Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1104
April 1, 2013
April Fools' Day News Stories That Weren't Jokes but Should Have Been
It is sometimes a parallel universe, this world of ours, and while we seek every day to bring you truth beyond the headlines and the conversations behind the news, well, today the stars aligned somewhere between surreal and real. On a day full of enough bad jokes across the Web, and stunts from Google, and accidents in newspapers, and horrifying bunnies at the White House, these nine stories cut through the debate on April Fool's Day — whether they seemed fake or not, believe it: They were just patently absurd enough headlines from our world to be the actual news of April 1, 2013.
Sean Parker's Dream Wedding Isn't a Game of Thrones Theme Party, Thank You Very Much
Just when we were hoping for more details than HBO offered with Sunday's return to the realm, the Napster founder and Facebook conspirator (not pictured above) found himself fighting back Monday against reports that his June wedding to musician Alexandra Lenas would be some sort of medieval costume party. The New York Post's article (which also does not picture Parker) could "exclusively reveal" the following, according to "one source":
“There will be some kind of medieval theme, and guests will each get their own costumier. It’s not yet fully decided what the costumes will be like, the theme is supposed to fit in with the environment and the natural beauty of the area. But, yes, there is a chance the wedding could end up looking like an episode of ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”
But that's apparently not the case, according to Parker. "Sorry to disappoint, but the wardrobe we're giving wedding guests is essentially modern. No swords or chain mail," he tweeted Monday afternoon. But then Parker continued:
Just because we don't trust our guests to dress themselves properly doesn't mean we want them to look like Game of Thrones characters. This is not a "theme" wedding, and there will be nothing medieval about it. Academy award winning costume designer Ngila Dickson is creating gorgeous, inspiring, and unique designs that are both modern and whimsical.
Dickson won an Academy award for her work on Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. You may also be familiar with her work on Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai, or Xena: The Warrior Princess, the Hercules television show with Kevin Sarbo that reminds everyone of Game of Thrones.
Lady Gage Turned Down $1 Million to Perform at the Republican National Convention
The Washington Examiner reported on a new lawsuit late Sunday proving that Lady Gaga was floated a seven-figure pay check to perform at the RNC last summer. Rob Jennings, the guy in charge of booking entertainment for the weekend, "was instructed... to try to make the offer to Lady Gaga more tempting by telling her it would be an event 'honoring women who run for public office,'" the Examiner reported. Gaga turned them down, and so did Pitbull, Dolly Parton, Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls, according to this lawsuit we found. Why the promoter thought booking a mini-Lillith Fair at the Republican convention was a good idea was never explained, unfortunately. Maybe it was on direct orders from Reince Priebus.
Bryce Harper Hit Two Home Runs on Opening Day
Because he's that good and the Nationals will probably ruin him. His swing is pretty like the girl you went to the sock hop with.
(Photos by Alex Brandon/AP)
Chris Brown Appeared on the Today Show, "Proving Myself Once Again"
The battle-happy singer went on NBC's embattled morning program, ostensibly to promote his new single, but mostly to forgive himself for beating Rihanna, talk about all the "positivity" in his life, insist that he is fighting to "regain, you know, public opinion or whatever it is," and wear a funny shirt. "I can't make everybody like me," he told Matt Lauer. Go away, Chris Brown — no one likes you.
MTV Buckwild Star Shain Gandee Was Found Dead in the Back of a Truck in West Virginia
Gandee was discovered with his uncle and one other person deceased in the back of his vehicle. Regardless of what you think of MTV and its horrible, exploiting brand of television, the kid was only 21 years old. No one wants to see that.
Everything About Alanis Morissette's New Book
It's just an aside in this Wall Street Journal concert review, but the "Ironic" singer is working on a book and it sounds all kinds of awful. The book will be "transpersonal psychology meets autobiography, with a little humor thrown in, I hope," she tells the Journal. Gag me with spoon, I guess, though what I really need is a knife.
