One year ago today the United States lost a city.  And if you’re still wondering why reconstruction has been taking so long to even get really started, then you’ve been missing the point of the past five years.  Digby has a post up, linking to a Frank Rich column that pretty much nails it, but I wouldn’t go reading it if you’re still not ready to see that open sewer that is the republican party today for what it is…

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”

The inaction is the action…  People who are thinking that the devistation of New Orleans, and the Bush gang’s shockingly callow response to it are going to hurt the republicans politically still aren’t getting it.  New Orleans is dead, but Louisiana is red.  The GOP is counting it as a plus, never doubt it. 

In another post, Digby quotes Kurt Vonnegut, on the inner nature of the people who have their hands on the levers of our government now…

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students frm Yale."

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!

This is why George Bush could strum a guitar while New Orleans died.  Last year, as the appalling scope of the disaster just kept getting more and more worse, and Brad DeLong was saying, astonished, "I really am naive. I did not expect this degree of unpreparedness and incompetence. I did not expect this even though I knew that the Bush administration is worse than you can imagine, even after having taken account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine"…I wrote this:

For generations the Republicans have played Americans against one another. As government in the late 20th century began to acknowledge and protect the rights of minorities and women, the republicans began a concerted effort to deliberately weaken government, so it could no longer do that. An America that extends the promise of liberty and justice to all is anathema to them. For decades they poured billions of right wing dollars into a relentless campaign to convince Americans that greed is good, and that their worst prejudices were righteous. American self reliance became self interest. American independence became insularity. In pulpits all across America, the Jesus who taught us to love our neighbor was crucified as a communist and a pervert, and a new one who taught that might makes right was put in his place. The payoff came with the election of George Bush. The punch line came this week in New Orleans.

It isn’t that America can’t respond to the need of New Orleans as well as it can the need of those places destroyed by the Indian Ocean Tsunami…it’s that it isn’t supposed to. That’s what all the vitriolic rhetoric about "nanny government" means. A government that can wage a successful fight against civil chaos after a devastating natural disaster, can also prevent lynchings, wife beatings, and gay bashings. Government isn’t supposed to take care of the powerless, whether they’ve been rendered helpless by a hurricane, or by a lynch mob. Rights are for the powerful. To be able to just get on with your life is a privilege, not a right. That is George Bush’s America.

Somewhere in a corner of the putrid stench the Superdome has become, are the rotting corpses of two elderly New Orleans women, laying where their bodies were dragged to get them out of the way of the still living. Take your mental camera into the Superdome. Pan it across the trash littered bleachers, move down the aisles, through the suffocating stench of hundreds of backed up toilets and cardboard boxes full of human excrement. There…there they are…in that dark corner over there. Two pitiful little bodies you could almost mistake for just another random pile of trash. But they were people once. Your fellow Americans. Slowly zoom your mental camera in on that image. There is the America the republicans have been doggedly leading us to for decades now. There is what is inside the shining city on the hill.

 Mr. President…America is under attack…

Or…to put it in more concrete terms…

Frm the Associated Press:

NEW ORLEANS – Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far frm the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. As many as 5,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.

Officials had hoped to evacuate the last of the crowd before dawn Saturday. Guard members said they were told only that the buses had stopped coming and to shut down the area where the vehicles were being loaded.

"We were rolling," Capt. Jean Clark said. "If the buses had kept coming, we would have this whole place cleaned out already or pretty close to it."

…

Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air Force National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when evacuation efforts began. That number swelled as people poured into the Superdome because they believed it was the best place to get a ride out of town.

He estimated Saturday morning that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were left at the Superdome. But it remained a mystery why the buses stopped coming to pick up refugees and shuttle them away.

Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she left the Superdome and walked toward a bus. "I never thought I’d make it. Oh, God, I thought I’d die in there. I’ve never been through anything this awful."

The arena’s second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.

Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench frm backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.

"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That’s all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.

Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.

…

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees frm the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line – much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.

"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.

The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome…

Frm the Washington Post:

One military official said that as of Friday morning, 4,200 people had been evacuated, including 1,000 frm the convention center, where many times that number spent days without any aid and where several corpses lay on the street Thursday. Another military official said that commanders had not been aware of the large and desperate concentration of people at the convention center until Wednesday, that the focus had been on evacuating the Superdome and conducting other emergency operations in the city.

"It had not perhaps been raised to our consciousness by the reports we had received," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, the chief operations officer of the U.S. Northern Command, said in a phone interview.

…

By Friday night, the number of National Guard troops was expected to reach 11,700 in Louisiana and 8,000 in Mississippi, with more than 5,000 troops still to come over the weekend. Add to that more than 2,500 Coast Guard personnel on the scene with more than 50 aircraft. Four Coast Guard cutters are stationed in the Mississippi River to offer communications and logistics support, said U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Sharon Richey. Even so, one frustrated state senator announced that he has lined up barges to float aid down the Mississippi River to stranded individuals…

…

As reports continued of famished and dehydrated people isolated across the Gulf Coast, angry questions were pressed about why the military has not been dropping food packets for them — as was done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami.

Bill Wattenburg, a consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the designers of the earlier food drop programs, said that he has lobbied the administration and the military to immediately begin something similar. He said he was told that the military was prepared to begin, but that it was awaiting a request frm FEMA.

"We know very well how to do this, and it’s just incomprehensible that we’re not," Wattenburg said.

…

Canaan Spriggs, 31, and his extended family, including three infants, again prepared to sleep on the floor of a nearby parking garage. He said he was pleased by the sight of the military convoys but that the city was far frm tame.

"It’s quiet now, but the night-time is wild," he said. "They’re sugarcoating it on the news. Come out here at night, but only if you have the National Guard with you. There are gunshots, and you hear people screaming for help.

Frm the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help frm his state’s National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come frm Washington until late Thursday.

Frm CNN:

The big disconnect on New Orleans

The official version; then there’s the in-the-trenches version

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views frm the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.

But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN’s transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here’s what they had to say:

Conditions in the Convention Center

# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. — 2:11)

# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin’s angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)

# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you.

# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you’ve got about 3,000 people here in this — in the Convention Center right now. They’re hungry. Don’t have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.

Uncollected corpses

# Brown: That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report frm my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I’m just not going to speculate.

# Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, ‘People are dying in front of us’ — 4:36 )

# Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy — that’s how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I’m like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just — I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He’s dead.

