MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — For many who lived through Vermont’s not-so-civil debate over civil unions, the memories remain painfully fresh: hate mail, threatening telephone messages, tense public meetings.
This time around, as the state weighs whether to legalize gay marriage, the debate is noticeably tamer with little of the vitriol and recrimination that surrounded its groundbreaking 2000 decision to legally recognize gay and lesbian couples.
…
Although that absence of an impending vote may be what’s keeping things civil, people involved in the debate have noticed a change in atmosphere.
"It’s a very different tenor," said Beth Robinson, chairwoman of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force, which supports gay marriage. "People have had an opportunity to come to terms. Vermonters have had eight years to see the two guys next door, or the two women down the street who have a legally recognized relationship under the civil unions law."
Ah yes… Now that they’ve had a chance to see how it works for themselves, and that the sky didn’t fall when same sex couples were allowed to have the same rights as opposite sex couples…tensions have eased, and people are more use to the idea….
"It was a time unlike anything since the Vietnam War era, when you had the sense that the whole world around you was divided," said David Moats, author of "Civil Wars: A Battle For Gay Marriage," a book about Vermont’s civil unions controversy.
…
Last summer, the Legislature appointed an 11-member Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection to explore the idea of gay marriage and hear how Vermonters feel about it. The panel, which opponents say is stacked with gay marriage supporters and have boycotted, has held seven hearings and has three more scheduled.
The hearings have generated plenty of input, but no name-calling or personal attacks.
James LaPierre, who has a civil union partner and two children, saw the contrast firsthand. He went to a 2000 meeting on civil unions intending to get up and speak, but he was intimidated by the atmosphere and kept quiet.
"People would stand up and go to the microphone and there was jeering and catcalling," said LaPierre, 43, a nurse from Burlington. "It was hateful, and scary."
Last month, LaPierre went to a hearing by the Commission on Family Recognition. This time, the gathering was "supportive" and he got up and spoke. But it had fewer people — about 100, by his count, compared with about 500 at the 2000 event.
"Instead of a hateful, unruly, mob-like meeting, it was civil and organized. There was representation of the other side, but only two or three people," he said.
Now…you see how that works? When people can see for themselves that gay folks aren’t monsters out to destroy America and Family Life and Moral Values things get a lot calmer.
Oh…wait…
Opponents believe the change in tone may have more to do with their boycott — and the lack of impending action — than acceptance of gay marriage.
There’s the reason things are more civil today in Vermont then they were in 2000. It’s the boycott. The bigots figured they were going to loose…probably even worse this time then in 2000 because their vitriolic hate looks so ugly in retrospect…and so they called a boycott of the town meetings. And so…surprise, surprise…things are a lot calmer now.
This isn’t so much an indication of progress, as a reminder that things would have been a lot calmer back then too, were it not for the hate mongers. Nobody’s really moved on this issue; the majority of Vermonters didn’t object to same sex marriage or they’d have thrown out of office all the politicians who supported it and that wasn’t what happened. Only the bigots care, and of course they still care as much now as they ever did. If you could teach a bigot something they wouldn’t be bigots. The only thing that’s changed in Vermont is that this time the bigots aren’t going to those town meetings to whip everyone into a frenzy of hate. So things are calmer. How…unsurprising.
At Saturday night’s Republican debate, Mike Huckabee used a word he emphasizes quite a bit: “vertical.”
“I think we also ought to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is to touch at the core of something Americans want,” Huckabee said. “They are so tired of everything being horizontal — left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. They’re looking for vertical leadership that leads up, not down. He has excited a lot of voters in this country. Let’s pay respect for that. He’s a likable person who has excited people about wanting to vote who have not voted in the past.”
A few hours earlier, Josh Marshall noted that “vertical” is a Huckabee favorite, with the former governor’s website arguing, “I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical.”
Can anyone explain what the hell that means? Vertical? I guess if you’re main opponent was Fred Thompson you might push the fact that you spend most of your time standing up. But seriously, is there something I’m missing here? Or is this the weirdest campaign I’ve ever heard?
