A few shots I took of myself with my new remote for the EOS 30D.  That’s the cable dangling down from my hand in all these shots.  What’s good about the remote is that it sets focus and exposure correctly, while I’m sitting in front of the camera, unlike the timer, which sets both as soon as you press the shutter release instead of waiting until just before it takes the shot.

These were taken in an ad hoc test of the remote while I was sitting on the steps leading down to my art room.

Via Talking Points Memo …  Today’s Washington Post is not the Washington Post that once brought down a crooked president.  Today’s Washington posts runs propaganda pieces on behalf of one…

Okay, this is pretty interesting. I think I’ve found something which reasonably suggests that Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt may have broken his own stated Op-ed policies by publishing a piece yesterday by Liz Cheney attacking Nancy Pelosi without identifying Ms. Cheney as Veep Cheney’s daughter.

When I asked Hiatt about this yesterday, he justified it with an email to me (again, I appreciate his willingness to answer) saying that she’d been selected to write the piece based on her professional qualifications alone and that there was thus no need to disclose her relationship with dad.

Knowing that they were reading a hit piece written by the Vice President’s daughter would only have confused their readers. 

So…Andrew Sullivan would like us to know that Don Imus isn’t really all that bad…inexcusable though his bigotry is…

The Imus Ranch

It does amazing things for some very sick and needy children. It does not excuse Imus’ bigotry, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. It’s more than I’ve ever done for sick kids. And probably more than you have either.

What Digby said…  See…what you need to paying attention to in the story about Imus…isn’t what Imus did…

As the media elite and various political insiders continue to behave as if they’ve just been hit over the head with a cudgel on this Imus matter, perhaps they should wake up and recognize that there have been people out there noticing the raw hypocrisy among this Imus Elite for years. And this does not just come from the more recent bloviating by scruffy bloggers in their deplorable "efficiency" apartments…

Hey man…don’t fuck with Vinny…

There have always been a handful of columnists and journalists who got it. And no one got it better than the late Lars Erik Nelson:

. . . 

Washington Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) came to the Senate floor with a look of sad concern on his face. He was deeply troubled, he said, at the vulgar, morally repugnant content of the new TV season. "We are lowering the standards of what is acceptable in our society and we are sending a message to our children," he said. He denounced an "acceptance of rude language, foul imagery and gross behavior in the entertainment mainstream."

Then, warning parents who might be watching on C-SPAN to move their little children away from the TV sets, Lieberman cited a few of the outrages: On ABC’s "Wilde Again," a character asks to be called "Daddy’s little whore." Another ABC program showed an upraised middle finger. CBS’ "Bless This House" used the phrase "little hooters" in reference to a girl’s breasts. "Profoundly disturbing," Lieberman intoned. "Sophomoric."

Funny thing: The previous morning, Lieberman had been a guest, as is his regular custom, on the Don Imus radio show on WFAN…

And as it turns out, there were a lot of other self righteous congressional scolds stopping by the Imus show back then.  Democrats and republicans, chasing the vote in Imus’ young white male demographic.  And did our mainstream news media ever bother to point out the hypocrisy of politicians bellyaching about the decay of television entertainment while appearing regularly on one of talk radio’s biggest cesspools?  Oh grow up.

There’s a phrase you hear now and then in political campaigning…Dog Whistle Politics.  It’s the art of using certain words and catch phrases that a specifically targeted audience will hear and respond to, while going over the heads of most of the rest of the audience as a whole.  The republicans, and in particular the Bush team, are masters of the dog whistle.  A good example of it was when Bush said that the Iraq war would "look just like a comma" to future historians.  It raised a lot of hackles that Bush would trivialize a war that had killed so many, wounded so many and was still killing and wounding.  But as Ian Welsh pointed out in The Agonist, it was a dog whistle to his hard core religious right base, recalling the proverb "Never put a period where God has put a comma."

It may be hard to think of Imus as a kind of dog whistle, but bear with me.  The audience that Lieberman and all the others were trying to appeal to when they went on their crusade for TV decency wouldn’t be caught dead tuning into Don Imus cesspool, even out of curiosity.  That kind of thing just disgusts the hell out of them.  So all the voters who would have been nodding their heads approvingly while Lieberman and other politicians were puffing themselves up condemning all the tits and ass on prime time TV, wouldn’t be regular listeners to Imus anyway.  The only people who would have known the extent of their hypocrisy, because they’d seen it with their own two eyes, were the news media talking heads who were also Imus regulars…and they kept their mouths shut too because they had books to sell on his show.  So the politicians get to troll Imus for votes among that hard to reach resentful young white male demographic at the same time they’re trolling for votes among the shocked middle class soccer mom demographic.

