Hang in there, Illinois.

And just like that, after holding out on concealed carry longer than 48 of los Estados Unidos, we're a "shall-issue" state. If I wanted to make a joke, I'd say it makes me mad enough to shoot something, but I don't want to joke about it. I have heard too many Republicans say and too many bumperstickers blare: "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." This seems less troubling than the alternative. I say, the more guns and bullets, the greater the potential for terrible crimes and terrible accidents, whomever is packing heat.

Is it really controversial?

Swearing off the rhetoric of violence.

But while we wait to learn the motivation behind Saturday's shooting, which killed six, including federal Judge John Roll, nine-year old Christine Taylor Green and Gabe Zimmerman, Giffords' community outreach director, is it really controversial to suggest that the overheated anti-government rhetoric of the last two years, with its often violent imagery, ought to be toned down? Really?

Sadly, to my knowledge, no conservative leader has yet called for dialing back the rage on the right in the wake of the Giffords shooting. Sarah Palin sent condolences to Giffords' family, but said nothing about her unconscionable SarahPAC map putting 20 House members, including Giffords, in actual crosshairs for supporting healthcare reform, or her infamous Tweet telling conservatives "don't retreat, reload." Giffords' 2010 Tea Party challenger, Jesse Kelly, hasn't apologized for inviting supporters to "shoot a fully automatic M16" to "get on target for victory" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords from office." Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle hasn't yet recanted her statement about the need to pursue "Second Amendment remedies" if political change lags behind the Tea Party's dreams.

But did it make any sense?

Jay Rosen's The Quest for Innocence and Loss of Reality in Political Journalism.

Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny… That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story.

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways. I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.
It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can.

Somehow the reality that this narrative exists as a binding force within the Tea Party movement is more reportable than the fact that the movement’s binding force is a fake crisis, a delusion shared.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

The result of Saturday afternoon's cloture motion on the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" will probably be a source of bafflement to future generations studying the issue: You mean that in December of 2010, they will marvel, 33 members of the United States Senate were still so adamantly opposed to the idea of gays and lesbians serving openly in the military that they tried to filibuster it?

And this.

Sarah wants to share a milkshake with a Ron Johnson or Scott Walker campaign staff member...

I was supposed to start volunteering at Russ Feingold's office today, but I'm still way too sick and on top of that, I don't want to get any hard-working Democrat sick... maybe I should visit Ron Johnson's campaign HQ instead, where I can sneeze on a staffer. Maybe Scott Walker would even shake my hand...

Elena Kagan.

Linked to on Salon's home page today.

So many problematic statements, so little time. I’ll just rattle off a few glaring errors…

Let’s start with these paragraphs…

We are told that Kagan is a manifestation of Obama’s concern that the common people are not being heard by the Supreme Court. So he appoints a person who attended an exclusive high school, then Princeton, then Oxford, and then Harvard. Just the sort of person who is most likely to be in touch with the struggles and aspirations, the stances and aims of We the People…

Socioeconomic class is only one disconnect between rhetoric and reality when it comes to the Kagan selection. If she is lesbian, as rumor has it, then she is definitely not average. If she is not lesbian, she is very unusual as a 50 year old woman who has never been married. She has no children, which is also unusual for a woman her age…

Each of these traits by itself means little. There are tens of thousands of graduates from prestigious, if overrated, universities. Not every woman is able to have children. Added together, however, they do not depict someone who can relate to “average people” or vice versa. Quite the opposite. When you look at the aggregate effect of 1%


- I don’t pretend to be a populist. I think the people we elect to serve in positions of great power and influence should be smarter and worldlier than “typical Americans.” I look at my neighbors, guests on the Jerry Springer Show, people on the evening news—and I look at myself!—and… no, bad idea. Education isn’t everything (a first-rate degree doesn’t guarantee a fair and discerning mind and a just and good heart) but it’s A Big (and I would venture “essential”) Something when one endeavors to be A Big, Consequential And Decisive Somebody.

- I bristle at the insinuation that a 50-year-old woman would ONLY be childless because she was either unable to bear children or unable to land a mate. “Not every woman is able to have children” ignores, by careless oversimplification, a woman’s agency in deciding whether or not she DESIRES to bear children.

- The whispers about lesbianism bug me also, but not nearly as much as these lines…

Like the construction? Although I understand homosexuality to be deficient on numerous grounds, I wouldn’t oppose Kagan for that reason, if she does privately fall into that category. Five-term Senator David Walsh (D-MA) was one of the best members of the upper legislative chamber during the first half of the 20th century. Apparently, he was also homosexual. Some of my favorite writers are self-identified homosexuals who are undeniably talented and insightful (e.g., Gore Vidal, Andrea Dworkin, Amy Ray, Emily Saliers, Justin Raimondo).

“These people were homosexuals BUT they had some redeeming qualities. See? Look at me. Listen to me! I’m no homophobe!”

I’m no fan of Elena Kagan. I oppose her nomination on the grounds that her scant, deliberately inoffensive record offends me with its lack of judicial conviction and courage.

Yep, pretty much.

I need to do an honest-to-goodness, quality, thought-provoking article link post soon, but I can't resist this one...