What Marshall was missing was one of the current fundamentalist tropes. He wouldn’t know, because he doesn’t live in that stifling environment…
This probably won’t come as too big a surprise given Huckabee’s faith-based campaigning, but this “vertical” talk seems to have dog-whistle implications.
This is definitely dog-whistle politics — that is, a message delivered in coded terminology and targeted to a particular subcultural group. Conservative evangelicals often talk about the need to prioritize their vertical relationships with God first and foremost before worrying about horizontal relationships among people. It’s the individualized “get right with God” approach of conservative Protestantism.
In contrast, progressive people of faith reject the vertical-horizontal dichotomy as a false one, saying that in interpersonal relationships one’s faith and spiritual teachings are made manifest. Such an outlook is wishy-washy, watered-down liberal theology in the minds of conservative evangelicals. Southern Baptist minister Huckabee knows this, and speaks evangelical-ese with his words. In fact, he’s got it up on his website as well.
I know this is so because I’ve been present a number of times when “vertical” rhetoric — the exact word — has been used in evangelical circles. It’s indeed a way of speaking one hears in many churches, part of the faith vocabulary of the evangelical and fundamentalist subculture.
And from “The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America”:
That’s the power of narrowcasting. Targeted, under-the-radar messages denote who is part of the club. It’s like a secret handshake, writ large and electoral: politicians who narrowcast religious cues are assigned considerable credibility by voters in the targeted constituency.
Something to keep an eye on.
Andrew Sullivan, who is no Huckabee fan, was quoting Rod Dreher, who admits now that he was bamboozled by Bush and is ready to be bamboozled now by Huckabee…
I don’t get why Andrew calls Huckabee’s rise a sign of "the perils of fundamentalist politics." For one, Huckabee is not a fundamentalist. He’s more of a Rick Warren Evangelical…
No, and No. If he’s not actually a theocrat, he’s certainly willing to give actual theocrats everything they want so long as they get him elected. Jim Burroway, as always, has done some homework on his past, and the folks he likes to hang out with…
We reported earlier on Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s fundraising event at the home of Houston multimillionaire Steven Hotze, a well-known Christian Reconstructionist. Pastor Rick Scarborough, who also maintains Reconstructionist beliefs, was there as well. Since then, we’ve learned that Huckabee’s ties go far deeper than mere acquaintances and financial backers. He has a history of working very closely with some very well-known Reconstructionists over the years. In this report, we will examine two of Huckabee’s closest Reconstructionist colleagues.
Go read the whole thing. There is no mistaking Huckabee for what he is. It’ll be interesting to see if the corporate news media, which is horrified at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination, actually delves into any of this…
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…"
Mike Huckabee says he stands by his statements fifteen years ago about AIDS patients, though he concedes he might phrase them differently today.
How many different ways can you say "Death Camps" Mike…?
In some old candidate questionnaires the Associated Press has dug up, Huckabee suggested back then that AIDS patients should essentially be quarantined.
"Fifteen years ago, the AIDS crisis was just that. It was a crisis," Huckabee told reporters at a campaign stop in Asheville, N.C. this weekend. "There were a lot of questions back in that time as to just how the disease could be carried. There was just a real panic in this country."
A reader asks, “what’s the big deal?” After all, didn’t a lot of people advocate quarantine for AIDS patients early in the epidemic? Yeah, early in the epidemic some did advocate just that—and not just bigots salivating at the prospect of rounding up all gay people, diseased or not. But that was early in the epidemic, very early, 1984-86. By 1992 only raving bigots were still talking about quarantining people with AIDS or HIV. People like, you know, Mike Huckabee.
You need to pay attention to that, because even back in the early stages of the AIDS outbreak, people talking about rounding up and "quarantining" AIDS victims weren’t doing that out of concern with the spread of the disease itself, as with the ever growing visibility of the people they despised:
Huckabee said he also stands by his words that homosexuality is sinful.
What a coincidence, that. Huckabee was far from the only one still calling for an AIDS "quarantine" by the 1990s, and yes, the ones who were just also happened to have a bottomless bit of animus toward homosexual people. One they often dressed up in biblical rhetoric that was as cheap as it was transparent.
