Fred Clark has this wonderful picture up on his blog of a group of second graders, who were watching a presentation from an educator with the Philadelphia Zoo.  They had just introduced the kids to a great horned owl and the owl had just spread its wings when the photographer snapped…

Some months ago my brother and I were on the phone brainstorming vacation times and places.  I live on one coast, he on the other.  It would be neat, says he, if we could all meet somewhere, like the Bahamas, or the Florida Keys…or say, how about Jamaica?

Uhm…not: 

(Kingston) Students at University of the West Indies rioted as police attempted to protect a gay student and escort him from the campus.

The Daily Gleaner reports that the student had been chased across the Mona campus by another student who claimed the gay man had attempted to proposition him in a washroom.

Dozens of students joined in the case and the student sought protection in a university building.

The mob demanded that campus security turn the student over. With security guards badly outnumbered college authorities called in police fearing the gay man would be killed.

The Gleaner reports that a contingent of police in full riot gear battled with students in an effort to protect the gay man.

Students threw objects from all directions at the officers. At one point the gay man was stabbed by another student, although the injuries are reportedly superficial.

The crowd only began to disperse when one officer drew his gun and fired a shot in the air.

This is far from the first story I’ve heard in a year, of Jamaican mobs chasing down gays (or more to the point, people only suspected of being gay) with the intention of killing them.  Last January a mob chased a young man through the streets and off a pier to his death, shouting homophobic epithets at him all the while.  And in December the man who who ran Jamaica AIDS Support for Life, Lenford Harvey, was shot to death on the eve of World AIDS Day.  Three men broke into his house, tied up two of his housemates and then forced Harvey into their car.  His body was found two hours later.

The Jamaica tourism web site says of the island country that it is a place of "sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors.  No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica."  Especially when they’re being chased through the streets by bloodthirsty mobs no doubt.

I had my second round of sleep clinic exams last weekend, and I’ve been meaning to post a little about the overall experience.  But then I read this guy in the New York Times (registration required), and I see an experience eerily similar to my own…

Lights out. During the night, as I traveled between wakefulness and sleep, sending back streams of data like a space probe, the technician appeared and disappeared, adjusting my wires, and exiting my consciousness in a ring of light — the door to the corridor — like a spectral visitor, a goblin that only the sixth-sensed see. He monitored my voyage from a desk somewhere in the clinic, taking notes as I sped through the blackness.

The next morning, miles from a cup of coffee, my head damp with mist and dotted with what looked like old toothpaste, I filled out another form, asking, among other things, what I had dreamed about.

"I dreamed I was wired to a bunch of wires, in a threatening tangle, that pulled me back to a wall every time I tried to escape," I wrote, truthfully.

"Perhaps it was not a dream," the technician said, reviewing my responses, with a graveyard humor that was also chilly and serious. Working nights will do it to you.

Yeah…something like that.  After a second miserable night in the sleep clinic I began to wonder if they aren’t measuring how well I sleep, so much as how well I sleep with a lot of wires attached to me.  Going in I was assured that they had the wiring down to an art now, and it would not disturb me in the least.  Well, that might be true if you sleep like you’re in a coffin, but I turn this way and that all night long and you just can’t do that with wires attached to several different spots on your head, and on both legs.

You go in bearing a little overnight bag.  They lead you to a room that looks half like a cheap motel room but with a (way too) narrow hospital bed in the middle, that has lots of plugs and gizmos in the headboard.  I sleep like a cat, sprawled all over the bed.  I took one look at that sleep clinic bed and just knew it was going to be a bad night, even before they put the wires on.  Hamilton in the Times describes a similar room to mine, so I reckon they’re all doing it the same now…

Try this sometime.

Plaster about two dozen electrodes to your face and head and tape some more to your chest and legs. Give yourself two to three feet of wire on each, and attach the other ends to the wall next to a bed, so they tug tightly when you move. Make sure the bed is in a room that you’ve never seen before, something that looks like a hospital room disguised as a hotel room. A kind of Soviet-era bugged spy box for information gathering, with a video camera, pointed at the bed, blinking silently from the ceiling.

Then turn out the lights and go to sleep.

At least they didn’t need to cut any of my hair to get the head leads on.  They use a paste that’s conductive and which comes out easily in the shower with just a little soap and water (really).  They didn’t bother misting my head at Johns Hopkins to get the leads off…just pulled gently.  I was given pretty much the same questionnaire that Hamilton was, but nobody reviewed it with me.  The first time I did the sleep study I dreamed that a technician woke me up and led me into the Hopkins Director’s office, where the Director sadly informed me that they probably couldn’t cure my sleeping problems, but if I wanted to I could finish the night sleeping on his office sofa. 

