Sorry, I seem to have peed on your Bible

A few weeks ago, Newsweek reported there had been reports of guards mistreating the Koran at Gitmo. Their anonymous government source then couldn't recall exactly what military report where he'd read that, and the resulting firestorm caused Newsweek to retract the entire story. It was accused by the White House of inciting Muslim riots worldwide, causing the deaths of over a dozen people, and damaging American interests.

The Pentagon said that no such abuse had taken place on May 17:

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman denied the substance of Newsweek's original report, calling the article "irresponsible" and "demonstrably false."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the article had "had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."

Making note of the rioting and deaths, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the news media needed to be more careful.

"I think it was Mark Twain who said that something that's not true can speed around the world three or four times in a matter of seconds … while truth is still trying to put their boots on," Rumsfeld said after a hearing on Capitol Hill. "And people have said, my goodness, why does it take so long for someone to come back and … have the actual facts?"

Via Americablog, Reuters, and the AP, we find out today that abuses did happen, including one guard accidentally splashing urine on the Koran. Accidentally. Oopsie.

Here's the part that pisses me off: "The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening..." So, in other words, there was a deliberate attempt to bury this information so that it would get minimal press.

The fun of grocery shopping

I was at the grocery store this weekend, and as much as people complain about people's behavior while shopping, I just don't see what the fuss is about. But I thought I'd draw up a list of acceptable behavior anyway:

• Shopping is a family event. Bring all the children. The more the merrier. They'll need energy for all that walking around, too, so make sure to feed them lots of high-sugar snacks and sodas in the car.
• And speaking of the children, don't try to surpress their natural exhuberance. Children have lots of enery and enthusiasm they need to express. If they want to do cartwheels in the frozen foods section, who are you to say no?
• For slightly older children, enlist their help. If they're old enough to see over the top of the cart, they're old enough to push it, no matter the weight difference between the two of them.
• Make sure to walk alongside your cart, and pull it along behind you. Using the handles is just so last year. You look cool doing that, and traffic is only supposed to go one-way down the asile, anyway.
• Use the cell phone. Use it lots. Use it loudly. There's no point in wasting time that could be otherwise used for gossiping with your friends. And don't worry about using it at the deli counter. We'll be happy to wait.
• Using the handsfree attachment for your cellphone is a good idea, too. Having a conversation with thin air doesn't make you look psychotic at all.

Candle blogging

Beeswax, #2/0 wick. I just like the idea of beeswax candles, and they smell great, but it almost requires a pact with the devil to get them out of the mold when they're done.

Oooh!

I just found out (by catching the trailer on TV) that there's going to be a movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe released this winter. Due December. Looks pretty good, and it's always been one of my favorite books. Hope they do it justice. Since it's Disney, I expect they will.

We've been there HOW long?

Wow. That's just about all I can say. The Angry Bear pointed this out:

This coming Thursday, May 19, 2005, [two days ago, now] will be the 1,346th day since the attacks of 9/11. That is the same length of time from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the end of WWII on V-J Day. (Dec 7, 1941 to Aug 14, 1945).

Think about that. We've now been at war in Iraq for longer than we were in World War II. And there's no end in sight.

Via Seeing the Forest.

Cinderella Man

Just how sad is it that I'm really tempted (even though I hate sports movies) to see Cinderella Man just because it has Russell Crowe running around basically in his boxer shorts?

Damn lawyers

I got an email misdirected to me at one of my accounts. Looks like it was supposed to go to someone with a similar name, but different email address. No biggie, it happens now and then. What caught my eye, was at the end of the two-line email was this company-mandated disclaimer (edited for privacy):

DISCLAIMER and CONFIDENTIALITY CAUTION:

This e-mail and any attached files are confidential, proprietary, and may also be legally privileged information, and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this e-mail in error or you are not the intended recipient, please send it back to the person who sent it to you and delete the e-mail and any attached files and destroy any copies of it;kindly notify us immediately by telephone at + 99 99 9999 9999 or email us at xxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx. We thank you for your co-operation.

Any views or opinions presented in the e-mail and any attached files are solely those of the sender, and do not necessarily represent those of X and/or any of its sister companies, unless the sender mentions so expressly, with due authority of X.

Unauthorized reading, reproduction, publication, use, dissemination,forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail and its associated attachments is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful.

Communicating through email is not secure and capable of interception, corruption and delays. Anyone communicating with X by email accepts the risks involved and their consequences. We have checked this message for any known viruses, however we decline any liability, expressed or implied, in case of any damage caused by a non-detected virus. The recipient should check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses and defects.

For further details about our company, visit us at http://www.X.com

For Christ's sake! That's at the end of every email someone at your company sends? I'm not even sure how much legal weight disclaimers like this carry. I mean, you emailed it to me, you've lost the right to control what I do with what you tell me. I love how I'm supposed to call them internationally if they email me by accident. Plus, how I'm supposed to check the email for the presense of "viruses and defects." Viruses I can understand, but "defects?" What, am I supposed to spell-check their email for them?

Hercules

I'm sitting here half-watching NBC's Hercules, and I'm struck by how all the gods have been removed from the story. There's lots of talk about Zeus this and Hera that, but it doesn't look like they're going to be players in the story at all. In fact, it looks like key elements of the story have been changed so that the actions of the gods are now actions by mortals in the story. The rape of Hercules's mother by Zeus was changed to one by a disaffected warrior of his father's, and the insanity that drives him to kill his beloved wife and children looks like it's going to be some drug given to him in a plot concocted by his mother and wife. (It looks like all the women are going to be evil, until he finally falls in love with one later in the movie.)

We saw the same thing earlier this year in Troy, which was equally purged of all religious figures. (It also purged the relationship between Achilles and Patrokles, making them "just good friends.")

The authors of this adaptation are, of course, welcome to their own interpretation of the myths. I can't help but wonder, however, that this cleansing of pagan gods is not so much a reinterpretation and a readaptation for more modern sensibilities, but more intended to sanitize these stories to make them acceptably palatable to the so-called red-staters. By removing any references to a religion they would consider evil and "demon worship" it becomes safe and acceptable. But what does it say of us as a culture if we can't even consider the religions of those that came before us?

Update: Interesting, they didn't shy away from showing two men in bed together. Of course, they were scheming, murderous, and evil, so I'm not sure I'm all happy about that.

Update II: It just ocurred to me that the men in the movie (after the "parental generation" has passed away) are all clean-shaven. That's something that Greek men would never have done. Shaving was something for women and homosexuals, i.e. undesirable.

Scary stuff

This blog posting over at Eschaton pointed me to this site, where I found this article. This is the creepiest, creepiest, creepiest thing I have ever read in my life.

So I really am "Daddy's girl." And no man can approach me as an independent agent because I am not my own, but belong, until my marriage, to my father. At the time of my marriage, my father gives me away to my husband and there is a lawful change of ownership. At that point and at that point only, I am no longer bound to do my father's will. Instead, I must answer to my husband.

The Christian ultra-Right really and truly does want to bring the world of The Handmaid's Tale down upon us.

Prius, schmius

There's an interesting discussion going on in the comments section at Eschaton. Basically, what is the minimum price to which gas would have to rise to force major changes in your lifestyle?

A number of people have written about how great Prius's are. A little bit about the other hybrid cars, but mostly about the Prius. I've always thought the gas/electric combo is a great idea. It's a really nifty technology at least. Then I did the math...

The milage for a Prius is 60 highway/51 city. Let's average that and say 55. For the Saturn Ion with an automatic transmission it's 32/24 for an average of 28. The Honda Civic is a bit better at 38/32 for an average of 35. Let's say you drive 10,000 miles a year, which I think is reasonable unless you have an 80 mile commute. (How anyone can live in California is beyond me.) Say half that is highway, and half that is city driving. The Prius will use 182 gallons of gas per year. The Ion will use 357 per year (327 for a manual trans.) and the Civic comes in at 285 gallons. With gas around $2.30 a gallon, that means the Ion will cost $403 more per year to run, and the Civic $239. Hardly chump change. So the Prius looks like a good deal.

Uh oh, but look at the base prices for these cars. (This is a simplistic analysis, so I'm not bothering with any options.) The Saturn starts at $12,000, the Civic at $13,300 but the Prius costs a whopping $21,000! Even if gas prices rose to $5 per gallon, it would take 10 years to make up the difference in purchase price for a Saturn, and 14 years for the Civic.

