Allegations arise after failed gay rights referendum attempt
The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating alleged election fraud in the failed attempt of a group called Equal Rights Not Special Rights to force a ballot referendum on whether over gay people should be protected by Cincinnati’s anti-discrimination law.
Equal Rights Not Special Rights officially withdrew its petitions Thursday, saying it discovered one paid signature gatherer had fraudulently signed 18 names in the more than 7,600 signatures that were validated by the Hamilton County Board of Elections last June.
Thousands of those validated signatures were to be challenged Thursday by a pro-ordinance group called Citizens To Restore Fairness, which said the referendum sponsor was systematic in its use of fraud and tampering of petitions to push the issue onto ballots this fall. A protest hearing at the Board of Elections, scheduled for Thursday, was canceled when Prosecutor Joe Deters started his investigation.
According to 365Gay.com, Fidel Castro and Cincinnati Reds owner Bob Castellini were among the signees. Maybe Castro gave Phil Burress a box of his best Cohibas while he was there…
Phil Burress, chairman of the group behind the referendum, said he referred to Deters the name of the signature gatherer who he thinks committed fraud. Burress said his staff alerted him to the 18 questionable signatures, and he didn’t look at any beyond that because it was clear they wouldn’t have enough signatures to force a referendum.
"No one else from staff has said anything about (other) signatures that are corrupt," Burress said.
"Why would I be required to check that out, when it’s the homosexual activists making the claims (of massive fraud)."
They pulled the petitions because they went a little too far this time, and Phil has somehow sensed this. The election process in Ohio has been corrupt for so long now under republican rule that the kook pews figured they could get away with anything now and threw caution to the wind. Citizens To Restore Fairness had only just started looking at the signatures and they found Fidel’s name in there and that was too much, even by Ohio standards. And true to form, Phil is looking for a scapegoat. Oh yes…it was that guy we paid to collect signatures. You sure it isn’t the gays Phil? Isn’t it always the gays?
No Phil, it’s you. Someone who feels utterly no compunction about lying through their teeth to incite the mob cannot possibly have any moral brakes when it comes to a little thing like election fraud. Your kind will lie, cheat and steal any election you come anywhere near and not feel the slightest twinge of guilt or remorse about it either, because you’re on a mission from God and God doesn’t mind it when people lie and cheat and steal for Him. God is that big mafia boss in the sky…right Phil? He likes it when you bring Him bling.
This is the republican party in a nutshell. I wander the liberal and progressive blogs and constantly I see amazement over how completely amoral the republicans have become. There’s Bush wiretapping Americans right and left at will as though he can do as he damn well pleases a fuck the rule of law. There’s the bogus rationals for the war in Iraq, in-your-face lies like Saddam was involved in 9-11 that have been debunked over and over again and yet the Bush administration keeps repeating them. There’s the whining petulant sense of entitlement and bitter resentment towards everyone who isn’t One Of Us. I’ve been seeing it for decades in the anti-gay kook pews: That Fuck The Constitution, Fuck Democracy, Fuck The Rule Of Law we’ll do to you as we damn well please attitude…that ritualistic waving around of one damn stupidly transparent lie after another, long after the lie has stopped convincing anyone, because as long as the lie can still incite the mob it’s still useful…that whining, petulant sense of entitlement by virtue of heterosexuality, and bitter resentment toward gay people who stubbornly refuse to hate themselves like they hate us. I’ve had to face that open sewer of arrogance and hate and resentment ever since I left puberty behind. And then I watched as the republican party became that.
This Tom Tomorrow cartoon has been my favorite, ever since he put it up right after 9-11 (click on the link to see the whole thing). In it, Uncle Sam exhorts Americans to hold firm in their basic American values in the face of the threat from Osama bin Laden and his Taliban backers.
Of course, the creator of This Modern World sees those basic American values a tad differently then the president and the congress we unfortunately happened to have on 9-11. Uncle Sam brings forward a political dissenter who says he still thinks Bush is a dufus ("That’s the spirit son!"), a feminist who says women make their own choices in this democracy ("Yow! Take that Osama!"), some gays, and an atheist to step up to the podium and flaunt themselves in the enemy’s face for America. Finally Sam says "The only way to beat these terrorists is to stand up for tolerance and diversity and everything else they hate about our free society! Are you with me Americans?" It was irony of course, but I think with tongue only partially in cheek; and I found myself thinking wistfully "If only I lived in that America…"
Well…we all know how things have gone since. Some days it seems like the religious wackos here at home are a grim mirror of the ones throwing bombs abroad, their views on social justice, women, gays, human sexuality and liberal secular democracy are so much alike. So it was with pleasure that while I was scanning the news today and I came across this…
Israel’s military campaign against Hizbullah in Lebanon was a "failure" and demonstrated to Palestinian groups the Jewish state is weak and can ultimately be defeated, a senior terror leader told WorldNetDaily in an interview.
The leader, Abu Oudai, chief rocket coordinator for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank, said Hizbullah’s "tremendous victory" has emboldened his group and other Palestinian terror organizations to immediately coordinate violence against Israel and to focus their "resistance" on rocket attacks.
"I think the most important achievement this war in Lebanon demonstrated is that Israel – with all its power, its air force, its tanks, its navy and its unlimited budget – can be defeated," said Abu Oudai.
"If we do (what Hizbullah accomplished), this Israeli army full of gay soldiers and full of corruption and with old-fashioned war methods can be defeated also in Palestine."