Hospital evacuations

# Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

# CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells — 4:45 )

# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.(Mayor’s video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix — 1:03)

Violence and civil unrest

# Brown: I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.

# CNN’s Chris Lawrence: Frm here and frm talking to the police officers, they’re losing control of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire — 2:12)

The federal response:

# Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.

# Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we’re doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.

# Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.

# Nagin: They don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.

# Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

Security

# Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There’s some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there’s somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty’s rant on the government’s ‘bungled’ response — 0:57)

# Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.

# Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.

# Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They’re literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.

Frm Maureen Dowd:

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N’Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen." Out of the cameras’ range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.

…

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA – a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

Frm Steve Gilliard:

No matter how nervously Kanye West said what he did, it wasn’t some revealed truth, but a long assumed feeling. Bush doesn’t care about black people. No fucking kidding.

The problem is that he doesn’t care about anybody.

The fact that the citizens of New Orleans are now Aligator MRE’s is of concern to Bush, because it may make him look bad. But the world of George Bush is a narrow one, not much beyond his nose. Everything is about him.

Which is why he can praise Brown. Even the French fired Nivelle once he failed and replaced him with Petain. Bush only sees what affects him.

 

Via aTypical Joe…  That new federal grant program for students majoring in science, engineering, mathematics, and some foreign languages…?  Heh…well if your major is in the evolutionary sciences…forget it…

Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.

That absence apparently indicates that students in the evolutionary sciences do not qualify for the grants, and some observers are wondering whether the omission was deliberate.

The question arises at a time when evolution has become a political hot potato at all levels of education. While the theory of evolution has overwhelming support from scientists, some conservative Christian groups argue for alternative explanations of the origins of life, including "intelligent design," which holds that an intelligent agent guided the creation of life.

Joe explains that the grants are worth up to four-thousand dollars, and are awarded in addition to the Pell Grants.

The [Department of Education] has an index of classification numbers — referred to as "CIP codes," for the Classification of Instructional Programs — for all academic areas of instruction,

Under that classification scheme, there is a heading for "Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology," under which 10 biological fields are defined. For instance, ecology is 26.1301, and evolutionary biology is 26.1303.

But on a list that defines majors eligible for the grants, issued by the department in May, one of those 10 is missing. On that list, the classification numbers rise in order from 26.1301 to 26.1309 — with the exception of a blank line where 26.1303, or evolutionary biology, would fall.

Tell me that’s not deliberate.  Go ahead.  Tell me that some Bush gang religious right policy wonk didn’t redline evolutionary biology from the list of eligible majors either because God told them to, or because Karl said it would keep the base happy.  I have a modest proposal.  If these kooks are that dead set against the study of evolution, they should all be willing to sign pledges stating that they will not partake of any medication or treatment of any kind, nor life enhancing technology, that was developed using evolutionary biology in some way, even if their doctors tell them it would mean saving their own lives.

But then…they don’t keep their own marriage or virginity pledges very well do they…

Is this what the faith I was raised in is coming to?  I guess…

Sunday School Teacher Fired For Being A Woman

First he dismissed 81-year-old Mary Lambert from the Diaconate Board of the First Baptist Church along with two members, claiming there were attendance issues.

Now the Rev. Timothy LaBouf has dismissed Mary Lambert as a Sunday School teacher for an adult class after she’s been on the job for over 50 years, claiming that his interpretation of the Bible is that a woman is prohibited from teaching men.

Lambert has been a church member for 54 years and a long time Sunday School teacher but got a letter dated Aug. 9 from LaBouf and the board saying that the Bible says a woman can perform any job, as long as its outside of the church.

LaBouf, who has been pastor at the church for about two years, and is also a member of the Watertown City Council, quotes the first epistle to Timothy which hold "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent".

Lambert received the letter signed by Kendra LaBouf, wife of the pastor. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission" the letter said. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became sinner".
 

Well…what the man does in his own church is his business I suppose…right?  I’m sure his knuckle dragging fundamentalist hatred for women won’t influence his decisions as a city councilman…

The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city’s day-to-day operations is a woman.

Of course it won’t.

Finally…a little accountability…

Prosecutor looking into petition fraud

 

Allegations arise after failed gay rights referendum attempt

 

The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating alleged election fraud in the failed attempt of a group called Equal Rights Not Special Rights to force a ballot referendum on whether over gay people should be protected by Cincinnati’s anti-discrimination law.

Equal Rights Not Special Rights officially withdrew its petitions Thursday, saying it discovered one paid signature gatherer had fraudulently signed 18 names in the more than 7,600 signatures that were validated by the Hamilton County Board of Elections last June.

Thousands of those validated signatures were to be challenged Thursday by a pro-ordinance group called Citizens To Restore Fairness, which said the referendum sponsor was systematic in its use of fraud and tampering of petitions to push the issue onto ballots this fall. A protest hearing at the Board of Elections, scheduled for Thursday, was canceled when Prosecutor Joe Deters started his investigation.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Janet Rowland, republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Colorado…

Un… 

"I have friends who are gay…"

Deux… 

"…I’ve worked with people who are gay…"

Trois… 

"…I have utmost respect for them…"

Quatre… 

"But I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Homosexuality is an alternative lifestyle," she said.

Cinq… 

"That doesn’t make it a marriage. Some people have group sex.  Should we allow two men and three women to marry? Should we allow polygamy with one man and five wives? For some people, the alternative lifestyle is bestiality. Do we allow a man to marry a sheep?"

Le Curtian…Applaus a Voux…

[Edited a tad…]  I found a copy of the actual quotes she made about having gay friends and having the utmost respect for them…

Heads…

GOP Lawmakers Walk Out Over Gay Recognition

A ceremony to honor the achievements of six high profile gay Californians erupted into a political fight at the State Capitol Monday with some Republicans storming off the Assembly Floor.

The Legislature’s Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender Caucus (LGBT) sponsored the first Pride Recognition Awards, a program they say is designed to recognize the accomplishments of people who happen to be gay in their respective fields.

Conservative Assemblymembers boycotted the program.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise," said Assembly Republican Leader George Plescia, R-San Diego. "We’re wasting a lot of time we have a lot of bills on the floor."

The honorees included several celebrities, including former NFL tackle Esera Tuaolo and Reichen Lehmkuhl, the million dollar prize winner of the "The Amazing Race 4" reality television show. Watching quietly from the back of the room was Lehmkuhl’s partner, Lance Bass, a singer with the former boy band ‘N Sync. Bass recently went public with the fact he is gay.

Assemblymember Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he hoped the event would benefit Republicans by showing them the "strength of our diversity and the many accomplishments in a variety of disciplines." But about 10 Republicans either walked out or boycotted the event altogether.

