Also from the Slashdot thread on the new Creation Museum…

"If the museum flops, it can always be turned into a minature golf course."

"I always wondered why God had to rest…"

-From the comments on Slashdot, in a thread about the new Creation Museum.

Mary Cheney has given birth to a boy, Samuel David, 8-pound, 6-ounces, at 9:46 a.m. at Sibley Hospital in Washington, Wednesday.

The Official White House photograph shows only his grandparents. 

Yes, I’ve made this complaint before, so just bear with me because I need to make it again.  I am fucking tired of movies about gay romances that end tragically! Can we please see stories about same sex love that succeeds, that triumphs over adversity? My thanks in advance.

I am so starved for romance that I can relate to, that the other night I find myself trolling YouTube for film clips from Japanese "boy’s love" anime that I don’t have yet.  If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, which sometimes goes by the name "Yaoi" in both manga and anime, it’s mostly torrid soap opera style love stories of the sort you might find in any paperback romance novel, save for the cultural differences in style, and the fact that they’re about gay male couples.  I’m told the audience for these stories in Japan are mostly teenage Japanese girls. 

I like them for the beauty of the males in the storylines, and the torrid romance of the storylines.  I used to smirk at some heterosexual friends, female, who had racks and racks of those Harlequin Romance paperbacks at home.  Well, I sure couldn’t smirk at them now.  I guess it was just a matter of not seeing any of it that I could relate to.  I tell myself these days that I’m finally having the teeny-bopper experience I couldn’t back in 1969-1970.  Well…apart from all those Tiger Beat magazines I used to buy, take home, devour, and hide under my bed, all the while telling myself that I was a perfectly normal heterosexual guy.

So…anyway…I’m busy trolling YouTube for some same sex romance, and I come across a set of 10 posts comprising an entire live action Japanese film titled, appropriately enough, Boy’s Love.  Ohmygod, thinks I, the leads are go goddamned Cute!  So I start watching the first one.  And I notice that it’s in Japanese with no sub-titles.  Oh well.  I keep watching, while trying to deduce the plot from the visuals.  Later on I find this about the film on Wiki…

Just doing his job, magazine editor Taishin Mamiya (Yoshikazu Kotani) interviews high school model Noeru Kisaragi (Takumi Saito). Despite Noeru’s bad attitude, an enchanting picture of the ocean he draws leads Mamiya to invite him out for dinner afterwards. They connect at the restaurant, but while in the bathroom there Noeru solicits Mamiya sexually. The next morning, Noeru’s office calls the magazine office where Mamiya works. "Your editor was rude. Have him come and apologize." When Mamiya goes to Noeru’s house to deliver the apology, he sees Noeru with a dirty-looking man. Mamiya is shocked to discover at that moment that his interest in Noeru goes beyond article research–he truly wants to know more about him.

Heh.  Yeah.  Sort-of.  There’s more to it, including a jealous classmate who the commenters on YouTube took to calling "Harry Potter" because of his glasses and bookish look I suppose.  But it’s pretty much your standard gay soap opera plot.

Warning…Major Spoilage after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Message In A Bottle:  To a certain someone living near the land of Walt…who I used to talk to way back when…in another time…

So,  bear with me here a little…  Jacob Bronowski tells of how Dimitri Mendeleeve used to play a little card game with himself that his friends used to call Patience.  He played it with cards that he’d written the known elements of his day on, along with their atomic numbers.  He put hydrogen aside, since it was kind of an odd one, and instead began his first column with lithium.  Next came beryllium, then boron, then the familiar elements, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and then fluorine at the seventh column.  Then next known element was sodium, and since it had a likeness to lithium, Mendeleeve decided it should go under that element, starting a new row.  He continued putting known elements into the second row, and as he did so, noticed that they all lined up perfectly with the elements that had similar likenesses above them. 

He continued doing this, and starting a new row as necessary, until he came to a…difficulty.  And that was the element titanium.   It didn’t fit exactly with the elements above it, boron and aluminum.  However it did seem to line up with carbon and silicon. Mendeleeve interpreted this difficulty as a missing element.  Aha, thinks he, there is an element we don’t know about yet, but when we find it, that element will have properties that put it under boron and aluminum.  He called the missing element, eka-silicon.

