The homobigot assholes in my home state have been trying to pass an amendment banning same-sex marriage for, like, ever now, and it's one of the totally heinous ones that would undermine domestic violence laws and all sorts of shit. On the same day that a civil union bill passed a House committee in Illinois, a House committee in Indiana heard testimony, from activists, business leaders, elected officials, constitutional scholars, and domestic violence advocates, and decided not to vote on the Marriage Discrimination Amendment today. They're gonna…think about it. Argh.
(If you're a Hoosier who wants to contact the committee and tell them to never vote on it, email me and I'll get you the info.)
Meanwhile, Bil Browning reports: "At last night's Indiana Family Institute dinner, Colts coach Tony Dungy announced his support of SJR-7 and his belief in the superiority of heterosexual marriage. … I'd like a refund on my portion of the taxes that's going to build the Colts that new stadium."
Yeah—me, too. Bil's got more here.
Indiana Marriage Amendment
Where There's Smoke, There's Porn
From The Carpetbagger Report:
I knew if we waited long enough, there’d be a sex angle to this controversy.Grab some popcorn, because Attorney-gate has just taken an interesting turn. Let's step back to the fall of 2006 when US Attorney Paul Charlton was fired. Shortly before the election, Charlton was investigating possible corruption charges against Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who was up for re-election. One month after the election, Charlton got the boot without any explanation. On the surface, this seems like your run-of-the-mill suspicious firing... until you delve a little further.
The finger-pointer was porn crusader Brent Ward, who thought that Paul Charlton was "unwilling to take good cases." A little history on Brent Ward:
Ward first came to prominence in Utah, where as US Attorney during the Reagan era he cast himself as a crusader against pornography. His battles made him one of the most fervent and earnest witnesses before Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography; he urged "testing the endurance" of pornographers by relentless prosecutions. Meese was so impressed that he named Ward a leader of a group of US Attorneys engaged in a federal anti-pornography campaign, which soon disappeared into the back rooms of adult bookshops to ferret out evildoers. Ward returned to government last year as the chief of the Justice Department's newly created Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, where his main achievement has been the prosecution of the producer of the Girls Gone Wild film series.With his newfound power, Ward wanted to use all resources at his disposal to continue his crusade against adult porn. More specifically, Ward wanted Charlton and an additional attorney to go after a video store for shipping certain adult titles across state lines instead of possibly concentrating on more important cases:
Ward's endless stream of mandates, the source revealed, were a source of frustration to many US Attorneys. "There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted," the source told me, "but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting adults. That's just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?"At the end of the day, Charlton was not the kind of team player that Ward wanted on his team, which is why Ward slipped Charlton's name in the list of those to be tossed.
It always comes back to teh sex on the Hill.
Dear Larry Kramer
[Spudsy and I spent a long time chatting about our thoughts on an op-ed we read yesterday, penned by someone we both admired, and finally decided we'd put them all down in one big post. So here it is. I'm up first, and then Spudsy's response comes after. — Shakes]
SHAKES: I first became an ally to the LGBT community without realizing it, the day that Hot Darryl (as opposed to Ugly Darrell) called my best girlfriend and I "dykes" in seventh grade, and we pretended to make out. In retrospect, it was a pretty good move for a couple of 12-year-olds, wrenching the sting from a homophobic epithet simply by not treating it as an insult. I wish I could say it was a conscious strategy, but, really, we were just sort of smart-asses that way. It was only when I saw the look on our tormentor's face—disgusted, intrigued, and mostly dejected; boy, we'd stolen his thunder—that I began to consider what it meant to him that straight girls refused to accept "dyke" as an insult. And it wasn't until I was 15, and made a friend called Faith, who was madly in love with Jane Wiedlin, that I began to consider what it meant to dykes.
For awhile, being an ally was strictly an intimate affair. Like countless other queer-brained straight girls before me, I was ally to a gay best friend, now haunting these parts as Mr. Furious, and my protests and advocacy consisted primarily of "Shut the fuck up, asshole!" when someone called him a fag. Or any of the other gay boys, trannies, and future drag queens who all seemed to end up on the school newspaper staff, where I was editor-in-chief and Morrissey provided the soundtrack in our refuge, The Pub (otherwise known to less enlightened souls as the publications room).
