These were all taken on my circle through the Four Corners area during the summer of 2004. I developed them as soon as I got home, but for some reason they’d just sat in my library until this week, when their turn came up in the Big Scan. What’s so great about this new photographer’s software I’m using now (Aperture), is that I don’t need to make contact prints of everything anymore. I can get a real good sense of what I have on film right after I’ve scanned it all in, which I’ll be doing more frequently here now that I’ve got a system set up for it.
Sometimes you just overload when you visit a place like the Four Corners, where everywhere you look there are stunning views. By the time I came back home in 2004 I’d completely forgotten about some of these images. My jaw was literally dropping the other day when I looked at them after scanning them in after several years had passed. My next photo gallery here will probably be of some of my Four Corners stuff.
Yes, the republicans are horrible on the issue of GLBT equality. Absolutely horrible. I’ve been a yellow dog democrat ever since Connie Morella voted for the Defense Of Marriage Act. Morella, a so-called moderate republican, absolutely did not have to cast that vote to hold onto her seat…if anything casting it helped lead to her eventually being turned out of office. To add insult to injury she said, when questioned about it she averred that the entire same sex marriage issue was too much. She said it was like the world being turned upside down. I wanted to scream in her face, "Lady, spend a few days in Sharon Bottom’s shoes…and you’ll know what a world turned upside down looks like!!!"
But having said all that, we need to remember that not all democrats can be trusted either. Some of them will look us right in the eye, and lie through their teeth. One blogger asks our forgiveness, for supporting one of them…but I don’t think he has anything to apologize for…
Blue America doesn’t ask much of our prospective endorsees. On GLBT issues, for example, we don’t ask them to promise to support a gay marriage bill; we just ask them if they will fight for gay equality, even if they have to exhibit some leadership in a tough environment. If they can’t do that, we may still root for them to beat a much worse Republican, but we don’t raise money for them. We expect the candidates we endorse and raise money for to support a woman’s right to choice, to support serious campaign finance reform, to favor serious proposals to end the occupation of Iraq, to support gay equality– and, like I said, to be willing to exercise leadership on difficult issues. I mean, sure, we want candidates who are for the minimum wage and who oppose the dismantling of Social Security, but those should be the easy issues for Democrats.
Fair enough. But the word of some politicians isn’t even worth the hot air it took them to speak it…
We don’t expect the men and women we support to necessarily support the same position we do on every single vote. But even in the short time Carney has been in Congress, he has moved further and further away from all the other Blue America endorsees who won seats. In terms of supporting progressive issues in general, he has established himself at the bottom of the barrel among the freshmen, along with candidates we chose not to endorse, like Jason Altmire (PA), Rahm Emanuel’s Heath Shuler (NC), Nick Lampson (TX) and Brad Ellsworth (IN). Some of us were disappointed but none of the writers at DownWithTyranny, Firedoglake or Crooks & Liars chose to castigate Carney. And then something happened that has made us decide to speak up. We realized Chris Carney lied to us. When he wanted our support he told us he favors equality for the GLBT community, something he also made clear to the folks at Project Vote Smart, when he checked the little box that indicates he would like to "Require that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes."
So weren’t we in for a surprise a few days ago when Congressman Carney joined 13 of the most die-hard reactionary Democrats in the House– near-Republicans who almost always support a reactionary social agenda– to vote against the Hate Crimes bill. The bill passed 237-180 and all but 14 Democrats supported… well, supported exactly what Carney promised in his campaign he would support, "that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes." I felt betrayed– like I had been kicked in the stomach. Based on my research and interview with candidate Carney, Blue America had endorsed him and hundreds of our members had donated effort and money to his campaign. Some of these donors are members of the GLBT community and others have friends and family who are part of that community and others just like to think that the candidates they contribute to will support equality as a core value. Chris Carney let us down, violently.