The German Flea Circus Has Been Ravaged by Tragedy
A terrible cold snap killed all 300 performers in a German flea circus, BBC News reports. Right now the promoter is working with a depleted roster of about 60 fleas donated by a professer. "The show must go on," the promoter told the BBC.
A Georgia Republican Said Straight People Will Get Fake Gay Married for the Benefits
Straight people should just shut up already, about everything, before another person says something as stupid as Sue Everhart. She is the chairwoman of the Georgia Republican Party and she does not like gay people. They are "not natural," she told the Marietta Daily Journal before explaining some of the perils of legalizing gay marriage. Chief among the problems? Straight people working the system for benefits:
“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” Everhart said. “Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”
Straight people saying things, y'all.
And Then There's This...
There's a whole section of Reddit devoted to art of Adolf Hitler with breasts. This is not an April Fools' joke: dly.do/10hSz6O
— The Daily Dot (@dailydot) April 1, 2013
Today can't be over fast enough.






This Is Very Probably the Facebook Phone
The tech blogger masses are treating the leak to the Android Police as the real deal version of Facebook's forthcoming phone, and since the social network hasn't been particularly secretive about the launch, it's safe to say this is probably a legitimate look at the gadget in some stage or another. Today's scoop matches a lot of the earlier reports all over the Internet: Facebook's "Home" will run on a mid-level HTC phone with a slightly modified Android operating system. Since the phone only worked with an employee log-in, Android Police's Ron Amadeo couldn't get pass the home screen, pictured above. But, with a little more sleuthing, he locates the following buttons for Messenger, home screen settings, two possibilities for the Facebook app button, and Google search:
That last one's a bit of a surprising since Facebook works with Microsoft to serve Bing search results on its social network. Then again, Android is made by Google. In addition, he discovers that the OS could function on more than just the 4.3 inch HTC "Myst" with 1GB Ram, meaning we could see this on other phones. But we're now expecting that Thursday's big reveal will likely show an HTC Myst with a Facebook app as the home screen.
The find does come with one interesting caveat: This is just a developer's version, so there may be some mysteries remaining. "Everything is a work in progress," notes Amadeo.






Here's President Obama Missing a Lot of Easy Jump Shots
We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cellphone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today
President Obama was supposed to be a cool president, you know? The kind that doesn't paint dogs so much as sink jump shots like Kobe. That was not the case Monday, as he went 2-for-22 on open jumpers at the already strange White House Easter Egg Roll. North Korea's Kim Jong-un, a huge self-proclaimed basketball fan, must be excited. Hey, Mr. President, at least your bracket is still doing already:
It appears the members of Vampire Weekend are as impressed with Steve Buscemi's singing as we are with theirs:
Our cold, New Yorker hearts totally believe this saxophone-battle (sax-off?) was staged and set up. Nevertheless, we will still claim ownership and add it to our list of reasons why we're never leaving this town, ever:
And finally, this bulldog singing along to Luciano Pavarotti is pretty much something every person should come home to:






Can Vice Save the Media from the Business Insider?
Advertently or not, The New Yorker this week presents a sort of Goofus-and-Gallant account of the kinds of media organizations to emerge in the digital age: Henry Blodget's news aggregator Business Insider and hipster clothing store-turned-magazine-turned-advertising empire Vice. As very different media organizations with very different ambitions and agendas, it's difficult to draw direct comparisons between what Business Insider and Vice set out to do, but it is apparent what kind of future of journalism The New Yorker is rooting for, even if the two pieces show they're not clear on how to pay for it.
