Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, widely touted as an Attorney General candidate, has instead been tabbed to be Barack Obama’s Homeland Security secretary.
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano has been chosen to be secretary of the vast and troubled Department of Homeland Security. Photo: AP
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) has been chosen to serve as secretary of the vast and troubled Department of Homeland Security for President-elect Obama, Democratic officials said. Napolitano is a border governor who will now be responsible for immigration policy and border security, which are part of Homeland Security’s myriad functions.
Napolitano brings law-and-order experience from her stint as the Grand Canyon State’s first female attorney general. One of the nation’s most prominent female elected officials, she made frequent appearances on behalf of Barack Obama during the campaign. She was re-elected to a second four-year term in 2006.
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In 2005, TIME magazine named her one of America’s five best governors, calling her “A Mountaineer on the Political Rise.” TIME reported: “The one issue Republicans think they can use against the popular Napolitano is illegal immigration, because the huge number of border crossings have left many Arizonans feeling overwhelmed and powerless. Her critics claim she came to the problem late, but she seems to have navigated it deftly. … Napolitano opposed … several bills that targeted illegal immigrants. Instead, she looked to the systems and people that make illegal immigration possible: she ordered state contractors to ensure that their employees are legal [and] set up an undercover unit to catch forgers of identity documents … In mid-August she declared a state of emergency in Arizona to direct more funds to protecting border areas from illegal crossings.”
An interesting and likely uncontroversial choice, continuing the “No Drama Obama” pattern.
What’s interesting here is the emphasis on illegal immigration rather than counterterrorism. The latter, you may recall, was the impetus for creating the new Department. Whether this signals a de-emphasis of that role or merely that they needed to put Napolitano somewhere and the options were limited, we’ll see.
The Pasadena-based dating website, heavily promoted by Christian evangelical leaders when it was founded, has agreed in a civil rights settlement to give up its heterosexuals-only policy and offer same-sex matches.
EHarmony was started by psychologist Neil Clark Warren, who is known for his mild-mannered television and radio advertisements. It must not only implement the new policy by March 31 but also give the first 10,000 same-sex registrants a free six-month subscription.
“That was one of the things I asked for,” said Eric McKinley, 46, who complained to New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights after being turned down for a subscription in 2005.
The company said that Warren was not giving interviews on the settlement. But attorney Theodore Olson, who issued a statement on the company’s behalf, made clear that it did not agree to offer gay matches willingly. “Even though we believed that the complaint resulted from an unfair characterization of our business,” Olson said, “we ultimately decided it was best to settle this case with the attorney general since litigation outcomes can be unpredictable.”
The settlement, which did not find that EHarmony broke any laws, calls for the company to either offer the gay matches on its current venue or create a new site for them. EHarmony has opted to create a site called Compatiblepartners.net.
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McKinley, who works at a nonprofit in New Jersey he declined to identify, said that he had originally heard of EHarmony through its radio ads. “You hear these wonderful people saying, ‘I met my soul mate on EHarmony.’ I thought, I could do that too,” he said. But he couldn’t. When he tried to enter the site, the pull-down menus had categories only for a man seeking a woman or a woman seeking a man. “I felt the whole range of emotions,” McKinley said. “Anger, that I was a second-class citizen.”
One understands eHarmony’s decision here. It’s often been said of lawsuits that “the process is the punishment.” One presumes that, as a private business, they’d be free to decide how to run it and gays are not generally regarded as a protected class. But Olsen’s right: One never knows how these suits will turn out and defending its interests would have cost millions. And winning in New Jersey wouldn’t preclude suits in the other 49 states. Or another suit in New Jersey in the future based on a slightly different legal theory.
Of course, the creation of a separate site for gays — even if it’s absolutely identical — will almost certainly lead to more suits in the future. There’s no shortage of emotional people who feel like “second-class citizens” when confronted by websites that don’t cater to them.
As an aside, despite the framing of the LAT piece excerpted above, eHarmony isn’t a Christian dating site. It does, however, match people for compatibility along a variety of vectors, with religious values high on the list. Warren believes, correctly I think, that compatibility on core values is essential to sustaining a long term relationship.
UPDATE: GayPatriotWest wonders when a Christian will sue JDate, “The Leading Jewish Singles Network,” and Michelle Malkin suggests, “Perhaps heterosexual men and women should start filing lawsuits against gay dating websites and undermine their business. Coerced tolerance and diversity-by-fiat cut both ways.”
I’m not a lawyer but I’m guessing eHarmony’s problem — in addition to the cost issues noted in the original post — is that it’s not explicitly a straight-only or Christian site, thus making it more difficult to argue that being forced to match same-sex couples undermined its mission.
The gang at Reason is concerned about the appointment of Eric Holder as the Attorney General, with both Dave Weigel and Jacob Sullum noting that he’s been a big advocate of harsher penalties for drug offenders, including marijuana users. Sullum’s right that the choice is “strikingly at odds not only with Obama’s signals regarding marijuana but with his opposition to long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.”
That said, Holder, like all cabinet officers, serves at the pleasure of the president and is there to carry out his policies. If Obama decides to de-emphasize drug enforcement — and here’s betting he won’t; he strikes me as a guy who’s not going to expend political capital on that sort of thing, at least in a first term — then Holder will de-emphasize drug enforcement. If, on the other hand, Holder escalates the war on drugs, its’ because Obama thinks that’s the right call politically.
