Via Slashdot…  The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a report outlining who among us are using computers and computer technology regularly.  About half of my generation hardly even bother with it all.  God, I hope they’re not all getting their news from Fox…

Popular Mechanics’ columnist Glenn Derene asks "What keeps the personal computer from being a universally accepted technology?"  Let me hazard a guess…

Memo To A Certain Someone Down In Orlando: Yes…I know.  Computer technology can be a real bear sometimes.  And my trade is largely responsible for that, and I’m sorry.  We should listen to the people who have to use the stuff we create better then we do.  But there is a whole wide wonderful and enriching world out there that you’re missing.  A world where a casual stroll down a trail can take you from Mark Twain to H.L. Mencken to Einstein to the study of extra-solar planets.  The blazes on these trails span the written word to the spoken one, to new music, paintings, photography from all over the world.  An afternoon hike can take you across time and space, to the light from near the beginning of time.  It’s worth the hassle it often still is.  Really.

Every day I go to work I am reminded of how lucky I am to be a part of the human exploration of space. Some days more then most.  The crew of the SM4 servicing mission to Hubble came to the Institute today and after conferring with the astronomers, gave the staff a little talk in the main auditorium.  It’s the forth time I’ve had the experience of listening to them firsthand and it always leaves me ecstatic.  How many times in a lifetime do you get to be a part of something like this?  I am so lucky, so fortunate. 

Never in my wildest dreams when I was a little space cadet did I ever think seriously I’d ever get to be a part of the space effort.  Never.  I grew up with little expectations beyond maybe having a series of jobs shuffling boxes from one end of a warehouse to another.  There was no money for college…some in mom’s side of the family never thought I’d amount to anything at all.  I remember one jerk in high school who told me without a doubt I’d end up a truck driver like my dad.  As if there’s anything wrong with being a truck driver…but he was from the well-to-do side of the tracks.  Never mind that I have a house of my own now, a nice car, and an income better then my wildest dreams.  The other day at one of our happy hours, my D.C. friends got started talking about the Hubble images, and one mentioned that the Deep Field was God for him.  I know the feeling.  To think that now I’m part of a team that gathers light from near the beginning of time and brings it to the world for people to see is just amazing.  I’m playing a small, very small, part in writing a few new lines in the book of human knowledge.  Seriously, what more could I ask of life?

Well…a boyfriend of course…but I guess you can’t have it all…

I brought my best 35mm film cameras and lenses to work today, and when the time for the assembly came I was dressed up in full photographer drag: two Canon F1 bodies hanging around my neck and one of my new gadget bags…a nice Tamrac shaped a bit like a teardrop so it hangs better around your body then the old bulky one I used to carry around in high school.  I had my best big glass lenses with me: the 50mm f1.2, the 24mm f.14, the 80mm f1.8 and the 135mm f2.  I could take better available light shots with those inside the auditorium then with the 17-70mm f5.6 zoom on my EOS 30D.  I hate using flash, especially in a crowd.  It distracts people, and calls attention to yourself.  I want to be invisible when I’m taking pictures.  But good available light lenses for the EOS cameras are too damn expensive, and when a digital image detector starts getting noisy, which they will if you have to kick up the sensitivity to take pictures in low light situations, it’s really, really ugly.  I tried that when Senator Mikulski came to the Institute after the SM4 mission was given the final go-ahead, and the digital noise in the resulting images was just awful.  So this time I came with the film cameras, which, yes, are a bit more clumsy to use then the EOS and its quick auto focusing zoom.  But I grew up on those cameras and fixed focal length lenses, and I’m used to working with them now, second nature.

Some staff had brought their kids into work to see the astronauts and their questions were just delightful.  One kid asked what happens when they’re suited up for a space walk and they have to go to the bathroom.  Another asked how they deal with getting itchy.  The astronauts  loved taking their questions, and they treated all of them seriously.  When I was that age I think I would have just been awed into silence.

After the assembly we all gathered outside the front of the Institute for the traditional group photo with the astronauts.  I wandered around the front of the crowd taking pictures while everyone was getting ready, and Matt Mountain, the director of the Institute, must have briefly mistaken me for the official photographer in my camera drag because he asked me where I wanted the astronauts to be.  Embarrassed, I told him I was just a staff member.  I was far from the only one there with cameras of course, but I guess I still have this air about me when I’m busy with my cameras looking for shots.  And I admit that sometimes I make use of that when I want to get a shot.  Once upon a time I did it professionally, and thought that one day it would be my living.  I can still get myself into that mindset with very little effort.

