Democrats Urge Obama to Protect Contraceptive Coverage in Health Plans
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: November 19, 2011
WASHINGTON — A dispute has erupted between President Obama and Democrats in Congress over a proposal to broaden the exemption from new rules that require health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women free of charge.
The National Academy of Sciences recommended that the government adopt such a requirement. And Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, announced in August that she had done so.
But after protests by Roman Catholic bishops, charities, schools and universities, the White House is considering a change that would grant a broad exemption to health plans sponsored by employers who object to such coverage for moral and religious reasons.
Churches may already qualify for an exemption. The proposal being weighed by the White House would expand the exemption to many universities, hospitals, clinics and other entities associated with religious organizations.
The prospect of such a change has infuriated many Democrats in Congress, who fought hard to secure coverage of birth control under the new health care law. Senators voiced their objections on Thursday in a telephone conference call with Pete Rouse, counselor to the president. House members registered their objections on Friday in a call with Valerie Jarrett, another member of the president’s inner circle.
House members have sent a letter to Mr. Obama urging him not to widen the exemption. Such a change, they said, would keep contraception out of reach for millions of women.
Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said the broad exemption was “an outrageous idea.”
“Millions of women work for colleges, hospitals and health care systems that are nominally religious, but these folks use birth control and need coverage,” said Ms. DeGette, a leader of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus.
The 2010 health care law says insurers must cover “preventive health services” and cannot charge for them. On Aug. 1, Ms. Sebelius issued rules that require health plans to cover contraceptive drugs and devices and sterilization procedures, among other services.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said: “There is not a scintilla of legislative direction in the statute that requires the broadened exemption the administration is contemplating. This change would be a reversal of the progress made in favor of reproductive rights when President Obama took office.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said: “It just doesn’t make sense to take this benefit away from millions of women. Americans of all religious faiths overwhelmingly support broad access to birth control.”
The rules already include an exemption for certain “religious employers,” but the exemption is so narrow that some church groups say it is almost meaningless. A religious employer cannot qualify for the exemption if it employs or serves large numbers of people of a different faith, as many Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies do.
When the administration announced the requirement for contraceptive coverage, it said the decision was “based on science.” The resulting uproar has forced Mr. Obama to weigh competing claims of Catholic leaders and advocates for women’s rights, including some of his strongest supporters.
The insurance mandate came up when Mr. Obama met this month at the White House with Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Archbishop Dolan said Mr. Obama was “very open to the sensitivities of the Catholic community.”
A Senate Democrat who participated in the phone call with the White House said: “This is a pro-choice president. It’s a surprise that we are even having this debate with the administration.”
Several lawmakers said administration officials had left them with the impression that the president was leaning toward a broader exemption.
But the White House said Mr. Obama had not made a final decision and would listen to all points of view at a meeting of administration officials soon after he returns on Sunday from his trip to Asia. In the past month, leaders of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other family planning advocates have met with Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, and other White House officials to oppose any broader exemption.
The issue resonates at the local level, as Catholic priests around the country have urged parishioners to tell federal officials why they object to the new mandate.
In a letter to the administration, the bishops’ conference said the requirement for coverage of contraceptives and sterilization was “an unprecedented attack on religious liberty.”
Under the government’s narrow criteria, the bishops said, “even the ministry of Jesus and the early Christian Church would not qualify as ‘religious,’ because they did not confine their ministry to their co-religionists.” Moreover, the bishops said, “the exemption is directly at odds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which Jesus teaches concern and assistance for those in need, regardless of faith differences.”
In comments filed with the Obama administration, some Catholic groups said the exemption for religious employers should be broadened to include any nonprofit tax-exempt organization that is controlled by or associated with a church or religious order.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said the exemption, as now written, “falls far short of securing the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment.”
Our topic for today is: Where do the Republican candidates for president get their money?
Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Gail Collins
The personal finances of the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls are important for two reasons. One is that we’re talking about people who aspire to the most prestigious and important job the nation has to offer. The other is that these folks seem to have done really, really well. Perhaps, they can offer career tips.
Remember when Newt Gingrich claimed that the mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 for his advice “as a historian?” Thousands of young history majors who were resigned to a future in which they would pad out their $2,000-a-semester salaries as part-time adjunct lecturers with fulfilling careers in bartending suddenly were engulfed with new hope.
Unfortunately, it turned out that Newt’s income actually comes from running think tanks that help promote the corporate clients’ goals in the public sector. That may be a little harder for the youth of America to put their heads around. But, kids, if anybody asks you what you want to be when you grow up, say: policy guru.
Gingrich wants everyone to understand that he does not lobby. Really, whatever the exact legal definition of lobbying is, that is something he did not do. The Gingrich Group got what turns out to be about $1.6 million to not-lobby for Freddie Mac, one of a long, long list of clients. Let’s all pause to recall the high dudgeon with which Gingrich announced, during one of the debates, that Representative Barney Frank ought to be put in jail for being “close to” Freddie Mac lobbyists. What kind of politician demands that an elected official be incarcerated for hanging out with the same people who are paying said politician $1.6 million or so to not-lobby?
This is an unusually delusional presidential field. Mitt Romney’s greatest political asset is that he doesn’t seem to actually believe it when he says he’s been consistent on matters like health care reform or abortion. Thank God there’s at least one guy on the stage who knows he’s fibbing.
