Judge tentatively rejects 'don't ask, don't tell' stay request - Los Angeles Times

A federal judge in Riverside who declared the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy banning gays unconstitutional issued a tentative ruling Monday rejecting the federal government's request to stay her decision while the case is appealed.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips said the government failed to provide sufficient proof that her injunction halting the policy would cause "irreparable harm" to the military or that the government's appeal would be successful. Phillips planned to issue her final decision early Tuesday.

Paul Freeborne of the U.S. attorney's office argued that the injunction immediately halting enforcement of the policy, which bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, jeopardized national security.

He urged Phillips, who issued the injunction last week, to set aside her decision while the government appealed the ruling and injunction to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a sworn declaration submitted to the court, Clifford L. Stanley, undersecretary of defense for overall military readiness, cautioned that an abrupt transition would undercut the Pentagon's survey of military commands around the world to determine how best to create a policy that allowed people who are openly homosexual to serve.

"The stakes are so high, and the potential harm so great, that caution is in order," he said.

But Phillips on Monday rejected that argument. The judge said her ruling ordered an end to all discharge and separation proceedings under "don't ask, don't tell," but did not prohibit the military from crafting a new policy or educating military personnel about serving side by side with openly gay service members.

Phillips also said that the government failed to produce any evidence during the two-week trial that showed allowing gays in the military would harm military readiness or troop cohesion.

"The arguments by the government are vague … and belied by the evidence produced at trial," Phillips said Monday. She also chastised the federal government lawyers for not filing their objections when she was considering the injunction.

In her initial Sept. 9 ruling, Phillips found that the ban on gays had a "direct and deleterious effect" on the armed services, including the dismissal of crucial military personnel such as translators. She noted that the Pentagon violated the policy when it saw fit, routinely delaying the discharge of service members suspected of violating the law until they completed their deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During Monday's hearing, Freeborne also argued that the judge exceeded her authority by issuing an injunction worldwide, as opposed to limiting it to the plaintiffs in the case or within her Southern California district. That argument will be a primary aspect of the government's appeal.

The ruling has put President Obama in a tricky spot. He strongly opposes the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which he once called a threat to national security, but says his administration has an obligation to defend laws passed by Congress.

Meanwhile, the military has suspended enforcement of the policy while Phillips' injunction is in place.

The challenge to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was filed in 2004 by the Log Cabin Republicans, the largest gay GOP political organization. It was the first successful broad-based constitutional challenge to the policy since Congress enacted it in 1993.

Dan Woods, the lead attorney for the Log Cabin Republicans, argued during Monday's hearing that lifting the judge's injunction would "deprive very patriotic Americans of their constitutional rights" and urged the judge to keep it in place.

Former President Clinton adopted the "don't ask, don't tell" policy as a reform to the military's practice of seeking out and discharging gays and lesbians. Under the policy, as long as gays and lesbians keep their sexual orientation secret, they are allowed to serve. More than 13,000 service members have been discharged under the policy.

The House of Representatives voted to repeal the policy last spring, contingent on the outcome of a Pentagon study to determine if it can adapt to the change without harming military readiness. The study is expected to be completed by December. The proposed repeal was blocked on the Senate floor, although it may be reconsidered during a lame-duck session after the November election.

phil.willon@latimes.com

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Disc-free and better than ever - CNET

October 18, 2010 2:55 PM PDT By: Matthew Moskovciak

As of this morning, PS3 owners should notice a new icon under the video section of the menu: Netflix. The PS3 gained the ability to stream Netflix back in November of 2009, but it required using a special Netflix disc and the user interface now looks outdated compared to newer offerings from Apple TV and Xbox 360. (The Nintendo Wii can also stream Netflix without a disc now as well.)

Photo credit: Matthew Moskovciak/CNET

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A Life Between - New York Times

Part of this is of course because she is a Republican who served under a deeply unpopular president. After the N.A.A.C.P. dutifully honored her with a President’s Image Award in 2002, the black Columbia historian Manning Marable dismissed Rice as a “leading race traitor” and the award as “accommodation” to an antiblack corporate establishment. Around the same time, black audiences chuckled approvingly when Amiri Baraka read the line “Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza,” from his poem “Somebody Blew Up America.”

Yet there is more to it than that. Rice’s public self-presentation is distinctly impersonal. Unethnic, for one, but shading into outright ineffability. One grapples for an adjective to describe her personality, even after reading her autobiography, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People.”

She would have us believe that her dazzling journey, from growing up in segregated Birmingham to helping to lead the world, can be credited to attentive parents, the “extraordinary, ordinary” folk of the title. Yet it becomes clear that Rice has always been a wunderkind singleton. As a result, one detects a touch of the perfunctory in the family aspect of her tale, as well as a disinclination toward serious introspection.