Later as the crowd was gathering back inside I managed to get a few more casual shots of the astronauts mingling with the staff and their kids, below the big model of Hubble in the main lobby.  I was switching lenses between the cameras and my clumsy middle aged fingers fumbled my good 135mm f2 lens and dropped it hard on the tile floor.  I was sure I’d be picking up pieces of lens glass, but there was only a small dent on the filter ring after all.  So I guess I won’t be mounting any filters on that lens now, but thankfully the glass and the mechanism were undamaged.  Those old Canon FD lenses, like the cameras themselves, were made to take a beating that the new stuff never could.  Had that been one of the EOS lenses it would surely have been ruined.

I don’t know yet if they’ll do it this time too, but on previous servicing missions the staff was allowed to sign a small poster the astronauts would take into space.  So my signature has been into space a couple times.  Not quite anything like actually having an instrument I made go up, or for that matter myself.  But I can say at the end of my life that a piece of me has been in space.  But more then that, I can say I’ve been part of a team that’s written a few new lines into the book of human knowledge.  I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have this chance in life, to be a part of space.  When I was a kid, I sat with my little Kodak Brownie Fiesta camera in front of the TV set while Neil Armstrong made the first human footprint on the moon, and snapped off a couple shots.  I’d experimented a few weeks before with different films and lighting, so I knew what would work.  Remember back then home VCRs were still years in the future.  I didn’t quite get the framing right…the Brownie wasn’t exactly an SLR after all…but it was good enough…

When they offered me the job at Space Telescope some years ago, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I still feel that way.

City rips down racy divorce billboard

The salacious "Life is short. Get a divorce" billboard with barely clothed models was ripped from its Rush Street perch one week after it went up and one day after the Sun-Times reported it.

The story was picked up internationally, running on CNN, MSNBC, ABC’s "Good Morning America" — even on "The View."

That’s not the kind of publicity Chicago officials wanted as they seek to host the 2016 Olympics, say supporters of attorney Corri Fetman.

"They ripped our billboard down without due process," Fetman said. "We own that art. I feel violated."

Well take heart…seems it wasn’t about the message after all… 

But it wasn’t a moral crusade that brought down the billboard — it was the lack of a proper permit, claimed Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd), who leaves the City Council this month after 36 years.

A billboard that reads, "Life is short.  Get a divorce."  Framed by two sexy models showing lots of skin, muscles and pecs on the guy and really big tits on the gal.  Just never you mind.  Homosexuals are trying to destroy the institution of marriage.  Remember…homosexuals are trying to destroy the institution of marriage.

Looks like Andrew discovered Chick’s The Death Cookie.  Probably got a bunch of reader mail about it…

Dennis Poust of the New York State Catholic Conference is upset with the new Governor…

Legalizing gay marriage would "only strengthen New York’s families," according to Governor Spitzer, who laid forth his most detailed argument in favor of recognizing same-sex relationships in a legislative memo.

Mr. Spitzer, who late last month became the nation’s first governor to propose legislation legalizing gay marriage, articulated a legal and moral argument in defense of the bill in a two-page "statement in support" that is being distributed to lawmakers.

The governor’s forceful language adds even more contrast between his position and that of the major Democratic candidates for president, including Senator Clinton, all of whom oppose gay marriage but favor civil unions.

Supporters of the bill said they were heartened and surprised by the governor’s appeal and said they viewed it as another sign that gay marriage could become a more mainstream Democratic position. While Mr. Spitzer’s stance is not shared by his party’s top-tier White House hopefuls, it could become a more widely accepted position within the party by 2012, when Mr. Spitzer, a nationally known political figure, may be a candidate for president.

The memo, which was prepared by the governor’s counsel, directly confronts one of the main arguments made by opponents of gay marriage, who have warned that allowing same-sex couples to marry would erode the institution of marriage.

"Same-sex couples who wish to marry are not simply looking to obtain additional rights, they are seeking out substantial responsibilities as well: to undertake significant and binding obligations to one another, and to lives of ‘shared intimacy and mutual financial and emotional support,’" the memo states.

"Granting legal recognition to these relationships can only strengthen New York’s families, by extending the ability to participate in this crucial social institution to all New Yorkers."

Opponents of gay marriage said the governor was trying to co-opt their argument.

"He’s couching it in this family values language, which is insulting. He’s trying to turn our argument on its head," a spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, Dennis Poust, said. The conference is the public policy arm of the bishops of New York.

