The cold war is over.  Get over it.

Love, Bruce.

Via Good As You… This ad apparently aired during an episode of the NBC TV show Heros last night. It’s a richly deserved dig at the eHarmony dating service, which doesn’t allow same-sex pairings. A business that makes its living selling folks the joys of love and romance while peddling cheapshit bigotry out the side door, probably isn’t all that serious about the love and romance it’s dealing out the front door either.

I hope it makes Lou Sheldon break out in hives…

A look back from Editor and Publisher at how the Great Satan of the Liberal News Media covered the event…

As presidential spectacles go, it would be hard to surpass George Bush’s triumphant ”Top Gun” visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln yesterday off the California coast. President Bush flew out to the giant aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia as the ”co-pilot” of a Navy warplane. After a dramatic landing on the compact deck — a new standard for high-risk presidential travel — Mr. Bush mingled with the ship’s crew, then later welcomed home thousands of cheering sailors and aviators on the flight deck in a nationally televised address.

The scene will undoubtedly make for a potent campaign commercial next year. For now, though, the point was to declare an end to the combat phase of the war in Iraq and to commit the nation to the reconstruction of that shattered country….

-Editorial, May 2, 2003, The New York Times.

The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.

Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”

This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003

And many others, either equally fawning or equally passive in their complete willingness to simply jot down all of President Junior’s talking points and pass them along as news, without so much as letting a peep be heard from the dissenters.  Oh no.  To read the New York Times back then you’d have thought there was no dissent anywhere regarding the threat Iraq posed to the world, or that it had weapons of mass destruction, much beyond a few dirty radical hippy leftists who nobody needed to pay any attention to.  It was "You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war…" all over again. except this time it wasn’t the William Randolph Hearst of our era doing it, but the Gray Lady herself.

Ah well…  The Times has yet to admit its culpability as a willing participant in the Whitewater smear campaign either…

Via Pam’s House Blend. Warning, this video is disturbing and violent. It is also the reality of life for gay people in Jamaica, a place that bills itself as “A premier caribbean travel destination”…a place of “Sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors…No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica.”

Watch the hearts beating faster…

The Jamaican public defender, while condemning anti-gay violence, averred that we gays…well…sometimes bring it on ourselves by…you know…being so brazen and not respecting the repulsion that others feel…

Public Defender Earl Witter resorted to the vernacular yesterday as he advised members of the gay community to “hold your corners”, and avoid flaunting their sexual preferences in the face of those who are repulsed by their behaviour.

Condemning violence in all forms, particularly against homosexuals, the public defender, however, warned members of the gay community that if they continued to shove their tendencies on others who found it repugnant, it might incite violence.

“It may provoke a violent breach of the peace,” Mr. Witter told The Gleaner yesterday evening.

… During the luncheon, Mr. Witter said that, as with most things, “tolerance has its limits” and gays and lesbians should be sensitive to the “repulsion that others feel” and should not be so “brazen”.

“What takes place behind closed doors between consenting males is ordinarily beyond the reach of the law so they (gays) should confine their activities to their bed chambers and not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. In other words ‘hold yu corner,'” Mr. Witter said.

…not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. Now…where have I heard that before…?

Okay, I’m going to actually link to Sullivan for this one.  I know…I know…  In blindly supporting Bush out of nothing more noble then a puerile contempt for democrats, progressives and liberals, for so many years, Sullivan has helped keep the time when the following stops being a horrific reality for gay and lesbian Americans just out of reach.  Even those of us blessed enough to live in places where our relationships are given some sort of legal status, can have it all go nightmarishly wrong the moment we step over a state line.  And if the republicans Sullivan has passionately supported for so long have their way, eventually nearly every fucking state in the union will have an anti same-sex marriage amendment in its constitution.  Just never mind that for a moment.  You want to know why we fight…why the struggle for same sex marriage is so important…?

I remember a story told by a friend during the plague years. He was visiting a dying friend in hospital and a couple of beds down the ward from his friend, the curtains were drawn around a patient. From behind the curtains, he could hear a man softly singing a show-tune. "Well, at least that guy’s keeping his spirits up," my friend remarked. "Actually," his dying friend replied, "the man in that bed died this morning and was taken away by his family. That’s his boyfriend. The family won’t let him go to the funeral or ever see his spouse’s body again. They’ve kicked him out of their apartment. It wasn’t his name on the lease. So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed. It’s the last time he’ll get that close to his husband. The nurses didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave yet. He’s been there for hours."

