Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Resonance Resistant” Mr. Blow says that Republicans miss another chance to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.  Joe Nocera shrieks that “Energy Exports Are Good!”  But he has a question:  Why is the Dow Chemical Company lobbying to keep a lid on them?  Apparently he’s as big a fan of fracking as he is of the Keystone pipeline.  (Well, as long as the shit doesn’t end up on his block, I guess…)  Ms. Collins, in “Hard of Hearings,” says don’t worry, people. If you missed the heated hearing on the I.R.S. held by the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, she has a complete rundown.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Whether one thinks the demiscandals being howled about in Washington should or should not resonate more widely, they don’t.

According to a Gallup report released Thursday, “The amount of attention Americans are paying to the I.R.S. and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years.” (The Associated Press phone records case wasn’t mentioned.) Why might this be? I have a few theories:

CREDIBILITY People know that the Internal Revenue Service is the conservatives’ bogeyman. It’s the agency that collects the taxes that Republicans hate so much. Some Americans see taxes as, at worst, a necessary nuisance; Republicans see them as an absolute evil. The I.R.S. is the agency that collects the wealth from “us” for the government to redistribute to “them.” As National Journal pointed out Friday, “The agency also implements much of the country’s social policy through the tax code.” We all know that anything with “social” in its name activates the conservative gag reflex.

And on the Associated Press front, it just doesn’t ring true to have Republicans standing up as defenders of the “lame-stream media.” It’s like the person with the club feigning common cause with the baby seal. People just don’t buy it.

Furthermore, Republicans have exhibited a near-pathological need to say anything, no matter how outlandish, that would invalidate the Obama presidency. This has left them with little credibility now that there may be legitimate problems. This is the story of the political party that cried “Kenyan.”

COMPLEXITY Where is Benghazi? Seriously, folks, quickly point it out on a map. Thought so. Now, to the controversy: the talking points — what they said, and the machination of how that was altered, and whether Al Qaeda should have been immediately blamed, and whether the word “terror” should have had an “-ist” or an “-ism.” Seeking to find the killers of four dead Americans is honorable; endless testimony about a fussed-over script used to explain the tragedy is mind-numbing.

UNPOPULARITY It is clear that the Justice Department overreached on the Associated Press scandal and that its strong-arm tactics are likely to have a chilling effect. But Americans are not big fans of mass media. A November Gallup poll found that only a fourth of Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of journalists highly. Even bankers ranked higher.

As for Tea Party groups that received extra scrutiny from the I.R.S., an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month found that fewer than a fourth of Americans say they support the group. The Tea Party may well be passé.

The policy issue is a different story, as The Washington Post pointed out this week: “In 2010, the Supreme Court’s landmark ‘Citizens United’ decision cleared the way for corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums of money, and register for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4).”

That decision was extremely unpopular. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released nearly a month after the decision was handed down found that 80 percent of Americans opposed it.

So an unpopular movement applied for tax-exempt status under conditions made possible by an unpopular court decision, in order to influence politics with unfathomable amounts money from unnamed donors? Good luck gaining sympathy for that.

ZEALOTRY The Congressional Tea Party Caucus founder, Michele Bachmann, who never misses a chance to say something asinine, suggested to the conservative site wnd.com that it was “reasonable” to worry that the I.R.S. might use Obamacare to kill conservatives.

The article reads, in part:

“Since the I.R.S. also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, she asked whether the I.R.S.’s admission means it ‘will deny or delay access to health care’ for conservatives. At this point, she said, that ‘is a reasonable question to ask.’ ”

“Reasonable” and “Bachmann” don’t even belong in the same conversation, let alone the same sentence, and yet she remains one of the most visible spokeswomen for the movement.

Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Republicans against overreaching. In an NPR interview that aired Friday, Gingrich, referring to the impeachment of President Clinton, said, “I think we overreached in ’98 — how’s that for a quote you can use?”

He continued, advising his party to be “calm and factual.” Ha! That’s too rich, and too late. Republicans are already invoking the I-word.

Republicans are their own worst enemies at times like these, unable to leave well-enough alone, and missing chances to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.

Well, if you have nothing to offer that the country wants, just howl louder…  Here’s Mr. Nocera’s love song to the energy industry:

What first caught my eye was the op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal. Published in late February, it was written by Andrew N. Liveris, the chairman and chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company. Liveris, an Australian, has become quite the Washington player in recent years. Among other things, he heads President Obama’s efforts to revive manufacturing.

The op-ed was about one of my favorite subjects: the abundance of natural gas reserves discovered in the United States since the “fracking” revolution began. This newly found gas, Liveris wrote, offered “a historic opportunity to strengthen the economy, increase national competitiveness and create jobs.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Within a few paragraphs, however, the Liveris article took on a Pravda-like quality: a political insider sending a coded message to other insiders. He wrote, for instance, that the new jobs the natural gas boom was expected to create would depend on an “affordable” and “plentiful” supply. Given that that’s exactly what we currently have, what was the real subtext?

Then it became clear: Liveris’s plan for ensuring cheap domestic gas was — are you ready for this? — limiting exports. An export market driven by, you know, supply and demand was described as “unchecked.” What was left unsaid was that if natural gas could not be exported, the resulting oversupply would depress prices — and boost Dow’s profits.

Finally, Liveris acknowledged that Dow owned 15 percent of a proposed facility in Texas, which was causing “advocates of unchecked exports” to “attack” the company for being in a position to profit from exports while publicly opposing them. But, he insisted, Dow would not make a profit. Hmmm.

I bring all this up because on Friday, the Department of Energy, after a two-year hiatus, granted a permit to a facility called Freeport LNG, which will allow it to export liquefied natural gas to countries with which we do not have free-trade agreements.

Originally built to import natural gas, the plant will cost as much as $11 billion to retrofit and take years to complete. It will export only a tiny fraction of the natural gas that is consumed by Americans. And wouldn’t you know it? This is the facility in which a Dow Chemical limited partnership holds a 15 percent stake.

Exporting natural gas has enormous benefits for the United States. Exports create jobs that are every bit as good as manufacturing jobs. They help our trade deficit. They tie us closer to important allies like Japan, which desperately need the gas. According to Michael Levi, the author of an authoritative new book, “The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future,” the prospect that America could export natural gas has even helped our European allies gain leverage with its primary supplier of fossil fuels, Russia.

“Most studies suggest that the main impact of exports will be to increase U.S. production rather than take away other uses,” Levi says. Thus, it will not likely have a major effect on the price of gas. Levi told me that one legitimate fear is that the additional drilling could increase the potential environmental risks posed by fracking. But the answer is to ensure that wells are drilled in an environmentally safe manner. That is true whether we export gas or not.

And what does Dow Chemical say now that “its” facility has been approved? I spent much of Friday afternoon peppering the company with questions, most of them revolving around Dow’s seeming hypocrisy in opposing “unfettered” exports while owning a big chunk of a facility that would someday be shipping natural gas to Japan.

Finally, more or less in exasperation, a Dow spokesman put Liveris on the phone. The Dow chairman pointed out that when the company originally invested in Freeport LNG, the facility was meant to import gas rather than export it. He said that the company won’t make money because its stake will be so diluted once capital is raised for the retrofitting. He insisted that he is a believer in market forces, but that the natural gas market is so different from other commodities that it must be treated differently.

He also said, though, that the company was not opposed to natural gas exports — just so long as it was limited.

Earlier, a Dow spokesman had sent out a press release claiming that the permit approval by the Department of Energy was actually a victory for Dow’s position. To put it in words that the press representative would never use, so long as the Department of Energy permitting process is so absurdly slow — thus creating a government bottleneck that restrains “unfettered” exports — Dow and Liveris have gotten exactly what they’ve been seeking: limited exports and plenty of cheap domestic gas to help fuel their profits.

There is a technical term for this. It’s called “having your cake and eating it, too.”

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Before Congress is finished with the Internal Revenue Service, there’s a serious danger some of us are going to wind up feeling sorry for the auditors.

And, honestly, that is not the way we were planning on spending the spring. Especially since it appears that there are people making decisions at the I.R.S. who have the intelligence of a wet Frisbee.

But, so far, the Congressional hearings of outrage have been even less sympathetic. Perhaps you didn’t have time to spend much of your Friday watching the House Ways and Means Committee grill Steven Miller, the newly axed I.R.S. head, about the agency’s targeting of groups with names like “Tea Party” for unwelcome in-depth attention.

Let me summarize:

Committee Chairman Dave Camp: Thank you all for coming here today. Our topic is abuses in the Internal Revenue Service, an entity that I believe is about the size of China, with long, spiky tentacles that reach out and squash all the hopes and dreams of the American people. My first question, Mr. Miller, is whether your agency is so enormous and evil that it will one day destroy the nation as we know it, or whether it already has, and this committee is actually just sitting on the scattered shards and rubble of what once was a great republic.

Steven Miller: Thank you for inviting me here today. I would like to begin by apologizing for mistakes that have been made. Now I am prepared to begin answering your questions, and then gradually fade into sullen exhaustion.

Sander Levin, Ranking Democrat: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for organizing this bipartisan outpouring of rage. I would like to begin by welcoming Inspector General J. Russell George, and asking him to repeat his conclusion that none of the bad things we’re discussing were the result of partisan pressure. Possibly he could say that twice. Then I would like to ask him to confirm that he was appointed by George W. Bush. And then to point out that the guy who was in charge of the I.R.S. when all this happened was also appointed by George W. Bush.

Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California: Mr. Miller, how would you like it if we were to subpoena your e-mails and phone calls and records of anyone you’ve met with over the last four years? Also, have you ever had any contact with the Obama re-election campaign?

Mr. Miller: I would just like to say in my defense that the I.R.S. provided horrible customer service.

Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington: What the I.R.S. did was inexcusable. Also, I want to register my strong protests about the way Mr. Miller keeps interrupting me while I am demanding that he answer my questions.

And then everybody went home for the weekend.

What are we going to do about the I.R.S.? Some of its workers made wildly inappropriate judgments and some of its top brass appears to have the spunk of a pillow. Congress is demanding that heads roll, but the inspector general says that, so far, there’s no evidence of political pressure, just ineptitude. There is literally only one person in the entire operation who’s not covered by civil service, so I wouldn’t expect a purge. Miller, in his testimony, said that, so far, one employee has been relocated in punishment for his or her role in the case. The American people cry out for blood and they get a transfer.

But here’s where the sympathy comes in. The I.R.S. employees were stuck with a pile of 70,000 applications for the tax-exempt status that’s awarded to organizations engaged in social welfare issues. Recently, political groups have been gaming the system, announcing they’re just do-gooders with a minor political sideline in order to qualify. When they succeed, they get to keep their donors secret. The rules for who qualifies are murky, and, according to Miller, only about 150 to 200 people were making the decisions about who got further scrutiny.

Also, they were working at the Determinations Unit of the Rulings and Agreements Office of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service. Spending their lives trying to clarify the 501(c)(4) status. You try that for a while and see how you like it.

If Congress wanted to help, the members could simplify the law so I.R.S. minions aren’t trying to figure out which groups spend only 49 percent of their resources on politics as opposed to 51 percent.

Or, they could give the I.R.S. more money to do the job it’s stuck with now. The budget has been cut almost $1 billion over the last few years, while its duties have expanded. Next Friday, I.R.S. workers will enjoy the first of a series of unpaid furloughs thanks to that sequester.

Or Congress could just keep holding committee hearings in hopes that investigators will finally discover that the I.R.S. offices in Cincinnati are actually controlled by a pack of left-wing operatives who are not only Obamaphiles but also vampires. Vampires who had no respect for the laws regarding 501(c)(4) status.

Nocera, solo

Mr. Nocera is flying solo, since Mr. Blow is off today, and Ms. Collins will show up tomorrow.  In “The Man at the Piano” he says a treasured institution, and its revered maestro, celebrate a 25th anniversary with a concert Monday night.  Here he is:

This Monday evening, a small, vibrant arts organization, The New York Festival of Song, which I’ve long treasured, will be celebrating its 25th anniversary with a gala concert.

The show is scheduled to include Joseph Kaiser, the opera singer; Judy Kaye, the Broadway actress; and William Bolcom, the composer. But the real star of the show will be the man accompanying most of those performers on the piano: Steven Blier.

By evening’s end, we will have listened to a program he devised, read an introduction he wrote and heard lyrics he translated. We will have laughed at his jokes and listened to him speak engagingly about the context of the songs we are hearing — something he does with great verve.

And, not least, we will have heard him play some of the most beautiful piano imaginable, whether a South American art song, a tune by Gershwin or a Beatles number. I suppose I should also mention here that Blier, 61, who co-founded the organization with another fine pianist, Michael Barrett, suffers from a degenerative disease called facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. We’ll get to that in a minute. Suffice it to say that he is one of the most extraordinary people I know.

I met Blier about a dozen years ago through Laury Frieber, a colleague at Time Inc. Seduced by his wit, charm, and boundless intelligence, Frieber began going to Nyfos concerts and soon joined the board. (Everyone connected to the New York Festival of Song simply calls it Nyfos.) She convinced me to go to a concert. That’s all it took. I was hooked.

I had never heard anything like a Nyfos concert — still haven’t, really. There are no microphones; Blier believes deeply that unmiked music creates a more intimate experience. At a Nyfos concert, the lyrics matter as much as the music.