Romney is the richest person running for president, worth somewhere between $190 million and $250 million. Most of that came from his work at Bain Capital, a firm that bought up troubled companies and gave them makeovers. Although many people lost their jobs when Bain Capital reeled in their employers, Romney’s work did create a lot of new value. Which, on occasion, Bain Capital walked away with, leaving the remnants of the company flopping helplessly on the beach.
In 2010, Mitt earned somewhere between $9.6 million and $43.2 million, according to The National Journal’s calculation of his financial reports. I believe I speak for us all when I say that there seems to be a lot of room in the middle of that estimate, but you get the idea. Much of that came from investments, but Romney also gets quite a bit of cash for making speeches. He once made $68,000 for one appearance before the International Franchise Association in Las Vegas.
People, if you were raking in more than $9.6 million a year, would you waste your time talking to the International Franchise Association? Perhaps you would if international franchises were especially close to your heart. But, in that case, why charge them $68,000? There are a lot of mysteries in the Mitt saga. For instance, if you were a very wealthy father of five energetic young boys, would you choose to spend your vacation driving the whole family to Canada with the dog strapped to the roof of the car? Wouldn’t it be more fun to take a plane to Disneyland?
Some of the Republican candidates seem to have no visible means of support whatsoever — like Rick Santorum, who has seven kids. You would hate to think they were going without shoes just so Dad could continue his never-ending quest to break into the 5 percent range in the polls.
But, good news! Santorum made at least $970,000 in 2010, in all those mysterious ways unsuccessful Republican candidates for president seem to have of making money. Part of it came from being a commentator for Fox News, and part of it came from Santorum’s work at — yes! — a think tank.
Rick Perry does not have a vast fortune, although he is blessed with friends who fly him around on private jets, take him on cool vacations and, occasionally, sell him real estate at bargain-basement prices. This week, Perry laced into Barack Obama as a man who could not possibly understand what ordinary Americans were going through because he “grew up in a privileged way.” This is a strange way to describe the president’s upbringing — particularly when Romney, the guy Perry is actually supposed to be running against, was the son of the head of American Motors. Maybe he got the two mixed up.
All I can tell you is this. Rick Perry will never be paid by a tank to think.
Knuckleheads and Worse, Bringing Guns in Carry-ons
By JOE SHARKEY
Published: November 14, 2011
EVERY day, screening officers find four to five guns in carry-on bags at American airports, according to John S. Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration.
Now, considering that about 1.7 million travelers pass through security checkpoints each day at the nation’s 450 commercial airports, that may not sound like a lot — until you think about how many guns it would take to set off a nasty scene on an airplane.
And the number of guns found seems to be increasing. In August 2010, for example, the T.S.A.’s blog said that, on average, “our officers find about two guns a day at checkpoints.”
Two other things seem to be at work here, and neither involves terrorism. The first I’ll call the knucklehead factor. A majority of passengers found with firearms in their carry-ons explain sheepishly that they simply forgot they had them in their bags. This seems plausible since many states have been steadily relaxing laws regulating the possession and carrying of firearms.
The other factor is more serious. A small percentage of firearms detected at checkpoints have been “artfully concealed,” as the T.S.A. puts it. That is, the traveler made an obvious attempt to hide the guns as they passed through metal detectors or as screeners inspected bags. The agency won’t speculate on this, but I’m guessing that certain misguided people are determined to have their weapons with them, even if it means risking arrest.
On its blog, the T.S.A. notes that finding prohibited items like guns on people “does not mean they had bad intentions.” That, it says, is “for the law-enforcement officer to decide.” And I should note an exception to all this. Travelers can carry guns — but only unloaded and in checked bags — after they have notified the airline.
In recent testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Mr. Pistole described one example in which guns were found. On Oct. 20, a passenger tried to board a plane at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport with three carry-on bags that concealed two pistols, two ammunition magazines, eight knives and a handsaw.
“Artfully concealed” doesn’t seem to require either art or skill. In this instance, the man was immediately arrested on state weapons charges.
“If a gun is detected in a carry-on bag, T.S.A. contacts local law enforcement,” said Kristin Lee, a spokeswoman for the agency. “Violations can result in state and local criminal prosecution, as well as civil penalties up to $2,000 per violation.” As of last week, “there have been 689 gun-related arrests” at checkpoints this year, she said.
A lot of these guns are loaded. According to the T.S.A., 24 loaded firearms were found in carry-on bags from Nov. 4 to Nov. 9.
This particular firearms issue, to me, reflects a culture in which laws covering the possession of guns are becoming increasingly looser. Lots of Americans carry guns. While I haven’t carried a firearm since I was required to in Vietnam, I happen to live in southern Arizona, where the Wild West is not that distant a memory.
In about an hour, for example, I can drive to Tombstone, site of the fabled gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But during that drive across the desert, I can also reflect on the fact that one of the events leading to that 1881 shootout was the insistence by Virgil Earp, a marshal, and his brother Wyatt that their antagonists, the Clanton and McLaury brothers, adhere to Tombstone’s ban on carrying firearms in town.
Few of the most ardent firearms advocates would argue that it’s a good idea for a passenger to try to board an airplane with a gun. But I have to wonder, given the white-hot politics of gun control, whether some travelers adequately understand that it is an extremely serious offense to deliberately try to take a gun onto a plane.
