Later On

The Wife is the designated owl-watcher here, so each day I get a report of what Molly, McGee, Max, Pattison, Austin, and Wesley have been up to the night before. The babies, which we first met as limp balls of white fluff, are now pretty much owls, with their final coat of plumage—and a bunch of downy feathers still visible, which they pick out for all they’re worth. (It seems to be for owls what acne is for human adolescents.)

The owlets are starting to leave the owl box for little tiny test flights, after flapping their wings as much as they could in the confines of the owl box. (Three of the owlets would move into a corner, giving one room to flap his wings.)

Now that the babies are big, Molly doesn’t seem to spend any time in the box, though she still faithfully delivers food (rodents, rats, rabbits, etc.) and will cluck encouragingly from outside as the boys start to try to leave the box.

Leaving the box seems to occur in stages, and the owlets are doing it in order of age. First, there is much poking of the head out door to look around, sometimes two owlets at a time. Then standing on the edge of the door. Then (Big Step) stepping out of the box onto the ledge, which much wing-flapping can freely be done. Then hopping/flying to the next perch—and, of course, hopping/flying back. The next perch is close enough so that Max and Pattison, one on the next perch, the other at the door, could nibble at each other encouragingly.

Finally, Max flew to the top of the owl box and sat there for a while, then back.

Austin broke the pattern. He kept looking out the door at the other two, getting right at the edge of the door, then backing down. Finally, he backed off into the box and The Wife thought, “He’s going to make a running leap.” He stayed out of sight for a handful of seconds, then he came: a running leap it was, and he made it directly onto the next perch, where he settled after a certain amount of flailing.

Here’s the odd emotion: We (well, The Wife and hundreds of thousands of others) have watched the babies hatch and grow up, and we’ve seen how Molly and McGee take care of them—and continue to care for them as they start to leave the nest, bringing them food, clucking encouragement, and probably teaching them something of how to hunt.

But we realize that these owls are almost grown, and that one day Max will fly away from the box and he will not come back. No goodbyes, no promises to write, no indication that it’s farewell: just another practice flight, only this time he keeps flying.

It’s such an odd sensation, to see the family grow up and then depart from each other without a word. McGee and Molly will stay together, of course: owls bond in their mating. But the boys will be off and on their own, just flying away one day and not coming back.

Very odd feeling.

Whether a remark is sexist, racist, or fits any other category of bigotry, when it’s made in your presence you have to speak up or go away feeling a little contempt for yourself. This video explains exactly how to speak up: by focusing on the remark that was made, not on the attitudes or beliefs of the person making it. You don’t even really know those, but you do know (a) what was said and (b) why it’s objectionable, so stick to that.

The Wife tells me that this video’s been around, and I’m glad to hear it. I’m now contributing to its viralality. Watch it, please. (Via this good post by DougJ at Balloon Juice.)

Very interesting report by the NYCLU===from 2008. I just learned about it thanks to this 2008 post in Reason by Jacob Sullum, which Ed Brayton linked to this morning. One interesting thing is the graph:

What happened?, you ask. Good question. Read Sullum’s summary.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

In his first Capitol Hill appearance since the Upper Big Branch mine explosion last month, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship told a Senate committee yesterday that "we never have, and never will" put profits above safety in any of his company’s mines.

"From the day I became a member of Massey’s leadership team 20 years ago, I have made safety my number one priority," Blankenship said.

But the truth is that Blankenship’s Big Branch mine alone was "cited for safety violations 515 times in 2009 and 124 times in 2010 before the blast," citations which Assistant Secretary of Labor Joseph Main said were "not only more numerous than average, but also more serious." 

The Big Branch violations are part of Massey’s long record of egregious environmental and health violations.

In 2000, a Massey subsidiary was responsible for what was at that time the "nation’s largest man-made environmental disaster east of the Mississippi." 

In 2007, the EPA sued Massey for violating the Clean Water Act "more than 4,500 times from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2006."