Most of all, though, a Nyfos concert has a theme — not some made-up excuse for stringing songs together, but something that makes deep musical or historical sense. Blier told me earlier this week that the main quality he seeks — in a song, a concert, or a performer — is “truthfulness.”

“Manning the Canon: Songs of Gay Life,” was a recent Nyfos program that explored the works of gay composers and songs about gay life. “Latin Lovers” included songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim as well as Ernesto Lecuona, the Cuban composer. My all-time favorite, which Blier programmed in 2002, was entitled “Dvorak’s American Soul.” It explored the musical repercussions of the three years Antonin Dvorak lived in the United States in the 1890s — both on Dvorak and the black classical composers who studied with him. It blew me away.

Back when I first met him, Blier walked with a cane. I used to see him occasionally at dinners organized by Frieber, and, though he was happy to talk about anything under the sun, he didn’t talk about his physical problems. The dinners eventually stopped, and I saw Blier primarily from my seat at Nyfos concerts.

Some years ago, Blier began using a wheelchair. Over time, he went from someone who could lift himself up with relative ease to speak to us from the stage to someone who had to remain seated on his piano stool because his legs would no longer allow him to stand.

It seemed a miracle to me that the person trapped in this body was still such a stunning pianist. Yet when I asked him how long he expected to be able to continue playing, he said, “Forever.”

This is not, it turns out, the words of a man in denial. Despite the toll muscular dystrophy has taken on his body, Blier considers himself, in some important ways, lucky. It did not target either his face or his forearms and hands, which remain supple and strong. He can still laugh his endearing laugh and play his beautiful piano — perhaps the two most important things in the world for him.

But that’s not all there is to it. In recent years, Blier has engaged with piano teachers who have helped him compensate for restrictions on his upper arm movements. He has worked incredibly hard to adapt to his condition so that he can continue doing what he loves. Though he can’t conquer the disease, he has refused to let the disease conquer him.

“Muscular dystrophy is not something I would recommend,” he told me as our talk was coming to an end. “But it is an amazing teacher. It shows you what you are made of. To live your life in a wheelchair, you have to man-up. To go on stage takes some guts. But you find your confidence and you become your own advocate.”

Soon, we had stopped talking about his disease and were back on his favorite subject: music.  “That moment of connection with me, my piano, the song, the lyrics, the singer, and audience — if you do it right, it is like a moon voyage,” he said. “The liftoff is incredible.”

Steven Blier may not be able to play forever, but so long as he is playing, I want to feel that liftoff, too.

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

In “Beyond the Fence” Bobo says opponents of immigration reform rarely say exactly what it is that they want. He’s decided to spell it out.  Mr. Nocera, in “The Chancellor’s Lament,” says as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill moves on, he raises some interesting questions about the management of college sports.  In “Religion Beyond the Right” Mr. Bruni says as a closer look at the Boy Scouts’ debate shows, God doesn’t wear tidy political labels.  Here’s Bobo:

The opponents of immigration reform have many small complaints, but they really have one core concern. It’s about control. America doesn’t control its borders. Past reform efforts have not established control. Current proposals wouldn’t establish effective control.

But the opponents rarely say what exactly it is they are trying to control. They talk about border security and various mechanisms to achieve that, but they rarely go into detail about what we should be so vigilant about restricting. I thought I would spell it out.

First, immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. They have lower incarceration rates. They place higher emphasis on career success. They have stronger work ethics. Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.

When immigrant areas go bad, it’s not because they have infected America with bad values. It’s because America has infected them with bad values already present. So the first thing conservative opponents of reform are trying to restrict is social conservatism.

Second, immigration opponents are trying to restrict assimilation. The evidence about this is clear, too. Current immigrants enter this country because they want to realize the same dreams that inspired past waves. Study after study shows current Hispanic immigrants are picking up English at an impressive clip, roughly as quickly as earlier immigrant groups. They are making steady gains in homeownership rates, job status and social identity. By second generation, according to a Pew Research Center study released earlier this year, 61 percent of immigrants think of themselves as “typical Americans.”

Third, immigration opponents are trying to restrict love affairs. Far from segregating themselves into their own alien subculture, today’s immigrant groups seem eager to marry into mainstream American society. Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9 percent of whites married outside of their racial or ethnic group, as did 17 percent of blacks. But an astonishing 26 percent of Hispanics and 28 percent of Asians married outside their groups. They are blending into America in the most intimate way.

Fourth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict social mobility. Generation after generation, the children of immigrants are gradually better educated and more affluent than their parents.

A few years ago, the great political scientist Samuel Huntington asserted that Hispanic immigrants were not succeeding as previous immigrants had. James P. Smith of the RAND Corporation conducted the most prominent investigation into this claim and concluded: “The concern that educational generational progress among Latino immigrants has lagged behind other immigrant groups is largely unfounded.”

Some intelligent skeptics say that mobility is fine through the second generation but stalls by the third. It is indeed harder to rise in a more chaotic and fragmented society. But one of the country’s leading immigration researchers, Richard Alba of the City University of New York, calls the third generation stall “a statistical illusion.”

Much of the research that shows the effect compares today’s third-generation immigrants with today’s second-generation group. But the third-generation families originally came to the U.S. decades ago, at a time when segregation was prevalent, discrimination was high and immigrants were harshly treated. You’d expect those families to progress more slowly than families that came to more welcoming conditions a generation later.

Fifth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict skills. Current reform proposals would increase high-skill immigration. Opponents of reform are trying to restrict an infusion of people most likely to start businesses and invent things.

Alba points out that, over the next decades, the retirement of the baby-boomer generation will open up a large number of positions, especially atop the labor force. He points out that the fastest-growing ethnic groups are already rising to fill these slots. Whites occupy 80 percent of the top-paying jobs among older workers. But, among younger workers, whites occupy only 67 percent of the top jobs. The work force is already more diverse the younger you go.

Finally, opponents of reform are trying to hold back the inevitable. Whether immigration reform passes or not, the United States is going to become a much more cosmopolitan country than it is now. The country will look more like the faces you see at college commencement exercises and less like the faces you see in senior citizen homes.

One crucial question is whether America will be better off in that future with today’s dysfunctional immigration laws or something else? Another interesting question is whether a major political party is going to consign itself to permanent irrelevance. If conservatives defeat immigration reform, the Republicans will definitely lose control of one thing for years to come: political power.

From your typing fingers to God’s ear, Bobo…  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

By most measures, Holden Thorp’s five-year tenure as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is coming to an end next month, was a roaring success. The university went from 19th to 9th in federal research grants. Undergraduate applications rose 43 percent. And, at a time when university budgets are under extreme pressure, Thorp helped keep U.N.C. an affordable public university.

But you won’t find a lot of people giving Thorp, 48, a pat on the back. For the last three years, North Carolina was mired in an athletic scandal. And the fact that it took place on Thorp’s watch overshadows everything else he did.

Though it started out as an N.C.A.A. rules-violation investigation, it morphed into an academic scandal when it was discovered that the chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies Department had long allowed students — athletes very much included — to take no-show classes.

For a university that had long held itself out as one of the “good schools” athletically, the scandal has been humiliating. The N.C.A.A. meted out penalties to the football team. The football coach, Butch Davis, was fired. The athletic director resigned. Even the college accrediting agency got involved.

By his own admission, Thorp was shellshocked by the experience of dealing with the scandal. As a lifelong North Carolina partisan, he had bought into the myth of the university as a place that harvested genuine student-athletes. The scandal showed him a reality he never before had to face.

It also engulfed him. If you are a college chancellor or president, you can’t delegate when there is a problem in the athletic department. “The governing board, the newspaper, the fans, the faculty, they all expect you to sort it out,” he said. He was spending, literally, half his time dealing with the football team. Yet he had no real experience with the business of college athletics — nor, for that matter, do most college presidents.

He found himself buffeted this way and that. At first, he supported his coach, but then he finally felt he had to fire him. He did so at the worst possible moment: on the eve of a new season. His press conferences dealing with the scandal were, by his own admission, “terrible.” He was, to be blunt, in over his head.

And as he departs U.N.C., his message is that virtually all college presidents are in over their heads when it comes to their athletic departments. They have no background, no experience, that would prepare them for overseeing the $6 billion entertainment complex that big-time college sports has become. In he early 1990s, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics issued a series of reports saying that college presidents needed to regain control of their athletic departments and restore “integrity.” The N.C.A.A. adopted this position.

But today, notwithstanding this supposed reform, the system is as morally corrupt as ever — and far more awash in money. It’s conference presidents, not college presidents and chancellors, who run college sports. The prototypical modern athletic director is David Brandon at the University of Michigan. His previous job — are you sitting down? — was chairman and chief executive of Domino’s Pizza. He is an unabashed revenue maximizer. Compared with the hard-nosed businessmen who control college sports, the presidents and chancellors are babes in the woods. The main thing they offer everyone else in the system is cover.

Not surprisingly, Thorp’s comments have not exactly been embraced. At U.N.C., there is still a lot of indignation, some deserved, at the way Thorp handled the scandal. Some people think he is trying to shuck his responsibility.

People associated with the Knight commission are also upset. Hodding Carter III, a former president of the Knight Foundation, which finances the commission, was quoted as saying that Thorp was “wrong on every count.” But he’s not. Even the Knight commission has begun to examine whether the system is so broken that it can’t be reformed.

That is what Thorp now thinks. He is not ready to go as far as I do, namely, end the hypocrisy and start calling “student-athletes” what they really are: employees who deserve to earn a paycheck for their labors. But he does believe athletes should be allowed to attend school after their playing days are over. And, he said, “the concept of amateurism” — the current bedrock of college athletics — “needs to be examined.” For a college chancellor, those are radical words.

Thorp himself will soon move to Washington University in St. Louis, a first-rate academic institution that no one will ever mistake for the University of North Carolina athletically. It is in Division III, meaning, among other things, it doesn’t offer athletic scholarships.

Not long ago, when he was being taken around the Washington University campus, Thorp remarked, “I hear that the football stadium seats 3,500.”

“Yes,” came the response, “but it’s never been tested.”

“I’m looking forward to Division III,” Thorp told me.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

As the Boy Scouts of America reassesses its ban on gay scouts and leaders, we’re hearing a lot about the organization’s need to remain sensitive to people whose religions condemn homosexual behavior. Their morals must be properly respected, their God aptly revered.

But what about the morals and the God of people whose religions exhort them to be inclusive and to treat gays and lesbians with the same dignity as anyone else? There are many Americans in this camp, and their opposition to the Scouts’ ban is as faith-based as the stance of those who want it maintained.

Take Scott Ward, 48, a public relations executive and married father of three in Takoma Park, Md. He’s a scout leader, with a 10-year-old son who’s a scout. He’s also an elder in his Presbyterian church.

And for him, the ban must go not in spite of what Christianity says about homosexuality (or what selective literalists have decided it says), but because of what it says about humanity.

“From my faith perspective, singling people out for exclusion from the life of the church or the life of the community cannot possibly be part of God’s plan,” Ward told me on the phone recently.

He added, “If you look at the people Jesus tended to be most suspicious of, they were people who sat in positions of authority to say that they had the unique ability to judge others.”

We refer incessantly in this country to the “religious right,” a phrase routinely presented as if it’s some sort of syllogism: to be devoutly religious is to gravitate to a certain side of the political spectrum, one set of values dictating the other. “Christian conservatives” is an almost equally ubiquitous bit of alliteration.

But there’s a religious center. A religious left. There are Christian moderates and Christian liberals: less alliterative and less dogmatic, but perhaps no less concerned with acting in ways that reflect moral ideals. We should better acknowledge that and them.

And we should stop equating conventional piety with certain issues only and sexual morality above other kinds.

Our tendency to do that was illustrated by the hullabaloo last year over the Nuns on the Bus. The Vatican officials who wanted them to be more assertively anti-abortion and anti-birth control were portrayed as the dutiful guardians of tradition, while the nuns, focused on matters of economic justice, were the rebels.

Why? It’s as fundamentally Catholic and Christian to care about the underprivileged as to safeguard the unborn (or to combat homosexuality). Indeed, many Catholics look to a politician’s social welfare policies as much as they do to other positions, and vote in a manner that would be accorded a label other than conservative.

Many people of faith are pacifists, and that’s a decisive factor in how they cast their ballots, though this concern is infrequently characterized in religious terms.

“I find it perplexing the way the ‘moral values’ phrase is used,” said the Rev. Mark Greiner, the pastor at the Presbyterian church that Ward attends.

“Concern for the environment, concern for workers’ rights: those are moral values,” he told me. “But the phrase ends up being limited to matters of human sexuality, as if Jesus was primarily concerned with what people did with their reproductive parts. It’s crazy-making.” Greiner wants the ban on gay scouts and leaders lifted.

Religion is inevitably part of the Scouts’ debate: more than 70 percent of local scout troops are chartered by religious groups.

Later this month, the organization’s National Council will vote on a recommendation that the ban on gay scouts be lifted but the prohibition against gay leaders be preserved. The Mormons have indicated that they can live with this. The National Catholic Committee on Scouting has been vague.