Compared to an SUV, sure, the Prius is probably a great price and you'd save a lot each year on gas. But it's not fair to compare the Prius and the Ford Monstrosity. If you compare it to similar sedans, the Prius is not an economical choice. Believe me, I wish it were, but the math just doesn't work out. This is just one case where economy doesn't pay.

Yay Texas

Manya passed this along to me today. State Rep. Senofria Thompson gave this speech on the floor of the Texas legislature opposing a Texas Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. It's long, but read the whole thing; it's worth it.

I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about; this is the politics of divisiveness at its worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.

Members, this issue is a distraction from the real things we need to be working on. At the end of this session, this Legislature, this Leadership will not be able to deliver the people of Texas, fundamental and fair answers to the pressing issues of our day.

Let's look at what this amendment does not do: It does not give one Texas citizen meaningful tax relief. It does not reform or fully fund our education system. It does not restore one child to CHIP, who was cut from health insurance last session. It does not put one dime into raising Texas' Third World access to health care. It does not do one thing to care for or protect one elderly person or one child in this state. In fact, it does not even do anything to protect one marriage.

Members, this bill is about hate and fear and discrimination. I know something about hate and fear and discrimination. When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about "protecting the institution of marriage" as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree. That's what the white folks did back then to "protect marriage." Fifty years ago, white folks thought inter-racial marriages were a "threat to the institution of marriage."

Members, I'm a Christian and a proud Christian. I read the good book, and do my best to live by it. I have never read the verse where it says, "gay people can't marry." I have never read the verse where it says, "thou shalt discriminate against those not like me." I have never read the verse where it says, "let's base our public policy on hate and fear and discrimination." Christianity to me is love and hope and faith and forgiveness-- not hate and discrimination.

I have served in this body a lot of years-- and I have seen a lot of promises broken. I should be up here demanding my 40 acres and a mule because that's another promise you broke. You used a wealthy white minister cloaked in the cloth to ease the stench of that form of discrimination.

So, now that blacks and women can vote, and now that blacks and women have equal rights-- you turn your hatred to homosexuals-- and you still use your misguided reading of the Bible to justify your hatred. You want to pass this ridiculous amendment so you can go home and brag-- brag about what? Declare that you saved the people of Texas from what?

Persons of the same sex cannot get married in this State now. Texas does not now recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions, religious unions, domestic partnerships, contractual arrangements or Christian blessings entered into in this State-- or anywhere else on this planet Earth.

If you want to make your hateful political statements then that is one thing-- the Chisum amendment does real harm. It repeals the contracts that many single people have paid thousands of dollars to purchase to obtain medical powers of attorney, powers of attorney, hospital visitation, joint ownership and support agreements. You have lost your way-- this is obscene.

Today, you are playing to the lowest common denominator-- you are putting aside the real issues of substance that we need to address so that you can instead play on the public's fears and prejudices to deceive and manipulate voters into thinking that we have done something important.

I realize that gay rights are not the same as civil rights-- but I can guarantee you we are going in the wrong direction. I can not hide my skin color. In fact, in most of the South, people as pink as Rep. Wayne Smith were still Black by law if they had a great grandparent who was African. I was unable to attend an integrated and equally funded school until I got my Master of Laws degree. There were separate and unequal facilities for nearly everything.

I got second-hand textbooks even worse than the kind you're trying to pass off on every public school student next year. I had to ride to school on the back of the bus. I had to quench my thirst from filthy coloreds-only drinking fountains. I had to enter restaurants from the kitchen door. I was banned from entering most public accommodations, even from serving on a jury. I had to live with the fear that getting too uppity could get you killed --- or worse. I know what third-class citizenship feels like. In my first term, one of my colleagues walked up and down this aisle muttering about how Nigras should be back in the field picking cotton instead of picking out committees.

So, I have to wonder about Rep. Chisum's 3/5 of a person amendment. Some of you folks hid behind your Bible then, too, to justify your cultural prejudices, your denial of liberty, and your gunpoint robbery of human dignity.

We have worked hard at putting our prejudices against homosexuals in law. We have denied them basic job protections. We have denied them and their children freedom from bullying and harassment at school. We have tried to criminalize their very existence. But, we have also absolved them of all family duties and responsibilities: to care for and support their spouses and children, to count their family's assets in determining public assistance, to obtain health insurance for dependents, to make end-of-life or necessary medical decisions for their life partners--- sometimes even to visit in the hospital, even to defend our own country. And then, we can stand on our two hind legs and proclaim, "See, I told you homosexual families are unstable." And nearly every one of you on this Floor has a homosexual in their extended families.

Some of you have shunned and isolated these family members. Some of you, even some of the joint coauthors, have embraced them within your own family for the essence of Christianity is love. Yet,you are now poised to constitutionalize discrimination against a particular class of people. I thought we would be debating real issues: education, health care for kids, teacher's health insurance, health care for the elderly, protecting survivors of sexual assault, protecting the pensions of seniors in nursing homes.

I thought we would be debating economic development, property tax relief, protecting seniors pensions and stem cell research, to save lives of Texans who are waiting for a more abundant life. Instead we are wasting this body's time with this political stunt that is nothing more than constitutionalizing discrimination. The prejudices exhibited by members of this body disgust me.

Last week, Republicans used a political wedge issue to pull kids-- sweet little vulnerable kids-- out of the homes of loving parents and put them back in a state orphanage just because those parents are gay. That's disgusting. Today, we are telling homosexuals that just like people of my ilk, when I was a small child; they too are second class citizens.

I have listened to all the arguments. I have listened to all of the crap. Mr. Chisum, is a person who I consider my good friend and revere. But, I want you to know that this amendment is blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry.

You are trying to protect your constituents from danger. This amendment is a CYB amendment for you to go home and talk about.

Makes me glad to be a Texan.

Sobig

I'm now nearing 500 mail messages containing the Sobig virus. All were sent through a high speed connection in Oregon belonging to comcast.net. Comcast, of course, doesn't give a damn. Yahoo, however, has done a 100% job of filtering them out. I'm just keeping track of the number out of interest.

The Sobig virus is currently the cause of 5% of all the email in the world. Holy crap. Damn antisocial, virus-writing bastards.

Yeah, I'm talking to you

To whoever in Oregon has been sent 305 copies of the Sobig worm in the past three days, buy a fucking virus scanner. How can anyone run Windows these days and not have one? It's like owning a car without seatbelts.

Happy 05/05/05!

The Kansas State Board of Education starting holding hearings today about whether or not evolution should still be taught in schools, or if it should be taught alongside creationism cloaked in its current "intelligent design" mantle.

How the hell has it come to this? How can it be 2005 and Americans are still unbelieving of the central tenet of scientific fields ranging from biology to astrophysics?

Oh, there's the usual crap about how evolution is "just a theory," putting it in such dubious company as the germ theory of disease, the theory of gravity, and Einstein's theory of relativity. There's, of course, the bit about "something coming from nothing," a concept which apparently doesn't apply to God. All of these are great soundbites, but they're not science. Apparently, decisions about science can no longer be left up to the scientists.

C-SPAN [vile streaming video link] did a bit on it's morning call-in show about whether or not people supported or opposed the teaching of evolution in schools. Along with the pro-evolution people, there were some real winners. One woman called in claiming the Bible Codes proved the Bible was correct, and therefore evolution was wrong. My favorite was the guy that called in, all but screaming into his telephone, about why are there still monkeys if we evolved from monkeys? Huh? Huh? Why? (My question: how are there monkeys smart enough to use a telephone?)

I think this whole debate is about more than just evolution. Pro-creationism are trying to force an issue into the school system by claiming there is doubt about this scientific theory and trying to make it seem like there is a debate where there is none. Science made up it's mind about this decades ago. The issue has been well-debated by people much smarter than me, and it's been decided.

I think this is about the Christian ultra-Right trying to force it's religion and its agenda into a realm of our society where it's not wanted. We're seeing it with the attack on the judiciary, the branch of government hardest for these people to control. We're seeing it in pharmacists refusing to dispense certain prescribed drugs. (Hope you don't have a Christian Scientist pharmacist. Or worse, EMT.)

This is not a small deal. The scientific literacy of the average American is horrific. We are educating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers every year. In a world where there are a billion Indians and 800 million Chinese more than happy to do our jobs for us, and in an era of increasing globalization, our growing ignorance is going to have far-reaching consequences.

