According to global marketing information firm J.D. Power and Associates, 42 percent of all car buyers … won’t even look at a vehicle built by a U.S. company.
Dave Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of auto research, said [that is] a mistake.
"Many consumers still have a view of the Detroit automakers that the products are not as reliable as the imports, but what our studies show is that that is simply not true," he said.
Detroit has been closing the quality gap in recent years, Sargent said. In a study this summer of three-year-old vehicles, J.D. Power said Buick tied Lexus as the most dependable brand. In another J.D. Power study on quality, Ford won in five categories — more than any other company.
But Sargent said when it comes to cars, it takes years for perception to catch up to reality.
I appreciate the dynamic J.D. Powerman is describing. My own experience with cars designed by the Big Three is an unbroken string of hoopdies. My Honda Civic has run for more years and more miles than my Dodge Colt, Ford Escort, Chevy Cavalier and Chevette combined. Those earlier cars all broke down so often, stranding me at so many key moments, that I can still feel the anxiety of those strandings in my muscle memory. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn. I can’t imagine easily coming around to feeling secure about relying on another Ford or Chevy to get me from point A to point B if I need to get there.
I have no problem with buying an American-made car — my Civic was built by the UAW in Ohio, my Escort was built in Korea — but it will be a long while before I overcome my hard-earned, visceral distrust of Detroit engineering.
That’s me. My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto and I loved it, and got 135k miles out of it (by taking care of the motor fanatically…changing the oil every two-thousand miles and so forth…) and still it broke down on me repeatedly. But it was 1973 and that was just what you expected of cars back then. Except for the Mercedes, which back then was legendary for its bombproof reliability. My mom’s first car was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant slant six (we were carless for most of my childhood), which just ran and ran and ran. But after she traded that one in, she endured a string of just awful Chryslers and I swear I wouldn’t trust a Chrysler motor any further then I could throw it.
I endured a string of really marginal used cars myself after the Pinto…but that was mostly because I was flat broke more often then not, and couldn’t afford more then a couple hundred buck junker. Then I started getting work as a software developer, and could actually afford a new car, and bought a 1993 Geo Prism on the recommendation of Consumer Reports. I got over 200k miles out of that car, and it never once left me stranded. Under the skin, that car was a Toyota Corolla.
My next car was the Honda Accord I just traded in. I drove that thing across the Imperial Valley and the wastelands of Western Wyoming and Idaho and eastern Oregon and never once worried that it would break down on me in the middle of nowhere. Thing is, that Accord, and that Geo Prism, were both made in America, by American labor.
American labor can build solid, reliable cars. But for ages it seems to me, Detroit just doesn’t want to design cars that way.
So I understand that aspect of what the J.D. Power guy is talking about. But he fails to notice another equally significant reason that the Big Three automakers have a lousy reputation: They’ve spent millions of dollars over the past several decades on a PR campaign designed to persuade us that they don’t know what they’re doing.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have loudly insisted for years that they are technologically incompetent. They have spent millions of lobbying dollars to explain all the things they cannot do, all the improvements they are unable to make, all the ways their abilities, designs and engineering are inferior to those of their competitors. All of that money spent advertising their limits and incompetency has had an impact. American car buyers listened. We believed them.
Consider, for example, CAFE standards — targets for corporate average fuel economy. Every time that Congress or Al Gore or the Sierra Club has suggested these standards should be higher, Detroit shrieks that they can’t take the pressure, that it couldn’t possibly be done, that they don’t have the skill, the know-how or the basic competence to pull it off. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes and Volkswagen, on the other hand, just said, "More fuel-efficient vehicles? Hai. Ja. We can do that. We’re good at making cars."
The same thing happened earlier with air bags and emissions standards. When California passed strict new emission standards in the 1990s, GM and Ford shipped their top lobbyists to Washington and Sacramento to argue that the new rules were technologically impossible. Toyota and Honda didn’t send lobbyists — they sent cars that met the new standard. The same dynamic occurred even earlier with seat belts. With GM’s lobbyists arguing that the company wasn’t capable of meeting the technological challenge of the seat belt why should consumers trust them to build reliable engines?
You know…I hadn’t thought of this before, but it fits. I can appreciate the big three arguing against government dictating auto design…I don’t agree with it on the basis of safety and emissions standards…but I can see them making that argument. But that’s not the argument that emphasized. Instead, like Fred says there, they cried doom and gloom and said repeatedly, over every friggin’ safety or emissions requirement, that it couldn’t be done. Meanwhile, Europe and Japan just kept..well…doing it.
It’s not that Americans can’t build good cars. It’s not that Americans can’t engineer good cars. It’s that corporate management didn’t want to. The mindset was, good enough to roll out of the factory is good enough. If there are problems, fix them after the fact, until the warranty runs out.
It’s not that they just didn’t design them to be maintained or repaired either…I remember one car, I think it was the AMC Pacer, which needed to have the engine jacked up to replace one of the spark plugs…a routine operation, something you did with every tune-up back in those days…but they didn’t design them to be Assembled either. I remember looking under the hood of the Toyota a friend bought in the late 1970s, when Japan was starting to actually worry Detroit. It was a marvel. Not only where there all sorts of little things they did in there to protect vulnerable hoses and electrical cables from the engine compartment environment, and thus decrease the likelihood of a breakdown, but there was all kinds of little things they did, that you could see, to the individual components to help the assembly line workers put it together right the first time. Little tick marks, or fittings on the individual parts that at a glance told you, attach this part to this other part Here…This way. You didn’t have to even think about it. The pieces Told You how to put them together. That kind of thinking did not penetrate Detroit management for decades. I’m not sure it has even now.
You go to a Toyota or Honda showroom now, and you’ll see some of the finest cars American labor can build. Absolutely world class stuff. They’re just not Detroit designs. And that’s not the fault of American engineering either. I recall reading a few years ago, about a guy who’d been put in charge of GM’s Cadillac devision, who was proposing to build an American supercar, something to compete, not merely with the top of the line Lexus, Mercedes and BMWs, but with Rolls and Bentley. Right On, I thought. It doesn’t matter if the market for something like that is small…Build It dammit! Let’s produce one America sedan that’s made as well as a car can be made, not just at the state of the art, but defining it, and cost be dammed. Go ahead and make it for the fabulously rich…and maybe…hopefully…the techniques learned will trickle down to the rest of the GM line. You think what Toyota learns while making Lexus doesn’t find its way eventually to the Camry? That’s why they’re so damn good…they have a line where they just go for it. Every car maker should have one of those.
But no…it was never done. And I don’t think that guy’s with Cadillac anymore. The new styling in the line since the 1990s is his, and maybe some engineering improvements. But Cadillac still has the worst reliability record of any luxury model. That’s not the fault of the people who build them. American workers can build a great car, if they’re given a great car to build.
Now, this is the issue: Does a political party say to its most militant, committed, ideologically driven believers in purity that they have a veto over what the party does? And I say that procedurally because substantively I agree with them. I have spoken on this floor and in committee for including people of transgender. I have argued that with my colleagues in private. I have argued that with the Democratic Caucus. But I also believe that I have a broader set of responsibilities than to any one group and my job is to advance the moral values that I came here to advance as far and as fast as I can and not voluntarily to withhold an advance because it doesn’t meet somebody’s view of perfection. And the question is, how do we relate to those people? And it has become an increasing problem for both parties.
