John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations answers questions
Caption This Photo
John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations answers questions
Bush could learn a thing or two from the cops
While D.C.’s most famous resident trades on anti-gay hysteria, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department's Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit wins an Innovations in American Government Award for its “cooperation and teamwork across departmental, jurisdictional, and geographic boundaries.”
In June of 2000, the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit (GLLU) was created with the goal of forging a cooperative relationship that would better protect the estimated 10 percent of the city's 575,000 residential population and even more daily workers and tourists.Beyond being a typical police-community liaison unit, D.C.’s GLLU has taken on more of a Special Victims Unit function, actually doing law enforcement and working “with other police units to deal with crimes committed by and against the GLBT communities.”
…In another innovation, GLBT and allied volunteers help guide and operate the unit, educating officers about the culture of the community and its needs, and freeing up department personnel for other work.
You can watch the presentation of the $100,000 award here.
The best Ann Coulter interview you'll ever hear
Courtesy of emailer Al at Crooks and Liars. Adam Carolla gives Coulter the bum's rush. The rough transcript is fun. The audio is a scream.
Hopeful Huckabee
Last Thursday, I mentioned it looked like Republican Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was gearing up for a presidential run, and, sure enough, he spent his weekend in Iowa hatin’ on the gays to shore up GOP support. Bragging about his state’s plan to ban gay foster parenting and adoption, he made quite the spectacular claim: “What I feared was going on was that the plaintiffs in this case were not as interested in foster children as they were in making the political point of homosexual activism… That's troubling that we would use children as apolitical tool to enact something that has nothing to do with the best interest of a foster child.”
Wow. Didja get that? It’s the members of the LGBT community who want to become foster parents that are turning this into a political issue and ignoring what’s best for foster children in need of homes.
I’ve said it before, but I guess I’ll have to say it again. Have a look at the thousands of American kids who need good homes, but had the audacity to become orphans after they weren’t cute wee babies anymore, or the impudence to have physical or psychological disabilities, or the scandalous impertinence to be not white. Older children, children of color, and/or children with special needs are more likely to be adopted by gays and lesbians. Not straight married couples. Not even straight singles. No matter how devout or how pro-life or how pro-family. Gays and lesbians adopt these kids in higher numbers than anyone else. All these kids want is a place to call home—someone to adopt them and love them and reassure them that they’re wanted. Do you think they give a rat’s ass whether they get a mom or a dad or two moms or two dads, or is it more likely that having two people to wrap loving arms around them and make them feel safe and adored would just be about the best thing they could ever imagine?
Huckabee and his ridiculous “conservative” cohorts have abandoned all pretense of the advocacy of privacy in favor of forcing on all of us their twisted version of morality that demonizes the people most likely to open their homes to the most unwanted children. They’re not “pro-family.” In actual fact, they’re anti-family, actively trying to prevent families from being formed—and, in the process, projecting their own despicable motivations onto the people who only want the opportunity to create a family that doesn’t meet the definition as laid out by good Christians like the Reverend Huckabee.
ARGH
Go watch this exchange between CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux and Bush about North Korea. He is an asshole. (C&L also has a partial transcript if you can't watch the video.)
And, btw, Mr. “We Don’t Know That,” in March of last year it was reported that the CIA believes “Pyongyang has perhaps two nuclear bombs and enough weapons-grade plutonium to make several more,” after North Korea said it had “boosted its nuclear weapons arsenal.” Maybe less time clearing brush working on a book and more time talking to the CIA, dickhead.
Welcome to America 2.0
Where supporting peace makes you a traitor:
Salem retiree Jim McCreary was stunned to find the word "traitor" spray-painted in black on both sides of his Toyota Corolla.In what I would imagine is a rather ironic twist, McCreary is a former Presbyterian seminarian who says that “his Christian faith has led him to his views about peace.”
His rearview mirrors, headlights and taillights were broken, and his tires were flattened. About $300 in damage was done, McCreary said. He thinks it was because of two magnetic peace decals on his car.
One decal looked similar to the magnetic yellow ribbons that say "Support our Troops." McCreary's was blue and said "Support Peace." The other decal resembled a dove and said "Advocate Peace."
"I was shocked and upset," he said Wednesday before going to have the paint professionally removed. "It's supposed to be a free country."
(Hat tip to Stranger.)
Domionists on the attack
Who likes activist judges now?
