That would be Bruce Bower I’m referring too, not yours truly. Bower, who wrote in Stealing Jesus how Christian fundamentalists have turned Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness into a religion utterly devoid of love let alone forgiveness, is loosing his mind. And the first hint you get of that in his latest essay, First They Came For The Gays, is that he’s writing now for the 101st Fighting Keyboarders over at Pajamas Media.
Reading Sebastian Haffner’s disturbing memoir, Defying Hitler, I learned two facts that were surprising to me. First, that the German people were delivered into the tender mercies of the Nazis, not by a bunch of weak kneed decadent liberal appeasers, but with the systematic destruction of the Weimar constitution by a series of right wing governments, each of which had declared that harsh measures had to be taken to protect Germany from extremists. And secondly, that the Communist menace was, by the time the Reichstag was burning down, almost completely toothless. It’s leaders and followers had been decimated by a series of anti-labor pogroms in the previous decade.
As it turned out, the communist menace was a convenient scarecrow various right wing governments waved in people’s faces, so it could do away with those constitutional rights and guarantees it found inconvenient. Not that people weren’t seriously afraid of the Communists…they were. But the actual menace to Germany, the domestic one, the Nazis, had much more in common with the rightist governments then people cared to notice. The argument was always that stern measures were needed to quell domestic unrest. But by 1932 that unrest was almost exclusively the work of the Nazis, not the Communists. The grim irony I discovered in Haffner’s book, was that if there was any appeasement going on back then in Germany, it was at the hands of the right who kept trying to appease the fanatics on Their right with the piecemeal dismantling of the democracy the Nazis detested, in order to save Germany from fanatics like…well…the Nazis. But they didn’t save it from extremism, so much as grease the skids for it. Here’s a clue for you Bruce: You don’t defend democracy, by abolishing it piecemeal.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bower, an American of my own generation who has since migrated to Norway, a gay conservative who just co-incidentally has a new book out titled, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, plays his part:
The reason for the rise in gay bashings in Europe is clear – and it’s the same reason for the rise in rape. As the number of Muslims in Europe grows, and as the proportion of those Muslims who were born and bred in Europe also grows, many Muslim men are more inclined to see Europe as a part of the umma (or Muslim world), to believe that they have the right and duty to enforce sharia law in the cities where they live, and to recognize that any aggression on their part will likely go unpunished. Such men need not be actively religious in order to feel that they have carte blanche to assault openly gay men and non-submissive women, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish is among the most conspicuous symbols of the West’s defiance of holy law.
Multiculturalists can’t face all this. So it is that even when there are brutal gay-bashings, few journalists write about them; of those who do, few mention that the perpetrators are Muslims; and those who do mention it take the line that these perpetrators are lashing out in desperate response to their own oppression.
The "Multiculturalists" Bower refers to here, and throughout, are strawmen. But more to the point, they are a standard right wing strawman. And that strawman is intended not so much to discredit multiculturalism, as democracy, and its bedrock of liberty and justice for all. In the name of sounding the alarm over the rise of anti-gay violence in Europe, Bower attaches that violence indiscriminately to a people, and to an entire religion. And in doing so he smears, backhandedly, cowardly, in the very manner of the anti-democratic subversive he claims to be standing proudly against, the central idea of democracy itself: that all citizens are equals under the law.
To claim that multiculturalism means tolerating honor rape equally with women’s freedom is pathetic bar stool sophistry, on the order of arguing that anti-lynching laws are just as much the product of bigotry as the lynchings themselves. This boilerplate right wing bar stool doggerel not only cheapens the political conversation, it means to actively shut it down. It’s Orwell’s black is white, up is down, doublespeak. And the idea here isn’t to discredit tolerance, but democracy. Where the promise of democracy belongs only to some, it belongs to no one. Except, perhaps, the ones who decide who is in, and who isn’t. The Europeans are painfully aware of exactly where that leads.