Actually Dennis, the insult was you and all your pals in the American political gutter turning the words "Family" and "Values" into code for prejudice and hate. On its head, did you say? I’m laughing in your face bigot. Your kind has turned two precious human institutions, Family and Marriage on Their heads; from things that nurture and sustain us, into instruments of your cheapshit culture war. May. You. Be. Damned.

The bill memo also suggests that civil unions, adopted by a number of states to confer many of the legal rights enjoyed by married couples, offer insufficient protection.

"Civil marriage is the means by which the state defines a couple’s place in society. Those who are excluded from its rubric are told by the institutions of the State, in essence, that their solemn commitment to one another has no legal weight," the memo says.

Mr. Spitzer also tries to place the legislation in a historical context by arguing that the "history of this country" has been a story of excluded groups achieving access to equal rights. New York has long been a main character in that story, the memo says. 

I hear Irish Catholics were part of that story in New York. Dennis. But of course, your kind thinks they’re the only ones entitled to have any rights, let alone be allowed any dignity. Father Charles Coughlin lives.

President Junior.  Loyalty for him runs only one way…

The White House fought back Tuesday against criticism from Kansas’ governor that National Guard deployments to Iraq are slowing the response to last week’s devastating tornado.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said the fault was Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’.

In a spat reminiscent of White House finger-pointing at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco after the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, Snow rapped Sebelius for not following procedure to find gaps and then asking the federal government to fill them.

The difference here of course is that the governor of Lousiana is a Democrat, and the city of New Orleans was mostly black, and it’s pretty damn obvious that Bush and Rove didn’t give a rat’s ass about New Orleans for those very reasons.  But…Kansas?  Okay, now we really get to see the squalid, petty core of the man who the republican powers that be practically hand picked to be president of the United States.  But millions of True Red White and Blue American red staters saw the perfect reflection of their own inner values and moral character, and voted for him estatically…

What you get in exchange for being a loyal republican one-hundred percent American supporter of George Bush, is the benefit of not being put on his petty shit list.  That’s it.  That’s the only thing you get for kissing his ass year after year.  A hearty handshake and a smile that couldn’t be less genuine if it was painted on a brick and the benefit of not being on his shit list.  This spoiled, cheapshit good-for-nothing is the bastard he is, probably because he never had to learn how to make friends with anyone.  Bullying everyone into cooperating with him is the only way he knows how to deal with people.

And much of red state America saw in him the same cheap resentments they hold within themselves and they voted for him in droves, not because they thought he was the better man but precisely because they knew he wasn’t, and putting him in the White House was as close as they could come to putting their thumbs in the eyes of the rest of America.  How pleasurable it must have been, to hear all those blue state voices howling in pain after he was  elected.  Twice.  Oh yes…they were all predicting that nothing good would come of it, that President Codpiece would be a disaster.  But so what?  It won’t be a disaster for the republican heartland.  Just those damn liberals, those damn elitists, those damn dirty hippies, all those pregnant welfare moms, all those uppity coloreds, and those god damn faggots.  Their cities can go to hell as far as we’re concerned…

…what is that to us?  But when you give power to a man who thinks he’s entitled, he’s going to act like he thinks he’s entitled to use it as he damn well pleases.  And now you’re on his shit list too, because you dared to complain.

It’s said that propaganda doesn’t fool anyone, so much as allow people to fool themselves.  Ronald Reagan got himself elected saying "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, `I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’" For years now the talk radio babblers have been telling the Constituency Of Resentment that "Government Isn’t The Solution, It’s The Problem".  And of course it was…it had to be…once Uncle Sam Uncle Sam started telling them that they had to start treating the coloreds, and their women, with respect and even a little basic human decency.  Next thing you know it’ll be the faggots too.  Fuck that shit.   So they put a cheap bar stool loudmouth asshole in the Whitehouse with the same contempt for government they had.  Which was great…just great…as long as it was only cities full of darkies in states with democratic governors that had to suffer for it.

Except now it isn’t.

"I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response is going to be slower," she said Monday. "The real victims here will be the residents of Greensburg, because the recovery will be at a slower pace."

Sebelius said about half the state’s National Guard trucks are in Iraq, equipment that would be helpful in removing debris, and that the state is also missing a number of well-trained personnel.

"The issue for the National Guard is the same wherever you go in the country. Stuff that we would have borrowed is gone," she said

Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, the state’s adjutant general, said the Kansas National Guard was equipped at only about 40 percent of its required levels, down from the 60 percent that it had at the start of the war.

