Seems more like an approaching head-on collision with a train then a birthday on the way.

I really need to be someplace else…

Taking a short stroll in the clear calm eye of a storm is asking…just asking…to get soaked…

That is all…

The center of Hanna has actually settled over the city, according to the latest weather radar.  No rain.  Just the occasional wind gust.  I’m going to take a wee stroll…

I just looked at NOAA radar for the area.  If you do a base reflection loop you can see clearly the center of the storm is strolling right up the bay.

It’s calm outside now, drizzling that fine rain you always get from tropical rain bands.  You can see on the radar that the south side of Baltimore is near the edge of Hanna’s center of rotation.  The center actually looks like it’s hugging the bay’s western shore.  Its between Washington and Baltimore as of 1:21 according to the radar images.  Good thing it wasn’t a hurricane.

I’m looking at the NOAA radar look for this area and it looks like Hanna’s center is passing a lot closer to Washington and Baltimore then they were saying last night.  Good thing it wasn’t a hurricane.

Looks like all the little seaside towns along the coast from the Delmarva north are going to get their beaches clobbered.  I doubt this thing’s going to do much damage beyond beach erosion though.  Which is bad enough for those places.

Wow…as I was typing this my Japanese maple just took a wind blast and got a real good shake.  This thing may bring some trees down around here after all…

Hanna’s bopping along though Virgina now, heading to the Chesapeake Bay.  But it looks like it’ll cut across the Delmarva peninsula and head out to sea, instead of running right up the bay like Isabel in 2003 and Agnes in 1972. 

We’re getting some wind now, but it isn’t bad.  Just some brief gusts that shake the tops of the trees a little.  A fine, driving rain is coming down in alternating bands of heavy and light, which is typical for the outer bands of tropical storms.   So far it doesn’t look like anything to worry about.  A couple weeks ago I was worried about a friend down in Orlando.  Now I’m getting a taste of it here in Baltimore.  But Hanna’s moving pretty quickly.  We have flash flood warnings and high wind warnings up, but they say tomorrow will be sun-shiny and blue skied.

Right now the wind is shaking my Japanese maple just outside my front bedroom window.  It does that for a little while and then stops.  The rain is pretty constant now though, alternating between pouring heavy and fine.  Just a day to stay indoors.  I’m going to try and get some cartooning done.

Remind me…is it God or Patriotism that’s the last refuge of a scoundrel…?

Fake Soldiers Used In RNC Video

It was a video that was supposed to elicit soaring patriotism and real emotions about the Pledge of Allegiance. But to do that, it used fake soldiers and a staged military funeral instead of the real thing.

On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience heard her 434-word essay, “Pledging myself to the Flag of the United States of America,” an essay she’d entered in the “Wave the Stars & Stripes” essay contest and won. The RNC turned that essay into a three and a half minute video, a visually stirring montage rolling over Victoria’s words about sharing the Pledge with Americans who have stood at important moments in history.

There’s the Continental Congress…A real WWII vet…Photos of workers at Ground Zero. A close-up of a folded flag presented to a grieving widow at a military funeral… profiles of soldiers swelling with pride in slo-motion.

But CBS News found that the footage of the ‘funeral’ and soldiers is what is called ‘stock’ footage. The soldiers were actors and the funeral scene was from a one-day film shoot, produced in June. No real soldiers were used during production.

The footage, sold by stock-film house Getty Images was produced by a commercial filmmaker in Chicago. Both Getty and the production company, Mr. Big Films, confirmed that the footage was shot on spec and sold to the Republican National Committee.

One of the actors, Perry Denton of Chicago, Ill. also confirmed that he was hired on a day-rate as an actor for the shoot and told CBS News he was surprised to learn the footage was shown at the convention.

One argument would be that using real soldiers in a political campaign video would amount to manipulating the U.S. military for domestic political purposes.  As if they don’t already do that anyway…

But they could have easily found usable news footage of an actual military funeral if they wanted to.  I don’t think that thought ever crossed their minds.  Our armed forces have been nothing more to them then a prop they can use to gain and keep political power.  So the difference between a stock actor and a soldier doesn’t come immediately to mind and that’s why nobody questioned the use of actors in that video.  We’re all props on their stage as far as the republicans are concerned, every one of us.  And in any case, reality is what they say it is.

So the other day a senior McCain campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, took a stroll over to the Log Cabin Club and commended them for all their hard work on behalf of gay civil rights…

“I just wanted to take a second to come by and pay my respect and the campaign’s respect to your organization and to your group,” said Schmidt, who many view as the new architect of the Republican Party. “Your organization is an important one in the fabric of our party.”