And in 2006, Massey’s Aracoma Coal Co. pled "guilty to 10 criminal charges, including one felony, and pay $2.5 million in criminal fines" after two workers died in a fire at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine in Melville, West Virginia. Massey failed to notify authorities of the fire until two hours after the disaster, and Blankenship later called the incident "statistically insignificant."

Though the company has been charged with tens of thousands of violations (10,653 in 2009), Massey continues to escape full responsibility by constantly appealing the penalties, and by leveraging connections with former employees of Blankenship who had been placed at the highest levels of the federal mine safety system.

Blankenship’s attitude toward worker safety is best embodied in a memo he sent to mine superintendents just two months before the Aracoma fire. "If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever)," he wrote, "you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills."

Needless to say, Blankenship has taken great pains to ensure that the mine is not unionized. Unions would not allow the continual safety violations.

This is ultra-cool: Chris Ho-Stuart at Skeptical Science:

Most participants in climate debates can agree that the atmosphere’s capacity to interact with thermal radiation helps maintain the Earth’s surface temperature at a livable level. The Earth’s surface is about 33 degrees Celsius warmer than required to radiate back all the absorbed energy from the Sun. This is possible only because most of this radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere, and what actually escapes out into space is mostly emitted from colder atmosphere.

This absorption is due to trace gases which make up only a very small part of the atmosphere. Such gases are opaque to thermal radiation, and are called "greenhouse gases". The most important greenhouse gases on Earth are water vapor and carbon dioxide, with additional contributions from methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and others. If the atmosphere was simply a dry mix of its major constituents, Oxygen and Nitrogen, the Earth would freeze over completely.

Observing the greenhouse effect in action

The simplest direct observation of the greenhouse effect at work is atmospheric backradiation. Any substance that absorbs thermal radiation will also emit thermal radiation; this is a consequence of Kirchoff’s law. The atmosphere absorbs thermal radiation because of the trace greenhouse gases, and also emits thermal radiation, in all directions. This thermal emission can be measured from the surface and also from space. The surface of the Earth actually receives in total more radiation from the atmosphere than it does from the Sun.

The net flow of radiant heat is still upwards from the surface to the atmosphere, because the upwards thermal emission is greater than the downwards atmospheric backradiation. This is a simple consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. The magnitude of the net flow of heat is the difference between the radiant energy flowing in each direction. Because of the backradiation, the surface temperature and the upwards thermal radiation is much larger than if there was no greenhouse effect.

Atmospheric backradiation has been directly measured for over fifty years. The effects of greenhouse gases stand out clearly in modern measurements, which are able to show a complete spectrum.

Figure 1. Coincident measurements of the infrared emission spectrum of the cloudfree atmosphere at (a) 20km looking downward over the Arctic ice sheet and (b) at the surface looking upwards. (Data courtesy of David Tobin, Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Diagram courtesy of Grant Petty, from Petty 2006).

When you look down from aircraft at 20km altitude (Fig 1a), what is "seen" is the thermal radiation from Earth that gets out to that height. Some of that radiation comes from the surface. This is the parts of the spectrum that follow a line corresponding in the diagram to about 268K. Some of that radiation comes from high in the atmosphere, where it is much colder. This is the parts of the spectrum that follow a line of something like 225K. The bites taken out of the spectrum are in those bands where greenhouse gases absorb radiation from the surface, and so the radiation that eventually escapes to space is actually emitted high in the atmosphere.

When you look up from the surface (Fig 1b), what is "seen" is thermal backradiation from the atmosphere. In some frequencies, thermal radiation is blocked very efficiently, and the backradiation shows the temperature of the warm air right near the surface. In the "infrared window" of the atmosphere, the atmosphere is transparent. In these frequencies, no radiation is absorbed, no radiation is emitted, and here is where IR telescopes and microwave sounding satellites can look out to space, and down to the surface, respectively.