Star of gay adult films to entertain Israeli troops
A star of gay pornographic films is traveling to Israel to entertain the troops and shoot two films, PageOneQ has learned.
Michael Lucas (picture, right), head of Lucas Entertainment, is planning to give troops free admission to a live sex show in Tel Aviv. It will be his third appearance there.
"I toured Israel before with Rob Ramos in 2004 (Haifa and Tel-Aviv) and with Wilfried Knight in 2005 (Tel-Aviv)," he wrotes in the announcement on his blog. "I haven’t decided yet who will be my partner for the live sex show I’m doing there (Israel has no problem with that type of entertainment)."
Taaaake thAT you miserable bunch of gutter crawling flea bitten human hating religious wackos…
A friend of mine passed on this link to a really cute AIDS prevention video. It’s the kind of thing you’ll never see here in the Excitable States of America. What makes this video so remarkable, and I think far more likely to drive its point home, is that it isn’t so much about having sex, as finding love in a world that seems horribly stacked against it. You watch this thing and by the end you’re really on the edge of your seat wondering if this poor little lost cuteling will ever find love, and cheering when he finally does. And as the lovers drive off into the sunset, the film makers drop the message on you…and it works brilliantly.
It’s done with computer animated characters and the hero of the piece is just adorable (see above!), it’s hilarious in spots (and a tad unsafe for work in others so be warned. This was obviously made somewhere that human sexuality isn’t considered a wicked dirty thing) and the message is a positive one, not a negative one; not an appeal to fear, but to hope and dreams of love. The religious right would collectively have kittens if anything like this was produced here in the U.S. Let’s hear it for the Internet.
[Update…] I had to update the link because the original location wasn’t playing this video anymore. The good news is it’s all over YouTube now and it wasn’t when I first posted this. I’ve linked to the one I thought had the best video quality.
Also…a reader was looking for the song played here and I think would have missed it if not for seeing a pingback from another post in the comments. It’s Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes.
Okay…so I’m 52 years old now and I shouldn’t eat a heavy meal before bedtime anymore. So I ate a Checkers burger and fries late last night, and then didn’t sleep very well the rest of that night. So I was kinda tired when I came home from work today and walked in the door to my little Baltimore rowhouse and right up the stairs to my bedroom and took a nap. And I had three very vivid dreams in a row. And then a forth very short one that kicked me back awake.
In the first dream I was having a pleasant conversation with someone I used to know, who passed away many years ago. We were walking around my old high school neighborhood and chatting pleasantly. In the second dream I was watching some co-workers at Space Telescope assembling some sort of space probe. There were people standing around watching the process who were all smoking cigarettes and the room was thick with it, and someone said they needed to back off or the cigarette smoke would contaminate the probe. In the third dream I was sitting on the floor in front of my TV watching some strange cartoon show. It was a comedy about three klutzy super heroes, each of whom had been independently assigned to fight the same two dangerous evil nasty super villains…but somehow each of them mistook the other two super heroes for the two super villains, and so they were constantly fighting each other to a draw in every episode and never realizing they were fighting the wrong people.
I began, as I sometimes do, to realize I was dreaming, and I thought to myself "These are pretty idiotic dreams I’m having now. The guy I was talking with in the first dream has been dead for years, and he never talked much to me in real life anyway. We don’t assemble space probes at the Institute, and nobody in their right mind assembles space probes in a smoke filled room. And that cartoon’s central joke would get old after just a few episodes…"
…and then…
…suddenly it was as if I had been pulled back to another place. I was looking down at a table with three, open three ring binders on it. Each binder was open to a page of some sort of software code print-out. Somehow I knew it was code anyway. But I’d never seen its like. I realized…somehow…that each binder was open to the page with the code on it for one of the three dreams I’d just had. It…felt like…something said to me something along the lines of "okay…you don’t like those dreams…then fix them."
I looked more carefully at the code. It was strange. Just a series of one line statements, one after the other after the other. It had been run through a print formatter, similar to what my programmer’s editor will do if you print code out from within it, with certain keywords and values in bold or italicized fonts to make it easier to read. But the character set was weird. I can’t reproduce it here, but the format of the statements was something like this:
XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x
Just that…one line after another after another, for about fifteen to twenty lines per dream. Each statement began with something like…I dunno…it seemed to be some kind of big and bolded keyword that I somehow knew was an identifier of some kind. Then there were between two and three smaller italicized words that…again somehow…I knew were modifiers of some sort. Then a sentence like structure of maybe a dozen or so more words that…somehow…I knew was an expression of some kind. One complete dream might look something like this:
XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx xx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxx XXXXXXXXXX x xxx x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxx XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXXXX x xx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxx xx x x x xx xx x xxxxx XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx xx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxx XXXXXXXXXX x xxx x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx XXXXXXXXX xx x xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxx xxx xx x x XXXXXXX xx xxxx x xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xx XXXXXXXXXX x xxx xx x xx xxxxx xxx xxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx x XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xx XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxx XXXXXXXXXX x x x x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xx xxxxx xx x x xx
It was weird. I stood there looking at it and thought to myself "This is the most monotonal code I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s too uniform. I don’t see any flow control, operators, conditionals branching… What the hell?" And while part of me was thinking "I can’t edit this…I don’t understand it" another part was thinking "You’re kidding….This is what makes a dream?"
