PlanetAlbany

Bring 'em home

After two-plus weeks driving around the eastern United States with my newly retired wife, we found none of our relatives and friends, of widely varied political viewpoints, favoring continuation of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Recent events appear to prove the main threat to our troops now comes from their purported Afghan allies. It is no comfort to say, as our political and military leaders do, that we will not be deterred from current plans "to shift increasingly away from a lead role in combat in the next year and toward intensified training and advising." Since the main threat comes from the people we are training and advising, against which there is very little realistic defense, that blather is anything but reassuring.

I'm not inclined particularly to blame the Obama administration, whose distractions in places like Libya and Syria have so far proved much less costly than the Bush administration's foray into Iraq. But if our leaders can't make a better case than this for continuing to risk the lives of our sons and daughters, after 10-and-a-half years, then I'll go with Seeger and Springsteen.

Why doesn't TU run Douthat's column? (updated)

The Albany Times Union's opinion department subscribes to The New York Times news service, regularly running its syndicated columnists such as Maureen Dowd and David Brooks. But the TU does not run the Times' Ross Douthat, so you won't read in its pages his Sunday column about "the media's abortion blinders".

Discussing a recent controversy, Douthat writes: "From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had 'politicized' the cause of women’s health. ... Conservative complaints about media bias are sometimes overdrawn. But on the abortion issue, the press’s prejudices are often absolute, its biases blatant and its blinders impenetrable."

This seems to me obviously true locally, and a particular problem in the TU editorial department, which strives mightily to obfuscate and deny the possibility of regarding abortion as a legitimately controversial issue. The Times itself has long had similar policies and coverage. For many years, like the TU now, it carried no regular columnist with pro-life opinions. But to the Times' credit, it did hire the pro-life Douthat -- whose views are apparently too dangerous to be read in Albany.

Update: This is not, to be clear, a strictly partisan problem. While pro-life Republicans are obviously beyond the pale, even the Obama administration came in for ferocious criticism in December 2011 when it decided to restrict over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill, and most news reports did not mention legitimate concerns about the pill sometimes acting as an abortifacient. No surprise that today's Catholic-bashing TU column on related issues manages to avoid all mention of abortion.

Media watch

The Times Union has a front-page story today, an expansion and rewrite of the AP, headlined Locals greet Komen reversal, concerning reaction to the announcement by "The Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast cancer charity, ... that it will continue to fund breast cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood, reversing a decision made earlier this week." Three local sources are quoted, all of them Planned Parenthood supporters. Nobody is allowed to put the contrary view, that Komen would be wise to remove itself from the Planned Parenthood connection because that organization is the biggest abortion provider in America, and a lot of people have reasonable moral objections to abortion.

TU blogger Libby Post links the Komen story to the ongoing controversy over the proposed appointment of Thomas Marcelle as Albany County attorney, which Post has led a campaign to derail because of Marcelle's connection to the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund. While most of the opposition to Marcelle has come from a gay rights perspective, Post also focuses on abortion: "That’s how the erosion of rights always starts. A little chip here and a little chip there and before you know it, we’re back in 1950, women are in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant and reproductive choice is relegated to the back alley and a hanger."

The TU's news coverage of the Marcelle brouhaha has been more even-handed  than today's Komen story, and the anti-Marcelle editorial was predictable. "We would have preferred that [Albany County Executive Dan] McCoy had picked a county attorney with more progressive views," says the editorial, which is considerably more restrained than Metroland columnist Miriam Axel-Lute. She alleges Marcelle "is in the employ of an organization that is specifically devoted to undermining one of the most important tenets of our Constitution. That is completely and utterly unacceptable." The italics are in the original.

Axel-Lute's point is that the Alliance Defense Fund seeks to undermine the First Amendment, and seeks to impose its views on people by "removing their autonomy over their own bodies and their legal right to equal protection for their families under law." I think the First Amendment claim is hogwash, but it's the latter sentence that is more radical. She is asserting that anyone opposed to the most expansive definitions of abortion and gay rights, e.g. "Marcelle, and any other employee or supporter of the Alliance Defense Fund, is not fit to hold public office in the United States of America." That's also the logic of the less extreme language in the TU editorial, and seems to me much more of a threat to liberty than anything proposed by the Alliance Defense Fund or its allies.