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.
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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.
Yesterday, as I was driving home, I was listening to the Michelangelo Signorile show on Sirius OutQ. He was playing a radio clip that was particularly chilling. It was James Dobson of Focus On Homosexuality The Family choking up for his listeners as he told them how God wanted him to drop everything and lead a "prayer" vigil in California to ban same-sex marriage. Right Wing Watch has more…
James Dobson dedicated his radio program today to explaining his sudden decision, which we mentioned earlier, to go to California this weekend to join Lou Engel, Tony Perkins and others for a massive "The Call" rally of prayer and fasting in the name of saving "traditional marriage."
In the clip below, Dobson has just explained that he received a letter from Rev. Jim Garlow, one of the leading organizers of the "yes on 8" movement pleading with Dobson to attend and, after reading it, felt God’s hand on his back telling him to attend "The Call." Dobson chokes up explaining that despite having been on the go for weeks and being exhausted, he knew God wanted him there. Dobson had to call his son to tell him he couldn’t babysit for his grandson this weekend as planned and his son Ryan then confirmed that God wanted him in California instead. Dobson could barely keep it together when he explained that "the Lord must be involved in this" and then hands over the program to Garlow, who also gets choked up and speaks of their level of spiritual desperation and their constant "crying out to God" to save California because they are "watching the destruction of Western civilization."
You can listen to the clip there. I heard it on the Signorile show, and listening to it I just knew it was going to drive the kook pews to open their wallets up in droves. All the little old ladies who believe Dobson when he tells them that gay people are the tools of Satan and that same sex marriage will allow homosexuals to molest children in public schools will open their fixed income pocketbooks and give, and give and give. And thus the smear campaign being waged now in California will get a new infusion of cash, allowing them to wash one final media tidal wave of lies over every television in the state, scaring people into believing every filthy lie they can get away with about their gay neighbors.
I was on my way home from the Lakeshore district when I encountered this group of supporters of Prop 8. After turning my vidphone on, I was screamed at, physically intimidated and eventually attacked by one of the more aggressive sign-wavers.
…
I asked the most aggressive woman (who was not underage) "are you afraid to be online?" She answered, "oh, no, they already videotaped me, but these kids don’t want to be online, cause they’re [unintelligible] loaded on a sexual perv profile and [unclear] look at my little cousins." Fair enough. I’m all for protecting the innocent. (Not that there’s anything particularly innocent about shouting hate speech in public.)
The woman continued to poke at my face with her sign and call me "nasty." Genuinely disturbed by the complete lack of rational behavior I’d seen up to this point, wanting to look into her face and possibly connect on some level with her as a fellow human being, I pulled a corner of the sign down away from my eyes and asked "why are you calling me nasty?"
That’s when she attacked, clawing, grabbing and then shoving. I didn’t fight back; she was much bigger than me. Calling me a "nasty fucker" and threatening to kick my ass, she pried my phone out of my hand and tried to break it in half while her friends egged her on.
Please note that I never touched or threatened her in any way (unless you want to consider my pulling the edge of her sign out of eye-poking territory a threatening gesture).
As she grabbed at my phone, I stood there stunned, not really sure what to do. One of the counter-protesters (the woman who you see saying "No on Prop 8" towards the beginning of this clip) quickly intervened and calmed the attacking woman down enough that I felt safe enough to try to take my phone back. After a second or two of grappling, she let go and went back to screaming at cars from a lawn chair near the side of the road.
(Big love and gratitude to the kindly counter-protester who pleaded for calm. I don’t think my phone would have survived without you!)
I stood there for another minute or two, checking the phone’s applications for damage. One of the other sign-wavers, a teenage boy standing nearby, leaned over and whispered "fuck you, dyke."
Even though I wasn’t hurt besides a small scratch on my hand, and my phone was okay, being attacked definitely shook me up. I was a bit tearful. Call me naive, but I never thought I’d actually be in physical danger just for shooting footage of their activity and pulling the edge of a person’s sign out of my eyes. Verbal insults, sure. But attacked by an anti-gay activist? In one of the most queer-friendly neighborhoods in the bay area? Yikes.
The man holding the "Vote No" sign noticed that I was in tears and approached me. We hugged to a chorus of jeers, exchanged some reassuring words, and I turned to leave. Someone called after me: "keep crying, and keep walking."…
(Emphasis mine…) You can see the video of the incident at the link above. When Dobson says god wants him to go to California, this is the flock to whom he will preach, that they are the salt of the earth, defending it from unspeakable evil… One of the other sign-wavers, a teenage boy standing nearby, leaned over and whispered "fuck you, dyke"… "…keep crying, and keep walking."