And then I woke up…
Mothers…don’t let your kids grow up to be programmers…
NEW YORK, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Bankrupt Northwest Airlines Corp. advised workers to fish in the trash for things they like or take their dates for a walk in the woods in a move to help workers facing the ax to save money.
The No. 5 U.S. carrier, which has slashed most employees’ pay and is looking to cut jobs as it prepares to exit bankruptcy, put the tips in a booklet handed out to about 50 workers and posted for a time on its employee Web site.
The section, entitled "101 ways to save money", does not feature in new versions of the booklet or the Web site.
Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said some employees who received the handbook had taken issue with a couple of the items. "We agree that some of these suggestions and tips … were a bit insensitive," Blahoski told Reuters.
The four-page booklet, "Preparing for a Financial Setback" contained suggestions such as shopping in thrift stores, taking "a date for a walk along the beach or in the woods" and not being "shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."
The booklet was part of a 150-page packet to ground workers, such as baggage handlers, whose jobs will likely be cut after their union agreed to allow the airline to outsource some of their work, Blahoski said.
I have a proposal: From now on the board of directors of Northwest Airlines and their families will have to fly to all their destinations on board airplanes that are being maintained and operated by people who need to dumpster dive in order to make ends meet.
"But I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Homosexuality is an alternative lifestyle," she said.
Cinq…
"That doesn’t make it a marriage. Some people have group sex. Should we allow two men and three women to marry? Should we allow polygamy with one man and five wives? For some people, the alternative lifestyle is bestiality. Do we allow a man to marry a sheep?"
Le Curtian…Applaus a Voux…
[Edited a tad…] I found a copy of the actual quotes she made about having gay friends and having the utmost respect for them…
A ceremony to honor the achievements of six high profile gay Californians erupted into a political fight at the State Capitol Monday with some Republicans storming off the Assembly Floor.
The Legislature’s Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender Caucus (LGBT) sponsored the first Pride Recognition Awards, a program they say is designed to recognize the accomplishments of people who happen to be gay in their respective fields.
Conservative Assemblymembers boycotted the program.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise," said Assembly Republican Leader George Plescia, R-San Diego. "We’re wasting a lot of time we have a lot of bills on the floor."
The honorees included several celebrities, including former NFL tackle Esera Tuaolo and Reichen Lehmkuhl, the million dollar prize winner of the "The Amazing Race 4" reality television show. Watching quietly from the back of the room was Lehmkuhl’s partner, Lance Bass, a singer with the former boy band ‘N Sync. Bass recently went public with the fact he is gay.
Assemblymember Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he hoped the event would benefit Republicans by showing them the "strength of our diversity and the many accomplishments in a variety of disciplines." But about 10 Republicans either walked out or boycotted the event altogether.
"So it’s a great disappointment that they’re acting like such children," Leno said.
MEADE – Two Meade boys have confessed to cutting down a rainbow flag outside a hotel here, the proprietors said Monday.
The Lakeway Hotel became a focus of controversy last month after owners J.R. and Robin Knight hung the colorful banner, a gift from their 12-year-old son, in front of the place. Locals uncomfortable with such a symbol – it also stands for gay pride – decried the flag’s presence and then, in the early-morning hours of July 31, someone cut it down.
The disappearance had remained a mystery, but the father of two local boys brought them to the Lakeway on Friday and they owned up to their involvement.
"They apologized and said they’d replace it," J.R. Knight said. He didn’t name the boys, and Meade County Sheriff Michael Cox said only that officials are investigating.
Meanwhile, Knight said replacing a 5-foot-by-5-foot plate glass window smashed in at the hotel’s restaurant – also apparently due to the flag flap – probably would cost about $500. Two neon beer signs destroyed in the same incident probably will cost another $1,000.
Someone tossed a brick through the window early Friday morning, according to the Knights and local authorities, who are investigating. Scrawled on the brick was the word "fag."
An 18-year-old gay man who was badly beaten in Edgewood on July 30 might have been assaulted because a man at the party believed the gay man had touched his butt, a statement of probable cause filed in state District Court says.
William York, 21, of Edgewood, and Leroy Segura, 19, of Moriarty have been charged with aggravated battery, kidnapping, false imprisonment and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Bond for each man was set at $100,000 cash only by District Judge Michael Vigil on Monday. Two juveniles, a boy and girl, are also being held in connection to the case.
York believed the victim tried to grab his butt while they were at a party in Edgewood on July 30, the statement says. He said Segura, who is known by the nickname “Half Pint,” told him the victim tried to grab York’s butt, the statement says.
In an interview, York told state police the comment upset him and made him want to fight the 18-year-old man, the statement says. York said everyone at the party made fun of the 18-year-old man because he was gay, the statement says. York said he wanted to “scare” the victim to “make him straight and to get him to stop acting the way he was,” the statement says.
The juvenile male arrested in the case said he, York and Segura tied the gay man’s hands, placed a torn black T-shirt over his head, walked him into a deserted field, pushed him onto a downed fence and beat him, the statement says. The juvenile, the statement says, said he egged on York by calling the gay man joto, a derogatory Spanish word meaning gay.
The documents did not contain statements from Segura, who wore a rosary around his neck in court Monday.
The gay man suffered bleeding on the brain, a concussion, facial lacerations and bruising from the beating, which lasted for hours, state police have said. York, Segura and the juvenile male have been charged under New Mexico’s hate-crimes law.
