Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion
By George Friedman

"This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR"
On Sunday, Israeli naval forces intercepted the ships of a Turkish nongovernmental organization (NGO) delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Israel had demanded that the vessels not go directly to Gaza but instead dock in Israeli ports, where the supplies would be offloaded and delivered to Gaza. The Turkish NGO refused, insisting on going directly to Gaza. Gunfire ensued when Israeli naval personnel boarded one of the vessels, and a significant number of the passengers and crew on the ship were killed or wounded.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon charged that the mission was simply an attempt to provoke the Israelis. That was certainly the case. The mission was designed to demonstrate that the Israelis were unreasonable and brutal. The hope was that Israel would be provoked to extreme action, further alienating Israel from the global community and possibly driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The operation’s planners also hoped this would trigger a political crisis in Israel.
A logical Israeli response would have been avoiding falling into the provocation trap and suffering the political repercussions the Turkish NGO was trying to trigger. Instead, the Israelis decided to make a show of force. The Israelis appear to have reasoned that backing down would demonstrate weakness and encourage further flotillas to Gaza, unraveling the Israeli position vis-à-vis Hamas. In this thinking, a violent interception was a superior strategy to accommodation regardless of political consequences. Thus, the Israelis accepted the bait and were provoked.
The ‘Exodus’ Scenario
In the 1950s, an author named Leon Uris published a book called “Exodus.” Later made into a major motion picture, Exodus told the story of a Zionist provocation against the British. In the wake of World War II, the British — who controlled Palestine, as it was then known — maintained limits on Jewish immigration there. Would-be immigrants captured trying to run the blockade were detained in camps in Cyprus. In the book and movie, Zionists planned a propaganda exercise involving a breakout of Jews — mostly children — from the camp, who would then board a ship renamed the Exodus. When the Royal Navy intercepted the ship, the passengers would mount a hunger strike. The goal was to portray the British as brutes finishing the work of the Nazis. The image of children potentially dying of hunger would force the British to permit the ship to go to Palestine, to reconsider British policy on immigration, and ultimately to decide to abandon Palestine and turn the matter over to the United Nations.
There was in fact a ship called Exodus, but the affair did not play out precisely as portrayed by Uris, who used an amalgam of incidents to display the propaganda war waged by the Jews. Those carrying out this war had two goals. The first was to create sympathy in Britain and throughout the world for Jews who, just a couple of years after German concentration camps, were now being held in British camps. Second, they sought to portray their struggle as being against the British. The British were portrayed as continuing Nazi policies toward the Jews in order to maintain their empire. The Jews were portrayed as anti-imperialists, fighting the British much as the Americans had.
It was a brilliant strategy. By focusing on Jewish victimhood and on the British, the Zionists defined the battle as being against the British, with the Arabs playing the role of people trying to create the second phase of the Holocaust. The British were portrayed as pro-Arab for economic and imperial reasons, indifferent at best to the survivors of the Holocaust. Rather than restraining the Arabs, the British were arming them. The goal was not to vilify the Arabs but to villify the British, and to position the Jews with other nationalist groups whether in India or Egypt rising against the British.
The precise truth or falsehood of this portrayal didn’t particularly matter. For most of the world, the Palestine issue was poorly understood and not a matter of immediate concern. The Zionists intended to shape the perceptions of a global public with limited interest in or understanding of the issues, filling in the blanks with their own narrative. And they succeeded.
The success was rooted in a political reality. Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. And on a matter of only tangential interest, governments tend to follow their publics’ wishes, however they originate. There is little to be gained for governments in resisting public opinion and much to be gained by giving in. By shaping the battlefield of public perception, it is thus possible to get governments to change positions.
In this way, the Zionists’ ability to shape global public perceptions of what was happening in Palestine — to demonize the British and turn the question of Palestine into a Jewish-British issue — shaped the political decisions of a range of governments. It was not the truth or falsehood of the narrative that mattered. What mattered was the ability to identify the victim and victimizer such that global opinion caused both London and governments not directly involved in the issue to adopt political stances advantageous to the Zionists. It is in this context that we need to view the Turkish flotilla.
The Turkish Flotilla to Gaza
The Palestinians have long argued that they are the victims of Israel, an invention of British and American imperialism. Since 1967, they have focused not so much on the existence of the state of Israel (at least in messages geared toward the West) as on the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Since the split between Hamas and Fatah and the Gaza War, the focus has been on the plight of the citizens of Gaza, who have been portrayed as the dispossessed victims of Israeli violence.
The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis. The way this resistance was carried out, from airplane hijackings to stone-throwing children to suicide bombers, interfered with the first part of the campaign, however. The Israelis could point to suicide bombings or the use of children against soldiers as symbols of Palestinian inhumanity. This in turn was used to justify conditions in Gaza. While the Palestinians had made significant inroads in placing Israel on the defensive in global public opinion, they thus consistently gave the Israelis the opportunity to turn the tables. And this is where the flotilla comes in.
The Turkish flotilla aimed to replicate the Exodus story or, more precisely, to define the global image of Israel in the same way the Zionists defined the image that they wanted to project. As with the Zionist portrayal of the situation in 1947, the Gaza situation is far more complicated than as portrayed by the Palestinians. The moral question is also far more ambiguous. But as in 1947, when the Zionist portrayal was not intended to be a scholarly analysis of the situation but a political weapon designed to define perceptions, the Turkish flotilla was not designed to carry out a moral inquest.
Instead, the flotilla was designed to achieve two ends. The first is to divide Israel and Western governments by shifting public opinion against Israel. The second is to create a political crisis inside Israel between those who feel that Israel’s increasing isolation over the Gaza issue is dangerous versus those who think any weakening of resolve is dangerous.
The Geopolitical Fallout for Israel
It is vital that the Israelis succeed in portraying the flotilla as an extremist plot. Whether extremist or not, the plot has generated an image of Israel quite damaging to Israeli political interests. Israel is increasingly isolated internationally, with heavy pressure on its relationship with Europe and the United States.
In all of these countries, politicians are extremely sensitive to public opinion. It is difficult to imagine circumstances under which public opinion will see Israel as the victim. The general response in the Western public is likely to be that the Israelis probably should have allowed the ships to go to Gaza and offload rather than to precipitate bloodshed. Israel’s enemies will fan these flames by arguing that the Israelis prefer bloodshed to reasonable accommodation. And as Western public opinion shifts against Israel, Western political leaders will track with this shift.
The incident also wrecks Israeli relations with Turkey, historically an Israeli ally in the Muslim world with longstanding military cooperation with Israel. The Turkish government undoubtedly has wanted to move away from this relationship, but it faced resistance within the Turkish military and among secularists. The new Israeli action makes a break with Israel easy, and indeed almost necessary for Ankara.
With roughly the population of Houston, Texas, Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation, meaning this event has profound geopolitical implications.
Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation. Israel is not a fundamental interest to other nations. The ability to generate public antipathy to Israel can therefore reshape Israeli relations with countries critical to Israel. For example, a redefinition of U.S.-Israeli relations will have much less effect on the United States than on Israel. The Obama administration, already irritated by the Israelis, might now see a shift in U.S. public opinion that will open the way to a new U.S.-Israeli relationship disadvantageous to Israel.
The Israelis will argue that this is all unfair, as they were provoked. Like the British, they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard? As with a tank battle or an airstrike, this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction.
Internationally, there is little doubt that the incident will generate a firestorm. Certainly, Turkey will break cooperation with Israel. Opinion in Europe will likely harden. And public opinion in the United States — by far the most important in the equation — might shift to a “plague-on-both-your-houses” position.
While the international reaction is predictable, the interesting question is whether this evolution will cause a political crisis in Israel. Those in Israel who feel that international isolation is preferable to accommodation with the Palestinians are in control now. Many in the opposition see Israel’s isolation as a strategic threat. Economically and militarily, they argue, Israel cannot survive in isolation. The current regime will respond that there will be no isolation. The flotilla aimed to generate what the government has said would not happen.
The tougher Israel is, the more the flotilla’s narrative takes hold. As the Zionists knew in 1947 and the Palestinians are learning, controlling public opinion requires subtlety, a selective narrative and cynicism. As they also knew, losing the battle can be catastrophic. It cost Britain the Mandate and allowed Israel to survive. Israel’s enemies are now turning the tables. This maneuver was far more effective than suicide bombings or the Intifada in challenging Israel’s public perception and therefore its geopolitical position (though if the Palestinians return to some of their more distasteful tactics like suicide bombing, the Turkish strategy of portraying Israel as the instigator of violence will be undermined).
Israel is now in uncharted waters. It does not know how to respond. It is not clear that the Palestinians know how to take full advantage of the situation, either. But even so, this places the battle on a new field, far more fluid and uncontrollable than what went before. The next steps will involve calls for sanctions against Israel. The Israeli threats against Iran will be seen in a different context, and Israeli portrayal of Iran will hold less sway over the world.
And this will cause a political crisis in Israel. If this government survives, then Israel is locked into a course that gives it freedom of action but international isolation. If the government falls, then Israel enters a period of domestic uncertainty. In either case, the flotilla achieved its strategic mission. It got Israel to take violent action against it. In doing so, Israel ran into its own fist