This second visit was to calibrate a CPAP machine for me.  They got a small nose mask that fit me very well, and after a time I hardly noticed it was on me.  Putting it on though caused a weird sensation because they had the machine on when they did it.  CPAP stands for Controlled Positive Air Pressure…it’s supposed to keep your post nasal breathing passages pressurized just enough that they don’t collapse (which is what causes snoring) and make it hard for you to breath while sleeping.  They tell you to close your mouth when they put the mask on, but it’s instinctual to open it when your nose is being closed off by something, and for an instant I had air going in my nose and coming back out my mouth.  Felt…very funky.  My brother, who scuba dives, would probably have seen it coming.  But I sleep with my mouth closed normally, and once you close your mouth you don’t notice the pressurization. 

But I noticed the effect it had on my breathing immediately.  My sleep problem has been developing over a period of about a decade now, and I hadn’t realized how hard it had become for me to breath at night with my head on the pillow, until it was suddenly effortless again.  I’m actually starting to think now that I may get this problem licked after all.

And in researching my problem I’ve discovered that sleeplessness is no joking matter.  The consequences of chronic sleeplessness that I’m digging up out there, are actually starting to scare me a bit…

The mortality rate is significantly higher in patients with untreated OSAS [obstructive sleep apnea syndrome] than in patients who have received adequate treatment or who experience primary snoring. Several studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between OSAS and cardiovascular morbidity, including myocardial infarctions and stroke. Patients with coronary artery disease may experience myocardial ischemia during episodes of apnea.

Systemic hypertension is found in 70% to 90% of patients with OSAS, and 30% to 35% of patients with essential hypertension also have OSAS. Cardiac arrhythmias are another serious complication of OSAS. The most common pattern consists of repeated cycles of bradycardia during apnea followed by tachycardia with arousal that terminates the apnea. Other arrhythmias include sinus arrest, second- or third-degree heart block, premature ventricular contractions, and potentially lethal tachyarrhythmias.

Automobile accidents caused by sleepiness or degraded perception and response, or both, are another cause of morbidity and death. In addition to higher mortality and morbidity rates, patients with OSAS have more cognitive impairment and a poorer overall quality of life than people without OSAS. Other complications include peripheral neuropathy, gastroesophageal reflux, increased intracranial pressure, optic neuropathy, glaucoma, recurrent delirium, and exacerbation of cluster headaches.

Fuck! 

Okay…this explains why my HMO isn’t bellyaching about paying for all this.  Supposedly they got enough data from me at the sleep clinic last weekend to know how much pressure my CPAP machine will need.  Too little and the breathing problems come back.  Too much and I’ll keep popping awake like I always do now anyway.  I’m supposed to be contacted by someone about getting my machine this week.  If it works for me I’ll look into my surgical options, because I don’t want to be tied to a machine for the rest of my life.  Especially one that requires a visit to the sleep clinic every time it needs adjusting.  These sleep clinic visits are running about two grand a pop.  And I’m not ready to have my house, and especially my bedroom, invaded by a lot of weird looking medical equipment.

And how the hell am I going to attract a boyfriend if I have to sleep next to him looking and sounding like Darth Vader?  No…if this works, I’ll have the surgery.

Really good post from The Malcontent about Penn and Teller’s season premiere: 

For the past several years, ever since the landmark Boy Scouts of America v Dale case, I thought I had staked out a solid position: As reprehensible as I found the Boy Scouts’ discrimination against gays and atheists, I don’t cherry-pick the First Amendment.  I think that freedom of association is generally a good thing, because it means the assholes of the world will usually cordon themselves off where they won’t bother the rest of us.

But then came last night’s season premiere of Showtime’s outstanding series "Bullshit!"

Penn and the silent though emotive Teller laid bare the tangled relationship between the Boy Scouts and government, relying on an almost incalculable amount of public funds and accommodations to carry out Scouting activities.

See…this is the problem I’ve had with them when the case of James Dale came up.  You’d have had to be living in a cave not to know how much money the BSA sucks from the public teat for their own purposes.  Their annual jamboree, held with pentagon help and funding, costs the U.S. Taxpayer from what I’ve heard something between seven and eight million dollars every year.  That’s just the jamboree.  Atheists pay a portion to fund that thing.  So do gay and lesbian Americans, and the parents of gay and lesbian kids.  And without even they tiniest compunction or shred of shame, the BSA cheerfully takes that money and puts it into its pocket.

