VLADIMIR: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Barack comes.

ESTRAGON: And if he comes?

VLADIMIR: We’ll be saved.

(Beckett…slightly altered…)

Scanning my server logs, I see someone hit my site today with the following Google search string…

why are democrats not defending themselves against republicans

I think the answer is Because they are democrats, but what do I know…

So I’m reading this morning that one of god’s little right hands shot a doctor to death…in his church…during services…

Kan. abortion doc killed in church; suspect held

WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions through decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir.

The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.

Andrew Sullivan writes that Bill O’Reilly painted a bull’s eye on the doctor during one of his shows. John Aravosis reminds us that President Obama caved recently to right wing demands to bottle up or tone down a report on domestic terrorism.  At some point, this naton is going to have to confront its right wing hate mongers and their willing tools.  Either that, or let them cow us all into the facist theocracy of their dreams.  In the meantime, I am on vacation and I have a new mantra…

…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…

According to After Elton, the Inaugural Committee is saying they never told HBO not to broadcast Gene Robinson’s prayer and that the whole thing was an unfortunate mis-communication. 

The Presidential Inauguration Committee just issued a statement saying, "We had always intended and planned for Rt. Rev. Robinson’s invocation to be included in the televised portion of yesterday’s program. We regret the error in executing this plan – but are gratified that hundreds of thousands of people who gathered on the mall heard his eloquent prayer for our nation that was a fitting start to our event.” — PIC communications director Josh Earnest. 

Okay…  So why was the Gay Men’s Chorus closeted?

Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin, wonders if Robinson was hurried onto the stage and then off again before the Pre Inauguration festivities actually began…

Did HBO cave in the face of conservative outcries over Rev. Robinson’s selection for this event? Did the Inaugural committee rush Rev. Robinson onstage and off before the broadcast was slated to begin? Whatever the case may be, this is a cold slap. HBO has some serious explaining to do, as does the Inaugural committee.

Harvey Milk is screaming in his metaphorical grave right now.

It’s a good question, and this scenario fits nicely with the alleged technical difficulties I keep hearing about, that prevented Robinson’s words from even being clearly heard by the crowd that was there:  I have friends who work as sound engineers, I’ve been with them as they did their work in various settings, and I’m here to tell you that they work hard at choreographing each and every microphone and pickup’s settings for each and every element of an event.  I have no idea how the video side of it works but I’d be surprised if it was any less intricate.  If Robinson was rushed out before the stage crew and the technical engineers were ready for him that would explain the fumbling around, and possibly even the video black-out.  The only problem with this scenerio of course, is it still doesn’t explain why the Gay Men’s Chorus was closeted.

One fuckup I can accept.  It’s still unacceptable, amateurish, unprofessional behavior that gay Americans have every right to be pissed off about and demand an apology for, but I can be convinced that one was a fuckup.  Two of them that Just Happen to target the gay presence at this event and only the gay presence at this event and it’s staringly obvious that it was deliberate.  The only question now is who engineered it?

I’m reading elsewhere that Dianne Feinstein heads the inagural committee.  Well, there’s a good place to start.  People just assume that since she was Mayor of San Francisco after Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assasinated that she’s a friend of the gay community.  Nothing could be further from the truth…

After the 1978 death of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, gay rights activist Tom Brougham came up with a definition of domestic partnership that is now universally used, and was designed to include everything about marriage except sexual orientation. According to Brougham, the definition was that the couple must be more than 18 years old and mentally competent to make a contract. Furthermore, his position was that domestic partners must publicly declare the partnership and pledge to be responsible for each other.

In 1982, Brougham’s definition was modified by Supervisor Harry Britt (a gay man appointed to replace Harvey Milk). Britt’s version was adopted and passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but Dianne Feinstein, mayor of San Francisco at the time, came under intense pressure from the Catholic Church and subsequently vetoed the bill. Not until 1989 was a domestic partnership law adopted in the city of San Francisco…

–Wikipedia – Domestic Partnership

Note that we have been fighting for marriage rights since the 1970s.  Next time some ignorant jackass asks you why same-sex marriage has suddenly become such a big deal with teh gays, slap them upside the head with the biggest, thickest history book you can find.

