A Thing Obama Has Done For Gay Rights

I've given the president a hard time over unkept promises with regards to gay rights, so let me praise him for this unambiguous advance: "The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare issued new rules yesterday that require all hospitals that participate in Medicaid and Medicare to allow patients to designate who shall be allowed to visit them and make medical decisions on their behalf. The order will allow for same-sex partners to have the same rights as other immediate family members. The new rules will be published in the Federal Register on November 19."

There's still more to be done, of course. But that's something that should've happened a long time ago -- and didn't until Obama was president. So good on him.

Mr. Mom Chronicles: An Update

Tobias can't be expected to
interrupt his work to deal with me.

When I first started the "Mr. Mom Chronicles," documenting my new life as a stay-at-home freelance writing dad, I expected it to be cute. Oh, I also expected there to be challenges, but I expected them to be cute challenges, making for entertaining stories that people would smile at and pass along to their friends.

You might notice it's been more than a month since I updated this series.

A little math: Parenting is hard. Work is hard. Combine the two? Days full of exhaustion and never catching up. And I'm afraid it's my son who is paying the price.

Here's what the typical day has been like the last couple of months: I wake up and go straight into office mode. The boy wakes up, generally an hour later. I get him up, diapered and fed, then return to writing mode. This is how we spend the day: I work. He lets me know when he needs something. I yell at him when he does stuff I don't want him to. And we both pray for the moment that momma gets home.

This is where I've done a lousy job: I haven't routinely set aside time that's just me and him. Parenting has been a subset of my day, but I haven't really let it dominate any part of my day, to where other duties -- to myself and my freelance employers -- get put totally aside. The boy, it seems, has been completely screwed by all this.

I stayed home, in part, so that we wouldn't have to resort to daycare. Not just for cost reasons, but because we weren't ready to have him hanging with strangers all day. At the rate I've been going, though, he might be better served by the attention he'd be getting in an institution.

Or...

Or I could dedicate myself a bit more to the task of parenting. This morning, I took him to breakfast and then a walk through the neighborhood. Nothing fancy, but it was time that we hung out and I didn't have my nose buried in a computer. I think it was good for him. I know it was good for me. We'll just have to keep on trying.

Richard Cohen On Sarah Palin's Empathy Problem

I think Richard Cohen is on to something here:

It's appalling that Palin and too many others fail to understand that fact - indeed so many facts of American history. They don't offer the slightest hint that they can appreciate the history of the Obama family and that in Michelle's case, her ancestors were slaves - Jim Robinson of South Carolina, her paternal great-great grandfather, being one. Even after they were freed they were consigned to peonage, second-class citizens, forbidden to vote in much of the South, dissuaded from doing so in some of the North, relegated to separate schools, restaurants, churches, hotels, waiting rooms of train stations, the back of the bus, the other side of the tracks, the mortuary, the cemetery and, if whites could manage it, heaven itself.

It was the government that oppressed blacks, enforcing the laws that imprisoned them and hanged them for crimes grave and trivial, whipped them if they bolted for freedom and, in the Civil War, massacred them if they were captured fighting for the North. And yet if African Americans hesitate in embracing the mythical wonderfulness of America, they are accused of racism - of having the gall to know more about their own experience and history than Palin and others think they should.

There's a large sect of the American people for whom the only acceptable narrative of our nation's history is one of ever-greater triumphs. Oh, sure, they acknowledge some bad times in the past, but anybody who lets those bad times define the meaning of "America" -- even in the slightest -- becomes guilty of an "America hatred" that disqualifies them from the mainstream of public discourse.

The irony, of course, is that we Americans spend a huge amount time celebrating our past. There's nothing wrong with this. But it does mean we define ourselves by our collective heritage. That's normal. But Cohen is right: Americans who define themselves by the grimmer moments of our heritage are routinely shunned. We don't want to think about that stuff. We are allowed to be proud that our great-grandfather fought in the war, but we are not allowed to be angry that our other great-grandfather spent a lifetime in bondage, or that his children and grandchildren lived lives that denied them their full personhood. It's an unbalanced approach to life and history.

Me? I think there's far more right about America than is wrong, on balance. But to define that heritage purely in terms of the triumphs, it seems to me, is arrogant and chauvinistic. And it leads us down paths that are bad for the nation. A sense of the possibility of tragedy is, generally, a useful thing.

Palin Is The GOP Front-Runner

Jim Geraghty, Liberal Pundit:

"The two Republicans whose names came up most often on the NR cruise? Sarah Palin and Chris Christie.

In my interactions with only a fraction of the 700+ NR cruisegoers — mostly older, mostly well-off, passionate about politics, and many heavily involved with the tea parties — I found about two-thirds wildly enthusiastic about Sarah Palin; you could hear the gasps when Scott Rasmussen predicted she would not be the 2012 Republican nominee.

