Just a glimpse into the far-right psyche. The two biggest ticket items that have leaped into public consciousness discrediting parts of the stimulus package have been family planning and STD prevention. Both have been blaring Drudge headlines. Now, this is technical stuff and I don’t doubt that there’s merit to the case against portraying these as in some way necessary counter-cyclical emergency funding.
But why is it the GOP is so easily galvanized by sexual panic? Weird, if you ask me. This is the budget we’re talking about here. Even there, they reach, like the exhausted tacticians they are, for the culture war. And it isn’t reaching back.
The republicans became the party of culture war when they gave the nomination to Nixon. This is what people continue not to get about them…even now, amidst the horrific train wreckage of the "free market economy" republican domination of the federal government was supposed to usher in. Oh…they betrayed their principles, did you say? No. Absolutely no. They did nothing of the kind. All that small government free market stuff was just the window dressing, over a core that was entirely, completely, absolutely about culture war. When they finally got the power they craved, they set to work implementing their vision. Yes, it is an unmitigated disaster. But you have to understand that it was always going to be that.
They didn’t care about the economy…they cared about elbowing science out of the classroom and out of government in favor of their nutty religion in which Jesus says to hate the stranger, obey the authorities, and that the rich will inherent the earth. They didn’t care about the deficit…they cared about keeping women, people of color and homosexuals in their place. They didn’t care about national security…they cared about rolling back decades of constitutional law that said all Americans were entitled to equal justice, equal rights, to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness. They didn’t care about fighting terrorism…they cared about fighting the 60s all over again, and winning this time.
In Goldwater they had their last honest small government candidate. Nixon gave them culture war, which they embraced with gusto. Why? The darkies weren’t drinking from the fountain marked ‘coloreds’ anymore. The kids weren’t passively going off to die in a war nobody understood, and what was worse, they weren’t cutting their hair. And more horrifying then all of that, the women were going off the Miltown pill and going on the birth control one instead and asserting their sexual equality. Suddenly you couldn’t make jokes about women drivers anymore. And then the faggots started marching.
Something had to be done. Nixon was the one. That he turned out to be a crook, should have been a warning. But the first thing you have to understand about culture warriors, is they have no inner sense of morality, of right and wrong. That is why they fight tooth and nail to keep their world from changing around them. They have no brakes, so they need fences and guardrails. That, and the privilege that comes with being on top of the cultural ladder, even if you’re at the bottom of the economic one. White. Male. Protestant. Heterosexual. You got it made pal…drink up. In a world where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, or the shape of their own genitals or that of their lovers’, then what becomes of the privileged?
The joke after the last Republican convention was that you didn’t see any black or brown faces in the crowd until it was all over, and the cleaning crews came out. So what about all that Big Tent talk? What about all that reaching out to minorities and stuff? For real? Why…the same Goddamned thing that happened to all that small government stuff. It wasn’t important. It wasn’t what the party is about. The party is about the culture war. Of course the first thing they had fits about in the stimulus plan was the family planning items. Do you still think, after the last eight years of it, that they even saw the rest of it? I sure hope you don’t think that since Bush went down in flames they went down with him. They sure didn’t go down with Nixon.
A Junker Is A Car That Gets You Through The Rough Times
Via Fark, I stumbled across a post in Spike titled 10 Signs Your Car Is A Beater. After a while I realized I was laughing because I’d owned some of those cars myself.
10. Your Trunk Looks Like a Pep Boys Exploded
My first car was a new car. Looking back on it, I was unreasonably lucky in that regard. Most kids on my side of the railroad tracks, fresh out of high school, were lucky to get hand me downs or well worn junkers. I got a brand new 1973 Ford Pinto. I had to make the payments myself, but Mom willingly co-signed the loan. I guess I’d proven by that time that I could be responsible about money. The drive it off the lot price was $1997.48. It had a 1600cc overhead valve four with a tiny one barrel carb and a four-speed manual transmission. I got the most bare bones one they had on the lot: it didn’t have a radio, it didn’t even have a cigarette lighter above the ash tray…only a metal plug where one would have gone. I later found that the wiring for the lighter was there anyway when I added one so I could power things off it.
Ford and GM and AMC had just decided to get into the sub-compact car market, and the big selling point of the Pinto back then, was it’s basic simplicity. In the sexist climate of the times, one of their ads was of a group of airline stewardesses standing around a Pinto with its hood up, holding various tools, demonstrating that even stewardesses could do the maintenance on one. The great thing about that car for me was that even a kid fresh out of high school could work on one. That was important, because I had absolutely no money to pay anyone to work on it.
Over the years I learned to do the maintenance on it myself, even to the point of replacing brakes, clutches, water pumps and exhaust pipes and mufflers, even the radiator at one point. That bought me a familiarity with automobile basics, and over time an appreciation for good mechanical design, which the Pinto had in some regards, and didn’t in others. It also got me started on assembling a good tool collection.
I made a decision early on, influenced by the Uber geek crowd I’d already fallen into at that age, to only buy the very best tools. Since I was in no position to be buying expensive tool sets, I simply bought one of what I needed, when I needed it. I could skimp on food and clothes if I had to, but if I needed a tool for something I would buy the very best Sears Craftsman or Snap-On. The thinking was that a tool was something you didn’t just buy, but invested in because they made you self sufficient. It’s a strategy I pursued the rest of my life. When I moved into Casa del Garrett back in 2001, I came well equipped with tools (and spare parts…I’m a pack rat after all…) for doing all sorts of Harry Homeowner tasks around the house, many of which, particularly the hand tools, had been bought back in my teens and twenties.
