Finally

Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates deserve recognition, as does the "squeaky wheel gets the oil" organization Get Equal.

My Adopted Senator

Crazy Obsession

Andrew Shirvell is an assistant attorney general in Michigan. And he is CRAZY obsessed with the University of Michigan's student assembly president, who is gay. Watch this video; it's pretty clear what's going on here.

Just When You Thought She Hit Stupid Bottom...

...the dope shows us her stupid underground garage.

This Statue of Liberty was gifted to us by foreign leaders, really as a warning to us, it was a warning to us to stay unique and to stay exceptional from other countries. Certainly not to go down the path of other countries that adopted socialist policies.

Sarah Palin

________________________________________________

Did I mention it's a multilevel stupid underground garage?

I tell my parents all the time there is no better gift that they could have given me than besides such an appreciation for family and for faith and patriotism, it's been an upbringing in America in this most perfect state in America - Alaska, where we are independent and we have the pioneering spirit that more of America should hopefully get to look into the state and understand and really try to emulate because it's that pioneering spirit that America needs more of.

I get more coherent sentences out of the illegal immigrants around here.

We need these books

At Reason: Heeding the Sage of Baltimore

A new edition of H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices captures the legendary journalist at his corrosive best

On William Jennings Bryan:
“Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

Religion Is Evil; And Your Shit Stinks As Bad As Theirs, So SHUT THE FUCK UP

Thank you, authoritarian Christian nationalists, for compromising our national security. We now have video for al Queda' recruiting propaganda:



When I joined the protest of "Draw a Mohammad Day," I didn't do so to bully a religious class. I did so to stand up against an assertion that religious sentiments trumped free speech (and could do so with threats of violence).

The same applies to my support of the "Ground Zero Mosque;" or, as I like to call it, the "Ground Zero YMMA." I will not accept crazy, non-realist arguments ("this slaps the 9/11 victims in the face"), nor the insistence that tolerance has a radius.

The first amendment to our Constitution is hard; it's not for the weak of mind, but it protects us from them. And I am weary of Christians throwing bibles in glass houses.

Forget about Ground Zero and use your noggin to think back to the bloodiest event in American history. Was it the Confederacy of Muslims, Atheists, and Homosexuals whose bloodthirsty hordes converged on the goodly Christian Yankee Army of the Union North at Antietam and Gettysburg?

I am the first to say that Islam is a wicked religion: but they all are. And our great republic doesn't win by pretending that the arguments that work in theocracies apply here. Or by pretending that sentiments trump rights.

I am deeply disturbed by this rhetorical Jabberwocky. What do you think will happen when some Muslim Americans go to the completed Ground Zero Memorial, pull out their prayer rugs, and pray that the families of the victims have an iota of grief lifted off of them; and that Muslims around the world will unite against those who would commit violence against our republic?

Now, we all know what will happen: they will likely be castigated and harassed, if not beaten and kicked and spit upon.

We are better than that, and I won't have it any other way.

I'll defer to another Alabama graduate:



Roll Tide Joe! Were the Republican Party as decent, and thoughtful, and principled, and grown up as you.

Prop 8 Overturned, 14th Amendment Next

Chief Judge Vaughn Walker (a gay, libertarian conservative first nominated to the bench by known socialist and butt-cancer survivor, Ronald Reagan) overturned California's Prop 8, stating that,

The freedom to marry is recognized as a fundamental right protected by the Due Process Clause. See, for example, Turner v Safely, 482 US 78, 95 (1987)...

Uh oh, it's the Republican/Tea Party's new worst enemy: Amendment XIV!!! But what about "traditional marriage" in the US?

The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. FF 21. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.

Don't tell that to the fussbudgets over at Concerned Women for America. Those pious, submitting broads might rend their maternity aprons and stomp on them in disgust with their bare feet.

After going on about how the government must have a very compelling reason to restrict rights of a group of people--or some communist French nonsense like that--up comes my favorite part (which is a header, no less):

PROPOSITION 8 IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL BECAUSE IT DENIES PLAINTIFFS A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT WITHOUT A LEGITIMATE (MUCH LESS COMPELLING) REASON

The whole thing is a scathing page-turner. Early in the ruling, Chief Judge Walker describes how the defendants only called two witnesses, one of whom was not qualified to enter expert testimony. It's as riotous as dry legalese can get, and it reminds me of Judge Jone's ruling in Kitzmiller vs. Dover.

Cheers to Gov. Schwarzenegger for refusing to defend Prop 8. And cheers to Chief Judge Walker for including this nugget:

That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as “fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.” West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette...

Cue "activist."

What Does This Even Mean?

Sharon Angle, the Republican running for Harry Reid's Senate seat, actually said the following:

I believe that God has been in this from the beginning and because of that when he has a plan and a purpose for your life and you fit into that, what he calls you to he always equipped you for.

Do these people even listen to what they say? And what religious monster hasn't said something similar? I bet if you search the rantings of Bin Laden, you'll find similar drivel.

The Industrial Revolution Has Slipped The Bitch On Evolution

...and prosperity via simpleton culture: the idiots are taking over.

Uh-oh

The US Navy is massing warships, including the nuclear carriers Eisenhower and Truman, near Iran.

This confluence of warships may only be a transfer; but given the G8's condemnation and Israel's naval positioning and alleged pre-basings, I am concerned.

