Via Brad DeLong …  Something to keep in mind as you read the news stories about intelligence reports indicating that Iran had stopped its nuclear program some years ago:  When George Bush started rattling the saber at them over their nuke program…he knew there wasn’t one…

Robert Waldmann points out that corrupt Washington Post stenographers Peter Baker and Robin Wright know how to write an honest, factual lead paragraph–they just usually choose not to:

Robert’s Stochastic thoughts:

A Blow to Bush’s Tehran Policy

By Peter Baker and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 4, 2007; Page A01

President Bush got the world’s attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.

Now that is what I call a lead*. The contrast couldn’t be more sharp with Baker’s recent effort to thoroughly inform all readers who get to paragraph 8 that Karl Rove is a liar about which I posted at the linked post…

Oh…and here’s the pathetic Washington Post headline that Waldmann is referring to:

Rove’s Version of 2002 War Vote Is Disputed

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 1, 2007; Page A06

Former White House aide Karl Rove said yesterday it was Congress, not President Bush, who wanted to rush a vote on the looming war in Iraq in the fall of 2002

As numerous people on the net have pointed out…Rove’s version is a flat-out lie.  To say it is "disputed" would, in any reality but a beltway journalist’s indicate that there is some way of honestly disputing it and there isn’t.  It’s classic, vapid, idiotic, brain dead  "he said, she said" journalism.  How about "Death Of George Washington Over 200 Years Ago Is Disputed"  What the fuck?

Just because…

"Theres a star that shines…for everyone.  And theres a greater dusk, in the rising sun.
The path you don’t know why you’re taking, and the lovers arms tonight I’m waking"
Honeyroot – "Starshine"

In the republican Big Tent, you can never be too far to the right…

Mysterious Group Attacks Huckabee

A mysterious group calling itself Iowans for Some Semblance of Christian Decency has begun waging a campaign against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, insinuating that not only is the Republican presidential candidate not a true conservative, he’s not a real Christian.

In fliers put under the doors of reporters at the Marriott in Des Moines, where Huckabee was staying Monday night, the organization, whose members are unknown, lays out its interpretation of how the former Baptist minister’s views run contrary to the Bible.

Huckabee’s support of educational opportunities for the children of illegal immigrants is portrayed, for instance, as "justification for violating the 8th commandment (stealing from U.S. citizens)." A lighthearted video clip where he pretends to talk to the Lord (watch HERE) is portrayed as "sacrilegious mocking of God for political gain."

From this cesspool the republicans will pick their presidential candidate.  The one who wins will be the one that floats to the top.

Via Slog…

A Lurid Aftermath to a Hedge Fund Manager’s Life

A life of private jets and black-tie balls ended with Seth Tobias, a wealthy investment manager and a familiar presence on CNBC, floating face down in the swimming pool of his mansion here…

Mr. Tobias, who was 44 years old, had apparently suffered a heart attack, his brother Spence said at the time. The police did not consider his death suspicious.

But now an unfolding drama over Mr. Tobias’s estate is providing a lurid account of fast money and faster living in the volatile world of hedge funds. Mr. Tobias’s four brothers and Mrs. Tobias are locked in a legal battle over the estate, which is worth at least $25 million. And, in a civil complaint, they have gone so far as to accuse her of murder.

The brothers, Samuel, Spence, Scott and Joshua, claim Mrs. Tobias drugged her husband and lured him into the pool. Bill Ash, a former assistant to Mr. Tobias, said he had told the police that Mrs. Tobias confessed to him that she had cajoled her husband into the water while he was on a cocaine binge with a promise of sex with a male go-go dancer known as Tiger.

… 

Mr. Tobias’s life was apparently as volatile as his investment returns. After Circle T lost 5.3 percent in 2005, his marriage began to fray. In March 2006, the police were called to the Tobiases’ home because of a domestic disturbance. A few days later. Mr. Tobias filed for divorce. It was one week before the couple’s first anniversary.

The Tobiases later reconciled. But the divorce filings included a laundry list of accusations. Mrs. Tobias stated that she caught him having an “adulterous affair” and that he “gambled away tens of thousands of dollars and used other funds on illicit habits.” She asked the court to award her $46,000 a month for living expenses. He argued that she was constantly spending too much money.

