My polling place is a little elementary school a couple blocks from Casa del Garrett. They were calling for occasional rain this morning and rain this afternoon and evening, so I took an umbrella. And my iPod and a book to read because of all the news stories I was hearing about long lines in the states that did early voting.
My polling place was busy, but not horribly so. I was able to just walk right up to a vacant voting machine. But all the others were being used, and a steady stream of people were coming in and out.
I’m at work now…seeing a bunch of co-workers here all with their "I Voted" stickers on.
I’m one of a first generation of 18-year-old voters. 18 year olds got the vote during the last years of Vietnam, largely on the argument that if we could be drafted and sent off to war at that age we should at least be able to cast a vote.
I’d been taken on the bus to an involuntary pre-induction physical that summer, and escaped being drafted only because I was found to be 11 pounds underweight. I suppose I could have simply told the examiners that I was a homosexual, but back in those days that could have easily meant having your name placed on a registry of sexual deviants.
I voted that year for McGovern, mostly out of disgust with Nixon and his prolonging of the war…
As I Was Saying Four Years Ago
…but also because I thought McGovern a decent man who really did believe in liberty and justice for all. After Kent State, I knew what Nixon and Agnew and their gang thought of all that liberty and justice stuff.
And while Nixon didn’t actually start his war, he began the deliberate rending of the American fabric that we are living with today. I’ve voted in every election I could since. And as best as I could judge it, for the person who could make a decent start at putting back together, what the Nixon republicans tore asunder. But after Nixon came Reagan. And then…Bush The Junior. The hatred with which the republican grass roots views the rest of us is deeper, more venomous then ever. It didn’t have to be that way. But the party leadership are republicans first, and Americans second, and they have stoked the hate in ways even Nixon might have found appalling, to keep their grip on power.
I don’t expect to see healing in my lifetime. But it would be nice to live long enough to see a start on it.
I see Faux News is reporting this morning that the total raised for the fight over Proposition 8 in California is something like 74 million dollars. Let me repeat that: 74 Million Dollars.
There’s your fall of western civilization right there. Not same sex marriage, but that it’s a knife fight, just to let loving, devoted couples tie the knot.
Who still believes in this day and age that gay people are twisted sub-human monsters? I don’t think half the people voting today to cut the ring fingers off their gay and lesbian neighbors think that. I doubt a tenth of them think that. But they are all of them, all of them, taking right now, right this moment, some kind of visceral self righteous pleasure in sucking the hopes and dreams from our lives.
So I Guess Giving Your Best Employees A Choice Between A Pay Cut Or Fired Wasn’t A Plan After All…
Circuit City…March 29, 2007…
Circuit City lays off 3400 employees because they make too much!
Circuit City Stores Inc. has a message for some of its best-paid employees: Work for less or work somewhere else.
The electronics retailer on Wednesday laid off 3,400 people who earned "well above" the local market rate for the sort of jobs they held at its stores.
In 11 weeks they’ll be able to apply for their old positions – which will come with lower hourly wages.
The move put Richmond, Va.-based Circuit City, which has more than 40,000 employees in the United States, at the forefront of a new way of controlling labor costs in the service industry. Employers determine the prevailing market wages for particular jobs in various geographic regions and then find ways to make sure that their workers’ salaries stay within that range.
…
Company spokesman Bill Cimino said Circuit City wanted to be honest with its sales associates so they would understand the reason for the layoffs.
"It had nothing to do with their skills or whether they were a good worker or not," Cimino said. "It was a function of their salary relative to the market."
Circuit City expects to reap $110 million in savings in the next year, partly as a result of the layoffs and other changes announced Wednesday, including the outsourcing of about 130 information technology jobs to IBM Corp.
Circuit City…Today…
Circuit City to Close 155 Stores, Lay Off Thousands
Electronic retailer Circuit City plans to shutter 20 percent of its U.S. stores by December 31 and evaluate other cost reduction initiatives, it announced today, citing waning consumer confidence and the struggling financial markets.
The move will close about 155 of its 700 stores, and result in layoffs of about 17 percent of its workforce. It will also reduce future store openings and renegotiate some leases.