...it’s easy to picture a half-dozen GOP candidates quitting the race the day after Palin jumps in. She’ll suck most of the oxygen out of the room, almost all of the media attention, the donations, etc. The 2012 Republican presidential primary could quickly shift from a wide-open free-for-all to a one-on-one match between Palin and the anti-Palin."

Like I said yesterday, the Palin phenomenon is not liberals trying to set the GOP up for 2012 loss. There are lots and lots of Republicans who love her already.

Why Is North Korea Shelling South Korea?

This can't be good:

"South Korea's military is on its highest non-wartime alert level after North Korean troops fired dozens of rounds of artillery on to a populated island near disputed waters, reportedly injuring civilians and soldiers.

It has scrambled F-16 fighter jets to the western sea and returned fire after the North shot off artillery towards South Korean waters and Yeonpyeong at around 2.30pm today, officials said."

Afghanistan Quagmire Watch

New York Times:

"For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little."

Chris Christie's Theater of 'Plain Talk'

Part of the intrigue surrounding New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is his apparent willingness to dispense with niceties and tell the truth, as he sees it, in unvarnished -- even bullying -- fashion. Jason Zengerle's profile of Christie for New York magazine reveals that these moments, usually distributed widely on YouTube, are actually pretty varnished:

But Christie was holding the town hall to do more than just promote his agenda; he was also trying to gin up some Internet content. While his fellow governors tend to use their official YouTube channels to show ribbon-cuttings and speeches, Christie, a former federal prosecutor who relishes the thrust and parry of political debate, has turned his into a video library of gubernatorial smackdowns—which, after just ten months in office, are already so numerous that his admirers are able to rank their favorites. Like the one he delivered at a town hall in Rutherford, where he told a public-school teacher complaining about her salary that “teachers go into it knowing what the pay scale is” and that if she didn’t like what she was being paid, “then you don’t have to do it.” Or another he dished out to a reporter who asked him about his “confrontational tone.” “You must be the thinnest-skinned guy in America,” Christie replied, “because you think that’s a confrontational tone? Then you should really see me when I’m pissed.”

Almost everywhere Christie goes, he is filmed by an aide whose job is to capture these “moments,” as the governor’s staff has come to call them. When one occurs, Christie’s press shop splices the video and uploads it to YouTube; from there, conservatives throughout the country share Christie clips the way tween girls circulate Justin Bieber videos. “The YouTube stuff is golden,” says Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review. “I can’t tell you how many people forward them to me.” One video on Christie’s YouTube channel—a drubbing he delivered to another aggrieved public-school teacher at a town hall in September—has racked up over 750,000 views.

I don't have any reason to believe that Christie is anything other than sincere when he delivers his rants against school teachers. But the fact that he goes looking for teachers to shout at on camera surely makes Christie seem much less like a roll-up-his-sleeves-and-tell-it-like-it-is ingenue and more like an old-fashioned pol who's figured out a 21st century way of creating his own free advertising for the Christie brand. This shouldn't be surprising: You don't get to be governor of a state as big as New Jersey without a certain level of ego and cunning. But it does make Christie's videos -- previously a source of fascination for me -- a little less interesting, a bit more tawdry. Chris Christie, it turns out, is just filming a reality show for the Republican Party. He's the Puck of New Jersey politics.

'Buffy' Gets A Movie Remake. Without Joss Whedon.

EW.com: "Today, Warner Bros. announced plans to remake 1992′s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which gave birth to the much-loved Sarah Michelle Gellar-headed TV series (which we all still worship unashamedly)."

As it happens, 2010 was my year of "Buffy" immersion. I watched the entire series on Netflix Instant, then went back -- for the first time in 16 years -- and watched the original movie staring Kristy Swanson. What's remarkable about that movie is that you can see a lot of great elements in it (and certainly, Paul Reubens' performance makes the movie worth watching on its own) but it never quite comes together. The people who made that movie are making the remake, not the people who made the TV series. I don't expect the new flick to be much good, either.

TSA Backlash Watch: Talking With My Dad

TSA administrator John Pistole is making vague noises about backing down from the invasive security measures his agency is undertaking at the nation's airports. While we wait to see if those noises turn into action on this Thanksgiving holiday travel week, I decided to talk to the person I know who travels more than any other: My dad.

David Mathis is the senior vice president for sales and marketing at Golden Heritage Foods, located in my hometown of Hillsboro, Kan. He gets on a plane a couple of dozen times a year -- something he's been doing for, well, a couple of dozen decades now. And he's not all that bothered by the TSA's procedures. Weirdly, he agreed to let me interview him about this. Take a listen.