In the profile of Blodget, Ken Auletta is so dismissive of Business Insider as a scary manufacturer of parasitic slideshows, one wonders why he followed through on the assignment in the first place. "Lengthy investigative pieces," like the one Auletta wrote on Blodget, "are rare on all-digital platforms. They are expensive to produce, and given a readership that has an average of four minutes to spare, not likely to attract a largue audience." Kevin Ryan, an early investor in Business Insider* gives him a quote that makes journalists cringe: "Scoops are irrelevant. They take two days to report. They're not worth it. If someone has a scoop we post it four minutes later." The business of Business Insider is not described as very impressive either. Ryan tells Auletta that BI lost $3 million in 2012 and journalism is "a bad business so far," adding, "We'll do $11 million in revenues this year. That's tiny. Ad rates are low. It's tough to monetize."
So, what is impressive about BI? Its massive audience. "Traffic was negligible at the beginning, but, according to Google Analytics, Business Insider now draws 24 million unique monthly visitors," Auletta writes, "more than CNBC. Among business-oriented sites, only The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Bloomberg have more online users."
Despite being described as "a combination of National Geographic, High Times, and Penthouse Forum," Vice gets a much more favorable treatment from Lizzie Widdicombe, in large part because what it produces resembles the longform, original reporting that magazines like The New Yorker pride themselves on. "In recent years, Vice has been engaged in an energetic process of growing up—both commercially and in terms of journalistic ambition," she writes. After all, it got a huge, expensive scoop, getting some American media into North Korea, didn't it? "Look, the fact that he came is a big deal. The fact that we’re the only people to meet him is a big deal. The fact that we went to his house was a really big deal," argues CEO Shane Smith, referring to Kim Jong Un. The fogies at the big magazine companies may have reservations on how Vice presents its stories (and now its HBO show) but, as Widdicombe writes, "Vice’s biggest novelty is not its unruly journalistic techniques but its ability to make money in the Internet age."
While that might calm the likes of The New Yorker, it shouldn't. As Widdicombe relays, Vice relies on a different kind of business model that blurs the ethical lines between journalism and corporate sponsorship to a degree that would easily become scandal at most established outlets. Vice has no compunction about using its journalism to help make big bucks at its record label, book and film divisions, web sites, and in-house ad agency. In short: "Vice’s profits—which a source estimates were $40 million last year—seem to be dependent on securing and maintaining partnerships with a few major corporate clients," explains Widdicombe. That's a set-up that involves some compromises. Even its relationship with HBO, which is producing and airing a Vice television show, is filled with the types of compromises a news outlet doesn't want to make. Smith agreed to a certain concession because Bill Maher, who was providing supplementary material for the show, wouldn't like it. "Yeah," Smith said. "We’ll move the bear."
Business Insider, on the other hand, attempts to make money the old fashioned, honorable way: amass a loyal trove of eyeballs and then sell ads to them. While Business Insider and The New Yorker use very different tactics to draw advertisers—quantity versus quality—they are in the same business, which, as is no secret, has been going through some difficulties lately.
It's usually the case that journalists know more about journalism than the business of journalism. And so, as is also often the case, the discussion of the new media is usually driven by the end result, not necessarily what goes into paying for it. "For anyone accustomed to the current offerings on cable news—with its 24-hour cycles and blow-dried personalities rehashing wire reports—it’s hard not to be impressed by Vice’s vitality and by some of the topics that it covers firsthand," Widdicombe writes admiringly. It's true: Vice does some very fine work, paid for by money most traditional media organizations would never accept.
*Correction: Blodget is the CEO of Business Insider as well as its editor-in-chief, not Kevin Ryan.






Here's Who Didn't Play at the Republican Lollapalooza
The 2012 Republican National Convention will go down in the history for Clint Eastwood's dialogue with an empty chair — and, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Action Network against one of its vendors, for all the female pop stars it tried and failed to get to play the party's quadrennial party for itself. As first reported by the Washington Examiner, Lady Gaga, Dolly Parton, and Pitbull turned down enormous offers from AAN, which raises money on behalf of Republican politicians, according to emails collected for the lawsuit. (Which we were able to download from the PACER database.) But the Examiner overlooked several other performers mentioned in the lawsuit (a portion of which is reproduced below), all of whom were apparently considered as serious candidates to perform at the RNC.