Well you got what you voted for: a government that doesn’t work…a government that Can’t Help when you need it to, because Junior needs his toys over in Iraq, because it was either put the likes of him in power, or let the darkies, the heathens, the women, and the faggots have a share in the American Dream too. 

Good thing the tornado sirens still work. 

Andrew Sullivan discovers Jack Chick…

A 1984 evangelical Christian cartoon pamphlet, helpfully put online here. Don’t tell Hewitt. It could upset the Popular Front. (I think the racial stuff is out of date.)

Try some of his anti-Catholic pamphlets while you’re at it.  Oh…and the anti-Gay ones.  My favorite, the one that really lets you see that open sewer Chick calls a conscience, is the one where he tells the parents of kids who have commited suicide that their children are burning in hell…

Wow…you actually can be too big to make a black hole…

In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported yesterday that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.

The cataclysm — a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives — may be an example, they said, of a completely new type of explosion. Such a blast, proposed but never seen, would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilize future stars and planets.

The star in question wasn’t on the fringe of what we can see, toward the beginning of time, but "only" about 240 million light years away. 

Astronomers have been following the star since last September, when it was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The discovery was made by Robert Quimby, a University of Texas graduate student, who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Tex., to troll for supernovas.

The star bears an eerie resemblance to Eta Carinae, a star in our own galaxy that has been burbling and bubbling in the last few centuries as if getting ready for its own outburst. The observations suggest that the troubled and enigmatic Eta Carinae, thought to weigh in at about 120 solar masses, could blow up sooner than theorists have thought. Mario Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute…

Hey…I work there! 

…who was not involved in the research, said Eta Carinae’s death could be “the most spectacular star show in history.”

They are still haggling over what happened to cause such a massive blast, but they have an interesting idea.  The star was so big, that it created matter/antimatter pairs.  Specifically, electrons and positrons…

Supernovas come about in two basic ways: explosions of small stars about one and half times the mass of the Sun, which are known as white dwarfs and are uniform enough to serve as cosmological distance markers; and the collapse of the cores of more massive stars into black holes or neutron stars when their thermonuclear fuel has run out.

The astronomers first suspected that the supernova’s dramatic output was caused by the shock wave of a white dwarf exploding into a dense cloud of hydrogen. When observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory failed to find enough X-rays to support that idea, the group was forced to consider an alternative: that the luminosity was produced by the decay of radioactive nickel. But to match the observations, the star would have had to produce 22 solar masses of radioactive nickel — way off scale for the core collapse model.

In desperation, the astronomers turned to a theory proposed nearly 40 years ago by Zalman Barkat of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues. The intensity of radiation in the cores of supermassive stars could be so great, they said, that pairs of electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, would be created.

“That is bad news for the star,” Dr. Livio said, explaining that the disappearance of the radiation would sap the core’s energy and cause the star to collapse. But in this case the star still has plenty of fuel and blows up.

“The core is still composed of explosive oxygen,” explained another of the paper’s authors, J. Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas. “The oxygen ignites and blows the star to smithereens with no remnant, no black hole left.”

Too big to make a black hole…or anything else!  Damn.  It just blows itself apart.  Damn!

The thinking is that there were a lot of these super massive stars around back near the beginning of time.  The stars back then, they think, got really, really big.  But so big, they figured, that most of the heavier elements they made had to be trapped in the resulting black hole at the end of their lives.  And yet astronomers see a lot of heavy elements in the light from those distances.  A lot more of it then they’d expected to.  So something had to be seeding the early universe with it.  Maybe this is what was doing that.  Maybe there is an upper limit to how big a star can be in order to make a black hole, and maybe those early super massive stars at the beginning of time didn’t actually make any.  Instead they started making antimatter at some point and blew themselves apart before they’d even exhausted their fuel.

Some really neat animations of the explosion, one an artist’s conception of how the explosion took place, and the other from actual observations, first from the PAIRITEL telescope, then an infrared adaptive optics image from Lick Observatory, then Chandra imagery, over at the Chandra project Here. 

They say, like a bunch of Johnny One Notes, that the "Gay Agenda" is an assault on families.  They say it with the utmost sincerity, while driving their knives into the hearts of families of gay children.

