Friday, February 27, 2009 - Posts
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Hanna, you may well be right that government is the only thing that can save us from this financial crisis. But like Abigail and Bobby Jindal and many of my fellow conservatives, I'm going to maintain a healthy skepticism. Because even if government is going to be our savior, I am not convinced that our government has yet taken the right steps. The stimulus package might indeed have some provisions that actually stimulate, but they're buried among the hundreds and hundreds of pages of pork and years-old Democratic Christmas wish lists. Only 23 percent of the money in the stimulus package will be spent in 2009 and 2010 (by estimate of the Congressional Budget Office), but it was so urgent to get it passed that members of Congress had no time to read it? The market tanked earlier this month after our new treasury secretary announced a bailout plan with no details, apparently because at the last minute he scrapped the plan he'd been working on for months. Chris Dodd—the chairman of the Senate banking committee—had to apologize earlier this week after claiming that maybe banks would be nationalized, causing the market to tank last Friday.
Believe me, I'm not rooting against the economy. I want nothing more than to see my friends and family who've been laid off find new jobs and for things I used to take for granted, like a modest summer vacation, no longer to seem like inaccessible luxuries. But unlike those poor folks who gave all their money to Bernie Madoff and watched it disappaer, I'm not going to put all my hope and faith in the government to sort this out by itself.
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I honestly never thought I'd see the day when James Dobson stepped down. To me, he so perfectly encapsulated this moment in evangelical history, when conservative Christians feel simultaneously persecuted and entitled. To much of America, Dobson was revered as a kind of friendly living God, dispensing advice on all things family from his headquarters in Colorado Springs, through his books and radio shows. Then every once in a while, Dobson would step a big foot into secular politics, often with disastrous results.
Rick Warren is the closest Dobson has to a successor. Until he was embraced by Obama, Warren too operated as an outsider, keeping a low profile as he glad-handed around Washington. Dobson operated much more clumsily. He would declare someone—Gingrich, Bush—the next savior and then be bitterly disappointed when things didn't work out. He remained to the end baffled and angry about the outside world, despite his considerable influence in it.
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"Why Can't a Woman Write the Great American Novel?" Others here have weighed in already on why the literary canon seems to be lacking when it comes to Great American Novels written by women. What struck me about Laura Miller's essay was the same line Noreen pulled out:
Prose is right that many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
Male authors also fetishize writing the Great American Novel. Somehow, I get the sense Miller finds all this male ambition problematic. Is it? Or is there a serious lack of female writers who aspire to write the Great American Novel? That, I find, would be problematic.
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As Jessica just noted, the Obama administration has announced it’s moving to rescind one of the most troubling of President Bush’s “midnight regulations”—a vague and subjective “conscience” rule that allows seemingly everyone with an opinion about abortion and a job connected to health care, the right to make on-the-spot decisions about when and how to do their jobs. We’ve written about this issue here before, both pro and con. But the one thing nobody can claim about the "right of conscience” protected by the new HHS rules was that it afforded any legal clarity to a very rancorous and emotional issue. The Post story today suggests that the move to lift the conscience clause represents “the latest challenge to the Obama administration's attempt to find more of a middle ground on issues related to abortion.” But that strikes me as oversimplification. The decision to craft what an unnamed HHS official characterizes as “a tightly written conscience clause” (er, they already exist ...) isn’t really a capitulation to the abortion lobby. It’s simply a way of saying that health care workers, like everyone else, can’t make up the rules as they go along. Efforts to rewrite fuzzy laws with precision and clarity shouldn't be derided as partisan. Clarity benefits everyone I think.
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Abby, you suggested calling the new Obama puppy "Government." I'd say how about calling the dog "Northern Trust Corp." Noco for short. Or maybe "Wells Fargo." (Welly). That way we can employ that old-fashioned doggy command, not much in vogue anymore: "Beg," whenever Welly comes to the president wanting treats, particularly after he just peed on our rug.
I can see by your post, and Sen. Bobby Jindal's response to the president this week, that conservatives are holding fast to that old Reagan motto: "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." Holding fast, that is, despite all evidence. If there's any moment when that attitude is proving fantastically, stupendously wrong, it is this one. We can argue forever over whether a hands-off government got us to where we are today. But one thing is for sure: Only government—" a jewel of human association and an heirloom of human reason," in the words of Leon Wieseltier—can dig us out of this one.
Obama is by temperament such a conciliator, so judicious, that he is failing to embrace this triumphal moment for liberalism and what should be the new motto: "Good boy, Government!"