This is what Dobson and his congregation are doing to California. This is what they have been doing to America for decades now. Dividing us against one another, so they can carve their own personal kingdoms out of the shattered pieces.
Behold their righteousness…
Ken Mettler, a politically conservative activist and member of the Kern High School District Board of Trustees, was caught on video kicking and punching a protester at a Friday night demonstration against Proposition 8.
Mettler said the following day that he was only defending himself.
"I was assaulted," Mettler said. "A fellow threw a punch at me. He missed, and I did hit him."
The incident was recorded by another protester. The video shows Mettler taking signs which originally read "Yes on 8" but had been altered to read "No on 8."
And…surprise, surprise…the video tells a somewhat different tale…
Here is the America of their dreams…a place where high school trustees beat the crap out of dissenters and then lie through their teeth about it afterward. Tell me that the kids in this man’s schools won’t take a cue from this, that it’s okay to beat the crap out of their gay and lesbian peers. Tell me he wouldn’t want them to take that cue. Tell me Dobson wouldn’t want them to take that cue. Homosexuals are destroying Western civilization. That means it’s okay to shove that terrified gay kid’s face into his locker, like they’ve been wanting to do for weeks now…
So…what are you going to do about it? I know…I know…you’re going to vote for Obama. You’re going to work like hell to keep McCain and especially Palin out of the White House. You are going to help get better democrats elected, so this country doesn’t have to endure another year, let alone four, let alone eight, of rule by the kook wing of the republican party. Fine. Good. Wonderful. Really. But…can you spare a few dollars in the fight for the right to love? Because that’s what this fight is about, in its starkest terms. This is about hate that cannot bear the sight of decent, wholehearted human love, and urgently wants to snuff it out.
This nation has a lot of work ahead of it, healing the wounds from decades of republican hate mongering for votes. Making gay and lesbian people second class citizens, cutting the ring fingers off of devoted, loving couples, only prolongs the bitterness. It could last for decades. Do you want to see hundreds of loving couples forcibly divorced? Do you want to see thousands more denied the right to marry. Do you think another two or three decades of this…
Is going to help America heal its wounds? What kind of America do you want. This one…
Or this one…
I’m in for another $500 dollars. That makes $1,500 I’ve given to this fight and it will take me months to pay it off, win or loose. But I can live with that, so long as I know I gave it everything I had, cut to the bone, so that love could have a chance in this poor angry world.
I’m not asking you to cut to the bone. I’m not asking you for hundreds, let alone thousands. Can you spare 20? 10? 5? It’s easy. Just go to the No On 8 site and give. Anything. Anything at all. The polls all say it is close. We can win this. We can. But we have to give the people fighting on the front lines of this something to keep their ads going. The other side is going to spend millions in the next few days to dump an tidalwave of hate mongering over California. The polls all say that when our side gets its message out in equal force, we win.
They have the Mormon church, which has given anywhere from 40 to 70 (!) percent of the money for the Proposition 8 campaign. They have Pope Ratzinger’s Catholic church. The have James Dobson, and the protestant religious right. They have their own array of right wing billionaires. They have Fox news. What do we have? We have a dream. An ages old dream of freedom and justice. For all. Where Americans can live together in peace. Where love is not spat upon, but nurtured and cherished. Where hate does not rule.
I know this fight is an uphill struggle. I know how much it can soul-weary a person, how deeply it can wound. Hate takes its toll on all of us. I still vividly remember sitting in my eighth grade sex ed class, hearing our gym teachers tell me and everyone I knew in that school, that homosexuals mutilate the bodies of people they have sex with, and then, usually, kill them. I have no idea how many of my classmates from back then still believe that. But I suspect even now some of them still do. And some of those who still believe it, are themselves gay, and they have loathed themselves all their lives.
And that is why, win or loose on the night on November 4th, I know where my name will be written…
BARBARA GARRETT $100 CERRITOS CA 90703 ST FRANCIS HOSP Support
BRAD GARRETT $500 SAN JOSE CA 95133 APPLIED SIGNAL TECHNOLOGY Support
BRETT GARRETT $250 REDWOOD CITY CA 94061 SAME NAME Oppose
BRETT GARRETT $100 REDWOOD CITY CA 94061 YOHOSTCOM Oppose
BRUCE GARRETT $500 BALTIMORE MD 21211 SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INST Oppose
BRUCE GARRETT $500 BALTIMORE MD 21211 SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INST Oppose
DAVID GARRETT $100 WALNUT CREEK CA 94597 SELF-EMPLOYED Oppose
DAVID GARRETT DDS $1,000 LA CANADA CA 91011 DAVID P GARRETT DDS Support
So I be written in the Book of Love,
I Do not care about that Book above.