In his brief remarks, Schmidt weaved in a personal anecdote about his lesbian sister and her relationship to him, his wife, and his children. “On a personal level, my sister and her partner are an important part of my life and our children’s life,” he said. “I admire your group and your organization and I encourage you to keep fighting for what you believe in because the day is going to come.”

The Log Cabin members there in attendance immediately began questioning him on McCain’s record on gay equality, pressing him repeatedly on his stance on same sex marriage.  Finally concluding that they’d come there looking to see a leader and they didn’t.

Hahahahaha….  No.  Actually, that was a high school student in Concord New Hampshire, speaking directly to McCain himself…

High School Student to McCain: You’re No Leader

William Sleaster, a student at Concord High School rose to ask McCain a question about gay rights and, ultimately dissatisfied by the answer he received from McCain, told the Republican presidential contender that he’d come looking to see a leader and didn’t.

McCain first answered the high school student by talking about his support for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the military’s policy regarding gays, and about his belief in the sanctity of marriage.

“Discrimination in any form is unacceptable in America today,” McCain said.

“I understand the controversy that continues to swirl around this issue,” McCain said. “That debate needs to be continued.”

Sleaster pressed on. “Do you support civil unions or gay marriage?”

“I do not,” McCain answered. “I think that they impinge on the status and the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”

“So you believe in taking away someone’s rights because you believe it’s wrong?”

“I wouldn’t put that interpretation on my position, but I understand yours,” McCain said diplomatically.

Sleaster went on to ask another question about how to help the working class in America, which McCain fielded by talking about the country’s need to figure out education and health care, and to secure the environment.

Sleaster indicated that he wanted to follow up again.

“You have one more? Go ahead you’re doing good,” McCain encouraged.

“I came here looking to see a leader,” Sleaster said. “I don’t.”

The assembled students murmured, and a teacher started to step in.

“I understand,” McCain said. “I thank you. That’s what America is all about.”

…and Homeland security immediately began tapping his family’s phones and intercepting their emails.  I sure hope that poor kid doesn’t need any student loans to get himself through college.  Anyway…here’s what the Log Cabin members actually did.  They…uhm…cheered as Schmidt rose to the defense of Sarah Palin…

“You saw one of the great speeches in the history of political conventions last night by an accomplished governor of a state who has just announced herself as a major force in the Republican Party in her own right, and I think the other side this morning, when you consider the backlash that is likely to occur after all the vile filth that’s been thrown at her, they ought to be sitting on the other side saying, Oh – My – God,” Schmidt said to the cheers of some 50 attendees. 

Vile filth…???  You mean…like this…?

Like…this…?

This…maybe…?

That kind of vile filth?  Meanwhile the Log Cabin cheered for the lady who tried to eliminate domestic partner benefits in her state by referendum when she couldn’t get it via the courts, and told the Eagle Forum in a 2006 questionnaire that her No. 2 priority as governor would be "preserving the definition of ‘marriage’ as defined in our constitution."  They cheered.

If sixteen year old William Sleaster had been there to see it, he might not have bothered challenging McCain on his gay rights positions.  If we don’t stand up for ourselves, no one will stand with us.

The Log Cabin Republicans: Breathing new life every election year into Truman Capote’s saying, that a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.  

Snapshot from the Anglican Kulturkrieg…

Canon says he would quit over gay bishop

A SENIOR clergyman has threatened to quit rather than work alongside the man who could become the UK’s first openly gay bishop because he says homosexual acts are “sinful and wrong”.

Canon Peter Jones said he would consider his position should the Dean of St Albans, Dr Jeffrey John, become the new Bishop of Bangor.

And just so you know he isn’t motivated by anything as sordid as mere hate…

Mr Jones, who is married to health visitor Susan and has two grown up children, added: “I’m not against homosexuals as people, but people who engage in homosexual acts or people who teach that such acts may be acceptable.

We don’t hate the person, only the act…  But if if an "act" is all you can see in the sexual intimacy between same sex couples, then you are beyond hating the person.  You don’t even see the person.  Hate has already done its work on you.  It has turned homosexual people into nothing.  It has taken loving same sex couples and turned them into strange two-legged beasts who merely copulate.  It has turned their love for each other into an act.  And now the enemy can no longer be just the act, but the meaning that underscores it. 

Dr John, 55, and his long-term partner the Rev Grant Holmes became civil partners in August 2006, but he claims to be celibate.