I kept that Pinto for an entire decade, pampering it as best I could. Back then you were doing good if you got over 50k out of a standard American made car. They only made them back then with five digits on the odometer, which tells you right there what they expected the life span of one of their cars would be. I got 135k out of that Pinto. But age took its toll and the car began to fall completely apart in ways I simply could not cope with and I had to give it up.
3. Starting Your Car Requires the Hood to be Open
That was the Pinto toward the end of its life. The little one barrel carburetor had some sort of vapor lock going on inside of it. During the hot summer months I had to open the hood unscrew the air filter lid and stick a paper clip, I swear, into a hole near where the float lived. I’d hear a slight swoosh of pressure being released. Then the car would start. If I didn’t do that…forget it.
There were other problems. The plastic in the dashboard and the steering wheel was severely cracked, as well as the vinyl in the driver’s seat. I patched the driver seat with duct tape, I thing I reckoned I could get away with since I lived on the white trash side of the tracks anyway. One of the windshield wiper arms was prone to popping off, as was the rear view mirror occasionally. The gear shifter would come off the trans like a gecko’s tail in my hands while I was shifting if I wasn’t careful. I’d added an oil cooler, a nice stereo cassette deck, a set of gauges including a Heathkit electronic tachometer, and an electric rear window defogger, and I’d religiously changed the engine oil every 2000 miles. I pampered that engine and it never failed me, but by 135k everything around it was pretty much falling apart. If mom and I had a house I’d have kept at it, but we lived in an apartment and while I could get away with the occasional oil change landlords tend to frown on tenants doing clutch work in the parking lot.
I had no money for a new one, and since I didn’t have steady work then I couldn’t ask mom to co-sign a loan for another one. I couldn’t promise her I’d be able to keep up the payments. A friend stepped forward and offered me his mom’s old Chrysler Newport. It was a tank. It had a 450 cubic inch V8 under the hood and bench seats front and rear. It was so big the dashboard had two ashtrays, one on the driver side, and one on the passenger side. Having driven a Pinto for ten years, I felt tiny and lost inside that thing. I named it The Blue Wale.
Oh…and it had a pretty big hole in the floor in front of the driver’s seat. I kept it covered with a floor mat.
I did my best to take care of it, including replacing the motor mounts after one broke loose. But a reckless driver in a Mercury Capri hit me head-on and totaled what was left of it. I was really grateful for that massive hood in front of me when I saw that Capri careening toward me. It slammed my Newport backward three feet and pretty much creamed the front-end, but I walked out without a scratch. Getting my face slammed into the all metal dashboard of a Rambler American one day when I was seven years old, had taught me the value of seatbelts long before I’d even heard of such things.
I entered a period of carlessness. I was utterly dependent on public transportation to get around any further then my own two feet could take me…which wasn’t a trivial distance since I have always loved to walk. But don’t ever ask me to depend on public transportation again. At least not in America. New York City and Portland Oregon exempted.
The last junker I ever owned was another 1974 model. It was fall of 1991, and I’d just gotten my first good job as a software developer. Problem was I had to commute to Baltimore from Rockville. I tried taking the metro to Union Station in Washington, and the MARC rail to Baltimore, and the Baltimore Light Rail to Timonium. Once. It was three hours each way. So I needed a car. Another friend stepped forward and arranged for me to buy the car owned by the mother of another one of his friends.
Common attributes include a gaping hole where a stereo might’ve once been, a stench which demands that the windows never get rolled up, and interior which constantly sheds various bits of material on anyone unfortunate enough to be within its confines. A thief looks at your car and says “man, sucks to be that guy” and moves on. Criminals pity you. That’s where you’re at right now.
It was a white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon. She’d used it to service her gumball machine business in West Virginia. It had 240k miles on it, and was powered by a 400 cubic inch V8 with a collapsed hydraulic lifter in it somewhere. I could make the tap, tap, tapping of the lifter go away for a few hundred miles after a fresh oil change, but it always came back and fixing the lifter would have meant serious engine work I was unwilling to put into it. The interior roof cloth was delaminating and sagging to the point where it had started to block the view out the back window. So I cut it all down. The foam lining then began to flake off and I’d get out of the car with my hair full of it. Big as the Newport was, the LTD wagon was immense. I named it The Great White…as in great white whale.
After driving it for a year and a half to and from Baltimore I was at the place where I could finally believe that this earning a living as a computer programmer thing wasn’t a fluke and I moved into my first apartment of my very own. I was thirty-eight years old. Having that station wagon was a big plus during that move. But shortly after I’d settled in, I wandered into a car dealer to see, just out of curiosity, if I could talk myself into a new car too. That evening I drove home in a brand new 1993 Geo Prism and felt like I’d hit the big time. I named it Aya. The dealer took my LTD in for a hundred bucks trade-in and I felt grateful they hadn’t made me pay them to take it.
Aya was the size of my first new car, the Pinto. But technologically it was light years away. It had the same size engine but it was an overhead cam fuel injected little goer. I could do 85 in it no sweat. The Pinto labored at 60. I did the Rocky Mountains in Aya and it just hummed along. The Pinto gasped for breath in those mountains. I owned Aya for twelve years, put just a tad over 200k on it, and the main reason I sold it was I was ready then to step up a bit.
Two junkers, and one Ford Pinto that became a junker simply because Ford hadn’t built it to last even if you took care of it. But they encouraged me to buy good tools and learn how to take care of a car. They taught me to keep emergency stuff in the trunk, jumper cables, flares, this and that for quick repairs, and not to panic if the car broke down and left me stranded somewhere miles from anything. In retrospect for all that I am grateful.
