John McCain, it gets worse

Still catching up on my Daily Shows, but I had to mention the brilliant public service announcement spoof aimed at Sen. John McCain, whose intransigence on "don't ask, don't tell" has reduced him to a no longer amusing caricature of himself. Here's the clip, but you probably know by now that I have this weird compulsion to do a transcript.

Jon Stewart: You know, as I see John McCain doing anything to keep "don't ask, don't tell" from being repealed, it's hard not to remember [chokes up with emotion] it gets worse.

[PSA starts]
John Oliver: Hello, Senator McCain. We know you're going through a tough time with this "don't ask, don't tell" thing.

Jason Jones: But trust us ...

Sean Hayes: It gets worse.

Wyatt Cenac: Seriously, it's all downhill from here.

JJ: The head of the military doesn't even agree with you.

SH: Your own wife doesn't agree with you.

JJ: Your own wife! Holy s***!

JO: She's very attractive, but that is irrelevant to this discussion.

WC: But it gets worse ...

SH: ... because sooner or later, gay people are going to wind up serving ...

WC: ... and then twenty years later, they'll make the documentary about it.

JO: And you know how every documentary about some big social change has a bad guy ...

JJ: ... the guy who fought it tooth and nail, long after it was obvious to everyone else what needed to be done?

WC: You know, the George Wallace character. That's gonna be you ...

SH: ... saying stuff like ...

WC: ... "Black people don't belong in a white man's military," or ...

SH: ... "I have no problem with Catholics ..."

JO: "... I just don't want one in the White House taking orders on a special Pope-phone to Rome," or ...

JJ: ... "A lady astronaut? But what about the gazongas? Won't they get in the way?"

WC: That'll be you, and the narrator will say something like, ...

JO: ... "Senator John McCain fought the move every step of the way, using increasingly obvious stalling tactics."

WC: Although they'll probably pick somebody with a better voice than John's.

JO: Yeah, you know what, Wyatt? You can go f*** yourself.

WC: I'm just saying.

SH: Anyway, it'll be part of your legacy.

WC: It gets worse.

JO: It does get worse.

JJ: It gets worser.

SH: You have no idea how much worse it gets.

It's not just the funnymen who are noticing. Yahoo!'s blog The Lookout says supporters of "don't ask, don't tell" are running out of reasons to oppose repeal.

McCain isn't giving ground:

"The military is at its highest point in recruitment, in retention, in professionalism, in capability," McCain said on CNN's "State of the Union." "So to somehow allege that this policy has been damaging the military is simply false."

Recruitment is up because it always goes up during an economic downturn such as we've been enduring. Retention is up because the military cannot afford to let people leave (remember those infamous stop-loss orders during George W. Bush's term?). Professionalism and capability -- is John McCain saying gays are unprofessional and incapable, and that they would reduce those qualities in the military? That's just this side of homophobic. Do you really want to narrow your support to the most regressive and bigoted voters in Arizona, Senator?

"I want to know the effect on battle effectiveness and morale, not on how best to implement the change in policy."

As I've said before, how units perform in the field is a function of how well they trust each other to do their jobs, not how well they like each other or what they think of one another's private lives.

Senator, what would you think of a policy that excluded Mormons from serving because anecdotal evidence suggested they disrupted unit morale? Would you be supporting a ban on openly-declared Mormons serving?

John McCain, as The Daily Show illustrated in a terrific then-and-now video montage preceding the aforementioned spoof PSA, is fighting with his own previously-expressed views. He said he would support repealing "don't ask, don't tell" when the military leadership was ready to end the ban. When the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed their willingness, he backpedaled and wanted a study done. Now that the study is done -- it's due on President Obama's desk tomorrow -- McCain is saying it's a flawed study. What next, Senator? Do you want each and every service member individually to appear before you to testify as to whether he or she supports the ban?

Here's where supporters of "don't ask, don't tell" are likely to take some solace:

Among Marines and other specialty combat troops, resistance to openly gay service is higher than the overall average of 30 percent. Between 40 and 60 percent of combat troops say they think repealing the policy will be bad for troop morale. (Opposition is lower among troops who say they have served with a gay comrade before.) Military chaplains are also very strongly opposed.

Glossing the final report -- it's over a hundred pages long, so I haven't been able to read it in depth -- the objections raised by those disposed to maintain the ban appear to be based either in the usual tired misconception that openly gay troops will engage in ridiculously stereotypical misbehavior (flamboyant dress, propositioning of straight troops, etc.) or in religious strictures against homosexuality. In short, the supporters of "don't ask, don't tell" are living in a world in which it's all right to consider gays second-class citizens.

Nothing that John McCain or any other supporter of the ban has said addresses what I said in October about it:

As a nation, we weighed discomfort against honor -- and we deemed discomfort more important.

That decision was indefensible.