It was when I joined the gay-straight alliance at university, giving my advocacy a formal outlet, that I first encountered queer radicals who professed to hate straight people and threatened constantly to start their own group where "breeders" would not be welcome. Looking back on it more than a decade hence, I am almost charmed by the stridency, evoking as it does a nostalgia for dorms packed with 18-year-olds trying on ideologies of all sorts; I never knew so many Marxists as I did my freshman year of college. But at the time, it was very upsetting. The radicals' leader, a beautiful and reckless trust fund kid who would end his life with an unintentional drug overdose in three years, would launch into tirades about straight people that made my eyes sting with tears, until I slowly realized that he wasn't talking about me. Not because he made exceptions, but because I made myself one.
In the intervening years, I've heard rants, from far less radical corners, about straight people—those problematic, privileged, pains in the ass. Sometimes people remember I'm there and say, "I don't mean you," and sometimes they forget, and sometimes they just don't care about catching me in the crossfire. And I haven't felt compelled to say, "Hey, I'm not like that," except on the occasions someone needed to hear it—if they were not angry, but despairing; if those words brought them some hopeful comfort. I have ever tried to say those words only gently and encouragingly, never defensively.
Until now.
Yesterday, Larry Kramer, founder of ACT UP and a man I have long admired, penned an op-ed for the LA Times titled Why do straights hate gays? It begins:DEAR STRAIGHT PEOPLE,
He then goes on to list all the evidence, with much of which I not only agree, but have written about on many occasions. Some of it, however, is plainly wrong: "Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated."—From continually increasing support among straights for full equality under the law, to demonstrated correlations between straight support for the LGBT community and personal relationships with out LGBT people, surveys and studies repeatedly show that assertion to be untrue. Surely, Kramer is not unaware of those facts; what purpose does it serve to claim victimhood unnecessarily?
Why do you hate gay people so much?
Which brings me to my feeling about the piece in its entirety: What purpose does its framing serve? More importantly, who benefits from positioning this fight as one between LGBT people and straight people?
Because, realistically, this isn't a Gay v. Straight fight anymore. It's a People Who Believe in Equality v. People Who Don't Believe in Equality fight—and Kramer's being disingenuous (and worse—unhelpful) when he pretends that all gay people are on one side of that "v" and all straight people are on the other. It's just ain't so—and it ain't People Who Believe in Equality who benefit from pretending that it is.
When we pretend that there are not prominent gay/closeted conservatives who not only provide cover for the GOP and their big-tent claims, but also support anti-gay legislation, that there are not even yet gay Republicans whose votes prioritize tax cuts or warmongering over their own equality, it benefits them. When we pretend that there is not a vibrant gay rights movement (but instead the "feeble gay movement" Kramer sees) that includes many straight allies—among them the governors of several states, the mayors of some of the nation's largest cities, numerous household name entertainers, parents and siblings and children of LGBT people, and countless anonymous schmucks like me who are just trying to do what we think is right—that benefits them. Not us. Not the People Who Believe in Equality. Not the people who deserve equality at long last.
It's deeply disappointing for me to see Kramer so profoundly and unconstructively mischaracterize the current state of this struggle, because it benefits those who oppose equality by redirecting attention away from their motives—scapegoats, wedge issues, diversions, exploitations of ignorance and bigotry—and erroneously boiling all that down to a playground fight between two ends of the sexual orientation spectrum. Worse yet, it obfuscates all the very accessible places into which emergent straight allies can plug into this movement. Every equality movement in the nation's history has been dependent on privileged members of the majority buying into the underlying principles, and the Gay v. Straight framing doesn't remotely begin to suggest what natural allies straight feminists are, nor straight men keen to challenge traditional masculinity. In the end, Kramer's just needlessly conceding a point to the retrofuck jackholes by conflating "people hostile or apathetic toward equality" with "straight people."
So.
DEAR MR. KRAMER:
I don't hate gay people.
But I hated your column. And, because it doesn't actually do any of us any good to so disobligingly portray this struggle, I feel compelled to tell you, defensively, "Hey, I'm not like that"—not in defense of myself, but in defense of all People Who Believe in Equality.
