(Warning: Not work safe.)
Okay fine. But where do I get the “hers”?
Spudsy, consider this my answer to your QotD.
Necessary Accoutrements
Quote of the Day
Yesterday, actually. I almost forgot the mention this, but luckily Dlisted reminded me!
Simon Cowell to Ryan Seacrest on last night’s American Idol: “Ryan, with respect, I’m not the one trying to look like someone out of Desperate Housewives. Lose the beard.”
Ooh, snap! Methinks he wasn’t talking about this beard:
But this one:
I know everyone hates Ryan Seacrest, but I think he’s adorable and totally likable; I can’t help myself. And one day, if my deepest wish comes true, he will come out of the closet, and all the heads of all the conservative homobigots who watch American Idol will just explode, and I will be very happy.
The Sanctity of Marriage
“Eminem's dysfunctional relationship with wife Kim has hit another low -- he filed divorce papers Wednesday, less than three months after remarrying her.”
One more go-round between these two, and I think we’re going to need a Constitutional Amendment.
Words (Almost) Fail Me
Brian Doyle was the second DHS employee to get busted on child sex charges.
Apparently, “a senior Homeland Security Department law enforcement agent was busted last October for exposing himself to a girl in the food court of a mall,” and not only that—the agent, Frank Figueroa, used to run Operation Predator, the Department of Homeland Security’s program to combat child sex abuse.
Yes, that’s correct. A child sex predator, charged with exposing himself and masturbating in front of a 16-year-old girl in a mall, was heading up Operation Predator. He has pleaded No Contest.
The GOP is a breeding ground for lunatics. That is all.
(Thanks to Blogenfreude for the heads-up.)
I’m sure to be hauled in any day now.
Anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said on Wednesday…First of all, this is ridiculous, and that cabbie’s a total buttfor.
The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash's 1979 anthem "London Calling," which features the lyrics "Now war is declared -- and battle come down" while other lines warn of a "meltdown expected".
Mann told newspapers the taxi had been fitted with a music system which allowed him to plug in his MP3 player and he had been playing The Clash, Procol Harum, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles to the driver.
"He didn't like Led Zeppelin or The Clash but I don't think there was any need to tell the police," Mann told the Daily Mirror.
A Durham police spokeswoman said Mann had been released after questioning -- but had missed his flight.
Secondly, OMG—I literally sing in my sleep. I’m always singing to myself, without even realizing I’m doing it. Like I need something else to worry about. Fates save me if some ninnybrained moron with a trigger finger poised over his cellphone overhears me singing Ask!
Shakes: And if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb the bomb the bomb the bomb the bomb the bomb the bomb that will bring us together…
Moron: 911! 911!
Sheesh.
of "girly men" and "smart talk"
Melissa emailed this to me earlier:
Smart Talk and Girly Talk on the Campaign Trail
According to a computer text analysis that used 271 transcripts of debates, townhall meetings, and televised conferences and interviews:
Cheney is a “man’s man”, Edwards edged out Bush on being “girly”, and Kerry sounds suicidal.
Specifically, they rated each candidate’s use of language along six dimensions: cognitive complexity (marked by sophisticated sentence structure and word choice); femininity (use of words and speech patterns favored by women); depression (use of words that are markers for depression or known “indicators of suicidality”); age (preference for words favored by young or old people); presidentiality (speech patterns and frequently occurring words favored by presidents since FDR in their speeches); and honesty (based on analyses of samples of truthful and deceptive language).
The article mentioned results for all categories except honesty. Interesting.
Let’s go back to the “manly/girly” thing for a moment, shall we? Just what was it Edwards talked about more than Cheney that, apparently, made him “girly”? Equality? The poor? Education? What is it that Cheney said that is so manly? Could it be "go fuck yourself"? Ok, to be fair, that wasn’t from the campaign cycle. But this is, taken from the Veep debate:
It’s important to look at all of our developments in Iraq within the broader context of the global war on terror. And, after 9/11, it became clear that we had to do several things to have a successful strategy to win the global war on terror, specifically that we had to go after the terrorists where ever we might find them, that we also had to go after state sponsors of terror, those who might provide sanctuary or safe harbor for terror.