And that’s probably the brick wall that Bower, an American of my own generation, keeps hitting when he babbles on and on about how the Europeans need to wake up to the Islamist Menace, like he thinks he’s Paul Revere and not Father Coughlin. The events leading up to World War II in Europe are not so distant that the people over there have forgotten what happens when you start stigmatizing minorities, and Bower isn’t warning about a rise in intolerance and violence toward minorities: he’s warning them about the Muslims. He’s blaming it all on them. He’s telling Europe that it has a Muslim Problem. That’s probably scaring his audience the hell away. If he’d taken some time to try to understand the people he’s living among now, he might have expected that. But then if he could open his eyes a tad to the world around him, he might not be such a brick brained conservative now either. It’s really sad to watch a keen mind suffocate itself.
The problem facing gay people in Europe, as well as the rest of the world, isn’t radical Islamic fundamentalism, it’s radical fundamentalism period. And that rising, anti-modernist, anti-humanist, fundamentalism isn’t just threatening gay people, and it isn’t just threatening Europe. It’s a threat to democracy everywhere, to gay people, to women, to anyone who won’t bow down to its law. And it wears its Jesus mask as easily as it wears its Mohamed mask. In the end it isn’t about God or piety, it’s about obedience. In Stealing Jesus, Bower almost seemed to grasp that. Now he’s just letting his cheapshit xenophobia do his thinking for him. If I could stop being tired of seeing this kind of crap I might be sad for him.
He need only look to the scorched earth war between the gay haters and everyone else in his own church, the Anglicans, to see that isn’t true. There, the leader of the movement to chuck gay people out of the communion of Christ like so much human garbage, Bishop Peter Akinola, who once said he once literally jumped backward after realizing he’d shaken hands with a gay man, heartily endorse a proposed Nigerian law which would not only have outlawed same sex marriage, but prohibit any association of gays and lesbians, restrict their freedom of speech and movement, even to the point of making meeting in a restaurant or together in their own homes an illegal act. Here’s what Akinola, an ersatz Christian, had to say about the law…
"The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality."
And if that wasn’t enough…
"The Church affirms our commitment to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality which is a perversion of human dignity and encourages the National Assembly to ratify the Bill prohibiting the legality of homosexuality since it is incongruent with the teachings of the Bible, Quran and the basic African traditional values."
So here’s Akinola embracing his Christian, Muslim and African brothers in the war on homosexuality. Multiculturalism anyone? And surely Bowers knows by now that the upcoming schism in his church is being funded in large measure by American right wingers, and in particular Howard Ahmanson, the former Christian Reconstructionist who now claims he no longer considers it essential to stone homosexuals to death, although "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral…" You can just hear him handing Akinola and his brethren the stones there. Shara law anyone?
In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
The trio leading the Watchmen are Alexey Ledyaev, leader of the New Generation Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch in Riga, Latvia, Ken Hutcherson, leader of the Antioch Bible meagchurch near Seattle Washington, and Scott Lively, a holocaust denier who wrote The Pink Triangle, in which he claims that Nazism itself is a form of homosexuality, and that the Nazis didn’t so much persecute homosexuals, as were themselves homosexual. This claim he is currently busy spreading far and wide throughout Eastern Europe, a land whose people suffered a cataclysm at the hands of the Nazis during the second world war. That propaganda has done its work on some younger Slavs…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
"After a couple years of fundamentalist and Slavic Christian virulent anti-gay protests at almost every Sacramento gay event in the region," said local gay rights activist Michael Gorman, "what the gay community has feared for some time has finally happened."
Now Bower again…
Not very long ago, Oslo was an icy Shangri-la of Scandinavian self-discipline, governability, and respect for the law. But in recent years, there have been grim changes, including a rise in gay-bashings. The summer of 2006 saw an unprecedented wave of them. The culprits, very disproportionately, are young Muslim men.
Well I guess it was a good thing for Satender Singh that his attackers weren’t Muslims then. Except, he’s just as dead isn’t he? And that didn’t happen in Europe…it happened right here in America. Gay bashings, even killings, at the hands of young men who later claim a divine purpose to their bloodshed are hardly uncommon here. Meanwhile, in pulpits all across America, the religious right is hyping up the Homosexual Menace. We’re destroyers of marriage, and the family, and for good measure, civilization itself. And when the rhetoric from the pulpits is transmuted into blood, the religious right looses no time in declaring itself innocent, and in fact itself a victim of oppression by radical homosexuals.