“The weakened environment has resulted in a slowdown of consumer spending, further impacting our business as well as the business of our vendors. The combination of these trends has strained severely our working capital and liquidity, and so we are making a number of difficult, but necessary, decisions to address the company’s financial situation as quickly as possible,” said James A. Marcum, vice chairman and acting president and CEO.
It had nothing to do with their skills or whether they were a good worker or not… Jackass. Treat your people like shit and don’t be surprised to find one day that you’re the CEO of a company that isn’t worth shit.
In what the Washington Post called "perhaps the most ill-timed press release of the 2008 campaign," the California Republican Party announced that they’d filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Sen. Barack Obama had illegally funneled funds from his campaign account for his personal use.
The use? Visiting his dying grandmother, whose passing was announced this afternoon.
The GOP sent the release at 1:30 pm ET, a few hours before Obama’s grandmother’s death was announced.
"Obama for America violated federal law by converting its campaign funds to Senator Obama’s personal use," the release stated. "Senator Obama recently traveled to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother. This was the right thing for any grandson to do — at his own expense — but it was not travel that his campaign may fund."
Federal law prohibits campaigns from using campaign funds for personal travel. Obama’s campaign said beforehand that they had reviewed the trips with their lawyers and believed it was allowable. Republicans, meanwhile, contend that because Obama did not campaign in Hawaii, it should not have been budgeted as a campaign expense.
We have our far right nutcases here in Maryland, but I rest easy at night knowing my brother can go about his day with absolutely batshit wingnuts like these babbling in his face constantly and still keep a mellow attitude.
I’ve only ever lived with one romantic partner in my life, but I’ve been married twice. Once in a big, celebratory ceremony on the beach in 1998, in front of almost a hundred friends and relations, in a ceremony that the Renaissance Woman and I wrote ourselves; and the second time, five years later to the day, on a different beach, in front of exactly eight guests (not counting the picnickers and rollerbladers all around us), with brief boilerplate state-issued vows, in front of a Marriage Commissioner we’d never met before.
The first ceremony, in legal terms, meant nothing. The second also meant nothing legally as soon as we got home to Seattle, but made us next of kin according to all authorities just a couple of hours’ drive to the North.
We used to joke about it, or sort of joke, whenever we drove up to Vancouver to visit friends. "We’re married now!" We’d cry, after crossing through Customs and handing over all our papers and the Mermaid Girl’s birth certificate with both our names on it. And then, on the way home, as we passed the Peace Arch: "Not married any more! Hey, girlfriend!"
It wasn’t that funny, though, to tell the truth.
One of RW’s relatives, older than us, an established doctor with a great house in the San Francisco Bay area, flew to Niagra Falls with her partner, a lawyer, to get married at around the same time we did. They were so inspired by the ceremony that they up and moved to Canada a few months later. They live in the Okanagan now, in a house surrounded by vineyards.
Four years after our Vancouver wedding, we also moved to Canada. Now we’re married all the time.
The prospect of legal marriage wasn’t the only reason or even the main reason that we emigrated, but we’ve both been surprised at the depth of the difference we feel. It’s a difference that makes it possible for me to shrug off the opinions of sweet old ladies on the street and even, to some extent, the prejudices of my child’s teacher, because– and here’s the part I didn’t think about much– here, we are not different. We’re not special, we’re not the subject of battles over court decisions and legislative changes. We don’t have to go to lawyers to make special arrangements and get special papers written up. We don’t have to qualify anything when insurance companies and mortgage brokers and doctors ask for our marital status. We’re married, period. The law is on our side.
Let me repeat that: the law is on our side.
This is a new concept for me, and not one I’d given much consideration before our move. After all, in Seattle we lived in a liberal bubble of tolerance and acceptance, taking for granted that under almost all circumstances– except legal ones– we’d be treated the same as our straight friends and neighbors. And just about always, we were.
