If you didn’t catch “Meet the Press” yesterday, you missed a lively conversation about, among other things, women’s votes in 2012 and the policy controversies that have put women’s issues at the forefront of the political landscape.
As you’ll see in this clip, around the 5:20 mark, Rachel noted the pay disparity between men and women in this country, which prompted some unexpected pushback (and incessant interruptions) from Republican strategist Alex Castellanos.
Unexpected? Like the incessant interruptions? Golly it’s almost as if they wanted to just shut you up woman…
The angle to this to keep in mind is that the Republicans on the panel, Castellanos and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), simply reject the available facts on the wage gap. Despite ampleevidence that shows women make less than men for the same work, Castellanos chooses to believe his own version of reality in which that’s not the case.
…
There’s simply no shared foundation of reality, which in turn shapes the policy debate in unproductive ways. The left sees gender-based pay disparity and looks for mechanisms to address the problem; the right rejects the existence of the disparity and sees no use for the solutions because, to them, there is no problem.
If I may…no. Just…no. You’re giving the right way too much credit for making a good faith argument here.
The problem isn’t that they don’t think gender pay disparity exists. They know damn well it exists. They don’t think that’s a problem. It is instead but a simple The Way God And Nature Intended Things To Be truth. Women just don’t belong in the workplace, let alone the family planning clinic. Giving them equal pay diminishes the rightful status of men and encourages women to abandon their role as child bearers and housekeepers. That said, the right also knows that in this day and age, at least here in the decadent west if not in many areas of the righteous middle east, people are generally sickened by caveman attitudes toward women. This is part of what they see as the decline of civilization. It’s getting so men can’t drag their women around by the hair anymore! So rather then give people their honest reasons why discrimination against women is a good thing they’re spreading a line of propaganda to the effect that there is no discrimination.
Wage discrimination? No such thing! So nothing to see here people….move along…move along…
Dan Savage offended some Christian teens when he told them “We can learn to ignore the bull—t in the Bible about gay people.”
…
After many students walked out of the speech, one of whom appeared to be crying, Savage said, “It’s funny, as someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.”
Right on cue the usual suspects wing up the noise machine…
Fox News reports that Savage’s comments upset the executive director of GOProud, a gay conservative group.
“Dan Savage should apologize for his comments and should apologize to the high school students in attendance whom he called ‘pansy-asses,’” Jimmy LaSalvia told Fox. “It is ironic that someone whose claim to fame is fighting bullying would resort to bullying tactics in attacking high school students who were offended by his outrageous remarks.”
There is so much to unpack here. Firstly, the headline. This is that right wing propaganda everyone has bought into over the years, that the only authentic Christians are the right wing bigots and everyone else is just faking it. How many of the kids who stayed to hear what Savage had to say, regardless of what they thought of it, also identified as Christian? We don’t get that information in any of the mainstream news stories I’ve seen on this. No, no…it was Christians, capital ‘C’ who walked out and who Savage tossed a going away insult at. Those were the only Christians in that auditorium that day.
Secondly, Savage didn’t stir up anything…that bubbling open sewer that calls itself the moral majority needs no stirring, it is always on the boil. This incident wouldn’t look more like the usual case of right wing manufactured outrage if those kids were wearing t-shirts that said “We Are Here To Take Offense At Anything You Have To Say”. I am expected to believe that none of the kids in that group who walked out knew who Dan Savage was or what his positions were on sex, gay sex, and the bible am I? Right. Pull the other one.
Suddenly it’s We’re Not The Bullies, Dan Savage Is The Bully, Because He Insulted Us!!! Yes. Yes he did. And a well earned insult it was too. In the Twitter fury that followed, LOLGOP Tweeted: “I’ve not yet met one conservative Christian who is considering suicide because of bullying as thousands of LGBT youth do every day.” Just so. It is grotesque to watch the right wing noise machine compare Dan Savage’s crack about the kids walking out of his talk to what gay kids deal with every day of their lives, usually at the hands of kids like the ones who walked out. This from The Christian Post:
The 17-year-old California student, whose name was not given, told CitizenLink’s Karla Dial that Savage said people using the Bible to justify their views on homosexuality being a sin often cite Leviticus and Romans in saying that “being gay is wrong.”
“Right after that, he said we can ignore all the ‘B.S.’ in the Bible,” the student told CitizenLink, which is affiliated with faith-based organization Focus on the Family.
