The debate over same-sex marriage was a black-or-white proposition two years ago when voters in 11 states barred gay couples from marrying.
But this year shades of gray are everywhere, as eight more states consider similar ballot measures. Some of the proposed bans are struggling in the polls, and the issue of same-sex marriage itself has largely failed to rouse conservative voters.
…[W]hile most of the measures are expected to pass, their emotional force in drawing committed, conservative voters to the polls, many political experts say, has been muted or spent.
…Some pollsters say people might just be burned out on the subject of marriage and its boundaries.
I guess that’s the good thing about being on the side of the angels in a battle for equal rights—it never gets boring!
The Bush administration and Congressional GOP leadership basically blew its load by repeatedly bringing up the Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage for a vote when they knew it had no chance of passing. As the homobigot base wakes up to the fact that they’ve been used and abused like a falafel within arm’s length of Bill O’Reilly, and finally clack onto the fact that it was just a big sham to get them to the voting booths, they’re starting to feel yawntastic with the whole thing. If it looks like the measure on your ballot is going to pass, anyway, what’s the ding-dang point of dragging your ass to the polls to vote?
And there’s the rub for the GOP. Their once-reliable Get Out the Vote card—hatin’ on the gays—has been overplayed. And despicable, discriminatory state measures banning gay marriage are of no use to them, whether they pass or not, if they don’t dig up every Christian conservative within a hundred miles whose votes will also send the Republicans on the ticket back to D.C.
(Side note: If you’re in Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, or Virginia, a gay marriage measure will be on your ballot in the upcoming election. So, in the coming weeks, talk to anyone who will listen about the importance of equality, try to change some minds if you can, and make sure you get to the polls on election day.)
Some Republican strategists are increasingly upset with what they consider the overconfidence of President Bush and his senior advisers about the midterm elections November 7–a concern aggravated by the president's news conference this week.
"They aren't even planning for if they lose," says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing.
Either they don’t need a plan beyond Diebold, or it’s just more of the same incompetent nonsense that resulted in a foreign invasion with no plans beyond Shock & Awe. Or both. Who knows with these douches anymore? They can’t do anything worth a damn except break the law and squat out giant, stinking ploppers on the Constitution. I don’t care what their reason is for not having a plan—because no matter what that reasons is, it’s just another line item on an enormous list of justifications for ripping the steering wheel out of their idiotic hands.
Federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation of a camping trip Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took 10 years ago that included two teenage congressional pages, a Justice Department spokesman told NBC News.
…Kolbe took a tour down the Grand Canyon in July 1996 with a group that included two 17-year-old males who had recently left the congressional page program.
National Park Service employees also were on the three-day trip, along with several Kolbe staffers and the congressman's sister. Kolbe, the only openly gay Republican legislator in both houses of Congress, had not acknowledged his homosexuality publicly at the time.
Kolbe's office issued a statement to NBC News denying that anything improper had happened. "The rafting trip back in 1996 consisted of five current staff, two former pages, and his sister," a spokeswoman for Kolbe said. "There is absolutely no basis and no truth to any [allegations of] inappropriate behavior."
Um, House Republicans sure seem to have a very different idea of what constitutes “inappropriate behavior” than I do. I don’t actually think that an adult Congressman has to bugger two 17-year-old boys on a camping trip before it gets “inappropriate.” Just going camping with them alone strikes me as inappropriate. And it has nothing to do with his sexuality or the sex of the kids—although I imagine people wouldn’t think it was just fucking swell if he were straight and had gone cavorting in the wilderness with two 17-year-old teenage girls.
One of the pages says nothing happened. The other refuses to comment to the media because “I might possibly be considered for a job in the administration." Wev.
Perhaps George Bush is afraid of cooties. Or something. That's one possible explanation for why he kept his distance from newly-unemployed Rep. Mark Foley:
Disgraced former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley complained to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush two years ago that the White House snubbed him during presidential visits to the state, according to e-mails obtained by the Palm Beach Post.
In e-mails the newspaper excerpted on its Web site on Thursday, Foley asked the governor to intervene on his behalf with his brother, President George W. Bush.
