Duncan Black (Atrios) remarks ironically...

Nobody Could’ve Predicted

That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.

Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.

But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.

All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.

And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light.  But NBC isn’t just a television network.  It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation.  In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about.  So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits?  They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.

Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole.  But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA.  They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line.  No more.  The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.

Your staff plants a recording device on your opponent’s podium prior to your debate, so they can record any off the cuff remarks he makes while the mics are off.  Your opponent finds the device and erases the tape before giving it back to them.  Do you: a) Apologize and assure your opponent that the responsible parties will be punished? b) Deny everything and point to your opponent’s support for the militant homosexual agenda?  c) File criminal charges against your opponent for destruction of property for erasing the tape?

This is What It’s Come To…

I guess you file this under the heading of Deep, Late Election Comic Relief. And not surprisingly it comes from a Senate Republican who should have been coasting but now finds himself with a real chance losing his seat.

Last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) squared off in a debate with Democratic challenger Bruce Lunsford. But on Lunsford’s podium a GOP operative had placed a small voice recorder, presumably to pick up some off-mic comments Lunsford might make — apparently a violation of the debate rules.

(The recorder itself — sans recording — was eventually returned.)

Now, from here the accounts differ. According to the Lunsford campaign, Lunsford actually didn’t see the recorder. But since it was nestled in among his papers it was included when he handed his papers off to his staffers after the debate — staffers who say they later erased the recording since it violated debate rules to have a planted recorder on the opponents podium.

According to the McConnell staffers, however, Lunsford did see the recorder during the debate and essentially confiscated it. Richard St. Onge, II (who, in a separate story, may have absconded with his name from some neo-gothic southern novel) is the GOP operative who planted the recorder. And according to St. Onge, when he went up to Lunsford after the debate to demand his recorder back, Lunsford said, "No you won’t get it back."

And now St. Onge and the chairman of McConnell’s campaign have filed a criminal complaint against Lunsford for petty larceny and destruction of property — because of the erasure.

To be included in The Updated Book Of Virtues by William J. Bennett:  It’s Not Cheating If You Do It To Win …or… Extremism In The Defense Of The Party Is No Vice…

Ahem…

To The Three Dim Bulbs With Full Shopping Carts Who Monopolized The Self Checkouts At The Superfresh Just Up The Street:  Thank you for wasting the precious minutes of the lives of everyone in the long line that developed behind you, watching you struggle to cope with a device even someone with a lead pipe shoved through their brains could figure out how to use.  But not you apparently.  Oh…and with shopping carts half full of unlabeled produce no less.  Which means you have to flail around for five or ten minutes trying to figure out what you have in your hands and then how to enter the produce code for it, and then ohmyfuckinggod how to weigh the motherfucking thing and then remember that you have to put it in the fucking bag when your done.  Nice.  I’m talking to you Mrs Upscale Granola Lady, who probably knows the precise nutritional value of every motherfucking one of those bananas and carrot sticks and broccoli heads and other produce section crap you loaded your shopping cart up with, but can’t be bothered to learn how to use a goddamned self checkout machine before you fucking walk up to it.  Oh…and You, Mr. Middle-Aged Overweight Sports Slacks Polo Shirt And Golf Cap.  The patient as a saint lady behind the service counter had to walk up and help you fourteen, count em, fourteen times while you tried valiantly to do what the goddamned screen prompts were telling you to fucking do in the first place.  Like…you know…place the item in the bag after you’d scanned it.  Let me give you a hint…just between you and me…  Scan your motherfucking coupons in by placing the bar code face Down.  Moron.   Oh…and swipe your credit card on the side with the goddamned magnetic strip on it.  You didn’t have to try another card.  The first one you picked out of that wallet full of plastic would have worked if you’d just…you know…swiped correctly.  Jackass.  Do you even Know what that magnetic stripe on the card is for?  No…it’s not for sticking your credit card to the refrigerator door. I hope your wife is paying your bills because you’d be licking the wrong side of the envelope flap before you mailed them.  With the wrong checks inside the envelops.  When you were done the bagging side of that self checkout machine was so full I swear I thought it was going to tip over.  And sure enough it took you another…what…five minutes…to carefully…meticulously…re-pack your shopping cart while the self checkout machine just sat there waiting for the next customer.  Good thing the lady behind the service counter came over to help you with that mentally challenging task or you’d have been there for the rest of the afternoon. Let me guess…it was too much like having to put the square pegs in the square holes in kindergarten wasn’t it?  The bags…they don’t fit…maybe if I placed the one with the bread in it underneath the one with the three two-liter bottles of Coke in it…  Golly…the line behind you folks sure cleared out fast once you got the hell out of the way didn’t it?  I have a wee suggestion.  Next time you’re buying groceries, use the regular checkout lines.  The time you save getting to the front of the self checkout lanes, because most of the people using them are only buying just a few items, you loose in spades because you just don’t fucking have a clue.  Admit it.  Embrace your destiny.  You are not qualified to check yourself out of a mental hospital, let alone a grocery store.  Use the regular checkout lines.  Trust me…the folks who are being paid to scan your items, weigh your produce, enter the produce codes, and bag everything, do it a hell of a lot faster then you.  You will get out of the store quicker, even if you don’t get to the head of the line quicker.  And you won’t have a long line of people behind you, all picturing how good it would feel to cut your empty head off, place it on the scanner tray, enter the produce code on the touch screen for Inconsiderate Time Sucking Asshole and stuff it in one of those little plastic grocery bags.