I requested an opportunity to speak with him and went back and forth with his office a few times until they finally sent me this e-mail:
Hi Howie, I have a short statement for you that I hope will be sufficient. This statement has been issued exclusively to you. Please let me know that you received it. Thanks.
Congressman Carney has not wavered from his original position of equality. Treating people the same is one of his core values, creating separate constitutional classes detracts from that goal. This was overarching legislation that created too many classes of people, and Congressman Carney could not support it.
This was a difficult decision and some of our supporters will disagree. As always, Congressman Carney voted with what he saw to be the best interests of Pennsylvania’s 10th District.
I explained that sending me the Republican Party talking points — which have long and routinely been used by the party of hatred and bigotry to try to please their rabidly homophobic base while covering their asses is not satisfactory.
Tough shit…he’s in office now. To get him out you’re probably going to have to allow a republican to take the seat back unless you want to put up a scorched earth fight during the primary.
But at least we know. Chris Carney (PA-10). Remember this man. He will look you right in the eye, and lie through his teeth.
I’m copying the whole of this post by Atrios because I think he really hits it as to what has changed fundamentally now about many American’s relationship to the news media…
In the post below I had meant to prominently include the 2000 election recount/selection as a cause of a major online lefty boom. While that was the time when I began to turn to the web for news/perspectives I couldn’t find elsewhere, it wasn’t actually until the inauguration that I finally concluded that something was seriously messed up, and that the problem was the media. I never had any illusions that Supreme Court Justices were noble people above reproach or that politicians could be trusted. I did at some point, however, have the sense that the mainstream media – CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, network news – while imperfect wasn’t completely broken. It was the coverage of the inauguration that did it for me.
You may remember that this was a cold and rainy day, truly miserable. Nonetheless thousands of protesters had gathered. However, most Americans would have no idea this was happening. Switching back and forth between coverage by the television networks, and the somewhat more raw footage carried by C-SPAN, it was apparent just how much effort the networks were expending to hide this fact from their viewing public. They would frequently cut away from the parade, provide odd camera angles, and do anything to maintain the illusion that the coronation was proceeding blissfully. The following day, for its inauguration coverage, the New York Times published a photo of George W. Bush walking the parade route. As discussed in Dennis Loy Jonson’s The Big Chill, this was an entirely staged photo. Bush had been unable to follow in the tradition established by Carter and carried on Ronald Reagan, Bush’s father, and Bill Clinton. The presence of the protesters prevented this, and it wasn’t until after Bush had left the public parade route, and was behind a barrier, that he could briefly hop out of the limousine and wave for the cameras. The Times had established a practice which impacted much of the media’s reporting on the activities of the Bush administration. They signaled a willingness to report things not as they necessarily were but as the administration wished to present them.
Emphasis above are mine. For me, the moment when I finally came to the conclusion that something is seriously messed up and the problem is the media, came at the tail end of a slow steady accumulation of small observations that they were becoming part of the spin. And that was preceded by many years of watching the quality of the news broadcasts getting thinner and thinner, as the right wing became more and more skilled at intimidating and undermining the press.
For decades, literally, I’d watched the news media cover the gay rights movement with that faux even handedness that demands that gutter crawling bigots be granted equal stature while on camera, even when it meant they could spread one filthy lie after another about gay and lesbian Americans without any of it being challenged as nonfactual, because to do so would be "taking sides" in a "controversial topic." I’ve been writing here for years now that this behavior, this faux even handedness on the part of the news media was probably more painfully familiar to gay America then to straight. Even so, my jaw kept dropping again and again during the Bush years, as staringly obvious Bush white house lies were simply passed along without comment by the press.
I don’t know when exactly I’d finally concluded that the media had embedded themselves in the Bush spin machine, but the ghastly performance during MISSION ACCOMPLISHED day was what finally convinced me that they really were part of the problem. As a gay man, all the fawning adoration of Bush’s "masculinity" on that carrier deck by the news media and the Washington pundocracy that day, and in the weeks that followed, struck me as…weird. Very, very weird.