"Have I done something to offend the White House? ... I am always getting the shaft," Foley wrote to Gov. Bush on Sept. 29, 2004.
The Republican former congressman said in that message he had not been allowed to accompany the president on post-hurricane visits to Foley's district in Florida, although other local lawmakers had been invited.
"I can't quite figure what I have done, but this is a continuing pattern of slights. ... I have constantly put the president in the best possible light," Foley wrote to the governor.
The governor responded, "I will try to help. I know it is nothing you have done."
I would give up my lunch money for the next six months to read a transcript of a subsequent conversation on Foley between Jeb and George.
Of course, George W. couldn't avoid Foley forever...though it took the worst natural disaster in American history to finally bring them together.
Fear of cooties overcome, apparently.
Note: Couldn't help snickering at the "getting the shaft" remark, couldja? Jeez, you are so juvenile.
Arlen's got pictures he took of the protestors who greeted Bush in Chicago yesterday. Unsurprisingly, Chicagoans seem particularly unhappy with Bush's anti-gay policies, along with his compulsion to shit on the Constitution.
The birds and the bees may be gay, according to the world's first museum exhibition about homosexuality among animals.
With documentation of gay or lesbian behavior among giraffes, penguins, parrots, beetles, whales and dozens of other creatures, the Oslo Natural History Museum concludes human homosexuality cannot be viewed as "unnatural."
"We may have opinions on a lot of things, but one thing is clear -- homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom, it is not against nature," an exhibit statement said.
B-b-but Jeebus! It’s against Jeebus! Who cares about stinking nature?
One photograph shows two giant erect penises flailing above the water as two male right whales rub together.
Those can’t be right whales! Surely, they’re left whales. Far left whales! Far left whales with a radical gay whale agenda!
Whale Songs of the Right Whale
That's the best whale ever.
Anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention to this stuff knows that examples of homosexuality among animals has been documented for, um, ever. So I don’t think this exhibit, unfortunately, will change anyone’s mind who wasn’t prepared to have it changed anyway, but it’s still cool.
Wev. Predictably, conservative bloggers are touting this as evidence that there’s simply no market for progressive ideas. I don’t actually think this is true. I’m ostensibly the perfect target audience for Air America, and I can’t frigging stand it. Obviously, it’s not because I disagree with what they’re saying most of the time, but because I just find political talk radio absolute shit no matter who it is or what they’re saying.
The thing about talk radio is that the discussions just hang in the air and I can’t wrap my hands around them. If someone says something, and I think, “That can’t be right, can it?” I have to note it, then go research it—and half the time they don’t even cite sources, because the nature of the medium doesn’t really accommodate such detail, so I’m stumbling around in the dark trying to find the origin of some esoteric statistic or whatever. Books have endnotes, or footnotes. Blogs have links. People can be asked, “Where did you get that number?” I’m not good at being a passive receiver of information. I like to make up my own mind, and to do that, I want the whole context. Talk radio doesn’t suit me. I really like the interviews, but that’s about it—and I feel much the same about political talk shows on telly.
And many of the criticisms of Air America being poorly run are valid. Even when I was trying to give Air America a good chance, they were completely screwing up in Chicago. On the air, not on the air, a different station, filled with static, off the air, what the fuck? In one of the bluest cities in the country, and hence presumably one of the best audiences, they should have sorted that shit out long ago.
"Lack of confirmation is not proof of a non-event," warns an unnamed intelligence official. True enough, and yet, and yet...
Sources: NK sample shows no radiation
Two U.S. government officials with access to classified information tell CNN that the initial air sampling over North Korea shows no indication of radioactive debris from the event Monday that North Korea says was an underground nuclear test.
The U.S. Air Force flew a WC-135 Constant Phoenix on Tuesday to collect air samples from the region.
A third official reiterated that at this point "there isn't information to allow confirmation it was a nuclear test."
So, yeah, maybe if NorKor perfectly sealed the test site, or buried the bomb really far underground, that would explain the absence of radiation.
Or maybe there's no radiation because there was no nuke to begin with.
Sometimes a blast that is the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT is actually caused by...a thousand tons of TNT.
