Plead the First

In the interest of keeping everyone informed, I thought I should pass on this useful bit of information. The official position of the North Carolina Republican Party is that if you are gay, you are not “normal”. From the 2005 NC Republican Platform:

We believe homosexual behavior is not normal and should not be established as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle either in public education or in public policy.

Please note, this isn’t just the opinion of some random Republicans, this is their official, state-wide, “thought it through, debated it, took a vote on it and put it in writing” position.

Unfortunately, there’s no indication of their definition of “normal” (other than “not gay”) or any explanation of why something needs to be “normal” to be considered “acceptable”. If by “not normal” they simply mean “not usually done” then it would seem that there must be a whole slew of behaviors that Republicans deem unacceptable. After all, homosexuals and bisexuals make up about four percent of the population. Compare that percentage to the percentage of mixed-race marriages in the US – about 2.5 percent in 1997. If “not normal” – as measured by frequency of a given behavior – means “unacceptable” then the North Carolina Republican Party must have an even bigger problem with mixed-race marriages, right?

Maybe by “not normal” they simply mean “not approved of by the Bible”. I’ve heard many Republicans give this as their reason for disapproving of homosexual behavior. I suppose as long as they’re limiting their pronouncements of normality to their party platform they shouldn’t run into trouble with the establishment clause by using that reasoning.

We support federal and state constitutional amendments to ensure that marriage is limited to the union of one man and one woman. We oppose attempts to legitimize homosexual relationships by placing such relationships on an equal footing with marriage.

Oops. I guess they’ll need to try to forego any religious arguments when they push for those amendments.

Well, whatever their rationalizations, it’s nice to know that state Republicans will keep us informed as to what personal behaviors are normal and acceptable.

Some Republicans are beginning to try to distance themselves from Bush in earnest. Jonah Goldberg compares him to Nixon and tries to pass them both off as liberal:

But there is one area where we can make somewhat useful comparisons between Nixon and Bush: their status as liberal Republicans.

However, Glenn Greenwald is having none of it:

( … funny how we never heard any of that when The Commander had approval ratings in the 60s). With rare and noble exception, conservatives did not repudiate Bush until very recently. To the contrary, they have vigorously supported and claimed him (while he was popular), and he is their creation. They are and should be stuck with him.

Eight out of nine Greensboro City Council members have agreed to take a lie detector test in hopes of getting to the bottom of who leaked an investigative report to the Greensboro News and Record. Or, if not to find out who did it, at least to clear their own names. Or if not that, at least to spend some money and spark a discussion on the efficacy of lie detector tests. No one’s really sure what this will actually accomplish. Ed Cone rightly mocks the whole process on his blog. Allen Johnson at the News and Record also questions how helpful this will be.

At this point, with one council member – Dianne Bellamy-Small – sitting herself out of the whole process, it seems that at best all the test will accomplish will be to waste money and strengthen suspicions (though not confirm them) that Bellamy-Small was the leaker. At worst, if the test shows that one or more of the council members are lying, it may waste money and create even more confusion and suspicion.

Here’s a bonus cartoon on the whole fiasco:

Update: Sandy Carmany, one of the aforementioned council members, has a great post about the bind the council members now find themselves in. The polygraph nonsense can be stopped, but not by the council itself.

In the Local (High Point) section of today’s News and Record the top story was entitled “What They Earn”:

They patrol your streets, collect your trash, patch potholes and keep the city’s parks clean. They run afterschool programs for your children and help them find library books.

They are the city of High Point’s nearly 1,500 employees, and they received $77.2 million in salary and benefits in the 2005-06 fiscal year.

As a taxpayers, [sic] you help pay their salaries and should know who they are and how much they get for what they do.

The article then proceeds to list the name of every city of High Point employee, along with his or her job title and salary. Starting with the City Manager, the list works its way through every director, police officer, fireman, and sanitation worker. While I appreciate the fact that as a taxpayer I have the right to know this information, listing it all in the newspaper seems a bit intrusive.

If someone feels they really must know how much their neighbor the firefighter or city office worker makes in a year, they are free to make a call to High Point’s Human Resources department to hunt down that information. Does it really need to be handed to me on a silver platter (or, I suppose, in a plastic bag on my driveway) so I can get a glimpse into their finances over breakfast?

If the News and Record really feels we should have this information available at our fingertips, would it not have been better to just list specifics for the mayor and a handful of top city positions, and then just give salary ranges broken out by job title? That would still give everone a good idea of where money is being spent without plastering individual workers’ actual salaries all over the paper. If anyone felt they needed more information, they could always go into stalker mode and make the call to Human Resources on their own.

Greg over at The Talent Show points out an interesting dichotomy in the news yesterday:

On the Democratic side, five congressmen were arrested for protesting outside the Sudanese embassy over the genocide in Darfur. On the Republican side, as many as a half a dozen congressmen may be implicated in a prostitution ring tied to one of the many GOP bribery scandals.

