Who's to blame and who's responsible for fixing it

Wednesday's David Leonhardt column is terrific for its clarity and fairness. His two "basic truths" about the deficit:

The first is that President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

Here he goes through the methodology. And here's a pie chart by Matt Yglesias:

The silence from the ticking-time-bomb crowd

Though I appreciate Frank Schaeffer's boldness and credibility, I generally agree with Nat that his "You know who was a real asshole? My dad and his stupid evangelical friends. Come read my latest HuffPost rant about it!" routine is wearing thin. (This post had its excesses but was powerful and much-needed; this one's mostly just over the top.)

So I could take or leave this Rachel Maddow interview with Schaeffer. But the clip's worth watching for Maddow's intro, when she briefly raises the question of whether Scott Roeder, who has volunteered that he has information about future violent attacks against abortion providers, is pretty much a textbook example of who, if anyone, should be tortured by the authorities. (Leaving aside the definition of "terrorist," it's certainly worth noting that Roeder, unlike most of the people at Gitmo, is clearly guilty.) Here's Maddow:

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She's not the only one to bring this up. Zachary Roth asked Dick Cheney, John Cornyn, Charles Krauthammer, and Rich Lowry whether they'd support using enhanced interrogation techniques on Roeder. Three days later, he's still waiting for a reply.

Those anything-goes Episcopalians!

It looks as though Kevin Thew Forrester, the controversial and liberal bishop-elect of the Northern Michigan diocese of TEC, doesn't have the votes for consecration.

"But wait," you say. "I thought the Episcopal church leadership was just a bastion of unmoored heterodoxy, that virtually all the people who actually believe anything left already and live in the Rwandan town of Wheaton or the Nigerian town of Fairfax."

Well, not quite. Surprise!

CT ran a pretty good news story by Frank Lockwood, though they also couldn't resist headlining it "Too Unorthodox Even for the Episcopal Church?" That's right: the headline perpetuates the very stereotype that the story itself resists.

E.E. Evans has a good take.

Draft from HELP

Sen. Kennedy and the HELP Committee Democrats have released draft health care legislation (pdfs).

Jonathan Cohn has a quick take.

The phrase "open carry celebration" doesn't belong in the same sentence as the word "church"

And that's granting that the words "open carry celebration" belong together in the first place, which requires all the see-both-sides energy I can muster today. Beyond that, words fail me.

They don't, however, fail Nat.

Civil marriage and the church

I've long been interested in Rebecca Voelkel's point (pdf) that the way to win hearts and minds on the same-sex (civil) marriage question is to include religious people in the effort. (She said this to me in an interview a couple years ago.) Gene Robinson agrees.

It's a provocative observation, among other reasons because it troubles the basic assumption shared by many, including me--namely, that the reason the same-sex marriage conversation is so difficult in this country, or at least one of the main ones, is that marriage is apparently immune to the separation of church and state in an unparalleled way.

Still, I'm with Mark on this one: it seems pretty clear that the key to winning civil marriage equality for same-sex couples is not to undo church people's objections so much as to take seriously the ones that deserve to be taken seriously: the ones about religious freedom.

Or rather, SOME of the ones about religious freedom. Others are basically crap. See this great Century article by Thomas Berg for more on that distinction, and on how to craft better policy that protects EVERYBODY's rights.

Obama in Cairo

Mark Juergensmeyer gets it right: It's amazing, and sobering, that all Obama has to do to make a deep impression in Cairo is speak respectfully and graciously to his audience. To which I'll add only that the contrast is not just with BO's immediate predecessor but with most of presidential history. Obama's disappointed me in any number of ways, both during and before his presidency, but he's doing a fine job in communicating to the rest of the world that America does, in fact, care that they exist, and not just for the exciting business opportunities.

And in the Times: a great example of what a large, internationally situated news company can do that you or I or our three-person-start-up-on-a-shoestring-budget simply can't (notice I didn't say that PAPER is a necessary part of the equation): a short article that gives us feedback to the speech from all over the region. 1400 words from 11+ journalists makes for an incredibly informative five minutes of your time.

Some Tiller links

Per usual, William Saletan asks the hard questions: if abortion is murder, why is killing one of the country's handful of providers of late-term abortion not a perfectly reasonable act? His good point: few anti-abortion folks actually behave as though abortion were equivalent to murder, whatever their rhetoric.