Peterson Toscano has posted one of the most moving blog entries that I have ever read, about what he learned John Smid’s Love In Action was doing to his parents, while it was busy doing it’s work on him…

On a recent road trip with my dad I asked him what it was like when he and my mom came to Memphis for the Family and Friends Weekend at LIA, a concentrated family encounter. Here is some of what he said.

We went to the meeting and had no idea of what we were going into. We met a lot of parents in the same category. Lots of kids had no parents there.

Everything seemed to be on the up and up at first. Yeah, but we found out these things aren’t so. I said to them, "You can’t change a zebra’s stripes." They didn’t go along with me, and they were very aggravated with me for saying so. Some people go through two colleges and they don’t have common sense. I hate when people keep things locked up.

They made me feel that I failed you. That’s how I felt after they got through with me. That’s how they made all the parents feel.

Years after I left LIA and I began to write my play, I interviewed my younger sister, Maria, about that time. What she told me broke my heart. She said that when our parents returned home from the Family and Friends Weekend, they were devastated. They didn’t eat right or look right. They acted sad and depressed. This went on for weeks. My sister felt so concerned that she actually called Love in Action and asked, "What did you do to my parents?!" She felt frustrated by the lack of concern or comprehension she encountered from the staff.

Lance Carroll could say a few things I reckon, about that stunning lack of concern or comprehension…

My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.

Of course John Smid was nowhere to be seen while all this was going on in Lance’s family.  It isn’t just the kids John is heart-wounding. He puts his little mark on the hearts of vulnerable parents too, and other family members, and leaves a wreckage strewn landscape behind he doesn’t even bother looking back on as he walks away from it.  Perhaps he’s afraid of turning into a pillar of salt.

…a world where hate was held accountable for the damage it does.

So the Matthew Shepard Act passed the House last week.  Here’s a taste of what the right wing has to say about why hate crime laws are necessary …

…we move on to the condescending protection of "minorities" in the form of superfluous hate crimes legislation. The latest attempt has been named the Matthew Shepard Act, in honor of a Wyoming meth addict killed in a drug deal gone bad. The fact that he happened to be gay apparently entitled him to more protection than your average straight meth addict.

Thank you, ABC News, and especially you Elizabeth Vargas, for giving gay haters everywhere a way to pistol whip that poor kid’s memory forever, if not his actual body like they’d like to.

Almost immediately after the bill passed the House, president Nice Job Brownie threatened to veto it, saying that the laws "already on the books" were sufficient.  One of the most pernicious memes the religious right is putting out there regarding hate crime laws is that they’re unnecessary, because the violent crimes committed against gay people are already illegal.

It’s one of those pat little bits of dishonest rhetoric by which they poison the national discourse.  Yes, killing someone is already illegal.  But motive has always been a part of how killings are prosecuted.  It is more then simply determining the kind of punishment that fits the crime.  You have to know what crime was actually committed, before you can know the punishment that fits it.  Was the killing accidental?  Was it accidental but reckless?  Was it reckless in a depraved and indifferent way?  Was it intentional?  Was it committed in a heat of passion, or in a cold, calculating and deliberate way? This process of evaluating a criminal’s motive, and differentiating between them as to the charges and punishments applied works the same for just about every serious crime that comes before a court of law.  When the religious right argues that hate crime laws are thought crime laws, they are in effect arguing that four-fifths of the laws on the books today are also thought crime laws.

That’s not what they mean of course.  What they mean is that crimes committed against gay people should not be treated as what they are, but as something they are not.  Murder is murder is murder, they say.  But it isn’t.  Otherwise, why have so many different laws for it?  And where you really see the effects of hate crimes on the gay community, isn’t in the murders, but in the far more common, and often devastating to the survivors, assaults, beatings, gay bashings.

Steve Schalchlin over at "Living In The Bonus Round" posts about bringing the piano John Lennon composed "Imagine" on, to the home of a mother who lost her gay son to hate. 

Gabi Clayton called me on Wednesday to tell me that she had some very good news. She sent me the link to lennonpiano.com and said that they had contacted her to participate in an even to happen this next Tuesday at her house May 8, the anniversary of the death of her son, Bill.

Longtime readers of my diary know that I met Gabi at least 10 years ago over the net after having seen a picture of Bill. I also wrote and recorded a song — "Will It Always Be Like This" — about her and the whole incident.