When they found it, they named it germanium, since it was discovered in Germany.  But it was Mendeleeve who first realized it was there.  He had in fact, predicted just what properties germanium had, even before it was discovered.  He knew the element was there, because the elements he had told him it was there, and where to look for it, and what it would look like when they found it.

So…here’s the point.  There is something that we folks who work in Information Technologies understand about data, that most people miss.  Data is not important, really.  Data does not matter.   What matters, are the connections between the data.

So…anyway…I have these keys.  Some of which I found for myself, and some of which you gave me.  But there was one I wanted that you would not give to me.  And..well…you know how I am.   So I knew it was out there somewhere, but none of the keys I had would give it to me.  But I knew that if I used the keys I did have, they would probably give me another key, and that key would give me another, and so on.  Which I did.  Until I came to a…difficulty.  And there most people might have figured it for another dead end, but that difficulty told me where the missing key was, and pretty much what it would look like when I found it.   And so I went looking there, and I fit one of the keys I had into that place and turned, and the key I needed just sort of popped out.

And you told me why I couldn’t use it, and you were right.  I can’t.  I can see that for myself now.  So I won’t.  I reckon I’ll just keep tossing these messages in a bottle out to you until the day comes, maybe, when you give me one I can use.

Be nice if we didn’t have to keep waving flags at a distance to each other.  Be nice if we could just…you know…talk.  Like we used to.

Well this was a first I could have lived contentedly without ever knowing about…

No escape as mobile phone reaches Everest’s summit

A British man has set a world record by making the first mobile telephone call from the summit of Mount Everest, taking the blessing — or curse — of the cell phone to new heights.

"It’s cold, it’s fantastic, the Himalayas are everywhere," Rod Baber said in the phone call from the top of the 8,848-metre (29,198-foot) peak…

No Shit?  The Himalayas, did you say?  And…like…is there snow everywhere up there too?  Is it really high up there? 

See?  He’s on the fucking summit of Mount Everest, and you have to think that the thoughts in his head at that moment were actually some pretty profound ones.  That is a rare and dangerous adventure.  And he goes on that adventure…and he reaches the top.  He did it.  And the reward is a view of planet earth that few humans have ever seen with their own eyes.  But then he puts the goddamned cell phone to his face and all the comes out is shopping mall babble.  Cell phones just bring out the chattering little monkeys in all of us.  I’m not busting on them…I’d hate to live in a world without them.  But there will never be famous memorable words spoken into a cell phone.

Oh, just what I need to make me worry more about my reliable forgetfulness…

Men’s Minds Decline More with Age

Everyone becomes a little more forgetful as they get older, but men’s minds decline more than women’s, according to the results of a worldwide survey.

…

Some studies found more age-related decline in men than in women, while others saw the reverse or even no relationship at all between sex and mental decline. Those results could be biased because the studies involved older people, and women live longer than men: The men tested are the survivors, "so they’re the ones that may not have shown such cognitive decline," said study team leader Elizabeth Maylor of the University of Warwick in England.

The new study used data from the BBC Sex ID Internet Survey, conducted between February and May 2005. The survey had more than 250,000 respondents worldwide.

Survey participants completed four tasks that tested sex-related cognitive skills: matching an object to its rotated form, matching lines shown from the same angle, typing as many words in a particular category as possible in the given time (e.g. "object usually colored grey") and recalling the location of objects in a line drawing. The first two were tasks at which men usually excel; the latter are typically dominated by women.

Within each age group studied, men and women performed better in their respective categories on average. And though performance declined with age for both genders, women showed significantly less decline than men overall. Women slowed down more in terms of their decline, but when comparing men and women of the same age, men showed a greater amount of decline.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll forget that I’m forgetting.  So this could be good news. 

Peterson Toscano writes It’s About Heterosexism, Silly on the International Day Against Homophobia, and Alan Chambers’ post on the Exodus blog about how he is all in agreement that violence against gay people shouldn’t be tolerated.  Chambers writes…

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia. And, you might be surprised to learn that I support this effort. Homophobia does exist. Irrational fear of those who are gay or lesbian is a real problem in our culture. While I believe we have come a long way, I still see true homophobia at work each and every day.