The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.
Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”
This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.
–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003
……
MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?
LIDDY: Well, I—in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know—and I’ve worn those because I parachute—and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count—they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.
…..
MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.
Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.
Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…
MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.
Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.
MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.
It was only later I heard from other pilots that the usual thing is to take off your parachute harness once you’re out of the airplane. But you knew he was deliberately calling attention to his genitals the moment you saw it. Bush kept the parachute harness on and swaggered around that carrier deck in pure frat boy jock sneerage, like some alpha ape wagging his dong around looking for a fight after he’s just beaten the crap out of another poor ape half his size. It was amazing. Another time, it seemed long long ago, I might have been appalled. But the longer its gone on, the more desensitized I’ve become to it. There is a sizable portion of America that a man like that really does adequately represent. And they really do enjoy making the rest of us flinch at the sight of that open sewer they call a conscience.
We are sexual beings, yes. And brazen male sexuality can be an awesomely thrilling thing to behold. This gay boy has beheld lots of defiantly brazen sexual posturing among human males. But there is a difference when it’s meant to get you all hot and bothered and when it’s sneering and disdainful and meant only to intimidate and threaten. And even then, even in the old human struggle for status and power and glory, the sexual posturing of the more recently evolved alpha males among us is more a subtext then a crude locker room joke. But for those males among us with small frontal lobes, the sexual component of aggression takes center stage the minute the chest thumping begins.
"Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out."
It was always obvious what kind of man Bush was. It was clear to me after November 2000 that there were enough people in this country just like him to take the nation straight into the gutter if the rest of us didn’t start fighting back hard, and quickly. What really bothered me that day, and in the weeks that followed, was watching how many people in the mainstream news media were actually turned on by the sight of Bush swaggering around that carrier deck all but flashing his dick at the world…
I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking–how to put it?–really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly "hot," as in virile, sexy and powerful.
-Lisa Schiffren, The Wall Street Journal 5/9/2003
So I’m watching all this gushing and fawning, all these media big shots getting the vapors over Junior’s Manly Characteristic, along with thugs like G. Gordon Liddy and I’m getting that same smarmy feeling I’ve had a time or two, stumbling onto something going on in the bathroom stalls at the back of some really seedy gay bar I’d been dragged into. When sex gets dragged into the toilet you don’t know whether to cry or puke. You just want to look away and get the hell out of there. Except the shadowy figures in the toilet stalls have more dignity then these goddamned news media talking heads. At least there is honest desire going on in there. I watched the American news media having hot flashes over Bush all but wagging his dick at the world after he’d just started a war and I think that was when I knew that far too many media big shots nowadays were part of the same open sewer that Bush had risen from, and that was why they were cheering him on, why they thumped their chests for war too, why they hate democrats, why they treat all that bleeding heart liberal peace love and understanding stuff with sneering contempt. It wasn’t that they were stupid. It wasn’t that they’d been co-opted. It was that the smirking boob really was their kind of guy.
It’s not just the news media either. Ever notice how, on the prime time TV cop shows, the good guys can threaten suspects and witnesses with prison rape unless they cooperate, and still remain good guys?
Digby, riffing off Glen Greenwald, smacks around the cutlure of High Broderism.
Joseph Kraft defined "Middle America" as a blue collar or rural white male, "traditional in his values and defensive against innovation." Ever since then, the denizens of the beltway have deluded themselves into thinking they speak for that "silent majority." (And what a serendipitous coincidence it was that this happened at the moment of a right wing political ascension that also made a fetish out of the same blue collar white male.) The converse of this, of course, is that they also assume that the "fringe" liberals from the coasts are way out of the mainstream, even to the extent that editors of Time simply make up data to conform to Kraft’s outdated observations.