As an aside, a few years back when I worked in the Senate, I played a bit part in helping to turn back legislative threats to the Scouts’ dependence on government.  Even though I was accurately representing the position of my boss, I felt I could do so in good faith, based on my own experience in the Boy Scouts dating back to the early 1980s.  But as "Bullshit!" points out, the BSA was hijacked by the Mormon Church in the mid-’80s, and today I’m sickened that I didn’t know the full story before now.

You may have heard that Mormons have this reputation for being thrifty self sufficient hard working people.  That’s certainly the reputation I grew up hearing.  So either it wasn’t true all along or something’s changed since then, because now it seems as though self sufficiency is more like bigoted insularity, and thrift is not spending your own money so long as you can spend other people’s money.

The bottom line is, you cannot have private membership standards that exclude a good swath of the public while continuing to suck off the public teat…

Just so.  My feelings at the time of Dale were that that BSA had worked so diligently for so long to make itself into a national institution, and now that it had this special place in the law and in public funding, for it to suddenly claim it was a private religion based club when it suited its purposes to do so was such transparent hypocrisy it deserved to be thrown out of court.  They wanted that special place over all other youth organizations in American culture, that Norman Rockwell spot in American life.  Now they needed to accept that with that came an obligation to actually serve all American youth…not just the chosen few. 

That was the political issue as far as I was concerned.  But there was a moral one too, which made me furious.  The Boy Scouts were telling certain kids that they were lesser beings, destined to live immoral squalid lives simply as a matter of their religious beliefs, or their sexual orientation.  I don’t care what your religious beliefs are, to beat up on a kid’s deepest sense of themselves, their relationship to their creator, their emerging sexuality, is obscene.  It is a crime against humanity to take hope away from a child…to teach them that it’s pointless for them to reach higher, to strive for the best within themselves, to teach them that in fact they have no best within, only squalor they will never escape from.  You can argue that youth groups deserve some degree of public support, but only to the extent that they actually nurture America’s children.  An organization that takes some of America’s children and shoves their faces into the mud and then tells them that’s all they deserve in life is beyond contempt.  After all the BSA had strived to become to America’s children, somebody needed to hold them to their own damn standards.

But…no, this is not the America it once was.  The case came down against Dale and I was furious.  Okay…fine…they want to be a private club…let them exist as one…on their own dime from now on.  But judging from the religious right, and the ferocity by which they’ve fought to keep the BSA sucking at the public teat, you’d think hypocrits were Christ’s favorite kind of people.

Man…I wish I’d caught that premiere of Bullshit.  Over at Naked Writing, Jody Wheeler says they’ve signed on for two more seasons of it, but in the process of doing their shows they’ve managed to piss off just about every executive at Showtime so more then five aren’t likely.  Fine.  I was looking to see if any of the big cable movie channels were going to be running Brokeback and I saw Showtime was running Crash, so they’ve pissed me off.  Two more years of Bullshit is just about enough reason to keep subscribing despite that.  But barely.

Having failed to force Ford Motor company to discriminate against homosexual people via threats of a boycott, the religious right will next attempt to force it to discriminate via shareholder vote…

(Washington) Ford Motor Company shareholders will vote next month on a resolution to drop protections for LGBT workers from the company’s human resources regulations.

The company had fought the motion, submitted by shareholder Robert Hurley of Alton, Ill, but when Alton took the issue to the  U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission the commission said the automaker must put the resolution to a vote at Ford’s annual meeting May 11.

The motion calls for Ford to change its policy to exclude any reference to sexual interests, activities or orientation.

Fine.  Let’s see how the shareholders feel about their gay and lesbian neighbors.  Every time we buy a Ford product, which now includes Volvo, that’s money into their pockets too after all, in one way or another.  It isn’t just the executive salaries we’re helping to pay.

Pitching wares to the gay community while discriminating against glbt employees is nothing new in the auto world of course.  BMW seems more then willing to try it , and they don’t even have the excuse of being located in a nation that religious fundamentalists are holding by the balls…

Our goal is not to incite a boycott of BMW’s cars, but rather to arm you, our readers, with awareness of the company’s actions as well as of those of the media outlets that published the ad. Speaking of which, one would hope that the publishers of GLBT-owned magazines and web sites would have higher standards than to accept advertising from a major, multinational corporation whose policies discriminate against the very audience that those publications were created to serve. Advertising dollars are scarce these days, but there is plenty of business from other car companies to go after—Gaywheels.com lists no less than 30 brands that qualify as gay-friendly.

But what really makes you angry about Robert Hurley’s cheapshit attempt to put a knife in the back of loyal Ford Motor Company employees, is that Ford management wants to be part of the civilized world, was willing to stand up to bigotry in a way that it’s founder, who admired Adolf Hitler, could never have fathomed.  And like an infection the homophobic bigots keep trying to drag it down into their gutter. 