The smooth dotted lines in the diagram labeled with temperatures are the curves for a simple blackbody radiating at that temperature. Water vapor has complex absorption spectrum, and it is not well mixed in the atmosphere. The emissions seen below 600 cm^-1are due to water vapor appearing at various altitudes. Carbon dioxide is the major contributor for emission seen between between about 600 and 750 cm^-1. The patch of emission just above 1000 cm^-1 is due to ozone.

Continue reading.

Rand Paul probably wishes he had been much more circumspect about his beliefs. When Rachel Maddow asked him what he thought about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said he didn’t like it, and when she asked point-blank if private businesses should be able to refuse to serve African-Americans, he answered, "Yes." Ever since that, he’s been desperately trying to claim that his "yes" meant "no," blaming the "liberal media" and the "loony left" for misrepresenting his position as saying that private businesses should be able to refuse to serve African-Americans—which, in fact, was what he said.

Steve Benen has an excellent summary under the title "When A Walk-Back Becomes A Sprint" :

It all started with a simple, 11-word question: "Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?" The question was posed by the editors of the Louisville Courier-Journal to Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky.

The answer proved problematic — Paul says he’s opposed to discrimination, but also opposes laws that impose restrictions on free enterprise. The Civil Rights Act went too far, Paul argued, when it mandated requirements on private entities. That’s what he told Courier-Journal, NPR, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and it’s consistent with what he wrote in 2002 when he articulated his opposition to the Fair Housing Act for the same reasons.

Indeed, Rachel specifically asked Paul if a private business should be able to refuse service to black people. The Republican candidate replied, "Yes."

And then the evolution of Rand Paul kicked into overdrive.

Over the course of 24 hours, Paul went from opposing the Civil Rights Act to opposing repeal of the Civil Rights Act to considering the Civil Rights Act settled law to actually supporting the legislation he said he would have opposed.

[Paul] said he would have voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act if he were in the Senate at the time, calling the racial climate at the time "a stain on the South and our history."

"There was an overriding problem in the South that was so big that it did require federal intervention in the Sixties," he said. "The Southern states weren’t correcting it, and there was a need for federal intervention."

Presented again with the original question that got him in trouble in the first place, the Kentucky Republican said, "Yes, I would have voted yes" on the Civil Rights Act.

As political flip-flops go, Rand Paul’s reversal is one for the books. "Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?" He had a very specific answer before yesterday, which he’d articulated on multiple occasions, over the course of many years. It just happens to be the exact opposite of the position he endorsed while on CNN.

It appears that Paul had a choice: defend his deeply held principles and try to convince voters of the merit of his ideas, or abandon those principles when they became politically problematic and put his Senate bid in jeopardy. Paul has obviously made his decision.

Indeed, he’s trying to soften other extreme beliefs, too. Paul has already voiced opposition to the Americans with Disabilities Act, but when asked about the ADA by Wolf Blitzer yesterday, the Senate hopeful said, "I’d have to look at it and see."

I suspect that the video of Rand Paul saying what he did in fact say will play a big role in the run-up to the general election this fall. But certainly he’s mastered one of the basic GOP skills: bald-faced lying.

I’m very glad to see some pushback against the Right’s rewriting history.

The Wife has a friend who lives on Staten Island, and she sent along the razor shown above, which she found in an estate sale. I cleaned it up, but the nickel plate seems to have worn substantially and there’s little shine to it. OTOH, I got a very fine shave. It’s a Gillette flare-tipped Super Speed. It has no date code—and the Gillette Razor date codes site seems gone, alas. (I knew I should have copied that page.) It arrived with an old Wilkinson blade in it, which I discarded and instead used a Swedish Gillette blade of a few uses from another Super Speed.