There it is.  Why we fight.  What our enemies are fighting to preserve.  It’s not about marriage.  It’s not about the bible.  It’s about keeping that knife in our hearts, and their right to twist it whenever they feel like it.  Preferably, right when our hearts are most exposed and vulnerable.  Because if we don’t bleed, they’re not righteous.

Hey Stu…you still think I’m too angry?  Still think I need to be a tad more closeted in order to get along with people?  Of course you do.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  Right?  It’s like I have this nasty disgusting little…personal issue…or mental disorder, as you’ve suggested a time or two…and as long as people like me just keep that disgusting part of ourselves under wraps we’ll all get along, won’t we?

So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed…

I’d tell you to go to Hell…but what the fuck, you’re already there.

Toastmaster: Gentlemen, pray silence for the President of the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.

(There is much upper class applause and banging on the table as Sir William rises to his feet.)

Sir William: I thank you, gentlemen. The year has been a good one for the Society (hear, hear). This year our members have put more things on top of other things than ever before. But, I should warn you, this is no time for complacency. No, there are still many things, and I cannot emphasize this too strongly, not on top of other things. I myself, on my way here this evening, saw a thing that was not on top of another thing in any way. (shame!) Shame indeed but we must not allow ourselves to become too despondent. For, we must never forget that if there was not one thing that was not on top of another thing our society would be nothing more than a meaningless body of men that had gathered together for no good purpose. But we flourish. This year our Australasian members and the various organizations affiliated to our Australasian branches put no fewer than twenty-two things on top of other things. (applause) Well done all of you. But there is one cloud on the horizon. In this last year our Staffordshire branch has not succeeded in putting one thing on top of another (shame!). Therefore I call upon our Staffordshire delegate to explain this weird behaviour.

(As Sir William sits a meek man met at one of the side tables.)

Mr Cutler: Er, Cutler, Staffordshire. Um … well, Mr Chairman, it’s just that most of the members in Staffordshire feel… the whole thing’s a bit silly.

(Cries of outrage. Chairman leaps to feet.)

Sir William: Silly SILLY!! (he pauses and thinks) Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have we been doing wasting our lives with all this nonsense (hear, hear). Right, okay, meeting adjourned for ever.

(He gets right up and walks away from the table to approving noises and applause…)

Ever have one of those moments?  Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have I been doing wasting my life with all this nonsense…  I remember my Ayn Rand days with about the same bewhildered emberassment that I remember my early teenage bible thumper days.  In my defense first, hey…I was raised in a Baptist household…okay?  Second, I can honestly say that the rarefied heights of my passion for all things scriptural occurred within months of my having a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment.  I guess I’m just one of those people who has to smack into every damn brick wall for himself, before he knows its there.

I was a passionate Randian right up until Ronald Reagan convinced me that an utterly unregulated market will happily drive itself off a cliff chasing after that one last dollar it hasn’t yet pocketed.  I devoured her books.  Re-reading them again after all these years is really, Really embarrassing.  She may be a good at plot and scenerio, but a writer of believable characters, let alone believable dialogue, she simply wasn’t.  I’ve read yaoi romance novels with less embarrassing dialogue then Rand’s.  And she never, never trusted her readers to understand anything.  Why simply make your point in the story’s action, when you can pound it into your reader’s head with a jackhammer.  She’s like a little bird perched on your shoulder while you read, constantly chirping in your ear, Do you get it?  Do you get it?  Do you get it? 

So I remember very well, all her novel’s heroic capitalists, and her school girl idolization of the manly titans of industry.  I once heard romanticism described as an art form that wasn’t concerned with reality, but with the idealization of reality.  Probably the one and only thing I still have from Rand that I believe in, is that this is false, that romanticism is not only an idealization, but an essentialization of the world around us, and that no one who disconnects themselves from reality, can ever be a good romantic, because you cannot idealize something you do not understand.  Oh…had Rand only taken her own advice a time or two, and actually looked the fuck at what she was writing about…

Duke Cheating Probe Shows Failure of Post-Enron Ethics Classes

By Matthew Keenan and Brian K. Sullivan

May 1 (Bloomberg) — The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.