The 18-year-old victim went to the party with a girl, who was also beaten and held inside the trailer house where the party took place, the statement says. She told police “the male subjects would knock (the gay man) down and if he did not get up off the ground within a certain count or if he did not make any noise, they would jump on him, hitting and kicking him,” the statement says.
The female victim said the beating stopped as “the sun was coming up,” the statement says.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise…"
What…Did The Greeks Threaten To Sue You Or Something…?
That Oliver Stone sure knows how to tell an incisive and gripping human drama about real people, doesn’t he. None of this puerile Hollywood tinseltown fairlytale crap for him. He tells gripping human dramas about real people. And he gets the facts right. Sort of…
‘World Trade Center’ omits Black soldier
The World Trade Center movie tells the story of the rescues of New York Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno from Ground Zero, as well as that of the men who rescued them. In real life, the officers were rescued by sergeants Karnes and Thomas. In the film, however, they were rescued by Karnes and PFC Dave Thomas; a composite character, played by William Mapother, a white actor, who is meant to represent Thomas.
World Trade Center producer Michael Shamberg said that they knew about Sgt. Thomas’s role in the rescue, but were unable to find him when creating the film. He said producers didn’t discover Thomas was a Black man until after they had started the movie. He also said that in spite of the fact that the film was co-written by McLoughlin and Jimeno was consulted for authenticity, no one ever asked them for a physical description of the man who helped save their lives.
“Frankly, we goofed–we learned when we were filming that he was an African-American,” said Shamberg. “We would change it if we could. I actually called him and apologized, and he said he didn’t mind. He was very gracious about it.”
And I’m sure Alexander The Great would have been equally gracious about being turned into a heterosexual too. Him and his…best buddy…Hephaistion. And…no way are you the kinda cowardly bottom feeding slug who would think about how much box office he’d loose in flyover territory if one of his 9-11 heroes was a black man…
Shamberg also apologized for another African-American officer, Bruce Reynolds, who was also portrayed as white in the movie.
Er…make that two black men. So…you gonna leave these guys out of the director’s cut? Make them more white?
It’s been a long six years of George Bush…but it looks like all those folks who thought the old politics-as-usual were still preferable to "partisanship" and "divisiveness" are finally starting to get what they’re dealing with now. This from Oliver Willis:
I can completely identify with Josh Marshall here and his portrayal of the bare-knuckle style of our politics nowadays.
With all those caveats though, there is a difference. And I think at some level or another, it’s one almost everyone in the center-left can relate to, at least at some level. For my part, I don’t feel my politics have changed much over the past half dozen years, if by that we mean my basic political orientation, policies I believe in and don’t, basic understanding of how the world works and so forth. Many people who read my site are much more to the left politically than I am. And occasionally, some issue will come up where that fact suddenly becomes evident, often to people’s surprise and sometimes anger.
I was going to start by saying that what’s changed for me is that the country I know and value is under attack. But that’s not quite it.
I live in Manhattan and have a certain perspective on the country. Folks in Oklahoma or evangelicals in South Carolina have a different one. And that’s fine. It’s their country too. What I think is that a certain political movement has taken over the country — call it movement conservatism in its late, degraded form — and wants to govern it by all or nothing rules.
I’ve not really moved an inch on my positions on the important issues, but the insanity of the Bush presidency makes my center-left proclivities appear to be on the far, far, left (which, in a Democratic presidency will probably be the second biggest pain in my butt).
I dislike the two-dimensional political spectrum. I seem liberal on some issues (censorship, victimless crime, minority rights, war, immigration, church-state separation, education) conservative on others (gun control, free trade, national defense) and moderate on still others (regulation of the economy, taxation, state’s rights, science and research). I don’t see myself so much as liberal or conservative, as a social engineer. A rule of law is social engineering. A constitution is social engineering. Societies either engineer themselves to work or they don’t. Ask the children of Marx and Lenin, ask the shades that walk the fields of Gettysburg what happens to a society when its understanding of the human identity and society is profoundly wrong. I am of the party of Whatever Actually Works.
But in these times anyone who isn’t with Bush is a liberal, so I reckon that’s what I am now too. And it’s not because we’ve all actually become liberals. It’s because the Bush gang has deliberately, cynically, and with malice, sought to up-end politics-as-usual in America, destroy the American political consensus and, quite literally, destroy the democratic political process. And they did it so they could seize power for themselves and hold onto it indefinitely. Pat Buchanan saw it back when he was working for Nixon, and called it "positive polarization": divide the country, and they’d have the bigger half. But the Bush gang has gone beyond that, into the destruction of the democratic process itself. They are radicals, in the mold of the 1930s brownshirts, who reject not just social liberalism, but democracy itself, as decadent.
In an interview with the London Guardian back in September 19, 2003, Paul Krugman spoke of when he saw it himself…ironically through the words of Henry Kissinger…
Even more confusing for those who like their politics to consist of nicely pigeonholed leftwingers criticising rightwingers, and vice versa, will be the incendiary essay that introduces Krugman’s new collection of columns, The Great Unravelling, published in the UK next week. In it, Krugman describes how, just as he was about to send his manuscript to the publishers, he chanced upon a passage in an old history book from the 1950s, about 19th-century diplomacy, that seemed to pinpoint, with eerie accuracy, what is happening in the US now. Eerie, but also perhaps a little embarrassing, really, given the identity of the author. Because it’s Henry Kissinger.