Frankly, until recently I have felt that one of the advantages we Democrats have had over our Republican colleagues is that we were more willing to be responsible, less susceptible to the most committed minority of our party having a veto. I think from the days of Terri Schiavo and before and since, the Republican Party has suffered from that. I don’t want the Democratic Party to suffer from it. Not because I want to protect the Democratic Party as an end in itself, but because the Democratic Party is the means by which these values I care about are most likely to be advanced.
And let me talk about this ideological faction that we have. There are some characteristics that they have that I think led them to this profoundly mistaken view that the greatest single advance we can make in civil rights in many, many years would somehow be a bad thing because it would only include millions of people and leave some hundreds of thousands out. And I want to include those hundreds of thousands. I have done more to try to include them than many of the people who say we should kill the whole thing, but I don’t understand how killing the whole thing advances that.
But here are some of the characteristics: first of all, they tend to talk excessively to each other. One of the things when you are in this body is you talk to people all over the country. You talk to Members of Congress from every State. And I have this with people who can’t understand why I am not introducing legislation to impeach the President and the Vice President, and I find that this is a characteristic that these are people who do not know what the majority thinks, who do not understand the depths of disagreement with their positions on some issues. And that doesn’t mean a majority that says George Bush is wonderful. That isn’t there anymore, but a majority who would be skeptical of impeachment.
But let me get back to this. There are people who talk excessively to each other. They don’t know people of other views.
There is another characteristic of these people who are so dedicated. They do not have allies. You can take an elected official who has been with one of these groups day after day for years, but let that individual once disagree, and it’s a betrayal. It’s a failure of moral will. And lest anyone think I am here being defensive about myself, let me be very clear: I will be running for reelection again. The likelihood that I will be defeated by someone who claims that I am insufficiently dedicated to protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation seems to me quite slender. I am not worried about my own situation, and let me also say that I have said that my colleagues suffer sometimes from the unwillingness to tell people bad news. It has been suggested that I may suffer from the opposite direction. It’s not that I like telling people bad news, but I do think that you should when you have to.
I am not worried about myself, but here is what I’m worried about: I am worried about people from more vulnerable districts because not only do people talk only to themselves and not understand the differences that exist and not accept anybody’s bona fides ever, that they will turn on anybody the first time there is an honest disagreement, but there is also the single-issue nature. That is, there are people who say, okay, you know what, I don’t care about your survival to fight for any other issue.
I’ll say this…you have to admire the chutzpah of a man who argues that he has "a broader set of responsibilities than to any one group" while defending a bill that protects only the group he belongs to, and not the broader set of sexual minority groups that it used to. You have to admire the chutzpah of a man who cites his minority rights credentials, while arguing that the people he’s culling out of a civil rights bill don’t matter as much, because they’re a smaller minority. But you Really have to admire the chutzpah of a man who is willing to state flatly that the job security of his fellow democratic congressmen is more important to him then then the job security of the people he’s culling out of his anti-discrimination bill.
This business about people with "no allies" who "talk excessively to each other" and bitch about being betrayed over an "honest disagreement" stinks like a cesspool. This is the language the gentleman bigots use to paint gay people as a militant pressure group for wanting equal rights, equal opportunity and access to marriage. They call us a threat to children and families, they call us disrupters of military cohesiveness, they call us disease spreading sexual deviants, they say we’re offensive to god almighty, and when we call them on their cheapshit bigotry they reply that they’re being viciously attacked for disagreeing with us. That’s called begging the question. What is the nature of the disagreement Barney?
You are betraying them Barney. And in doing that, you are betraying all of us. You’re selling them out, and in the process, cheapening our many many years of hard, bitter struggle. This wasn’t for fairness. It wasn’t for equality. It wasn’t for justice. It was just for Getting Ours. That’s what you’ve turned our struggle into. Jackass.
Yes you drooling moron, you have a broader responsibility. You have a responsibility to All Americans. Not just Some Americans. Not just Your Kind Of Americans. You have a responsibility to America. To what America stands for. Or…used to anyway. The American Dream? Liberty and Justice For All? That stuff? Remember it?
Members of the House of Representatives recently threatened to hold a vote on a bill that would cut from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act the people who most need its protections. There is no better example of the reason we need a transgender-inclusive ENDA than Diane Schroer, a highly-decorated veteran who transitioned from male to female after 25 years of distinguished service in the Army. Diane interviewed for a job as a terrorism research analyst at the Library of Congress, and accepted the position, but the job offer was rescinded when she told her future supervisor that she was in the process of gender transition.
The ACLU does not support an employment discrimination law that covers sexual orientation but not gender identity, for two reasons. First, the sexual orientation only bill may well not even do what its sponsors want. Because it currently defines sexual orientation as “homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality,” there is still a serious risk that employers may get away with claiming they fired women because they are too masculine and men because they are too feminine. There is a serious risk courts will say the definition only covers who you have a relationship with, and not stereotypes that only apply to some gay people. If that sounds far fetched, we’ve been watching courts do just this in disability and marital status discrimination cases. And courts have already said that harassing someone over perceived masculinity or femininity is not sex discrimination if the prejudice stems from sexual orientation. We have been warning members of Congress about this problem for over four years.
But the more important reason to oppose excluding gender identity and expression is this: We truly do believe that discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression are not mutually exclusive. They are all based on beliefs about what is or is not appropriate for men and women; what jobs are appropriate, what relationships are appropriate, what kind of personal and public identity is appropriate. It makes no sense to split them apart.
No one is more aware than the ACLU that compromise is a critical part of the legislative process, and that change in a large republic is almost always incremental. But a compromise that cuts out some of the community, as a group, as opposed to one that cuts out some employers or some situations, is wrong. It would create the belief that this is a less worthy group of LGBT people, something that doesn’t happen when you leave people who work for small employers uncovered (something most civil rights laws do). There has been plenty of compromise in ENDA. It allows employers to keep same-sex partners out of health plans. It doesn’t apply to the military. But some bargains are just not worth it. Cutting out people who have been on the front lines of the LGBT movement is not a concession we should make.
Matt Coles
Director, ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & AIDS Project
Why I’m a card-carrying member. You think the ACLU is an extremist pressure group Barney? Well walk across the isle and shake John Boehner’s hand Barney, because without a doubt he believes that too.
Barney Frank wants to pass an EDNA and he doesn’t care if it leaves some members of our community (Yes John Aravosis, Our community…) in the dust. He doesn’t even really care if it really protects the people he claims it will. How does this make any sense? Because it’s got his name on it, that’s how. Frank wants his name in on the first ever federal law banning discrimination against gay people, and never mind whether or not it actually does that. It’s not for the community…it’s for posterity.
“This is a perverse distraction from the issue at hand,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, D-Nev. “Instead of debating the merits of providing health care to children, some in GOP leadership and their right-wing friends would rather attack a 12-year-old boy and his sister who were in a horrific car accident.”