The Baptists have cried foul, as have evangelicals like Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, which sponsored a webcast over the weekend called “Stand with Scouts Sunday.” Rick Perry, the Texas governor, appeared on it to denounce any change to the ban, and for good measure called homosexuality “the flavor of the month.” Like pralines ’n cream, I guess.

But that’s not the whole story. The Episcopal Church wants all aspects of the ban lifted, as does the National Jewish Committee on Scouting, whose former chairman, a Baltimore lawyer named Jay Lenrow, told me that while no troop should be forced to choose a gay leader, no troop should be prevented from doing so, either.

He noted that our country was founded on a principle of religious freedom; that the Scouts’ bylaws require equal treatment of every religion’s teachings; and that certain denominations — the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), for example — ordain gay and lesbian ministers. By the Scouts’ current rules, those very ministers, fit for the pulpit, aren’t deemed fit to lead a troop.

Isn’t that as much of an insult to their religions as the ban’s end would be to Perkins, Perry and their kind?

Blow, Nocera and Collins

Today we have Blow, Nocera and Collins.  Mr. Blow, in “Dear College Graduates…” says congratulations and good luck, Class of ’13. You’ll need it.  Mr. Nocera has a question in “2 Killings and 2 Guns, Unattended:”  Why is it that a reckless driver can be prosecuted but not an irresponsible gun owner?  Gee, Joe, I don’t have a clue.  Why don’t you ask the NRA?  Ms. Collins, in “An Ode to Helium,” says forget the hot air jokes, people. Who said that Congress hasn’t been getting anything done lately?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

I’m scheduled to deliver the commencement address Friday at my alma mater, Grambling State University in Louisiana, so I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought to the America into which these students are graduating.

I must admit that finding hopeful, encouraging things to say has been exceedingly difficult, in part because the landscape at the moment — particularly for young adults — is so bleak.

Here are some of the facts that I’m up against rhetorically and that these students will be up against more literally.

1. Being a college graduate is becoming less exceptional. As the Pew Research Center pointed out in November, “Record shares of young adults are completing high school, going to college and finishing college.” College graduation rates are growing even more in other countries. And Anya Kamenetz noted in The Atlantic magazine in December, “During the past three decades, the United States has slipped from first among nations to 10th in the percentage of people holding a college degree, even as the job market has eroded for Americans without one.”

2. Graduates are emerging with staggering amounts of debt and entering a still-sluggish job market. This is causing them to delay major life decisions, like marriage or buying a home or even moving out of their parents’ home.

A Pew report from February 2012 found that:

“Since 2010, the share of young adults ages 18 to 24 currently employed (54 percent) has been its lowest since the government began collecting these data in 1948. And the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults — roughly 15 percentage points — is the widest in recorded history. In addition, young adults employed full time have experienced a greater drop in weekly earnings (down 6 percent) than any other age group over the past four years.”

3. Emerging markets, like China and India, have become major competitors for exportable jobs.

4. Income inequality between top earners and the rest of America has risen. And the recovery since the Great Recession has essentially been a recovery of the rich. A recent study by Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, found that:

“From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew modestly by 1.7 percent but the gains were very uneven. Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence, the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery.”

This was similar to a finding by the Pew Research Center last month:

“During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

5. At the same time, the cost of basic goods has soared. For example, when I graduated from college the average price of a gallon of gas was about $1 (adjusted for inflation, that would still be less than $2), and it’s currently nearing $4. Some people now have to make desperate choices: a tank of gas, a bag of groceries or a bottle of medicine.

6. Our politics have become polarized to the point of paralysis. A Pew poll last June found that Americans’ “values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years.”

What gives me hope is that despite this dire environment, young people remain more optimistic than anyone else. Some of that may simply be the intrinsic glow of youth, but I believe that with this generation, something more is afoot.

This is a generation of people who have come of age in an era of overlapping traumas — terrorism and wars and recession. They have also come of age in changing times, and are more tolerant and less punitive in their social view. They see this country, and the world, differently than we older folks do. Theirs is an America waiting to be made better, not one that is simply, and irreversibly, getting worse.

According to a CNN/ORC poll released last month, young adults (those 18 to 34) were the most likely to think that things were going well in this country.

I plan to tap into that optimism on Friday, and I hope to reflect some of it back at those beaming faces under square hats.

Dear college graduates, this is your moment and your America. Both need your vision and demand your efforts. Keep your head up and your hopes rising. Congratulations and good luck. You’ll need it, and I’ll be rooting for you. (Flip tassels.)

Next up we have Mr. Nocera:

On the afternoon of Aug. 7, 2012, Greg Imhoff — a big, friendly 61-year-old construction superintendent from Madison, Wis., who had moved to Florida with his partner, Shari Telvick — went to check on the home of a neighbor.

The neighbor, Richard Detlor, was a friend, someone Imhoff had known back in Madison, where the Detlors still lived for part of the year. Whenever the Detlors went back to Wisconsin, Imhoff would look in on their house, something he did for many of his neighbors.

It is impossible to know whether, on that August afternoon, Imhoff ever saw the stranger in the house with the .22 caliber revolver; all we know for sure is that Imhoff was shot in the head. When Telvick and a friend found him that evening, he was lying in a pool of blood, dead.

The killer turned out to be a man named Billy Ray Retherford, who was on the lam after killing a woman two weeks earlier and was hiding in the Detlors’ empty home. The next day, Retherford was killed in a shootout with the police. He was using the same .22 handgun.

The gun, however, was not his. It belonged to Richard Detlor, who, according to the police report, had left it, loaded, in the nightstand by his bed before departing for Wisconsin several months earlier.

When Imhoff’s murder was brought to my attention recently, I was stunned that a supposedly “responsible gun owner” would leave a loaded gun in a house that was empty for months at a time. Yes, the odds of someone breaking into the house and using the gun were small, but they weren’t zero. That the Detlors didn’t take the simple precaution of unloading their gun and locking it up struck me as incredibly negligent.

Not surprisingly, that’s how Shari Telvick sees it, too. “I think the Detlors had a responsibility to secure their weapon,” she told me when I spoke to her earlier this week. “I think they should be held accountable.” But when she talked to a lawyer, she discovered, to her dismay, that leaving a loaded gun in an empty house doesn’t violate Florida law. As Arthur Hayhoe, the executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, explained to me, “Safe storage laws in Florida only apply if a minor lives in the house. If it’s adults, you can do whatever you want.” (He added, “In Florida, there are more laws to protect guns than people.”)

For all the protestations by gun owners that most are responsible with their weapons, I have been struck by how many killings take place because people do careless, stupid things. In the gun report that my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I compile on my blog, I see daily examples of children accidentally shooting other children with a gun found in the house.

Just the other day, in Burkesville, Ky., a 5-year-old boy shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a small rifle that had been given to him as a present. Who gives a 5-year-old a gun? (The rifle is called a Crickett; incredibly, it is marketed specifically to children.) Who leaves the room where their children are playing without checking whether the rifle in the corner is loaded? For that matter, who puts a shotgun within such easy reach of a child?

Gary White, the county coroner, was quick to say that no charges would be brought because it was an accident — and, after all, “accidents happen.” But it was a completely preventable accident. When a passenger dies in a car accident that is the result of negligence, there are usually serious legal consequences for the driver. If we really want to reduce gun violence, there must be consequences for negligent gun owners, too. The entire culture of gun ownership has to begin emphasizing safety in a way it doesn’t now. It is as important as universal background checks, or limits on magazine rounds.

Shari Telvick couldn’t live in Florida after Imhoff’s death. “It was unbearable to be in that house without him,” she said. She remains devastated. Two months after Imhoff died, she told me, his first grandchild was born.

Telvick had never been friendly with the Detlors, and she made it clear that she didn’t want to see them. But she’s been surprised, she said, that they’ve never reached out to Greg’s children, whom they’ve known for years.

I decided to call the Detlors. The woman who answered refused to put Richard Detlor on the phone.

“Do you think he is sorry?” I asked. “Sorry for what?” she said, before hanging up on me.

A few days later, I called again. The same woman picked up. This time, she said, “We are as much victims as anyone else in this.”

Then, once again, she hung up the phone.

And, according to the NRA, the obvious answer to any problem at all is MOAR GUNZ!!!  Here’s Ms. Collins:

We have not been paying nearly enough attention to helium legislation.

Seriously. We’ve been complaining about the way Congress fails at everything except scheduling vacations. So it seems only fair to salute the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act. The way things are going, it could be the most significant piece of legislation to make it into law this year.

The issue is our helium stockpile, which is scheduled to go out of business. The House approved a bipartisan bill to save the program just before the members — yes! — left town for vacation. The Senate seems inclined to go along, unless, of course, Ted Cruz decides it’s a United Nations plot.

The House debate took two days, which some people felt was way more than enough time, given the fact that the final vote was 394 to 1. The lone “nay” came from Representative Linda Sanchez of California, who accidentally pressed the wrong button.

Democrats complained that the House could have taken care of helium in an hour, if the Republicans hadn’t been afraid of discussing anything else. It’s been a tough stretch for Republican leaders, who had set aside several days to debate a plan to improve the Obama health care act, before the rank-and-file rejected the idea on the grounds that it might improve the Obama health care act.

So, helium. “I’m pleased to support this bill, which shows that this Tea Party Congress will make the tough choice to keep children’s birthday parties on schedule and give industries that rely on helium the lift that they deserve,” sniped Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia.

The second most popular theme for speeches, which Johnson ignored, was: look, helium is not a joke.

“Despite what many think, helium is not just used for party balloons,” said Representative Doc Hastings of Washington, the Republican who brought the bill to the House floor.

Actually, if you’d heard the entire debate you would have been so impressed with helium that you would be wondering whether it should be wasted on balloons at all. It’s used in M.R.I. machines, scientific research, fiber optics, aerospace technology. And it’s not all that easy to come by, being the product of slow radioactive decay deep in the earth.

“It’s liquid down to absolute zero. You can pour it on M.R.I. magnets. It’ll cool those superconductive magnets down. There’s nothing else like it,” said Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a physicist who has very strong feelings about helium.

The United States began stockpiling helium after World War I because Congress was worried about catching up with the Germans in the race to build a fleet of dirigibles. Miraculously, despite the Pentagon’s affection for continuing to build things that have no earthly use in modern warfare, the government eventually cut back on the blimp program. But it kept the stockpile going at a helium reserve near Amarillo, Tex.

In 1996, during the Newt Gingrich era, Congress voted to go out of the helium business and let private enterprise take over as soon as the reserve paid off the money the government had sunk into it.

Hasn’t quite worked out. The debt is almost paid off, but the magic of the marketplace hasn’t kicked in. If the reserve closes now, the country loses 40 percent of its helium supply. So, last week, the House voted to extend the program. “Many people don’t believe that the federal government should be in the helium business, and I would agree,” said Hastings, as he pushed the bill to keep the government in the helium business.

There are two ways to look at this story. One is that it’s about the impossibility of ever actually stopping any government program. Former Representative Barney Frank, who said in 1996 that if Congress could not manage to get rid of the helium reserve “then we cannot undo anything,” hasn’t changed his mind. “Everybody is against waste, but strongly defends this or that particular piece,” Frank said in a phone interview.

He’s right. I have fond memories of listening to protests after Congress managed, with great effort, to end a totally useless subsidy on mohair. Most of the howls came from lawmakers from Texas, land of many mohair goats. “I have a mohair sweater! It’s my favorite one!” cried Republican Lamar Smith. The subsidy came creeping back a few years later.

But there’s another possible moral. The helium program is great; it provided the country with a crucial product that business wasn’t prepared to produce. It spurred economic growth and scientific research and made enough profit to pay the taxpayers back.

Maybe the only mistake was trying to pull the plug in the first place.

“The federal government going into helium in the 1920s I think was a fine thing,” said Holt. He looks upon the current bill not as a temporary fix but as “a validation” of government’s role in looking after things that the private sector is reluctant or afraid to take on.

The helium reserve, by the way, is still going to run dry in five or 10 years. Maybe private enterprise will step up to the plate. But if not, somebody’s going to have to organize one hell of a balloon recycling program.

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

In “Engaged or Detached?” Bobo says there are various styles of political influence. One compels the team by joining it and the other seeks to persuade from the view that comes from distance.  Mr. Nocera has a question in “The Detainees’ Dilemma:”  If you have been cleared for release from the prison in Guantánamo and you still can’t leave, what do you do?  Mr. Bruni looks at “Basketball’s Gay Paragon” and says only when we’re past the milestones and gay is just one adjective among many will we have won the game.  Here’s Bobo:

Let’s say you are a young person beginning to write about politics and policy. You probably have some idea of what you believe, but have you thought about how you believe it? That is to say, have you thought about where you will sit on the continuum that stretches from writers who are engaged to those who are detached?

Writers who are at the classic engaged position believe that social change is usually initiated by political parties. To have the most influence, the engaged writer wants to channel his efforts through a party.

The engaged writer closely and intimately aligns with a team. In his writing, he provides arguments for the party faithful and builds community by reminding everyone of the errors and villainy of the opposing side. For the engaged writer, the writing is often not about persuasion. (Realistically, how many times does a piece of writing persuade someone to switch sides?) It’s often about mobilization. It’s about energizing the people who already agree with you.