And now the lot of them are all looking like they’ve just been caught in a police raid on a whorehouse. 

By all means, Lieberman, Bradley, Dole and the rest should go on Imus. But if they do, spare us the sanctimonious sermons about the vulgarity of modern broadcasting.

They never stopped. in fact three years later Lieberman took to the floor of the Senate and "helped" Bill Clinton by saying to the whole world that he was immoral. All of these moral scolds, but most especially Lieberman, are rank hypocrites.

I do not want to hear another word from these people about civility, rudeness and the decline of the discourse. And I certainly don’t want to hear any more BS about blogging ethics and good manners on the internet from any of them. For more than a decade we had to endure lectures from many of these people about "values" and more recently we’ve had to listen to them call for the smelling salts over the degradation of the public square from the barbaric polloi. Yet throughout they loved to hang around with that overgrown adolescent and let him sell their books for him when he wasn’t cruelly disparaging everything in his sights, including them. If those are the decent values Joe Lieberman has been braying about incessantly for the last decade, he certainly got what what he was looking for.

This has been another edition of What Digby Said… 

Via The Rocky Mountain News…

Gay student in Pueblo attacked by teens

A 15-year-old gay Centennial High School student was taunted and attacked by six classmates last week because of his sexual orientation.

The victim was undergoing surgery for a broken nose and facial injuries today, according to the Gay, Lesbian and Gay Alliance.

The incident happened last Thursday afternoon, when Anthony Hergesheimer was walking home from Centennial High School along Denver Boulevard, the organization said. Six male students, ages 15 and 16, in a vehicle apparently passed by Hergesheimer several times before they stopped and hurled anti-gay insults at him.

One of the students also got out of the vehicle and threw a can of Lysol at Hergesheimer, who suffered a broken nose and severe facial injuries.

Lysol.  Like they were cleansing the street of some kind of human garbage…

The six male Centennial students, who were not identified, were suspended Monday until a decision is made about possible expulsion. The district usually has 25 days to make a recommendation on whether to expel a student.

Pueblo police is also investigating the attack and possible criminal charges may be filed against the youths.

But it’s not the teenagers who attacked the gay kid who need to be ashamed of themselves, according to The Alliance Defense Fund…

God has condemned them.  They should live in shame.  What was I saying the other day?  You can’t paint a bulls-eye on a group of kids, tell their peers that those kids are condemned by god, and not expect that every now and then one of them will get the shit beaten out of them.  But…that’s the intent isn’t it?  A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual.  You have to beat the pride out of them young.  Christianity has come to this in the Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave:  Accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior means you can set kids loose on other kids, and still look at yourself in a mirror.  Who would Jesus throw the first can of Lysol at?

Florida Legislature Forces University To Idolize Jeb Bush

Two weeks ago, the University of Florida voted to deny Jeb Bush an honorary degree. By a 38-28 vote, the faculty Senate rejected the former governor’s nomination, citing concerns about some of Bush’s education initiatives, including his dismantling of affirmative action programs in the state:

In higher education circles, Bush’s greatest criticism came over his “One Florida” plan, which ended race-based admissions in state universities. Black enrollment dropped at UF and statewide after the change took effect, as critics predicted.

Bush’s policies of “rewarding and punishing schools according to students’ standardized test results and using vouchers to send certain students to private schools at public expense” also contributed to the rejection of his nomination.

Upset by this lack of Jeb Bush adoration, the conservative-controlled House Schools & Learning Council voted yesterday to force the university to rename its education school the “Jeb Bush College of Education.”

Over the faculty’s opposition, the school will now have “to erect ‘suitable markers‘ noting the college’s new name and include the revised name in all university documents, including catalogues and brochures.” The lawmakers acknowledge they “came up with the idea as an answer” to the faculty’s denial of Bush’s honorary degree.