Dennis Hopper, 74, Hollywood Rebel, Dies

By EDWARD WYATT NY TIMES
Dennis Hopper, whose portrayals of drug-addled, often deranged misfits in the landmark films “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet” drew on his early out-of-control experiences as part of a new generation of Hollywood rebel, died Saturday at his home in Venice, Calif. He was 74.
The cause was complications from metastasized prostate cancer, according to a statement issued by Alex Hitz, a family friend.
Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include no fewer than six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.
Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series “Crash,” an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. Produced for the Starz cable channel, the show had Mr. Hopper portraying a music producer unhinged by years of drug use.
During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said had been first diagnosed a decade ago.
Mr. Hopper was hospitalized in Los Angeles in January, at which time he also filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, with whom he had a young daughter. Mr. Hopper issued a news release citing “irreconcilable differences” for the filing.
“I wish Victoria the best but only want to spend these difficult days surrounded by my children and close friends,” he said in the release.
Mr. Hopper first won praise in Hollywood as a teenager in 1955 for his portrayal of an epileptic on the NBC series “Medic” and for a small part in the James Dean film “Rebel Without a Cause.”
He confirmed his status as a rising star the next year, as the son of a wealthy rancher played by Rock Hudson in “Giant,” the epic western also starring Elizabeth Taylor and Dean.
Soon he was traveling in social circles with Dean and was linked romantically with Natalie Wood and Joanne Woodward.
But success as a Hollywood star brought with it a growing hubris, and in 1958 Mr. Hopper found himself in a battle of wills with the director Henry Hathaway on the set of “From Hell to Texas.”
The story has several versions; the most common is that his refusal to play a scene in the manner that the director requested resulted in Mr. Hopper’s stubbornly performing more than 80 takes before he finally followed orders.
Upon wrapping the scene, Mr. Hopper later recalled, Mr. Hathaway told him that his career in Hollywood was finished.
He soon left for New York, where he studied with Lee Strasberg for several years, performed on stage and acted in more than 100 episodes of television shows.
It was not until after his marriage in 1961 to Brooke Hayward — who, as the daughter of Leland Hayward, a producer and agent, and Margaret Sullavan, the actress, was part of Hollywood royalty — that Mr. Hopper was regularly offered film roles again.
He wrangled small parts in big studio films like “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965) — directed by his former nemesis Henry Hathaway — as well as “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “Hang ’Em High” (1968).
And he grew close to his wife’s childhood friend Peter Fonda, who, with Mr. Hopper and a few others, began mulling over a film whose story line followed traditional western themes but substituted motorcycles for horses.
That film, “Easy Rider,” which Mr. Hopper wrote with Mr. Fonda and Terry Southern and directed, followed a pair of truth-seeking bikers (Mr. Fonda and Mr. Hopper) on a cross-country journey to New Orleans.
It won the prize for best first film at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival (though it faced only one competitor, as the critic Vincent Canby pointed out in a tepid 1969 review in The New York Times)
Mr. Hopper also shared an Oscar nomination for writing the film, while a nomination for best supporting actor went to a little-known Jack Nicholson.
“Easy Rider” introduced much of its audience, if not Mr. Hopper, to cocaine, and the film’s success accelerated a period of intense drug and alcohol use that Mr. Hopper later said nearly killed him and turned him into a professional pariah.
Given nearly $1 million by Universal for a follow-up project, he retreated with a cadre of hippies to Peru to shoot “The Last Movie,” a hallucinogenic film about the making of a movie. It won a top prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but it failed with critics and at the box office.
Mr. Hopper edited the film while living at Los Gallos, a 22-room adobe house in Taos, N.M., that he rechristened the Mud Palace and envisioned as a counterculture Hollywood.
It was there that his drug-induced paranoia took full flower, including a period in which he posted armed guards on the roof.
“I was terribly naïve in those days,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “I thought the crazier you behaved, the better artist you would be. And there was a time when I had a lot of energy to display how crazy that was.”
Mr. Hopper was seen mostly in small film parts until he returned to prominence with his performance in “Apocalypse Now” (1979).
In a 1993 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Hopper credited Marlon Brando, a star of the film, with the idea of having him portray a freewheeling photojournalist, rather than the smaller role of a C.I.A. officer, in which he was originally cast.
But Mr. Hopper’s after-hours style continued to affect his work; in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” a documentary about the making of that film, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, is seen lamenting that Mr. Hopper cannot seem to learn his lines.
After becoming sober in the 1980s, Mr. Hopper began taking on roles in several films a year, becoming one of the most recognizable character actors of the day.
He earned a second Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as the alcoholic father of a troubled high school basketball star in “Hoosiers” (1986), and he honed his portrayal of unhinged villains in films like “Blue Velvet” (also in 1986), “Speed” (1994) and “Waterworld” (1995), as well as in the first season of the television series “24” (2002).
Mr. Hopper had several artistic pursuits beyond film. Early in his career, he painted and wrote poetry, though many of his works were destroyed in a 1961 fire that burned scores of homes, including his, in the Los Angeles enclave Bel Air.
Around that time, Ms. Hayward gave him a camera as a gift, and Mr. Hopper took up photography.
His intimate and unguarded images of celebrities like Ike and Tina Turner, Andy Warhol and Jane Fonda were the subject of gallery shows and were collected in a book, “1712 North Crescent Heights.” The book, whose title was his address in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s, was edited by Marin Hopper, his daughter by Ms. Hayward.
He also built an extensive collection of works by artists he knew, including Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Julian Schnabel.
Born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kan., and raised on a nearby farm, Dennis Lee Hopper moved with his family to San Diego in the late 1940s.
He studied at the Old Globe Theater there while in high school, then signed a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to Los Angeles.
Mr. Hopper’s five marriages included one of eight days in 1970 to the singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. He is survived by four children, all of the Los Angeles area: Marin Hopper; Ruthanna Hopper, his daughter by Daria Halprin, his third wife; a son, Henry Lee Hopper, whose mother is Katherine LaNasa; and Galen, his daughter by Ms. Duffy.
On March 26, surrounded by friends like Mr. Nicholson and David Lynch, the director of “Blue Velvet,” Mr. Hopper received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Looking frail, he began his brief acceptance speech by sardonically thanking the paparazzi for supposedly distracting him and causing him to lose his balance and fall the day before. He continued, “Everyone here today that I’ve invited — and obviously some that I haven’t invited — have enriched my life tremendously.”

Deficit Eclipses Jobs In Congress: 'Nickel-And-Diming The Most Fragile People'