The student said she suddenly reacted by blurting out “That’s bull!” before storming out of the auditorium along with several other students. Savage reportedly called the students pansies upon noticing their exit.
That passage in Leviticus Savage was telling them was BS, and which the student there is righteously affirming, calls for homosexuals to be put to death, adding “Their blood is upon them”. Yes, we can throw death threats at our classmates and we’re just quoting the bible, but if you call us pansies you’re a bully.
Look at what this tells you about the mindset here. It was a rash of gay kids killing themselves at the beginning of the previous school year that prompted Savage to start his “It Get’s Better” campaign, which has never gotten anything but raspberries from the wingers. Yet now they rise in a righteous howl of anger at a small group of fundamentalist kids being called pansies. Look at it. No…really look at it. These are people who just can’t figure out why tormenting gay kids to death would be such a big deal with anyone other then it’s some kind of political posturing. The way they see it we’re posturing so they get to posture too. That gay kids are being made so miserable by the torrent of hatred being directed at them that they want to kill themselves just doesn’t seem like it should be such a big deal to the wingers.
And the reason for that is simple, obvious, and sickening. The way the right wing sees it, if the kid is gay then being treated like human garbage is what they should expect. Because they are.
Think I’m engaging in hyperbole there? When did you ever see the kind of outrage on the right toward the tormenting of gay kids that you are seeing now being directed at Dan Savage after he called the fundamentalists who walked out of his talk “pansies”. When have you ever heard a winger get upset at gay kids being called that? Cut me a break. They call gay people that and worse all the fucking time and they don’t particularly care if gay kids get called names or not. Who is fighting tooth and nail to prevent anti-bullying campaigns from specifically protecting gay kids from being bullied? The same people who are bellyaching about what Dan Savage said to a group of fundamentalists, that’s who.
How often do I have to see this before I’m allowed to call it what it is? The way the right wing sees it, the way fundamentalist bigots see it, it is only natural to treat gay kids like human garbage. Because they are. God hates them. My bible tells me so and if yours doesn’t you are not a Christian. Make no mistake, the outrage here isn’t entirely manufactured, but if you think it’s out of sympathy for the kids Savage insulted you are still not getting it. The problem isn’t that Dan Savage insulted a group of fundamentalist kids. It’s that he told them to leave their gay peers alone, using language they routinely use against their gay peers. He stood up for the gay kids. There’s where the anger is coming from.
Brutalizing gay people is one of their most cherished religious sacraments. You mess with that and you will hear the gutter scream like they are being crucified.
[Update…] “Theirs was not an act born of suffering. It was a proud show of disdain.” – Christian author John Shore.
The so-called “license to bully” bill…would allow students to share any “religious, philosophical, or political views” that are “unpopular,” regardless of their consequences to the learning environment, and limits educators’ ability to curb such harassment.
Equality advocates lodged an email protest campaign against the measure, but were particularly surprised by the reaction of state Rep. John Ragan (R). In a long letter to one opponent of the bill, Ragan replied that gay “feelings” can be controlled by “mentally healthy adult human beings,” and concluded by stating, “Should society avoid disapproving of pedophilia, prostitution, murder, etc., because practitioners of those behaviors may commit suicide at higher rates?”
(Emphasis mine) What you have to understand about the human gutter is it has no bottom. Here is a man who wants to enable the very bullying that causes gay kids to kill themselves, saying the fact that gays are more likely to commit suicide is proof that there’s something wrong with them. Nice way to prove a point huh?
No bigot, there’s something wrong with you. Something profoundly, terribly wrong with you. Mentally healthy adult human beings? I’m laughing in your face. What do you call an adult who can abuse kids, can create a climate where kids can be easily abused, and does not see anything wrong with what they’re doing?
In the current issue of the center-right policy journal, National Affairs, former Bush domestic policy adviser Tevi Troy worries about the decline of Washington think tanks into partisan messaging operations.
Stop…stop…you’re killing me. Seriously, on what planet were most beltway think tanks, and especially AEI and Heritage, ever not partisan messaging operations?
Yes, yes, liberal “think tanks” exist, but how many global corporations and multi-billionaires are going to fund a think tank that starts from an ideologically liberal economic position? Right wing and conservative “think tanks” basically rule the beltway discourse and you always know what their conclusions will be, and which party will happily benefit from them. Their non-partisanship is a farce. They are think tanks like Intelligent Design is science.
