Brill Scheme

Jack Shafer at "Slate" is pessimistic about a plan to charge readers for journalism.

Devesting Ourselves Of The Power Vested In Us

Visiting St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Studio City, California, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson says the church should call a truce over gay marriage by confining itself to blessing prior civil marriages:

Robinson said he favored the system used in France and other parts of Europe in which civil marriage – performed by government officials – is completely separate from religious vows. In the U.S., the civil and religious ceremonies are often combined with the cleric signing the government marriage license.

"In this country, it has become very confusing about where the civil action begins and ends and where the religious action begins and ends, because we have asked clergy to be agents of the state," said Robinson, the bishop of New Hampshire.

Works on paper. But American couples are pretty attached to having their preachers tie the knot. I doubt they'll want to give it up to solve the church's nettlesome theological debate.

To Golda

With Chagall's painting of Moses reading the Ten Commandments as backdrop, President Nixon toasts Israel's Prime Minister, Golda Meir, at a dinner in his honor in the Knesset in 1974. The text of his remarks, and her response, is here.

Coffee, Tea, Or A Third-Party Challenge?

Another hint that the anti-tax "tea parties" presage a third-party candidacy in 2012 that would increase the chances of President Obama's reelection. All it needs is a candidate. Thomas McClanahan in the Kansas City Star:

What we’re seeing is a center-right populist outpouring prompted by the long-term implications of President Barack Obama’s gargantuan budget, his spending plans, the massive tide of red ink those plans will generate — and, most important, what all that implies about the future balance between the government and the private sector.

I attended the tea party Wednesday at Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial, and I couldn’t find anyone who thought the event was about partisan politics. “Both parties are corrupt,” said Brian Stednick of North Kansas City....

The tea party protests recall the Ross Perot phenomenon of the early 1990s. Then as now, the basic concerns were massive federal spending and the size of government. Then as now, the movement blossomed outside the confines of traditional Democratic-Republican politics.

Hat tip to Instapundit

I Say, Good Chap, Please Get Out Of My Lap

Leave it to the British to solve this ancient problem. From the London "Spectator"'s Dear Mary column:

Q. I wonder if you could turn your mind to a distressing problem affecting those of us confined to the pleb class of aircraft and not in a financial position to nibble canapés up front with the co-pilot. What does one do when the...person in front unilaterally decides to press the button entitling him or her to some hours of snore-laden sleep and you to a lapful of coffee? I’ve just come back from a (delightful) trip to New Zealand with stopovers in Hong Kong, and it happened four times. I’m too polite to pretend that my coffee has shot into the air and landed on the back of their neck.

J.B., London N1

A. Respond by leaning forward immediately, and before the offender has nodded off, to ask, concernedly, is he or she is all right? Explain that their chair came back with such force you suspect it may be broken and may collapse fully while they are asleep. Would they like you to call the stewardess? Wear an anxious facial expression. In this way you will get the message across.

The Only Fair Bushwacking

Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder invite us to read carefully what Obama adviser David Axelrod says about the possibility of prosecuting those who may have broken the law in authorizing interrogation techniques that could be construed as torture. I think they're reading too much into it. Axelrod's comment sounds like a boilerplate anchor to windward. But if they're right, and he is hinting at war crimes trials for Bush administration officials, will we also have the opportunity to learn the details of all the terrorist plots foiled on their watch?

Besides:

President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.

Hosts Say The Darnedest Things

Left-wing talk radio is just as nutty as right-wing talk radio.

National City Days

National City is a gutsy Navy and working-class town of about 50,000. San Diego is its northern neighbor. In 1941, a sharecropper's son named Kile Morgan arrived, made his fortune, and decided, as impossibly quaint as it may sound, that he owed his neighbors something in return. After all, growing up in Tennessee and Missouri during the Depression, he'd often gone to bed hungry, whereas he'd never missed a meal in National City. That was good enough for Kile.

