Seen on Twitter: “Family of four sitting in the patio furniture section of Costco eating picnic lunch made up entirely of samples. #theamericandream”

I remember as a kid, listening to mom’s tales of the Great Depression.   Little did I know those stories would prepare me for life in 21st century America…

Newt Gingrich says yesterday that same-sex marriage is paganism. Presumably unlike having a wife and a mistress.

This cracks me up…

In the current issue of the center-right policy journal, National Affairs, former Bush domestic policy adviser Tevi Troy worries about the decline of Washington think tanks into partisan messaging operations.

Stop…stop…you’re killing me.   Seriously, on what planet were most beltway think tanks, and especially AEI and Heritage, ever not partisan messaging operations?

Yes, yes, liberal “think tanks” exist, but how many global corporations and multi-billionaires are going to fund a think tank that starts from an ideologically liberal economic position?   Right wing and conservative “think tanks” basically rule the beltway discourse and you always know what their conclusions will be, and which party will happily benefit from them.   Their non-partisanship is a farce.   They are think tanks like Intelligent Design is science.

There’s a rule of thumb about think tanks: If you already know what the conclusion is before you pick up the paper and read it, it is not a think tank. Rand is a think tank.   Let me explain by this example from Wiki:

In 1958, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the U.S. had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to U.S. interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.

See how that works.   They asked a question they didn’t already know the answer to and set about to answer it.   No ideology, just answers. AEI and Heritage, to name two, begin with the answer in the form of an ideological position (unconditional surrender is always the most favorable outcome) and try to figure out a way to message that for the benefits of republicans.

What these organizations do is tactical rhetoric, not thinking.   Thinking is where you search for answers, not fashion attractive political battle flags.   Thinking takes you into undiscovered places.   That’s not allowed in organization like AEI, which Frum found out when he got the boot for not towing the line.   These are party instruments, nothing more nothing less.   They exist precisely to discourage thinking.   You are told what to think.   Or at any rate, what to say that you think.

Witness the decline in American governance.   We can’t confront the real problems that exist because our institutions of government are mired in ideologies which demand fealty over everything else.   Facts don’t matter, only the party matters, and free thinking is treason to the party.   And so our ability as a nation to grow and prosper into the 21st century is limited to what the ideologies in power will allow, and that isn’t much.   We were promised a shining city on a hill.   What we got were factories closed, wages devastated, pensions lost, entire neighborhoods in foreclosure and state and local governments teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.   Yet the ideologies that promised us that shining city are never held to account.   For all the think tanks in Washington, not a whole lot of thinking is actually going on.

Some days I feel like nothing at all has changed in forty years…

At Saturday’s GOP presidential forum in Iowa, newly minted frontrunner Newt Gingrich tore into the Occupy Wall Street movement, pointing to it as a symbol of exactly what’s wrong with America. “All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything,” he explained. “That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, ‘Go get a job, right after you take a bath'”

There is an unpopular war going on, protestors are in the streets, cops fly into sickening displays of police brutality at every peaceful protest they show up at, and right wing politicians are telling the dirty fucking hippies to take a bath.   When did 2011 turn into 1972 and can I at least have my eighteen year old body back?

Are there no prisons?   Are there no workhouses?

Answer: Their mouth is moving.   This, from Joe. My. God…

Yesterday we enjoyed the evisceration of anti-gay NC Sen. James Forrester at the hands of Michelangelo Signorile, who got rather incredulous at Forrester’s lack of HIV knowledge, especially considering that Forrester claims to be a Fellow with the esteemed American College of Preventive Medicine. As it turns out, THAT WAS A FUCKING LIE.

Pam Spaulding has the delicious dirt via contributor Scott Rose, who got this response from the ACPM:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. The quick answer to your questions is that Dr. Forrester is not, and never has been, a member of ACPM (much less a Fellow, which is our highest designation of membership). However, this is troubling to us, too, that he’s apparently claiming to be a Fellow of ACPM, and we would like to know where Dr. Forrester is making these proclamations so that we can approach him and demand that he cease falsely using ACPM credentials in his campaign or wherever else he’s using it. If you can point us to some places where he’s using those credentials, we’d be most appreciative. Many thanks.

