aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Fun Ikea ads
Commercial Closet reports IKEA has returned to gay couples with a new family ad:
A happy couple are entangled on their sofa as they kiss, and the following shot shows a child doing a headstand The narrator asks: “Who says sofas are just for sitting?”
The inverted kid is knocked down from his headstand as the rest of his family joins him to wage a pillow fight. The voiceover continues, “Why can’t pillows fight with each other?”
The narrator wonders, “Why can’t a bookcase expand with your mind” as a father and his daughter, evidently a bookworm, hold stacks of books.
The last shot is of a happy gay male couple and their daughter on the floor, resting up against each other, as they lean on the front of their couch.
The voiceover poses the final question: “Why shouldn’t sofas come in flavors, just like families?”
CC has a Quicktime version up. Too small to even make out, I went to YouTube. Not there. Yet. But look what I found:
If you liked that one (from the Swedes, not seen in the US) you might like this one too.
Et Tu Bono update
Gregory Heller of Defective By Design wrote to thank me for signing the petition asking Bono to take a stand on DRM. Almost 5,000 people so far; the goal is 10,000 by the end of the month.
He also pointed to a Reuters report questioning the viability of a record industry business model built on DRM which included this great quote from Yahoo Music general manager David Goldberg:
“It’s all nonsense. Music is never going to be protected, and anybody who tells you that is not being honest. Yes, you can put up speed bumps, but the people who really want to steal music are going to steal it. So you’re just making it hard for people who want to do the right thing to get the music they legitimately purchased on the devices and services that they want.”
This difficulty, Goldberg continues, only serves to dissuade consumers from buying music legally and instead keeps unauthorized peer-to-peer services in business. He calls the protected a la carte download model a “failure,” noting that legal digital download figures have remained flat all year.
“There’s been no growth this year at all,” he says. “The market has stalled.”
A Church Known for its Faith
Says Doug, “What about a church known for its love? Or a church known for its good work?”
Seven Must Principles of Membership:
1.Believe that Christ was God manifested in the flesh.
2. Believe that Christ died for the sin of the world and arose from the dead.
3. Develop an intimate relationship with Christ through prayer daily.
4. Develop an attitude to attend worship regularly.
5. Develop an attitude to study of GodÂ’s word daily to live victoriously.
6. Develop an attitude of giving through tithing.
7. Develop an attitude of servant hood by participating in a ministryChurch Goals for Conference Year 2006 - 2007
1. Endeavor to complete Project 2501. [Build a new church!]
2. Endeavor to develop a campus ministry to win college students to Christ.
3. Endeavor to have 100-plus attendees in Bible study.
4. Endeavor to win 100 new converts to Christ.
5. Endeavor to develop a 100% tithing church.
Make money giving away your photos
One of Larry Lessig’s favorite Creative Commons articles, is from Mark Glaser in Media Shift. Here Glaser quotes Kris Krug, president of the online community management company Bryght:
“I think Creative Commons is a huge thing and I attribute a lot of my success to it,” Krug said. “Since the beginning I’ve given all my photos away on the Internet and they’ve been used by other bloggers and people all along the way and it’s gotten my name out there. So without going to photography school, and just networking with other photographers, and giving my stuff away with attribution, I’ve got my name out there, I’ve got a lot of incoming links to my website…I didn’t realize that I could make money on photography by giving away as much as I could, that I could build up a portfolio and reputation so I could get paid work.”
Krug says it’s sometimes difficult to explain the concept of Creative Commons to friends, who are used to holding onto their work and not giving it away. He admits it takes more than one conversation to convince someone to try it out. But Krug even tells musician friends to give away their music for a chance at better success in the long run.
“If [the music is] good, people will be turned on to it and go to the live shows and buy merchandise there,” Krug said. “The next thing you know, they’ll have 10,000 fans and they’ll be courted by record companies. You’re not going to make much money selling 100 MP3 singles on CD Baby…It’s a paradigm shift, man. There are a lot of people that don’t get it and they get upset at the suggestion that they give it away. But there’s a moment when they clue in.”