You’d have thought that by now the United States of America would at least be past the point about arguing whether or not gay and lesbian people should even be allowed something as basic as the ability to hold down a job.  But you’d be wrong.  Never mind same sex marriage…it’s the twenty-first century and we’re still arguing about evolution, let alone about the humanity of women, people of color, and homosexuals.  There’s an old joke about how Australia got all of England’s criminals, and America got all its religious fanatics, and between the two countries we got the shit end of the stick.

It would probably go something like this:

Why would a boy raised by a family of conservative republican Mormons want to mock rape 18 children under his charge at a Student Leadership camp and then plead for leniency so he could go on missionary duty for his church?  Why would a conservative family values republican allow his son to evade responsibility for the serial sexual assault of children, some 15, some as young as 11 years old?  Why would a staunchly conservative family values church institution like the Mormon church allow someone who mock raped 18 children with broomsticks, canes, mop handles and flashlights, and who despite being confronted by the testimony of his victims, continued to maintain it was nothing but a little hazing, go on a mission so they could become an elder member of the faith?  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it does not make sense.  And if it does not make sense, you must acquit!

Clifton Bennett, the 18 year old son of Ken Bennett, the president of the Arizona state senate will, in all likelihood, get probation instead of a prison term, for mock sodomizing  18 children aged 11 to 15 with an assortment of implements, including a broom, a cane, a mop handle and a heavy-duty flashlight.  The assaults occurred at the Chapel Rock Camp in Prescott Arizona, at a week long camp held for student council leaders. 

The son of Arizona’s Senate president confessed that he and another counselor shoved broomsticks and flashlights into the rectums of 18 boys in at least 40 incidents at a youth camp in June.

Now Yavapai County prosecutors say they will drop all but one assault charge and likely recommend little or no jail time if 18-year-old Clifton Bennett agrees to plead guilty.

A similar agreement has been offered to co-defendant Kyle Wheeler, 19, who faces an additional assault charge for choking three of the boys until they passed out.

The plea agreements were first presented in court last week and could be completed at a hearing Monday.

Prosecuting attorney James Landis explained the plea agreement in court, saying the "broomsticking" was a hazing ritual and a punishment, not sexual assault.

But legal experts, sex-crimes prosecutors and victims’-rights lawyers say the acts clearly fit the definition of sexual assault.

Perhaps, but that definition does not take into account being the son of one of the most powerful republicans in the state of Arizona, which can turn even the serial mock raping of 18 children in less then a week into a non-dangerous, non-repetitive offense…

The pleas, which describe the assault charge as "a non-dangerous, non-repetitive offense," have outraged parents who say their sons were victims of violent sexual attacks. The boys, who were 11 to 14 years old at the time, have had trouble going to the bathroom, sleep with clothes on, are afraid at night, and have undergone sexual-assault counseling.

Boys will be boys.  Probation in this case is being sought as the preferable outcome, as this will allow young Bennett to continue with his upcoming missionary duties…

They [Bennett’s lawyers] described Bennett as an honor student and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, planning to go on a mission in September. "A felony conviction for assault will make his desire to complete his mission impossible," they wrote.

And this poor world could certainly use another missionary like him couldn’t it. 

Brooming’ suspects may get plea deal

Police reports say he was assaulted with a broomstick, a flashlight and a cane — and now a 12-year-old Tucson boy may see the camp counselors accused of attacking him receive a plea deal that could allow them to avoid prison.

 

…

 

According to police reports, the assaults took place at Chapel Rock Camp during a weeklong camp for school leaders in June. The reports say some campers clogged a toilet and, when no one would confess, witnesses told police the junior counselors lined up the youngsters, told them to bend over and "broomsticked" them.

 

The boys told police that "broomsticking" was done alternately with a broom, a cane, a mop handle and a heavy-duty flashlight while they were clothed. The exact definition of broomsticking varied, according to witness reports, from touching brooms to the boys’ rectal areas to one description of how a boy was held down and the witness said the broomstick was "shoved" into his bottom.

 

…

 

The father of that boy says he did not know about the assaults until a detective called the family’s home in December. The father said his son spoke directly with the detective and has been reluctant to discuss the incidents with his family.

 

…

 

The father said he spoke to the victim advocate in the County Attorney’s Office, who told them Clifton Bennett was going to be offered a plea bargain to one count of aggravated assault. Cadigan also said she was told by a representative from the office that Bennett is being offered a plea bargain to one count of aggravated assault and Wheeler will be offered two counts. They’ll both face probation rather than jail or prison time, a possibility.

