Jim, one of the founders of the political blogosphere, started the Rittenhouse Review a week or two before Duncan Black started Eschaton.
He was my fairy blogfather. He showed me how to install a sitemeter, he gave me tips for building readership, and advised me to “pick a fight with a blogger who’s much better known – you can’t believe how well it works.” (I never took his advice, though.) He even paid to have the ugly banner ad removed from the top of my first site.
More than that, Jim was extraordinarily generous. A master networker, he insisted on introducing all of his friends to each other and they, in turn, became friends. “See?” he’d say. “I told you you’d hit it off.” In turn, I introduced him to the sweet potato fries and the chocolate bread pudding at Silk City.
Rittenhouse Review was one of the first progressive blogs I started reading regularly. Through his blog Jim introduced me to many others in the progressive blog sphere who I now regard as daily necessities. Atrios, and Fred Clark’s Slacktivist to name two. Jim was kind enough to put my little blog on his blogroll one day, and he emailed me some questions about why I was blogging, and would I mind being put on his blogger mailing list. I was just thrilled to have the attention. I quickly began to thoroughly enjoy Jim’s online company. Jim was a really good hearted man, and he had a curious, restless, hungry mind. His blog posts, which ranged far and wide across any topic that interested him only gave you a hint of it. I remember one day Jim emailed me out of the blue and asked if I could take some photos of a couple specific Christian Scientist temples in the Washington Baltimore area. He said he was doing research for a book on their architectural styles. Susie notes in her blog post…
Jim spoke God knows how many languages. I once met him for lunch when he walked in wearing a Walkman. This intrigued me, because he never, ever listened to popular music. “What are you listening to?” I said, pulling at the headphones.
“I’m teaching myself Dutch,” he said, almost apologetically.
Then one day, just as Susie mentions in the post above, Jim invited me to Philadelphia to meet his other blogger friends. That was when I got to meet Duncan Black (Atrios) and Fred Clark, and many other really nice folks…and of course Jim himself. It was a treat. You hear it over and over again how some people are much quieter and more soft spoken in person then they are online. That was true to a degree with Jim, but also he was if anything, more intense in person then you saw on his blog. You really saw that restless curiosity about…well…everything…when you met him in person. It was wonderful for an evening, just to behold it.
So we’ve lost another good person in the blog world this summer and I am heartbroken. I hadn’t heard from Jim in ages and I just assumed he’d lost interest in blogging because that hungry mind of his had wandered elsewhere. I had no idea he was sick. I should have pinged him a time or two this past year and I didn’t, and now I can’t.
…and want to help them to be everything that God intended for them to be when He created them.
Quatre…
This being the case, we have no desire with the following information to try and attack or hurt someone…
Cinq…
…involved in homosexual sex.
Six…
Quite the contrary
Sept…
…our intention is first to try and help to set them free from the sin of homosexuality and the subsequent tragic consequences associated with homosexual sex – this is an act of love.
Huit…
Our society has been attacked by homosexual activists at every quarter, lying to us about the reality of homosexual sex while they are FULLY AWARE of this sin’s implications and dangers – FULLY!
At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.
Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I’m facing? How will history judge what we’ve done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?
These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation. Not generally known for intellectual curiosity, Bush is seeking out those who are, engaging in a philosophical exploration of the currents of history that have swept up his administration. For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely expressing doubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off course.
Well when you nail your compass needle down, staying on course is pretty much a matter of dumb luck George. And while dumb you are, dumb and lucky you never were. Otherwise your rich father and his cronies wouldn’t have had to save you from from jackass self over and over again.
These sessions, usually held in the Oval Office or the elegant living areas of the executive mansion, are never listed on the president’s public schedule and remain largely unknown even to many on his staff. To some of those invited to talk, Bush seems alone, isolated by events beyond his control, with trusted advisers taking their leave and erstwhile friends turning on him.
"You think about prime ministers and presidents being surrounded by cabinet officials and aides and so forth," said Alistair Horne, a British historian who met with Bush recently. "But at the end of the day, they’re alone. They’re lonely. And that’s what occurred to me as I was at the White House. It must be quite difficult for him to get out and about.
That’ll happen to people who would rather have sycophants then real friends. You’re the golden boy, right up ’till the moment you’re not. Then you’re nobody.
…In which it begins to dawn on our hero that resistance may be futile. Click Here or on the graphic above to go directly to episode ten. Or click Here to go to the main series page.
Coming up: Episode 11 – An Intervention Moment. In which Left Brain and Right Brain try to reason with this Libido character. Probably sometime in August, after my trip out west.
(London) A senior Church of England bishop says floods that have caused widespread damage in the UK are the result of God’s wrath on a permissive society that endorses gay rights.
"We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate," the Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, told the Sunday Telegraph.