And I never thought I'd have to defend them against you.
Then again, maybe you just needed to know I care.
I do.
Love,
Shakespeare's Sister
PAUL THE SPUD: Here's the thing: Blanket statements like Mr. Kramer's risk alienating existing and potential allies.
Mr. Kramer, it would appear, has finally reached the point in his frustration with attempting to understand the "hate" directed at us by many heterosexuals that he can't (or won't) differentiate between allies and enemies.
There are straight people out there who may believe in equality for all people that have never spoken out about it either in public, or to loved ones. They have never attended a pride parade, nor have they participated in an ACT-UP rally. They may never have read The Celluloid Closet or even thumbed through a copy of "The Advocate." However, these people are not lazy, apathetic "straights." They are potential allies, and this needs to be recognized. Not only do they need to be approached as becoming more vocal/voting allies of the LGBTQ community, but they don’t need to be scared away. Saying"You may say you don't hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what's the difference? Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us."
comes dangerously close to the famous "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" rhetoric that has turned so many potential allies away from America. Why would anyone reach their hand out to assist someone that displays such bitter contempt for their aid? Kramer is declaring them the enemy no matter what they do.
Playing the constant, beaten-down victim does nothing to aid our community. We're not going to get any sympathy votes. If anything, the constant cries of "You hate us! You hate us! You hate us!" will earn you a response along the lines of "I didn’t before, but now I’m beginning to." Flinging hyperbole like "Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love?" and "Make no mistake: Forbidding gay people to love or marry is based on hate, pure and simple," will earn nothing but scoffing and scorn from those that do actively work against us, and bewilderment from our allies. No one forbids gay people to love. You can't forbid someone to love. Throwing an abstract concept in with an actual legal right and pretending they are synonymous defeats them both.
To see a powerful activist like Larry Kramer throw a page-long tantrum like this one is disheartening to me. This is the man that created ACT-UP, and inspired playwright David Drake to create one of the most famous gay plays of all time; a victorious, powerful monologue about his journey to self-awareness and pride in himself. He's a man that inspired so many gay men, myself included, to fight back.
Now, with this column, he slaps our staunch and potential allies and tells them they're not good enough, that their past and present efforts display not alliance, but hate. Those of us that are gay and continue to fight against marginalization by the actively anti-gay movement are "feeble," with blinders on. Only he can see what's going on in the world; only he knows how much we are hated by everyone without exception. Only his fighting back is effective and meaningful.
But why band together when it's much more satisfying to hate back?
I'm through playing the victim. And frankly, I'm surprised and disillusioned to see one of the most powerful names in our fight for equality to fall back on such a weak and embarrassing weapon. It's time we left "Why are you all so mean?" in the schoolyard.
This column could have been a powerful fist raised in defiance. Instead, it's just a pout.
Know why the blogosphere rules?
Because I can, from my desk in Nowheresville, spend a moment, as it were, with Piny—Feministe blogger extraordinaire, sometime Shakes commenter, and all-around clever, witty, and fascinating person—sharing in a decision I'll never have to make, and feeling for all the world like our lives, which may be completely different in a thousand ways, are not really different at all.
And then I can head over to Mannion's place and spend a little time with him, and through his thoughts some time the blonde, and their boys, too—and have a little opportunity to talk about Mr. Shakes, which is always nice.
And then I can be nearly What-the-Poopesque surprised that Bob Barr is talking sense.
And then I can cry at Erica's place, but celebrate at Pam's.
And on and on it goes, and it makes the world seem very vast and diverse and very small and intimate at the same time, and, in either case, rich with people worth knowing.
Tres Nixon
Jill: "Can these guys GET any more Nixonian? Turns out there's an 18-day gap in the document dump of e-mails released by the Justice Department."
Paging Rose Mary Woods...
Mission: Identify That Book!
This morning, the Boston Globe reported that the House Panel voted to authorize subpoenas to drag Karl and Harriet, kicking and screaming, into Congress for testimony on the US Attorney purge.