There’s a rule of thumb about think tanks: If you already know what the conclusion is before you pick up the paper and read it, it is not a think tank. Rand is a think tank. Let me explain by this example from Wiki:
In 1958, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the U.S. had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to U.S. interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.
See how that works. They asked a question they didn’t already know the answer to and set about to answer it. No ideology, just answers. AEI and Heritage, to name two, begin with the answer in the form of an ideological position (unconditional surrender is always the most favorable outcome) and try to figure out a way to message that for the benefits of republicans.
What these organizations do is tactical rhetoric, not thinking. Thinking is where you search for answers, not fashion attractive political battle flags. Thinking takes you into undiscovered places. That’s not allowed in organization like AEI, which Frum found out when he got the boot for not towing the line. These are party instruments, nothing more nothing less. They exist precisely to discourage thinking. You are told what to think. Or at any rate, what to say that you think.
Witness the decline in American governance. We can’t confront the real problems that exist because our institutions of government are mired in ideologies which demand fealty over everything else. Facts don’t matter, only the party matters, and free thinking is treason to the party. And so our ability as a nation to grow and prosper into the 21st century is limited to what the ideologies in power will allow, and that isn’t much. We were promised a shining city on a hill. What we got were factories closed, wages devastated, pensions lost, entire neighborhoods in foreclosure and state and local governments teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Yet the ideologies that promised us that shining city are never held to account. For all the think tanks in Washington, not a whole lot of thinking is actually going on.
Behold Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders…beset upon by socialist moochers, second-handers and looters…
…not. Let’s be real here…no welfare queen ever had a larger sense of entitlement then the tea partiers.
Its easy to point and laugh at signs like the one above…and this one…
But it isn’t just the crazies who’ve been taken in and lit up by the right wing noise machine. To one degree or another, the nation as a whole has accepted a disastrously false economic construct: that the economy is driven by businesses, banks and wealthy investors. Producers produce wealth, consumers consume it. Producers build factories, establish businesses, engage in commerce and thereby create jobs…almost as a side effect of their economic vitality. It’s their world, they built it, these Atlases of commerce. The rest of us just live in it. Without the Atlases the rest of us would have nothing.
Hence the bellyaching about going Galt. It’s like the constantly nagging and entitled parent or grandparent who keeps warning You’ll be sorry when I’m gone and after so many years of it you’ve begun planning a party to celebrate the event. There’s a scene in Atlas Shrugged where the worthless playboy Francisco d’Anconia (secretly an agent of the Galt’s Gulch strikers) talks with industrialist Hank Rearden, owner of Rearden Steel and inventor of Rearden Metal. They are at a party at Readen’s magnificent mansion. They stand at a window as a storm rages in the night outside…
“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.”
Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny…”
“What?”
“You told me what I was thinking just a while ago…”
“You were?”
“…only I didn’t have the words for it.”
“Shall I tell you the rest of the words?”
“Go ahead.”
“You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel – because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”
…and just never you mind the people who designed and engineered that house, who mined its marble floors and brass and gold for its fixtures, who felled and milled the trees and laid the bricks and stones. See…they don’t even exist in the right winger frame of mind, let alone the world of Ayn Rand, except as looters, moochers and second-handers, leaching off the vitality of the world’s Atlases like vampires. But without all those looters, those second-handers, those moochers paying rents for their own modest apartments, or buying their own modest homes, purchasing their own little economy cars and appliances, patronizing various merchants, making the building of all those things economically viable, Hank Rearden’s foundries would have nothing to do and his magnificent mansion would have never been built and he’d be shit out of luck on that open plain too.
Whose, really, is the motor of the world? Nick Hanauer, himself a venture capitalist, sees where it really is:
It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.
That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.
Since 1980, the share of the nation’s income for fat cats like me in the top 0.1 percent has increased a shocking 400 percent, while the share for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has declined 33 percent. At the same time, effective tax rates on the superwealthy fell to 16.6 percent in 2007, from 42 percent at the peak of U.S. productivity in the early 1960s, and about 30 percent during the expansion of the 1990s. In my case, that means that this year, I paid an 11 percent rate on an eight-figure income.