Here's a full list of those performers, and the offers AAN made to each of them (if known):
Lady Gaga ($1,000,000) Pitbull ($250,000) Gloria Estefan ($750,000) Dolly Parton (Unknown, but supposedly required a jet to travel) Kelly Clarkson (Unknown) The Indigo Girls (Unknown) Melissa Etheridge (Unknown) Pedrito Martinez ("next to nothing")In the end, Kid Rock, Journey, Zac Brown Band, and Three Doors Down performed at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in August (along with Paul Ryan's iPod). Lynyrd Skynyrd had to cancel due to Hurricane Isaac — but that's a lot of aging white men, so you can see why the party might have wanted to reach out, and why the revised RNC music lineup may have had less to do with the weather than those performers the party didn't get. (At the Democratic National Convention, President Obama's rock-star speech was moved due to weather from a bigger stadium back indoors, where he shared a stage with James Taylor, Mary J. Blige, Foo Fighters, and Jessica Sanchez.)
In the meantime, the lineup for the actual Lollapalooza, scheduled for this August, was released today. None of the artists mentioned above will appear there, unfortunately, although with The Cure rounding out the headliners, we suppose Perry Ferrell ended up just as heavy on old white men and light on the hip female pop stars as Reince Priebus.
Embedded below is the excerpt from the lawsuit in which American Action Network officials discuss which artists they were considering:






March 31, 2013
Arkansas Is Having a Bad Day
Nothing ruins a nice Easter weekend worse than an oil spill and a deadly accident at a nuclear power plant. Just ask the people of Arkansas. That's how they spent their holiday. It's sounds messy.
Arkansas's beleaguered weekend started on Friday afternoon when oil started to leak out of an Exxon Mobil pipeline in Mayflower, about 25 miles northwest of Little Rock. The breach flooded the tiny town of less than 3,000 people forcing 22 families from their homes in what the Environmental Protection Agency classified as a "major spill." The true scale of the spill didn't come into focus until Sunday, however. At that point in time, Exxon's army of 15 vacuum trucks and 120 workers had sucked up 12,000 barrels of oil and water. The pipeline carries 95,000 barrels of fuel a day.
The spill comes just four days after a train derailed in Minnesota dumping 15,000 gallons of crude, leaving critics to criticize the impending Keystone XL pipeline project. Opponents of the new pipeline are quick to point out how spills like this be terribly destructive to the natural environment. "Whether it's the proposed Keystone XL pipeline," said Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, or the "mess in Arkansas, Americans are realizing that transporting large amounts of this corrosive and polluting fuel is a bad deal for American taxpayers and for our environment."
Well some of the alternatives aren't exactly a walk in the park. After the inconvenient oil spill near LIttle Rock, there was an accident at a nuclear power plant about 200 miles south of Magnolia and its oil spill. It left one 24-year-old worker dead and three injured. The specific details of the incident at Arkansas Nuclear One are unclear but authorities say "in a non-radiation area, and there has been no risk to public health and safety identified." The head of the plant's emergency preparedness department also asked people to read their Emergency Instructions Booklet. Because after an oil spill and a nuclear accident, who knows what's coming next!






Should You Watch the Kevin Ware Injury?
Louisville guard Kevin Ware suffered a horrific knee injury during Sunday's Elite Eight game against Duke that was so bad it spawned an ethical debate online over whether sites should be able to GIF or host video of the injury. CBS, too, was criticized for showing the replay.
Ware jumped to block a three point shot at the elbow and appeared to suffer a compound fracture when he landed. To put it more plainly, his leg snapped into two pieces, and it happened right in front of the Louisville bench. There was no contact or foul on the play. It was a freak accident. This is what Twitter looked like when the injury happened:
So, yeah, it's bad. It's really, really bad. It immediately drew comparisons to other memorable, horrific knee injuries in basketball. Shaun Livingston's knee injury came to mind. So, too, did Joe Theismann's famous knee injury on Monday Night Football. And then this happened:
Watching Duke/ Louisville my heart goes out to Kevin Ware.