Even after the couple reconciled, they fought constantly, mostly over money, according to several friends, who asked not to be identified for fear of being subpoenaed in connection with the case or because they were worried that their professional reputations would be harmed by being associated with the case. At one point, Mrs. Tobias bought a Porsche on her credit card and then cried when Mr. Tobias told her to return it, one friend recounted.

They also secretly frequented a gay bar called Cupids in West Palm Beach, in a strip mall along a main thoroughfare. It was there, according to Mr. Ash, that Mr. Tobias first met Tiger.

“Seth used to come in here back when it was crazy,” said Adiel Hemingway, the longtime manager of Cupids. As a flat-screen television blared hard-core gay pornography, he said that Mr. Tobias often came to the club with his wife. Mr. Hemingway took out a picture of Tiger in his office. Tiger is blond and covered with tattoos that look like stripes.

Lifestyles of the rich and shallow… 

Some time ago Brad DeLong linked to this post over at Cosmic Variance… 

Academics: Still Totally Lame   

Here’s the thing: the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a handful of academics to divulge their guilty pleasures. Seems like a potentially amusing parlor game, no? Well, as a moment’s reflection would reveal, no. Because you see, what could they possibly say? Most academics, for better or for worse, basically conform to the stereotype. They like reading books and teaching classes, not shooting up heroin or walking around in public dressed up in gender-inappropriate undergarments. (See, I don’t even know what would count as a respectable guilty pleasure.) And if they did, they certainly wouldn’t admit it. And if they did admit it, it certainly wouldn’t be in the pages of the Chronicle.

I was one of the people they asked, and I immediately felt bad that I couldn’t come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others.

But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.

But the award goes to Prof. McCloskey, who in a candid examination of the dark hedonistic corners of her soul, managed to include this sentence:

Nothing pleases me more than opening a new textbook.

Arrrgh! Stuff like that sets back the cause of academic non-geekiness for centuries!

Thing of it is, if you really were the edgy hipster of your Walter Mitty dreams, then all that salacious stuff wouldn’t be your Guilty pleasures because you wouldn’t be feeling guilty about them.  They would just be your pleasures and you would revel in them.  Your guilty pleasures might just in fact, look a lot like the ones those academics thrilled to share with the world.  Oh…and by the way…I rilly enjoy a cup of hot chocolate by the fireplace…

Here’s what I think of as guilty pleasures: things you enjoy, but you’re a tad embarrassed to admit to.  Here are a few of mine… 

• Yaoi/Shounen Ai.  Beautiful, often longhaired guys, who are madly in love.  Sex, romance, angst, soap opera plots…what’s not to like?  I discovered these Japanese comics a few years ago and now I have a couple book shelves full of it.  There are usually several on my bed stand at any given moment, and another few on order from Amazon.  I feel sometimes like I’m having the teeny bopper experience I was denied back when I actually was that age.

• My Deep Fryer.  I shouldn’t eat out of that thing as much as I do, but I’ve found that if I don’t eat junk food between meals I can still eat from the deep fryer and maintain my weight.  I have a fish fry recipe that my neighbors and co-workers all love, and Cosco tempura shrimp cooks up deliciously in it.  Also hot dogs and Maryland crab cakes.  Deep fried food is high on my list of this life’s simple pleasures.  These days I put nothing but peanut oil in mine.

• Driving.  This isn’t very green of me, but just throwing my maps in the car and some luggage if I need it and driving from one horizon to the next is one of my all time favorite pastimes.  And now I have a car with a built-in GPS navagation system, so I don’t even need the maps.  I love to drive…not just to see someplace I’ve never seen before, although that too is one of this life’s pure joys, but also the simple physical act of driving a car down the road just gives me hours and hours of pleasure.  When I was a toddler I used to embarrass my mom no end pretending to be driving a car…complete with sound effects…as I walked alongside of her while she shopped. 

  I justify it on the grounds that I live within walking distance of work so I’m really not burning all that much gasoline on a yearly basis.  But I reckon I’ll keep doing it until the price of gasoline makes it prohibitive.  My fear is that I’ll live to see the price of gas spell the end of the American open road.  You have never seen this country, if you haven’t driven it from one end to the other.  Flying over it is like only reading the Cliff’s Notes or Readers Digest version.