The article's accompanying picture (above) shows Karl holding either a book or magazine. Can anyone make out what it is? Just wondering what Karl and Georgie are reading these days.
UPDATE: Kudos to Shaker Spectrum Blue who solved the mystery! The book is: Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary.
(Cross-posted at Pure and Easy)
Shaker Gourmet
Our recipe this week comes from Shaker Karen!
Karen adds: "This is my favorite self-created recipe. It's a condiment, but useful for anything except beef. I like it best on pork and game birds. It's really easy but looks enormously impressive."Dried Cherry Chutney
Cover one cup dried cherries in port or sherry. (Use cheap stuff, and port really is better.) Allow to soak for one hour.
Chop one big shallot finely. Heat 1 tblsp. olive oil in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan and saute shallot until clear. Add cherries and port and stir. Add .5 tsp cumin, .5 tsp. allspice. 5. tsp. cloves and 1 tsp. coriander seeds. Add 2 tbls. cherry, peach, or apricot preserves. (please note, use only ONE kind. This is not supposed to be dessert.) Cook until thickened. Add 1 tblsp. butter and serve with desired meat.
Variations: Add coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans before adding the cherries. Add a clove or two of chopped garlic with the shallot. (I always add garlic when I serve this with pork.)
If you would like to submit a recipe for Shaker Gourmet, email me at: shakergourmet (at) gmail.com Include clear instructions and a link to your blog, if you have one!
IOKIYAR, Part Eight Jillion
It's okay to flip-flop if you're a Republican. It's particularly okay to flip-flop if the Clenis is somehow involved. That's why, in scrambling to make it acceptable for Rove, Miers, and whoever the hell else to not take an oath while testifying and to do it in secret, Tony Snow can say this:
When in 1998, "Executive Privilege" was a "dodge."I asked whether the president was perhaps overly confrontational at this stage of the game. “I don’t think it’s confrontational,” Snow said. “We feel pretty comfortable with the constitutional argument.” …
The White House, Snow said, is determined to avoid “hearings or the trappings of hearings” when White House officials talk to Congress. “They’re looking for hands up, cameras on,” Snow said of Democrats. “They’re talking about a show trial.”
Can you smell the chutzpah tonight?Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.
Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.
One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public’s faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold — the rule of law.
I'm telling you, after this administration, I never want to hear "Executive Privilege" ever again.
Duh of the Day
In what's actually quite a good editorial, the NYT makes the obvious point about Bush refusing to send Rove and Miers (et. al.) to testify before Congress under oath: "Why would anyone refuse to take an oath on a matter like this, unless he were not fully committed to telling the truth?"
Why indeed.
Coverage of Bush's Presser on Prosecutor Purge Yesterday
The Hidden Scandal Within the Prosecutor Purge
Written and researched by Joseph Hughes of Hughes for America and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister
Between the thousand-page document dumps, somewhat rejuvenated press corps and always up-to-the-second reporting from the progressive blogosphere, the prosecutor purge scandal is exploding at a seemingly exponential rate. Every hour, the story grows in new and different directions, and now clearly threatens the job security of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others in the Department of Justice. Further, it now appears as though the scandal's tentacles reach into the uppermost echelons of the Bush White House, including, as recent administration controversies almost always do, Karl Rove. While the endgame of this saga is far from decided, what is already apparent is that a vital facet of the story—the administration's seeming unwillingness to comply with both the law and a fundamental cornerstone of our American system—is in danger of being lost in the shuffle of the overarching stampede. And, if we can no longer expect our government's top officials—including the top official, the president—to obey the law and adhere to the bedrock standard of open government, then the questions about whether or not we still live in a democracy are no longer so far-fetched.