"In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as ‘the beast’, which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want," he told the paper, adding that the introduction of recent pro-gay laws undermines marriage.
"The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance."
Dow is a leading church conservative.
"Conservative" being a euphemism for "Witch Doctor"…
Yes I am interested in owning an iPhone. But not the first generation ones. I’ll wait. But I’ve been wanting that all in one communication, personal information store, entertainment, wear on the belt or put in your pocket widget for years now. The thing needs to grow a little more memory, and shrink a tad less in cost though. But it will eventually.
Broder seems to have at long last recognized that something is very rotten in Dick Cheney’s office. Huzzah. But it is curious that he mentions Scooter Libby’s name without addressing whether he still thinks it’s such a great idea to shield one of these lying, power-mad zealots from the consequences of his actions. (Maybe Sally Quinn ought to crank up the phone tree and find out.)
With all the Claud Rainsing about Dick Cheney’s power grab, you have to wonder when Broder will finally break to the surface of his beltway wet dream long enough to recognize that a federal prosecutor dealing with one of Dick Cheney’s minions repeatedly lying to his face might have justifiably been suspicious that something more than "just politics" was going on. After all, he was seeing this operation close up, in all its glory, years ago. Cops and prosecutors tend to get curious about why people are lying and covering things up. It’s just the way they think. And when people continue to do it, even when they are caught red handed and everyone knows it, prosecutors have no choice but to charge them. The stench coming from Cheney’s office had to have been extremely pungent.
Broder admits that he was wrong to think that Cheney would be a good second in command and that’s a big admission for him, I’m sure. But he also makes the flat claim that what Cheney has done was constitutional and legal. Again with the knee-jerk defense of the Bushies. Just because they say it doesn’t make it true and there are so many secrets still unrevealed that it’s impossible to properly assess that fact. It’s long past time for these insiders to stop automatically giving the administration the benefit of the doubt.
And it is also long past time they offered an apology to Patrick Fitzgerald who was just doing his job, quietly and deliberately, while Cheney and Scooter’s compatriots both in and out of the administration shrieked like wounded harpies at the prospect of any of the Vice President’s good and honest men being held to account for anything. These courtiers were so caught up in defending one of their own that they didn’t even realize that the bastard in all this was the guy who sent Scooter out to lie and cover up — their great pal, Dick Cheney, the man who learned everything he ever needed to learn about politics by watching Dick Nixon and then doing it better. These people look more and more foolish every day.
The decline of undercover reporting — and of investigative reporting in general — also reflects, in part, the increasing conservatism and cautiousness of the media, especially the smug, high-end Washington press corps. As reporters have grown more socially prominent during the last several decades, they’ve become part of the very power structure that they’re supposed to be tracking and scrutinizing.
Chuck Lewis, a former "60 Minutes" producer and founder of the Center for Public Integrity, once told me: "The values of the news media are the same as those of the elite, and they badly want to be viewed by the elites as acceptable."
Ever wonder why mainstream news has had that rancid aroma ever since Bush was elected? For a good alternative you might try the McClatchy Bureau home page. It’s motto is the heartening Truth To Power. Also, you should give Raw Story and HinesSight a look.
The Bush Administration crack down a couple years ago on broadcast indecency was usually taken to be a bone tossed at it’s fundamentalist base.
That’s not a reference to crack cocaine you drooling morons! You’ll never see me advocating the use of that poison here. And why the hell (whoops…I said it again…dang…) is the word "gay" something impressionable kids shouldn’t be exposed to? I’m a gay man. Right? Okay…fine. Gay. Gay. Gay. Gay. Now I have 32 instances of the word to count against my poor blog. Oh…and five for crack. Uh…six. Aw…fuck it . Whoops.
But you know what…this is exactly the kind of jackass way the MPAA rates movies anyway. So I guess you won’t be seeing ads for The Story So Far in your local newspaper’s movieguide anytime soon…
Seriously. I could use some conversation…with someone who knows me from the old days. You…especially.
I still have some things in my treasure box I could share with you. Things I’ve gathered over the course of a life. The light from desert vistas. The night sky over the open plains. The stillness of the old forests. Places only a few have seen. Things only people who have been there know. The Fire. The Light. The Silence. I’d like to share them with you. But you have to ask.
Even through the darkest phase
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin
Constant craving
Has always been
Maybe a great magnet pulls
All souls towards truth
Or maybe it is life itself
That feeds wisdom
To its youth
Constant craving
Has always been
Craving
Ah ha
Constant craving
Has always been
Is this all there is?
Is there nothing more?
They say there’s a lid for every pot…
But…where’s mine?
Are you there? Somewhere?
Please…knock on my door…
Say hello.
Please. I need you. So badly.
There must be more. Please tell me there is more.