If AIDS had hit America in the early 1950s, the Huckabees of the world would have without a doubt gotten their wish and every homosexual the authorities could identify would have been rounded up and locked into concentration camps…and from there, isolated from the rest of the American community who didn’t have to see, didn’t have to care, didn’t have to know, a final solution to the sexual pervert problem would have been just one small step away. In 1986 William F. Buckley shocked even many of his fellow wingers by advocating the forcible tattooing of AIDS victims, once on the arm, and once on the buttocks, he claimed to prevent the spread of the disease via shared needles and sex. He only withdrew his suggestion after being forced to admit that the plan had an "unfortunate association" with the Holocaust.
AIDS didn’t happen in 1950, it happened in the early 80s, over a decade of gay rights activism after Stonewall, and the republican right wing theocratic base is deeply resentful to this day that they didn’t get their chance back then to let their hate run free and unfettered over the lives of all gay people, whether we had the disease or not, and gleefully stomp the human life out of us.
Delegates at the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin voted Saturday in Fresno to withdraw from the U.S. Episcopal Church. With the decision, the diocese is the first to leave the U.S. Episcopal Church, which has 110 dioceses and 2.4 million members.
Delegates said they voted to break away from the church because it allows the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of gay bishops and the ordination of women.
Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! That’s San Joaquin as in San Joaquin Valley…the sullen and resentful red heartland of California. If the California coast and its coniferous mountain north are laid back, progressive wonderlands, the San Joaquin valley is Rush Limbaughville. Agrarian, xenophobic, insular, it’s the Antebellum South, only with lots and lots of irrigation and Hispanics playing the part of the darkies picking in the fields. The only surprising thing about this is they didn’t bolt back when women got the robe. Oh…and they’re aligning with the South American church instead of the murderous Bishop Akinola. But he was probably a shade too dark for them.
A mysterious group calling itself Iowans for Some Semblance of Christian Decency has begun waging a campaign against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, insinuating that not only is the Republican presidential candidate not a true conservative, he’s not a real Christian.
In fliers put under the doors of reporters at the Marriott in Des Moines, where Huckabee was staying Monday night, the organization, whose members are unknown, lays out its interpretation of how the former Baptist minister’s views run contrary to the Bible.
Huckabee’s support of educational opportunities for the children of illegal immigrants is portrayed, for instance, as "justification for violating the 8th commandment (stealing from U.S. citizens)." A lighthearted video clip where he pretends to talk to the Lord (watch HERE) is portrayed as "sacrilegious mocking of God for political gain."
From this cesspool the republicans will pick their presidential candidate. The one who wins will be the one that floats to the top.
It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.
Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfactions with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.
Actually, I can sum up what I used to dislike most about porn in a few words: there was very little romance in it. But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen. I fit the same pattern of boyhood that Chris and Robert both seem to have had, and while I’m not sure that in porn lies, as Chris says, our salvation, I think he’s is absolutely right about this in general…
And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.
Jensen’s book is supposedly a critical examination of the relationship between pornography and misogyny. Amazon describes it thusly…
Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.
If calling anti-pornography arguments anti-sex has ever silenced the debate I sure haven’t noticed it. More often then not the retort is something along the lines of, Sure…sexual freedom is destroying family life and American morals. Children born out of wedlock, raised in fatherless households, rising crime and sexually transmitted disease… You’re damn right we’re anti-sex! It’s telling that the one reader comment still up on the book’s Amazon page comes from a self identified "biblical Christian". I guess that’s as opposed to…you know…one of those plain old ordinary everyday Christians or something. But as Chris carefully explains in his review, Jensen’s book is neither a critical examination of pornography nor a necessary breaking of silence. If anything, it wants the silence to continue.