I’m surprised they didn’t make them give Jeb a few more college degrees while they were at it…maybe a PhD in Advanced Physics or Computer Science or something.  This may all seem like the same old, same old and yes it is, but look at it: a group of conservative lawmakers decided to force an institute of higher education to give someone recognition in the field of education that they had not earned from that institution.  Yes, yes…often that only amounts to giving them piles of money…but at least the giving of money to a college or university makes it possible for that institution to continue to do its job.  Jeb acted to deny minority students an education and drain the public schools of money they desperately need to educate kids, our nation’s future…voted to in other words, make the world poorer then it was before he took office, and he and his Conservative cronies expected that institution to give him accolades anyway.  And when they didn’t, they forced them to.  Next time you hear a conservative yap, yap, yapping about how people have to earn their place in this world, and that liberals are always giving people stuff they haven’t earned and don’t deserve…laugh in their face.

Fuck.  Kurt Vonnegut is dead…

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Damn…

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

Damn… 

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be. 

Fuck! 

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years
–Brian Williams, anchor of the NBC Nightly News, speaking before New York University journalism students.

Hey man, don’t fuck with Vinny…

Via Slashdot…

Xerox has filed a patent covering a technique to recover demographic information like your age, sex and perhaps even your income by analysing the pattern of web pages you browse. They want to license the technique to online advertisers and shops. Read the full patent here.

Damn.  Damn.  I will need that trailer in the middle of the desert to retire to.   Except by then there probably won’t be any escape even in the middle of the fucking desert.  None at all.  I’ll be getting junk mail targeted precisely to grouchy old hermits living in trailers in the middle of the desert.  No…  To grouchy old Gay Long-Haired hermits living in my specific make of trailer in the middle of the desert.  They’ll know exactly what’s in my refrigerator and my medicine cabinet and I’ll be getting helpful reminders like,  Dear Valued Customer…according to our records you are running out of cranky pills…did you know that your local middle-of-the-desert WalMart Superstore is having a sale on your favorite brand of cranky pills…and did you know that most of our customers who buy cranky pills also bought these other fine products…

From No More Mister Nice Blog…

IMUS AND "THE BLACK BEATLES"

I don’t know when this aired, and I’ve never seen it on any list of Imus’s racist bits, but it’s pretty awful.

You can listen to it at the link here, and also here and here.

Transcript:

IMUS: Some of you may know, who listen to the Imus in the Morning program on a regular basis, there is a new group being formed called the Black Beatles.

BLACK BEATLES MEMBER (in a stereotypical black accent): That’s right, Don. My name is Tyrone McCartney…

IMUS: Uh-huh.

TYRONE McCARTNEY: … bass player for the fabulous Black Beatles, and me and my friends Leroy Lennon, George Jellybean Darnell Rashad Mustafa Muhammad Harrison, and Bingo Starr, we have a new album out of our very famous #1 hits called Beat the Meatles.

IMUS: What’s that?

TYRONE McCARTNEY: Beat the Meatles. We wanted y’all to get it ’cause it’s got some of our famous #1 hits, like this one: (singing) "When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary come to me and speak those woids of wisdom, ‘What it be.’"

And how ’bout this one? (singing) "I shoulda known better with a bitch like you." "Jo Jo was a man who only had three inches, but he knew it wouldn’t last, Jo Jo never had much luck with all the bitches, but I said, ‘Hey, Jo, get black. Get black, get black, get black and watch your johnson grow.’" "Lucy in the sky with a lot of jewelry on." "Strawberry-flavored malt liquor." "Here come my son, he play football. Here come my son, and I say, ‘He bad.’" "I’m back on the old FDR." "Yesterday, my parole came through just yesterday." "Hey dude, lend me a dollar." "I can play center, I can play forward, I be six foot four."

And, of course, my personal favorite: (singing) "We all live in a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville. And my friends is all aboard, many more of them is in the trunk, vinyl tires with wire wheels, in my yellow Coupe de Ville."

Swell.  Just swell.

IMUS: A lot of friends of mine called, but I didn’t want to put up — put anybody on this morning who wasn’t scheduled, because I can make my own case, and it is what it is.

OLIPHANT: But to me, that only means that those of us who, through an accident, were scheduled, who know better, have a moral obligation to stand up and say to you, "Solidarity forever, pal."

Right Tom.  "We all live in a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville, a yellow Coupe de Ville. 