TSA Backlash Watch: The Shirt Off His Back

The TSA Blog:: "A video is being widely circulated showing a shirtless boy receiving secondary screening from a Transportation Security Officer (TSO). A passenger filmed the screening with their cell phone and posted the video on the web. ... It should be mentioned that you will not be asked to and you should not remove clothing (other than shoes, coats and jackets) at a TSA checkpoint. If you're asked to remove your clothing, you should ask for a supervisor or manager."

Will Saletan Is Wrong About Kinect and the Future of Innovation

While I'm in the business of talking about Slate's Will Saletan, let's examine this tweet: "Microsoft yields to the unpredictable creativity of the collective human mind. http://j.mp/d0KTB5 This, not R&D, is the future of innovation"

Follow the link, and you'll find this morning's Times story about how hackers are taking Microsoft's new Kinect technology and taking it places that Microsoft didn't expect. Some of those places are really cool. But Saletan's wrong to cast the future of innovation in either-or terms. It was a big huge company, Microsoft, that created the foundational technology and the people at home who are taking it new places. That would suggest that the future of innovation isn't just in big research labs or in somebody's home office, but in both places, building off the possibilities revealed by the other.

TSA Backlash Watch: William Saletan's Backlash

Slate's William Saletan grumbles about the "imbecils" protesting scanners and pat-downs: "Wednesday is the busiest air travel day of the year, and a horde of paranoid zealots—techno-libertarians, Tea Partiers, rabble-rousers, Internet activists, and congressional demagogues—has decided to make it even worse."

Saletan can get away with this string of insults because he's arguing against straw men. He disdains the health argument against the scanners, which is fine: I don't really buy that line of reasoning myself. But he invokes the menace of the underwear bomber -- all while failing to mention that it's questionable whether the scanners would've detected the underwear bomber in the first place.

And he grumbles about the idea that "National Opt-Out Day" will make air lines slower and air travel less secure. We'll see about that. Certainly, I'd agree that there needs to be a balance between keeping the system running smoothly and safely, and letting passengers retain a sense of liberty and dignity. Saletan treats the last consideration as though it's completely negligible in light of the first two factors. It's not, or at least it shouldn't be.

The Coming GOP Overreach

Republicans like to say that Barack Obama overinterpreted the mandate of the 2008 election. It's easy to see that Republicans are about to start doing stuff the voters didn't really intend:

"Liberal groups in Wisconsin are bracing for a fight over contraception coverage under Medicaid. Battle lines are being drawn over sex education in North Carolina. And conservatives in several states intend to try to limit the ability of private insurers to cover abortions.

Social issues barely rated in this year's economy-centric midterm elections. More than six in 10 voters who cast ballots on Election Day cited the economic downturn as their top concern, according to exit polls. And this year was the first in more than a decade in which same-sex marriage did not appear on a statewide ballot.

But major GOP gains in state legislatures across the country - where policy on social issues is often set - left cultural conservatives newly empowered"

The voters were thinking economy. The GOP is thinking about gay marriage and abortion. Let us know how that works out for you, Republicans.

The Party of 'Real America'

Slatest: "November's elections showed that the country is getting increasingly politically divided. Unlike the big GOP win in 1994, Republicans this time around won back the House without any real help from metropolitan areas, which remained largely Democratic. The GOP gains came mostly in districts 'that were older, less diverse and less educated than the nation as a whole,' notes the Washington Post. The good news for Democrats is that they continue to win among minorities and whites with more education, but they are increasingly losing working-class voters. While that's good news for Republicans it's also a shrinking percentage of the electorate."

Facebook Makes You Have Threesomes Before Facebook Was Invented

The Guardian:

"A pastor who said Facebook was a 'portal to infidelity' – and told married church leaders to delete their accounts or resign – once testified that he took part in group sex with his wife and a male church assistant.

Rev Cedric Miller confirmed the information reported yesterday by the Asbury Park Press of Neptune, New Jersey, which cited testimony he gave in court in 2003. The activities had ended by that time."

Difficult not to be mildly amused by a man who creates rules for other's behavior when he's played by rather more expansive rules. But seeing this in the best light: Rev. Miller might be very sincere in wanting to put up barriers to future infidelity for himself and the people around him. He's like the reformed alcoholic who becomes an anti-drinking zealot. (I've known a couple.) Hey buddy: Just because you can't handle the stuff doesn't mean the rest of us can't.

Is Sarah Palin A Liberal Plot?

That seems to be David Boaz's belief:

"Talk about Sarah Palin running for president continues to mount — in the liberal media. Conservatives smile and look away when the topic is raised. They want to watch her on TV, they want to turn out for her lively speeches, but they don’t see her as a president.