"The first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine," Krugman writes of A World Restored, the 1957 tome by the man who would later become the unacceptable face of cynical realpolitik. Kissinger, using Napoleon as a case study – but also, Krugman believes, implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s – describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself.
This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the US today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn’t comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger’s theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections – as opposed to, say, from God.
But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." Exactly, says Krugman, who recallss the response to his column about Tom DeLay, the anti-evolutionist Republican leader of the House of Representatives, who claimed, bafflingly, that "nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes".
"My liberal friends said, ‘I’m not interested in what some crazy guy in Congress has to say’," Krugman recalls. "But this is not some crazy guy! This guy runs Congress! There’s this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we’re facing." But those who point out what is happening, Kissinger had already noted long ago, "are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane." ("Those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word are usually accused of being ‘shrill’, of going over the top," Krugman writes, and he has become well used to such accusations.)
Which is how, as Krugman sees it, the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn’t have the evidence. Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."
Why anyone would be surprised to see all this in that open sewer that is the Bush base after the election of 2000 is beyond me, other then, as Krugman says, people just find it nearly impossible to take at face value what they’re seeing, when it comes to dealing with a group of anti democratic radicals who are actually in power. Somehow, power is supposed to moderate the radical impulse. But sometimes it just feeds it.
I came of political age during Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate. Back then Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, in response to a reporter’s question about desegregation, said something that I have thought ever since should be engraved on every ballot presented to every voter in every election, in every polling place in America: "Watch what we do, not what we say." I never thought I would see a president tell a bigger lie to the American people then Nixon’s "I am not a crook." But George Bush has looked us all in the eye and said "I’m a uniter, not a divider", and now America is more divided then ever, and that was deliberate. They knew they couldn’t govern from a majority consensus, but they figured they could have the biggest piece of a factionalized America. So they waved the flag in our faces, while they were busy ripping the America it stood for apart, and now there is no more politics-as-usual.
Remember this name if you haven’t already heard it: George Allen. Son of legendary Redskins coach George Allen, one time governor of the state of Virgina, now senator, and all around racist prick. This is from his Wikipedia entry:
Allen has a long history of interest in the Confederacy although he never lived in the South until he transferred from UCLA to the University of Virginia as a sophomore in college.
The May 8, 2006 [16] and the May 15, 2006 [17]issues of The New Republic reported extensively on Allen’s long association with the Confederate flag. The magazine reported that "[a]ccording to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the [Confederate] flag–on himself, his car, inside his home–or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000." Allen wore a Confederate flag pin for his high school senior class photo. In high school, college, and law school, Allen adorned his vehicle with a Confederate flag. In college he displayed a Confederate flag in his room. He displayed a Confederate flag in his family’s living room until 1992. In 1993, Allen’s first statewide TV campaign ad for governor included a Confederate flag. In 2000, when a voter told Allen, "Long live the Confederate flag!" Allen replied, "You got it!"
Allen has confirmed that the pin in his high school yearbook was a Confederate flag. Allen has said "it is possible" that he had a Confederate flag on his car in high school. He has not responded to the allegations that he displayed the flag on his pickup truck and in his room in college and law school. In 1993, he confirmed that he had long displayed the Confederate flag in his living room. Greg Stevens, the political consultant who made the 1993 TV ad, confirmed that the ad included a Confederate flag.
I say remember this guy’s name, because from the chattering on the Right I’m hearing, this is the guy the Bush power base Really Likes…the one they’re going to anoint as the next republican candidate for president of the United States. And here’s what they’ll be sending to the White House if they succeed:
Democrat James Webb’s Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.
S.R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, had been trailing Allen with a video camera to document his travels and speeches for the Webb campaign. During a campaign speech Friday in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen singled out Sidarth and called him a word that sounded like "Macaca."
"This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film and its great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he’s never been there and probably will never come."
After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls," Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.
"Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia," said Allen, who then began talking about the "war on terror."
The Webb staffer in question…
Macaca…I hear you asking (assuming you’re as naive about these things as I am)? Well…Atrios was wondering too…
I was thinking that the assumption that George Felix Allen had been invoking a species of monkey was a bit of a stretch and that he was probably just speaking gibberish for "furrin name." But it is actually an established racial/slur, specifically directed at North Africans. If you search the nastier corners of the internet you’ll find it’s in surprisingly common usage.
Here…from the List Of Ethnic Slurs…
Macaque (Belgium & France) a Negro (originally) or a person of North-African origin (more recently); derived from macaque monkeys
What you need to notice about this, more then the slur itself, is the arcane nature of the slur. I’ve heard racist slurs tossed around, sometimes casually and thoughtlessly, and sometimes with bitter venom, probably no more or less then any other average white America male has (and I’m sure a good deal less then the average black American has…). I was a school kid during the worst of the late 20th century race riots, the great civil rights march on Washington, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers. I’ve heard plenty of racist catcalls in my lifetime. This one was new to me. But apparently fairly common among the hard core racist set. That’s what you need to notice.
If you think this will hurt Allen in Virginia, you are sadly mistaken. If you thought Bush was the bottom of the barrel, think again. There is no bottom.
In my grade school years I devoured westerns, mostly Louis L’Amour, and science-fiction, mostly hard, mostly Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement style stuff, but also Ray Bradbury’s poetic mindbenders, and E.E. Smith’s space operas and James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations. Once upon a time I adored Larry Niven’s "Known Space" tales. Then I read an interview with him in Future Life magazine (back in the 70s), where he averred in response to a question about gay rights, that giving homosexuals what they wanted would be a good way of breeding them out of the population (I’ve always wondered what Kerry O’Quinn, the publisher, thought when he read that). That was when I began to realize that science fiction folk weren’t necessarily a very broad minded lot.
