Protest Against Conversion Therapy In Palm Springs
This is a friend’s MySpace bulletin. Daniel writes for Ex-Gay Watch which you should be reading regularly if you aren’t already. If you live in the Southern California area please consider adding your support to this protest on Saturday September 23rd in Palm Springs from 7-9am.
For those of you who don’t live in So Cal please pass this along to your friends in the area who may be interested.
Focus on the Family is having a one day workshop in a suburb of Palm Springs to promote their lies about "curing" gay people. The event is Saturday Sept 23rd and there’s a group of people from my website www.ExGayWatch.com who will be there protesting outside the host church from 7-9am which is when people arrive at the conference for check-in. Very few people who actually want to be "cured" attend, most tend to be parents who want to push their gay child into a conversion program. Signs I’m making up include:
exgay therapy is child abuse (most people attending the conference are parents of gay kids)
You are the parent of a gay christian
love needs no cure
caution junk science ahead
Don’t psychologically torture your child
Exodus deceives by omission
Focus: Stop antigay politics
don’t oppress us because you can’t reconcile your faith and sexuality
science and reality win out (the name of the exgay conferene is "love won out")
I reconciled my faith and sexuality
If you’re interested in joining us please email me at daniel@exgaywatch.com
Kinsey never said that ten percent of the male population is gay. What he did was construct a range from the behavior of his subjects, the Kinsey scale, which went from zero, which was exclusive heterosexuality, to six, which was exclusive homosexuality. It was only later, as gay people began to fight against oppression, that the data for 5s and 6s were combined to come up with a figure of ten percent. Kinsey never said it, but when you looked at it that way it was a figure that made sense to throw out there. Ten percent of the male population is exclusively homosexual, or nearly so.
It’s a figure that the kook pews have challenged ever since, because it is in their interest to claim that we are a tiny, insignificant, worthless part of the human family. Except when we’re the vast conspiracy of militant homosexuality that controls the news media, Hollywood, liberal churches and the democratic party. Then we’re a looming menace. But a looming menace mind you, that only amounts to 1, or maybe 2 percent of the human family at most.
Almost one in 10 straight men on the `down-low,’ study finds
PHILADELPHIA – Almost 10 percent of men who say they’re straight also happen to be having sex with men, according to a new study, one of the largest ever to specifically address "down-low" behavior.
The study, based out of New York City, found that most of the down-low men did not use condoms and that 70 percent were married. Researchers said they hoped their report would change the way doctors asked patients about their sexual behavior.
"Everyone talks about it, but it’s the first time I’ve seen data on this issue," said Thomas J. Coates, a psychologist who specializes in sexual behavior at the University of California at Los Angeles. Even so, he said the numbers were probably low estimates.
"It’s probably above this, because it’s hard to get people to admit to this kind of behavior."
What’s really interesting about Kinsey’s figures is how well they’ve withstood the test of time, considering what it was he actually looked at. All he studied was the behavior of his subjects over a three year period. But why three? Why not just one? Why not five? It’s like Mendel and his damn beans. Mendel was the monk who did that now famous experiment in which he showed how traits are inherited. For his subjects, he used a bean plant, and he tested for seven characteristics. And as it turns out, seven is the most you can cleanly test for, without getting some cross linkage on the genes, because the bean plant only has seven genes. But Mendel knew nothing of genes. As Jacob Bronowski once put it, you can be elected abbot of your monastery, you can even be elected pope, but you can’t have that luck. Mendel had obviously done some background work with his beans prior to his experiment, which told him which traits he could test for. Kinsey had to have done something similar, that told him three years of sexual history was all he needed to know about his subjects, to have a good idea of the whole.
Clearly, the stigma surrounding homosexuality is still strong here in America, and in particular in minority communities. While many of us are now able to live lives out and proud, many cannot. The religious right would like to bring the stigma back down on all of us in the name of righteousness and morality. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. Homosexuality they say, brings only disease and pain and suffering. No. Shame does. Here is what shame buys you.
"We found that those who identified as straight but had sex with men were also less likely to be HIV tested within the last year and less likely to use a condom," than men who said they were gay, said Preeti Pathela, a research scientist at the department.
Pride has the power to lift us out of the gutter of self abuse and self destructiveness. And that is why the religious right hates gay pride. In the relentless logic of knuckle dragging fundamentalism, if we’re not bleeding, they’re not righteous.