This you may recall, is the Upstanding All-American Heterosexual Christian Pillar Of His Community…

…who   introduced the current anti same-sex marriage amendment in the North Carolina Senate, and whose rational for doing that was in part, his longstanding work as a physician and Fellow at the American College of Preventive Medicine dealing with the medical problems of homosexuals.

When all is said and done, the only problem I have with bigots who live in their own alternate reality is they can’t actually go live there, they have to keep inflicting their fantasy world on the rest of us in the reality based community.   That said, it is occasionally sweet to watch reality bite them in the ass from time to time.   I stopped waiting long ago, for any of them to learn anything from the experience.   I just bask in the schadenfreude.   Can you at least take that little tin North Carolina Flag lapel pin off your jacket while you’re looking your fellow senators in the face and lying through your teeth?   Try to be respectful of your state flag man.

Think Progress tweets: GOP Rep. Steve King: Free birth control will make America “a dying civilization”

Right.   Because children aren’t ever conceived because parents actually want them.   Your parents reminded you of that fact often didn’t they Steve.

Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:12:57 -0400
From: Bruce Garrett
To: ombudsman@washpost.com
Subject: The furor

You write…

Liberals and conservatives don’t talk to each other much anymore; they exist in parallel online universes, only crossing over to grab some explosive anti-matter from the other side to stoke the rage in their own blogosphere.

Followed almost immediately by…

Rubin was hired by Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Post, to be an opinion blogger who would appeal to conservatives and people who want to follow conservative politics. She does.

He hired her in other words, to do for the Post readership what you are bellyaching that blogs are doing to their readers.   You’d think that the newspaper of record in the nation’s capital would set a higher standard for itself.   You’d think.

Maybe your publication should consider the possible consequences of enabling political echo chamber vitriol itself.   You are giving it a legitimacy the blogs could never hope to accomplish.

—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.

Haitt hired Rubin because he knew she’d stoke right wing vitriol.   And he hired you because he knew you’d make excuses for that.

In 1997, the state of Florida made it a felony for someone who is HIV positive to have sexual intercourse without telling their partner. Now…what do you think that means in a state that very specifically defines sexual intercourse only as vaginal sex between a man and a woman.

Correct…

Case overturned because of narrow definition of sex

Last month, the court of appeal overturned a Bradenton woman’s conviction for exposing her female partner to HIV because the sexual acts were between two women. The law “does not apply to her actions,” the 2nd District Court of Appeal said.

The ruling applies statewide, meaning gays and lesbians cannot be convicted of hiding their HIV status from their sex partners, at least for now. Neither can anyone who only engages in sexual acts that do not fit the state’s legal definition of intercourse — “the penetration of the female sex organ by the male sex organ.”

So when Sarasota County authorities arrested an HIV-positive man this week on charges he had anal and oral sex with a 14-year-old boy, the sexual battery charge may stick, but the HIV charge will not…

This reminds me of another case, I think it was also in Florida, where it turned out a man could either not be charged by the state or not be sued by his estranged wife for adultery, because his sexual dalliance was committed with another man not another woman. In this case the oversight was, as the article notes, “…a glitch in the statute that nobody noticed before…” I can’t imagine why.

Well…yes I can. The thinking here clearly is that if we’re written out of the law then they don’t have to worry about some activist judge finding that we have these things called “rights”. So as far as the law is concerned in Florida, only heterosexuals have this thing called sex, and for that matter only when one man’s penis is entering one woman’s vagina. At some point they may also want to specify the missionary position for further clarity.

So I see the ex-gay movement held it’s annual medicine show down in Orlando earlier this month…

Andrew Sullivan this morning:

Last night, it struck me that every single statement on gay rights by the GOP candidates, however brutal, could have been leavened by some small concession that gays are serving their country honorably, that gays are a part of many families and indeed the American family, that they should not be demonized by the majority, etc. But none of the candidates could say a single positive thing. Or rather they believed they could not survive a GOP primary by saying anything even vaguely positive about gay Americans. In some ways, that’s more telling.