"So it’s a great disappointment that they’re acting like such children," Leno said.

Tails…

Meade boys confess to stealing couple’s controversial flag

MEADE – Two Meade boys have confessed to cutting down a rainbow flag outside a hotel here, the proprietors said Monday.

The Lakeway Hotel became a focus of controversy last month after owners J.R. and Robin Knight hung the colorful banner, a gift from their 12-year-old son, in front of the place. Locals uncomfortable with such a symbol – it also stands for gay pride – decried the flag’s presence and then, in the early-morning hours of July 31, someone cut it down.

The disappearance had remained a mystery, but the father of two local boys brought them to the Lakeway on Friday and they owned up to their involvement.

"They apologized and said they’d replace it," J.R. Knight said. He didn’t name the boys, and Meade County Sheriff Michael Cox said only that officials are investigating.

Meanwhile, Knight said replacing a 5-foot-by-5-foot plate glass window smashed in at the hotel’s restaurant – also apparently due to the flag flap – probably would cost about $500. Two neon beer signs destroyed in the same incident probably will cost another $1,000.

Someone tossed a brick through the window early Friday morning, according to the Knights and local authorities, who are investigating. Scrawled on the brick was the word "fag."

Fence…

Gay man beaten to be `scared straight’

An 18-year-old gay man who was badly beaten in Edgewood on July 30 might have been assaulted because a man at the party believed the gay man had touched his butt, a statement of probable cause filed in state District Court says.

William York, 21, of Edgewood, and Leroy Segura, 19, of Moriarty have been charged with aggravated battery, kidnapping, false imprisonment and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Bond for each man was set at $100,000 cash only by District Judge Michael Vigil on Monday. Two juveniles, a boy and girl, are also being held in connection to the case.

York believed the victim tried to grab his butt while they were at a party in Edgewood on July 30, the statement says. He said Segura, who is known by the nickname “Half Pint,” told him the victim tried to grab York’s butt, the statement says.

In an interview, York told state police the comment upset him and made him want to fight the 18-year-old man, the statement says. York said everyone at the party made fun of the 18-year-old man because he was gay, the statement says. York said he wanted to “scare” the victim to “make him straight and to get him to stop acting the way he was,” the statement says.

The juvenile male arrested in the case said he, York and Segura tied the gay man’s hands, placed a torn black T-shirt over his head, walked him into a deserted field, pushed him onto a downed fence and beat him, the statement says. The juvenile, the statement says, said he egged on York by calling the gay man joto, a derogatory Spanish word meaning gay.

The documents did not contain statements from Segura, who wore a rosary around his neck in court Monday.

The gay man suffered bleeding on the brain, a concussion, facial lacerations and bruising from the beating, which lasted for hours, state police have said. York, Segura and the juvenile male have been charged under New Mexico’s hate-crimes law.

The 18-year-old victim went to the party with a girl, who was also beaten and held inside the trailer house where the party took place, the statement says. She told police “the male subjects would knock (the gay man) down and if he did not get up off the ground within a certain count or if he did not make any noise, they would jump on him, hitting and kicking him,” the statement says.

The female victim said the beating stopped as “the sun was coming up,” the statement says.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise…"

Remember this name if you haven’t already heard it: George Allen.  Son of legendary Redskins coach George Allen, one time governor of the state of Virgina, now senator, and all around racist prick.  This is from his Wikipedia entry:

Allen has a long history of interest in the Confederacy although he never lived in the South until he transferred from UCLA to the University of Virginia as a sophomore in college.

The May 8, 2006 [16] and the May 15, 2006 [17]issues of The New Republic reported extensively on Allen’s long association with the Confederate flag. The magazine reported that "[a]ccording to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the [Confederate] flag–on himself, his car, inside his home–or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000." Allen wore a Confederate flag pin for his high school senior class photo. In high school, college, and law school, Allen adorned his vehicle with a Confederate flag. In college he displayed a Confederate flag in his room. He displayed a Confederate flag in his family’s living room until 1992. In 1993, Allen’s first statewide TV campaign ad for governor included a Confederate flag. In 2000, when a voter told Allen, "Long live the Confederate flag!" Allen replied, "You got it!"

Allen has confirmed that the pin in his high school yearbook was a Confederate flag. Allen has said "it is possible" that he had a Confederate flag on his car in high school. He has not responded to the allegations that he displayed the flag on his pickup truck and in his room in college and law school. In 1993, he confirmed that he had long displayed the Confederate flag in his living room. Greg Stevens, the political consultant who made the 1993 TV ad, confirmed that the ad included a Confederate flag.

I say remember this guy’s name, because from the chattering on the Right I’m hearing, this is the guy the Bush power base Really Likes…the one they’re going to anoint as the next republican candidate for president of the United States.  And here’s what they’ll be sending to the White House if they succeed:

Democrat James Webb’s Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.

S.R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, had been trailing Allen with a video camera to document his travels and speeches for the Webb campaign. During a campaign speech Friday in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen singled out Sidarth and called him a word that sounded like "Macaca."

"This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film and its great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he’s never been there and probably will never come."

After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls," Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.

"Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia," said Allen, who then began talking about the "war on terror."

The Webb staffer in question…

Macaca…I hear you asking (assuming you’re as naive about these things as I am)?   Well…Atrios was wondering too…

I was thinking that the assumption that George Felix Allen had been invoking a species of monkey was a bit of a stretch and that he was probably just speaking gibberish for "furrin name." But it is actually an established racial/slur, specifically directed at North Africans. If you search the nastier corners of the internet you’ll find it’s in surprisingly common usage.

Here…from the List Of Ethnic Slurs…

^{Macaque  (Belgium & France) a Negro (originally) or a person of North-African origin (more recently); derived from macaque monkeys}

What you need to notice about this, more then the slur itself, is the arcane nature of the slur.  I’ve heard racist slurs tossed around, sometimes casually and thoughtlessly, and sometimes with bitter venom, probably no more or less then any other average white America male has (and I’m sure a good deal less then the average black American has…).  I was a school kid during the worst of the late 20th century race riots, the great civil rights march on Washington, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers.  I’ve heard plenty of racist catcalls in my lifetime.  This one was new to me.  But apparently fairly common among the hard core racist set.  That’s what you need to notice.

If you think this will hurt Allen in Virginia, you are sadly mistaken.  If you thought Bush was the bottom of the barrel, think again.  There is no bottom.