Ryan Grim & Brian Delaney Huffington Post
Late on Thursday evening, Democrats were arguing on the House floor over the size of a jobs bill that was two days overdue for a vote when word started to filter through the chamber that the Senate had adjourned and was leaving for the Memorial Day break. With no Senate, there could be no bill.
"People were astounded. I mean stunned," said freshman Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "We're in the midst of this debate and trying to find a path to doing the right thing and they went out on recess? Without addressing these issues? Some of which have deadlines? I mean, there are going to be unemployed Americans who will not have their unemployment extended."
On June 1, several programs, including extended unemployment benefits, will expire. By the end of the week, 19,400 people will prematurely stop receiving checks, according to data from the Department of Labor. How long will it take the Senate to finish the bill? With Republicans promising to stand in the way, leadership will need to file at least one time-consuming "cloture" motion to break the filibuster and to set up a vote by the end of the week in the best-case scenario. By the end of the following week, the number of premature unemployment exhaustions will climb to 323,400. The week after that, 903,000. By the end of the month, 1.2 million.
"But the numbers really don't tell the story," said Marc Katz of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies. "The states are going to get calls from very concerned claimants about what's going on, what's the outlook. That's the real story. And it puts claimants through real anguish. It's just terribly unfair to them."
It will be the third time this year that lawmakers have allowed extended unemployment benefits to lapse, and the second time they've decided to leave town for recess fully knowing the lapse would cause panic and confusion among blameless layoff victims -- not to mention what Katz calls a "huge" administrative burden on state workforce agencies.
But this is the first time the Democratic Party can't even half-plausibly blame the Republicans for the lapse. "This isn't being done because of Republicans, believe me. This is done because there's a group of us, we don't have a majority, but they listen," said Rep. Dutch Ruppersburger (D-Md.), who fought to shrink the size of the bill. "I think it's really symbolic. We have a very diverse party and the party has come together... This is a real victory for the moderates and the Blue Dogs and the freshmen, that our party leadership is working with us to let this happen."
And it signals the beginning of the end of the commitment to ending the jobs crisis. It took FDR two congressional terms to lose his New Deal majority. Though Democrats still controlled Congress in 1937, deficit hawks put a stop to federal efforts to end the Great Depression, bringing about what became known as the "recession within the depression."
This is also the first lapse that isn't entirely the Senate's fault. Connolly himself, for instance, had been part of the holdup, promising to vote no if the bill wasn't offset by spending cuts or tax hikes elsewhere. And when the unemployment extension finally came up for a vote in the House Friday morning, Connolly opposed it.
It passed regardless, after an intense intraparty debate between those pushing for federal spending to create jobs and stitch together the social safety net and those who see the deficit as the number one concern. The entire debate had the potential to be about extending aid to the unemployed while closing a tax loophole for rich investment fund managers. And there are plenty of mainstream economists -- among them Mark Zandi, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- who say that in the short term it's more important to support the economy with unemployment benefits, which are highly stimulative, than to worry about the deficit. Instead, deficit hawks won the week.
And at critical moments, it looked as if the hawks would feast on the entire spending bill, with House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) intervening at the last moment to bring whimpering Blue Dogs back into the fold. "We couldn't quite get to 218 until Steny was able to sort of bifurcate--broker the deal where we'd separate out the Doc fix," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the chief deputy whip. "That broke the logjam."
Blue Dogs are now baying. "The week we had talking about the need to pay for things that are not emergencies has paid off," said Blue Dog Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.).
Connolly said that it's a signal to congressional leaders. "It may be a turning point. We only know that when we look back on something, really," said Connolly. "But I think it's a growing and collective recognition that you're going to be held to a higher account if you're going to propose deficit spending for anything."
Conservative Democrats in both chambers pushed back against the government spending, with some arguing that enough unemployment extensions had been granted and that the unemployed should be told there will be no more coming. That reasoning infuriates progressive Democrats. "So what would that do? If you're unemployed, what the fuck difference does that make to you? If you had a job, you'd take the job," Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) told reporters before Friday's vote.
For some Democrats, though, the improving economy, while it has yet to reduce unemployment, changes the calculation. "I think there's a different threshold of justification with this bill," said Connolly, the president of the freshman class, noting his support for stimulus spending in early 2009. "A year ago we were in the midst of the worst recession in 80 years and desperately trying to find ways to climb out of it... We did the right thing and it's working. Now, a year and four months later, it's a very different situation. We are now managing a recovery and trying to sustain it. I would argue that's a different threshold of justification. It doesn't mean there is no threshold that can be met, but it's a higher threshold in terms of this emergency legislation category. And in my view, this one has trouble meeting that threshold for me."
HuffPost noted to Connolly that unemployment has yet to come down.
"But, you know, voters can hold seemingly contradictory views simultaneously," said Connolly. "That is to say, somebody can say, 'I want you to fix the unemployment problem, but I want you to stop those drunken-sailor ways of yours. Get rid of that wasteful, over-reaching spending you seem to love.' Voters can hold both views simultaneously, and it seems to me that politicians ignore that at their peril."
Despite the failure of Congress to extend programs that will now expire, throwing state agencies into chaos and risking jobless and health benefits for thousands of people, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said nobody is to blame. "I don't think there's any fault involved. It's not as if the House has been lazy," Reid said, adding that Democrats got "spooked" by deficit concerns. "So there's no fault. It's just a very, very hard bill."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also declined to play the blame game. "It's not a question of blame," she said. "No one will be deprived of anything. We will pass the bill, it will pass in the Senate... and people will be compensated."
Several weeks ago, Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the chairmen of the committees overseeing the legislation, were tasked by their leadership to find a spending package that would be acceptable on both sides. It was Levin's first go as chairman since Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) had been forced to give up the Ways and Means gavel. The House had scheduled a vote for Tuesday, required by the Constitution to move first, but leadership didn't feel confident that the votes were there. "We didn't have the votes until right up to the very end," said Ruppersburger, a member of the whip team.
At a House leadership meeting on Tuesday, Hoyer proposed cutting the size of the bill by trimming the "Doc fix" -- some $65 billion of the package was eaten up by staving off a 21 percent cut in reimbursement rates for doctors. Nobody wants the scheduled cut to take effect, with doctors groups and seniors lobbying hard. Hoyer proposed blocking the cut, but doing it for less time, trimming tens of billions off the price tag. The final bill passed by the House would include a 19-month fix at a cost of $23 billion, but when Hoyer proposed it Tuesday, the rest of leadership wasn't yet ready to go along, said a person familiar with the talks. On Wednesday, the vote was again punted and leadership came around to Hoyer's Doc fix proposal, but subsequent whip counts showed votes still weren't there.
Hoyer met with Blue Dogs Thursday morning and presented them with the Doc fix solution, which was then estimated to trim $50 billion. Blue Dogs wanted more but weren't sure what. "We went around the table and different members shared their perspectives, and each of them was a little different in terms of what they supported, how much they were willing to come up with new payfors, whether they thoght the answer was removing certain things and how much they wanted to remove," said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the dozens of Blue Dogs who attended the Hoyer meeting. "I don't think there was a consensus among the members about the individual pieces so much as that there needed to be a greater degree to which whatever was in the package was paid for."
Leadership whipped throughout the day and met again in the afternoon. House Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) made it clear, said two people who were present at the meeting, that the package simply didn't have the votes and a new approach was needed. Several ideas were batted around. Hoyer asked Clyburn: If we take out COBRA and FMAP, do we have the votes? Clyburn said the votes would be wrapped up. Hoyer further suggested splitting the Doc fix and the rest of the package into two separate votes, making each vote an easier one in that the dollar figures would be lower.
Cutting FMAP, which are federal dollars to help states pay for Medicaid, was a tough policy decision but an easier one politically: homestate elected officials such as state legislators and governors are often the most formidable opponents of a member of Congress. While reaping the political benefit of spending federal Medicaid dollars, state officials simultaneously criticize Congress for out-of-control, runaway spending. It's a game federal officials don't want to help their friends back home to play. Unless, that is, they can get the state politicians to ask for the money, something they generally didn't do this time around. Over the next few week, FMAP funding will again be before Congress. "We need to hear from both Democratic and Republican governors that they need this," said Ruppersburger.
COBRA is a harder cut. Thanks to the congressional failure to extend it, anybody laid off after Monday, May 31st will be ineligible for COBRA subsidies -- which generally puts the temporary health insurance out of reach of most unemployed people. That, too, could get a second look in the next few weeks, said aides.
"It's obscene," Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wisc.) said of cutting COBRA. The cut reduces deficit spending by less than $7 billion. Ethanol subsidies, which Blue Dogs support almost unanimously, come closer to $9 billion.
On Thursday evening, the Senate was still planning to return on Friday to try to pass whatever the House approved, with leadership aides telling reporters that the lower chamber would send over a short-term extension of basic benefits and tax credits, done on an emergency basis and unpaid for. Such an extension was never considered, said several aides.
Democrats spent Thursday and Friday accusing the opposite chamber of failing to do its job. Senate aides argued that the House has had since March to send the bill over to the Senate and still hadn't done so by Thursday evening, knowing that the Senate may need to amend it and send it back. House leadership aides were furious at the Senate for failing to provide adequate assurance that it had the votes to move what the House was considering. Without a guarantee from the Senate, conservative House Democrats were unwilling to take a vote that may be meaningless. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) particularly rankled the House side with a quote in HuffPost Hill bemoaning the loss of COBRA benefits from the House package.
"COBRA? Ooooh," said Durbin when told what the House was considering. "It's painful for many of us who have sympathy for the unemployed to see their COBRA cut."
Painful as it may be, if Durbin had whipped support for the House package on the Senate side, it wouldn't have been cut, noted House partisans. "He has no one to blame but his lack of whipping. The uncertainty of Senate support was killer," said one Democratic aide.
To which Senate folks reply: What House package?
To fight the recession that started at the end of 2007, Congress passed several measures that prolonged the amount of time a layoff victim could collect unemployment benefits, eventually providing up to 99 weeks in some states. The 99 weeks are broken into "tiers" consisting of several weeks each -- when the program lapses, people will continue to receive checks for the remaining weeks of their current tier, but they will be ineligible for the next one. When Congress finishes its work, any missed payments will be made retroactively.
The stimulus bill also gave the unemployed an extra $25 per week and the COBRA subsidy, which covers 65 percent of the cost of the program. It's an expanded safety net that is catching a huge number of people. At the end of 2009 (the most recent data available), some 67 percent of of the more than 15 million unemployed received unemployment benefits. The initial 26 weeks provided by states cover only 35 percent of the unemployed.
Hundreds of thousands of people have already exhausted all 99 weeks. For them, no help is forthcoming: Congress is getting ready to say goodbye to the safety net that already bounced them out.
The bill passed by the House on Friday will preserve existing benefits through November (the original plan had been to extend the programs for the rest of the year, but leadership shaved $7 billion from the bill's cost by giving up December). What's going to happen when the next expiration date looms? If the jobs reports during the intervening months bring another few hundred thousand jobs, the deficit hawks likely will not have much of an appetite for another across-the-board extension.
"When we get to November we need to look at that," said Altmire. In the upper chamber, Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said the same thing when asked if Congress would provide another extension. "It's so hard to know what the economic conditions will be at that point," he said.
Lurking beneath some Democrats' deficit concerns is the suspicion that unemployment benefits make people too lazy to look for work.
"We've had four straight months of job growth," Altmire said. "At some point you have to take a step back and look at the relative value of unemployment benefits versus people looking for jobs."
The San Francisco Federal Reserve did a study in April that found "extended unemployment insurance benefits have not been important factors in the increase in the duration of unemployment or in the elevated unemployment rate." But despite this authoritative debunking, Altmire and other members, such as Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pa.) say businesses in their districts complain of hiring trouble, claiming that would-be employees would rather stay on the dole.
"We're nickel and diming the most fragile people in this economy," said Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the National Employment Law Project. "These are people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. They continually certify that they are out there looking for work."
"What do we do now?" said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.). "We could just turn our backs on them, but that doesn't seem very American to me."