Manley cited an e-mail sent to reporters by a Senate Republican leadership aide, summing up recent blog traffic about the boy’s family. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment on Manley’s charge that GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about Frosts. (emphasis mine)
In my experience, if you are not participating in something, you deny it outright to kill the story.
Mitch McConnell is the Republican Minority Leader in the Senate and sponsor of the Orwellian-named “Families First” legislation which would actually decrease the number of kids covered for benefits. Classy. Is someone in his office coordinating a dirty tricks PR advance against a 12 year old child? Have they been helping the story along, doing oppo on this child and his family and feeding it out through the wurlitzer to their corporate media buddies so their hands appear publicly clean while the wingnuts launder their slime tactics for them? As Digby asks, has the Senate Republican Minority leaders office frequently been used as a laundering point of contact for wayward freepers and random wingnuttery at large? Yes or no.
You often wonder sometimes, where the winger blogs are getting their information from.
Anyway, let’s see how the NYTimes does in fielding their latest gibberish.
when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.
Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.
In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.
OK. So they accused the kid’s family of fraud, essentially. How does the NYTimes do in fact-checking the asses of the right blogosphere?
The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.
One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.
Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.
Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.
In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.
That’s a pretty thorough refutation of every single accusation the wingnuts could come up with against the family. So, good. I myself would add that there never really was any reason to take their frenzied posts seriously in the first place: the crap about the private school, and their real estate assets supposedly affecting how much they could pay for health insurance, were obviously absurd from the start. There never was any need to "investigate" these claims: common sense should have said, "irrelevant."
In other words, if, as the NYT has it,
But what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud, all the nastier because a child is at the center of it, actually cuts to the most substantive debate around S-chip. Democrats say it is crucially needed to help the working poor — Medicaid already helps the impoverished — but many Republicans say it now helps too many people with the means to help themselves.
… It’s pretty clear that yes, the Frosts are a good example of the kind of people the program would help, and it’s also pretty clear that the reason the wingnuts went after them and their kitchen counters (!) was that their example is in fact a very persuasive one.
Most Americans know perfectly damn well just how messed up our heathcare system is, and they want relief from the constant stress this mess imposes upon them, and they’d really think it is kind of neat that you might not have to lose your home because your kids get in a serious car wreck. What are their "arguments," anyway? That it’s too costly? When money is shamelessly being flushed away by this administration on all sorts of harebrained schemes, most notably the wildly unpopular Iraq debacle, how’s that one going to fly? That it could lead to eeek socialism booga booga? When people might think to themselves, "is this constant worry over healthcare, which causes me to make constant sacrifices and affects even so basic a question as what do I want to do with my life and what kind of a family do I want to have, actually what American liberty is supposed to be all about? Constant fear?"
You can see why they decided to fling slime on the Frosts’ kitchen counters instead.
Reading the article, this all seems to me pretty clear, though naturally I’d like it spelled out more firmly.
But the real news in the article is this:
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, have backed off.
An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.
And that is good news. If the GOP party leaders are backing off, then the media very likely won’t feel the need to plaster the Frosts all over the damn place over essentially nothing. And that is a Good Thing.
The progressive blogs started fighting back at once on this, and it looks like it made a difference. Now the noise from the right wing sewer isn’t going unchallenged by the time it percolates up to the corporate news rooms. This is good. This is very good. The radical right has spent decades building this noise machine. But it’s starting to look like other voices are finally, Finally, making themselves heard in the echo chamber.
But there’s more to this story then the simple fact that the right is lying about the Frosts. This little smear campaign illustrates perfectly how the radical right has been looking America in the eye and lying about itself, about its purpose, its values, its motives, for decades. Juan Cole (soon to be an ex-republican) sums it all up pretty well here…
I was talking to Tim via AOL IM, and I decided it was probably worthwhile to bring this up for everyone. One of the things that is so surprising (for me, at least) about the whole Graeme Frost episode is that rather than make their case against this program with their vicious assault against this family, they Malkin/Freeper/Limbaugh brigade are doing just the opposite. Rather than expose this family as a bunch of frauds and lazy slackers and welfare queens, they are making the family’s case.
If you look through this family’s dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.
In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.
They are, however, not without fault. They are unable to afford insurance through normal means (and now that they have pre-existing conditions, probably couldn’t get traditional insurance anyway), and managed to get several of their family members injured in a traumatic accident. And, it appears, those are the big blind spots for compassionate conservatism. That, and the real big sin- allowing themselves to advocate for a policy that the Decider was going to veto. Here it is, so you can see their grievous sin that requires they be destroyed:
“Hi, my name is Graeme Frost. I’m 12 years old and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. Most kids my age probably haven’t heard of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But I know all about it, because if it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today.
“CHIP is a law the government made to help families like mine afford healthcare for their kids. Three years ago, my family was in a really bad car accident. My younger sister Gemma and I were both hurt. I was in a coma for a week and couldn’t eat or stand up or even talk at first. My sister was even worse. I was in the hospital for five-and-a-half months and I needed a big surgery. For a long time after that, I had to go to physical therapy after school to get stronger. But even though I was hurt badly, I was really lucky. My sister and I both were.
“My parents work really hard and always make sure my sister and I have everything we need, but the hospital bills were huge. We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program.
“But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. Their parents might have to sell their cars or their houses, or they might not be able to pay for hospital bills at all.
“Now I’m back to school. One of my vocal chords is paralyzed so I don’t talk the same way I used to. And I can’t walk or run as fast as I did. The doctors say I can’t play football any more, but I might still be able to be a coach. I’m just happy to be back with my friends.
“I don’t know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP. All I know is I have some really good doctors. They took great care of me when I was sick, and I’m glad I could see them because of the Children’s Health Program.
“I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me. This is Graeme Frost, and this has been the Weekly Democratic Radio address. Thanks for listening.”
Pretty strong stuff. I can see why this rabid dog needs to be put down with the full force of the wingnutosphere. And it just goes downhill from there. We learn from our intrepid “reporters” on the right that $45,000 is now rich, which is news to me and everyone else who remember mocking Democrats when they tried to claim $100k combined income was considered rich. You righties do remember that, don’t you?
I think the property was valued at around $225,000. I dunno, I have no sympathy for them. Looks like they have more than enough money for luxuries they won’t sacrifice, yet they expect everyone else to sacrifice for them. My family had to sell our house because we couldn’t afford to keep it, have one used minivan and a clunker my husband uses to get back and forth to work, and until this past weekend we didn’t have a television because it was a luxury we couldn’t justify spending on. No private schools for my 3 kids- can’t even afford daycare. Yet we manage to afford health insurance, keep our rental home comfy, and have food on the table. I’m content with what I have and certainly don’t want anyone else paying for what I can afford, after cutting out the luxuries.
15 years ago, when my then-wife and I discovered we were going to have a child – I had a job with no health insurance.
I changed jobs – period. I was stupid and willing to go without insurance for myself – but with my child there was no way I was going to risk it.
These parents have the same opportunity.
They chose not to find jobs that offered health insurance – and they chose to spend their money elsewhere.
Then, when tragedy strikes, they’re held up as models of “what’s wrong with this country”.
Sorry – but they should be held up as models of “What’s wrong with many Americans”.