Sexual desire is hard wired into us, is a normal, natural part of our flesh and blood lives, is an essential part of our nature. It is a drive that runs through the fabric of our being, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates. It is not a blackboard anyone can just scribble their will upon. Sweeping it under the rug, hiding it in the closet, burying it under layers of shame can only do us great psychological harm and put it utterly beyond our ability to manage decently and honorably. Witness the torrent of family values republican sex scandals lately. Just this morning I am reading on the news nets that four more men have come forward to testify to having had sex with Mr. (I Am Not Gay) Larry Craig. Sex is a powerful, ancient and venerable urge. You force it into the closet, and all you end up doing is insuring that it’ll come rushing out in inappropriate, and self destructive ways, taking you helplessly along for the ride.
Which makes this remark about Jensen and his kind toward the end of Chris’ review worth pondering:
There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked.
You tend to find that most pornography is just plain trash. There’s a couple reasons for that. First..because it mostly Is trash. In that, it is merely obeying the relentlessness of Sturgeon’s Law that everything does. But porn is also vastly limited by its very purpose. It’s job is to happily push our buttons. But everyone’s buttons are different. And what makes one person all hot and bothered can positively disgust another.
When I was a gay young adult, trying to find my way around a gay community that was still mostly hidden from view back in the early 1970s, if I wanted a copy of the local gay newspaper, or The Advocate, I mostly had to go to seedy adult bookstores to find them. Wandering around the shelves of almost exclusively heterosexual pornography was eye opening, and pretty disgusting and I am certain that wasn’t because I mate to my own, and not the opposite sex. Even the gay pornography I saw turned me off far more then it turned me on. I began to realize then that what turned me on was an eroticism that was mostly sensual and not terribly explicit, and which included heavy doses of romance and emotion. That is me. My sexual response is inextricably knotted up with my romantic one. But back in the early 70s, sex was either heavily censored, or grossly explicit. Commercial pornography was about the money shot and nothing else. I remember one of my first porn tapes I’d bought on the basis of the very hot looking guys on the cover, only to end up feeling let down that there was nothing on display throughout but rote genital contact. They didn’t show the slightest bit of affection. It really was just like the bigots always said homosexuality was… Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. I can hear people laughing now at the idea that I went looking for romance on the porn shelves, and that’s part of the problem. It didn’t, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
It would be decades before I began finding erotic art that I could whole heartedly enjoy, as artists, more specifically, female artists, began to freely and unashamedly express their own human sexuality. I always found it interesting that my favorite gay male romance novels have been written by women. Now I find that my favorite source of erotic art these days comes from Japan, in the form of comic book stories of torrid gay male love affairs, that are largely written by heterosexual females, for heterosexual females.
This is, I think, important, because anti-pornography crusaders like Jensen like to posture that they’re about defending women from violent male sexuality. But if anything can be said to be responsible for the rote objectification of women in pornography, and the absence of images of tenderness and balanced relationships in it, it’s not unbridled male sexuality but the suppression of female sexuality. That only men, and never women, enjoy sex for its own sake, is a hoary old lie powerful men used to tell everyone so nobody would question their domination of women. The problem with pornography isn’t that it exploits women, but that women have never, until recently, been allowed their own erotic voice. That’s why the images you commonly find in pornography are unbalanced. But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.
Yes, most representations of sex are obvious; our sexual nature reduced to its lowest common denominator. But there are so many layers, intricate and sublime to human sexuality, to our sexual relationships, even when it’s not so much Mr. Right as Mr. Right Away. And nowadays, thankfully and I think mostly because more women are producing pornography now, artists are going there now, and when they do it can be awesomely beautiful, and powerfully life affirming. Ironically enough, if the anti-porn crusaders have their way, all of that will vanish, and we’ll be back to cheap, tawdry, sterile porn that degrades both men and women, that treats sexual desire as nothing more then urges that have nothing to do with the rest of our being, other then to drag it down into the gutter.
But that’s exactly what some people want. Better we feel ashamed then proud. Proud people don’t passively take orders.
There is a sad joke in calling Robert Jensen “radical” in any sense of the word. He has nothing to give us but the same bitter fruit we were fed by hateful priests and timid parents.