Erase my name, or write it, as you please..
So I be written in the Book of Love.
Will you write yours there with mine? You have the power to tell the heart-wounded, young and old, that they do not have to hate themselves…that they never had to hate themselves…that love is possible to them. Please donate to No On 8. Write your name in the book of love.
So this spam email arrives in my personal (not my work…there’s pretty good about blocking spam here at work) mailbox. Gain Inches The Easy Way…reads the subject line. Ah-ha…thinks I…of course it’s easy. Just stuff your face with cookies all day long and you’ll gain lots of inches. Er…around the waste. That’s what you meant…right???
Ever notice how much spam is targeted at male sexuality? Never mind the porn ads…just look at all the ads for bootleg Viagra, among other things. Either spammers think the entire world is gay (and that gay men like straight male pornography too) or they’re targeting all this to a mostly straight audience. Yet we gay men are the ones who are obsessed with sex, and have like, thousands of sexual partners every night or something…
Isn’t it…interesting…how we’re suddenly seeing all these stories in the IT press about how Wonderful Windows Vista version 2…er…Windows version 7…will be. I mean…since it’s not going to be released for another year and a half yet at least. They don’t even have a beta candidate yet, let alone a product that reviewers can try, and already it’s…So Wonderful!
In other cases, vaporware may be announced by companies in order to damage the development or marketability of more real products by competitors, sometimes in combination with a campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt; if customers believe the hype, they may put off purchasing the real product to wait for its vaporous rival to mature.
And who knows…they might even be able to get away with it one more time. Especially if Steve Jobs keeps jerking around Apple third party developers. On the other hand… DOT-NET.
I get settled into work and a co-worker comes in with something from the Institute cafeteria. After a while I’m beginning to smell…Sauerkraut…??? Er…no. It was a Ranchero something. It’s Mexico week at the Institute cafeteria.
Life with a nose like mine. Something in the Ranchero sauce set it off. But my sense of smell isn’t good at all, and getting weird feedback from my nose is something I’ve had to learn to live with. I have about a dozen different kinds of incense here at Casa del Garrett that I’ve bought over the years…most of it from Chinatown in San Francisco…and time was I could distinguish between each of them and I had my favorites. Swear to God it all smells exactly alike to me now. But at least I can still smell it.
I’ve watched my sense of smell deteriorating ever since adolescence. You don’t really think of smell as being something you might miss horribly. Eyesight yes. Hearing yes. But smell? It might be a nuisance not having it working right, but what more then that? Let me tell you. Back in the mid 1990s I visited Ocean City, New Jersey again after nearly twenty years of not visiting the seashore at all, and was saddened to discover that I could no longer smell the ocean. That tang of salt air that use to delight me as a kid, because it meant vacation at the beach, was gone to me. I walked right up to the shore and waded in a bit and I still couldn’t smell it. I really can’t describe that moment, other then the kid inside of me felt a bit heartbroken.
It can lead to embarrassments too. I run my deep fryer a lot here at Casa del Garrett and the only times I can really smell it is when it’s at temperature. Some months back a friend came over for a visit and when they walked in the door asked me if I’d been frying fish. I had. About a week previously. So now I make it a point to open the windows and burn some incense after running the deep fryer.
Nowadays I can barely smell anything, and when I do I often have trouble identifying it. They put a lot of things in their food south of the border but Sauerkraut isn’t one of them. About the only thing I can still reliably smell in small amounts is whatever scent it is they put into natural gas as a leak warning. Thank goodness I can still smell that. Oh…and that really foul smell of burning wire insulator. That’s a good thing to be able to notice too.
After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that’s what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.
The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.
"People were screaming ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!’" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."
Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting ‘Obama!’ and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."
