From Andrew Breitbart's attack on Congressional Democrats for walking outdoors:

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the most controversial members of the Democratic caucus walking through the peaceful but animated "Tea Party" demonstrators on Capitol Hill. There is no reason for these elected officials to walk above ground through the media circus amid their ideological foes. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a highly symbolic walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the majority white crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction.

Emphasis mine, because Breitbart's use of the word "controversial" as a stand-in for "Black" pretty much tells you all you need to know about Breitbart and the right-wing drive to blame Black and gay congressmembers for going where angry White people could see them.

(This is the same school of thought in which "carefree" kids are ones who aren't gay and don't know about anyone that is)

Unless we're supposed to believe that two-term Rep. Andre Carson became one of "the most controversial" Democrats based on the content of his character.

The most memorable video we watched in middle school showed the treatment of animals in the beauty industry. Students squirmed as they saw what happens to a rabbit's eyes after lipstick has been shoved in them. Many kids covered their faces. Others protested having to watch.

It bothered me then, newly a vegetarian, to see students shielding themselves from confronting cruelty. But today it troubles me more to see animal rights advocates defending a law to banish images of cruelty entirely.

The federal law, Section 48, prohibits selling any "depiction of animal cruelty" across state lines. The Supreme Court is now considering whether the ban - targeted at violence fetish "crush" videos of people stomping animals, but far broader in scope - violates the First Amendment. Animal rights groups and the Obama administration are asking to Court to restore Section 48, which was overturned by 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, along with the conviction of Robert Stevens, who created and narrated dogfighting videos using others' footage.  Stevens had been sentenced under Section 48 to three years in jail for making the films.  Michael Vick served one year less for running a dogfighting ring.

Animal Rights groups like the Humane Society reassure us that Section 48 specifically exempts works with "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value." But by carving out that exception, the law's authors only confirm that banning videos just because they depict violence against animals is a problem for free expression. That exception is no solution. Section 48 requires depictions of violence against animals, unlike other speech, to demonstrate serious value (How would Zombieland fare against the same standard?). It's an arbitrary standard, and it invites arbitrary judgments: In oral arguments, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal reassured the Justices that Spanish bullfights are artistic enough, and Roman gladiator contests are historic enough, to be exempt from the ban.

Some have defended Section 48 by comparing animal cruelty law to child pornography. But the act of capturing an abused child on tape is, itself, a further violation of the child's dignity.  Few would argue, on the other hand, that the act of taping an abused animal is a separate violation of the animal's rights.

As part of his defense, Stevens is now claiming that his videos, which he marketed through the underground "Sporting Dog Journal," were really designed as critiques of dogfighting.  As a factual claim, that's hard to take seriously.  But by raising the hypothetical - what if these videos really were intentionally nauseating exposes, theApocalypse Now of dogfighting - he highlights a serious challenge to Section 48 and its defenders.  If the law would ban the ugly film supporting dogfighting but permit the one opposing it, how can animal rights advocates defend it under the First Ammendment? On the other hand, if the law bans disturbing images equally, whether they condone or condemn the cruelty, should those advocates want to defend it?

Anti-abortion advocates use images of abortion. Anti-war activists use images of war. We should expect animal rights activists to use images of animal abuse. Why would they make it easier to ban them?

Most Americans stand somewhere between Michael Vick and veganism. California voters last year passed tough (and expensive) new protections for farm animals. But few blinked when Republicans tapped as Senate Majority leader a surgeon who'd once admitted to gathering cats from shelters for extracurricular experiments.  Dr. Frist's actions still strike the nation as more strange than sadistic.  A country in which taking out your curiosity on cats is no more than a bump on the road to national leadership is a country with no consensus against animal cruelty.  It's a country in which you can earn some bucks on it.  Katyal estimated that at the time Section 48 became law, there were 3,000 "crush" videos on the market.

Advocates want to ban animal cruelty imagery not because of how many Americans abhor it but because of how many Americans enjoy it.  They would not be expending time and energy to keep these videos banned if there weren't a chunk of Americans in the market for them.  But the real challenge facing animal rights advocates is not how to make these videos less legal - it's how to make them less popular.  Banning video of animal abuse is no more effective as an animal rights tactic than trying to make 24illegal would be as an anti-torture tactic.

Animal rights advocates should not look to film critics in robes to stand between loathsome video and loathsome impulses. Rather, they should look to the democratic process to move the majority and strengthen laws against acts of cruelty.  A moment of increasing popular interest and awareness about where our food comes from and how it arrived on our plate is a moment of real opportunity to pass laws that protect animals from food industry abuse - time better spent than time pushing laws to protect Americans from bad ideas.

