Dave's Verse

Conor Friedersdorf has a good post up about the coverage of the incident in Boston and how some conservatives are already reacting to what they think the media will do. Here's a point I want to add to: There are times when journalists bungle this sort of coverage in ways that are unfair to the right and times when they handle things in ways that are unfair to Muslims. But as a general matter, tolerance is urged when the perpetrator is Muslim, and not when the perpetrator is a white right-winger, not because journalists only value tolerance in one situation, but because when guys like Tim McVeigh perpetrate terrorism, there's never an irrational backlash against white men. That racial and ethnic tolerance will prevail goes without saying. He's completely correct. And I think people have this reaction in part because it's a numbers game. Sure, there are some people who are just going to be outright racist regardless of what the facts say. But other well meaning peopl...

If you haven't heard about it, Accidental Racist is a song put out by LL Cool J and Brad Paisley. I haven't listened to the song because I despise country music and rap isn't really my thing. But I've read some of the lyrics and it's about as dumb as the title would suggest. Yeah, their hearts seem to be in the right place. But jeez are they ignorant of history. And being ignorant isn't really an excuse when you take on a subject like racism, nor does it make anything an accident. Apparently, in explaining himself, Paisley invoked the whole souther heritage excuse as a reason for liking the rebel flag and whatever other stuff he talks about in the song. Lawyers, Guns, and Money has a post up pointing out how you can celebrate southern heritage without doing things Paisley does, like wearing a rebel flag: Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King’s birthday, to celebrate ...

This happened last week I think. But basically North Korea, or really just Kim Jong Un, decided he wanted to stir some shit up and said some stuff about bombing the US or something. I don't really know the details because I don't pay close attention when these things come up. I don't want to completely ignore what could be real consequences that are related to this issue. One of those things is certainly the horrible situation the North Korea people live in. And there are probably some long term, large scale IR issues to be taken seriously (such as the safety of South Koreans). But I wanted to suggest that we shouldn't pay much attention to this type of nonsense. The media loves this stuff. A crazy dictator saying crazy shit is a great way to fill time on cable networks. My suspicion is that it's also a way for Americans to sit back and relish in how awesome we are while laughing at the crazy. But I don't think we should pay much attention to the crazy shit ta...

It's been quite a while since I posted. I've been doing a new internship. Usually I sit around reading politics all day and something comes up that I want to write about. But actually doing things gets me out of that routine. And I think after I do things I just don't want to expand the mental energy needed to keep up my normal blogging output. That, and I go through dry spells where I just don't think I have anything unique to say, or I tweet about it. Anyway, now that I've done my obligatory explanation for my extremely slow (some would say non-existent) blogging lately, I wanted to jump back in with some thoughts about the war on poverty. But I don't want to talk about that war on poverty, the one where we try to help people get out of poverty. I want to talk about the one that rich people and Republicans are waging on the poor, the one in which they want to essentially punish the poor for not being one of them. It's not officially a thing like the g...

Scott Lemieux notices a lot of people reflecting on Iraq and trying to justify their support for the war based on the idea that they had "WMDs". And since they didn't and they feel they were mislead, their support isn't so bad in retrospect. Scott explains why the "WMD" argument is still an insufficient reason to go to war: Let’s say that Hussein turned out to have something that could be called “unconventional weapons.” So what? 1)Such “unconventional weapons” posed no threat whatsoever to American civilians (even the least apologetic liberal hawks aren’t claiming that Hussein had any ties to anti-American terrorist groups or any independent capacity for deploying weapons abroad). And, even more importantly, 2)the whole “WMD” argument was in itself a massive con. WMD is an umbrella term that conflates the genuinely unique threat of nuclear weapons with many more chemical and biological weapons that don’t have any more destructive capacity than weapons th...

A few posts from Kevin Drum made me ask that question. The first one is the story of Rob Portman changing his stance on gay marriage because of his son: That isn’t how I’ve always felt. As a congressman, and more recently as a senator, I opposed marriage for same-sex couples. Then something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way. Two years ago, my son Will, then a college freshman, told my wife, Jane, and me that he is gay. He said he’d known for some time, and that his sexual orientation wasn’t something he chose; it was simply a part of who he is. Jane and I were proud of him for his honesty and courage. We were surprised to learn he is gay but knew he was still the same person he’d always been. The only difference was that now we had a more complete picture of the son we love. That's a nice story. I'm glad Portman and his wife we able to accept their son as he is, and that their son had the courage to come out and inspire this change in ...

This March marks the ten year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Andrew Sullivan is rounding up reflections here and here . They mostly consist of people admitting they were wrong. Like Andrew, I supported the Iraq war. I was a freshman in college at the time. I had just started paying attention to politics after 9/11. I was fairly conservative. So I watched a lot of FoxNews and pretty much acted like a cheerleader in the lead up to the war. What happened over the next few years in Iraq wasn't the sole reason I had a change in perspective. I think being on my own and being exposed to a bunch of different ideas for the first time in my life was the biggest reason. I started thinking about things I had taken for granted most of my life and began to change my views. The tragedy that resulted from the war certainly changed how I viewed war. But the more fundamental transformation occurred upon learning about how the Bush administration manipulated things, abused power, and ac...