Via Brad DeLong…  Via Andrew Sullivan…  Via Balkinization…  What it takes to be considered a terrorist threat in George Bush’s America …

Andrew Sullivan writes:

The Daily Dish: Enemy of the People: Meet Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. He’s a former Marine, with five years of active service and 19 years in the reserve, and a legal critic of Roe vs Wade and supporter of the Alito confirmation. He’s also on the Terrorist No-Fly List:

I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That’ll do it," the man said."

Just a heads up about what these people are up to.

Nice.  Welcome to George Bush’s America.  If you’re thinking they "lost" his luggage so they could take it somewhere they could inspect it more thoroughly for evidence of a crime, you’re still not paying attention.  This was harassment.  State sanctioned harassment of someone who was critical of Bush.  And they would have Wanted him to complain publicly about it.  So harassment not only punishes its target, but also sends a message to anyone else thinking about speaking out against the Bush administration.  One of DeLong’s commenter’s avers the following:

Possibly, just possibly, Walter Murphy might now question his support for the nomination of Samuel Alito.

Yah Think? Another commenter brings up the firing of all those federal prosecutors via this New York Times story:

April 9, 2007

Another Layer of Scandal

As Congress investigates the politicization of the United States attorney offices by the Bush administration, it should review the extraordinary events the other day in a federal courtroom in Wisconsin. The case involved Georgia Thompson, a state employee sent to prison on the flimsiest of corruption charges just as her boss, a Democrat, was fighting off a Republican challenger. It just might shed some light on a question that lurks behind the firing of eight top federal prosecutors: what did the surviving attorneys do to escape the axe?

Ms. Thompson, a purchasing official in the state’s Department of Administration, was accused by the United States attorney in Milwaukee, Steven Biskupic, of awarding a travel contract to a company whose chief executive contributed to the campaign of Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat. Ms. Thompson said the decision was made on the merits, but she was convicted and sent to prison before she could appeal.

The prosecution was a boon to Mr. Doyle’s opponent. Republicans ran a barrage of attack ads that purported to tie Ms. Thompson’s "corruption" to Mr. Doyle. Ms. Thompson was sentenced shortly before the election, which Governor Doyle won.

The Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit seemed shocked by the injustice of her conviction. It took the extraordinary step of releasing Ms. Thompson from prison immediately after hearing arguments, without waiting to issue a ruling. One of the judges hinted that Ms. Thompson may have been railroaded. "It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin," Judge Diane Wood told the lawyer from Mr. Biskupic’s office.

For years now critics of those of us who have been warning of the creeping facisim of the Bush administration have been called hysterical, and suffering from something they call "Bush Derangement Syndrome".  The only thing surprising about Ms. Thompson’s case is that she was allowed to challenge her imprisonment in the courts at all.  Bush, Gonzalas and the republicans have made it quite clear that they think Habius Corpus is a luxury America can no longer afford…

Via Brad DeLong…  Here’s one another black female target of Imus’ good ‘ol boy humor has to say…

Trash Talk Radio – New York Times: LET’S say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather. The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before. I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton. Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program. It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me. It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well. So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field. Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

I’m old enough to remember when it was merely taken for granted that white males had the right to piss on everyone who wasn’t white and male.  That was in addition to having the right to piss on everyone who Was white and male and below them on the economic ladder.  Ever wonder why poor whites consistently vote republican against their better economic interests, especially in certain parts of this country?  It’s because racism gives them status, even over well-off people of color.  Without racism they’re just another face on the bottom of the pile.  The resentment these people feel, and have felt ever since the black civil rights movement began tearing down the walls of race segregation in America, are enormous and run very, very deep.  They feel as though they’ve lost their place, their status, Their Manhood, in a country that was once theirs…them and the rich white men holding them and everyone else down on the economic ladder.  Rich white men like Don Imus…but more to the point, his producers…the people that make his radio and TV platform possible with their money, and their radio and TV networks.

They give Imus his platform to play his Good ‘Ol Boy shtick, knowing full well who it plays to, knowing full well it allows that audience to imagine itself as part of the same privileged class as the rich white guys who own the airwaves.  They’d be escorted quickly to the door by well dressed butlers wearing gloves so as not to get their hands dirty if they ever showed up in any of the exclusive clubs and playgrounds the people who pay for Imus’ broadcasts enjoy.  But for a few moments listening to him going through his crude, racist, bigoted Good ‘Ol Boy patter routine, they can imagine that they’re all comrades in arms, all sharing the same bitter resentments toward the uppity darkies, women, and faggots who used to know their place.