No, assaults by Muslims always have to be construed as defensive – as expressions not of power but of weakness, not of aggression but of helplessness. To suggest that the culprits, far from being fragile, sensitive flowers who’ve been pushed over the line by something we did, are in fact bullies driven by an overweening sense of superiority and a deep-seated malice – both of which they’ve been carefully taught at home, at school, and, yes, in the mosque – is verboten.
Boy doesn’t that sound familiar. When was the last time you saw the American news media pointing a finger at the hate coming from the pulpits? Can’t remember? Neither can I. And I know I’d have heard about it because the religious right would have been screaming about the liberal news media and it’s anti-Christian pro-homosexual agenda so loud you could hear it on the moon.
By framing this as an exclusively Muslim problem, Bower plays right into the hands of those who raise the race card whenever Islamic extremism is called out for what it is. But worse then that, he’s wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Horribly wrong. Damnably wrong. Shara law, when and if it delivers Europe back into the dark ages, will be wearing a Jesus mask, not a Mohamed mask. In the Arab world it is the Mohammad mask. Maybe elsewhere it will look something like this…
A Jewish invocation will be used by ultra Orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem to curse the organizers of the Gay Pride March and the police who protect them, said a spokesman for the Edah Haredit Monday.
In a ceremony known as “Pulsa D’nura” (blows of fire), rabbis of the anti-Zionist Edah Haredit rabbinic court will convene sometime before the march, which is scheduled for Friday, to conduct the kabbalistic ceremony which is believed to unleash unearthly powers against specified sinners.
According to Shmuel Poppenheim, a spokesman for the Edah Haredit, Rabbi Moshe Sternbach, head of the Edah Haredit’s rabbinic court proposed conducting the ceremony during a meeting of rabbinic judges Monday morning.
“All the rabbis were together at the rabbinic court to proceed over a chalitza (part of a levirate ceremony),” said Poppenheim. “After the chalitza, Rabbi Sternbach recommended doing the Pulsa D’nura.”
Pulsa D’nura is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Metzia 47a) and in the Zohar.
“If done by a competent, God-fearing rabbinic court like the Edah Haredit, the people who are cursed do not live out the year,” said a Jerusalem-based rabbi who preferred to remain anonymous.
In 2005 a young ultra orthodox Jew, Yishai Schlissel, stabbed three gay Israelis during a Pride march. During his interrogation he said,
“I came to murder on behalf of God. We can’t have such abomination in the country.”
What you need to understand is that this violent hatred of the secular world, and all the freedom it brings, and human potential it unleashes, is not a Muslim phenomena, nor is it particular or even necessary to any one religion or faith. And in a deeper sense, it’s not even about homosexuality. It’s about modernism. It’s about freedom, about the awesome human potential that modern democracy has unleashed. It’s fundamentally about the ones who can’t cope with it…the ones who are Left Behind.
In his time, Haffner saw it…
Money came into the country, the currency maintained its value, and business was good. The older generation began to retrieve its store of experience from the attic, burnish it bright, and show it off, as if it had never been invalidated. The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries. The pubic sector required only competent officials, and the private sector only hard working businessmen. There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food, and a little political boredom. Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their own personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own tastes, and to find their own paths to happiness.
Now something strange happened – and with this I believe I am about to reveal one of the most fundamental political events of our rime, something that was not reported in any newspaper; by and large that invitation was declined. It was not what was wanted. A whole generation was, it seemed, at a loss as to how to cope with the offer of an unfettered private life.
There’s the root of it. The threat to democracy now, and eternally, is not Islam, but the Left Behind, and their sullen, resentful, hatred of everything a human being can be, of everything humanity can become, that they cannot. Or at any rate could, if only they weren’t so afraid of existence. This isn’t a Muslim thing. It’s a human thing. The Left Behind are everywhere, in every nation, of every race, in every culture. To embrace their cheapshit paranoias about Otherness, is to let them win the only battle that matters…the one for your soul. You embrace their fear and hatred of The Other, and the next thing you know you will be taking the ax to your precious democracy just as cheerfully as they are. Side by side you’ll both systematically destroy it. And then the next thing to get the ax, will be you. Because a race to the bottom is always won by the one that’s already there.