And for those who explain that they simply forgot they had it in a bag, I would add that is a serious offense. It goes against a basic gun-safety protocol, that you should always know where your firearm is. If you completely forgot that it was in your gym bag, that’s bad gun safety.
“Most travelers present very little risk of committing acts of terrorism,” Mr. Pistole said in outlining to the Senate committee the agency’s plans to rely more on “intelligence-based risk-assessment.” In the future, security agents will focus less on the “one size fits all” approach at the checkpoints, where they are constantly searching every passenger for various contraband.
I would say that somebody blithely carrying a loaded .45-caliber pistol in a bag to a checkpoint, as the T.S.A. says a man did last week at the airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., creates a real hurdle for any “intelligence-based” initiative.
Caroline Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, agrees.
“We’re just pleased that the T.S.A. is being aggressive about searching for guns,” even though that often increases waits at the checkpoints, she said.
Of the apparent increase in guns, she added: “It could be that people aren’t getting the news that you just don’t bring your gun to the airport. The National Rifle Association in recent years has been trying to expand the number of places that people can take their guns — restaurants and bars, stadiums and other places. So it could be that there is a sense by some gun owners, why not take my gun to the airport? Maybe people just aren’t getting the word that, listen, you simply don’t bring your gun to the airport.”
At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.
“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”
He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.”
Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.”
But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher.
In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.”
In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion.
Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward.
Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”
Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”
The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.
It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.
Mormons desisted in 1995 after Michel, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “discovered that his own mother, father, grandmother and best childhood friend, all from Mannheim, Germany, had been posthumously baptized.”
Michel told the news agency that “I was hurt that my parents, who were killed as Jews in Auschwitz, were being listed as members of the Mormon faith.”
Richard Bushman, a Mormon who is a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said that after “the Jewish dust-up,” Mormons “backed away” from “going to extravagant lengths to collect the names of every last person who ever lived and baptize them — even George Washington.” Now they will do it for Mormons who bring a relative or ancestor’s name into the temple, he said.
Bushman said that “Mormons believe that Christ is the divine son of God who atoned for our sins, but we don’t believe in the Trinity in the sense that there are three in one. We believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct persons.”
Kent Jackson, the associate dean of religion at Brigham Young University, says that while Mormons are Christians, “Mormonism is not part of the Christian family tree.”
It probably won’t comfort skeptical evangelicals and Catholics to know that Mormons think that while other Christians merely “have a portion of the truth, what God revealed to Joseph Smith is the fullness of the truth,” as Jackson says. “We have no qualms about saying evangelicals, Catholics and Protestants can go to heaven, including Pastor Jeffress. We just believe that the highest blessings of heaven come” to Mormons.
As for those planets that devout Mormon couples might get after death, Jackson says that’s a canard. But Bushman says it’s part of “Mormon lore,” and that it’s based on the belief that if humans can become like God, and God has the whole universe, then maybe Mormons will get to run a bit of that universe.
As for the special garment that Mitt wears, “we wouldn’t say ‘magic underwear,’ ” Bushman explains.
It is meant to denote “moral protection,” a sign that they are “a consecrated people like the priests of ancient Israel.”
And it’s not only a one-piece any more. “There’s a two-piece now,” he said.
Republicans are the ones who have made faith part of the presidential test. Now we’ll see if Mitt can pass it.
In person, in prison and in the media, the woman convicted by an Italian court of murder — and now exonerated — was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior.
Amanda Knox cries following the verdict that overturns her conviction and acquits her of murdering her British roommate Meredith Kercher, at the Perugia court, in Italy Oct. 3. (Lapresse / AP Photo)
By Nina Burleigh
October 4, 2011
Amanda Knox is nothing if not a good story. The pretty young American who headed to Italy for her junior year abroad, fell for an Italian boy and then landed in the dock with him, accused, convicted and then exonerated on charges of murdering another young woman in a sex game gone wild.
Knox was never one of the usual suspects. Her roommate, Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student, was found on the night after Halloween 2007, raped, with her throat slit, in the Perugia apartment they shared. According to the European Council, 1 in 5 European females are victims of a sexual assault at some point in their lives. Ninety-eight percent of their aggressors are male.
When I went to Perugia in 2009, as Knox's testimony began, to research a book on the case, I didn't know whether she was guilty as charged, but I was certainly willing to believe it. Either way, it was a textbook example of our never-ending fascination with the supposed femme fatale. Men may batter wives and girlfriends daily, sometimes to death, but their perp walks rarely make it onto Nancy Grace's show, let alone through a second cycle of the local news. "Foxy Knoxy" (as she called herself on her MySpace page), on the other hand, has been a continual headline grabber from the moment of her arrest.
After a few weeks in Perugia, I saw that there was something very wrong with the narrative of the murder that the authorities and the media were presenting. There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case. It became clear that it wasn't facts but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case.
In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior. A prison "doctor" (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox's blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she'd had sex with. Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it. Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was mistaken and she didn't have AIDS.
Outside prison walls, Italian criminologists were opining in the media and eventually on the witness stand that because the body had been covered with a blanket, the killer was surely female because such an act was evidence of feminine "pieta."
Finally, there were the prosecution's operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a "luciferina" — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity. She was "dirty on the inside." Always, even from the defense lawyers, the closing arguments ended with appeals to God, in a medieval courtroom with a peeling fresco of the Madonna on the wall and a crucifix hanging above the judge.