A recall attempt was made after Feinstein vetoed Britt’s bill, to get her booted out of office.  The gay community was massively pissed off.  But Feinstein calculated that there weren’t enough gay people in San Francisco who cared enough about domestic partnership in the disco 70s to sign enough recall petitions to get it to the point of their actually being a vote.  But another group of pissed off San Franciscans, gun owners, were already circulating a recall petition on her after she signed some new gun control measure or another.  Many gay folk simply started adding their names to that one.  That gave it enough signatures that a vote was actually held, much to her shock. 

She survived it.  Ever since when asked about it she has not only never apologized, she has insisted vetoing the bill was the right thing to do.  Feinstein is that sort of democrat that blocks progress on equality far more then outright bigots manage, because they keep conning people into believing they’ll do the right thing once in office and then when it actually comes time to do the right thing, they don’t.

I wonder if another Catholic Bishop whispered into Feinstein’s ear again, that she’d better not be seen giving anything to the gays…

Via SLOG, via Twitter…

I’ll bet when we elect our first gay president, he doesn’t invite an avowed racist to deliver the invocation.

They say that gay folk, liberals and progressives are furious over Rick Warren being chosen to give the inagural invocation.  Well then our fury is some pretty pathetic stuff isn’t it?  Compare and contrast: suppose McCain had won, and then invited Gene Robinson to give the invocation.  Imagine the fury on the right.  The boycott by the right of the inaugural would be instantaneous and total.  Nobody…Nobody…on the right would show up.  Not to sit by McCain in the stands, not to march in the parade…they’d even walk away from cabinet positions.  The rage from the right wing media would be blistering, second only to the nuclear bombs being lobbed from the Mega-Church and Jesus Mall pulpits all over America.  Total war would be declared on the McCain presidency then and there. Four years into his presidency and he’d still be hearing it, the outrage not one iota less.  They’d never forgive him.  They’d be beating him over the head with it every second of every day of every year of his first term.  And make no mistake, he’d never get a second. 

Now open your eyes and take another look at the so-called fury on the left.  Pretty lame, isn’t it?  American liberals are so cute when they’re angry.

This:

Obama And The Gay Community

Posted by Kevin Hechtkopf

This post was written by CBS News chief political consultant Marc Ambinder:

One reason the Rick Warren thing is a big deal is because, after Bill Clinton, the gay community is unusually sensitive to getting the shorter angle of presidential triangulation. It is hard to overstate the optimism and excitement that gays and lesbians felt in 1992. But the optimism deflated spectacularly after "Don’t Ask, Don’t tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act, not to mention President Clinton’s sneaky 1996 ad boasting about DOMA, which aired only on Christian radio.

Clinton was willing to say the word "gay" in public and appear in black tie at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, but, in the eyes of the gay political community, his commitment to gay rights vanished both times it counted most.

Relative to other minority groups, the LGBT community is disproportionately dependent on the goodwill of the president, because almost all of their big-ticket agenda items are federal laws (the military, DOMA repeal, hate crimes, ENDA, the Permanent Partners Immigration Act, etc.). And relative to other minorities, gays still want and need basic reassurance that they are an ordinary part of American life and politics. So everyone is peering anxiously at Obama wondering if he is going to let them down like Clinton did. 

Emphasis mine.  That is all we want to be.  An ordinary part of American life.  And yet…we can’t.  Our lives have to be other people’s stepping stones to heaven.  That’s what we were put on this earth for, apparently.  To be other people’s stepping stones to heaven.  Or in the case of Mormons, godhood…

Fine.  When we’re all equals in the eyes of the law. 

Proposition 8 was not about agreeing to disagree.  If the law treated gay people equally with heterosexuals, I doubt any of us would give a rat’s ass what Rick Warren thinks.  First we should be a nation of equals.  Then we can all agree to disagree.  Not before.

Pam Spaulding puts it all into perspective …

While it’s obvious that an invocation is just a prayer and that Warren is not part of the Obama administration, Warren taking the pulpit as some sort of olive branch to evangelicals and a show of unity and diversity is absurd and insulting symbolism. The fact that the Obama camp’s talking points mention a LGBT marching band’s presence during the official parade shows you how clueless (or calculating, you decide) these folks are.

