The Idaho Values Alliance–"Making Idaho the Friendliest Place in the World to Raise a Family"–is going to have a hard time swallowing the latest news about its beloved Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for lewd conduct in an airport restroom.
Here’s one page of the group’s site, a news update where it praises Craig for his "pro-life" vote on stem cell research, followed by a "Bonus Byte" on the perils of homosexuality and airport restrooms:
One of the tragic characteristics of the homosexual lifestyle is its emphasis on anonymous sex and multiple sexual partners. It is a little-acknowledged secret that many active homosexuals will have more than 1,000 sex partners over the course of a lifetime…
Figure at age 53 I should have had at least 6 or 7 hundred of those by now. I’ve laid down with exactly six guys in my entire lifetime. That’s one less then these kooks claim is the average for heterosexuals, and I figure one of those times really shouldn’t count because nothing really happened. So somebody, some royal son of a bitch, took my share of all that fabulous gay sex I keep hearing about…and when I get my hands on him I’m going to throttle him…
This sordid fact of homosexual life surfaced yesterday in an AP article yesterday that reports on the number of arrests police have made for indecent exposure and public sex acts in the restrooms at Atlanta’s airport, the busiest in the world. The increased restroom patrols, begun to apprehend luggage thieves, instead uncovered a rash of sex crimes. Airport restrooms have become so popular that men looking for anonymous sexual trysts with other men have advertised their airport availability on Craigslist. One such ad was from a man saying he was stuck at the airport for three hours and was looking for “discreet, quick action.”
He wouldn’t have been from Boise…by any chance…?
This Idaho Values Alliance was (until lately one would have to suppose) a big supporter of Larry Craig’s. Point of fact, according to Marshall…
What are the odds of a piece on airport restroom trysts appearing below a picture of Larry Craig in a conservative group’s newsletter, not to mention the reference to Craigslist?
See…this is what I meant in that last post, when I said that Craig was only behaving the way the right wing culture he was swimming in told him homosexuals behave. I won’t deny that there are gay people who are into the quick anonymous hooking up sex scene…but that’s no more the whole of gay life then Baltimore’s Block amounts to the whole of heterosexual life. Don’t tell me that there aren’t a lot of heterosexuals who get into all that crap too. Back in the 70s the only places where I could find copies of the local Washington gay paper (The Blade) and The Advocate, were seedy adult bookstores. I got an eyeful in those days of what heterosexuals were up to.
But crackpots like The Idaho Values Alliance aren’t saying merely that having sex in toilets is something most homosexuals do…they’re saying that To Be Homosexual, Is To Have Sex In Bathrooms. Or in other words, Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex. And tragically, a lot of gay people grow up believing that of themselves. Homosexuality doesn’t drag people into the gutter. Homosexuals are pushed into it. By…you know…decent god fearing people. Morally righteous people who have no trouble whatsoever teaching gay kids that homosexuality is nothing but cheap random empty sex in toilets, and then congratulating themselves on their heterosexuality when those kids grow up acting like they were taught to act.
Senators aren’t the only folks these days with their reputations in the toilet. American journalism is also looking pretty squalid. The chatter around the net, after Senator Larry Craig’s arrest and guilty plea for lewd conduct, was that reporter Dan Popkey of The Idaho Statesman had been working on a pretty explosive investigation into Craig’s past sexual conduct, and uncovered the arrest and guilty plea for lewd behavior last June, and that Popkey’s story got trashcanned after Craig’s lawyers sat down and had a little chat with the editor and the publisher of his home state newspaper.
Well…I guess on the principle that there’s no point in sitting on the story now, The Idaho Statesman has finally gone ahead and published what looks like a slightly updated version of Popkey’s story. Here it is:
Idaho senator pleads guilty to disorderly conduct after incident at Minnesota airport that echoes previous allegation of homosexual conduct.
…
In an interview on May 14, Craig told the Idaho Statesman he’d never engaged in sex with a man or solicited sex with a man. The Craig interview was the culmination of a Statesman investigation that began after a blogger accused Craig of homosexual sex in October. Over five months, the Statesman examined rumors about Craig dating to his college days and his 1982 pre-emptive denial that he had sex with underage congressional pages.
The most serious finding by the Statesman was the report by a professional man with close ties to Republican officials. The 40-year-old man reported having oral sex with Craig at Washington’s Union Station, probably in 2004. The Statesman also spoke with a man who said Craig made a sexual advance toward him at the University of Idaho in 1967 and a man who said Craig "cruised" him for sex in 1994 at the REI store in Boise. The Statesman also explored dozens of allegations that proved untrue, unclear or unverifiable.
Craig, 62, was elected to Congress in 1980. Should he win re-election in 2008 and complete his term, he would be the longest-serving Idahoan ever in Congress. His record includes a series of votes against gay rights and his support of a 2006 amendment to the Idaho Constitution that bars gay marriage and civil unions.
The article is lengthy and pretty detailed and reading it you get a better grasp of the rest of the iceburg that was lurking under the news reports of Craig’s airport men’s room arrest. It starts with his sudden and head turning pre-emptive denial back in 1982 that he’d ever had sex with a congressional page, and flits from one men’s room to another…with a brief detour back to his college fraternity days.
