning turn of phrase, into the "fierce urgency of whenever." Never mind that gay people are being turned away from their partners’ bedsides during medical emergencies now. Never mind that people are being kicked out of the military now. Never mind that Arkansas banned adoptions by same-sex couples on the very same day that Obama was elected. (Gosh, where’s that bully pulpit when you need it?) The man who wasn’t afraid to appeal directly to us for our votes as a candidate -- and certainly wasn’t shy about asking us for our dollars -- couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge the promises he had made to us and seemed to greatly resent being asked to actually honor them.

That paragraph says, eloquently and concisely, everything I've been struggling to say for the last seven months. In all likelihood, I will be turning to it again and again throughout the next three and a half years because, as Savage concludes his piece:

Last fall we, along with everyone else, got swept up in the momentousness of the campaign, in the symbolism and the history and the drama, and lost sight of something important: Obama is a politician -- and a Chicago politician at that. Nothing is ever given to you. You have to ask and tell and demand and do the work -- not passing the legislation ourselves or signing it ourselves (no coup gay’tat is in the offing), but in making sure our "friends" in the White House and Congress understand that we won’t take "wait" for an answer.

What do we want? What we were promised. When do we want it?

Now.

We're not going to go away. We're not going to sit back and let you shove us back into the closet, or put our issues on a back burner until the next time you feel like coming around and begging for our time, our talent, and our treasure to help you get (re-)elected. In fact, if we don't start seeing some action--and I mean concrete action, not just pretty words or a cocktail party for the A Gays or a proclamation that carries with it no actual substance--you can beg us all you want for our support, but you still won't get it. Come 2010, if we're still standing on the outside looking in, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are going to find out what "I just can't seem to find the votes" really means.

Wingnuttery: The gift that keeps on giving

So I was digging around on Thomas this morning (the Library of Congress's interface where anybody with an internet connection can go to look up what's been going on in the legislative branch), trying to find some summary or, better still, the actual legislative language, of the congressional budget estimates for 2010. I was going through the Congressional Record's daily digest pages for the House of Representatives when I stumbled upon this lovely tidbit:

By Mrs. BACHMANN (for herself, Mr. HENSARLING, Mr. PRICE of Georgia, Mr. SHADEGG, Mr. KIRK, Ms. FOXX, Mr. PITTS, Mr. BARTLETT, Mr. MCCLINTOCK, Mr. GINGREY of Georgia, Mr. WAMP, Ms. FALLIN, Mr. FLEMING, Mrs. BLACKBURN, Mr. BROUN of Georgia, Mr. AKIN, Mr. ISSA, Mr. KING of Iowa, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. GOHMERT, Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania, Mr. LAMBORN, Mr. PAUL, Mr. CULBERSON, Mrs. BIGGERT, Mr. BROWN of South Carolina, Mr. JONES, Mr. POSEY, Mr. ROE of Tennessee, and Mr. CONAWAY):

H.J. Res. 41. A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the President from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

This, after I lay in bed this morning listening to way too much Republican whining, whinging, and hand-wringing about the budget--this is what our Republican "friends" (to use the appropriate legislative phrase) think it's important for Congress to be spending time on? Making sure we don't inadvertently join the Euro zone?

Never mind that the euro has been outperforming the dollar for most of the ten years since it was first introduced--or that the euro zone, considered as an entity unto itself, is the second largest economy in the world. And never mind that, as is apparent to virtually anyone with a brain over the age of about seven years, the U.S. economy (along with those of most of the rest of the world) is hanging, Wile. E. Coyote-like, in the air after running itself off a cliff. While we're waiting to see if its forward momentum will be enough to carry it more or less safely to the other side of the chasm and back on to safe ground, and while the president and the Democratic majority in Congress are working together to get us out of the tremendous messes left for us by the previous (Republican) administration, all the Republicans in Congress seem to have on offer is a lot of hyper-partisan (and scathingly, blindingly, typically short-sighted and forgetful) carping--and this piece of crap.