As animal rights advocates take on the real fights against companies mistreating animals, history suggests they'll be invoking some disturbing images of their own.  And that their opponents will seek to have them silenced or shut down.  When PETA released video of staff at Convance Inc.hitting the monkeys they were using for experiments, Convance sued PETA.  When PETA released video of staff at Huntingdon Life Sciencesautopsying a still-breathing animal, Huntingdon sued PETA.  It's only a matter of time before PETA's antagonists, be they lipstick tycoons or puppy mill proprietors, again sue them for bringing uncomfortable images to light.  When that happens, advocates will want more than their work's "serious value" to protect them. They will want the First Amendment.

PETA's most famous film, "Unnecessary Fuss," uses footage shot by staff at UPenn's Head Injury Clinic researching brain damage on baboons.  Researchers laugh and joke after accidentally tearing a monkey's ear off while prying its head from a helmet attached with dental cement.  PETA's video led to the firing of UPenn's chief veterinarian and the demise of the clinic.  It's a disturbing video, and it depicts animal cruelty.  You can watch it on YouTube.  But think twice before you try to sell it, or an expose like it, across state lines.  If the Supreme Court backs Section 48, you could be breaking the law.  If you're sued, will PETA come to your defense?

Over at the Corner, Mark Steyn links the story of one (yes, one) protester yelling "slaughter the Jews" at Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister and smirks

But don't worry. I'm sure it's only "anti-Zionist."

Besides humor (failed), what is Steyn's point here? Maybe the "slaughter" guy can't distinguish between the country Israel and the Jewish people. I can. Most Jews can, including the ones who live in Israel. Can Mark Steyn? (More in this vein here) Meanwhile, Steyn's corner colleague John Derbyshire (the Marty Peretz of the National Review is defending Tom Tancredo's call for literacy tests at the polls. But don't worry. I'm sure it's only "literacy supremacism."

Over at the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru is defending anti-choice folks against criticism for highlighting Tim Tebow's mom's choice not to have an abortion while pushing to take that choice away from her.  I'll grant that it's not contradictory for someone to both want abortion to be made illegal and to like it when women who legally could have abortion choose not to.  But it's intentionally misleading for a movement seeking a ban on abortion to appeal to the electorate's good feelings about choice by invoking individuals' choices as an argument for prohibition.  It's especially cynical given that it's the pro-choice movement that stands up for women threatened coercive abortion or sterilization by the government or their employer.  I wrote more about this here and here.

As for Tim and Pam Tebow, apparently they share Focus on the Family's belief that it should be illegal for women like Pam whose doctors advise them to terminate their pregnancy to choose to follow their doctors' advice.  So why won't their ad say that?  Why not say:

"I'm Tim Tebow, football great.  I've been blessed with so much in life.  I know my life itself is a blessing.  Doctors in the Phillipines recommended my Mom abort me because of serious complications in pregnancy.  Good thing abortion was illegal in the Phillipines.  It should be illegal here in America too."

I think Focus on the Family isn't running an ad like that because they know the median American has discomfort about abortion but doesn't want to see it banned.  But what does Ramesh Ponnuru think is the explanation?

Folks who were hoping that a lame duck Dodd would be more inclined to push for more aggressive financial regulatory reform should be disappointed to hear that Dodd, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, is now considering negotiating away creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency in an attempt to win over Republican senators.  Actually, all of us should be disappointed.  What's as discouraging as the move is the motivation: Dodd is saying he wants a financial regulatory reform that Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the committee, can support.  He's created a team of four Democratic senators and four Republicans to try to hash out a deal.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Dodd and Shelby seem to be reading from the Max Baucus - Charles Grassley script that consumed the healthcare process in the Senate for long enough that now a special election result in January has the chance to blow up the bill again.  What did they get to show for it?  Olympia Snowe voted the bill out of the Finance Committee but then voted with every other Senate GOPer to declare it unconstitutional.

What's most frustrating about this is that it's just bad negotiating.  Chris Dodd only weakens his position by giving Richard Shelby (and thus Mitch McConnell) a veto over financial regulatory reform.  Republicans have no motivation to help Democrats pass a strong bill regulating the banks - first, because Republicans are in bed with the banks, and second, because Republicans want to keep bashing the Democrats for being in bed with the banks (a strategy which is paying off, judging by the polls in Massachusetts).