Okay…done…

Via SLOG…  Oh look..the wingers are all going to go live on a commune…

From The National Review, we have the Republican version of “I’m moving to Canada if their side wins”:

Canada or Galt’s Gulch? [Lisa Schiffren]

So, what happens if McCain really does pull it out and win? After the urban riots, might this be the year that all those libs with Bush derangement syndrome actually make good on their threat to leave the country? What if Canada had a special policy to lure them in? (Win-win-win situation —them/us/Canada )

…

Of course conservatives don’t threaten to leave the U.S. as a rule. However, on more or less the same subject, I haven’t heard so much about John Galt since …well, ever. (And objectivists were thick on the ground in D.C. during the Reagan administration.) I suppose, with all the projections of the Obama administration and its confiscatory tax rates on people and businesses, subordination of the productive to the dependent, public schools turned into training camps for radicals and legions of speech/thought police — i.e. — the end of liberty as we knew it — it might be time to start thinking about the mechanics of Galt’s Gulch. Actually, this is probably a great time to buy property in the Rockies. Love to see the video for that…

For those of you who are unaware, Galt’s Gulch is where all the world’s libertarian intellectuals flee to in the novel Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. In the novel, the resulting lack of intellectuals and competent businessmen causes the rest of the world to nearly die in an apocalypse of mediocrity. I’m willing to take the gamble that it’s not going to work out that way in the real world, and I implore the conservatives to move to the Rockies and start working on their conservatopia. I’ll even donate to a fund in their honor.

In my college years I succumbed to the rhetoric of Ayn Rand.  So did a lot of folks, some well before me.  Alan Greenspan for one, who was at one time a member of her inner circle.  I became a Libertarian.  Fiercely so.  But to my credit I think, I never let my new found ideology interpret reality for me.  Eventually Ronald Reagan showed me what sort of people make money synonymous with morality, and the kind of government we were likely to end up with with them in charge.  So I shrugged…and left both Rand and her bastard child, the Libertarian party.  Is it so insufferably arrogant of me to say that I’ve been waiting for the rest of them to wise up ever since?

Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation

For years, a Congressional hearing with Alan Greenspan was a marquee event. Lawmakers doted on him as an economic sage. Markets jumped up or down depending on what he said. Politicians in both parties wanted the maestro on their side.

But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

I had my Damascus moment twenty years ago you drooling moron and it was called the Silverado Savings and Loan Scandal.  You could have seen then if you’d just taken a look at it, that what happens when financial institutions are deregulated is a mad rush to stuff other people’s, mostly working people’s money into their pockets.  Self interest after all, is about Self, not about the institution you work for, let alone the communities they serve.  It doesn’t matter if the whole shitpile collapses if you can get out of it with enough cash to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of your life, does it?  If self-interest is all there is to it, then you’ve done pretty good haven’t you…even if thousands of other people had to loose everything so you could live high on the hog.

Greed is, contrary to Randian dogma, Not Good.  Ambition is good.  But ambition is self actualizing.  You want to become something.  Something better.  Greed is just wanting what someone else has.  There was a time when I believed that Rand’s attempt to redefine Greed as Ambition was just an artifact of her not knowing English natively.  But no…she knew what she was doing.  It was from the beginning, all about raping the working class for the benefit of the rich and powerful.  Her revenge for the communist appropriation of her father’s pharmacy.  If she couldn’t stick it to the Russian proletariat, she could at least help the rich here in America carpet their mansions with the life savings of working Americans.  She raised a generation on her Greed Is Good religion.  And when they got the power they craved, they put her ideas into practice.  The only practice they could have been put to.  The only practice they were ever meant to be put to…

401k Losses May be Double than Previously Thought

Along with the rest of America, Rep. George Miller has watched the value of his retirement investments plummet in recent weeks.

"I’ve lost 30 percent like everybody else. This hits home with the Miller family, too," the California Democrat said in a recent interview.

In recent years, Congress has promoted the dramatic movement in corporate America away from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s with policies encouraging automatic enrollment and raising contribution limits. Under 401(k) plans employees contribute to their own investment accounts and assume the risks and rewards that go with them. Lately, with the crisis on Wall Street and across the globe, it’s been more risk than reward.

Earlier this month, Miller’s House Education and Labor Committee found that Americans’ retirement plans, pension plans and 401(k)s included, have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months– about 20 percent of their value. At a committee hearing Wednesday in San Francisco, Miller cited new research suggesting that the losses might be as much as double that.