To quote Dr. Johnson, that the Republican party is still functioning is much like a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." If they keep this kind of crap up, I think we can reasonably and confidently predict that they will very shortly fall over and be unable to get up again.

Does somebody have a scorecard I could borrow?

OK, so I left the office about three and a half hours ago after a busy day, got on the train, took a cab to the hotel, checked in, registered for the conference, and then went back to my room to check e-mail, check in with friends and family, and see what was going on in the world. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there's been yet another startling development in the As The Obama Cabinet Turns drama, namely, that President Obama is now 0-for-2 on nominees for the Department of Commerce, soon-to-be-ex-New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg having abruptly withdrawn his name from consideration today.

The ostensible reason for his withdrawal was that he had come to realize, apparently never having considered the possibility before lobbying to get the nomination in the first place, that he had irreconcilable differences with the Obama administration on policy matters directly relevant to the department which he had been nominated to lead. While I applaud his decision not to stand in the way of the president's agenda, I must say that it strikes me as more than a little odd that the fact that Senator Gregg, being a Republican, might have some issues with a Democratic administration and the way it wanted to run things, seems not to have ruffled the edges of Senator Gregg's beautiful mind even a little before now. In fact, I'd have thought that he'd have thought that possibility through quite thoroughly before ever asking to be nominated to the position in the first place, much less accepting the nomination once it had been offered.

And while I understand that President Obama campaigned on the idea of ending the partisan political divide and reaching out to qualified people with good ideas who wanted to serve their country, I've got to say that so far, that idea doesn't seem to be working too well for him in practice. I'd suggest he try appointing a Democrat this time, and preferably someone who has never even had to pay a late fee to the Internal Revenue Service.

Meanwhile, now that I'm here, I'm going to spend most of the next several days immersed in science and science policy. My itinerary of sessions I'd like to see at least part of over the next four days stretches to a dozen pages. Chances are good that I won't even get the opportunity to check my e-mail other than first thing in the morning and after the last session of the day is done.

One session I am definitely trying to get into, however, is the invited address tomorrow night by a certain Mr. Gore. Yes, that Mr. Gore. He of the Nobel Peace Prize and former vice president. It's all I've heard anyone talking about since I checked in here this afternoon. I'm hoping that whatever is on my schedule just before his address lets out early so I can be in line in plenty of time to have at least a shot at getting a decent seat for that talk tomorrow night, after which I'm going to go out for dinner with some friends.

Things that did not surprise me today

• Clay Aiken is gay. (Not that I particularly care, though I hope he lives up to what he says he wants to do about teaching his child to tell the truth and not to hide. This is, after all, the twenty-first century.)
• John McCain tries to chicken out of Friday's scheduled presidential debate. Given the way his poll numbers have been going lately, I can certainly understand his not wanting to do anything to raise his own visibility.
• George W. Bush decided (a week and a half after the "crisis" started) that it might be a good idea to talk to the nation about it. (And for the record, neither will I be surprised to learn, tomorrow, that hardly anybody bothered to tune in and listen to what The Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer had to say.)
• Congress allowed the 25-year-old moratorium on offshore drilling to expire at the end of this month. (Somehow I doubt that the ban will stay dead past the end of this year. Nor do I expect that any of the oil companies, despite all their whining and posturing on this issue, are going to be in any big hurry to start exploring drilling on any of the lands that will soon be open to them.)
• Faced with a looming economic crisis, the start of a recession, and a federal budget deficit that's already projected to hit half a trillion dollars next year before taking the Wall Street bailout into consideration, the Republicans propose cutting taxes yet again.

No, no, no, a trillion times no!

So the talking heads were out in force this morning. All over the media, I'm sure, but I heard more than my fair share on NPR as I was getting ready for work. And most of them were all hyping some variation on the same theme: "We've got to fix this thing right this instant or all hell will break loose."

To which I say, get real.

If we don't take our time and get this right, we won't get a second chance to fix it. There's no way on earth we'd be able to find anybody stupid enough to lend us another trillion dollars to throw after the first one we pissed away.