The engaged writer often criticizes his own party, but from a zone of trust inside it, and he is usually advising the party to return to its core creed. The engaged writer is willing to be repetitive because that’s how you make yourself an unavoidable pole in the debate. The goal is to have immediate political influence, to provide party leaders with advice, strategy and policy recommendations.

The detached writer also starts with a worldview. If you don’t have a philosophic worldview, your essays won’t even rise to the status of being wrong. They won’t be anything.

But the detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans. She is progressive but not Democratic, conservative but not Republican. She fears the team mentality will blinker her views. She wants to remain mentally independent because she sees politics as a competition between partial truths, and she wants the liberty to find the proper balance between them, issue by issue.

The detached writer believes that writing is more like teaching than activism. Her essays are generally not about winning short-term influence. (Realistically, how many times can an outside writer shape the short-term strategies of the insider politicians?) She would rather have an impact upstream, shaping people’s perceptions of underlying reality and hoping that she can provide a context in which other people can think. She sometimes gets passionate about her views, but she distrusts her passions. She takes notes with emotion, but aims to write with a regulated sobriety.

There are trade-offs, no matter what spot on the continuum you ultimately choose. The engaged writer enjoys a tight community and a powerful sense of commitment. The detached writer enjoys more freedom and objectivity. The engaged writer emphasizes loyalty, while the detached writer emphasizes honesty. At his worst, the engaged writer slips into rabid extremism and simple-minded brutalism. At her worst, the detached writer slips into a sanguine, pox-on-all-your-houses complacency and an unearned sense of superiority. The engaged writer might become predictable. The detached writer might become irrelevant, ignored at both ends.

These days most writers land on the engaged side of the continuum. Look at most think tanks. They used to look like detached quasi universities; now some are more like rapid response teams for their partisan masters. If you ever want to get a political appointment, you have to be engaged, working on political campaigns and serving the team.

But I would still urge you to slide over toward the detached side of the scale. First, there is the matter of mental hygiene. You may think you can become a political partisan without becoming rigid and stale, and we all know people who achieve this, but the risk is high.

Engaged writers gravitate toward topics where they can do the most damage to the other side. These are topics where the battle lines are clearly drawn, not topics where there is a great deal of uncertainty. Engaged writers develop a talent for muzzle velocity, not curiosity. Just as in life, our manners end up dictating our morals. So, in writing our prose, styles end up shaping our mentalities. If you write in a way that suggests combative certitude, you may gradually smother the inner chaos that will be the source of lifelong freshness and creativity.

Also, detached writers have more realistic goals. Detached writers generally understand that they are not going to succeed in telling people what to think. It is enough to prod people to think — to provide an idea or piece information that sets readers on a train of thought that takes them far in front of whatever you put down.

The detached writer understands that, at the top level, politics is a bipolar struggle for turf. But the real fun is down below, sparking conversations about underlying concepts, underlying reality and the underlying frame of debate.

Since “detached writers generally understand that they are not going to succeed in telling people what to think” one must assume that everyone working for Faux Noise is rabidly engaged…  Why not address that some day, Bobo?  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif is one of about 100 detainees on a hunger strike in the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He was captured in 2001 by Pakistanis after crossing the border from Afghanistan, and, by 2002, he was in the American naval detention facility. He was 20 years old. He has been there since.

Although the Americans contend that Hentif left his home in Yemen to become an Al Qaeda jihadist, he has always insisted that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. A devout Muslim, he says he went to Afghanistan to do charitable work to honor the memory of his father — and that he then left Afghanistan for Pakistan because, as one of his lawyers, Robert Palmer, put it to me recently, “the place was a mess.”

Like most Guantánamo detainees, Hentif spent years in solitary confinement. He was subjected to “alternative interrogation techniques” as it was euphemistically called. He watched the Bush administration release more than 500 of the 779 detainees who have passed through Guantánamo. He learned about lawyers arguing in court that the detainees had the legal right to a habeas corpus hearing — that is, to try to prove that they were not enemy combatants and had been detained illegally.

And, in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that they did have that right. That same year, a presidential candidate headed toward the White House, Barack Obama, promised to close Guantánamo. That never happened, though President Obama continued the Bush policy of releasing detainees who were not deemed a threat to the United States.

Hentif, in fact, was among those set to be released. In late 2009, he was hours away from flying home to Yemen when a man on a flight to Detroit tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear. Because the man had purportedly been trained by an Al Qaeda affiliate with bases in Yemen, Congress demanded that the administration stop releasing all Yemen detainees. Obama complied.

And so it went: Hentif had a habeas corpus hearing in 2010, but, by then, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had made a mockery of the Supreme Court’s ruling, establishing evidentiary presumptions that made it impossible for a detainee to win a habeas ruling. (The Supreme Court has declined to hear further cases.) Sure enough, the judge ruled against him in 2012, despite concluding, among other things, that Hentif had never been to an Al Qaeda training camp, as the government alleged.

Meanwhile, along with 55 other Yemen detainees, he has been placed on a “cleared” list compiled by a commission composed of national security officials, meaning he could be transferred out of Guantánamo. But Congress, led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans, quickly passed laws that put impossible conditions on their release. Shamefully, President Obama signed those bills.

Is there any wonder that Hentif — and the other detainees — are on a hunger strike? “It is a total expression of despair and hopelessness,” said Brent Rushforth, who also represents him.

It is impossible to know for sure what triggered the hunger strike. Lawyers for the detainees say that the military, after years of loosening the reins — including eliminating solitary confinement for many prisoners — was tightening the screws again for no reason. The military insists that its procedures did not change but that the detainees had begun breaking and covering cameras and refusing demands that they stop doing so.

On April 13, with the hunger strike spreading, the military raided the prison and put the detainees back in solitary. It says it has done so because the detainees are more likely to eat if they are not surrounded by other hunger strikers. If so, it isn’t working; there are more detainees refusing food today than before the April 13 raid. To force food into them, the military now shoves a tube down their nose, in an extremely painful procedure it called “enteral feeding.”

Are there terrorists at Guantánamo? Yes. The government knows who they are and keeps them away from the other detainees. But the hunger strike is a vivid reminder that Guantánamo remains exactly what it has always been: a stain on our country.

On April 13, Hentif was returning from morning prayers when the raid began. He was pushed up against a fence and shot with rubber bullets at such close range that five of them penetrated the skin. He was handcuffed and taken to the clinic. Now back in solitary confinement, he is worried that one of his wounds is becoming infected. Given their concerns about hunger strikers, the military medical staff haven’t been able to pay him much attention.

Thus it was that one more time, Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

I heard a lot of talk Monday about how “perfect” Jason Collins, the basketball player who just came out, is. Perfect as in straight from central casting. (Or maybe I should say gay from central casting.)

He went to college at Stanford. Roomed there with Joe Kennedy III. Was in the same class as Chelsea Clinton, who tweeted her congratulations to him for the courage she said he was showing.

Seven feet tall, he’s strapping even by the brawny standards of the National Basketball Association, and his designated role on the court, as a human roadblock against the most physically imposing opponents, is an aggressive one.

“I’m not proud of it, but I once fouled a player so hard that he had to leave the arena on a stretcher,” he writes in the cover article of the new Sports Illustrated, the one in which he becomes the trailblazer so many of us have been waiting for: the first active athlete in any of America’s four major professional sports leagues to acknowledge his homosexuality.

He mentions his Christian values. “I take the teachings of Jesus seriously, particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding,” he says, getting in a deft dig at religious extremists. And he notes that he hopes to start a family of his own.

But none of these biographical details, none of these remarks, stayed with me the way the first paragraph of the article, whose co-author is the journalist Franz Lidz, did. It’s built from three short sentences:

“I’m a 34-year-old N.B.A. center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

The gay part will now define him, in the public eye, more than any other. It will be the prompt for the loudest cheers he basks in and the nastiest jeers he sloughs off.

But in the opening paragraph, it comes after his age and occupation and race, getting no more space, in that one passage and for that brief moment, than other aspects of his identity. It’s a detail among many, but not the defining one.

That’s the integrated way that things should be, the unremarkable way a person’s sexual orientation ought to be lived and perceived. And that’s precisely what Collins and his fellow trailblazers are trying to move us toward: not a constant discussion of the rightful place and treatment of L.G.B.T. people in America, but an America in which the discussion is no longer necessary. He’s letting us focus on his gayness precisely so we can focus less on others’ down the road.

I point that out because I know that some conversation in the days to come, perhaps not public discussion but certainly private grumbling, will include questions about why Collins has to rock the boat, why the news media is paying such lavish heed to him and why gays and lesbians in general make such a fuss of things. I know this from my in-box, where some readers routinely tell me that they’d be less bothered by homosexuals if we’d just please shut up about it.

Many of us want to, and will: when a gay, lesbian or transgendered kid isn’t at special risk of being brutalized or committing suicide. When the federal government outlaws discrimination against people based on sexual orientation, which it still hasn’t done.

When immigration laws give same-sex couples the same consideration that they do heterosexual ones. When the Defense of Marriage Act crumbles and our committed relationships aren’t relegated to a lesser status, a diminished dignity.

When a Rutgers coach doesn’t determine that the aptly ugly garnish for hurling basketballs at his players’ heads is the slur “faggot.” When professional football scouts don’t try to ascertain that potential recruits are straight.

When an athlete like Collins can be honest about himself without he and his co-author having to stress that he’s a guy’s guy, a godly man, someone who stayed mum about himself before now precisely so he wouldn’t disrupt his teams or upset his teammates, someone who’s inhabited locker rooms for 12 seasons already without incident.

When a gay person’s central-casting earnestness and eloquence aren’t noted with excitement and relief, because his or her sexual orientation needn’t be accompanied by a litany of virtues and accomplishments in order for bigotry to be toppled and a negative reaction to be overcome.

When being gay doesn’t warrant a magazine cover or a phone call from the president, any more than being 34 or being black does.

If you read all of Collins’s article, and you should, you’ll come away realizing that the gay part of him was and is so big only because his world — by which I mean America, and by which I mean pro sports — made it so.

From now on, he says, “I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful.” Those are adjectives and attributes also worth dwelling on.

Blow and Nocera

In “The Morose Middle Class” Mr. Blow says the “true engine of America’s economic growth” sure seems to have stalled.  Well, sweetie, when there’s a concerted effort to move wealth upward and away from that “true engine” the engine must be expected to stall.  Mr. Nocera is all fizzy and excited.  He has a question in “How to Build a Spoon.”  He says Manufacturing is making a comeback in Brooklyn. Have you seen the Spuni?  I hate to break this to you, Joe, but that thing looks very much like the silver baby spoon my mother fed me with about 67 years ago.  There really is nothing new under the sun.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm.

An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released Thursday found that while most Americans (56 percent) hold out hope that they‘ll be in a higher class at some point, even more Americans (59 percent) are worried about falling out of their current class over the next few years. In fact, more than eight in 10 Americans believe that more people have fallen out of the middle class than moved into it in the past few years.

The poll paints a picture of a group that is scared to death about its station in life.

By the way, 58 percent of respondents in the poll viewed themselves as either middle class (46 percent) or upper middle class (12 percent).

According to the poll, Americans see a middle class with less opportunity to get ahead, less job security and less disposable income than the middle class of previous generations.

Respondents were most likely (52 percent) to say that losing a job would put them at the greatest risk of falling out of their current class, followed by an unexpected illness or injury in the family.

Most of those polled believe that higher education is the key to staying in the middle class, but many worry about its prohibitive cost and inaccessibility.

And who did most of them say is responsible for making it worse for the middle class? Congress, chief executives of major corporations and big financial institutions.

Of those who blame politicians, there is some evidence that Republicans get more of the blame than Democrats. A CNN/ORC poll released last month found that 32 percent of respondents thought that Democrats favor the middle class compared with 27 percent who believed the same of Republicans. Sixty-eight percent of those polled believed that Republicans favor the wealthy, compared with 24 percent who believed that Democrats do.

This anxiety about a shrinking middle class is understandable.

A Pew Research Center study, “The Lost Decade of the Middle Class,” released in August, found that “since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some — but by no means all — of its characteristic faith in the future.”

According to the report, “Fully 85 percent of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living.”

The report continued:

“Their downbeat take on their economic situation comes at the end of a decade in which, for the first time since the end of World War II, mean family incomes declined for Americans in all income tiers. But the middle-income tier — defined in this Pew Research analysis as all adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median — is the only one that also shrunk in size, a trend that has continued over the past four decades.”

It’s important to note that many of the people who describe themselves as middle class would not be placed under that rubric by most objective observers. For instance, the Pew study found that 35 percent of people making $30,000 and under and 46 percent of those making $100,000 and over self-identified as middle class. (Meantime, six percent of those making $30,000 and under self-identified as upper class, and six percent of those making $100,000 and over self-identified as lower class. Go figure.)

As Pew pointed out, over the last decade, “middle-tier median household income” fell and median net worth plummeted, and people in the middle class said it was becoming harder to maintain their lifestyles.

To add insult to injury, another Pew report, released this week, found that “during the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

As The Washington Post reported in September after the release of a frightening Census report: “The vise on the middle class tightened last year, driving down its share of the income pie as the number of Americans in poverty leveled off and the most affluent households saw their portion grow.”

The wealthy have come surging back, riding record stock market highs, but many in the middle class are at best treading water and at worst sinking.

