Rich Mintz  

The judge in the Log Cabin Republicans’ “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” suit in California ruled for the plaintiffs tonight, concluding that the policy of dismissing gay and lesbian members of the military is unconstitutional on both First and Fifth Amendment grounds. She says she will issue a permanent injunction against its enforcement within a week. Not clear yet whether DOJ will appeal.

Associated Press story here; opinion itself is here. The opinion is worth leafing through; among other things, the judge finds that the Government’s claims about unit cohesion are directly contradicted by the evidence, including evidence that the Government has delayed the discharge of gay and lesbian servicemembers until after their combat tours are over.

Stuff like this is obvious to gay people, in the same way that mixed-race couples in 1940 found it obvious that prohibitions against their marriage are inherently unconstitutional. But it’s a relief to see the culture as a whole acknowledging it. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends toward justice — I believe that that is true fundamentally, and not just contingently or locally, among a human race that is wired for communitarian living — and we’ve seen a lot of positive social change for gay people in just a few short years.

I follow the news from the city I lived in from 1999 to 2007, and a couple of things I’ve read recently, such as this short piece from the Economist’s American politics blog, have got me wondering whether Atlanta — like Phoenix and Las Vegas — may have hit its growth ceiling in the current recession, and whether the Atlanta of, say, 2030 might not be somewhat smaller than today’s.

I’m not talking about the city of Atlanta (2008 pop: 537,000), the municipality at the heart of the metro area, which has absorbed rapid growth over the past decade (due to both densification and immigration) and can presumably absorb plenty more on its ample vacant land. I’m talking about the Atlanta metropolitan area (oops, the “Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta MSA”) — the agglomeration of 20 counties, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, that is home to 5.4 million people.

Much of that land — and virtually all the land outside the Perimeter, except along traditional rail and road corridors like US 41 — was rational to develop only in an economy that counted on three things: unlimited cheap gasoline married to an unlimited willingness to build new highway mileage; endless real estate appreciation, leading to endless speculative residential construction; and a core city of Atlanta that was perceived as unsafe, tax-hungry, and crumbling. The recession’s taken care of the first two; and the third has been taking care of itself, as the city has spiffed itself up, embraced its advantages, and started living within its means. (When I left for good, the city of Atlanta was a much nicer and better-kept place to live than when I arrived eight years earlier, and the progress has continued.)

Geographically speaking, Atlanta is in an arbitrary spot. It is located where it is because of the decisions of railroad-builders and local boosters more than a century ago. Unlike most American cities, it is not on a river, not on the fall line, not on a traditional trade route. And it’s so far up in its watershed — in the Piedmont of the Appalachians — that even something as basic as water can by no means be taken for granted.

When I was in high school, the late Father John Gill, who taught me 9th-grade European history — and was also a California history fetishist, and our chaplain, and probably one of the most interesting adults who took me seriously before I moved away for college — said that if we wanted to make a mint, we should all study riparian law. He was thinking of California (where it’s also true), but his advice would have been useful in Georgia, too. The endless squabbling with Florida and Alabama over water rights — in which, the Economist writer points out, all of Georgia downstream of the Atlanta metropolitan colossus inherently sides with Florida and Alabama — may well be resolved in the favor of those downstream, which would make it difficult to sustain a population the size of Atlanta’s indefinitely without major civil engineering projects.

The City of Atlanta — the hole in the doughnut — will likely be fine. Dense enough to justify infrastructure investment, it’s also proportionally wealthier now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, so a solution will be found to serve the water needs of 600,000, or 800,000, or a million. But at least two or three of the remaining four million in the metro area are living unsustainably, and as foreclosures hollow out their neighborhoods and job losses devastate the county tax bases, there’s going to be a lot of shrinkage in the doughnut itself. And it looks like the go-go days of a decade ago are probably gone for good.

In the long term and even the medium term, that probably means densification, infrastructure, and quality-of-life improvements that my old friends in Grant Park and Candler Park and East Atlanta and Decatur, and the other inner neighborhoods I used to frequent, will get to enjoy. But it will also mean a lot of pain, spread out over a decade or two, for people who bought into an unsustainable lifestyle in places like Suwanee and Buford.

I sure love me some Orly Taitz… and she’s back!