Craig told the Statesman he was unaware of rumors about him being gay going back to his college days. Craig had about 150 fraternity brothers at Delta Chi during his U of I years.
The Statesman interviewed 41 of them. Of those 41, three said there were jokes about him being effeminate and possibly gay. Most said that had Craig been thought to be gay, he would have never become a leader in the fraternity and the student body.
As president of Delta Chi, Craig secured a $100,000 loan to remodel the fraternity house, instituted study hours, and blackballed members for drug use. They called him "Mother Craig" for his officiousness.
…
Most of Craig’s college friends say he was disciplined, studious and serious, even if he was awkward with women.
One woman who dated him off and on for a year asked not to be named, but said, "I don’t imagine that he ever held my hand. He was into the gotta-hold-the-door-for-the-woman sort of thing. But I always felt like I was an accessory. I might as well have been his briefcase."
Lady…the word is ‘beard’. One student who had been considering pledging with Craig’s fraternity told the reporter that Craig had taken him back to his room and made a pass at him. Craig denied it, as he denied the story of the man who said he cruised him at the REI store in Boise, and the man who said he’d had sex with Craig in the men’s room at Union Station in Washington D.C.
I want to feel some sympathy for Craig…the religious right’s long war on human sexuality has left a lot of Americans with twisted up sex lives…but I can’t. He made himself as much a part of the right wing machine as any Dobson or Falwell and whether that was his way of transferring his own self loathing onto everyone else, or he really does hate humanity as much as his neighbors in the kook pews, it doesn’t matter. While he was cruising the toilets for sex, he was busy bashing gay people who were trying to make something fine and decent and whole out of their lives. He tried to cut off our wedding rings, at the same time his own was peeping out from under toilet stall walls. It’s unforgivable.
But Craig is what you get when you apply the religious right’s teachings on homosexuality. He was everything the religious right said a homosexual should be. Self-loathing and dedicated to maintaining a heterosexual pretense regardless of the cost to himself, or to others.
In the May 14 interview, Craig and his wife listened to a four-minute excerpt of the Statesman’s interview with the 40-year-old man who first spoke to Rogers. At first, Craig objected to the man’s anonymity, but agreed to listen. The man’s voice was disguised.
Craig said the man is an activist. "The gay movement, we know it for what it is. It’s now aggressive and it’s liberal and it’s naming people to try to put them in compromising, difficult situations."
Suzanne Craig’s eyes reddened and filled with tears as she listened. After her husband’s denial, she said, "I’m incensed that you would even consider such a piece of trash as a credible source."
To which Craig added, "Jiminy God!"
I hope she saves a bit of the blame for all of this, for all the fundamentalist pulpit thumpers that keep screaming at Americans that sex is a shameful and dirty thing, and that there is nothing more shameful and dirty and perverted, then to be a homosexual. Craig was only doing that day in that men’s room, what they’d told him all his life that homosexuals do.
Roll Call is reporting that Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, was arrested earlier this summer in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport by an undercover officer investigating complaints about sexual activity. The Capitol Hill newspaper says it obtained the arrest report.
…
According to the incident report, Sgt. Dave Karsnia was working as a plainclothes officer on June 11 investigating civilian complaints regarding sexual activity in the men’s public restroom in which Craig was arrested.
Airport police previously had made numerous arrests in the men’s restroom of the Northstar Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal in connection with sexual activity.
Karsnia entered the bathroom at noon that day and about 13 minutes after taking a seat in a stall, he stated he could see “an older white male with grey hair standing outside my stall.”
The man, who lingered in front of the stall for two minutes, was later identified as Craig.
“I could see Craig look through the crack in the door from his position. Craig would look down at his hands, ‘fidget’ with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again. Craig would repeat this cycle for about two minutes,” the report states.
Craig then entered the stall next to Karsnia’s and placed his roller bag against the front of the stall door.
“My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall,” Karsnia stated in his report. “From my seated position, I could observe the shoes and ankles of Craig seated to the left of me.”
Craig was wearing dress pants with black dress shoes.
“At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot.
I moved my foot up and down slowly. While this was occurring, the male in the stall to my right was still present. I could hear several unknown persons in the restroom that appeared to use the restroom for its intended use. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area,” the report states.
Craig then proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times, and Karsnia noted in his report that “I could … see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.”
Karsnia then held his police identification down by the floor so that Craig could see it. “With my left hand near the floor, I pointed towards the exit. Craig responded, ‘No!’ I again pointed towards the exit. Craig exited the stall with his roller bags without flushing the toilet. … Craig said he would not go. I told Craig that he was under arrest, he had to go, and that I didn’t want to make a scene. Craig then left the restroom.”
In a recorded interview after his arrest, Craig “either disagreed with me or ‘didn’t recall’ the events as they happened,” the report states.
Craig stated “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine,” the report states. Craig also told the arresting officer that he reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor.
“It should be noted that there was not a piece of paper on the bathroom floor, nor did Craig pick up a piece of paper,” the arresting officer said in the report.