There is so much more I could be. But I need you there…
Okay…I’ve finished the pencils and the inks on episode ten of A Coming Out Story and scanned all the pages in. There are five pages comprising twenty-four panels in this next episode. All that’s left now is the Photoshopping, which I’ve already started on. That amounts to just some touching up, adding some shadows and the crosshatching (yes…I cheat on the cross hatching now. But it saves me weeks of work per episode…) and adding text and word balloons and panel frames. I should be done and have it posted by tomorrow evening, barring some major problem.
I’ve been giggling the whole time I’ve been drawing this one. I hope its contagious.
I have this really bad habit sometimes of assuming that the people who read my blog read the other stuff I do online and as a consequence I’ve been horribly remiss in blogging about the Ex-Gay Survivor’s Conference now going on in Irvine California. You should go visit their page and witness the amazing, heartbreaking, heartlifting, incredibly powerful stories of the people there.
For way too long now the ex-gay movement has had its own little monopoly on telling the personal stories of people who have been subjected to ex-gay therapy, and surprise, surprise, their stories have all reflected positively on the experience. To this day, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, various ex-gay leaders still claim treatment successes in the tens of thousands. But ever since the story of a gay teenager who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will became national, and then international news, organizations like Exodus have had to deal with a much heightened degree of scrutiny of their claims. Nowadays even Exodus will admit to no more then a 30 percent or so success rate. So now the other 70 percent are having their say about it and this has been long, long overdue.
I’ve never been though ex-gay therapy myself, never had a need to even consider it. Ever since I came out to myself as a gay teenager I’ve been fine with my sexual orientation. And for years I regarded the ex-gay movement as little more then the silliness of right wing bigots. I once dated a guy who gave the ex-gay life it a brief go, breaking off a relationship with me that left me sad and lonely, but fully determined to let him find out for himself that the human identity isn’t a blackboard you can just scribble anything you want on. It pained me to watch him throw the possibility of an honest and rewarding intimate life way for the sake of the approval of his family and his church. But you can’t take anyone else’s falls for them, and especially not your lovers’. So I let him go. Seven years later he came back…but that’s another long story.
But when I saw the cry for help from one scared, desperate gay teenager something deep inside of me got very, very angry, and to this day is still very, very angry. That incident radicalized me in a way I thought I’d never be radicalized. Time was I’d soft peddle my sexuality around people who I knew, or felt were uncomfortable. Time was I’d tell myself to give them space, let them get comfortable dealing with it on their own terms. I just wanted us all to get along. No more. Getting along should not cost me my dignity, and for goddamned sure it shouldn’t cost gay teens that wonderful time of life when you discover what it is to be in love. My silence I discovered that summer, was giving gay hating thugs license to put a knife into the hearts of gay teens, and tell the world with a straight face that they were only trying to heal them.
In becoming active against the ex-gay movement, I began to meet wonderful, good hearted, decent people who had put themselves through hell because they thought it was the only way to make themselves right with God. People like Peterson Toscano. I’ve heard stories that would make stones cry. I’ve met other gay teens, like Lance Carroll, who had been forced into the grotesquely misnamed Love In Action against their will, and came out of it even more alienated from their parents. To walk among the survivors of ex-gay therapy is to know the essential cruelty of it. But it had to be. What started out in the early 1970s as a few fellowships of believers supporting each other against urges they could not reconcile with their faith, was cynically co-opted by the religious right into a propaganda tool against gay rights. The people undergoing therapy in these ministries don’t matter anymore. They haven’t mattered for decades now.
I really, almost desperately wanted to go out to that conference, and hear the stories, and show my support. But work pressures prevented it…and that may be the other reason I haven’t blogged about it all that much, even when they were kind enough to link to one of my recent posts. It’s been depressing. So I’ve had to watch from afar. I hope they’re having a good time sharing their stories. I hope they’re finding the support, and the healing now that they need.
CitizenLink is just making things up. It’s like they’re not even trying to be credible anymore. I got a laugh out of this one, about the two competing ex-gay and ex-ex-gay conferences:
The [Exodus Freedom Conference], which began Tuesday and wraps up Sunday, has drawn close to 1,000 people — and no protesters so far. Across town, a counter-conference drew about 100 people. [Emphasis mine]
Drew? Past tense?
The Ex-gay Survivor’s conference doesn’t begin until this evening. The main events don’t start until tomorrow. Conference organizers haven’t released pre-registration figures, and of course we don’t know how many walk-ups will show.
But thanks, Focus, for the prediction. We’ll see how good it turns out to be.
Well of course, James Dobson is a profit…er…prophet…
And let’s bring a little perspective into this little bragging war. This is Exodus’s 32nd conference, but only the first Ex-Gay Survivor’s conference. When Exodus held their first conference in Anaheim in 1976, sixty-two people attended. They broke a hundred in 1977 at their second conference in Oakland.