Maybe it’s saying the word “terror” four times in one breath. Is repetition manly?
Next we get a good idea of why they didn’t report the honesty category. From the same debate, next paragraph:
Concern about Iraq specifically focused on the fact that Saddam Hussein had been, for years, listed on the state sponsor of terror, that they he had established relationships with Abu Nidal, who operated out of Baghdad; he paid $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers; and he had an established relationship with Al Qaida.
Then responding to Edwards (who just responded to the above):
I have not suggested there’s a connection between Iraq and 9/11…
Seriously.
Anyway, the WaPo article theorizes that these finding illustrate the real reason Kerry/Edwards lost. That Bush/Cheney gave the most “smart talk” and Kerry/Edwards the most “girly talk” and Americans can’t do for “girly”, no siree. Wev.
(go cross-post yourself!)
The Rich Get Richer
We all knew Bush’s tax cuts were going to disproportionately favor the wealthy. Well, the numbers are in, so now we know just how much he helped his pals.
Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003...Sickening. Meanwhile, “Last year was the first year on record, according to an annual study conducted by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, that a full-time worker at minimum wage could not afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country at average market rates.”
The analyses show that more than 70 percent of the tax savings on investment income went to the top 2 percent, about 2.6 million taxpayers.
Conservatives love to babble about how progressives “hate America.” I don’t hate America—but I do hate certain things about America. I hate its promotion of avarice above social conscience, its fascination with wealth, its disdain of compassion for the weak, its delight in ignorance, its xenophobic nationalism, the immutable beliefs among so many of its citizens that the markets solve everything, that this country is the Almighty’s gift to the world, especially when it’s a still a really shitty place to live for lots of struggling people, that those people are always, only, to blame for their troubles, and that there’s something wrong with the rest of us who don’t wrap our hands around the throat of American Dream and wring every last bit of life out of it to our own benefit.
I hate that the idea that some of us could do with a little less so that others could have a little more has become a punchline.
Bush, and his administration, and his most enthusiastic supporters, represent all of it, even though they patently refuse to own up to it, instead calling us America-haters, wrapping themselves in the flag, and declaring themselves the True Patriots, so it’s all but impossible for someone like me to express my abhorrence of them without seemingly attacking America itself, so it’s easier for them to do what they really want to do—turn America into a place I really, genuinely do hate, by ridding it of everything that I love.
Because there are things I love about this country. I love that it is a beautiful mosiac of people and cultures and ideas; I love its landscapes; I love its spirit of adventure and innovation; I love that it produces some of the most generous and unique people on the planet; I love its humor; I love that it really does have the potential to be a land of opporunity for everyone, if we really gave that notion half the chance it deserved.
And those are precisely the things the Bush Brigade endeavors to crush, turning America into a nation where everyone who is not blandly, mindlessly like its self-appointed True Patriots are de facto threatening, where the natural and philsophical resources are raped and destroyed in the acquisition of more wealth, where philanthropy and empathy are relegated to little more than cute, clichéd memories, where the barrel-chested barons of a new Gilded Age stand astride the bodies of those who have been condemned to less fortunate fates, singing the praises of social Darwinism and bellowing about the superfluity of a social safety net. “The government never gave me anything!” they declare, as they deposit their million-dollar checks from their latest no-bid Defense Department contract then head off to Tiffany’s to get The Little Woman a bauble with their fat tax return.
They’re a truly disgusting lot. And the next time one of them has the temerity to accuse me of hating America, I’m going to tell them flat out, “No, I don’t hate America. I hate you.”
Lunchtime Laffs
Scenes from a video store, with an energy dome tip to Tbogg, who looks into his crystal ball and predicts:
Both Brokeback Mountain and The Chronicles Of Narnia are being released on DVD tomorrow, and besides witnessing scenes like this (the above link) from your local Blockbuster you can start placing your bets on which conservative culture commando will be the first to point out that Narnia is outselling Brokeback and, therefore, America wants fewer gay cowboys and more talking Jesus lions.