* Voted YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. (Jun 2006)
* Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
* Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
* Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. (Sep 1996)
* Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation. (Sep 1996)
I could … see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.” If there’s one image you can take away from the George Bush years, one defining moment that sums up perfectly the condition of the right wing gutter, the moral compass of the William Bennett’s, James Dobsons, Jerry Falwells and Charles Krauthammers of the American right…here it is: the hand of a senator who voted for the federal marriage amendment, furtively moving under a toilet stall wall, the gold wedding band on his ring finger glinting in the pale florescent light as he tries to proposition the vice cop in the stall next to his. You could write volumes about the degeneracy of the American right wing, and not capture it as utterly, as elegantly, as that one profoundly sickening image does. It is perfect.
Marriage is a sacred thing the right insists…and so it is. For couples in love the wedding band is a symbol of one of this life’s most perfect joys. But to the right it is no more then a cheap status symbol…like owning a Bentley, or having white skin. Something to denote privilege, status, rank. Certainly nothing to do with love and desire, trust and devotion. Whether Larry Craig is a homosexual, or a heterosexual man with some pretty major sexual issues, it makes no difference. When he consigned the sex lives of his gay neighbors to the toilet, he consigned his own sex life there too. Love keeps no balance sheet, acknowledges no rank, bows to no prejudice. The one who doesn’t know this, has either never loved, or never loved anyone more then they loved rank and status. The ring knew where it belonged.
Are You Seriously Asking What’s Wrong With Torturing Dogs…???
I haven’t been following the Michael Vick dog fighting story all that much, partly because it’s one of those miserable stories that I just don’t want to get very emotionally involved in. There are tons of those going across my news ticker every day and after I’ve read the latest from President Dispshit’s Excellent Iraq Adventure, and More Anti-Gay Crap From The Haters, I’ve usually had enough news for one day. And partly, it’s because I’ve become inured to news articles about pro athletes behaving badly. I should be willing to summon up more outrage but I can’t. The standards of conduct in professional sports have been going into the gutter for decades now.
Arianna’s ‘progressive’ celebrity pals have recently posted a slew of editorials defending the electrocution, hanging, gang rape, drowning, starvation, and systematic torture of dogs. Their reasoning? Well, through the lens of their sophistical primitivism, they seem to think it’s just plain irrational to feel anything for ‘lesser mammals’. Some have even gone so far to suggest that Vick’s crimes are some sort of appropriate karmic balance to the silliness of people putting sweaters on their dogs.
If you’re like me, you probably find it hard to believe that these views are being seriously considered among our ‘allies’ in the so-called ‘Progressive Blogosphere’, but check it out for yourself:
Huh? Is Lawrence O’ Donnell seriously asking what’s wrong with what Michael Vick did? Because if he is I hope the rest of his family is keeping an eye on him. My understanding is that torturing animals is a Really Bad Sign that there’s something deeply, profoundly, sociopathically wrong inside a person’s head. It’s something you really need to pay attention to.
I acknowledge the vegan’s retort that if you’re willing to kill animals and eat them you might as well be willing to torture them too. I don’t find those things to be on the same psychological plane. If I’m cruel to animals because I eat meat, then it’s a cruel world that can have my body back after I’m dead to nourish itself. That’s in my will. But I don’t think our flesh and blood life is essentially cruel. It just Is.
I won’t argue that modern factory farming isn’t an abomination, let alone cruel. I won’t argue that a lot of people who call themselves sportsmen just enjoy killing something for the sake of killing it, without a moment’s pause to reflect on how they’re just as much a part of the circle of life on earth as their food. A human who is thoughtlessly cruel to animals has no brakes and needs to learn a thing or two about sympathy. But a human who makes a sport out of watching animals suffer, whether they actually die or not, is dangerous. If O’Donnell can’t figure out what the fuss is over electrocuting, hanging, drowning, starving, and sexually abusing small animals and calling that a sport, I recommend he give the matter some quality thought time, before he turns his back on the wrong person.
Oh…and before he looses his own conscience. Over at KOS, Stroszek makes clear what the problem here is…
So yes, O’Donnell is right in his point that there is no ‘natural law’ that protects dogs, just as much as there is no natural law that protects humans. What drives people to react with disgust and horror at any immoral act is simply COMPASSION, which, sadly, seems to be more exception than ‘law’ in a society that, in just a few short years, has produced Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Prison, "Shock & Awe", and yes, Michael Vick.
We’re swimming in a cesspool of Might Makes Right here, and you need to understand that there’s no bottom to it. We need to take a longer, closer look at where all the excuses our culture makes now for the prerogative of power are leading us. The Greed Is Good, Power Is It’s Own Reason credo of the last couple decades has made us indifferent to cruelty. It’s just part of the background noise in George Bush’s America. We start viewing sadism as a normal part of our environment too, and I don’t think there is a road back from there.
Tragically, not all of my fellow boomers made it out of the 60s and 70s sane. Many of them are stumbling through life now, middle aged pathetic burned out shells of their former selves. One case in point being the drooling jackass who wrote this last week in the Wall Street Journal…
The Summer of Drugs
Forty years ago, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in and drop out."