If in the process of conducting your political campaign you give a silent consent to hate then you are just as much a part of the mob as if you had born one of their torches yourself and screamed for blood.   Anyone who cannot muster the moral backbone to denounce hate is unfit to be director of public parking, let alone president of the United States.   It is that simple.

Ah…the predictable backlash against the backlash against the backlash has begun…

Lawyers question firm’s decision to ditch gay marriage case

Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding won plaudits Monday from gay activists for backing out of an agreement to argue to uphold the federal ban on gay marriage. But a day later the reviews were a bit more bruising in  the legal community.

Top lawyers and law professors, with some notable exceptions, called it an embarrassing blunder by the prestigious firm or  a betrayal of a client and legal principles. Others think King & Spalding, whose clients include General Electric and Coca-Cola, may have backed out because the firm fears the fallout from leading an anti-gay legal fight.

You say that like it’s a bad thing…

King & Spalding’s announcement it would not represent congressional House Republicans in their quest to defend court challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)  and the subsequent decision of Paul Clement, the lawyer  in the case, to quit the firm and take it  elsewhere was the talk Tuesday among Yale University Law School faculty, said Lawrence Fox, a Yale professor and expert in legal ethics. DOMA defines marriage “for federal tax, Social Security and other purposes” as only a union between a man and a woman.

“We really go down a bad road if we say law firms can’t take on (controversial)  matters or people will assume you have those views,” said Fox. “I’m going to walk into my class today and I’m going to use this. I’m tearing up my lesson plan …  to talk about this case.”

The nice thing about working in an ivory tower is what you do doesn’t have to have any relationship to the world outside.   Tenure.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who have to live there, in the world of the commoners, it’s only they who remember the panic that set in back in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples could not constitutionally be denied the right to marry.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the party of Lincoln and Fred Phelps pushed through congress the Defense Of Marriage Act to protect American heterosexuals from the damaging effects of having to live in a world where the sordid, brief and barren sexual assignations of homosexuals had the same legal standing as their noble unions of male and female.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the man who stood in front of them and said “I have a vision for America and you’re part of it” signed that bill into law in the dead of night, somewhat less then three years after he folded on his promise to let gay servicemen serve openly and with dignity.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who watched as the new republican majority in congress, elected on campaign pledges of jobs, set about immediately to work reassuring their base that the meager gains gay Americans had made while the democrats were in control would not stand, and that they would be steadfast in opposing president Obama’s plan to impose The Gay Agenda on America.

It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who read the steady stream of news reports of same-sex couples beaten down and destroyed by this nation’s abject capitulation to bigotry, month after month, year after year.

Gay couple’s immigration plight: Ailing New Yorker may be torn from spouse over visa

A gay Long Island couple who have played by the immigration rules for more than a decade are stuck in a Catch-22 that could tear them apart just when they need each other most.

New Yorker Edwin Blesch, 70 and his South African husband, Tim Smulian, 65, have been spending six months on Long Island and six months abroad to comply with Smulian’s tourist visa.

But Blesch, who has HIV, suffered several mini-strokes and other complications and is now unable to travel safely.

Smulian is his primary caregiver – but has no way to stay here permanently.

Immigration Officials To Gay Binational Couples: Just Kidding, No Deportation Holds

It’s unclear what will happen to the couples already profiled by major news sources, like Monica Alcota and Cristina Ojeda. The one thing that is clear is that this is a sad day for binational same-sex couples, and for everyone who values America’s tradition of being a place where people can come from anywhere in the world to make a home. Like so many other things, that seems to be a privilege reserved for straight people.

It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember their names…names like Laurel Hester.   Not law professors in ivory towers.