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Emily, there's another decision from the Obama White House that women can cheer about: Word is they're rolling back the provider conscience rule today. Bush finalized the legislation in the waning days of his administration, and it allows medical professionals to refuse to do anything they object to on moral grounds, including, but not limited to, family planning services. The Chicago Tribune notes that seven states filed suit against the Bush rule, "arguing it sacrifices the health of patients to religious beliefs of medical providers."
According to the Trib, the Obama administration says they will look into a new, differently worded rule that will "clarify what health-care workers can reasonably refuse for patients." Hopefully the new rule will not include denying rape victims emergency contraception.
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Wall-E's Oscar win for best animated feature has reminded some bloggers about Pixar's lady problem, or more exactly, its lack-of-ladies problem. In the words of Vast Public Indifference, it's not that Pixar doesn't write female characters so much as present them all as "helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives." Wall-E's Eve might have been a move in a more girl-powered direction, but the forthcoming Up! doesn't seem to have any women in it at all (though it does look predictably delightful).
Buffy creator Joss Whedon, whose feminist credentials are better than just about any other Hollywood dude's, thinks Pixar got girl trouble too. (Whedon tangent: Anyone watching Dollhouse? Just saw the second episode, in which Eliza Dushku spends an hour running from a crazed lover trying to track her down with a compound bow and arrow, and it's only the memory of Buffy, which is strong in me, that has kept me from a DVR purge.) Here's what he said to Mother Jones about Pixar this past November:
MJ: As a father, what do you think about the fact that Pixar doesn't have a [top-billed] female protagonist yet?
JW: I wrote Toy Story [for Pixar]. And I remember at the time having a crisis in myself because I couldn't figure out Bo Peep. There's no reason why there couldn't be [female Pixar leads]. There is that moment in The Incredibles, when the mom has a pep talk with Violet and Violet stands up like a hero and you can see her other eye for the first time. [My wife] said, "Oh look, they wrote a scene for you."
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The teachable moments continue with yet another instance of a politician who should know better making a supposedly well-intentioned racial slur then falling back on a stammering defense. ("But being clean is a good thing!" "But I said I liked his tan!") The latest: Los Alamitos, Calif., Mayor Dean Grose's claim that he didn't know there were racial undertones to a doctored image of the White House lawn as a watermelon patch, which he sent in an e-mail with the subject line "No Easter egg hunt this year."
Grose announced Thursday that he plans to resign because of this controversy. But first, he argued that he hadn't meant to offend anyone and wrote the following in a fairly unrepentant e-mail response to a black businesswoman who demanded an apology: "The way things are today, you gotta laugh every now and then. I wanna see the coloring contests."
The first problem here is that, as with the New York Post cartoon, the joke excuse falls flat when the thing just isn't funny. There's also the issue of the way these apologies are phrased: the passive voice; the attitude of I didn't mean to offend you and I'm sorry you got offended, rather than I did something offensive and I'm sorry for my action.
We as a nation may have felt triumphant and accepting on Nov. 4 and Jan. 20. But a black man leading the country hardly means the end of racism within it, as shown by these ongoing gaffes—and the conviction of the offenders, whether honestly held or not, that their racially motivated comments or drawings or actions were not in fact race-related at all. Eric Holder was right. We need to talk more about race. Maybe then it will stop keep popping up where Grose and Murdoch swear they didn't expect it.
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The case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was No. 1 on my list for Bush holdovers in desperate need of new thinking from the Obama administration. It wasn't a hard call. Al-Marri is the only person arrested in the United States who the government is holding indefinitely in military detention without charges. And now, in a huge switch that makes me feel a whole lot more sure that we've finally made it to a new legal era, al-Marri is about to be indicted. Normally, defense lawyers don't applaud when it's announced that their clients will face charges. But Marri's lawyers have been battling since 2003 to get their client before a judge in the regular old federal-court system.
Those same lawyers will no doubt be incredibly frustrated if the Supreme Court now dismisses al-Marri's constitutional challenge to his detention as moot. If the court had ruled for al-Marri and rejected the sweeping Bush claim of executive power, that would have been enormous vindication. But we don't know what the court would have done. And now we know that the executive branch is capable of doing the right thing.
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Um, Susannah, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems kind of obvious to me why johns seek out prostitutes: They get sex with no consequences or commitment. So it make sense that when we create a system where there are consequences, a lot of guys stop coming. Is there something I'm missing about "understanding the complicated realities of johns' psychologies"?
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We are very pleased to announce that Peggy White will be the publisher of Double X, the online women's magazine that Slate will launch later this year. Peggy was formerly general manager of Yahoo Finance, and before that vice president and general manager of Business Week online and vice president of sales and business development for MSNBC.com. She'll start March 9. We can't wait!
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