It reached the zenith of synergistic absurdity during the Lewinsky scandal when the cosmopolitan beltway courtiers finally went all in and portrayed themselves as as the salt-of-the-earth provincial town folk who were appalled by the misbehavior ‘o them out-a-towners from thuh big city:
When Establishment Washingtonians of all persuasions gather to support their own, they are not unlike any other small community in the country.
On this evening, the roster included Cabinet members Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala, Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Bob Livingston, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, PBS’s Jim Lehrer and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, all behaving like the pals that they are. On display was a side of Washington that most people in this country never see. For all their apparent public differences, the people in the room that night were coming together with genuine affection and emotion to support their friends — the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt and his wife, CNN’s Judy Woodruff, whose son Jeffrey has spina bifida.
But this particular community happens to be in the nation’s capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders — the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.
They call the capital city their "town."
And their town has been turned upside down.
Here you had the most powerful people in the world identifying themselves with Bedford Falls from "It’s A Wonderful Life" when the court of Versailles or Augustan Rome would be far more more apt. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Thirty years after Kraft’s epiphany, this decadent world capital that had recently seen the likes of Richard Nixon’s crimes and John F. Kennedy’s philandering (and corruption of all types, both moral and legal at the highest levels for years), were now telling the nation that they themselves were small town burghers and factory workers upholding traditional American values. And even more amazing, the rest of America was now morally suspect and needed to be led by these purveyors of Real American values:
Why Less Then Half Of My Generation Even Bother With PCs
Via Slashdot… The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a report outlining who among us are using computers and computer technology regularly. About half of my generation hardly even bother with it all. God, I hope they’re not all getting their news from Fox…
Memo To A Certain Someone Down In Orlando: Yes…I know. Computer technology can be a real bear sometimes. And my trade is largely responsible for that, and I’m sorry. We should listen to the people who have to use the stuff we create better then we do. But there is a whole wide wonderful and enriching world out there that you’re missing. A world where a casual stroll down a trail can take you from Mark Twain to H.L. Mencken to Einstein to the study of extra-solar planets. The blazes on these trails span the written word to the spoken one, to new music, paintings, photography from all over the world. An afternoon hike can take you across time and space, to the light from near the beginning of time. It’s worth the hassle it often still is. Really.
Every day I go to work I am reminded of how lucky I am to be a part of the human exploration of space. Some days more then most. The crew of the SM4 servicing mission to Hubble came to the Institute today and after conferring with the astronomers, gave the staff a little talk in the main auditorium. It’s the forth time I’ve had the experience of listening to them firsthand and it always leaves me ecstatic. How many times in a lifetime do you get to be a part of something like this? I am so lucky, so fortunate.
Never in my wildest dreams when I was a little space cadet did I ever think seriously I’d ever get to be a part of the space effort. Never. I grew up with little expectations beyond maybe having a series of jobs shuffling boxes from one end of a warehouse to another. There was no money for college…some in mom’s side of the family never thought I’d amount to anything at all. I remember one jerk in high school who told me without a doubt I’d end up a truck driver like my dad. As if there’s anything wrong with being a truck driver…but he was from the well-to-do side of the tracks. Never mind that I have a house of my own now, a nice car, and an income better then my wildest dreams. The other day at one of our happy hours, my D.C. friends got started talking about the Hubble images, and one mentioned that the Deep Field was God for him. I know the feeling. To think that now I’m part of a team that gathers light from near the beginning of time and brings it to the world for people to see is just amazing. I’m playing a small, very small, part in writing a few new lines in the book of human knowledge. Seriously, what more could I ask of life?