Celibate or not, they are a couple, and your enemy isn’t lust, it isn’t sex, it isn’t moral relativism.  The enemy now is love.  Which is why it has to be an act.  "…people who engage in homosexual acts or people who teach that such acts may be acceptable."  Acts.  Acts.  Acts.  Homosexual sex isn’t what offends you.  Homosexual sex isn’t what you are striking out at there.  You are not denying that sex is moral between same sex couples, but that love plays any role in their intimacy.  That’s why it has to be an act.  By calling it such, you are throwing a dagger at the hearts of loving same sex couples and hoping for blood.  You are trashing their garden.  You are spitting on their hearts, because the heart, not the sex, is what offends you. 

Hate has done its work on you.  You are beyond hating the person.  You are beyond hating homosexuals.  You have taken that one critical step past the edge of the Pit and you have fallen in.  The enemy isn’t sex.  The enemy now is Love. 

There probably isn’t any going back from this place.  You’re done.  By all means, return the stole to someone who is fit to wear it.

So…Joe Lieberman, the Last Honest Man In The Senate, gives a speech at the GOP convention, in which he says, among other things…

When others were silent, John McCain had the judgment to sound the alarm about the mistakes we were making in Iraq. When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground,

John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion and support the surge, and because of that, today, our troops are at last beginning to come home, not in failure, but in honor!

Honor…is it?

If Obama voted against funding the troops, so did Lieberman

To support the charge, the McCain campaign has cited Obama’s vote of May 24, 2007, against an appropriations bill that included funding for the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and passed, 80-14).

So was that a vote "to cut off funding for our American troops on the battlefield"?

Not primarily.

Obama was fighting at the time for a requirement that President Bush begin to bring the troops home from Iraq. The bill in question did not include such a requirement, and that is why Obama voted against it. Obama said at the time that he wanted to fund the troops, he just didn’t want to fund the particular military strategy that the bill would enable.

“We must fund our troops," Obama said at the time. "But we owe them something more. We owe them a clear, prudent plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else’s civil war."

Clearly Obama wanted to provide funding for the troops — just not the president’s military strategy.

If, by voting against funding for a strategy he opposed, Obama voted to "cut off funding for the troops," then so did almost every Republican in the Senate — and Lieberman himself — when they voted against a $124-billion appropriations bill on April 26, 2007, that would have funded operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also required Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. (McCain missed the vote on that bill, which passed 51-46 and was subsequently vetoed by Bush.)

What part of honor involves lying through your teeth Joe?

From Talking Points Memo…  Peggy Noonan, Chuck Todd, and Mike Murphy get caught actually speaking their minds over a live mike.  Problem is, what they really thought wasn’t quite the same thing as what they were telling their NBC audience they really thought…

Oy … Live Mics Are Such Dangerous Things

Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we’ll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We’ll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she’s the right woman for the job Up next, one man who’s already convinced and he’ll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman.

(cut away)

Peggy Noonan: Yeah.

Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys — this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work. And —

PN: It’s over.

MM: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

CT: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.

PN: Saw Kay this morning.

CT: Yeah, she’s never looked comfortable about this —

MM: They’re all bummed out.

CT: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

PN: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives —

CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.

MM: I totally agree.

PN: Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.

MM: You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.

CT: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.

MM: Yeah.

What’s worth paying attention to here is now nobody out linking to this transcript is even bothering to bring up the fact that this is not anything like what these people are telling their viewers when they think the mikes are on.  It’s all just a big belly laugh.  Everyone just takes for granted now that pundits don’t tell the truth.  Everyone just takes being manipulated by the major news networks for granted now.  And to top it off, they’re bellyaching here about McCain being cynical.  Well thank God for cynicism Murphy, or you and Chuck and Peggy would have to find real jobs.

The Sidney Morning Herald prints what NBC didn’t want you to know…

Out-and-out champion celebrates

HE KISSED him briefly in the stands and gave him his Olympic bouquet. Later, outside the glowing blue Water Cube, Matthew Mitcham and his partner, Lachlan Fletcher, firmly embraced, both shedding tears. Next it was his mother Vivien’s turn to hold her golden boy, and more tears fell.

…

Carefully nursing Mitcham’s Olympic bouquet, Fletcher spoke of the incredible journey that the diver had taken to the top. Fletcher has been the one constant over the past two years.

He was his rock when Mitcham retired in his late teenage years suffering anxiety and depression. He watched him become a stunt diver at the Sydney Royal Easter show, supported his fight back into the sport and now to win Olympic gold.