So it’s spectacularly unsurprising to see the simple, straightforward reflex of Imus and his crew to spit in the faces of a group of young black girls who had succeeded where nobody thought they would.  That’s What They’re On The Radio For.  This gutter crawling racism on Imus’ part isn’t anything new…nor is it anything particularly out of place on Talk Radio.  That’s why talk radio has the large audience it does.

And that large audience, is why Talk Radio’s big names are held in high regard by the guardians of mainstream media opinion…why Rush Limbaugh and Imus and others of their kind can command the respect of the mainstream news media and its pundocracy, even as that pundocracy wags, wags, wags its finger at bloggers…well…progressive bloggers anyway…for being such an uncouth, uncivilized rabble.  There’s no double standard here.  No hypocrisy.  The moral standard is, as always, money.  How many of copies of our books can you sell? 

Thus we have the squeaky clean mild mannered Wally Cox of the pundocracy, Tom Oliphant, rising his fist in solidarity with comrade Imus…

OLIPHANT: What I thought would be instructive for people is to go back on the tape to a minute or so before this happens and see if you can see it developing. Now, believe me, as you well know, I don’t know beans about hip-hop culture or trash-talking, or what do you call those things where you run on forever? Riffs, or whatever.

But even I could see the beginning of what appeared to me to be a riff. And the train went off the tracks, which, you know, can happen to anybody. And, of course, what counts when the train goes off the tracks is what you then do. And that’s why I, you know, didn’t have a moment’s hesitation talking to this guy from The New York Times yesterday. Of course I didn’t think about reacting like that because I saw the whole episode in context, including your statements about it.

No Tom…the train didn’t go off the tracks.  It arrived at it’s destination on time, and on schedule.  And…oh look…you’re heading for that same destination too, aren’t you..?  

IMUS: A lot of friends of mine called, but I didn’t want to put up — put anybody on this morning who wasn’t scheduled, because I can make my own case, and it is what it is.

OLIPHANT: But to me, that only means that those of us who, through an accident, were scheduled, who know better, have a moral obligation to stand up and say to you, "Solidarity forever, pal."

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: So, I watched the basketball game last night between — a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women’s final.

ROSENBERG: Yeah, Tennessee won last night — seventh championship for [Tennessee coach] Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.

IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and —

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.

McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.

IMUS: Yeah.

Solidarity Forever…

McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie that he had.

IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough —

McCORD: Do The Right Thing.

McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: I don’t know if I’d have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?

ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.

IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.

RUFFINO: Only tougher.

McGUIRK: The [Memphis] Grizzlies would be more appropriate.

Solidarity Forever…

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

Welcome to the gutter Tom.  I hear book sales are pretty brisk once you get that initial sale of your soul taken care of…

Okay…I’m riffing on the title of Jim Burroway’s latest expose of Paul Cameron’s latest anti-gay propaganda missive.  Read that as either I’m calling Cameron a devil or that I’m calling him a jackass.  Or that I’m calling his audience devil worshipers, or jackass kissers…

Another “homosexual lifespan" study has hit the news. According to a flurry of press releases making rounds, married gays in Scandinavia die 24 years younger than everyone else:

Once more, Burroway completely destroys Cameron’s propaganda (even calling it junk science ennobles it, really) by way of the simple trick of actually looking at the data.  This is Cameron’s essential technique…one he has perfected over the decades he’s been generating bogus statistics on homosexuality for the religious right: first gerrymander the data, then analyze it as though you hadn’t.  His classic study which is still being used today as proof that the lifespan of gay people is significantly shorter then that of heterosexuals, was conducted on data Cameron pulled from the obituary pages of two gay newspapers.  At the height of the first wave of AIDS deaths.  He averaged the age of death in those obituaries and compared it with that of the average lifespan of the population as a whole.  His supporters have argued since that you can compare the average age at death in mainstream news papers and even in small ethnic ones and get a figure that is comparable to the average lifespan figures of the population as a whole.  But this still makes the same essential mistake of assuming that the social and cultural context gay community papers exist in isn’t different enough that it would skew the data you’re pulling out of the obituary notices.  In fact it is.  Staringly obviously so.