Here is a law firm that proudly touted its support for gay Americans in their struggle for equality.   Suddenly it is, in a very high profile way, part of the republican party’s DOMA circus.   Suddenly every attorney, every clerk, every secretary, every intern working for this law firm is under a gag order…not simply to refrain from speaking about the case, but never to breath so much as a word against DOMA.   Imagine that instead of Teh Gay this case was about defending a congressional ban on Jewish ownership of businesses.   How many eyebrows would be raised when a law firm that touted its opposition to antisemitism, suddenly took on the congressional defense of that law, and gagged its partners and staff from ever speaking a word against the segregation of Jews?   Who would complain when the law firm withdrew and the jackass antisemitic partner who dragged them into that despicable case left to pursue it on his own, that the Jews had gone too far?

But conscience, and a sense of basic human decency wanders in a lot of people, even now, when it comes to the persecution of gay Americans.   Suddenly persecuting minorities becomes some abstract thing, less important, less real, then the right of republicans to conduct a great circus show of defending marriage against the forces of Obama and Satan, and demonize a segment of America for votes.   The constant rain of gay blood on the streets isn’t even on their moral radar…

HRC is right to fight vigorously to overturn DOMA, which deprives gays and lesbians of many of the rights enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts. But it sullies itself and its cause by resorting to bullying tactics.

So says The Washington Post.   Bullying tactics?

Details Of Brutal Hate Crime Attack On Damian Furtch Emerge

A gay man was attacked outside a West Village McDonalds for doing nothing more than wearing pink shoelaces and bright clothing, according to the victim.

Damian Furtch, 26, was pummeled early Sunday by two suspects shouting anti-gay epithets, police said.

The beating was the third bias attack in the neighborhood since October.

Bullying Tactics?

Gay Bash Benefits Gay Bashing Victim

On February 22, around 11:00 p.m., Shortell was walking home to his apartment on Kent Avenue and North Fourth Street, a walk that never felt unsafe to him before, when he was brutally attacked by a group of four teenagers. The details were fuzzy after that and as a result of the incident, Shortell suffered a fractured chin and nose; eye sockets and cheekbones, requiring ten hours of immediate surgery, several days in the hospital, and a month of recovery since.

Bullying tactics?   Bullying tactics?   Here’s the problem: the scapegoats aren’t taking it anymore.   They’re fighting back.   Where is the outrage in the corporate news media…the comfortable McMansion in the rich white suburbs corporate news media?   Once again, it’s directed at gay Americans.   For standing up for their human dignity.   For defending themselves against hate.   For fighting back.   Republicans inciting hatred for votes is just Business As Usual.   Gays asking businesses to walk the walk not just talk the talk on civil rights is front page news!   How dare they.   Don’t they know their place anymore?   What is this world coming to, when even homosexuals demand to be treated with respect?   Who told the them they had a right not to be bullied?   It certainly wasn’t us.

The pushback from the right started almost immediately, and with all the acid vitriol by which they inflamed the violent passions that almost certainly led to the shooting in Arizona last Saturday in the first place.   You could watch the bogus Jared Lee Loughner Facebook pages…the ones where he admits his loathsome liberal tendancies…being created and deleted as fast as the Facebook administrators could catch them going up.   You can really tell they learned their lesson from the killing of Matthew Shepard.   If now was then, they’d have been calling Shepard a meth using sex addict and McKinney and Henderson a couple of drugged out psychopaths and the killing a Tragic robbery gone bad long before the body had a chance to get cold, let alone buried.   And as always, a key ingredient in the smokescreen building are the uncertainties, inevitable so close to the event itself, if not for far, far beyond it.   What actually did motivate the killer?   Was he a leftist or a hard core Tea Partier?   Did he read Marx or Hitler?   Did he surf The New Republic or Daily KOS?   And if we can’t answer those basic questions then dare you lay blame for this horrible, horrible tragedy at the feet of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party you treasonous America hating liberals.

And so on…and so forth…

What does it mean to “lay the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at the feet of Palin and the Right”?   That they gave the killer the gun and some money and sent him on his way?   That they deliberately incited this specific killer to this specific act?     That they fueled a dangerous climate of violence against their political opponents, deliberately, to intimidate their political opposition without particularly caring if any one of them actually got killed, because long ago they stopped seeing the opposition as their neighbors, their fellow Americans, but rather as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary, and if one of them Did get killed it would teach the rest a lesson?

“Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!'”
-Sarah Palin via Twitter

Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who’s in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…

Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.

Angle: Well it’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.

Responsibility.   If our fingerprints are not actually on the murder weapon itself then we are not responsible.   It is immoral for you to use this National Tragedy for partisan political advantage.   And if our violent eliminationist rhetoric did happen to motivate that poor psycho to pack a gun and kill an elected officeholder we’ve placed our crosshairs on, well then logically liberals are the ones who are responsible.   Because if it wasn’t for all that ACLU liberal freedom of speech stuff he would never have heard us talking about 2nd amendment remedies for adverse election outcomes.   Responsibility.

What do I have to change my name to so I can get on one of those No-Fly lists?   Seriously.

Napolitano defends new screening at airports

Amid criticism over intensified airport screening measures, Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the Department of Homeland Security’s use of full-body scanners and pat-downs as essential to “match the changing threat environment that we inhabit.”

“This is all being done as a process to make sure that the traveling public is safe,” she said, adding that officials would “have an open ear” if adjustments to the new rules needed to be made.

Got an open ear do you?

Good thing I actually like long distance road trips.   But hopefully in my lifetime the great ocean liners can start making a comeback.     Please.   I would still like to see the world someday.

Rand Paul, white heterosexual tea party candidate won his contest last night, and among cheering white heterosexual supporters announced to the world…

I have a message – a message from the people of Kentucky, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We’ve come to take our government back!

Our government.   Our government.   Our government.   This from the man who said it was wrong for government to force businesses to obey civil rights laws because it was a violation of individual liberty, but who also thinks government should be in the business of controlling women’s bodies, dictating what is and what is not marriage and what is and what is not a family.   So when speaks of “the people” and utters the phrase “our government” it’s pretty easy to tell that “the people” are not necessarily his neighbors in this life but merely his own kind.   White.   Heterosexual.   Oh…and rich.   Very very rich.

Thus, the Louisiana Courier Press reported during the campaign…

Along with college and university students, Paul is courting the libertarian-leaning Republicans who got excited about his father. But to win a Kentucky primary, he’ll need social conservatives, and University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss said he must be careful as he tries to appeal to both.

“This is a difficult tightrope to walk,” said Voss, who nonetheless believes Paul may be the front-runner right now. “When he’s talking economics and money, he is philosophically a libertarian. When he talks about social issues, he’s sending guarantees to the right wing that he’s not libertarian.”

Paul says he opposes abortion without exception, not even in cases of rape, incest or the health of the expectant mother. He also opposes marriages between gay and lesbian couples. At the same time, he voices staunch opposition to government intruding in the private lives of citizens.

A Difficult Tightrope To Walk… No, not a tightrope, a deception.     There are two kinds of “libertarian”.   There’s the useful tools who really believe that crap.   I was one of those back in the late 70s and moved around in Libertarian circles, working on campaigns, getting bored shoppers to sign our petitions, and that was where I saw that I was basically just a useful tool for the other sort of Libertarian.   The faux ones.   The rich right wingers and hard core John Birchers who saw libertarian rhetoric as a good way to bamboozle voters, especially young voters.   I first saw it when a vigorous argument broke out in the ranks after the U.S. supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers upheld the state’s sodomy laws.   I was aghast and fully expected my comrades in the movement to be also.   But…no.   It was all about “state’s rights” many of them said.   But, but…says I…surely the states don’t have the right to toss grown adults in jail for simply for having sex either, no matter how strongly others may disapprove.   Individual liberty and all that.   No, no, I was told over and over.   “State’s rights”.   “State’s rights”.   “State’s rights”.

It was a slogan I had come to know well from the fight over race segregation in America, and I knew perfectly well even at a young age just what it was code for, along with that other famous code phrase of the time.   We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

I got your libertarian America right here…

…and here…

…and here…

…and here…

…and here.

And I got your “libertarian” senator right here…