— Joe Theismann (@Theismann7) March 31, 2013
A debate started to arise on Twitter over CBS' coverage. The network replayed video of the injury once or twice when it initially occurred. But they eventually opted to show reaction shots from Ware's teammates and Duke opponents instead. Ware's coach Rick Pitino was caught crying. There was a ten minute delay in action while stadium medical staff helped Ware onto a stretcher and out of the building. He received a standing ovation from the crowd all while CBS' cameras rolled.
But was CBS right to show everything? ESPN's Bill Simmons didn't think so. "Show some dignity and go to commercial CBS," he tweeted. "Disagree here. You tell the story. They've handled it well," responded Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch. CBS decided not to show the video again, SI's Pete Thamel reported. There were cries for the Internet to refrain from GIFing the injury. SB Nation -- usually the go-to site for sports GIFs -- announced they made an "an executive decision not to gif that Kevin Ware injury." Instead, they rounded up the reaction shots CBS showed. They paint a pretty clear picture. The injury is very, very bad. You can see some Louisville players on the bench almost vomit. There were questions about whether ESPN should show it all. Our take it the video is news, and despite its warts, as sports news station ESPN should show it. They should issue a warning before showing it, and exercise some discretion when calculating the number of time it's played in a broadcast. That said, we don't have the video. It is still available, if you are still interested in watching it, over at Deadspin. Again, a warning: it is one of the most gruesome injuries we've ever seen. It is not for the faint of heart.






The Daily Mail Declares War on The New York Times
The Daily Mail doesn't know what it is yet, but it does know that America is an untapped market they want to tackle head on by going after the boring, stodgy New York Times.
Yes, the notorious U.K. tabloid is looking to expand into the U.S. and compete for eyeballs with The Times, reports The Guardian's Mark Sweney. In fact, the website's publisher Martin Clarke took some shots at the Gray Lady during a recent meeting with investors. He said the Daily Mail peddled "all the news that fits to talk about," a play on the Times' century old slogan. It's central to their ad strategy targeting an American audience:
Positioning it very differently from the print Mail titles in the UK, a US ad for the website says that papers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal cover weighty news, but asks "how many of your friends discuss the Arab Spring at lunch?" Unlike them, Mail Online brings you "what you want to talk about. It's not so serious. And it's never more than you need."
The U.K. tabloid is fairly well known. They had 111 million unique visitors in February. Casually browsing their homepage right now shows a lead story about the royal family and more pictures of celebrities in bikinis than some skin-dedicated sites. It's easy to click on just about anything. Tina Brown is a fan. This is why she likes the site:
Every story is something you can’t resist. It’s about, you know, how your kids will get ADD if they eat, I don’t know, saffron rice. It’s just irresistible. So I read that. And then I go to the Sutton Cafe diner with Harry, and we sit and read our papers.
But it's not serious news, not by any stretch of anyone's imagination. Times employees are usually quick to defend their paper's honor. David Carr's brutal takedown of Vice's Shane Smith, as seen in the movie Page 1, is the thing of legend. At least one New York Times employee has fired back at the Mail publisher's assertions that the Times is dreary, important news no one should care about already. Staff social media editor Michael Roston responded to Clarke in a Facebook post:
But it's just tiring that the people who run the Daily Mail keep playing like they're involved in some sort of zero-sum game for visitors with our New York Times or our peers at the Wall Street Journal. "It's not so serious" you say about your web site. No kidding! That's why we're not competing with you. We're deadly serious about the news. We're for the tens of millions of people who don't really want to be friends with people who wouldn't discuss the Arab Spring over lunch.