 

"Come on. I told her that was unacceptable. This was not roughhousing. These are 12 and 13-year-old kids. Anyone else would go to prison for six to 10 years," said the father, whom the Star is not naming because it would identify his son.

 

"I do remember when we picked him up from camp he complained that his butt hurt. But we didn’t pursue it. We had no idea what had been going on," he said. "He’s a pretty accomplished kid and he’s in counseling now, so hopefully he’ll get over it. He’s a strong kid."

The next time either the Mormon church or the republican caucus of the Arizona state senate go on a roll about how homosexuals, and same sex marriages, are such a dire threat to the welfare of children, someone ought to ask them where Clifton Bennett is doing his missionary duty these days, and if he’s allowed anywhere near children or broomsticks.

[Update…] Photo of our fine young Mormon missionary-to-be and one of his accomplices via Pam’s House Blend:

Eighteen boys ages 11 to 15.  Broomsticks.  Canes.  Mop handles.  Flashlights.  Good thing Dad’s the president of the Arizona State Senate..!

Mystified by a rash of burglaries where thieves made off with…oven doors…the cops in South Bend think they may now know what the heck is going on…

South Bend detective Sgt. Jim Walsh said police arrested a suspect Thursday they believe sold the door to the woman. Police said an oven door and packaging materials were found in the trunk of the man’s car.

Oven doors are an increasingly hot item in burglaries targeting vacant properties. Walsh said oven doors were among the items stolen in five recent burglaries.

… 

In the case of the bilked woman, she was approached by the suspect Feb. 20 at her workplace with an offer of a flat-screen TV for $500. The suspect settled for $300. But when the woman unwrapped the packaging, she found a cord, a controller — and an oven door.

Do you really need a flat screen TV so badly you’ll buy it from that shady character selling them out the back of his van?  Look…go buy a book…

They’re remembering the death of pope John Paul this week, and in couple more it’ll be the ascendancy of pope Ratzinger.  So since my weekly cartoon is late again (I did another sleep clinic at Hopkins which really mucked up my weekend…), I’ll try and bribe you with a re-run:

And that’s pretty much been the way it’s been with Ratzinger: 

Calling same-sex unions “pseudo-matrimony” the pope said: “The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man.”

Although was his first public comment on same-sex marriage since becoming Pope, Benedict had long history of attacking same-sex unions. 

As Cardinal Ratzinger he was the Vatican’s most outspoken opponent of gay marriage.

He was the author of the a 2003 Vatican directive to priests around the world calling for a proactive stand to stop governments from legalizing same-sex marriage and for a repeal of those those already on the books that give rights, including adoption, to gay couples. (story)

In just a year Ratzinger took John-Paul’s various assaults on the humanity of homosexual people, removed the paternalistic veneer from them, and turned it all into a relentless machine.  And now worldwide, violence toward homosexuals is on the rise.  Imagine that.  You’d think the Catholic church would know better then to go down this path again…

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. 

-James Carroll, “Constantine’s Sword”

…but hate takes away all reason.  In another year people will be marveling at how Ratzinger managed to make the climate for gays and lesbians even worse then he already had.  And that hostile climate will in turn, kill more innocent people.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a photojournalist…

Time was, I had several small newspapers running my photos.  But for a kid fresh out of high school there was scant little money in it, and my soul was never competitive enough to keep pounding doors for work in a market that was saturated with other guys like me looking to get their pictures printed.  By the mid-70s I’d given it up, and for a decade I just wandered aimlessly in the workforce.  But my interest in what news photographers do has never flagged, and I’ll reliably stop to listen whenever a photographer comes forward to tell the story behind a photo.  Their stories are worth hearing, to understand the struggle it sometimes is just to take the images that can keep the public informed, let alone deal with the fallout…

So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera — the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.

You’ve probably already seen the photo of supreme court justice Scalia making an obscene gesture in a church, after a reporter for the Boston Herald asked him how he would respond to people who question his impartiality in matters of church-state separation.  Scalia responded thusly:

…telling the reporter, "To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’"  Michelangelo Signorile, himself of Italian descent, said on his show the other day that the word translates roughly into "get fucked up the ass".  This is the man the right has been for years calling the most intellectual justice on the court.  You have to figure they think it’s too bad Al Capone wasn’t available when Reagan had an opening to fill.

Whether Scalia knew there was a photographer there when he did that I’m still not sure.  But the moment he heard the camera go off, he said "You’re not going to print that, are you?".  So at minimum he knew he’d been caught being the crude barstool asshole he always is when he thinks the cameras aren’t there.  But this time one was.