In his State of the Union speech in February, President Obama said that the “true engine of America’s economic growth” is “a rising, thriving middle class.”

It certainly looks as if that engine has stalled.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera, all fizzy and excited:

I have seen the future, and it is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I’ve seen young entrepreneurs creating companies that actually make things — not some digital app (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) — but actual products you can hold in your hand. I have seen prototypes being churned out on 3-D printers. I have seen the Navy Yard’s 300-acre complex of buildings — whose disrepair was once a symbol of manufacturing’s decline — become a symbol of manufacturing’s revival.

Sorry to sound so highfalutin, but it is easy to get carried away after you’ve been to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It offers something you don’t often feel these days when you contemplate the future of the American economy, with its loss of middle-class jobs and the widening of the income gap.

It allows you to feel hopeful again.

I went there this week because I had gotten interested in Spuni, a little start-up that was operating out of a development called New Lab — essentially shared space in one of the Navy Yard’s buildings for entrepreneurs and artists. (To be more precise, David Belt, New Lab’s developer, is using temporary space in the Navy Yard to house his tenants, while he refurbishes some 85,000 square feet in the old naval machine shop.)

Spuni is a product dreamed up in the Boston kitchen of Isabel and Trevor Hardy. The 30-something parents of two small children, they got to mulling the mess that William, their first child, made as he was transitioning from a bottle to a spoon.

“We both have design backgrounds,” said Isabel, “and we were trained to solve problems by using simple design solutions.” The problem, the Hardys concluded, was that spoons are poorly designed for small children. As they bite into the spoon, the food in the back half has nowhere to go but the floor. One day, as they were kicking around this idea with their friend Marcel Botha, a serial entrepreneur who shares a South African heritage with Trevor, they came up with the idea of a flatter-shaped, more ergonomical spoon that would allow a baby to suck the food off it.

Trevor and Isabel have full-time jobs. Once upon a time, their little idea would have remained just that — an idea. But Marcel, who had considerable small-manufacturing experience, was convinced that they could create a company to make the Spuni, as they quickly named it. First sketched in the spring of 2011, the Spuni saw its first prototype within two months. Using a 3-D printer, they went through a half-dozen prototype iterations until they felt they had the Spuni and its packaging exactly right.

To raise capital, they relied on crowd-sourcing, generating almost $38,000 by preselling Spunis on the Web site Indiegogo. Marcel, meanwhile, cut a deal with a small German manufacturer he had used before. When we spoke on Friday, he was just returning from Germany, where he had supervised the first quality tests. Within weeks, some 8,000 Spunis will be available for purchase. Marcel expects to be manufacturing 600,000 Spunis within a year’s time. If all goes according to plan, Spuni will be churning out around one million spoons a year by 2015.

The role of the Navy Yard is as an incubator of companies like Spuni. Andrew Kimball, who runs the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, a nonprofit with a 99-year lease from the city, told me that between public and private investment, around $1 billion has been raised to make the Navy Yard a destination for small entrepreneurs and other members of the creative class. According to a recent study by the Pratt Center for Community Development, the companies in the Navy Yard have been responsible for $2 billion in direct economic output and another $2 billion in indirect economic benefits. Kimball says there is a waiting list of 150 companies trying to get space in one of the Navy Yard’s buildings. “It’s cool to make things again,” he said.

Still, for all this glorious activity, the Navy Yard companies employ only 6,400 people. That’s up from 3,600 in 2001, but it is a far cry from the 70,000 men who once built ships during the Navy Yard’s muscular manufacturing heyday. That, of course, is the downside of the manufacturing revival in the U.S. — it simply doesn’t create the number of jobs that the old-style assembly lines used to. When I asked the Spuni founders how many employees they would need in the U.S. if they got to 600,000 in annual production, the number stunned me: 10. In Germany, the factory, at peak production, would probably not need more than 20 employees.

Marcel told me that his goal is to create a small manufacturing center in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He would like to employ 100 or more people and produce a variety of products, not just Spunis. This is the model of modern American manufacturing.

Welcome to the future.

Blow and Nocera

Ms. Collins is off today, and Mr. Kristof is still on book leave.  In “Politics of Paranoia” Mr. Blow says far-right Republicans throw up their hands and expect the worst.  Mr. Blow is much too polite to say that they piss their pants…  Mr. Nocera is still engaged in a love affair with the Keystone pipeline.  In “Canada’s Oil Minister, Unmuzzled” he says that on a visit to New York and Washington, Joe Oliver has a few things to say to opponents of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.  Frankly, Mr. Nocera, I don’t give a crap what he has to say.  The goddamn pipeline isn’t running over his aquifers, and won’t be leaking shit all over his country.  Canadians can do what they like to their land, but they can keep their filthy shit to themselves.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Out-of-control federal government. An immediate and immense Muslim threat. Gun grabbing, national registries and eventual mass confiscations. Tyranny.

The politics of the political right have become the politics of paranoia.

According to too many of them, the country is collapsing, and the government is not to be trusted. The circle of safety is contracting. You must arm yourselves to defend your own.

It is no wonder, then, that in this environment, a Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found that while 47 percent of Americans were angry or disappointed that new gun control legislation in the Senate (including the enormously popular background-checks provision) had failed to pass, 39 percent were very happy or relieved. Fifty-one percent of Republicans had those sentiments, compared with 22 percent of Democrats.

This underscores just how frightened of the government far-right Republicans are.

A Quinnipiac University poll this month found that 91 percent of Americans (including 88 percent of Republicans) said that they supported background checks for all gun buyers. But that same poll found that 61 percent of Republicans worried that if there were background checks for all gun purchases, the government would use that information in the future to confiscate legally owned guns.

Furthermore, a January Pew Research Center report found that for the first time since the question was asked in 1995, most Americans now believe that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.

According to the report:

“The growing view that the federal government threatens personal rights and freedoms has been led by conservative Republicans. Currently 76 percent of conservative Republicans say that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms and 54 percent describe the government as a ‘major’ threat.”

The report continued:

“By comparison, there has been little change in opinions among Democrats; 38 percent say the government poses a threat to personal rights and freedoms and just 16 percent view it as a major threat.”

Incidentally, 62 percent of those who had a gun in their home thought the government posed a threat, as opposed to 45 percent of those without a gun in the home.

In January, the right-wing Web site World Net Daily, writing about a poll the site conducted with the consulting firm Wenzel Strategies, bemoaned:

“The seeds of a tyrannical government are present in the United States, with a citizenry happy with a heavily armed law enforcement presence and a disbelief that their government could do anything that would make them want to revolt, according to a new poll.” The poll revealed “widespread belief” that the Second Amendment “really is for self-protection and hunting, not for ‘fighting back against a tyrannical government.’”

Fritz Wenzel of the consulting firm is quoted as saying that the poll’s finding “demonstrates the downside of more than 230 years of government stability. This survey shows it is hard for many Americans to think of a situation in which their government would need to be overthrown. Of course, the last time there was a serious fight for the future of the federal government, in the Civil War, Washington won.”

And that’s just the tip of it. Last month, Glenn Beck described the makeup of what he believed was the coming “New World Order.” It did not bode well for America.

“I think you might even have some Nazi influence in the United States, unfortunately, because we’ve had it before. And it will happen there and there, I think,” Beck said, placing dots over the Northwest and the Northeast on a map.

Discussing the Muslim Brotherhood’s “influence,” Beck said:

“I think there’s going to be a slight influence in South America and Mexico and in the United States. I think it is going to be more significant than anyone imagines, and I believe that you are also then going to be co-ruled by a thug-ocracy of this part of the world. And I think it’s going to be, at least in our case, I think it’s going to be China. China will be the balance of our power. They will use Muslim, um, Islam as the real enforcers that they will then help us and whoever is in power in our country. We will be ruled by an American, but it will be a technocrat that will answer to China. And, they will stomp things out and use Islam as much as they have to, to get rid of anyone who’s standing up, I think.”

O-kay.

And Beck delivered this prattle in a suit jacket, not a straitjacket.

This is the constant stream of desperate drivel that has fostered a climate of fear on the far right that makes common-sense consensus nearly impossible.

Next up is Mr. Nocera:

The last time your friendly scribe sought an interview with Joe Oliver, Canada’s minister of natural resources, he was turned down flat. It was February last year. Oliver had made a series of impolitic remarks about the efforts to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which, if it’s ever built, would import oil from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast — and which Canadians believe that the United States would be nuts to reject.

“I referred to the fact that some U.S. environmental groups were sending money to Canada to advance their anti-pipeline, anti-hydrocarbon agenda, and I just felt that that effort was working against Canada’s national interest,” is how he puts it now. But shortly after Oliver began speaking out, Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, told his cabinet to refrain from making any remarks that might be construed as commenting on the upcoming presidential election. Hence, no interviews with American columnists.

Which is not to say that Oliver — and Harper — didn’t have other means to send a message. After President Obama, looking to shore up his base, temporarily delayed the Keystone pipeline — an action that stunned Canada — the Canadian leaders jetted to China for a series of meetings with Chinese officials. Thanks to the Alberta sands, Canada is sitting on the third largest oil reserves in the world after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. “That oil will be sold,” says Oliver, “if not to you, then to somebody else. That is not meant as a threat. It is just a fact.”

As you can tell by now, Oliver is talking again. With the election over; with a presidential decision on Keystone imminent; with the pipeline rerouted to mollify the concerns of Nebraskans; with the State Department having issued a recent report saying there are no environmental impediments — with all of that as the backdrop, Oliver came to New York and Washington earlier this week to preach Canada’s energy message.

In part because of enormous new natural gas finds, made possible thanks to hydraulic fracturing (a k a fracking), and in part because of the oil sands, energy independence is finally within reach for North America. As recently as five years ago, this goal would have been “inconceivable,” Oliver said on Monday, at a Bloomberg energy conference. Canada, he added, “has the resources to meet all of America’s future needs for imported oil.”

When I spoke to him before his speech, Oliver pointed out that Venezuela, which currently supplies the United States around one million barrels a day, has more than once threatened to cut us off. “That would never happen with Canada,” he said. “We honor our contractual obligations.” As a longtime supporter of Keystone, I could only nod my head in agreement.

Perhaps a quick refresher on the benefits of Keystone are in order. First, notwithstanding the development of alternative energy sources, the world is going to continue to need oil; Oliver, quoting the International Energy Agency, says that global energy demand is expected to grow by at least 35 percent over the next 20 years. The notion, pushed by environmentalists, that blocking the oil sands will spur green energy is delusion.

Second, energy independence is a long-sought national goal. We would no longer need OPEC, a cartel of countries with values, in many cases, antithetical to ours. Third, that oil is coming here anyway — by rail and boat, where spills are common, and via pipelines that are older, and hence less safe, than Keystone would be.

And one other thing: Oil mined from the sands is simply not as environmentally disastrous as opponents like to claim. Extraction technology has improved to the point where there is almost no difference, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, between sands oil and old-fashioned oil drilling. The government has insisted that the companies extracting the oil return the land to its original state when the mining is completed. Indeed, for all the hysteria over the environmental consequences of the oil sands, there is oil in California that is actually dirtier than the oil from the sands.

Even now, nothing gets under Oliver’s skin more than the accusation that Canada’s oil sands will be ruinous to the environment. “That statement that the Keystone pipeline would mean ‘game over’ for the environment is absurd,” he said. He was referring, of course, to the line first used by James Hansen, the recently retired leader of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is one of the most prominent critics of the oil sands and the Keystone pipeline.

I couldn’t help myself: I asked Oliver what he thought of Hansen’s willingness to chain himself to the White House fence to protest the pipeline.

He couldn’t help himself either. Given the dirty oil in California, he replied, “he should be chaining himself to a mannequin in Rodeo Drive.”

Gee, maybe he was “turned down flat” by Oliver in February of last year because he hadn’t started his crusade to build the pipeline yet… Nocera should go back to having fits about the NCAA and STFU about oil pipelines.

Blow and Nocera

Ms. Collins is off today.  Mr. Blow takes a look at “The Mind of a Terror Suspect” and says his tweets paint a fuller picture.  Oh, yes, by all means let’s focus on twitter-twatting…  Mr. Nocera considers “That Spineless Gun Vote” and says even the personal pleas from a survivor of Columbine can’t trump the power of the N.R.A. on Capitol Hill.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

While the Boston area lay paralyzed by a lockdown, with one terror suspect dead and another on the loose as a massive manhunt filtered through the area’s arteries, we got a better sense of the second young man.

It’s complicated.

The suspects were brothers. The one who was on the loose was taken into custody on Friday evening. He was the younger of the two, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. The elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a confrontation with authorities, but not before participating in the fatal shooting of an M.I.T. police officer, the carjacking of an S.U.V. and the shooting of a transit police officer, who was critically injured.

They were of Chechnyan heritage. Tamerlan was a boxer; Dzhokhar, a college student.

“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into an act of terror,” The Boston Globe reported Friday.

The Globe quoted a person named Zaur Tsarnaev, who the newspaper said identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, as saying, “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”

But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?

On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness.

Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music, saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in his tweets.

He tweeted quite a bit about women, dating and relationships; many of his musings were misogynistic and profane. Still, he seemed to want to have it both ways, to be rude and respectful at once, tweeting on Dec. 24, 2012: “My last tweets felt too wrong. I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions.”