If there is anything we gay folk can teach our heterosexual neighbors about sex it’s this: shame rots your soul from within. It takes away your ability to love someone whole heartedly, body and soul and every playful and ecstatic and wonderful moment of joy you could ever have had in the arms of a lover. If there’s anything this poor human race doesn’t need any more of, it’s shame over our sexual nature. There is a place, a wholesome necessary healing place, for an art that is both erotic and humane. We need an art that holds a mirror to us of our sexual selves, in which we see the wonder and joy of our lives of flesh and blood untainted by fear or shame or guilt. That mirror is slowly coming to light, thanks I am convinced to the emerging sexual freedom of women. So naturally, the haters of humanity, and their useful tools, want to stifle that once more, and forever.
The Intersection Of Batshit Crazy and Fucking Nuts
If you don’t know about the nefarious plan to build a NAFTA Superhighway from Mexico to Canada, stabbing right though the very heartland of America to merge all three countries into a North American Union as a first step toward One World Government…then you obviously haven’t been peering into the right wing cesspool lately. You’re probably better for it…
The American people never supported NAFTA, and they are angry over Bush’s failure to secure the border — but a shotgun marriage between our two nations appears prearranged. Central feature: a ten-lane, 400-yard-wide NAFTA Super Highway from the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, up to and across the U.S. border, all the way to Canada. Within the median strip dividing the north and south car and truck lanes would be rail lines for both passengers and freight traffic, and oil and gas pipelines.
As author Jerome Corsi describes this Fox-Bush autobahn, container ships from China would unload at Lazaro Cardenas, a port named for the Mexican president who nationalized all U.S. oil companies in 1938. From there, trucks with Mexican drivers would run fast lines into the United States, hauling their cargo to a U.S. customs inspection terminal — in Kansas City, Mo. From there, the trucks would fan out across America or roll on into Canada. Similar super-highways from Mexico through the United States into Canada are planned.
According to Corsi, construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor, the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway, is to begin next year.
The beneficiaries of this NAFTA Super Highway project would be the contractors who build it and the importers and outlet stores for the Chinese-manufactured goods that would come flooding in. The losers would be U.S. longshoremen, truckers, manufacturers and taxpayers.
The latter would pay the cost of building the highway in Mexico and the United States, both in dollars and in the lost sovereignty of our once-independent American republic.
So says Pat Buchanan over at Town Hall. That column ends with the cheery note that Pat Buchanan is the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. And if you think he’s the only wing nut bellyaching about the secret plan to replace sovereign America with a North American Union by way of a superhighway from Mexico to Canada you are sadly mistaken. Here’s winger Phyllis Schlafly keeping tabs on the plot over at the Eagle Forum…
Plans call for a ten-lane limited-access highway to parallel I-35. It would have three lanes each way for passenger cars, two express lanes each way for trucks, rail lines both ways for people and freight, plus a utility corridor for oil and natural gas pipelines, electric towers, cables for communication, and telephone lines.
Central to this plan is a massive taking of 584,000 acres of farm and ranch land at an estimated cost of $11 to $30 billion, property then lost from the tax rolls of counties and school districts. After the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London, no one need worry about the power of eminent domain to take private property.
The Trans-Texas Corridor will be the first leg of what has been dubbed the NAFTA Super Highway to go through heartland America all the way to Canada. This would be a major lifeline of the plan to merge the United States into a North American Community
Ask some members of Congress about plans to build a "NAFTA superhighway" connecting Mexico and Canada via the U.S. and you might hear snickers.
Some officials will tell you they have seen no "earmarks" for such a plan and question whether it even exists.
But the plan does exist and the NAFTA superhighway is being built – under the radar screen.
One need look no further than the $286 billion highway bill signed into law earlier this month by President Bush for some of the "earmarks."
The measure gave the state of Tennessee more than $111 million to help plan and build Interstate 69, called "one of the most significant transportation projects in the region’s history" by the Commercial Appeal.
No one in Tennessee has any doubts about plans for the NAFTA superhighway. It is being built now with federal taxpayer dollars. And the plan calls for I-69 to extend from Michigan to Texas, linking the Canadian and Mexican borders.