• Cigars.  I know I shouldn’t.  But a relaxing walk through the neighborhood after dinner with a good cigar is one of this life’s simple, lovely pleasures.  As my body ages I’ve been cutting back…too much nicotine all at once and my body complains in various ways.  I like the Paul Garmirian Belicosos, the La Gloria Cubana Churchills and the Bahia Golds.  When I can get my hands on a real Cuban Montecristo I am in heaven.  They’re not as addictive as cigarettes, but dangerous enough in their own way, granted.  I can go weeks without bothering to open up my humidor.  But I doubt I’ll ever stop completely.

• Elevator Music.  There’s a ton of it on my iPod.  Henry Mancini, 101 Strings, Percy Faith.  I get in a mood and just wallow in the stuff.  I think it’s because it’s what mom used to listen to while I was a toddler.  (I got her taste for Swing music then too probably)  I’ll listen to it while doing chores around the house, or oddly enough while coding at work.  It’s pleasant, undemanding, and puts me in mind of simpler times.

  I’m sitting here right now listening to The Living Strings Play Songs of the Sea, something I searched for a digital copy of for years.

• Republic Serials.  I have a collection of them, mostly from the Rocket Man series.  Man…I still wish I had one of those jet packs I could take flight in.  Republic made the absolutely best serials of that golden age.  Columbia, which had the rights to the Superman and Batman characters, seemed to be aiming at a very young audience.  The republic serials were appealing more to an older boy, and I still love watching them.  Something about invaders from another planet employing fedora capped gangster henchmen to do their dirty work while they build fantastic machines of destruction in secret cave hideaways is still appealing somehow, to my inner teenager.

• Longhaired rocker boy music videos.  I stopped watching MTV when it stopped playing these.  I still keep my Bon Jovi and Nelson Brothers posters up.  Not that I really listen to much of their music, especially since the Nelsons went a little bit country, since I’m a little bit rock and roll…

• The Monkees.  Yes…I know.  This is about as uncool as it gets.  But I collected every friggin one of their albums back in the day, even as the group started breaking up, and I sill love to listen to it.  Tell me Pleasant Valley Sunday (the 45 version) doesn’t still hold up.  I don’t think people really appreciated how well Dolenz and Nesmith’s voices worked together in a song.

• Harry and Son.  The Paul Newman movie featuring Robbie Benson appearing in the nicest pair of cut-offs you will ever see on the silver screen.  Sometimes the cutoffs are all he’s wearing!  I’ve been searching for a DVD or VHS tape of this for ages.  I watch it religiously whenever I see it appear on the TV listings.  Maybe one of these times I’ll get around to following the plot too.  It’s just…the moment the cutoffs appear I keep forgetting to follow the story.

• 80s-90s Metal. Sometimes, as with elevator music, I just get in a mood and next thing I know I’m jammin’ to Lita Ford.

This from Brad DeLong…

Scott Eric Kaufman writes:

Acephalous: Google’s Images, Searched for Me: A reader who attended a function I’d planned to (but, due to illness, could not) attend suggested I spend a few minutes skimming the results of a Google Image Search for my name.  (He wanted to be sure he could spot me in the crowd.) Intrigued, I took him up on his offer.  The results are … interesting. A search for my full name, bookended by quotation marks, returns: a photo of Eric Lott on the beach; Scott McLemee’s Simpson’s self; some books McLemee bought for Kotsko in Canada a few years in; the header of the Iranian Supreme Leader’s blog…. Chard Orzel; Salma Hayek; an angry duck; Salma Hayek; Brad DeLong; Salma Hayek… Salma Hayek… Salma Hayek…. Something must’ve gone horribly wrong with Google.  I don’t even like Salma Hayek, much less—what do you mean "Page Rank"?  This post will do what? Seriously?…

At least it is not Friedrich Hayek.

And "Chard" Orzel?

From Box Turtle Bulletin.  I’ve mentioned before how Paul Cameron is often stealth-cited in right wing anti-gay propaganda, by citing someone else, who in turn cites Cameron.  But this is a first …

As I went about organizing my library over the weekend, I re-opened the book, Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Position on Homosexuality (Maxie D. Dunnam & H. Newton Malony, editors). And as I often do, I take a quick glance through the bibliographies, and among the many things I look for is whether they cite Paul Cameron or not. Nope. His name was nowhere to be found.