He served as mayor for two decades beginning in 1966, pioneering the concept of the auto park (now-ubiquitous clusters of dealerships, designed to reap sales tax revenue for municipalities), creating a Heritage Square of historic residences, paving roads, rebuilding sewers, persuading the May Co. to build a regional shopping center, and raising the funds to build high-rise affordable housing for older people. He became famous for finishing what he started, occasionally cutting corners to get the job done, keeping secrets, turning off his hearing aid when he found you tiresome, and running through city managers as if they were Diet Cokes. When he took office, the city couldn't cover its payroll. By the time he left, it had $8 million in reserves.

I got to know the mayor when I covered National City for a local paper, the Star-News, in 1978-79. He died on Maundy Thursday at 89 after a long, faithful life of joyous servanthood and practicing the art of the possible. He'd asked that I be one of his eulogists.

After the service, I got caught up with Charlotte Webster and her son Tom, who could be the twin of his substantial late father George. As manager of the Chamber of Commerce, George was Kile's cheerful consigliere, feeding me stories and taking me to McDini's for corned beef and shrimp cocktail. As much as I enjoyed my time in National City, I learned that year that I wasn't cut out to be a journalist. Just as the Cold War was, according to Bob Dole, the age of Nixon, in National City I was experiencing the age of Morgan. He was so good at what he did, and so obviously proceeding from good motives, that it seemed churlish seriously to question any of it in print. At least in part as the result of the glaring lack of objectivity in my reporting. I believe I was Kile's favorite reporter. At least, I was the only one he asked to speak at his funeral.

Friday's service was at the One in Christ Church, an American Baptist parish where the mayor had been a church council member and usher for many years. Like many urban congregations, One in Christ is struggling against the tide of demographics. On Sundays, its soft-spoken, thoughtful pastor, James Kilinsky, welcomes a congregation of whites, Latinos, and Laotian-Americans. Everyone worships together, so Pastor Jim produces a complicated 16-page trilingual bulletin, and without a church secretary. Money's tight, but he's still preaching the good news of fellowship, community, and the hope of the Resurrection.

Around the corner is the oldest church in town, St. Matthew's Episcopal (pictured here). A National Historic Site, it was completed in 1887, built from California redwood on a skeleton of timbers brought around the horn, presumably from the east coast or Canada. At 8:30 a.m., its front door was wide open, the downscale neighborhood notwithstanding. As I knelt to pray in the silent, fragrant nave, I wished that when I'd worked in town all those years ago, I'd thought to visit the church of my forebears, just once. All that time, it had been there, and it would've done me some good.

Good Sense Will Hunting

I read George Will's column about Russia three times and couldn't figure out what it means. Then I realized that he doesn't know what it means, either. He accuses President Obama of being nostalgic for the Nixonian era of U.S.-Soviet detente by making the blunder of proposing arms control negotiations with Moscow. Without meaning to do so, he then shows why Obama is right.

Reprising arguments he made two generations ago from the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, Will says that arms control wasn't the ticket for combating rampant Soviet militarism. Ronald Reagan's tough policies were. Will's setup prepares the reader for the argument that Obama is overlooking the threat that Putin's Russia still poses to U.S. interests. Instead, marshaling his usual flurry of statistics, Will argues that Russia, drowning in vodka and stunted by declining fertility rates, is dying as a great power. He enumerates no threats posed by Russia to U.S. interests except one: The nukes that Obama's policy is aimed at reducing:

Today, in a world bristling with new threats, the president suggests addressing an old one -- Russia's nuclear arsenal. It remains potentially dangerous, particularly if a portion of it falls into nonstate hands.

But if it's dangerous to have several thousand thermonuclear devices aimed at us by a crumbling nation (which I would think Will would accept as an axiom), and if Obama can achieve reductions in their number at no risk whatsoever to our interests, why is it a bad idea to have arms control negotiations?

It's not Obama who's nostalgic for the Nixon era (which he barely remembers, of course). It's Will, who embarks on the same anti-arms control column he would've written back then, even though he ends up proving (in spite of himself) that U.S.-Russian arms control today makes abundant good sense. If things are really so bad for Russia, perhaps we'd even be doing it, and the stability of the Asia-Pacific region, a favor by helping relieve it of the cost of maintaining its arsenal.

Extreme Anger

A blogger and former political columnist for the Nashville Tennessean, and a cancer survivor, helps us understand that political extremism and anger (whether on the right or left) are sometimes indistinguishable.