Even if the Democrats are desperate for Republican votes (whether to give moderate Democrats cover, to make up for Democratic defections, or to earn a bipartisan aura), the best way to get them is to show you're ready to pass a bill without them.  Then there's a shot a Republican offers to support a weaker version.  The worst strategy to win Republican votes is to try to show how reasonable you are by offering them veto power in exchange for being willing to talk to you.  We call that negotiating against yourself.

And as Matt Yglesias observes, there are worse things that could happen than a Republican filibuster of financial regulatory reform.

I am so sick of reading quotes like this:

I am pro-choice, but I must say that with the caveat that I have never had to make that decision, and I don't know if it's a decision I could make myself. It's one of the hardest decisions any woman could ever have to make.

That's Connecticut GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon qualifying her self-description as "pro-choice" by adding that she herself might not choose an abortion if she had the choice. Guess it could be that she says "caveat" to distinguish herself from some abortion-happy pro-choice stereotype she doesn't buy into herself. But the plain reading of her quote is that she's not that pro-choice because she might choose against abortion. Which is bogus. Unfortunately, McMahon's quote echoes the most common media frame on the abortion debate: pro-choicers pushing abortion across the board, anti-choicers pushing back against it, and women somewhere in the middle making hard choices. Meanwhile, back in reality, it's pro-choicers who believe women should be able to make those sometimes hard choices at all. And when the government or the boss tries to force women not to give birth, it's pro-choicers who have those women's backs.

First, the Family Research Council held its "Values Voters Summit" on Rosh HaShanah. Maybe they figured it was a good way to avoid the embarrassment of having any Jews show up because they thought "Values" actually meant "values." Or more likely none of them knew or cared when Rosh HaShanah was. That, or they were looking for a way to keep the liberal media away from their conference.

Now, Glenn Beck is calling for a day of "fast and prayer" on...Yom Kippur? Are the right-wingers trying to win us back?

Wonder what the right-of-right-wingers are cooking up for Sukkot...

In unrelated news, Norman Podhoretz just spent a book puzzling over Why Are Jews Liberals?

Jeff Sessions - who couldn't get his own judicial nomination through a GOP Judiciary Committee even after flip-flopping to the correct position on whether the NAACP or the KKK poses a greater threat to the Republic - is now tying himself in knots over whether he would have a problem with a gay Supreme Court nominee per se, or just with one who believed gay people should have the same rights as everyone else. I'm sure when Strom Thurmond voted against Thurgood Marshall's nomination to the Court, it had nothing to do with him being Black - just with him being a Black man who believed Black people should have their equal protection rights protected.

But while it's funny/ sad/ ridiculous to watch Sessions and Co. squirm in saying first that "identity politics" are bad and then that we should be concerned that a gay nominee would make people "uneasy," or hear the Family Research Council signal openness to a gay nominee without "pro-gay ideology," there's a reason these guys are struggling to say something coherent: Open gay-bashing is becoming less popular in America, but it's hard to explain why LGBT people shouldn't have equal rights if we're not inferior Americans.

It's not by accident that the right-wing opposition to gay equality is a moving target. Anti-gay bigotry is still prevalent in America, and will be no doubt for a long time. But as Americans, including many who are uncomfortable with gay people, become less sympathetic to politicians saying that there are no gay people, that gay people need psychiatric help, that gay people are sinners, etc., Jeff Sessions has to come up with different ways to explain why he opposes the "gay agenda" - just like he had to come up with new ways to explain his animus towards the NAACP a generation ago.

So the issue is: elitist judges trying to tell regular people what to do (this one gets more tenuous now that more people support same-sex marriage than the Republican party); schoolteachers depriving parents of control over how (and whether) their kids learn about sexual orientation; priests getting locked up for not officiating at marriages they don't believe in; now Miss California's Miss America candidacy was judged not just on her body but on (gasp) how she answered a question! Perusing The Corner suggests that National Organization for Marriage President Maggie Gallagher's latest argument for why LGBT people shouldn't be allowed to get married is that opponents of gay rights will face social stigma as soon as gay people escape enshrined legal stigma. In the 90's Mike Huckabee was decrying our culture's decline "from Barney Fife to Barney Frank" - now he's decrying a gay blogger's intolerance towards Miss California.

So as more states and more Americans come out for legal equality, expect conservatives to get that much more creative in explaining their opposition as a defense of the little guy (the teacher, the priest, the voter, the beauty pageant contestant, the law professor), that much more eager to declare themselves tolerant of people with "gay tendencies," and that much more fulsome in their outrage when intolerant liberals suggest they have a problem with gay people.