Ah yes…  The old raving lunatic in a wheelchair gimmick…

Lay aside, for the purposes of this argument, the destruction this war has delivered to Lebanon. Krauthammer has never in his career expressed a word of sympathy for an Arab, anywhere. He hates them all. For him, the only good part of this war is the damage done to Lebanon.

But here’s the beauty part. Krauthammer doesn’t care about the Jews either. He wants a ground war and if it kills 500 Israeli soldier boys, so be it. Can you imagine. Usually, you can count on Krauthammer to weigh in about Jewish losses at every opportunity. In fact, the mean-spirited Krauthammer only cares about Jews. Or so I thought.

Actually I should have known better. About three years ago, I saw Krauthammer flip out in synagogue on Yom Kippur. The rabbi had offered some timid endorsement of peace — peace essentially on Israel’s terms — but peace anyway. Krauthammer went nuts. He actually started bellowing at the rabbi, from his wheel chair in the aisle. People tried to "shush" him. It was, after all, the holiest day of the year. But Krauthammer kept howling until the rabbi apologized. The man is as arrogant as he is thuggish. Who screams at the rabbi at services? For advocating peace?

So I was wrong about Krauthammer. He doesn’t give a damn about Israel…

I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens…

The antigay junk science of the religious right often strikes me like a bunch of drunks in a bar trying to see who can out bullshit everyone.  I’m telling you guys, homos are all pedophiles.  The average homo has sex with a thousand underage kids in his lifetime…did I say a thousand?  I meant ten thousand.  In a day.  During their lunch break.  That’s why they’re all school teachers.  I’m telling you.  Where’s my drink?  The whole entire fucking NEA is a bunch of liberal homos.  And they’re communists too.  Communist Islamic terrorists.  They want to teach six year olds how to use dildos.  No shit…I did a study that proves it.  They should pass an amendment closing all the public schools and making home schooling mandatory for everyone.  Last year the NEA passed out a million dildos to elementary school kids.  It’s true.  And they panted them to look like candy canes.  FOX news did a story on it…

One of these days, I figured, they’d start yapping that we’re having sex with infants too.  Well…guess what…

An organizer for the conservative Renew America is under fire for linking homosexuality with infant pedophilia.

"The newest thing in Chicago, it’s becoming a trend, and you’re gonna find this hard to believe…sex with infants," Guy Adams told an Internet radio show hosted by fellow conservative Stacy L. Harp.

Adams (pictured) offered no evidence to back up his claims of infant pedophilia.

He appeared on Harp’s program on Wednesday to discuss the recent Gay Games in Chicago and embarked on a nearly 30 minute conversation with Harp to attack gays.

"It’s not enough that they have…you know when you engage in perversion, and homosexuality is perversion, we don’t hate the gays mind you, we don’t hate them, we hate what they’re doing…pretty soon that perversion is like addiction, it’s not enough, so you need to graduate to something else. You need to move on. So now they’re having sex with animals, a small group that’s getting bigger, sex with infants, sex in the street in Chicago out in the open, it’s just getting more and more perverted."

Adams dismissed the contributions of GLBT people to society by saying, "what contributions, AIDS, pornography?" 

He also referred to gay people as "a very angry and violent group when confronted with the truth."

Angry and violent are we?  Well here’s how Adams responded to blogger Joe Brummer, after Brummer demanded an apology.

—– Original Message —–

From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To "Joe Brummer" <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Cc <stacyharp@gmail.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 216 AM
Subject Reply From Joe
    

What’s your point Joe?  It sex with babies the truth; it IS happening, so what’s your point?

Let’s just assume that gays are not screwing babies. Okay then, what ARE gays doing? Can you describe it for me and the public???

If you won’t describe it, then I will. Openly and in a national forum.

One thing you will quickly discover about me — I CANNOT be intimidated nor will I retreat.  I will stand my ground no matter what.

YOU brought this war to me and I will finish it.  And there are many, many more like me too.

We simply don’t care about you petty proclamations, not does Alan.

You woke up the wrong guy.

~Guy
    

 —– Original Message —–

From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Cc <stacyharp@gmail.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 329 AM
Subject Re From Joe

Dear Joe,

You are intentionally deceived.

Whether I reach gays or not is not that important to me. Yes, I hope that God is able to reach them, but at the end of the day, I have been placed at war with your likes, and that was YOUR choice.

In other words, I declare war against you and your kind.

I did not desire this war, but you thrust it upon us. It was your call.

Having said that, I say to you (now more than ever) that I am singularly determined to see your agenda defeated, and it will be.

Not that I am perfect — far from it, but your behavior is explicitly labeled by God as an "abomination".  T\here’s no getting around that judgment.

Say what you will and argue as you must, but at the end of the day, God declares your behavior as totally unacceptable to Him.

God will not change His position on that, as He has clearly stated, Jesus is the same today, yesterday and tomorrow.

He will never affirm homosexuality.

Nor will I.

~Guy

On Thu, August 3, 2006 856, joebrummer@joebrummer.com said

> Dear Guy,
> Sorry you feel that way.   While your busy trying to get God to call me,
> you are also out in the public eye making outlandish and false claims
> about gays and lesbians.    Injustice like that needs to be brought to the
> light of the public eye, or as I commonly say, the sunlight of justice.
> I cannot change your mind about gays and lesbians, although I can
> certainly say I have never had sex with animals or infants.   Your claims
> are disgusting and your message is evil.   Talk about bearing false
> witness.
> You will never reach gays and lesbians with these immoral acts.  Your
> approach is awful.   Sadly you discredit anything truthful you could say
> with the utterly outrageous claims like this.     Stacy informs me that
> part 2 of the show is worse and that your claims there are eve more
> outrageous.
> Your mentality is nothing more than a call to arms that some sick minds
> will be happy to take.  Over the past six weeks there have been some
> violent attacks on gays and lesbians espcially in San Diego.    Where do
> you think people get this notion tht they need to "get the homos"?   Is it
> perhaps your false messages about gays being after children?    Is it your
> false notion we are the biggest danger since the civil war?
> Your message is wrong and it will be paid for in the blood of GLBT people.
>    Perhaps you should think before you speak.  If you think you are doing
> god’s works, you are sadly mistaken.    God would have no part in putting
> his children in danger they way you have done.
> Joe

On Thu Aug 3 1:19 , ‘Guy Adams’  sent

Joe,

Initially, I had a great sense of compassion for you and I hoped that God would be able to reach you.

But after your actions in shutting me down on your blog, and esp after reading your recent pleas to Stacy, I am of the persuasion that you are what God calls a "reprobate", beyond His willingness to save.