A marching band is entertainment…

Gay people have always provided the entertainment for heterosexuals.  And…we do their hair.  And decorate their homes.  And arrange the floral bouquets on their wedding day.  It’s our function in life…

In case anyone in the democratic party has forgotten…

Bill Clinton -> Ralph Nader -> George Bush.  Just saying…

(graphic via Open Left…)

A. Serwer over at Tapped gets it…

I think it’s more likely that he’s marginalizing Warren’s rivals among the Evangelical leadership. Warren is not actually any less conservative than Dobson or Robertson or anyone else. He is less partisan. His views on abortion and violence are similarly inconsistent, with one being abhorrent and the other acceptable. (The power and legitimacy of the American state, it seems, turns the conservative faithful into moral relativists.) But Warren has shown a tendency not to attack individual political figures the way his peers have, and so Obama has made the decision to elevate Warren at his rivals’ expense. I had an argument with my colleague Brentin Mock yesterday about Obama’s decision, where he pointed out that someone else would be occupying Warren’s leadership role if it wasn’t Warren, and given the alternatives he’s the best choice.

None of this really changes the fact that mainstreaming homophobia is inexcusable, and that Warren does not deserve to share a stage with the Rev. Joseph Lowery. The contrast between Warren’s celebrity and Lowery’s life fighting for civil rights is absolutely staggering. It’s possible to interpret the decision to include Warren and Lowery as another Lincoln "we are not enemies but friends" moment, an attempt to bring the religious right and religious left together. The only problem is the most offended parties, the LGBTQ community and the women Warren equates with Nazis, are not in any symbolic sense present to make the choice to be friends or enemies. Had Obama, say, chosen a gay pastor and forced Warren to make the difficult decision of whether or not to appear, the situation might be a bit different. At the same time, Lowery’s presence as a symbol of his generation’s sacrifice is absolutely necessary. Obama simply wouldn’t be able to run for president without men like Joseph Lowery.

Even if one reads Warren’s presence as a cold political calculation, it’s hard to see why the LGBTQ community wouldn’t be outraged at being exploited for the purpose of cultural triangulation. Obama isn’t a homophobe, but you gotta wonder how long the LGBTQ community has to wait before they get a president who thinks homophobia is unacceptable…

Someone else…I forget who…remarked that it was as if it was 1993 all over again…an unpopular Bush leaves office and a bright and shining new hope for everyone who believes in liberty and justice for all takes office, only to sell out gay Americans and begin a strategy of triangulation…

How long?  Yes.  That is The Question.  How long do we have to wait for our heterosexual neighbors to finally, at long last, become appalled at what has been done all these years to their gay and lesbian neighbors…to their friends…to their own children…?  How long before they finally, Finally see the magnitude of what has been taken from?   How long before the sight of hate toward loving couples disgusts them more, then the sight of someone making excuses for hate?  How long before shaking hands with gutter crawling bigots like Rick Warren disgusts them enough that even a politician can feel it?

Isobel White over at Huffington Post pretty well sums it up …

ike everyone else who cares about LGBT equality, election night brought a mix of joy as it became apparent Obama would win, and pain as we realized Prop. 8 would pass. My wife and I spent the evening in Union Square trying to enjoy a birthday dinner with friends before heading to the official No on 8 party. When word came at around 8:15 that Obama had been elected, cable cars rang their bells and whoops of job sprang up all around the Square. I joined a dozen folks clustering around a local TV station’s van watching a teeny tiny TV broadcasting CNN. I tried to join in the revelry, but all I could access was alienation. At no other time in my life had I felt so discriminated against . I spend my days working on a variety of progressive issues, but in that moment — and for the next week — all that mattered was Prop. 8. My vision narrowed and intensified. They say this happens when you feel under attack. "What about us?" I kept wanting to say. "What about our rights?"

Our dinner ran late, so we missed Obama’s speech and we even missed the official No on 8 party. Upon leaving the restaurant all we saw was members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and other assorted folks out on the street, stunned and wondering what to do next. I spent the next few days fearing conversation with anyone who might not be thinking about Prop. 8 — anyone who would want to talk about Obama, or the weather, or our kids’ school, or anything not related to my pain. It was as though I was grieving and I didn’t want to be with anyone who wasn’t grieving too.