The prosecution's "angel-faced killer" had arrived in Italy a few months after turning 20, a high school ugly duckling who blossomed into a beauty in college and was still testing her effect on men. She appeared outwardly confident, but, according to people I interviewed, she was deeply averse to conflict. She was also a compulsive diarist, explaining herself in rounded handwriting filling hundreds of journals. She thought of herself as a writer.
But that penchant for unfiltered self-expression hastened her demise.
In her "prison diary," a document police handed to reporters after she'd scribbled in it for a month, Knox was often upbeat, blithe, clearly a devotee of positive thinking. The reporters who read the diary explained it as evidence of a psychopathic mind. Tabloid reporters from Britain concentrated on the few instances where she appeared to have sex on her mind — when she wrote about the fan letters Italian men sent her in jail, for example. They ignored pages she filled with details about being sexually harassed by a prison guard.
In Perugia, reporters found people to talk about how the young American had attracted sexual desire and attention from men — willfully and not. She may have been doing only what liberated, self-absorbed young American girls do — having fun. But that liberation and fun — breaking into solo singing in a restaurant, doing yoga stretches and cartwheels in a police station — were read differently by Perugia authorities and more reticent peers, like the victim's British girlfriends. To the Italian authorities, her careless seductiveness juxtaposed with the ghastly scene inside her house were clues to the witch, the deliberate player of men: Their theory was that she was not only a murderer but a murderous mastermind.
Knox was put through an extreme version of the test many young women face. She was endowed with compelling, mysterious powers. The focus on her sexuality suggests that civilization can easily tip backward to the primeval era when the feminine was classified, worshiped and feared in the form of powerful archetypes: Madonnas and Dianas, virgins and whores. Knox inadvertently fed these archetypes by the ways she behaved in public and advertised herself on the Web and, eventually, in her own compulsive writings.
In the end, however, it was precisely because she wasn't that monster, because she hadn't perfected that persona in the world, that she could do so little to defend herself. Knox had barely defined herself; she didn't possess the language or the maturity to match, let along overcome, the authority of other people's notions.
In Perugia's archaeology museum, there are hundreds of ancient Etruscan funerary urns. For some reason, perhaps having to do with women dying in childbirth, many of them feature a carved relief depicting the Iphigenia fable. Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon, who agreed to sacrifice her so that his ships might sail to Troy. At the last moment, the goddess Diana replaced the girl with a deer. In prison, Knox's jail mates nicknamed her Bambi, apparently because of her passivity in the face of accusations.
The young woman who first went to jail at age 20 was a cipher onto whose photogenic, smiling face some Italians could see the archetypal Madonna-whore and, in whose pale eyes, others saw a psychopath. She was arrested at a time and in a place where young sexually active women are endowed in the minds of grown men, and maybe women too, with propensities for fantastic adult kink that few possess. The gaunt, tense woman defending herself on appeal bore barely any resemblance to the fresh, pretty girl photographed kissing her boyfriend outside the murder scene. Only now, having lost the power to bewitch and beguile, has she been revealed as human — and also, apparently, not guilty of murder.
Nina Burleigh's book on the Knox case, "The Fatal Gift of Beauty," was published in August.
Stuart Wilber, a gay Seattle man, started an online petition when he learned about Charity Giveback Group.
A handful of advocates, armed with nothing more than their keyboards, have put many of the country’s largest retailers, including Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and Wal-Mart, on the spot over their indirect and, until recently, unnoticed roles in funneling money to Christian groups that are vocal in opposing homosexuality.
The advocates are demanding that the retailers end their association with an Internet marketer that gets a commission from the retailers for each online customer it gives them. It is a routine arrangement on hundreds of e-commerce sites, but with a twist here: a share of the commission that retailers pay is donated to a Christian charity of the buyer’s choice, from a list that includes prominent conservative evangelical groups like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.
The marketer and the Christian groups are fighting back, saying that the hundred or so companies that have dropped the marketer were misled and that the charities are being slandered for their religious beliefs.
The national battle was ignited in July by Stuart Wilber, a 73-year-old gay man in Seattle. He was astonished, he said, when he learned that people who bought Microsoft products through a Christian-oriented Internet marketer known as Charity Giveback Group, or CGBG, could channel a donation to evangelical organizations that call homosexual behavior a threat to the moral and social fabric.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, Microsoft,’ ” he recalled, noting that the software giant — like many other corporations accessible through the commerce site, including Apple and Netflix — was known as friendly to gay causes.
In July, Mr. Wilber went to a Web site that helps groups and individuals circulate petitions, called Change.org, and started one, asking Microsoft to end its association with what he called “hate groups.” By that night, 520 people had signed, with their ire copied to Microsoft officials — and Microsoft had quietly dropped out of the donation plan. Much to Mr. Wilber’s surprise, this would be the start of an electronic conflict that has put hundreds of well-known companies in an unwelcome glare.
On one side are angry gay-rights advocates and bloggers, wielding the club of the gay community’s purchasing power.
On the other side are conservative Christian groups that say they are being attacked for their legitimate biblical views of sex and marriage, as well as a Web marketing firm that feels trampled for providing consumers with free choice.