The anonymous looking shaving soap is Woods of Windsor, as is the anonymous looking aftershave. (A spill in shipment wiped off the printing.) I got a fine lather with the G.B. Kent BK4, and as noted the razor did a very nice job: totally smooth face in three easy passes. A splash of Woods of Windsor, and I’m ready to put the laundry in.

EPA orders BP to use less-toxic dispersant on spill. People who trust businesses and want the government to stop regulating them so closely: Explain, please, why BP did not make the switch on its own, without being forced to.

Toyota’s claims of extensive testing untrue, lawmakers charge.

Top U.S. intelligence official Dennis Blair says he’ll resign. But only if Obama will finally appoint someone both competent and ethical to clean house.

Or let the scientists look at the high-res feed and all the data. Marisa Taylor, Renee Schoof, and Erika Bolstad for McClatchy:

The disputed official estimate that only 5,000 barrels of oil are leaking daily from a runaway well in the Gulf of Mexico could save BP millions of dollars in damages when the financial impact of the spill is resolved in court, legal experts say.

One month after a surge of gas from the undersea well engulfed the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in flames and triggered the massive leak that now threatens sea life, fisheries and tourist centers in five Gulf coast states, neither BP nor the federal government has yet to measure at the source the amount of crude pouring into the water.

BP and the Obama administration have said they did not want to take the measurements for fear of interfering with efforts to stanch the leaks.

That decision, however, runs counter to BP’s own regional plan for dealing with offshore leaks. "In the event of a significant release of oil," the 583-page plan says on Page 2, "an accurate estimation of the spill’s total volume . . . is essential in providing preliminary data to plan and initiate cleanup operations."

Legal experts say there’s another benefit for BP of not having a credible official estimate of the leak’s size: the amount of oil spilled is certain to be key evidence in the court battles likely to result from the disaster. The size of the Exxon Valdez spill, for example, was a significant factor that the jury considered when it assessed damages against Exxon.

“If they put off measuring, then it’s going to be a battle of dueling experts after the fact trying to extrapolate how much spilled after it has all sunk or has been carried away,” said Lloyd Benton Miller, one of the lead plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Exxon Valdez spill litigation. ”The ability to measure how much oil was released will be impossible.”

“It’s always a bottom-line issue,” said Marilyn Heiman, a former Clinton administration Interior Department official who now heads the Arctic Program for the Pew Environment Group. “Any company wouldn’t have an interest in having this kind of measurement if they can help it.”

The question of the size of the spill has become a high stakes political controversy that’s put the Obama administration and the oil company on the defensive. In congressional testimony Wednesday, an engineering professor from Perdue University said that based on videos released Tuesday he believed the wells was spewing at 95,000 barrels of a day into the Gulf.

On Thursday, the Obama administration demanded that BP publicly release all information related to the disaster.

BP officials had pledged in congressional testimony to keep the public and government officials informed, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a letter to BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward.

“Those efforts, to date, have fallen short in both their scope and effectiveness,” they wrote.

That letter came after members of Congress made similar demands of BP, leading to the release Tuesday of the new videos. One showed oil still billowing from one underwater pipe, despite an insertion tube BP now says is capturing 5,000 barrels of crude a day. The other showed a previously unseen leak spewing clouds of crude from just above the well’s dysfunctional blowout preventer.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday ordered BP to switch to a less toxic version of the chemical mix it’s using to disperse the oil. The EPA also for the first time posted on its Web site BP’s test data of the dispersant’s use in deep water. Those orders came days after members of Congress made a similar demand.

Scientists and environmentalists praised the government for demanding that more information be made public.

“This is exactly the role the government needs to be playing — they need to be overseeing BP’s actions to assure that health and natural resources are protected, as much as possible, and that information is available to the public,” said Gina Solomon, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

John Curry, a BP spokesman, said he hadn’t seen the letter from Napolitano and Jackson and couldn’t comment specifically, but added: “We’re just trying to provide the information people are asking for at the same time we are trying to position a lot more resources to stop the flow of oil.” …

Continue reading, really. The sleaze/dishonest index for BP is off the charts.