This is exactly why I haven’t posted much here about Obama’s victory.  Yes, I’m grateful.  Especially so since a certain someone told me recently, that he’d have moved, possibly back to Germany, if McCain had won.  As he’s lived here in America most of his life, its not exactly like the old country is home now.  But for him, like for a lot of people, America had started to become a strange foreign land…a place where the American dream of liberty and justice for all had become a dirty joke.  A McCain victory would have been the final straw.  I’d have wanted to leave too then.  I wanted to leave after the 2004 election.  But I’m too old to immigrate anywhere unless I bring sacks of money along with me.  It’s good Obama won.  But how good…really?

So it breaks my heart — in fact, it’s pretty much inconceivable — to learn that Obama has asked anti-gay California pastor Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.

I could forgive Obama his tepid support for the No on 8 campaign. It was election time — he had to win. There are so many critical issues in front of him. He had to win.

But he could have chosen any clergy member in the nation to deliver his invocation. So why one from the state where religion has so recently been a painful dividing line? One who spoke out so publicly in support of Prop 8, stating that "there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about"? One who continues to argue that marriage equality silences his religious views?

Why re-open painful wounds?

As unlikely as it seems, here’s hoping Obama will listen to reason and rescind his invitation. Here’s hoping I will finally, finally, be able to have my Obama moment.

He won’t.  He’s smarter then that.  Rescinding the invitation now would just make more headlines and keep the thing in the news that much longer.  But it’s a disaster.  Lee Stranahan, also over at the Huffington Post , assures us that he understands our anger, but that the reality is most Americans agree with Warren on same sex marriage. 

Like my comrades, I think Warren is dead wrong on same sex marriage. But the reality is that at the end of 2008, a majority of voters in California agreed with him. A majority of Americans agree with Warren about same sex marriage and many more states have made marriage equality unconstitutional than have ratified it.

Fine.  But Warren’s dagger at same-sex marriage was dipped in hate monger’s poison.  Here’s some reality for you: Warren said that same sex love was akin to incest.  He said that same sex couples were akin to pedophiles.  Stranahan urges us to embrace what we have in common with Warren…but what could any decent person have in common with that gutter crawling bigot, other then that we’re all breathing the same oxygen? 

This is being portrayed as an olive branch to the social conservatives, by a heterosexual news media that thinks the cheapshit hatreds of bar stool preachers like Warren are more legitimate, more real, more essentially American, then the love and devotion of same-sex couples.  But the betrayal here is larger then the gay community.  Obama’s election give the entire world hope.  That hope, for peace, for justice, for a re-awakening of the better part of human nature, is what was betrayed here.  

Rick Warren is on record as saying America should feel free to assassinate foreign leaders if that is in its interests.   But when is political assassination ever in the interest of democracy, let alone the rule of law?  Reality.  Obama is about to sit down in the Oval Office in a world that has become so violent with hate, sectarian and nationalistic, that the possibility of world war III has practically become moot.  Hundreds of innocent people died in a series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks in India just a few weeks ago.  Reality.  And Obama choses a minister of hate to speak the words that begin his presidency.  There’s your reality Stranahan.  Look at it.  No…really look at it.

You don’t heal the wounds in a people by spitting more poison on them.  You don’t bind a nation back together by giving the knife that cut it apart a place at the table.  You don’t offer an olive branch to your enemy while he’s still busy burning down the forest. 

Rick Warren.  Rick Warren.  Rick Warren. The man who said that the love of same-sex couples for one another was akin to incest.  The man who said that the love of same-sex couples for one another was akin to pedophilia.  Rick Warren.  Gay Americans were brutalized last November, and now we’re being spit on by what we thought was a ray of hope.