Over and out,

~Guy
    
~Guy Adams

Deputy National Grassroots Director
(Alan Keyes’ RenewAmerica)
    
Email GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us

    

—– Original Message —–

From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To "Joe Brummer" <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 257 AM
Subject Re From Joe / you lose.

You and your remarks are inconsequential.

At the end of the day, you lose.

~TGuy
    

—– Original Message —–

From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To "Joe Brummer" <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Cc <stacyharp@gmail.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 222 AM
Subject Re From Joe
    

Your comments are not even worth me read. I’ll bypass.  WHO ARE YOU? WHAT’S YOUR NAME?

In the course of a few short months, no one will want to mention your name out of sheer fear.

You CANNOT tear my words apart because you are speaking from the moral low ground and because my words spoke the truth.

In other words, you have no firm ground on which to stand. You are a coward. I initially had a heart for you but you have proven yourself to be a reprobate.

The war is on.  As Reagan said: We win, you lose.

Understand that quite well, because in a true war (unlike Iraq), all means available to me will be used.

You targeted the wrong guy, but I thank God that you did.

Enjoy your brief stay in the spotlight.

Nice guy.  Calm.  Reasoned.  Compassionate.  Loving the sinner, while hating the sin.  Uhm….not.  There’s more on Joe Brummer’s site.

There it is.  There is the hot burning core of hate not far beneath all that pious rhetoric about loving the sinner, and hating the sin.  And that kind of thing, I want to emphasize, is nothing new.  Over and over I saw words just like those on Usenet, back as far as 1993.  Paranoid…threatening…hysterical…and not just from the usual gutter trash, but from…well…otherwise fine and upstanding pillars of the community.  People just like Mr. Guy Adams, who, as it turns out, not only works for Renew America, but also is, or was as of January 2005, a Deputy Sheriff in Cook County Illinois.

(Thanks to Pam’s House Blend for the catch) I’m sure he treats the gay and lesbian citizens of Cook County he encounters during the course of his work with dignity and respect.  Well…actually I’m not.

More on this on the Cartoon Page tomorrow…

Things aren’t so bad in the Middle East.  Really.  In fact, they’re going swimmingly.  If you believe the world is going to end soon anyway that is…

President Bush often complains about lack of transparency in places like North Korea or, more recently, Cuba — and contrasts that with the United States.

Here he is in Vienna in June: "We’re a transparent democracy. People know exactly what’s on our mind. We debate things in the open. We’ve got a legislative process that’s active."

But the reality is that, particularly when it comes to Bush’s foreign policy, the minimal press access to the intensely secret inner workings of the White House and the almost complete lack of effective Congressional oversight have left Bush’s decision-making process largely a mystery.

Case in point: What is really motivating our policy in the Middle East? And who’s really making the decisions? We don’t know.

…

Today, Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers writes: "If there’s a starting point for George W. Bush’s attachment to Israel, it’s the day in late 1998 when he stood on the hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’

" ‘He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience,’ said Matthew Brooks, a prominent Jewish Republican who escorted Bush, then governor of Texas, and three other GOP governors on the Middle East visit. ‘He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved.’

"Eight years later, Bush is living up to his reputation as the most pro-Israel president ever. As Israel’s military action in Lebanon heads into its fourth week, the president is standing firm against growing international pressure for an immediate cease-fire."

Yesterday, I noted former Newsday and Knight Ridder White House correspondent Saul Friedman ‘s essay on NiemanWatchdog.org: "I believe this to be the first time in modern American history that a president’s religion, in this case his Christian fundamentalism, has become a decisive factor in his foreign and domestic policies. It’s a factor that has been under-reported, to say the least, and that begs for press attention."

Former Clinton official Sidney Blumenthal sees another, related form of evangelism at work: The neoconservative variety. He writes in Salon: "By secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining the hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are trying to widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it. . . .

"The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war."

…

And here’s another data point: Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy.

Rosenberg said that on February 10, 2005, he came to speak to a "couple dozen" White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since.

Rosenberg wouldn’t say exactly what was discussed. "The meeting itself was off the record, as you could imagine," he said. He declined to name the staffer he said invited him or describe the attendees in any way other than to say that the president was not among them. "I can’t imagine they’d want to talk about it," he said.

"I can’t tell you that the people that I spoke with agree with me, or believe that prophecy can really help you understand what will happen next in the Middle East, but I’m not surprised that they’re intrigued."

The White House press office wasn’t able to confirm the visit for me, but there have been previous reports about White House Bible study groups inviting Christian authors to come speak.

Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg’s particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true.

Here he is in a recent interview with Christian talk-show host Pat Robertson , talking about what he thinks is going to happen next: "Now I have to say, Pat, I believe that Ezekiel 38 and 39 — the prophecies that we’re talking about — I think this is about the end of radical Islam as we know it. God says He’s going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We’re talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It’s going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there’s going to be a great spiritual awakening. We’re seeing more Muslims coming to Christ right now than at any other time in history. But I think that’s just the beginning. We’ve got dark days ahead of us. But I believe there’s a light at the end of that tunnel."

Rosenberg says he got a call last year from a White House staffer. "He said ‘A lot of people over here are reading your novels, and they’re intrigued that these things keep on happening. . . . Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events. . . . And so we’re curious, how are you doing it? What’s the secret? Why don’t you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?’ So I did."

Judy Keen first wrote back in October 2002, in USA Today, that "some White House staffers have been meeting weekly at hour-long prayer and Bible study sessions."

Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in the New York Times last year that "intelligent design was the subject of a weekly Bible study class several years ago when Charles W. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, spoke to the group."

All this talk about family values, and preserving the institution of marriage as the best way to raise children, and nurture the next generation, and underneath it all the fervent hope that the end of the world will happen in their lifetimes.

Sure thing Mel…

"For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the ’60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules.  Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated… The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don’t believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends.It’s the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it."

Mel Gibson, in an interview with El Pais in January 1992, discussing why his brand of Traditionalist Catholicism does not subscribe to the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 rulings on various subjects including who was responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.

"Why are they calling her a Nazi? …Because modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church. And it’s a lie. And it’s revisionism. And they’ve been working on that one for a while."

On criticism of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a nineteenth-century nun whose writings influenced his portrayal of Jesus’ death. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003

"That’s bullshit…I don’t want to be dissing my father. He never denied the Holocaust; he just said there were fewer than six million. I don’t want them having me dissing my father. I mean, he’s my father."