He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.”

His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” This sounds like a take on a quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern Conservatism: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had strong views on the Middle East, tweeting on Nov. 28, “Free Palestine.” Later that day he tweeted, “I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate.”

Toward the end of last year, the presence of dark tweets seemed to grow — tweets that in retrospect might have raised some concerns.

He tweeted about crime. On Dec. 28 he tweeted about what sounds like a hit-and-run: “Just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching my car into reverse and driving away from the accident.” And on Feb. 6 he tweeted, “Everything in life can be free if you run fast enough.”

He posted other tweets that could be taken as particularly ominous.

Oct. 22: “i won’t run i’ll just gun you all out #thugliving.”

Jan. 5: “I don’t like when people ask unnecessary questions like how are you? Why so sad? Why do you need cyanide pills?”

Jan. 16: “Breaking Bad taught me how to dispose of a corpse.”

Feb. 2: “Do I look like that much of a softy?” The tweet continued with “little do these dogs know they’re barking at a lion.”

Feb. 13: “I killed Abe Lincoln during my two hour nap #intensedream.”

The last tweet on the account reads: “I’m a stress free kind of guy.” The whole of the Twitter feed would argue against that assessment.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 20, 2013

An earlier version of this column misstated the origins of the suspects. They were not from Chechnya, but of Chechnyan heritage.

And now here’s Mr. Nocera:

On April 20, 1999, Katie Lyles, a high school sophomore, was taking a math test when she heard a popping sound. “I assumed it was a prank,” she says.

It wasn’t. The fire alarm soon went off, and a teacher shouted, “This is not a drill. Go, go, go!” Katie and several classmates ran through the neighborhood, seeking shelter. All around them, they could hear the screams of sirens and the whir of helicopter blades.

Finally, a woman answered their frantic knocking. “Are you all from the high school?” she asked. When they said yes, the woman invited them in. That is where they learned that two of their fellow students at Columbine High School had gone on a murderous spree, killing 13 and wounding 21, before turning their guns on themselves.

On Wednesday, 14 years later, I met Katie Lyles in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Now 30 and married, Katie is a grade-school art teacher in Littleton, Colo., the same town where she became, in the sad vernacular of our age, “a Columbine survivor.” She was in Washington as part of a lobbying effort by the National Education Association, the big teachers’ union, to back the handful of simple, common-sense gun bills, starting with universal background checks, that the Senate would be voting on later that day.

Until the shootings in Newtown, Conn., Katie had never spoken publicly about her experience. She is still affected by what happened that day. But after Newtown, Katie realized that the school where she now teaches was as vulnerable to gun violence as Columbine had been in 1999. And she couldn’t stay silent. “I realize that my life has led me to this moment,” she says.

We talked for maybe 20 minutes before Katie and the N.E.A. lobbyists went off to their next appointment. And, of course, a few hours later, the Senate voted down every single gun proposal that was on the table. Among those who cast votes against universal background checks, which should have been a no-brainer, were four Democrats. They are: Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. (The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, changed his vote from “yea” to “nay,” but that was said to be for tactical reasons, so he could bring the legislation up again at a later date.)

I spent much of Thursday calling the offices of the four Democrats with one question: Why? Why had they voted against universal background checks? Begich’s office put out a statement claiming that universal background checks “do not reflect Alaska values.” How so? His office wouldn’t say. Although Heitkamp issued a press release boasting of protecting “the Second Amendment rights of North Dakotans,” calls to her office produced only busy signals. The phone in Baucus’s office rang and rang and rang. Nobody answered.

Of course, we all know the reason: The four Democrats — along with many Republicans — quake in fear of the National Rifle Association. In 1994, Baucus voted in favor of the assault rifle ban — and then nearly lost his re-election bid. He never again stood up to the N.R.A. Yes, his phones were undoubtedly jammed this week. Still, it seemed to me that his unanswered phone was a potent symbol. I could almost picture him cowering in his office, waiting for us to stop asking why he sold the country down the river.

I loathe single-issue politics, but maybe this is what it has come to. Maybe it is going to take senators like Max Baucus losing their jobs because they wouldn’t stand up to the N.R.A. Maybe it is going to require the majority of Americans who support sensible gun laws to turn themselves into an avenging political force. I wish it weren’t so, but nothing else seems to move them — not even the sight of 20 slaughtered children in Connecticut.

On Thursday afternoon, I spoke again to Katie Lyles. She was deeply disappointed, of course, but she wasn’t ready to give up. A few months earlier, she had testified before the Colorado State Legislature as it debated stricter gun laws, including mandatory background checks and a limit to the size of magazines. The laws passed a month ago.

“It took a long time,” she said. “Fourteen years. You can’t give up just because you lose one battle.”

She pointed out something else. Colorado has seen some of the nation’s worst gun tragedies — not just Columbine, but last year’s shooting in Aurora. “We’re a Western state,” she said. Colorado has plenty of gun owners. Yet it was still willing to pass tough new gun laws. Katie believes that all that pain Colorado has experienced is the reason.

“I fear that people are going to have to experience that pain for themselves before we can pass these bills,” she said.

“But I hope not.”

Brooks and Nocera

Mr. Bruni is off today.  Bobo, in “The Vigorous Virtues,” says Margaret Thatcher was a pioneering figure for the qualities of public leadership we most admire today.  What’s this “we” shit, sparky?  There were those of us who were never really fans of Attila the Hen…  Mr. Nocera has a question in “The Military Prep School Scam:”  The military academies wouldn’t lower their standards to enroll top athletes. Would they?  Here’s Bobo:

The 1990 Tory coup against Margaret Thatcher was the most intense political event I’ve covered. The Conservative politicians who were trying to remove her from party leadership and the prime minister’s office knew they were toppling a person who was their political and moral superior. They knew she had earned the right to face the country in an election one last time, rather than be deposed by the supposed lieutenants in her own party. They sensed there would be some Shakespearean retribution for the act of disloyalty they were engaged in. They went around rubbing their hands like Lady Macbeth trying to expunge the sin even as they were committing it.

But Thatcher had exhausted the country. She had run through all the potential ministers on her side, and blocked the ambitions of many others. Her colleagues thought she was too anti-Europe. Her poll numbers were sinking. And so they felt compelled to act. After a series of fervid meetings and maneuvers while she was away, the members of her own party brought her down.

She came back from Paris betrayed and red around the eyes. But she still had to lead a Question Time in the House of Commons, speaking for a government she no longer headed.

It was a triumph. She dominated the hall, crushed the hecklers and rose magnificently above her own misery. “I’m enjoying this,” she exulted at one point. “I’m enjoying this!” The men who destroyed her leapt to their feet and roared. “You can wipe the floor with those people!” one of her remaining supporters shouted.

Thatcher went down in full cry: “When good has to be upheld, when evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms!”

A little while later I literally bumped into her at a conference. I asked her what was running through her mind as she entered the House of Commons for that triumphant session. I’ve rarely received an answer so disappointing. She told me she was thinking of the thank-you notes she would have to write that evening, and other mundane details of the day.

The people who make history are usually not the same people who are able to reflect and be introspective about it. As her former aide Matthew Parris once wrote, “I don’t actually believe she had hidden depths.”

Margaret Thatcher was a world historical figure for the obvious reasons. Before Thatcher, history seemed to be moving in the direction of Swedish social democracy. After Thatcher, it wasn’t. But her most pervasive influence was on the level of values.

She was formed by her disgust with 1970s Britain. She witnessed a moral shift in those years, away from people who were competitive and toward people who were cooperative, away from the ambitious and toward those who were self-nurturing and self-exploring, away from the culture of rectitude and toward the culture of narcissism. Especially in the prestigious reaches of society, people were often uninterested in technology and disdainful of commerce.

In the political sphere this translated into an aversion to conflict, a desperate desire for consensus, which often translated into policy drift and a gradual surrender to entrenched interests. Thatcher saw this as a loss of national potency. She saw it as a loss of will, a settling for mediocrity, a betrayal of Britain’s great history and an acceptance of decline.

The daughter of a small grocer, she led a fervent bourgeois Risorgimento. She was the voice of the ambitious middle class. She lionized the self-made striver. Loving tidiness, she checked to see if the space above the picture frames was properly dusted.

She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

If her predecessors stood for consensus and the endless negotiation of interests over beer and sandwiches, Thatcher stood for steadfast conviction on behalf of the national good. An admirer of the free market, her companion goal was to restore the authority of the state, and she was willing to centralize power to do it.

At a time when others were sliding toward moral relativism, Thatcher stood for individual responsibility, moral self-confidence and often, it has to be admitted, self-righteous certitude.

Put aside her personal failings, she was a militant optimist for a country slipping unconsciously toward defeatism. Beyond her policy decisions, she was part of a values shift.

Today, bourgeois virtues like industry, competitiveness, ambition and personal responsibility are once again widely admired, by people of all political stripes. Today, technology is central to our world and tech moguls are celebrated.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton embraced and ratified her policy shifts. Millions more have been influenced by her idea of what makes an admirable individual.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

Is there any institution of higher learning that isn’t gaming the system to gain athletic advantage? I’ve come to believe the answer is no.

Harvard? Last year, before announcing that the university had uncovered widespread cheating, a Harvard administrator sent an e-mail to the university’s resident deans, saying that potentially culpable athletes might withdraw from school temporarily. That way, the cheating scandal wouldn’t cost them eligibility.

On the other side of the country, the University of California, Davis, had long kept athletics in perspective — until 2007, when it inexplicably joined the big boys in Division I. Vowing not to cut any “minor” sports, it did just that as athletic expenses soared. Promising not to lower standards, it abandoned that vow, too. After the U.C. Davis faculty athletic representative refused to support the application of “a talented basketball player with a questionable academic background,” she was removed from that position, according to a report by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. The basketball player was admitted.

Which brings us to today’s subject: the military academies. Incredibly, even the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy and West Point, charged with training the next generation of military leaders, systematically abandon their standards and admissions processes when a good athlete is within reach. Their highly questionable enrollment practices make one wonder whether the academies care as much about their mission these days as they do about winning football games.

There are two ways the military academies sneak in athletes who fail to meet their admissions standards. First, they all operate prep schools whose original purpose — preparing promising enlisted personnel for the rigors of an academy education — is long outdated.

Instead, the prep schools, which cost taxpayers around $25 million or so per year, are used for other purposes, including “redshirting” athletes — that is, stockpiling them for a year — when their high school records would prevent them from being admitted directly from high school. For instance, of the 300 students in the 2011 class of the Naval Academy Prep School, 110 are recruited athletes — typical for the other service academies. Oh, and they get paid a monthly stipend — which would seem to be a rather blatant violation of N.C.A.A. rules.

When I talked to academy officials, they pooh-poohed the idea that the prep school was a place to sneak athletes in through the back door. Because athletics are so important, said a public affairs officer, “we consider every midshipman to be an athlete.”

But the statistics tell a different story. Nearly 80 percent of the 52-member Navy lacrosse team came through the Naval Academy Prep School; for returning football lettermen, the percentage is around two-thirds.

Meanwhile, West Point recently built a new $107 million campus for its prep school. An aerial shot of the new campus on the Military Academy Prep School Web site highlights its dominant feature: acres of lush athletic fields.

The second scam involves the nonprofit foundations that exist to give financial support to the service academies. Among other things, the foundations offer scholarships to athletes to go to certain prep schools that stress certain sports — with the proviso, of course, that they then attend whichever service academy the boosters are supporting. (In 2010, when a Naval Academy athlete who had gotten in via the foundation route tried to withdraw, saying “this isn’t the place for me,” the foundation demanded the return of his prep school “scholarship” money.)

Although Ed Wallace, a retired Navy captain who runs the Naval Academy foundation’s “athletic and scholarship programs,” denied that it directed athletes to certain schools — or that it singled out recruited athletes for financial support — a document outlining this contractual obligation is on the Naval Academy Foundation’s Web site. Or rather, it was. It was removed in 2012, when the N.C.A.A. began an investigation into the practices of the prep schools and the foundations. (Despite some pretty obvious violations of its rules, the N.C.A.A. dropped the investigation last year.)

Of course, these practices are troubling for reasons that go far beyond the N.C.A.A. Is it really appropriate for our military academies to favor recruited athletes over more qualified candidates? Surely there’s a lot more at stake when the academies lower their admissions standards than when, say, Auburn does.

There is also the sequester. The Navy right now is in the process of canceling deployments, grounding airplanes and deferring ship maintenance. The civilian faculty members at the Naval Academy have been told that they will have to take a 14-day furlough sometime before the end of the semester. But I don’t see anyone suggesting cutting back on the prep school or the athletic teams.

Of course not. After all, Navy is joining the Big East in 2015.