Why didn't WE think of that?

I forgot about the Presidential Press Conference, so I missed the first bit, but managed to catch a bit of the smirk-through-the-Q&A session. Bush wants to allow people to put some of their own money into an account that can be invested, giving people the opportunity for a higher rate of return. It would be "your money." The government wouldn't be able to "take it away."

Apparently, Bush just invented the IRA.

OK, yeah, I'm weird

And you thought Hannidate 2005 was bizarre? I forget where, but I recently found a link to RepublicanPeopleMeet.com. On a total lark, I signed up just to see what it was like inside. You have to fill out a initial profile. The weirdest thing is that in the "What are you looking for in a partner?" section, it makes suggestions about what you should ask for, and the very first suggestion is, "Assertive/Submissive." Huh? I thought the whole surrendered wife movement had come and gone. So naturally, I said that "submissiveness is very important to me."

Inside, it looks like there are scads of women looking for good, dominant, Republican men, but only 14 men looking for the same, in the entire country. I got a kick out of rwfacist's profile:

A little about me...
I am an aryan republican who believes that affirmative action and immigration are the greatest challenges that this nation faces.

What are you looking for in a partner?
I am looking for a strong, blue eyed, blonde who doesn't mind raising similar blue eyed, blond haired children.

I'd just like to add...
I enjoy marching, large torchlight rallys that occur at night, and Octoberfest. My life's dream is to invade Poland.

Sure sounds like a good, red-blooded American Republican to me.

This just in

From the "Yes, we are a bunch of inbred dumbfucks" department: State Rep. Gerald Allen of Alabama (boy, now that's a surprise) introduced a bill that would ban the state from spending money on books that recognize or promote homosexuality. That would include any book with a gay character or a gay author. (Presumably not Fagbashing for Dummies, however.) Allen is such a nutjob that he even wanted it to extend to Shakespeare, because of the cross dressing inherent in his plays. He has now relented, and it would not apply to the "classics," but leaves that term undefined. He now only wishes to ban "some Shakespeare."

He's doing this, he claims to "protect our children" from the "homosexual lifestyle." It appears he's only interested in protecting "our" straight children; the gay kids can go fuck off.

This ban would include:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, one of the biggest poofters of all time.
• Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, which is a perennial classic in high school theater and English classes
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• The Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, because recent research suggests Abraham Lincoln may have been gay
• any writings by Walt Whitman, probably the greatest American poet of the 20th century
• ... and so on and so forth

More reading:

Alabama Bill Targets 'Gay' Books
Possible Gay Book Ban in Alabama
Legislators debate gay books in schools; other bills stalled

Bleep! this, nitwit

AMC is running Bleep! Censoring Hollywood, studying a "controversial movement" of a small number of companies that sanitize Hollywood movies of sex, profanity, and violence. ClearPlay, for example, is software that automatically fast-forwards through, or mutes over, sections of the film.

The AMC site has quite a bit of streaming video, which doesn't seem to play right for me in Firefox (which is just another example of what's wrong with the entertainment industry). In one of them, Steven Soderberg is complaining about the edit of his movie Traffic,

It doesn't make me happy that some anonymous person sitting in a room somewhere can recut Traffic, and can essentially sell that version of it through this software, and it has my name on it and the implication is that I condoned it or that it represents what I did.

First of all, it's not like anyone is going to accidentally get a CleanFlicks (a NetFlix-like service) version of a movie and not realize that it's been edited. People seek these services out for a reason.

Secondly, and what Soderberg doesn't seem to get is that I don't give a damn about his artistic vision. It's my movie, and I'll do with it what I damn well want to. If I want to fast-forward through the rape scene in Showgirls, I damn well will. If I want to freeze-frame Russell Crowe's mostly naked scene in The Sum of Us, I damn well will (and have). I read magazine articles out of order too, and even tear out the heavy paper advertising inserts I find so annoying. Once you sell me a product, it's mine to do whatever I want with. You've lost control, get over it.

OK, yeah, cleaning up Hollywood movies is kinda silly. And, yes, I'm a bit disturbed that one of the things that one of these companies remove from movies is "homosexuality, perversions, and cohabitation." But it's not the director's decision in these matters, and it's not mine, either.

Things would be different if his name were Monica

Remember Jeff Gannon/James Guckert? It appears his fifteen minutes have been extended another five. Not only is he on the cover of this week's Advocate, but there are new questions about his comings and goings at the White House. I doubt Secret Service paperwork is regularly this sloppy, but it looks like his perpetual temporary pass was used on days there was no White House press briefing, and his comings and goings were poorly tracked.

Excerpted from this Raw Story article:

Gannon’s ready access to President Bush and his work for a news agency that frequently plagiarized content from other reporters and tailored it to serve a conservative message may raise new questions about the White House’s attempts to seed favorable news coverage.

Perhaps more notable than the frequency of his attendance, however, is several distinct anomalies about his visits.

Guckert made more than three dozen excursions to the White House when there were no scheduled briefings. On many of these days, the Press Office held press gaggles aboard Air Force One—which raises questions about what Guckert was doing at the White House.

On at least fourteen occasions, Secret Service records show either the entry or exit time missing. Generally, the existing entry or exit times correlate with press conferences; on most of these days, the records show that Guckert checked in but was never processed out.

So Secret Service records show that a male prostitute entered the White House, but don't show that he left, possibly until the next day. Hmmmm. I wonder what that could mean.

If his name were Monica, Republicans would be impeaching.

(Via AmericaBlog)

Welcome to the blogolution

How cool is it that WILL has a blog?

Shocking

The four top officers accused of wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib torture scandle have all been cleared. I guess that all the abuse was simultaneously going on at multiple locations was just ... a coincidence. So much for the administrations vaunted "personal responsibility" theme.

The sad part is that I'm not suprised one whit.

Yeah, what he said

Did you ever read something that was put so well, you're afraid to add to the discussion because you're afraid that you'll mess it up? With that, I'll just link to this blog entry: Keep the Church Out of My State

There is only one thing I could possibly contribute to the discussion, and it was not written by me:

... the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion ...

-- The Treaty with Tripoli, 1796

So is this evil in a good way?

My blog is apparently 22% evil. Funny, I figured I'd be worse than that. I'm slightly more evil than David's Reports From the Edge, but I'm not sure if he's ahead or I am.

Gematria, by the way, is the study of numerolgy of Hebrew alphabet, usually applied to the Talmud. It works by assigning a number value to the letters, and adding up the numbers associated with the letters. It seems 3 is a good number and 13 is an evil number.

I couldn't help but wonder who else was good and evil.

• Liberal blog: DailyKos is 27% evil.
• Liberal blog: Eschaton is 45% evil. Hmm, gonna have to watch that guy.
• Liberal blog: AmericaBLOG is 37% evil.
• Conservative blog: Powerlineblog is 40% evil.

and ...

• rushlimbaugh.com is 95% evil. Seriously.

Bunnies!

OK, so whoever did this is no Jennifer Shiman, but this is the sort of thing that Flash excels at. Not basics like navigating your crappy website, but rather singing, dancing bunnies. Bunnies are always good.

The only logical conclusion

Daily Kos has put up a copy of the Republicans new "Fillibuster against people of faith" ad. Yeah, because Democrats are all just a bunch of athiests. And if you're not a right-wing, whack-job, conservative Christian, you're an athiest too.

I can only draw one logical conclusion from this new tacic.

Republicans hate the Constitution. They hate freedom. And they hate America.

Please answer the question

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was at NYU today to receive an award. There was a Q&A period with law students beforehand. According to NYUNews:

In asking about Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas and his view that privacy is not constitutionally protected, Eric Berndt, a law student, shocked the crowd by asking, "Do you sodomize your wife?"

Scalia refused to answer the question. Administrators at the event, immediately silenced Berndt.

Scalia has repeatedly claimed that there is no right to privacy. Presumably he has no such right, just like all other Americans. Furthermore, he claims that it is legitimate for the State to regulate the sexual behavior between even married citizens.

We need to do more of this. If right-wingers are going to claim that there is no legal right to privacy, and that they should be the arbiters of sexual morality, then we must be vigilant and persistent in determining that they do not take part in such sexual deviancy. Including homosexuality or oral sex or even more perverted things like letting the wife be on top.

So, Justice Scalia, will you please answer the question?