One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff…
I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages…
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit…
So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business…
The meme, the Randian dogma, the right wing spin the nation has bought into since Reagan sold us on it, that it is the rich industrialists who create jobs. No. Customers create jobs. The flow of money from employer to employee to employer again creates jobs. Building factories and office space where there is no demand for goods, simply because you suddenly have tons of money to do something with, is what happens in this thing they call a Bubble. Hey…let’s build a factory because we can! No demand, no sales. No sales: bankruptcy. The factory closes, the employees loose their paychecks, the money stops flowing, the motors…were…stopping…
We’ve seen how that works, time and time again in the past thirty years, yet the right wingers keep insisting if we just give more free money to the rich they’ll build factories, or offices space or something and then the rest of us will have jobs. But nobody sane builds a factory if it isn’t bloody likely to sell anything that it makes.
No. The super rich won’t build factories. Not if there is no money to be made doing that. And if they can plainly see there is an easier way to make money, they’ll do that instead. And for them these days, there is. It’s called Wall Street. So if the middle class is dying, how are the rich making money these days…?
A newly-released study from the Congressional Research Service bolsters claims that the nation’s largest banks profited off the Federal Reserve’s financial crisis-era programs by borrowing cash for next to nothing, then lending it back to the federal government at substantially higher rates.
The report reinforces long-held beliefs that the banking system in essence engaged in taxpayer-financed arbitrage: They got money for free, then lent it back to Uncle Sam while collecting juicy returns.
They make paper profits by moving money back and forth among each other, and then when that blows up in their faces, they take it from the taxpayers…the middle class and the poor. Obviously they’re fine with that system and don’t want it touched. But it is not sustainable and they are not just putting the economy at risk, but our very democracy.
You see, trickle down economics really does work…but only from the middle down. I grew up in the world Hanauer speaks of. I remember it well. I was raised by a single working mother back in a day when women made maybe 60 cents on the dollar a man made for doing the same work. I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothes mom got from the church, but I never went out the door in dirty clothes. We ate a simple, very bland English diet, but I never went to bed hungry. I got a decent education because back in the late 50s and early 60s we were in a cold war with the Soviet Union and public education was something the nation was keen to spend money on so we didn’t loose the technological race. There were good jobs (at least if you were white). And all those high paying union jobs went to families who spent that money on goods and services, not at the Wall Street casino. And that made it possible for poorer, service sector workers, even single mothers, to still earn a living wage and raise kids. I know this. I am one of those kids.
Yes, when government sucks money out of the economy in the form of oppressive taxes, that will stifle economic growth and kill the middle class too. But taxation isn’t the only worry and big government isn’t the only threat to the economy. You can kill the middle class by sucking their wages out in the form of taxes, but you can also kill it, as we are clearly seeing now, by slashing wages in order to maintain astronomical profits that do nothing more then grease the roulette wheels of Wall Street. Big business can be every bit the threat to the economy and to democracy that big government can be.
There need to be brakes put on both. For the sake of our cherished freedoms, and our children’s and their children’s. Libertarianism, with its dogma of unregulated unfettered capitalism utterly removes the brakes on big business. Anyone with eyes to see and a mind not completely corrupted by ideology can see in the decades after Reagan sold us that shining city on a hill what comes of that. If the totalitarian police state is one side of a coin, Libertarianism is the other. Heads, power collects in the hands of the few, the people become their slaves, the economy grinds to a halt and the country tailspins into economic collapse. Tails: see heads.
Democracy gave the common man and woman, gave humanity as a whole, a level of prosperity that would have astonished the peasants who labored under the kings of old. To live, it needs a robust and energetic economy. And to have that, you need a stable and prosperous middle class. Because those people take their money and they spend it on Things…on goods and services that other people earn money making…and that keeps the money circulating and the economy humming along.
John Galt isn’t the motor of the world. John and Jane Doe are.
1943, Female Welder at Work in a Steel Mill by Margaret Bourke-White
At Saturday’s GOP presidential forum in Iowa, newly minted frontrunner Newt Gingrich tore into the Occupy Wall Street movement, pointing to it as a symbol of exactly what’s wrong with America. “All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything,” he explained. “That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, ‘Go get a job, right after you take a bath'”
There is an unpopular war going on, protestors are in the streets, cops fly into sickening displays of police brutality at every peaceful protest they show up at, and right wing politicians are telling the dirty fucking hippies to take a bath. When did 2011 turn into 1972 and can I at least have my eighteen year old body back?