After the Prism came a brand-new 2005 Honda Accord which I named Beauty because it was just so lovely to look at. Beauty had all the options…it was the first car I’d ever bought with a shopping list bigger then "whatever I can afford that rolls off the lot under its own power". It had leather seats, fake wood trim, satellite radio, a power driver seat, seat warmers. Seat warmers! The rear seats folded down so I could transport large items. I had to unbolt the back seat to do that in the Prism. And after the Accord came a brand-new 2008 Mercedes-Benz C300.
A Mercedes-Benz… I stood there just staring at it after I got it home, thinking of all the places we would go, and I named it Traveler. I’d dreamed of owning a Mercedes since I was a teenager, when an uncle had driven down for a visit in his new 220D. By the time I was thirty-five I figured it would always be just a dream. But I never thought I’d ever have a house of my own either.
Almost eighteen years passed from the first time I laid eyes on The Great White to the first time I sat down in Traveler. It wasn’t that long. It was twenty between the time I bought the Pinto and when I was able once more to afford another new car, the Prism. I was eighteen years old when I bought the Pinto. Thirty-eight when I bought the Prism. The time between them were some of the worst years of my life. For eight of them I had no car at all. When I finally did get a car again, the insurance companies wouldn’t touch me because I hadn’t owned a car for so long. I had to get state funded insurance, at drunk driver rates even though my license was spotless.
I can sit here and close my eyes and with very little effort remember, vividly, struggling under the Pinto with the transmission, trying to get it threaded back through the clutch pack after replacing the clutch because yet another new clutch they’d sold me turned out to be a crappy rebuilt clutch instead which had failed after only a few miles. I can recall sitting in the Newport with the hood open and the engine idling, tapping the gas pedal ever so slightly, and seeing the engine try to jump out of the car because one of the motor mounts had just broken off. I can recall driving to Baltimore on a sunny February morning up I-95 listening to the loud tap, tap, tapping of the collapsed lifter and wondering if I had enough money that week for another six quarts of fresh oil or should I just let it rattle.
If it seems sometimes here like I never stop gushing over the Mercedes, there is a reason for it.
I was noticing in the server logs this morning that someone came in from an ip address at the University of Maryland on the following Google search string:
coming out comic garrett
Well…that made my day right there. Someone went looking Specifically for my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story. They didn’t know or couldn’t remember the title exactly, but they knew what it was about and at least the last name of the guy who did it.
Nice. Cartooning was the first love. I gave up hope that I’d ever make a living at it for pretty much the same reason I gave up on being a professional photographer. I’m just not competitive enough, and when I was younger too timid, shy and scared to try making a go of things as a freelancer. Ironically, I ended up spending most of my life freelancing in other fields, only one of which, architectural modelmaking, even remotely touched on my artistic skills. But there it is. I gave up dreaming about seeing my cartoons in print anywhere. Then along came the internet and I could just put up my own web site and see if my stuff attracted anyone.
It does. I have put zero effort into advertising anything I do here and yet after just a few years I get hits on my cartoons from all over the world. Not a torrent of hits. But the steady nature of what I do get is more rewarding then you can imagine.
Which is why I’ll be spending the weekend down in the art room…
Via Atrios… I’m reading this story about how the republican governor of South Carolina finally decided it was better to let people collect unemployment then…well…starve or something I guess…
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Just hours before the unemployment benefits fund was to run out in South Carolina, the state with the nation’s third-highest jobless rate, Gov. Mark Sanford relented Wednesday and agreed to apply for a $146 million federal loan to shore it up, after weeks of refusing to do so.
The governor’s position had drawn rebukes even from fellow Republicans in the Legislature, one of whom denounced Mr. Sanford as “heartless,” and from newspaper editorial pages. On Wednesday, The State, the daily newspaper here in Columbia, accused the governor of playing “chicken with the lives of the 77,000” who are unemployed in South Carolina.
For weeks, Mr. Sanford, newly elected as head of the Republican Governors Association and known for being a fierce free-market foe of government spending, stuck to his stand, questioning the probity of the South Carolina Employment Security Commission and demanding a new audit of the agency.
Emphasis mine. Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. Wow. That must have been pretty heartless then.
Third highest unemployment rate in the nation. You’d think there were things South Carolina could do to put its unemployed to work, some infrastructure work, or other short term one-off projects that need doing that might not only keep the state economy going, but even improve it a tad. But that would be government spending wouldn’t it? Better to let people who can’t find work loose everything. Gotta love that free market stuff.
Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. I think quite a few working people who have voted republican lately because they hate the darkies and the feminists and the Jews and the wetbacks and the liberals and the homos are starting to discover that as far as the country club republicans are concerned working people aren’t shit either, even if they’re male, white, heterosexual and protestant.
No job? Retirement fund gone? About to loose your house? Oh cheer up. The gays can’t get married so things can’t be all bad now can they? You got what you voted for. Smile!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was flitting around the web and came upon some posts about a newly animated version of the tale of Peter and the Wolf. The YouTube clips absolutely fascinated me, both in their artistic style and the interesting modern take on the story. I discovered it was available on iTunes for a couple bucks so I bit.
It’s the first video I’ve ever downloaded from iTunes and it was the best couple bucks I have ever spent on a movie, even a short one (it’s about 32 minutes). If you enjoy good stop motion animation, and fresh takes on old childhood tales, and beautiful classical music, then you should definitely go grab a copy. It’s available on DVD at Amazon for about 18 bucks, but as I said, you can get it off iTunes for only two and the video quality is excellent. I was skeptical as to how good the video from iTunes could be considering it is so compressed, but it displayed on Bagheera’s HD monitor as well as any DVD, and the sound quality was excellent.