Here, in concise a listing as possible, is what we now know:
1. President Bush does not use e-mail. Our evidence for this comes both from the president himself, as well as an exchange between George H.W. Bush, Barbara Bush and Greta Van Susteren. The president, as seen in this telling video, said, of e-mail: "I tend not to e-mail—not only tend not to e-mail, I don't e-mail, uh, because of, uh, the different record requests that could happen to a president. I don't want to receive e-mails, 'cause, you know, there's no telling what somebody would e-mail me and it would show up as, uh, you know, part of some kind of a story that—and I wouldn't be able to say, 'Well, I didn't read the e-mail'—'But I sent it your address; how can you say you didn't?' So, in other words, I'm very cautious about e-mailing." As mentioned, the president's father and mother have spoken about his avoidance of e-mail as well:
H.W. BUSH: ... I think it's too bad in a way that e-mail will detract from the historical record of presidents. I don't think that the President Bush uses e-mail.2. Gonzales reportedly does not use e-mail. The evidence for this has come via reporting on the prosecutor purge and the related document dumps. Per an ABC News story, we see this: "The e-mails detail conversations about attorneys targeted for dismissal. There are no e-mails from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who reportedly does not use e-mail, though the Justice Department says messages show some indication that Gonzales' former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, kept the attorney general apprised."
BARBARA BUSH: He doesn't.
H.W. BUSH: You worry about it. People are going to subpoena the email records and we are going to, you know, you've gotta prove that you were telling the truth and all this stuff. I mean, it's gotten so adversarial that it's ugly.
3. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, at least as of March of 2004, does not use e-mail. From an interview the then-National Security Advisor gave to wire and print journalists, we see this: "That's how I do business. I don't use e-mail for business. I think it's intemperate, and I don't communicate by e-mail." Curiously, however, in the same response, Rice said, "I did have to send Dick [Clarke] two e-mails telling him, come to my staff meetings, because he kept being too busy. I finally told him that it was important that he not be too busy." If that, too, is true and Rice herself—though she had just told reporters that she didn't "use e-mail for business"—did indeed e-mail Richard Clarke, this suggests a selective use of e-mail for business that, to be sure, is also suspicious.
4. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and current Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, at least as of February of 2006, did/do not use e-mail. What was suspected about Rumsfeld in late 2004 was confirmed a little more than a year later when, in the midst of the congressional investigation of the official government response to Hurricane Katrina, we saw this: "When it came to documentation of how Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Donald Rumsfeld responded to Katrina, however, congressional investigators got a different answer from the administration. The House committee established to investigate Katrina was 'informed that neither Secretary Chertoff nor Secretary Rumsfeld use e-mail,' reported Reps. Charlie Melancon and William Jefferson, two Louisiana Democrats who participated in the inquiry despite a boycott by other House Democrats who felt that the inquiry was too partisan."
5. Per a Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) letter to Henry Waxman calling for an investigation into "whether the White House has violated its mandatory record-keeping obligation under the Presidential Records Act (PRA)", we learned the following:
One email, sent to Justice Department Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson from J. Scott Jennings, White House Deputy Political Director, uses an email account, SJennings@gwb43.com, on a server owned by the Republican National Committee. This raises serious questions about whether the White House was trying to deliberately evade its responsibilities under the PRA, which directs the president to take all necessary steps to maintain presidential records to provide a full accounting of all activities during his tenure.Taking everything we now know into account, some important questions arise. Why the obvious concern from the president about what could happen were he to use e-mail? To use the classic refrain employed by countless pro-warrantless wiretapping Republicans: Why avoid e-mail if you have nothing to hide? Also, why the seeming willingness by so many top administration officials to avoid perhaps the most omnipresent method of communication available today? Could it really be that Bush, Gonzales, Rice, Chertoff and Rumsfeld are each so technologically illiterate that they can't master a simple e-mail application? Or could it be something else entirely? To wit: A coordinated administration effort to avoid accountability at all costs, from bosses shielded from accumulating an electronic paper trail to staffers conducting official business on decidedly unofficial e-mail accounts. One wonders how many other administration officials either refuse to use e-mail or use non-governmental addresses to conduct official business. Dan Froomkin, writing in the Washington Post, posed similar questions. Froomkin passed the questions along to a White House spokesman, and so far has yet to receive a response.
A number of other emails from Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove's former assistant Susan Ralston to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff document Ms. Ralston's use of three outside domains: rnchq.com (used for the headquarters of the Republican National Committee), georgebush.com and aol.com. In many of these emails Ms. Ralston is communicating inside White House information to Mr. Abramoff in response to Mr. Abramoff's efforts to broker deals for his clients and place specified individuals in positions within the administration.