Bread and circuses, Joe, bread and circuses.  Except, of course, this time around we’re not even getting the bread, just the circuses…

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman, Nocera and Bruni

In “The Secrets of Princeton” The Pasty Little Putz informs us that Ivy Leaguers don’t need advice on how to preserve their privilege.  No shit — really?  Putzy should know, he’s a Harvard man himself…  MoDo has a question:  “Can We Get Hillary Without the Foolery?”  She claims that Democrats feel the inevitable, inexorable, inescapable pull of the Clintons.  The SASQ to MoDo’s question is “NO.”  The Moustache of Wisdom is hankering after another war, apparently.  In “How We Wasted Our Timeout” he says for the last five years, the world has had a break from major conflict. That may be about to end.  You can practically hear the hope in his voice…  Mr. Nocera also has a question in “What Gun Lovers Think:”  Could a gun-owning liberal explain the thinking of the other side?  Gee, Joe, I don’t know.  Let’s see if Mr. Bruni will weigh in on the matter.  In “Day of the Hunter” Mr. Bruni says that a first experience with a shotgun and pheasants only heightened my worry about guns and my support for gun control.  Here’s the Putz:

Susan Patton, the Princeton alumna who became famous for her letter urging Ivy League women to use their college years to find a mate, has been denounced as a traitor to feminism, to coeducation, to the university ideal. But really she’s something much more interesting: a traitor to her class.

Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.

Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.

The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn’t telling Princetonians anything they didn’t already understand. Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”?

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly. We all know what we’re supposed to do — our mothers don’t have to come out and say it!

Why, it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need — that’s what we’re already doing! (What Richard Florida called “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places” is one of the striking social facts of the modern meritocratic era.) We don’t need well-meaning parents lecturing us about the advantages of elite self-segregation, and giving the game away to everybody else. …

Or it would be like telling admissions offices at elite schools that they should seek a form of student-body “diversity” that’s mostly cosmetic, designed to flatter multicultural sensibilities without threatening existing hierarchies all that much. They don’t need to be told — that’s how the system already works! The “holistic” approach to admissions, which privileges résumé-padding and extracurriculars over raw test scores or G.P.A.’s, has two major consequences: It enforces what looks suspiciously like de facto discrimination against Asian applicants with high SAT scores, while disadvantaging talented kids — often white and working class and geographically dispersed — who don’t grow up in elite enclaves with parents and friends who understand the system. The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation’s elite.

But don’t come out and say it! Next people will start wondering why the names in the U.S. News rankings change so little from decade to decade. Or why the American population gets bigger and bigger, but our richest universities admit the same size classes every year, Or why in a country of 300 million people and countless universities, we can’t seem to elect a president or nominate a Supreme Court justice who doesn’t have a Harvard or Yale degree.

No, it’s better for everyone when these questions aren’t asked too loudly. The days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite’s entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that “merit” correlates with talents and deserts.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

But really, Susan Patton, do we have to talk about it?

Christ, he gets worse and worse…  Now let’s slog through MoDo:

Please don’t ask me this anymore.

It’s such a silly question. Of course Hillary is running. I’ve never met a man who was told he could be president who didn’t want to be president. So naturally, a woman who’s told she can be the first commandress in chief wants to be.

“Running for president is like sex,” James Carville told me. “No one ever did it once and forgot about it.”

Joe Biden wants the job. He’s human (very). But he’s a realist. He knows the Democratic Party has a messianic urge to finish what it started so spectacularly with the election of Barack Obama — busting up the world’s most exclusive white-bread old-boys’ club. And he knows that women, both Democratic and Republican, want to see one of their own in the White House and became even more militant while listening to the G.O.P.’s retrogressive talk about contraception and vaginal probes last year.

Also, Joe genuinely likes Hillary. These two have no appetite for tearing each other apart.

As long as there are no more health scares — the thick glasses are gone — Hillary’s age won’t stop her. The Clinton scandals and dysfunction are in the rearview mirror at the moment, and the sluggish economy casts a halcyon glow on the Clinton era. Hillary is a symbol and a survivor, running on sainthood. Ronald Reagan, elected at 69, was seen as an “ancient king” gliding through life, as an aide put it. Hillary, who would be elected at 69, would be seen as an ancient queen striding through life.

She was supposed to go off to a spa, rest and get back in shape after her grueling laps around the world. But instead she’s a tornado of activity, speaking at global women’s conferences in D.C. and New York; starting to buck-rake on the speaking circuit; putting out a video flipping her position to support gay marriage; and signing a lucrative deal for a memoir on world affairs — all as PACs spring up around her, Bill Clinton and Carville begin to foment, and Chelsea lands on the cover of this week’s Parade, talking about how “unapologetically and unabashedly” biased she is about her mother’s future.

“I can’t see her taking it easy and sitting on the couch eating a bowl of popcorn,” said Randall Johnston, a 25-year-old New York University Law School student who helped pass out “Ready for Hillary” signs on Friday outside Lincoln Center, while her icon was inside enthralling the crowd at Tina Brown’s “Women in the World” conference.

Hillary jokes that people regard her hair as totemic, and just so, her new haircut sends a signal of shimmering intention: she has ditched the skinned-back bun that gave her the air of a K.G.B. villainess in a Bond movie and has a sleek new layered cut that looks modern and glamorous.

In a hot pink jacket and black slacks, she leaned in for a 2016 manifesto, telling the blissed-out crowd of women that America cannot truly lead in the world until women here at home are full partners with equal pay and benefits, careers in math and science, and “no limit” on how big girls can dream.

“This truly is the unfinished business of the 21st century,” she said. But everyone knew the truly “unfinished business” Hillary was referring to: herself.

“She’s gone to hell and back trying to be president,” Carville said. “She’s paid her dues, to say the least. The old cliché is that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. But now Republicans want a lot of people to run and they want to fall in love. And Democrats don’t want to fight; they just want to get behind Hillary and go on from there.”

The real question is not whether but whither. Does Hillary have learning software? Did she learn, from her debacle with health care, to be more transparent and less my-way-or-the-highway? Did she learn, after voting to support W.’s nonsensical invasion of Iraq without even reading the intelligence estimate, that she doesn’t need to overcompensate to show she’s tough? (No one, even Fox News, thinks she’s a Wellesley hippie anymore.)

Did she learn, from her viper’s nest and money pit of a campaign in 2008, how to manage an enterprise rather than be swamped by rampant dysfunction? Did she learn, when she wrapped herself in an off-putting and opaque mantle of entitlement in the primary, that she’s perfectly capable of charming reporters and voters if she wants to, without the obnoxious undertone of “I’m owed this”?

Even top Democrats who plan to support Hillary worry about her two sides. One side is the idealistic public servant who wants to make the world a better place. The other side is darker, stemming from old insecurities; this is the side that causes her to make decisions from a place of fear and to second-guess herself. It dulls her sense of ethics and leads to ends-justify-the-means wayward ways. This is the side that compels her to do anything to win, like hiring the scummy strategists Dick Morris and Mark Penn, and greedily grab for what she feels she deserves.

If Obama is the kid who studies only on the night before and gets an A, Hillary is the kid who studies all the time, stays up all night and does extra credit work to get the A. She doesn’t know how not to drive herself into the ground.

As Carl Bernstein wrote in his Hillary biography, “A Woman in Charge,” her insecurities grew from her herculean effort to win paternal praise: “When Hillary came home with all A’s except for one B on her report card, her father suggested that perhaps her school was too easy, and wondered half-seriously why she hadn’t gotten straight A’s. Hillary tried mightily to extract some unequivocal declaration of approval from her father, but he had tremendous difficulty in expressing pride or affection.”

Hillary was an indefatigable secretary of state — she logged 956,733 diplomatic frequent-flier miles — and a star ambassador, especially on women’s issues. But many experts feel, as John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker, that, compared with the work of more geopolitical secretaries, her “signature achievements look like small beer.”

Still, the job allowed her to get out of her husband’s codependent shadow and develop a more authentic aura of inevitability. President Obama allowed his former rival to take Hillaryland into the State Department and then build it out, burnishing her own feminist brand around the world.

The idea of Hillary is winning, a grand historical gender bender: first lady upgrading to president. But is the reality winning? The Clintons have a rare talent for finding puddles to step in. Out of public life, can she adapt and make the leaps needed, in a world changing at a dizzying tempo, to keep herself on top?

Her challenge is to get into the future and stay there, adding fresh people and perspectives and leaving the Clinton mishegoss and cheesiness in the past.

The real question about Hillary is this: When people take a new look at her in the coming years, will they see the past or the future — Mrs. Clinton or Madam President?

And now we come to The Moustache of Wisdom, who’s never met a conflict he didn’t love, at least at first, for a few FUs…:

Yes, it’s true — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. But a “timeout” is also a terrible thing to waste, and as I look at the world today I wonder if that’s exactly what we’ve just done. We’ve wasted a five-year timeout from geopolitics, and if we don’t wake up and get our act together as a country — and if the Chinese, Russians and Europeans don’t do the same — we’re all really going to regret it.

Think about what a relative luxury we’ve enjoyed since the Great Recession hit in 2008. We, the Europeans and the world’s other major powers all have been able to focus almost entirely on healing our own economies — without having to worry about a major war or globe-rattling conflict that would snuff out our fragile economic recoveries or require extensive new defense spending. Relatively speaking, the world in the last five years has had a geopolitical timeout.

But now, everywhere you turn, you see different actors standing with their toes on red lines, seemingly ready and willing, even itching, to cross them at any moment. North Korea’s boy king, Kim Jong-un, who seems totally off the grid, has ordered his strategic rocket forces to be on standby, ready to hit U.S. and South Korean targets at a moment’s notice. Which is why you see the South Koreans starting to wonder aloud whether they should stay on this side of the red line and not be building their own nuclear bomb. Iran is also steadily getting closer to a similar combination of a homemade nuclear weapon and delivery system, and so far no sanctions have deterred Tehran. Meanwhile, Egypt is running out of money to buy bread for its people and is perilously close to crossing the red line into failed-state status, which would destabilize the whole region. At the same time, Syria’s mad leader, Bashar al-Assad, having been given the choice of “rule or ruin,” has chosen ruin for his country, which is also approaching state collapse, raising the prospect of jihadist militias picking through the rubble to obtain chemical weapons and sophisticated surface-to-air missiles — with no adult supervision.

Finally, the bailed-out euro zone states just had to bail out Cyprus — a bailout by the bailed-out — leading one to wonder just how many more Band-Aids the European Union has left. Maybe you can bail out Cyprus and its people will accept the haircut on their bank accounts, but we are one thin red line away from Spaniards’ waking up one morning and asking why they should keep their money in euros in their banks, when there is a real possibility they could get a similar haircut. Warren Buffett likes to say that if you ever walk by a bank and there is a long line of people out front, “get in it.” A bank run is a terrible thing to miss.

If any one of these red lines, let alone all of them together, get crossed, we will rue the day that we did not use these last five years to make our own economy more resilient. After all, in sports, timeouts are when you catch your breath, try to make sense of what is coming at you at high speed, figure out what has been working and what has not, design a play to win the game and then collaborate on its execution.

Future historians will surely ask how we in America could not agree on sensible near-term infrastructure investment — to upgrade our country with cheap money — paired with a long-term package of tax reforms and spending cuts, phased in gradually as the economy improves, so we have a much sturdier balance sheet to survive any geopolitical storms. We’re now driving around without a bumper and a spare tire, just when the world seems poised to turn into a crash ’n’ smash derby. (Kudos to President Obama for still trying for a Grand Bargain. Will the G.O.P. step up?)

But historians will also ask China: What were you thinking? When will you realize that whatever is bad for America is not necessarily good for you? Will it take South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan all getting nuclear weapons? China controls food and fuel going into North Korea. It could end the freak show there anytime it wants, by cutting off both and opening its border to refugees. Yes, it is worried about a united, nuclear Korea and a flood of refugees, but America could help facilitate a united, nonnuclear Korea and dealing with refugees.

Then there is the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — the man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, because his country has so much oil and gas. Refusing to ease Assad out in Syria, rather than hanging tough with him, at best could alienate Russia from the next generation of rulers in Syria and at worst could help Syria turn into another Afghanistan. Do the Russians really believe that indulging Iran’s covert nuclear program, to spite us, won’t come back to haunt them with a nuclear-armed Iranian Islamist regime on its border?

In many ways Russia and China are more irresponsible than we are. We need to make ourselves resilient but are not. We are being shortsighted. They are being downright harmful.

But the net result is that we could all look back one day and wish we had used this timeout from any global geopolitical contagion more wisely. I hope historians won’t say that for five years we were lucky. And then we weren’t.

And now we have Mr. Nocera:

In most respects, Dan Baum is a political liberal. But he has always had a thing for guns and has just written a book, “Gun Guys: A Road Trip,” which is part gun country travelogue and part meditation on what it means to be a gun lover at this particular moment. Baum, who lives in Colorado, agreed to come to New York, where he grew up, to debate the issue with me.

JOE: Let’s start here: Connecticut just passed what may be the toughest gun law in the country, which includes restrictions on magazine capacity and an assault rifle ban. Sounds good to me.

DAN: I’m not one of those gun owners who says, “You can’t ever infringe my rights.” My orientation is safety. How are we going to live more safely? And, to me, the impulse to ban guns and large-capacity magazines is rooted in a delusion — that somehow if we ban them, we’ll be rid of them. That might have been a good idea 75 years ago, but it’s too late. There are 300 million guns in the country.

JOE: In your book, though, you make a very different argument for not banning assault weapons. You argue that very few people are killed with them.

DAN: That is true. They’ve been used in these big high-profile mass killings, no doubt about it. But there were no assault rifles at Virginia Tech or Fort Hood.