The story takes place in a more modern day Russia, in the forest outside a small village Peter lives with his grandfather, in a ramshackle house surrounded by a high wooden fence. Grandpa is terrified of the dangers of the forest, and the howl of the wolf, and as the film opens we see him doggedly reinforcing his fence and plugging all the openings in so nothing can get in…and it seems, so Peter can’t get out. Grandpa is very protective…perhaps a bit too much so. When Peter pries a piece of scrap metal off a small opening in the fence so he can look out, grandpa drags him away, nails it shut again, and sends Peter to town to get some food (presumably the boy doesn’t have to go through the forest to get to town…but never mind…).
Peter and grandpa are a couple of poor folk living in a run down shack in the sticks. As he walks into town the town’s kids, in their nice new winter clothes, all stare at him like he’s from another planet. He makes his way to a small shop, accidentally bumping into one of the town bullies. I’ve never seen the bully type so deftly and surely brought to life as in this film. They drag Peter into an ally and throw him in a dumpster.
Back home, and in tears, Peter is comforted by his pet duck…his only friend. Suddenly, a bird with a broken wing crash lands in the yard. Peter watches fascinated as the bird tries to tie itself to a balloon that Peter brought back with him from town, so it can fly again.
But the bird is too heavy for the balloon to hold it up. Peter determines to help the bird go free again, and sneaks into grandpa’s bedroom and grabs his keys as he sleeps. He unlocks the padlocks, pushes hard against the door, and then it gives way and Peter and Duck and Bird all tumble through…
…and the lovely Prokofiev music begins. Up to that moment, the entire thing has been done with only the background sounds audible. There is no dialogue throughout the film. Just the sounds of the forest and town, the howl of the wind, and the random sounds Peter and Grandpa and Duck and Bird and Cat make as they go on about their lives. When the Prokofiev score suddenly starts up, just as the boy and his friends break free of the confining fence, it is an almost magical effect.
Peter gazes in wonder at an immense tree and a frozen over pond, just outside the fence door. He helps bird up onto a limb and watches delightedly as it sails through the air dangling from the balloon. Duck and Peter take turns sliding around the frozen pond. They all have fun. But eventually grandpa sees them and drags Peter back inside. Then the wolf begins to howl, and Peter realizes his beloved Duck is still outside.
You have to watch this thing, to believe how much new life the artists have given to this old story. It is breathtaking. The stop motion animation is first rate and the characters are wonderfully drawn. The expressiveness given to Peter in particular, a boy trapped in a hard life seemingly alone and apart from the rest of the world, is remarkable. All the more so when you realize that this is traditionally done stop motion animation. The art has come a long, long way from the original King Kong. Duck and Bird and Cat and Grandpa, and even the random townsfolk and the bullies all are distinctly drawn personalities, and the Wolf is satisfyingly feral and menacing…almost as though Prokofiev’s Wolf theme assumed physical form.
It doesn’t end the way Prokofiev ended it though. I won’t give it away, but you could almost wish Prokofiev had thought of this one instead. It is perfect. When you know you can defeat the wolf, the bullies don’t matter anymore.
How To Wrest News From The TV In 21st Century America
Yes, yes…network news is to news, like processed cheese food product is to cheese. But as it turns out, there Is a way to find out from your TV what’s going on in Washington. You just have to adjust your perspective a tad.
For example…have you noticed all those "clean coal" ads on TV lately?
The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday abandoned its push to revise two air-pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.
One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would result in fewer such cleanups.
EPA officials had been trying to finalize both proposals before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But yesterday, an agency spokesman said they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters of the measures.
Rule of thumb: When you suddenly start seeing a lot of feel good advertising from some big corporate interest groups, it’s a safe bet they’re trying to push something through congress.
What the coal and energy corporations want you to know, is that coal is clean. Swell. That’s really swell. Glad to hear it. But if coal is clean then why do they need congress to change the clean air act?
“Nobody was prepared for this,” Mr. Rubin said in an interview. He cited former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as another example of someone whose reputation has been unfairly damaged by the crisis.
This seems like a pretty serious dodge here…
Yes, but not the one you think it is. Rubin, like a lot of the Bush-Reagan big money cronies, drank the deregulation kool-aid some time ago. He really thinks that unregulated capitalism is self correcting and self sustaining. He’s Still looking at what happened to the world economies through those ideological rose colored glasses. What’s happening now just wasn’t supposed to happen. They still can’t believe that it’s happening. And if the government they’ve been calling part of the problem not part of the solution for so long hadn’t started bailing their asses out, they’d be jumping out of windows now, just like they were during the Great Depression.
For generations now, ever since FDR, the country club class has been dispensing crap about how the Great Depression wasn’t really caused by their greed and excesses, but by the very government regulation that has kept us from having more of those massive boom and bust cycles ever since. The great middle class created in this country by the New Deal is something they sincerely regard as having been carved out of their hides and they hate it. They think we’re taking money from their pockets and they don’t see and don’t care that it was making the nation stable and the economy solid and strong for generations…strong enough for them to keep getting all the rich they want to get…just not as much or as fast. But this idea that taxes are theft, and regulation is socialism, not the cost of having a stable democracy and a stable economy, is like a religion to them.