But a bubble is just what it was. Underneath it all, recognition of our relationship was based on nothing but the good graces of our friends and relations. And while those good graces were pleasant and much appreciated, they still left us hugely vulnerable in the face of all the vicissitudes and disasters that could happen to any family. We were lucky that none of those happened to us. And we took for granted that dependence on luck and good grace, and the slight anxiety it brought with it.
Now, we don’t have that any more. It’s not just that we consider ourselves married, and our families consider us married, and our friends and neighbors and bosses and dentists consider us married: now, the Province of British Columbia and the Nation of Canada consider us married, too. And that has made all the difference.
Let me tell you about something that happened a couple of days before our wedding:
In Canada, you don’t go to City Hall to register for a marriage license, you go to a big drugstore and wait in line with the people who are getting their auto insurance renewed, all the while shopper push past you in their search for Q-tips and deodorant and hairbrushes.
And so, a few days before our legal marriage ceremony on the beach in Vancouver, the Renaissance Woman and I found ourselves at a booth in London Drugs, with our passports in hand. The clerk who processed our paperwork was a bored-looking middle-aged guy whose first language wasn’t English (not unusual in a city of immigrants). We filled our the required papers and passed them back to him, along with the payment, and he took them with barely a glance at us.
This was back in 2o03, and same-sex marriage hadn’t been legal for very long in British Columbia, and we were anxious and wanted to make sure the papers were done right, so they wouldn’t be invalidated in some unforseen way. So we pressed the point.
"We’re both women," we explained carefully, ready for shock or disapproval or at least the need to fill out a whole other set of special forms. "We’re getting married to each other."
"Yeah, yeah, okay," he nodded, filing and stamping and perforating and barely stifling a yawn. "Lots of people doing this. You sign here."
His shrugging matter-of-factness, the face of the machinery of bureaucracy chugging along on our behalf, was as sweet as wedding bells, as satisfying as the New York Times wedding announcement I’d wangled, as celebratory as the flowers MG tossed enthusiastically at the ceremony that weekend. It was the story we ended up telling over and over, in wonderment, after the ceremony. And it was one big reason that we packed up and moved four years later, and that we live here now.
I might live in Canada, but I’m still an American. I want everyone in my home country to have the chance at what I have now: an ordinary, boring, un-notable married life with the person I love. I’m seeing a chance of that, or at least a step towards it, in California. And like so many people, I’m e-mailing and reading and donating and watching and worrying about the prospects of Proposition 8: if it passes, that hope is so much further away.
And if not, if same-sex marriage stays legal in California, it’s at least a bit closer.
We used to joke about it, or sort of joke, whenever we drove up to Vancouver to visit friends. "We’re married now!" It won’t be a joke for me if I ever do manage to find my other half. There will be many states in this country we simply couldn’t pass on through, let alone visit, because the instant we were to cross that border we’d be, in effect, forcibly divorced for the duration, and if something were to happen to one of us…an accident or medical emergency…it could quickly become a nightmare for both of us. Life in some other country could start looking a lot more attractive.
And, as this blogger points out, not only for the legal recognition. I suppose when the stress of always knowing in the back of your mind that you are living on the edge of a precipice goes away, life probably does become a lot sweeter.
This is what writing us out of the state constitutions, if not the federal one, is meant to do. Not protect marriage, but keep us fearful. Life can’t be sweet for us. Maybe they can’t always prevent us from finding love…but they can make fear walk in lock-step with love. The sweetness of life for a bigot, comes only from taking it away from the ones they hate. That is the beginning and the end of what this fight has always been about.
The campaign promoting Proposition 8, which proposes to amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriages, has masterfully misdirected its audience, California voters. Look at the first-graders in San Francisco, attending their lesbian teacher’s wedding! Look at Catholic Charities, halting its adoption services in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal! Look at the church that lost its tax exemption over gay marriage! Look at anything except what Proposition 8 is actually about: a group of people who are trying to impose on the state their belief that homosexuality is immoral and that gays and lesbians are not entitled to be treated equally under the law.
That truth would never sell in tolerant, live-and-let-live California, and so it has been hidden behind a series of misleading half-truths. Once the sleight of hand is revealed, though, the campaign’s illusions fall away.