So I’m strolling the main street of little middle of nowhere Hillsville Virginia late last night and I come across a small group of teens sitting in front of one of the main street shops with their friggin’ laptops out busy with something. So I walk over to them and ask if there is a hotspot nearby. Yes, says they. The city of Hillsville put one up in the office building next to the courthouse. Anyone can access it from anywhere along mainstreet.
Wow. Well that’s better then Baltimore can say. But this is good. Now kids who are growing up in the middle of nowhere, can get to everywhere whenever they want.
Oh…and the price of gasoline down here is two dollars and nineteen cents a gallon.
By late Sunday night, I was in so much pain I became delirious. Terry took me back to the hospital, where an emergency-room doctor took one look and admitted me. It wasn’t the flu after all—I had bacterial meningitis, a potentially life-threatening infection of the fluid in the spinal cord and the fluid that surrounds the brain. While I was curled up in a ball on the bed, the doctor tried to ask me questions. But I couldn’t answer, or consent to medical treatment; I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. So the doctor turned to Terry—who was standing across the room, DJ at his side—and asked if he could make medical decisions on my behalf.
This is the nightmare scenario for same sex couples. One is left incapacitated in the hospital, while the other is denied even the right to be by their bedside, let alone give direction to the hospital staff. It’s what happened to William Robert Flanigan Jr., and Robert Lee Danial at Maryland Shock Trauma back in March of 2002. Though Flanigan had legal power of attorney for his partner Daniel, officials at the Shock Trauma Center insisted he would not be allowed his partner’s bedside. Only when Daniel’s mother arrived from New Mexico, was Flanigan allowed into Daniel’s room. By that time, Daniel had lost consciousness. Because Flanigan was not present during Daniel’s final four hours of consciousness, Flanigan was unable to tell Shock Trauma that Daniel did not want breathing tubes or a respirator. When Daniel tried to rip the tubes out of his throat, staff members put his arms in restraints. He died two days later.
Things turned out better for Savage and his partner Terry…
Terry quickly okayed a morphine drip (the nicest thing he ever did for me); he okayed a spinal tap (the worst thing he ever did to me); and okayed a course of powerful antibiotics. The doctors and nurses treated Terry like my spouse, like my next of kin—not just allowing him to remain at my bedside, but also empowering him to make crucial medical decisions for me in a crisis.
The next day I was sitting up, still in a great deal of pain, when the doctor came by. He directed his comments and questions to Terry, not to me; Terry was still in charge, still making medical decisions for me. The only thing I was in charge of was the button in my hand that delivered drops of morphine into my veins.
I was sent home three days later with a catheter in my chest, a cooler full of antibiotics, and a warm feeling in my heart. Wasn’t I lucky to have a boyfriend who cared so much for me? And weren’t we lucky to live in a place where our relationship was respected? The medical personnel didn’t have to treat Terry like my spouse, but they did. Our experience at the hospital left me feeling uncharacteristically optimistic.
Then the painkillers wore off.
Right. Go read the whole thing. If anything the experience of having their relationship treated with dignity and respect made the couple even more worried. What if… It could have been a nightmare. It could have literally killed Savage because absent Terry, the doctors would have run aroung trying to contact someone who was "legally family" and the time they lost doing it could have been fatal. It’s one thing to understand this theoretically, and another to actually live it yourself. They were damn lucky, and they both know they were damn lucky.
The gay haters claim all we have to do to prevent the potential heartbreak here is fill out the proper forms. But they want to bring the nightmare and the heartbreak down on us, because they hate us, because if we aren’t in pain, they aren’t righteous. So if they say same sex couples can protect themselves in one round about way or another you know right then and there it isn’t true. In fact, Flanigan and Daniel had filled out the proper forms and the hospital ignored them anyway. Only having the same right to marry as heterosexuals do, will put our relationships on the same playing field as theirs. Only an equal right to marriage will give same sex couples the kind of legitimacy they need in the eyes of others, whose snap decisions can mean life or death.
WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.
The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.
… Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion," he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.
In a letter sent to Martin Wednesday, Boxer said she was "dismayed that this report, which was done at taxpayer expense more than two years ago, and which concluded that localism is beneficial to the public, was shoved in a drawer."