My bad- they don’t have any advice other than “SUCKS TO BE YOU” or “SELL YOUR HOUSE” or “GET ANOTHER JOB.” Because, as we all know, the hallmark of responsibility is making your children homeless so they can maybe get healthcare. Nobody even pointed to the numerous charities that we conservatives are supposed to expect to fill the gap so the government doesn’t have to pay for things. Instead, it was taunts, catcalls, contempt, and jealousy (because these folks are in SUCH an enviable situation).
I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.
I’m registering Independent tomorrow.
For the record, I was raised in a family of Rockefeller republicans. I registered republican at age 18, as soon as 18 year olds were given the vote back in the early 70s. I switched to democrat in the 1990s, because I got tired of gay folks like myself being used as baseball bats against democrats. I figured if the party regarded me as the ultimate weapon against democrats, I might as well be one. Mr. Cole…your gay and lesbian neighbors have known what a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows, the republican grassroots are for a long, long time now. Reagan delivered them into power. Bush taught them that to the victor belong the spoils.
Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the "needy" out there that only the government can rescue. An editorial in Canada’s biggest-selling newspaper today states:
A total of 905,000 people visited food banks across the Greater Toronto Area in the past year.
The population of Toronto is about two-and-a-half million. Is the Star suggesting one in three citizens of one of the wealthiest municipalities on earth depends on "food banks"? Or is it the same one thousand people getting three square meals a day there? Or ten thousand people swinging by a couple of times a week? And, in that case, how many of them actually "depend" on food banks? Only the Star knows. But the idea that 905,000 Torontonians need food aid is innumerate bunk.
(emphasis added)
Now, I don’t know anything about the Star article in question, but anyone who’s not a wingnut engaged in "fact-checking" can plainly see that the "Greater Toronto Area" would have a larger population than "Toronto." Since wingnut research is done entirely with The Google, let’s consult the oracle:
The Greater Toronto Area (widely abbreviated as the GTA) is the most populous metropolitan area in Canada. The GTA is a provincial planning area with a population of 5,555,912 at the 2006 Canadian Census.[1]
5.6 million vs 2.5 million. OK, the actual figure is only 220% higher than Steyn’s.
These little slights-of-hand aren’t clumsy or accidental.
Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game.
So says Mark Steyn of the National Review. Firedoglake has more…
Why are all these high traffic wingnut blogs (and far right Fox News) attacking this 12 year old boy and his family? This may well be the lamest excuse I have ever heard in my life for attacking two children who were severely injured in a car accident and their parents who couldn’t afford health insurance for them. I mean honestly, this propaganda fishing expedition disguised as “questions” doesn’t pass the smell test, and Malkin and her cronies know it:
Asking questions and subjecting political anecdotes to scrutiny are what journalists should be doing.
First of all, you weren’t scrutinizing, you were harassing the family at their place of business and their home, and then you kept on harassing them and egged your readers to do the same. Your gin up a phony distraction from your bad press because ”the GOP doesn’t care about poor children“ conservative bloggers and pundits decided that the ends justifies the means in cleaning up after George Bush’s latest mess — even if it meant sacrificing the daily lives of a couple of injured children in the fray. Secondly, you weren’t even close to following the code of ethics that professional journalists require in this situation to “minimize harm,” so you can call yourself the ethically-challenged political hacks that you are and be done with it.
None of you political hatchet cronies give a rat’s ass about minimizing harm for these children, one of whom suffered a severe brain injury in the car accident and can’t possibly fight back against this crass, thoughtless tactic. And on top of that, you are liars.
Which really says it all about how much they believe themselves in their own ideology. A political movement that claims to have access to certain truths about morality and governance that so-called "leftists" and "socialists" are trying to suppress has to resort to lies to get it’s point across? So where’s all this Truth you guys claim you have over progressives? No. No. They lie, starting with their declared moral and political values, because if they told the truth, that all they really believe in is Might Makes Right, and the absolute rule of the rich and powerful, they’d never get anywhere. They’re scum. Or as Digby says…
This is so loathesome I am literally sick to my stomach. These kids were hurt in a car accident. Their parents could not afford health insurance — and sure as hell couldn’t get it now with a severely handicapped daughter. And these shrieking wingnut jackasses are harassing their family for publicly supporting the program that allowed the kids to get health care. A program, by the way, which a large number of these Republicans support as well.
They went after Michael J. Fox. They went after a wounded Iraq war veteran. Now they are going after handicapped kids. There is obviously no limit to how low these people will go.
It has come to this: Democrats give a twelve year old boy airtime on their weekly address to relate his story about what happened to him and his family when she was in an automobile accident, and they couldn’t afford to pay the bills without the kind of federal help that President Nice Job Brownie just vetoed, and the Bush republican grassroots immediately begin Swift-Boating his family.
Whiskey Fire has some good notes on the obscenity Here. The gutter is bitching about the fact that they own a 3000 square foot rowhouse in Baltimore, that their father owns his own cabinet making business, that the kids are going to a private school with a 20,000 a year tuition. No part of that family’s life is now escaping the smear machine’s attention…right down to the kitchen counter tops…
The current market value of their improved 3,040 SF home at 104 S Collington Ave is unknown but 113 S COLLINGTON AVE, also an end unit, sold for $485,000 this past March and it was only 2,060 SF. A photo taken in the family’s kitchen shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass front cabinets.
Yeah, and the current market value of my little 1500 sq foot Baltimore rowhouse is about $240,000 but just six years ago I was able to buy it for $89,900, because that was what it’s market value was then. One reason the housing market is still so hot here in Baltimore is that prices in the surrounding suburbs, and Washington D.C., are simply insane. So people of modest means are buying up Baltimore rowhouses in the neighborhoods are that are still fairly safe. One Whiskey Fire commenter puts it thusly:
Let me get this straight. This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?
Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.
In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.
But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).
Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.
And these jokers are pissed off about it.
Amazing.
I have a next door neighbor who is doing just that on his rowhouse. He’s a building contractor of some sort, and he redid his own kitchen and it is just fabulous. But you’d expect it to be, or you wouldn’t be wanting him to do your kitchen too. And I have another neighbor who is by no means wealthy, and trying hard to keep his own kids in the Friends school here in Baltimore, rather then public school. The public schools here in the city, thanks in large measure to republican scorched earth attacks on racial equality, cities, and public education, are teetering on the verge of collapse.
So this self employed father does his best to provide for his family, and give his kids a decent education, on $45,000 a year, and his kids are nearly killed in an automobile accident and that family suddenly finds themselves looking into an almost bottomless pit of medical expenses…and the gutter puppies at Powerline and The Free Republic, and professor InstaJackass, think there’s something suspicious about this? No. No. Absolutely not. They know goddamn well there’s nothing wrong with this family’s story. Nothing factually wrong that is. But it was very politically incorrect, and for that the family must not only suffer, it must be publicly run through the wringer as an example to others who might be considering speaking out.
For the Bush base, the Party is the only truth, the only religion, the only morality. When the right wing talks about virtue and morality, what they’re talking about is fealty to the party. Nothing else. That’s how you can run a propaganda steamroller over a twelve year old boy’s family, because she dared to ask the nation to look, really look, at what happened to them.
