September 19, 2013
“In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them,” Pope Francis said in a long, occasionally mesmerizing interview with Father Antonio Spadaro that was published Thursday by sixteen Jesuit journals, in a range of languages. (The English version is in America.) “But the church does not want to do this.” He had just told Spadaro that wounds were what the Church was meant to heal: “I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.”
And yet the Church “sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules.” And then, in a passage that will probably always be associated with his papacy, he went on to make clear what he considered small, or smaller-minded:
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September 19, 2013
On Tuesday, Judge Claire Eagan, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, released an opinion that reflected a certain number of oddities, both about the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone-call metadata and about the entire set of N.S.A. revelations since this summer. Some of those have to do with the FISC itself: its work is usually secret, and, along with telling the government that it could order a phone company to hand over information about calls, Eagan herself asked permission to make her opinion public. That request was directed to the FISC’s presiding judge; in this, as in other aspects of the court’s dealings, the lines of accountability look like a closed circle. As to why she wanted it out there:
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September 16, 2013
[Updated]
Just before 8:30 on Monday morning, people in the cafeteria of Building 197, at the Washington Navy Yard, started hearing the sound of gunfire. In a short time, thirteen people were dead, the police said, including one they believed to be the gunman, a man later identified as Aaron Alexis; more were wounded, and many friends and relatives would be getting awful calls in the next hours. The Navy issued a broad order for all uniformed personnel to report where they were—an abrupt muster that will also, for some, be a comfort. But the question, in the first hours, was less how we could be, as President Obama said in a statement, “confronting yet another mass shooting,” or even whether it could happen in the capital—they happen everywhere, and frequently—than where this one fits in the taxonomy of gun violence.
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September 16, 2013
“Well, you know, I think that folks here in Washington like to grade on style,” President Obama told George Stephanopoulos, in an interview about Syria that aired on Sunday. “And so had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy. We know that, because that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq War until it ended up blowing in our face.” There is a certain amount of retrospective reassurance there, especially given that Secretary of State John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, agreed, over the weekend, on a plan to do away with Syria’s chemical weapons in the course of the next year, with the first steps (an accounting of an arsenal that Assad didn’t even acknowledge having a week ago). A deal on a plan on one of the sorts of weapons at work in Syria’s civil war—worked out in a room filled with Russians—may not be as kinetically satisfying as firing a cruise missile, but it is eminently more sensible than bombing who knew what in Syria (it wouldn’t have been the chemical weapons themselves, for fear of dispersing them), toward who knew what end.
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September 11, 2013
Anthony Weiner, at the end of his concession speech Tuesday night, talked about fun. “Here we are on Election Day, when we all divide up into different camps, and that’s part of the fun of it,” he said, as a small crowd cheered; his wife, Huma Abedin, did not appear to be among them, and he never mentioned her. “Some people say, ‘Why do you show so much enthusiasm, have so much fun at parades?’ I make no apologies for that,” he said. His expression of joy was strained and sad, with a filmy layer of jitteriness; but then one of the problems with Weiner is that his idea of fun is a pretty strange one. He’d been dodging Sydney Leathers, one of the women he’d communicated with in the guise of Carlos Danger, and would later flash his middle finger at a reporter. He had “put a call in” to Bill de Blasio, Bill Thompson, “and Christine Quinn, to be on the safe side”—three of the four candidates who finished ahead of him in the Democratic primary, in which he got under five per cent—but didn’t say whether any of them came to the phone.
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September 10, 2013
“If Bashar al-Assad yields control of his chemical weapons to international authorities, are we back from the brink? Is ‘military strike’ on pause?” Diane Sawyer, of ABC News, asked President Obama. “Absolutely,” he replied. “If, in fact, that happened.”
What did just happen? Sawyer’s was one of six interviews that the President gave on Monday. They were meant to be previews of a speech he is giving on Tuesday night; that’s now likely been re-written, after Secretary of State John Kerry said something that he might not have meant to, which turned out to be what everyone wanted to hear. When Kerry appeared before the press with British Foreign Secretary William Hague, Margaret Brennan of CBS asked Kerry if there was anything Assad’s government “could do or offer that would stop an attack?”
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September 6, 2013
What would it cost Barack Obama if Congress votes against taking military action in Syria? The latest counts suggest that it is a real possibility, and not one that the President can dismiss as blind Republican recalcitrance: he doesn’t have his own party behind him, either. “I knew this was going to be a heavy lift,” Obama told reporters at a press conference, in St. Petersburg, in which he said he would address the U.S. about Syria on Tuesday, and try to bring the public around to his point of view. He said that he knew that Congressmen were hearing from their constituents that they didn’t want to get involved in Syria; he hoped that could be overcome. “It’s—it’s a hard sell, but it’s something I believe in.”
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September 4, 2013
On Tuesday night, locked in a prison cell in Ohio, Ariel Castro died by hanging. He had kept three women captive in his home in Cleveland for more than a decade, had beaten and raped them, caused one to have multiple miscarriages, chained them, and told them that it was their fault. They made it through. Castro was sentenced to life in prison plus a thousand years. He seems to have chosen to start on what would have been the posthumous part of that term early, and killed himself.
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September 3, 2013
“Make me proud today, Secretary Kerry,” Senator Rand Paul said toward the end of more than three hours of Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on whether to authorize President Obama to use military force against Syria. Paul wanted Kerry to say that if Congress voted no—“which is unlikely”—the White House “wouldn’t go forward with the war.” Otherwise, he said, “you’re making a joke of us. You’re making us into theatre. And so we play constitutional theatre for the President.” (Despite what Paul told Kerry, it’s not clear that there are the votes to get a resolution through Congress, even though House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday that he’d support it, as did Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton, for that matter.) Meanwhile, his colleague John McCain, who complained that there wasn’t enough of a war planned, had been caught on camera playing poker on his iPhone.
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August 31, 2013
President Barack Obama announced two decisions today—one his own resolution, the other potentially far more historic. It might not be immediately obvious which was which. He began by saying that, ten days after what very much appears to have been a chemical-weapons attack outside of Damascus, “I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.” He spoke of the emotional reasons why (the children who died in their sleep) and what he hoped the national-security benefits would be (that part is still muddled). But note the verb: “should take military action”—not will—which set up Obama’s second, more important, and quite correct decision: “I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.”
I’m also mindful that I’m the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. … I believe that the people’s representatives must be invested in what America does abroad.
Congress is out of town now, and Obama is not calling on them to reconvene. He said that Saturday morning he’d spoken “with all four congressional leaders, and they’ve agreed to schedule a debate and then a vote as soon as Congress comes back into session.” That will be September 9th, though the leaders can call them back if they want to. The President said that time was not against him here: “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs has informed me that we are prepared to strike whenever we choose,” he said. “Moreover, the chairman has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.”
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