It is not radical Islam that threatens to destroy the West from within Bowers, it is the likes of you and your fellow fighting 101st Keyboarders over at Pajamas. ‘Multiculturalism’ is just one of this period’s trite little buzz-words that simply acknowledges the fact that in a free country your neighbor has the right to dress funny, and worship in a funny looking church if they want to. And maybe, just maybe, there might be something of value in their lives for the rest of us to take note of. Or not. But that’s how melting pots work after all you drooling moron. And as Jefferson said, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Multiculturalism is no more about giving Muslim men the right to rape women any more then the American civil rights movement was about giving black men the right to rape women, although a lot of white conservatives back then seemed to think it was. Grow up. You’re fighting the wrong enemy, and in the process you are loosing the war.
The Muslim man who looks you in the face hails from a culture that gave humanity the modern decimal system, and which preserved much of what the ancients knew through the dark ages. You know…that period of time in Europe where the Christian church burned faggots and heretics at the stake. And if you think that’s all in your culture’s past, and that the primative, fanatical haters of his kind don’t also have their precise counterparts among yours too, or that yours are at least no great threat to your peace and freedom, you are sadly, horribly, fatally mistaken.
The enemy within, the one you need to fear the most, is the one that wears a face much like yours, and gives you a sincere smile and a hearty handshake, and whispers in your ear that this world would be So much nicer without all those horrible other people in it…
Kwame Kilpatrick was a guest on Real Time with Bill Mayer on Friday, Feb. 27 [2004]. On the show, which is broadcast live on the cable television network HBO, Kilpatrick adamantly opposed marriage for gays.
"I think that where this doesn’t belong is in a political discussion and I think that that’s where we’re starting off on the wrong foot," Kilpatrick said. "I personally do not support gay marriage. No, I don’t support gay marriage."
"Is that a political opinion?" Mayer asked.
"I think that marriage is between a woman and a man," answered Kilpatrick. "That is not a political opinion. If I was not in politics I’d say the same thing."
"Based on what?"
"Based on who I am, whose I am and where I come from," Kilpatrick continued.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is hanging on for his political life after the revelation that, among 14,000 text messages between him and his chief of staff Christine Beatty, there was evidence of an extramarital affair between the pair — evidence that contradicts his sworn statements in a whistleblower case brought by former police officers that ended in $9 million in damages against the city.
City Councilman Kwame Kenyatta this afternoon began the process to initiate a full audit of the finances of the mayor’s office — including travel and legal charges — since Kwame Kilpatrick took office in 2002.
A full council vote is expected next week.
Kenyatta also wants the city’s Auditor General to investigate the law department and what type of legal representation it has provided Kilpatrick.
Last week it was confirmed that a secret deal was hatched to help settle an $8 million whistle-blower’s lawsuit filed by two ex-police officers. The deal prevented the disclosure of text messages embarrassing to the mayor. The messages confirmed an affair between Kilpatrick and his now-ex chief of staff Christine Beatty, contrary to their testimony during the whistle-blower’s trial.
No doubt the fact that Michigan allows same sex marriage is responsible for Mr. Kilpatrick’s cheating on his wife. Oh…wait…
MICHIGAN
Current law: DOMA written into state constitution and state law
Legislation: State constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage placed on the Nov. 2 [2004] ballot by citizen initiative groups and approved by 59 percent of voters.
…plans to “decide in about a month” on another third-party run at the White House. In addition to having done enough damage to our country already, Ralph is 74 years old—three years older than ancient ol’ John McCain—and really ought to be thinking about retirement.
C’mon, Ralph. Don’t you want to enjoy your golden years? Kick back—you’ve earned it. Don’t you wanna travel a bit, see the country…
Tell you what, Ralph, if you don’t run for president I’ll head up a fundraising drive to purchase you a nice car—perhaps a bitchin’ vintage ‘62 Corvair—for you to tour the country in. Whatdaya say, Ralph?