Lucia Graves contributed reporting

London Times Online
Useless, jobless men – the social blight of our age
The benefits system has produced an emasculated generation who can find neither work nor a wife
Camilla Cavendish

Of all the government adverts that have swamped our radio stations these past few years (must be a quick saving there for the Treasury), one of the most irritating was the jolly woman asking us in a sing-song voice if we had remembered to report changes in our circumstances. Like hell. Every time I heard the ad it conjured up a vision of a lonely official waiting in vain at her desk for people to come in and sign away entitlements to which they feel, well, entitled.
This pathetic advert seemed to me to epitomise the politicians’ total loss of control over the monster that is our benefits system. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) presides over a system so complex that it has to issue 8,690 pages of guidance to help its staff to apply its 51 different benefits — the product of the ever more precise targeting of benefits to particular groups.
In the years of plenty, it was easier to placate and complicate than to simplify. Every new benefit and its separate computer system was just bolted on to the mainframe. But the result is that Britain has more than twice the number of sick people as France. The potential for playing the system, defrauding the system and falling foul of the system is enormous.
So in declaring war yesterday on both poverty and the benefits system, Iain Duncan Smith had it right. If the Government is going to make real inroads into the deficit it will have to tackle the nearly £200 billion welfare budget, which is a third of government spending. This week’s £6 billion of cuts was only Round 1: £6 billion is only 1 per cent of government expenditure, so this was a warm-up. Round 2 will need to take on the DWP leviathan.
But the argument for welfare reform is not just one of affordability. In too many cases, welfare has entrenched poverty. Mr Duncan Smith is one of the few politicians who really understand the poverty trap. Gordon Brown made life more bearable for many people on benefits, but he also made it harder to escape from them. Get a job tomorrow earning between £10,000 and £30,000 a year and you’ll take home only 30p out of every extra pound you earn after the first £10,000. Twenty pence will go in income tax, 11p in national insurance, and 39p in lost tax credits. Add in the loss of other allowances (housing benefit, council tax benefit) and you may find it simply doesn’t pay to work harder. Our poverty trap is deeper than that of most other European countries. That is a strange legacy for a government that wanted to make work pay.
The fear of losing benefits — of not being able to scramble back on to the lifeboat if you fall off — is a huge disincentive to change your circumstances, let alone report them. One in seven working-age households is dependent on benefits for more than half its income. More than half of all lone parents depend on the State for at least half their income. William Beveridge would be horrified to discover that the safety net he designed has become a trap, creating generations of worklessness and dwindling self-esteem. It is also creating a glut of unemployed, unwanted, unmarriageable men.
These men were overlooked during a decade of prosperity that did nothing to change their lives. At the beginning of that decade, 5.4 million working-age adults were claiming out-of-work benefits. The same number were still claiming just before the recession struck. Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006. These people stayed put in the Welsh valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.
The problem affects the whole of society because of the striking correlation between male joblessness and single motherhood, particularly in the old industrial cities. In Liverpool, male unemployment rose from 12 per cent in 1971 to 30 per cent in 2001. In 1971 11 per cent of families were headed by a single parent; by 2001, 45 per cent were. Similar patterns can be seen in Birmingham, Strathclyde and Newcastle. The epidemic of male joblessness after the collapse of manufacturing industries coincided with an increase in female employment and welfare support to mothers who found that they could manage alone.
Overlooked by society, irrelevant to employers, unwanted by women who can raise families on benefits without their help, the man who has no work or a series of short-term jobs is a problem. Without steady work, he will struggle to acquire a family: unemployed men are less likely to marry or cohabit than employed ones. Without a stable relationship, he is less likely to grow into a good family man and raise good sons. The taxpayer has become the father: one in four mothers is single and more than half live on welfare. A lot of these women describe the real fathers of their children as “useless” or worse. The men have no role.
In the worst cases, the State has helped to create a class of jobless serial boyfriends who prey on single mothers on benefits. When two of these men moved into the flat that Haringey Council had generously provided for Tracey Connelly, Baby P’s mother, the little boy’s fate was sealed. They killed him. Other such men appear in bit parts in tragedies such as that of Shannon Matthews, abducted and drugged by her own “family”. The welfare system has helped to deprive these children of the most effective check on abuse — the family.
Robert Rowthorn, Professor of Economics at Cambridge, has shown that female and male worklessness have been going in opposite directions for 30 years, well before this latest “mancession”. His research suggests that half the rise in lone parenthood in the past 30 years may be due to male unemployment. He believes that governments must start to focus on these men, and question the feminisation of education and the workplace. It is no solution, he says, to say that women don’t need men or that men should become more female. Nor is it any good waiting for economic growth to dig them out of poverty. Those men need a chance, not a benefits system that undermines them.