So for generations now, the uber rich have been drenching the middle class with this fairy tale that the Great Depression was actually caused by…get this…Too Much government regulation, as opposed to the nearly none that allowed them to create worthless paper wealth on top of worthless paper wealth…just like…oh…what they did during the Bush years. They told the middle class that if the rich were only allowed to dismantle the New Deal, why, Everyone would prosper. But that crap was supposed to be just for the rubes to eat, while the rich ate the standard of living and the life savings of the middle class because they’ve thought all along that all that was rightfully theirs to begin with.
But some of the uber rich actually started believing they could have their middle class and eat it too. Sorta like the way they told us they could take the Social Security trust fund money and put it into the stock market and then there would be money in both the trust fund to pay for current benefits and money in the stock market too! See how one dollar magically becomes two? That thinking is how they got us into the current mess, and not coincidentally how they got us into the Great Depression once upon a time. Back then, the government regulated the banks to prevent that magic money from getting into the finance system again, and the uber rich have been trying to roll back those regulations ever since, because that prevented them from sucking money out of the banks…money that theoretically belonged to working class depositors. Oh sorry depositor…we loaned your life savings out to somebody…who loaned it out to somebody…who loaned it out to somebody…who bought stocks with it…
They began thinking they really could suck the money out of the middle class, and still have a middle class left to sell things to and keep the economy running. But…There is no free lunch. Really. There isn’t. Why…the Free Market will self correct…and the rising tide will lift all boats… No. It doesn’t. It sure didn’t during the Great Depression…that grand daddy of all boom and busts. And now that they’ve managed to gut most of the New Deal brakes that kept those huge boom and bust cycles from seriously crashing the economy…surprise, surprise….it’s all crashing around their heads again. And only that evil wicked federal government is standing between them and absolute ruin. And they’re begging it to step in and save them from…well…themselves. Schadenfreude.
And they won’t learn. Trust me…they won’t learn. At the end of some future day, when things are back to normal, or as near to normal as possible, they’ll still look resentfully out from their rarefied heights down upon the middle class, all the ticky-tacky homes with their ticky-tacky furniture and their ticky-tacky clothes and their ticky-tacky lawn ornaments, believing all that only exists because it was carved out of, and not there to save their sorry hides.
When we think of what governments should legitimately do —- provide police and fire protection, build roads and lighthouses, defend borders —- the idea of sanctioning marriage immediately sticks out as an anomaly, all the more so for those who wish to keep government’s activities to a minimum.
…
Unlike religious bodies, however, governments need to tread cautiously. That fact is especially true in America, where religious and moral commitments are widely viewed as private matters. This is not a partisan claim: Conscientious members of both parties would surely reject the idea that we can use the state to foist our deeply held beliefs on our fellow citizens.
And yet, affirming through law the sanctity of heterosexual marriage does just that. In essence the state is anointing an “American way” of intimacy, and it is difficult to imagine how the real American way could be any more imperiled.
No, no, no. You don’t get it. Conservatives like to Claim they’re in favor of limited government, but as we’ve see for the past eight years, when they’re in power that’s not exactly the kind of government you get.
This isn’t rocket science. All it takes, is a little historical perspective. Conservatives started yap, yap, yapping about limited government, around the time of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. More to the point, around the time the hated Warren court started knocking down racial segregation laws.
That was when limited government gained their favor. When government was busy telling black people where they could and could not eat, where they could and could not live, what schools they could and could not get an education in, and who they could and could not marry, big, invasive, intrusive, all powerful government was just fine with them.
You look at the old guard today and what do you see? If they’re old enough, you usually see a segregationist. That’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact. They’re the ones who fought tooth and nail against racial equality, and when Johnson signed the civil rights act, bolted in droves to the republican party. The young bloods of the movement grew up after those battles had been fought, so none of them have a history of standing in front of school house doors or ranting against race mixing. But scratch most of them and you’ll find the same pusillanimous attitudes toward race their philosophical fathers had. And the grass roots are still living back in the segregated fifties.
Isn’t it staringly obvious that if none of this were true, republican party conventions wouldn’t be so goddamned white? The joke at the last convention was that you only saw black people on the convention floor after the show was over and the clean-up crew came out. All this rhetoric about limited government came about, after the federal government stopped being their race cop, and started tearing down all the "whites only" signs. Then they suddenly saw the value of limited government. Or more specifically, government that was too weak to assure that the darkies could share in the American Dream too. When they say they want to get government off the people’s backs, what you have to understand is by ‘people’ they mean white people. Rich white people.
Ronald Reagan didn’t begin his campaign for the white house in the town where three civil rights workers were murdered, with a speech on "state’s rights" accidentally. And what Reagan began once he got into the white house, George Bush devoted himself to with gusto. George Bush Was the climax of the American conservative movement. The government he ushered in, of privilege, theocracy and cronyism, was Exactly the government they had dreamed of, ever since Earl Warren’s supreme court issued Brown v. Board of Education. It wasn’t what they’d advertised to the rest of the nation, but by the time Bush was ushered into power by enough conservative supreme court justices, they figured they had a racket going whereby they could mouth platitudes about limited government for the rubes, while dog whistling to the grass roots and that would keep them in power indefinitely. It was going to be Karl Rove’s permanent republican majority. The only problem was, the morons had eaten their own dog food about deregulation.
Deregulation was never about freeing up the potential of the marketplace. Like everything else about their limited government rhetoric, it was about getting government off the backs of the greedy so they could pillage to their heart’s content. The sense of divine retribution here, comes from seeing how thoroughly they’d bamboozled themselves into thinking it would actually work…that a marketplace with no rules would actually have a different outcome then an implosion of worthless paper, backed by even more worthless paper. The shock of seeing it all come crashing down in a whirlwind of fraud and deceit is pitifully real. They seem to have forgotten for a moment, that they’d set out to line their own pockets with other people’s retirement money, not grow an economy.
