Sunday, February 7, 2010

“ANALYSIS: Cultural shifts push end of 'don't ask, don't tell' - North County Times” plus 3 more

“ANALYSIS: Cultural shifts push end of 'don't ask, don't tell' - North County Times” plus 3 more

ANALYSIS: Cultural shifts push end of 'don't ask, don't tell' - North County Times

Posted: 07 Feb 2010 12:03 AM PST

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

WASHINGTON ---- A cultural shift in the 17 years since Congress passed a legal ban on gays serving openly in the military had changed the debate even before it was reopened by President Barack Obama.

Colin Powell, for example, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993 was part of the opposition to gays in the military, said Wednesday that for the past two years he has favored reviewing the current ban.

"Attitudes and circumstances have changed," he said.

For many younger members of the military ---- those doing the bulk of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq ---- it's hardly a debate at all. Polls suggest they care little about sexual orientation in their ranks.

And views in the wider society have evolved; gay marriage is now legal in five states and the District of Columbia. Opinion surveys say a majority of Americans think it's OK for gays to serve in uniform.

"Do I care if someone is gay? I have no qualms," said Army Sgt. Justin Graff, serving with the 5th Stryker Brigade in southern Afghanistan.

Jason Jonas, a former Army staff sergeant from Tempe, Ariz., said openly gay soldiers served in his intelligence unit at Fort Bragg, N.C., and their presence never affected unit morale.

"I don't think it is anybody's right to say who can and who can't fight for their country," said Jonas, 28, who served in Afghanistan before being injured. "Nobody cares. 'Don't ask, don't tell' is kind of a joke."

A major influence in the coming debate will be the stance of the military's most senior uniformed leader, Adm. Mike Mullen. He told a Senate panel Tuesday that he personally believes it is time to allow gays to serve openly. It's just wrong, Mullen said, that gays must "lie about who they are" to defend their country.

Although Obama said he would work to change the law this year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave him some extra leeway by telling Congress the Pentagon would need at least a year to implement the changes. Gates' comment gave the impression that he thinks repeal is almost inevitable, although a leading Republican voice on defense matters, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, opposes the change.

"I fully support the president's decision," Gates said. "The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it," adding that the final decision rests with Congress.

In the meantime, Gates said he is seeking latitude in how the law is enforced.

The list of countries that permit gays to serve openly in uniform has grown to 28, including Canada, Israel, Australia and most of Europe. Many of those nations have troops fighting alongside U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Yet in the U.S., there remains a powerful rhetorical weapon for opponents of lifting the ban ---- fear that it would weaken a military at war.

It's a question that cuts to the heart of why sexual orientation has been such a sensitive topic in the military in the past ---- and remains so among those who see repeal of the 1993 ban on allowing gays to serve openly as putting still more stress on a military strained by years of conflict.

Mullen said he shares that concern, even as he became the first sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs to publicly advocate allowing gays to serve openly. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee "there will be some disruption in the force" if the law is changed.

"Our plate is very full" already, he said.

Obama entered the White House as an advocate of repealing the ban, but he let it rest for a year. In his State of the Union address, he vowed to work with Congress this year "to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are."

When Clinton entered the White House in 1993, he ignited a political firestorm by trying to use his executive powers to end the policy ---- not written into law at that point ---- of discriminating against gay service members in the military.

Congress stopped him by passing a law that does not explicitly prohibit gays or lesbians from serving but requires them to serve in silence. If they acknowledge their sexual orientation or engage in a homosexual act, they can be expelled. But if not asked, they need not disclose it.

The 1993 statute calls the military a "specialized society" in which life is "fundamentally different from civilian life." And so it is. But the cultural differences are not necessarily as stark as in 1993.

Walter Slocombe, a defense consultant who was a senior Pentagon policy officer during the Clinton administration, says most military members "won't care one way or another" if the ban is lifted.

All branches of the military struggle to some extent with racial, religious and gender tensions, he noted, but "that's a result of having a military that reflects the diversity of the country."