Revelations

Tonight is the start of Revelations, NBC's big Left Behind-esque miniseries about the Biblical end of the world. I'll probably watch it; there's lots about the end of the world and in Christian theology that can make for entertaining fiction. See Neil Gaiman's Good Omens for an amusing example, and 1991's The Rapture for a thought-provoking and creepy example.

But this sort of thing worries me. It seems that we're seeing more and more fanatical Christians claiming that this is the End of Days, and that God will soon destroy the world. Fortunately, not before he sucks up the faithful into heaven with the Celestial Dust Buster. These are not people that take the Bible lightly, nor do they understand that much of it is metaphor and allegory. These are the people that actually believe that there will be a seven-headed, ten-horned Beast that will come from the sea to make war on the peoples of the Earth. That's not an analogy. That's exactly what they think is going to happen.

This kind of thinking just isn't healthy. The recent church shooting in Milwaukee took place at a church that teaches we are living in the End Days. Jerry Falwell claims that the Antichrist lives today as a male Jew. These people seem to be the "moral values" voters that are trying to exert tremendus pressure on the government. They're not a small force, and their efforts aren't harmless. One of the reasons they are so pro-Israel, as I understand it, is that the Second Coming can't happen until the Temple on the Mount is rebuilt by the Jews. That's a major political football because there's an important Muslim temple built on that site now. So this sort of thinking does influence our foreign policy.

This kind of thing scares me because when you really, truly believe that then end of the world is nigh, then there's no reason to prepare for tomorrow. It's OK to destroy the environment and raid Social Security.

But hopefully tonight will just be about entertaining (or, more likely, mediocre) television.

Next: Cialis X-treme!

I got a spam today advertising "a new medicine on the market now!" It's "Viagra Professional."

I guess it's Viagra for right-wing pseudojouranlists?

HHGTTG

There's a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie coming out. I was excited. Really excited. Then I read this review of the nearly-complete version of the movie. I'm not so excited anymore. (That's the link to the spoiler-free version of the movie. The spolieriffic version is here.)

The important part of the review is this:

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It’s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really pisspoor, unfunny jokes; they have replaced them with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick.

I suspect Douglas Adams is spinning in his grave so fast right now that we should hook up a turbine to him.

Update: it looks like the author of this article was Adam's biographer. As such, he's probably awfully attached to the source material, and may not have the most unbiased opinion. I guess we'll have to wait and see until us mere mortals can have a look.

Orange and something

[Note: I wrote this and it was supposed to be posted on Apr. 2. I must have saved it as a draft, rather than publishing the post. Oops.]

On my way in to work, this week I've had to pass no less than three tent-like kiosks selling sports-related merchandise. From what I've been able to glean, one of the Illini teams made it to the Fantastic Four or something. I just don't get why people are going crazy over this. But, then, I didn't inherit the sports gene. It's apparently recessive since no one in my family seems to have it.

If your kid is on the team, I can completely understand it. It's good to support your own. But people completely unrelated, who have no stake in the matter, are painting "Go Illini!" in bright orange on the side of their cars and such.

I just dont get it. Do these people really think that they are somehow embiggened by being geographically associated with one team that is victorious in a ball-handling activity? Really, if the Illini beat the (insert opposing team's racially-charged mascot name here), does this imply you are better, smarter, faster, or anything?

The university is in the middle of a budget crunch so bad, they can't find money to fix the ceiling in historic Lincoln Hall, and pieces of it are falling in on lectures. Priorities, people.

Your attention please!

The Pope is still dead.

CNN has basically been covering the Pope's death and funeral non-stop since last week. Watching it, you'd think that no other news happened since then. The only break I've seen was Larry King interviewing Jane Fonda and someone else.

You know, it's a good thing that:

• We're not currently involved in a war in the Middle East
• Tom DeLay has not been embroiled in yet another scandal.
• Tom DeLay did not claim Congress has authority over the judicial system and makes vague threats against them, possibly including impeachment for ruling in ways he doesn't agree with.
• Sixteen people were not killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, the most serious such incident since the 2001 invasion.

I'm not saying the death and funeral of the Pope aren't newsworthy. I'm just saying that it's not the only important thing that happened in the world this week. This level of coverage is totally out of proportion.

Furthermore, it seems the coverage (which I can't bring myself to watch, non-stop so this may be in there) has been basically glowingly complementary to the Pope. Virtually nothing about how the Catholic Church basically ignored the pedophelia scandal in its ranks. Cardinal Law (see scandal, above) gave one of the Masses in the Pope's honor. Nothing about how many tens of thousands have died all over the world because the Church maintains it's a sin to use a condom, even in a marriage where one spouse is HIV+. Nothing about how the Pope recently called gay people part of "a new ideology of evil."

Are the other 24-hour news-like networks devoting this level of coverage to the late Pope? (I only get CNN.)

Still not getting it

What a crappy day for the bus to break down on the way home. The traffic on Green Street was already heavy; the lines outside the bars were a block long at 5:40. Outside every bar, it was like a sea of orange. And bright orange is not a flattering color on anyone.

It's been near-hysteria the lead up to this final game of whatever sport we're talking about. If our ball-manipulating athletic team is victorious against the other city's, it clearly means that, not just all the inhabitants of Champaign-Urbana are faster, stronger, and can jump higher than them, but it shows we're just morally superior in every way, too.

If the Illini win, I predict rioting on camplus. If not, I predict mass, cult-like suicides. Don't disappoint me, folks.

This just in

I'll sum up all of the non-stop news coverage for you for the next day or so:

The Pope is not dead yet.

This will, of course, be slightly modified upon his death, along with several multi-hour retrospectives on his life which will undoubtedly credit him with singlehandedly defeating Communism (*cough* China *cough*) and the USSR and will basically ignore the Church's willful blindness to the pedophilia in it's ranks.

PDW '05

Obviously, I don't particular care for the guy, but I see that Papal Death Watch 2005 has continued unabated since this morning. This is positively gruesome. Did nothing actually happen in the world today?

RIP Terri

I'm sure you know by now the last remaining pieces of Terri Shaivo died today. I figure the media circus around her will die down in two weeks or so. Canonization by the Religious Right will soon follow. (Or whatever it is Southern Baptists do instead of making people saints.)

IL health care

Manya sent me email saying that legislation that just passed the Michigan House would allow health care providers to refuse to treat gay people. I'm assuming this bill now has to pass the Michigan Senate before becoming law. (Emergency care may not be refused, thankfully.)

Michigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays

That's pretty Cro-Magnon, you have to admit. Then I was shocked and rather horrified to find that Illinois already has such a law.

(745 ILCS 70) Health Care Right of Conscience Act

It is the public policy of the State of Illinois to ... prohibit all forms of discrimination ... [against] persons ... refusing to act contrary to their conscience or conscientious convictions in refusing to ... deliver ... health care services and medical care.

Sorry for the extreme editing, but the statue is in very circuituous, legalistic language.

I got my eyes checked a few years ago, and was rather -- not offended, that's not the right word -- put out that there were a number of little crocheted things saying "Jesus" scattered around the waiting room. It certainly made me feel rather uncomfortable; someone like me probably wasn't welcome there. I don't think I've ever actually come out to an optometrist before, or ever been in a situation where it would be relevant, but what if I had been in a similar doctor's office for something of a more, shall we say, delicate nature?

Both hospitals in town are Catholic. Now, abortion aside, Catholics are actually quite generous in their good works; I don't expect them to start turning gays away at the door. I'm not sure if that would be the case if they were run by any of the more fire-and-brimstone Christian denominations. Do the Southern Baptists run any hospitals? Let's hope not.

Hypocrisy in Florida

I don't mean to harp on the Schiavo thing. It's just that there's basically a media blitzkrieg going on now about it, so it's often in my mind. Good thing there isn't anything important going on in the world right now to distract us from this coverage. Can you imagine what would happen how unimportant this would seem if we were involved in a war or something at the same time?

And the Christian right is being their typical hypocritical selves:

Tom Delay pulls the plug on his father
Robert Schiavo withdrew life support for his mother

I guess the correct term is "culture of life for you people, not me."

Also, there's an article over at DailyKos that makes this point:

My answer is that the radical right hasn't taken a moral position at all.

The radical right has not argued for reinsertion based on a moral position. Instead they are disputing the facts and claiming that Schiavo is not in a persistent vegetative state...