Via Elizabeth Warren: William F. Buckley discovers the virtues of regulation and calls for government intervention to help fix the mortgage crisis.
If conservative principles are abandoned so easily in the face of a bad economic situation, what was the whole thing about in the first place?
Oh. You thought they really believed all that crap did you? (Well..of course Krugman doesn’t…) This from Warren:
I’m willing to go with Big Bill on his basic idea. Let’s all admit that consumer credit markets need basic safety regulations in place all the time. Without those regulations, we are ALL put at risk, the reckless and the prudent alike. If this economy melts down, it will take us all, and that means we have a collective interest in sensible credit regulation.
Just so. This is the problem with deregulation theology. The titans of business aren’t any less likely to get suckered into some stupid get rich quick scheme then you or I. The problem is when they do it they’re playing with other people’s money…their investors. And more then likely, their investors are also playing with other people’s money. And where does all that money ultimately come from? Banks…bonds…securities…pension and retirement funds…municipal funds… You and I, in other words.
And…hahahaha…weren’t they talking about opening up the social security trust fund to the Wall Street boys just a few years ago…as a way to save it from bankruptcy…?
So…according to this young cuteling I met in a D.C. bar last night…I’m a Throwback.
I’m quietly standing at the balcony rail of the outdoor smoker’s lounge of this gay bar, puffing on down one of my mini-cigars while some local friends of mine are inside chatting. I don’t smoke often, but lately I’ve been going for after dinner cigar walks and right now I feel like a cigar between the B-52s I’ve been downing.
This kinda cute young guy walks over to me and gives me a look…
Me: Hi.
He: Are you a throwback?
Me: Sorry?
He: You lived through the sixtes? You know…the hippies and that stuff…?
Me: Yeah…but I wasn’t a Hippy. There were a lot of different things going on back then. Most of us were just along for the ride.
He: I know…I’ve read all the books.
Me: Throwback?
He: You know…from back then…
Me: I don’t understand your use of the term.
He: You’re about my mother’s age…
The reason I’m a computer geek is that computers never baffled me as much as people do…
I was reading Google News and this caught my eye in because I was driving down in that part of Florida recently, although not on that particular stretch of highway. Basically, yesterday there was a horrible 50 car pile-up on I-4 south of Orlando. It was almost certainly the result of fog and smoke from a nearby brush fire. I was watching video off the Orlando Sentinel website, which had been taken by helicopter, and when the camera panned away from the accident scene and up and around the area, I could not believe how dense the fog/smoke was all over a very wide area around the highway. How, I wondered, did the highway patrol not know there was a dangerous situation around that part of I-4? Well as it turns out…they did.
My family in California has to deal with these killer fogs all the time and it’s something I watch for while driving cross country. Sometimes you see visibility warnings on the highways about things like dust storms and such. But the danger…and I really worry about this…is that you’re driving down the road and you see an approaching fog bank or something and you don’t really know how bad it is in there until you actually drive into it and then it’s too late.
The warnings came long before metal slammed into metal on a moonless, socked-in Interstate 4 early Wednesday.
Before sunset Tuesday, National Weather Service meteorologists issued a fog alert based on a scale of one through 10. Experts consider seven or higher to be risky for drivers. The forecast for north Polk County was a 10.
A few hours later, the state Division of Forestry told the Florida Highway Patrol to expect dangerous conditions because of a particularly stubborn and smoky wildfire at I-4 and County Road 557. The blaze escaped from a controlled burn meant to get rid of dangerously dry brush.
The warning was not a routine call. Only once or twice a year do forestry officials, who rely on sophisticated computer models, tell FHP to be on guard for a smoked-in highway.
In all, those and other warnings of horrendous visibility caused by smoke, fog or both were unmistakable. Yet as it turned out, FHP troopers would find little to be concerned about, and the state Department of Transportation installed just one warning sign in each direction.