I'm betting on The Virgin Ben, who I'm sure won't be rentin' no faggot cowboy movie.
Then there's this picture, brought to you by Dependable Renegade:
Do you think that garbage can holds the Bush/Cheney sticker scraped off their back bumper?
(Cross-Posts are frequently, secretly fond of each other...)
Bush: Death Preferable to Non-Procreative Sex
That’s the only logical conclusion. When criminalized abortion is preferable to safe and legal abortions, when abstinence education is advocated in favor of comprehensive sex ed even in the face of evidence that kids who go through abstinence courses are more likely to have unsafe sex, when a vaccine against an STD that causes cervical cancer is squashed because eliminating the threat would “encourage casual sex,” when a possible HIV prevention pill is criticized for the same reason, there is no other conclusion other than conservatives would rather see you dead than having recreational sex. Period.
And now, to add to the mounting evidence, this: Bush’s AIDS prevention plan is eroding prevention efforts—including mother-to-child transmissions—because it requires such a large percentage of the funding to go to abstinence and fidelity promotion.
The Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator requires that 20 percent of all AIDS spending go for prevention. Half the prevention budget must be spent to stop sexual transmission of HIV. Two-thirds of that spending, in turn, must be used promoting abstinence and fidelity…Proponents of this idiotic policy are big fans of saying things like, “Abstinence is the only 100% effective way to prevent the transmission of HIV,” which is true—except it ignores the reality that abstinence as a prescription for prevention doesn’t work, because people are going to have sex. Some of them will even be people who were abstinent until marriage and have always been faithful to their spouses—spouses who have not been faithful and are now HIV+. (This is particularly a problem for women in poor countries.) So how, exactly, does abstinence and fidelity protect them?
In perhaps the largest adjustment, one country cut from $8 million to $4 million its spending on prevention services for couples in which one person has HIV infection and the other does not -- an extremely high-risk group -- as well as on sexually active youths and sex workers…
The abstinence policy "is basically unworkable," said Paul Zeitz, director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "This shows the problem very clearly and starkly."
*crickets*
Continually insisting that people just should be abstinent and faithful addresses this problem as if the world is the way Bush & Company want it to be, rather than the way the world really is. Wishing and hoping and praying that people will never engage in unsafe, casual sex is pointless—and it’s killing people. They know this. They see the same evidence we do. And they don’t care.
They say that condoms can be made available as a last resort. But fuck that. Condoms should be flowing like rivers, falling from the skies like rain, in every country where AIDS is wreaking havoc upon its population. Not another single dime should be spent on a billboard, a pamphlet, a button, advocating abstinence until we have made sure that everyone who already is having sex, is having safe sex. Then we can worry about denying innate urges. Until safe sex is the standard, directing the majority of funding toward these ludicrous policies rooted in repression is catastrophically foolish.
But they’d rather see a million dead children than a million free condoms. And that’s the truth. How fucked up is that?
McCain is a Petulant Arse
If this buttfor can’t even hack a heckling audience, how does he expect to be president?
Sen. John McCain threatened on Tuesday to cut short a speech to union leaders who booed his immigration views and later challenged his statements on organized labor and the Iraq war.Wev. Is there a Republican who doesn’t talk to adults like they’re children? Who doesn’t refuse to face people who disagree with them and aren’t afraid to make it known? Who doesn’t reject accountability, or the notion that courtesy is earned, not demanded?
"If you like, I will leave," McCain told the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department, pivoting briefly from the lectern. He returned to the microphone after the crowd quieted.
"OK, then please give me the courtesy I would give you."
Later, the senator outlined his position on the Senate immigration debate, saying tougher border enforcement must be accompanied by guest-worker provisions that give illegal immigrants a legal path toward citizenship.What a baby.
Murmurs from the crowd turned to booing. "Pay a decent wage!" one audience member shouted.
"I've heard that statement before," McCain said before threatening to leave.