Unless we (and by we, I mean NATO, Israel, and those Gulf allies who want to remain nameless) have special ops and civilian intelligence in place to do the dirty work that smart bombs can't, any preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear centrifuges could be a disaster.

Or, it all could be nothing: a show of force whose political implications will be, in my opinion, nothing but stupid. Bombastic, insincere bullying should be left with the previous administration's 2nd-term failures. And sincere, not-thought-out military actions should be left to its 1st-term debacles. We should not lend our support to such wearying, unproductive nonsense now: all military actions should be approved by Congress (per our constitution).

Either bomb them right or get away. Doing either would make Obama demonstrably better than Bush the Younger.

Penn Gilette. I love that guy.

Penn Jillette Is Willing to Be a Guest on Adolf Hitler's Talk Show

It's Not Just Evolution They Want To Dismiss

David Barton is a Christian fundamentalist tool. He has no history bone fides, but he was lauded as a serious history scholar by the Texas Board of Education. He justifies his theocratic notions by waving around a letter by John Adams that he says proves that said Founder believed that the Holy Spirit supported...nay wrote...the Constitution. As John Adams was a Unitarian, such a supposition should be immediately and logically dismissed.

Glen Beck, however...

No, Mr. Beck, John Adams Did Not Think Governments Must be Administered by the Holy Ghost from Chris Rodda on Vimeo.

Distrust anything you hear from Fox News: they are all the infections that the sun sucks up.

I Miss My Uncle Lowell

Pink, with her father, on the Vietnam war.



Let's pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan now so that fewer have to bear this pain. We have means of responding to 9/11 and other attacks that don't involve the needless slaughter of devoted and admirable young men and women.

My uncle died of cancer that can be traced back to Vietnam. The stories he told me are immeasurably horrifying, and they weigh on my conscience every day.

He would have been the first to accept me as a homo, and I miss him so much...

Time to get out, and time to figure out a way to not need them.

Sadly, I Want Him To Be My Senator

Al Franken is a great Senator. To say that should make me ill, but he is the LGBT's strongest ally in the Senate.

Said Franken: "Our nation's civil rights laws protect our children from bullying due to race, sex, religion, disability and national origin. My proposal corrects a glaring injustice and extends these protections to our gay and lesbian students who need them just as badly."

Despite the Obama Administration's push to ignore the problem, Congress will likely repeal DODT in the next two weeks through the defense appropriation bill. Only 70% of Americans are for the repeal of this bigotry, so it will be a controversial slog.

The gays are howling for the change that the President campaigned on. And by the gays, I don't mean our primary political institution, the HRC. I don't give money to that compromised organization of political apologists for a reason: there is no LGBT position that they won't compromise for a social invite.

We win when we convince enough of our straight allies (gay-adjacents) to put pressure on their families and friends. Not when we give money and credence to an organization that persists in sucking up to the (Democratic) powers-that-be and then apologizing for their lack of progress. And it looks like we will win through organized fits of indignity, as progressives join with socially-liberal conservatives to repeal disgusting, religious-based bigotry and unite to promote equal rights for all.

Album Review: American Idiot The Musical

Am I listening to a Broadway version of an album by a band that I saw in a shit-hole in Birmingham back in 1993? Really?

I'm the son of rage and love
The Jesus of Suburbia
From the bible of none of the above

Green Day's Tony-nominated American Idiot is unsettling. It is a surreal confluence of Broadway and my love of punk rock (and my love of Green Day's album by the same name). I don't know if I feel more gay or less gay listening to it. But it is brilliant nonetheless...I couldn't recommend it more.

Green Day always was very pro-gay.

Still "Our Nation's Most Treasured Jew"

Funniest. The Daily Show. Ever.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Bernie Goldberg Fires Back
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Andrew Sullivan On The Teabaggers

I tend to agree with Andrew Sullivan more than I care to, as in this great analysis:

And this is why, despite my own deep suspicion of big government, I remain unmoved by the tea-partiers. Their partisanship and cultural hostility to Obama are far more intense, it seems to me, than their genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation. And this is largely because they have no genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation. They seem very protective of Medicare and Social Security - and their older age bracket underlines this. They also seem primed for maximal neo-imperial reach, backing the nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, favoring war against Iran, etc. Only Ron Paul, peace be upon him, extends his big government critique to the military-industrial-ideological complex.

I can't speak for Mr. Sullivan, but here is my own brusque protestation of the Teabaggers: I won't be a tool of corporate-funded, superstitious imbeciles who casually use the words of my ideology to herd benighted mooncalves towards an anti-individual, Christian corporatist autocracy.

For When You Get Bored Looking At Walcreatues

Teabonics

Hitchens And Maher On The Vatican

Atheist = Hate

White House officials met today with representatives from the Secular Coalition for America. The hysterical responses by right-wing Christians could just as easily be the predictions by any thinking person of what those people would say. Case in point, the irony-deficient Catholic League spokesperson/apologist/sole member Bill Donahue:

In an unprecedented move, leaders of a presidential administration are hosting some of the biggest anti-religious zealots in the nation.

A photo for Bill to ponder over:

In a very precedented move, a President is hosting one of the biggest anti-atheist* zealots in the world: President Bush pictured with cross-dressing daywalker Pope Benedict XVI.

*Also anti-Protestant, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-rationalism, and anti-child molestation investigations