The photographer, Peter Smith, an assistant photojournalism professor at Boston University, was freelancing for The Pilot, a newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese.  The operative word here is freelancing.  Had he been staff, the photo of Scalia making an obscene gesture would have been the newspaper’s property and likely would never have seen the light of day.  But, at least when I was doing it, a freelancer owns the photos they take, until they sell them to a newspaper.  Whether The Pilot offered to buy the photo I don’t know, but I know had that been me I’d have held onto the rights for dear life.  

For a couple days the photo stayed in the shadows, while the republican Mighty Wurlitzer went into operation, to convince the public that Scalia had made no obscene gesture…that the reporter was lying…blah blah woof woof…  I was watching the whole thing unfold from the sidelines, knowing from my own experience just how suddenly things can happen, and how being just a fraction of a second on either side of the moment means you missed it.  You get yourself back home to your darkroom (or nowadays I guess your computer), and you develop your film and you look over what you got and you see that you were close, but not spot-on enough that the picture is clear and unambiguous about what that moment was.  Where the difference between capturing the moment and missing it entirely is less then a heartbeat, less then the blink of an eye, to be good at what you do you have to train your mind to see it coming and be there when it happens, just to stand a chance of getting it at all.  The rest is chance, and chance can do even the best photographers wrong sometimes.  I’d expected the photo of Scalia would hit the papers and the Internet almost at once, and when it didn’t I started to wonder if either Scalia had successfully managed to have it suppressed, or the photographer simply didn’t get a good shot of it.

Then, after several days of republican spin machine bellyaching that Scalia didn’t do it, the photographer came forward with the photo. 

“It’s inaccurate and deceptive of him to say there was no vulgarity in the moment,” said Peter Smith, the Boston University assistant photojournalism professor who made the shot.

Despite Scalia’s insistence that the Sicilian gesture was not offensive and had been incorrectly characterized by the Herald as obscene, the photographer said the newspaper “got the story right.”

Smith said the jurist “immediately knew he’d made a mistake, and said, ‘You’re not going to print that, are you?’ ” 

The Archdiocese of course, fired Smith immediately.  Only I’m a little fuzzy about how you fire a freelancer.  I guess what they meant was never darken our door again…  Well, they covered up for child molesters.  You have to figure that demanding a photographer cover up for a gutter crawling thug, who feels perfectly free to treat a church like it’s the corner bar, would be even less likely to strike them as unethical behavior.  Morals.  Values. 

Peter Smith has taken what will become one of the iconic photographs of our times.  That face, and the gesture, say it all, not only about the man, but about the times we are living in.  That is what photographers live for.  The god of shadow and light smiled on him in that one instant, and he captured an image that says it all, and he did not just the right thing, but the only thing a photographer could do with it; he showed it to the world.  Because the world needs to see.

It’s almost shirt sleeve weather in the evenings now.  A light jacket is enough to keep me comfortable when I take a casual stroll through the neighborhood.  I’ve been a walker ever since I can remember, always taking long meandering strolls through my territory whenever I had something on my mind, or, as mom used to say, I got "ants in my pants".  Four feet of snow or a torrent of rain are about the only things that’ll keep me from taking my walks, and even then it’s a near thing.  I do my best thinking while walking.  I devise software algorithms, write lines of code, compose cartoons, stories, email, blog posts (like this one), and ponder over various household chores and the Big Questions in life.  Sometimes the only way I can get a clear head about something is to take a walk and think it over.  I really look forward as winter recedes, to not having to bundle up whenever I get the urge to get out of the house and walk about for a bit. 

My neighborhood has several corner gas stations scattered around, and nowadays more then ever I’m always taking note of the price whenever I walk by one.  Regrettably it always seems to start rising again, whenever I start thinking about a road trip.  Tonight I noticed that the price had gone up ten cents a gallon in just the last few days.

Well my retirement fund isn’t giving me returns like that.  Maybe instead of buying savings bonds, I should just buy myself a gallon of gasoline and put it in a safety deposit vault somewhere.  By the time I’m old and gray I might be able to retire on that gallon of gasoline.

Richard Cohen visits the Clue Boutique: 

I would not go so far as to say that Bush wanted war from Day One in the White House, but there was plenty of evidence he had Saddam on his mind and in his sights from the very moment he got the news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We have it from Richard Clarke, formerly the White House’s chief anti-terrorism official, that within a day of the attacks Bush was inquiring if Saddam might have had a hand in them. When told no — "But, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this," Clarke told him — it became instantly clear that this was not the answer Bush wanted. "’Look into Iraq, Saddam,’ the president said testily," Clarke writes in his book, "Against All Enemies."

