Unfriendly Fire: Gays and National Security

Conservatives Offer Compromise on Ground Zero Mosque — Crooked Timber. “We’re being cast as opponents of religious freedom,” said blogger Pamela Geller, “and that’s not fair.  We’re just saying that this is a highly sensitive matter and a very important place for us.  We’re all about freedom.  And to prove it, we propose that the location of the Ground Zero mosque should be dedicated, instead, to a Museum of Danish Mohammed Cartoons.  We were very pro-freedom when those cartoons were published, and we think it would be appropriate if the site were to serve as a memorial to that watershed…

Inbox Influence reveals your connections’ connections » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism. A new tool from the Sunlight Foundation would seem to seek to tweak that paradigm. It’s called Inbox Influence, a Gmail plugin that requires exactly one step: installing it. When an email message arrives — from a company, a political candidate, a PR person, your aunt — you’ll see statistics about that entity’s political connections. The plugin detects names in body text, email addresses, and links.

Peter King’s Obsession – NYTimes.com. Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.