The last couple of days have had more event than I’m used to. Among the events:

• American Express mailed me a notice because some charges looked inappropriate—$30 to iTunes and another $100 to iTunes. I’ve never bought anything from iTunes. I called them, and we resolved the charges. They also found a $1 purchase from “Budshack,” from which I have purchased nothing. The AmEx guy said that credit-card criminals will often try a very small purchase just to see if the card works. Then they get serious. We went over all recent charges, and those were the only bad ones. That card has been canceled and today I should receive a new card and account number—sent out overnight mail, very nice. I appreciate the way AmEx protects me (and them). I’ve even had the experience of placing an on-line order (from a site in Portugal), have it declined, and have my phone ring immediately with AmEx on the line, asking, “Was that you?” Very heads-up protection. Still, I now have to notify all services that bill the card automatically—well, what I do is not notify any of them, and they will contact me asking for the correct number. Still, a bunch of folderol must follow.
• My library card stopped working when I tried to put a hold on things on-line. Finally made it in today to see why: renewal time (every 5 years). No biggie.
• The “Wings of Freedom” tour is stopping in Monterey and I drove out to do a walkthrough of a B-24 Liberator and a B-17 Flying Fortress and look at a P-51 Mustang. (I would love also to see a B-29 Superfortress.) I drove out to the Monterey Peninsula Airport to see them, based on the ad. Not in sight. Returned home, and found online that they are actually at the Monterey Jet Center (different entrance). I’ll go again tomorrow. I’m particularly interested in the B-17, the bomber used in Operation Tidal Wave. I read James Dugan & Carroll Stewart’s fascinating book [link is to the actual content of the book on Project Gutenberg] on the raid, and I’m eager to see the bomber itself. Then I’ll probably read the book again.
• Finally walked a block downhill to check out the Prime center I just noticed. Turns out it’s a fitness center for individual (or VERY small group) instruction. Actually, exactly what I need, plus the equipment looks quite interesting. I’m particularly intrigued by the kettlebells, which I’ve never used. The links following the Wikipedia article include some videos of kettlebell routines. My first appointment is next Tuesday morning. I’ve filled out the questionnaire, and I took the medical releases to my PCP and endocrinologist, who’ll doubtless be thrilled that I’m taking some action.
• The Wife and I decided that we need to take care of the end-of-life planning that’s so easy to postpone, so I called our tax accountant and got a couple of recommendations of estate lawyers with whom they’ve had a good working experience, then called one of them to set up an appointment in early June. The woman I talked to said that she would mail me a list of what to bring and have ready.

All that was going around in my head at the same time I was trying to figure out how to do fewer political posts and still post the stuff that most interests me. Despite lists, things kept running into each other in my mind, making it difficult to concentrate.

But now I’ve taken care of just about everything. The new AmEx card arrives tonight, and that will go smoothly—it’s not the first time I’ve gone through this. Library card is good for another 5 years, and while I was there I checked out 4 good books on botany, including one specifically on the plants of the Monterey Peninsula. I’ll see the planes tomorrow morning, and I’m looking forward to the fitness program. The questionnaire I filled out for them was very interesting—a fair amount of focus on diet, which I aced, of course. And getting that death stuff out of the way so that it’s not nagging at me in the back of my mind will be a great relief—and, I’m sure, contribute to a peaceful passing.

Glad to trim the list, feeling much better just looking at the things coming under control again. Plus I got the Avatar DVD from Netflix today.

Andrew Sullivan:

A Palestinian woman whose house has been occupied by Jewish settlers argues with Israelis who came to celebrate Jerusalem Day on May 12, 2010 in front of her disputed house in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Israel recently celebrating the anniversary of the ‘unification’ of Jerusalem, marking 43 years since it captured mainly Arab east Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East war. By Ahmad Gharabli/Getty. [click photo to enlarge - LG]

That’s modern Israel for you: Thugs can simply steal your entire house if you happen to be Palestinian—and the government backs them up! No property rights for Palestinians. What a despicable country Israel has become!