Well thank you for stating what’s been staringly obvious for, oh, about a couple years Richard.  Only…what’s missing from this picture…

If there was an “I’m sorry for being so stupid” embedded in Cohen’s column I didn’t spot it.

This is the man who, on Feb. 6, 2003, after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deeply-flawed testimony in New York, wrote: “The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.”

In France right now they’re probably raising a toast now to the fact that Richard Cohen isn’t one of them.

Hey…Richard…  The next time some serious threat to world peace raises its head, and I mean a Real threat, not a let’s go start a splendid little war to prove we have bigger balls then everyone else and demagogue the democrats into political submission threat…and the U.S. needs to prove its case to the rest of the world…before you get that urge to tell the world it had better listen to us…Just Shut The Fuck Up!  k?

• Waking up to birds singing
• Walking to work in shirt sleeve weather, and watching your neighborhood wake up around you as you go.
• Sitting on the front porch with a glass of ice tea, reading or drawing, in the weeks before the mosquitoes take it over (swear to God I’m gonna screen it in one of these years…).
• Being able to keep all the windows in the house open because its nether too cold nor to hot outside.
• You can stand still at night without freezing while looking up at the stars
• Time for another road trip…

That far-right Catholic web site that theocrat Richard Neuhaus leaned on for his claim that 50 or 60 percent of children raised by male homosexuals turn out to be homosexual or bisexual, and suffer many times the norm in incidence of child sexual abuse, has taken its own a peek at Michael Calace’s "Rape Of The Soul.  Unaccountably, they seem somewhat appalled…

"The Rape of the Soul" is a fear-mongering, small-minded, and pathetically smutty polemic about art and the Roman Catholic Church. Presented as a documentary by filmmaker and self-described devout Catholic Michael A. Calace, the film seeks to discredit "predatory artists" from da Vinci and Botticelli to anonymous designers of contemporary greeting cards.

Ooooh.  Self described devout Catholic is it?  But look on the bright side.  He doesn’t described himself as a recovering Catholic.  Or an Ex-Catholic. 

Kinda gets your goat when people read all kinds of filth into even the simplest expressions of beauty and joy in your world, let alone satanic influences, does it?  Kinda pisses you off when people ascribe sinister motives to even the smallest commonplaces of your everyday life does it?  "Predatory artists", did they say?  Why…how unfair…how terribly, terribly unfair it must seem.  But what Calace does he does out of love for the church…not hate.  I’m sure many who are Catholic may view exposing the disordered subliminal sex messages and satanism in everything from Catholic art to Catholic children’s song books as a personal attack but it is not…any more then saying cancer or a closer parallel perhaps, alcoholism is a disorder.

Or…not.  After Andrew Sullivan posted about the gutter Neuhaus gets his facts on homosexuality from, the gutter replied that Paul Cameron is being smeared by the "gay lobby", Neuhaus only said it was a claim, Cameron isn’t his only source, and in any case homosexuals just don’t want to address the fact that they are "psychologically malformed".  But it would "keep trying to find ways to say so in as charitable manner as possible."  Or at any rate, as charitable a manner as possible while spitting in people’s faces and simultaneously twisting a knife in their heart.  And you best believe charity like that doesn’t come along every day.

Like here, for instance… 

Now if I were to call homosexual pedophilia an affective disorder and an activist from NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) accused me of bigotry most people would see that this was clearly an attempt to change the subject from a discussion of the issue at hand. However, in part, because the MSM has conditioned us to think of SSA as an alternative life style it is not so clear that the same logical fallacy is at play in discussing the “gay” issue.

Charity starts with the standard issue comparison of homosexuals to pedophiles.  "SSA" in case you’re wondering, is Same Sex Attraction, "MSM" is Main Stream Media, and "gay" is always in quotes because it’s always better to invent acronyms that dehumanize people, then allow them to speak for themselves.  Charity.  I wonder if Calace invented any good acronyms for all the penises and satanism he found in Catholic art?  And in children’s song books no less…

Now if I were to call homosexual pedophilia an affective disorder and an activist from NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) accused me of bigotry most people would see that this was clearly an attempt to change the subject from a discussion of the issue at hand. However, in part, because the MSM has conditioned us to think of Catholicism as an alternative life style it is not so clear that the same logical fallacy is at play in discussing the “left-footers” issue.

Yeah…something like that.  With lots of references to how they put pictures of cocks into school children’s books.  And remember, it’s a devout Catholic saying so.