Year later I’d run into the same set of knuckle dragging prejudices among fantasy world fans and authors. I and a few other readers had an online…er…disagreement…with Richard Pini, co-author of the Elfquest series of comics, about the absence of gay elves in the storyline. Understand that by that time it had been very, Very well established that the Pini’s elves were a thoroughly uninhibited lot (the orgy scene in EQ 17 comes to mind…). It has always struck me as downright bizarre that Richard and Wendy Pini could write a storyline that had as its major plot device, the mating of a female elf with wolves in order to produce a race of elves better adapted to their world, and yet be so goddamned squeamish about the idea of same sex elven lovers.
But people Do learn and grow. A younger Wil Wheaton once mouthed off crap about gays in Star Trek that an older Wil Wheaton would later regret and apologize for. In fact, Wheaton later did volunteer work against a California referendum against same sex marriage because it so outraged him (that, and the fact that he’s a fellow geek, is why he’s on my blog roll).
But you still see an amazing amount of anti-gay crap in science-fiction and fantasy fandom and it’s a big reason why, much as I still like the genres, I keep the scene at arm’s length. I was doing a little research the other day, and came across some reader reviews of Red King, one of the latest in the Star Trek franchise novels. Apparently one or more characters in it (I haven’t read it) are gay. This causes some concern to one reader…
Too much diversity!
Star Trek novels are known for introducing a variety of different species, cultures, and religions, but this series bombards the reader with so many at once that the storyline becomes muddled and one is left begging for a glossary. I hope that the third book, written by a different author, will narrow its focus somewhat.
I don’t take issue with the authors for including a gay character in the books. It makes sense, with that many different species, that someone would be. What I find annoying is that they focus so much time on him and seem to feel the need to have one of the other characters either make a pass at him or give him that "knowing look" in each one of the books. He’s gay, I get it! Get on with the the exploration and adventure!
…and outrage by another.
Gay, Gay, Gay. Enough Already
Gene Roddenberry creator of Star Trek established via interviews and convention appearances that he felt that homosexuality was a desease that would no longer exist in the 23rd century. It is a slap in the face to his vision and his ideas to fill his universe with gay characters when it is so against what Star Trek stood for (social illnesses being done away with). I could tolerate this inclusion in the story if the writers, one of which is gay, hadn’t tried to shovel it down my throught every time I came across one of their gay characters. I can only hope that these characters will be pushed back or their preferences buried in the next installment in the series now that they are no longer being written by the two that penned this book. Not Recommended unless you are into the gay scene
As I said, I haven’t read the book, but I strongly doubt that Paramount would let pornography be published under their own imprint. So probably the only thing on display in that book would have been another character little different from any of the other Trek characters save that they mate to their own sex. As opposed to…I dunno…a wolf or something. Yet that’s all it takes for some folks to start bellyaching about gay being shoved down their throats. Well…let it be said that not everyone agreed…
…dumb a*s! Gene Roddenberry never said that he thought homosexuality is a disease. Get your sh*t right! Stupid people like this are what make Star Trek’s future look so promising. Because people like L. Redman won’t be around. People like him with his type of belief will be long extinct. Dumb Sh*t! If you like Star Trek read the book. It’s good.
Gene Roddenberry did announce shortly before his death, that Star Trek: The Next Generation would begin featuring gay characters on a regular basis. But after he died, that promise was quickly trashcanned by Paramount. In fact to this day the Trek universe has no regular gay characters in it. I don’t think it’s because the executives at Paramount share the views of the reader above, who said that homosexuality is a disease that will be cured by the 24th century, but it might as well be. Roddenberry understood that stories about the future, are really stories about who we are now. And who we are now is Brokeback Mountain couldn’t win best picture, because John Wayne was rolling over in his grave.
“Just to get Star Trek on TV was an astounding move,” George Takei–the openly gay actor who starred as Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu–says in an interview with AfterElton. “The program execs were baffled. They did not know what to do with it! Now, we are in the 21st century, and this is speculation, but I really think that if Gene were still with us today, he would have been equally bold for our times today and addressed the issue of equality for gays, lesbians, transgenders and bisexuals.”
So, why hasn’t Star Trek entered this final frontier?
Many blame Rick Berman, Star Trek’s longtime executive producer. While Berman has never publicly said he has no plans in the long-term for gay characters on the show, many fans have read cryptic messages into some things he has mentioned over the years. In a 2002 interview with USAToday.com, Berman addresses the subject matter.
“That was really the wishful thinking of some people who were constantly at us,” Berman states. “But we don’t see heterosexual couples holding hands on the show, so it would be somewhat dishonest of us to see two gay men or lesbians holding hands.”
But in Star Trek: Insurrection, Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) are seen holding hands at the end of the movie. Indeed, Star Trek has often shown characters kissing and embracing. And fans have desired more than just handholding, hoping instead for a well-rounded character with as many virtues and flaws as their heterosexual counterparts.
In an exclusive interview with AfterElton, Andy Mangels–Trek’s only openly gay writer, having written over a dozen Star Trek themed novels–says he believes blame lies with Berman. “I have never met Rick Berman, and he has never expressed any specific attitudes directly to me. That said, not one single actor, staff member, or Paramount employee has ever once defended him from charges of homophobia, and many have accused him of it.