When I Use A Word It Means Just What I Want You To Hate
I see from Jeremy at Good As You that NOM is doubling down on the Gay Rights = Pedophilia rhetoric. On the NOM Blog they’re pointing to a post by Joe Carter that babbles that same claptrap about the B4U-ACT Symposium happening in Baltimore Brian Brown was a couple days ago…
Back in June I outlined how to destroy a culture in 5 easy steps.
An academic symposium in Baltimore comprised of just such a cluster of professoriate and perverts is meeting today to shift the acceptance of pedophilia from “unthinkable” to merely “radical”…
With the euphemism “minor-attracted persons” they are also including Step #2: “From Radical to Acceptable — This shift requires the creation and employment of euphemism.”… Remember when conservatives were mocked and derided for claiming that Lawrence would lead to the normalization [of] polygamy and pedophilia? Now some of those same people who sneered at us are using the decision to promote . . . polygamy and pedophilia.
It looks like they’re fixating on the use of the term “minor-attracted persons” by a group of mental health professionals, but you need to understand while you read it that they know their audience. They are speaking to the kook pews…the ones who don’t know and don’t care what words mean so long as they help win the culture war. Words are weapons, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. And science is the enemy that believes words have meaning. What Joe Carter and Brian Brown know perfectly well, is that “minor-attracted persons” is not intended to obfuscate that meaning, but clarify it. They know this. But they also know their audience.
There is ephebophilia, which is the sexual attraction to mid to late adolescents…teens 15 and up. There is hebephilia, which this symposium seems to view as the sexual attraction toward teens from post puberty to 14 years (I’ve seen this defined to a higher age range elsewhere). And then there is the ever popular (to the gay haters) pedophilia, which is the sexual attraction to children below the age of puberty. All these terms are used precisely and specifically by mental health professionals, whereas your usual right wing nutcase just says PEDOPHILE for all of it. And without a doubt that’s less because they are idiots with small vocabularies, smaller brains and even smaller regard for whether the words they do know mean anything, and more because they understand that screaming PEDOPHILE at gay people rouses passions and short circuits any possibility of mutual understanding. They don’t want understanding, they just want people to hate Teh Gay.
And that means science is the hated enemy. More even, then Teh Gay. It is the first enemy. The enemy that must be brought down before all others, or else the war is lost. Because the practice of science uses words for their actual meaning, not their tactical advantage. Because science lets the evidence speak for itself. Because science acknowledges no higher authority then the observable facts. Let’s take a look once more, at the part of this symposium brochure that the kook pews are screaming bloody murder about:
This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:
Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process
It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. This is especially true for the DSM entry on pedophilia; it has an enormous impact on the beliefs and practices of mental health professionals, the criminal justice system, the media, and the public. It also has a profound effect on adults and teenagers who are emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents, on the availability of mental health services for them, and on relevant research.
It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. No shit Sherlock. The problem is anything that tells us something real and useful about the human condition is almost certain to drive the kook pews into babbling hysterical fits. Darwin anyone?
It is staringly obvious that the term “minor-attracted persons” in the context of this symposium is clearly intended to be an all-encompassing term for pedophilia and hebephilia together. To the world outside the anti-gay industrial complex, but especially the mental health profession, using the term pedophilia to describe all adults who are sexually attracted to minors is illiterate. And to anyone who has followed the ravings of the gay-fixated kook pews, and especially crackpot wholesale warehouses like NOM and FRC, it would be easy to assume that illiteracy is the functional norm in there. But it isn’t. Not at the top. Not where the money is being collected. Not where the votes are being counted. When Brian Brown and Joe Carter tell their readers that the term “minor attracted adults” is a euphemism signaling a desire to normalize pedophilia they know Exactly what they are doing. They are rousing the mob. And not just because the mob is the only tool they have left, to win the culture war.
The mob is their kinfolk, their kingdom, their shining city on the hill; cleansed completely of the hated Other, where no one rises above the prejudices of the many to remind them of the gutter they’ve turned America into, and which they are all living in.
Letter To Fred Haitt’s Pathetic Excuse For An Ombudsman…
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:12:57 -0400
From: Bruce Garrett
To: ombudsman@washpost.com
Subject: The furor
You write…
Liberals and conservatives don’t talk to each other much anymore; they exist in parallel online universes, only crossing over to grab some explosive anti-matter from the other side to stoke the rage in their own blogosphere.