So…you’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives voted to write gay couples out of one state constitution after another are you? You’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives want to enshrine their religious and moral beliefs in the constitutions of every state in the union are you? Wise up.
Wise up.
The republican bubble popped last election day, because it was always hollow inside. They never wanted limited government. What they wanted was an America where they were king and the rest of us knew our place and how they liked their shoes shined. When government started treating all Americans equally, they set out to deliberately wreak it. Limited government was their hatchet, by which they meant to do that.
You Thought They Jumped On The Anti-Gay Bandwagon Just Yesterday Did You?
People seem to be discovering that, surprise, surprise, the Mormon church has been working against gay equality for a bit longer then just Proposition 8…
This memo was reportedly sent from a LDS General Authority to a member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
It deals with the issue of same-sex marriage and it is dated, March 4, 1997.
This eleven-year-old memo gives a glimpse into President Gordon B. Hinckley’s strategy for dealing with same-sex marriage.
It talks of a meeting with President Hinckley who reportedly said to "move ahead" with the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage.
This memo also discusses joining forces with the Catholic Church, saying:
"…the public image of the Catholic Church is higher than our Church. In other words, if we get into this, they are the ones with which to join."
But President Hinckley apparently urged caution as the memo makes clear, "he (President Hinckley) also said the (LDS) Church should be in a coalition and not out front by itself.
And this is a key point…
You best believe it is. They’ve been waging a semi-stealth campaign against gay people for a decade now, and probably much longer then that. It’s not surprising in the least, coming from a religion that declared black skinned people got their skin color because their spirit ancestors defied God. The mindset that the different ‘other’ wasn’t really human was there right from the beginning.
So I Guess Giving Your Best Employees A Choice Between A Pay Cut Or Fired Wasn’t A Plan After All…
Circuit City…March 29, 2007…
Circuit City lays off 3400 employees because they make too much!
Circuit City Stores Inc. has a message for some of its best-paid employees: Work for less or work somewhere else.
The electronics retailer on Wednesday laid off 3,400 people who earned "well above" the local market rate for the sort of jobs they held at its stores.
In 11 weeks they’ll be able to apply for their old positions – which will come with lower hourly wages.
The move put Richmond, Va.-based Circuit City, which has more than 40,000 employees in the United States, at the forefront of a new way of controlling labor costs in the service industry. Employers determine the prevailing market wages for particular jobs in various geographic regions and then find ways to make sure that their workers’ salaries stay within that range.
…
Company spokesman Bill Cimino said Circuit City wanted to be honest with its sales associates so they would understand the reason for the layoffs.
"It had nothing to do with their skills or whether they were a good worker or not," Cimino said. "It was a function of their salary relative to the market."
Circuit City expects to reap $110 million in savings in the next year, partly as a result of the layoffs and other changes announced Wednesday, including the outsourcing of about 130 information technology jobs to IBM Corp.
Circuit City…Today…
Circuit City to Close 155 Stores, Lay Off Thousands
Electronic retailer Circuit City plans to shutter 20 percent of its U.S. stores by December 31 and evaluate other cost reduction initiatives, it announced today, citing waning consumer confidence and the struggling financial markets.
The move will close about 155 of its 700 stores, and result in layoffs of about 17 percent of its workforce. It will also reduce future store openings and renegotiate some leases.
“The weakened environment has resulted in a slowdown of consumer spending, further impacting our business as well as the business of our vendors. The combination of these trends has strained severely our working capital and liquidity, and so we are making a number of difficult, but necessary, decisions to address the company’s financial situation as quickly as possible,” said James A. Marcum, vice chairman and acting president and CEO.
It had nothing to do with their skills or whether they were a good worker or not… Jackass. Treat your people like shit and don’t be surprised to find one day that you’re the CEO of a company that isn’t worth shit.
After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that’s what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.
The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.
"People were screaming ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!’" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."
Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting ‘Obama!’ and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."
I hope nobody thinks this sort of thing is going to stop after election day. What you need to understand is they’re not trying to win the election anymore. I really believe that choosing Palin was for inciting the base for war on an Obama administration they had come to believe was a certainty. They know this time the fighting will be harder then it was to destroy Clinton because the democratic grassroots, if not the leadership, is organized and ready for it this time. Expecting it even. And maybe they’ve taken the measure of Obama in their private conferences and figured that he’s no Bill Clinton. So they’re stoking the gutter full of hate, because the gutter is all they have left to win with. That’s why it was Palin. People are shaking their heads wondering how McCain could pick the likes of her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. But he didn’t pick her to be vice president. Her job is to be gasoline on the fire.
What we’re seeing now isn’t the last ugly gasp of a failed presidential campaign, but the start of the scorched earth after-the-election knife fight for the next four years, if not longer. I’ve been saying for years now that the shit doesn’t really hit the fan until the republicans begin loosing power. In the coming years, it won’t only be gay people getting bashed on the streets of America. Just so you know.
Welcome to the reality your gay and lesbian neighbors have been living with for decades now. You knew it had to be you next didn’t you.
That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.
Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.
But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.
All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.
And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light. But NBC isn’t just a television network. It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation. In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about. So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits? They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.
Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole. But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA. They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line. No more. The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.
I wrote earlier that Obama’s favorabilities have surprisingly survived this election intact, given the amount of shit that has been flung in his direction. Part of the reason is that the GOP overreached in their attacks. While arguing that he was inexperienced could’ve gained traction pre-Palin, the stuff about being a Muslim Marxist Manchurian candidate was simply, well, ludicrous.