Thirty-four first-year candidates for a master’s of business administration degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program’s largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, in violation of the professor’s rules.

Business students are more likely to cut corners than those in any other academic discipline, several studies show. A Rutgers University survey last year found that cheating at business schools is common, even after ethics courses were added following scandals that bankrupted Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc.

"What is taught in a business program sometimes reinforces students’ tendencies to be entrepreneurial and results-oriented", said Timothy Dodd, 50, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke, in an interview from Durham, North Carolina. "Those sometimes aren’t the people who understand that moral means have to be used to achieve moral ends."

Well…duh.  The Baptist Boy in me would say that if they’re not getting their lessons on ethics at home, they won’t learn them in school.  But there have been good, bad, and indifferent families for generations, and I think the world worn middle aged guy I’m becoming has come to believe now, that the problem isn’t the home life a kid has, but that sharks simply gravitate to where the good hunting is, and a marketplace where ripping people off and bleeding them dry is not only legal, but an easy and respectable way of life, is going to attract a lot of sharks.

I’m old enough to remember when our economy had some regulation that made it hard for business to do that.  I can remember when folks who worked in the retail sector could afford decent if modest housing, a basic car, and still raise a family, pay their bills, put the kids through school, and take a short vacation to someplace once a year.  I was raised through most of my childhood by a single working woman who made nothing more then basic clerical wages all her life and I never went to bed hungry once, never walked out of the house without clean clothes on, and had everything I needed for school and my health provided for.  The bills got paid, we lived in a series of pretty nice garden style apartments, I got the usual gifts on my birthdays and at Christmas, and once a year we all went to the beach for a couple weeks.  When mom retired, she got a basic pension (you may have to look up that word ‘pension’) which combined with her social security and medicare gave her a pretty nice retirement right up to the day she died.

They called it trickle-down economics during the Reagan years.  A rising tide would lift all the boats they said.  So they freed big business from the shackles of the liberal welfare state.  And golly, a lot of businessmen are doing much better for it, aren’t they.  But I’m sure as fuck glad I’m not a kid today, being raise by a single mother trying to make ends meet on clerical wages.  I go to the store these days, and I see the faces of the people serving me behind the counter, being nickeled and dimed to death now and no, the tide didn’t rise, it went out and left a lot of boats stranded, which doesn’t make sense because people can’t spend money they don’t have and when they don’t have a living wage anymore they aren’t bloody likely to be buying stuff they can’t afford.  But what you have to understand about an unregulated marketplace, is that nothing, not even its own sustainability, matters more then the profit you can make Right Now.  The sharks will happily drive our economy and our country off a cliff chasing after that last dollar they haven’t pocketed yet, just because it’s there.

At some point, hopefully, the nation will have a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment, regarding the innate goodness of unregulated markets and we can start talking about how to put back together again, what the Reagan republicans started tearing apart.  It would be nice someday, to be able to walk into a store and not feel ashamed at being served by people who simply cannot make ends meet on what they’re being paid.

Rick Perlstein has a good blog going at Campaign For America’s Future that you should check out .  For some help loosing your appitite, read some of his posts on what he’s calling, E. coli Conservatives:

(Click here to learn why we call them "E. coli conservatives.")

I wrote here about how we found out how Peter Pan peter butter got poisoned: the company, months after the event, did a belated inspection that blamed a leaky roof. The FDA hadn’t been able to find that same leaky roof when it inspected fact two months earlier.

Neither the company nor the FDA, we know now, managed to notice what it took those evil "trial lawyers" conservative Republicans so love to hate to discover some three months after the fact: a dead rat, rat traps, and roaches, and more. Conditions worthy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

"Attorney Randall Hood of Rock Hill and 15 other attorneys were inspecting a ConAgra foods plant in Slyvaester, Ga., in April when they found the dead rat, bird fathers inside the plant, roaches on raw peanuts and other things ‘consistent with salmonella contamination,’ according to a court document."

Ask your Aunt Millie to stop voting for Republicans. If she won’t, at least tell her to skip the Skippy.

Now go back and read that post I put up a few days ago, where David Broder waxes happily about the times he spent eating quail with Karl Rove.

[Update…] Fixed the link to the Broder post.  Sorry…

Via Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, comes the news that Exodus has repudiated, at least in part, the work of Paul Cameron…

This article has been removed due to the inaccuracies surrounding the research of Paul Cameron.