Atlanta: A hub of child prostitution
More evidence of how ineffective Georgia’s draconian sex offender law is, from Bob Herbert in today’s Times:
Atlanta, for a variety of reasons, has become a hub of child prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation of children. The overall market for sex with kids is booming in many parts of the U.S. In Atlanta - a thriving hotel and convention center with a sophisticated airport and ground transportation network - pimps and other lowlifes have tapped into that market bigtime.
“These guys are even going into rural Georgia and getting these girls and bringing them into Atlanta,” said Alesia Adams, a longtime advocate who has worked with the courts and social service agencies to assist young girls who are lured into the sex trade.
Kaffie McCullough, the project director of a federally sponsored intervention program, said Atlanta’s juvenile prostitution problem “is a lot bigger than anybody would really like to know.” The sex trade in Atlanta is “a huge, huge, huge industry,” she said, and the involvement of kids under 17, which is the age of consent in Georgia, is a substantial part of it.
Stephanie Davis, the policy adviser on women’s issues for Mayor Shirley Franklin, agreed. “Sex tourism is coming south,” she told me. “There is advertising that I’ve seen on the Internet and other places that actually targets the New York market, urging men to come to Atlanta for the day and fly back home that night.”
The risks for pimps and other exploiters of children are low, and the payoff is often enormous. Demand is increasing for younger and younger prostitutes, in part because of the cultural emphasis on the sexual appeal of very young women and girls, and in part because of the widely held belief among johns that there is less risk of contracting a disease from younger prostitutes.
Pubertal problems
The other day in the Times, a report that there have been clusters of cases in which children have prematurely developed signs of puberty, outbreaks similar to epidemics of influenza or environmental poisonings:
Increasingly - though the science is still far from definitive and the precise number of such cases is highly speculative - some physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called “endocrine disruptors,” that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.
Most commonly, outbreaks of puberty in children are traced to accidental drug exposures from products that are used incorrectly.
Dr. Dedekian’s first patient was evaluated for possible genetic endocrine problems and a rare brain tumor before the cause of her puberty was discovered. It turned out that her testosterone level was almost 100 times normal, in the range of an adult man. The same problem affected her brother.
The doctors realized that the girl’s father was using a concentrated testosterone skin cream bought from an Internet compounding pharmacy for cosmetic and sexual performance purposes. From normal skin contact with their father, the children absorbed the testosterone, which caused pubic hair growth and genital enlargement.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Lock up the vote
Six prisons in my town; felons can’t vote in Georgia.
Is felony disenfranchisement racist?
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, one-third of black men in Florida cannot legally cast a ballot, either because they’re in prison or once were.
Or just partisan?
In Alabama, which maintains strict restrictions on ex-felons’ voting, the chair of the Republican Party Marty Connors said in 2003: “As frank as I can be, we’re opposed to [restoring voting rights] because felons don’t tend to vote Republican.”
SEE ALSO: The Sentencing Project.
Bus beef
A city bus driver who complained about a gay-themed ad got official permission not to drive any bus that carries that ad, according to an internal memo confirmed Tuesday by Metro Transit.
Transit authorities call it a reasonable accommodation to the driver’s religious beliefs.
Amalgamated Transit Unit Local 1005 officials at the bus company say it condones intolerance; besides, drivers never have been excused from other buses carrying ads they found objectionable - from political candidates to pink bras.
Apple shines
The company said it shipped 1.6 million Macintosh computers, up 30 percent from a year earlier. Revenue from desktop and portable Macs increased 37 percent, to $2.2 billion.
Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, said: “This strong quarter caps an extraordinary year for Apple. Selling more than 39 million iPods and 5.3 million Macs while performing an incredibly complex architecture transition is something we are all very proud of.”
They wrote us a letter
A block the vote update:
Georgia’s State Election Board on Tuesday approved a letter that will inform more than 300,000 voters that they can cast a ballot on Nov. 7 without presenting a photo ID.