The radical right say there are "factual questions" about Terri's condition and wishes that are open and have not been resolved. They aren't arguing a moral position -- they are playing amateur detectives, marriage counselors and neurologists.

We're waiting...

Radio host and right-wing racist whackjob Hal Turner had this to say on his radio show today:

I advocate the use of force to rescue Terri Schiavo from being starved to death.

Something tells me that what he really means is:

I advocate the use of force by someone other than myself to rescue Terri Shiavo from being starved to death.

Unless he actually has the courage of his convictions, which I strongly doubt.

I won't even dignify his website with a link. If you want, Google for it. Then go wash yourself.

The Age of Enlightenment

Via Mediamatters:

Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was removed from office in 2003 after defying a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state Supreme Court building, claimed that "there's no scientific evidence of evolution."

From the March 22 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MOORE: There's no scientific evidence of evolution. Evolution is a theory and has been recognized so by many. You have always heard of the missing link, haven't you?

MATTHEWS: Right.

MOORE: It is still missing. In other words, they can't explain how male and female came and every species from one atom or one amoeba.

Again, we see the "evolution is just a theory" bugagoo which creationists bring out constantly, showing their complete ignorance of what the word means in a scientific context.

And this nonsense about the "missing link"? The missing link harkens back to the 19th centry idea of the Great Chain of Being, back when all living things were considered to be reside on a ladder, having God at the top, all the different kinds of angels beneath him, white men directly underneath the angels, then the other races, then all the different animal species. The missing link was supposed to be something between the different races of man, and the apes. That it had never been found was supposed to be "proof" that evolution was wrong. Roy Moore has no idea what he's talking about.

Of course, the whole evolution vs. creationism debate isn't about rational discourse. It's about setting back the Enlightenment, the 18th century revolution of reason against the superstition and irrationality of the Dark Ages.

There is a Culture War going on around us. It is not a war we can afford to lose without losing our soul as a country and a people and a society.

We must rage against the dying of this light.

Nobel, my ass

We've all heard that Terri Schaivo is, to all intents and purposes, brain-dead. Most of her brain has liquified. So how is it that places like FOX News can come up with a doctor that says not only does she respond to those around her, but can essentially communicate? How come she's so responsive to this doctor, and no others?

That doctor is William Hammesfahr. MediaMatters points out that, according to FOX News and his website, he was nominated for a Nobel prize. Hammesfahr's Senator wrote a letter to the Nobel committee nominating him for the Nobel. The problem with that is that you can't just up and nominate someone for a Nobel. Making a nomination for a Nobel prize is by invitation only. The only people that get invited to make a nomination are themselves doctors and scientists. Hammesfahr's Senator is, by trade, a lawyer and engineer. So his letter to the Nobel committee was a meaningless gesture. By this logic, I would send an email to someone at nobelprize.org and nominate my ass for the Peace Prize.

Furthermore, even if Hammesfahr had been legintemately nominated for the Nobel, we would never know. The names of nominees are not released for fifty years after the prize is awarded.

Terri Schiavo

Republicans jumped onto the Terri Schiavo wagon as fast as they could, beating their pro-life drums with all the hypocritical fervor they could muster. I came across the last-minute debates on C-SPAN this evening, and am having a hard time turning away. The speed and ruthlesness with which the Republicans have politicized this issue is truly repulsive.

One thing I've noticed is that the parents and siblings of Ms. Schiavo is referred to as "the family of Terri Schiavo." Why is Michael Schiavo, her legal husband, no longer considered her family? So much for "preserving the sanctity of marriage."

You can lead a Creationist to water...

The News-Gazette now has a weblogs page. They don't have much of the newspaper online, but they have some links to local blogs. I was poking around in the ones they to which they currently link, and came across this amusing exchange between a U of I senior and a creationist putting up flyers all over campus. His replies to the creationist are remarkably well-written and thought out. I've read quite a few undergraduate (and even graduate) writings, and you'd be surprised at how bad the writing is. It's always good to see someone in the science able to put a sentence together.

The problem is: you can't have a rational argument with a creationist. They're not coming from a rational mind-place. They've already made up their minds; they know the way the world was put together, and anything that disagrees with their Biblical worldview is, by definition, wrong. Oddly, that's what puts science at a disadvantage. Science needs hypotheses, experiments, data, and all that stuff, while creationism just needs the Bible. Anything fact in dispute with creationism is just part of the evil, athiest conspiracy to either "force God out of our schools" or "force God out of our society."

OK, I guess you can argue with a creationist. You can't debate one. Their position is primarily an emotional one. There is no fact or fossil or theory that can get them to change their view, which is why creationism is inherently un-scientific. (Don't get me started on misuse of the word "theory.") That's why their arguments are usually directed at school boards and laypeople rather than the scientific community. The belief doesn't hold up under scientific scrutiny (Evolution is just a theory. Life is really complicated; it had to be designed.), but it sounds good. The problem is that sound-good, feel-good soundbites don't a scientific theory make.

Bang, bang, you're dead

The Illinois House today passed the Safe Games Illinois Act, a completely useless law that bans the sale or rental of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. The penalty for doing so would be up to a year in jail and up to a $5,000 fine. Furnishing alcohol to a minor will only get you at most a $2,500 fine, even though both are Class A midemeanors.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that minors should be getting their hands on these games. From what I've heard, Grand Theft Auto is not a game that should be played by anyone of, shall we say, a more impressionable age. Governor Blagojevich said of the passing of this bill,

I would like to commend and thank the Illinois House of Representatives for moving Illinois one step closer to protecting our children from violent and sexually explicit video games. In today's world, parents face unprecedented challenges in monitoring and protecting their children from harmful influences. This bill will make their job easier."

"Protecting our children from video games"? He makes it sound like they jumping off the shelves and attacking people. Every video game out there is ESRB rated right one the front of the box, just like movies. You can't miss these ratings. Grand Theft Auto, which is basically the game being demonized this week is rated Mature, inappropriate for those under 17. Apparently this law will make it easier for parents to protect their children because they're too damn lazy to pick up the game and look at the front of it.

Even though movies are rated using similar criteria as video games, and movie theaters (in theory) don't let kids into R-rated movies, a kid getting a ticket to see Constantine or Sideways isn't a criminal act. Why should movies be treated differently?

Andrew O'Hehir has a fascinating article in Salon today about the myth of violence in media and how it affects children. It is taken as gospel that violent media and violent video games turns kids violent. Whereas, it turns out that there is no scientific basis to make that claim. The article points out that there is no such consensus in the fields of psychology, criminology or media studies about the effect of the media.

The author says there are two assumptions that underlie this debate:

1. We live in an unusually violent era.
2. Our entertainment avenues, our media, is significantly more violent than previous generations', and therefore the cause.

He points out that we do not live in violent times. In fact, over the past five centuries, violence has been decreasing. The murder rate now is lower than it was in medieval Europe. Perhaps a steady diet of Scott Peterson, OJ, and the War on Terror just has us hypersensitized to it.

Nor is our entertainment more violent than previously. Now we watch movies and TV and play video games. O'Hehir points out that in previous generations, as recently as the 1930s, public executions were actually attended by thousands of people, recreationally. Now we watch fantasy violence. Our grandparents watched real violence.

This stupid law is just a hysterical overreaction to an imaginary problem.

The Icky Race

Yes, I'm hooked on a reality TV show. I really do think that The Amazing Race is a really good show. I do have a blog entry running around in my head all about the Big Asshole From Boston, so that will be coming sometime.

One thing I really like about TAR is that they go to all these amazing places and incorporate local traditions and costumes and historical sites. This season in Peru, one of the challenges was herding llamas. Last season in Argentina, they had to find the grave of Eva Peron. This week was the disgusting food challenge, where contestants had to eat a traditional Argentinian barbecue consisting of a whole lot of beef, some of more ... obscure parts of the animal. Four pounds of barbecue.

From what I can find on the Web, that's about 4500 calories of beef, or more than two days worth. (That's 190 to 330 calories per 3.5 oz serving, depending on the cut of beef, cooking method, and fat content.)

This is the only part of the show that I really don't like. We're already a fat country. Obesity kills a lot of us. Do we really need to watch people stuff their big fat mouths with literally enough food to feed an entire family? Much of the rest of the Race can be overcome by either physical strength or cleverness and the ability to not get lost in the middle of nowhere in Urgblechistan. This challenge just seems out of place, and I get the feeling it's only in there because Survivor and Fear Factor all have a disgusting food challenge.