Liberals, on the other hand, are jumping up and down at the prospect of a Palin candidacy. She could win! they urgently insist to skeptical Republicans; you should get behind her. Don’t throw us Democrats in that Palin briar patch! The latest example is the star columnist of the New York Times, Frank Rich. His Sunday column is titled “Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You Betcha.” Palin’s got a huge television presence, Rich says — 5 million viewers for her new TLC series. Which is slightly less than the 65 million it would take to win a presidential election. She’s running, he says; her upcoming book tour “disproportionately dotes on the primary states of Iowa and South Carolina.” Well, yes, she’s going to both those states, along with 14 others."

Oh, poppycock. Liberals didn't put her on the 2008 ticket. We didn't put her on Fox News. And we're not the ones making her books into bestsellers. We're not in the party that's giving her an 80 percent approval rating. And we're not the ones scouting office space in Iowa for her. There's something going on there, and it's not the left's fault.

Undoubtedly there's a few liberals who would like to see Palin win the GOP nomination because they think she'd be easy for Obama to beat in 2012. I'm not one of those people: I'd like to see the Republican Party put forth a credible, non-demagogic leader who is capable of leading the entire country. But the reason many, probably most, liberals talk about Sarah Palin is because she's clearly connected to the id of the GOP, and would seem to thus have a realistic chance of contending for her party's nomination. A conservative friend says: " I'd wager she raises more money for Democrats than she does for Republicans." And that may be true. But one could say the same thing about Hillary Clinton's profile among Republicans for most of the last 20 years; she nearly became president, and it's not because conservatives were secretly trying to push her into being the Democratic Party's mistake. Sarah Palin is a real phenomenon, but she's not a liberal one.

Afghanistan Quagmire Watch

The Washington Post reports from a refugee camp outside Kabul:

"Helmand refugees living in this squalid camp, known as Charahi Qambar, offer a bleaker assessment. They blame insecurity on the presence of U.S. and British troops, and despite official claims of emerging stability, these Afghans believe their villages are still too dangerous to risk returning.

'Where is security? The Americans are just making life worse and worse, and they're destroying our country,' said Barigul, a 22-year-old opium farmer from the Musa Qala district of Helmand who, like many Afghans, has only one name. 'If they were building our country, why would I leave my home town and come here?'"

Republicans Won't Repeal Health Care

New York Times:

"More than a few Republicans know that while the politics of trying to nitpick provisions and curb funding are appealing, any wholesale repeal of major provisions of the health care overhaul is likely to generate a backlash.

Even the Republican-leaning electorate on Nov. 2 was evenly split on repealing Obamacare, the exit polls showed. And many of the major provisions of the bill command broad support or could expose critics and repeal advocates to embarrassing contradictions."

Federalist 40: A Strict Reading of the Rules

In the tradition of James Madison?

The men who created the Constitution didn't gather at Philadelphia with the purpose of creating a constitution, actually. They were there to try to fix the old constitution, the Articles of Confederation, that bound the United States together loosely but imperfectly. This was their commission:

"Resolved -- That in the opinion of Congress it is expedient, that on the second Monday of May next a convention of delegates, who shall have been appointed by the several States, be held at Philadelphia, for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein, as shall, when agreed to in Congress, and confirmed by the States, render the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union."

But the men who gathered at Philadelphia didn't actually do the specific job they were given. Rather than fiddle around trying to fix the (apparently) unfixable Articles of Confederation, they more or less ripped up the document and started over with a blank piece of paper. And it's important to consider that act, very carefully, because what it means is this:

The Constitution was created because the Founders decided not to be "strict constructionists" about the rules they were given. Instead, they decided to act in the spirit of their commission, for the good of their country. The Constitution -- and the country -- we have is the result of their expansive reading of a plainspoken document.

Seems to me that this fact should have some bearing on how we decide to read the rules the Founders gave to us. Do we rely on a strict or originalist reading of the Constitution and bind ourselves very tightly to the vision of men who died more than two centuries ago? Or do we act in what we perceive to be the spirit of that document, allowing the government some leeway in acting for the collective good? And if we do that, where can we say the line is drawn, where the government has gone beyond the bounds a free people should allow it? Tough questions, often treated simply. But the experience of the Founders suggests, really, that there isn't a simple answer.

TSA Backlash Week: Mennonite Backlash!

Young Anabaptist Radicals:

"When you find yourself in a situation of being scanned, you should voluntarily, in public, strip down naked.

This act would not be disobeying the command of the TSA but rather it would be going the ‘second mile’, if you will.  While on one hand it is submitting to the invasiveness of the screenings it is also doing it in such a way that takes control and power back in the situation.  And I would also venture to say that if such an act were done in front of all of the other passengers waiting in line, it would expose the true invasiveness of the procedure and thus place the ultimate shame on the TSA, not on the individual.

Creative.  Non-violent.  Resisting."

Thanks to the friend who shared this with me. Don't know if she wants her name associated with this, but she knows who she is!