On allegations that his father is a Holocaust denier. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003

"I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

In The New York Post, January 30, 2004

"They take it up the ass.  This [pointing to his butt] is only for taking a shit."

When asked what he thinks of homosexuals in an interview with El Pais in January 1992

"With this look, who’s going to think I’m gay. I don’t lend myself to that type of confusion. Do I sound like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?" 

When asked during the El Pais interview if he is afraid of being mistaken for a homosexual, because he is an actor.

"I have no idea how anti-Semitism entered into it. But I do feel that gay people will burn in hell. Their way of life goes completely against God’s plan for procreation."

When asked by Philip Wuntch during filming of The Man Without A Face about the El Pais interview

"Fucking Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

During his arrest for driving under the influence, July 2006

"What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?"

To a female sergeant during his arrest for DUI

"In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images."

 

Leon Wieseltier on The Passion of the Christ

 

I’m going on another of my cross-country road trips this weekend, and the news today gives me reason to reflect once more on a simple, devastating fact: I can freely travel all over America, only because I am single.

Had I a spouse, a same-sex spouse because I am a gay man, we would have to take care not to set so much as a toe in states like Virginia, and Nebraska, and any of the other states in the Union (maybe we should start referring to it as a Dis-union now…), that have not only passed constitutional amendments banning same sex marriage, but also any legal recognition whatsoever of any possible legal right a same sex couple may need to have, in order to defend their union. Because if anything should happen to either one of us, it would be a nightmare for the other. A nightmare like this…

When Sharon Kowalski was injured in an automobile accident in November 1983, her partner, Karen Thompson had to fight a nightmarish legal battle with Kowalski’s parents lasting ten years. During that time, Kowalski’s parents placed her in a nursing home where they could insure that Thompson would be kept away. The nursing home was unequipped to give Kowalski the physical therapy she needed, and which might have made a difference in the extent of her recovery had it been given to her early on. When Kowalski was given a typewriter to communicate, she instantly began typing out calls for Karen. The typewriter was taken from her.

…or this…

When Juan Navarrete came home in 1989 and found his partner LeRoy Tranton lying bloody on the concrete driveway to their house, it marked the beginning of a bitter fight with Tranton’s brother who prevented Navarrete from seeing his beloved in the hospital. Despite Tranton’s persistent calling for his lover Juan, he was kept away. When Tranton later died, Navarrete was unable even to visit the grave.

…or this…

In 1993, a Virginia judge ruled that Sharon Bottoms was an unfit mother because she was a lesbian, and awarded custody of her 20-month-old son, to her mother, who had sought custody of the boy when she learned her daughter was a lesbian, and in love with another woman.

…or this…

In 2000, a court in Tacoma Washington ruled that Frank Vasques could be denied his lover of 28 years’ estate because the two where in a homosexual relationship. They had shared a house, business and financial assets for 28 years.

…or this…

After NBC news cameraman Rob Pierce died in a helicopter crash, his family visited his partner Frank Gagliano, in the Miami condominium the two had shared. After mourning together, they told Gagliano he should take a walk on the beach. Then Pierce’s family changed the locks on the condo, and when Gagliano returned, told him he was no longer welcome there. Gagliano had to go to court just to get his belongings.

…or this…

In Massachusetts, after Ken Kirkey’s partner Mark died of cancer, Mark’s family removed his ashes from the home the two shared. Kirkey discovered he had no legal right to Mark’s ashes, though they were among the first to take advantage of Vermont’s new Civil Unions law.

…or this…I

n 2001 Sharon Smith was told she had no legal standing to file a wrongful death suit against Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller, after two of their dogs mauled her partner Diane Whipple to death in the hallway of her apartment.

…or this…

In 2002 Officials at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center barred William Robert Flanigan Jr. from his dying partner’s bedside, saying he was not "family", and that ‘partners’ did not qualify. Though Flanigan had legal power of attorney for his partner, Robert Lee Daniel, officials at the Shock Trauma Center insisted he would not be allowed his partner’s bedside. Only when Daniel’s mother arrived from New Mexico, was Flanigan allowed into Daniel’s room. By that time, Daniel had lost consciousness. He would die two days later. Because Flanigan was not present during Daniel’s final four hours of consciousness, Flanigan was unable to tell Shock Trauma that Daniel did not want breathing tubes or a respirator. When Daniel tried to rip the tubes out of his throat, staff members put his arms in restraints

…or this…

In 1999 Earl Meadows 56, passed away a year after suffering a stroke which left him unable to take care of himself. He was cared for by his lover and partner, Sam Beaumont, 61, on the Oklahoma ranch they had both worked together for a quarter century. Meadows cousins, filed suit and Beaumont lost everything he and Meadows had worked together for, the ranch, the cattle, everything, because even though he had a will, it lacked a second witness signature, and a judge ruled it was invalid, and in a state that has a constitutional amendment banning not only same sex marriage but any legal recognition of same sex couples, as far as the law was concerned, Beaumont and Meadows were legally strangers.

After Meadows’ cousins won his worldly goods in court, they went back to court and sued Beaumont for back rent for every year he lived on the ranch.

This is the future that jackasses like Andrew Sullivan, and the Deep Thinkers at the Independent (sic) Gay Forum, who preach the virtues of "federalism"and letting each state go their own way on same sex marriage, are condemning gay couples to: a patchwork of states they can safely travel in, embedded in a dangerous no-homo-land where the law doesn’t merely fail to acknowledge your rights as a couple, but actively seeks to destroy your union, and throw the two of you into a living nightmare, when given any opportunity whatever to do so. For all the same reasons that a nation half free and half slave would not work, for all the same reasons that a nation where rights are allocated on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion different in every state would not work, a nation where some couples are allowed to live in peace in some states and in a state of fear in others will not work. You cannot build a democracy out of "some animals are more equal then others, depending on their sexual orientation and their physical location at any given moment".

In Georgia, where the question was about how many different subjects a constitutional amendment ballot could embrace, the court unanimously decided that the subject in question was not, after all, a combination of same sex marriage plus civil unions, but one simple all embracing expression of animus by the heterosexual majority of Georgia toward same sex couples as a class. On that basis, the heterosexual majority of Georgia could have thrown every knife at gay people they could have gotten their hands on in that ballot question, the right to hold property, the right to vote, the right to walk down any street in Georgia without getting your head bashed in, and the subject of the ballot question would still have been only the hate, not the particulars of how that hate is expressed. On the other hand, let’s face it, that is pretty much a correct view of what the subject of the ballot question was: Resolved – same sex couples have no rights the heterosexual majority is bound to respect…

But for this week’s laughing mockery of justice, the court in New York has to take top honors. This is their rational, I am not kidding, for keeping marriage in New York a heterosexual prerogative:

First, the Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or – temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement — in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits — to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.