In making the case for his recovery plan today, Barack Obama quoted the lesson of the Sermon on the Mount that a storm can destroy a house build on sand, but not a house built on a rock.  The way Obama used the quote reminded me of a debate a few years ago between Sojourners' Jim Wallis and Americans United's Barry Lynn where Lynn said the problem with politicians quoting the Bible is that unlike quotes from other literature, quotes from the Bible are appeals to the author's inherent authority rather than to the author's particular insight.  In other words, biblical quotes are used to support your argument based on who said it (God says don't oppress strangers) rather than why they said it (because you yourself have experienced slavery).  I think Lynn is making an insightful distinction, but it cuts against his argument.

Now that the Senate has voted for cloture on the stimulus, I gotta say it's striking how the goalposts have moved in terms of what the media consider a majority out of 100 senators. The dominant sense you'd get from following mainstream media coverage of the debate is that 61 Senators is the cut-off for a Senate majority, and if Obama's initiatives don't make it past that post he hasn't garnered that much support (and he isn't really that bipartisan). That's not how I remember things being covered during the Bush administration, when the same talking heads did their talking about the filibuster as though it was an extreme measure.

Put differently, with a Republican in the White House the onus was on Democrats to justify why anything would be worth a filibuster; with a Democrat in the White House, the onus is on Democrats to scare up 61 votes.

When John Kerry talked about filibustering Sam Alito's Supreme Court nomination (which, compared to the stimulus package, is also far-reaching in impact but most would agree was less time-sensitive to get done), that was covered as an antic from the fringe. But amidst the veneration of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, the starting assumption seems to be that the very most moderate members of the Senate GOP Caucus by default will filibuster the President's bill unless they get to rewrite it.

Is this an unfair comparison? And if not, then do we blame the media, or blame the Democrats for having lacked the parliamentary-style party discipline to better control the media narrative?

That said, I don't think there's much evidence that the public cares terribly much about what Nancy Pelosi rightly called "process arguments" - who's obstructing who, who's more bipartisan, etc. And the latest polling suggests that as with the Presidential election, the GOP may be capturing media cycles without capturing voters. Another reason to hope the Conference Committee leaves the Nelson-Snowe crew with a token accomplishment or two but otherwise churns out the bill best designed to actually stimulate the economy - whose success or failure is what voters will actually remember a year from now.

Just finished Buzz Bissinger's A Prayer for the City, which he wrote after shadowing Ed Rendell (and staff) through his first term as Mayor. It's a compelling read and gives an interesting sense of the politics of early '90s Philadelphia and, more than that, of how folks in City Hall go about their jobs and why. The book suffers, though, from the blinders of ideology in a way that maybe only a book by a zealously pragmatic journalist about a zealously pragmatic technocrat can.

In the Philadelphia of Bissinger's book, there is no public policy argument for raising taxes to maintain public services - only the weakness of previous politicians who indulge in tax hikes like heroin. Disability rights activists get a dismissive sentence about how they unreasonably expect the city to spend "money that isn't there" on public services. In Bissinger's Philadelphia, there's little grounds for the skepticism Ed Rendell and his crew face from people in the "Black establishment" or "Hispanic interest groups" - you wouldn't think from the way such folks are described that they really represented anybody, except when Rendell worries if they turn on him they could summon thousands to vote him out of office. The most prolonged, serious engagement with the reality of racism (as supposed to the evils of racial politics) is a discussion of the the devastating legacy of explicitly racist New Deal redlining on the city's neighborhoods, and it segues back into why urban citizens don't trust the federal government rather than why racial distrust might still persist. Bissinger's narrative of the life of an African-American great-grandmother struggling to raise her great-grandkids, like the redlining discussion, is compelling, but essentially divorced from the discussion of racial politics and the book's scorned "Black leaders."

And while a good chunk of the book is built around Rendell's successful campaign to force takeaways in negotiations with the public sector unions, we never get a sympathetic - or even much better than contemptuous - portrayal of anyone who works in one. Bissinger repeatedly mourns, in vividly anthropomorphic terms, the death of middle class manufacturing jobs in Philadelphia (and he talks about service jobs as though they're inherently undignified and inevitably sub-middle class). But he never gives the reader any reason beyond greed that the city's employees, some middle class and some aspiring towards it, might zealously defend the standard they've won. He gives no reason beyond ambition and self-protection that Union leaders would go to the ramparts in that fight. Bissinger is super sympathetic, on the other hand, in describing a fervently anti-government libertarian who comes to work for Rendell on subcontracting out city jobs and ultimately moves first from downtown to gentrified pricey Chestnut Hill and then out to suburbs because of crime and schools. In Philadelphia, Bissinger states flatly, she had "no choice" but to pay for private school education.