State officials acknowledged last Thursday that nearly 200,000 voters—not the 20,000 initially reported by Vice Chair Claud “Tex” McIver—were told by letter that they would need to get a photo ID at the polls, even though Fulton County Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford had previously declared that requirement unconstitutional.
The new letters will tell voters they can still use 17 forms of identification at the polls. [...]
Supporters of the law—primarily Republicans—have said it is needed to prevent voter fraud, despite the absence of examples of in-person voter fraud. Opponents claim the photo ID law is intended to discourage minorities, the poor and the elderly from casting ballots.
This in a state that’s as safely Republican as they come.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
If NJ finds a right to marry…
Conventional wisdom has it that if NJ rules in favor of gay marriage, all bets are off in the coming election; the Right will be reinvigorated and motivated to turn out in droves.
I don’t think so. I think just as plausibly the left will be so motivated that it will turn out in droves:
The state Supreme Court is expected within the next week to rule on the legality of same-sex marriage. If the court rules for the plaintiffs in the case, known as Lewis v Harris, New Jersey would be the second state in the country to allow such unions.
Several legal scholars and political insiders expect the court - known to be among the more activist in the country on social issues and individual rights - to find that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry in the state.
I just do not believe that people are as moved by this as all those elections have seemed to indicate.
Not a paint ad
From Sony, an ad with its own RSS feed. Watch it. More here, here, here, here, here and here. Remember balls?
The iPod story: short and sweet
Wired News has a nice telling of the birth of the iPod. About that name:
The iPod name came from an earlier Apple project to build an internet kiosk, which never saw the light of day. On July 24, 2000, Apple registered the iPod name for “a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment,” according to the filing.
“The name ‘iPod’ makes much more sense for an internet kiosk, which is a pod for a human, than a music player,” said Athol Foden, a naming expert and president of Brighter Naming of Mountain View, California.
But Foden said the name is a stroke of genius: It is simple, memorable and, crucially, it doesn’t describe the device, so it can still be used as the technology evolves, even if the device’s function changes. He noted the “i” prefix has a double meaning: It can mean “internet,” as in “iMac,” or it can denote the first person: “I,” as in me.
“They discovered in their tool chest of registered names they had ‘iPod,’” he said. “If you think about the product, it doesn’t really fit. But it doesn’t matter. It’s short and sweet.”
A GOP Mission: save America’s most-endangered senator
It is a four-alarm fire for conservatives, who are bringing water buckets from all corners of the political world. Across Pennsylvania, pastors are preparing to stuff voter guides into their Sunday bulletins. In Washington, D.C., Paul Weyrich, a national conservative leader, hosted a conference call to give a pep talk to Republicans in Pennsylvania. In England, some Santorum fans are planning to cross the Atlantic to help campaign.
“I think it’s important for people across the country to recognize how important it is not only to pay attention but to get engaged in this race, whatever way they can,” said Colin Hanna, head of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group based in Pennsylvania. “If Rick Santorum were to lose, it would be cited as a turning point in the social conservative movement.”
Uh huh. It will.
Commercial culture
The future of advertising, attraction then promotion:
In some ways, marketers on these sites are treated just like any other member. On MySpace they can have a profile page and a group of friends. Facebook allows marketers to use a feature that lets any member create a group that other members can join.
Advertisers can add features to their MySpace profiles and Facebook group pages like video clips, quizzes, downloadable goodies like ring tones, and, of course, links to their own Web sites.
These approaches run the risk of generating a sour reaction from the online community if site members feel marketers are going too far in trying to fit in.
The risk is not advertising, it’s bad advertising. Young people have always embraced ad campaigns that speak to them. In fact, we all like advertising; we want advertising; we even need advertising. We don’t know it because we’ve been overwhelmed with ad clutter, ads that assault and interrupt us and irrelevant ads. Advertising can’t get away with that anymore and so must learn another way.
Unilever, for example, has turned its Axe deodorant into the No. 1 brand in less than four years by promising to help men attract more women. This spring it created a promotion around a group it called Gamekillers - people who get in the way of a seduction, like a guy with a British accent who gets all the attention. The pitch is that Axe helps men stay cool in the face of the Gamekillers.