Martin said he was not aware of the existence of the report, nor was his staff. His office indicated it had not received Boxer’s letter as of midafternoon Thursday. In the letter, Boxer asked whether any other commissioners "past or present" knew of the report’s existence and why it was never made public. She also asked whether it was "shelved because the outcome was not to the liking of some of the commissioners and/or any outside powerful interests?"
The report, written by two economists in the FCC’s Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. The broadcasts were obtained from Danilo Yanich, a professor and researcher at the University of Delaware, and were originally gathered by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The analysis showed local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of "on-location" news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. It was part of a broader decision liberalizing ownership rules.
At that time, the agency pointed to evidence that "commonly owned television stations are more likely to carry local news than other stations."
And you just know that evidence was skewed to fit a pre-ordained ideological belief as opposed to any actual examination of the facts at hand. So when someone later on Did examine the evidence and saw what really happens when you let big media companies monopolize the local airwaves, that evidence was thoroughly destroyed. It wasn’t true, because it didn’t agree with the party line. It had to be destroyed. They probably danced in the paper shreds afterward.
Big corporate media monopolization is the single biggest reason why tv and radio are so worthless nowadays. Thank god for the Internet. And now that I think of it, that might be why the big media companies and news networks hate Al Gore so much.
(Wellington) As leaders of New Zealand’s Presbyterian Church prepare to vote on whether to ban gay clergy all 500 members of the body which will decided the issue have received bumper stickers in the mail declaring that "gays are a cancer".
Two versions of the bumper stickers were sent to all members of the Presbyterian Assembly – the body that sets the Church’s policy and direction.
One sticker reads "Gays aren’t welcome in our church, help us let New Zealand know". The other says "Gays are a cancer in our church, let’s keep them out of leadership".
No one has taken responsibility for producing or mailing them, but church leaders say they had to have come from someone with access to the names and home addresses of Assembly members.
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism"
and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient"
cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church
as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history:
Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
TPMmuckraker September 12, 2006 02:46 PM: WPost Taps White House War Salesman for Op-Ed Spot: The big story in the New York Times’ Sept. 8, 2002 edition was headlined, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." That infamous article, by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, told the now-debunked tales of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, through the voices of lying Iraqi defectors and anonymous quotes by Bush administration officials. Most folks who read it probably can’t recall the details of the article. But few have forgotten one comment from an unnamed "hard-liner" administration official, paraphrased by the reporters:
The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.
It was memorable then for being such a clever and powerful turn of phrase. It’s memorable now because we know it was baseless — yet oft-repeated. And it’s important to remember at this moment because the man who wrote it, Michael Gerson, just got himself a regular column in the Washington Post.
With no apparent sense of irony, the Post announced on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that Gerson — one of the men who worked hardest to dishonestly connect al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in the public mind, and launch an invasion of Iraq based on the horrible events of that day — will join its op-ed team.
In the release publicizing its selection, Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt calls Gerson "an eloquent writer and provocative thinker." Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Take, for example, this eloquent and provocative line from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own." (We know now, of course, that’s not the case.)
Yep, that was Gerson’s. He was, in fact, the only speechwriter in the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), created to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the U.S. public. He was responsible for nearly every misleading statement that came out of the administration — at least the ones that sounded good…
What is more despicable…a totalitarian state that shuts down the free press, or a free press that sells its country out to totalitarians?
Steve Irwin would have known very well, how dangerous a wounded animal is.
For all his daring, he was actually a very careful man, which made his sudden death some days ago all the more shocking and tragic. His margin of safety came from his love of wildlife: he knew the animals he filmed…he studied their ways carefully. You have to figure he knew the risks of getting stung when he approached that group of stingrays. But as anyone will tell you, getting a sudden spike just right through the heart like that was a one chance in a million thing. In retrospect it would probably have been the one in a million thing that got him, if anything was going to…because he was a careful man around dangerous animals.
SYDNEY, Australia —At least 10 stingrays have been killed since "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was fatally injured by one of the fish, an official said yesterday, prompting a spokesman for the late TV star’s animal charity to urge people not take revenge on the animals.
Irwin died last week after a stingray barb pierced his chest as he recorded a show off the Great Barrier Reef.
Stingray bodies since have been discovered on two beaches in Queensland state on Australia’s eastern coast. Two were discovered yesterday with their tails lopped off, state fisheries department official Wayne Sumpton said.