If you want to take a look at their reasoning, I recommend the work of Stanley Kurtz over at the National Review…
Stanley Kurtz being the guy who doctored up marriage statistics from Scandiavian countries so he could claim that legal same-sex marriage resulted in the decline of heterosexual marriages and that children were being raised mostly by unmarried parents now. Over at Slate, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, M. V. Lee Badgett shows how Kurtz did it…
Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.
Of course, the good news about marriage rates is bad news for Kurtz’s sky-is-falling argument. So, Kurtz instead focuses on the increasing tendency in Europe for couples to have children out of wedlock. Gay marriage, he argues, is a wedge that is prying marriage and parenthood apart.
The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.
But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.
That’s a higher rate then some states here in America. Mostly bible belt states. But look at this. First Kurtz gerrymanders the marriage statistics in Scandinavia by including time frames when it was declining Prior to the passage of same sex civil unions, to prove that those civil unions had an adverse affect on heterosexual marriage. In fact, after civil unions passed heterosexual marriage rates Improved. But that wasn’t enough. Kurtz also pointed out the fact that many heterosexual couples have their first kid out of wedlock, deliberately omitting the fact that they almost always marry afterward, in order to lead people to believe that there was some sort of massive population of kids living with unmarried parents in Scandinavia now. That this conclusion is absolutely false, that you can only arrive at it by concealing the fact that most parents do in fact marry after their child is born, mattered nothing to Kurtz. He had something to prove, and damn the evidence. This is what passes for virtue and morality among social conservatives.
Now he’s peddling the Obama is a marxist and/or muslim terrorist claptrap. How…unsurprising…
Mark Weigel reads a note from the kook pews, and takes it apart…line by line…
Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii.
What evidence? We have a newspaper announcement of Obama’s birth in Hawai’i from 1961, and we have a Hawai’ian certificate of live birth. Obama did have Kenyan citizenship until he turned 21; as the son of Barack Obama, Sr, it was automatic. And it did not negate his American citizenship.
There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian.
Here’s the document. It does identify Obama as a Muslim and identifies Indonesia as his "nation of citizenship," but that’s what his parents wrote down on their seven-year old son’s school form. If Gaffney thinks this negates Obama’s American citizenship, he doesn’t understand the law.
If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.
Completely false. The document lists Honolulu as Obama’s "place and date of birth."
Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.
False. I’ll link it again. Unless Gaffney believes that the state of Hawai’i is forging documents for Obama, this is proof that he was born in Honolulu.
This is fever swamp, Vince Foster-was-murdered, Bush-blew-up-the-WTC stuff…
Yes…isn’t it. Oh…but look…it isn’t some babbling nutcase churning this stuff out from his parent’s basement…
Neoconservative pundit Frank Gaffney, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, has bid adieu to polite society with this column on "the Jihadist vote."
Let me repeat that: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary Of Defense. These are the folks who have been running the country for the past, oh, Eight Years. The debacles that are Iraq, Katrina and the national economy starting to make sense now? Here…let me explain something to you… No…Wait… Let Them explain something to you…
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.”
This isn’t just the heart of the Bush presidency…it’s the heart of the republican grassroots. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore”… Actually…yes it is…
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. They are not entitled to their own facts. Lies have consequences. The erosion of trust has consequences. You can’t just keep on making things up and expect nothing to come of it… When stocks become worthless, markets fail. When the word of the people becomes worthless, democracy fails.
UPDATE: Later in the column Gaffney cites Pennsylvania attorney Philip Berg, who’s filed a frivolous lawsuit against Obama on this citizenship conspiracy theory. That would be this Philip Berg.
Now, it is time for world leaders to take the lesson learned from Iraq and issue a warrant for the arrest of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney; arrest them; take them to a neutral country; try them for the murder of over 2,800 people from more than 80 countries on 9/11/01 and, when found guilty, sentence them appropriately. Jurisdiction would be proper in any of the more than 80 countries whose citizens were murdered on 9/11.
I compared Gaffney’s nonsense to 9/11 trutherism for a reason.
UPDATE II: This is pathetic: a Toledo station runs a "local hero"-type story on Berg, which puts legal documents from Hawai’i on equal footing with his fact-free claims. It’s mind-boggling. On the one hand you have a government certificate that says Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. on 8/4/61 in Honolulu. On the other you have Berg’s claim, from his lawsuit:
Obama’s grandmother on his father’s side, his half-brother and half-sister all claim Obama was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya. Reports reflect that Obama’s mother traveled to Kenya during her pregnancy; however, she was prevented from boarding a flight from Kenya to Hawaii at her late stage of pregnancy (which, apparently, was a normal restriction, to avoid births during a flight).
Notice the distinct lack of quotes and sources? It’s because the "Obama’s African family members claim he was born in Kenya" story is an internet myth. They have never claimed that. There is no such story. Go ahead and try to find it.
An internet myth. Note that. It’s what the grassroots are saying. To each other. Among other things. Over and over. Obama is a Muslim. Obama has ties to al Qaeda. Obama is a traitor. Obama is a terrorist. So it is, that the republican grassroots take their collective consciences around behind the barn and shoot it. Anything to win, even if it means taking a running bellyflop into the gutter. But it’s not just Obama they are hurling bullshit shit at. They are taking a dump on the very flags that they are busy waving.