"Berman was ultimately responsible for killing almost every pitch for gay characters, and in interviews, was mealy-mouthed and waffling about the need for GLB T representation. At the very least, he was gutless and didn’t care about GLBT representation. From the information and evidence I’ve seen, heard, and read, I believe that Berman is the reason we never saw gays on Star Trek I shed no tears that he’s gone, except that he did his best to ruin the franchise on his way out.”
For all the digs and jokes about MySpace, I’m finding it a cheerful place to meet people and chat about this and that. That’s more then I expected when I joined, which btw was only so I could communicate with other people in the center of the Love In Action protests back in the summer of 2005. A fun MySpace thing are the random surveys and questions people exchange with others on their friends list, via ‘bulletins’. One came my way a few days ago, a dare of sorts, and reticent little dweeb that I still am inside, I decided to risk it myself:
ONE QUESTION
You get to ask me 1 Question (TO MY INBOX)…any one question, no matter how crazy it is, and I promise to answer it truthfully…the catch is…you have to repost this and see what people ask you….so go for it…
I got a few bites, some of which really made me think. One asked me how I would compare my hopes and fears about my future and the future of my country now, as compared to when I was 21. Considering that I turned 21 within a few weeks after Nixon resigned, the question really floored me: the more I thought about it, the more I realized how vastly different America is now, from what it was then, and how far down the right wing has dragged us since those days, since Reagan. I’m still pondering my answer to him, but it’s really hard to look at how much damage has been done.
Another one came the other day asking me what my proof of the existence of God is. In another survey I’d joked that beautiful guys were my proof that there is a God. My questioner, an atheist, wanted a bit more detail.
The question managed to open the door a tad to that place inside of me where I talk to God; where I’m still a six year old boy, laying on his back on a warm summer night, looking up at the stars and wondering what they are. I thought I’d share my answer. The country is in a grip of fundamentalist hysteria, the central conceit of which is that those of us who aren’t "bible believing Christians" have no faith, no spirituality, no reverence, no sense of awe and rapture, no morals, no values higher then the pleasure of the moment. We’re all just skating by, just cheating our way through life. But it is not those of us who are willing stand before the creation, before the great work of nature, just as we are, and let it speak for itself, who are the cheats.
No…that was just me being ironic. You hear heterosexual guys saying the same thing about beautiful women being their proof that there is a god.
Until you get to the point that you can even say you understand how the universe was created in the first place, I really don’t think you can claim you have a proof that there is a creator. My thoughts about God are mostly along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, when he said "I believe in God but I spell it Nature." I don’t look to the bible or any sort of holy writ, other then the natural world, which I take to be the firsthand testament of the creator itself. When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird. But I admit the natural world reveals no objective evidence of a creator. And that doesn’t really surprise or distress me. I am fine with that and not really interested in whether others share my spiritual beliefs or not. Just that we’re all free to live by our conscience in these matters. I care very much about that.
I feel a great spiritual exaltation whenever I contemplate the fundamentals of physics and nature, and a deep spiritual gratitude toward whatever it was that created this amazing and beautiful universe, and whether or not it amounts to any sort of consciousness, or anything a human mind could grasp as being an consciousness, is not a question I can answer, or worry about all that much. I ponder it often but I don’t worry about it. I have no proof to offer you or anyone else, nor any doctrine nor creed nor theology to impart, other then don’t stop asking questions, and don’t be afraid to discard answers that don’t work anymore. The tree that stops growing is dead.
I am blessed with a body that reacts…strongly…to mood altering drugs of any sort. Alcohol, marijuana, whatever. It never took much to get me blasted as a teen, and beings as I was usually zonked pretty quickly, I never really had more fun if I did more…just pass out. I’m convinced this is why I never fell into any cycle of addiction and recovery. It certainly kept me from becoming addicted to cigarettes.
I still vividly remember my first toke on a cigarette. I was 11 or 12, and one day my friends and I found an unopened pack of Winstons in a construction site near our apartments. We took it to our private hang out and passed them around. That first puff was my last. It felt like my entire body was under attack. My lungs burned, my skin chilled, my head started to go Right Up Into The Stratosphere. I was hacking and coughing all over the place and for once my friends weren’t making fun of me for not being cool because they were all doing it too. For years after that I wondered why the hell adults smoked. And then I became one.
I smoke the occasional cigar now. It’s a gentler, more mellow nicotine buzz, and I don’t have to drag the smoke into my lungs to get it. And I can tell you exactly why I do it. Stress. Work deadline stress mostly, but also the stress of my life at times. I’m single, and when you’re single you don’t get the chance to have those heart to heart talks about life with someone you trust intimately. So I paint, I draw, I blog, and I go for solitary walks, sometimes with a cigar in hand, just trying to mellow out. And like those other highs it doesn’t take much, and that keeps my tobacco usage down. But I’m aware of the dangers, and when I walk past the Baltimore Gay Community Center sometimes, and I see a bunch of gay kids hanging out, and at least half of them are smoking, I get angry. Not at them, but at the stresses in their lives. It doesn’t take much to figure why you see more gay then straight teens smoking.