Followed almost immediately by…
Rubin was hired by Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Post, to be an opinion blogger who would appeal to conservatives and people who want to follow conservative politics. She does.
He hired her in other words, to do for the Post readership what you are bellyaching that blogs are doing to their readers. You’d think that the newspaper of record in the nation’s capital would set a higher standard for itself. You’d think.
Maybe your publication should consider the possible consequences of enabling political echo chamber vitriol itself. You are giving it a legitimacy the blogs could never hope to accomplish.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
Haitt hired Rubin because he knew she’d stoke right wing vitriol. And he hired you because he knew you’d make excuses for that.
Now You Know The Reason They Seemed So Vulnerable To You
Details of the horrific events in Norway will continue to unfold no doubt for weeks, if not months to come. So it is well that we all just take a deep breath and wait for solid information to come out. I understand the impulse to think it was radical Islamic terrorism when the news first hit; it was my first reaction too. But I remembered Oklahoma City and held my peace and waited. And now it seems from the facts coming to light, that this was indeed more Oklahoma City then 9/11…
She did not think the order was strange at the time because the suspect has a farm, but after Friday’s explosion in Norway’s capital, Oslo, she called police because she knew the material can be used to make bombs.
“We are very shocked that this man was connected to our company,” said Estenstad. “We are very sad about what happened.”
That sounds vaguely familiar. But bear in mind there is still an investigation going on and we really still don’t know much. This passage from the suspect’s postings to an anti-Muslim website struck me though…
I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years.
….Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.
This from a man who (it is said) methodically killed 80 kids at a youth camp, some while they were swimming away for their lives. Always, the monster the bigot sees in others is themselves. And they are right to fear that monster.
In 1997, the state of Florida made it a felony for someone who is HIV positive to have sexual intercourse without telling their partner. Now…what do you think that means in a state that very specifically defines sexual intercourse only as vaginal sex between a man and a woman.
Last month, the court of appeal overturned a Bradenton woman’s conviction for exposing her female partner to HIV because the sexual acts were between two women. The law “does not apply to her actions,” the 2nd District Court of Appeal said.
The ruling applies statewide, meaning gays and lesbians cannot be convicted of hiding their HIV status from their sex partners, at least for now. Neither can anyone who only engages in sexual acts that do not fit the state’s legal definition of intercourse — “the penetration of the female sex organ by the male sex organ.”
So when Sarasota County authorities arrested an HIV-positive man this week on charges he had anal and oral sex with a 14-year-old boy, the sexual battery charge may stick, but the HIV charge will not…
This reminds me of another case, I think it was also in Florida, where it turned out a man could either not be charged by the state or not be sued by his estranged wife for adultery, because his sexual dalliance was committed with another man not another woman. In this case the oversight was, as the article notes, “…a glitch in the statute that nobody noticed before…” I can’t imagine why.
Well…yes I can. The thinking here clearly is that if we’re written out of the law then they don’t have to worry about some activist judge finding that we have these things called “rights”. So as far as the law is concerned in Florida, only heterosexuals have this thing called sex, and for that matter only when one man’s penis is entering one woman’s vagina. At some point they may also want to specify the missionary position for further clarity.
So somebody who just didn’t know that Bradlee Dean thinks homosexuals are responsible for the Holocaust, will molest 117 people before they’re caught, and that if American does not begin enforcing biblical law against homosexuality God will rise of a foreign enemy to do it, invited him to give the opening prayer for the Minnesota House of Delegates on the day republican speaker of the house Sam Zellers was ready to bring a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to the floor…
The decision to allow anti-gay preacher Bradlee Dean to give the opening prayer before the Minnesota House on Friday sent shockwaves through the Legislature, and the reverberations from that decision continued over the weekend. Democrats filed a complaint on Sunday after House Speaker Kurt Zellers moved to strike Dean’s name from the official record…
They were shocked, shocked, that Dean would stoop to questioning President Obama’s Christianity…
Zellers, R- Maple Grove, restarted the House session and brought in a chaplain to redo the prayer. He also condemned Dean’s prayer in a floor statement.“Members, I can only ask for your forgiveness. That type of person will never ever be allowed on this House floor again as long as I have the honor of serving as speaker,” Zellers said.
Rep. Ernie Leidiger, R-Mayer, confirmed that he invited Dean to give the House prayer. He said it was “an honest mistake” that Dean was invited on the same day that the constitutional amendment to ban same marriage could have been debated.