The story of Bill Clayton is just heartbreaking…

Bill came out to us as bisexual when he was 14. He was afraid to tell us, because he knew that other kids had told their parents and that their parents had disowned them or reacted in other ways that were frightening. He had read the book I had loaned him "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives," and there were coming out stories in the book. Finally he worked up the courage to tell us and we assured him that we loved him and accepted him. He was so happy that he wanted to tell the whole world. We recommended a support group out at the college which I had just graduated from. Bill went to that group three times and stopped – he said he really liked it but that he was fine and didn’t need to go any more.

An older man had sexually assaulted him after one of the support group meetings.  Bill struggled afterwards with the trauma, and with suicidal throughts…

Bill finally told Sam, his best friend. He told Sam that the memories of that sexual assault were overwhelming him and that he was suicidal. He asked Sam not to tell anyone, but Sam put the friendship on the line and told me, because he didn’t want to lose his friend. Bill was relieved once we knew, and we reported it to the police and got Bill started with a therapist.

It took the police a long time to find the man. When they finally questioned him he confessed to exactly what Bill had said. Then he got a lawyer, plead not guilty at his arraignment, and managed to avoid jail and court until a month after Bill died. (He finally went to prison for 13 months.) So, Bill would see him around town — which aggravated the post-traumatic stress he was in counseling for. There were times when Bill would suddenly take a nose dive into severe depression for no apparent reason. Later we would find out that it was because he had seen this man on the bus or at the movies. Bill was so depressed and suicidal at one point that he spent some time in the hospital.

He stayed in counseling, and finally was getting back to being his old, impish self again. His mental health improved tremendously. He had a summer job doing computer and office stuff, and he loved it. He started looking forward to school again (after two rough years), and he felt like he had a future. Yes, he was back! He and his counselor agreed that he was done with therapy, and she closed his case with Crime Victims Compensation — on April 5th, 1995.

And then it all came apart…

On April 6, 1995, Sam and his girlfriend, Jenny, were walking with Bill near their high school to Jenny’s house to watch a video they had rented. Four guys — one of whom knew Bill and Sam because he was in the same high school (and had gone to their middle school before that) — followed them in a car and yelled things I will not repeat related to sexual orientation. Bill and his friends ignored them and decided to walk through the high school campus, thinking it would be safer because the gate was closed. The four guys drove off, but they parked the car nearby, because the next thing Bill and his friends knew, they came up on foot and surrounded them. They said "You wanna fight?" Bill, Sam and Jenny tried to walk away — they didn’t want to fight at all.

The four then brutally assaulted Bill and Sam, kicking and beating them both into unconsciousness while Jenny screamed at them to stop. It was broad daylight during Spring break.

When they regained consciousness a minute after the attackers left; Bill, Sam and Jenny ran to the school custodian’s office and called the police and then their families. They were taken to the emergency room where we met them. Bill had abrasions and bruises. They thought he might have kidney damage, but he didn’t. Sam was a mess too, with a broken nose and many bruises.

While we were in the emergency room, one of the guys who did the assault came casually walking through with two other friends, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. Sam saw him and Sam’s parents called the police. When they found him he confessed and told the police who the other guys were – they were all under 18 years old. The police treated it as a hate crime from the very beginning.

It did its work…

We thought he was going to make it – he seemed to handle things really well until after the rally, and then he crashed back into depression. He was suicidal again – it was too much. The assault sent him right back into the place he had fought so hard to get out of. He suddenly became depressed and suicidal, and we had to put him in the hospital again. While he was in the hospital he heard that a friend of his was gay-bashed at school in a nearby town.

After about 10 days he came home. We and his doctors in the hospital thought he had gotten past being suicidal. But Bill took a massive overdose on May 8th. Alec found him unconscious on the kitchen floor and had him rushed to the hospital, but they couldn’t save him.

And the attackers?  Well the police may have treated it as a hate crime from the beginning, but the courts sure didn’t…

The boys who assaulted Bill and Sam were finally sentenced to 20-30 days in juvenile detention followed by probation and community service and 4 hours of diversity training focusing on sexual orientation.

Hate crimes really are different in kind, from other crimes, just as manslaughter is different from murder one is different from terrorism.  That much is obvious from the overkill police often see in them.  But the religious right doesn’t want people to see it that way.  Partly, it’s because they don’t see it that way themselves.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…  In their eyes, gay people aren’t even human.  We don’t feel pain like real humans do.  We are sick, depraved, lower then animals.  Attacks on us simply do not do the kind of profound damage they otherwise do to real humans.  If anything, the gay haters think that crimes against us should be treated Less seriously then crimes committed against real people…as something tacky and graceless, that polite upright god fearing men don’t do, at least not in public anyway, but not rising to the level of an actual crime against a Person.  More like kicking a dog.  These are homosexuals after all. 