Caught in the middle are companies, including such giants as Macy’s, Expedia and Delta Air Lines, which have the dual aims of avoiding politics but not offending any consumers. In this case, they have been pressured to make a choice that may involve little money either way but that could offend large blocs of consumers.
“This is economic terrorism,” said Mike Huckabee, the former pastor, governor and presidential contender, who is a paid CGBG consultant. “To try to destroy a business because you don’t like some of the customers is, to me, unbelievably un-American,” he said in an interview.
CGBG, a for-profit company formerly called the Christian Values Network, resembles hundreds of so-called affiliate marketers, which retailers use to bring customers to their own Web sites. The affiliate receives a commission on any sales, and CGBG allows buyers to send half that commission to any of the Christian charities on its list.
In July, as word of Mr. Wilber’s victory spread virally, Ben Crowther, a college student in Bellingham, Wash., started a similar Internet appeal to Apple, which would soon succeed after drawing 22,700 signers. Roy Steele, who runs a gay-rights Web site in San Francisco, picked up the crusade, directly contacting about 150 companies listed on the e-commerce site.
AllOut.org, a gay-rights group in New York with hundreds of thousands of e-mail-ready members, focused on the travel industry, helping to push Avis, Westin Hotels & Resorts, Expedia and many other hotels and travel agencies to disassociate themselves from CGBG.
Close to 100 companies have left the charity arrangement, though most refuse to discuss the matter. These have become the objects, in turn, of a countercampaign from the Christian groups — “Please Don’t Discriminate Against My Faith” is the heading of a sample letter — and of high-level entreaties from Mr. Huckabee and other Christian leaders.
A few companies that briefly left the network have been persuaded to rejoin, including Delta, PetSmart, Sam’s Club, Target and Wal-Mart.
“People have been misled. The retailers are not donating to anyone; they are simply paying a commission to get traffic,” John Higgins, the president of CGBG, said in an interview.
He said CGBG focused on Christian consumers and marketing through large organizations like Focus on the Family because it saw an untapped commercial opportunity.
“Retailers should keep their doors open to everybody,” Mr. Higgins said. He also complained that some competing e-commerce sites included the same conservative groups on charity lists but had not been subjected to similar attacks.
Beyond condemning the advocates’ efforts as an infringement on consumer freedom, Mr. Huckabee said it was offensive to apply the “hate group” label to organizations that are legal, peaceful and promote biblical values.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the Family Research Council a hate group for “regularly pumping out known falsehoods that demonize the gay community,” said Mark Potok, a project director at the law center — and not, he said, because the council calls homosexuality a sin or opposes gay marriage. The falsehoods, he said, include the discredited claim that gay men are especially prone to pedophilia.
The Family Research Council has accused the law center of “slanderous attacks.”
Advocates insist that their push is not anti-Christian. “It has nothing to do with biblical positions,” said Mr. Steele, the blogger. “It has to do with the fact that these groups spread lies and misinformation about millions of Americans.”
The discomfort of retailers has been evident in their varied responses. Expedia, in an e-mail to AllOut.org in August, confirmed that it had withdrawn from the network. “Expedia values diversity in its employee base and customer base and does not support discrimination of any kind based on sexual orientation,” the message said.
Barneys New York said it had left CGBG because of the site’s support for groups that promote discrimination.
But Microsoft, though it led the way with its swift response, has never said a public word about it, nor has Apple been willing to do more than confirm that it no longer is associated with CGBG.
This summer, Macy’s told Change.org that it had left the network because “Macy’s serves a diverse society” and is “deeply committed to a philosophy of inclusion,” but the retailer declined to comment for this article.
In a statement explaining why it had returned to the network, Wal-Mart and its sister company Sam’s Club said their marketing affiliates included “more than 43,000 diverse organizations” that “serve a wide range of interests with diverse viewpoints.”
Delta changed course “because of the letters we received from several faith-based leaders,” including Mr. Huckabee, said Chris Kelly Singley, manager of corporate communications. “This was important to them, and we were willing to reconsider,” she said, adding that Delta had a history of supporting gay and lesbian causes.
“We don’t want to engage in a political debate,” Ms. Singley said. “And we just thought we were flying airplanes.”
The performer, who’s set to play a big date at Staples Center this weekend, doesn’t have terribly kind words for the MTV reality hit. “They're all morons and gangsters,” Bennett said of the Situation & Co. “It’s terrible.”
In an interview with Show Tracker promoting his new "Duets II" album, the singer said he had, on principle, not watched the series. But he was sufficiently familiar with it from clips and secondhand reports to find it offensive.
"Jersey Shore" drew controversy when it first came on the air two years ago, particularly for its use of a potentially offensive word for Italian Americans. But as the show has become more established, there's been less noise about it.
Making his comments more notable: Bennett is a staple on MTV (he recently was seen on the MTV Video Music Awards next to Lady Gaga) and in fact owes much of his late-career renaissance to appearances on the cable network beginning in the early 1990s.
Bennett, who is of Italian ancestry, said that he found shows like "Jersey Shore," "The Sopranos" and even 'The Godfather" evidence of a double standard when it came to Italian Americans.
“If you depicted Jews in a stereotypical way, there would be parades in the street, and rightly so,” he said. “Same thing with Chinese people and Poles. So why aren't there any here?
We really wanted to move things to a higher plane. But they keep having these debates.