Rice’s parents, both educators, provided a fine environment for germination. Rice grew up in the parallel universe that middle-­class black parents in the segregated South built for their children, a world of socials, bowling and bonnets, with black children from “rough” neighborhoods kept at a distance. Her recollection of her parents all aflutter trying to teach her about the birds and the bees plays like something out of “Father Knows Best.”

As a young piano student, Rice liked to imagine herself as Mozart’s wife, and in 1968, when she was 13 years old, she spent afternoons mimicking ice-skating moves to Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. No one in this era was tarring any of this as “white,” and parents insisted that blacks had to be twice as good as whites to succeed. Rice notes, “This was declared as a matter of fact, not a point for debate.”

All of this was ordinary for middle-class blacks in that time and place. What wasn’t ordinary was Rice’s coming out of a political science course at the University of Denver so entranced with Russian history that she decided to become a Soviet specialist. It does not discount black people’s wide range of interests to say that in the early ’70s, Soviet affairs was an unusual career choice for a black woman raised in Jim Crow Birmingham. Members of this first generation of black academics much more commonly sought to explore the black past and present.

You would never know this from Rice’s breezy account of this period in her life. She sometimes sounds like a white debutante from somewhere in Connecticut, as if black people from the Deep South always named their cars after the protagonist of their favorite Russian opera (hers was “Boris Godunov,” for the record). We learn little about Rice’s inner life as she sails to one triumph after another, as a Stanford fellowship becomes a tenure-track assistant professorship, the Council on Foreign Relations sends her to Washington and next thing she knows she’s working at the National Security Council, getting appointed provost of Stanford, and fielding calls from George Bush père, who wants her to meet his son for some foreign policy brush-up.

The rest we know. Yet we will need biographers to give us more than Rice does about her actual work and the reasons for its rapturous reception. Her book comes close only in furnishing scattered childhood evidence of a furiously disciplined, even insular, individual. Rice reminds us that she liked the Temptations and Led Zeppelin and admits a tendency to procrastination (one she has apparently indulged only rarely over the past 30 years). However, this is also someone who as a girl encouraged her father to rat out local kids who were having an unchaperoned party; refused to settle for the kiddie plate in restaurants; and as a teenager adhered enthusiastically to a schedule that had her up at 4:30 for skating practice, followed by school at 7, piano lessons and more skating afterward, and bedtime by 9:30. Plenty of her peers, even the above-average ones with self-sacrificing parents, would have considered this schedule unthinkable.

This singularity presumably helps explain the Republicanism that all but a sliver of her black generation rejected. Her explanation is that she’d rather be ignored by Republicans than patronized by Democrats, but this suggests an ironic, back-door motivation that does not correspond to her general politics, upon which she would find little disagreement from Michael (as well as Shelby) Steele. “There are no excuses and there is no place for victims,” she says she was taught. She rejects the idea that one needs mentors who “look like you,” as well as the term “African-­American.”

Yet Rice is not deracialized in the way some suppose. It would be hard to be, growing up in Birmingham in the ’50s. She knew the girls who died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and reminds us that to blacks of that era, the immediate response to John F. Kennedy’s assassination was terror that a Southerner was now in the White House.

Despite reports to the contrary, she favors affirmative action, albeit in the sense of outreach rather than so-called diversity quotas (although her comments here reveal a level of ambivalence about aspects of implementation). At Stanford in the 1990s, she helped found the Centers for a New Generation, a youth-education program in depressed East Palo Alto; and she acknowledges that her own rise at Stanford, early in her academic career, was facilitated by the university’s affirmative-action efforts.

We learn these things as facts, but over all, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” is oddly detached for an autobiography. People like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maya Angelou are fully present in their childhood recollections of similar circumstances in a way that Rice never is; she often seems to be watching rather than writing about herself. Those interested in her romantic life, for instance, will have to be satisfied with elliptical glimpses. (She didn’t marry her main college sweetheart, the Denver Broncos wide receiver Rick Upchurch, because he mysteriously “had too many irons in the fire.”)

In general, her political aperçus rarely go deeper than this: “But the war left the Iraqi dictator in power, able to threaten his neighbors and oppress his people. That would be a problem for another day.” Nor is this “Memoir of Family” an insider’s report on Rice’s life after 2000, to which she devotes a single page: the last one.

If there is a lesson from Rice’s book, it is that the civil rights revolution made it possible for an extremely talented black person (a woman, no less) to embrace a race-neutral subject and ride it into service as secretary of state, all the while thinking of herself largely as just a person. That the story is not exactly exciting can perhaps be taken as confirmation of how considerably times have changed.

John McWhorter teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor for The New Republic and City Journal.

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