Yes, I saw the stock market took another tumble today. And that the price of U.S. crude had its biggest-ever single-day jump as well. Bound to happen.

But the simple and sad fact of the matter is, this mess took a generation to get into. It isn't going to be anything we can reasonably expect to fix in a week. And certainly not this week, when Congress will be busy trying to write up either an omnibus funding bill or a batch of continuing resolutions to keep the government running until after the elections. (Here's a thought: how about instead of coming home to kiss babies for the next month and a half, y'all stay in Washington and do what we sent you there to do, but do it properly this time?)

If we've learned anything from the Bush administration, it should be that it's always in a hurry when it thinks it can pull a fast one. At all other times, "glacially slow" is too fast a speed for them, but when they see a chance to push another unpopular item from their agenda over on an unsuspecting public, watch out--they'll make the Blitzkrieg look like the proverbial molasses in January.

So I'm absolutely not buying this "the sky is falling" hype. At this point, we don't even know what the true magnitude of the problem is. Shouldn't we be figuring that out before we try and find a solution for it? Today it's $700 billion; tomorrow it could be twice that. Or half. And do we really think the idea of handing over Phenomenal Cosmic Power (untroubled by pesky things like oversight, rules, courts, public scrutiny, transparency, etc.) to a guy who's going to be out of a job in five months' time is a good one? I'm leery about it--and I'm betting that the next treasury secretary is going to be a Democrat. I still don't think s/he should have that kind of power.

Before we bail out Wall Street, perhaps we ought to pay a little more attention to Main Street, just like Obama said over the weekend. In the meantime, let's let the dust settle a bit, take our time, and do this right. Or else we're really going to have a problem.

Not in my name, nor with my money

Not even the fertile brain of Samuel Beckett could have imagined the course of events that have transpired over the past week. (Or if it could have, I suspect it would only have been while under the influence of psychotropic substances.)

In the space of a single week, the Republicans have thrown away every last fiscal principle they ever even claimed to stand for. (Never mind that they actually stopped standing for them--or applying them--at least a decade ago.) Any Republican who claims to represent the party of fiscal discipline should hereafter be laughed out of the room--and preferably pelted with rotten vegetables to hasten his exit. Any Republican (or so-called conservative) who has the temerity to refer to a "free market" should be beaten about the head and shoulders with a copy of The Wealth of Nations until he can no longer utter the phrase "invisible hand" without cringing.

The week started with the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by means of federal loan guarantees. There followed the biggest plunge in global equity indices since the first time the Hedgemony fell asleep at the switch, seven years ago this month. That was followed by John McCain's insistence that "the fundamentals of our economy are still sound." (You couldn't hear the jaws dropping onto tables and floors around the nation over the noise of falling stock prices and the howls of anguish from people who were watching their retirement savings or their children's college tuition being flushed down the toilet.)

And now, at the end of the week, the same people who broke the economy in the first place, who fell asleep at the switch and allowed Osama bin Laden to strike our nation with impunity, who instigated and prosecuted a pointless war that has done nothing to make us any safer than we were before it was started, who have scrapped the very Constitution they all took an oath before God to "preserve, protect, and defend," these same people want us to hand them a blank check. Right now. Or else something really, really bad will happen to us and the terrrists will win.

I have two words for you, Mr. Bush. Fuck, and No.

Hey, let's try alchemy! It might work.

So yesterday I was attempting to enjoy a nice lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant, and catch up on some back issues of Science, when the pretzelnit appeared on the television to issue a steely-eyed announcement that he was lifting the ban on drilling in offshore locations, in an attempt to "do something" about the high cost of gasoline. Gazing into the camera like the big-eared monkey he is, he threatened Congress (who, he said, had been hearing from their constituents during the Fourth of July recess about the problems being caused by said high price of gasoline) to go along with him or else. He then stalked back into the White House and the television went back to pumping out the noon news, for which I was infinitely grateful--as otherwise I might have had difficulty swallowing my dish of Hunan shredded pork.