BY TED NUGENT
Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.
Irresponsible lifestyle of random sex…did you say Ted…?
The first time that I got it
I was just ten years old
I got it from some kitty next door
I went and see the Dr. and
He gave me the cure
I think I got it some more
They give me cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever
It’s nothin dangerous
I feel no pain
I’ve got to ch-ch-change
You know you got it when you’re going insane
It makes a grown man cryin’ cryin’
Won’t you make my bed
I make the pussy purr with
The stroke of my hand
They know they gettin’ it from me
They know just where to go
When they need their lovin man
They know I do it for free
Do it for free do you Ted? Got it from a lady next door when you were just ten did you Ted?
That Nadine, what a teenage queen
She lookin’ so clean, especi’lly down in between; what I like
She come to town; she be foolin’ around
a puttin’ me down as a rock-and-roll clown
It’s all right
Wang Dang Sweet Poontang
Wang dang, what a sweet poontang
a shakin’ my thang as a rang-a-dang-dang in the bell
She’s so sweet when she yanks on my meat
Down on the street you know she can’t be beat
What the hell
Wang dang Ted…
I don’t wanna hand nothin’ to ya
I just wanna sit back and do ya
Dontcha make me stand up and chase it
I just wanna lay back and taste it
Come and get it right here for you
I would never want to bore you
No
Come and get it
Come and get it
Come on girl and sit down beside me
Let me tell ya whats burnin’ inside me
I want you to take it
I know that you’ll like it
Sit right down and grab it and bite it
Come on girl its right here for you
Yes…I think we can see what’s burnin’ inside of you Ted…
Looking for trouble, looking for sex
Walking on the wild side, she’s so complex
She’s on fire, the heat is coming on
The girl’s on fire, she burns all night long
High hell sneakers
Head to toe in lace
Such a dangerous body
With a little girl’s face
Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, was it? Well I’m sure there wasn’t a father anywhere in this country back then Ted, who wouldn’t have felt completely at ease letting you be alone with their little girl. No random irresponsible sex for you. With…little girls…
I with you Ted, when you morn the deaths of all those amazing talents back then. They died way too young and it was a tragedy. Just think where they’d be now if they had lived on. For one thing, I don’t think Hendrix or Joplin or Morrison would be writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal. I mean…just try to picture it. Would John Lennon be writing for the Wall Street Journal? Would the Wall Street Journal let John Lennon fucking anywhere near it’s pages? But then it wasn’t drugs that killed Lennon…it was some burned out lunatic with a gun.
I was in Chicago last week I said, "Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk?" Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns. Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, "Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch." Since I’m in California, I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns. Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore.
I can understand why you’re so pissed off Ted. I can understand why you hate all the dirty hippies. Hendrix…Joplin…Cass Elliot…Jim Morrison…John Lennon… They’re still taking the spotlight away from you, aren’t they? Their music lives on generation after generation…long after their pointless deaths. Kids who were born long after they’d died are still groovin’ to their music…and you still can’t raise your act much higher then the gutter trash crowd.
You understand why that is…don’t you Ted. In a world where Hendrix can still sing Foxy Lady to us, why would anyone want to listen to a burned out lunatic belching Kiss My Ass…
I believe in animal rights
I let my dog hump on my shin
Right. Whatever. You’re howling out abuse at the hippies so you won’t have to face the fact that if it wasn’t for the greats who took rock and roll from the back streets to Woodstock you wouldn’t have a stage to prance around with your…machine gun. You’d be just another long haired weirdo with a guitar and an open guitar case on the sidewalk in front of him with a little card in it asking for spare change. I mean…it certainly isn’t your music your audience comes to you for now is it…?
Oh look…a naked woman tied up and served on a platter like a pig, with a hand grenade in her mouth. So nice of the Wall Street Journal to give you a forum to bitch about hippies, drugs, cowardly irresponsible lifestyles of random sex, and…soulless music.
There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.
So tell us Ted, what this clean and sober lifestyle has to do with naked ladies bound on silver platters and gaged with hand grenades. And…does being clean and sober help much for getting on stage and announcing to the world that you want a black man and three white women to suck on your…machine gun? Wow…it must have been awful…simply awful…getting all caught up in that toxic underbelly of excess back then. Good thing you made it out of there clean and sober. Every father would want his son to grow up clean and sober…
It’s really cute how the Wall Street Journal ends your editorial with "Mr. Nugent is a rock star releasing his 35th album, "Love Grenade," this summer." Perhaps they should have put a photo of the cover art there too. Or one of these souvenir stickers they’re selling now on eBay…
I’m picturing you looking at the cover art for your new album, and thanking your lucky stars that you weren’t caught up in any toxic underbellies of excess…
…and I’ll take what all those Haight-Ashbury hippies gave the world over this ugly shock jock crap any day. See…the hippies shocked the establishment, but they weren’t About shocking the establishment. They rejected the empty values and broken promises of the 50s…they were reaching for something they really thought was a better place. You just want to shock. And the problem with shock is that it gets old. People get used to it. So to stay in the spotlight, you have to keep ratcheting it up…increasing the dose.
