I cannot despair for my country so long as it keeps producing kickass arrest photos like this one…

Courtesy of The Morning Call.  This is why I never took up a life of crime.  I have no fashion sense.

Hahahahaha….

Ralph Nader…
Posted by Dan Savage on January 22 at 11:34 AM

…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?

I’m in…

Via Brad DeLong…  Paul Krugman asks a good question…

Signs of the Apocalypse

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?

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. 

Which makes this all the more aggravating…

Warning signs began nearly 20 hours before Polk crash

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.

Not McCain.  Not Huckabee.

Via Brad DeLong…

Mitt Romney Is Ahead in the Republican Race

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…

Romney’s Fishy Delegate Claim

Why is the former Massachusetts governor telling folks that he leads in delegates?

In Boston today, Romney told supporters, "we have more delegates than any other Republican candidate running for president."

Here’s the ABC News GOP Delegate Estimate:

Huckabee – 31
Romney – 19
McCain – 7
Thompson – 3
Hunter – 1
Giuliani – 0
Paul – 0

According to my pal, ABC News’ John Berman, the count the Romney folks have is:

Romney – 15
McCain – 12
Thompson – 3
Huckabee – 2
Hunter – 1
Giuliani – 0
Paul – 0

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…

For those times when a driver’s license just isn’t good enough…

2 Bring Corpse to Store to Cash Check

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.

This is why I don’t work in retail.

AT&T, Clear Channel designated top employers for gay workers

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!  

Wait…what…?

Clear Channel execs donate more to Bush

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.

…what?

Bain Capital, Founded by Romney, Buys Clear Channel

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 bought ClearChannel, a company that owns over 1100 radio stations and 30 TV stations.

J-Ro:

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.

And writing about my past is the least of what’s been going on around here… 

Via Brad DeLong…

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…"

The entire Gideon Rachman snark is Here. 

From Slog this morning, reviewing the morning news…

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.

Via Slashdot…

"According to Ars Technica, California testers have discovered severe flaws in the ES&S voting machines. The paper seals were easily bypassed, and the lock could be picked with a "common office implement". 

Let me guess…

From Atrios…

New Religion

This kind of intolerant horseshit is basically gibberish, but since words mean things let’s try to figure out the implications of what Mitt’s saying.

It’s as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

Really it would just be crazy if anyone tried to start a new religion in America… oh, wait.

This has been another edition of What Atrios Said…

Via Slog…

A Lurid Aftermath to a Hedge Fund Manager’s Life

A life of private jets and black-tie balls ended with Seth Tobias, a wealthy investment manager and a familiar presence on CNBC, floating face down in the swimming pool of his mansion here…

Mr. Tobias, who was 44 years old, had apparently suffered a heart attack, his brother Spence said at the time. The police did not consider his death suspicious.

But now an unfolding drama over Mr. Tobias’s estate is providing a lurid account of fast money and faster living in the volatile world of hedge funds. Mr. Tobias’s four brothers and Mrs. Tobias are locked in a legal battle over the estate, which is worth at least $25 million. And, in a civil complaint, they have gone so far as to accuse her of murder.

The brothers, Samuel, Spence, Scott and Joshua, claim Mrs. Tobias drugged her husband and lured him into the pool. Bill Ash, a former assistant to Mr. Tobias, said he had told the police that Mrs. Tobias confessed to him that she had cajoled her husband into the water while he was on a cocaine binge with a promise of sex with a male go-go dancer known as Tiger.

… 

Mr. Tobias’s life was apparently as volatile as his investment returns. After Circle T lost 5.3 percent in 2005, his marriage began to fray. In March 2006, the police were called to the Tobiases’ home because of a domestic disturbance. A few days later. Mr. Tobias filed for divorce. It was one week before the couple’s first anniversary.

The Tobiases later reconciled. But the divorce filings included a laundry list of accusations. Mrs. Tobias stated that she caught him having an “adulterous affair” and that he “gambled away tens of thousands of dollars and used other funds on illicit habits.” She asked the court to award her $46,000 a month for living expenses. He argued that she was constantly spending too much money.

Even after the couple reconciled, they fought constantly, mostly over money, according to several friends, who asked not to be identified for fear of being subpoenaed in connection with the case or because they were worried that their professional reputations would be harmed by being associated with the case. At one point, Mrs. Tobias bought a Porsche on her credit card and then cried when Mr. Tobias told her to return it, one friend recounted.

They also secretly frequented a gay bar called Cupids in West Palm Beach, in a strip mall along a main thoroughfare. It was there, according to Mr. Ash, that Mr. Tobias first met Tiger.

“Seth used to come in here back when it was crazy,” said Adiel Hemingway, the longtime manager of Cupids. As a flat-screen television blared hard-core gay pornography, he said that Mr. Tobias often came to the club with his wife. Mr. Hemingway took out a picture of Tiger in his office. Tiger is blond and covered with tattoos that look like stripes.

Lifestyles of the rich and shallow…