NYT Keeps Marriage Heat On Obama

The New York Times has published yet another story critical of the president's position on marriage equality.

Legal scholars say Mr. Obama is correct; regulating marriage is indeed the province of the states — to a point. Federal courts have at times intervened to declare state marriage laws unconstitutional, as was the case in Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that effectively ended all race-based restrictions on marriage. Yet in the context of the New York debate, Mr. Obama’s comments infuriated some prominent advocates and potential donors. They include Chad Griffin, who sits on the finance committee for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign and recently co-hosted a fund-raiser featuring Michelle Obama that raised more than $1 million, and Paul Yandura, a Democratic strategist who advises gay philanthropists, including some Obama donors. “That language is really a dog whistle for the right,” Mr. Yandura said. Mr. Griffin, who said he intended to continue to work to re-elect the president, called the comments “a step backwards,” and said Mr. Obama should use Wednesday’s reception to clarify them. The White House sees no need to clarify.

President Obama will be hosting a LGBT Pride reception at the White House today. GetEQUAL has promised to picket.

NYT Rips Obama On Marriage

From today's New York Times editorial:

After he took office, it became evident that Republicans intended to portray him as a radical, out-of-touch leftist no matter what he did. Supporting same-sex marriage at this point is hardly going to change that drumbeat, and any voter for whom that is a make-or-break issue will probably not be an Obama supporter anyway. Firm support for gay marriage is, on the other hand, likely to help him among his cheerless base. Mr. Obama opposes the Defense of Marriage Act and is presiding over the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He signed the United Nations declaration on gay rights, and allowed the Census to count same-sex relationships. But he has been absent from the biggest and most difficult drive of all.

Public opinion has swung toward acceptance of gay marriage since 2008; five more states and the District of Columbia have lifted marriage bans. Thousands of gay men and lesbians now possess marriage certificates and many former skeptics have come to realize that the moral foundation of the country has been strengthened. It is long past time for the president to catch up. He often criticizes discrimination with the memorable phrase, “that’s not who we are.” Favoring this discrimination should not be who he is.

NYT Rips New York Senate On Inaction

The New York Times tears into the GOP-led New York Senate for dragging their feet on marriage equality.

As we wrote this editorial on Thursday evening, we were still waiting for the New York State Senate to do what it should have done long ago — end a basic inequality under the law by allowing same-sex couples the full right to marry. The solution is obvious: Pass a clean bill that allows all adult New Yorkers to marry whomever they choose to marry, without unneeded exemptions for religious-affiliated organizations. [snip] In Albany, they say hidden talks are necessary to get anything done. Nonsense. The state’s leaders just don’t want public scrutiny. It’s a cowardly way to conduct the public’s business.

Right fucking on.

Hitchens On Mamet

Christopher Hitchens eviscerates the new book by recently revealed douchebag David Mamet.

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this: “Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.” Or this: “America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.” [Snip] Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating.

COMING OUT: New York Times Launches Interactive Series On LGBT Youth

The New York Times has launched a new series in which LGBT youth tell their stories. Hit the link, this looks pretty cool.

New York Times Announces Paywall

Beginning March 28th, you'll be allowed to read exactly twenty New York Times articles per month. After that, you've gotta pay.

Once readers click on their 21st article, they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages — $15 for a month of access to the Web site and a mobile phone app; $20 for Web access and an iPad app; and $35 for an all-access plan. All subscribers who receive the paper through home delivery will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. “A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the Web,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, said in his annual State of The Times remarks, which were delivered to employees on Thursday morning.

Even the Times itself is unsure if this will work.

The debate consuming the newspaper business now centers on the question that The Times hopes to answer: Can you reverse 15 years of consumer behavior and build a business around online subscriptions? Many believe the answer is no. No American news organization as large as The Times has attempted to put its content behind a pay wall after allowing unrestricted access. The move is being closely watched by anxious publishers, which have warily embraced the Web and struggled with how to turn online journalism into a profitable business.