After all, it did appear at moments this week that life might still be fantastic, mind-expanding and shot through with wonder. First, 50 new planets outside our solar system were found, one of them orbiting not one but two suns. Then, a report of subatomic particles shattering the speed of light. The world in a grain of sand. Infinity in the palms of our hands! Wow. What wasn’t possible?
Plus, isn’t the new iPhone coming out?
NASA/NASA, via Getty ImagesAn illustration of the planet Kepler 16b orbiting two stars.
Back on terra firma, though, things were less awesome and more confounding. Here, humans still roamed the earth, with predictable results, and could be observed saying things like “we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past” to large audiences, who would then applaud.
That statement was not uttered by a mischievous astrophysicist but by Rick Santorum, a candidate for president, speaking at the most recent Republican debate last night in Orlando. Santorum’s time-twisting formulation was his way of saying that, if he were president, he would reinstate the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gay men and women in the military. The law, of course, was repealed Tuesday, after years of efforts by advocates; discrimination in the armed forces based on sexual orientation would never again be allowed. The march of time could not be reversed. Or could it?
That the past and future could dovetail in some Mobius strip of time was suggested by Santorum in a response to a question from a gay soldier, Stephen Hill, who is serving in Iraq. Hill appeared at the debate to ask his question via the magic of video. Please watch:
Or read.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HILL: In 2010, when I was deployed to Iraq, I had to lie about who I was, because I’m a gay soldier, and I didn’t want to lose my job.
My question is, under one of your presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that’s been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(Booing from audience.)
SANTORUM: Yeah, I — I would say, any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to — to — and removing “don’t ask/don’t tell” I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military’s job is to do one thing, and that is to defend our country.
We need to give the military, which is all-volunteer, the ability to do so in a way that is most efficient at protecting our men and women in uniform.
(APPLAUSE)
And I believe this undermines that ability.
(APPLAUSE)
KELLY: So what — what — what would you do with soldiers like Stephen Hill? I mean, he’s — now he’s out. He’s — you know, you saw his face on camera. When he first submitted this video to us, it was without his face on camera. Now he’s out. So what would you do as president?
SANTORUM: I think it’s it’s — it’s — look, what we’re doing is playing social experimentation with — with our military right now. And that’s tragic.
I would — I would just say that, going forward, we would — we would reinstitute that policy, if Rick Santorum was president, period.
That policy would be reinstituted. And as far as people who are in — in — I would not throw them out, because that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration, but we would move forward in — in conformity with what was happening in the past, which was, sex is not an issue. It is — it should not be an issue. Leave it alone, keep it — keep it to yourself, whether you’re a heterosexual or a homosexual.
(APPLAUSE)
The gay conservative group GOProud quickly demanded an apology from Santorum. “Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform,” the statement said, “and he owes Stephen Hill …an immediate apology. That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done — put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life. It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.”
But that sure wasn’t the end of it.
(Santorum, in a follow up interview today, did thank the soldier, and claimed he did not hear the booing, but alas he could not turn back time. The truth was out there.)
Yes, the boos were for the soldier. And the applause for Santorum’s explanation of why he would repeal the repeal as president. This more or less followed the pattern of the notable audience outbursts at the two previous debates — the “Texas death penalty cheer” and the “Let him die” uninsured whoop.
Jonathan Weisman at The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire was quick to note the pattern, which is certainly being used by opponents of the G.O.P.
Three Republican debates in as many weeks have produced plenty of fodder for voters deciding not just who the Republican presidential nominee should be but ultimately who should sit in the White House.
But a surprising factor has emerged in the impressions being left: the audience. Three times now, an incident with the audience has left some watchers scratching their heads and has touched off plenty of chatter in media and pundit circles. …
Ultimately, voters are making judgments on the candidates, not the crowds that pack the debates. But liberal activists are using the crowd responses to paint the GOP as extremist.
So true. Support for Santorum’s position or for the proclivities of the audiences at the Republican debates was exceedingly hard to find.
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air agrees that, policy aside, moments like this one have repercussions for Republicans beyond the lecterns. They turn into red meat for the Democratic wolves:
When something like that happens, the response of the candidate — and even the subject itself — ceases to be the story and the media picks up on “the bloodthirsty Republican audience” as the story du jour. It happened last time with the death penalty and health insurance questions, and sure enough, when I began flipping through the morning news shows today, those two items were right up near the top of the list of what they were talking about.
Hey, look! Republicans are booing an active duty soldier and cheering for the elimination of unemployment insurance!
You don’t need to be Karl Rove to figure out this might not be a winning visual image.
Andrew Sullivan, who aside from being a blogger and editor of renown is openly gay, did fire off a quick tirade during the debate, but stewed overnight and returned Friday with an extended, angry meditation:
As I went to bed last night, the scattered boos for an American soldier in the field at any debate began to sink in. And Santorum’s despicable lie in response — that repealing DADT somehow means license of gay sexual misconduct in the armed services — was intended to reduce that soldier, his life and work, to Santorum’s obsession: the intrinsic evil of gay sex. Again, this is usual. Gays are used to being reduced to sexual acts rather than being seen as full human beings, like straight people, with sexuality sure, but a whole lot of other things as well.
But somehow the fact that these indignities were heaped on a man risking his life to serve this country, a man ballsy enough to make that video, a man in the uniform of the United States … well, it tells me a couple of things. It tells me that these Republicans don’t actually deep down care for the troops, if that means gay troops. Their constant posturing military patriotism has its limits.
