Author: hankkalet

New Jersey conservatives are officially weighing in on the issue of gay marriage. As expected, they are planning to unveil a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman — an amendment that woudl write discrimination into law.

And they are planning to unveil a compromise domestic benefits bill that would grant all of the rights and benefits of marriage not only to gay couples, but to nearly every non-married living arrangement. On the surface this seems a useful compromise, but it falls short for two reasons. First, it ignores the psychic and social benefits that come with the marriage designation (a purposeful sleight). And, just as importantly, it would not cover heterosexual couples who choose not to marry because they would be eligible to marry — making it both unfair to gays and straights and unnecessarily coercive.

A better and fairer approach would be to include gay couples in a new marriage law while also creating a separate domestic benefits bill that would cover all of those arrangements short of marriage.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Milton Friedman was, no doubt, a great thinker. But his approach to economics has wrought serious damage to our economy and the classes of Americans who fail in his winner-take-all world. Leave it to William Greider to remind us of this when much of the press in the wake of Friedman’s death has been so laudatory.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

OK. I’m sorry. I forgot — Roger Moore, Grace Jones and a jumble of bad vibes. A View to a Kill gave Moore the chance to show us all that even old and out-of-shape guys can, well, … whatever.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

I finally have had the chance to see what maybe the worst Bond film ever, Octopussy, the 1983 farewell to the genre from Roger Moore. It was a film that served both as an unfortunate and fitting ending to his tenure as the British spy, displaying everything that had gone wrong with the series over his decade-plus in the lead role.

1. Moore is obviously too old for the role, making the series of stunts seem even more absurd than they were.
2. Moore doesn’t sweat — in fact, he never sweats and rarely has a hair out of place.
3. Forget the story. It’s not even worth getting into, something about stolen jewels and missiles or something. Whatever.
4. Bond is made at one point to wear a gorilla suit and ride a circus train. And then, if that wasn’t demeaning enough, he dresses as a clown and has to explain to a disbelieving American general that there is a bomb in the circus.
5. Bond also hangs from a small-engine plane and then fights a crazed, knife-wielding, turban-wearing thug — on the plane.

At least Moonraker, silly and bloated, was fun. This was just a painful wreck.

The series, of course, only gets moderately better. I missed the Dalton years, but at least Pierce Brosnan, trapped in a set of bad stories and buried under an avalanche of bad effects, was a stronger, more sadistic Bond, combining Moore and Connery and returning some of the edge to the series. He brought in the cash, but it was still mired under the weight of irrelevancy.

The new Bond — the magnificent Daniel Craig in the best Bond film since the Connery days — has the chance to redeem the series, or at least atone for films like Octopussy.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

At least one major national newspaper is starting to call the violence in Iraq what it has been for too long: a civil war.

Here is the lead from this morning’s LA Times story:

Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. A main Shiite political faction threatened to quit the government, a move that probably would cause its collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray.

By way of contrast, this is what The New York Times offers:

Defying a government curfew, Shiite militiamen stormed Sunni mosques in Baghdad and a nearby city on Friday, shooting guards and burning down buildings in apparent retaliation for the devastating bombings that killed more than 200 people the day before in the capital’s largest Shiite district, residents and police officials said.

Militia fighters drove through neighborhoods in Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, firing at mosques with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades on the Muslim day of prayer.

The vengeance attacks unfolded while lawmakers loyal to the virulently anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr threatened to boycott the government if Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki met with President Bush next week in Jordan. Mr. Sadr controls one of the biggest blocs of seats in Parliament, and on Friday he reiterated his claim that the American presence was the root cause of the rising violence in Iraq.

The Washington Post comes closer, but refuses to acknowledge that we have entered the abyss:

In a wave of reprisal killings, Shiite militiamen attacked Sunni mosques in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq on Friday, defying a government curfew and propelling the country further toward full-blown civil war.

Why this is the case is difficult to understand. The internecine violence has been a chief characteristic of the war for a long time now, and it seems naive to pretend that this kind of factional brutality is something other less than civil war.

I think the American people, who have shown by their November vote that they want a change of course in Iraq and in the United States, understand what they are witnessing from afar.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Pres
The Blog of South Brunswick