[Update…] Graeme Frost is a boy, not a girl, as I’d originally written. Obviously I didn’t listen to the radio address that started all this. Sorry guy…
Daily KOS has some facts the Freepers don’t want you to know…
Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.
So Graeme’s sister is actually in a private school because she’s still struggling with injuries from the automobile accident. And their Baltimore rowhouse was bought for considerably less then what it’s worth now…a fact which would only be surprising to someone who didn’t know that housing prices have risen dramatically in the past few years. But see what the Freepers did. They took the current value of the house and related it as though that represented the income level of the owners. They took the cost of tuition at the schools the kids are going to, and related it as though they’d just proven that was what the family was actually paying. They even put photos of the family kitchen under the microscope.
Michelle Malkin, who once posted the names and home phone numbers of University of California students who had organized a protest against military recruiters on campus, is now stalking the family of Graeme Frost. And surely she’s not the only wingnut that wants to get this family somehow, some way, for speaking out, for putting human faces on the American health care crisis. They say that this family is not deserving of support, because it is not destitute. But that something like an automobile accident can drive an essentially middle-class, small business family into destitution is emblematic of Exactly what’s wrong with our health care system. The political movement that waves "family values" as a banner has now officially made American families another enemy in the kulturkampf. The political movement that enshrined free market capitalism as a moral standard more righteous then the Sermon On The Mount has now officially declared small businessmen are the enemy. We are all on the front line now. We are all targets. But of course, we always were.
[Update II…] You gotta love the comments the gutter is leaving on progressive blogs on this. The suggestion being floated now is that the Frost family should have sold their house to pay for their children’s medical expenses. They bought the house for 55 grand and now its worth almost half a million and so the kook pews are saying that means the family is rich and they’re just milking the system like a bunch of liberal welfare junkies. I’ve seen one of them suggest the family sell the house and rent a 1 thousand square foot apartment to make ends meet.
Let’s deconstruct this. The family of six, whose father is a self employed cabinet maker, is making somewhat less then 50 grand a year. The house is 3 thousand square feet, which is good for a family of six. I once rented a 750k sq foot apartment and that rent was costing me by the time I moved out in 2001 800 dollars a month. And that was a One Bedroom apartment. The two bedrooms, which were 1200 sq feet, rented for over a thousand a month. Rents in Baltimore have skyrocketed as the value of homes have skyrocketed, and I doubt you could find a decent 1k sq foot apartment in Baltimore for less then the mortgage this family is currently paying on their house. And it would be at most two bedrooms, which isn’t enough for a family of six.
So in other words, to pay the medical bills incurred because their children were in an automobile accident, and still stay right with the kook pews, this middle class working family should sell the house that’s big enough to raise four kids in, and which they can afford the mortgage on, and move everyone into a one bedroom apartment that will cost them more to rent, and which they’ll never own, and which is too small to raise a family of four children in.
Actually, this is Exactly what would have happened to this family were it not for the Maryland CHIP program. They would have lost their home, and been forced into a downward spiral that so many working poor are. Their living expenses would have gone up, even as their standard of living went down. I never realized how much my own family had been nickeled and dimed to death until I bought my house, and saw all the tax and economic breaks I was suddenly getting.
And the Bush republicans think this is the Right policy. They really think that pushing middle class families into poverty by medical bills is better then having a national health care system that would keep them, and their children out of poverty.
The next time a Bush republican utters the words "Family Values" in your presence, laugh in their face. Oh, and do the same whenever you hear them start yapping about the virtues of small business.
As some of you probably already know, the RIAA won its case against a Minnesota woman who was accused of sharing songs through Kazaa. The judge told the jury that the RIAA didn’t have to prove that anyone actually copied the files, or that the woman had herself put them on the network…only that she own the computer in question, and that the files Had been made available.
In a lot of unsavory ways, the RIAA is like the owners in baseball, whose only contribution to the sport is to act as a gateway to the game, through which both players and fans have to pass. The fans hate them, the players hate them, but they own the game, so to speak, so you have to deal with them on their terms, like it or not. But unlike baseball fans and players, music lovers and musicians now have a way to bypass completely the RIAA, and I think it’s time now that more of us concentrated on doing just that. There are plenty of legal means, if online sharing still pricks your conscience.
Rather then buy a new CD, I’ve started looking for titles I want on the used market. I get a CD at half, to a quarter the price, and it rips to my iPod just as easily as a new one, and the sweet part of it is that the RIAA doesn’t get a penny of my money on it. Of course, neither to the musicians…but if they want to sell to me directly, as Radiohead and others are now doing, I’ll be more then happy to buy from them.
What looks like commercial suicide is, in today’s reality, sound business sense. Records, CDs or downloads now have all become downgraded to the status of promotional tools – useful to sell concert tickets and fan paraphernalia. While there is still good money to be made in music, and particularly on the concert circuit, the record business – blame it on piracy, too many CD giveaways or the advent of the recordable CD – is a busted flush.
A revealing story doing the rounds in America tells of a young rock band who decided to stop selling their CDs at gigs after they discovered that by offering their CDs for $10 they were cannibalising sales of their $20 T-shirts. The truth now is that a rudimentary cotton garment with a band logo stamped across it that has probably been manufactured for pennies in a Third World sweatshop costs about twice as much as an album recorded in a state-of-the-art western studio. And even at that price, recorded music isn’t selling.
That Times of London article relates something I’ve seen happening for quite some time now. Once upon a time concerts were promotional tools used by the record industry to sell albums. That’s completely reversed now, and recorded music exists mostly to give people a reason to go see concerts. And go they are…
The reprioritisation in recent years of live music over the recorded variety has been dramatic. Attendance at arena shows rose here by 11% last year. By the time 2007 bows out, 450 music festivals will have taken place in the UK.
Every week brings news of another frenzied assault on the box office. Last Monday Ticket-master reported that 20,000 tickets for the Spice Girls’ first reunion concert at London’s O2 arena in December sold out in 38 seconds, with 1m fans registering to buy. Three weeks back more than a million clamoured for seats at the forthcoming Led Zeppelin reunion. Glastonbury disposed of its 135,000 weekend passes for this year’s event within two hours – taking more than £21m in the process.
Ticket prices, especially for A-list artists, have soared as the price of CDs has tumbled…
Music, is a performing art, unlike say, painting (William Alexander and his student Bob Ross notwithstanding). A recording can only capture a performance. It’s great to be able to do that, some performances should live forever, and its wonderful to be living in an age where you can carry a thousand performances around with you on your hip and listen to them whenever and wherever you want. But the soul of music is the stage, not the recording studio.
Jeeze…it’s only been since last March that I did one…
This is about our wonderful governor here in Maryland, who privately told his gay supporters, while he was mayor of Baltimore, and campaigning for governor against the anti-gay Robert Ehrlich, that he would support same-sex marriage. When the Maryland Court of appeals a couple weeks ago ruled against it, O’Malley came out publicly against it too, citing his Catholic faith.
While he was the mayor of Baltimore, O’Malley was the architect of the BELIEVE campaign, which placed the banners with "BELIEVE" in bright bold letters over a black background all over the city…on the buses, on the trashcans, everywhere, in an attempt to rise city pride.