UPDATE: It suddenly struck me what this picture reminds me of. Turn the clock back to around 1933-34. Instead of Palestine territory, place the situation somewhere in Austria or Germany. Which person(s) in the photo seem likely to be Jewish?

UPDATE 2: Mark Kleiman has a good comment.

Steve Benen:

After multiple interviews in which Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul explained his opposition to the Civil Rights Act infringing on private enterprise, his campaign aides have decided to try a new tack. As of this afternoon, the new strategy is to simply pretend that the positions the candidate has already articulated are not actually the positions the candidate believes.

In other words, afraid of how explosive this may be, the Rand Paul Senate campaign is giving lying a shot.

This afternoon, a spokesman for the Paul campaign told Greg Sargent, "Civil Rights legislation that has been affirmed by our courts gives the Federal government the right to insure that private businesses don’t discriminate based on race. Dr. Paul supports those powers."

Except, of course, he doesn’t. We know Paul doesn’t support this policy because he’s told us he doesn’t support this policy. Indeed, just last night, Rachel Maddow asked the Republican candidate, "Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve black people?" Paul replied, "Yes."

Worse, this has always been Paul’s position. This afternoon, Dave Weigel notes remarks the right-wing ophthalmologist made several years ago.

In a May 30, 2002, letter to the Bowling Green Daily News, Paul’s hometown newspaper, he criticized the paper for endorsing the Fair Housing Act, and explained that "a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin." (Hat tip: Page One Kentucky.)

"The Daily News ignores," wrote Paul, "as does the Fair Housing Act, the distinction between private and public property. Should it be prohibited for public, taxpayer-financed institutions such as schools to reject someone based on an individual’s beliefs or attributes? Most certainly. Should it be prohibited for private entities such as a church, bed and breakfast or retirement neighborhood that doesn’t want noisy children? Absolutely not."

In language similar to the language he’s used talking about the Civil Rights Act, Paul criticized racism while defending the right of businesses to discriminate.

"A free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination," wrote Paul, "even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin. It is unenlightened and ill-informed to promote discrimination against individuals based on the color of their skin. It is likewise unwise to forget the distinction between public (taxpayer-financed) and private entities."

So, when the campaign spokesperson argues that Rand Paul "supports" government restrictions on private enterprise regarding discrimination, that’s plainly false. That, or Paul woke up this morning with a policy position entirely at odds with everything he’s said and/or thought on the subject for years.

Indeed, this new report drives the point home nicely — Paul not only thinks the Civil Rights Act was excessive, but he doesn’t even support the Fair Housing Act, for the same reason.

Far be it for me to give the Paul campaign advice, but lying about this is the wrong way to go. Paul’s only legitimate avenue is to make the philosophical argument — he finds racism offensive, but doesn’t want government to interfere with business’ choices — and hope voters buy it.

Rekers clearly did a lot of human damage with his inability to face his own homosexuality. Penn Bullock and Brandon Thorp in the Miami New Times:

What do you do with a little boy who likes cross-dressing and playing with dolls? If you’re George Alan Rekers, you "extinguish" the boy’s feminine behavior with a sometimes violent Pavlovian regimen while your scientific team observes through a one-way mirror.

That’s what the Baptist minister — who made international headlines when he was exposed by Miami New Times this month for hiring a gay escort — did in the early 1970s at a clinic he opened at UCLA called the Feminine Boy Project.

In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old "effeminate boy" named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a "play-observation room" with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.

According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, "On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him… Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room."

Rekers’s research team continued the experiment in the family’s home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a "swat" or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family’s home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system.

After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as "the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy."

At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers’s poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke. Rekers, whose early experiments were the first to ostensibly demonstrate a "gay cure," resigned from the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) last week, after it was revealed the gay escort had given him nude sexual massages. NARTH, however, stands by his science.