Then, I skimmed through H. Newton Malony’s chapter, “Homosexuality In the Postmodern World.” And there it was:

Longevity is another area in which homosexuality has been a determining factor. A 1991-92 survey of newspapers available to homosexual communities found that among homosexuals not suffering from AIDS, the median age of death for 5,371 persons to be 42 years of age, [sic] with only 9 percent living to old age. Among lesbians, the average age at death was 45 years. Both these figures are dramatically below the life expectancy of the population in general.²²

Footnote 22 was this:

22. Malony, Perspectives on Homosexuality, 37.

See? No Cameron. Unless of course, you happened to have access to Malony’s 1998 Perpsectives on Homosexuality: The Transforming Point of View from Integration Press. And if you could find access to that obscure and now out-of-print book, you would eventually discover that this nugget came from an earlier version of Cameron’s pamphlet, “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do.”

There’s no doubt here about this one.  Obviously, that you’re citing yourself to hide the fact that Cameron is the source of your "facts", means you know full well what you’re doing is deceitful.  Now take another look at that title…  Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Position on Homosexuality.  A faith that needs lies to support it, is a faith that is already dead.

Particularly scary to the villagers.  Or as Atrios says …

I always find Hugo Chavez to be a somewhat annoying subject because he’s neither the Satanic Hitler as reflected universally in our media (and it’s really creepy how much he’s distorted) nor the Great Savior Of The Left. He’s a left wing populist with an authoritarian streak, but no matter what they say it’s "left wing populist" which makes the Villagers froth, not the authoritarian part. There are plenty of dictators around the world which get respectful treatment from our media, and the anti-Democratic authoritarian actions of our own president disturb them not at all.

But, in any case, it seems the dictator lost an election. Strange dictatorship indeed.

Anyway, watching US media coverage of Venezuela makes me realize that US coverage of foreign affairs is utterly corrupted by something. Still paying the piper. Who can forget this Orwellian NYT editorial?

Published: April 13, 2002

With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. But democracy has not yet been restored, and won’t be until a new president is elected. That vote has been scheduled for next spring, with new Congressional elections to be held by this December. The prompt announcement of a timetable is welcome, but a year seems rather long to wait for a legitimately elected president.

After Chavez was elected in 1996 and re-elected in 2000, the New York Times cheers on a military coup which installed "a respected business leader" and hails it as a move signaling "democracy is no longer threatened."

They backpedaled from this editorial after the fact, but likely only because the coup didn’t take and Chavez was returned to power.

And thus the nation that once held itself out to the oppressed peoples of the world as a beacon of hope, fritters away its last remaining shreds of moral authority.  Oh it isn’t just Iraq…we’ve been proving to the rest of the world for generations down in South America that we don’t mean what we say about democracy, let alone liberty and justice for all. 

Somebody stick a fork in America’s corporate news media, it’s done…

Via Atrios…

Where Was Jeb?

A government money market debacle unfolding in Florida is raising questions about former governor and presidential brother Jeb Bush’s possible involvement in the mess.

Florida froze withdrawals from a state investment fund earlier this week when local governments withdrew billions of dollars out of concern for the fund’s financial stability.

In the past few days, municipalities have withdrawn roughly $9 billion, nearly a third of the $28 billion fund (which is similar to a money market fund) controlled by the Florida’s State Board of Administration (SBA). The run on the fund was triggered by worries that a percentage of the portfolio contained debt that had defaulted.

That would be the sub-prime mess…or as people are referring to it these days, the Big Shitpile…

A majority of this paper was sold to SBA by Lehman Brothers. Bush, as the state’s top elected official, served on a three-member board that oversaw the SBA until he retired as governor in January. In August, Bush was hired as a consultant to the bank. Lehman spokesperson Kerrie Cohen, speaking on behalf of Bush, said they had no comment and would not say when the bank had sold Florida the paper. SBA did not return calls.

While SBA wouldn’t confirm, Bloomberg reported the amount of debt in default is around $900 million.

Edward Siedle, a former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney who investigates money management wrongdoing and has worked on behalf of several Florida public pension funds, thinks this is just the tip of the iceberg. He expects problems with defaulting debt to crop up in public funds across the country, especially in states with disclosure laws weaker than Florida’s.

The state is now trying to pull together a committee of investors over the weekend to find a solution…

Say…didn’t one of the Bush brothers figure prominently in the big Savings And Loan crisis of 1988…?

Chris, over at Sex In The Public Square, begins his review of Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity thusly…

It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.

Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfactions with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.

Actually, I can sum up what I used to dislike most about porn in a few words: there was very little romance in it.   But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.  I fit the same pattern of boyhood that Chris and Robert both seem to have had, and while I’m not sure that in porn lies, as Chris says, our salvation, I think he’s  is absolutely right about this in general…

And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.