This from Glenn Greenwald, who is on fire here.  Maybe you are aware, if not utterly disgusted, at how abjectly the democrats capitulated on telcom immunity for illegally spying on American citizens.  Maybe you’re aware of how the immunity bill not only gave the telcoms immunity for illegally spying on us, but made it even easier for Bush to keep spying on us without having to bother with all that getting a warrent and other forth amendment do-wah.  Maybe you’re wondering how democrats can be such absolute wusses when it comes to fighting Bush’s abuses of power.  Maybe your wondering why democrats don’t really seem to care much about protecting and preserving our precious democracy.  Maybe this will enlighten you…

Last night in Denver, at the Mile High Station — next to Invesco Stadium, where Barack Obama will address a crowd of 30,000 people on Thursday night — AT&T threw a lavish, private party for Blue Dog House Democrats, virtually all of whom blindly support whatever legislation the telecom industry demands and who also, specifically, led the way this July in immunizing AT&T and other telecoms from the consequences for their illegal participation in the Bush administration’s warrantless spying program. Matt Stoller has one of the listings for the party here.

Armed with full-scale Convention press credentials issued by the DNC, I went — along with Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher, John Amato, Stoller and others — in order to cover the event, interview the attendees, and videotape the festivities. There was a wall of private security deployed around the building, and after asking where the press entrance was, we were told by the security officials, after they consulted with event organizers, that the press was barred from the event, and that only those with invitations could enter — notwithstanding the fact that what was taking place in side was a meeting between one of the nation’s largest corporations and the numerous members of the most influential elected faction in Congress. As a result, we stood in front of the entrance and began videotaping and trying to interview the parade of Blue Dog Representatives, AT&T executives, assorted lobbyists and delegates who pulled up in rented limousines, chauffeured cars, and SUVs in order to find out who was attending and why AT&T would be throwing such a lavish party for the Blue Dog members of Congress.

Amazingly, not a single one of the 25-30 people we tried to interview would speak to us about who they were, how they got invited, what the party’s purpose was, why they were attending, etc. One attendee said he was with an "energy company," and the other confessed she was affiliated with a "trade association," but that was the full extent of their willingness to describe themselves or this event. It was as though they knew they’re part of a filthy and deeply corrupt process and were ashamed of — or at least eager to conceal — their involvement in it. After just a few minutes, the private security teams demanded that we leave, and when we refused and continued to stand in front trying to interview the reticent attendees, the Denver Police forced us to move further and further away until finally we were unable to approach any more of the arriving guests.

It was really the perfect symbol for how the Beltway political system functions — those who dictate the nation’s laws (the largest corporations and their lobbyists) cavorting in total secrecy with those who are elected to write those laws (members of Congress), while completely prohibiting the public from having any access to and knowledge of — let alone involvement in — what they are doing. And all of this was arranged by the corporation — AT&T — that is paying for a substantial part of the Democratic National Convention with millions upon millions of dollars, which just received an extraordinary gift of retroactive amnesty from the Congress controlled by that party, whose logo is splattered throughout the city wherever the DNC logo appears — virtually attached to it — all taking place next to the stadium where the Democratic presidential nominee, claiming he will cleanse the Beltway of corporate and lobbying influences, will accept the nomination on Thursday night.

Sometimes I wonder if things really are getting more corrupt these days, or if we’re just seeing more of the corruption because of the grassroots media that has emerged during the Bush years.  In any case, the above isn’t to my mind so much an argument against voting for democrats too, as for paying more attention to local elections, because congress is an aggregate of many local elections.  I strongly doubt that the voters in the districts represented by the Blue Dogs approve of having their phones tapped, let alone giving the tappers a free pass in exchange for millions of dollars to run a convention. 

We need to break the republcan grip on power in Washington, so they can’t do any more damage then they’ve already done to the courts, to the economy, to civil liberties at home and America’s moral stature abroad.  But we also need a grassroots effort to get more people elected who want to serve the people, not the corporations.  Because the corporations don’t give a good goddamn about democracy, let alone about America.  All they see is their bottom line.  We need better democrats.

Despite the fact that I still don’t have my college degree and that I struggled to make ends meet for most of my life working various low paying blue collar jobs, I suspect I could never pass myself off as "a man of the people", were it not for the shot of "Bartender’s Special" a very foxy bartender gave me once at Larry’s Lounge in D.C.. 

To run for president, you need to drink a lot…

I think it had Southern Comfort in it, which automatically gives me extra bonus populist points.  Which is good, because I wouldn’t have touched that glass with a ten foot pool if I hadn’t been completely twitterpated by the guy who handed it to me, and having a drink with a cute guy in a gay bar penalizes me severely on populist points.