Sumpton said fishermen who inadvertently catch the diamond-shaped rays sometimes cut off their tails to avoid being stung, but the practice is uncommon. Stingrays often are caught in fishing nets by mistake and should be returned to the sea, Sumpton said.
Michael Hornby, the executive director of Irwin’s Wildlife Warriors conservation group, said he was concerned the rays were being hunted and killed in retaliation for Irwin’s death.
He said killing stingrays was "not what Steve was about.”
"We are disgusted and disappointed that people would take this sort of action to hurt wildlife," he said.
Now…this is perfectly pointless. They’re stingrays for Christ’s sake. They don’t know. The ray that killed Irwin was simply and doggedly reacting to what it probably saw as a threat. They’ll do that. They’re animals. The ray was probably just defending it’s own, just behaving like you would expect one to behave when it perceives a threat.
And yet…so do we.
Natural selection doesn’t sweep away the old to create the new. It builds the new right on top of the old. So the human line got the expanded brain cortex. So we were blessed with a capacity for forward looking rationality. The ancient passions move within us, the old tides pull and tug at us, and yet we can think. We can reason. We can choose our course. It has given us a great advantage over all the other creatures on this good earth in the struggle for survival. And it has given us great power. Power which we loose utterly, when the old passions well up suddenly within us, and turn us away from what we are, to what we once were. I know some folks just hate hearing this but we all need to face it…we must face it…squarely: We are human. We are primates. We are mammals. And…we are predators.
The wounded animal is in all of us. To reach a calming hand out to it, stroke it gently out of its rage, we must first acknowledge it. Or it’ll drag us right back into the wilderness we walked out of, time and again.
OBSCENE. Both the Times and the Post note this morning that Bush laid two wreaths at ground zero last night in the company of George Pataki, Mike Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani. The Post goes well out of its way to remark that the event “left aside the partisan rancor” that…well, that Bush & Co. have enforced on the country since about 9-14.
If this event was so nonpartisan, where were Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton? Neither paper makes any mention of their having been there. I’m told that in fact they were not invited (they were at St. Paul’s church, where Bush went after laying the wreaths — and where there were apparently no photographers!!). In what sense does an event that features four Republicans but excludes the two senators who were representing New York at the time of the event, but who happen to be Democrats, leave aside partisan rancor?
I was in NYC during 9-11 and for two years after, and I remember Chuck and HRC (and House members of both parties) attending virtually all previous such commemorations. Today’s New York Post carries this photo of the four Republicans arriving on the scene. That’s the photo the White House wanted. Can you imagine how Chuck and especially HRC would’ve mucked that up for them?
Back in July 2003, I wrote a column in New York magazine discussing how Pataki had wanted, at the time, to dedicate the cornerstone of a new ground-zero tower…during the 2004 GOP Convention. It was an appalling idea, and worse yet, The New York Times editorial page endorsed it! Read the column. It has real relevance as we head into the guts of this election season.
If you have any doubt, watch a movie called Baghdad ER. It’s run on HBO. The doctors and nurses there are among the bravest people you will ever see. They save lives, but they also tell teenagers, hard core grunts, that their friends have died. If you don’t think that requires bravery, well, taking away a bit of the world from a kid who would be in college if he had the money, you’ve never seen it up close.
There’s a line in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven:"When you kill a man, you take away all he’s had and all he’s ever gonna have."
Well, when those nurses and doctors tell a kid that their friend has died, it takes away a part of what they’ve had, and that part never really comes back. When the parents find out, whether they’re Iraqi or American or British, you have taken away much of what they hoped to have, their future.
Bush neither understands that nor cares. He doesn’t get that his war is wiping away the futures of families.
War corrodes lives. I was reading the paper the other day when a mother writing in for advice says that her son’s wife had taken up with another man and was pregnant. The girl refused to tell the kid that she had cheated on him and the mother was in a quandry.
Now, imagine this: you survive a year in Iraq and what do you get as a prize, your wife pregnant by another man. What is his mother supposed to do? Say "honey, your wife is six months pregnant and you’ve been gone ten?" Sure, he comes home in one piece, but that wife he had is gone, probably with his money and a bunch of his shit. Hell, she’s been sharing the allotment money with this asshole while people shot at him.