This raises an interesting dilemma for bloggers, who even if they subscribe, may hesitate to excerpt articles that their readers may not be able to access in full.

UDPATE: Andrew Sullivan notes the exception for stories linked by blogs, which I totally missed.

If I read it correctly, it almost privileges links from blogs and social media against more direct access. Which makes it a gift to the blogosphere. Anyway, that's my first take: and it's one of great relief. We all want to keep the NYT in business (well, almost all of us). But we also don't want to see it disappear behind some Great NewsCorp-Style Paywall. It looks to me as if they have gotten the balance just about right.

Why Frank Rich Supports Gay Marriage

Speaking to a group at Harvard, New York Times columnist Frank Rich explained that he first came to support gay rights when at the height of the AIDS crisis, an editor asked him to write a lengthy essay on how straight people view gays.

Frank Rich On Palin 2012

"If logic applied to Palin’s career trajectory, this month might have been judged dreadful for her. In an otherwise great year for Republicans she endorsed a 'Star Wars' bar gaggle of anomalous and wacky losers — the former witch, Christine O’Donnell; the raging nativist, Tom Tancredo; and at least two candidates who called for armed insurrection against the government, Sharron Angle and a would-be Texas congressman, Stephen Broden, who lost by over 50 percentage points. Last week voters in Palin’s home state humiliatingly 'refudiated' her protégé, Joe Miller, overturning his victory in the G.O.P. Senate primary with a write-in campaign.

"But logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

"Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so. Democrats, who gloat that she’s the Republicans’ problem, may be humoring themselves. When Palin told Barbara Walters last week that she believed she could beat Barack Obama in 2012, it wasn’t an idle boast. Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off." - Frank Rich, writing for the New York Times.

New York Times Says "No" To Rep. Nancy Pelosi As House Minority Leader

In an editorial published today, the New York Times says that House Democrats would be better served by a Minority Leader other than Nancy Pelosi.

Ms. Pelosi announced on Friday that she would seek the post of House minority leader. That job is not a good match for her abilities in maneuvering legislation and trading votes, since Democrats will no longer be passing bills in the House. What they need is what Ms. Pelosi has been unable to provide: a clear and convincing voice to help Americans understand that Democratic policies are not bankrupting the country, advancing socialism or destroying freedom.

If Ms. Pelosi had been a more persuasive communicator, she could have batted away the ludicrous caricature of her painted by Republicans across the country as some kind of fur-hatted commissar jamming her diktats down the public’s throat. Both Ms. Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, are inside players who seem to visibly shrink on camera when defending their policies, rarely connecting with the skeptical independent voters who raged so loudly on Tuesday. With President Obama proving to be a surprisingly diffident salesman of his own work, Congressional Democrats need a new champion to stand against a tightly disciplined Republican insurgency.

RELATED: Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT), one of the few Blue Dogs to survive Tuesday's bloodbath, says that he won't support Pelosi's bid for Minority Leader.

New York Times Asks: Why Aren't Gays Fired Up Against Meg Whitman?

The New York Times observes that there appears to be "little passion" among LGBT voters regarding the outcome of California's gubernatorial race. And that's curious because Meg Whitman has vowed to attempt to defend Proposition 8 in the Ninth Circuit Court, should she be elected.

Intervention would be an “unprecedented situation,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. “We don’t know what would happen if a new governor or attorney general tried to intervene,” he said. The December appeals hearing could face a lengthy delay, or an argument could be made for a new trial, with the state reversing its stance and supporting the marriage ban. Rory Little, professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, said that a new trial would be unlikely, but that the judges would carefully consider the motion. “The court will take this very seriously,” Mr. Little said. With the election possibly affecting such a hard-fought legal victory, gay men and lesbians should be motivated to vote, but they might not be aware of the stakes, according to political analysts.

I think we at this here website thingy have been ringing the Fear Whitman bell fairly loudly, but the above-linked NYT piece places the overall blame for Whitman apathy on LGBT disappointment with the Obama administration.