Jensen’s book is supposedly a critical examination of the relationship between pornography and misogyny.  Amazon describes it thusly…

Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.

If calling anti-pornography arguments anti-sex has ever silenced the debate I sure haven’t noticed it.  More often then not the retort is something along the lines of, Sure…sexual freedom is destroying family life and American morals.  Children born out of wedlock, raised in fatherless households, rising crime and sexually transmitted disease…  You’re damn right we’re anti-sex!  It’s telling that the one reader comment still up on the book’s Amazon page comes from a self identified "biblical Christian".  I guess that’s as opposed to…you know…one of those plain old ordinary everyday Christians or something.  But as Chris carefully explains in his review, Jensen’s book is neither a critical examination of pornography nor a necessary breaking of silence.  If anything, it wants the silence to continue.

Sexual desire is hard wired into us, is a normal, natural part of our flesh and blood lives, is an essential part of our nature.  It is a drive that runs through the fabric of our being, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates.  It is not a blackboard anyone can just scribble their will upon.  Sweeping it under the rug, hiding it in the closet, burying it under layers of shame can only do us great psychological harm and put it utterly beyond our ability to manage decently and honorably.  Witness the torrent of family values republican sex scandals lately.   Just this morning I am reading on the news nets that four more men have come forward to testify to having had sex with Mr. (I Am Not Gay) Larry Craig.  Sex is a powerful, ancient and venerable urge.  You force it into the closet, and all you end up doing is insuring that it’ll come rushing out in inappropriate, and self destructive ways, taking you helplessly along for the ride.

Which makes this remark about Jensen and his kind toward the end of Chris’ review worth pondering:

There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked.

You tend to find that most pornography is just plain trash.  There’s a couple reasons for that.  First..because it mostly Is trash.  In that, it is merely obeying the relentlessness of Sturgeon’s Law that everything does.  But porn is also vastly limited by its very purpose.  It’s job is to happily push our buttons.  But everyone’s buttons are different.  And what makes one person all hot and bothered can positively disgust another. 

When I was a gay young adult, trying to find my way around a gay community that was still mostly hidden from view back in the early 1970s, if I wanted a copy of the local gay newspaper, or The Advocate, I mostly had to go to seedy adult bookstores to find them.  Wandering around the shelves of almost exclusively heterosexual pornography was eye opening, and pretty disgusting and I am certain that wasn’t because I mate to my own, and not the opposite sex.  Even the gay pornography I saw turned me off far more then it turned me on.  I began to realize then that what turned me on was an eroticism that was mostly sensual and not terribly explicit, and which included heavy doses of romance and emotion.  That is me.  My sexual response is inextricably knotted up with my romantic one.  But back in the early 70s, sex was either heavily censored, or grossly explicit.  Commercial pornography was about the money shot and nothing else.  I remember one of my first porn tapes I’d bought on the basis of the very hot looking guys on the cover, only to end up feeling let down that there was nothing on display throughout but rote genital contact.  They didn’t show the slightest bit of affection.  It really was just like the bigots always said homosexuality was…  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  I can hear people laughing now at the idea that I went looking for romance on the porn shelves, and that’s part of the problem.  It didn’t, and it doesn’t have to be that way. 

It would be decades before I began finding erotic art that I could whole heartedly enjoy, as artists, more specifically, female artists, began to freely and unashamedly express their own human sexuality.  I always found it interesting that my favorite gay male romance novels have been written by women.  Now I find that my favorite source of erotic art these days comes from Japan, in the form of comic book stories of torrid gay male love affairs, that are largely written by heterosexual females, for heterosexual females. 

This is, I think, important, because anti-pornography crusaders like Jensen like to posture that they’re about defending women from violent male sexuality.  But if anything can be said to be responsible for the rote objectification of women in pornography, and the absence of images of tenderness and balanced relationships in it, it’s not unbridled male sexuality but the suppression of female sexuality.  That only men, and never women, enjoy sex for its own sake, is a hoary old lie powerful men used to tell everyone so nobody would question their domination of women.  The problem with pornography isn’t that it exploits women, but that women have never, until recently, been allowed their own erotic voice.  That’s why the images you commonly find in pornography are unbalanced.  But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.