Thinklinkr is a truly terrific Web 2.0 outliner that can import and export outlines. This one, though Web-based, has more capability than most standalone outliners—and it has a very handy menu (which you can hide) of the various commands and capabilities.

Well worth bookmarking for anyone who writes.

Suzy Khimm at Mother Jones:

President Obama has placed Arizona’s immigration law at the forefront of his talks with visiting Mexican President Felipe Calderon, with both leaders sharpening their criticism of the harsh enforcement policy. But missing from the entire discussion is Mexico’s own terrible record on immigration, with human rights violations of a different order altogether.

In a recent report, Amnesty International details some of the worst abuses that Central American migrants endure in Mexico en route to the US. According to Amnesty, as many as six in 10 women are raped as they pass through Mexico—the victims of both criminal gang members and local authorities. Other violations abound:

[M]any Central American migrants to Mexico accuse Mexican officials of demanding bribes or flat-out stealing their cash.

"Migrants in Mexico are facing a major human rights crisis leaving them with virtually no access to justice, fearing reprisals and deportation if they complain of abuses," Rupert Knox, Mexico Researcher at Amnesty International, said. "Persistent failure by the authorities to tackle abuses carried out against irregular migrants has made their journey through Mexico one of the most dangerous in the world."

Lately, as drug violence has soared, migrants have also been increasingly the victims of kidnapping.

To point out such abuses isn’t to say that the concerns about Arizona’s new law are illegitimate. But if Mexico is going to criticize Arizona’s law—the country has even issued a travel warning for residents headed to the state–it must be willing to look in the mirror. The systemic corruption that feeds the drug violence at the border is also victimizing the migrants who are headed there. And having prioritized immigration and border security issues in his talks with Calderon, Obama needs to press these human rights issues directly with the Mexican president.

Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Kevin Drum and others have been having quite a discussion about whether it’s legitimate to ask whether a public official—Elena Kagan in this case—is gay. Generally speaking, the gay people think it’s legit, the straight think it’s not.

As has been pointed out several times, though the straights don’t seem to get it, is that sexual orientation is not the same as sexual activity. Kevin Drum, for example, listed a bunch of questions about sexual activity ("Have you had an affair?", "Do you masturbate?", etc.) and compared those to asking whether a person is gay.

But asking whether a person is gay is (to my mind) like asking whether the person is heterosexual. What’s the problem? It’s who you are. Indeed, one often does not need to ask: when someone shows up with their spouse, you can tell pretty quickly whether the person is gay or heterosexual.

And Sullivan has this today, quoting Greenwald (who, like Sullivan, is gay):

Glenn Greenwald makes the point a lot of out gay people have recently been screaming at the television:

The very notion that it is "outrageous" or "despicable" to inquire into a public figure’s sexual orientation — adjectives I heard repeatedly applied to those raising questions about Kagan — is completely inconsistent with the belief that sexual orientation is value-neutral.   If being straight and gay are precise moral equivalents, then what possible harm can come from asking someone, especially one who seeks high political office:  "are you gay?"  If one really believes that they are equivalent, then that question would be no different than asking someone where they grew up, whether they are married, or how many children they have.  That’s what made the White House’s response to the initial claims that Kagan was gay so revealing and infuriating:   by angrily rejecting those claims as "false charges," they were — as Alex Pareene put it — "treating lesbian rumors like allegations of vampiric necrophilia."

The double standards are pretty staggering:

It’s ironic indeed that so many progressives — who spent months during Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation process insisting that one’s life experiences (growing up as a poor Puerto Rican in the South Bronx) play a crucial role in how one understands the claims of litigants — are now demanding that sexual orientation be permitted to be kept hidden as though it’s completely irrelevant to one’s perspective.  If there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with being gay, why the double standard?  Just as Sotomayor’s background would undoubtedly affect her ability to understand (or "empathize" with) claims of discrimination or other forms of oppression, wouldn’t the same be true of a judge’s growing up gay — or choosing to remain closeted?