…which makes you the drug Ted. You and all the other shock jocks who’ve been busy ever since the Reagan years, dragging America into the gutter for money. Rush Limbaugh…Michael Savage…Don Imus… You. You’re no Hendrix. You’re no Morrison. You’re no Joplin. You’re sure as shit no John Lennon. Drugs may have killed some of the best musical talent of my generation Ted, but they left behind a little beauty and wonder for the rest of us and for generations to come, and that’s something you’ll never be able to say on your deathbed. You’re the symptom of cultural decay Ted. You’re one drop of the heroin coursing through America’s veins now. You give your customers a quick little high, a cheap little thrill, and when you’re done with them they’re a little less then they were before.
Wang dang, what a sweet poontang…
I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns…
…and your wallet is a little bigger. How fitting that you’re in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, so soon after Rupert Murdoch bought it.
[Update…] Via Harp I learn that Nugent’s new album has a cover of the old Amboy Duke’s psychedelic hit Journey To The Center Of The Mind. A quick visit to the CD listing on Amazon.Com confirms it. This is rich…
The Amboy Dukes, some of us still recall, was the 60s band Nugent made a name for himself in. Sweet. Here we have Nugent bellyaching in the Wall Street Journal about the 60s drug culture, and hippies and LSD and how "the bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood"…and the album he’s releasing this month has a cover of one of the quintessential songs of that period, and that culture. Christ…I’ve heard of playing both sides of the street, but this is really brazen.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Guns are so prevalent in Orlando that 50 percent of the young men in the downtown area on weekends are carrying them or have access to them in a vehicle, according to a 20-year police veteran.
"There are always guns involved, in just about every call," Orlando police veteran Derwin Bradley said. "Out of every two guys walking down the street, one of them will have a gun."
Bradley said he has to assume most of the young men are armed.
Okay…now…wait a minute… Is it one in two men in downtown Orlando…or one in two Young men…?
I guess I can blab about this now…since it’s been made public… Perhaps you’ve heard of Google Earth. Have you ever wondered what Google Sky might look like?
Sky at Google Earth, which made its debut in cyberspace early yesterday, turns Googlers around and aims their eyes toward the heavens, with user-friendly tools for navigating and zooming deep into the skies of both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
In the background there are 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. They’re not randomly generated dots, but real, digitized photos — a million of them — stitched seamlessly together from some of the world’s most complete sky surveys.
Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore have added 127 high-resolution digital photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. They’ve spent months patching them all into Google’s sky at their proper zoomable distances and precisely in position.
"It’s a very interesting tool to allow people, as never before, to browse the sky," said Alberto Conti, an institute astronomer and development manager for the institute’s Community Missions Office, which works to make Hubble’s discoveries accessible to the public.
Because of light pollution, he said, lots of people, especially in East Coast cities like Baltimore and New York, "have never really seen the sky." With Google Sky’s software, they can "explore things they could never see with their own eyes, or things they probably would not see in a planetarium."
More overlays, or "mashups," available to Sky users can reveal the constellations, and identify stars and planets visible from their backyards. Sky can also forecast the positions of the moon and planets two months in advance.
"I’m looking forward to people adding asteroids, and things that are moving — a lot of comets, you name it," Conti said. Just like Google Earth itself, Sky will allow users to form communities of common interest, and add their own images and lists of interesting sights.
This has been in the works for a while and it’s wonderful, the potential even more vast then with Google Earth. Imagine being able to view any part of the sky above, as only the most powerful telescopes humankind ever possessed can. Imagine zooming into a section of sky and viewing it in different wavelengths of light, or watching stellar events unfold over a time selectable period. Watch the light echo from V838 Monocerotis expand into the distant shells of its own cast-off matter. View the galaxies in various wavelengths, to pinpoint the regions of active star birth. Wander among distant galaxies near the dawn of time.
Now you can.
Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return.
And we can, because the Cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.
-Carl Sagan
The Class of 72 Reunion Committee is working on plans for a 35th year reunion sometime this November. I’m on the committee, and I’ll be posting regular notices and forwarding reunion committee updates here between now and November in hopes that either another classmate will see it, or someone who knows someone…(etc, etc…). Rounding up our stray cats is a bit like detective work.
Mostly right now we need contact info. Send email to reunion@woodwardclassof72.com if you’re interested, or know someone who is, or if you have any contact information you think might be helpful. If you think you know of other good places to post this notice send that to me. Thanks!
From our Now Just Imagine How Much Bellyaching You’d Hear From The Kook Pews If Gay People Were Doing This department…
Color me unimpressed by Mark Penn’s "microtrends" based on Marc Ambinder’s writeup. Penn mostly seems to be playing his favorite sport of defining groups arbitrarily and then finding that if you slice up the population in random ways, you can get interesting-but-meaningless results. That said, this is funny:
Within the past ten years, the number of women who sought younger male boyfriends has quintupled. These are the "cougars," Penn writes.
I’m not sure I understand why they’re cougars? Because it’s an alternative to being a cat lady?