What a swell guy, eh?  Almost makes you wonder why they’re all so uptight about hate crime laws over at Exodus.  Peterson responds that the lives of gay people are less impacted directly from violence, so much as the premise of heterosexual superiority…

While homophobic attacks happen daily, heterosexism happens by the nano second. A young child gets the message over and over again in books, TV ads, teacher’s examples and even heterosexually paired salt & pepper shakers, that anything other than heterosexual pairing is just not right. Growing up in such a world, with virtually no positive examples of same-sex couples, queer and questioning young people begin to develope a negative sense of self and can even grow quite isolated and suicidal within a society where they do not see themselves reflected or accepted.

Just so.  I’ve often wondered of late, how different my own life might have been had I the chance to grow up in a culture as accepting of same sex pairings as opposite sex ones.  Maybe I’d have found my soul mate by now.  Maybe I did find him long ago, once upon a time, only to loose him due to that relentless hostility toward same sex pairings. 

Once while I was working as a stock clerk at a catalog retailer, I met this really nice guy from one of the branch stores who’d come to the warehouse on an errand.  I think my jaw dropped a little when I caught sight of him, he was so drop dead beautiful.  He saw me looking and flashed a wonderful smile at me.  Some weeks later I had a chance to go to the store he worked at on an errand of my own and the look he gave me when he saw it was me was thrilling.  We didn’t have any time to talk that day, we were both so busy with work related chores.  But I vowed to get his name and phone number the next time we met.  Which should have been the following week.  But his supervisor caught us sharing a smile and I guess she didn’t like the look of it because the next day we were both fired, me ostensibly because my hair was too long.  I never learned why exactly they’d canned him.  I only found out when I tried visiting his store afterwords and was coldly told he wasn’t working there anymore. 

I never saw him again.  I don’t even know his name.  It is one of many junctions in my life that I’ve always wondered about since, wondered about what might have been had they left us alone.  He was real nice.  And that is not the only time something like that has happened to me.

Not one to let a suggestion that gay people be given a measure of human dignity go by without spitting on it, Mike Ensley commented on Chamber’s blog thusly:

The fact is, heterosexuality is innately superior. Only heterosexual partners enjoy the complimentary aspect of their physiology, and only they can produce children.

Ensley is a jackass.  Dr. John Corvino in this lecture on the morality of homosexuality , hilariously addresses that The Parts Don’t Fit argument, with the simple retort that, yes the parts Do fit, and that ought to be obvious since if they didn’t, people wouldn’t do that.  This isn’t rocket science.  It shouldn’t take a micro-watt of brain power to figure that if sex wasn’t gratifying and fulfilling for same sex couples then they wouldn’t do it, let alone take all the risks that same sex couples often have to take, even in this day and age, let alone back when sodomy could still land you in prison, in order to do it.  The trick is…well…you have to be gay in order to find it fulfilling.  If you’re heterosexual, then you won’t.

Because heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex, it’s easy for them to mistake the complementary nature of their relationship for gender.  But the complement isn’t the gender, it’s the person.  What people like Ensley are doing in reality, is denying gay people that intimate, body and soul complementary relationship with another person.  Then they point to how miserable gay people often are as proof of the innate superiority of heterosexuality.  It’s called, building yourself up, by putting other people down.  Ensley is doing a little dance there, over corpses of gay people’s dreams and hopes, as a way of demonstrating the superiority of heterosexuality.  And he has no idea how ugly it looks to anyone with a conscience.

And thus prejudice, eventually, destroys the destroyer. 

Leonard Pitts writes about the one moment in Jerry Falwell’s life when it seemed like he had a conscience after all…

It happened in 1999 when Falwell and other Christian conservatives met with a group of gay, lesbian and transgendered people of faith. As gay observers condemned the gay delegation for its involvement and his fellow Christians excoriated Falwell for his, the two groups worshipped together and talked.

Falwell and the Rev. Mel White, leader of Soulforce, a group of gay Christian activists, said they organized the meeting out of a sense that the language between them and the groups they represented had become harsh, acrid, unChristian. If they could not change one another’s minds, they reasoned, perhaps they could at least change one another’s words. In the spirit of the moment, each apologized for hateful language directed at the other. It was a brave and moral moment.

In a column I wrote at the time, I warned both sides that, while it’s easy to stigmatize anonymous others, it would become a lot more difficult after they had spent time in one another’s company, gotten to know each other a little. "How," I asked, "do you go back to being who you were and hating as blindly as you did?"