In the speech, McCain also argued that withdrawing U.S. troops prematurely from Iraq would turn terrorists loose on the United States.People like McCain have no idea what the fuck real life is like anymore. Of course people would take that job. A lot of people do a lot worse jobs for a lot less money. Even Americans, who people like him like to assume just “won’t do” certain jobs. There’s a difference between refusing to do a job because you think you’re above it, which is what they think is the problem, and not choosing a certain job because you couldn’t possibly support yourself, no less a family, on the salary being offered. People like McCain think that Americans won’t clean toilets or pick fruit or whatever because of pride. Well, I grew up in Northwest Indiana when all the steel mills were closing, and men who got laid off from those jobs to find out that there was nothing left for them did anything they could to put food on their tables. Men who had been supervisors were slinging hash and stocking shelves, working two and three menial jobs to try to avoid losing their homes. Between pride and feeding your kids, the kids win out every time. How dare he suggest that there are people who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pick lettuce if given a livable wage? Asshole.
This time, there was no booing — though one audience member cursed from the back of the crowd.
[…]
But he took more questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.
McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.
Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain's job offer.
"I'll take it!" one man shouted.
McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. "You can't do it, my friends."
Some in the crowd said they didn't appreciate McCain questioning their work ethic.
"I was impressed with his comedy routine and ability to tap dance without music. But I was impressed with nothing else about him," said John Wasniewski of Milwaukee. "He's supposed to be Mr. Straight Talk?"Welcome to the real America, Mr. McCain.
DHS Official Arrested in Sex Sting
The world never allows one to enjoy anything too long. Sigh.
This disgusting old coot, Brian Doyle, the fourth-ranking official in the Department of Homeland Security’s public affairs office, has been arrested and “charged with using a computer to seduce a child after authorities said he struck up sexual conversations with an undercover detective posing as a 14-year-old girl.”
During online conversations, Doyle revealed his name, who he worked for and offered his office and government-issued cell phone numbers, the sheriff's office said.Unsurprisingly, the only comment is no comment—because of the ongoing investigation.
On several occasions, Doyle instructed her to perform a sexual act while thinking of him and described explicit activities he wanted to have with her, investigators said.
He was booked into the Montgomery County Detention Center. Doyle also faces a charge of transmission of harmful material to a minor.
UPDATE: There’s a NY Times article today that, coincidentally, covers a Congressional hearing held yesterday about the sexual exploitation of children on the internet, which reveals, in part, the following:
The lead witness at the hearings was Justin Berry, who was molested as a teenager by people he had met online, and then went on to run a pornographic Web site for five years, featuring images of himself.This administration cannot do anything right. They aren’t properly vetting the people who work for them. They aren’t making sure the Justice Department is doing its bloody job and collecting evidence that could help get 1,500 pedophiles off the fucking streets. And I wouldn’t be the tiniest bit surprised if we come to find out that the Justice Department’s child exploitation unit has been decimated, either through redirection of funding or redirection of manpower, to make sure they’ve got enough people working on all the other messes the administration has created, because as we’ve seen again and again and again, anything that isn’t important to the Bush administration—i.e. anything that doesn’t serve Empire and enriching them and their cronies—has fallen to absolute shit. Our entire governmental infrastructure is collapsing under the weight of their utter indifference, and good luck to us in restoring it after they’ve raped our treasury and left us with a crushing deficit. Fuckers.
Mr. Berry was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times in December by an investigative reporter, Kurt Eichenwald. The article detailed Mr. Berry's experiences and his efforts to assist in the prosecution of some of the 1,500 people who had paid him to perform on camera.
Mr. Eichenwald spent six months on the investigation and was subpoenaed to testify before the committee. He sat alongside Mr. Berry, 19, who delivered his remarks in a measured tone to the committee…
Child exploitation investigators in the Justice Department came under fire from lawmakers at the hearings, who questioned whether officials had responded too slowly to leads provided by Mr. Berry. These included clients' names and credit card numbers, which could presumably help investigators identify children entangled in the online pornography industry. The department denied that contention…
"Justin Berry stepped forward at a time the government did not know he existed," Mr. Eichenwald said. "He is, to experts' knowledge, the first such teenage witness to ever turn over this kind of vast evidence to the government."