Those supporting the plan, like Transportation Secretary Mario Cino, say it will bring an unprecedented windfall not only to the regions it traverses but for all Americans, Mexicans and Canadians.
Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner Gerald Nicely said I-69 "could help position the western part of the state as one of the world’s new economic centers of power in the global marketplace."
The entire I-69 project is expected to cost $8.8 billion in current dollars, with states picking up 10 percent of the tab. So where is the money hidden? It’s not really. But nowhere in any highway bill is the project referred to as the "NAFTA superhighway." Since the money is doled out to states to spend on their portion of the project, the allocations look like any other highway spending.
Ultimately, the Tennessee portion of the I-69 project is expected to cost $1 billion. It will shadow the present route of U.S. 51, connecting towns like Union City, Troy, Dyersburg, Ripley, Covington and Millington before following what is now I-40/240 through Midtown, according to the Commercial Appeal. The new highway bill focuses on the portion of I-69 through Northwest Tennessee about 80-110 miles north of Memphis. A 20-mile section of that segment – a four-lane stretch of U.S. 51 between Dyersburg and Troy – already is completed. Signs label it as part of the "Future I-69 Corridor." That leaves a 19-mile section to be built from Troy to the Kentucky line before one-third of the I-69 route through Tennessee is completed.
"The route’s already been laid out, with survey markers planted in fields and cryptic benchmarks painted on the pavement of country roads," reports the Commercial Appeal.
Ohhhh…Cryptic Benchmarks…! What they really need to do is number the new highway ‘666’ and maybe they’ll all have heart attacks. For a good debunking of all this right wing paranoia, see the August 2007 article in The Nation, titled The NAFTA Superhighway. It’s a case study in how the eternally paranoid right takes random scraps of fact and weaves them into super secret conspiracies against red-blooded true-blue 100 percent Americans. I’m old enough to remember the hysteria over fluoridation, that communist plot to poison the precious bodily fluids of Americans. No…that wasn’t some little bit of comedy Stanley Kubrick’s writers came up with for Dr. Strangelove. It was a real right wing conspiracy theory back then, and for all I know they probably still believe it.
But what if Corsi and friends are wrong? What if the yellow cloud surrounding I-35 isn’t an “invasion” from Mexico but an “invasion” of God? That, apparently, is the theory of the youth-oriented church activists profiled on yesterday’s “700 Club,” who are running “purity sieges” at clinics and porn shops, where they claim to be “moving angels and demons” by, for example, “setting free” an inebriated young man from “the desires to be with men” through the laying of hands at a gay bar.
While the CBN report doesn’t mention NAFTA or a North American Union, the suspicious highway is central to the story:
A number of Christians have come to believe, because of recent prophecies, dreams, and visions, that I-35 is the highway spoken in Isaiah 35, verse 8: “And a highway will be there, it will be called the way of holiness.”
… [Heartland Ministries’ Hill] believes God has an awesome plan that starts along I-35. “Let’s draw a line in the center of America, set people on fire, get young people saved, get moms and dads saved, get churches on fire, get holy, and watch how it affects the rest of America.”
“What do we expect to see?” [said Cindy Jacob.] “We expect laws to be changed in cities. We expect righteous leaders. We expect a movement, a reformation that will literally sweep the face of the earth.”
Lovely… I’m thinking Pat, with his south African diamond mines and other international investments, has some interest in making sure NAFTA doesn’t suddenly go sour on him. So he found himself a bible verse to calm the rubes down with. But maybe he really does believe it. Welcome to the intersection of Batshit Crazy and Fucking Nuts. Otherwise known as the republican grassroots.
Via Molly I over at Eschaton… The Kenosha Kid says it’s not that Rudy had an extramarital affair that will cost him the wingnut vote. It isn’t even that he billed it to the tax payers. It’s that he conducted his affair in the Hamptons, that hated den of filthy Jews Liberals. They’ll never forgive him for it.
I think he’s on to something there. The moral posturing of the hard right, especially the southern contingent, has always been a nothing more then a thin veneer over the bedrock of their prejudices.