What he skips, however, is the fact that most in the anti-abortion movement have deep respect for the rule of law, and many--particularly of the Catholic persuasion--are also invested in nonviolent means of social change. The condemnation Tiller's murder has received from the mainstream anti-abortion folks reflects political damage control, of course, but it also has the advantage of representing the actual opinions of the vast majority of people who oppose abortion. And opposing both abortion and vigilantism is hardly an inconsistent position.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing calls the murder a "big propaganda coup for the left," without providing any links as evidence. (And then this nugget: "From the point of view of our progressive ruling class, only innocent life is expendable." Interesting phrase, "innocent life." In fact, the same qualifier appears in the boilerplate language from some of the anti-abortion groups. Wonder why.)

Which is not to say that some responses from the left haven't been over the top, totalizing of abortion opponents, etc. Here's a good example. But I've been relieved to see how good of a job most of the left-leaning folks I read have done at maintaining that this is about violent, lawless extremism, and not about the anti-abortion movement itself. And the Planned Parenthood statement is exactly what it should be, given who they are--it's entirely about the man who was murdered and the work he did, which they of course support, and not about what this event says about their political opponents.

Finally, what would the aftermath of an event like this be without a strongly worded piece by Frank Schaeffer?

U of C's Wheaton-style incident

Back at Wheaton, there used to be a "forum wall" at the post office, on which people engaged in debate, sometimes informative and sometimes less so. Every spring like clockwork, some freshman guy would post a note addressed generally to women in the campus community, asking them--sometimes indignantly, other times apologetically--to dress modestly so as not to lead the men, for whom the author claimed to speak generally, into temptation. Sometimes he would speak in quite degrading terms of the women in question. Other times the whole thing was couched in a softer, pleading, come-on-sisters-in-Christ-enough-with-the-sundresses-already tone.

Then all forum-wall hell would break loose: between the feminists and the putters-of-women-in-their-place, between the libertines and the prudes, between the straight shooters and those who danced tortuously around the word "masturbation."

At some point some older student--I did this at least once--would point out that a) the feminists are right and, whatever you think of sexual ethics, it's way out of line for men to blame women for their own issues, and b) seriously? again? This stupid thing gets posted every damn year. (What we needed was an archive of past posts, perhaps some sort of Web-based log, to refer back to.)

Anyway, I always figured this sort of thing was an issue peculiar to conservative religious institutions of higher learning, in this case, to what administrators and distinguished guests often referred to as "the Harvard of the Midwest," though "the Notre Dame of evangelicalism"would have been more accurate. Turns out this spring saw a somewhat similar controversy at the ACTUAL Harvard of the Midwest, the University of Chicago. Huh.

Yes we can! Look the other way!

Good question raised by Justin Raimondo in the first major magazine to oppose the Iraq war back in 2003, The Nation Washington Monthly The New Republic In These Times The Mennonite The American Conservative: where are the antiwar Democrats now that their favorite mostly-antiwar candidate is the not-so-antiwar president?

What will be the next exhibit A?

OMG, the religious right is dead!

Exhibit A: the NAE's main lobbyist is an anti-global-warming advocate.

UPDATE: Exhibit A: There's a campus Democrats group at Liberty University.

UPDATE:

Tough guys and nature hymns

I recently learned that I'm not (quite) a real man. So I was heartened when the Daily Mail informed me that hymns can be macho. I love hymns!

Unfortunately, the actual list of macho hymns is a mix of hymns I don't like and hymns that don't strike me as particularly macho. I love "How Great Thou Art," but really? If memory serves:

When through the woods and forest glades I wander
And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze
When I look out on lofty mountains' grandeur
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees

Makes me want to watch some wrestling or whatever!

The Republican health care plan

According to Ezra, it looks as though the Republicans are putting forth a health care plan that bears little resemblance to the awful one McCain offered during the election. Instead, it's acknowledging that serious reform is needed and that some, though not all, of the Democrats' ideas as to what KIND of reform are not partisan ones to be fought but simply good ones to be embraced.

Good for them.

This week's must-read comes from...

...of all places, the Washington Post. DeNeen L. Brown's article on how expensive it is to be poor paints a vivid picture of financial barriers and inequities that those of us who are not poor rarely see.

My current favorite blogger:

Adam Serwer at TAPPED.