Or perhaps my own charity is a tad lacking.  But I tried…I swear I tried…and it’s just too goddamn hard to extend the benefit of good faith to the braying jackass who wrote this, right before he compared gay people to child molesters:

The response to the statements that ’same sex attraction is a disorder’ is never an argument for why it is clearly a part of human nature (I suppose because there is none). Rather, the responses include the accusations of bigotry, “homophobia” (I’ve never figured this out, is that the fear of sameness or the fear of human beings???)…

Get me started… You know David, you’re right.  You’re Absolutely Right.  The word "phobia" means "an intense, abnormal, or illogical fear of a specified thing".  It doesn’t mean "hate".  It doesn’t mean "avoidance".  It doesn’t mean "prejudiced".  You’re Absolutely Right David.  The word "phobia" does not have that meaning.  But The Suffix Can!  Look Up The Motherfucking Suffix!  

Tell your chemistry teacher that the word "hydrophobe" is something you can’t figure out (Is that fearful water?  How can water be afraid?).  Then tell your biology teacher that "photosynthesis" is something you can’t figure out, because plants don’t synthesize light, they synthesize sugars.  It’ll be fun.

Many who are personally affected by SSA might see this as a personal attack. It is not. In fact, the very reason for this series is to show why calling SSA a disorder cannot be viewed as a personal attack any more than is saying cancer, or a closer parallel perhaps, alcoholism is a disorder. Let me know what you think…

What I think: Jack Chick is worse then you deserve.  "Rape of the Soul" on the other hand, is about right.  Charity.

Via Slashdot…this revealing little dustup between the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and the Gaston County Police Department in North Carolina…

AOPA has prompted the FAA to keep an unregulated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operation out of navigable airspace above one North Carolina community.

"Safety is paramount, and current airspace users must be assured that a reasonable level of safety can be maintained," said Melissa Rudinger, AOPA vice president of regulatory affairs. "The prospect of small UAVs flitting around in the same airspace we use is frightening. We know what kind of damage a 5-pound bird can do to a GA aircraft. Imagine what would happen if you hit a 14-pound UAV?"

The issue came to head when AOPA learned that the Gaston County Police Department in North Carolina had bought a "CyberBUG" UAV from Cyber Defense Systems. The company sells the small radio-controlled drones as cheap helicopter substitutes for police, military, and news gathering uses.

The company says the 14-pound UAV cruises at 29 mph at 1,300 feet agl, which puts it easily into navigable airspace and creates a potential midair collision hazard.

"What do you think your chances are of seeing this thing before you hit it?" said Rudinger. "And it can’t sense you or get out of the way."

Oh tut, tut…  Your local police department has better things to worry about.  Like…unruly behavior…

This isn’t the first time law enforcement has flown the CyberBUG. The company claims it was used to watch for "unruly behavior" and "alert authorities about accidents" during the 12th Annual Southern Maryland "Blessing of the Bikes" in La Plata. And the company also sells a much larger 70-pound, turbine-powered drone that cruises at 250 knots.

Maryland.  Great.  Just great.  Next time I’m out enjoying myself at an outdoor gathering I’ll be keeping an eye on the sky like I’m a damn rabbit looking out for hawks.  All together now…My country ’tis, of thee…

Looks like the decent folk in town aren’t taking that "Natural Family" resolution laying down…

(Kanab, Utah) Signs began popping up in store windows this week in Kanab, Utah proclaiming ”Everyone welcome here!” in a desperate move to avoid a threatened gay boycott. Some businesses went so far as putting small rainbow flag stickers on their front doors.

Dozens of business owners in the small southern Utah community are trying all they can to distance themselves from a proclamation by the city council that Kanab supports the "natural family" consisting of a working husband, a stay-at-home wife and a "full quiver of children."

…

The signs and stickers are being distributed by the Kanab Boosters, a business owners group. The Boosters are selling the signs and small stickers for cars for between $2.50 and $4.50. 

The group hopes to raise enough money to take out newspaper ads throughout the state to promote the town as a diverse place to vacation.

…

Kanab is the only Utah governmental entity to pass the resolution, which was sent to cities all over Utah by the Salt Lake City-based Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank. 

Earlier this week Sutherland President Paul Mero told the AP that studies show community problems such as crime, violence and poverty increase when family structures break down.

I question (as in ironically) the importance Mero places on intact families, so long as he’s busy teaching families to hate their gay and lesbian sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles.  But anyway…

That view was supported by Councilor Terril Honey who voted for the measure. Honey, who also is a local businessman, said it isn’t the council that is discriminatory, its the boosters.

He says that the poster and sticker campaign is likely to drive away families.

You gotta love how the bigot mind works.  Gay people have families too of course, and families have gay people in them.  And that never occurs to a jackass like Honey.  But…never mind…  The Everyone Welcome Here signs are discriminatory, because they will drive away people won’t go anywhere everyone is welcome.