I’m headed for bed, and not even going to bother watching the republican debate. But scanning the blogs that are following it live, I’m seeing that a gay (former) general asked a question concerning gays in the military and he was apparently roundly booed by the audience…
…so I just want to re-emphasize something I put up on my Twitter bar a few hours ago, for the sake of a few certain someones I no longer speak to, and one who I’m still very much holding at arm’s length: If you can still vote republican after all the gay bashing they’ve been doing, then we are not friends. It really is that simple.
Someone put a fork in the party of Lincoln, it’s done. And…I’m going to bed now…
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to discard the moderate and liberal positions of his past. The latest is civil unions for same-sex couples, which the Republican presidential candidate has been backing away from in recent months.
A campaign aide told the Globe this weekend that Giuliani favors a much more modest set of rights for gay partners than civil union laws in effect in four states offer.
Giuliani has described himself as a backer of civil unions and is frequently described that way in news reports. But he began distancing himself from civil unions in late April, when his campaign told The New York Sun that New Hampshire’s new law goes too far because it is "the equivalent of marriage," which he has always opposed for gays.
Giuliani’s aides offered little explanation of what specific rights he would support for same-sex couples.
Rudy Giuliani faced fresh questions about his judgment last night amid claims that trysts with his mistress while he was New York’s Mayor cost taxpayers thousands of dollars.
The Republican presidential frontrunner’s record as New York mayor is already facing closer scrutiny after the indictment this month of his close friend Bernard Kerik, whom Mr Giuliani appointed as the city’s police chief.
According to records obtained by a respected US political website, Mr Giuliani billed New York City for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for his security detail, who accompanied him on trips to Long Island while he visited his mistress.
Many of the security expenses were billed to obscure city agencies, such as the New York City Loft Board, giving the impression somebody did not want the expense claims to be linked to Mr Giuliani. The expense receipts tally the cost of hotel and petrol bills for police detectives who travelled everywhere with Mr Giuliani, according to the website, Politico.com.
More fun and games, from the folks morally qualified to tell gay people that our unions aren’t fit to be called marriages. Tune in next week as Mike Huckabee explains how having a divorce rate three times that of Massachusetts means Arkansas covenant marriage laws are working to protect and preserve the sacred institution of marriage whilst same sex marriage in Massachusetts has been greatly weakening it…
For Tax Year 2007 I Will Not Be Bringing My Schedule C Income Onto My Balance Sheet
Via Atrios…
From CNBC: "Citigroup will not be bringing its SIV assets onto their balance sheet."
SIV = Structured Investment Vehicle. The Wiki article isn’t bad…go read it for some insight into why big capital is getting anxious about what’s happening now due to the sub-prime mortgage collapse. Basically what Citigroup is trying to do here is a little creative Enron style shell company book keeping in the hope of propping up their market value. Oh no…those aren’t Our worthless assets…they belong to that company over there…er, the one we created to hold those worthless assets… What’s…astonishing…is how brazen they’re apparently being about it.
And you thought the stock market was the only form of gambling Wall Street did. Oh goodness no…
Via Atrios… In case you haven’t heard of it, Conservapedia is Wikipedia for culture warriors who want their reality filtered through the lens of their own bar stool prejudices. Or as Wikipedia puts it…
There are 45,009 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Conservapedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don’t qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 19,565 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.
5,901 files have been uploaded.
There have been a total of 36,693,438 page views, and 334,231 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 7.43 average edits per page, and 109.78 views per edit.
User statistics
There are 15,474 registered users, of which 27 (or 0.17%) are Administrators.
Well it ain’t economics. Geeze…I don’t think about homosexuality as much as these people and I’m a gay male.
Back when I was a teenager, this list would probably have been all about the International Communist Conspiracy. The top link would have been to an article on Communism, followed by a bunch of Communism and This, and Communism and Thats. Communism and Atheism…Communism and Jews…Communism and Liberalism…Communism and Democrats…Communism and Hollywood…Communism and Hippies…Communism and Feminism…Communism and Negroes… In my lifetime the American far right has gone from looking for communists under the bed to sniffing the underwear of gay men. That’s degeneracy for you.
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