The problem with the pretzelnit's idea is, of course, that it won't work--like most of everything else he's tried over the last eight years. Even if by some miracle BP or Shell or Exxon manages to poke a drill into exactly the right spot tonight and unleashes a gusher of light sweet crude with the promise of hundreds of billions of barrels more to come, it will take a minimum of several years to tap that well properly, construct a pipeline, and provide the storage and refinery capacity necessary to turn that crude oil into gasoline fit for sale--by which time Bush and his cronies will be long out of office (and, please God, just starting their lengthy jail terms in Guantanamo Bay, where they will enjoy the same rights and endure the same treatment as they gave all those detainees for all those years...). So what the hell--we might as well try alchemy. It's got just as good a chance of doing something to bring down the high cost of fuel as what Bush was proposing.

Plus, as the Obama campaign and the congressional Democrats were quick to point out after Bush was off the teevee, the oil companies already own leases on nearly 70 million acres of federal land, on which they're perfectly free to drill for oil right now. None of them has been, of course, because for years it was cheaper to buy it overseas--and once it became profitable to drill in this country again, the oil company execs were so busy giving themselves obscenely outrageous compensation packages and gold-plating everything in their offices that they could that they didn't have the time to bother with anything so petty as renewed oil exploration.

Of course Mr. Bush wasn't about to suggest anything like a reasonable course of action to all his buddies in the oil industry, because he expects them to help him get even richer once he's out of office, and he doesn't want to jeopardize that gravy train (since I have to think it's about as unlikely as my waking up tomorrow morning to the news that I've been elected pope that Bush is actually going to be able to make much money in any of the more traditional ways ex-presidents have occupied their time, since nobody not actually drawing a paycheck to do so would voluntarily go and listen to anything the man had to say). I do hope, however, that the Democrats (and the few sane Republicans) in Congress will, with the best will in the world, tell Mr. Bush exactly what he can do with his threats, and then perhaps offer a few suggestions on how best to fold them to present the maximum number of sharp corners while he does so.

The present energy crunch is serious business, and we need someone who's serious--and in touch with reality--to work on it. Unfortunately, the roster of people in the Hedgemony who fit that bill has as many names on it as the list of Bush Cabinet appointees that are likely to be offered their posts back in Obama's first presidency--to wit, none. The only thing that might (and regrettably, I have to stress the word "might") do something to bring down the cost of fuel would be to release some of the millions of barrels we have stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But even that would be only a temporary expedient, and eventually we'd have to fill it back up again at a much higher cost in all likelihood.

The smarter answer to this present crisis was, of course, along the lines of the measures that President Carter suggested way back in the mid-1970s, the last time we found ourselves in something of an oil crunch. But no sooner had St. Ronnie of Ray-Gun swept into office atop the "Let's drown government in the bathtub" nonsense of Grover Norquist than they dropped any suggestion that Americans needed to curtail their appetites for petroleum products, nixed the regulations that would have required American automobile manufacturers to have started work that might have begun to bear fruit right about now on significantly raising fuel efficiency, and abandoned almost all forms of alternative energy research. We're pouring money down that rabbit hole right now (and that's a good thing), but we're years behind the learning curve and are not likely, barring the kind of scientific breakthrough that can never be planned for, to find much in the way of tangible results for years or decades yet.

Alchemy. It's the only way, I tell you.

"Don't ask, don't tell": Don't keep it

According to Agence-France Presse, a federal appeals court in Boston has thrown out Major Margaret Witt's lawsuit challenging the Pentagon's (in)famous "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" policy. The court, striking down a previous ruling by a San Francisco appeals court (and I'm dying to know how an appellate court in Boston has jurisdiction over an appellate court in San Francisco--but this one is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court as sure as the sun rises in the east, unless there's some awfully quick fixin' done on Capitol Hill, about which I am, shall we say, less than entirely sanguine), argued that the courts owe "special deference" to Congress on matters regarding military policy.