Well…a boyfriend of course…but I guess you can’t have it all…
I brought my best 35mm film cameras and lenses to work today, and when the time for the assembly came I was dressed up in full photographer drag: two Canon F1 bodies hanging around my neck and one of my new gadget bags…a nice Tamrac shaped a bit like a teardrop so it hangs better around your body then the old bulky one I used to carry around in high school. I had my best big glass lenses with me: the 50mm f1.2, the 24mm f.14, the 80mm f1.8 and the 135mm f2. I could take better available light shots with those inside the auditorium then with the 17-70mm f5.6 zoom on my EOS 30D. I hate using flash, especially in a crowd. It distracts people, and calls attention to yourself. I want to be invisible when I’m taking pictures. But good available light lenses for the EOS cameras are too damn expensive, and when a digital image detector starts getting noisy, which they will if you have to kick up the sensitivity to take pictures in low light situations, it’s really, really ugly. I tried that when Senator Mikulski came to the Institute after the SM4 mission was given the final go-ahead, and the digital noise in the resulting images was just awful. So this time I came with the film cameras, which, yes, are a bit more clumsy to use then the EOS and its quick auto focusing zoom. But I grew up on those cameras and fixed focal length lenses, and I’m used to working with them now, second nature.
Some staff had brought their kids into work to see the astronauts and their questions were just delightful. One kid asked what happens when they’re suited up for a space walk and they have to go to the bathroom. Another asked how they deal with getting itchy. The astronauts loved taking their questions, and they treated all of them seriously. When I was that age I think I would have just been awed into silence.
After the assembly we all gathered outside the front of the Institute for the traditional group photo with the astronauts. I wandered around the front of the crowd taking pictures while everyone was getting ready, and Matt Mountain, the director of the Institute, must have briefly mistaken me for the official photographer in my camera drag because he asked me where I wanted the astronauts to be. Embarrassed, I told him I was just a staff member. I was far from the only one there with cameras of course, but I guess I still have this air about me when I’m busy with my cameras looking for shots. And I admit that sometimes I make use of that when I want to get a shot. Once upon a time I did it professionally, and thought that one day it would be my living. I can still get myself into that mindset with very little effort.
Later as the crowd was gathering back inside I managed to get a few more casual shots of the astronauts mingling with the staff and their kids, below the big model of Hubble in the main lobby. I was switching lenses between the cameras and my clumsy middle aged fingers fumbled my good 135mm f2 lens and dropped it hard on the tile floor. I was sure I’d be picking up pieces of lens glass, but there was only a small dent on the filter ring after all. So I guess I won’t be mounting any filters on that lens now, but thankfully the glass and the mechanism were undamaged. Those old Canon FD lenses, like the cameras themselves, were made to take a beating that the new stuff never could. Had that been one of the EOS lenses it would surely have been ruined.
I don’t know yet if they’ll do it this time too, but on previous servicing missions the staff was allowed to sign a small poster the astronauts would take into space. So my signature has been into space a couple times. Not quite anything like actually having an instrument I made go up, or for that matter myself. But I can say at the end of my life that a piece of me has been in space. But more then that, I can say I’ve been part of a team that’s written a few new lines into the book of human knowledge. I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have this chance in life, to be a part of space. When I was a kid, I sat with my little Kodak Brownie Fiesta camera in front of the TV set while Neil Armstrong made the first human footprint on the moon, and snapped off a couple shots. I’d experimented a few weeks before with different films and lighting, so I knew what would work. Remember back then home VCRs were still years in the future. I didn’t quite get the framing right…the Brownie wasn’t exactly an SLR after all…but it was good enough…
When they offered me the job at Space Telescope some years ago, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I still feel that way.
The salacious "Life is short. Get a divorce" billboard with barely clothed models was ripped from its Rush Street perch one week after it went up and one day after the Sun-Times reported it.
The story was picked up internationally, running on CNN, MSNBC, ABC’s "Good Morning America" — even on "The View."
That’s not the kind of publicity Chicago officials wanted as they seek to host the 2016 Olympics, say supporters of attorney Corri Fetman.
"They ripped our billboard down without due process," Fetman said. "We own that art. I feel violated."
Well take heart…seems it wasn’t about the message after all…
But it wasn’t a moral crusade that brought down the billboard — it was the lack of a proper permit, claimed Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd), who leaves the City Council this month after 36 years.