Kevin Drum still holds by the old standard (which hearkens back to the days when homosexuality was considered shameful—and I hope we’re moving beyond that):

Responding to my post last night about what kinds of things we have a right to know about public figures, Andrew Sullivan says:

Drum objects to asking public figures about their sex lives. So do I. I have zero interest — less than zero, actually — in Elena Kagan’s sex life or lack of it. I do have an interest in someone’s public identity. And how many times can I say this before my straight friends get it? Being gay is not about your sex life. It’s about a core element of your identity, one that no gay person can bypass or ignore.

This is right. I made up a list of questions about sexual activity and compared them to the question of whether someone is gay. That was a screwup. But —

(You knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?)

But — Andrew says he’s interested in people’s "public identity." And this gets to the core of my disagreement with him. Maybe I’m just mired in a different era, but I believe pretty passionately that people should be allowed a wide latitude to display themselves to the public however they want. There are limits, of course, because lots of aspects of our identities are inherently public — Barack Obama is black, Hillary Clinton is a woman — but this doesn’t inescapably mean that we should also be required, as a prerequisite to public service, to make even the less visible parts of our identity visible whether we want to or not. Some of these less visible aspects, it’s true, might well affect the way a Supreme Court justice views the law. But that’s just logic chopping. Every aspect of identity potentially affects the way a Supreme Court justice views the law. It’s the nature of the job. But that doesn’t automatically mean that we the public have the right to know every last trace of their personal identities. At some point, you just have to accept that other people are always enigmatic in certain ways and that enigma is part of the human condition. You can never be absolutely sure of what’s on their mind or how it will ultimately affect their future conduct.

This is true of more than just sexual identity. Suppose, for example, that Jane Jones grew up in an abusive household. Suppose her father came home drunk every night, beat up her mother, and terrorized the family. And this went on for years. Do you think that would inform her identity as much as growing up gay? If you’re not sure, you should probably talk to someone who’s been through this before you make up your mind.

Now, does the public have a right to know this if Jane is nominated to the Supreme Court? I don’t think so. If Jane chooses to talk about this, perhaps because she’s become an advocate for domestic violence causes, that’s her right. But if she chooses not to, perhaps because her mother is still alive and she knows that public discussion of this would cause her considerable pain, that’s her right too. And this is her right even if domestic violence groups believe their cause would be advanced if more victims told their stories publicly. It’s still her right.

Ditto for sexual identity. Like Andrew, I wish there were no such thing as a closeted gay person. When every single one of them lives their lives openly we’ll be that much closer to being a decent society. And like Andrew, I’m happy to advocate this in public argument.

But that’s a very different thing than badgering a specific person to talk about an aspect of their identity whether they want to or not. That’s just not our decision to make. It’s theirs. And even if we happily chatter about this stuff endlessly with our friends — because we are, after all, a gossipy species — nothing changes. It’s still not right to make this into a public campaign.

I don’t get it. One’s sexual orientation—whether homosexual or heterosexual—is not a big deal (or at least not anymore, with laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination). More important, obviously, is how a person handles their sexual orientation. Some do well, some not so well. Charlie Sheen is an example of a heterosexual who seems to handle his sexuality poorly; Ellen DeGeneres, an example of a homosexual who seems to handle her sexuality well.

I really can’t see why it’s such a big deal: as soon as a person shows up at an event with his or her spouse, you know immediately whether the person is heterosexual or homosexual (at least in their public persona). Should we say that spouses must remain secret lest one’s sexual orientation be (gasp!) revealed?

Why on earth should one’s sexual orientation be any more secret than one’s sex? Indeed, in the old days, one used the sex as a way of knowing the person’s sexual orientation, but then we found the world was more complex.

Worth watching.