Another thing is that it seems very disrespectful to the cultures the Racers are visiting. Like I said, the show goes all over the world and incorporates local, ahem, flavor into each episode. Then comes an episode where the challenge is, "Welcome to our country, now eat enough of a local dish until you're vomiting all over everywhere, and eat some more!" Two seasons ago, the Racers had to eat the equivalent of a dozen eggs (one ostrich egg) in a less-than-particularly-opulent African village. The locals didn't look particularly overfed, and here are a bunch of rich Americans eating so much that they puked, only to continue eating.

It is sometimes considered a sign of the decadence of Ancient Rome that the highest classes would deliberatly vomit after a huge meal so they could contiue to feast. (The existence of the vomitorium, or a room specifically dedicated to the practice appears to be a myth.) Bulemia is a serious and completely un-entertaining problem for many in this country. Is watching it as entertainment something that's really appropriate?

Give me a break

Sci-fi has done some really good shows. Farscape and Battlestar Galactica both come to mind. Unfortunately, they also have a penchant for really crappy movies with at best B-grade actors and some CGI monster of the week. Giant insects, giant snakes, giant worms from the depths of the sea, etc. Usually with about five people trapped in some remote location trying to not get eaten, except most of them do.

This week's pile of crap is Mansquito. I can't decide if that sounds more like a crappy sci-fi movie, or some sort of sci-fi porn movie.

Yet more gay.com porn spammers

If you've ever been in the gay.com chatrooms, you're familiar with the gay.com porn spammers. Previously confined to putting links in their bios, and dropping nonsense phrases into the chatroom, they're now starting to advertise directly.

This particular spammer always has the same MO. A geocities link redirects to gayonlinevideos.com, which hosts a page containing nothing but links to his many other porn sites. And by many, I mean many:

HardcoreGayBondage.com
HardcoreAsianVideos.com
SelfSuckingVideos.com
HardcoreTwinkVideos.com
HardcoreGloryholes.com
GayChineseVideos.com
FistingBearVideos.com
HardcorePissVideos.com
TwinkBarebackVideos.com
TwinkFistingVideos.com
BarebackingBearVideos.com
GayFootFetishes.com
GayWrestlingVideos.com
GayTwinkVideos.com
GayFacialCumshots.com
UncutCockVideos.com
AutoFellatioVideos.com
GayMilitaryVideos.com
GayBondageVideos.com
BarebackSexVideos.com
HardcoreFistFucking.com
GayWatersports.net
MensroomSexVideos.com
GayDominationVideos.com
GloryholeSexVideos.com
GayBlowjobVideos.com
GayMuscleVideos.com
GayLeatherVideos.com
GayAnalVideos.com
RimmingVideos.com
BlackOnlineVideos.com
GayEnemaVideos.com
BearsOnFilm.com
BisexualSexVideos.com
GayCumshotVideos.com
GloryholeVideos.com
HardcoreBarebackVideos.com
GaySpankingVideos.com
GayAsianVideos.com
ChineseTwinkVideos.com

Whew! All of these are hosted on reliablehosting.com, a completely spam-friendly outfit. In fact, it appears they are not even a legitimate hosting firm, but rather just part of a long term porn spam gang.

Every one of these sites (every one I checked, anyway) is owned by onlinemedianetwork.com.

whois -h whois.namesecure.com hardcoregaybondage.com ...
Registrant:
Online Media Network, Inc. Online Media Network, Inc.
Online Media Network, Inc.
2805 East Oakland Park Blvd.
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33306-1813
US

Registrar: NameSecure.com
Domain: HARDCOREGAYBONDAGE.COM
Created on 08-25-2003
Expires on 08-25-2005

Administrative Contact:
Online Media Network, Inc. Online Media Network, Inc.
Phone: 1-954-537-3445
E-mail: records@onlinemedianetwork.com

Interestingly enough, onlinemedianetwork.com is apparently so very successful, the are not mentioned anywhere on the web at all. They have no website. www.onlinemedianetwork.com returns a 403 forbidden error. The only Google hits I got were two posts by someone named "Antonio" looking for gay porn models ("no over weights sorry") and a gay porn webmaster.

Motherfucking, parasitic, spamming bastards.

Eeeeek!

I got Half-Life some time ago, played it about half way through, and reinstalled it last night to finish it. Anything that won that many awards and often gets named the best game of all time is something I have to play. Rather than work through the half that I played again, I figured out some of the cheats, and am playing through in god mode. Even in god mode, the game still scares the crap out of me. Now *that* is a sign of an effective game.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go change my underwear.

Well, yee haw!

I did not realize this until just today. From the Texas Constitution:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.

Fortunately, the US Constitution overrides that clause and nullifies it, unless Clarence Thomas gets his way.

WTF?

I just had a guy in the chatroom, who I've never seen before and certainly never chatted with, private me to call me an ugly bitch. What the fuck? The sad thing is he's the only gay man who's looked at me in months.

It's hard to beat free

If you live in Illinois or Michigan you can get a free copy of your credit report from the three big credit agencies for free. Actually it applies to a number of states other than those, but I know that all the people that regularly read this blog are from one of those states. I haven't checked mine in quite a while. As a previous victim of identity theft, yes, I know that's bad of me.

You can get your credit reports by visiting www.annualcreditreport.com or by phone at 877-322-8228. I just did it, and it really is painless. Now we'll see if my credit is just as painless.

You just gotta love the Right

Ann Coulter's current column on her website, "Republicans, Bloggers, and Gays, Oh My!" currently reads:

Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.

This is one of those occasional moments where I am absolutely speechless with rage. (Well, not entirely speechless; I'm here.)

This didn't go unnoticed. It appears that Coulter's racial comment was edited out by someone or another, but the rest of the column ran anyway. Every place on the Web I can find has this line as:

Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that dyspeptic, old Helen Thomas...

Now you may or may not like Helen Thomas, but she has been a reporter on the White House beat for decades. She flew with Nixon to China. She has certainly earned her place in the White House press room, unlike a particular male prostitute. Ann Coulter is not worthy to lick her boots.

The Bush adminstration moved her from her seat in the front row to the back, and now rarely calls upon her in press conferences. She is no longer permitted to close press conferences with her traditional, "Thank you, Mr. President." All this is presumably because she is not sufficiently obedient to their agenda. Or maybe she wouldn't take a payoff.

And here's what really chafes: you won't hear word one from the Right about this. They are too protective of their own. (Commandment #11: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.)

It just makes me wonder what Coulter calls Jesse Jackson before her editor catches it.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Why, yes!

I found this poll on the News-Gazette site this week.

Reloading didn't help. Not surprisingly, the results showed a lot of people voting "Yes."

HotmilitarystudGate.com

Apparently eager to ride his 15 minutes for another couple of hours, "Jeff Gannon" now has a blog. (Via Americablog) Right now, it largely seems to be a collection of links to conservative apologists for his behavior. He says he's being attacked just because he's a conservative. Um, hello? There are plenty of conservatives more visible than one White House reporter for a website, who's only apparent purpose is to ask softball questions of the President and his press secretary.

Gannon claims that had he "been a liberal reporter with the salacious past now attributed to me, I would be the Grand Marshall of the next Gay Pride Parade as well as a media darling, able to give softball interviews. But because I am a conservative, they continue to try to smear me with allegations of behavior that they otherwise would vigorously defend." Quick, think. How many liberals have you heard defending prostitution lately?

Jim, err, Jeff, the Evil Baby-Eating Liberal Bloggers aren't criticizing you because you're gay. It's not because you're a prostitute. It's because you're gay (or at least gay-for-pay) and write for an organization that refers to the murder of Matthew Shepard as a "so-called hate crime." It's because you're a hustler with access to the White House, the President, and possibly classified materials. It's because you're a gay prostitute given special access to the "Family Values" White House when it was politically convenient.

Interestingly, his website doesn't address the prostitution angle. How many conservatives when falsely accused of being a hustler wouldn't at least say something to the effect of, "No, I'm not"? The website does say that he has been "advised by my attorneys not to comment on any of the details pending the outcome of any possible legal action I might pursue." Might those attorneys be your criminal defense team, perhaps?