CREW has learned that to fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.
One other question remains unanswered: What about the law? In an informative New York Times piece, Adam Cohen sketches out four potential crimes that may one day be associated with the prosecutor purge. About his first instance, "Misrepresentations to Congress", Cohen writes, "It is illegal to lie to Congress, and also to 'impede' it in getting information." It doesn't take much of an imagination to see how an orchestrated refusal among top administration officials to use e-mail for even basic communications could be construed as an intent to impede Congress from getting information. Especially considering the information Chuck Schumer relayed Tuesday when discussing the initial offer from the White House to allow Rove and Harriet Miers to testify before Congress, though unsworn, not under oath, not in public and with no transcript: "They [the White House] did offer to turn over documents, but that too was extremely incomplete because the only documents they'd turn over to us are communications from the White House to the Justice Department, from the White House to other third parties, and back. But no intra-White House communications. So, if Karl Rove sent a communication to Harriet Miers and said, and this is purely hypothetical, 'We have to get rid of US Attorney Lam. Come up with a good reason ...' and the only communication we get is the good reason that Harriet Miers sent to the Justice department in terms of getting rid is."
This is not to mention the notion that administration avoidance and misdirection thwarts the American citizenry from keeping tabs on their government. Consider the Presidential Records Act, referenced by CREW, whose release—as mentioned above—points to the idea that "to fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA." Pretty cut-and-dried. Beyond using non-White House e-mails, what about not using e-mail altogether? If the administration, as in this case, appears willing to skirt the law regarding one form of communication, one wonders how closely they're toeing the line regarding others. The bottom line of the matter is this: Potential lawbreaking aside, there's a definite appearance of impropriety in this pattern of behavior.
If you couple the president's obvious distrust of e-mail communications with the fact that both he and other top officials don't use e-mail, a picture begins to emerge. When you add to these facts the notion that other administration officials are conducting official business using unofficial e-mail addresses, the picture becomes clearer. Given this administration's history of avoidance of openness and distrust of democracy, this matter is definitely worthy of further discussion and research. One doesn't doubt that, the more stones we overturn, the more we'll find. And something else lost in this is that these are our employees. They work for us. They may not think so, but the inconvenient truth is that they do. And when they're conducting our business, their communications should be subject to our oversight. Anything short of that, anything that attempts to either cloud or circumvent the transparency that lies at the heart of our democracy is, quite simply, un-American. Do you have something to hide, Mr. President? Does your administration? America deserves an answer.
[Crossposted at Hughes for America, Big Brass Blog, AlterNet PEEK, TPMCafe, Daily Kos, MyDD, Democratic Underground, and The Democratic Party Community Blogs.]
Question of the Day
With regard to my earlier post featuring Mama Shakes, I thought a good question tonight would be: What do/did you love most about your mum?
I know that not everyone gets on with their mums, so if you'd prefer to talk about a favorite aunt, or a grandma, or an older sister or friend, or any other sort of mum-substitute, that absolutely counts.
There are a lot of things I love about Mama Shakes, but the two things that come most immediately to mind are:
1. Her silliness: She introduced me Ed Wood films (she taped Glen or Glenda off the TV back in the '80s), old anti-drug films like Marijuana: The Killer Weed (in spite of having never even smoked a joint), and Monty Python (we have silly-walked all over the country together); I can get her laughing like nobody's business with the crappiest Dick Cheney impersonation of all time; and, hello, she lets me post silly pictures of her!
2. Her continual yearning to learn new things: She and I often look for answers in different places, but she has set a great example for me of someone who spends a life never feeling as though there's nothing left to know. And I like talking to her about the stuff she's exploring, whether it's something as big as universal grace or something as intimate as an aspect of her own personality.
Senate Votes to Renege Patriot Act Provision
That would be the provision the White House allegedly hoped to exploit which eliminated the time limit by which the Senate must confirm U.S. attorney appointees, instead allowing the Attorney General to appoint interim prosecutors (not subject to Senate confirmation) for indefinite lengths of time.
Steve Benen: "The Senate voted 94 to 2 today to undo the Patriot Act provision that allows the Bush administration to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies. ... The two who voted against the legislation, for reasons that escape me, were Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.)."