He [Dean] said it wasn’t right to call him “anti-gay,” but he spoke admiringly of the time when homosexuality was illegal.
“We don’t enforce those laws anymore, and we wonder why we are going backwards,” Dean said. “If you were to ask me my position as far as enforcing the laws of sodomy in the state of Minnesota, I would say absolutely yes. Yeah. Yeah.”
Honest Mistakes…
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?”
Zellers brought up the anti-gay constitutional amendment the following day. It passed. And that type of person will never be allowed on the floor again, until the next time an honest mistake needs to be made.
Who Knew The Wedding Altar Was Also A Sacrificial One…(continued)
Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God posts what looks like the cover of NOM’s current mailer…
So it looks like NOM is doubling-down on their The Homosexuals Are After Your Children card that worked for them so well in California. How…unsurprising…
When you have reduced your neighbor to the status of a scarecrow that drives voters to the polls, or a scapegoat for every failure of moral character you would rather not be held accountable for, when you cannot see the people for the homosexuals, then threats to their lives become meaningless abstractions. They’re not your neighbors, they’re not people, they’re things…and the safety of things isn’t something that often crosses the mind. It’s not hate exactly…it’s what hate does to the heart eventually. That may look like a photo of a cute little boy with his daddy’s glasses on, reading a book about two kings who fall in love, but look closer. That is a photo of human souls in free fall. To win elections, to prevent loving same-sex couples from having access to marriage, NOM is belly flopping into the gutter, and they know it, and they don’t care. Not honor, not morality, not any shred of basic human decency left within them matters to them any more. All that matters is striking out at the Homosexual Menace. This is what hate does to the heart, eventually.
The Homosexuals Are After Your Children!!! It’s a message that gets attention and, for now, wins elections. The trump card you can play when it looks like too many voters are starting to view the homosexual as their neighbor. It also gets people killed. But for that to weigh on your conscience, you have to see gays as people, not things. You have to be able to see the people for the homosexuals. Bigots can’t.
The only thing that leaps out at me upon viewing President Obama’s “long form” Hawaiian birth certificate, is it looks structurally a lot like my California one. I’m guessing they all used the same ready-made government forms company back then. Oh…you want our Form 417B rev-c62-1011-A product. We have a special on that this week…purchase a million and you get a handy desk calendar embossed with your initials free of charge…
Well…I for one was expecting a sheet of paper at least five or six feet in length given all the fuss. Some progressive commentators are alternately wondering why Obama gave in to the kooks and why he would want to put this particular republican clown show to rest. Hahahaha…you can never shut up the kooks. This is beautiful actually. Here’s what’s going to happen: the kooks will, as they always do, simply reinvent their conspiracy theories, come up with new ones that explain why the old ones were right all along, babble even more loudly that Obama isn’t an American, is really a secret Muslim, is bringing atheism and shara law to the U.S., and thereby drag themselves even further into insanityland and the republican party with them since that’s essentially their base now. What’s the RNC going to do…them them to STFU? They can’t…they’ll loose a critical part of their base they can’t win elections without: the lunatics.
What Obama just did was poke a stick at the kook nest while acting all presidential and everything and all the democrats have to do now is pass the popcorn and sit back and watch. Bet he does it again right before the GOP convention too.
[Update…] On Twitter, Atrios shouts “Huzzah…the kerners are back.” Yes…they’re questioning the typewriter lettering. See…I told you…
Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding won plaudits Monday from gay activists for backing out of an agreement to argue to uphold the federal ban on gay marriage. But a day later the reviews were a bit more bruising in the legal community.
Top lawyers and law professors, with some notable exceptions, called it an embarrassing blunder by the prestigious firm or a betrayal of a client and legal principles. Others think King & Spalding, whose clients include General Electric and Coca-Cola, may have backed out because the firm fears the fallout from leading an anti-gay legal fight.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
King & Spalding’s announcement it would not represent congressional House Republicans in their quest to defend court challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the subsequent decision of Paul Clement, the lawyer in the case, to quit the firm and take it elsewhere was the talk Tuesday among Yale University Law School faculty, said Lawrence Fox, a Yale professor and expert in legal ethics. DOMA defines marriage “for federal tax, Social Security and other purposes” as only a union between a man and a woman.
“We really go down a bad road if we say law firms can’t take on (controversial) matters or people will assume you have those views,” said Fox. “I’m going to walk into my class today and I’m going to use this. I’m tearing up my lesson plan … to talk about this case.”