That’s from Matthew Yglesias, who gets himself an education on "Cougars" in the comments to his post. And so did I actually…
Los Angeles is a land where conventional time no longer exists. “There are no seasons, it’s always the same sunny blue sky day after day, so you never feel you’re getting any older,” said a friend, tranquilly. Here you can pause the passing of the years, or even rewind a little — breasts can be pert again, skin taut, forehead uncreased.
Age is no bar to anything in LA, least of all relationships — look at 44-year-old Demi Moore, all glowing and toned on the arm of 29-year-old husband Ashton Kutcher.
So perhaps the rise of the cougars should be no surprise. They’re a new Angeleno phenomenon: rich, powerful and — unlike Demi — predatory older women, whose natural habitat is the high-end shops, bars and spas of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and whose chosen prey is younger men.
Chris Breed, the Brit maestro of the Hollywood club scene — he looks about 28, but isn’t — has seen them in action. “It’s a complete role reversal,” he said over dinner at Maestro’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills, a frenzy of mirrors and laughter. “But if you want to get on in this town, you go where the power is, and often the older women have power: power to cast an actor in the right role, power to get a man into the right club.”
“These girls don’t want steady relationships,” said Chris’s friend. “They’ve had that. Some of them have been married four times. They want to keep their money. Their attitude is, I’m rich, I’m in great shape, I don’t give a shit. They shred young men alive.”
“Do the men mind?” I asked. He grinned. “Hell, no.” At that moment, a woman swept in wearing a floor-length leopardskin coat, her hair bleached blonde, her lips cartoon-character colossal and exaggerated with so much lip liner and lipstick, she seemed to be more mouth than face. One hundred per cent cougar. Behind her hovered a slight young black guy, with white trousers slung low, and black beanie hat pulled down in an attempt to keep some street cred.
I later saw her haughtily leave the restaurant, and the doors nearly swung back on the poor guy as he bleakly followed.
“These girls,” the friend continued, “they carry Viagra in their handbags. Viagra and Cialis, the 36-hour drug. They are vicious. They call the shots.”
That’s from an LA Times article, posted up on the website UrbanCougar.Com…a website for older women who like younger men, and lots of them. Take a wee stroll over there, and ask yourself how loudly they’d be screaming about it on Fox News if that was a web site for older gay men who like younger guys. For one thing, no matter how much the operators and users of that site made it clear they weren’t about going after teenagers, let along children, the word all over the corporate news media, never mind Fox, would be that the site was somehow linked to NAMBLA, and was facilitating pedophiles. Middle aged heterosexuals can pursue younger lovers and maybe get an occasional sniff of disapproval, when they’re not getting knowing winks. Homosexuals are presumed to be child molesters.
But…never mind. There’s this foundational myth in western culture about female sexuality being more chaste and demure then male sexuality, and I’ve always been skeptical of it. I went through adolescence in the free love 60s and early 70s, and I’m here to tell you the girls weren’t any less sexually aggressive then the boys. But one of the slogans anti-gay crackpots like to throw out there is how male-female couples naturally complement each other in terms of their sexuality. The female’s less lustful, more maternal sexuality attenuates the male’s predatory sexual nature, while males, provide structure and a firm hand of guidance to the emotionally weak females. This, they claim, is why male homosexuality is so inherently reckless and promiscuous. Men need a female to tame them. Never mind it’s male superiority dressed up in a veneer of junk psychology. With regard to female libidos, it simply isn’t true.
Historically, it wasn’t all that long ago in western culture that the notion that women might actually experience orgasm when they weren’t ovulating, let alone enjoy sex for its own sake, was considered implausible. And even these days, the most rigidly male dominated cultures are without exception also the ones in the deepest denial about female sexuality. The more male dominated and fundamentalist a culture is, the more likely it is to nail female sexuality into a coffin. In Saudi Arabia they put women in burkas. Here in the U.S. we put them into the kitchen and tell them that only boys are allowed to have sex for its own sake, and that’s only because they can’t help themselves…they’re guys. But women like to dance in the arms of eros too.
Early work, both empirical research and theorizing, took a decidedly male-centered perspective on multiple mating, emphasizing how males maximize their paternity by being sexually available to more than one female whenever possible, also competing with each other directly (by bluffing, displaying, and fighting) and indirectly by guarding their mates, as well as by using an array of anatomical, physiological and behavioral techniques – such as frequent copulations – to give them an advantage over other males.
More recently, biologists have begun to identify how females partake of their own strategies: mating with more than one male, controlling (or at least, influencing) the outcome of sperm competition, sometimes obtaining direct, personal benefits such as food or protection in return for these extra-pair copulations, as well as gaining indirect, genetic benefits that eventually accrue to their offspring. A penchant for non-monogamy among males is no great surprise, but as we shall see, the most dramatic new findings and revised science brought about by recent demolitions of the myth of monogamy concern the role of females. Freud spoke more truth than he knew when he observed that female psychology was essentially a "dark continent." A well integrated theory of female sexuality in particular still remains to be articulated…
But that’s half the human race. If men don’t really know all that much about female sexuality, then how can they say they really know their own? The dark continent is sex. Still.