Nothing that John McCain or any other supporter of the ban has said addresses what I asked earlier this month:

[H]ow long will we continue to shortchange our armed forces and dishonor our fellow citizens by catering to those who have an irrational fear, a fear that is without foundation, whose root cause they cannot even explain because that root cause does not exist?

Senator, you already look like a hypocrite. No, actually, you already are a hypocrite in my eyes, and you're teetering on the brink of out-and-out bigotry.

Would it satisfy you if the military segregated gays into separate units, as the military segregated African Americans in an earlier age? After all, that was the approved solution when we last institutionalized prejudice under color of military regulations.

An ugly vision, isn't it, Senator? Yet that's where your unprincipled opposition to repealing "don't ask, don't tell" leaves you.

And as The Daily Show said, it gets worse.

The Wikileaks disclosures

Opposed as I was and am to the George W. Bush administration's refusal to deal openly on its energy policy or its reason(s) for invading Iraq (the latter is still one of the most most incomprehensible decisions ever, to me), one might expect me to applaud Wikileaks' release of U.S. diplomatic cables.

As a matter of fact, it leaves me queasy. Not being a foreign-policy expert, I couldn't put my uneasiness into words. Fortunately, Heather Hurlburt did a nice job on this score for The New Republic.

She sees three bad effects of the disclosures:

1. Reduced candor abroad
2. Reduced openness at home
3. What Hurlburt calls "undermining progressive policies and frameworks"

The first refers to the chilling effect the prospect of unintended publication will have not only on the U.S.'s own diplomatic corps in their internal communications, but also on foreign representatives' willingness to give "frank and honest opinions [and] assessments" of other nations.

By "reduced openness at home," Hurlburt means a reduction in the speed and extent of declassification of older documents. Such a slowdown hurts historians, for the most part. As for the final effect, to use Hurlburt's own words, "quiet talk is much more effective than loud threats" if the goal is to work with others to solve mutual problems. Hurlburt's no fan of the unilateralist approach that characterized Bush 43's administration: as she puts it, "in the long run, America’s national interests will be best served if we see and act on them as inextricably linked with the interests of others." She calls these interests "progressive," and worries that if quiet diplomacy is not possible, we will be left to the mercies of absolutists like Bush 43 and their "illusions of a black and white world."

I have abstract but limited sympathy for the historians' problem. As for "undermining progressive policies and frameworks," I agree but concede that I might be blinkered by my still-acute antipathy toward Bush 43 and his administration.

But I absolutely agree with Hurlburt that the U.S. will stop benefiting from foreign observers' candid opinions of their neighbors, and this loss will hurt the U.S. for a long time. That's the real damage the Wikileaks disclosure has done, and that's the reason it makes me queasy.

You might accuse me of hypocrisy for still insisting that Bush 43 should be forced to disclose the deliberations leading up to his administration's backwards-looking energy policy and nowhere-looking Iraq invasion. I could argue in turn that those disclosures would not harm U.S. interests in the way the Wikileaks disclosures have. My argument on that score might be wrong. But I don't see much good coming from the Wikileaks disclosures. I certainly don't see the good outweighing the harm, at least to the U.S.

Of email hoaxes

One of my relatives recently received email warning that cell phone numbers would be released to telemarketers in a matter of days. As I suspected from the moment I heard about this, it's not true.

Unlike most untrue warnings, this one wasn't harmful except that it clogged up people's in-boxes (and continues to do so because credulous people keep forwarding it).

I can't remember if I used to pass this kind of nonsense along to my email contacts, but after I had been online for several years I certainly used to evaluate this kind of message for relatives and friends. I like to think my diplomatically worded, if perhaps terse, replies to the senders eventually taught them to be less susceptible to hoaxes. All I know is that it had been a long time since I had been asked to cast an eyeball over one before this.

Fortunately, it no longer requires hard-won and sometimes embarrassing experience to distinguish fake from fact. snopes.com is my favorite verification site, though I admit that for the cell-phone email story I first performed a search to see what the Web as a whole had to say. (snopes.com was the second match in the list.)

Even more important to me is a guide to recognizing bogosity, since the best way to reduce the impact of hoaxes is to make people more likely to recognize them as bogus before they hit "Forward Mail." The Urban Legends pages at about.com have some good tips for spotting emailed hoaxes.

Another "happy" drilling story

Courtesy of the AP, here's the story of a family whose Pennsylvania property was leased for natural-gas drilling by an energy company for $50 an acre. That turned out to be a ridiculously low amount compared to what other property owners in the area have received.

The matter would never have made the news except that the house wasn't solely owned by the 94-year-old woman who signed the original agreement. The co-owners who were not contacted by the company raised a squawk, and that's how a news story was born.

The low price for the lease was not the only reason the recalcitrant family members were angry. According to the grandson leading the resistance, his father had asked him not to lease the land for gas drilling due to environmental concerns of the sort mentioned by the documentary Gasland. And by "environmental concerns," of course I mean those associated with "fracking." (Search this blog for that term to see what else I've posted on the subject.)