This statement from the web page of Exodus International was the result of intense work of the web page www.exgaywatch.com

The web masters of the site noticed that Exodus International was using Cameron’s work, so they made it known.

Exodus International removed the information and the head of the group, Alan Chambers, also said:

I appreciate EGW’s tremendous research skills. I saw your post on Exodus using Paul Cameron’s research and was embarrassed. We do not support the work of Paul Cameron nor desire to use flawed research. A member of my staff will remove these articles today and post a retraction. In the coming months we will be doing a survey of the content on our site to determine what if there are other articles or links that need to be removed.

Forgive me for being cynical, but I am not sold.

I can’t imagine why not.  A. McEwen goes on in his post to list the various folks in the ex-gay/anti-gay movement who use, and keep on using, Cameron’s junk science, and who have helped its zombie lies (because they seemingly cannot be killed no matter how many times they are refuted) become part of the political discourse surrounding homosexuality and the rights of gay people.  He ends the post with this:

In using Paul Cameron’s work, Exodus International helped to create a monster; a cottage industry of groups and spokespersons who used his studies to stroke the egos and prejudices of people against the gay and lesbian community and hinder the passage of pro-gay laws.

Exodus International owes the gay and lesbian community big time. And if it is serious about its repudiation, then Exodus International should take more of a key role in killing the monster it helped to create.

Meanwhile, over at Ex-Gay Watch, they’ve just posted several examples of NARTH’s use Cameron’s junk science.  NARTH, some of you may recall, positions itself as a purely secular organization of mental health professionals in opposition to the APA on the issue of homosexuality.  But they can’t claim the mantle of science for their work, and willingly and deliberately make use of the work of a fabulist like Cameron.  When you see crap like this, you have to know they know full well that they are spreading lies…

For our first example, NARTH member Ross Olson sent a letter to the Pediatric Annals, a letter that was published on NARTH’s web site (I don’t know if that letter was ever published by Pediatric Annals). In that letter, Olson criticizes an article that described a thirteen-year-old transgender MTF. Because the original article described the teen’s sexual activities, Olson jumped to the conclusion that the teen was being sexually abused, and that allowed him to bring up the familiar charge that ties homosexuality to pedophilia. For support, he cited Cameron’s “research” as though it has been presented in a professional journal. Here’s the screen-shot of that paragraph:

This citation is one of the more amazing ones I’ve ever seen. The Journal of the Family Research Institute? It doesn’t exist, at least not as Olsen implies. The link actually goes to a quasi-monthly newsletter that Cameron published for several years called the Family Research Report (hence the “FRR” in the URL). It’s not a journal by any stretch of the term, let alone a peer-reviewed one. Maybe Dr. Olson aspires to be the Dr. Cameron of pediatrics.

But NARTH, claiming its opposition to homosexuality is not religious, but only based on the science, would find it far more difficult to walk away from Cameron then Exodus could.  Exodus at least, can at least plausibly stand pat on its religious fundamentalism.  NARTH insists it is only following the science.  But ever since the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, NARTH has been nothing more then a refuge for reactionary anti-gay gasbags, who keep insisting that homosexuality must be harmful, because their bar stool prejudices keep telling them it must be.  They can’t repudiate Cameron, because without his junk science, all they have left is their animus and contempt.  At least Exodus has its religion.

Walking though my Baltimore neighborhood
high as a kite on Galliano and Bahia Gold cigar
walking, dancing, strolling
seeing
my cameras safely tucked away at home
only my eyes to see tonight
the images beckon
everywhere I look
everywhere
everywhere
Here.  Here.  And…Here!
Look!  Look!  See!
but it’s for my eyes only
tonight
you can be the guidebook
soul set free to fly
tonight
Alive
the little rowhouses
brick walls stare silently back indifferent
lights in the windows
stars above
the moon shines
shadows and light
the images, everywhere
everywhere
just for me
I see it all
constant craving
but just for my eyes only
tonight
just for me
just for my eyes
tonight
thank you, whatever you are
ominpotent indifferent creator
or nature itself
that brought me into the world this way
the way I am
with these eyes
thank you thank you thank you thank you!
for these eyes
for these visions
for this need
am I mad?  No.  Just…blessed.