In case you’re not an obsessive follower of this story, Orly is the über-Birther who’s bombarding the federal courts with frivolous lawsuits about Obama’s origins. Here’s a detailed history of the saga (juiciest part here — court’s judgment worth reading in its entirety).

Well, Orly’s back! She’s pissed off a Federal judge, the Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, but she’s not letting it go. In our latest installment, Orly claims that Obama’s passport is doctored and she can prove it. If I’ve learned anything from TV about judges, it’s that they don’t like having their time wasted, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that fine go up, and up, and up…

The Awl sends crack reporter Jordan Carr to Park Place in Lower Manhattan, to investigate the neighborhood where the new Islamic center is going in. He finds a defunct Burlington Coat Factory, an OTB full of sad old guys, and a bunch of people who don’t give a shit about Cordoba House, as, you know, pretty much any of us who live anywhere near there could have told you.

With all the coverage of Sarah Palin’s Facebook and Twitter strategy, it’s easy to forget that a presidential election is not conducted by putting the members of each candidate’s social network on one side of a scale and seeing which side is heavier. (Obligatory joke about obese red-staters goes here.)

But would that it were! If it were, someone like Stephen Fry — actor, auteur, thoughtful social commentator — would boot that Sarah Palin right back to the hostess counter at the Wasilla Applebee’s where she belongs.

Consider:

(True, Fry wasn’t born in the United States. But then I think I read somewhere that Obama wasn’t either, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his success any.)

I’m ashamed of my fellow Americans this month, as allegedly intelligent and thoughtful people toss the Constitution (not to mention American values and common sense) in the garbage, and come out against the Islamic cultural center (abbreviated by everyone as “mosque”) on Park Place in Lower Manhattan.

This location is six blocks from my apartment, and I walk past it almost daily, so I think I have standing to have an opinion on the matter. The elected and appointed officials who have jurisdiction are, in large part, people whom I and my neighbors selected, who serve at our whim and whose salaries we pay. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, live 4,300 miles away and 236 miles away, respectively. Would they kindly shut the hell up and go away?

There have been Muslim-Americans living in Lower Manhattan effectively forever, in planning terms; there were mosques in our neighborhood before the World Trade Center was here, and long before I lived here, and certainly before Sarah Palin ever came shopping here. Every day, hundreds of Muslim-American taxi drivers stop for lunch or dinner at one of the halal restaurants on Church Street around the corner from the proposed site. And last time I checked, neither the First Amendment nor RLUIPA had an asterisk leading to the disclaimer “except Muslims.” End of story.

Matt Yglesias’s Mosque Exclusion Zone posts are funny, and right on point, but this is a serious matter, which is why I was so disappointed to learn today that the Anti-Defamation League, one of America’s most important historical forces against intolerance and bigotry, has come down on the wrong side of this issue.

There are, to be sure, political issues in American social discourse that have two sides. But if you have any respect at all for equality, for freedom of religion, or for the founding principles of America, this isn’t one of them. And we do have plots of secular hallowed ground in America — but they’re not at “Ground Zero” (an embarrassing term that highlights all the wrong aspects of the events of the past decade). They’re in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks rode home from work on the bus. They’re in Little Rock, at Central High School. They’re at Tule Lake, in California, where my great-grandparents (I’ve been told) taught school during one of the most shameful failures of our constitutional system in our nation’s history. They’re at Gettysburg. They’re in Jackson Heights, Queens, home of some of the most diverse census tracts in the country.

I’m angry at Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, but at the end of the day, what can you expect from anti-intellectuals and opportunists? But the ADL? I’m ashamed of them, for losing sight of their mission, and for the implication that they are speaking in my name as a Jewish American. They emphatically are not, and I’m afraid they have done permanent damage to their credibility today.

Signs by the side of the road, NY 22 at NY 311, Patterson, New York.

In “Do You Take This Immigrant”, the NYT’s Nina Bernstein interviews people on both sides of the desk at one particular immigration office: the one where green-card applicants and their US-citizen spouses are questioned separately and together to root out cases of fraud.

The incidence of fraud is very, very low, but that doesn’t keep this process from being emotionally draining and controversial. The examiners interviewed come off as, on the whole, respectful and thoughtful people. One of them is even herself a US permanent resident. It’s worth noting that a Federal district court settlement almost four decades ago put extra safeguards in place with regard to this process in New York that don’t apply elsewhere.