Gayroomie spammer

This is interesting. I blogged some months ago about the gayroomie spammer in the local gay.com chatroom. The whois info for them now reads:

Organization:
MoveOn Media. LLC
Domain Admin
PO Box 1825
Denver, CO 80203
US
Phone: 505-238-1234
Email: admin@gayroomie.com

Previously, it had read a different Colorado address, and not a post office box. But that phone number is a New Mexico number, not Colorado. Maybe poor Toby Benjamin went off to college. Let's hope he's found some action at last.

But there's more! Checking with the Colorado Secretary of State shows that MoveOn Media had its incorporated status dissolved after neglecting to file an annual report. I don't think that's a particularly big deal, though. The SoS lists the address for MoveOn Media as 1825 Logan St., Ste. 305. Interesting to note that the suite number wasn't in the original whois information for this domain.

HotmilitarystudGate on CNN

Anderson Cooper just interviewed Gannon on CNN. In that interview, and in other places, he's said it's fine that he's a partisan agent for a news organization with a conservative bent. In another CNN interview, he said, "Call me partisan, fine, but don't let my colleagues off the hook. They're partisan too, but they don't admit it." I guess that's the "but they started it" defense.

The problem with his claim is that Talon News, his former employer claims not to be partisan. From their web page:

Talon News is your source for unbiased news coverage and no-spin reporting. If you want the facts without all the slant, Talon News is the place to go for political, national, and international news.

So which is it? Are they deliberately partisan or unbiased and "no-spin?" Conservatives like to bitch and moan about the "liberal media," but even the media they're always complaining about isn't trying to deliberatly foster a political agenda, while claiming impartiality. Talon News is.

That's the problem. It's not the bias, it's the deception. They're trying to claim they're not doing something, while they are underhandedly doing that exact thing.

Dean

It looks like Dean is a lock for the head of the DNC. But I just saw on CNN yet again the famous footage of the Dean Scream, as they're doing a bit of a story on him. I mean, really, are we ever going to be shown Dean on the news without a clip of that? The guy mobilized Democrats in a way not really ever seen before, and was one of the first people to effectively use the Internet to get out his message (a blog) and to rainse funding. And yet all we see is that arm wave and a high pitched, "Yeahhh!" When George Bush I is on TV, we don't get cut-away clips of him vomiting in the Japanese Prime Minister's lap, the pretzel jokes about Bush II stopped fairly quickly, and Bob Dole fell off a fucking stage. How come we don't see the clip of that anymore?

Liberal media, my big fat ass.

HotmilitarystudGate hits the fan

It looks like the allegations about Jeff Gannon, the White House "reporter" of being a hustler, may well be true. Americablog has the scoop. (Link NOT safe for work.) If those pictures aren't the same guy, then this is a case of mistaken identity on a scale not seen since Dickens.

I worry that this will just get shoved under the rug as being his "personal life," something of which I'm sure Monica Lewinsky will find very comforting. The White House Press Secretary says there's nothing wrong with a Republican hack sitting in on the press conferences because, "There are a number of people in the room who express certain points of view and cross the lines of advocacy journalism." He claims that Gannon passed White House security checks under his legal name, but that doesn't explain why McClellan referred to him as "Jeff," his pseudonym. A married woman isn't allowed to use a pseudonym, even if if is her own name.

So either the White House didn't notice that this guy used to be a hustler, suggesting serious inadequacies in the vetting process, or they didn't care. If they didn't daily claim the "moral values" high ground, this wouldn't be nearly the big deal it is. White House interns don't pull a salary. Do you think that if Monica Lewinsky was stripping to make ends meet, we wouldn't have been reminded of it every night?

More gossip

Americablog is promising a big revelation on the Gannon scandal will break tomorrow. He's such a tease. I want to know now!

The sad thing is that I saw the picture from his AOL profile, with him in just the boxers in the dogtags, and thought he was pretty hot.

The Keyes to the bedroom

When Alan Keyes was carpetbagging for the Illinois Senate seat, his daughter Mara was right there beside him for much of the race. Now, Alan Keyes is a rabid "family values" man, and his daughter is a 19-year-old, out lesbian. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, indeed.

Now the story has taken a rather sad turn:

Now Maya Keyes ... finds herself out on her own. She says her parents ... threw her out of their house, refused to pay her college tuition and stopped speaking to her.

She wrote in her blog last fall, "I'm all about working for global justice. THEY don't care about that. THEY only care that I am an evil dyke."

Although I don't agree with a lot of her politics, you have to feel rather bad for Mara Keyes. It must be incredibly difficult to be disowned by your parents a 19 and have them stop speaking to you. And she must be rather conflicted. She is a vocal activist, and her father is a public figure. How much of this should be played out in public? Does she endanger any future relationship with her family by calling them on their shit?

Fortunately, I have no such personal stake in this matter. And from what I've learned about this, two conclusions can be drawn:

1. "Family values" means disowning your children if you don't like their lifestyle.
2. Alan Keyes is a big fat pig.

Entrepreneurship at work

You have been following the Jeff Gannon story, haven't you? If not, naughty, naughty.

I don't know how someone got ahold of his credentials, but you can take a look at, and even bid on, his White House press pass here. Go now, because it ain't gonna be there long!

(Link courtesy of Americablog.)

HotmilitarystudGate

The mainstream media is starting to pick up on the Gannon story. Not entirely unsurprising, they seem to be focusing on whether he was a plant from the Bush administration in the press briefing room and the propaganda angle and largely ignoring what they euphamistically refer to as his "personal life." I'm sorry, but when a conservative, born-again Christian, holier-than-thou guy runs a website called hotmilitaryescortsm4m.com, that's about a bit more than his "personal life."

This was the lead story on Salon today, and Americablog has a good summary of the media links.

Not just politics, but juicy gossip!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Bunny payback is a bitch

PBS's Lesbo Bunnygate is just another example of this administration trying to force it's religion down the throats of the rest of America. The completely harmless episode focused on a kid being raised by lesbian mothers. At no point in the episode is their sexual orientation discussed.

It's not like the show took an informative segment on maple sugar making and turned it into a lesbian infomercial. The whole point of Postcards is to introduce kids to cultural diversity. This Boston Globe editorial remarks on how unoffensive the episode actually is. But it's unoffensiveness isn't the point is it? From the point of Christian extremists, PBS had the unmitigated gall to portray lesbians at all. From the BG editorial:

Against the pastoral glories of Vermont, with maple trees dripping and cows in need of milking, the lesbian families are almost Waltonesque in their rural charm. For those who'd rather pathologize and exclude same-sex couples and their children, that normalcy must spark a lot of anguish. To them, showing and telling about lesbian families is the same as promoting... Buster's parents are divorced, although I don't think the show is promoting marital breakup.

David posted an editorial from the Portsmoth Herald asking PBS stations to have the intestinal fortitude to air the episode anyway.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen in most markets. Retaliations against PBS by the Department of Education have begun. The executive producer of the Postcards from Buster show has been disinvited from a children's television conference cosponsored by the Department of Education and PBS. I'm sure it was just a coincidence that Margaret Spellings, the same public "servant" that objected to the show in the first place, now runs the Department of Education. If such retaliation is expected from the government, it could have a chilling effect throughout all of media.

The GLADD Executive Director commented that Spellings is trying to enforce an official policy of invisibility on gay and lesbian families. And that's exactly what they're trying to do.

The State of the (other) Union

There has been a bit of a silence from the left about the Iraq elections. I guess maybe because if you aren't a hawk, being happy about them makes you seem a bit as if you are. While the President gave a very self-congratulatory State of the Union, and Republican lawmakers pointed purple fingers around, as if they had done something heroic themselves, actual Iraqi voters risked death in their first elections. (I think this last particularly arrogant. See: You Do Not Own Their Courage.) It just reeks of some powerful imperial force civilizing the savage natives, and patting themselves on the back for their moral superiority.

But I've heard no one doubt that elections in Iraq are unequivocally a good thing. For the first time, a nation of people gets to control their own destiny. Unfortunatly, it doesn't look like it's the sort of destiny Americans probably want for them. The majority Shiites seem to be flexing their new political muscle. And conservative Islamic clerics seems to be a very powerful force in that movement. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a Shiite cleric,and those like him may be very influential when writing the Iraqi constitution. They are trying to get Shariah law enshrined as the law of the land in the dawn of this new nation.

From the linked NY Times article:

The clerics generally agree that the constitution must ensure that no laws passed by the state contradict a basic understanding of Shariah as laid out in the Koran. Women should not be treated as the equals of men in matters of marriage, divorce and family inheritance, they say. Nor should men be prevented from having multiple wives, they add...