ROBERT BURNS has covered national security and military affairs for The Associated Press since 1990. Associated Press writers Christopher Torchia in southern Afghanistan and Kevin Maurer in Wilmington, N.C. contributed to this report.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Huge Church Project Renews Downtown, and Debate - New York Times

Posted: 07 Feb 2010 09:10 PM PST

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

SALT LAKE CITY — For many devout Mormons, Utah's capital city is important mainly as a setting for the jewel that really matters: Temple Square at the city's center. Brigham Young, the pioneer leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, laid out the urban grid with street numbers starting at the temple. The secular world was thus defined by the sacred core.

But now a hugely ambitious, $1 billion church-financed redevelopment project near the temple, called City Creek Center, and a wave of recent church property purchases in the vicinity are prompting a new debate inside the church community and out over where the line between culture and economics should be drawn.

Some residents say the church, by opening its checkbook in a recession, rescued the city when times got tough. The 1,800 construction jobs at City Creek alone have provided a big local economic cushion. Completion of the project — 20 acres of retail shops and residential towers — is scheduled for 2012.

"City Creek has been a literal and figurative godsend," said Bradley D. Baird, the business development manager at the Economic Development Corporation of Utah, a private nonprofit group that has no direct involvement with the project.

Other people say that if the new heart of downtown has a strong church flavor, Salt Lake, which has become more diverse in recent years — could veer back toward its roots, for better or worse. About half of city residents are Mormon, according to many estimates, and if many, or most, of the roughly 700 apartment units at City Creek were occupied by Mormon families, the city could have a dramatic new feel.

"Our downtown has become a ghost town in my life — nobody lives there," said Dan Egan, 55, a lawyer and church member who works near the site but lives in the suburbs. "Having several thousand people live down here will have a big impact, and having many of them L.D.S. would be a very interesting thing to see."

Church leaders say they have no religious goals in mind for City Creek, or for their other recent acquisitions. Over just the last month, the church has bought three more properties, including a 13-acre parcel a few blocks south of City Creek. A spokesman said the purchases were investments.

"There will be no evidence of the church within those blocks," said H. David Burton, a former corporate executive who oversees the church's business interests as the presiding bishop. Mr. Burton said the civic spaces inside City Creek would be private property, but "with all the attributes of a public venue."

Alcohol, for example — always a cultural flashpoint because of the church's teachings to avoid it — will probably be allowed in City Creek, Mr. Burton said, under special contracts that will allow a restaurant wanting a liquor license to buy the underlying property. That would keep the church from being in the liquor business or from benefiting from liquor sales while still allowing sale and consumption on the premises.

As for who might want to move in, Mr. Burton said he thought proximity to the temple would make the apartments attractive to church families, but only time will tell. About 40 percent of the available condominium units have been reserved by deposit, but a church spokesman said the buyers' religious affiliations were unknown.

"If I were making a guess — and I don't have any empirical data — it might be more attractive to L.D.S. than to others," Mr. Burton said.

One former Salt Lake City planning official, Stephen A. Goldsmith, who is not a Mormon, said he was thrilled by the thought of people moving back downtown, but feared that the church's economic concentration would lead to a "Vaticanization" of the area.

"The concern is about having just one owner own so much of the heart of the capital city," said Mr. Goldsmith, who was director of city planning from 2000 to 2002 and is now an associate professor of architecture and planning at the University of Utah.

Already, Professor Goldsmith said, a buffer zone of about 100 acres of church-owned properties, assembled gradually over the past few decades, rings the inner core. He said the "we/they" divide between Mormons and non-Mormons could widen if even more public space became private or was linked to one group's cultural values.

Church leaders said the desire to head off economic decline in downtown was their prime directive at City Creek.

"Along with economic malaise comes an element that we were concerned about in proximity to the temple," said Mr. Burton, the presiding bishop. That the temple area might one day start to feel dangerous was simply intolerable, he said. "With decay, sometimes comes crime," he said.