Why are we still so ignorant about this vital part of our lives? Because the status-quo doesn’t like being upset…and nothing upsets the status-quo like sex. Female sexuality has been kept in the closet all this time for the same reason that homosexuals were. Control. The prerogative of power is that you get first dibs on the hotties. Otherwise what good is money and status? In a world without fences, where everyone owns their own love lives, and manages their own sexual affairs for themselves, and are not only free to say Yes, but also No Thanks…then even the powerful have to ask.
That’s why, for so very, very long, so many of us have been taught not to trust our own feelings when it comes to sex. There are others who know what’s best for us. We must always listen to them…never to our own hearts…
For a variety of reasons I try to stay out of the debates over blogs as such, what they’re good or bad at and the rest. But this morning I was alerted to an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University. The sum of the piece is that the blogosphere is as rife with disputation as it is thin on information, or more specifically, reporting, writing that demands "time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance."
Skube, as Marshal explains, gives us a fine example of the high standards of professional journalists…
Now, whether we do any quality reporting at TPM is a matter of opinion. And everyone is entitled to theirs. So against my better judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere.
Now, I get criticized plenty. And that’s fair since I do plenty of criticizing. And I wouldn’t raise any of this here if it weren’t for what came up in Skube’s response.
Not long after I wrote I got a reply: "I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …"
This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example — along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to remember what he’d written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he’d never read.
To which I got this response: "I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples … "
Where Six Years Of GOP Rule Has Brought America To The Brink Of
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help. -Ronald Reagan
Oh…Ya Think, Ron….?
A government plan to use members of the clergy to quell dissent and objections to government orders during a time of national emergency has been revealed by a Shreveport, La., television station.
Sandy Davis, director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said there are several advantages, but primarily, “these clergy would already be known in the neighborhoods in which they’re helping to diffuse that situation.”
So government orders to abandon homes, turn over guns, leave livestock behind, or whatever would come to the minds of various officials during an “emergency,” would be easier for people to accept, the report indicated.
The report said one of the biggest tools the clergy members would use would be the Bible itself, specifically Romans 13, where Tuberville said the Bible states “the government’s established by the Lord, you know. And, that’s what we believe in the Christian faith. That’s what’s stated in the Scripture.”
Civil rights advocates have raised questions about the idea of using clergy in such a fashion, noting the balance clergy would have to maintain when asked to do what the government wants under color of their status as a religious leader.
A blogger for the Christian education site, Chalcedon noted that the training has been going on in secret for over a year already.
In case you’re wondering, Chalcedon is the Christian Reconstructionist organization founded by RJ Rushdoony himself. These folks believe in imposing biblical, as in Old Testament, law on the United States.
The grim irony here is that the above is taken from the right wing kook site, World Net Daily. Gosh…even the wingers are starting to get scared of the republicans now. Well folks…You Fucking Asked For It…! When they come with the local preacher to take your guns away from you, just hand them over quietly. After all, you voted for them, and then you looked the other way while they got busy shredding the Constitution because you always thought that it was only the darkies and the dirty hippies and the faggots and weirdos who had anything to worry and you couldn’t wait to see them all get what was coming to them.
So, yes, I am a supporter of gay marriage and undoubtedly will remain so, since it is consistent with my values of long duration. And, yes, I will continue to agitate for it in my writing and elsewhere. But in return I call on my friends on the Left –- straight or gay -– to help defend that real source of liberalism the Enlightenment, because if we lose and fall under religious law, there not only will be no gay marriage, there will be no women’s rights, no freedom of the press, no basic human rights, not even – as in the case of Iran – any music.
Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/ right-wing-blogosphere / Fox News / Michelle Malkin / Rush Limbaugh listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.
To which, Tom Tomorrow points out that the agenda of our own homebrew religious extremists doesn’t look too terribly different. Simon, he of the Moses Wine detective novels, is doing his level best to throw his country to the wolves over here, to save it from the wolves over there. And thanks to the likes of him, and all the other Roger Simons of America, now they’ve got their hands firmly around our democracy’s throat. Far out Moses…
Here’s the KSLA News 12 video, via YouTube. All together now…My country ’tis, of thee….
Hey Roger…don’t worry…it’s okay as long as it’s a Christian sharia law…
This program is not bad at all. I could do things with it…
The color tools work so much more naturally for me then the ones in Painter. Ironically, Painter bills itself as a tool that goes to great lengths to mimic the behavior of traditional artist’s tools…even down to mimicking a wide assortment of paper types. But I’ve just never been able to get it to work. This was my first effort at a color drawing in Sketchbook Pro and I’m very pleased with it. The software never once fought me. I can do some stuff with this…
Still experimenting with Sketchbook Pro. I thought I’d post one in the middle of working on it, so you can still see the rough sketch lines leading up to a finished drawing…
Sketchbook Pro is making it really easy for me to use the Wacom tablet to sketch out a drawing on. Here I’ve tightened up the lines a bit and started to add some color…
I don’t have a fill tool in Sketchbook Pro, so I’m having to add color one brush stroke at a time. But there are layers so what I did was add another layer over my pencil lines and used a pen tool to draw the inks over the pencils. Then I added another layer for color between the two and started coloring in. I’ve started here, to erase some of the lines on the pencil layer to tighten things up a bit.