It’s easy when you just can’t see the people for the homosexuals.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…

Wow.  Just…wow.  This place is Really Nice!

Great old lodge style place that’s been added on to and added on to, such that it has all kinds of nice neat little nooks and comfy lounge areas hidden away here and there throughout the lodge and the grounds around it.  There’s a lot of space here, and yet so many little places in this corner and that full of very nice comfortable furniture where groups or couples or individuals can have some privacy too.  Yet you can just take a few steps and be out in one of the public areas again at your leisure.  Very nice. It’s got a first-rate dinning room and a little community breakfast room (they actually ring a triangle bell in the morning to call the guests to breakfast).  There’s a nice bar, an exercise room, two hot tubs and a steam room. 

Wireless broadband works too (obviously since I’m posting)  But the cell phones are completely dead.  It’s a long windy gravel road to get here.  You’re tucked into a nice stretch of West Virginia scenery.  The lodge and the little guest houses have a very, very nice comfy feel.  Lots of oversized leather sofas and chairs all over the place.  I’m in a little room in the top floor of their "carriage house".  it almost has a treehouse quality to it on the inside.  Bed was one of the most comfortable I’ve ever slept on and I’ve lost count of all the hotel beds I’ve slept on.  I’ll definitely be coming back here regularly.

I’ll post some photos as soon as I get them processed.  I have my film cameras with me this trip so, sorry, no instant digital images for now…

I’m heading out to The Guest House at Lost River in West Virginia with some pals of mine from D.C.  It’s a gay resort (straight couples occasionally go there too) tucked away in the hills near Dolly Sods wilderness area, which I’ve backpacked a time or two.  They say there is wireless there now, but last year the cell phones didn’t work, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to post over the weekend, and anyway this is a mini vacation, so I don’t plan on posting much.  Just guy watching mostly.  And a little warm-up to my annual southwestern/California road trip.

My friends say the pool there is heated, which it damn well better be that close to Dolly Sods, and there is a hot tub, and they insist on my joining in.  Diet notwithstanding, I’m not sure I’m ready to let anyone see my stomach yet.  It still needs a little work.  But they insist and so I went out yesterday looking for a decent pair of swimming trucks.  All I could find at the local stores were either Speedos, which I don’t quite have the figure for again yet (getting there though) and the god awful Bozo The Clown trunks American heterosexual males have been wearing at the beach now for over a decade.  Crap that goes down to your knees and is big enough to fit three sets of legs in. Fuck that.  I was looking for a nice pair of Brazilian cut trucks…something like this…

…ideally in some nice colors.  I am not wearing Bozo The Clown trunks to the pool, or the beach, or anywhere else!  So I guess I’m mail ordering swim suits now too.  In the meantime I bought a couple Speedos anyway, more for motivation to stick to my diet then anything else, and a close-to-decently fitting set of white Fila trunks that apparently aren’t being made anymore so they had them on clearence.  I’ll probably wear the Fila’s this weekend.  At least they fit fairly well and they don’t hang down around my knees, but just above mid-thigh.

Swear to God…it ought to be illegal for men to wear this sort of thing in public…!

Max Blumenthal writing for The Nation has an article up about the career of Jerry Falwell that is must reading while the republican candidates for president are busy singing his praises.  Most folks know the man’s recent history all too well…

In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell’s denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.

Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life…

…but it’s his beginnings that the republicans who are calling him a saint now, would probably like us all to utterly forget.  Point of fact, the religious right itself has been busy rewriting that part of their history for the past couple decades. For generations after the trouncing fundamentalism got during the Scopes trial, fundamentalists held themselves apart from the secular world.  Falwell himself said that "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners", though at the time he was hurling that one at Martin Luther King Jr.  But it was the sensibility of the breed for generations.  

They would all have us all believe now, that it was largely Roe v. Wade that brought fundamentalists into politics.  It wasn’t.

Falwell started his career like a lot of them did, preaching segregation…

Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.

As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"

"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."

As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."

In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."

But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

Dig it.  It wasn’t abortion.  It wasn’t militant homosexuality.  It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism.  It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools.  It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy.  It was their tax exemption.  It was money.