Still, he added, "important data offered to the government by Justin has, even at this late date, not been collected and has only been reviewed by me."
Ringleader of the Tormentors
I have the new album.
It’s playing right now.
I am swooning.
Last night, when Mr. Shakes came home, he pulled the beautiful thing out of his jacket and handed it to me, and that’s when the ritual began. I slowly pulled off the cellophane and annoying stickers, and then held it in my hands, looking at the cover, looking at the track list. Then I opened it, breathed in the magical air—that particular scent of a new CD. And then I slipped out the liner notes, the lyrics. The grail.
It’s been exceedingly difficult to avoid reading any of the lyrics in advance this time around, since the reviews have been fantastic, which means lots of quotes. I always read advance reviews, but I try to skip the bits with excerpted lyrics, because those are, with Morrissey, the best part.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
On the back page of the liner notes, is a picture of Mozza sitting on his powder blue Vespa, fiddling with an ancient camera. He’s leaning against a stone wall, upon which is scrawled in black graffiti: Smash Bush. That’s when the panting began. The CD went in the player.
Twelve tracks washed over me like the ocean. Now I’m spreading your legs / with mine in between / dear God… Retrousse nose / turned up and mischievous / forget-me-not eyes / that cried if we left his side… It’s the same old SOS / but with brand new broken fortunes / I am the same underneath / but this you, you surely knew? / Life is a pigsty… Streets of wet-black holes / on roads that you can never know / You can never have them / but they always have you… At last I am born / vulgarians know / I am finally born / I once thought that time accentuates despair / but now I don’t actually care / because I am born, born born…
Now I know, in the future (when all’s well), when I look back at this time, what music will accompany my memory. It is the music of strings arranged by Ennio Morricone, of an Italian children’s choir directed by Rosella Ruini, of production by Tony Visconti. They are songs that look at the state of the world, which looks hopeless, but sound hopeful nonetheless.
Which is, as it happens, exactly how I feel.
I feel the pain
To sing the song
To tell the tale…
Question of the Day
And I'll try not to word it too awkwardly.
So, I have a birthday coming up. It's a month off, actually, but I got the standard e-mail from my mother today: "So what do you want for your birthday?"
The thing is, I don't really need anything. I could do the standard "just look at my Amazon wish list," (dont' hit me Shakes, I'll switch it to B&N, I swear!) but I always feel like it's not necessary. Now, my family is a group of people for whom the statement "Seriously, I don't want anything, just being together is enough" does not work, so I suppose I'll have to come up with something.
But like I said, I don't really need anything.
So... what do you ask for on your birthday (or any other gift-giving holiday) when your cup is full?
And I'm still bitter that Trader Vic's is closed and I can't spend my birthday there like I always do. Meh.
McClellatron in Vanity Fair
Ouch:
A kind of daily Socratic dialogue, or at least an attempt at one, continues to take place in the briefing room in a method of inquiry initiated by Joseph Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson's primary aide and, effectively, the nation's first press secretary: a ritual Q&A that leads to both what the White House wants you to know and away from what it doesn't want you to know. Only, now the dialogue is led by something of a knuckleheaded Socrates, each day struggling and failing to talk his way out of a paper bag.(Read the whole thing.)
It's this verbal haplessness that has made Scott McClellan—a pleasant, low-wattage, old-before-his-time young fellow, with, at 38, a wife, no children, and "two dogs and four cats"—the living symbol of this White House's profound and, perhaps, mortal problem with language and meaning. McClellan himself, as though having some terrible social disability, has, standing miserably in the press briefing room every day, become a kick-me archetype. He's Piggy in Lord of the Flies: a living victim, whose reason for being is, apparently, to shoulder public ridicule and pain (or, come to think of it, he's Squealer from Animal Farm). He's the person nobody would ever choose to be.
Funny. But I don’t think McClellan is Piggy. Piggy was a pitiable character, whose wretched desperation without his glasses was excruciatingly sad; I felt bad for Piggy, even as I wanted to smack him in the head and tell him to get with the program for his own good. If a giant rock fell on McClellan’s head, I’d probably have as much sympathy as I would at the sight of any other crushed robot programmed to lie to me on a daily basis.