I’m tired of being bullshitted. Terrorists aren’t coming here with nuclear weapons. They aren’t going to set one off in Baltimore harbor, because no state, not even a Sadr-run Iraq, would permit such a basic threat to their national security. Osama isn’t a threat to they US. You know, most of the stores near Ground Zero were killed by a lack of business, not Osama. People still shop there, still live there, life continues. Who the hell would let crazy people set them up for a nuclear cruise missile attack?
I’m tired of the cowardice masquerading as patriotism. Osama isn’t coming to blow up your mall, not coming to poision your water or release a dirty bomb. Because they can’t. They couldn’t even make the liquid chemical bombs they wanted to. The American muslim community responded to 9/11 by enlisting in the military, not joining Al Qaeda. AQ gets the misfits like Adam Gahan, who was pissed off at his mom, and when Delta snaps him up, he will be blubbering like a small child who banged his knee.
Americans can do great things when asked. Bush has never asked. Not even to rebuild Ground Zero.
Bush wanted to remake the world, but never had the courage to say so. He uses fear to maintain his power because it is who he is, a man scared of the world. He is weak and thus must maintain power by the basest means possible.
But by doing so, he denied Americans the one thing they expected from him: a measure of justice. Not in of the dungeon or the gulag, but of the courtroom. And they have not gotten that. Not even Osama killed in a last stand with Delta troopers gunning him down. Just dungeons, gulags and the excuse that these pathetic men are so dangerous that not only did they have to be tortured like animals, but now he needs a kangaroo court to try and execute them in. As if his word should end the traditions Americans have died for.
Bush and Cheney do not trust the courts or Congress. They trust power and nothing else. Most of all, they do not trust the American people and that will be their downfall. They are not kings, but men elected by and accountable to the people. No matter how many laws they break or mud they toss, will that ever change. They rule as the weak rule, by fear, fiat and suspicion. And the weak will fail, because those who live in fear can never truly gain the trust and respect of those they attempt to lead.
Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.
All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.
And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.
And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.
However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds — none of us could have predicted this.
Five years later this space is still empty.
Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country’s wound is still open.
Five years later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.
Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.
It is beyond shameful.
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial — barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field — Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.
Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won’t.
Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.
And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.
And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.
Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.
History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President — and those around him — did that.
They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.
The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ‘something to do’ with 9/11 is "lying by implication."
The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."
Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.
Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.
Yet what is happening this very night?
A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.
The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.
How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you — or those around you — ever "spin" 9/11?
Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.
So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
That’s actually a really fascinating juxtaposition of Starry Night and Mona Lisa. See…most vandals have absolutely no imagination. A really cruel trick would be to find a thing of beauty on your car window that now you have to destroy.
A year after the World Trade Center towers fell, I attended a software developer’s seminar at Sun HQ in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks away from the big hole in the ground. Our classroom was well up one of those tall financial district towers and faced out toward the Statue of Liberty. On a hunch one afternoon during break I strolled to the other side of the building and sure enough, there would have been a glorious view of the twin towers there, had they still been standing. A little hesitantly I brought that up to our instructor, a young lady who seemed more then willing to talk about it. I guess a lot of people in that city still needed to talk about it then. Yes, she said, she had been at work there that day. Yes, you could see the towers clearly. In fact, she said, her co-workers on that side of the building saw the whole thing happen.
She sat at her desk in the front of our classroom during the afternoon break, telling us all this matter of factly. And as her story came out, what struck me was how little people know about what is happening to them, when they’re right in the middle of it. In the smoke and dust and confusion of the evacuation, as her and her office mates left the financial district to try and, somehow, make their way back to their homes when the streets were jammed, the bridges closed to traffic and the subways not running, nobody knew that one of the towers had already come down (they thought all the smoke and dust was from the fires), nobody knew if the attacks were still coming, and nobody knew which direction safety was. She told us that it was when she and her co-workers got to the Brooklyn Bridge, that it really hit her how bad their situation was. Some of her friends implored her to come with them to Brooklyn where it might be safer, while others feared the bridge itself would be the next target. She parted ways with some of her friends there, not knowing if she’d ever see them again.