In retrospect, if I’d had half a brain I’d have done the pencils in a light blue color, so I could easily differentiate between them and the inks on the ink layer while working on it. But I’m not used to using blue pencil like some other artists, so it didn’t occur to me until I was well into the inking process.
There is a marker tool, which works to blend the colors between layers. I’ll start using that later to add depth and texture.
I notice I keep using the terminology of traditional tools to explain what I’m doing, even though it only applies in metaphor. I’m not really creating pencils or inks…just using software tools that mimic how those things work. It seems a bit dishonest to call them "pencils". But I can’t think of another word to use here.
So I decided. Manga Studio is way to complex and its workspace far too cluttered for me to concentrate on a sketch with. Maybe I can us it in some other part of the work flow…like the layout for instance. Its page layout and panel formatting features look really nice. And its got an amazing array of texture screens that I still want to try out. But for creating the initial sketches, it just doesn’t cut it. For my hand, none of the others come close to Sketchbook Pro.
At some point I’ll start producing some cartoons with it. Right now I’m still in a learning curve. I’ll post some more sketches along the way. When I do a complete cartoon in the computer I’ll let you all know which one it was, so you can compare. Hopefully, the only person who notices the difference will be me. As in, no more stacks of layout paper on my drawing board…no more cursing at jammed up Rapidographs…no more inhaling fixative fumes…no more erasers that tear up the paper…
It took only a few hours after news circulated that entertainer and entrepreneur Merv Griffin had died (at 82, Sunday, in Los Angeles) for a drumbeat of wrath—yes, wrath—to begin on some of the Internet’s fringe Web sites, where Griffin was assailed by various contributors for allegedly having been a "closeted" homosexual who should have announced he was gay to the world—though at which stage of his career he should have made the declaration was not specified.
Well…actually one place he could have done it was spelled out. And as it turns out…Shales knows damn well where and when it was, that Griffin could have made a difference…
Whatever, the vehemence and fury in the attacks was disheartening. "A bloated pig like that should burn in hell," wrote one anonymous assailant. Michelangelo Signorile, who runs a Web site called The Gist, wrote that Griffin could have helped prevent the AIDS epidemic if only he had spoken to his friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan about it, but that "it is highly unlikely" he ever did, preferring to remain "shockingly silent" even as "his own people were dying."
The Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS is complex and goes far beyond Reagan’s refusal to speak out about the epidemic. A great deal of his power base was born-again Christian Republican conservatives who embraced a reactionary social agenda that included a virulent, demonizing homophobia. In the media, people like Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell portrayed gay people as diseased sinners and promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God and that the gay rights movement had to be stopped. In the Republican Party, zealous right-wingers, such as Representative William Dannenmeyer (CA) and Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), hammered home this same message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, his chief domestic advisor, worked to enact it in the Adminis- tration’s policies.
In practical terms this meant AIDS research was chronically underfunded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982, the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS, but $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point over 1,000 of the 2,000 AIDS cases reported resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.
When health and support groups in the gay community instigated education and prevention programs, they were denied federal funding. In October 1987 Jesse Helms amended a federal appropriation bill that prohibited AIDS education efforts that “encourage or promoted homosexual activity”(that is, tell gay men how to have safe sex).
When almost all medical opinion spoke out against mandatory HIV testing (since it would drive those at risk away from being tested) and the ACLU and Lambda Legal Defense were fighting discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS, Republicans such as Vice President George Bush in 1987 and William Dannenmeyer (in a California state referendum in 1988) called for mandatory HIV testing.
Throughout all of this Ronald Reagan did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagan’s, was diagnosed and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986 New York Times article, called for mandatory testing of HIV and said that HIV+ gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their arms), Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence) when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop’s too-little too-late initiative. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.
The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died.
Emphasis mine. If the Reagans epitomized Truman Capote’s remark that "a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", Shales epitomizes the person who looks the other way when they see it. But Griffin had a chance to put a human face on that joke, and he ether didn’t, or he allowed the illusion of friendship persist, let himself be the "some" in "some of my best friends are…"
One commenter on the TV Week site avers that Griffin, "…was under no obligation to share his sexual preference" and "the GLBT community must realize that, just as they have a right to "come out," they have no right to "out" anyone else- unless that person says one thing and does another." True enough, generally. The struggling gay teen…the poor working stiff who’s just barely making ends meet…the closeted solider torn between the needs of their heart and the needs of their country…the closeted middle manager, struggling to hold on to their career dreams…most all of us need to be left alone to deal with the closet on our own terms, in our own way. But with power comes responsibility. In the face of social indifference to a staggering death toll that many then (and even now still) were saying was nothing more then what homosexuals were due, closeted celebrities like Griffin, people whom pop culture fame had blessed with status and wealth had an obligation, not only to their own people, but to their country, and to humanity, to raise their voices. And Griffin didn’t.
You can’t take it with you…not even your closet. But something that remains behind, long after we’re gone from this good earth, are the things we did to make a difference, that made our world better for our having walked in it. Those remain, long after our names are forgotten. And also, the things we didn’t, that we could have.
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