Cabinet officers are powerful and the Attorney General is one of the most powerful cabinet officers. But it’s because of day-to-day decisions that fall below the president’s radar. On the big issues, blame the Big Guy.
John McCain has won Missouri’s 11 electoral votes, CNN declares. Missouri hasn’t actually made that official yet, mind you. But the election was a mere sixteen days ago.
According to the unofficial results, McCain won the state by 3,632 votes . The unofficial count shows McCain with 1,445,812 votes, or 49.4 percent, and Obama with 1,442,180 votes, or 49.3 percent.
With Missouri’s 11 electoral votes in Senator McCain’s column, the final count is 365 for Obama and 173 for McCain.
The “news” here, if you want to call it that, is that another statistical anomaly has bitten the dust:
McCain’s edging out of Obama in Missouri breaks the state’s bellwether streak in which Missourians correctly picked the presidential candiate in every election dating back to the 1960 contest. Missouri got it wrong in 1956, voting for the Democratic challenger Adlai Stevenson, who lost the election to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Before that election, Missouri correctly picked the winner in every race for the White House dating back to 1904.
We’re dealing with an incredibly small sample size here. Basically, they’ve gotten 24 of 26 elections “right.” The vast majority of these were blowouts, too.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Federal Reserve on Wednesday sharply lowered its projections for economic activity this year and next, and signaled that additional interest rate reductions may be needed to help combat the worst financial crisis to jolt the country in more than a half-century.
With the economy forecast to lose traction, or even jolt into reverse, unemployment will move higher, the Fed predicted.
Facing the likelihood of “significant weakness” in the economy, some Fed officials suggested “additional policy easing could well be appropriate at future meetings,” according to documents from the Fed’s most recent closed-door deliberations on interest rate policy at the end of October.
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To help ease financial turmoil and spur banks to lend money more freely again to customers, the Fed has taken a series of other unprecedented steps, including offering short-term cash loans and buying up mounds of short-term debt that companies rely on to pay day-to-day expenses like payrolls and supplies.
Under its new economic forecast, the Fed now believes gross domestic product could be flat or grow by just 0.3 percent this year. GDP could actually shrink or expand by 1.1 percent next year. Both sets of projections are lower than the Fed’s forecasts delivered to Congress in July.
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The prospects for weaker economic activity will push up unemployment. The Fed projected that the national unemployment rate will rise to between 6.3 percent and 6.5 percent this year. The rate in October was 6.5 percent, and last year the rate averaged 4.6 percent.
Given news like this I have to say that it will be interesting to see if Obama is going to stick to his statements about holding off in implementing his tax plan.
While the National Bureau of Economic Research has not announced whether or not the economy is in a recession I think it is a safe bet to conclude that we are in a recession. GDP decreased last quarter. The non-farm payroll has declined for 10 straight months in a row. Unemployment insurance claims are up.
Unemployment has been rising steadily since the start of the year. In January unemployment was 4.9% and now it is 6.5%. Citigroup is laying of 50,000 employees. The auto-industry is begging for money or they too will be laying of thousands of employees. Real personal consumption expenditures have been zero or negative from August through September. This is significant in that personal consumption expenditures (PCE) make up just under 71% of GDP. If PCE goes negative it does not bode well for GDP. If PCE is negative again for October and November it will likely mean that GDP is going to be very low and/or negative. So far the only bright spots I’ve heard of are that the CPI is sharply down and real earnings were up from September to October.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Ladin’s deputy, called Barack Obama a “house negro.”
Al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the president-elect in demeaning terms that imply he does the bidding of whites.
The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies. Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is “the direct opposite of honorable black Americans” like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.
In al-Qaida’s first response to Obama’s victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect—along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—”house negroes.”
Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term “abeed al-beit,” which literally translates as “house slaves.” But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as “house negroes.”
The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters’ house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the latest message was just “more despicable comments from a terrorist.”
Despicable, indeed. Comments like this lead to insensitive behavior. Shame, shame al Qaeda.
Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, speaking at the Atlantic Council today, declared that Russia’s justification for invading Georgia, that it was defending its friends abroad, is one that has been used by Russian autocrats for centuries to justify a doctrine of imperialism. Saying that we need “a doctrine for a doctrine,” Sikorski declared that, “Any further attempt to redraw borders in Europe by force or by subversion will be regarded by Poland as an existential threat to our security and should entail a proportional response by the whole Atlantic community.” Beyond that, “We need to make NATO’s traditional security guarantees credible again.”
In “Melting the Russian Glacier,” an essay at New Atlanticist, I question whether the West actually has the will to carry out this doctrine.
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The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased 1.0 percent in October, before seasonal adjustment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The October level of 216.573 (1982-84=100) was 3.7 percent higher than in October 2007.
A drop like this in the CPI suggests that at the very least the Fed can put aside worries of inflation for the moment which means it is unlikely that interest rates will go up. This is the largest one month decrease since 1947 when the BLS started publishing the monthly seasonally adjusted CPI numbers.
The reason for the decline are the large decreases in the energy portion of the index lead by the 14.2 percent drop in the gasoline index. Still gasoline prices are over 12 percent higher than where they were last year.