The shocking silence on the stage — the fact that no one challenged this outrage — also tells me that this kind of slur is not regarded as a big deal. …
And then I think of all those gay servicemembers who have died for this country, or been wounded in battle, or been on tours year after year … and the fury builds.
At Politico, Roger Simon imagined how the audience might be called to account for its response: “The crowd, knowing it was several thousand miles away from him, felt courageous enough to boo. It’s a shame that the curtains did not part, revealing the soldier standing on the stage. Did I mention this guy had biceps he could cracked walnuts with? The boo-birds would have whimpered once or twice and then stampeded for the exits.”
Walter Shapiro at The New Republic suggested that Santorum not only went awry, but could also use to brush up on his military history: “…Santorum was unyielding in his demand for heterosexuality in the military. The former Pennsylvania senator did not even thank the solider for his service in a war zone. But Santorum did insist, ‘Any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military.’ Needless to say, that comment displayed a naiveté about the lives of soldiers since the days of Achilles and Hector at the gates of Troy.”
A few others found the “no sex in the military” line to be absurd. At The New Yorker, Amy Davidson wrote:
“Sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military”? That will be a surprise to the men and women, of every orientation, who love, marry, and become parents while serving. We have an all-volunteer military whose health relies on its strong ties to civilian life — not a praetorian guard of eunuchs. Does Santorum think that “the military” is a collection of battle scenes in an action movie? Surely not; his father worked for the Veterans Administration, and so he must know better. He also ought to know that there is no “special privilege” here, just the possibility of serving without the special obligation of lying, and the same knowledge other soldiers have that the person they love most might be able to be handed a folded flag if they die. Or is the word “gay” so strong for Santorum that it blotted out the word “soldier”?
James Joyner at Outside the Beltway followed suit: “Rick Santorum once again proved what a weird human being he is. Aside from the Mike Dukakis-like tone deafness of his response to the question being humanized rather than theoretical, the notion that ‘Any type of sexual activity has no place in the military’ is simply bizarre.”
At Opinion L.A. the Los Angeles Times opinion staff points out the damage this sort of rhetoric does for social conservatives:
That a Republican endorsed “don’t ask, don’t tell” isn’t surprising. But there was something especially crass about Santorum’s reply. His remark that “any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military” completely misses the point and continues his bizarre refocusing of the gay-rights debate on sex.
And he doesn’t know how profoundly insulting it is to gays and lesbians to call requiring the military to afford them basic respect a “social experiment.” (Besides, which is the more dubious social experiment: sexually cleansing our armed forces, or having them reflect society’s inexorable march toward fully accepting gay men and women?)
Worst, watching Santorum and other Republicans stand stoically while a handful of debate-goers shout their disgust with a homosexual soldier leaves the impression that the GOP candidates have more outwardly embraced anti-gay prejudice to win over conservative voters. This kind of behavior makes it difficult to take social conservatives at their word when they insist that their opposition to, say, same-sex marriage is rooted respect for a longstanding institution instead of prejudice.
William Kristol summed up the general G.O.P. sentiment with the headline of The Weekly Standard’s special editorial following the debate: “Yikes.” Kristol does not single out Santorum, but rather channels the despair of the party faithful about the field of candidates:
Reading the reactions of thoughtful commentators after the stage emptied, talking with conservative policy types and GOP political operatives later last evening and this morning, we know we’re not alone. Most won’t express publicly just how horrified — or at least how demoralized — they are. After all, they still want to beat Obama — as do we. And they want to get along with the possible nominee and the other candidates and their supporters. They don’t want to rock the boat too much. But maybe the GOP presidential boat needs rocking.
The e-mails flooding into our inbox during the evening were less guarded. Early on, we received this missive from a bright young conservative: “I’m watching my first GOP debate…and WE SOUND LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE!!!!” As the evening went on, the craziness receded, and the demoralized comments we received stressed the mediocrity of the field rather than its wackiness.
Conservatives reflecting on their own weaknesses? What’s next? Democratic bouts of self-examination? Maybe the earth still is a wondrous place.
If Brian Harrison and W. G. Stover, the two Solyndra executives who took the Fifth Amendment at a Congressional hearing on Friday, ever spend a day in jail, I’ll stand on my head in Times Square.
It’s not going to happen, for one simple reason: neither they, nor anyone else connected with Solyndra, have done anything remotely criminal. The company’s recent bankruptcy — which the Republicans are now rabidly “investigating” because Solyndra had the misfortune to receive a $535 million federally guaranteed loan from the Obama administration — was largely brought on by a stunning collapse in the price of solar panels over the past year or so.
The company’s innovative solar panels, high-priced to begin with, became increasingly uncompetitive in the marketplace. Solyndra didn’t have enough big commercial customers to create the necessary economies of scale. And although Harrison and Stover remained optimistic up to the bitter end — insisting six weeks before the late-August bankruptcy filing that the company was going to be fine — they ultimately failed to raise additional capital that would have allowed Solyndra to stay in business.
The Republicans are trying to make that optimism appear sinister, but if we’ve learned anything from the financial crisis, it is that wishful thinking in the face of a collapsing market is not a crime. Otherwise, Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, would be wearing prison garb.