The campaign included an hourlong program on MTV and a page on MySpace devoted to the topic, with message boards where people could trade complaints and tips about Gamekillers. Its online host was Christine Dolce, a busty model who was already a celebrity thanks to MySpace, where she has accumulated more than a million friends. [...]
As they start to build up advertising sales operations, the social networking sites are starting to develop offerings that let marketers take advantage of some of their features.
For example, Chase has a promotion on Facebook that implicitly uses a person’s friends to endorse its credit cards. When people join the Chase “+1” group on Facebook, they see a list of their other friends who have joined the group. The program gives members points when they do things like apply for a card and get others to sign up. Those points can be redeemed for prizes, donated to charity or given to other friends on Facebook.
Monday, October 16, 2006
199,999,999th
Slate’s Explainer tells how they’re calculating who will be the 300,000,000th American, ”It’s a guess.”
Last time they guessed was on the 200,000,000th:
When [Robert Ken Woo Jr.] was born Nov. 20, 1967, at 11:03 a.m. EST in Atlanta’s Crawford Long Hospital, Life magazine proclaimed him the 200 millionth American. In the years since, he has worn his footnote in history lightly and well, his flicker of fame fanned anew by the approaching milestone.
“I never took it that seriously,” Woo says of his place in the annals of American trivia. “To me, it seemed very random.”
Talk about random: Doug, my life-partner, was born 70 miles away and 24 hours before, in Athens, GA on November 19, 1967 at 11:16 a.m. I guess that makes him a candidate for 199,999,999th?
He’ll always be #1 to me. 
Beauty & artifice
I bought a bar of Dove yesterday, unaware of their good work. From the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty:
danah says, “This video is important. Please watch.”
Cory sez, “transhuman tricks used on models...a very effective short film.”
Dove says, “Dove would like to thank the photographer for not retouching any of the photographs; the make-up artist for not covering up anything; and the women who took part for being proud of their own, unique beauty.”
SEE ALSO: The Dove Self-Esteem Fund.
Hillary & feminists
Rebecca Traister finds Hillary has to earn the women’s vote:
Clinton puts liberal women, especially those who comfortably call themselves feminists, in a very awkward position. At last a woman is favored to run for president of the United States. And not the kind of woman one might have guessed would grace a major-party ticket. Clinton is not a Republican whose politics make Margaret Thatcher look like Barbara Jordan. She is a politician who once appeared to be feminism’s fantasy made flesh—smart, direct and driven to defend bold social causes like children’s welfare and women’s equality.
But pick apart the pretty tapestry that features Hillary as Eleanor Roosevelt reborn, Shirley Chisholm recalled, and Pat Schroeder redeemed, and you’ll find a knottier weave: recognition threaded with betrayal, idolatry with disappointment, approval with anger. You’ll certainly find ardent feminists who are true Hillary believers. But you’ll also find plenty whose moods blacken at the mention of the New York senator’s name.
And here’s the nub:
Ann Douglas, a Columbia University social historian who profiled Clinton for Vogue in 1999, told me that women see in Clinton what they want to see in themselves and in the body politic. She referred to an old Tony Curtis anecdote about a fan who approached him and asked, “Are you who I think I am?” It’s the same with Clinton, Douglas said. “We say, ‘I want her to be who I think I am.’ I want her to hold up my own ideals of myself.” With expectations so high, can Clinton do anything but let women down?
Ephron, Michelman, Wattleton, Sarandon and others are quoted. I excerpt two:
[Rebecca Walker, author and founder of the Third Wave Foundation, an organization of young feminists] broke a big-time taboo by coming out and saying one of those things that is impolite to mention. “I have to be totally honest and say that I would vote for Hillary because of her husband,” she said. “Real partnership, with its mammoth requirements of negotiating power and taking turns, is the next feminist frontier,” and “President Hillary and first gentleman Bill would give the world one hell of a demo.”