Ouch. Hopefully more will chime in soon and we can get a good, old fashioned media war.






'G.I. Joe' Blasts Away Cobra Commander and 'The Croods'
Welcome to the Box Office Report, where we're trying to figure out if the The Rock even lifts, bro.
1. G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Paramount): $41.2 million in 3,719 theaters
Bros, do you think The Rock lifts? The jury is still out on whether or not The Rock lifts. For now, he's got the best movie in the country. It's not hard to figure out how G.I. Joe got to the top this weekend. The first one wasn't universally terrible -- it was pretty fun, to be completely honest -- and this one has more explosions than the last one. That's how sequels work. Channing Tatum is a huge star now, too, which always helps. Oh, and Bruce Willis is here as a G.I. Joe actually named Joe. So he is, technically, the title character. Anyway, The Rock will be pleased to have the number one movie heading into his Wrestlemania showdown with John Cena next weekend. It's called "cross-promoting," kids. And he's the best at it.
2. The Croods (Fox): $26.5 million in 4,065 theaters [Week 2]
It's nice that they let Donald Trump star in his own movie.
3. Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor (Lionsgate): $22.3 million in 2,047 theaters
Temptation is the latest product from the Tyler Perry factory of movies that make money somehow. Seriously, this has something to do with a creepy playboy social network owner trying to have sex with Julie from Friday Night Lights and Kim Kardashian is there, too. Doing what? Who knows. This is supposed to be terrible. Don't watch movies with Kim Kardashian in them.
4. Olympus Has Fallen (FilmDistrict): $14 million in 3,106 theaters [Week 2]
Eventually they're just going to release a movie called Blowing Up The White House for 90 Minutes and it's going to be the most successful movie of all time.
5. Oz: the Great and Powerful (Buena Vista): $11.6 million in 3,324 theaters [Week 4]
Oz is the most successful movie of 2013 so far. This is Obama's America.






Graham Won't Block Gun Control; Dolan Thinks Church Needs to Work with Gays
Sen. Lindsey Graham announced he will not be join other Republican Senators planning to filibuster any gun reform bills on CNN's State of the Union. "The only way I would filibuster a bill is if Sen. [Harry] Reid did not allow alternative amendments," Graham told Candy Crowley. Graham argued he would rather see the current system fixed and better enforced than see a new background check system pass. "I don't think" it will pass, Graham said. "Nothing we're talking about would not have prevented Newtown from happening. The guy [shooter Adam Lanza] did not fail a background check," the senator added. Graham also touched briefly on the bipartisan immigration reform bill he's working on with eight other Senators. The bill has been approved by all the overseers. It just need to be written, Graham said. "I think we've got a deal. We've got to write the legislation, but 2013, I hope, will be the year that we pass bipartisan immigration reform," Graham said. Graham assured Crowley it would pass easily because it satisfies everything that all parties are asking for. "It will pass the House because it secures our borders, it controls who gets a job... [and] the 11 million [undocumented immigrations] will have a pathway to citizenship, but it will be earned, it will be long, and it will be hard," Graham said.
Sen. Chuck Schumer -- one of the other eight Senators working on the immigration reform bill -- said he hoped the bill would make it to the Senate floor in May during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "I am very, very optimistic that we will have an agreement among the eight of us next week. Sen. [Patrick] Leahy has agreed to have extensive markup and debate on the bill in April, and then we go to the floor, God willing, in May," Schumer said. "With the agreement between business and labor, every major policy issue has been resolved on the Gang of Eight," he added. But there are still some major hurdles, he cautioned. For example, the language of the bill still has to be written and debated. "We're not going to come to a final agreement until we see draft legislative language and we agree on that. We drafted some of it already, the rest will be drafted this week," Schumer said. "I am very, very optimistic that we will have an agreement among the eight of us next week."