Harrison and Stover are on the hot seat. Anything they say in their defense — even an off-hand remark — can and will be used against them. Their lawyers would be fools if they didn’t insist that their clients take the Fifth Amendment.
Do the Republicans know this? Of course. Do they care? Of course not. For an hour and a half on Friday morning, they peppered the two men with questions about this “taxpayer ripoff,” as Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, described it, knowing full well that Harrison and Stover would invoke their constitutional right to remain silent. Joe McCarthy would have been proud.
The purpose of the hearing — indeed, the point of manufacturing a Solyndra investigation in the first place — is to embarrass the president. That’s how Washington works in the modern age: the party out of power gins up phony scandals aimed at hurting the party in power.
Undoubtedly, the Solyndra “scandal” will draw a little blood: there are some embarrassing e-mails showing the White House pushing to get the deal done quickly so it could tout Solyndra’s green jobs as part of the stimulus package.
But if we could just stop playing gotcha for a second, we might realize that federal loan programs — especially loans for innovative energy technologies — virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take. Indeed, risk-taking is what these programs are all about. Sometimes, the risks pay off. Other times, they don’t. It’s not a taxpayer ripoff if you don’t bat 1.000; on the contrary, a zero failure rate likely means that the program is too risk-averse. Thus, the real question the Solyndra case poses is this: Are the potential successes significant enough to negate the inevitable failures?
I have a hard time answering “no.” Most electricity today is generated by coal-fired power plants, operated by monopoly, state-regulated utilities. Because they’ve been around so long, and because coal is cheap, these plants have built-in cost advantages that no new technology can overcome without help. The federal guarantees help lower the cost of capital for technologies like solar; they help spur innovation; and they help encourage private investment. These are all worthy goals.
To say “no” is also to cede the solar panel industry to China, which last year alone provided some $30 billon in subsidies for its solar industry. Over all, the American solar industry is a big success story; it now employs more people than either steel or coal, and it’s a net exporter.
But solar panel manufacturing — a potential source of middle-class jobs, and an important reason the White House was so high on Solyndra, which made its panels in Fremont, Calif. — is another story. Not so long ago, China made 6 percent of the world’s solar panels. Now it makes 54 percent, and leads the world in solar panel manufacturing. Needless to say, the U.S. share of the market has shrunk. The only way America can manufacture competitive solar panels is to come up with innovative technologies that the Chinese can’t replicate. Like, for instance, Solyndra’s.
At the hearing on Friday, several of the Republican congressmen boasted that, in passing the continuing resolution to keep the government running the day before, they had succeeded in slashing the program that had made the loan to Solyndra. It’s true: of the $4 billion that remained in the program, $1.5 billion was cut.
But the real winner isn’t the American taxpayer or even the House Republicans. It’s the Chinese solar industry.
Presidential debate: The most entertaining, unexpected, weirdest and awkward moments
September 8, 2011 | 4:38 am
Quick take-aways from last night's Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Presidential Library:
BIGGEST WINNERS: Rick Perry, who did much better than not bomb, and Mitt Romney, who looked presidential again and magnanimous.
BIGGEST LOSER: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who wasn't there, but will learn this morning that he'll be joining the 14 million unemployed if virtually any of these Republicans get to the White House.
BEST PRESIDENTIAL PUT-DOWN: Romney calling the president a nice fella but one who's clueless about economics.
MOST OUTSPOKEN LIBERTARIAN: Ron Paul.
MOST ELOQUENT: Newt Gingrich warning moderators probing for differences among the eight Republicans that any minor distinctions pale in comparison to their unity over defeating Barack Obama.
LOUDEST APPLAUSE: See Most Eloquent.
BIGGEST AIRPLANE EVER HANGING OVER DEBATERS: President Reagan's Air Force One 707.
PINKEST TIE: Rick Santorum.
MOST ENTERTAINING CHRIS MATTHEWS BLOOD PRESSURE RAISER: Perry on this whole global warming hoax.
WARMEST FAMILY MENTION: Michele Bachmann, as message-disciplined as ever on Obama killing jobs, also recalling raising five biological and 23 foster children.
MOST PUZZLING PLAN ABOUT SOMETHING: Herman Cain's 9-9-9.
BEST FINANCIAL TIP IF THE GOP WINS NEXT YEAR: Buy stock in border fence companies.
MOST UNEXPECTED APPLAUSE-GETTER: NBC's Brian Williams asking Perry about Texas executing 234 convicted murderers.
BEST FIVE-WORD ANSWER: Perry asked to explain that applause: "I think Americans understand justice."
CALMEST CHINESE-SPEAKING EX-AMBASSADOR: Jon Huntsman.
MOST AWKWARD MOMENT: Moderator John Harris introducing a gotcha video clip of Romney that wouldn't play. So, the gotcha guy got got.
UNDECLARED CANDIDATE WHOSE ABSENCE WENT LEAST NOTICED: What's-her-name from Alaska.
WEIRDEST SUGGESTED ECONOMY MOVE: Ron Paul's idea to save billions by bringing home air conditioners cooling troop tents in Afghanistan.
BIGGEST UNANSWERED QUESTION: What in the world did Telemundo's Jose Diaz-Balart do to be denied a chair on stage like Williams and Harris had?
NASA/NASA, via Getty ImagesAn illustration of the planet Kepler 16b orbiting two stars.
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