How Much You Want To Bet Ahmanson Is Giving Them Money Too…
Obviously American thugboys aren’t up to the job, so at least in the Pacific states, the hard right is reaching down a little deeper into the gutter. Here comes the next phase in the right wing’s anti-gay jihad: the brownshirts. Only this time, they’re Russian…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
You should read this whole article, particularly if you’re gay, or have gay friends or family living on the west coast. I’m sure not all Russian immigrants are this violent, but some are affiliated with a church, and a movement, that specifically targets gay people for violence, in exactly the same way the brownshirts once targeted Jews. Understand, this isn’t random violence due to an endemic hatred of gay people. This is organized violence, and it’s organized from within their church…
Gay rights activists blame Singh’s death on what they call "The West Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher [Alexey Ledyaev] who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh’s death, which they characterized as a hate crime.
A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has "made an injection" of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. "In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin," Kusakin said.
The anti-gay tactics of the Slavic evangelicals in the U.S. branch of the Watchmen movement are just as crude and even more physically abusive than Fred Phelps’ infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and they’re rooted in gay-bashing theology that’s even more hardcore than the late Jerry Falwell’s. Slavic anti-gay talk radio hosts and fundamentalist preachers routinely deliver hateful screeds on the airwaves and from the pulpit in their native tongue that, were they delivered in English, would be a source of nationwide controversy.
And surprise, surprise, Oregon holocaust revisionist Scott Lively (he of The Pink Triangle fame) is now their "envoy". Lively, as it turns out, and unsurprisingly, also has a connection to the Christian Reconstructionists…
The executive director of the OCA at that time was Scott Lively, a longtime anti-gay activist who is now the chief international envoy for the Watchmen movement. Lively also is the former director of the California chapter of the anti-gay American Family Association and the founder of both Defend the Family Ministries and the Pro-Family Law Center, which claims to be the country’s "only legal organization devoted exclusively to opposing the homosexual political agenda."
The Watchmen movement’s strategy for combating the "disease" of homosexuality calls for aggressive confrontation. "We church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues," Lively argues in a widely-circulated tract called Masculine Christianity. "For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like [the anti-abortion group] Operation Rescue."
Lively identifies "the enemy" as not only homosexuals, but also what he terms "homosexualists," a category that includes anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, who "actively promotes homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy."
When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he preaches when it comes to "battle-hardened" tactics. He recently was ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through the halls of a Portland church in 1991.
Lively occasionally writes for Chalcedon Report, a journal published by the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading Christian Reconstructionist organization in the country. (Reconstructionists typically call for the imposition of Old Testament law, including such draconian punishments as stoning to death active homosexuals and children who curse their parents, on the United States.)
Washington State homophobic preacher Ken Hutcherson, who tried to single handedly torpedo that state’s antidiscriminaton law, is also on board with Ledyaev’s brownshirts…
In addition to Lively and Robertson, Ledyaev has cultivated the support of Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the African-American founder of Antioch Bible Church, a Seattle-area megachurch. "Hutch," as the ex-NFL player is known, played a key role in persuading Microsoft to temporarily withdraw its support for a Washington bill that would have made it illegal to fire an employee for their sexual orientation. In 2004, his "Mayday for Marriage" rally drew 20,000 people to the Seattle Mariner’s Safeco Field to oppose legalizing same-sex marriage.
One of Ledyaev’s nephews saw Hutcherson speak in Seattle at a March 2006 debate on gay rights and arranged a meeting with the Latvian pastor. By the end of the year, Hutcherson, Ledyaev and Lively had teamed up with Vlad Kusakin, the editor of The Speaker, to form an international alliance to oppose what Hutcherson characterizes as "the homosexual movement saying they’re a minority and that they need their equal rights."
They took the name Watchmen on the Walls from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, in which the "watchmen" guard the reconstruction of a ruined Jerusalem. The cities they guard over today, say the contemporary Watchmen, are being destroyed by homosexuality.
"Nehemiah stood by the destroyed city of Jerusalem. So are we standing these days by the ruins of our legislative walls," Ledyaev says on the Watchmen website. "Defending Christianity begins with the restoration of the walls which is where the watchmen should stand up." The group’s mission is "to bring the laws of our nations in[to] full compliance with the law of God."
During the past year, the Watchmen have met twice in the United States, first in Sacramento, then in Bellevue, Wash. They gathered to strategize against same-sex marriage and build a political organization to fight "gay-straight alliances" in public schools and push for the boycott of textbooks that mention homosexuality in any context other than total condemnation.
The group has also convened outside America. In the summer of 2006, the Watchmen and their supporters gathered in Riga, Latvia, to "protect the city from a homosexual invasion." Gay rights activists in Europe counter that it’s gays who need protection from the Latvian capital, not the other way around.
And, indeed, the city is a hotbed of violent homophobia. In 2005, for example, a group of 100 gay activists, most of them from Western Europe and Scandinavia, traveled to Riga to hold a gay rights march that was widely viewed as the first real test of Latvia’s official commitment to freedom of assembly, a requirement for its tentative admission to the European Union in 2004. Under heavy police escort, the gay rights demonstrators walked a few blocks through a gauntlet of ultranationalists, neo-Nazi skinheads, elderly women and youths wearing "I Love New Generation" T-shirts. They were pelted with eggs, rotten tomatoes and plastic bags full of feces.
The mayor of Riga at the time was Janic Smits, a close friend of Pastor Ledyaev and a prominent member of his New Generation Church. During a parliamentary debate on whether sexual orientation should be covered under a national ban on discrimination, Smits quoted the Old Testament: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." Last year, Smits was elevated to chair the Latvian Parliament’s Human Rights Commission.
Ledyaev and Lively have both refused to publicly condemn the murder of Satender Singh. The message in that should be as crystal clear to the rest of us, as it is to their followers: Go, and do likewise…
But let it be said that the thuggishness of their flock isn’t limited to attacks on gay people. In the comments to this AlterNet story, one person writes:
I taught in Sacramento. When we had the National Day of Silence at our school, aside from the traditional fundamentalist groups that opposed it, the Russian immigrant kids were down right rude, requiring removal from the class because they couldn’t respect people’s differences. Russian gangs in Sacramento, especially the Rancho Cordova area has been responsible for auto theft and chop shop operations, meth labs, and numerous murders. They are heavily connected through their church, and most of them will tell you that its because of the suppression in the former Soviet Union that their parents experienced. So, what you get is not just a born again mentality, but a born again and uber-survivorish type adherence to their version of scripture.
They are heavily connected through their church. Looks like Ken Hutcherson has found his brothers in Christ. And so the face of the man who once said that to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, was the highest commandment, is twisted into a gangsters leer. If you thought the insular hatred of the bible belt south was the bottom of the gutter, you were wrong. It has no bottom.