You should go visit the Conference web page. I’ve been saying for years now that the real stories of our lives are like rust to bigotry. You’ll never see a better example of that then the stories being told there this weekend.
WHITE CLOUD — A Newaygo County man could spend another weekend behind bars if he doesn’t take care of his yard.
David Burch says he tried to seed the yard last fall but it wouldn’t take root. This all stems from a contractor who failed to sod the yard in the first place. Now a judge is saying, do the yard or do the time.
"The people who work at the court, at the jail, thought it was funny," Burch said. "They said there had to be more. I said, ‘No, it’s just because I don’t have grass growing.’ They said, ‘You’re in here for that?’"
He claims he is not skirting the law. Burch said the contractor for his new house is responsible for the lawn. But a White Cloud city ordinance states otherwise.
"This has been in the courts for over a year," said White Cloud Police Chief Roger Ungrey. "I believe Mr. Burch has made an attempt. He did bring me in some receipts for grass seed."
But when it didn’t grow, a county judge ordered the yard planted. It never happened. Again this April – no sprouts. Then, in jail, an inspiration. Burch is sodding his yard with donated turf.
They’ve been having a drought in White Cloud by the way. Say…you think that might have something to do with why his grass isn’t growing…? Just curious. They must see things differently up there. Maybe they’ve never experienced a drought before and they’re not sure if that means you have to conserve the water you still have or not. I mean…here in Baltimore when we had our drought you pretty much had to let your lawn go brown or else you got fined. Having a green lawn was considered evidence that you were watering it illegally.
So I’m picturing this poor man finally getting his lawn taken care of so he can stay out of jail, only to then be fined for watering it. But at least it’s a city ordinance and not a Home Owner’s Association he’s at the mercy of. If it was an HOA they’d be suing him for not using the right kind of grass seed too probably. He’d have had to submit seed samples to the Architectural Review Committee before planting for DNA analysis, and maybe provide them with architectural renderings of what his new lawn would look like so that the Board Of Directors could pass on it first.
The martini is an honest drink, tasting exactly like what it is and nothing else. There are no fruit juices or chocolate in a martini, and it’s not served in a pineapple shell. The martini is a clear, clean, cold, pure and honest drink – especially for people with established values and a liking for purity, even in their vices.
I regret the passing of this friend from our culture, just as I regret knowing that I’ll never again see a pretty woman in nylons, garter belt and spiked heels. Now I read they want to do away with high heels and swimsuits in the Miss America Pageant. I suppose next it will be brown paper bags over heads and every contestant clothed in XXL potato sacks.
…
Martinis, garter belts, bathing suits and high heels – why do good things pass away? Tonight I’m going to pour myself a martini, light up my pipe, sit in my backyard and give this matter a lot more thought.
Oh cheer up. I know the feeling…sort of. I’ve been morning the pasing of cutoffs and slight bathing suits on guys since the1980s. The beach just isn’t fun anymore. At least not the American ones. Never did like martinis though. Ugh. Some of my gay happy hour pals just love them though. I’m more a Kahlua on the rocks kinda guy. But…what the hell happened to cutoffs?
(sigh…)
[Update…] It’s kinda fun, in a perverse way I suppose, to watch the reactions among the heterosexual guys on Fark to that guy’s letter to the editor. Some of them are completely in agreement, and some think he’s a dinosaur who needs to just get over it…
Awesome article.
He sounds like my dad. Who is also from the midwest. (perhaps I should say mid-VEST this guy is a cheesehead) Eh time marches on. I’ve no sympathy because HE’S sad that Miss America isn’t putting on her high heels for him.
I may be a youngster, but I raise my glass for this man. Awesome letter.
That guy is my farking hero!
Yeah, keep biatching gramps. You didn’t have blowjob parties and chicks with whale-tails when you were in high school. You didn’t have internet porn. You didn’t have access to 80 beers on tap at the bar down the street from your house. Times change, and you’re stuck in the past.
There is nothing stupider than high heels on a woman in a bathing suit, and who the hell wears shoes to bed?
*Dims the lights in this thread and cues up Henry Mancini’s "Lujon"*
THIS GUY IS AWESOME!!
And stay off my lawn!!!
Eh, keep your fetish gear to yourself, dinosaur
And a lady writes…
I own a garter belt. Its a pain in the ass to wear, but its so hot and sexy, I want to do myself when I wear it.
And now you know why the the Southern Baptist Convention thinks the Internet is the tool of Satan…
[Update 2…] Oh…now they’re arguing about whether a martini should be made with gin or vodka…
And the ladies are telling the guys that they look sexy in fedoras. I’ll agree with that. Some of them.
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