I understand the impulse, though. There was a time I almost had some compassion for McClellan. He reminds me of a doughy freshman waterboy, who didn’t mind that the football players snapped his ass with wet towels and put their stinky jockstraps on his head for a laugh, because at least he got to be near them. He seemed hopeful of being cool by association, without, seemingly, the faintest notion that the coolness to which he aspired was not really cool at all, but a bombastic cruelty masking the chronic insecurity of vapid cowards, in spite of their undeserved privilege. I remember seeing such kids when I was of that age, kids about whom I’d think, “You’re so much more interesting than the cads you adore, or would be, if you stopped adoring them.” It was a posture that has always made me blanch, even as it has evoked my sympathy.
Those kids went one of two ways, after spending some amount of time swallowing their pride as their unworthy idols heaped abuse upon them for a passing amusement. Either they eventually wised up, and when a nicer, if not so popular, group of kids extended a tacit invitation to become part of their peer group, they gladly, and with some relief, accepted—or they never learned, internalizing the bullying, and, instead of extricating themselves from the group of nonfriends, lashed out at anyone who had the distinct misfortune of being even more vulnerable than they were. The hopeless wannabes, insistent on standing their ground and fueled by a gossamer promise of social elevation that would never come to fruition, were, in the end, the meanest of the lot. They were the ones who would pick on the cripples, the retards, the fags, the fat kids, the kid with the lazy eye. They’d serve as court jester to the kings by teasing a Downs classmate with a game of keepaway, hating him only because they refused to admit they hated themselves.
McClellan’s stuck with it. The captain of the team stays the course, and, by god, so does he. I can precisely imagine his being greeted after a tough Q&A by having his behind snapped with a GWB-monogrammed towel. And every day he waits on the sidelines and watches the team captain with all his pals—Big Time, Turd Blossom, Tangent Man, Guru, Fredo—and he wonders when he’ll get a nickname, too. Because that would be just so cool. And it’s the least he deserves after defending the whole lot of them every single day, after being so loyal for oh so long.
I don’t know if McClellan read Lord of the Flies when he was in high school, or Animal Farm, or whether he was too busy lugging water around. It certainly seems like he read Emerson though: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” I just don’t think he got it. It wasn’t designed as a recommendation.
Note to CBS: When Bob goes, so do I
Count me among the wearily nonplussed regarding the all-but-certain ascension of The Today Show's Katie Couric to the big chair at the CBS Evening News. The less said about that, the better - I should be watching The News Hour anyway - but this is an appropriate a time as any to offer up appreciation for the one thing that had me watching any CBS news product at all: Bob Schieffer. He labored dutifully to give the network a touch of grown-up journalism in the post-Rather days. Somebody should thank him, goddamnit, and Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice does a succinct job of it:
(1)Schieffer's response to Couric's likely new job is so typical of the kind of class he has constantly displayed during his long and honorable career with CBS. He not only has brought honor to his network but honor to television broadcasting.
(2)The only bittersweet note in this whole affair is that it's clear Schieffer, who was never taken for granted by his network, should have had a much higher profile job during the years. He fit the Edward R. Murrow/Walter Cronkite mode perfectly. We suspect some of the CBS Evening News' ratings increase is due to the fact that Schieffer is so classy, professional and oozes credibility. Hopefully CBS will give him as high a profile as possible once Couric takes the spot.
I'm not as optimistic as Gandelman; Schieffer will likely be returned to the gilded ghetto of Sunday morning public affairs shows, then retired with a gold watch and hearty handshake. And a CBS coffee mug, perhaps.
Well. Thanks for trying, Bob.
(From pillar to cross-post...)
One Time Only
Ted at State of the Day:
On Wednesday, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be:Good call. Also, let’s put it after “the GOP controlling all three branches of the government,” too.
01:02:03 04/05/06
That won't ever happen again.
Can we please place that sentence after "a reactionary law-breaking lying fear-mongering intolerant incompetent delusional corrupt insulated isolated compromised smirking chimp moron in The White House" as well? Pretty please? Pretty please with Democracy on top?