But gay bashings are more like rape then like common assaults.  For the victim, a gay bashing strikes a knife into the heart of their most intimate sense of sexuality and self.  And that is the intent.  And they are a kind of domestic terrorism.  It is that last quality that makes them particularly useful to the religious right, and why they emphatically don’t want the nation to become serious about combating anti-gay hate.  A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual.  Fearful homosexuals stay in the closet.  They don’t agitate for equal rights.  They don’t live openly.  They don’t hold their lover’s hand in public.  They are not proud.

This is what the fight against hate crime law is about.  This is why the gay haters are taking such a scorched earth attitude toward the Matthew Shepard Act.  When a gay person is murdered, the religious right can point to the seriousness of the crime and argue that a hate crime enhancement is meaningless.  When the killer is brought to justice they can say that the law already prosecutes murder, what is the point of adding a hate crime charge too?   But most gay bashings do not result in death, most are random and sudden attacks such as the one that left a same sex couple beaten and bloody on the streets of Scottsdale Arizona last year, when they’d dared to hold hands in public …

Scottsdale police are investigating an alleged hate crime reported by a gay couple who said they were jumped by as many as seven men outside a Scottsdale restaurant near McDowell and Scottsdale roads.

As they held hands and began to leave Frasher’s Steakhouse late Sunday, Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost said they were humiliated and beaten in the restaurant’s entryway.

Frost, 19, was taken to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he was treated and released. Frost received several staples to treat a wound on his scalp, and several stitches to seal other wounds to his face. 

Rolland, 28, suffered minor injuries.

The men, who had been dating for a couple of weeks, are seeking to press charges against their attackers – none of whom have been arrested as of Monday afternoon, according to Scottsdale police.

"My only hope is that they’re going to brag about it and tell their friends how tough they were," said Rolland, a native of France who lives part-time in Scottsdale.

"How tough is it to use seven guys to take on two guys, including one 19-year-old who weighs 120 pounds?" he asked.

Frost, a Scottsdale resident who graduated from Mesa Westwood High, said the attack was the second he endured in the past three years. When he was 16, he said, he was attacked by two teens and an adult in Mesa. One used an aluminum baseball bat.

The Sunday night incident was upsetting, he said, because no one from the restaurant said they saw anything, though the attack happened only a few feet from the front door.

Of course no one saw anything.  And George Bush and James Dobson would like it very much if this nation keeps right on not seeing anything. Except this:

Imagine.  Imagine a world, where there was no hate…

Via Brad DeLong…  Yes…the Internet probably plays its part.  But there is no doubt that a sizable portion of old media’s audience is being driven away from it, by the stench of rot.  Delong Quotes Tristero over at Digby’s Hullabaloo…

And in fact the sheer mediocrity of print columnists – Friedman – as well as their blithering stupidity – Brooks – surely must be a factor in the decline of newspaper readership… As for Jon Chait, well… he supported the war when he should have known better. There’s a myth that simply won’t die, that the horror we see today in Iraq was unpredictable. Here’s Nora Ephron’s version:

[Tenet and Powell] couldn’t have known at that time [Powell’s infamous UN speech] that the war would be such an unmitigated disaster; they surely couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t even be a July 4th sparkler found in all of Iraq…

Well, actually, they could have and should have. And so should have Chait. I suppose it’s not fair to dismiss someone’s entire corpus of opinion-making because they happened to make one itty-bitty mistake about something like an illegal, immoral, totally unjustifiable invasion of a foreign country that – no matter how depraved the leadership might be – never attacked the US and had nothing to do whatsoever with 9/11. But that’s just the way I am. After William Buckley called for all HIV positive people to be tattooed on their buttocks – yes, he did, you can look it up – it should have been quite clear to anyone with a brain that you could get more coherent political and cultural commentary from reading Mad Magazine than the National Review. Similarly, when Chait supported Bush/Iraq.

As I’ve said before, there is a serious intellectual crisis in this country. Bush/Iraq – especially the failure of the media to catch on before it was too late – is a direct consequence of that. That folks like Chait still command enough respect to have the opportunity to write cover articles for the New Republic – on any subject – while those who were absolutely right about this debacle from the start are still all but completely ignored by "respectable" opinion-making journalism should be cause for genuine alarm. Without truly intelligent, educated, and street-smart voices available to raise a… hullabaloo before it’s too late, this country is almost guaranteed to repeat the spectacular debacle of Iraq in the near future. And I don’t see enough of those voices in the mainstream political discourse.