Although lots of urban churches worry about those issues, the ones that can write a $1 billion check are rare.

"It's certainly one of the largest, if not the largest project in the United States funded by a single entity, and the fact that the entity is a church makes it doubly unusual," said Patrick L. Anderson, the chief executive and founder of the Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan-based real-estate consulting company.

Mr. Anderson, who said his firm had no economic involvement in City Creek, said such megascale urban redevelopment mostly went out of fashion after the 1970s and '80s. That makes Salt Lake even more singular, he said.

Church officials said, however, that some of what they were doing was a throwback — to the 1930s. In the Great Depression, the church established a food and clothing distribution system for destitute members and bought land all over the state, establishing a precedent for wading in during hard times.

Now, some of those 1930s economic stimulus lands could come back into play. The Salt Lake City Council is considering another huge development project called the Northwest Quadrant near the airport, where the church owns a swath of land used long ago as a Depression-era church farm.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

THE INFLUENCE GAME: Toyota's powerful DC friends - San Francisco Chronicle

Posted: 07 Feb 2010 09:10 PM PST

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

The company has sought to sow good will and win allies with lobbying, charitable giving, racing in the American-as-apple pie NASCAR series and, perhaps most important, creating jobs.

Lawmakers on the committees investigating Toyota's massive recall represent states where Toyota has factories and the coveted well-paying manufacturing jobs they bring. Some members of Congress have been such cheerleaders for Toyota that the public may wonder how they can act objectively as government watchdogs for auto safety and oversight. The company's executives include a former employee of the federal agency that is supposed to oversee the automaker.

Will Toyota's connections pay off as it tries to minimize fallout from its problems?

The Senate's lead Toyota investigator, West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller, credits himself with lobbying Toyota to build a factory in his state. A member of a House investigating panel, California Rep. Jane Harman, represents the district of Toyota's U.S. headquarters and has financial ties to the company.

Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, has known Toyota's founding family since the 1960s. He was so closely involved with Toyota's selection of Buffalo, W.Va., for a factory that he slogged through cornfields with Toyota executives scouting locations and still mentions his role in the 1990s deal to this day.

"By the time Toyota decided to make Buffalo its new home," Rockefeller said in 2006 during the plant's 10th anniversary, "I felt like a full-fledged member of that site selection team."

Rockefeller's committee is expected to review whether the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration acted aggressively enough toward Toyota. The agency's new chief, David L. Strickland, worked for eight years on Rockefeller's committee as a lawyer and senior staffer.

Strickland has such close relationships with Rockefeller and other senators that Republican Sen. George LeMieux of Florida asked Strickland at his confirmation hearing two months ago whether he could disagree with Rockefeller, his former boss: "The oversight for you in your role will be from the committee that you once served on," LeMieux told him.

"I will be honest with you, sir," Strickland answered. "I've had disagreements with the chairman personally. But he signs the paycheck, and he wins. But I will have no problem with that all, sir."

Rockefeller sees no reason to step aside from his committee's investigation. Consumer protection is a cornerstone of his work as chairman and that is reflected in the steps he and the committee are taking, including NHTSA briefings and plans to hold hearings and seek recall-related documents, Rockefeller spokeswoman Jamie Smith said.

"While this important work proceeds, Senator Rockefeller is encouraged that Toyota is making every effort to minimize the impact on its U.S. work force, especially during these difficult economic times," Smith said. "He hopes and expects that Toyota will remain a strong company and is capable of getting back on the right track with safety and consumer confidence."

Toyota's U.S. operations are based in Torrance, Calif., in Harman's district. She serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating Toyota's recall.

Harman and her husband, Sidney, held at least $115,000 in Toyota stock as of her most recent financial disclosure report. The company to which the couple owes much of their multimillion-dollar fortune, Harman International Industries, founded by Sidney Harman, sells vehicle audio and entertainment systems to Toyota. The two companies teamed up on a charitable education project in 2003, when Sidney Harman was Harman International's executive chairman. He retired from the Harman board in December 2008.