He's been damn sharp lately: here he is on the curious disconnect between opposition to affirmative action in college admissions and quiet acceptance of legacy admissions. A good point: either it's racist, it's classist, and/or it makes absolutely no sense.

Here he is pointing out that saying that the CIA lies to Congress is not slanderous and unproductive. It's a well-documented fact and a tacitly embraced status quo.

Here he is ably busting the stereotype that liberals are just a bunch of uncritical Obama heads. (This was never entirely fair even during the election, and several Wall Street giveaways, South Asian military escalations, and sneaky union-screwings later, why should it be now?) Also: here and here.

And here he is on the vile, hateful, offensive Wanda Sykes. Decent Americans unite!

"Local" Lays and local fish

Ethicurean calls foul on junk food companies advertising their products as "local food" just in those media markets that happen to be near where they mass produce the junk food...and ship it all over the country.

Fair enough. But Tom L points out that the Times story buries the real lede: big farms moving from growing commodities for junk food and livestock feed and toward diversified crops that feed their human (regional, not hyperlocal) neighbors. Which is...not greenwashing at all, but exactly the main things that's needed to scale sustainable agriculture beyond its current niche. Good on them.

Meanwhile, while I don't eat fish--even before I quit eating meat, it was never a favorite of mine--if I did I'd be real excited about this development: CSFs. (Via Liz.)

A day in the life of our bizarro-world red-scare politics

The president and the majority leadership--that is, the most powerful Democrats in the country--are making it really, really clear that single-payer health care (aka the system that would be a massively positive change for everyone involved except the insurance companies and the politicians tarred as socialists for supporting it, a senseless accusation since private care providers would stay that way) is off the table. Not even going to talk about it, except to remind people that they're not talking about it and that they love America and free markets.

Meanwhile, the Republicans keep it classy.

"Waterboarding may make a person talk, but it won't make 'em talk English."

Pretty funny Jon Stewart clip here, but I can't even muster a smile:

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If only the church were that powerful

Awhile back I pooh-poohed the idea that going to church makes anybody MORE likely to support torture. The problem, instead, is that the church's power to PREVENT people from supporting torture--or to shape their political/social/ethical beliefs in any particular way--is far more limited than we often like to think. Or as Dave put it in the comments, "I WISH churches exerted that kind of influence ... then we could stop torture from the pulpits."

Sarah Sentilles goes in a different direction, exploring the ways Christian theology/ies can in fact, in often subtle ways, nurture a tolerance for torture. It's a fairly compelling argument, based on the starting point that religion's power over people's thinking is not only or even primarily about explicit teaching.

Still, it's interesting that evangelical leaders--who are presumably more immersed in religion than the average layperson and thus even more susceptible to its subconscious influence, good or bad--have been pretty bold in opposing torture. Why the disconnect between the leadership and those in-the-pews-at-least-once-a-week? I don't think it's because their theology is different to such a degree that it pushes them in opposite directions on such an enormously important question.

I still think it's because, as David Neff hinted at recently without coming out and saying it, many white evangelicals are Republicans first and Christians second.

And yes, certainly many liberal Christians are Democrats first, as I said in my previous post. And anyway the problem is not that a lot of Christians are Republicans. The problem is that a lot of Christians' faith-based ethical commitments seem unable to match the power of political loyalties in their lives, whatever those loyalties. This is bad for everybody except the political powers so adept at manipulating people of faith to their own purposes. The GOP mainstream seems committed to defending--not denying or downplaying--U.S. torture practices. Sadly, I fear that this alone does more than any other factor to produce the sobering sorts of findings we saw from Pew.

According to Esquire, I'm either half or two-thirds of a man

I opened up Esquire's "How to be a Man" special issue with more than a little skepticism. And seriously: "a man knows how to bust balls"? He loves "the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of the flesh"? I'm not a regular reader, so maybe you get used to this sort of thing, but--what the hell?

Before I put it down in disgust, however, I came across this:

A man has had liquor enough in his life that he can order a drink without sounding breathless, clueless, or obtuse. When he doesn't want to think, he orders bourbon or something on tap.

Well, I thought, I don't know about calling people obtuse because they don't know how to order a trendy cocktail smoothly. Of course, I NEVER want to think--and I felt a flush of manly pride when I realized that I, too, generally order bourbon or something on tap. These are two of the three things I drink, in fact. I must be a real man.

But then: "Never the sauvignon blanc."

That's the third. Oh well.