I hope nobody thinks this sort of thing is going to stop after election day. What you need to understand is they’re not trying to win the election anymore. I really believe that choosing Palin was for inciting the base for war on an Obama administration they had come to believe was a certainty. They know this time the fighting will be harder then it was to destroy Clinton because the democratic grassroots, if not the leadership, is organized and ready for it this time. Expecting it even. And maybe they’ve taken the measure of Obama in their private conferences and figured that he’s no Bill Clinton. So they’re stoking the gutter full of hate, because the gutter is all they have left to win with. That’s why it was Palin. People are shaking their heads wondering how McCain could pick the likes of her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. But he didn’t pick her to be vice president. Her job is to be gasoline on the fire.
What we’re seeing now isn’t the last ugly gasp of a failed presidential campaign, but the start of the scorched earth after-the-election knife fight for the next four years, if not longer. I’ve been saying for years now that the shit doesn’t really hit the fan until the republicans begin loosing power. In the coming years, it won’t only be gay people getting bashed on the streets of America. Just so you know.
Welcome to the reality your gay and lesbian neighbors have been living with for decades now. You knew it had to be you next didn’t you.
So I’ve finished updating my old Sony Clie’ with all the new personal data I’d accumulated on the iPhone. Including all the notes I couldn’t sync. Then I updated my Palm Desktop for the Mac software and synced the Clie’ to it. I’ve just now finished syncing with kPilot on my Linux system. It was absolutely painless, unlike the first few times I tried it back when I first bought the Clie’ in 2003. kPilot now has a configuration "wizard" that detects which device port the Clie’ is trying to talk to the PC on and configures everything. So you don’t have to muck with finding out which /dev device your Palm is on and setting the permissions correctly and then getting the conduits to work properly. It all just works…to borrow a phrase. Wow…that’s a new one in Linuxville…
I’m off now to try and find a belt case for the Clie’ at the new and improved Towson Town Mall. Wish me luck. I don’t think very many folks bother with dedicated Palm organizers anymore. Usually it’s a smartphone nowadays. But Palm is still selling them so there must be a market out there for them. Alas, Sony doesn’t anymore, so I can’t just go out and buy or order a belt case from them.
[Update…] Success. Yeah, not many people use dedicated Palm Organizers anymore, but Blackberry’s are pretty popular, and about the size as my Clie’. So I have a nice belt case for it now.
So this makes three belt widgets I’m carrying around with me now, though not always at one time. A phone widget (the iPhone), a music widget (my iPod 3rd generation), and my data widget (the Clie’). The iPhone was supposed to be the thing that integrated all of those. But it doesn’t. It can’t hold all my digital music, and its organizer functionality is missing critical pieces.
It’s Not About Teaching Children That Gay Couples Are Alright…
Andrew Sullivan almost gets it from time to time…
Althouse makes marriage equality opponent Dean Broyles’s argument clearer:
Let me see if I can make Broyles’s point. I think he means to say that if same-sex marriage remains a legal right, enshrined in state constitutional law, then homosexual relationships will come to be regarded normal and good, and, consequently, anyone who objects to them will start to look like a bigot who should not be permitted to have his way. Thus, in order to preserve the right to discriminate against gay people and to keep schools from teaching children that gay couples are perfectly nice and so forth — all things Broyles wants — it’s important to outlaw gay marriage, because it will be a powerful force in changing perceptions about gay people and those who think gay people are doing something terribly wrong.
Yes! That’s it. One reason I favor marriage equality is that the simple public fact of gay married couples will in itself teach something about the reality of gay people and our lives – without any school or parent having to say a thing. It gives us a way to talk about gay couples for the first time in human history without talking about sex acts.
There is something else that the haters don’t want happening in schools, beyond teaching children that gay couples are perfectly nice and so forth as Althouse puts it. Look more closely. Kids don’t usually socialize with adult couples other then those of their own immediate family. Yes, we can hope the next generation grows up without hate in their hearts. But if they are immersed in anti-gay hate at that age, it’s their peers, those who are gay and those who are only thought to be gay, who will feel the impact of that.
And that’s what Broyles and his kind are adamant must never happen. Gay kids must be hated. And that is because gay kids must hate themselves. What the example of same sex couples living normal, decent, whole lives will do is this: show the gay kids a future where love is possible to them too. That cannot be. Gay kids must never feel loved. Because they are vermin. More despicable even then the gay adults they will eventually become. Because their hearts are sincere. Ever wonder why right wingers seem to hate children so much?
Or to put it in a way that might appeal to social conservatives: grant marriage equality and we can stop talking about homosexuality. We can start talking about love and friendship and commitment and family – for gays and straights. We can leave this horrible identity politics division behind.