And they almost got Social Security during the Bush administration too.  Remember that?  They were going to let individuals "invest" their retirement money.  Basically, give it to Wall Street to play with.  It was going to be better then Social Security…just like our 401ks were going to be better then real pensions.  When the butcher’s bill for decades of Randian inspired market deregulation is added up, a lot of folks are going to be Real Glad they didn’t get their hands on that trust fund too.

In the coming years, as the folks who lined their pockets during the past few decades with other people’s life savings are made to pay some of it pack, there is going to be a lot of bellyaching from the high and mighty about class warfare.  As though they haven’t been engaging in it themselves.  Once upon a time the robber barons lived by the simple maxim that might makes right.  If they thought of it at all in moralistic terms they saw themselves as a kind of Darwinism in action…survival of the fittest and all that.  Then Rand came along and told them that anyone who isn’t rich is a leach on those who are.  Capitalism, by which she meant the unrestrained greed motive of the rich and powerful, was not only the best economic system, it was the only Moral one.  Now in the higher echelons of wealth, raping the rest of us isn’t merely something you do because you can.  Now it’s your moral obligation. 

But no amount of apologetics can make what is essentially a pillage and conquest based economic model work for very long, now that we’re not living in caves anymore.  Cooperation is necessary.  Trust is necessary.  For there to be rewards for industriousness, there also need to be guards against perdition.  The marketplace needs a cop on the block, or it simply degenerates into gang warfare and shear thievery and collapses.  Preying on other people, trusting people, naive people, weaker people, is not made into a workable, sustainable economic model simply by calling it good.  Greed is not good.

So I’ve checked all my credit and bank accounts and there is no unusual activity.  Nobody has charged anything to me on any of my accounts, and nobody has opened any new accounts in my name according to the credit reporting agencies.  So…I’m stumped.  If this is a gift I think I’d have heard something about it from the giver by now.  I can’t imagine why some company would have wanted to just send me one of these.

It’s a Polaroid Pogo.  A pocket sized photo printer that uses a paper with the ink already embedded in it…so you don’t have to deal with ink cartridges.   It takes a Bluetooth connection for printing from a cell phone camera, or a USB connection for printing directly from a PictBridge enabled digital camera.  I guess it’s Polaroid’s attempt to stay in the game in a digital world.  Supposedly the paper has a mild adhesive backing for sticking prints you make from it on walls or things.  Looks from the marketing campaign like it’s being mostly marketed toward teens as a kind of fun thing to take along and share prints with your friends with.  The prints aren’t very big…just 2×3"…but I can see where kids might have some fun with it.  But it’s a tad pricey for them, both for the device and expecially for the special ink embedded paper.

I could see taking it along with me on trips…and maybe to some special occassions.  But not carrying it with me everywhere.  What is more, it’s not compatible with my iPhone, though that’s not necessarily a long term problem.  It’s compatible with Palm devices apparently…and I am in the process of making slow defection back to Palmland.  More on that in some other post…

Anyway…I’m still very much stumped as to why I got this.  I’m going to leave it in the box for now, until I get it figured out.

Submitted for your idle viewing pleasure… A wee taste of what your gay and lesbian neighbors have to endure every single fucking day. To my heterosexual friends and family, those of you who have married…while planning your happy day, did you remember to take into account that one or more total strangers might decide to crash it, so they could hurl insults at you, your beloved spouse to be, and everyone else in the chapel?

Of course you didn’t…

More on the guy trying to piss on the happy couple’s big day Here…

…when my editors at SN&R decided that someone with journalistic sensibilities and a sense of humor ought to look into these folks—with their extreme approach to protesting; their bold, yellow “Sodomy is Sin” banner; and their retro use of language that even many anti-gay groups have abandoned as insensitive—I volunteered. The timing was right. Real anger had been stirred up between parts of the local gay community and some members of the Slavic evangelical churches, who have protested at gay events for a few years. And since Proposition 8, which aims to end marriage equality, is on the ballot for November, the upcoming months promised plenty of discussion of gay rights as well as ample opportunity to see Luke and company in action.

So through the rest of the spring and summer and on into fall, I followed Luke and his small crew of activists to protest after protest. With my notebook and camera, I trailed after them during the first local same-sex weddings at the Sacramento County clerk/recorder’s office, at the Sacramento Pride Festival and while protesting at an area McDonald’s, which they perceived as gay-friendly. I kept an eye on the activities of Luke and his friends Viktor Choban and Yuriy Popko at American River College, where they’ve stirred up quite a fuss over the past couple of semesters. They’ve managed to aggravate an impressive list of people: the GLBTQ club, Latinos Unidos, campus progressives, Muslim students and the Improv Club.

The most important thing I’ve discovered through all this: Luke and company won’t compromise. They believe they’re on God’s side, and as far as they’re concerned, if you’re arguing with God, you deserve what’s coming to you: death, destruction and eternal torment.