I was surprised to see Ezra Klein endorse Nicholas Kristof's column arguing that "the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough." Back in my college Macroeconomics class, this argument was expressed as "They're not poor because they work in sweatshops. They work in sweatshops because they're poor."

Well actually, they're poor because they don't make enough money to support themselves. If the people who hire them paid them enough, they would not be poor. Providing jobs to people who would rather work them than stay unemployed doesn't release whoever provides the job from responsibility for how they treat them, just as saving someone from drowning would not give me any more right to mug that person than I have to mug anyone else.

The Post reported in 2005 that National Labor Committee Head Charles Kernaghan

gets angry when he recalls what a worker told him in Bangladesh: "If we could earn 37 cents an hour, we could live with a little dignity." (As opposed to the 21-cent hourly wage that barely staved off starvation.)

As CAPAF's Sabina Dawan observes, it's not as though the International Labor Organization and allied groups working to close such gaps and to see basic human rights protected in plants that make Western companies so rich are out to drive the people of Cambodia out of their jobs - or as though that's the inevitable result of letting workers go to the bathroom, or leave work to give birth. Does Kristof believe that the Bangladeshi worker Kernaghan references makes 21 cents an hour because at 22 cents his plant would stop making a profit?

As Richard Rothstein wrote in his rejoinder to Kristof:

Read more »

Having spent middle school reading pretty much only the novels of Orson Scott Card, I was as surprised as anyone to see him pop up before the election in 2004 endorsing George Bush and straight-ticket Republican voting because "as a Democrat, what can I say to that except that, because my party has been taken over by an astonishingly self-destructive bunch of lunatics who are so dazzled by Hollywood that they think their ideas make sense, I have to agree that right now, any President but Bush and any Congress but a Republican-dominated one would be disastrous." After the election, Card revealed he'd voted for Bush the first time too. But I can't say I registered the same surprise when Card rose again to call for us to vote Republican in the 2006 midterm elections ("there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war"), or most recently this past October when the self-professed "Moynihan Democrat" endorsed John McCain, with a special dig at the "reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor." You might wonder why Card keeps identifying as a Democrat. Wonder no more: four years after endorsing Bush at Slate, he got himself this press on the same site:

Orson Scott Card, the science-fiction author and registered Democrat, sparked a similar Web backlash when he endorsed McCain just a few weeks before Election Day...For him, national security is paramount.

I bet many of us in college got to meet someone convinced their right-wing views on the issue of the day packed extra punch because they were prefaced with "As a loyal Democrat..." But you can pull off the same trick in the national media too. It seems there are not diminishing returns to self-proclaimed apostasy. Take Tammy Bruce, who years after writing one book taking us "Inside The Left's Assault On Free Speech and Free Minds" and another "Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values," got the San Francisco Chronicle to publish her "Feminist's Argument for McCain's VP" and identify her as a "registered Democrat her entire adult life until February."

Look forward to 2010, when Moynihan Democrat Orson Scott Card announces, more in sadness than in anger, that he must buck the President and Congressional leadership of his own party and endorse a Republican takeover of Congress, for the sake of our children's safety. The column almost writes itself.

At times, this felt like a debate between a stoner and an alcoholic.  Like in the first debate, it was frustrating to see Obama let McCain largely drive the debate and keep Obama on the defensive.  But more so than in the first debate, I think if Obama seemed somewhat too subdued or even sedate, McCain came off as cranky, irritable, and nasty to the point of seeming unpresidential.  McCain did himself no favors by cutting Obama off to bring up Bill Ayers an extra time, or with the endless sarcastic asides.  And I think you look small when you whine on and on about how a civil rights hero was too mean in criticizing the nastiness of your campaign.

As a super-decided voter, it was aggravating to see McCain attack on the first Gulf War without Obama firing back about the current one, and more so to see Obama sounding defensive, reassuring tones about his tax plan without hammering McCain on why now of all times he would want to outdo George Bush in sending more money to the richest among us.  That said, it's not that Barack Obama doesn't know how to go on the attack.  It's just that he's winning, and his strategy in this debate - like the prior two but even more so - was to show himself a steady hand steering the ship of state.  It's hard to find someone not currently receiving checks from the McCain campaign to argue the Obama strategy isn't working.