JOE: But assault rifles were used in Aurora and Newtown. And here is my larger point. When I talk to gun absolutists, they claim that we shouldn’t make such a big deal out of mass shootings because they are statistically insignificant. But so what? We have turned this society upside down because 3,000 people died on 9/11. In the scheme of things, that number is also statistically insignificant. Yet we take extraordinary measures, limiting people’s personal freedoms, to prevent another act of terrorism on our soil. Besides, we enact regulations all the time designed to keep people safe, even when the number of people who have been harmed is small. Why are guns different?

DAN: The answer is because we already have so many of them. You need gun owners — the “gun guys” as I call them. They are the custodians of the guns. I also think, though, that gun guys need to take their responsibility as gun owners seriously. A lot of gun owners are perfectly fine, for instance, with universal background checks. I know I am. They are fine with it so long as it doesn’t lead to a database and de facto registration.

Gun guys need to lock ’em up; gun guys need to take our responsibility to us much more seriously.

JOE: And what if they don’t?

DAN: Then I think we need to punish gun guys. If a gun guy leaves his gun in the glove compartment of a car and it’s stolen and used in a crime, perhaps he should be criminally liable. If a gun guy leaves a gun unlocked and a child finds it and kills himself or somebody else, that gun guy should perhaps be liable. And laws that require people to lock their guns up, I think they’re great. Report them if they’re stolen.

JOE: So why don’t “responsible gun owners” — and I know there are a lot — why don’t they support such laws?

DAN: There is no tree for them to gather under. And this is a big problem. Because they don’t feel represented by the N.R.A. This is why I started on this book — I don’t feel represented by the N.R.A., and I know a lot of gun guys who don’t. But we don’t have — perhaps because we don’t feel strongly enough about it — there is no other organization of the sane gun guys, of the nice gun guys, the reasonable, socially minded gun guys. Gun guys, I think, need to take much more seriously that they’re custodians of firearms. Their guns affect everybody and they need to be much more responsible with them. And in order to get them there, we need to make allies of them. And frankly, forgive me, you and your rhetoric make enemies of them, and that’s making us less safe. Look at what Connecticut is doing. You’re not going to get any public safety benefit out of that. I think you’re gonna make us less safe. Because you drive the gun guys into that defensive crouch that’s so destructive.

My essential belief is that we need to treat gun owners with more respect while also demanding a higher level of responsibility.

JOE: Why do gun owners get to have this level of “respect” that no other segment of society has? I could say, “I’m a responsible driver. Why does the government get to tell me that I have to wear a seat belt?”

DAN: It’s not a question of fairness. I am not making a rights argument, or a fairness argument. I’m interested in what will make the country safer.

JOE: Actually, you do make a fairness argument. Toward the end of your book, you write about how you had gained a greater appreciation for the way many Americans feel “over-managed and under-respected.” You use the example of a neonatal nurse in California, irate that the state passed legislation mandating that hospitals lock up certain drugs that had always been readily available to the nursing staff. “We’re nurses,” you quote her as saying. “We’re responsible professionals who know how to take care of our medications.” And then you write, “Substitute a word or two and she might have been any gun guy who is certain that his gun will never be a public safety problem.”

DAN: We have a tendency to say, “There oughtta be a law!” Why would you ever think that someone who’s bent on homicide is going to obey any of these laws? Also, you’re operating in a la-la land if you think that by banning guns we’ll be rid of them.

JOE: Forget about banning. What if the law said, “Your gun must be locked up at home. If it’s not, we’ll prosecute you.”

DAN: I’m with you.

JOE: If a child finds a loaded gun in his house and accidentally shoots himself or someone else, should his parents be prosecuted?

DAN: Perhaps they should be. But let me ask you this. Do you favor having a course in school for children, “What to do if you find a gun?” To educate children on how to handle a gun — would you favor that? Because most liberal parents would not.

JOE: I don’t know. Here’s what I would like to see, though. I would like to see a cultural change, like the cultural shift that took place with drunken driving, where a behavior that was once acceptable becomes unacceptable. I would like to see a cultural protocol, for instance, that would make it O.K. for parents to ask other parents if there is a loaded gun in the house prior to allowing a play date.

DAN: That’s fine. But then you should also ask, “Do you have a backyard swimming pool?” since young kids are more likely to die from a swimming pool accident.

JOE: Here we go! The classic gun guy’s argument.

DAN: I’m not trying to make an ideological point. I’m talking about being safer. And we get there, I think, by being respectful to the people who own the guns.

JOE: Once again, your argument seems to be, we’re going to treat gun owners differently from everyone else.

DAN: Well, maybe we have to, because guns are so dangerous.

JOE: Why, because they’re going to shoot us?

DAN: No, no! Because we need the gun guys. You won’t get there by vilifying them or treating them like children. I think most of what happens with guns that is bad in this country could be solved by the gun guys themselves.

JOE: I disagree.

DAN: You don’t understand guns, and you don’t know gun guys, yet you want to make rules for things you don’t understand for people you don’t know. And that is not how we’re going to end up safer. Where gun guys draw the line is having you make consumer decisions for them. Because what you’re saying, Joe — you, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — you want to say to some guy in Kansas, “You can have this rifle. But you can’t have that one.” And they’re saying, “What does Joe Nocera know about guns? What does Joe Nocera know about me?” It is offensive. We should be insisting on real responsibility from gun owners instead of doing what we’re doing now, which doesn’t get us anywhere. Because you don’t really think that by adjusting the number of rounds in a magazine we’re going to make everybody safer. You can’t possibly believe that.

JOE: When there is a mass shooting, and you’ve limited the number of rounds in a magazine, fewer people might get killed. That seems obvious to me.

DAN: Once you have made a consumer decision for 100 million gun owners that they can’t have these magazines because they are too irresponsible, you have now driven them out of the conversation.

JOE: After Newtown, Wayne LaPierre said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Do you believe that?

DAN: As much as I dislike the N.R.A., there’s a cold logic to it. It’s the reason we have armed guards in airports and shopping malls. When you see an armed guard someplace, what you’re hoping is, if somebody pulls out a gun and does something bad, that the guard will use his gun to protect you.

JOE: Actually, what the N.R.A. means by that statement is that if somebody attempts a mass shooting in a movie theater, someone else in the theater will have a gun and shoot the shooter. Which seems crazy to me.

DAN: I can’t imagine anything worse than one guy with a gun bent on mass murder in a room full of unarmed people. Anything is better than that.

JOE: The idea that some heroic figure is going to be able to get up and actually be able to shoot them…

DAN: Then why do cops carry guns? Disarm the police.

JOE: That’s an absurd, extremist argument.

DAN: Why? I carried a concealed weapon…

JOE: And did you think you were going to save somebody?

DAN: I was not nearly well-trained enough. I think somebody who wants to carry a gun should be at least as well trained as the police. Right now, for example, if I wanted to carry a gun, my permit would be good in 30 states. But in every state it’s different. I can wear it in a restaurant in this state, but not in that state. In this place, I can take it near a school, but in that place I can’t. Flip the script. Say, “If you get licensed to carry a handgun, you can carry it anywhere. But you have to be trained at least as well as a police officer.” Do you worry when there’s a police officer in your kid’s school? No. You trust the police officer. Trust gun owners. Raise everybody’s level of responsibility instead of treating them like children. It’s getting us nowhere. Folks like you, who have a cultural aversion to guns, who want to stick it to the gun guys…

JOE [interrupts]: I find it astonishing that you say we’re deepening the divide but the N.R.A….

DAN: Oh, they are, too! A pox on both their houses. Absolutely. The N.R.A. is a hideous organization. Every day I get e-mails from people who say, “I’m a gun guy, and I can’t stand the N.R.A.” We need to speak with a different voice. It’s really important.

It’s cute that Dan thinks everyone trusts police officers…  Last but not least we have Mr. Bruni:

People who rhapsodize about the glory of hunting never mention what an unfair fight it is.

Or was, in my case. I went last week, for the first time, visiting a bird-hunting grounds in Pennsylvania with two companions. The pheasants and partridges there had wings, which gave them one advantage over us. Over them we had something like 50 advantages: the number of shells for our shotguns. The gun on loan to me, a semiautomatic, could fire three rounds in rapid succession, which seemed to me as many as anybody could want or need before reloading. I’m a lousy aim, and still I killed.

I had never used a firearm before, not even on a shooting range, and understood the allure instantly. My 12-gauge semi was black, sleek, elegant and Italian-made, as much an accessory as an instrument of death. The Vinci, it’s named, as in Leonardo da, the “Renaissance inventor, artist and thinker who shattered the technological boundaries of his world,” according to the Web site of the manufacturer, Benelli. This is how thoroughly a weapon can be romanticized and fetishized, as if it were a Rolex. As if it were a shoe.

Holding it, I felt potent. But also anxious, even panicked, with a new grasp of how much could go wrong. The safety on the Vinci is a small, gray button, and the difference between on and off is perhaps a quarter-inch. In a moment’s distraction, I could mistake one for the other. In a burst of adrenaline, I could deactivate the safety too soon before a shot or wait too long after to reactivate it.

I could forget, when not aiming at a bird, to keep the gun pointed toward the sky or the ground. Or my pivot as I followed a bird’s flight could bring one of my companions, so perilously near me, into my sights. I was haunted by this and by the fact that although I was a first-timer, I needed no background check, no training, no proof of any dexterity to hold this shotgun and squeeze its trigger, not on the kind of regulated hunting grounds (called a preserve) that we went to. This country of ours makes it astonishingly easy for people to arm themselves and take aim. Is it any wonder that we have an exceptional harvest of gun-related injuries and deaths, many accidental?

I went hunting mainly for dinner. A few weeks ago I was in a favorite Manhattan restaurant, Tertulia, and its chef, Seamus Mullen, mentioned that he had been shooting and cooking game birds. I said that I had never eaten anything I’d killed myself and had never acknowledged, in that way, the connection between an animal’s death and my nourishment and pleasure. We agreed that I should join him on his next expedition. An experience of hunting made ethical sense.

Political sense, too. Hunting is always coming up when the country is debating new restrictions on firearms, as we are now. Opponents of such basic gun-control measures as universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban talk of slippery slopes and raise the specter of parents’ being unable to lend shotguns to their children for a wholesome duck or deer hunt. They assert the importance to hunters of certain semiautomatics that might be prohibited.

Hunting enthusiasts recently went as far as advocating a boycott of Colorado because the state had passed some entirely reasonable new gun restrictions. There’s this assiduously orchestrated outcry that a primal, virile, broadly beloved American pastime is under dire siege from disconnected lawmakers.

And it’s hooey. Let’s take the broadly beloved part first. The popularity of hunting has generally declined over the last four decades. According to a survey by the Fish and Wildlife Service, only 13.7 million Americans 16 or older hunted in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. That’s in a country of more than 313 million people.

In Pennsylvania, the number of people interested enough in hunting to get licenses dropped from 1.2 million in the 1980s to about 930,000 now, according to Joe Neville, a spokesman for the game commission. And fewer than half of those people are such committed hunters that they renew their licenses regularly.

Hunters are already governed by a thicket of state and local regulations about whether they can use a rifle or a shotgun in a certain place, for a certain quarry; about how many bullets or shells it can hold; about when they can hunt; about how much, or even what gender, of a creature they can kill. Any tinkering that new federal measures would do is so puny in contrast as to be almost irrelevant. It’s not going to threaten hunting as we know it.

And hunting as it’s done doesn’t always hew to the mythic man-in-nature images often promoted. Paul Ryan with his bow and arrow is one kind of hunter; a klutz like me with my Vinci loafer — I mean shotgun — is another.

The pheasants and chukar partridges, or chukars, that I was after had been scattered across a patch of property expressly so that Seamus, a friend of his and I could chase them down. That’s how preserves work. The birds are raised there, and some are released from their pens just before the hunt.

Pennsylvania has more than 300 bird preserves, including the one where we hunted, Pheasant Hill Birds, in Honesdale. For about $325, its owner released 20 pheasants and chukars. For another $60, he lent us his Brittany spaniel, Red, to find and flush out the birds. Red was Advantage No. 51.

Advantage No. 52: many of the birds weren’t so quick to use their wings. We would be within inches of one of them before it fluttered skyward, and it would be maybe 20 feet away when one of us took our shot, which wasn’t a single bullet but rather — Advantage No. 53 — a scattering of pellets.

If we missed a bird, it tended to land close enough to be flushed out anew. Only three birds actually fled the area and escaped death.

All of that explains how even I managed to down a chukar. Maybe a pheasant as well: it was sometimes hard to tell whose shot had hit what.

And there was a thrill to it, no question. My heart hammered. My curiosity spiked. Will a dinner of these birds — gutted, cleaned and cooked by Seamus, thankfully — be different from another? On my blog next week, I’ll let you know.

I’d hunt again, though I’m in no rush. It was impossible for me not to be nervous around guns, even with Seamus patiently teaching me and repeatedly urging vigilance.

He’s 38 and has hunted on and off since his teens. I asked him if more stringent gun control would cramp his and other hunters’ style.

“A totally bogus argument,” he said without hesitation or elaboration, then he flitted to a topic that accommodated more disagreement. How should the pheasant be prepared?