Art Linkletter, TV Host, Dies at 97

By WILLIAM GRIMES NY TIMES
Art Linkletter, the genial host who parlayed his talent for the ad-libbed interview into two of television’s longest-running shows, “People Are Funny” and “House Party,” in the 1950s and 1960s, died on Wednesday at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 97.
The death was confirmed by Art Hershey, a son-in-law.
From his early days as an announcer on local radio and a roving broadcaster at state fairs, Mr. Linkletter showed a talent for ingratiating himself with his subjects and getting them to open up, often with hilarious results.
He was particularly adept at putting small children at ease, which he did every day on a special segment of “House Party,” a reliably amusing question-and-answer session that provided the material for his best-selling book, “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”
Television critics and intellectuals found the Linkletter persona bland and his popularity unfathomable. “There is nothing greatly impressive, one way or the other, about his appearance, mannerisms, or his small talk,” one newspaper critic wrote. Another referred to his “imperishable banality.”
Millions of Americans disagreed. They responded to his wholesome, friendly manner and upbeat appeal. Women, who made up three quarters of the audience for “House Party,” which was broadcast in the afternoon, loved his easy, enthusiastic way with children.
“I know enough about a lot of things to be interesting, but I’m not interested enough in any one thing to be boring,” Mr. Linkletter told The New York Post in 1965. “I’m like everybody’s next-door neighbor, only a little bit smarter.”
He was also genuinely curious to know what was going on in the heads of the people he interviewed. “You have to listen,” he said. “A lot of guys can talk.”
Gordon Arthur Kelly was born on July 17, 1912, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Before he was a month old, he was abandoned by his parents and adopted by Fulton John and Mary Metzler Linkletter, a middle-age couple whose two children had died. It was not until he was 12, while rummaging through his father’s desk, that he discovered he was adopted.
In his autobiography, “Confessions of a Happy Man,” Mr. Linkletter recalled his adoptive father, a one-legged cobbler and itinerant evangelist, as “a strange, uncompromising man whose main interest in life was the Bible.” The family prayed and performed on street corners, with Art playing the triangle.
By the time Art was 5, the family had moved to an unpaved adobe section of San Diego. As a child, he took on any job he could find. At one point he sorted through lemons left abandoned in piles outside a packing plant, cleaned them off and sold them for six cents a dozen.
After graduating from high school at 16, Mr. Linkletter decided to see the world. With $10 in his pocket, he rode freight trains and hitchhiked around the country, working here and there as a meatpacker, a harvester and a busboy in a roadhouse.
“Among other things, I learned to chisel rides on freight trains, outwit the road bulls, cook stew with the bindlestiffs and never to argue with a gun,” he later recalled. A fast typist, he found work in a Wall Street bank just in time to watch the stock market crash in 1929. He also shipped out to Hawaii and Rio de Janeiro as a merchant seaman.
After retuning to California, he entered San Diego State College with plans of becoming an English teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1934, but in his last year he was hired to do spot announcements by a local radio station, KGB, a job that led to radio work at the California International Exposition in San Diego and at similar fairs in Dallas and San Francisco.
With microphone in hand and countless programming hours to fill, Mr. Linkletter relied on ad-libbing, stunts and audience participation to get attention and keep listeners entertained. He was once lowered from a skyscraper in a bosun’s chair, interviewing office workers on every floor as he descended. “It was the forced feeding of a young and growing M.C.,” he later said of his more than 9,000 fair broadcasts.
In 1936 he married Lois Foerster, a college student in San Diego, who survives him. The couple had five children: Jack, who followed his father into television and died of lymphoma in 2007; Dawn, of Sedona, Ariz.; Robert, who died in a car accident in 1980; Sharon, of Calabasas, Calif.; and Diane, who committed suicide in 1969 after experimenting with LSD, an event that spurred her father into becoming a crusader against drug use. There are 7 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Linkletter quickly established himself on local radio in San Francisco but floundered when he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1940s. A radio show picked up by Shell Oil, “Shell Goes to a Party,” was canceled after Mr. Linkletter, reporting on a nighttime beach party, fell over some driftwood and lost his microphone.
He did have one piece of radio luck. With John Guedel, who would go on to create the quiz show “You Bet Your Life” and the comedy “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” Mr. Linkletter made an audition tape for an audience-participation show, with contests and gags, that would rely on his ability to ad-lib and coax humorous material from virtually anyone. Mr. Guedel came up with the name “People Are Funny,” and NBC put it on the air in 1942. Enormously popular, it ran on radio until 1960. The television version, which made its debut in 1954, ran until 1961.
Working without a script, Mr. Linkletter sent audience volunteers on silly assignments outside the studio with instructions to report back on their experience. One man was handed a $1,000 bill and told to buy chewing gum. Another was given $15,000 to invest in the stock market. Mr. Linkletter mingled with the audience, asking questions, setting up gags and handing out prizes like a yard of hot dogs or five feet of dollar bills.
On one show, Mr. Linkletter spotted a woman’s enormous purse and began rummaging through it, announcing each item in turn: a can opener, a can of snuff, a losing racetrack ticket and a photograph of Herbert Hoover. The handbag bit became a staple of the show. More ingeniously, Mr. Linkletter set a dozen balls adrift in the Pacific, announcing a $1,000 prize for the first person to find one. Two years later, a resident of the Marshall Islands claimed the money.
“House Party,” which ran five days a week on radio from 1945 to 1967 and on television from 1952 to 1969, was a looser version of “People Are Funny,” with beauty tips and cooking demonstrations filling time between Mr. Linkletter’s audience-chatter sessions. The highlight of the show was a segment in which five schoolchildren between the ages of 5 and 10 sat down to be interviewed by Mr. Linkletter, who sat at eye level with his little subjects and, time and time again, made their parents wish television had never been invented.
After one boy revealed that his father was a policeman who arrested lots of burglars, Mr. Linkletter asked if his mother ever worried about the risks. “Naw, she thinks it’s great,” he answered. “He brings home rings and bracelets and jewelry almost every week.”
Mr. Linkletter assembled replies like that in “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” and its sequel, “Kids Still Say the Darndest Things.”
In 1969, Mr. Linkletter’s daughter Diane leapt to her death from her sixth story apartment. After taking LSD some days before, she had become depressed, convinced that she was losing her mind. Although an autopsy showed no signs of the drug in her body, her death became a national event, suggesting to many Americans that drugs and the counterculture were making inroads even into seemingly model families like the Linkletters.
Mr. Linkletter, rather than retreating from the attention, became a crusader against drug use and an adviser to President Richard M. Nixon on drug policy, although, in 1972, he announced that he had changed his position on marijuana. After much thought and study, he had concluded that the drug was relatively harmless and that law-enforcement officials should spend their time concentrating on hard drugs.
Much in demand as a public speaker and a fund-raiser for Republican candidates, Mr. Linkletter spent his subsequent years on lecture tours, appearing in commercials and tending to his far-flung business interests, including oil wells and toys. (One of his companies manufactured a version of the Hula-Hoop.)
A former college athlete, he remained remarkably healthy well into his 90s and the ideal front man for the United Seniors Association (renamed USA Next), a conservative organization formed in opposition to AARP and dedicated in large part to privatizing Social Security. In keeping with his new role as a prominent elder American, Mr. Linkletter wrote “Old Age Is Not for Sissies.”
When he was well into his 80s and still going strong, someone asked him the secret of longevity. “You live between your ears,” he replied. “You can’t turn back the clock, but you can rewind it.”

Two Theories of Change

By DAVID BROOKS NY TIMES
When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment — thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire and Condorcet.
These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth.
Their great model was Descartes. He aimed to begin human understanding anew. He’d discard the accumulated prejudices of the past and build from the ground up, erecting one logical certainty upon another.
What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution.
But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.
They put more emphasis on our sentiments. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism, which mar rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost, and politics should not forget that.
These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.”
As Levin shows, Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again.
Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them.
Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.
Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working.
If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.
Burke also supported the American Revolution, but saw it in a different light than Paine. He believed the British Parliament had recklessly trampled upon the ancient liberties the colonists had come to enjoy. The Americans were seeking to preserve what they had.
We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.
Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.
The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

White House Backs Compromise on Gays in Military

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A proposal to step up the repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military but still allow the Pentagon time -- perhaps even years -- to implement new policies won the White House's backing on Monday after administration officials met with gay rights activists.
The White House budget office sent a letter supporting the proposal to remove the Clinton-era ''don't ask, don't tell'' law even as the Pentagon continues a review of the system. Implementation of policy for gays serving openly would still require the approval of President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. How long implementation might take is not known, but the proposed amendment would have no effect on current practices.
''The proposed amendment will allow for completion of the comprehensive review, enable the Department of Defense to assess the results of the review, and ensure that the implementation of the of the repeal is consistent with standards of military readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, recruiting and retention,'' budget chief Peter Orszag wrote in identical evening letters to Pennsylvania Rep. Patrick Murphy, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and Michigan Sen. Carl Levin -- the Democrats leading the push for repeal
Murphy, an Iraq war veteran, was expected to introduce the legislative proposal on Tuesday. Gay rights groups urged a quick vote, which could come as early as Thursday.
''Without a repeal vote by Congress this year, the Pentagon's hands are tied and the armed forces will be forced to continue adhering to the discriminatory 'don't ask, don't tell' law,'' said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
The White House had hoped lawmakers would delay action until Pentagon officials had completed their study so fellow Democrats would not face criticism that they moved too quickly or too far ahead of public opinion in this election year. Instead, administration officials recognized it could not stop Congress in its effort to repeal the 1993 ban and joined the negotiations.
Hours after activists met at the White House, top Democratic lawmakers met on Capitol Hill and approved the final version of a brokered deal that adds the repeal to the annual defense spending bill.
Obama called for the repeal during his State of the Union address this year, and Gates and Mullen have echoed his views but have cautioned any action must be paced.
In a speech last year at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., Gates noted that the 1948 executive order for racial integration took five years to implement.
''I'm not saying that's a model for this, but I'm saying that I believe this is something that needs to be done very, very carefully,'' he told the audience.
One organization dedicated to repealing the law urged supporters to hold celebration.
''President Obama's support and Secretary Gates' buy-in should ensure a winning vote, but we are not there yet,'' said Aubrey Sarvis, an Army veteran and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network executive director. ''The votes still need to be worked and counted.''
The administration has argued that any repeal should start in Congress and have the backing of top military leaders. Gay rights activists criticized the administration as Obama did little to push for a repeal during his first year in office.
On Capitol Hill, the third-ranking House Republican promised unified GOP opposition to lifting the ban. ''The American people don't want the American military to be used to advance a liberal political agenda. And House Republicans will stand on that principle,'' said Mike Pence, R-Ind.
Pence urged Democrats who control both chambers to wait until the Pentagon completes its review of what a repeal would take.
Congress led hearings on a repeal and heard testimony from Gates and Mullen -- the top uniformed official in the country -- in favor of repeal. Additionally, a Gallup poll earlier this month found 70 percent of American favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly.
Obama's relationship with gay activists has been rocky since his election. Gays and lesbians objected to the invitation of evangelist Rev. Rick Warren's to participate in Obama's inauguration because of Warren's support for repealing gay marriage in California. Obama responded by having Episcopalian Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the denomination's first openly gay bishop, participate at another event.
Obama has taken a slow and incremental approach to the politically charged issues. He has expanded some federal benefits to same-sex partners, but not health benefits or pension guarantees. He has allowed State Department employees to include their same-sex partners in certain embassy programs already available to opposite-sex spouses.
The military's ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy was imposed by a 1993 law intended as a compromise between President Bill Clinton, who wanted to lift the ban on gays entirely, and a reluctant Congress and military that said doing so would threaten order.
Under the policy, the military can't ask recruits their sexual orientation. In turn, service members can't say they are gay or bisexual, engage in homosexual activity or marry a member of the same sex.
Between 1997 and 2008, the Defense Department discharged more than 10,500 service members for violating the policy.
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Associated Press writers Anne Flaherty and Jim Abrams contributed to this report.