Gutter crawling bigots like these are no more representative of most of America then Ed Gein, but I’ve often wondered why more good people don’t speak out about the torrent of hate coming from them. I suppose there are a lot of reasons for that, but one is almost certainly that they don’t experience this sort of relentless hatred themselves, first hand. They don’t get to see how completely disconnected the haters are from anything remotely resembling reality, and how that unreality they live in gives them a kind of schizophrenic permission to attack anyone and everyone they perceive as an enemy, without any sort of moral or ethical restraint. They embody not just virtue, but God’s own righteousness, and so they are immune from the moral considerations the rest of us must live by.

Gay Americans have been living with this adversary for decades. We’ve watched it grow in reach from the political gutter to the summit of American political power. The only thing that surprises many of us, is how surprised, how shocked, the rest of America is whenever it catches a glimpse of its essential moral degeneracy. How easily…how effortlessly…they will look you in the eye, and lie through their teeth. How they cheat, and even when flagrantly caught doing it, will deny everything. How they ignore every moral law they insist everyone else must live by when it suits them. Because fighting for God’s truth excuses them from having to live it themselves. It’s not absolute power that corrupts, it’s absolute certainty.

We gay folk need to document our experience more, so others can better understand what America faces. These people want to take everyone down into their gutter and they are determined. It isn’t just our freedoms that are at stake here. If you think these people are just a bunch of irritating, but basically weak and harmless wackos, if you don’t think they’re dangerous, you aren’t paying attention. Perhaps that’s something your gay and lesbian neighbors can help you with. Look again. That guy in the video who called us ‘sodomites’…if you don’t obey his rules, then as far as he’s concerned, you’re one too, and you deserve what’s coming to you: death, destruction and eternal torment.

I arrive back at Casa del Garrett to find a UPS package waiting for me.  I’d ordered something from Amazon but it had only shipped yesterday so I couldn’t imagine it was that.  And closer inspection of the shipping label indicated it was not the product I’d ordered anyway.  But what was it then? 

So I open it and discover something kinda nifty but not anything I’d ordered from anyone anywhere.  It wasn’t on my Amazon Wish List either, so I doubt it came from an appreciative reader.  People just don’t send you things like the item that arrived on my doorstep today without at least some indication that you might actually want it.  I mean…it’s nice and all…and if someone I know did send it to me I really appreciate the thought.  But I’d never have bought one of these for myself.

I try to think if it came as part of something else I’d bought sometime in the past, that was, like, some bonus item you got if you bought some other thing.  But no…this particular thing was only introduced into the marketplace last July.  I haven’t bought anything since then that might have included this item as a bonus.

So now I’m thinking…Identity Theft.  So I need to go online and check to see if someone is making purchases on one of my credit cards and something got shipped to my house instead of theirs by mistake…

I’ll keep you posted on how this all sorts out…

[Update…]  Okay…The cards I use to buy things online show no suspicious activity.  Neither do any of my bank accounts.  I have no new credit card accounts created in my name according to my credit reporting service.  I have some other accounts I need to check tomorrow morning because I have to contact those agencies by phone and it’s past business hours now.  But my main spending cards seem to be safe,

This item I got today really was sent to me…it has my name on the packing slip, but frustratingly no payment information other then it was "pre-paid".  There is also no number on the packing slip I can call to make inquiries.   It’s a product from a well known American corporation…but there is no contact information on the packing slip for them.  Just that it was sent from one of their distribution centers.

It’s not horribly expensive, judging from the prices for it I see online.  Anywhere from  $100 – $150.  But I didn’t order it and I can’t imagine how it might have been sent to me other then as a gift, or because someone out there got my credit card info and is using it to buy themselves goodies…one of which just happened to get sent to me.  But so far I can’t see any evidence of that.

I don’t have that many cards…I don’t like credit but I live with it because it’s necessary in this day and age.  This is a good reason not to have too many accounts out there…so if something looks suspicious you don’t have to check out very many things.  I have an account with a credit monitoring agency that sends me notification of any changes in my credit status almost instantly.  When I financed the Mercedes they practically barraged me with notifications that I was being checked, and that the loan in my name had been approved.  So I think I’m safe there.

Via Sullivan…  Once upon a time, gay folk were easy targets for blackmail.  And if some people have their way…

Threatening Letters Spark New Prop 8 Controversy

Video Only — A threatening letter has sparked a new controversy here in San Diego surrounding the gay marriage debate. Donors who gave money to the No on Prop 8 campaign say they received blackmail letters demanding money, and the Yes on 8 campaign now says the letters were sent by their employees.

In Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The West End Horror, there’s a scene between Holmes and Oscar Wilde…I’m quoting from memory here…where Wilde tells Holmes that he has a perfect way of dealing with blackmailers when they threaten him with incriminating letters.  "I publish them", he says. 

Donate to No On 8, Here.  Maybe you’ll get one of these letters too…suitable for framing…or posting online…

You know how it is that some Über heterosexuals just have this…overwhelming need…to project their cheapshit character flaws and emotional infirmities onto gays?  Yeah…it’s like that…

William Shatner goes on video rant over George Takei wedding snub

William Shatner is aiming his phaser at his former "Star Trek" colleague George Takei, calling him "sick" and "psychotic" in a YouTube rant.