When leading Toyota engineer David Hermance died in a 2006 plane crash in California, Rep. Harman took to the floor to pay tribute, calling Hermance the "Father of the American Prius."

"It was David's passionate approach and commitment to the environment that helped persuade a skeptical industry and auto-buying public to appreciate the enormous potential of his work," Harman said at the time. "In fact, Madam Speaker, my family drives two hybrid vehicles — one in California and the other in Washington, D.C."

Harman didn't respond to The Associated Press' request for comment.

Several other lawmakers on investigating committees also represent states with Toyota factories, including Missouri, Texas, Mississippi, Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky. Toyota says it employs nearly 36,000 people in the U.S. and indirectly employs about 166,000 people at dealerships and suppliers.

Republicans also have spoken of Toyota's importance to their states. "Kentucky is still reaping the rewards of its 20-year partnership with Toyota, and we hope to continue to do so for years to come," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in marking the 2006 anniversary of a Toyota plant there.

Still, Toyota has a long way to go to win the wholesale affection of Congress. Democrats criticize it for nonunion shops. Some lawmakers suggest it benefits from unfair Japanese trade policies at the expense of automakers they consider American, such as Ford and General Motors.

Toyota has tried hard to be thought of as an American brand. Its efforts include trying to become part of the nation's car culture.

n recent years it broke into the highest ranks of the beloved U.S. sport of auto racing, fielding cars in NASCAR races in front of millions of die-hard fans. Popular driver Rusty Wallace announced in November that his team would race in Toyotas starting with the 2010 season.

Its U.S. charity doles out millions each year, sometimes in photo opportunities with politicians. It gave $5.6 million to charitable causes from mid-2007 to mid-2008, much of it focused on education and the environment, according to its most recent report. Toyota promised former President Bill Clinton's charity that it would spend $496,000 to sustain forests in the southern United States.

"Words cannot express the generosity that Toyota has shown Kentucky through industry job opportunities and community service," Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., said in a 2006 Senate speech.

Toyota's lobbying spending in Washington has risen as its U.S. sales have. Toyota spent $5 million last year lobbying on such issues as industry regulation, energy, labor laws, patents, trade, taxes and government contracting. That's more than five times what it spent a decade earlier, when one of its lobbying reports acknowledged that its mission included "reducing unnecessary regulations." It is active in several trade associations that lobby, including the National Association of Manufacturers.

Its Washington team is well connected.

Its main liaison to the federal government on vehicle safety issues is Christopher Tinto, who worked for several years in NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation as a vehicle defect investigator and in its Office of Vehicle Safety Standards, where he mostly worked on heavy-truck braking standards.

Among its lobbyists is Josephine Cooper, who was chief executive of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry coalition to which Toyota belongs, and who also worked at the Environmental Protection Agency and as an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney when he was in Congress.

Its lobbyists also include Tom Lehner, who was an aide to five senators and was the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's treasurer. Another lobbyist, Robert Chiappetta, organizes an annual event in which Toyota sends employees to Washington to lobby Congress and he was a delegate for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama at the 2008 Virginia Democratic Party Convention.

Toyota recently retained Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a well-connected, bipartisan lobbying and public affairs firm that will help Toyota try to contain the damage in Washington, the AP has learned. On its Web site, the firm promises to "limit damage to reputation." The AP also has learned that Toyota has retained The Glover Park Group, a Democratic public affairs-lobbying firm, for crisis management.

Toyota has a diversity advisory board that includes Federico Pena, a Clinton administration Cabinet secretary, national co-chairman of Obama's presidential campaign and a member of Obama's transition team; Clinton administration Labor Secretary Alexis Herman; former Republican Rep. Susan Molinari, now a lobbyist working with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and Gilbert Casellas, former chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, former general counsel of the Air Force and former co-chairman of the U.S. Census Monitoring Board.

One of Toyota's executives, Tom Stricker, serves on the EPA's Clean Air Act Advisory Committee, and a former executive, Thomas Zawacki, is commissioner of Kentucky's Vehicle Regulation Department.