Not much that is, if you have half a brain and a functional conscience. Which brings me to the post I saw the other day on Stacy Harp’s blog. You’ll recall Stacy as the anti-gay activist who just the other week was pushing Guy Adams’ claims that raping babies is the newest trend among gays. But, baby sodomizers though we are, Stacy still cares about our health. Really. Stacy thinks the gay community should sue the tobacco industry.
…according to The San Francisco Chronicle the gay community has a higher rate of smoking than the heterosexual community. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, because according to the article gays smoke because of stress, they go to bars (DUH) and the advertisers are victimizing the gay community because they are intentionally targeting the gay community because they know they are stressed out more than any other community.
So much, so obvious. For instance, you’d be kinda stressed too if you had crackpots going around telling your neighbors that you were a having sex with infants because you thought it was trendy. But…no. The problem with linking higher incidence of smoking (and overall drug abuse) among gay people with stress is that’s a finger pointing right back at the likes of…er…Stacy. And the finger must always point to homosexuals. Whatever happens to gay people, whether it’s drug abuse, suicide or violence, it must always be their own fault. Their blood is upon them…
But this is interesting, according to the article…
Gay smokers have their own theories on why they smoke: the club and bar scene, trouble finding dates and falling in love, high alcohol- and drug-abuse rates in the community. Sometimes, smoking is related to a lack of family connections, which can cause stress and also remove pressure to stop smoking once someone has started.
and this….
"Gay people probably smoke longer because we’re not as family- oriented. If you don’t have kids and raise a family, you don’t need to stop," said John Daly, 41, who has smoked for 25 years. "We don’t have the same responsibilities. We can be reckless a little longer."
OH…okay…so now we know why the gay community smokes so much, and here I thought that we are being told constantly by the gay community activists that their lives are just like the normal heterosexual’s life. And yet, in the gays own words they admit that they use stink sticks because they are not as "family oriented", "don’t have kids or raise a family" and "can be reckless", as well as are "drug users" and "alcohol abusers".
Right. Our lives are just like the normal heterosexual’s life, if normal heterosexuals had multi-million dollar political hate machines working hard year after year to deny them the right to marry, the right to raise children, the right to so much as be with their spouse in an emergency room. Our lives are just like the normal life of heterosexuals who have to live under the cloud of one relentless propaganda campaign after another, telling their parents, their siblings, their co-workers, their neighbors that, for example, they’re all busy raping babies. Our lives are just like that of any other heterosexuals who have to listen to the sound of pulpits thumping from one end of the country to the other about how they’re going to burn in hell because god hates them, god condemns them, and everyone else should too. That kind of normal heterosexual family life.
Stacy thinks we ought to be outraged.
As for me, I’m not going to hold my breath (unless some stinky smoker is around) waiting for the gay community to go after the tobacco companies… or the bars or alcohol companies. But if I was gay, I’d sure as heck be very mad that these companies are targeting my community and hoping to snag my community with deadly substances that could kill my community off quicker than if we didn’t all drink and smoke.
Hmmm. Double standard…it’s okay for the tobacco and alcohol communties to push a deadly substance on the gay community, and no outrage. But when someone who is trying to help the gay community tells them they should stop having sex, especially sex with someone who has HIV, you get persecuted.
Not to mention being persecuted just for politely telling us not to have sex with babies please. Yes…we’re a cranky lot.
That last one being in reaction to a news article I came across in July of 2004, about a Utah anti smoking campaign directed a gay youth that lost its funding because…well…it was directed at gay youth…
For eight months, the "Queers Kick Ash" campaign hummed along, spreading its anti-tobacco message to Utah’s gay and lesbian community with help from a state grant.
During that time, records show the Utah Department of Health routinely approved and funded promotional materials – posters, banners, T-shirts, newspaper ads, even a Web site – for the campaign by the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Utah. Then, in mid-May, several students were disciplined at Hillcrest High for wearing "Queers Kick Ash" T-shirts.
A few weeks later, the Health Department yanked the funding – an expected $200,000 over the next two years – and the anti-tobacco campaign fizzled. Ever since then, the community center has wondered why it lost the funding.
"We’ve made phone calls, mailed letters and sent faxes – and nothing," said Tami Marquardt, the center’s acting executive director. "They haven’t had the courtesy or the public decency to give us an answer. I don’t know why they won’t talk to anyone if this is all aboveboard. This is nothing but a homophobic cover-up. It’s discrimination, pure and simple."
For its part, the Health Department – in a June 1 letter from Heather Borski, manager of the department’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Program – maintains that it opted not to renew the center’s grant to "prevent the anti-tobacco health message from being overshadowed by unrelated advocacy activity."
Richard Milton, the department’s deputy director, and two department spokeswomen would not define "unrelated advocacy activity."
"Our statement speaks for itself," Milton said Friday. "It’s a question of interpretation."
Let me hazard an interpretation: You can’t target gay youth with an anti-smoking message directed specifically to them, because that might lead them to think we actually care what the fuck happens to the little faggots.
Well if I was Stacy Harp I’d be outraged that the state of Utah withdrew funding for an anti-smoking program that targeted gay youth. Wait…no. If I was Stacy Harp I’d have probably taken up smoking years ago, due to the constant stress of trying not to see a gutter crawling bigot every time I looked in a mirror.
Excuse me, while I look down into the Pit for a little while…
What kind of adult takes a good kid, who doesn’t do drugs, behaves decently to other people, and works hard enough in school that they make the honor roll one goddamn year after another after another after another, and tries to make them feel insecure and worthless inside?
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