I Love Russ Feingold
"Gay and lesbian couples should be able to marry and have access to the same rights, privileges and benefits that straight couples currently enjoy." Feingold went on to add, "[This] kind of discrimination ... has no place in our laws, especially in a progressive state like Wisconsin. The time has come to end this discrimination and the politics of divisiveness that has become part of this issue."No parsing. No punting. No squirming.
No states’ rights. No civil unions.
Gays should be able to marry.
Discrimination has no place in America.
I’m going to cry.
Conservatives are Assholes
Part whatever in an ongoing series. They Hate the Truth—Internet Edition.
[T]he right-wing movement has just turned its attention to the free nature of the internet. No, this is no joke. There's a really nasty bill threading through Congress put out by telco-funded Joe Barton that will basically wreck the ability of ordinary people to use the internet, making the web the province of large and well-capitalized companies. Barton's bill will allow telecom companies to charge people for putting up web sites, blogging, using VOIP services, IMing, or anything else. It will allow them to discriminate against certain types of content, and yes, that's an ominous and very bad step. Congressman Markey is working against it, and for the principle of 'net neutrality'.I believe the name of this bill is “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could all get rich off making it harder for lefties to organize?”
This is scary stuff. The right-wing used to be against regulation; as it turns out, they just want to privatize who gets to regulate.
-----------
And when I say "Conservatives are Assholes," of course I mean only the conservatives that are actually assholes. Which is to say, all of them.
More on Mr. Zero Credibility
My favorite bit of snark so far, courtesy of John Howard:
Good. And good riddance. I just wish he would take some of his buddies with him. I really like this line: “The reason for DeLay's departure was unclear.”Heh.
Yeah, that's a puzzler.
Pam, as ever, has the Freeper reaction. Here are a couple of my favorites:
"Tom needs to take a break, finish up with this annoying legal business is Texas, and figure out what he can do next with his considerable skills."Yeah! The Bug Man needs to pull all his mad skillz together and become the new White House Press Pony. Or run for the Senate! Or for PREZNIT! I don't know how easy it is to campaign from jail, but where there's a will, there's a way. I'm sure a man of his considerable skills will figure it out.
"How about Tom as the new White House Press Secretary?"
"Senator Delay?"
"Delay '08"
There's also a lot of moaning in Freepopolis about how this is all down to the damn, dirty Dems. Dudes, your guys control everything. You're delusional. And fake martyrs make the baby Jesus cry.
(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)
Sex Tourism Thriving in Bible Belt
In a sleazy hotel room, "Brittany," then aged 16 and drugged into oblivion, waited for the men to arrive. Her pimps sent as many as 17 clients an evening through the door.Hmm…deviant and criminal sexuality, but with just a hint of consideration that compels drugging the victim out of her gourd so she doesn’t suffer during her gangrape. I smell compassionate conservatism!
A "john" could even pre-book the pretty young blonde for $1,000 a night, sometimes flying in and then flying out from a nearby airport.
None of this happened in Bangkok or Costa Rica, places that have become synonymous with sex tourism and underage sex.
It took place in Atlanta, the buckle of the U.S. Bible Belt, where the world's busiest passenger airport provides a cheaper, more convenient and safer underage sex destination for men seeking girls as young as 10.
"Men fly in, are met by pimps, have sex with a 14-year-old for lunch, and get home in time for dinner with the family," said Sanford Jones, the chief juvenile judge of Fulton County, Georgia.
The victim mentioned above is the same age as the victim in the recently discussed case in Illinois, in which the videotaped victim was passed out while she was gangraped and had vulgarities scrawled on her naked body with a marker. When her attackers were acquitted, there were plenty of people willing to assume that meant the rape never occurred, using another frustrating acquittal after a defense maligned a victim’s character to justify their belief that false charges are pervasive. Just her word—and a videotape—against theirs. What chance do these teens have for justice? They’re not even on video and are probably never conscious enough to gander at their rapists’ faces. Oh, well. Sucks to be a sex slave.
Hat tip to Gordon.