Our right simply to live, never mind to get married or hold down a job, has always been subject to the whims of hate. Now that violent hate is being given an International organization from which to operate, and grow, and thrive. By men of god. In the name of Jesus. But it would be a profound mistake to give this a Russian face. There is violent anti-gay hate in many more parts of the world then Russia. The men who are now developing, and those who are financing, this international anti-gay terrorism force have a large pool of potential soldiers to draw from. They’ve been unsuccessful at turning the western world against its gay sons and daughters, so now they’re reaching out to the east, and the third world. So Ahmanson brings the African church to America, if the American church won’t do his bidding. So he, or other like minded right wing billionaires, may well be reaching out to Russia, and other nations, for willing murderers, to bring the war on gay people back to a satisfactory pace. The new weapon against the American dream of liberty and justice for all, are the people of the lands where the Dream is unknown, or even hated as virulently as the American right hates it.
It is not pleasant to have to disagree with a Congressman who has done so much that we admire and who has been such a stalwart leader for our community, but your recent response to our organization’s legal analysis of the failings of H.R. 3685 (the weakened version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act [ENDA] introduced into Congress last week) forces us to reply. This is a difference of opinion over legal analysis, not over goals. We all share the goal of enacting a strong and effective law to protect the LGBT community against employment discrimination.
On October 1, 2007, Lambda Legal issued a preliminary analysis of the differences between
H.R. 2015 (the version of ENDA that was introduced into Congress in April of this year) and the new, less protective version of ENDA recently introduced to replace it. In your press release issued late Wednesday in response to our comments, you asserted that our analysis was flawed and that the new version of ENDA only omits reference to people who are transgender but “makes no other change in the wording on this point.” Unfortunately, that is not true, because the definition of “gender identity” that was removed from the originally proposed bill included “…gender-related identity, appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual.” These words are critically important. This year’s original version of ENDA would protect against discrimination not only on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender identity. Unlike the more recent version, the original version also would prohibit discrimination on the grounds that a person does not have an appearance, mannerisms or other characteristics that may be perceived by some people as different from those traditionally associated with that person’s sex.
This is a very important protection, one that many LGBT organizations have been advocating to have expressly enacted into law for a number of years. Earlier today we released a joint statement with four other LGBT legal organizations to further explain our concerns about this to the community. After much negotiation with members of Congress, this protection was included in the version of ENDA introduced in April, only to have it cut out of the version introduced last week.
There can be no debating that this cut weakened the bill. As our prior analysis indicated, this cut diminished the bill not only by excluding transgender people – a consequence we strongly oppose in itself. The cut also made the more recent bill far weaker by denying the protection that would have been provided by the earlier version to those who may not identify as transgender but who are discriminated against because they are perceived as gender nonconforming. Lesbians, gay men and bisexuals frequently are perceived that way.
As our original analysis indicated, a version of ENDA that does not prohibit discrimination based on gender nonconformity is inadequate. In cases brought under Title VII (the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination and sexual harassment), employers often try to argue that employees who have been discriminated against or sexually harassed were really discriminated against or harassed based on their sexual orientation, not their sex. Because Title VII does not prohibit sexual orientation discrimination, many lesbians, gay men and bisexuals have been denied relief when increasingly conservative federal courts have agreed with those employers. In just the same way, we are very concerned that employers may argue that a law that prohibits sexual orientation discrimination but that intentionally eliminated the protections against discrimination based on gender nonconformity would provide no protection to employees judged by an employer to be non-conforming – that is, men who were judged too effeminate or women judged too masculine. We have no doubt that, were the weaker version of ENDA to pass, some employers will claim they have nothing against lesbians, gay men and bisexuals per se, but that they do not want men whom they see as unmanly or women who they believe are not feminine enough, and that that loophole would be invoked against almost any lesbian, gay man or bisexual who sought protection against discrimination under ENDA.
You stated that you were not aware of any instances where state laws that prohibit only sexual orientation discrimination and not gender identity discrimination have proven inadequate. Unfortunately, such cases exist. For example, just two years ago, a federal court of appeal ruled that a lesbian who claimed that she was discriminated against because she did not conform to stereotypical expectations of femininity did not to have a viable claim under New York state’s Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which fails to include an express prohibition on discrimination based on gender identity and expression.
Lambda Legal appreciates the confidence you expressed in our organization by stating that we could “easily defeat such an end run around the sexual orientation language.” If this weaker version of ENDA were to become law, we certainly would try and hope that we would be able to do so. But without an express prohibition on discrimination based on gender nonconformity, there is a real risk that we might not succeed. That is a risk that we and our colleagues at other legal organizations repeatedly have seen play out in other anti-discrimination laws, and it is a risk to which we believe members of our community should not be exposed.
It is beside the point that earlier versions of ENDA, many of which were the result of cumulative compromises made in Washington, D.C., may not have guarded against this danger. The version of ENDA originally introduced this year did, and the new version, introduced last week, did not. The more recent version is a law that provides inadequate protection to LGBT people. Lambda Legal and many other LGBT groups therefore oppose it.
In your press release, you further assert that it was appropriate for the more recent version of ENDA to delete the previously included provision that state and local governments could require domestic partner benefits and to permit a blanket exemption for all religious organizations that exists in no other federal antidiscrimination laws. You argued that contrary provisions in the earlier, stronger version of ENDA were a mistake or would have drawn strong opposition and that you are not aware of anyone involved in the drafting of the bill that raised objections to these changes. In our view, these arguments also are beside the point. Our analysis showed that the more recent version of ENDA provides significantly less protection to LGBT people in numerous respects than the version introduced earlier this year. This really cannot be contested. The new version of ENDA is less protective. Whether or not these stronger provisions might have survived amendments when the matter was voted on, the undeniable fact is that the new version of ENDA deleted them without there even being a debate or a vote.
Finally, we want to emphasize the main point we and other LGBT groups have been trying to make. It simply is wrong for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals to seek protection for themselves and leave transgender people in the dust. Transgender individuals have fought against discrimination along with gay people years before Stonewall and were prime actors at that epic moment in our joint civil rights history. Imagine if the proponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had decided that the prohibition against race discrimination included only some racial groups but not others. For gay people to sacrifice transgender people to get protection only for themselves would be wrong.
We stand by that position and our further concern that a sexual orientation antidiscrimination law that has eliminated protections against discrimination based on gender nonconformity will provide less secure protection for everyone, including lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. Unfortunately, as you said yourself, “bigots [will] try to get around the law.” We need a law that will make that as hard as possible. That is why we continue to support H.R. 2015, the version of ENDA introduced in April, and to oppose
H.R. 3685, the version of ENDA introduced last week. Respectfully yours,
Kevin M. Cathcart
Executive Director
Lambda Legal
(Emphasis in the above are mine)
Look…John…transgendered and non gender conforming people were fighting for gay rights while you were still figuring out grade school. You can at least say "Thank you"…
Your argument boils down to the assertion that America really does accept transgendered people far more than I’m willing to realize and therefore we’d have no problem passing a trans-inclusive ENDA. Great. I’m game. Show me the votes. Show me that you have the votes to pass a trans-inclusive ENDA, that the bill won’t go down in flames, that Democrats won’t be forced en masse to vote in favor of some hideously anti-trans amendment lest they lose their jobs next election, and I’m there for you. You think this is some easy game, that we actually have the votes, but some of us simply don’t like you and find you icky and that’s why we’re concerned. Fine, then I’ll call your bluff. I adore you. Now prove to me that you have the votes to pass ENDA and that your strategy won’t kill this legislation for the next two decades, and you have my support. You have two weeks, which should be ample time considering all of us are lying about there not being enough votes to pass ENDA with trans inclusion.