Stark contrast.

Next week, three North Carolina Republicans face off for a shot at taking on Brad Miller in the race for U.S. House District 13. One of them is Vernon Robinson, who doesn’t seem to care for illegal immigrants. Ironically, Robinson doesn’t live in District 13.

There’s already a lively discussion about the cartoon over at Ed Cone’s blog. You’ll see an example there of a theme I’ve noticed among some conservatives lately: If you criticize a how a conservative politician speaks about immigration, it means that you want open borders and deny that there’s any immigration problem in our country. That sort of simplistic, black-and-white attitude doesn’t tend to further the conversation any. I agree that there is a problem, but a big part of Robinson’s “solution” seems to be stirring up fear and resentment against illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, doing that is only going to cause additional problems, and doesn’t really address the cause of the situation. As Ed said in the comments on that thread, “You are cursing the water on the floor, oblivious to the hand on the tap.”

My first cartoon is in today’s print copy of the News and Record, in the Ideas section. I’ll be posting it here first thing tomorrow morning – as part of my agreement with them, they get it to themselves for a day before I can put it up here. They’ll eventually be posting them on their own website as well, but I’m told they’re not set up to do that yet. So go out to the news stand and buy a copy, or stop by here first thing tomorrow to check it out.

Mark Binker at the News and Record has a good rundown of info on the three Republican candidates facing off in the primary for North Carolina’s 13th U.S. House district. His post includes audio files of interviews he did with the three candidates.

I noticed that the last audio file link for the Robinson interviews is entitled “Talking about gay marriage and guns.” I’m almost afraid to listen to find out how Vernon Robinson links those two topics together…

A post by DarkSyde at DailyKos takes a look at one way to untangle the arguments surrounding global warming:

One of the best ways to cut through the propaganda about the risk of potentially dangerous activity is to look at what businesses with a financial stake in getting it right are doing.

Who has a financial stake in global warming? The insurance industry. The post links to an article in Environmental Science and Technology Online, in which Evan Mills was interviewed:

As the world’s largest industry, the insurance business faces more financial risk from global warming than any other sector of the economy. To better understand how business leaders are dealing with the dilemma, ES&T spoke with Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In the past 15 years, Mills has distinguished himself as an expert on the economic risks posed by climate change. In a study in Science last August, he detailed how global warming stands to hurt the insurance industry. He further explicated this work in a recent report released by Ceres, a network of investors and public interest groups that promote environmental stewardship on the part of corporations.

DarkSyde’s post quotes this part of the article specifically:

Right now, the media seems to be caught in a debate over whether hurricanes are becoming stronger because of global warming. What does the insurance industry predict?

Earlier this year, the insurers’ catastrophe [CAT] modelers unveiled their first attempt to incorporate the implications of climate change […] The net result was an approximately 45% increase in previously expected insured losses due to changes in the physical characteristics of the extreme weather events alone.

Why do the insurance companies buy into the science?

I would say that insurers are better equipped to understand and evaluate the science than most other industries, and they have no particular vested interest in propping up polluting industries. […] Insured losses from weather-related events in 2005 approached $80 billion (4 times those from 9/11) …

Seems like a pretty sound argument to me – not foolproof, but very suggestive of which side is more likely to be right. Insurance companies are in business to make money, and they can only do that by correctly interpreting the data they look at.

As a side note, the article also mentioned this (emphasis added):

When the U.S. delegation failed to engage in efforts to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) during climate talks in Montreal last December, a group of 25 economists—including 3 Nobel Prize laureates and 1 former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers—urged President Bush to drop his opposition to cuts in carbon emissions.

The rising costs from weather damage and agricultural losses far outweigh the price of curbing emissions, the economists wrote to Bush. Geoffrey Heal, an economist with the Columbia Business School, told the Financial Times, “The cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol is about 1% of GNP. That is about two quarters of growth.�

I’ve heard it said that Kyoto would have “wrecked the economy”. One percent of the GNP doesn’t sound like much of a wrecking ball.

I’ve gotten a great response to my local political cartoons here at Plead the First. Starting on Sunday, they’ll have a wider audience, as they’ll be appearing on The News and Record’s Sunday editorial page. (Yes, the “Anthony” mentioned at that link is me, for those of you who were until now unaware of my secret identity. Or I guess that would be my “public” identity. Whichever.)

It seems that I’ll be in good company. Two other local bloggers – David Hoggard and Sarah Jones will also be making regular contributions to the paper.

I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to reach some non-blog-readers, and looking forward to a weekly mix of adrenaline and fear as I try to come up with a cartoon on a deadline.

Update: The first cartoon will be appearing on the 23rd – I was a little unclear in the original post and some folks thought I meant the 16th. Sorry for any confusion!