Yes, most representations of sex are obvious; our sexual nature reduced to its lowest common denominator.  But there are so many layers, intricate and sublime to human sexuality, to our sexual relationships, even when it’s not so much Mr. Right as Mr. Right Away.  And nowadays, thankfully and I think mostly because more women are producing pornography now, artists are going there now, and when they do it can be awesomely beautiful, and powerfully life affirming.  Ironically enough, if the anti-porn crusaders have their way, all of that will vanish, and we’ll be back to cheap, tawdry, sterile porn that degrades both men and women, that treats sexual desire as nothing more then urges that have nothing to do with the rest of our being, other then to drag it down into the gutter.  

But that’s exactly what some people want.  Better we feel ashamed then proud.  Proud people don’t passively take orders.

There is a sad joke in calling Robert Jensen “radical” in any sense of the word. He has nothing to give us but the same bitter fruit we were fed by hateful priests and timid parents.

If there is anything we gay folk can teach our heterosexual neighbors about sex it’s this: shame rots your soul from within.  It takes away your ability to love someone whole heartedly, body and soul and every playful and ecstatic and wonderful moment of joy you could ever have had in the arms of a lover.  If there’s anything this poor human race doesn’t need any more of, it’s shame over our sexual nature.  There is a place, a wholesome necessary healing place, for an art that is both erotic and humane.  We need an art that holds a mirror to us of our sexual selves, in which we see the wonder and joy of our lives of flesh and blood untainted by fear or shame or guilt.  That mirror is slowly coming to light, thanks I am convinced to the emerging sexual freedom of women.  So naturally, the haters of humanity, and their useful tools, want to stifle that once more, and forever.

If you don’t know about the nefarious plan to build a NAFTA Superhighway from Mexico to Canada, stabbing right though the very heartland of America to merge all three countries into a North American Union as a first step toward One World Government…then you obviously haven’t been peering into the right wing cesspool lately. You’re probably better for it…

The American people never supported NAFTA, and they are angry over Bush’s failure to secure the border — but a shotgun marriage between our two nations appears prearranged. Central feature: a ten-lane, 400-yard-wide NAFTA Super Highway from the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, up to and across the U.S. border, all the way to Canada. Within the median strip dividing the north and south car and truck lanes would be rail lines for both passengers and freight traffic, and oil and gas pipelines.

As author Jerome Corsi describes this Fox-Bush autobahn, container ships from China would unload at Lazaro Cardenas, a port named for the Mexican president who nationalized all U.S. oil companies in 1938. From there, trucks with Mexican drivers would run fast lines into the United States, hauling their cargo to a U.S. customs inspection terminal — in Kansas City, Mo. From there, the trucks would fan out across America or roll on into Canada. Similar super-highways from Mexico through the United States into Canada are planned.

According to Corsi, construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor, the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway, is to begin next year.

The beneficiaries of this NAFTA Super Highway project would be the contractors who build it and the importers and outlet stores for the Chinese-manufactured goods that would come flooding in. The losers would be U.S. longshoremen, truckers, manufacturers and taxpayers.

The latter would pay the cost of building the highway in Mexico and the United States, both in dollars and in the lost sovereignty of our once-independent American republic.

So says Pat Buchanan over at Town Hall. That column ends with the cheery note that Pat Buchanan is the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.  And if you think he’s the only wing nut bellyaching about the secret plan to replace sovereign America with a North American Union by way of a superhighway from Mexico to Canada you are sadly mistaken.  Here’s winger Phyllis Schlafly keeping tabs on the plot over at the Eagle Forum…

Plans call for a ten-lane limited-access highway to parallel I-35. It would have three lanes each way for passenger cars, two express lanes each way for trucks, rail lines both ways for people and freight, plus a utility corridor for oil and natural gas pipelines, electric towers, cables for communication, and telephone lines.

Central to this plan is a massive taking of 584,000 acres of farm and ranch land at an estimated cost of $11 to $30 billion, property then lost from the tax rolls of counties and school districts. After the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London, no one need worry about the power of eminent domain to take private property.

The Trans-Texas Corridor will be the first leg of what has been dubbed the NAFTA Super Highway to go through heartland America all the way to Canada. This would be a major lifeline of the plan to merge the United States into a North American Community

World Net Daily is also on the case …

Ask some members of Congress about plans to build a "NAFTA superhighway" connecting Mexico and Canada via the U.S. and you might hear snickers.

Some officials will tell you they have seen no "earmarks" for such a plan and question whether it even exists.