Unfortunately, one family's resistance means little when it comes to a shared resource like natural gas.

The grandchildren could choose to fight Chesapeake in court to keep the drill at bay, spending thousands of dollars on lawyers in a battle they weren't guaranteed to win. Even if they prevailed, it was likely to be an empty victory. Nearly all the neighbors had already signed leases, and the region's gas deposits were sure to be harvested eventually. With or without the Stevens siblings.

The bottom line is that the energy company is going to be able to drill on the property, albeit not at the low price it originally offered.

Another fracking tragedy.

Ruffalo on terror watch list

It's crap like this that makes us mistrust government: actor Mark Ruffalo was added to a "terror alert watchlist" courtesy of Pennsylvania's Office of Homeland Security. Why? The best guess is that the office is unhappy that he helped to promote the documentary Gasland.

I mentioned Ruffalo (misspelling his name in the process) in passing when discussing the E.P.A.'s subpoenaing of Halliburton for details of its fracking operations. Ruffalo wrote that a group associated with Karl Rove had started running ads against the candidate for Congress Ruffalo supported, a man who introduced legislation to close the so-called "Halliburton Loophole" that exempted hydraulic fracturing from disclosure requirements mandated by the Safe Drinking Water Act. According to Ruffalo, Rove's group "has received significant funding from the oil and gas industry."

Gasland is a documentary about the controversial practice of "hydraulic fracturing," or "fracking," which is used to extract natural gas in many parts of the world. Fracking is thought to result in contamination of aquifers, though its advocates, including Halliburton (which developed the technique over fifty years ago), deny that that's the case. Gasland focuses on the firsthand experiences of several U.S. households who allowed natural gas companies to perform fracking on their properties; these households have all experienced severe contamination of their groundwater and indifference from state regulators. The U.S. is home to one of the largest suspected natural gas reserves in the world, making its extraction a highly profitable pursuit.

As I wrote in September, Gasland is a compelling film, and becomes the more so when I see behavior like that of the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection does not come off with the most credible image in the film, to put it mildly, and it's hard not to see the action by the state's Office of Homeland Security (admittedly, "reported" but not officially confirmed as far as I know) as a kind of indirect retribution for Ruffalo's support for the film.

Transit fantasy

In an otherwise encouraging story about light-rail expansion in Los Angeles, Robert B. Cervero, director of the University of California Transportation Center in Berkeley, is quoted from his email:

The science of public transit is not too complicated. It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.

I'm pretty sure Cervero knows better. I certainly do, having been a dedicated transit rider for decades.

Choosing transit over the car is a multifactor decision. Speed is one factor, certainly, but so is cost, convenience (a trip to the bulk-discount store isn't going to happen on a bus), and what might be termed quality of experience (people for whom transit is genuinely a choice aren't going to tolerate the smell of dried urine, overcrowded vehicles, erratic driving, too-frequent stops, etc.).

So if all you're doing is heading to and from work, and it doesn't cost more than the amount you think you spend on gas (people never account for maintenance, insurance, and depreciation when calculating the cost of driving), and you don't need to carry heavy or bulky accoutrements, transit might appeal to you, especially if all-day parking is scarce.

That's a lot of caveats, isn't it? Trust me, even the most dedicated riders weigh these hidden costs.

Positing that ridership depends only on a single aspect of the ride invites unrealistic expectations of how much the system can reduce congestion. Riding transit is a habit it takes time to acquire, and it requires a culture that supports transit as an option even among people who don't regularly use it. Blithe, airy pronouncements like Cervero's just reduce the credibility of transit advocates.

North Korea

This quotation, from an article about South Korea's military posture in the wake of North Korea's recent attack, sums up the two Koreas' position nicely:

“North Korea has nothing to lose, while we have everything to lose,” said Kang Won-taek, a professor of politics at Seoul National University. “[South Korean president] Lee Myung-bak has no choice but to soften his tone to keep this country peaceful. It is not an appealing choice, but it is the only realistic choice.”

South Korea, with one of the world's stronger economies, does have a hell of a lot more to lose. So does China, which faces the ugly possibility of thousands of impoverished, hungry North Koreans fleeing across its border in the event of a crisis.

This reminds me of the gag in Blazing Saddles in which Bart fends off the angry townsfolk by holding a gun to his own head and snarling, "Hold it! Next man makes a move, the n***er gets it!"

North Korea's leadership, by unbelievable skill or equally unbelievable luck, has acquired unparalleled leverage over the rest of the world. It has created a population that, though underfed and increasingly aware of how badly its living standard lags behind its neighbors', is nevertheless just docile enough to remain controllable by the military. That population is the leadership's best strategic weapon, and the leadership skillfully wields the threat of unleashing that weapon to keep China, South Korea, Japan, and the United States all dancing to its tune.

The Browser has a North Korea topic area that predates the current crisis. I found the tourist's POV piece interesting and a history of North Korea's dabbling in a looser monetary policy fascinating.