Later on Meet the Press, David Axelrod said the President was keen to pass immigration reform during his second term. "He wants this accomplishment. This is a legacy item for him. There is no doubt in my mind he wants to pass comprehensive immigration reform," Axelrod said.
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal is still hopeful a "sensible compromise" can be reached on gun reform bills when they come before the Senate, he told Candy Crowley on State of the Union. Blumenthal is still optimistic universal background checks could pass. The Connecticut Senator also promised he would add an amendment to any gun reform bill limiting the sale of high-capacity magazines. "The majority leader has assured me... that we can offer amendments on both the assault weapons ban and the prohibition on high-capacity magazines," Blumenthal said. "So there will be votes." Crowley asked if he thinks the gun reform movement would be considered a failure if a limit on high-capacity magazines didn't pass. Blumenthal didn't think so. "Any step that saves lives is a step in the right direction," he said. "The question is not winning or losing here, but really, saving lives, which the people of Newtown... want to happen."
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake -- one of eight Senators working on bipartisan immigration reform -- said it is "inevitable" a Republican Presidential candidate supports gay marriage some day. Not that his view is changing any time soon, mind you. "I think that's inevitable. There will be one, and I think he'll receive Republican support, or she will, so I think that...The answer is yes," Flake said on Meet the Press. But, yeah, he still doesn't support gay marriage. "I still hold to the traditional definition of marriage," Flake said. He doesn't see his position changing any time soon.
Former Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie doesn't seem to agree with Flake, though. He said on Fox News Sunday that he "wouldn't have any problem" with a Republican platform that supports traditional marriage. "I don't ever think you'd ever see the Republican Party platform say 'we're in favor' of same-sex marriage," Gillespie said. He predicted Republicans would advocate federal laws restricting gay rights would be condemned by Republicans, but they would still argue gay marriage was up to the states to decide.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan thinks Americans are still a very religious people, dismissing new poll numbers showing more and more Americans drifting away from the church. CBS' Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer asked Dolan to "judge the state of America's spirituality these days," after showing him poll numbers showing 20 percent of Americans claiming no affiliation to the church. Dolan did say the survey was "somber," but argued that America is still a religious nation -- it's the church they have the problem with. He said the U.S. is "still a very strong religious nation," but that some people "have some troubles with the church." In a sign that Cardinal Dolan might understand where the world is going, he said the church needs to work harder to reach out to gay members during an appearance on ABC's This Week. "We gotta do better to see that our defense of marriage is not reduced to an attack on gay people. And I admit, we haven't been too good at that. We try our darndest to make sure we're not an anti-anybody," he said. He doesn't have any bright ideas as to how the church could fix that problem, though. "I don't know. We're still trying. We're trying our best to do it. We got to listen to people," Dolan said. "Jesus died on the cross for them as much as he did for me." But that doesn't mean Dolan has evolved on gay marriage. Oh no, he still thinks gays should not marry and that sex between two males or two females is wrong. "Sexual love... is intended only for a man and woman in marriage, where children can come about naturally," Dolan said. "Sometimes we're not as successful or as effective as we can be in translating that warm embrace into also teaching what God has told us about the way He wants us to live," Dolan added.
Here's Dolan on Face the Nation:
Here's Dolan on This Week:
Unfortunately your browser does not support IFrames.
Rep. Peter King doesn't think we should talk to North Korea. "I don't see any purpose in that. As far as I see, [North Korea] is not even a government. It's more like an organized crime family running a territory. They are brutal," the New Yorker said on ABC's This Week. "It would demoralize our allies in Asia... and it would to me serve no constructive purpose whatsoever." On Friday, Kim Jong-Un threatened retaliation against Western countries for the sanctions crippling his country. "Kim Kong-Un is trying to establish himself, trying to be the tough guy. He's 28, 29 years old, and he keeps going further and further out," King said. "My concern would be that he may launch some sort of attack on South Korea."






Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog
- Atlantic Monthly Contributors's profile
- 1 follower