Ticked off that Takei didn’t invite him to his recent California wedding, Shatner trashed the actor who played Mr. Sulu on the 1960s sci-fi series as if he were a villainous Klingon.

"The whole thing makes me feel badly, poor man," Shatner said in the video. "There is such a sickness there. It’s so patently obvious that there is a psychosis there. I don’t know what his original thing about me was."

…

"He has continued to speak badly about me for all these years," Shatner continued. "Obviously, hiding his homosexuality – talk about festering and not living the truth of your life and feeling badly about yourself – and being fearful somebody would find out about this terrible, terrible secret, so he thought."

Geeze Bill…Ego much?  I like the response of Takei’s spouse, Brad Altman…

Altman later told the News that the pair "definitely" sent an invitation to Shatner through his manager, Larry Thompson.

"Maybe he thought it was junk mail," Altman said. 

KaPow!  

And in other news…at least one happy gay man out there managed to land an Altman.  Not that I happen to know anyone by that name myself…precisely… 

Nice work George.  I’d be all smiles too…

Since last Monday I’ve finished half a page on Episode 11 of A Coming Out Story.  It’s slow work when all I have is the weekday evenings.  Tonight I was only able to finish one panel, but that got a page done and I can see the end of the pencil work on this one in front of me.

A few panels are some of my best pencil work so far.  There’s a close-up of a young me with my head on the pillow at the beginning of this one that I’m especially happy with.  And one pencil of the object of my affections that gets him pretty well right, as I remember him strolling through the hallways of my old high school.  I’m getting good now at drawing my main actors with a few simple lines.  We’ll see how well they translate into inks.

I’m able to have fun again with the whole situation I’m relating in my story.  I think now, that part of my cartoonist’s block this past year has been that it wasn’t fun revisiting it, because I was living it all over after again having found him again after 35 years of searching.  That shy seventeen year old is still there inside of me, and I’ve been walking on eggshells for over a year now, stressing all over again about what he thinks or doesn’t think of me.  It’s crazy…I’m a grown man now…but there it is.  So trying to get my sense of humor back about that part of my life so I could work on the story just hasn’t been do-able.  I’ve been stressing almost exactly like I was 35 years ago.  Maybe some day when I’ve finished A Coming Out Story, I’ll do one about how finding your first crush turns you back into the kid you were all over again, and all the things in your past you thought you’d settled and resolved you only thought you had.

The other thing that may have got me motivated again is a couple books I’m reading written by gay men who were imprisoned in Britian back in the 1950s for "homosexual offenses" or "gross indecency".  I’m into a book my Peter Wildeblood, Against The Law, in which he gives an account of his being caught up in the Montagu scandal of 1954 and his subsiquent imprisonment.  Part of what I want to relate in my own story is how it was I managed to navagate my way to self acceptance without hating myself, and how easily it could have gone the other way for me.  I was lucky in so many ways, but mostly in that.  Because I fell in love, and because the guy I fell in love with was a decent, good-hearted guy who was good to me, I never hated myself. 

But that was purely accidental.  I came of age just after Stonewall, and just before the APA removed homosexuality from it’s list of mental illnesses, and the popular culture all around me constantly told me I was some sort of disgusting, degenerate monster.  It was seeing my sexual orientation in the context of being in love, that saved me from that.  It was pure luck.  And I was fortunate also, very fortunate, to be coming of age right when the modern gay rights movement was taking off, just after Stonewall.  Ten years earlier, and I might have been locked up like Wildeblood was.  Or sent off to a mental hospital.  That would probably have killed me.  It killed a lot of people. 

And the hate is still killing people.  When I was a gay teenager, gay kids got absolutely no adult guidance while making that difficult transition from child to adult.  The only thing we were taught then was that it was tragic, if not utterly disgusting, that we existed.  It is barely any better nowadays.  The religious right is fighting a furious, bitter, scorched earth battle to keep gay kids from accepting themselves and growing up to live healthy and whole adult lives.  We have to hate ourselves, as much as they hate us.  One thing I want to try to do with my story is get across the message that gay kids need to be loved, like all children do.  They don’t need to be taught to hate themselves.  It is a crime against humanity, to teach a child to hate themselves.  Reading Wildeblood’s story reminded me of that other reason why I wanted to get my own story down, in my own way.

Via Kos…  Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been watching this for decades…

The failure of the character assassination attempt, part II

I wrote earlier that Obama’s favorabilities have surprisingly survived this election intact, given the amount of shit that has been flung in his direction. Part of the reason is that the GOP overreached in their attacks. While arguing that he was inexperienced could’ve gained traction pre-Palin, the stuff about being a Muslim Marxist Manchurian candidate was simply, well, ludicrous.

In this narrative, Obama is “a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists,.” Once elected, presumably, will reveal himself to be the monster that he is, in the manner of Kang and Kodos in that classic 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons.

If you want to take a look at their reasoning, I recommend the work of Stanley Kurtz over at the National Review…

Stanley Kurtz being the guy who doctored up marriage statistics from Scandiavian countries so he could claim that legal same-sex marriage resulted in the decline of heterosexual marriages and that children were being raised mostly by unmarried parents now.  Over at Slate, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, M. V. Lee Badgett shows how Kurtz did it…

Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.