Why would social conservatives want to do that? Identity politics is their creation. It’s a belly laugh listening to you blame liberals for it. When people are discriminated against based on things like race, religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation, when doors are closed to them again and again and again, when they are driven from neighborhoods, job opportunities, when a decent education is denied them, simply for being different, do you really think they’ll continue to see themselves as a part of the whole, or as one of the outcast? They are supposed to see themselves in terms of their assigned identity. You can’t marry…you’re a homosexual. Your very presence in the house of marriage defiles it. We don’t want no faggots in our community. I’m just telling you Bruce that there is no place in this company for homosexuals… That’s the whole point of prejudice. Not to elevate the bigot, but to make hated other feel hated, cast out, separate.
I would love to see my sexual orientation as just another random, and not particularly important aspect of my being. But I can’t. Bigots like the ones pushing anti same-sex marriage amendments keep telling me that it’s the only part of me that matters. You need to stop blaming the victims of identity politics, for being imprisoned in it.
That said, I’m really heartened to see you acknowledging that the breaking down of real barriers in this election cycle will go a long way towards the day when we see and end to identity politics. I agree. Liberals have been trying hard to break down these barriers for decades now, so that we can all be Americans one day…free and equal.
Via Atrios… If this is true, then maybe it means that voters have finally become fed up enough with the republican strategy of winning elections by alienating Americans from one another, that they’re willing now at long last to punish them at the polls for it.
North Carolina Congressman Robin Hayes, reeling from recent remarks about "Liberals hating real Americans," has lost his lead in North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District race.
Hayes trails Democrat Larry Kissell 51-46 in a poll released Tuesday by Raleigh’s Public Policy Polling. In its last NC-8 poll in August, PPP had the incumbent Hayes leading by five points.
You can argue that the republican party has a lot to answer for, in terms of how badly they’ve damanged the economy, our moral standing abroad and the rule of law here at home. But all of that pales in comparison to this one fact: that for decades now the republicans have sought to deliberately make Americans hate one another in order to win elections.
As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Patrick Buchanan once expounded upon the politics of polorization. "If we tear the country in half," Buchanan assured his boss in a perversely optimistic memo, "we can pick up the bigger half."
–J. Michael Hogan, Rhetoric and Community
And so they set about to do exactly that, inflaming bigotries and ugly passions to separate neighbor from neighbor, the better to split apart the New Deal coalition of working class urban and rural Americans, women and minorities, and replace it with a toxic wasteland of mutual hatred. And every election year that hatred had to be stoked a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, to keep it alive, to keep Americans from voting for their hopes and dreams instead of their fears and hatreds.
The damage they have done to America goes far beyond the economy and the war. It is worse even, then the constitutional damage Bush has done while in office. Those things can be fixed, with effort, in our lifetimes. The hate they have deliberately sown amongst the amber waves of grain will take generations to heal. If the republican party is to be held accountable for anything this election night, let it be for that.
[Update…] Via Atrios… From Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly…
WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE WEAK GET RIDICULOUS…. Recent polling shows Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) trailing in her re-election fight in North Carolina against Democrat Kay Hagan, so it stands to reason that she’s getting a little desperate.
Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s latest advertisement suggests her Democratic opponent, Kay Hagan, is a godless heathen.
"A leader of the Godless Americans PAC recently held a secret fundraiser for Kay Hagan," the 30-second spot says, showing footage of the group’s members talking about their atheist beliefs on cable news.
"Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took godless money," the ad concludes. "What did Kay Hagan promise in return?"
At the very end of the ad, a voice sounding like Hagan’s says: "There is no God."
Seriously, Dole used a Hagan impersonator to make voters think she’s an atheist.
It’s hard to know where to start with an ad this deplorable. First, Hagan is actually a Sunday school teacher and an elder in her church. Second, the fundraiser in question was co-hosted by 40 people, one of whom is on the board of an atheist political action committee. Third, there’s nothing scandalous about non-believers.
And fourth, what the hell is "godless money"?
Hagan held a press conference this morning with her family and pastor to denounce the ad, and announced that if Dole didn’t pull the ad, she would seek a cease-and-desist order.
Even in a campaign cycle filled with sleazy, deplorable attacks, Dole has disgraced herself in a way few thought possible.
Possible? Possible? If you’d spent the last couple decades as a gay man, living under the kinds of attacks on your person that republicans just take for granted as normal conversation, you’d know goddamned well what the kook pews are capable of. There is no bottom in that gutter. That’s what you need to understand. There is no bottom.
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