…and Christmas crap is already in stores. And Bill O’Reilly is already warning that if Democrats get control of Congress, it could mean “no more Christmas.”
(Hat tip to Constant Comment, who pointed to Raw Story.)
What an absolutely mendacious buffoon O’Reilly is. “My biggest fear that we become Holland. All right? That we’re The Netherlands.” Never mind that the Dutch celebrate Christmas. In fact, they celebrate St. Nicolas' Eve on December 5, St. Nicholas' Day on December 6, Christmas Eve on December 24, Christmas Day on December 25, and have made December 26 a national holiday, too.
And, by the way, being more like the The Netherlands wouldn’t be such a bad thing. The Netherlands have levees that work, for a fucking start.
The rest of the clip is even worse. I really do hate him with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
President Bush finds the world around him increasingly "unacceptable."
In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems "unacceptable," including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea's claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran's nuclear ambitions.
…In the first nine months of this year, Bush declared more than twice as many events or outcomes "unacceptable" or "not acceptable" as he did in all of 2005, and nearly four times as many as he did in 2004. He is, in fact, at a presidential career high in denouncing events he considers intolerable. They number 37 so far this year, as opposed to five in 2003, 18 in 2002 and 14 in 2001.
…Bush's use of the term "reflects in some ways his frustration with a world that doesn't seem as amenable to his policies as he would like them to be," said Stanley A. Renshon, a political scientist at the City University of New York.
Gee, ya think? It’s almost like he wants he wants to be a dictator, but everyone keeps treating him like he’s only a president.
Unacceptable!
…Bush's proclamations are not the only rhetorical evidence of his mounting frustrations. One of his favorite verbal tics has long been to instruct audiences bluntly to "listen" to what he is about to say, as in "Listen, America is respected" (Aug. 30) or "Listen, this economy is good" (May 24). This year, he made that request more often than he did in a comparable portion of 2005, a sign that he hasn't given up hope it might work.
More like a sign that our country is being run by a petulant two-year-old who never met an issue that a tantrum couldn’t fix. Someone give this guy a cookie and tell him to go take a nap.
“People are wary of the word ‘liberal’ because they think it means weak and wishy-washy. But it’s growing increasingly hard to treat Hollywood Gore as a weakling, when he’s clearly a driven man who can get shit done.”—Amanda
Aside: In a couple of pieces about Warner folding up his presidential ambition tent, I’ve read that, if Gore runs, he has the capacity to usurp much of Hillary’s fundraising juggernaut. That’s interesting. It seems like the increasingly-asked question “Can anything stop Hillary?” has but one answer: “Gore.”
A commission formed to assess the Iraq war and recommend a new course has ruled out the prospect of victory for America, according to draft policy options shared with The New York Sun by commission officials.
Currently, the 10-member commission — headed by a secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush, James Baker — is considering two option papers, "Stability First" and "Redeploy and Contain," both of which rule out any prospect of making Iraq a stable democracy in the near term.
…Instead, the commission is headed toward presenting President Bush with two clear policy choices that contradict his rhetoric of establishing democracy in Iraq. The more palatable of the two choices for the White House, "Stability First," argues that the military should focus on stabilizing Baghdad while the American Embassy should work toward political accommodation with insurgents. The goal of nurturing a democracy in Iraq is dropped.
…Mr. Bush yesterday spoke approvingly of his father's old campaign manager and top diplomat, saying he looked forward to seeing "what Jimmy Baker and Lee Hamilton have to say about getting the job done."
Today: “Nah nah nah nah! I can’t hear you!”
Or, conversely, Bush knew all along what Jimmy “Bush Family Fixer” Baker was planning to say, and counts on using it to extricate himself from the mess he’s created. He can then point to his own people for making the case for “readjustments,” in an attempt to look like he isn’t straying from the course just because the public demands it. Because everyone knows Bush hates nothing more than the appearance that he’s actually serving Americans.
This was what I found when I clicked through to this morning's Huffington Post Daily Brief, which is sent out by email to who knows how many people. (Thanks to Amish for the heads-up.)
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