To which DeLong adds: 

I remember Powell’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Wilkerson, saying that the night and he and Colin Powell worked on Powell’s speech was the worst night of his life–that they knew at the time that they were doing something very evil.

Yup.  And they did it anyway.  Tells you all you need to know about them.  And the fact that the mainstream news media actively looked the other way while they did it, tells you all you need to know about Them. 

How did it all come to this?  Well…

I think one of the most telling moments in Bill Moyers’ Iraq/media show was this one.

WALTER ISAACSON: We’d put it on the air and by nature of a 24 hour TV network, it was replaying over and over again. So, you would get phone calls. You would get advertisers. You would get the Administration.

BILL MOYERS: You said pressure from advertisers?WALTER ISAACSON: Not direct pressure from advertisers, but big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’

So, "big people in corporations" get to call up CNN and tell them what they should be doing with their news coverage.

If you haven’t watched the most recent Bill Moyers Journal, Buying The War, and you’ve got a strong stomach, you can watch it online, Here.  At least until the republicans manage to finally pull the plug on PBS…

Digby watches the republicans debate …starting with a riff off Keith Olbermann…

OLBERMANN: Let’s just sit here a moment more as we watch this. And this touches on the idea of regal qualities that were not seen in South Carolina. This is the prosession, this is the parade, these are tonight’s debaters. The ten candidates, filing out, just in fact to our right. We can see them from where we are seated. There is a coronation quality that just was not present in South Carolina.

FINEMAN: Keith, if you look at that picture and took away all of the writing and all of the words, and just had the image, could the American people tell that those were Republicans? I think the answer is yes. There is a hierarchical, there is, dare I say it, male, there is an old-line quality to them that some voters, indeed a lot of voters, find reassuring. And this is something that the Democrats need to understand. The Democrats are the “we are family” party, which is great, but this is the other side of the conversation and this is their home here. We really are in Reagan country.

Anyone remember how Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 presidential campaign on a theme of State’s Rights…in Philadelphia, Mississippi…the town where civil rights workers Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered?  Yes, it’s about old male superiority…but not just any old males…

But the "old guard" that so many people find reassuring isn’t just male, is it? The Democrats had a couple of other inappropriate people on that stage last week — a brown one and a black one. (Yet another example of that ridiculous "we are family" stuff.)

I think the Democrats know very well what "the other half of the conversation" is, don’t you?

I, for one, found it extremely "reassuring" that only three out of ten of the Republican candidates for president don’t believe in evolution. And only nine out of ten said it would be a good day if Roe v Wade were repealed. Hey, it could have been worse. 

Only nine out of ten?  Gosh.  They’re really getting liberal over there, aren’t they.

Okay, Gallery Three – The Shadows and Light Sessions, is up, Here.  You probably want to read the About The Images page, Here.  This is as I said, a younger me.  But I’m still pretty happy with the work I did back in the early 70s.  I can’t say in all honestly that I am completely comfortable with it. But it’s me. Looking at my own work, I often find myself thinking of something the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams is said to have remarked upon hearing his forth symphony performed for the first time: "I don’t like it, but it’s what I meant." Yeah. Pretty much.

On The Boardwalk, Ocean City New Jersey, Winter 1973

Oh look…another resignation…  And right before the hearings start too…

Embattled Interior official resigns post

WASHINGTON – An Interior Department official accused of pressuring government scientists to make their research fit her policy goals has resigned.

Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, submitted her resignation letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a department spokesman said Tuesday.

MacDonald resigned a week before a House congressional oversight committee was to hold a hearing on accusations that she violated the Endangered Species Act, censored science and mistreated staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

MacDonald was recently rebuked by the department’s inspector general, who told Congress in a report last month that she broke federal rules and should face punishment for leaking information about endangered species to private groups.

Interior Department spokesman Hugh Vickery confirmed MacDonald’s resignation but declined to comment further.

This is why the three branches of government are supposed to be equal and independent from each other.  And of course, why the republicans have been trying so hard to make them all into one great big party machine.  You have to understand…they don’t regard this sort of thing as corruption.  They hate the system precisely because it was designed to favor democratic over authoritarian governing, a premise they categorically reject.  The republicans of this day and age are anti-democratic authoritarian radicals.  This is not Goldwater’s republican party.