Ben Brantley On The Future Of Drag

"How much longer can they continue without a fresh batch of bona fide female stars to draw inspiration from? Since the 1960s, such role models have been scarce. Sure, there have been beautiful-freak performers like Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli, with their surreally emotive song stylings (descended from the patron saint of musical drag queens, Minnelli’s mother, Judy Garland).

"But with the feminist movement and the let-it-all-hang out ethos of the hippies that took hold in the post-Kennedy years, heroines in movies started to look more like natural women (to borrow a title from Carole King). In the 1970s and ’80s, Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda and Jill Clayburgh emerged as strong personalities, but they were not obvious fodder for drag shows. In the so-called postfeminist era, women may have stepped back into high heels and makeup as thick and precise as a geisha’s. But now they wear these identities with quotation marks, as female impersonators had before them." - New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, in an interesting piece on the future of drag. Read the entire thing.

New York Times To President Obama: Don't Appeal Court Ruling On DADT

Today the New York Times published an editorial advising President Obama not to appeal the recent federal court ruling that DADT is unconstitutional.

President Obama, the House and a majority of senators clearly support an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but that, of course, is insufficient in the upside-down world of today’s Senate, where 40 members can block anything. The two parties clashed on the number of amendments that Republicans could offer. Republicans wanted to add dozens of amendments, an obvious delaying tactic, while Democrats tried to block all but their own amendments. In an earlier time, the two sides might have reached an agreement on a limited number of amendments, but not in this Senate, and certainly not right before this election, when everyone’s blood is up even more than usual.

If the military’s unjust policy is not repealed in the lame-duck session, there is another way out. The Obama administration can choose not to appeal Judge Phillips’s ruling that the policy is unconstitutional, and simply stop ejecting soldiers. But that would simply enable lawmakers who want to shirk their responsibility. History will hold to account every member of Congress who refused to end this blatant injustice.

NY Times To Stop Printing (Someday)

The New York Times will cease production of its print edition relatively soon according to its publisher.

"We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD," Arthur Sulzberger told an audience at a London media summit Wednesday. Sulzberger's statement came in response to a prediction that the newspaper would go out-of-print by 2015. "This sounds obvious, but it's a big deal," Business Insider founder Henry Blodget wrote. "The economics of the online news business will not support the infrastructure or newsroom that the printed paper supports. Unless the New York Times Company can come up with a miracle new digital revenue stream, therefore, it will eventually have to be restructured and downsized.

Early next year the Times will install a metered paywall on its website in which users will be able to read a limited number of free articles before being forced to subscribe.

New York Times Outs Christwire

Today the New York Times does what numerous other publications have tried and failed to do, they've gotten the guys behind Christwire to come clean.

Christwire has lately reached new levels of popularity, in part thanks to an Aug. 14 column, “Is My Husband Gay?” Written by Stephenson Billings, the piece is a 15-point checklist to help wives diagnose possibly closeted husbands. “Gym membership but no interest in sports” is one warning sign. So is “Sassy, sarcastic and ironic around his friends” and “Love of pop culture.” “Is My Husband Gay?” was picked up on The Huffington Post and mentioned by Ryan Seacrest on his radio show; so far it has been viewed 8.3 million times. Oh, by the way: Christwire is all one big joke. Not the readership — which hit a high of 27 million page views in August — but the content, the opinions and the fake authors who write the stuff. (There is no “Stephenson Billings.”) Neither of the two founders is a conservative Christian. They are just like-minded 28-year-olds who met on the Internet, have never seen each other in person, and until this week had never given their real identities to a reporter. Bryan Butvidas is a software developer who works out of his house in Southern California. Kirwin Watson is a former Pepperdine student who moved back home in Kansas, where he now works “on the patient-care staff” of a local hospital. According to phone interviews with both men, they met online in 2005, when both were contributing to the news aggregator Shoutwire.com.