Take the story of Catholic Charities. The service arm of the Roman Catholic Church closed its adoption program in Massachusetts not because of the state’s gay marriage law but because of a gay anti-discrimination law passed many years earlier. In fact, the charity had voluntarily placed older foster children in gay and lesbian households — among those most willing to take hard-to-place children — until the church hierarchy was alerted and demanded that adoptions conform to the church’s religious teaching, which was in conflict with state law. The Proposition 8 campaign, funded in large part by Mormons who were urged to do so by their church, does not mention that the Mormon church’s adoption arm in Massachusetts is still operating, even though it does not place children in gay and lesbian households.
How can this be? It’s a matter of public accountability, not infringement on religion. Catholic Charities acted as a state contractor, receiving state and federal money to find homes for special-needs children who were wards of the state, and it faced the loss of public funding if it did not comply with the anti-discrimination law. In contrast, LDS (for Latter-day Saints) Family Services runs a private adoption service without public funding. Its work, and its ability to follow its religious teachings, have not been altered.
That San Francisco field trip? The children who attended the wedding had their parents’ signed permission, as law requires. A year ago, with the same permission, they could have traveled to their teacher’s domestic-partnership ceremony. Proposition 8 does not change the rules about what children are exposed to in school. The state Education Code does not allow schools to teach comprehensive sex education — which includes instruction about marriage — to children whose parents object.
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
Emphasis mine. Go read the rest of it. This is how the game has always been played against your gay and lesbian neighbors. Lie. Then lie some more. Wash, rinse, repeat. But look closer at the tax cases. The people pushing anti-gay legislation are saying basically that their animus toward homosexuals gives them the right to demand government funding without having to follow the rules that come with those taxpayer dollars. They have the right to tax breaks without having to meet the same requirements other people do in order to get those same tax breaks.
Here’s what’s missing from this: gay people pay taxes too. Nobody is saying that gay haters can’t avail themselves of state funded programs because of their prejudices. Any homophobe who wanted to could have gone to that Catholic adoption agency, or married in that Methodist pavilion. And I’m sure a lot did. But with tax dollars comes this one important thing: equal access. Because everyone is paying for it out of their taxes, then everyone must have equal access to it. In Massachusetts adoption by same-sex couples is legal. If you operate with taxpayer dollars, then you must treat all citizens equally. How hard is that to understand?
But there’s that word the haters keep choking on: Equal. As the pig said in Animal Farm, Some animals are more equal then others. Understand this if you understand nothing else about the mindset of the hater. They don’t so much think gay people are less then equal, as they think they themselves are more equal. So, naturally, they have the right to dictate terms nobody else does. They are the superior beings here…the Elect…the chosen ones… The bitter irony here is that they accuse gay people of wanting Special Rights.
Special Rights?? Like…the right to feed at the government trough and then pick and choose who you will serve? Like…the right to get tax breaks for property in exchange for opening it up to the public, and then decide for yourself who can and who cannot use it? Those kinds of special rights?
What’s changing now is that these liars, these cheats, have grown more and more powerful and now the rest of America is getting a good look at how they operate. Like Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people some of the time…
Please Donate to No On 8. And if you live in California, please be sure to vote on Tuesday. Take nothing for granted. As the saying goes, pray as though everything depends on God, but act as though everything depends on you. In an election this close, your vote Will make a difference. So please…vote…so that love can have a chance in this world.
Nutball Congressman Chris Cannon (R-UT) tried to hire an Oxford don to use his special computer program to prove that Obama’s memoir was actually written by Bill Ayers. The program "can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases." Apparently, he got cold feet after the he learned that the Oxford academic, Dr Peter Millican, would release the results publicly no matter what they showed.
No sense in letting the voters know something if it isn’t something you want them to know. The soul of a political movement isn’t the faces at the top of the ticket, or the rhetoric of its intellectuals. Its soul, its heart, resides in all the people who do its day-to-day grunt work. The grass roots. The rank and file. The True Believers. It’s not the headline grabbing crimes that reveal the character of an ugly movement…it’s in all the little moments of casual mendacity by its grass roots. There is where the people are. There is where the movement is.
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