The Alliance Defense Fund, which fancies itself the Christian Right’s answer to the ACLU, is a “socially conservative legal consortium” that takes up battles it views as evidence of the attack on Christianity in America. Battles like:
A 29-foot war memorial shaped like a cross should be allowed to remain on public land. A teacher should be able to emphasize references to God in the Declaration of Independence. Protesters should be permitted to approach women near the doors of an abortion clinic.Its $20 million annual budget has made it “the leading player in a movement to tug the nation to the right by challenging decades of legal precedent. By stepping into the nation's most impassioned debates about religion in the public sphere, the group aims to bring law and society into alignment with conservative Christianity.”
…The group successfully challenged the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses in California and Oregon, and worked on statewide ballot initiatives prohibiting such unions. Its attorneys helped the Boy Scouts win approval of a policy barring gay Scout leaders.
The group has been battling embryonic stem cell research in Missouri and won a Supreme Court stay preventing the removal of California's 29-foot Mount Soledad cross. In Florida, where saving the life of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo became a crusade, the group supported efforts to nourish her.
"What we see is an overarching agenda from the left wing and the pro-homosexual groups," said [Gary S. McCaleb, director of ADF's litigation team], who perceives "clear hostility to Christian thought." He described the stakes as "the fundamental ability of Christians to speak their minds on the issues of the day."This is, of course, total bullshit, predicated on ignoring that there are religious liberals, including gay Christians. The only way to contort oneself into the position held by the ADF is to pretend that “Christians” is defined as “social conservatives who fervently desire for every American citizen to live his or her life as they dictate” and that “speak their minds” is defined as “forcing their belief system down the rest of our throats.” Their objective is quite literally Christian domination via theocracy, and at least one prominent Christian (and ordained minister) is calling bullshit.
"They're not for some form of generic religious freedom. They're for Christian superiority, that Christians take over the courts," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. "They are living in this fantasy world where the majority religion, Christianity, is claimed to be literally under attack."Exactly right. What else can I say about this that I haven’t already said a hundred times? This isn’t “Christianity,” and it isn’t American. It in, in fact, an attempt to turn this country into precisely the kind of religious state that our soldiers have died in Afghanistan trying to undermine. And it’s ruining our political system in all kinds of obvious and less obvious ways.
If you’ve any doubt that the GOP has become a willing conduit for delivering the Domioninsts to the promised land of D.C., look no further than likely presidential nominee and faux-maverick John McCain, who’s buddied up with Jerry Falwell, an ally of the ADF. The only conceivable entity with the ability to sever that alliance is Big Business, who love the GOP but hate the fundies and their habit of boycotting their most progressive business ventures. Business is dependent on progress; the Dominionists are bent on regression. As long as that break looks inevitable, and there’s the possibility that the GOP hangs with the fundies, forcing Big Business to drop its anchor elsewhere, the Dems are going to wait with open arms, meaning that money will continue to drive our politics for the foreseeable future. That’s bad for all of us. We shouldn’t be held in the thrall of either interest to the degree that we are, but our lazily complacent parties aren’t going to provide us with any alternative.
The Green Knight has more.
Send this cowboy into the sunset.
TIME’s cover story examines the Bush doctrine and how its failure has become evident in the wake of, as CNN’s summary suggests, a “litany of global crises,” including the “grinding and unpopular war in Iraq, a growing insurgency in Afghanistan, an impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions, brewing war between Israel and the Palestinians,” and, of course, the escalating North Korea issue, which has prompted Japan to consider a preemptive strike on the rogue nation’s missile bases. Meanwhile, Baghdad has erupted in mob violence, and some Iraqis are seeking deadly vengeance against American soldiers in retribution for the rape and murders perpetrated by other soldiers. Basically, everything Bush touches turns to shit—and the administration “has been forced to rethink the doctrine by which it hoped to remake the world.”
This would be frightening in the best of circumstances, but instead it is also almost indescribably infuriating, too, as Bush administration detractors have been predicting this as the inevitable result of “cowboy diplomacy” from day fucking one. And not only have these now-proven right critics never been treated with a modicum of legitimacy by the administration as they tumble half-cocked from one foreign disaster to the next, but even the media (and much of the opposition party) has refused to respect their criticisms by giving them a platform that didn’t come with a disproportionate level of scrutiny and suspicions of sour grapes, ideological blindness, or outright treason.
At every step of the way, there have been well-educated, highly-credentialed dissenters who have predicted precisely what has happened, not to mention a small army of both professional and amateur pundits who have done the same. They warned against turning our attentions from Afghanistan before the job was finished. They warned that Iraq would require a long occupation and more troops, that the Bush plan for the job would result in nothing less than a protracted quagmire. They warned that we ignored Iran and North Korea at our peril. They warned that our culture of systemic torture and abuses would come back to haunt our soldiers. They warned that Iraq would deplete our talent and treasure, and leave us less agile and unable to properly deal with genuine threats. And at every step of the way, they have not only been ignored, but ridiculed and accused of nefarious motives.