In Defense of Homophobia
Jonathan I. Katz
Homophobia is the moral judgement that homosexual behavior (most of the arguments in this essay refer specifically to male homosexual behavior) is wrong. Homophobia is not like ethnic, racial or religious prejudice, which deny the intrinsic moral rights and value of other people. Rather, it is a moral judgement upon acts engaged in by choice.
If you are religious, you probably agree with the homophobic position, because most major religions make this moral judgement. The Jewish and Christian Bible describes homosexual activity, in most English translations, as an ``abomination''. This condemnation is found in the Book of Leviticus, along with condemnations of incest and bestiality. Unlike homosexuality, there has been no organized effort to win approval for those sexual sins, which are condemned by almost everyone. The same word is used to condemn moving boundary markers, a grievous sin in an agricultural society.
If you are a rationalist, you ask for logical explanation, beyond the word of the Bible, and beyond the revulsion which most people feel. Why have most cultures adopted this attitude? The rationalist does not accept any book as the word of God, but regards it as the embodiment of traditional wisdom. He cannot reject it out of hand; he must ask why traditional wisdom came to this conclusion.
Recent medical history provides a convincing argument. HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, has been present, and occasionally found in the human population, for about half a century (a few sporadic AIDS cases have been identified as far back as the 1950's, or even earlier). Yet they were quite rare; the modern AIDS epidemic began suddenly about 1980. Its first victims were promiscuous homosexual males; it was initially called ``Gay-Related Immune Deficiency''.
In America attitudes towards homosexuality changed in the 1970's. It went from a private, furtively practiced, vice to an open and accepted subculture. In many circles, ``sodomite'' ceased to be an insult. This acceptance led to the toleration, and wide practice, of gross homosexual promiscuity. HIV, falling onto that fertile soil, made the AIDS epidemic. Even before AIDS was recognized, practicing homosexuals were notorious for a high rate of venereal diseases.
The religious believer may see the hand of God, but both he and the rationalist must see a fact of Nature. The human body was not designed to share hypodermic needles, it was not designed to be promiscuous, and it was not designed to engage in homosexual acts. Engaging in such behavior is like riding a motorcycle on an icy road without a helmet. It may be possible to get away with it for a while, and a few misguided souls may get a thrill out of doing so, but sooner or later (probably sooner) the consequences will be catastrophic. Lethal diseases spread rapidly among people who do such things.
Unfortunately, the victims are not only those whose reckless behavior brought death on themselves. There are many completely innocent victims, too: hemophiliacs (a substantial fraction died as a result of contaminated clotting factor), recipients of contaminated transfusions, and their spouses and children, for AIDS can be transmitted heterosexually (in America, only infrequently) and congenitally. The icy road was lined with unsuspecting innocents, who never chose to ride a motorcycle. Guilt for their deaths is on the hands of the homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers who poisoned the blood supply. These people died so the sodomites could feel good about themselves.
At present, HIV testing has reduced the risk of infection by transfusion almost (but not exactly) to zero. However, should a new lethal blood-borne virus arise, it will not be detected, and a test developed, until thousands of people have been infected. Experience with HIV shows that the environments of homosexual promiscuity and intravenous drug abuse can readily turn a single infection into an epidemic.
The homophobe does not engage in violence against homosexuals. Repelled, he stays away from them. Homophobes are divided on the wisdom of laws against homosexual acts. Some believe laws are a good way to reduce their frequency and damaging consequences. Others, probably the majority, believe that outlawing these acts is futile, just as outlawing drug abuse may be futile, and that laws may lead to destructive witch-hunts. These homophobes believe the best approach is moral condemnation, which is the approach our society now applies to many other destructive practices, such as adultery, alcohol and tobacco abuse, and suicide. Moral condemnation will not extirpate them, but neither can the law; a climate of disapproval may reduce their frequency and their harm.
What of those cursed with unnatural sexual desires? Must they forever suppress these desires? Yes, but this is hardly a unique fate. Almost everyone has desires which must be suppressed. Most men and women think adulterous thoughts fairly often, and find themselves attracted to members of the opposite sex to whom they are not married. Morality requires them to suppress these desires, and most do not commit adultery, though they feel lust in their hearts. Almost everyone, at one time or another, covets another's property. They do not steal. Many people feel great anger or intense hatred at some time in their lives. They do not kill.

I am a homophobe, and proud.

Post-Script October 17, 2003: The homosexual movement is now campaigning against blood drives, because blood banks do not accept blood from men who have engaged in homosexual acts. This is ``discrimination'', the campaigners say (see, for example, Washington University Student Life October 17, 2003). Of course it is discrimination; the blood banks are discriminating against blood at risk of contamination with HIV, which would give the recipients the fatal disease AIDS. Intravenous drug abusers are also rejected as donors, for the same reason. People who have lived in the United Kingdom are now rejected because they are at (much lesser) risk for CJD. Some discrimination is wrong. Racial discrimination, for example, is almost invariably unethical (and generally illegal) because race is unrelated to the ability to do a job, study, fulfill a contract, or almost any other activity of daily life. Some discrimination, however, is both justified and necessary. For example, it is quite appropriate for a basketball team to discriminate among applicants on the basis of height, agility and stamina, for a prospective patient to discriminate among doctors on the basis of their academic qualifications and past record of practice, and for a blood bank to discriminate among prospective donors on the basis of the statistical risk that their blood is contaminated with infectious diseases. In order to satisfy their demand for full acceptance by society, the homosexual movement demands to kill some transfusion recipients by infecting them with AIDS, or to kill patients who need transfusions by making it impossible for blood banks to collect blood. Or, perhaps, this was just a joke. But I think not.

Post-Script October 9, 2005: In recent weeks this essay has been the subject of controversy at, and even beyond, Washington University (see, for example, recent issues of Student Life). A number of critics have asked if monogamous homosexuals are also culpable. Quite apart from the question of the definition of monogamous (sexual contact with only one person in a lifetime? serial monogamy? some cheating? etc.), I suggest the following analogy: A man joins the Ku Klux Klan. He is not violent, and would never hurt a fly; he just wants a safe place to express his racist feelings. Is he culpable for the Klan's past acts of violence? I believe that even though he is not criminally responsible for acts that occurred before he joined, he is morally culpable for joining the Klan. The Klan has blood on its hands, and anyone who joins must share the guilt. So, too, with the homosexual movement.

Sunday London Times
Answer the lesbian question, Ms Legal Eagle
Andrew Sullivan
The nominee to be the next justice of the Supreme Court has no opinion on anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. She did believe in providing free coffee for students when she was dean of Harvard Law School. She once publicly protested against the ban on honest homosexuals serving in the US military — but that is genuinely the only controversial statement she has ever made in public.
How do such people exist? Well, the truth is they have existed on the career ladder for the US Supreme Court since Robert Bork was crucified by the Senate when Ronald Reagan nominated him. Bork had written on everything, had opinions on everything and was a thoroughly interesting, even riveting, intellectual character. He was done in by the radicalism of his views on the limits of judicial power — and even, in some part, because of his religious agnosticism. It was a spectacle almost as ugly as Bork himself. And ever since, every judicial nominee has maintained an almost comic poker face when describing their views and opinions in front of the senators, who have the power to consent (or not) to their appointment.
But it is fair to say that nobody has been as blank a slate as Elena Kagan. Although she has been solicitor-general for more than a year, she has never been a judge, so it is impossible to examine her rulings and her reasoning. She has barely written a thing, despite being an obviously brilliant and accomplished legal mind. Liberals worry that she is another wimpy, namby-pamby Democratic nominee and no match for the firebrands of the right that the second Bush appointed. Conservatives worry that she is a stealth leftist, an almost textbook case of a left-liberal marching silently and stealthily through the institutions of American power. But the truth is: none of us outside her circles has a clue.
What we do know is that everyone in America’s legal and constitutional elite — a rarefied world that seems to include Yale, Harvard, Washington and not much else — thinks she’s the bee’s knees. Reading their quotes in the press this past week is like reading academic references for a Rhodes scholarship. Take this classic piece of blather from an icon of the liberal legal establishment, Walter Dellinger: “Her open-mindedness may disappoint some who want a sure liberal vote on almost every issue. Her pragmatism may disappoint those who believe that mechanical logic can decide all cases. And her progressive personal values will not endear her to the hard right. But that is exactly the combination the president was seeking.”
So Dellinger testifies to her “progressive personal values”. How does he know? Because he’s her friend. How are we supposed to know, when she has never articulated any such progressive values in, you know, public? Well, we just have to take Barack Obama’s word for it.
Jeffrey Toobin, the brilliant legal correspondent for The New Yorker, says he’s a close friend, but has no idea what her views are on anything. The New York Times ran a 4,500-word profile last week in which — again — not a single stand of any note could be discerned. The piece was full of anecdotes — she argued with her rabbi at her bat mitzvah, she left her car engine running in her garage overnight because she was so absent-minded, she smokes cigars, she plays softball — that were so artfully constructed to make her seem wonderful without revealing anything of any substance that another of the paper’s writers noted: “She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.”
There was one other strange thing about 4,500 words of profile — no mention of any private life. She is unmarried, and apparently has no anecdotes of dates, no ex-boyfriends or girlfriends, no romantic interludes ... nothing. In 4,500 words, we do not find out even where she lives or has lived or if she lives alone. (But we do know what her brothers do for a living — teaching). The far right has already identified her as a “lesbian homosexual”; and the gay blogosphere openly discussed her alleged lesbianism weeks ago.
But there is no confirmation of that anywhere and the White House reiterated last week that questions about sexual orientation “have no place” in judging a nominee (but her gender most certainly does). Quite how you defend this argument — from a president whose own criterion for nominees is a real experience of how law can affect ordinary people — is beyond me. It is also beyond most ordinary people out there.
If you type Elena Kagan into Google, you will get “elena kagan husband” and “elena kagan personal life” among the prompts for the most likely search terms. But my own attempt to inquire in as positive a way as possible last week — I’d be thrilled to have a gay Supreme Court justice — was simply ignored by the Obama press operation and smacked down elsewhere as an outrageous and unethical question. She is not only a blank slate as an intellectual and public figure; she is also a blank slate in other respects as well.
We are left guessing. The good news is that everyone has an interest in finding out; and we may have a set of hearings in which real questions are asked. In a rare moment of opining, she did once write that she found the hearings process since Bork oddly empty — and so she has opened herself up to a more rigorous set of questions than usual. She will, after all, assume a lifelong position with immense power. It is not crazy to ask questions that would help us judge how she sees the world and the law and the core issues of public moment she will have to address in the future.
My best bet is that she is quite hardcore in her left-liberalism but, like Obama, has managed to placate so many conservatives and independents on her way up the greasy pole that she will sail through. At Harvard Law School she hired many right-of-centre scholars, just as Obama engaged many right-of-centre thinkers at the Harvard Law Review. Never showing her hand, she wooed them with universal success.
Obama is answerable every day to the voters and to Congress and to the press. Once Kagan gets on the court, she will answer to nobody for the rest of her life. Better get some answers now, then, don’t you think? Or does that too “have no place” in such a process?