I've exchanged some emails with the guy writing as Stephenson Billings, who remains anonymous in the Times article. Last week another well-known New York publication wrote me several times in an attempt to divine Billings' true identity, asking me if he ever "broke character" during our email exchanges.

New York Times Compiles LGBT Bloggers' Responses To Ken Mehlman's Coming Out

New York Times op-ed editor Tobin Harshaw has compiled bloggers' reactions to Ken Mehlman's coming out, quoting Pam Spaulding, Melissa McEwan, and this here website thingy on the left, and the usual Quisling apologists on the right. Pam Spaulding nails it:

"While it’s nice that Ken has finally come out of the closet as an advocate, it’s really hard to forgive him for the damage he did to the community by working actively against it for pay for years. That he can coast on the gains for our community by supporting AFER’s stellar work on Prop 8 on the backs of many during his tenure at the RNC who bore the brunt of homophobia, those who died as a result of hate crimes, the activists who were assailed professionally is unbelievable. Yet here we are in 2010 watching it unfold. As a human being Mehlman owes the community a serious apology for fomenting homophobia for political gain.”

New York Times Whitewashes Ken Mehlman's Anti-Gay Past

Check out how the New York Times reports Ken Mehlman's history with the GOP.

Mr. Mehlman was in Mr. Bush’s inner circle in both presidential campaigns and ran his campaign in 2004, when the party courted Christian conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage. But Mr. Mehlman, in his work as chairman of the Republican National Committee and as head of Mr. Bush’s campaign, tended to personally avoid social issues. He was a leading figure in the Bush White House in pushing for the party to try to appeal to black and Hispanic voters.

Uh, yeah. Scroll down the posts below for examples of all that "avoidance."

Nate Silver's 2010 Senate Predictions

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight makes its debut as part of the New York Times today, where he gives us the above predictions for this year's Senate races. It looks like Silver is predicting that the Democrats will lose about seven seats, yet retain a slim majority.

NY Post Readers Weigh In

A hilarious and very NSFW spoof of the New York Times Weekender commercials. Get da fuck outta heeyah.

Quote Of The Day - Randy Cohen

"As partners cultivate romance, and particularly as they move toward erotic involvement, there are things each should reveal, things they would not mention to a casual acquaintance — any history of S.T.D.’s, for example, or the existence of any current spouse. Even before a first kiss, this person should have told you those things that you would regard as germane to this phase of your evolving relationship, including his being transgendered. Clearly he thought you’d find it pertinent; that’s why he discreditably withheld it, lest you reject him." - New York Times ethics columnist Randy Cohen, telling a reader that she has the right to out a transgender man who didn't reveal his trans status to her before they dated.

Bilerico's Dr. Jillian Weiss strongly disagrees.

Mr. Cohen, who has no reputable credentials in the field of ethics, suggests that transgender people have a responsibility to out themselves on a first date, and implies that their failure to do so is morally wrong. He compares transgender history to the case of sexually transmitted disease and adultery. He suggests, however, that notifying the local community via handbills or having local clergy announce it from the pulpit would be inappropriate. This is dangerous nonsense. Hundreds of transgender people are murdered every year, and more subjected to violence, many from partners and potential partners. What is morally wrong and reprehensible is lending the credence of The New York Times to this idea.

NYT Takes Over Nate Silver

The New York Times has taken over hosting of FiveThirtyEight, the popular elections prognostication site run by statistics guru Nate Silver.

Mr. Silver, a statistical wizard, became a media star during the last presidential election season for his political projections based on dissections of polling data. He retains all rights to FiveThirtyEight and will continue to run it himself, but “under the banner and auspices of NYTimes.com,” The Times said in a news release. The arrangement is similar to one The Times struck with the authors of the blog Freakonomics in 2007. The Freakonomics blog appears in the Opinion section of NYTimes.com. FiveThirtyEight content will be incorporated in the politics section of NYTimes.com.

The hiring of Silver, a loud supporter of Democrats, will further annoy the Freepers and their ilk, who usually disparage the paper as the "New York Slimes." Good.