Of course, the good news about marriage rates is bad news for Kurtz’s sky-is-falling argument. So, Kurtz instead focuses on the increasing tendency in Europe for couples to have children out of wedlock. Gay marriage, he argues, is a wedge that is prying marriage and parenthood apart.

The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.

But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.

That’s a higher rate then some states here in America.  Mostly bible belt states.  But look at this.  First Kurtz gerrymanders the marriage statistics in Scandinavia by including time frames when it was declining Prior to the passage of same sex civil unions, to prove that those civil unions had an adverse affect on heterosexual marriage.  In fact, after civil unions passed heterosexual marriage rates Improved.  But that wasn’t enough.  Kurtz also pointed out the fact that many heterosexual couples have their first kid out of wedlock, deliberately omitting the fact that they almost always marry afterward, in order to lead people to believe that there was some sort of massive population of kids living with unmarried parents in Scandinavia now.  That this conclusion is absolutely false, that you can only arrive at it by concealing the fact that most parents do in fact marry after their child is born, mattered nothing to Kurtz.  He had something to prove, and damn the evidence.  This is what passes for virtue and morality among social conservatives.

Now he’s peddling the Obama is a marxist and/or muslim terrorist claptrap.  How…unsurprising…

For some reason I was suddenly able today to sit down at my drafting table and finish two pages of the next episode of A Coming Out Story.  Just…bang, bang bang…one panel after another…just…came out of me.  The first hour or so of it was very difficult, but there was none of the reluctance to immerse myself in the storyline that I’d been experiencing for the past year or so and after a while it just kept coming.  Two pages of good quality pencils.  It was as though I’d never stopped drawing it a year ago.

I’ve got another two and a half pages to go and the pencils are done.  After that, the inks should only take about five or six working days and the Photoshopping another two or three.  By working days, I mean solid four hour stints at the drafting table.  That’s a working day when all I have to give it is the time I have after work, or weekends.

I have no idea where all this just suddenly came from.  I’ll probably be pondering it for the next few days.  So much has happened since I started this little tale.  So much, just over the past couple months.  But I was able to churn out pages of this thing during other times of stress in my life.  For some reason I just couldn’t so much as bear to look at this thing for a long, long while.  Now I can.  And…it’s fun again.  I think that’s probably the biggest thing.  I was banging out panels and quietly laughing to myself at the humor in the storyline as I drew them.  It was a fun I haven’t had in a long time.

I’m going out for a brief walk now.  I need to take a break.  But I feel as if I could do some more when I get back inside.

I’ve lived with this creative urge inside of me all my life and I still don’t understand it.  It comes and it goes in its own good time is all I can figure.

[Update…]  Did two more panels before turning in for bed tonight.  I keep this head of steam up and I’ll have the next episode out the door before the end of the month for sure…

The database of contributors to the campaigns, for and against, California proposition 8 must be lagging a tad behind because my first contribution of $500 still isn’t in there.  But just for kicks and grins I took a stroll though the listings of contributors from Maryland, and was gratified at the overwhelming support No On 8 was getting from my neighbors.  Out of something like a hundred and thirty names, only about five or six were from folks who gave money to support cutting the ring fingers off same sex couples.  None of them were names I recognized.

I dontated another $500 dollars to the No campaign today.  That makes my stake in the fight an even thousand now.  But everyone who donates money between now and midnight Sunday (tomorrow as I write this) gets their contribution matched…

Dear Bruce,

Thanks to the outpouring of support in response to the $1 million match grant announced on Thursday, we are nearly halfway there.

Help us meet our ONE MILLION DOLLAR CHALLENGE. Every contribution made by midnight Sunday will be matched in value — and impact — by philanthropist Steve Bing and Equality California.

We will be able to buy double the amount of air time for our new, hard-hitting ad. That means more opportunity to reach important undecided voters.

Donate now before Sunday’s midnight deadline. Please forward this message to everyone you know. It’s going to take everyone we know to fill this match. Urge your friends and family to donate at http://www.noonprop8.com/challenge

In solidarity,

Geoff Kors
Executive Committee
No On Prop. 8

The Yes campaign is now dragging out the usual Homosexuals Want To Prey On Your Children scare rhetoric…some of which is being targeted at California’s ethnic communities.  Box Turtle Bulletin has a post up on a Yes ad aimed at Chinese readers, that directly links same sex marriage and pedophilia.  Also incest and polygamy.  The hate mongering from the Yes crowd has turned what was a likely victory for same-sex marriage, into a dead heat, largely because the No side is being outspent and out organized…largely with the behind the scenes support of the Mormon church.  The Latter Day Saints as they like to call themselves, account for 40 percent of the Yes money bucket. 