Now the best we get is a cover story that reacts with mild surprise and a disdainful attachment that the Bush doctrine of cowboy diplomacy doesn’t work. Wev. Tell us something we didn’t know six years ago, you placating, enabling wankers.
Get a Life
[NOTE: I'm moving this back up just for a bit, because I posted it Friday evening, and Toast suggested I repost it again this morning.]
Echidne has a great post today in which she addresses a particular frustration of active feminists: “Feminists are somehow the unpaid cleaning crew … who is supposed to turn up after dark and fix the world so that the attractive nonfeminists can live in it comfortably. So that nobody else needs to spend time or money or their lives in trying to move the almost immovable rock that is public opinion on the so-called ‘women's issues’. So that it's only the feminists who can be painted with the caricature brush as mirthless and humorless, as too ugly to get laid, as man-hating fanatics.”
Her post reminded me of my lament in the same vein, about the American majority’s intractable lethargy toward their duty as a watchdog of government to ensure good governance. “Leaving a small group to carry the burden of caring doesn’t work—especially when the party in power has endeavored to marginalize them as hysterical lunatics at every turn and the impetus to stay disengaged makes accepting that characterization so very appealing, conveniently masking as it does any reminder that one’s own indifference is not just ignoble, but dangerous.”
And it struck me that both the sweeping scale of national politics and the subset of issue-specific progressive movements in America are both plagued by the same problem: too few people willing to do the hard work required to produce the results from which everyone wants to benefit. (Excepting, of course, the retrofuck jackholes who endeavor to drive us all several centuries backwards.) If only it were simply apathy, that would be, well, a pretty normal state of affairs. But it is beyond apathy—it is hostility toward activists, a resentment expressed in Echidne’s reference to “only the feminists who can be painted with the caricature brush as mirthless and humorless, as too ugly to get laid, as man-hating fanatics,” and in my reference to the marginalization of activists “as hysterical lunatics at every turn.”
Never in my lifetime has the word “activist” been as dirty a word as it is now, never has it been so inextricably linked to all manner of negative association—crazy, humorless, dangerous, traitorous. There’s always been a certain strain of activism regarded by some as laughable; anytime someone plops themselves in a treetop, there’s inevitably going to be giggles. Now, however, seemingly anyone who cares passionately about making a difference, holding the government accountable, ensuring fair elections, changing minds on social issues, arguing for fairness and equality, etc. is regarded as unhinged, and the quickest way to discredit someone is to call them an activist.
This is collective amnesia of our own history. America was a nation of action. The spirit of “can be done…the pioneer thing,” as Eddie Izzard would say. Go West, young man. Manifest destiny. Send the boys off to war; Rosie the Riveter and her sisters will keep the factories humming. Rural electrification?—no problem. By god, we’ll put a man on the bloody moon! And so we did.
And now, apparently, we’ve decided to take a little nap, after all our forebears’ hard work. Yawn. Thanks to their blood, sweat, and tears, we can fulfill our destiny as couch potatoes.
Especially since we all know that somebody will keep an eye on things. Surely someone will stay vigilant and make sure the train doesn’t go careening off the tracks, that we don’t lose our reproductive rights, our separation of church and state, our environment, our jobs, our right to vote, our very country. Yawn. What’s that? Cindy Sheehan’s on the teevee? Ohmigod, hahaha. What a wacko! She is such a loser. She, like, totally needs to get a life.
Get a life, you mourning mother of a fallen soldier. Get a life, you humorless feminists. Get a life, you parading queers yelling about marriage. Get a life, you affirmative action dopes. Get a life, you poor, lazy slobs on welfare. Get a life, you enabling progressives. Get a life, you national healthcare advocates. Get a life, Al Gore. Get a life, get a life, get a life.
So we are instructed by the La-Z-Boy jockeys. So is their resentment at those who refuse to quit stirring the pot made manifest. By telling the rest of us to get a life from the slack-jawed, numb-brained comfort of their comatose lives, by recasting inaction as life and activism as a pathetic, contemptible waste of time, they deflect the responsibility for any and every unhappiness, inequity, or injustice that befalls themselves or anyone else.
In the new American paradigm, pacifists are the enemy, and passivists are the real heroes, realizing their ultimate purpose as inert, impotent consumers, who contribute nothing but judgment on those who refuse such a fate. Get a life.
Even the phrase is rich with the notion of consumption. Get a life—surely the local Wal-Mart’s got several lovely models on offer. As if we don’t all have lives already. What we need is more people who are willing to use their lives for a purpose, to make those lives meaningful, to contribute to effecting the changes from which they want to benefit.