The Rehoboth Beach one has been up almost five months now and my goal since starting to work in Apple’s Aperture software was to have a new one up every quarter or so.  But what really motivated me was a conversation I had with my Friday happy hour pals in D.C. 

Jon Larimore, a dear old friend and former sysop of the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS once upon a time, had weeks earlier paid me some of the best complements I’ve ever had on my photography and my photographic eye, when he viewed the Rehoboth Beach gallery.  What made his complements especially delightful for me is that he once worked for the National Geographic Society, and all his working life there he was swimming in some of this world’s absolutely first rate photography.  He knows good photography when he sees it.  Well…last Friday some friends who’d been with us to Rehoboth Beach came to the roving happy hour and I finally had a chance to ask them about the Rehoboth gallery.  One of them took me aside during the evening, asked some questions and made some observations that really convinced me he was getting what I do, at the level of someone who is really into photography.  He saw it.  And what was more, he really liked what I was up to.  Not everyone who appreciates photography is going to like my photographic voice.  They’re just not.

Well…Jon later told me that the guy works for the Smithsonian Institute, and he knows from good photography too.  So I told them before the evening ended that I’d be putting up a new gallery soon.  This is what I’ve been working on, between weekend household chores, here at Casa del Garrett yesterday and today.

This next one is from a book I tried to do back in the mid 70s.  Back then the options for self publishing photography books were limited and you really needed money to pull it off, which I didn’t have much of.  So I devised a scheme for hand binding a book of photos that consisted basically of pages of silver paper photos (we didn’t have PCs back then. let alone photo quality ink jet printers) dry mounted on archival board.  I hand made every one, and I think I sold like about a dozen of them before giving up.  Nowadays I could use any of dozens of Internet companies that let amateur photographers create their own photo books on a limited production basis.  Even my photographer’s software, Apple’s Aperture, now has a built-in system to let you create and publish your own photo books.

But I was really proud of that first effort, vanishingly small as its print run was, and my basic style and the themes in my photography have not changed much over the years.  I called that first book, Shadows and Light.  If you saw the first gallery I put up here, the one of Philadelphia images, you saw my pure photographic voice there, as it’s matured over the years.  You can see the distance from the twenty-something photographer who did Shadows and Light back in 1975 to the Philadelphia gallery in late 2004 in the sure footed way I do it now.  I know what I’m doing.  I still don’t have words for it, but I’ve learned that a graphic artist doesn’t need words to understand themselves.  That’s why we’re graphic artists as opposed to writers or poets.  We deal in imagery.  And looking back on those early images, which is what I’ve been doing lately for my Big Scan project, I’m really pleased with how well most of them hold up.  I sure can’t say the same for my early efforts and painting and cartooning.  Those embarrass me.  But the photography I did as a young man still holds up, at least to my eye.  I know what I’m doing.  I’ve been doing it for decades now.  Mostly.

So the next gallery is going to be from the Shadows and Light sessions, circa 1973-75, when I can finish scanning enough of it in to make a decent gallery out of.  Expect it sometime this coming week.  It’s a younger me.  But the voice is there, sure and certain.  That really amazes me in retrospect.  I went through a period of time when I just put my cameras away and didn’t touch them for years because I was sick of looking at what I was seeing in my photography.  It was a bad time for me.  But time passes, the universe expands and cools, and I picked my cameras back up again, around 1998, because sooner or later I just had to. 

Hotel Windows – August 2004

Store Window – August 2004

Walnut Street – August 2004

Installing a new lawnmower blade after the old one gets worn out and dinged will make cutting your grass easier, I’ve discovered.  Also…common lawn grass has the ability to wear down steel.

I have an electric lawnmower.  It would hardly do for most suburban lawns but it feels a tad extravagant for the one in the back of my little brick rowhouse.  But two years of trying to cut grass with a basic pushmower sold me on a power one.  Now I just run the mower back and forth over my little patch of grass a few times and I’m done, all but the trimming which I do with my electric weed whacker.   Spring is here in Baltimore now, and the grass in my back yard has already needed mowing once.  But when I got the mower out this year, it seemed unduly sluggish.  I could hear the motor bogging down on grass it shouldn’t have had to work at cutting.  So I stopped, unplugged, and took a look at the blade and was just amazed…I had no idea grass can make steel dull like that in just four years.  Well…I dinged the blade once also, when I pushed the mower too close to the sewer tap that sticks out of the ground in my back yard near the alley, just far enough that a couple weeks worth of grass growth hides it almost completely from view.  I should plant flowers around it or something.  But I swear just cutting the frigging grass for four summers made the rest of the blade about as dull as the edge of a quarter. 