The Legislature could find that this rationale for marriage does not apply with comparable force to same-sex couples. These couples can become parents by adoption, or by artificial insemination or other technological marvels, but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse. The Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples, and thus that promoting stability in opposite sex relationships will help children more. This is one reason why the Legislature could rationally offer the benefits of marriage to opposite-sex couples only.

What they’re saying there, is that a "rational" reason for limiting marriage to heterosexuals only, "could be" because heterosexual couples are less likely to provide stable homes for children, because heterosexuals can have children just by randomly fucking around, and probably will, whilst homosexual couples are more likely to provide stable homes for children because they have to work harder to bring children into their homes.

Never mind that this is, once again, arguing that the purpose of marriage is to provide an environment for the raising of children, which is patently is not since having children, or even being physically able to have children, is not a requirement for marriage.  Never mind that.  This argument is pathetic on its face.  I guess you have to have grown up during the Stonewall years to appreciate the irony of it all. Once upon a time it was your gay and lesbian neighbors who were begging for some meager measure of rights, or at least a shred or two of human dignity, on the grounds that it wasn’t our fault that we were mentally unstable, and it would be cruel to punish us for something we cannot help. Today, at least in New York, it is heterosexuals who are saying they need rights because they cannot help being unstable. But if heterosexuals relationships are too unstable to exist without marriage, then heterosexuals are in no position to pass judgment on the fitness of their gay and lesbian neighbors for marriage either.

Except that they are the majority, so they can anyway. That is the rational here, nothing else. We outnumber you, so we can. The rights of heterosexual couples are enshrined in the fabric of our democracy, our constitution. The rights of gay couples exist, or not, a the discretion of heterosexuals. We can beg for rights, but we cannot assert a right of equality because we are manifestly unequal to heterosexuals in the only way that matters in George Bush’s America: we are fewer. What two state supreme courts have said today, is that this means the majority can do whatever it damn well pleases with our households, and any hopes and dreams we might have ever had or ever dared to want for happiness and peace and a life together with the ones we love, simply because they outnumber us. My Country ‘Tis Of Thee…

And here I am, slowly packing my things for another cross country trip, looking at my path through Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, and so on…and wondering how the hell I could possibly make such a trip if I had a spouse. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t. It would be too dangerous for both of us. The minute either of us became sick or ill or incapacitated in some way, everything we made of our lives together, and every hope and dream we ever had for the future, could be annihilated by laws designed specifically to be relentlessly hostile toward same sex couples. 

And never mind vacations.  My employer is sending me to the OSCON Open Source conference in Portland Oregon at the end of the month.  Do I tell them I can’t go because Oregon passed a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage and if I get sick or injured out there my spouse could be legally barred from taking any sort of care of me, let alone visiting me in the hospital, or seeing to it that my medical wishes are respected.  Robert Flanigan Jr.  Karen Thompson.  Juan Navarrete. 

And then there is the matter of families being torn apart.   I have family in Virginia, and my mother’s grave, that I could never see again, if I had a spouse.  They say Virginia’s anti same sex laws are so draconian, they may even disallow joint checking accounts between same sex couples.  How the hell do I even go lay flowers on my mother’s grave, when every moment I am in Virginia, I am putting my spouse at risk for a legal nightmare?  It is impossible.  No family of mine has the right to demand I risk flushing our marriage down the toilet, simply to come down for a visit.  If the people busy passing these laws really believe that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex, then there are a lot of families in those states, in for some bitter awakenings in the years to come.  Of course a lot of these people just discard their gay and lesbian children anyway, like so much human garbage.  But not all of them do.  I guess the message to those families is, if you love your gay children, there’s probably something wrong with you people anyway.

Anyone who thinks this state’s rights approach is fine for solving the issue of same sex marriage in America is smoking crack.  It is a recipe for tearing this nation apart, one family at a time.  And friends from friends.  I used to have straight friends who would have told me today, to count my blessings, and be glad that I am still single. That is why they are now ex-friends.

Daily Kos diarist Darksyde give me a link to another good one, Cosmic Variance.  Jo Ann blogs on the topic of who owns the data, and should it be made public…

…Tao Han brought up a push-your-buttons topic during his presentation: he proposed that the LHC data should be made available to the community as maximal openess would only benefit the physics. He admitted that while us non-LHC experimenters could not comprehend the raw data, he proposed that LHC- experimenters store their data in ASCII and make it available to the public. First a gasp and then audible silence swept the audience as this has been a controversial topic for years.

Han’s public data proposal completely dominated the lively and sometimes heated discussion afterwards. Joe Lykken called Maria Spiropulu up to the podium to defend the bastion of the secret data experimental world, noting that the astrophysics community does make its data public (although I could not find a site while looking tonight – anybody know a URL?). Maria stood silent for a minute, then turned directly towards Tao and said a single word: “ASCII?” It brought the house down. Then she started on the usual diatribe on how their data would be useless as us theorists don’t understand the detectors, their data format, blah blah blah. Frankly, I think she (and experimenters in general) misunderstand the point and underestimate us. Tao Han did not ask for raw data – nobody without the proper background or code can comprehend that – he asked for the 4-vectors (the energy and momentum read-outs) in ASCII. In other words, he asked for the data after it had been processed and sifted, and churned into a useable format. It is the form of data that us particle theorists deal with in our Monte Carlo codes and is what the experimenter works with in the end. It is a reasonable request, but not likely to happen.

So, just who “owns” this data anyway? The experimenters feel that they worked hard and suffered to build the detector (and they have indeed), so the data and any discoveries are theirs. But, who came up with the theories that are being tested? Who did the calculations to see what type of machine should be built? Who convinced the politicians to build the machine? And last, but by no means least, who footed the bill to pay for the machine? So who really owns this data and why is it kept under lock and key?

Even better then the data being made public would be making public the process of arguing and debating what the data means.  When scientists hide their work behind closed doors, they shouldn’t be surprised when the general public becomes suspicious that they don’t really know anything, and begin to embrace superstitious claptrap like Intelligent Design.  Why does it matter if they do?  Well…

MJ: How did we get to this point, where science is so blatantly abused for political purposes?