"We don't want to see equality between men and women because according to Islamic law, men should have double of women," said Muhammad Kuraidy, a spokesman for Ayatollah Yacoubi. "This is written in the Koran and according to God."

Remember Shariah law is what Muslims invoke when they require women to move about dressed in black burkahs (Afghanistan) or stone adulterous women to death (Nigeria). Women in Basra (second largest city in Iraq) are already being pressured to wear the burkhas in public. I haven't read anything about it, but something tells me it won't be particularly safe for me to visit the New Iraq.

It's great that Iraqis are finally electing their own government. But what will we do if they decide to elect another Taliban?

Geez

From the State of the Union

It is time for an immigration policy that permits temporary guest workers to fill jobs Americans will not take, that rejects amnesty, that tells us who is entering and leaving our country, and that closes the border to drug dealers and terrorists.

We might as well call it it the migrant farm worker bill. It's not that there are jobs that no American will do, it's just that American's won't do them for $3 an hour with no medical insurance.

I don't get it, when we're talking something like health care, the market is all-powerful. When we're talking cleaning bathrooms and picking cabbage, we have to import workers because snotty Americans are too good for those jobs. Why not just let the market decide?

And now the lies about Social Security begin:

And instead of 16 workers paying in for every beneficiary, right now it's only about three workers - and over the next few decades, that number will fall to just two workers per beneficiary. With each passing year, fewer workers are paying ever-higher benefits to an ever-larger number of retirees.

The scary ratio of workers to retirees is often thrown around as a sign SS is in imminent danger of failure. But it's not. Consider that workers in the future are expected to have fewer dependent children, even as they support more elderly. So if these balance out, it doesn't matter. Here is a better summary of this.

If you are a younger worker, I believe you should be able to set aside part of that money in your own retirement account, so you can build a nest egg for your own future.

We have that. It's called an IRA. It allows you to plan for your retirement by putting money away tax-free for the future (in the case of a traditional IRA). You can put it in just about any investment that you want, from stocks to mutual funds to bonds. Social Security is the back up plan in case you're one of the many people that doesn't make good investment choices. By eliminating Social Security and replacing it with an IRA-like scheme -- and make no mistake, that's exactly what we're talking here -- we'd be eliminating that backup, and putting all our eggs in one basket.

Your money will grow, over time, at a greater rate than anything the current system can deliver - and your account will provide money for retirement over and above the check you will receive from Social Security.

Ah, there's the rub. What happens when (not if) it doesn't? Another economic slowdown at some point in the future is inevitable. And since Social Security won't be funded as much as it has been in the past, it won't be able to make up the shortfall.

...raising the yearly limits on contributions over time, eventually permitting all workers to set aside four percentage points of their payroll taxes in their accounts.

Something tells me this is wrong. He probably means four percent of income, not four percent of payroll taxes. For a worker making $50,000, 4% of that 6% would be $120 a year. Hardly enough to support a retirement. So that should probably be 4% of a worker's total income.

But hey, 4% isn't a lot, is it? If you're making less than the SS cap (and pretty much everyone does), then about 6% of your income is taken out as Social Security. So he's talking about diverting 4% of income to the SS privatized accounts. That's 66% of the total SS contribution from the worker. (The employer contributes an additional 6%.)

---

Here was the big lie from the SotU:

[Social Security] is headed toward bankruptcy.

I don't use the term "lie" loosely. But I can think of no other appropriate term. From the Center for Economic and Policy Research, "Even after 2042 the program would always be able to pay retirees a higher benefit (in today's dollars) than what current retirees receive." Did you get that? That's even if the trust fund runs out! Paul Krugman agrees, "...even after the trust fund is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits." That's a problem, yes, but it's hardly a catastrophic crisis.

---

This isn't a small deal. This is about one political party making radical and drastic changes to a very important program, and justifying it through distortion, half-truths, and spin. They are relying on the American public's poor math skills and general ignorance about Social Security to remake it how they will.

This is important shit. They can't be allowed to get away with it.

This week in stupidity

There simply is nothing so low that the pro "family" organizations will not stoop to it. Last week was No Name Calling Week, basically an anti-bullying project aimed at schoolkids. The Illinois Family Institute is all up in arms becase one of the forty-two sponsoring organizations was GLESN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. This project wasn't targeted at defending gay kids, but anyone bullied, whether for their weight, height, intelligence, and, yes, sexual orientation. Other sponsors of the project include the Anti Defamation League, the Girl Scouts, and National Association of Secondary School Principals, a notoriously well-known terrorist organization.

But no, we can't have that. David Smith, Senior Policy Analyst for the IFI, objects to the Week because "No Name Calling Week targets young impressionable children in fifth through eighth grades with messages that seem harmless enough - 'diversity' and 'tolerance.'" Yeah, we can't have that, can we? "Their main objective is ... part of an overall effort to promote the homosexual agenda to children." Exactly. The radical agenda of not getting the queer kid's ass kicked in gym class.

So I'm now officially proposing February 7-11, 2005 as Call David Smith a Cocksucker Week.

The other Social Security shoe

Here we go. From today's LA Times:

In a significant shift in his rationale for [privatized] accounts, Bush dropped his claim that they would help solve Social Security's fiscal problems — a link he sometimes made during last year's presidential campaign. Instead, he said the individual accounts were desirable because they would be "a better deal," providing workers what he said would be a higher rate of return and "greater security in retirement."

So, apparently, all that stuff about SS being "bankrupt" and too few workers paying in for the number of retirees was just a red herring.

I think what we're seeing here is the beginning of an attempt to reframe perceptions of Social Security from a insurance policy that would protect you you from living out your retirement in poverty to an investment account. Part of that whole "ownership society" nonsense.

So Trident doesn't work too?

Oh, God, I just laughed so hard, I think I swallowed my tongue. You are supposed to chew this stuff, right?

SocSec

I'm sure that Social Security will be a big part of tonight's State of the Union, and so this may be completely moot by the time you read it.

I can't find any good citations on the Web right now, but it seems that the Bush administration is playing three card monte with economic predictions when it comes to Social Security. They seem to be assuming good economic growth when it comes to privatized SS accounts, but poor economic growth when direly predicting the fall and collapse of the SS program in general. You don't get to have it both ways.

This is what steams my potatoes. Look, I'm a scientist, and a fairly rational guy. (Or so I like to think.) I am, as they said when I interviewed at Intel (but didn't get the job), very data-driven. If privatizing Social Security will help it financially, I'd be all for it. Numbers don't lie. Unfortunately, you can lie with numbers.

Yes the governments budget office is making some fairly low numbers when they do their economic forecasts. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a good idea to make a conservative estimate when you're forecasting something, so if things do a little bit better than that, you have extra to work with. But when they pull a rosy forecast out of their ass when talking about growth of these private accounts?

That's cheating.

The fact that they are making these distortions suggests something else entirely. This isn't about trying to save Social Security. It's about marketing a decision that's already been made. Note how everything used to be about "privatizing" SS, then moved to "private accounts?" Those terms didn't focus test well, and so now it's about "personal accounts." The administration even critisizes those in the press that use the verboten terms, even though they were using them themselves a few weeks ago.

And quibbling about rates of return in SS is a red herring. Social Security isn't a retirement plan. It's insurance against retirement planning. It's a compact between this generation and their parents that they won't be forced into poverty when they retire. It's not supposed to replace sensible retirement savings, it's supposed to protect you if it catastrophically fails. (Just ask Enron employees about how bad stocks can do.) No one thinks of fire insurance as a great investment. It's not there to be collected on eventually;, it's there to stop you from being homeless if your house burns down.

So that's why Lost is a rerun...

I didn't realize it until this morning, but tonight is the State of the Union address. Just as David likes to predict the Oscars, I've been thinking about what's going to be in tonight's speech.

What we will hear: Iraq, democracy, voting, etc.; winning the War on Terror, capturing xx% of Al Qaeda; Social Security and personal accounts; tort reform; tax cuts; and possibly steroids in sports;

What we won't hear: WMDs, civilian casualties in Iraq; war-cause sacrifice by anyone other than the military; Social Security and privatization or private accounts; the profit margins of large insurance and/or drug companies; tax reform

What I'm not sure about yet: a culture of "life"; gay marriage