It’s five years later, and many people in this country still don’t really know much about what happened that day. In all the anger over ABC/Disney’s right wing porn flick The Path To 9-11 (produced, unsurprisingly, by a secretive right wing network within the network…), I keep waiting for someone to preach a little fire and brimstone that ABC or any TV network, would dare produce and air a goddamned Docudrama on the anniversary of a terrorist attack that killed more Americans then died in Perl Harbor. A docudrama for Christ’s sake! Hey…how about…you know…a plain old Documentary? You know…one of those things where the events are recounted, Factually, and people who were there tell their stories, and some kind of sense is made of the chaos of the event? But then I must be living on another planet these days. Documentary? Factual? Oh good heavens no…we’re a Television Network…it isn’t our business to actually keep Americans informed about anything…
But it’s not as though Dear Leader has been anxious to keep us informed either. In fact one of the biggest sources of disinformation about 9-11 has been the Bush white house and the republican party. And that isn’t merely because doing that dispicably serves them politically. Joshua Marshall, writing about the relentless lying by Dick Cheney, posted this from a reader…
Speaking as a historian, no historians won’t be puzzling, not at all. A future historian might state, matter of factly, "Vice President Cheney, one of the administration’s most ardent advocates of war with Iraq, continued to maintain that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda long after the existence of such a connection had been disproved. Critics at the time noted that the Bush administration was unable to respond to changing circumstances in the Middle East because, instead of responding to new information, it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Subsequently historians have concluded this approach to problems was the chief reason for the Bush administration’s multiple failures, of which the debacle in Iraq is the most stunning – and, because of its lasting impact on America’s standing in the world – unfortunate example."
…it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Yeah. That’s the republican party I know and love. Your Gay and lesbian neighbors of the Stonewall generation have been seeing it for decades. Hell, we’ve had our faces rubbed in it time and time again. Never mind the facts…here’s what we believe… But don’t just go by us. Ask the men and women of American science what it’s been like since the republicans took charge…
A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the space agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.
"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency’s 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA’s technical staff."
The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency’s 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.
And…about that age of the universe thing….
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
Of course. But…mind you…not a religious issue in the sense of…well…religion. But politics. The religion of the republican party is that it isn’t true, unless its in the party’s interest for it to be true. The god of the republican party, is the republican party.
Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.
I’ll tell you how. He was a party loyalist. No, no…don’t mistake him for a devoted creationist. That, he may well have been, but it wouldn’t have mattered. What mattered wasn’t his devotion to god, but to the party. That’s why he got the job.
The path to 9-11 didn’t start with Osama bin Laden. It didn’t even start at the signpost that read The Ends Justify The Means. That doesn’t get you there. There’s a turnoff from there marked We’re On The Side Of God, but that doesn’t quite get you there either. Somewhere down that road there is a signpost that reads: Truth Is What We Say It Is. Take that road and eventually you come to 9-11. And Iraq. And Abu Ghraib. And Guantanamo Bay. And Katrina. And our slowly warming planet earth. The Taliban are resurgent. Iraq is in chaos, and now we learn that Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who even thought about a plan for stabilizing it after the invasion. al Qaeda is more popular now in the middle east then it has ever been. Our military is stretched so thin it’s putting middle aged men and women back into uniforms they haven’t worn in years and recruting autistic teenagers. And as long as the Bush gang is in power, we are staying the course. Because truth is what they say it is. Except it isn’t.
The one supremely damnable thing about what the Bush gang has done to America is this: We had more then lies to fight the terrorists with, and yet they chose to fight with lies. But understand this one thing: lies were all they knew how to fight with. This serenely clueless mendacity on display didn’t just happen overnight. It didn’t even start with the stealing of the vote in Florida in 2000. Anyone remember the Brooks Brother’s Riot? For certain, there isn’t a single one of those "rioters" who couldn’t look you in the face, even now, and tell you that what happened was a spontaneous act of local voter anger, even as they know damn well it was orchestrated and performed exclusively by republican operatives. Truth is what we say it is… Or as one Bush gang member famously put it:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
What they did: Turn the moral power of liberty and justice for all into a dirty joke every tinpot dictator in the world, and even the Taliban, could laugh at. But that’s because they hated it too. The Bush administration is an American cultural catastrophe that was in the making for decades. Just ask your gay and lesbian neighbors. We’ve had to endure their single-minded march away from justice, away from reason, away from the reality based community, for decades.
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