It is the definitive nod to what a lackluster, overindulged, ungrateful, and uninspired nation of people we have become that disdain for activism is not only accepted, but encouraged. When people marched to protest the war, the big news story was how they were holding up traffic, the inconsiderate bastards. Don’t they have anything better to do? Don’t they have lives?
Quaint, and silly, this notion of sacrifice, when juxtaposed against the ease of taking liberty and opportunity for granted. Only a fool would waste time trying to make his voice heard over the roar of complacency that echoes across the nation to its farthest corners. If we can have a war and tax cuts, surely too we can bask in our freedom with no obligatory exertion to protect it.
Having been given the chance to do nearly anything, the majority of us choose to do nothing.
But it can’t last forever. Believing one’s choices are guaranteed but leaving it up to others to protect the continued ability to make those choices—others who then become objects of ridicule for one’s amusement—is a recipe for disaster. Sooner than later, every American will be left with only one choice: keep on laughing at the activists, or become one to save themselves. And what a glorious dawn in America it will be when every chortling, finger-pointing, invective-hurling slacker who finds activism the epitome of pitiable profligacy stops counseling us to get a life, and instead, gets off his ass, and at long last takes a stand.
Caption This Photo
Okay, honestly, I don't know what's funnier: the photo or the caption.
President Bush looks up after blowing out the candles on his birthday cake
Quote of the Day
“If Jeb runs, I'm moving to a country where the dictators come from smarter families.” — Via Stranger at Blah3, who saw it at Democratic Underground.
Boom
Taking a cue from John Amato regarding an unauthorized leak to the Daily News, which subsequently reported on the FBI sting which nabbed alleged terrorists chatting online about blowing up a commuter train in New York, Glenn Greenwald asked yesterday, “Why are Bush supporters celebrating today's leak of classified information?” The obvious answer is, of course, that they’re raging hypocrites devoid of the merest trace of integrity. But no need to take my word for it, since Glenn lays out the case.
I’m not a qualified physician, but I’m nonetheless fairly certain that at some point, a brain which sustains such wanton disregard for consistency, necessitating continual radical shifts in its thought processes, would actually begin to undermine the integrity of the skull which holds it. So I’m predicting we’ll see a massive epidemic of cranial implosions beginning around mid-2007, with an epicenter somewhere near eastern Kansas.
(Crossposted at Ezra’s place.)
Who are the luckiest women in the world?
The women of Pennsylvania, that’s who.
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) has launched a new strategy called "Women for Rick," according to US News and World Report, as he tries to hold onto his Senate seat in Pennsylvania.A spokesman for Santorum’s challenger, Bob Casey, retorted: "It's fitting that Santorum announced his outreach program with a text messaging campaign. His list of women's accomplishments can fit on a cellphone screen.”
The strategy includes a new website, outreach events, and encourages female Pennsylvanians to receive campaign updates via text message. "From keeping women's docs in PA to allowing parents the freedom to work from home, Rick Santorum is leading 4 women," says one of the text messages.
That might even be funny if Casey weren’t pro-life.
Bush or Lieberman: You make the call!
Okay, this is amusing enough to share. Over at Salon, Tim Grieve dares you to distinguish between remarks made by Joe Lieberman at last night's debate vs. Ned Lamont, and statements made by George Bush during his interview with Larry King. Just to give you a frame of reference, I got six of eight correct and I saw neither the debate nor the interview. Okay, go get 'em.
(Thanks to Imperial Leader Kos. Dutifully cross-posted.)
Friday Cat Blogging
Cutest pink nose in the world? Probably.
Sleepy girl.
Alert girl looks to pounce on the sleepy girl.
But it's too much trouble, and Olivia Twist collapses for a nap in the sunshine instead.
Is There a Lawyer in the House?
(Misty and I were apparently typing at the same time. Clicky to read her thoughts, too.)
Here's a chance for you to give back to the community, and feel good about what you do, too. Skateboarding T-shirts aren't a crime, man!
I really don't have anything to say about the knuckleheadedness of this situation; the story speaks for itself. This crackdown on any form of speech contrary to the wishes of Dear Leader needs to be stopped. Ferner mentions at the end that any interested lawyers should contact him.
In his last spoken word album, Jello Biafra mentioned a concept that I've always liked... one way for professionals to give back to the community is by... giving back to the community. Simply volunteering your services (that you normally do for a living) for free to those who need it and can't afford it. I'm hoping to do this myself, once I have my degree and I'm full-force in the therapy game.
So... any lawyers out there wanna help a guy out?
(Energy dome tip to Crooks & Liars. I get high with a little help from my cross-posts.)