To others, Clinton is all the feminist they need right now. “I am wild about her as a person, and I am definitely a liberal feminist,” said comedian Janeane Garofalo, a host on liberal radio station Air America. “I like her very much for who she is—when she doesn’t pander to right-wing constituencies.” As for troubling Clinton stands like the flag-burning conflagration, Garofalo said, “There’s no way she could fully believe in that. Having said that, this woman has been so browbeaten, so picked-on, so ridiculously maligned that I don’t blame her for having these spurts of post-traumatic stress disorder.”
TV & autism
Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.
Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Politics: the 4th part of the Trinity
Wow! I watched to hear the headline - “You name the important Christian leader and I have heard them mocked by serious people in serious places.” - But I stayed to 
listen to all that David Kuo had to say. There was plenty.
David Kuo, once the number two guy in the president’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, is my king of fundamentalist Christian. A man with a Biblical Worldview that would no doubt keep him from voting my way on many issues, I can admire and respect his views just the same.
A “pioneer of the Compassionate Conservative movement” once dazzled by Bush’s compassion, he wants to talk about the poor:
[D]uring the 2000 campaign...Bush proposed for the first time that he would spend $8 billion dollars on programs for the poor.
“I think it’s one of the most important political speeches given in the last generation. I really do,” says Kuo. “It laid out a whole new philosophy for Republicans.”
After the election, to much fanfare, President Bush created the office of faith-based initiatives to increase funds to religious charities.
But Kuo says there were problems right off the bat. For one, he says the office dropped very quickly down the list of priorities.
His story, his book,Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, and his 60 Minutes interview are about what he learned from his disappointment:
Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from “the base,” the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups - his old stomping ground - and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.
“You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell,” Kuo remarked. “Not a mention of the poor.”
“This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda - as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference,” says Kuo. [...]
“God and politics had become very much fused together into a sort of a single entity. Where, in a way, politics was the fourth part of the trinity. God the father, God the son, God the holy spirit, God the politician,” says Kuo.
Jim Towey, his old boss at the faith based office, calls Kuo “naive and simplistic.” Towey had the look, feel and language of the slick DC politician, even if he learned it as Mother Teresa’s lawyer. I’m thinking my neighbors will identify much more with Kuo. That is, of course, if ever they hear him. He suffers from a malignant brain tumor:
“I have this burden on my heart that the name of God is just being destroyed in the name of politics,” Kuo says. “I felt like I had to write this.”
“You’re calling for a fast. That’s your expression,” Stahl remarks.
“Yes. I think that Christians, particularly evangelical Christians need to take a step back. To have a fast from politics,” he replies. “People are being manipulated. Good well-meaning people are being told, ‘Send your money to this Christian advocacy group or that.’ And that’s the answer. It’s just not the answer. It’s not the answer.”
Asked if he thinks the White House is going to view his book as a betrayal and may go after him, Kuo says, “Of course they will. I can hear the attacks, right? ‘Oh, he’s really a liberal.’ or, ‘Oh, maybe that brain tumor really messed up his head.’ Or, you know, ‘He’s an idealist.’”
Rich Times
I’ve argued pro and not-so-pro about TimesSelect. Today’s Rich column makes me want to shout a Reaganesque, “Tear down this wall!”
To that end, I quote liberally:
The Gay Old Party Comes Out
by Frank RichPAGING Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council: Here’s a gay Republican story you probably did not hear last week. On Tuesday a card-carrying homosexual, Mark Dybul, was sworn into office at the State Department with his partner holding the Bible. Dr. Dybul, the administration’s new global AIDS coordinator, was flanked by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. In her official remarks, the secretary of state referred to the mother of Dr. Dybul’s partner as his “mother-in-law.”
Could wedding bells be far behind? It was all on display, photo included, on http://www.state.gov. And while you’re cruising the Internet, a little creative Googling will yield a long list of who else is gay, openly and not, in the highest ranks of both the Bush administration and the Republican hierarchy. The openly gay range from Steve Herbits, the prescient right-hand consultant to Donald Rumsfeld who foresees disaster in Iraq in Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial,” to Israel Hernandez, the former Bush personal aide and current Commerce Department official whom the president nicknamed ”Altoid boy.” (Let’s not go there.)