The local gay paper was then, and is now, a fairly new phenomena in a nation that only until the latter part of the twentieth century was even disposed to admit that homosexuals existed, much less allow them to print their own newspapers.  In fact, until the hated Warren Court decided that homosexuals could in fact, distribute their own magazines and newspapers through the mail in 1958 in One v Olesen, it was pretty much impossible.  So you have the fact that local gay papers are a recent phenomena.  You have the fact that older gay people grew up in a climate of repression that marked most of them for life.  You have the fact that even by the time Cameron started collecting gay obituaries the out and proud part of the gay community was decidedly skewed toward younger generations.  You have the fact that obituaries are generally not placed in newspapers by the person who died but by their families, many of whom even today are reluctant to acknowledge the homosexuality of a dead relative (a number of obituaries in the mainstream press back then were written so as to conceal the fact that the deceased had succumbed to an AIDS related illness).  They would be unlikely then to even consider placing an obit in a gay paper.  You have the fact that the readership of gay papers then, as now, played to a largely urban and younger and more sexually active slice of the community as a whole.   And on top of that you have the fact that Cameron was collecting his data while the death toll from AIDS was just coming off its peak.  This is what Cameron was comparing to the average lifespan in the nation as a whole.

That’s his trademark: not so much falsifying the data, although he won’t shrink from doing that either whenever he thinks he can get away with it…but skewing the initial dataset, so right from the get-go any conclusions drawn from it will break in the direction he wants them to.

And his latest artwork may be his masterpiece:

Statistics Denmark and Statistics Norway publish official population cross-tabulations of marital status by age for each sex in their annual statistical yearbooks. Since 1994 in Denmark and 1995 in Norway, these tables have included separate categories for homosexual-partnered individuals…

Cameron is comparing the ages at death of married heterosexuals with same sex couples in registered partnerships.  At first glance it seems shocking that the average age at death is so much lower for the same sex couples.  But in reality it’s nothing more then a brilliant slight-of-hand…maybe his best yet.  The problem, as Burroway notes, is that the statistics for married couples have been gathering for an entire century, but for the same sex couples, only for as long as there had been domestic partnerships in Denmark…just since 1989.  There was no rush of older gay couples to register.  So as Burroway put’s it…

Why is this important? The heterosexual sample has been accumulating under-forties for an entire century.(In 2005, the average age of the groom was 37.4 years; for the bride, 34.7 years) But registered same-sex partnerships have only been available in Denmark since 1989, which means the gay sample got a late start. And if the typical age of someone entering into a same-sex partnership is around forty, then it stands to reason that the typical age at death of someone who has died so far would be similarly young.

If I have a flock of mostly young sheep, and in one year five are eaten by wolves and two more die of disease I can’t look at that and say what the average lifespan of a sheep is.  The age of my flock is skewed young to start with.  I’d need to keep collecting lifespan data on my flock for a period of many years before I could assume I was getting a handle on the average lifespan of my sheep.  What Cameron does is use data that only amounts to snapshots, and he is very careful to get just the right snapshots he wants, to end up with the results he wants:

Cameron’s Danish and Norwegian statistics show an average age at death in the fifties for registered partners simply because there aren’t many older partners in those samples to begin with. And the reason they aren’t in that sample is because for whatever reason, they haven’t registered their partnerships.

Now what might the reason for that be?  Once again, you have the generational differences between those of us who grew up before Stonewall, and those of us who grew up after…

Cameron dismisses the idea that homophobia is a major factor in Scandinavia because “Canada, Norway, and Denmark are far more accepting of homosexual practitioners than the United States (where homosexuals are still barred from the military and ‘gay rights’ laws do not exist in most states).” But saying that homophobia is lower in Scandinavia isn’t the same as saying it doesn’t exist. For example, it is still illegal in Denmark for gay couples to adopt children except for the children of their registered partners. And homosexuality is still not acceptable among many Danes and Norwegians, particularly among those living in rural areas and among the older generations — precisely the populations that haven’t availed themselves of registered partnerships.

This generational difference in the willingness of people to be open about their homosexuality, or that of their family members, is something every honest scientific investigation of the gay community must acknowledge and deal with somehow.  But for Paul Cameron its a handy way to filter out the old people, when he wants to prove that there aren’t any.  Cameron’s trademark is to pull from pools of data that are intrinsically skewed strongly towards a young, urban, and sexually active slice of the gay community and then analyze that data as if it were a random sample that was representative of the whole.  Wherever possible, he finds snapshots of those data pools…timeframes…that he knows will skew the results even further in the direction he wants them skewed.