JOY BEHAR
The brassy comedienne of one of daytime's biggest gabfests now has her own hit talk show on HLN. She talks to Kevin Sessums about aging, Ann Coulter, and the secret to Ryan Seacrest's success.

Kevin Sessums Daily Beast
Stand-up comedienne Joy Behar found her greatest success when she finally decided to sit down.
As one of the original co-hosts of The View, and now on The Joy Behar Show on HLN, she has become one of the leading liberal voices in media. Her show has caught on quickly, beating even Larry King in the ratings 21 times in the first quarter of this year. Not shy about going for the laugh line, she is also deadly serious when the discourse calls for it. In all her camera-ready conversations, it is her dexterous intelligence that keeps it all carefully balanced. And let’s face it: the lady loves to dish.
Born Josephina Victoria Occhiuto, she was the only child of working-class parents in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Her mother was a seamstress and her father drove a delivery truck for Coca-Cola. Her first tickets out of the neighborhood were marriage and a college education. She received a Masters Degree in English Education and was a high-school teacher for many years. Married in 1965, she was divorced in 1981 and has one daughter, Eve, who is a celebrated ceramicist. She has been happily unmarried to her partner Steve Janowitz since the mid-1980s.
I don’t want to be the kind of person who is closed to the right-wing. I do like having conversations with those on the right.
I met Behar at her office in the Time/Warner Building in New York after a long day of taping both The View over at ABC and her own show at the CNN studios. Though a bit tired, she was still ready to keep the conversation going, for she is mindful of how wonderful it is that the media culture still has room for a woman who, like her point of view, is well matured.
You’re having quite a second act in your life.
I don’t think I ever had a first one. Well, my first one was as a regular person in the world. I was married and had a kid. Went to college. Worked in a mental hospital. Taught at-risk kids. Worked as a receptionist at Good Morning America. Had a near-death experience from an ectopic pregnancy. Got a divorce. Got fired. Then, became a comedian.
I don’t know. That’s sounds like a first act worthy of Odets at his wordiest.
Well, that near-death experience was bad. And the divorce was horrendous. And the firing wasn’t so great either. All those high-stress things all happened around the same time. They all sort of propelled me into this second act. But going into show-biz was hard too. Sometimes I look back and if I knew what I was going to have to put up with, I don’t know if I would have done it.
Well, you chose a very tough part of the business to break into—that comedy club circuit. It’s a killer, and not that kind to women.
Last night I went to see this documentary about Joan Rivers. It’s called Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work. It’s stupendous. I loved it. The way she describes her career and the way they described it in the film—well, it’s just appalling. The things we’ve had to put up with.
Yet a lot of her early work was itself self-deprecating.
But she gets a bad rap for that. And so does Phyllis Diller. No. 1: nobody would accept a woman standing up there being funny very easily. It was difficult to accept back then. The big stars of the day were Martha Raye. Lucille Ball. These were women who basically took the punch. So you had to do it as a comic also. Joan’s daughter in the documentary says at one point, “All stand-up comedians are insecure people.” And I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been wondering if I’m an insecure person. But I don’t think I am an insecure person. First of all, I’ve had a lot of psychotherapy.
You have such chutzpa about everything in your life but you do have an issue about saying your age. You’re so open about so much in your life but you won’t come out of the closet about that.
I know. But it’s been told everywhere now.
On CBS Sunday Morning they said 63 when they recently did a story on you. But I read somewhere else that you’re 67. If you really are 67, you look damn good. I would own it, honey.
Let’s not say that number aloud anymore. Okay? You know what it is. At a certain point the number starts to get so high it gives me vertigo. So I can’t say it!
Come on, Joy. With all your therapy, can't you accept that to many women you're daily proof that 60 is the new 40.
Tonight on my show I had William Shatner on. He’s in his 80s and he’s got three or four projects on the burner. Last night I had Phil Donahue on and we got a really great rating. They are always saying in television, “the young, the young, the young.” Well, not necessarily.
When and if Larry King ever retires would you like to take over his chair on CNN?
I don’t know. We’re doing really well over here at HLN. If it would be a good move for my show to move over there, then I would certainly want to do it. I mean I do think the CNN audience is my audience. So why not. Larry has been very good to me. And he was very charming and gracious when I took this slot at HLN opposite him.
But hasn’t Larry sort of anointed Ryan Seacrest as his successor? You’ll have to elbow Ryan out of the way.
Well, I don’t know. Do you think Ryan Seacrest would be good in that slot?
Let me put it in a question. How do you explain Ryan Seacrest’s career?
Well ... he’s ... ah ... he’s cute. He’s cute in a way.
Don't be sexist.
No. No. He's very likable. Cute meaning ... I don't know what word I should use... charming. He was in the right place at the right time.
I see Donald Trump’s name on your line-up board. You had him on tonight. He and his wife Melania were on The View the other day as well. Now stay with me. The other night on your show you had Richard Lewis on and he said that he “felt badly” about something. You almost jumped down his throat correcting his English. Trump used the same phrase on The View the other day, saying he “felt badly” for Tiger Woods and you sat there beside him and didn’t utter a peep.
Oh, I thought about it. Believe me.
I could feel you chomping at the bit.
The shows are different—is that what your getting at? First of all, Richard Lewis is an old friend of mine. And he’s a comic. He and I love to spar. I said to him, “You don’t say, ‘I feel sadly.’ So why would you feel badly?” With Richard it was different. As a rule I’m not going to be rude and go around correcting people’s English—even, as tempting as it was, Donald Trump’s.
But are you also thinking, OK this is Barbara Walter's show and I have to behave.
Over the years—I’ve been there for 13 years now—I don’t think I’ve behaved that well. I became notorious for confronting John McCain.
But Frank Rich in his Sunday New York Times column called you the modern-day Edward R. Murrow for calling John McCain out on his lies during the presidential campaign when more mainstream journalists wouldn’t.
I know. That was a good one. I got rewarded for my big mouth. I’ll never forgive John McCain for foisting Sarah Palin on us. I took on Rod Blagojevich. I have taken on politicians from time to time. I feel that politicians are fair game whereas regular people in the business really aren’t. I’m not out to get them or to criticize them in public to make them look bad. Politicians are different. They work for me. Other people don’t work for me.
You are the only original co-host left on The View.
Yep. Barbara and I.
After all this time do you still look on her as a mentor or do you see her now as a colleague?
She is kind of like a colleague now—as much as a living legend can be your colleague. She always laughs when I call her that.
What have you learned from Barbara other than the importance of good lighting?
Well, she has a tremendous work ethic. She—and Joan Rivers—will never retire. Because I’m at the advanced age that we dare not mention aloud anymore, I did not start young at all this. I really haven’t been in the business as long as someone like Barbara. So I’m not sure I would want to quit so easily myself, but I am hoping I will know when to exit stage left.
That moderator’s chair on The View has passed from Meredith Vieira to Rosie O’Donnell to Whoopi Goldberg. Did you ever feel passed over for not being offered that job yourself?
No. I didn’t feel passed over because it becomes a very tricky thing to be as part of that show. They never asked me to do it. And I’ve never asked to do it. It’s a Catch-22, that seat. Different things happen in that seat. You have to control things too much. Look, I’m basically an only child. So I’m back being one here on my show. I’ve put in my time as a sibling over there for 13 years.
You’re a left-winger who seems to get along with right-wingers. You like to book Ann Coulter, for example.
So you hate her, huh.
Well, I question someone’s judgment whose criticism of John Edwards was once based on her calling him a “fag.” That was certainly insightful. I do find her schtick hateful. I think you like her because she looks like your partner Steve—they each have a kind of gangly appeal. Though she’s probably got a better goose step.
A lot of my friends on the left hate her. I can’t say that I love her. I don’t hang out with her. But I like to have her on and spar with her and tease her and play around with it. I like to have her on the way Bill Maher likes to have her on his show, but she told me she doesn’t want to go on there anymore because she doesn’t like the audience and the way they behave. She feels that they’re always clapping and yelling and participating too much.
Like A Tea Party crowd, huh.
Well, yeah. Look, I don’t want to be the kind of person who is closed to the right-wing. I do like having conversations with those on the right.
On The View you’ve got Elizabeth Hasselbeck to contend with every day. But some days I sense you just rolling your eyes at what she says and don’t want to waste your energy anymore with her.
I’m not arguing with her anymore. I don’t want to. You’re right. It’s exhausting. And I don’t feel like doing it any longer. I just don’t.
Bill Geddie—your boss who’s the Executive Producer of The View and who has worked with Barbara for ages—is a right-winger.
That’s right. And we’ve had some rocky days. But we don’t have a problem anymore because we understand each other. I said to him just recently, “Bill, let’s not ever talk politics again because we’ve been getting along so well.”
Well, you do have Barbara as an example. She’s worked with Bill forever and one of her closest friends—or a confidant at least—was Roy Cohn.
She doesn’t judge people by their politics I don’t think. That’s because she was trained as a neutral journalist—though, believe me, she has her own positions on things.
You were trained as a comedian. You still identify as that. You still go out and do stand-up. How has that affected this other even bigger aspect of your career now as a talk show host whose job at times does border on being a journalist?
The thing about comedians, rather than the fact that we’re insecure, is that more likely we just didn’t fit in in some way when we were growing up. So it does give you a sense of empathy when interviewing someone. But I do see myself as a comedian first and foremost. I wasn’t influenced by Edward R. Murrow growing up. I was influenced by Jerry Lewis. When I was a kid I used to go around the house acting like him and imitating him and getting laughs like Jerry Lewis. Then when I grew up, I would get laughs as a teacher. I would even get laughs when I worked in the mental hospital. And I’m still getting ‘em.
Editor’s Note: This interview took place last week, before Barbara Walters announced she would undergo heart surgery.
Plus: Check out more of the latest entertainment, fashion, and culture coverage on Sexy Beast—photos, videos, features, and Tweets.
Kevin Sessums is the author of the New York Times bestseller Mississippi Sissy, a memoir of his childhood. He was executive editor of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and Allure. He is a contributing editor of Parade. His new memoir, I Left It on Mountain will be published by St. Martins Press.
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URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-12/joy-behars-new-point-of-view/p/