They’ve been swamping California TV with ads that portray gay people, both directly and indirectly, as child molesters, and claim that same-sex marriage will give homosexuals the legal means to go into schools and conduct recruiting activity even in kindergarten.  They’re also claiming that churches will be forced to marry same sex couples under threat of prison if they don’t comply.  It’s like Watching Anita Bryant’s campaign all over again.  All that’s missing is Jerry Falwell standing up in front of a room full of reporters saying that a homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.

That’s why the polls have tightened.  We could loose marriage in California…possibly for generations, if people don’t step up to the plate and give.  Now.

I’m single.  It’s looking now as though I’ll always be single.  So why should I care.  Because I still believe in love.  Love hasn’t looked at me twice but I still believe in it.  And I can see with my own two eyes all the happy, contented, loving couples out there and they deserve a chance to make a home together, grow old together, have a life together.  So I’m in for a thousand.  Before its over I’ll probably give more.  If we loose California the bitterness will just go on and on and on and maybe I’ll never live to see the end of it.  But at least I’ll know I was one of those who did something, took a stand for freedom and justice and love even when it seemed hate would win anyway.  What is freedom worth to you?  What is equality worth? 

What is your safety worth to you?  Do you consider yourself a danger to children?  The Mormon church says you are.  They are telling every one of your neighbors that you want to enter their kid’s schools and teach them to be homosexuals.  Probably so you can have sex with them. 

Do you want to put the neighborhood pastor in jail?  The religious right says you do.  They are telling everyone, every single person you will ever walk past on the street after this election is over, that you want to put their pastors in prison if they don’t marry same-sex couples.

Do you want to put your neighbors in jail along with them.  The right wingers backing proposition 8 say you do.  They are telling your neighbors that you will have them arrested if you aren’t allowed into their kid’s schools to teach them how to have sex with you.

Maybe you don’t care all that much about same sex marriage.  But the hate mongering going on to get proposition 8 passed, if allowed to go unchallenged, could get you killed.  Or someone you love.  Maybe that someone in your arms.

We are not supposed to exist.  But we do.  We are not supposed to love.  But we do.  We are not supposed to have a share of the American dream of liberty and justice for all.  But it is the human dream, and we are as human as they.   We exist.  We love.  We dream.  Now we take our stand, for love, for life, and in the doing so, tell the world that we believe in the righteousness of our love, and our dream of freedom.  Because it is righteous.  Because our dream does not need us to hate our neighbor to make it real.

Donate Here, to No on 8.   If you do it before midnight tomorrow whatever amount you donate will be matched.  Any small amount…any at all…can help make a difference in leveling the playing field. 

If you donate between now and election day online (for any amount), and send me your confirmation email, I will draw, if you wish, an editorial cartoon on the topic of your choice. Or…alternately…a Mark and Josh cartoon on the topic of your choice.  Or…if my cartoons don’t do it for you…you can have a signed 11 by 17 print of the image of your choice out of any of my photo galleries.

I’ve been giving it some thought lately.  Probably I’m no different in this regard then any middle aged man who is staring it in the face at this point in his life.  You’ve lived so many years, and now it’s looking you in the face.  And I happen across this article in Scientific American that pretty well tracks my own thoughts on the matter…

Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?

Yeah…that’s about it…

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

Actually…I’ve never had that problem.  Maybe it’s just a failure of imagination…and mine is altogether too good for my own good.  But here it is:  Think of sleep.  You lay down, and then you sleep.  Perhaps you dream.  Perhaps you remember a few of them when you wake up.  Fine.  But what about that part you don’t remember.  The part where you are just..not there.  That void between sleep and awake.  That’s death.  Or if that doesn’t do it for you…try to remember what it was like Before you were born.  That point in time when you weren’t.  That’s it too.

It’s a horrible thing to consider.  But ironically, it’s nothing to be afraid of either.  There’s a lot of ways of Dying that are worth being afraid of for sure.  But if death really is the end of you, then you won’t know it, so it’s really nothing to fear in and of itself.  A painful death maybe.  A failed life maybe.  But the saving grace of actually being dead is that won’t know it.

I’m 55 now.  I don’t think I’m going to make it past my sixties.  My body is getting tired.  I can feel the strength in it slipping away.  I think I have more of mom’s side of the family genes in me then dads.  Males in her side just don’t last all that long.  I figure I have maybe another ten years or so in me and that will be it.  Either my heart will go or I’ll get a stroke or something like the males in her side usually do and that will be that.

Of course, that’s assuming I get the natural death and there’s no guarantee of that.  I live in the city after all.  I was taking my nightly walk the other day, with my iPod’s earbuds plugged in.  I was strolling through my neighborhood where I’ve always felt safe, listening to a favorite classical piece, my mind wandering between this and that, when a friggin’ huge pit bull lunged at me from out of nowhere.  This lady was walking her dogs…the other one was this little fluffy white thing…and as I passed by the big pit bull suddenly decided to take offense at my existence.  There were parked cars between me and her and I didn’t even see them coming, just the motherfucking dog lunging at me from between two parked cars while it’s owner struggled to hold on.  "Jesus Christ", I exclaimed, and she looked at me for a moment like she’d have loved to just let the dog go.  They walked on by without so much as a word of apology from the lady.  And here I always thought my violent Baltimore end would be at the hands of a mugger.