When I read this I thought, maybe they don’t get a lot of these down in Florida like they do in California. But no…they know perfectly well what can happen down there when they get the fog warnings this time of year. I didn’t know this…
But fire and weather experts in Florida say tons of tiny smoke particles roiling from a wildfire are a powerful magnet for water molecules. Smoke doesn’t create fog; it dramatically thickens it.
The two often go hand in hand this time of the year, Florida’s fog season. This also is the time of year for setting "controlled burns" to thin out grass, leaves and brush in forests.
So a little smoke can make a fog bank vastly more dangerous then otherwise. And those conditions are no stranger to that part of Florida.
I hadn’t known any of this. Along the California coast I know to watch for fog and I just won’t drive through a fog bank I see coming off the ocean. I had no idea it could be even worse in central Florida, well inland.
They should have closed that highway until the danger passed. I know…closing highways creates major traffic messes elsewhere. But they had to close I-4 anyway, when the cars and trucks started slamming into each other, and people started dying. One trooper later said he watched a man burn to death. They should have closed that highway.
Apparently Dan Savage appreciates the kind of male I do…at least judging by the ribbing he gets every now and then on Slog. Yes, I am well aware that tastes such as mine (and apparently his) are not all that well respected, anymore then the guys themselves are. I am reminded of this fact every year when the new calendars come out, and all I see on the racks at the gay bookstores are Chippendale types, or super models with body builder torsos, or big furry bears dressed in odd leather accessories.
I can say for a fact I’d fare better at seeing what I like reflected in gay culture in other parts of the world, particularly Asia and South America. But here in America men, both gay and straight, have to be double-plus Y chromosome Manly or they’re…well…you know…faggots. Look…I can appreciate how after generations of having our maleness called into question by prejudiced straights, gay men have been busy reclaiming that manhood thing for themselves ever since Stonewall. And that’s not a bad thing, really. Unless it descends into that same sterile brain dead fear of femininity thing that’s got the KulturKrieger here in the U.S. all worked up. Then it gets tiresome. It wasn’t the Manly Men who fought back at Stonewall…it was the drag queens and the girly boys.
Matthew Yglesias points out that Mitt Romney is ahead in delegates:
I saw some sentiment on TV last night that Michigan is must win for Romney, but I don’t really see it that way. Second place finishes are survivable for Romney as long as different people are beating him in different places and as long as he keeps picking up delegates. The GOP side has more winner-take-all primaries than does the Democratic side and, clearly, you can’t lose all of those. But basically while Romney’s not in good shape, he’s in at least okay shape.
I strongly doubt it’s going to be McCain. It’s either Romney or Huckabee. My guess is that Huckabee will take it. They won’t trust Romney as much as they’ll trust Huckabee. All those church buses full of primary voters the movement conservatives have been using to keep the moderate wing of the GOP on the outside looking in…? They’re going to run their own damn candidate this year, and to hell with what the establishment wants them to do. After all…it’s their party now…
[Update…] Looks like this was yet another Milt Romney ad-hoc rewrite of the facts…
Explains Berman, "the way they are doing this is by simply not counting Iowa. They say that Iowa’s delegates are not technically committed through the caucus process, and so, instead of extrapolating how the delegates would be apportioned (which is what media, such as ABC News and the Associated Press, do) they just pretend like Iowa did not happen."
Right. Like he’s pretending all those nice things he said about gay equality while he was governor of Massachusetts didn’t happen…
NEW YORK – Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said.
David J. Dalaia and James O’Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron’s body from the Manhattan apartment that O’Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police.
"The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side," Browne said.
The men left Cintron’s body outside the store, went inside and tried to cash his $355 check, Browne said. The store’s clerk, who knew Cintron, asked the men where he was, and O’Hare told the clerk they would go and get him, Browne said.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation has once again named two San Antonio companies among the country’s best places to work for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender workers.
Media company Clear Channel Communications Inc. (NYSE: CCU) and telecommunication company AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) earned spots on the 2008 "Best Places to Work for GLBT Equality."
The designation is given to those companies that earn perfect scores on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index. It is a measurement, the organization says, that ensures that 10 million employees have protections on the job on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Yay! Let’s hear it for Gay Friendly Clear Channel!