Congratulations to James Johnson, whom I’ve met professionally and who was elected this week to the Long Beach (California) city council.

I’m always cheered by “local boy goes away to get edumacated, moves home and gets city staff job, sees opportunity for positive change, runs and wins” stories like these. With all the cynicism in politics (and especially in the coverage of politics), it’s important to keep in mind that government and politics are not the same thing. And the matter-of-fact desire to invest in and improve the community where you and your family live — the desire to pick up part of the task of governing and carry it forward — is still a powerful force pulling people into elective office.

And that’s probably truer the closer to the neighborhood level you are — truer in city council than in the county council, truer in county council than in the state legislature, truer in the state legislature than in Congress. In Congress, way out there in Washington, it’s possible to drift away from true north as seen by your constituents, but that’s much harder to do if your job is to approve zoning applications and sanitation contracts and oversee the Streets & Roads Department. Potholes can’t be wished away by slick Washington talk, and if you don’t make sure they get fixed, you’ll get sent home.

When term limits first turned over the California Legislature en masse beginning in 1990, I considered running for Assembly. It was never more than a germ of an idea of a plan — and I couldn’t have won — but I thought about it seriously enough way back then that I still really respect people who run for local office. So congratulations to James and his family for investing in the future of Long Beach, and best of luck.

One final note: Although I don’t live in California anymore, I care about Long Beach — my mother graduated from Robert A. Millikan High School — so I sent James a small contribution, a hundred bucks as I recall. In a city council race (really, in any race, but especially in local races that may fall below the radar of the organized interests), even a hundred bucks matters. So don’t be shy about contributing to political candidates in local races — step forward and give your $1000 or $100 or $10 to the candidate you’d like to see win. Sometimes they actually do!

Having just finished Jonathan Cohn’s monumental TNR feature on the mechanics of the healthcare reform legislative win, “How They Did It”, I’m left with one question reverberating in my brain above all else:

Kent Conrad has a bichon frise? **

But seriously, folks: lots of exciting horserace detail here. The whole thing is worth reading (and, while you’re at it, subscribe to TNR to help keep this stuff coming), but here for your perusal is a sample of what makes this story so interesting:

• All that death-panels folderol originated in an amendment (permitting reimbursement for end-of-life counseling) that came from a Republican, Johnny Isaakson of Georgia.
• The net impact of Joe Wilson’s “you lie!” during the President’s September address was to galvanize Democrats into pushing forward. And, at that time, the Administration had a backup bill in their pocket in case Max Baucus didn’t move.
• The October AHIP report was so transparent an attempt to game the vote that it had the effect of solidifying Democratic support in the Finance Committee.
• Rules Committee chair Louise Slaughter skipped her own committee meeting so she wouldn’t have to preside over the vote that inserted the Stupak amendment.
• The February summit helped buy time for support for the final compromise to build. “It just froze the game,” says John Podesta.

Cohn makes a special point of acknowledging the critical role that Max Baucus played — he may have weakened the bill, from a progressive perspective, but if he’d walked off the field (and he was pressured plenty hard to do so), the game would have been over. And he didn’t walk.

A nice sum-up from Neera Tanden, an adviser to Kathleen Sebelius: “People like to second-guess, but, at the time, with the information we had, almost every controversial decision was a series of hard calls — fifty-five percent to forty-five percent at best.” Cohn marshals plenty of evidence that the whole thing could have fallen apart at virtually any point over a period of year and a half for two dozen different reasons. Like any significant legislative achievement, the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is nothing short of a confluence of miracles.

And then there’s this quote from an unnamed Democratic House aide, which I think alone is worth the $4.95 cover price: “There was a guy at a caucus who stood up and said [to Pelosi], ‘Nancy, there’s an ad in my district, and it’s with you and me, which would be nice, but we’re both being struck by lightning.’”

Great reporting, well written — again, subscribe to TNR. It’s full of stuff like this every week — and unlike your iPad, it works in the bathtub.

** The citation:

[Obama] also showered gifts on Conrad’s dog, a white bichon frise named “Dakota,” which Conrad sometimes totes to his office. The doggie gifts even came with a personal note — “Rahm idea, Obama execution,” says one administration official.

– Jonathan Cohn, “How They Did It,” The New Republic, June 10, 2010, p. 19.