Lesley: So much for that "maverick" Chuck Hagel. Indeed.
Senators Johnson, who's still ill, Biden, McCain, and Mikulski didn't vote. The bill now has to go to the House.
Bush to Comment on Prosecutor Purge
In about 10 minutes. For those attached to their computers, it will be streamed on C-SPAN3.
Consider this an open thread for Prosecutor Purge talk and live commenting on Bush's statement when it commences.
News from Parental Manor
News, of course, usually comes from Shakes Manor, but in this installment, we visit Parental Manor, which is about a mile down the road from Shakes Manor, and at which Mr. Shakes and I can be found once a week for supper.
Last Monday evening, just after the time change, the four of us were sitting in the living room after dinz when we noticed one of their clocks was wrong. Some discussion of Day Light Savings ensued, until Mama Shakes noticed the second hand was stuck. Papa Shakes changed the clock's battery and rehung it on the wall. It worked for a moment, and then the second hand stuck again.
"What the poop?!" exclaimed Mama Shakes.
We all looked at her. "What the poop?" I said. This sent us all into gales of laughter.
For the rest of the night, I could say almost nothing else to my mother besides "What the poop?!" in increasingly ridiculous voices. In the intervening week, "What the poop?!" became more and more hilarious to me, as I found all kinds of uses for it. Out of milk? "What the poop?!" Try a new place for dinner? "What the poop?!" Bush makes an insane statement about how the Iraq War can be won? "What. The. Poop?!"
I began to realize that "WTF," while exceptionally useful in conveying cynical anger, paled in comparison to the genius of "What the poop?!" when one needs to express guileless bewilderment at so much weird and fucked-up shit in the world. Like clocks with bad ass 'tudes or finding out Karl Rove is married with a kid. (I mean, what the poop?!)
So last night, when we visited Parental Manor again, I told Mama Shakes that "What the poop?!" was going straight on the blog—and she was going to have to pose for a picture, to which she immediately consented, because she's as batshit nutz as I am. (Her only requirement was that I post a nice picture of her, too, which you see above.) So we started the photo shoot, but we couldn't get the "What the poop?!" face just right; she kept looking too angry. Then I said, "More Napoleon Dynamite!" and immediately came the perfect shot.
In future, when there are times I just. can't. believe. some story or other, nothing else will suffice. Mama Shakes must ask, nay demand to know, "What the poop?!" And we shall demand with her, bitchez.
Yeesh
Josh Marshall: "Gotta love this. The White House will allow Rove and Miers to testify about the US Attorney Purge. But they can't be under oath. It has to be behind closed doors and no transcript can be kept. And probably the whole thing has to take place at an undisclosed location and the senators have to wear blindfolds. Regrettably, only the last sentence is a joke."
Dear Senator Leahy,
Please tell Fred Fielding to go fuck himself and write up those damn subpoenas.
Love,
Shakespeare's Sister
Wow
Constant Comment just emailed this story to me, remarking "Now, this is a cool protest." Indeed it is.
There's a lot of weirdness every day in the capital city, but this one pushed the envelope: 13 Iraq war veterans in full desert camo going on "patrol" from Union Station to Arlington National Cemetery. They carried imaginary assault rifles, barked commands, roughly "detained" suspected hostiles with flex cuffs and hoods—and generally shocked, frightened and delighted tourists and office workers.Read the whole thing. You can also watch video of the protest here. It's pretty amazing.
"How does occupation feel, D.C.?!" shouted Geoff Millard, head of the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who previously served on a brigadier general's staff in Tikrit.
…The 12 men and one woman included one veteran of Afghanistan, and they represented the Army, Marines and Navy. They were young, intense, disillusioned. Home from the war, on yesterday's fourth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, they wanted to bring the war home to Washington.
They called it Operation First Casualty—citing the adage that truth is the first casualty of war.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
This is so sad. I don't even know what to say, except, perhaps that I'm totally not surprised, being as I am the wife of a Scottish immigrant who's been asked if Scotland is part of America and whether he can read English.
Via Pam, who says ominously: "These people vote."