CM: Well, I think it’s part of the history of the modern conservative movement, and you see it coming to fruition recently with that movement’s total control of the Republican Party and of the government. Here you have a movement anchored in, among other things, a distrust of big government. And of course a lot of science is funded by government, and a lot of science takes place in government agencies. This is also a movement that has plausibly been accused of having anti-intellectual tendencies, that thinks big universities and the academic elites are biased against ordinary folks.

But most importantly you have raw politics, or catering to your constituents. With the conservatives, you have industry, which is coming up against science all the time, and religious conservatives, who come out against science any time [it conflicts with] their moral view of the world.

So, you combine all of those things—not liking government, distrusting universities, catering to your base—and then you get control of the government and I think what you get is exactly what you’d predict.

MJ: How far back do you have to go to see this coming together?

CM: There are good indications that these tensions were mounting [in the 1950s] for instance, when William F. Buckley attacked Yale, or when Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964 and was attacked by the nation’s scientists for his anti-intellectual tendencies. Of course, they were fighting over different issues then, particularly arms control, but I think that the tension was clearly present.

But I think it really becomes a political phenomenon with Reagan. He was the [conservative] movement’s president and so of course he did a lot of this pro-industry and pro-religious stuff. He spoke favorably of creationism as well. So I think that’s when it really hit the political mainstream.

That’s an excerpt of the Mother Jones interview with Chris Moony, author of The Republican War On Science. 

What blogging is doing for the political dialog, it can do for science.  Science can speak for itself directly to the world.  It doesn’t have to have it’s voice filtered through the corporate republican friendly news media. It should.  It must.  What Jacob Bronowski wrote back in 1956 is so terribly true today:

The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes toward slavery. 

I have now in my browser’s bookmarks list about a half dozen or so good science blogs that I visit often.  I’m going to create a separate blogroll list for them, and add to it as I happen across new ones.

Just so you know.  Via Pam’s House Blend…  Linda Harvey of Mission America lists the ways we are made queer .  I’m linking to her so you can see for yourself that I’m not making this shit up…

The Creation of New Homosexuals

These warnings beg a very serious question: can people, children in this case, become homosexuals by exposure to certain ideas and behavior? In other words, can a person who would not otherwise become homosexual, start the behavior, come to prefer it and continue it?

Can a society create more homosexuals? The answer quite clearly is yes. That is how current homosexuals, in fact, came to be. There is no evidence–none– for a genetic origin for homosexuality. That may come as a surprise to many people, but it’s true. It’s even more astonishing when one realizes how many influential groups and people now accept homosexuality as inborn for some, but when you look behind the rhetoric, you find that there is nothing but wishful thinking. For an excellent paper debunking this myth, see Culture and Family Institute’s article at http://www.cwfa.org/images/content/bornorbred.pdf .

In view of this, the promotion of this behavior to our children has incredibly destructive potential, yet this unprecedented trend is occurring with few objections by parents.

People, especially the young, can be seduced into homosexual behavior and have their identity molded around the homosexual lifestyle, through a combination of persuasion and circumstances which may include the following:

• Being convinced homosexuality is acceptable;
• Reading or viewing explicit homosexual pornography;
• A close relationship with a peer who is practicing homosexuality;
• Admiring an older teacher or mentor who is homosexual;
• Attending homosexual social venues (a “gay” club, bar, church youth group);
• Being homosexually molested;
• Having parents who espouse liberal values;
• No strong ties to a conservative church, and hostility toward traditional views.

And in that spirit, I would like to offer my own tips on how to make people homosexual.  I should know, right, because I am one.  Trust me, this stuff really works.  The Gay Mafia could have me silenced for telling you people this stuff…

• Vote democratic.
  
• Stand too close to a homosexual on the bus or in the subway.  Five minutes might be enough.
  
• Breath in a homosexual’s second hand smoke.
• Enter a restaurant where a homosexual is eating.
• Call your senator or congressman and ask them to support extending the Voting Rights Act.
• If you are a woman, applying for a job outside the home will make you a lesbian.
• If you are a man, disrespecting your boss will make you gay.
• If you are a woman, enjoying sex will make you a lesbian.
  
• If you are a man, caring that your wife enjoys having sex with you will turn you gay.
• Enjoying sex with her will also make you gay.
• Yielding the right of way to oncoming traffic makes men gay.  Real men don’t yield, they penetrate.
• Oppose repealing the Estate Tax
• Oppose the war in Iraq.
• Question George Bush’s leadership.  This one will turn you gay in a heartbeat.
  

• Learn something new every day.
• Read a book.
  
• Question authority.
• Think.

Via Atrios, via Digby, who links to Tristram Shandy, after beginning thusly…

I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn’t she?"

Here’s another little pointer on wingnut gossip mongering and dirty politics. As you sling the shit with the biggest megaphone you can find, be sure to primly assert that you don’t believe a word of it and chastize those who are doing it on the victim’s behalf. It makes you look like a good guy even though your purpose is to spread the gossip far and wide.

In this case it doesn’t matter much because the "gossip" is irrelevant to normal people and would make no difference if it were true. This gossip is aimed solely at the wingnut doughboy losers who couldn’t manage to get laid at the Bunny Ranch with 5k in their pockets. Still, it’s nice of one of the leading voices in the blogosphere to spread it around, (while being above it all, of course.) It’s good practice for serious swift-boating.

Digby is referring to a post Instapundit (who is not a moderate libertarian-republican, but only plays one for effect) made concerning Markos, of Daily KOS who, running one of the biggest of the liberal-progressive blogs, now finds himself the target of the republican propaganda machine.  One simply cannot challenge the establishment party line and expect to get away with it.  Reynolds happliy plays his role, goosing a rumor that Markos is…wait for it…gay.

And as an aside, I see some blog-commenters are speculating that Kos is gay. Why that should matter, I don’t know, but I remember — back when the blogosphere was younger and people were nicer — commiserating with Kos over his wife’s miscarriage (my wife and I had several) and assuring him that it didn’t preclude successful pregnancies later on, which I believe his wife has since had. So try to keep things at something better than a seventh-grade level. 

…to which Tristram responds…

If it doesn’t matter, Glenn, why mention it? From the looks of it, the genial professor did so only to further cement his rep as a "gentleman" — the "civility" thing, you know? Why he had to use rumors about Kos’ sexuality and a rehashing of a miscarriage to do so is beyond this page’s comprehension.

Because he’s a gutter crawling Bush republican thug is why.  What else about him did you need to know?   Why else would speculation about his sexual orientation matter?  Digby’s right…this is about pumping up the bigot base, and practice for some serious swift boating later on as election day draws near.