A billboard that reads, "Life is short. Get a divorce." Framed by two sexy models showing lots of skin, muscles and pecs on the guy and really big tits on the gal. Just never you mind. Homosexuals are trying to destroy the institution of marriage. Remember…homosexuals are trying to destroy the institution of marriage.
Legalizing gay marriage would "only strengthen New York’s families," according to Governor Spitzer, who laid forth his most detailed argument in favor of recognizing same-sex relationships in a legislative memo.
Mr. Spitzer, who late last month became the nation’s first governor to propose legislation legalizing gay marriage, articulated a legal and moral argument in defense of the bill in a two-page "statement in support" that is being distributed to lawmakers.
The governor’s forceful language adds even more contrast between his position and that of the major Democratic candidates for president, including Senator Clinton, all of whom oppose gay marriage but favor civil unions.
Supporters of the bill said they were heartened and surprised by the governor’s appeal and said they viewed it as another sign that gay marriage could become a more mainstream Democratic position. While Mr. Spitzer’s stance is not shared by his party’s top-tier White House hopefuls, it could become a more widely accepted position within the party by 2012, when Mr. Spitzer, a nationally known political figure, may be a candidate for president.
The memo, which was prepared by the governor’s counsel, directly confronts one of the main arguments made by opponents of gay marriage, who have warned that allowing same-sex couples to marry would erode the institution of marriage.
"Same-sex couples who wish to marry are not simply looking to obtain additional rights, they are seeking out substantial responsibilities as well: to undertake significant and binding obligations to one another, and to lives of ‘shared intimacy and mutual financial and emotional support,’" the memo states.
"Granting legal recognition to these relationships can only strengthen New York’s families, by extending the ability to participate in this crucial social institution to all New Yorkers."
Opponents of gay marriage said the governor was trying to co-opt their argument.
"He’s couching it in this family values language, which is insulting. He’s trying to turn our argument on its head," a spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, Dennis Poust, said. The conference is the public policy arm of the bishops of New York.
Actually Dennis, the insult was you and all your pals in the American political gutter turning the words "Family" and "Values" into code for prejudice and hate. On its head, did you say? I’m laughing in your face bigot. Your kind has turned two precious human institutions, Family and Marriage on Their heads; from things that nurture and sustain us, into instruments of your cheapshit culture war. May. You. Be. Damned.
The bill memo also suggests that civil unions, adopted by a number of states to confer many of the legal rights enjoyed by married couples, offer insufficient protection.
"Civil marriage is the means by which the state defines a couple’s place in society. Those who are excluded from its rubric are told by the institutions of the State, in essence, that their solemn commitment to one another has no legal weight," the memo says.
Mr. Spitzer also tries to place the legislation in a historical context by arguing that the "history of this country" has been a story of excluded groups achieving access to equal rights. New York has long been a main character in that story, the memo says.
I’m From The Government And I’m Here To Give You The Finger…
President Junior. Loyalty for him runs only one way…
The White House fought back Tuesday against criticism from Kansas’ governor that National Guard deployments to Iraq are slowing the response to last week’s devastating tornado.
White House press secretary Tony Snow said the fault was Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’.
In a spat reminiscent of White House finger-pointing at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco after the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, Snow rapped Sebelius for not following procedure to find gaps and then asking the federal government to fill them.
The difference here of course is that the governor of Lousiana is a Democrat, and the city of New Orleans was mostly black, and it’s pretty damn obvious that Bush and Rove didn’t give a rat’s ass about New Orleans for those very reasons. But…Kansas? Okay, now we really get to see the squalid, petty core of the man who the republican powers that be practically hand picked to be president of the United States. But millions of True Red White and Blue American red staters saw the perfect reflection of their own inner values and moral character, and voted for him estatically…
What you get in exchange for being a loyal republican one-hundred percent American supporter of George Bush, is the benefit of not being put on his petty shit list. That’s it. That’s the only thing you get for kissing his ass year after year. A hearty handshake and a smile that couldn’t be less genuine if it was painted on a brick and the benefit of not being on his shit list. This spoiled, cheapshit good-for-nothing is the bastard he is, probably because he never had to learn how to make friends with anyone. Bullying everyone into cooperating with him is the only way he knows how to deal with people.