"It’s been so up and down," Fletcher said. "When I first met him, he was pretty unhappy, he wasn’t liking the diving in Brisbane at all, he didn’t want to do it, wasn’t happy being there.

"It took a lot for him to retire and stop doing it because it had been his life for so long. He wanted to try and be happy again. He took time to do normal things that people do.

"Then after five or six months he started to really miss it again and he had the opportunity to dive with Chava [Sobrino, his coach]. He started that and loved it ever since, every second of it, which is great to see him happy all the time."

What NBC didn’t want you to know:  Not that Matthew Mitcham is gay, but that he loves, and is loved, and that relationship nurtured and sustained him when he was beaten and down, and brought him back, all they way to the gold.  Love does that.  What NBC didn’t want you to know wasn’t that Mitcham is gay, but that love does that for gay people too.  To know that, is to see republican gay bashing for what it is.  Not a principled moral stand, but a crime against humanity.

What you have to understand about the entire gay rights struggle is that this is what was taken away from us for so very, very long, and what the haters are Still trying bitterly to take away from us.  Not sex, but love.  Vital, nurturing, sustaining, intimate human love.  The love that makes us whole, that completes us, that empowers us to reach beyond ourselves to the best within us. That is what was taken from us for so many human generations.  That is what we of the post-stonewall generations have been fighting to take back.  Our human status. 

When the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the sodomy laws the screaming from the hate pews afterward wasn’t about gay couples having sex, but fear the courts would now let them get married.  It was the first thing they started yapping about.  When bigots like Orson Scott Card say that a homosexual’s highest allegiance is to the society that gives them access to sex, he’s not describing what we are but what he sees us as being.  Not human.  Humans love, not-humans only have sex.  And you can rip the heart out of not-humans, because they don’t feel any pain.

This is hilarious…  (Link takes you to Mark Fiore’s page since he apparently doesn’t allow his videos to be embedded…)

Click image to play

Some are calling this an admission…

Attorney challenges Monegan firing inquiry

The state has hired a private lawyer to represent Gov. Sarah Palin’s office in the Legislature’s investigation into the firing of former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. The lawyer already has challenged whether lawmakers even have authority to oversee the inquiry.

The attorney hired to represent Palin, Thomas Van Flein, is challenging the authority of state Sen. Hollis French, a Democrat and former state prosecutor, who is project director for the legislative investigation.  Here’s his take on the matter…

"Our concern is that Hollis French turns into Ken Starr and uses public money to pursue a political vendetta rather than truly pursue an honest inquiry into an alleged ethics issue," Van Flein said in an interview.

Oh really?   While the sight of a republican spokesdroid for Sarah Palin saying publicly what everyone who was paying back then already knows about the Ken Starr investigations, it’s a mistake to take that as an admission. 

This is not your father’s republican party.  It’s the party of president junior, the most miserable failure of a man you ever met who can see himself as a glorious president and war leader.  It’s the party of James Dobson Gary Bauer and other religious right leaders who can thunder about sexual morality and family values and come rushing to the defence of Palin’s pregnant and unmarried teenage daughter.  It’s the party of CEOs that champion free markets and capitalism one moment and then bribe congress into locking down markets, stifling emergent technologies and handing out fat no-bid government contracts.  Republican doublethink would make Orwell’s jaw drop, let alone Goldwater’s. 

They knew Starr was engaging in a political vendetta.  They have always known that.  But Starr was conducting an honest inquiry into an alleged ethics issue.  They have always known that too.  They have always known both those things.  If you think that’s a contradiction, you’re still living in the reality based community, for which they no longer have any use…

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

-Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush

That wasn’t just the heart of the Bush Presidency, it was a glimpse into the heart and soul of the movement conservatives who now dominate the republican party, both secular and Christianist.  Reality is whatever they wish it to be, at the moment they need it to be that.  When they need it to be something else, then it becomes that thing too.  Never mind facts, never mind science, never mind God Almighty Himself.  They create reality.  And when it comes crashing down on their thick heads, they’ll keep right on creating new realities that deny everything they hate because they cannot cope with it, just like every other tinpot tyrant who ever spent his list furtive moments alone in a bunker somewhere, while the world burned all around him.

This is why we need to pry their hands off the levers of power come November.  It’s not the economy.  It’s not the Supreme Court.  It’s not the war.  It’s the reality stupid.  The ship of state needs pilots who don’t simply wish away the iceburgs.