This is sickening. No John, you don’t "adore" the transgendered. And reading this unmitigated bullshit you call a response I don’t think you even see human beings when you look at them, let alone people who are your neighbors. They’re speed bumps on the road to your place at the table is all they are. Your place at the table. Not ours, everyone’s. Your EDNA is a classified ad reading "No fems, freaks or fatties". Your EDNA is an gay nightclub with a doorman that keeps out all the uncool people. Your EDNA is a circuit party for a-listers only. And that’s your America too, isn’t it John? Why the fuck are you even bothering to call yourself a democrat?
Nothing worse in this poor world then a moron without a conscience, and you’re case in point aren’t you? Prove to You that the votes are there to pass a trans-inclusive ENDA…did you say? How about you prove the votes are there get one actually enacted into law. Bush is going to veto it, the republicans are going to uphold it, and you and every other braying inside the beltway jackass fucking knows that. If anyone is committing political theater here John, it’s you. And oh that it was meaningless. You’re proving not just to the transgendered community, but to all our heterosexual friends, people who have stood at our side, often at great personal cost, that we are as cheap, petty and insular as the homophobic bigots who are the reason we need EDNA. You’re proving to our straight allies that our struggle isn’t about anything more noble and righteous then getting ours, even if we have to put an elbow in the side of a few friends along the way. You’re proving to them that we really are the self absorbed, narcissistic, vainglorious pricks the religious right keeps saying we are.
I’m 54 years old, and I have been fired many times for being gay, back when doing that to gay people was utterly unremarkable. I think I know a thing or two about what it’s like to have to live and work and try to fucking earn a living under those conditions. My lifetime income when all is said and done and my body is laid to rest, will probably work out to around half what it would have been had I simply been more attracted to girls then guys. I’ve had employers tell me to my face that I was being let go because there wasn’t any place for homosexuals in their company. I’ve had them make pathetic excuses for letting me go when we all knew perfectly well the reason why. I’ve had them just show me the door, only to be told later by a co-worker what the problem was. There were times when I had to mow lawns to make ends meet.
I have always laughed at those "studies" that prove that homosexuals make more money then the average American. Where the hell did mine go then? Don’t tell Me I don’t know what’s at stake here if EDNA doesn’t pass. I fucking lived it for decades! Maybe someday you’ll grow a conscience and realize that’s exactly why I cannot look my transgendered neighbors in the face and tell them they’re holding me back and they have to get in line behind me. Who would you do that for John? Who would you get in the back of the bus for?
How You Sell This Stuff With A Straight Face I Have No Idea…
The Amazing Randi’s challenge to the golden ear cult made Slashdot today, and in the comments there is a link to a list of the worst audiophile products ever. If you remember what high end audio used to look like before The Absolute Sound and it’s spawn completely destroyed it, take a look now and weep. Here’s what it’s come to: A pen you color the edges of your CDs with to, I kid you not, "reduce the scattered reflections of the laser beam and increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the detected laser", for a "significant decrease in the harsh "edginess" in the sound of many CD’s and an increase in clarity, resolution and ambience". A $485 dollar wooden volume control knob to reduce "vibrations" and make your system sound "much more open and free flowing with a nice improvement in resolution." A thin mat you place "atop a CD, DVD-V, DVD-A, SACD, or mp3 disc" with cut-outs that will "…create a very specific energy spectra that mechanically dithers the laser to recognize and retrieve additional low level information that is otherwise lost, truncated or unseen."
But the ultimate really does have to be this demagnetizer for, I kid you not, CDs, CDRs, and DVDs. Yes, a demagnetizer for an object made of polycarbonate plastic with an aluminum coating. This is what you get, when you take objective measurements out of the picture, and replace them with a gaggle of golden ears.
"New! Featuring four beams, nearly twice the rotation speed and improved timing processing, the Quadri-Beam is an ultra cool disc treatment. This patented process reduces the noise floor allowing far more information to be retrieved from the disc. It also works great on DVDs, giving you a picture that is brighter, sharper, crisper and cleaner. For those of you who have never experienced the sonic benefits of the Bedini Clarifier, it significantly reduces high frequency glare and increases retrieval of information, enhancing dynamic range. Detail and resolution are improved dramatically."
I won’t comment. This is Slashdot, so I guess you have some entry level knowledge to know why this is the most ridiculous thing you’ve read in months.
There are physical reasons why vaccuum tube amplifiers sound DIFFERENT than solid state amplifiers. I don’t, however, subscribe to the philosophy that they’re better inherently, as I’ve heard some terrible-sounding tube amps.
Whoa. Let’s not equate the tube vs. solid-state debate with cable voodoo. You can look at the waveform of a tube amp’s output and compare it to a solid-state amp’s output and see the difference yourself, if you know what to look for. Tubes color the sound (essentially, distort it, but in a way that many people prefer) by emphasisizing the odd-ordered harmonics of a given tone.
EVEN ORDER, not odd order harmonics… TRANSISTOR gear has a higher ratio of odd harmonics to even, comparatively. Especially a triode vacuum tube in a single ended circuit design will have almost no 3rd harmonic signal compared to the second one.
"The thing is, even the cheap drilled wire of your phone-line is good enough to transmit multi-mhz signals for DSL over a few km."
That’s because the telephone system uses low-impedance balanced lines; without this technology, POTS would be largely impractical, and long-distance nearly impossible (at least in the days before satellite).
Low-Z balanced lines are also used in many hi-end audio systems, for the same reasons; they offer a material advantage. In fact, an inexpensive low-z balanced line cable can easily better very high-priced single-ended cables. It’s the primary reason that all of the equipment I build and work with uses balanced line technology.. better performance without fancy cables = value for the customer.
Man oh man how I wish the adults were back in charge in the world of high end home audio…
Transgender is not simply the ‘T’ in GLBT. It is people who, for one reason or another, may not express their gender in ways that conform to traditional gender norms or expectations. That covers everyone from transsexuals, to queer youth, to feminine acting men, to masculine appearing women. It is a broad label that cannot be confined to a specific silo of people. It is anyone who chooses to live authentically. To think that the work that we are doing on behalf of the entire GLBT community simply benefits or protects part of us is to choose a simplistic view of a complex community. In a very real way, the T is anyone who expresses themselves differently. To some it is about gender. To me, it is about freedom.
Just so. Unfortunately, Donna Rose had to say this, while resigning from HRC. John Aravosis is asking when transgender became part of the gay rights struggle. What I’d like to know is when "gay" became a synonym for "straight-acting". As I understand it, there weren’t very many of those taking to the streets the day they rioted at the Stonewall Inn.
This is so sad on any number of levels, not the least of which is watching people you could have sworn have a brain actually believing that the Bush republicans will accept gay equality before they’ll accept equality for transgendered folk. Yeah…they’ve always said they’ll accept us as long as we don’t flaunt it. I guess passing for straight is that freedom we’ve all been struggling for.
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Let me get this straight. This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?
Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.
In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.
But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).
Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.
And these jokers are pissed off about it.
Amazing.