If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. “What you’re really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill,” says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. “Across the board gay people are in leadership positions.” Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from “The Architect,” the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.
Read the rest of "Rich Times" in the extended entry.
Stalking the iPod killer
We have run the iPod Killers for Christmas/Summer series since 2004. In that time we reported on 149 portable players and NOT one iPod killer from the bunch. That said, we may actually have a couple of genuine challengers to Apple. This holiday season will see Microsoft pump tens-of-millions of dollars to hawk their new Zune portable and SanDisk’s 8GB e280 flash unit is compelling high-end users. Both can realistically grab double-digit market share from the iPod, particularly because the iPod only got a modest facelift this season. Whether they do or not waits to be seen.
The struggle of all brands is to find that secret sauce of features, look and that highly elusive “cool factor”. Disney is showing success with kiddies thanks to strong product branding (a touch wheel with mouse ears). If you can argue that part of the “iPod Aura” is really a fashion thing, then we should factor in the fact that fashion changes and some consumers will shift to new players simply because they are not an iPod. But Apple is not playing Versace, which would require the iPod to morph dramatically every year. Instead Apple takes the role of Anne Klein or Polo, a classic look that evolves within the context of popular consumer taste.
But seriously, is there really a player out there to challenge the iPod? In truth, one manufacturer has already found a secret sauce that makes it the second best selling portable digital player today. This player sells one unit for every 2.3 iPod’s and is the the best portable media player on the market in our opinion. That player is the Sony PSP…
Southern unmarrieds: largest of any region
In its article reporting that, for the first time, unmarried households outnumber married household, there’s this little tidbit on the South:
The highest share of male couples was in San Francisco, where, according to the census, they accounted for nearly 2 percent of all households. In Manhattan, they made up 1 percent of households. Hampshire County, Mass., home to Northampton, had the highest proportion of female couples, at 1.7 percent. Some of the highest numbers of unmarried couples were recorded in the South, which as defined by the census, has the largest population of any region.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The Times’ Hillary endorsement
Enthusiasm with a dash of vinegar:
We enthusiastically endorse Mrs. Clinton for re-election, while watching with interest to see if she can convince the country that she has as much aptitude for the presidency as she does for her current job. Her extraordinary discipline might help her to avoid mistakes during a presidential campaign, to run a race that will not center on some symbolic slip-up. But can she conjure up a vision of the future for a nation desperately in need of inspiration and real leadership? Can she speak to the great issues of the day directly, without carefully trimming every sentence to steer clear of controversy?
The real question is not whether she can turn in continued good performance in the Senate, or even whether she can run a smart campaign for president. It is whether she can put some great idea ahead of her own political upward mobility, whether there is a cause so important to her that she will risk her political security for it. We are waiting for a profile-in-courage moment, a sign that she is something more than a very competent politician. Meanwhile, we endorse Hillary Clinton for another six years in the Senate.
A rose by any other name
This from the Times in an article about gay marriage losing its punch as a ballot issue should make Stephen and Michael and Sean happy:
Scholars who track gender-law issues say that gay rights groups and their allies have worked hard since the last election to create a middle-ground position on the question of partnership rights that could appeal to voters who might not vote for same-sex marriage.
The position, which has been repeated like a mantra across Colorado this year by advocates for the civil union proposal, holds that civil unions are not marriage and that if voters want to hold marriage apart as a separate institution for heterosexuals, that would be fine. But it is only fair and just, they say, that couples in other types of relationships have legal protections, too.
Opponents of the civil union bill say that the moderation line is a smokescreen and that same-sex marriage in Colorado will become a reality in fact, if not in name, if the civil union proposition is approved.
“It is nothing short of Orwellian doublespeak to say it is not marriage,” State Representative Kevin Lundberg, a Republican from eastern Colorado, said at a recent forum in Denver on the ballot proposals.