And much of red state America saw in him the same cheap resentments they hold within themselves and they voted for him in droves, not because they thought he was the better man but precisely because they knew he wasn’t, and putting him in the White House was as close as they could come to putting their thumbs in the eyes of the rest of America. How pleasurable it must have been, to hear all those blue state voices howling in pain after he was elected. Twice. Oh yes…they were all predicting that nothing good would come of it, that President Codpiece would be a disaster. But so what? It won’t be a disaster for the republican heartland. Just those damn liberals, those damn elitists, those damn dirty hippies, all those pregnant welfare moms, all those uppity coloreds, and those god damn faggots. Their cities can go to hell as far as we’re concerned…
…what is that to us? But when you give power to a man who thinks he’s entitled, he’s going to act like he thinks he’s entitled to use it as he damn well pleases. And now you’re on his shit list too, because you dared to complain.
It’s said that propaganda doesn’t fool anyone, so much as allow people to fool themselves. Ronald Reagan got himself elected saying "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, `I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’" For years now the talk radio babblers have been telling the Constituency Of Resentment that "Government Isn’t The Solution, It’s The Problem". And of course it was…it had to be…once Uncle Sam Uncle Sam started telling them that they had to start treating the coloreds, and their women, with respect and even a little basic human decency. Next thing you know it’ll be the faggots too. Fuck that shit. So they put a cheap bar stool loudmouth asshole in the Whitehouse with the same contempt for government they had. Which was great…just great…as long as it was only cities full of darkies in states with democratic governors that had to suffer for it.
Except now it isn’t.
"I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response is going to be slower," she said Monday. "The real victims here will be the residents of Greensburg, because the recovery will be at a slower pace."
Sebelius said about half the state’s National Guard trucks are in Iraq, equipment that would be helpful in removing debris, and that the state is also missing a number of well-trained personnel.
"The issue for the National Guard is the same wherever you go in the country. Stuff that we would have borrowed is gone," she said
Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, the state’s adjutant general, said the Kansas National Guard was equipped at only about 40 percent of its required levels, down from the 60 percent that it had at the start of the war.
Well you got what you voted for: a government that doesn’t work…a government that Can’t Help when you need it to, because Junior needs his toys over in Iraq, because it was either put the likes of him in power, or let the darkies, the heathens, the women, and the faggots have a share in the American Dream too.
You Might Sample “The Death Cookie” Too, While You’re At It…
Andrew Sullivan discovers Jack Chick…
A 1984 evangelical Christian cartoon pamphlet, helpfully put online here. Don’t tell Hewitt. It could upset the Popular Front. (I think the racial stuff is out of date.)
Wow…you actually can be too big to make a black hole…
In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported yesterday that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.
The cataclysm — a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives — may be an example, they said, of a completely new type of explosion. Such a blast, proposed but never seen, would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilize future stars and planets.
The star in question wasn’t on the fringe of what we can see, toward the beginning of time, but "only" about 240 million light years away.
Astronomers have been following the star since last September, when it was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The discovery was made by Robert Quimby, a University of Texas graduate student, who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Tex., to troll for supernovas.
The star bears an eerie resemblance to Eta Carinae, a star in our own galaxy that has been burbling and bubbling in the last few centuries as if getting ready for its own outburst.The observations suggest that the troubled and enigmatic Eta Carinae, thought to weigh in at about 120 solar masses, could blow up sooner than theorists have thought. Mario Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute…
Hey…I work there!
…who was not involved in the research, said Eta Carinae’s death could be “the most spectacular star show in history.”