So…it could be anything…really…at any time.  It’s a thing I’ve always accepted, I think, somewhere in the back of my mind.  But when I was younger, it was only the violent or accidental death that seemed to be looking me over from somewhere just out of reach.  I still had most of a natural human lifespan ahead of me, and in that, plenty of time to find a mate.  Now I think, I’m just waiting to die because something somewhere in some corner of my mind has finally concluded that it won’t happen.  And I’ll pass on from life never having had experienced that love of my life that so many others do…even if it’s only for a while.  If I’d had it to do over again, knowing how it would be…I think I might have just opted out.

My brother once helpfully told me that a lot of people never find their soulmate.  Thanks brother mine.  Another of my gay Happy Hour friends helpfully told me recently that I should give up looking for that certain someone.  "I’ve seen the guys you keep looking at," he told me.  "People who look like that…want people who look like that."  This from a nice looking guy who himself has an older lover.  Thanks.  Thanks a lot.  I get the message.  I don’t qualify.  I reckon this is why the two of them decided to leave me stranded at the gate.

I kinda like the Fark.Com commenter’s responses to that Scientific American article…

"Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness."

Don’t try that. I did and wound up falling face-first into the coffee table.

…

f there’s an afterlife, you probably think "Whoa." If there is no afterlife, it’s probably like the last scene of

He’s probably referring there to that last brilliant last episode of The Sopranos…

Imagining death is the only way I get to fall asleep every night.

…

I do this all the time while brushing my teeth in the morning. It makes going to work not seem so bad.

…

So what about the virgins?

…

As long as I can taste Key Lime Pie. 

…

The last second firings of the last neurons to go create a neurologicalexperience that only seems to last an eternity. 

…

Yes I can. I’ve been to Ohio. 

…

I was not alive for 14+ billion years before I was born, didn’t bother me in the least. 

…

I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE. 

…

In every moment, we choose our eternity. Because eternity happens in an instant. I’m filling mine with love – and cream cheese. 

…

Isn’t imagining death counter-productive? I mean, if you imagine it, you’ve just proved your alive.

I would think that not imagining death is closer to actual death.

Now there’s a sharp mind.

A five page artical from Scientific America about Death… before noon. Christ, I was hopping to put off my despair untili after 4 o’clock today… Thanks subby… asshat. 

…

i dreamed that i died one time. i actually went to heaven, and could fly. but i still had to watch out for the powerlines just like i have to do in the dreams where i can fly, but haven’t died. 

…

Imagine death? I can barely imagine Australia. 

What’s awful now is that I can imagine death, but I can’t imagine being in love.  Another of my gay happy hour friends gave me a little impromptu lecture the last time I was visiting him, about how having a lover is "work".  You gotta love the way coupled people try to make lonely singles feel like they’re not missing out on anything.   Especially when they leave you hanging at the gate as though your missing out on a chance to find that certian someone wasn’t any big deal.

Some time ago I bought myself one of those "body pillow" things.  For those of you unfamiliar, they’re oversized pillows, about four feet long, that you can cuddle up to for comfort.  I’d seen them advertized, mostly to women, and resisted the impluse to go out and get one for myself because I don’t have the kind of brain that can fool myself with subsitutes for the real thing (which is partly why I’ve never just gone out and rented an "escort" for the night).  But I was at Costco one day and saw a big box full of them and the ones they were selling were so soft and nice that I found myself checking out with one and brought it home.  It’s actually kinda nice to have something to just wrap myself around at night, but the interesting thing I’ve discovered is that just having that…mass…there in the bed with me has become addictive, even if I don’t snuggle up to it.  It’s warm, it retains body heat, which will probably be nice when winter sets in here at Casa del Garrett.  But the thing is it’s this object that’s just there laying next to me in the bed and now if it’s not there the bed seems so horribly empty that I have to bring it back in or I can’t get to sleep.

There’s probably some primitive subconscious thing going on there, having to do with that human need to have that other there with you. It’s just a big long pillow.  It’s not flesh and bone, it doesn’t breath, it doesn’t have a heartbeat, it doesn’t roll over and hog the blankets.  It’s just a big soft pillow.  But it’s something.  We are not made to be single all our lives.  But some of us are condemned to be that.  The crying shame is it doesn’t have to be that way.  All the lonely people don’t have to be that way.  The human family could put its mind to fixing that if it only wanted to.  But the nature of coupled people is they stop caring about the lonely.   They are complete, and they don’t want to be reminded of how it was when they weren’t.  So they don’t pay attention to those of us who need help.  That leaves us at the mercy of predators…dating service cons…"escorts", love advisers, and other opportunists that just take our money because they know we are desperate and easy marks.  At least the body pillow only cost me a few bucks and it doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t.

Sleep these days, is the only time I don’t feel alone.  Death won’t be so bad, except if I see it coming I’ll know I failed, and it wasn’t really worth being alive.

[Edited a tad…]