That deference is quite traditional. It is, I would argue, equally wrong-headed, at least in some circumstances. I would not expect a court to get involved in a dispute, say, between a battalion commander and his or her superior officer about which was the correct strategy to employ to achieve a given tactical objective. But when it comes to something as fundamental as the right of any citizen to serve in this nation's armed forces without being discriminated against on the basis of any invidious characterization, that's another kettle of fish entirely. And that, ultimately, is exactly what Major Witt's lawsuit is about.

The Pentagon itself admitted, not long after the policy was implemented in the early 1990s, that it was fundamentally wrong-headed. That fact has been amply and repeatedly reiterated in the nearly two decades since then, each and every time we hear about another qualified officer or linguist or servicemember being kicked out--in what the Hedgemony is forever proclaiming to be a time of war--for the simple and irrelevant fact that s/he is sexually attracted to members of the same gender.

Big fat hairy fuckin' deal. Most of our major defense partners allow openly gay or lesbian individuals who are otherwise qualified to serve in their armed forces. They don't report discovering mass orgies in the gang showers, or massive desertions (or even requests for transfer) when "the unit" discovers "one of them" in its ranks. The world has not, to the best of my knowledge and belief, come to an end--and I think we are on safe ground in concluding that it will not do so should the United States decide to stop wasting valuable personnel whom it desperately needs in uniform, just because those individuals happen to be gay or lesbian or bisexual.

First thing we do...

...next January, when we've increased our majority in both houses of Congress, let's kick Joe Lieberman (R-Delusional) out of what he himself is now calling the "Democrat Party."

It's bad enough that he's a fatuous git who can suck the life out of a room faster than a giant life-sucking thing. Worse, he's forever prissifying and preaching at those of us he's supposed to have something in common with for not kissing up as hard as he does to all his Republican buddies. But this is going too far:

Today, I asked Senator McCain if I could create and chair a new grassroots organization, "Citizens for McCain."

Citizens for McCain is an organization within the McCain campaign for people who put country before political party and support the candidate for President who has a proven record of bipartisanship.

As you know, I caucus with the Democrats as a United States Senator and was the Democrat Party's nominee for Vice-President of the United States against President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

But first and foremost, I am an American. I have an obligation to do what I think is best for our nation regardless of political party. My love for this country and strong belief in John McCain's character, judgment, and willingness to work with leaders of both parties has convinced me to support him for President.

Stupid Republican tricks make a comeback

One might have expected, given dwindling interest in joining the party associated with the Hedgemony and all of its colossal screwups over the last eight years, that the Republicans would be saying and doing as little as possible this election season that would remind voters of their existence. One might also have expected, given that their president has sunk to a new all-time low in the approval polls, that they would be doing whatever they could to play down any connection with the man or his policies.

But one would be wrong to do so. It appears that there are no depths of either degradation or irrelevancy which the Republicans will not plumb, nor heights of hypocrisy or flights of irrelevancy that they will not aspire to.

I refer, of course, to the latest displays of lame-duck petulancy put on by congressional Republicans as the Democrats begin the consideration of the defense appropriations bill. Given that the Republicans are wont to wax effusive in their praise of, and pathetically eager to demonstrate their support for, our troops, one would have thought they'd be falling all over themselves to get this bill passed. They're not happy, though, that while the Democrats are giving them the money their president asked for to continue his pointless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're also attaching strings to that money, in the form of requirements to begin withdrawing our forces from Iraq and Afghanistan next year, and also increased allocations for benefits under the G.I. Bill for our returning veterans. And since this may well be the only appropriations bill that gets passed while the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer is still in office, it's also been loaded up with other items that are high on the Democrats' priority list, such as increased unemployment benefits.

But Republicans have been dragging their feet, instead. As reported on Morning Edition this morning, the Republicans in the House of Representatives called no fewer than 28 roll call votes yesterday, in an effort to forestall consideration of the bill to continue funding for the war--including two (nos. 274 and 275) on the supremely important question of "Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mothers Day." Their reason? They're upset at being excluded from the process of drawing up the bill.