It’s one thing to oppose the other party’s candidate on the basis of their record. It’s one thing to oppose them on the basis of their beliefs. It’s one thing to oppose them just because you don’t like their looks, the cut of their clothes, or because the sky is blue. Fine. It’s your right. But when you spread lies you are not opposing the man. You are hating on democracy. You are giving it the middle finger. A democracy is the sum of its citizens. Corrupt yourself, and you corrupt your country. It’s one thing for the politican on your TV screen to do it, it’s one thing for the talk radio host you tune into every day to do it, but when You lie to your neighbor for political gain, you are shitting on America.
This precious democracy we all share, that was bestowed us with the blood and treasure of so many of our forebears, asks only that you treat its core value, the election, with care and attention, and give to it whatever honest consideration you can, to the best of your ability. We all make mistakes sometimes in the ballot booth. Some votes we cast we long live to regret. But the important thing is we try and are honest. With ourselves. With our neighbors. Disagree we may. Vehemently. Fine. So long as it’s honest. That is what so many good people in so many generations past have died for, so that we could do. Speak freely and honestly to each other. Persuasively. Bluntly. Calmly. Angrily. Whatever. But honestly. Because you can. Because people died to give you that freedom. That’s all American is obliging you to do every election year. Instead, you are feeding it poison.
America is dying from that poison. I hear you speak of your patriotism, your love of flag and country. Over and over again I hear it. I see you wave the flag. I see it on your front doors. I see it on your bumpers. I see you wearing it on your lapels. Fine. Swell. Whatever. You love America? Then Stop Lying. Stop. Your motherfucking lies are killing it.
[Update…] Here’s a link to Factcheck.org on Obama’s birth certificate, since the one Weigel linked to isn’t enough for the kook pews. As if…anything could be…actually… I’m sure they have a way of explaining away this too…
In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961…
Dig it. They went looking through the newspaper archives and found the birth announcement. Of course…it’s all part of the consperacy you see…
”They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife. There were repeated allegations during [Newman’s] lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person’s sexual orientation.”
Peter Tatchell, a British gay rights activist, remarking on the life of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, an influential Catholic thinker, who may be granted full Sainthood by the Catholic Church despite the probability of a homo-relational life spent with his male companion, Ambrose Saint John.
At his own request, Newman was buried in the same grave as Ambrose St John. He had stated on three occasions his desire to be buried with his friend, including shortly before his death in 1890: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will", he wrote, later adding: "This I confirm and insist on."
–Wikipedia Entry on John Henry Newman
The long-running battle between gay rights activists and the Vatican has moved into the realm of the dead. With 19th century Anglican convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, arguably the greatest Catholic thinker from the English-speaking world, moving ever closer to sainthood, trouble is brewing over where his final resting place should be. The London-born historian and theologian died in 1890 and, following the instructions in his will, was buried beside his lifelong friend and fellow convert Ambrose St. John, who had died 15 years earlier. Newman’s deep expressions of grief after St. John’s death, along with other writings, have led some historians to ask whether the two men, who lived together for many years, lived much like common-law spouses.
Newman, whose ideas on conscience and faith have influenced Christian theology ever since, is expected to be beatified next year following the Vatican’s recent certification of a Newman miracle — when a Boston man’s cure from a crippling spinal disease could not be explained medically. The final step of canonization — full Sainthood — will require proof of an additional miracle achieved through the intercession of Newman’s spirit. The Vatican announced plans this month to move Newman’s remains from a small gravesite in the central English town of Rednal to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for venerating faithful.
-Time Magazine
Although the passionate love between them was entirely chaste, the campaigners were seeking to claim — extravagantly — that Newman’s was a "same-sex relationship" which the Catholic Church was trying to suppress, an accusation Rome felt the need to scotch. But even those who did not believe Newman was a "closet homosexual" were still concerned that Newman’s body was going to be dismembered to extract relics. For such an English saint — the first non-martyr since the Reformation to be raised to the altars – it all seemed a little, well, Mediterranean.
(It has also been a running joke for religious correspondents, who have been proposing a "graveside webcam" to cover the disinternment, and speculating at the embarrassment that would follow from the discovery that the body of St John, not Newman’s, had been preserved.)
The grave of the 19th Century Cardinal John Henry Newman did not contain his body, the Catholic Church has revealed.
The plot, at the Oratory House, Rednal, near Birmingham, was excavated on Thursday at the Vatican’s instruction.
His remains were to have been moved to the Birmingham Oratory, in preparation for Newman’s anticipated beatification.
Newman’s body may have decomposed, as his coffin was not lead-lined. Its absence will not affect the progress of his cause in Rome, a spokesman said.
In a statement released on Saturday, Peter Jennings from the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory, said: "Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts from Cardinal Newman’s coffin were found.
Newman was actually laid to rest, per his wishes, in St. John’s tomb. That’s what makes the joke Ivereigh mentions of particular interest. Regardless of whether their relationship ever became a physical one, Newman clearly and deeply loved St. John. That’s why his body had to be removed from St. John’s tomb before he could be canonized. The dehumanization of homosexual people proceeds not from a denial that sex between same sex lovers is natural, but from a denial that we love. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It isn’t the suggestion that Newman ever had sex with the man he loved that outrages the likes of Ratzinger. It’s the fact that he loved another man, and was loved by him, and that their love was vital to both of them. That is what simply cannot be. Not that they had sex, but that they loved each other. That is why Newman’s body had to be dug up, and separated from St. John’s. In his jihad on gay people, Pope Ratzinger isn’t one to let mere death prevent him from separating same sex lovers.
But when the tomb was opened they found no remains. Both men were gone. No Newman, No St. John. The tomb was empty.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