Toyota also is a federal contractor. Its contracts in the 2008 budget year included at least $3.8 million in business providing the State Department with motor vehicles and trailers, according to figures compiled by OMB Watch, a nonpartisan group that tracks government spending.

Toyota has not been a big player in U.S. campaigns. Its U.S. employees contributed roughly $30,000 to federal candidates in 2007-08, compared with about $880,000 from Ford Motor Co. employees and about $799,000 from GM workers.

Unlike rivals Ford and GM, Toyota doesn't have a political action committee to dole out campaign contributions. Toyota's PAC would have difficulty distinguishing itself from Toyota's Japanese management to the degree needed to be legal under U.S. campaign finance laws.

That makes Toyota an unwitting example of an issue that has become a hot topic in Washington in recent days: foreign companies with U.S. subsidiaries and their involvement in U.S. elections. The Supreme Court ruled last month that U.S. corporations and unions can spend treasury money on election ads attacking federal candidates. Some Democrats including President Obama argue the ruling would let foreign corporations with U.S. subsidiaries sneak into U.S. election activities, and they plan legislation to close such a loophole.

___

Associated Press writers Ted Bridis, Alan Fram and Ken Thomas contributed to this report.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Caprica’ blogging: “The Reins of a Waterfall” - Flick Filosopher

Posted: 07 Feb 2010 09:03 PM PST

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

I thought Joseph Adama was just a mob lawyer -- but he's worse than that, isn't he? Bribing corrupt judges ain't nothing next to ordering your brother to even out the deaths in the maglev bombing. We know Sam Adama has no trouble at all with killing in cold blood -- we've already seen him rather gleefully murder Cancer Man in his bed -- but even Sam seems taken aback by Joseph's calm request that he kill Amanda Graystone.

Amanda's take on her daughter is very intriguing! She believes her daughter was a terrorist, but while she's wrong about Zoe using a bomb on the maglev, she's not wrong about Zoe's apparent desire to inflict some sort of shattering change upon her culture. Zoe clearly believed that whatever she was working on would have a huge impact -- her avatar was meant to be "a gift," and obviously Sister Clarice, whom Zoe was apparently in the thrall of, believes that the One God is going to save them all. (Save them from what?) Zoe may not have wanted to use violence to affect a change, but she must have considered herself something of a revolutionary.

And hey, who is Clarice talking to behind the blurry glass in the virtual world? Is it one of the skinjobs from when this Happened Before?

Everything we see here -- much more so than we ever saw in Battlestar Galactica -- feels like a giant example of The More Things Change. And this was 150,000 years ago. And it wasn't the first time they'd happened, either! Talk show host Baxter Sarno, who's Leno (terrible monologue) + Stewart ("more than half of college-age students say they get their news from Sarno"). "Taurons are terrible drivers." Cops who play PR games and destroy evidence to cover their asses. "If you were my friend, you'd do this" -- kids have, it seems, been saying this for hundreds of thousands of year. And good things have never, ever started that way.

It makes me despair, a bit: Can we ever change? Then again, the portrayal of Sam's home life makes me hope. Lacy, who's brave and determined enough to knock down a boy twice her size because he pissed her off with his hypocrisy, makes me hope.

On the other hand, we already know this won't end well...

Random thoughts on "The Reins of a Waterfall":

• Am I the only one who thought, when we saw Willie Adama hanging around his uncle's club, "Every since I was a kid, I wanted to be a Tauron gangster"?

• I want a Serge.

• Ooo, Dr. Janet Frasier!

• I get the fedoras and the cigarettes as signifiers for "retro," for "this happened in the not-too-distant past." I'm not sure if the giant, boxy cameras the TV reporters are using work, though. With the kind of technology we've already seen, would the cameras really be that big?

(next: "Gravedancing")

(Watch full episodes and get recaps at SyFy's official site for the show.)

viewed at home on a small screen
rated TV14-V
official site | IMDB

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Posted by at

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)