Clear Channel, rejecting Howard Stern’s claims that he was canned for slamming President Bush, says its radio network does not have a political agenda.
But new political contribution data tell a different story about Clear Channel (CCU) executives. They have given $42,200 to Bush, vs. $1,750 to likely Democratic nominee John Kerry in the 2004 race.
What’s more, the executives and Clear Channel’s political action committee gave 77% of their $334,501 in federal contributions to Republicans. That’s a bigger share than any other entertainment company, says the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Mitt Romney founded Bain & Co. in 1984, and today its spinoff — Bain Capital — is the third largest private equity firm in the country. Today they boughtClearChannel, a company that owns over 1100 radio stations and 30 TV stations.
This is why media consolidation issues are so important. One rich guy who wants to be president can buy a media empire overnight. Now of course, Romney will argue that he didn’t buy Clear Channel, his private equity company Bain Capital did. And of course, there is no conflict of interest because Romney doesn’t tell Bain Capital what to do as he’s no longer officially with the company.
Still, seeing as how Clear Channel hosts Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity and controls over 1,000 TV and radio stations nationwide, does anyone here really think Romney won’t use this newfound pedestal to promote his candidacy, however subtly?
Sounds kind of like Romney’s relationship to Bain is like Dick Cheney’s to Halliburton. There certainly was never any problem there.
Okay…let me get this straight… The Human Rights Campaign Fund has given its award for "Best Places To Work For GLBT Equality" to a company whose executives works tirelessly to promote the party that works tirelessly to deny GLBT people equality in the workplace. A company that is owned in part now by a leading republican candidate for president, who has declared his opposition to just about any and all gay rights initiatives, Including the Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act…
Lopez: And what about the 1994 letter to the Log Cabin Republicans where you indicated you would support the Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and seemed open to changing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military? Are those your positions today?
Gov. Romney: No. I don’t see the need for new or special legislation. My experience over the past several years as governor has convinced me that ENDA would be an overly broad law that would open a litigation floodgate and unfairly penalize employers at the hands of activist judges.
This is the company HRC is giving an award to for "Best Places To Work For GLBT Equality"…and giving them a perfect score no less…???
Look…I appreciate that they want to be seen as non-partisan. But when you have two parties, one of which will at least consider supporting gay equality, and the other adamantly opposed to it, there isn’t much you can do…except sell out your membership for the sake of appearances…and invitations to cocktail parties in Georgetown and Chevy Chase.
One big reason I turned the comments off in those previous few posts here where I’m letting my heart bleed all over this blog, is that I didn’t want my friends and regular readers getting into it with the assholes I just knew those posts would attract. Like the one that sent me a longish missive last night about how he didn’t give a damn and didn’t see why anyone else should either, because having read my life story here, he could see so clearly that I’d brought all my problems on myself. And since I’d turned off the comments to the posts he was referring to, and he just couldn’t bear to send it to me in email like I’d asked, because then nobody else would have seen how profound his thinking on the subject was, he tried putting it on one of my other posts here with the comments still turned on. Let’s hear it for spam filters.
Actually nitwit, you Do give a damn…otherwise you wouldn’t have written that long, rambling, misspelled, babbling, incoherent message. Someone who really didn’t give a damn wouldn’t have bothered. They’d have just…you know…not given a damn. I’d never have heard from them.
But I heard from you. And in the spirit of cheap barstool psychoanalyzing someone you only know from a few words on a computer screen, methinks you protesteth too much. What I wrote got under your skin didn’t it? Seems to me like there’s probably someone in Your past, with a wound on Their heart with Your name on it, and you’ve been spending the rest of your life ever since you put it there trying to convince yourself that it wasn’t your fault and you don’t have to give a shit.
Fine. We all have our coping mechanisms. And they say a lot about who we are inside. I appreciate the "tough love" stuff and all guy, but you know, there are fates sadder then the one I was contemplating back there. I’d rather care too much and bleed myself to death then stop giving a damn and end my life as an asswipe whose companionship is like drinking turpentine.
If my bleeding heart emotionalism really really irritates you…good. That means there’s still something human left inside of you. Try to find it someday.