But the plan does exist and the NAFTA superhighway is being built – under the radar screen.

One need look no further than the $286 billion highway bill signed into law earlier this month by President Bush for some of the "earmarks."

The measure gave the state of Tennessee more than $111 million to help plan and build Interstate 69, called "one of the most significant transportation projects in the region’s history" by the Commercial Appeal.

No one in Tennessee has any doubts about plans for the NAFTA superhighway. It is being built now with federal taxpayer dollars. And the plan calls for I-69 to extend from Michigan to Texas, linking the Canadian and Mexican borders.

Those supporting the plan, like Transportation Secretary Mario Cino, say it will bring an unprecedented windfall not only to the regions it traverses but for all Americans, Mexicans and Canadians.

Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner Gerald Nicely said I-69 "could help position the western part of the state as one of the world’s new economic centers of power in the global marketplace."

The entire I-69 project is expected to cost $8.8 billion in current dollars, with states picking up 10 percent of the tab. So where is the money hidden? It’s not really. But nowhere in any highway bill is the project referred to as the "NAFTA superhighway." Since the money is doled out to states to spend on their portion of the project, the allocations look like any other highway spending.

Ultimately, the Tennessee portion of the I-69 project is expected to cost $1 billion. It will shadow the present route of U.S. 51, connecting towns like Union City, Troy, Dyersburg, Ripley, Covington and Millington before following what is now I-40/240 through Midtown, according to the Commercial Appeal. The new highway bill focuses on the portion of I-69 through Northwest Tennessee about 80-110 miles north of Memphis. A 20-mile section of that segment – a four-lane stretch of U.S. 51 between Dyersburg and Troy – already is completed. Signs label it as part of the "Future I-69 Corridor." That leaves a 19-mile section to be built from Troy to the Kentucky line before one-third of the I-69 route through Tennessee is completed.

"The route’s already been laid out, with survey markers planted in fields and cryptic benchmarks painted on the pavement of country roads," reports the Commercial Appeal.

Ohhhh…Cryptic Benchmarks…!   What they really need to do is number the new highway ‘666’ and maybe they’ll all have heart attacks.  For a good debunking of all this right wing paranoia, see the August 2007 article in The Nation, titled The NAFTA Superhighway.  It’s a case study in how the eternally paranoid right takes random scraps of fact and weaves them into super secret conspiracies against red-blooded true-blue 100 percent Americans.  I’m old enough to remember the hysteria over fluoridation, that communist plot to poison the precious bodily fluids of Americans.  No…that wasn’t some little bit of comedy Stanley Kubrick’s writers came up with for Dr. Strangelove.  It was a real right wing conspiracy theory back then, and for all I know they probably still believe it.

But there’s no rabbit hole crazy enough, that the right can’t make it even crazier.  Now along comes Pat Robertson to say, Oh No…The NAFTA Superhighway is the highway of righteousness prophesied in the bible …

But what if Corsi and friends are wrong? What if the yellow cloud surrounding I-35 isn’t an “invasion” from Mexico but an “invasion” of God? That, apparently, is the theory of the youth-oriented church activists profiled on yesterday’s “700 Club,” who are running “purity sieges” at clinics and porn shops, where they claim to be “moving angels and demons” by, for example, “setting free” an inebriated young man from “the desires to be with men” through the laying of hands at a gay bar.

While the CBN report doesn’t mention NAFTA or a North American Union, the suspicious highway is central to the story:

A number of Christians have come to believe, because of recent prophecies, dreams, and visions, that I-35 is the highway spoken in Isaiah 35, verse 8: “And a highway will be there, it will be called the way of holiness.”

… [Heartland Ministries’ Hill] believes God has an awesome plan that starts along I-35. “Let’s draw a line in the center of America, set people on fire, get young people saved, get moms and dads saved, get churches on fire, get holy, and watch how it affects the rest of America.”

“What do we expect to see?” [said Cindy Jacob.] “We expect laws to be changed in cities. We expect righteous leaders. We expect a movement, a reformation that will literally sweep the face of the earth.”

Lovely…  I’m thinking Pat, with his south African diamond mines and other international investments, has some interest in making sure NAFTA doesn’t suddenly go sour on him. So he found himself a bible verse to calm the rubes down with.  But maybe he really does believe it.  Welcome to the intersection of Batshit Crazy and Fucking Nuts.  Otherwise known as the republican grassroots.