The nice thing about working in an ivory tower is what you do doesn’t have to have any relationship to the world outside. Tenure. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who have to live there, in the world of the commoners, it’s only they who remember the panic that set in back in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples could not constitutionally be denied the right to marry. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the party of Lincoln and Fred Phelps pushed through congress the Defense Of Marriage Act to protect American heterosexuals from the damaging effects of having to live in a world where the sordid, brief and barren sexual assignations of homosexuals had the same legal standing as their noble unions of male and female. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the man who stood in front of them and said “I have a vision for America and you’re part of it” signed that bill into law in the dead of night, somewhat less then three years after he folded on his promise to let gay servicemen serve openly and with dignity. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who watched as the new republican majority in congress, elected on campaign pledges of jobs, set about immediately to work reassuring their base that the meager gains gay Americans had made while the democrats were in control would not stand, and that they would be steadfast in opposing president Obama’s plan to impose The Gay Agenda on America.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who read the steady stream of news reports of same-sex couples beaten down and destroyed by this nation’s abject capitulation to bigotry, month after month, year after year.
A gay Long Island couple who have played by the immigration rules for more than a decade are stuck in a Catch-22 that could tear them apart just when they need each other most.
New Yorker Edwin Blesch, 70 and his South African husband, Tim Smulian, 65, have been spending six months on Long Island and six months abroad to comply with Smulian’s tourist visa.
But Blesch, who has HIV, suffered several mini-strokes and other complications and is now unable to travel safely.
Smulian is his primary caregiver – but has no way to stay here permanently.
It’s unclear what will happen to the couples already profiled by major news sources, like Monica Alcota and Cristina Ojeda. The one thing that is clear is that this is a sad day for binational same-sex couples, and for everyone who values America’s tradition of being a place where people can come from anywhere in the world to make a home. Like so many other things, that seems to be a privilege reserved for straight people.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember their names…names like Laurel Hester. Not law professors in ivory towers.
Here is a law firm that proudly touted its support for gay Americans in their struggle for equality. Suddenly it is, in a very high profile way, part of the republican party’s DOMA circus. Suddenly every attorney, every clerk, every secretary, every intern working for this law firm is under a gag order…not simply to refrain from speaking about the case, but never to breath so much as a word against DOMA. Imagine that instead of Teh Gay this case was about defending a congressional ban on Jewish ownership of businesses. How many eyebrows would be raised when a law firm that touted its opposition to antisemitism, suddenly took on the congressional defense of that law, and gagged its partners and staff from ever speaking a word against the segregation of Jews? Who would complain when the law firm withdrew and the jackass antisemitic partner who dragged them into that despicable case left to pursue it on his own, that the Jews had gone too far?
But conscience, and a sense of basic human decency wanders in a lot of people, even now, when it comes to the persecution of gay Americans. Suddenly persecuting minorities becomes some abstract thing, less important, less real, then the right of republicans to conduct a great circus show of defending marriage against the forces of Obama and Satan, and demonize a segment of America for votes. The constant rain of gay blood on the streets isn’t even on their moral radar…
HRC is right to fight vigorously to overturn DOMA, which deprives gays and lesbians of many of the rights enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts. But it sullies itself and its cause by resorting to bullying tactics.
On February 22, around 11:00 p.m., Shortell was walking home to his apartment on Kent Avenue and North Fourth Street, a walk that never felt unsafe to him before, when he was brutally attacked by a group of four teenagers. The details were fuzzy after that and as a result of the incident, Shortell suffered a fractured chin and nose; eye sockets and cheekbones, requiring ten hours of immediate surgery, several days in the hospital, and a month of recovery since.
Bullying tactics? Bullying tactics? Here’s the problem: the scapegoats aren’t taking it anymore. They’re fighting back. Where is the outrage in the corporate news media…the comfortable McMansion in the rich white suburbs corporate news media? Once again, it’s directed at gay Americans. For standing up for their human dignity. For defending themselves against hate. For fighting back. Republicans inciting hatred for votes is just Business As Usual. Gays asking businesses to walk the walk not just talk the talk on civil rights is front page news! How dare they. Don’t they know their place anymore? What is this world coming to, when even homosexuals demand to be treated with respect? Who told the them they had a right not to be bullied? It certainly wasn’t us.
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