We software engineers have long had a saying for it: Garbage In – Garbage Out.   Give the man his due…Paul Cameron is a master at selecting just the right garbage to put in, to get the garbage he wants back out.  And he’s getting better at it.  In this latest propaganda missive of his he displays an impressively deft hand.  Thank goodness for people like Jim Barroway.

Go read the rest of his report: Paul Cameron’s Footprint.  And if you haven’t already, go read some of his other magnificent takedowns of this man’s propaganda.  If you are someone who is gay, or knows someone who is, you will likely have some of Paul Cameron’s claptrap waved in your face at one time or another.  He is, as he likes to call himself, the wellspring of all the anti-gay statistics religious right groups use to demonize homosexual people.  He gets away with it because so few people bother to actually look closely at his work and see where he’s pulling his numbers from.  Do the one thing they’re counting on you not to do: look behind the curtain.

WooHoo!  I’m holding at 144 now!  Last September I was 170.  Amazing…just amazing…what a simple No Junk Food Snacks diet will do for you.

Okay…there’s a bit more to it…I need to fess up…but it’s really not much.  I’ve cut out the junk food between meals, yes.  But I’m also putting Splenda in my tea now instead of sugar.  I drink tons of tea in a day…mostly ice tea.  At work though, I drink Earl Gray or English Breakfast tea.  There’s a place in Timonium near where I used to live that I can buy tins of it imported from Britain, produced by Taylors of Harrogate.  If you like hot black English teas don’t buy the stuff they sell on the grocery store shelves here in the U.S.  That stuff is weak compared to the stuff they sell in Britain.  Try to find a place that imports the tea they sell in Britain to the British.  So…anyway…I’m consuming a lot less sugar now since it’s not in my tea anymore.  And I’ve nudged my diet slightly toward higher protean and leaner meats, and away from carbohydrates.  That’s just nudging mind you…not a rule fixed in stone.  More lean meat, less fried potato.  I make my sandwiches with whole grain bread now and not Wonder White.

That’s pretty much it.   I eat until I’m full, I don’t limit my portions at all, and yet it definitely takes less food to satisfy me.  I am seldom hungry at all during the day…mostly just in the morning before breakfast.  And my body is still slimming down nicely.

Now I need to work on building some muscle around the chest and waist. I’ll never be ripped, and I don’t want to be really.  That look just doesn’t appeal to me.  But I want to be a tad more defined.  I want to not be embarrassed to take off my shirt at the beach.  I’ve been sitting at a desk for way too long without doing anything to exercise to compensate.

I’m going to steal this shtick from Atrios, but I don’t think he’ll mind…

So I make myself some coffee and open my dead tree version of the NY Times this morning only to see a call for blogger ethics on the front page. How interesting. Another call for "managed civil speech" (which is claimed to be "freer" than unfettered free speech.) There was no word on who would be the managers of such speech, but I think we can count on those who call for it to be the ones who feel they are most qualified to define and enforce it. (Apparently, this will all be done "voluntarily" and will be dealt with through purges and link boycotts and the novel concept of moderated comment sections. Or something.)

Meanwhile, on the media page is a story about the execrable Don Imus and the fact that he routinely makes racist, misogynistic and eliminationist jokes on his show while half the Washington press corps spends time there kissing his ring. For some reason that kind of "incivility" doesn’t upset the journalistic prima donnas half as much as the uncivil blogosphere does.

So what’s up with this? The blogosphere is admittedly an uncivil place. Nobody disputes that. But it is comprised of a bunch of disparate individuals who are arguing amongst themselves with varying degress of seriousness and talent as part of the national (and international) dialog. There is a corner of it that is despicable and revolting, as the misogyny that set off this latest debate clearly demonstrates. But for inexplicable reasons it’s the liberal blogosphere that is being particularly attacked for our alleged incivility by the mainstream media. (I suspect it’s the fact that we drop the "F" bomb too much, which is simply shocking in American life)

However, for almost two decades now, talk radio has been spewing vile racist, misogynistic and eliminationst spew — and their stars have been feted and petted for it among the highest levels of the capital cognoscenti. I don’t know for sure why that would be, but I have my suspicions.

Go Read the whole thing…  

This has been another edition of What Digby Said…