Panic drives Arizona’s immigration crackdown
A new law reveals the dangerous gap between old white and young Latino America
Andrew Sullivan

I never thought I’d live to see the day when Arizona — the free-wheeling, anti-government home of the libertarian right — would start copying France. Yes, France. In France, all non-European Union citizens are required to carry papers on them whenever they venture out of their homes or face being picked up by the police as possibly illegal.
This kind of state power over the individual stems from the Napoleonic era. It reeks of everything most Americans, let alone western frontier Americans, despise about Europe. Yet Arizona’s legislature has just passed and its Republican governor has just signed a law that would replicate exactly the French example.
Under the Arizona law, police will be able to stop and demand papers from anyone they “reasonably suspect” might be an illegal immigrant. A lack of papers means a path to deportation unless the papers are produced. Essentially, every working-class Hispanic in the state will henceforth be regarded as guilty until proven innocent as they move around the state. The fear of police surveillance may well push illegal immigrants underground while making legal immigrants feel like illegals when they are stopped and searched, as many almost certainly will be.
The law has provoked a predictable uproar among libertarians, civil liberties backers, Democrats and, of course, Latino organisations. The controversy has even invaded the sacred non-political world of sport, where protests against Arizona teams are being organised. Boycotts of the state are being mooted. President Barack Obama, with his usual flair for calculated understatement, called it “misguided”.
At the same time a clear majority of Americans back the law. Gallup found last week that among those who had not heard of the law, 39% still approved its essential principle — the right to demand papers from anyone in public reasonably suspected of being illegal — as opposed to 30% who opposed it. More strikingly, those polled who were aware of the law backed it by a bigger margin — 51% to 39%. A total of 75% of Republicans back it, along with 50% of independents, but only 34% of Democrats. That helps to explain why John McCain, the Arizona senator who was a fervent supporter of a near-amnesty for illegal immigrants just a few years ago, now backs the law while facing an election challenge from his far right in August.
So it isn’t just Britain that has a population fed up with uncontrolled immigration and lax oversight of borders — and that also believes that the national government still doesn’t get it and that the people are being tarred unfairly as racists for discussing a legitimate issue. Gillian Duffy, the Rochdale pensioner who tackled Gordon Brown, has many millions of American equivalents, with far more reason to vent than she has.
America’s immigration debate is more acute and volatile than Britain’s. While 80% of migrants to Britain come legally from Europe, the United States has a vast desert border with Mexico, where policing those coming in is a Sisyphean task. One reason the debate has exploded in Arizona is that there has been greater border vigilance elsewhere — resulting in a disproportionate share of illegal Latinos coming into Arizona. The problem is endemic and, without an Israeli-style wall, across thousands of miles of barren land, insoluble.
The law’s backers point out in their defence that it specifically precludes racial profiling. But what could practically prompt reasonable suspicion of being illegal apart from the colour of one’s skin? Driving erratically? Listening to Latino music? Picking fruit? Hanging out on a street corner where employers might be recruiting? Mowing someone’s lawn? I’m an immigrant with legal papers but I doubt I would ever be stopped in Arizona and suspected of being an illegal.
Although I sympathise a great deal with frustration at the federal government’s indifference to the rule of law in immigration (and can testify to how onerous, endless and bureaucratic the legal immigration process has become in contrast), I still feel there is something more irrational than rational about the backlash. During the recession more Latinos have been leaving the United States than entering. The Center for Immigration Studies has found that the number of illegal immigrants in America dropped by 1.7m in the recession — with newcomers dropping by a third and those returning to Mexico doubling in number. The sudden explosion of feeling about this problem is not therefore related directly to a current crisis of immigration.
William Frey of the Brookings Institution noted a fascinating demographic nugget that adds context to Arizona’s anti-immigrant spasm. If you calculate the proportion of whites among seniors and then among children in any state, you begin to see the scale of the cultural change in America. In Arizona 83% of senior citizens are white and only 43% of children are. That 40-point difference is the biggest racial generation gap in the country. Arizona is not alone — Nevada, California, Texas, New Mexico and Florida are close behind, all critical electoral states. Nationally the disparity is about 25 points. That’s a massive racial and social shift.
It’s predictable that many older Americans would demand a pause — especially if it’s occurring because of the flouting of immigration laws.
That’s why, it seems to me, the Arizona mood is legitimate and yet also perilous. The rule of law in immigration must matter in a globalised world. But cultural panic that targets — perhaps unintentionally — an entire ethnic group is a recipe for social conflict.
The evidence suggests that Hispanics are following much the same path as previous immigrant populations in assimilating and changing American culture into a mocha-coloured blend. I see no reason this won’t continue and there are plenty of parallels in American history when other ethnic groups — the Irish in particular — suffered much worse discrimination in the country, even if the borders were all but open for much of US history.
That’s why the Democrats sniff a real opportunity. This law has horrible consequences for the Republican image among Hispanics. Add it to the impression of the Tea Party protests and the loathing of Obama among many older white Americans — and the Republicans could lose the Hispanic vote for generations.
Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader, pandering in part to voters in his home state of Nevada, has suddenly pushed immigration reform to the front of the queue in Congress. Obama has seized on the law to advocate comprehensive reform. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto king of the Republican base, said the following on his massively popular radio show: “I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers. Maybe he’s afraid somebody is going to ask him for his.”
If America’s future is as coffee-coloured as its current president, the Republican base increasingly wants to throw a tea party with pellucidly white china. Unlike in Britain, where anti-immigrant sentiment will often snare a majority in a still overwhelmingly white country, in America the opponents of immigration today are often the political losers of tomorrow.
If the Democrats get an even stronger lock on the Hispanic vote and retain all the black vote, they could become a majority party for decades. Right now the Republicans in Arizona cannot see this through their understandable frustration. But they are committing political suicide if they continue down this path while Obama waits patiently and cunningly in the wings.
Yes, in this long game his party is winning.

andrewsullivan.com