They are still haggling over what happened to cause such a massive blast, but they have an interesting idea. The star was so big, that it created matter/antimatter pairs. Specifically, electrons and positrons…
Supernovas come about in two basic ways: explosions of small stars about one and half times the mass of the Sun, which are known as white dwarfs and are uniform enough to serve as cosmological distance markers; and the collapse of the cores of more massive stars into black holes or neutron stars when their thermonuclear fuel has run out.
The astronomers first suspected that the supernova’s dramatic output was caused by the shock wave of a white dwarf exploding into a dense cloud of hydrogen. When observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory failed to find enough X-rays to support that idea, the group was forced to consider an alternative: that the luminosity was produced by the decay of radioactive nickel. But to match the observations, the star would have had to produce 22 solar masses of radioactive nickel — way off scale for the core collapse model.
In desperation, the astronomers turned to a theory proposed nearly 40 years ago by Zalman Barkat of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues. The intensity of radiation in the cores of supermassive stars could be so great, they said, that pairs of electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, would be created.
“That is bad news for the star,” Dr. Livio said, explaining that the disappearance of the radiation would sap the core’s energy and cause the star to collapse. But in this case the star still has plenty of fuel and blows up.
“The core is still composed of explosive oxygen,” explained another of the paper’s authors, J. Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas. “The oxygen ignites and blows the star to smithereens with no remnant, no black hole left.”
Too big to make a black hole…or anything else! Damn. It just blows itself apart. Damn!
The thinking is that there were a lot of these super massive stars around back near the beginning of time. The stars back then, they think, got really, really big. But so big, they figured, that most of the heavier elements they made had to be trapped in the resulting black hole at the end of their lives. And yet astronomers see a lot of heavy elements in the light from those distances. A lot more of it then they’d expected to. So something had to be seeding the early universe with it. Maybe this is what was doing that. Maybe there is an upper limit to how big a star can be in order to make a black hole, and maybe those early super massive stars at the beginning of time didn’t actually make any. Instead they started making antimatter at some point and blew themselves apart before they’d even exhausted their fuel.
Some really neat animations of the explosion, one an artist’s conception of how the explosion took place, and the other from actual observations, first from the PAIRITEL telescope, then an infrared adaptive optics image from Lick Observatory, then Chandra imagery, over at the Chandra project Here.
They say, like a bunch of Johnny One Notes, that the "Gay Agenda" is an assault on families. They say it with the utmost sincerity, while driving their knives into the hearts of families of gay children.
On a recent road trip with my dad I asked him what it was like when he and my mom came to Memphis for the Family and Friends Weekend at LIA, a concentrated family encounter. Here is some of what he said.
We went to the meeting and had no idea of what we were going into. We met a lot of parents in the same category. Lots of kids had no parents there.
Everything seemed to be on the up and up at first. Yeah, but we found out these things aren’t so. I said to them, "You can’t change a zebra’s stripes." They didn’t go along with me, and they were very aggravated with me for saying so. Some people go through two colleges and they don’t have common sense. I hate when people keep things locked up.
They made me feel that I failed you. That’s how I felt after they got through with me. That’s how they made all the parents feel.
Years after I left LIA and I began to write my play, I interviewed my younger sister, Maria, about that time. What she told me broke my heart. She said that when our parents returned home from the Family and Friends Weekend, they were devastated. They didn’t eat right or look right. They acted sad and depressed. This went on for weeks. My sister felt so concerned that she actually called Love in Action and asked, "What did you do to my parents?!" She felt frustrated by the lack of concern or comprehension she encountered from the staff.
My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.
Of course John Smid was nowhere to be seen while all this was going on in Lance’s family. It isn’t just the kids John is heart-wounding. He puts his little mark on the hearts of vulnerable parents too, and other family members, and leaves a wreckage strewn landscape behind he doesn’t even bother looking back on as he walks away from it. Perhaps he’s afraid of turning into a pillar of salt.
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