Seen in that light, a lot of things fit nearly into place. Their exaltation of the profit motive over helping the needy, their outright contempt for the poor, like spitting in the face of the man who said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter heaven, their private jets, their mansions, their palace like mega churches, their weighty investment portfolios.  And that stunningly blind eye all these righteous men of God have been turning to the massive corruption of the Bush administration. They’re not hypocrites after all.  It was about money right from the beginning.  It’s still about money.

Go read the whole thing. 

Andrew Sullivan apparently missed out on a wee little bit of gay American history, as he had to go look it up…

The same people who have been telling me for years that Jerry Falwell is an anachronistic irrelevance are now singing his praises as a pivotal figure in American politics and culture. Presumably that’s why all the Republican candidates had to bow the knee at the moment of his passing. Dean Barnett recommends this reminiscence by Al Mohler. Money quote:

As a 16-year-old boy, I was in the crowd at the convention center in Miami Beach when Dr. Falwell joined singer Anita Bryant in holding a rally to involve Christians in the struggle against a gay rights ordinance adopted by Dade County. I had never heard of Jerry Falwell until that night – and after that experience I would never forget him.

What was that ordinance? Wiki tells me…

Er…Wiki??  I don’t think there’s a gay American who was past puberty and self aware at the time who would fucking need to look thAT one up.  Yes, Andrew, that was the Dade County non-discrimination ordinance she waged an all-out war on.  Yes, all it did was protect us from being fired, simply for being gay.  And yes, she based a large portion of her campaign on calling gay people pedophiles.  She fucking named her campaign Save Our Children after all, didn’t she. 

And that rally that Albert "Let’s Exterminate Homosexuality In The Womb" Mohler says he’ll never forget?  I suppose there are a lot of people who won’t forget it.  I saw some of the news footage of Falwell and Bryant standing together at the podium.  I remember vividly Falwell looking solemnly at the gathered reporters and saying "A homosexual will kill you, as soon as look at you."

Just a few years after Falwell and Bryant were standing together at the podium with Falwell telling everyone what a bunch of blood thirsty killers gay people are, Ronald Reagan was courting him in his presidential campaign.  The elephant has made gay bashing one of its primary vote getting tools ever since.  I guess if you’d actually lived through that part of our history Andrew, you’d know why so many of us feel nothing but contempt for the republican party.  Lame and cowardly as the democrats often are, they’re haven’t been busily inciting fear and hate toward us for the past few decades, simply to win elections.  How many gay people have died Andrew, because of the climate of hate the republicans have actively stoked in this country?  How many gay kids sent off to ex-gay camps?  How many kids growing being hated by their peers, growing up hating themselves? 

Yes…it’s the party of torture now, isn’t it?  But you had to know this day was coming Andrew, when they threw innocent lovers to the wolves back in the 1980s, because it won them elections.  Lovers, Andrew.  Not terrorists.  Not murderers.  Not jihadists.  Lovers.  Because it won them elections.  A race to the bottom is always won by the people who are already there.

I haven’t been watching the republican debates.  Apparently a lot of people got an eyeful of Milt the other day.  This from Atrios…

Commenter Bloix explains things to Massive Media Matt:

I thought he was clear. He does not believe in trial by jury, or the presumption of innocence, or the right to counsel, or an independent judiciary, or the right to liberty. He believes that the government should be disappear people from their homes and send them to prison camps where brutal guards will beat them up at their leisure. He thinks we need more Gitmos and bigger Gitmos. He wants to recreate the gulag. You saw how excited the audience was. They understood it. Why don’t you?

Apparently the only thing Milt isn’t willing to sell out on his quest for the presidency, is his religion.  He’s certainly willing to sell out his country. 

This debate is a window into what really drives the GOP id. The biggest applause lines were for faux tough guy Giuliani demanding Ron Paul take back his assertion that the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, macho man Huckabee talking about Edwards in a beauty parlor and the manly hunk Romney saying that he wants to double the number of prisoners in Guantanamo "where they can’t get lawyers." There’s very little energy for that girly talk about Jesus or "the culture of life" or any of that BS that the pansy Bush ran ran on. (Brownback’s position, forcing 14 year old girls who’ve been raped by their fathers to bear their own sibling, will have to suffice for the compassionate "life" crowd tonight.)

… 

Update: Amato has the "torture" segment. Dear God.
 

This has been another edition of What Digby Said…