Eight-term congressman Mark Souder will resign over a romantic affair with a staffer... Souder is, of course, an evangelical Christian who is deeply opposed to allowing gay people to have legally recognized spouses to cheat on.

People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed.

I spent all day yesterday in painful heels and a very sharp suit. The career fair would have been much more promising if I had majored in something sensible like, oh, economics, engineering, accounting, computer science, math, science-science… the few advertising and marketing positions available were flooded with applications.

Most of the day, I caught up with Saad and Marquis.

Last night, I rejoined my history seminar classmates for a debate on the use of unmanned drone strikes in Pakistan. It’s such a tricky subject. The way I see it
- Lack of oversight of the Predator drone program in the US makes me nervous.
- Lack of public debate over the Predator drone program in the US makes me nervous, since it represents a “radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force” (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker).
- Potential to destabilize the unpopular Zardari regime inside a politically fragmented, nuclear-armed country on the border with another nuclear-armed enemy country (India).
- Potential
- Drones destroy human intelligence on the ground.
- Some drone strike targets dictated by Pakistani government, whose interests (political and otherwise) are not always in line with our own.
- Predator drone strikes are a FRIGHTENINGLY sustainable way for the US to continue conflicts (low cost in terms of American blood, low oversight/accountability, low visibility to US population) around the world. I read somewhere that “drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on endless war” and—yes. That scares me. When war has a sufficiently high, sufficiently visible cost, we pick our battles more carefully.

Gibetsky.

1) Courtney and I spent four or five hours at the Rathskeller debating American foreign policy, our national security interests and—most depressingly—the sorry state of the public sphere in the United States. We were under the influence of much too much sugar, caffeine and nicotine, and it was great. But now it’s five hours later and I still need to write this paper.

2) My dismaying rant basically went like this... extended over several hours and backed with (much, much) more evidence and more vitriol:

American global strategy changes
When civilian leadership changes
And civilian leadership changes
When the voting public feels SOME WAY about SOMETHING
AND THAT MATTERS!
It matters if Iraq barely registers when a man casts his only vote out of an overblown aversion to gay marriage
And it matters if his neighbor votes with an eye to rehabilitating our image abroad.
IT MATTERS. A LOT.
IT MATTERS WHAT WE ELECT PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT—whether that’s restricting abortion or remaking Afghanistan!
It matters to troops when their home communities act and think like they’re not at war and it matters to policymakers whether or not the American people demand accountability or write a blank check for endless wars.
And it matters how we discuss foreign policy as a people—how often and how honestly!

IF we are not dying and killing and being bombed out of our homes, IF the electricity cooperates and the water runs clear and cool and drinkable, IF we know we will not pay the billions sunk in faraway wars, IF our interests stop at the end of our driveways or the limits of our school districts as long as our children are K-12, IF our compassion is critically limited by incuriosity, indifference and inattention, IF we have never met an Iraqi or wondered about him, we have denied him a share in our common humanity by not striving to understand and relate, IF we can’t locate Afghanistan on a map, IF the procession of distractions is endless, IF Nicole Richie has a new haircut—why should we care who kills and dies in our names on the other side of the world?

Sometimes I really hate us, honestly.



3) Honestly, sometimes I still date checks “2007.” This may have happened to me today.

4) Did you know if you type “honestly” with your fingers just slightly misplaced on the keyboard, you get “gibestky”? I like it.

Evil.

How should the United States military think about counterinsurgency operations as it moves forward in Afghanistan and the wider GWOT [Global War on Terror]?

Professor Suri! I can’t wrap my head around the immensity of this subject! I want to devote weeks and months and years to digging into it. The answers (if there are any) are always shifting, always evolving. My bedroom is littered with scraps of paper where I’ve recorded miscellaneous thoughts. I have twenty-six journal articles open in Adobe Acrobat, which makes my poor overloaded laptop decidedly unhappy. I have forty books scattered around me, some in my bed and—let me tell you—it was not comfortable trying to sleep on that many books. One or two - no big deal. I rolled over on three or four books as I tried to sleep last night.

I could talk about this subject for hours. But I can’t write about it. Just the act of writing something down assumes a degree of certainty, and the more I read, the more I discuss this, the more I know I don’t know and the more I’m tempted to keep reading and learning more forever. My big problem with academic essays (especially this one) is that I never know when to stop researching, pull my nose out of my books, press ‘pause’ on great discussions, and say, “Okay, I don’t/can’t know everything, but I know enough to write this paper!”


I am all about learning and digging. I'm all about that part of the process. I'm not sure I can produce any kind of polished, finished document on this subject that I won't want to tear to pieces immediately for its ignorance and shallowness and necessary incompleteness!

Party pooper, I said.

I know quiet hours start at midnight, but that doesn't mean that you need to get drunk right underneath my window and blast god-awful rap music and scream drunkenly for three hours (with no end in sight) right now. Some of us actually have exams tomorrow morning. Early tomorrow morning. Exams we have not had time to study for or even think about because of other claims on our time. I am reading about Kang Youwei and trying to remember why I care about Kang Youwei, and this passage leaps out at me for some reason: "The Empress Dowager ended the 100 Days reforms and ordered Kang executed through death by a thousand cuts." The thought of ordering death by a thousand cuts holds strange appeal at the moment. I can't explain it.