Oh…and you were wondering if the people I write about know that I’m writing about them? Duh…it’s a blog… Everyone can read it. If they don’t know, it’s because they don’t give a damn, which is what you said they were supposed to do.
200 proof snark, in the Financial Times. Gideon starts out by noting that "diplomat" Bolton rejects pacta sunt servanda, and goes on from there. The high point is Gideon’s noting that Bolton calls his book Surrender Is Not an Option, and observes that "When it came to Vietnam, surrender was not an option for Bolton because he never got close enough to the enemy to make it feasible…"
Anger: Among financially prudent Americans who are pissed at the government bail-out other Americans are getting for accepting mortgages they couldn’t afford.
Well I’m not angry, and I think I qualify as prudent. I bought my little Baltimore rowhouse in 2001 and it was way less house then I could "theoretically" afford, but I wanted something I could pay the monthly mortgage on with a week’s take-home pay. It was my first house ever, and I didn’t want to be saddled with a lot of debt over it. Debt makes me nervous. And I wanted to have plenty of financial breathing room to afford the maintenance costs I knew would be coming with home ownership. Like the seven grand worth of new furnace I had to put in a couple winters ago. The purchase price on my house was just under ninety grand, and since then, its "theoretically" gone up in value to just around two-hundred and fifty grand. So my house could loose over half of its "theoretical" value and it would still be worth more then what I have left to pay on the mortgage.
So I think I qualify as prudent. But I was also lucky in some ways. I bought before the price of housing began to skyrocket here in Baltimore…when for a while there was affordable housing near the place where I work. If that hadn’t been the case I’d have had to either keep on renting, for every increasing rents as the price of housing around here went up, or I’d have had to find a place to live further out of the city and commute. And the prices in the outer suburbs were starting to go up, even back then. Before I got work at Space Telescope, I rented a one bedroom apartment in the suburbs and I watched my rent rise from just under four-hundred a month back in 1993, to close to a thousand a month before I bought my house in 2001. What do you do when the price of housing just keeps going up and up and up, even in the outer suburbs? What do you do if you have a family and kids? I was, and am, a single gay guy. It’s not terribly hard for me to get a decent place to live at the low end of the cost scale. If I needed space for a family, I’d have been constantly worried to death about the rising prices.
So if someone came along and said they could get me into a house, even at today’s prices, with some of that new high-tech free-market creative financing stuff…my second thoughts might get snuffed out in the gnawing fear that if I didn’t jump on it now, right now, I might get left behind while home prices soar into outer space, so far beyond my reach I might as well resign myself and my family to living in slums and still not having enough to pay the rent. Especially when they sit me down and wave a bunch of numbers in my face telling me that even though it looks like I can’t afford this house, I really can because the trend is that in a few years the house’s value will have doubled and I’ll be able to refinance easily then, before the balloon payment comes due. Pay no attention to that crushing monthly payment behind the curtain…
If you want to point your finger at anyone in all this, point it at the jackasses who, for purely ideological reasons having little to do with the reality of how human beings behave, worked diligently to construct what is essentially a shadow banking system that could exist with nearly no governmental oversight, figured it would self regulate because free markets naturally self regulate to the best possible outcome, and then watched mutely as it evolved into a system of borrowing, wherein the people selling the loans, didn’t have to bear the burden of financing them. Oh who could have predicted that a bunch of people lending other people’s money for a tidy profit of their own, regardless of whether or not the loans went bad, would make so many bad loans? Oh who could have predicted that injecting so much easy credit into a market with so much demand for so limited goods would drive the price of those goods into outer space? Oh who could have predicted that the people making all those bad loans would view those rising prices as a way to make even more money making even more bad loans?
And once again, an unregulated market drives itself off a cliff, taking with it hundreds of thousands of hard working families. This is the Savings and Loan collapse of 1988 writ large. And…surprise, surprise…the current little unpleasantness is brought to us by the same people who gave us that other little unpleasantness. I guess the 1988 Savings and Loan fiasco was just practice, because I don’t think that one sacred Wall Street like this one is scaring Wall Street.
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