So I went looking around for a new one and none of the local hardware stores carried that particular blade, including the store I bought the mower from.  I guess I’m supposed to buy a whole new lawnmower when the blade wears out.  I ended up googling the part number and finding new blades on, of all places, Amazon.Com.  Somehow buying lawnmower parts where I buy my books doesn’t quite compute.

Disorderly conduct now means writing something that disturbs other people…

Student writes essay, arrested by police

High school senior Allen Lee sat down with his creative writing class on Monday and penned an essay that so disturbed his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct.

"I understand what happened recently at Virginia Tech," said the teen’s father, Albert Lee, referring to last week’s massacre of 32 students by gunman Seung-Hui Cho. "I understand the situation."

But he added: "I don’t see how somebody can get charged by writing in their homework. The teacher asked them to express themselves, and he followed instructions."

Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.

The youth’s father said his son was not suspended or expelled but was forced to attend classes elsewhere for now.

Today, Cary-Grove students rallied behind the arrested teen by organizing a petition drive to let him back in their school. They posted on walls quotes from the English teacher in which she had encouraged students to express their emotions through writing.

"I’m not going to lie. I signed the petition," said senior James Gitzinger. "But I can understand where the administration is coming from. I think I would react the same way if I was a teacher."

Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio said the charge was appropriate even though the essay was not published or posted for public viewing.

Disorderly conduct, which carries a penalty of 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine, is filed for pranks such as pulling a fire alarm or dialing 911. But it can also apply when someone’s writings can disturb an individual, Delelio said.

"The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content," he said.

But a civil rights advocate said the teacher’s reaction to an essay shouldn’t make it a crime.

"One of the elements is that some sort of disorder or disruption is created," said Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. "When something is done in private—when a paper is handed in to a teacher—there isn’t a disruption."

(emphasis mine) I hear they’re going to pass a new law against Disturbing The Peace Of The People In Charge.  They say the penalties will be severe.

Well now we know who’s to blame for all those darkies swarming over our borders…

Utah Republican Blames ‘The Devil’ For Immigration

If you really want to blame someone for trying to destroy the United States, point the finger at… Satan?

The devil, Lucifer… whatever you want to call it, one Utah Republican says it is he who is trying to bring the USA down.

And Satan’s apparent weapon of choice: Allowing illegal immigrants to cross the border.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah County District 65 Chairman Don Larsen has submitted a formal resolution to oppose the devil’s plan to destroy the country — to be discussed this weekend at the Utah County Republican Convention.

“In order for Satan to establish his ‘New World Order’ and destroy the freedom of all people as predicted in the scriptures, he must first destroy the U.S.,” Larsen’s resolution states. “[It is] insidious for its stealth and innocuousness.”

Larsen’s proposal to defeat Satan? Close the borders to illegal immigrants to “prevent the destruction of the U.S. by stealth invasion.”

Somebody wake me back up when the voters start electing grownups again…

We normally think of "High Broderism" as the worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. But in reality this is just the cover Broder uses for his real agenda, the defense of what he perceives to be "the establishment" at all costs. The establishment is the permanent ruling class of Washington, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. Democracy’s messy, in Broder’s world, and passionate voters are problematic. It is up to the Wise Old Men of Washington to implement the agenda, and the job of the voters to bless them for it. When the establishment fails, the most important issue is not their failure, but that the voters might begin to lose faith in and deference for their betters. Thus, people must always be allowed to save face, no matter what their transgressions, as long as they’re a part of his permanent floating tea party.

While this basic attitude isn’t unique to Broder, his apparent lack of interest in the actual details of policy makes him a more absurd figure than some. For him it’s not about results, but about the right people being in the right places. It is terribly elitist in all the wrong ways. Arguments can be made for certain types of elitism – you do want a brain surgeon conducting brain surgery – but Broder’s elites are simply aristocrats. It’s their town.

This has been another edition of What Atrios Said… 

From our Department Of Helpful PSAs…

They have like…ten innings in football…right…?